bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Afterword and Concluding Thoughts
Authors: Dandekar Deepra
Published: January 2019

The concluding chapter summarizes all the conceptual questions raised while analysing the topic of religious conversion in nineteenth-century Maharashtra. Using personal experience, the author explores whether Marathi Brahmin Christians could be considered an ethnic group in the early colonial period. Using arguments from the preface of this book, the author discusses how social stigma created family life and family associations among early Christian converts who converted and intermarried within and across colonial missions to form a separate social group that was outside both Marathi and Brahmin identity, and colonial identity. While this intellectual burgeoning group of Brahmin Christians did not survive after independence, their vernacular expressions of Christian piety constituted important notions about religious modernity in the colonial period. Finally, the author discusses how conversion became a mode of communication within Christian families that becomes inherent expressions of articulating dissent.
The Value of Fallible Knowledge
Authors: Hannon Michael
Published: January 2019

This chapter attempts to solve the “threshold problem”: how to provide a plausible account of what fixes the threshold (level, degree) of justification (evidence, probability, warrant, supporting ground) for knowledge in a nonarbitrary way that also makes sense of the perceived value of knowledge. Epistemologists have been largely silent about how strong the justificatory component of fallible knowledge must be. Indeed, nothing like a precise specification of this level of justification has ever been seriously suggested, let alone more widely endorsed. This chapter attempts to answer this challenge. By appealing to the hypothesis that the concept of knowledge is used to identify reliable informants, we can determine the level of justification required for fallible knowledge. Further, we may explain why this level of justification has the significance that makes knowledge valuable. This chapter also explores the alleged payoffs of rejecting fallibilism and shows these benefits to be illusory.
Impure Knowledge
Authors: Hannon Michael
Published: January 2019

This chapter defends “communal impurism.” According to this view, a true belief amounts to knowledge partly due to practical (or nonepistemic) factors. “Communal impurism” is based on our need to identify reliable informants to members of our community. Knowers must be sufficiently reliable to serve as actionable sources of information for members of their community, yet impurists claim the level of justification required for knowledge is partly fixed by an individual’s practical reasoning situation. Thus, a knower must meet a communal standard for knowledge and yet the threshold for knowledge is partly determined by an individual’s practical reasoning situation. These ideas are reconciled in the following way: there is a communal standard for knowledge that is needed to promote a deep kind of coordination in our epistemic practices, and yet an individual’s stakes may trump the communal standard when it is not sufficiently demanding for the relevant practical reasoning situation.
Epistemic Pragmatism
Authors: Hannon Michael
Published: January 2019

What is the correct semantic account of “knows”? This is a hotly debated question in epistemology. Scholars have recently appealed to putative facts about the purpose of knowledge ascriptions to adjudicate this dispute. This chapter raises doubts about the viability of this strategy. A radical proposal is suggested, namely, that the entire debate about the semantics of “knows” mistakenly presupposes that we should account for the meaning of epistemic claims by determining their truth conditions. A more natural way to approach the meaning of epistemic claims, however, is to ask what practical functions they serve us in communicating with each other. Drawing on the work of J. L. Austin, this chapter articulates a view called “epistemic pragmatism.” If this proposal is correct, it will undercut a variety of popular theories and could potentially reorient contemporary debates about the semantics of knowledge ascriptions.
Skepticism and the Point of Knowledge
Authors: Hannon Michael
Published: January 2019

This chapter explores the relationship between philosophical skepticism and the concerns of daily life. The aim is to show that function-first epistemology can augment an argument against skepticism. The force of the skeptic’s argument, as well as our desire to reject the skeptical conclusion, is explained in the following way: our need to share information pushes us to accept stricter epistemic standards that might logically end at skepticism, but practical factors encourage us to formulate standards that stop short of skepticism. This tension creates an area of indeterminacy in which controversies about skepticism take place. This chapter explains the persuasive power of skepticism while also explaining why skeptical worries do not (and should not) threaten our everyday knowledge.
What’s the Point of Understanding?
Authors: Hannon Michael
Published: January 2019

This final chapter extends the function-first approach to human understanding. It is argued that the concept of understanding serves the practical function of identifying good explainers, which is an important dimension of epistemic evaluation. This hypothesis throws light on a variety of issues, including the role of explanation in understanding, the relationship between understanding and knowledge, epistemic luck, and the value of understanding. This chapter also argues that understanding and knowledge play different social roles: roughly, knowledge is closely tied to answering our need for true beliefs, whereas understanding answers our need for good explanations. Everyday inquiry is typically aimed at true beliefs, which is why knowledge matters, but sometimes we need more than just true beliefs to get by in the world, which is why understanding is valuable.
Environmental Activism in the Middle East and North Africa
Authors: Sowers Jeannie
Published: January 2019

Environmental activism has intensified across the Middle East and North Africa over the past few decades, focusing primarily on environmental issues that affect public health and livelihoods. While intrusive security states limit information and stifle civil society, expanding educational opportunities, growing cities, and new means of communication have enabled environmental activism. This includes small-scale, informal, and localized activism to demand access to natural resources and environmental services; the spread of environmental nongovernmental organizations; and the coordinated popular resistance campaign that includes direct action, media outreach, and lobbying. State elites and official media often portray environmental mobilization as a threat to national security and state integrity, but sometimes tolerate it as an informal enforcement mechanism to pressure polluting firms and nonresponsive officials. As elsewhere, state and corporate actors also increasingly deploy their own discourses and interventions, generally focused on technocratic solutions rather than questions of political economy and environmental justice.
Tunisian Phosphates and the Politics of the Periphery
Authors: Ghilès Francis , Woertz Eckart
Published: January 2019

Using underexplored grey literature and personal interviews with officials, experts and businessmen, this chapter discusses the constitutive role of phosphate mining and trade unions in the politics of the periphery in Tunisia - politics that have been crucially affected by post-independence development agendas, the transformation of national elites in the crony capitalism of the Ben Ali era and its interplay with international donor and development institutions. First, the paper gives an historic overview of Tunisian phosphate mining and its role in regional development. Second, it analyses the politics of Tunisia’s periphery, the role of the Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail within it and the emergence of new social actors. Third, it takes a detailed look at how such conflicts played out during the strikes in the phosphate mines in 2008 and after 2011. It concludes with an outlook on future developments.
The Securitization of Oil and its Ramifications in the Gulf Cooperation Council States
Authors: Crystal Jill
Published: January 2019

This chapter examines the political construction of a new understanding of how natural resources and security are linked in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states. The chapter begins with the role of oil in state and class formation and then examines its broader securitization in the Gulf, a trend of particular salience in the last 10-15 years. The study documents the driving forces and motivations behind this process, both regionally and locally, then concludes with some reflections on the links between natural resources, development trajectories, and political outcomes.
The Politics of Natural Resources in the Caspian Sea
Authors: Maleki Abbas
Published: January 2019

This chapter examines the politics of the natural resources of the Caspian Sea as littoral states vie for dominance on energy resources and its routes to the world markets against a background of climate change, region-wide sustainability challenges, and local pollution. The Caspian is in full transformation and solving these problems will require a shift in regional politics towards environmental cooperation and political integration. However, the inherent challenges of such a new approach are compounded by the landlocked position of Caspian countries, uncertainty among littoral states as to each other’s intentions and a decaying infrastructure, last updated in the Soviet era.
Sympathy and Synesthesia
Authors: Gusejnova Dina
Published: January 2019

Gusejnova’s chapter offers a wide-ranging assessment of cosmopolitan interpretations of war in the European sentimental tradition. Taking impetus from Tolstoy’s reporting on the Crimean war, Gusejnova turns to the Russian formalists’ interpretation of his technique to reconstruct Tolstoy’s use of literary montage, later adapted to film by Sergei Eisenstein. The chapter then contextualizes the history of this technique within genealogies of cosmopolitan thought on the one hand, and literary sentimentalism on the other. Drawing on works by Adam Smith and Stendhal, Gusejnova surveys some of the intellectual and literary techniques through which cosmopolitan sentiments became widespread in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. She argues that Tolstoy’s reproduction of multi-sensory experiences through montage is a statement of his political thought, reflecting his intent to increase the human capacity for compassion in light of cosmopolitan ideals. The chapter proposes that greater understanding between people was driven by the literary, visual, and sonic mediation of violent wartime encounters.
The Revolution Will Not Be Telegraphed
Authors: McMurray Peter
Published: January 2019

McMurray’s chapter argues that law is a profoundly sonic medium, acting in, through, against, and modeled on sound—and more particularly, voice. Legal and cultural reforms in Islamicate societies in the Black Sea region during and around the time of the Crimean War illustrate these dynamics especially well. The first part of the chapter compares the legal reforms of the Caucasian Imamate (in North Daghestan and Chechnya) and the Ottoman Empire, showing how sound played a central role in negotiating new meanings of Islamic shari‘a law within those societies. Law thus becomes a critical archive for histories of sound, vocality, and listening. The latter part then reflects on the ontologies of law as a medium, considering both its sonic qualities—a recurring motif in both Anglo-American and Islamic jurisprudence—and its relation to the telegraph in particular, as a communications technology that simultaneously facilitated and challenged extant legal regimes.
Operatic Battlefields, Theater of War
Authors: Willson Flora
Published: January 2019

Willson’s chapter explores how opera inflected listening for British officers and tourists in and near Crimea: in particular it discusses operatic perceptions in the Pera district of Constantinople, the site of the city’s first opera house, as well as ways of listening to traveling military bands connected with the Ottoman imperial court. It also examines European elites’ perceptions of foreign battlefields and cityscapes, with the aim of examining a larger shift in the history of listening: that of middle-class audiences falling silent in theatrical spaces during the nineteenth century, supposedly to devote more concentrated attention to elite music. The chapter argues that these listening habits, formed in part in the opera house, persisted well beyond its hallowed enclosures when war came to extend the complex geographies of attentive listening.
Earwitness
Authors: Tapp Alyson
Published: January 2019

Tapp’s chapter considers one of the Crimean War’s most celebrated literary productions, Leo Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Stories. Through comparison with Virginia Woolf and her innovative narrative technique, it discusses the workings of wartime sound in Tolstoy’s famous text. In particular, it elucidates the representation of battlefield noise, whose valence changes as it approaches the war zone. In Tolstoy’s Stories sound becomes a cipher for unmediated reality and ultimately for truth: a means to gesture toward authentic experiences of combat. The chapter shows how Tolstoy cordoned off audible reality from its supposedly less immediate visual counterpart, reproducing an audiovisual split that was pervasive in nineteenth-century culture.
InConsequence
Authors: Schwartz Hillel
Published: January 2019

Schwartz’s chapter deploys historical listening as a critical and creative methodology. It opens with the sound of the whistling of dying horses as a means of generating a panoply of war-related homophones and connotations, inviting us to hear the decline of shrilling round shot on the battlefield and the ascendency of spiralled, hissing bullets. The chapter’s centerpiece is an extended analysis of “Pop Goes the Weasel,” one of the most whistled tunes in wartime Britain. Venturing an explanation for the refrain’s ubiquity, it argues that its “lexical potential energy could be enlisted to do highly kinetic, cultural work in dozens of contexts”—including military, political, literary, and scientific contexts, across and between which the idea of potential energy emerged.
Embodying Sovereignty
Authors: Jarvis Katie
Published: January 2019

From 1789 through 1793, the Dames reinvented their place in the nation through their activism, which they framed as civic work, and through their maternal initiatives, which they framed as gendered labor. The Dames reacted to local problems en masse and varied their response by situation. They bolstered their image as communal guardians by marching on Versailles during the October Days, by insisting that the municipal government assist citizens during food crises, and by sending a delegation to Italy to fetch the Comte d’Artois. As republican mothers, they reminded the National Assembly of its paternal responsibilities, spanked counterrevolutionary nuns who misled children, and sought to free imprisoned parents who defaulted on wet nurse payments. However, as Louis XVI proved an unwilling constitutional monarch, and bourgeoning clubs and assemblies grew into institutional venues for politics, the Dames’ sporadic interventions became less powerful.
Occupying the Marketplace
Authors: Jarvis Katie
Published: January 2019

This chapter analyzes the economically crucial and conceptually volatile debates over public space in the marketplace. It traces how the king’s public domain became national domain and how this transformation affected the ways that citizens pursued particular interests in les Halles. During the Old Regime, the king had issued an edict that permitted some especially indigent Dames to secure market spots before other retailers. He had also granted one company the privilege of renting shelters to these qualified Dames before others. However, when the private company attempted to renew its royal contract during the Revolution, clashes arose over the right to and regulation of public domain. During the disputes, the Dames who were not advantaged by the king’s edict seized new practices of citizenship to claim shelters and trading places. They harnessed revolutionary discourses to mark the earth as national property, attack monopoly-holders as privileged leeches, and secure economic exemptions based on their work’s public utility. As they justified their personal profits on public space, the Dames staked out their place in the body politic.
Selling Legitimacy
Authors: Jarvis Katie
Published: January 2019

In November 1793, the Convention acknowledged that goods passed through multiple hands en route to consumers, and it began to reform the Maximum to include both wholesale and retail prices. This chapter dissects how the Dames, their brokers, and market police compelled the deputies to economically affirm and politically legitimize merchants as useful citizens in their revisions. During the five months it took the state to plan tiered prices, retailers like the Dames remained unable to legally sell at a profit. To protect retailers and the food trade, the Dames and market police urged the deputies to hasten their recalculations. From a pragmatic perspective, they highlighted marketplace practices to illustrate why retailers’ services were necessary for supplying Parisians. From an ideological perspective, they argued that symbiotic trading relationships between merchants and consumers naturally underscored fraternal bonds among cooperative citizens. They also insisted that the municipal government balance commercial relationships by enforcing ceilings on workers’ wages. Due to police reports and merchants’ interventions, the national political economy of the Terror ultimately bent to local realities of les Halles. When the Thermidorians abolished the Maximum in December 1794, crippling inflation created shared interests between previously opposed retailers and wage workers, which encouraged class-based political alliances.
Conclusion
Authors: Jarvis Katie
Published: January 2019

The conclusion compares the Dames’ understanding of work, gender, and citizenship with other revolutionary and postrevolutionary imaginings. In contrast to citizenship couched in a priori rights and rooted in electoral practices, the Dames framed citizenship as contingent and grounded in social experience. Their vision of citizenship resonated with the symbiotic relationships and reciprocal duties at the core of the social contract. The market women asserted that they earned civic membership and the right to make claims on the state through useful work that served society. Their labor assumed occupational forms through their marketplace trade, civic forms through their political activism, and gendered forms through their contributions as republican mothers. However, by 1799, the deputies had conferred full electoral and economic citizenship on male heads of households with property. Nonetheless, the Dames’ early political influence and the deputies’ economic legislation overturn arguments that democratic citizenship emerged fully formed and masculine at the start of the French Revolution. Finally, the market women illustrate how, while transitioning from a corporate to capitalist world, individuals became autonomized and atomized in parallel arenas of work and politics. The Dames’ political emphasis on whom one’s labor serves rather than where one’s labor is performed complicates scholarly categories of a masculine public sphere and a feminine private sphere in the nineteenth century. From the revolutionary marketplace, the Dames force us to rethink the relationship among work, gender, and modern citizenship.
Learning the Story for Myself
Authors: Bishop Sarah C.
Published: January 2019

This chapter chronicles the ways young undocumented immigrants uncover their lack of legal status experientially—through interactions with parents and others, in attempts to pursue rites of passage reserved for citizens, and as audiences of political and popular media. The narrators featured in this chapter recount their immigration stories and explore the personal and social ramifications of discovering their status, including feelings of isolation and anomie. It explains how these experiences influence one’s decision about whether to cultivate a public voice, and the narrators reflect on the processes of determining how to narrate their experiences in the context of activism. After undocumented youth learn and grow to understand the implications of their undocumented status, they come to a crossroads: Will they come to see themselves as part of the story of immigrant activism, or does this story belong to others?
Reclaiming the Story and Finding the Frame
Authors: Bishop Sarah C.
Published: January 2019

This chapter offers both theoretical and pragmatic contextualization as activist narrators describe the diverse ways they conceive of and negotiate narrative frames and strategies toward the goal of immigration reform. The chapter chronicles the public work of undocumented immigrants who use their own stories as persuasive evidence that immigrants deserve a path to citizenship, and the narrators discuss the power and limitations of different immigrant rights strategies. I illuminate the strategies the narrators describe by way of textual analysis of some exemplars of each, demonstrate the ways members of the movement have lobbied for necessary shifts in the framing of their messages, and explore how these negotiations are promoted and implemented in grassroots activism. The resulting work reveals the power of storytelling in public media and the centrality of strategic communication to social movements.
In Pursuit of an Audience
Authors: Bishop Sarah C.
Published: January 2019

This chapter turns from undocumented creators to their audiences to illuminate how immigrant storytellers conceive of and characterize US citizens who encounter reclaimant narratives. The narrators describe their frustration with citizens’ apparent lack of knowledge about immigrant rights and policy. I illustrate the link between US audiences’ perceptions of immigrants and the tropes present in mediated portrayals of immigrants in public discourse, and the narrators describe their own reactions to these portrayals. Finally, in response to the question “What do you wish US citizens knew about undocumented immigrants?” they explain why it is so important that citizens recognize immigrants as human, take a bigger picture view of the historical reality of undocumented immigration, acknowledge the factors that lead immigrants to give up their homes and communities and flee to the United States, and understand the privilege of citizenship.
Urban Avenues to Love
Authors: Carrington Tyler
Published: January 2019

The modern city presented an alluring array of new avenues to love and intimacy that had not existed in the small towns that dominated the nineteenth century, and a great many maverick Berliners, including those looking for same-sex love, embraced these in the hopes of finding love and avoiding the loneliness and isolation that could be so oppressive. This chapter examines a variety of modern methods for finding love in the workplace, in apartment corridors, on the dance floor, and at evening balls that were gradually evolving to accommodate the modern world. The chapter concludes by studying the rise of casual dating, which was characterized by less-than-reputable romantic relationships that rarely led to marriage. It suggests that individualistic approaches such as these marked the beginning, however fraught with controversy and risk, of a potential modernization of the nineteenth-century middle-class sensibilities that formed the bedrock of German social life.
Emerging Technologies of Love
Authors: Carrington Tyler
Published: January 2019

Chapter Four begins in the heat of the police investigation into Frieda Kliem’s murder, following the police as they pursue Frieda’s killer. It then explores the ways in which the age-old practice of matchmaking was transformed into a fundamentally new technology of love: newspaper personal ads. Examining both the rise and wager of using personal ads to find love and exploring their significance for gay Berliners, this chapter argues that newspaper personal ads’ appeal lay both in their radical attempt to harness the distinct qualities of urban life as a way of making love more attainable and in their very practical rejection of middle-class society’s fascination with fate and fortuity. These advantages notwithstanding, personal ads remained too great of an affront to stability, that prized quality of middle-class life, and, as the chapter concludes, this relegated both ads and, importantly, their users, to the shadows.
Modern Dating and Respectability on Trial
Authors: Carrington Tyler
Published: January 2019

Chapter 5 follows the sensational trial of Frieda Kliem’s murderer and the strategy of the defense, which was not so much a legal strategy as a way of turning the trial into a question of Frieda’s respectability as a middle-class woman. It interprets this trial—and the life of Frieda Kliem, more generally—as a microcosm of the large-scale confrontation between nineteenth-century society and the emerging twentieth-century world. It contends that identity, presented either authentically or as an illusion, became supremely relevant in the metropolis, where the ubiquity of strangers, new faces, and mysterious crimes shaped the way city people narrated the search for love and intimacy. And because enterprising outsiders like Frieda Kliem so flouted the established patterns of middle-class respectability, they remained on the outside looking in as German society clung to the nineteenth-century world that was crumbling in the face of a bewilderingly new twentieth-century one.
Contours of the Printed Debate
Authors: Burnett Amy Nelson
Published: January 2019

This chapter analyzes 372 titles, in 905 imprints, concerning the Lord’s Supper printed between 1525 and 1529. The largest number were printed in the opening years of the Eucharistic controversy. The Wittenberg party published well over half of the total and more than twice as many imprints as the sacramentarians. Luther was by far the most important contributor owing to the frequent reprinting of his works, although only about a third of these were direct contributions to the controversy. Catholics defended the mass against the Wittenbergers and asserted Christ’s true presence against the sacramentarians. A significant proportion of the publications were exchanges between two individuals as a form of public debate. While sacramentarians wrote for the highly literate, pro-Wittenbergers used genres most effective for reaching the illiterate: sermons, catechisms, and liturgies.
Martin Bucer and Bugenhagen’s Psalms Commentary
Authors: Burnett Amy Nelson
Published: January 2019

In early 1524, Johannes Bugenhagen published a Latin commentary on the Psalms. Its printer commissioned Martin Bucer to translate the work. Bucer’s translation adapted the commentary’s contents to the interests of a literate urban audience. His changes included greater attention to practical piety, a more polemical tone, and an emphasis on spiritual communion and rejection of host adoration with regard to the Lord’s Supper. Bugenhagen became aware of these changes after an excerpt from the commentary discussing the Lord’s Supper was published under his name, and he denounced Bucer for attributing to him a position he did not hold. The episode highlights the difficulty of translating concepts from Latin into German and the role of printers in fanning controversy; illustrates differences in the spiritual priorities of Wittenberg and the radicalized Erasmian reformers and shows how positions unquestioned before 1525 became controversial after the outbreak of the Eucharistic controversy.
Undermining Oecolampadius
Authors: Burnett Amy Nelson
Published: January 2019

The published exchange of pamphlets between Johannes Oecolampadius and the Nuremberg humanist Willibald Pirckheimer pitted two renowned humanists against each other. Whereas other Wittenbergers rejected Oecolampadius’s biblical exegesis, Pirckheimer attacked Oecolampadius’s use of the church fathers, and he skillfully manipulated the debate to draw attention to those fathers who supported his side. Like Luther, Pirckheimer argued that “this is my body” must be understood literally, and that reason must be subordinated to faith. Pirckheimer’s rhetoric and his harsh polemic were intended to establish his superiority to Oecolampadius and undermine his opponent’s ethos or character and his credibility. Oecolampadius’s responses to Pirckheimer were also rhetorically shaped, but the Basler could not match Pirckheimer’s superior social position. Their exchange highlights the importance of nontheological factors in shaping the controversy.
The Debate Matures, 1527–1529
Authors: Burnett Amy Nelson
Published: January 2019

Luther’s 1527 That These Words Still Stand Firm initiated a new stage of the Eucharistic controversy by summarizing and then refuting the most important sacramentarian arguments. The treatise initiated an exchange with Oecolampadius and Zwingli that highlighted their hermeneutical and exegetical disagreements and emphasized Christology. In response to Luther’s 1528 Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper, Martin Bucer wrote a dialogue arguing that Luther and his opponents actually agreed. Although Bucer still advocated a sacramentarian position, he recognized that Luther did not teach impanation, and he began to shift the debate away from Christ’s bodily presence in the elements to Christ’s reception by communicants. Other contributions demonstrate that the two sides were consolidating their arguments and propagating them through a variety of genres.
Sacramentarian Diversity
Authors: Burnett Amy Nelson
Published: January 2019

The division of the Zurich reformation over the issue of infant baptism posed the problem of authority within the sacramentarian camp. Balthasar Hubmaier rejected Zwingli’s exegesis of scripture and accused him of inconsistency; Zwingli responded by asserting his position as called pastor and attacking the character of his Anabaptist opponents. Hubmaier’s pamphlets highlighted the links between baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and excommunication in creating and maintaining a separate, purified church. Spiritualists such as Ludwig Hätzer and Hans Denck, who downplayed the importance of external ceremonies, fit more easily with other sacramentarians. Kaspar Schwenckfeld and Martin Cellarius would contribute to Wolfgang Capito’s attraction to spiritualism.
Reconstituting Authority
Authors: Burnett Amy Nelson
Published: January 2019

Through the second half of the 1520s, cities and territories began to institutionalize reforms to the Lord’s Supper. Luther’s German Mass was influential in central and northern Germany, while the communion liturgies of Zurich and Basel were important as sacramentarian models. Church ordinances also contained sections on the Lord’s Supper, with the most important being the Instruction to the Visitors of Saxony and Bugenhagen’s Braunschweig ordinance. The Bern Disputation of 1528 generated a number of publications by both sacramentarians and Catholics; so, too, did the events leading to Basel’s abolition of the mass. The leaders of both parties could not reach agreement on the Lord’s Supper at the Marburg Colloquy, but the articles adopted there marked the emergence of a new source of collective authority: a confession of faith that defined orthodoxy.
Searching for Justice After the Holocaust
Authors: Bazyler Michael J. , Boyd Kathryn Lee , Nelson Kristen L. , Shah Rajika L.
Published: January 2019

The Nazis and their cohorts stole mercilessly from the Jews of Europe. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, returning survivors had to navigate unclear and hostile legal paths to recover their stolen property from governments and neighbors who often had been complicit in their persecution and theft. While the return of Nazi-looted art and recent legal settlements involving dormant Swiss bank accounts, unpaid insurance policies and use of slave labor by German companies have been well-publicized, efforts by Holocaust survivors and heirs over the last 70 years to recover stolen land and buildings were forgotten. In 2009, 47 countries convened in Prague to deal with the lingering problem of restitution of prewar private, communal, and heirless property stolen during the Holocaust. The outcome was the Terezin Declaration on Holocaust Era Assets and Related Issues, aiming to “rectify the consequences” of the wrongful Nazi-era immovable property seizures. This book sets forth the legal history of Holocaust immovable property restitution in each of the Terezin Declaration signatory states. It also analyzes how each of the 47 countries has fulfilled the standards of the Guidelines and Best Practices of the Terezin Declaration. These standards were issued in 2010 in conjunction with the establishment of the European Shoah Legacy Institute (ESLI), a state-sponsored NGO created to monitor compliance. The book is based on the Holocaust (Shoah) Immovable Property Restitution Study commissioned by ESLI, written by the authors and issued in Brussels in 2017 before the European Parliament.
Albania
Authors: Bazyler Michael J. , Boyd Kathryn Lee , Nelson Kristen L. , Shah Rajika L.
Published: January 2019

Albania was occupied by Fascist Italy and then Nazi Germany during World War II. Albania’s occupation experience was unique among all Axis-occupied countries. Despite Nazi Germany’s attempt to carry out the genocide of the Jews (the so-called Final Solution), Albanians resisted. Albania was the only Nazi-occupied country where the Jewish population increased after the war. Post-Communist Albania has not enacted any laws for restitution of Holocaust-era confiscated immovable property. Post-Communist restitution laws dealing with return or compensation for property nationalized during the Communist period apply equally to all citizens. Albania endorsed the Terezin Declaration in 2009 and the Guidelines and Best Practices in 2010.
Belarus
Authors: Bazyler Michael J. , Boyd Kathryn Lee , Nelson Kristen L. , Shah Rajika L.
Published: January 2019

Germany invaded Belarus (then known as Belorussia)—one of the Soviet Socialist Republics—in violation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1941. Between 80 and 90 percent of Jews in Belarus died during the war, one of the highest percentages in Europe. Homes and apartments vacated after their Jewish owners were forcibly driven out and then murdered were supposed to be registered by local auxiliary administrative offices. They were often given or sold to the supposedly needy or simply taken over by the German occupiers or the native population. Notwithstanding the systematic plunder of Jewish property in Belarus during the war, to date, Belarus does not have any laws governing the restitution of private property, or specific laws on the restitution of communal or heirless property. Belarus endorsed the Terezin Declaration in 2009 but did not endorse the 2010 Guidelines and Best Practices.
Bulgaria
Authors: Bazyler Michael J. , Boyd Kathryn Lee , Nelson Kristen L. , Shah Rajika L.
Published: January 2019

Bulgaria was an ally of Germany for most of World War II. Bulgaria passed a series of anti-Jewish laws in the early 1940s, but they received less support in Bulgaria than did similar laws in other countries in Europe. Toward the end of World War II, Bulgarian anti-Jewish laws were abolished, and there were efforts to restore Jewish confiscated property. The measures were short-lived. The incoming Communist regime’s desire to collectivize land led to the eventual nationalization of Bulgarian property—which occurred irrespective of race, religion, or ethnicity. After the end of Communism and the establishment of a parliamentary democracy in Bulgaria, the country made the actual return of confiscated property its main goal. However, the government’s aggressive focus on returning the physical properties to their original owners resulted in political and economic complications. Bulgaria endorsed the Terezin Declaration in 2009 and the Guidelines and Best Practices in 2010.
Cyprus
Authors: Bazyler Michael J. , Boyd Kathryn Lee , Nelson Kristen L. , Shah Rajika L.
Published: January 2019

Cyprus was a British Crown colony during World War II. Cyprus was a haven to refugees escaping Nazi persecution during World War II, and after concentration camps in Europe were liberated, detention centers were set up on the island by the British in an effort to curtail survivors from entering British Mandate Palestine. No immovable property—private, communal, or heirless—was confiscated from Jews or other targeted groups in Cyprus during the war. As a result, no immovable property restitution laws were required. Cyprus endorsed the Terezin Declaration in 2009 and the Guidelines and Best Practices in 2010.
Czech Republic
Authors: Bazyler Michael J. , Boyd Kathryn Lee , Nelson Kristen L. , Shah Rajika L.
Published: January 2019

During World War II, Nazi Germany occupied the territory comprising the modern-day Czech Republic (previously part of the independent country of Czechoslovakia), creating the Protectorate of Moravia and Bohemia. All Jews in the Protectorate became subject to German jurisdiction and anti-Jewish laws, including German laws on expropriation of Jewish property. Immediately after the war, Czechoslovakia enacted legislation invalidating property transfers made during Nazi occupation. The measures were short-lived, however, because the country fell under Communist rule that resulted in a second wave of confiscations from all persons. It was not until after the Velvet Revolution in 1989 that new immovable property restitution laws were enacted for private and communal property. The Czech Republic endorsed the Terezin Declaration in 2009 and the Guidelines and Best Practices in 2010.
Denmark
Authors: Bazyler Michael J. , Boyd Kathryn Lee , Nelson Kristen L. , Shah Rajika L.
Published: January 2019

Germany invaded Denmark in 1940. The country was granted relative autonomy until 1943, with the forced deportation of Danish Jews. With the assistance of Danish religious and nonreligious groups, several thousand Danish Jews were transported by boat to neutral Sweden, but hundreds were still captured and sent to concentration camps. There was no state policy of property confiscation during World War II. Immediately after the war, government offices were established and laws passed to assist victims of the occupation with restitution and compensation. Denmark endorsed the Terezin Declaration in 2009 and the Guidelines and Best Practices in 2010.
Estonia
Authors: Bazyler Michael J. , Boyd Kathryn Lee , Nelson Kristen L. , Shah Rajika L.
Published: January 2019

The independent Republic of Estonia was attacked and formally annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940. It was subsequently invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany in 1941 until Soviet troops re-entered the country in 1944. At the end of the war, virtually every member of Estonia’s small prewar Jewish community had been murdered, deported, or had fled the country. Estonia’s independence was restored in 1991, and post-Communist Estonia passed restitution laws that applied generally to private and communal immovable property confiscated during the Communist era. Estonia endorsed the Terezin Declaration in 2009 and the Guidelines and Best Practices in 2010.
Finland
Authors: Bazyler Michael J. , Boyd Kathryn Lee , Nelson Kristen L. , Shah Rajika L.
Published: January 2019

Between 1939 and 1944, Finland fought two separate wars against the Soviet Union. In 1941, Finland entered World War II aligned with Nazi Germany in its fight against the Soviet Union. Finland was never conquered or occupied by Germany, nor were any anti-Jewish laws passed in the country. No immovable property—private, communal, or heirless—was taken from Jews or other targeted groups in Finland during the war. As a result, no immovable property restitution laws were required. Finland endorsed the Terezin Declaration in 2009 and the Guidelines and Best Practices in 2010.
Germany
Authors: Bazyler Michael J. , Boyd Kathryn Lee , Nelson Kristen L. , Shah Rajika L.
Published: January 2019

Within months of becoming Chancellor in 1933, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party began to implement legal and extralegal measures to dispossess German Jews of their civil rights and their property. During the following 12 years, the regime systematically dispossessed Jews, Roma, and other targeted groups (in Germany and in other territories occupied by the Nazis and other Axis powers) of their dignity, jobs, homes, and businesses. By 1943, the German Reich was declared “free of Jews.” In the years since the end of World War II (under Allied occupation beginning in 1945, during the division of the country into East and West Germany, and finally after unification in 1990) various laws and other measures have been enacted to address restitution of confiscated immovable private, communal, and heirless property. This includes settlement agreements with foreign countries, national legislation, as well as the establishment of so-called Jewish “successor organizations” to claim heirless property and communal property. Germany’s restitution laws for Jewish stolen property have been the most comprehensive in Europe. Germany endorsed the Terezin Declaration in 2009 and the Guidelines and Best Practices in 2010.
Ireland
Authors: Bazyler Michael J. , Boyd Kathryn Lee , Nelson Kristen L. , Shah Rajika L.
Published: January 2019

The Republic of Ireland was neutral during World War II. Ireland was never invaded by Germany, nor were any anti-Jewish laws passed in the country. No immovable property—private, communal, or heirless—was taken from Jews or other targeted groups in Ireland during the war. As a result, no immovable property restitution laws were required. Ireland endorsed the Terezin Declaration in 2009 and the Guidelines and Best Practices in 2010.
Israel
Authors: Bazyler Michael J. , Boyd Kathryn Lee , Nelson Kristen L. , Shah Rajika L.
Published: January 2019

Even prior to World War II and the Holocaust, many Jews emigrated to Palestine. In the late nineteenth century, waves of anti-Semitism swept through Europe, reviving the Zionists’ quest to re-establish a Jewish homeland. An Israeli state was eventually declared in 1948. Even though Israel had not been a sovereign state during World War II, and no property expropriation laws had been passed, in 2005, the Israeli Parliament (Knesset) convened a commission to investigate the issue of property restitution in Israel—movable and immovable—for victims of the Holocaust. In 2006, Israel passed a restitution law addressing private property located in Israel where the owner had disappeared or died during World War II. The law also addressed what would happen if the properties had become heirless. A commission, the Company for Location and Restitution of Holocaust Victims’ Assets (known as “Hashava” in Hebrew), was created in 2006 to return assets of the Holocaust located in Israel (including land). Hashava ceased operations at the end of 2017. Israel endorsed the Terezin Declaration in 2009 and the Guidelines and Best Practices in 2010.
Italy
Authors: Bazyler Michael J. , Boyd Kathryn Lee , Nelson Kristen L. , Shah Rajika L.
Published: January 2019

Fascist Italy under Mussolini joined Germany as an Axis power in 1939, and passed numerous laws that restricted the rights of Italian Jews. After the establishment of the Nazi-controlled Italian Social Republic in northern Italy, a German Command ordered the arrest of all Jews and confiscation of their property for the benefit of those who lost property in enemy (Allied) air raids. The same government entity established to manage confiscated property during the war, the Office for the Management and Liquidation of Real Estate (EGELI), was entrusted to return the property after the war. A report issued in 2001 by a government commission (Anselmi Commission) found that private property was generally returned after the war. However, differences emerged regarding the ease of the restitution process in different regions, and restitution also varied depending on whether the property was in state or private hands. Italy endorsed the Terezin Declaration in 2009 and the Guidelines and Best Practices in 2010.
Lithuania
Authors: Bazyler Michael J. , Boyd Kathryn Lee , Nelson Kristen L. , Shah Rajika L.
Published: January 2019

During World War II, the independent Republic of Lithuania was attacked and formally annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940. It was subsequently invaded by Germany in 1941 until Soviet troops re-entered the country in 1944. Between 1939 and 1943, approximately 90–95 percent of Lithuania’s vibrant prewar Jewish community of 160,000 was murdered. Lithuania is one of the few European countries to enact restitution legislation since the Terezin Declaration was drafted in 2009. Despite passage of its communal property law in 2011, restitution of private and heirless property in the country is still an unsettled issue. Unlike its Baltic neighbors, Estonia and Latvia, Lithuania limits private property restitution to citizens of Lithuania. Lithuania, like its Baltic neighbors and almost all Eastern European states, has no effective heirless property legislation. Lithuania endorsed the Terezin Declaration in 2009 and the Guidelines and Best Practices in 2010.
Luxembourg
Authors: Bazyler Michael J. , Boyd Kathryn Lee , Nelson Kristen L. , Shah Rajika L.
Published: January 2019

During World War II, Luxembourg was occupied by Nazi Germany. Laws passed by the occupying administration confiscated property from Jews and other “enemies of the Reich.” Even before the war ended, the Luxembourg government-in-exile in London issued a number of decrees establishing the framework for restitution in Luxembourg. A 1950 law also provided compensation for material, political, and physical damages. However, the definition of “eligible recipients” under the law excluded Jewish survivors when they did not have Luxembourg citizenship—which was the majority of survivors. A 2001 government-sponsored Study Commission was established to examine the circumstances under which property belonging to Jews in Luxembourg was confiscated during World War II and the conditions under which restitution took place. Luxembourg endorsed the Terezin Declaration in 2009 and the Guidelines and Best Practices in 2010.
Montenegro
Authors: Bazyler Michael J. , Boyd Kathryn Lee , Nelson Kristen L. , Shah Rajika L.
Published: January 2019

Yugoslavia (which included present-day Montenegro) was invaded by the Axis powers in 1941 and immovable property was confiscated. Only an estimated 30 Jews lived in Montenegro prior to World War II. During the war, Montenegro received Jewish refugees from neighboring Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. After the war, Yugoslavia enacted a property restitution law, but it was short-lived. As Yugoslavia fell under Communist rule, widespread nationalization—which this time occurred irrespective of race, religion, or ethnicity—resulted in a second wave of property confiscations. The Republic of Montenegro in its current form came into existence in 2006. Restitution in Montenegro began in earnest in the 2000s, after nearly 50 years of Communist rule. During this period, Montenegro passed two property restitution laws, which chiefly addressed the issue of private property restitution. The most recent property restitution law included language that a separate law would be enacted to address communal property restitution. To date, no such law has been passed, but the government has stated that its deadline to adopt the law is the end of 2018. No provisions for heirless property have been made. Montenegro endorsed the Terezin Declaration in 2009 and the Guidelines and Best Practices in 2010.