bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Birth of Italian Horror
Authors: Conterio Martyn
Published: February 2021

This chapter discusses the rise of Italian genre cinema and its venerable golden age that was assisted by financial incentives and funding awards. It recounts how Mario Bava's Black Sunday became a stellar success in the United States when released in 1961. It also mentions US companies that spent approximately $35 million dollars a year from 1957 to 1967 in order to finance or buy the distribution rights to Italian films, or to make their own films, with Italian studios as their production base. The chapter talks about Galatea, the production outfit that financially backed Bava's film that branched out to the American market when they sold Hercules to producer Joe Levine and subsequently earned an advance to provide a sequel. It looks at the boost in feature production during the 1950s that was caused by the inviting cultural/economic protection model of Christian Democrat politician, Guilo Andrelotti.
The Curse of Frankenstein
Authors: Harmes Marcus K.
Published: February 2021

Critics abhorred it, audiences loved it, and Hammer executives were thrilled with the box office returns: The Curse of Frankenstein was big business. The 1957 film is the first to bring together in a horror movie the 'unholy two', Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, together with the Hammer company, and director Terence Fisher, combinations now legendary among horror fans. This book goes back to where the Hammer horror production started, looking at the film from a variety of perspectives: as a loose literary adaptation of Mary Shelley's novel; as a film that had, for legal reasons, to avoid adapting from James Whale's 1931 film for Universal Pictures; and as one which found immediate sources of inspiration in the Gainsborough bodice rippers of the 1940s and the poverty row horrors of the 1950s. Later Hammer horrors may have consolidated the reputation of the company and the stars, but these works had their starting point in the creative and commercial choices made by the team behind The Curse of Frankenstein. In the film sparks fly, new life is created and horrors unleashed, but the film itself was a jolt to 1950s cinemagoing that has never been entirely surpassed.
Emanation
Authors: Gillis David
Published: February 2021

This chapter evaluates the application of the Neoplatonic idea of emanation, as expounded by Maimonides himself in The Guide of the Perplexed, to the understanding of the structure of Mishneh torah. The first ten books are arranged according to a hierarchy of value, corresponding to the hierarchy of the successive levels of hypostases in the Plotinian system, as adapted by Alfarabi, but with the ultimate criterion of rank being the religious value of holiness. Furthermore, those first ten books form a pattern that is a projection of ‘Laws of the Foundations of the Torah’, expressing the idea that books 2 to 10 emanate from book 1, the Book of Knowledge. The Neoplatonic hierarchy in Mishneh torah suggested a way of reconciling the treatment of sacrifices in that work with their treatment in the Guide, evaluating them synchronically rather than diachronically. The underlying model or metaphor for emanation is a flow of water: water flowing downhill, and water flowing outwards from a source. This metaphor surfaces explicitly in ‘Laws of Immersion Pools’ at the end of the Book of Purity, and again at the end of Mishneh torah as a whole, pointing up the work's cosmic architecture and adding to it a dynamic element that brings a new level of significance.
From Theory to History, Via Midrash
Authors: Gillis David
Published: February 2021

This chapter presents a commentary on ‘Laws of the Foundations of the Torah’, 6:9 and 7:3. Maimonides deploys aggadah to add extra layers of meaning in Mishneh torah. Where he makes intense use of biblical reference, close reading and attention to midrashic resonances can be rewarding. ‘Laws of the Foundations of the Torah’, 6:9, was interpreted as broadening the chapter's theme of avoiding desecration of sacred objects and texts to include the need for sensitive reading of texts. In ‘Laws of the Foundations of the Torah’, 7:3, the juxtaposition of Jacob's dream of the ladder with Ezekiel's vision of the chariot was found to refer to the combination of theoretical knowledge and insight into historical process in the vision of the prophet. This is reflected in the ontological and teleological dimensions of Mishneh torah's form.
The Law of Sexual Relations
Authors: Novak David
Published: February 2021

This chapter evaluates how Noahide law forbids several types of sexual relations, including incest, homosexuality, and bestiality. Regarding attitudes towards incest, few differences can be found between Jews and non-Jews, although the rabbis recognized a significant dissimilarity toward relations between brother and sister. Noahide law was more permissive in this instance because it was also more general, whereas Jewish law knew of the specific prohibition of brother–sister relations. The rabbis were not the only Jews to reflect on prohibited relations: Philo held that sexual closeness between parents and children, or between siblings, breached the prior relationship of father and daughter, mother and son, or brother and sister. The chapter then looks at how the rabbis and later medieval thinkers addressed homosexuality, which was pervasive in the Greco-Roman world, and the nature of gentile family ties.
Aggadic Speculation
Authors: Novak David
Published: February 2021

This chapter addresses how the rabbis used the creative resources of theological inference to discover how the tradition charted universal moral law. This charting is particularly common when it comes to revelation, as the relationship of Jews and non-Jews to the Noahide law changed appreciably in the rabbinic mind. According to a famous aggadah, all people originally experienced the Noahide laws as divine directives. However, after Sinai, non-Jews no longer accepted the divine origins of these laws. Although gentiles no longer perceive a transcendent intention behind the laws, they are still obligated to adhere to them because of their social and political value. This powerful aggadah can be read in two ways: first, because non-Jews no longer hold to the divine origin of the Noahide laws but still observe them, the laws themselves must be rational, that is, capable of being understood and followed in the absence of direct revelation; second, if the rational element of the commandments are minimized, as they are by the medieval kabbalists, then the moral distance between Jews and non-Jews becomes abysmal. The chapter argues for the first view, which is philosophically more coherent and more in line with the developed Jewish tradition from rabbinic times to now.
Hermann Cohen and the Jewish Neo-Kantians
Authors: Novak David
Published: February 2021

This chapter reviews Hermann Cohen's presentation of the Noahide laws. Cohen desired to show that Jews in late nineteenth-century European (and especially German) society could be and were in fact good citizens, and that their Judaism was an aid to citizenship. Judaism was not an insular religion, and Jews supported the secular state, Cohen affirmed. For instance, he maintained that the aim of the law of adjudication was “objective lawfulness,” a signal starting-point for any society, secular or religious. Cohen's view of moral law was shaped by Kantian ethics. He argues that Noahide law confirms the humanity of gentiles, and that this rabbinic construction was the first of its kind. Recognizing the humanity of others is the beginning of autonomous ethics. For Cohen, the human ethical future is best presented through Jewish universalism, leading to universal ethical monotheism in the messianic age. This last point has been central to liberal Jewish theology since Cohen's time.
Towards a Jewish Theology of World Religions
Authors: Goshen-Gottstein Alon
Published: February 2021

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the broad range of issues that must be re-examined in order to construct a contemporary Jewish theology of world religions. Two interrelated conceptual foci underlie Jewish particularity: faith in revelation and faith in the election of the Jewish people. It is not simply the faith in one God that distinguishes Judaism from other world religions, for some of those others share that faith. Rather, differences arise with regard to how God reveals himself and which community receives his word and carries it through history to eschatological fulfilment. The theological challenge that any Jewish theology of world religions must meet is how to uphold faith in the Jewish particularity arising from these two core beliefs, with an openness that makes space for the spiritual and religious existence of others. This is not simply a conceptual or theological challenge, but also a cognitive and psychological one. These two doctrines shape not only Jewish faith but also a Jewish mentality that is often characterized by withdrawal and separation. The chapter then considers the legitimacy of other religious traditions, particularly Christianity and Islam; the problem of avodah zarah; and the challenge of safeguarding Jewish identity and continuity in the face of world religions.
Can Another Religion Be Seen as the Other?
Authors: Krajewski Stanisław
Published: February 2021

This chapter assesses whether it is possible to relate to another religious system as a true Other, or whether one can do so only to a person who subscribes to a different religion. One way of using the philosophy of the Other as an inspiration for the shaping of the vision of other religions is to transfer discoveries from the realm of individual persons to the realm of religions. When religions become the main focus, turning to the plural may be seen as the natural step. One can attempt various ways of acknowledging the Otherness of another religion, but one should constantly come back to one basic and obvious point: one never encounters ‘religions’. Instead, one encounters descriptions of religions. All genuine manifestations of religion, like texts, rituals, and buildings, are important, but they are nothing without religious people. Above all, one must encounter individual human beings who profess a religion. It is important to acknowledge not just some set of predicates, but someone's exceptional and socially rooted aspect — their religiosity. The chapter then considers the priestly status of the Jewish people.
The Banished Brother
Authors: Fenton Paul B.
Published: February 2021

This chapter studies the cultural encounter between Israel and Ishmael, how it has played a powerful role in shaping Judaism, and how it led the medieval rabbis and Jewish thinkers to oscillate between rejection and reception of Islam. Much of this dialectical attitude is played out through the ambivalent interpretations of the biblical Ishmael and in the polemical histories of Jews and Muslims. The chapter shows the Islamic impact on Judaism in halakhic, kabbalistic, messianic, and even hasidic texts. It is pessimistic about the enduring value of the Jewish–Muslim heritage, in view of how contemporary political circumstances have redefined Jewish–Muslim relations. Nevertheless, theological advances by Jews and Muslims are both necessary and possible. Through a process of inversion (teshuvah) of previous interpretative models regarding each other, Jews and Muslims can pave the way to mutual recognition and acceptance on theological and political levels.
Concluding Reflections
Authors: Goshen-Gottstein Alon
Published: February 2021

This concluding chapter presents some synthetic and comparative conclusions from the project as a whole. The classical model that governs most discussions in rabbinic literature regarding other religions and consequently figures heavily in this volume is the model of recognition. Doing theology of religions is thus an exercise in divine diplomacy — that is, one recognizes another religion, in part or in full, in light of the criteria one considers most important. The logic of recognition seeks to highlight that which is common, as a basis of recognition. The logic of hospitality, by contrast, tolerates differences without overlooking or minimizing them. Another important lesson from the project concerns the centrality of attitudes. The chapter then highlights the importance of choosing categories and criteria. Choosing emerges as a conscious strategy of coming to terms with other religions, especially in the context of recognition or tolerance. The chapter also notes the presence of mysticism and messianism in the Jewish view of other religions, and discusses the significance of Menahem Me'iri's views on religions.
Recovering a Voice
Authors: Weinberg David H.
Published: February 2021

This book focuses on the largely ignored efforts by the Jews of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands to reconstruct their lives after the Second World War. The book presents the challenges that were faced both in the national context and in the world Jewish arena and examines how they were dealt with. The book reviews the action taken to revive Jewish communities in the three countries, remodelling them as efficient, self-sustaining, and assertive bodies that could meet new challenges. With the creation of the State of Israel, Jews who stayed in western Europe had to defend their decision to do so while nevertheless showing public support for the new nation. There was also a felt need to respond quickly and effectively to any sign of antisemitism. In addition, tensions arose between Jews and non-Jews concerning wartime collaboration in deportations, and the need to memorialize Jewish victims of Nazism. The Cold War offered challenges of its own: the perceived need to exclude communist elements from communal affairs was countered by a resistance to pressures from American Jewish leaders to sever links with Jews in eastern Europe. Yet beneath the show of assertiveness, Jewish life was fragile, not only because of the physical depletion of the population and of its leadership but because the Holocaust had shaken religious beliefs and affiliations and had raised questions about the value of preserving ethnic and religious identity. At the same time, new forms of Jewish consciousness had evolved, meaning that Jewish leaders had to provide for diverse educational, religious, and cultural needs. This book demonstrates how, with the aid of international Jewish organizations, Jewish survivors used unprecedented means to meet unprecedented challenges.
Introduction
Authors: Weinberg David H.
Published: February 2021

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how the Jews of post-war France, Belgium, and the Netherlands reconstructed their communities in the period between 1945 and the early 1960s. During these years, the Jews of the three countries attempted not only to recover from the devastation of their recent past but also to lay the foundations for their future. International and American Jewish relief and political organizations played a seminal role in these efforts. As relief organizations began to realize that the majority of the surviving Jews in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands intended to remain where they were, they took an interest in helping to reshape communal life. The goal, as it emerged in discussions beginning in 1947, was to implement a ‘Jewish Marshall Plan’ that would enable viable settlements, such as those in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, to achieve stability and growth. Of the many external Jewish agencies that played a role in the efforts to reconstruct Jewish life in western Europe after 1945, three stand out: the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (known popularly in America as the JDC and in Europe as the Joint), the American Jewish Committee (AJC), and the World Jewish Congress (WJC).
Return, Relief, and Rehabilitation
Authors: Weinberg David H.
Published: February 2021

This chapter discusses the start of the relief effort for the Jews of post-war France, Belgium, and the Netherlands after the Second World War. The initial strategy devised by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) and other international Jewish organizations in 1945 in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands was to leave relief efforts to others. While working to secure Jewish representation on local aid committees that had been created by Christian charities, the Red Cross, and individual political parties, they would piggyback on the numerous relief efforts that Jewish communities in the three countries had themselves established during the war or had initiated at the time of liberation. Where possible, they would also demand that national governments assist Jewish survivors. In the absence of support from private aid groups and despite their weakened condition, a variety of local Jewish community agencies did what they could to aid survivors. Ultimately, in the first two decades after the war, American and other international organizations would be only partially successful in restructuring the Jewish communities of western Europe.
Restructuring European Jewish Communities: Hopes and Realities
Authors: Weinberg David H.
Published: February 2021

This chapter examines how the initial efforts by both international and local Jewish leaders to strengthen and streamline communal institutions and policies in the first decade and a half after the war became instrumental in ensuring the stability of west European Jewry and in shaping its emerging self-consciousness. With the restructuring of several important aspects of community activity in western Europe, it quickly became apparent that there was a need for long-range planning. New techniques in social work and fundraising meant that community leaders needed a clearer sense of the nature and the needs of their constituents. By the late 1950s, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) was sponsoring conferences to bring together social workers and leaders of Jewish welfare organizations from western and central Europe to discuss common problems and share solutions. In 1960, it helped to establish a permanent Standing Conference on European Jewish Community Services. The restructuring of health care within the French, Belgian, and Dutch communities also eventually led to the integration of Jewish communal service into the national social-welfare network. With the decline in distinct programmes to aid refugees and immigrants and the movement away from dependency upon international Jewish organizations, Jewish agencies in western Europe were beginning to receive government subsidies.
Modes of Reading
Authors: Wiskind-Elper Ora
Published: February 2021

This chapter explores the modes relating to Scripture that the Hasidic masters developed. It analyses the masters' sense of metaphor and poetic language, the roles of imagination, cognition, and the self, and the dynamics of translation and interpretation. It also provides a discussion through a thematic axis, which begins with a closer look at certain elements of Hadism and consider the ways in which they are manifested in the relationship between the rebbe and his Hasidim. The chapter highlights how the Hasidic masters created interpersonal connection by rhetorical means. It represents a full century of Hasidic creativity in a broad range of schools and trends, which speak of transformative learning and its experiential dimensions.
Chapter One The Evolution of Synagogue Textiles in Ancient and Medieval Times
Authors: Yaniv Bracha
Published: February 2021

The evolution of ceremonial synagogue textiles is closely related to that of the Torah scroll, particularly the way in which it was wrapped and the space in which it was stored. This process of evolution began during the Second Temple period and came to an end in the early fifth century, when the method of writing Torah scrolls was set; it was then that the tradition of writing the Pentateuch on parchment in the form of a scroll became accepted as the method of writing Torah scrolls....
Annotated Plates of Representative Textile Objects in the Synagogue
Authors: Yaniv Bracha
Published: February 2021

This chapter includes a section of plates in which ceremonial objects are illustrated and documented according to the communities in which they were used. It highlights the plates of textile that typically represent the ceremonial artistic concept of each community. It also describes the wrap from Rome that consists of fourteen pieces of undyed linen of various widths with linen strips that are embroidered with a pattern of vines. The chapter looks at a wrap from Rome that was stored in Museo Ebraico di Roma, which is made of seven pieces of rectangular fabric arranged symmetrically on each side of the central panel, which depicts the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai. The chapter analyses the embroidery of two pieces of fabric to the right and left of the central panel of the wrap with the name of the donor, Joseph Samuel Sarina.
Historical and Cultural Background
Authors: Yaniv Bracha
Published: February 2021

This chapter illustrates the design of the eastern European wooden Torah ark from that has several characteristic elements, such as tall height, variety in form, and richness in iconography. It describes the vast geographical diffusion of the numerous arks built during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Jewish communities in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. It also talks about the scattering of the Jewish population over many settlements that resulted in the establishment of several synagogues and construction of Torah arks against the background of wider historical processes. The chapter recounts events that affected the pattern of Jewish settlement that shaped the political, social, and cultural life of the population of eastern Europe. It reviews the establishment of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569 and the Cossack-peasant uprising headed by Bogdan Chmielnicki in 1648.
Construction and Design
Authors: Yaniv Bracha
Published: February 2021

This chapter focuses on carpentry and woodcarving as the artistic skills needed for the erection of a wooden Torah ark. It discloses how Jewish craftsmanship was restricted to professions necessary for Jewish life, such as ritual slaughtering, tailoring, book printing, and bookbinding from the sixteenth until the eighteenth century. It also discusses how local artisans gradually penetrated the more sophisticated crafts and how Jews practised carpentry, woodcarving, and painting in the mid-eighteenth century. The chapter talks about a few artisans that either worked as peripatetic craftsmen or received commissions from distant communities. It mentions Snycerz as a common name among Polish artisans, which originates from the word Schnitzer, that was adopted by Jewish carvers.
The Temple
Authors: Yaniv Bracha
Published: February 2021

This chapter reviews the concept of the synagogue as a little sanctuary that stems from Ezekiel's prophecy, and the identification of this sanctuary as the gateway to heaven based on Jacob's words. It talks about Jacob's words that became a popular inscription in houses of prayer and were painted above the entrance to the prayer hall of the synagogue in Lyuboml, Ukraine. It also explores the concept of a gateway to heaven through which prayers reach the Almighty that is deeply embedded in Jewish thought and finds expression in the annual cycle of prayers. The chapter talks about the earliest known use of biblical citations on an ark to express the concept of the gateway to heaven that was done in the Ben-Ezra synagogue in Fustat. It reflects the traditional concept of a virtual gateway to heaven as the main actual representation of a gate in the design of arks in the facade form.
Introduction
Authors: Polonsky Antony
Published: February 2021

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Jewish population of Poland–Lithuania. During the years of its flourishing, it gave rise to a unique religious and secular culture in Hebrew and Yiddish and enjoyed an unprecedented degree of self-government. Even after the upheavals which marked the beginning of the downfall of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Jewish community continued to grow and even to recover some of its vitality. In the late eighteenth century these lands saw the birth and development of hasidism, an innovative revivalist movement, which was eventually to win the allegiance of a large proportion of the Jewish population and which remains very much alive in the Jewish world today. The partitions of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century and again in 1815 divided Polish Jewry between the tsarist, Habsburg, and Prussian states. In all these areas, and particularly in the Pale of Settlement, the late nineteenth century saw the appearance and increasing ascendancy of ethnic and national conceptions of Jewish self-identification, in particular Zionism and Jewish autonomism.
Attempts to Transform and Integrate the Jews 1750–1881
Authors: Polonsky Antony
Published: February 2021

This chapter examines how the middle of the eighteenth century was a major turning point in the history of the Jews in Europe. Under the influence of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, many rulers now began to initiate attempts, carried still further by their constitutional successors in the nineteenth century, to transform the Jews from members of a religious and cultural community into ‘useful’ subjects, or, where a civil society had been established, into citizens. This attempt to change the legal, social, and economic status of the Jews was part of a wider process affecting the whole of society which can be described as ‘the Great Transformation’. There were two aspects to this transformation: economic and political. One now sees the industrial revolution as the culmination of a much longer process that should probably be dated back to the effects of European overseas expansion from the fifteenth century. The end result of this revolution was urbanization, the development of industry, the increasing importance of the bourgeoisie, and the displacement of the landed aristocracy as the dominant economic and political stratum.
The New Jewish Politics 1881–1914
Authors: Polonsky Antony
Published: February 2021

This chapter investigates how the years between 1881 and 1914 saw major changes in the situation of the Jews in the tsarist empire. Antisemitism became the stock-in-trade of the tsarist authorities, who fastened on imaginary Jewish conspiracies as the explanation for the crises that threatened the empire. In the Kingdom of Poland and in the Prussian partition, Polish political life was now dominated by the Endecja, which came increasingly under the sway of obsessive antisemitism, while the national conflict between Poles and Ukrainians was undermining Jewish support for Polish aristocratic hegemony in Galicia. One consequence of these changes was the increasing strength of the ‘new Jewish politics’. This new departure, the politics of ‘peoplehood’, which first emerged in the decade of the 1880s in the tsarist empire, was a response to the perceived failure of the politics of Jewish integration. The new political climate compelled the exponents of the new Jewish politics to look for allies from the broader political spectrum.
War and Genocide 1939–1945
Authors: Polonsky Antony
Published: February 2021

This chapter explores how the outbreak of the Second World War initiated a new and tragic period in the history of the Jews of north-eastern Europe. The Polish defeat by Nazi Germany in the unequal campaign that began in September of 1939 led to a new partition of the country by Germany and the Soviet Union. Though Hitler had been relatively slow to put the more extreme aspects of Nazi antisemitism into practice, by the time the war broke out, the Nazi regime was set in its deep-seated hatred of the Jews. Following the brutal violence of Kristallnacht on November 9–10, 1938, when up to a hundred Jews were murdered in Germany and Austria and over 400 synagogues burnt down, Hitler, disconcerted by the domestic and foreign unease which this provoked, decided to entrust policy on the Jews to the ideologues of the SS. They were determined at this stage to enforce a ‘total separation’ between Jews and Germans, but wanted to do so in an ‘orderly and disciplined’ manner, perhaps by compelling most Jews to emigrate. The Nazis did not act immediately on the genocidal threat of ‘the annihilation of the Jews as a race in Europe’, but during the first months of the war, a dual process took place: the barbarization of Nazi policy generally and a hardening of policy towards Jews.
A Sermon
Authors: Saperstein Marc
Published: February 2021

This chapter discusses a sermon by Solomon Hirschel given in the aftermath of a British naval victory in 1805. It was a fateful battle — some have claimed that the very survival of England was at stake — for it ended the immediate danger that French ships could dominate the Channel, allowing the Grande Armée to invade. Comparison with reports of other sermons given on this occasion reveals several predictable common themes: the importance of expressing humble gratitude to God; the role of divine providence, even when administered through apparently natural causes; the mixture of jubilation with intense shock and grief; the appeal for financial support of widows, orphans, and the wounded. Like the sermon from the previous chapter, Hirschel's does not contain the vilification of Napoleon. On the other hand, Hirschel devotes considerable attention to a theme not found in the Christian texts: whether it is proper to rejoice at the victory of one's own nation when this victory entails suffering and death among the enemy.
A Sermon Delivered on the Day of Prayer
Authors: Michelbacher M. J.
Published: February 2021

This chapter presents a sermon delivered by M. J. Michelbacher. The occasion for the sermon was one of the many days of fasting and prayer proclaimed by the governments in Richmond and in Washington, DC during the Civil War years. Jefferson Davis proclaimed nine such days during the life of the Confederacy. While it is difficult to know how seriously the fasting component was taken by the population, religious leaders were apparently committed to observing them as occasions for addressing their people in specially prepared sermons, many of which were summarized in local newspapers and subsequently printed in pamphlet form. The themes were generally the acknowledgement of divine providence, the recognition of failures and sins, and the need to pray, in an appropriate posture of humility, for God's favour.
On the Terrible War of 5675
Authors: Silverstone George (Gedaliah)
Published: February 2021

This chapter studies an early example of a sermon which focuses more on the toll taken by the First World War on the masses of Jewish civilians living on the contested territories of the Eastern Front rather than on the implications of the war for the general values of culture and civilization. Here the sermon of George (Gedaliah) Silverstone does not underline the patriotism of Jews towards all the countries where they lived, but rather emphasizes the underlying unity of the Jewish people, and the sometimes painful tension between that unity and such patriotism. The preacher introduces it by speaking of the reaction of his listeners to the story they have read ‘in the newspapers’, apparently within the past few days. In addition to narratives drawn from the contemporary newspapers, there are two other major components of the sermon's message, drawn from traditional Jewish literature. The source provides hope for a providential, redemptive dénouement to the bloodshed, in the traditional homiletical style.
Can we Win the War without Losing America?
Authors: Wise Stephen S.
Published: February 2021

This chapter discusses a sermon by Stephen S. Wise on the First World War. This sermon was delivered against the background of various legislative battles pertaining to the domestic implications of the war effort. Like most of his Sunday addresses, there is no biblical text: that role is played by the sermon's title, which is analysed at the beginning of the sermon. The central thesis is made clear in an introductory section: the reason we have gone to war is to protect the rights of self-determination for each nation in accordance with its own capacity for self-realization, to ‘shield the souls of nations from destruction by a brutalizing sovereignty’. The challenge — phrased in an allusion to a familiar passage from the New Testament — is to achieve this goal without, in the process, losing ‘our own soul’, the essence of American democracy.
Two Second World War Sermons
Authors: Berkovits Eliezer
Published: February 2021

This chapter presents two sermons following the Allied loss at Greece. The first of Eliezer Berkovits' sermons sets out the theme of ‘moral strategy’ as contrasted with military strategy. This leads to a biblical text and asserts the importance of faith in more religious terms. The second sermon was delivered some four months later, at the end of a summer during which the war had dramatically expanded with the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Berkovits uses the occasion of a national day of prayer, commemorating the completion of the second year of the war, to review the events of the recent past and his own homiletical responses to them.
Is it Death or Rebirth of the World that we Behold?
Authors: Levinthal Israel H.
Published: February 2021

This chapter concerns Israel H. Levinthal's sermon. His sermon reveals a realm of homiletical discourse far removed from that represented by the sermon of the previous chapter. There are no purple passages or polished periods, no memorable original turns of phrase. Except for the reference to the Battle of Britain and the war in Russia, there is no analysis of the details of the military situation abroad or of the specificity of political machinations. There is no engagement with the behaviour of American Jews in general or of Levinthal's congregants in particular. This is a sermon not of castigation and rebuke but of anguish and solace; the work of a preacher mobilizing the resources of the traditional literature to acknowledge the darkness of the world in his time, and yet to affirm at least the possibility of hope for something new and better.
Two Vietnam War Sermons
Authors: Gittelsohn Roland B.
Published: February 2021

This chapter presents sermons by Roland B. Gittelsohn. He was notably one of the first American rabbis of a large urban congregation to condemn from the pulpit the Johnson administration's policy in Vietnam. Gittelsohn's characteristic preaching style is well reflected in the two sermons shown in this chapter. They are not notable for a florid literary style, purple passages, or rhetorical flourishes; nothing in the sermons would be considered evidence of great ‘oratory’. Except perhaps for the opening sentence of the first sermon, there are no melodramatic moments intended to inspire the listeners or move them to tears. The appeal of these sermons is not to the emotions but to the mind. They provide information to buttress the preacher's position: quotations not from Jewish sources but from contemporary experts. The sermons set out an argument point by point, with lucidity and cogency. The recapitulation of points already made helps the listener to recall what has been said and to follow the next step in the exposition.
Ba’al Shem Tov
Authors: Rosman Moshe
Published: February 2021

This chapter gives scholarly biographical descriptions of Israel ben Eliezer. Most writers agree that Israel ben Eliezer lived from approximately 1700 to 1760 and was a person of humble origins who eventually merited the appellation Ba’al Shem Tov (the Besht), which translates as “Master of the Good Name.” The chapter talks about the Besht who had certain mystical powers and was known as a nonascetic, pneumatic-ecstatic who projected charismatic appeal. It explains how the Besht involved himself in the problems of everyday life and communicated with people through folksy discussion and the telling of stories. He was in some sense the founder of the movement that became known as Hasidism.
Międzybóż
Authors: Rosman Moshe
Published: February 2021

This chapter describes the development and relative prosperity of Podolia during the Besht’s lifetime in the three Podolian locales with which his life is most closely associated. First is his reported childhood home and birthplace, Okopy, and second is his later residence, Tluste. The third locale is the place where he spent most of his public career, Miçdzyboz. The chapter provides an understanding of the context of the Besht’s public and private life in Miçdzyboz and gives new criteria for linking and assessing the sources about him. Hundreds of documents relating to Miçdzyboz in the late seventeenth century and first half of the eighteenth century have been preserved in the archive of the families that owned the town, the Sieniawskis and Czartoryskis. It explains how some of the archival sources facilitate understanding of the circumstances in Miçdzyboz and within its Jewish community during the period the Besht lived there.
More Besht Correspondence
Authors: Rosman Moshe
Published: February 2021

This chapter talks about a collection of hagiographic stories about the Besht and his associates called the Shivhei Ha-Besht. It mentions Dov Ber of Ilintsy, the compiler, who included five citations from letters that the Ba’al Shem Tov wrote in the Shivhei Ha-Besht. The fifth quotation, unlike the other four cases, is where Dov Ber indicated that he was copying, not what someone had told him, but what he saw in a manuscript copy of the letter. The chapter points out how neither Dubnow nor Scholem presented the letter in their discussions of the Besht’s views on asceticism. Yet the letter to Jacob Joseph of Polonne provides a clear and reliable statement of the Besht’s antiasceticism.
A Person of His Time
Authors: Rosman Moshe
Published: February 2021

This chapter discusses Polish sources of the Ba’al Shem Tov, which emphasized hearsay and traditional Hebrew material that is full of colorful detail. It focuses on how the Polish paid little attention to some of the written sources and testimonies from the Besht. The unsystematic way in which many scholars set about interpreting the Hebrew sources they were willing to use led to an often-confusing portrayal of the Besht. Scholars have been preoccupied with the Besht’s “message” and “way,” to the exclusion of serious consideration of the physical, social, economic, and cultural parameters. The chapter also highlights Mendel Piekarz, who demonstrated that Hasidism was not theologically innovative. Virtually all of Piekarz’s religious doctrines were anticipated or expounded by non-Hasidim.
A Story within a Story
Authors: Schedrin Vassili
Published: February 2021

We should want a young Jewish man to know, although in brief form, the entire history of his people: to understand it and reflect on it. Then much would be revealed to him in the surrounding reality, in the spiritual and social life of his own nation....
How Jews Gained Their Education in Kiev, 1860–1917
Authors: Khiterer Victoria
Published: February 2021

RUSSIAN governmental policies on Jewish education changed several times during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Michael Stanislawski has shown, the Russian government actively intervened in affairs related to the traditional Jewish educational system. The law of 1844 led to the establishment of Jewish state schools in many cities and towns in the Pale of Settlement, subordinating traditional religious Jewish schools, ...
Between a Love of Poland, Symbolic Violence, and Antisemitism
Authors: Kijek Kamil
Published: February 2021

THE ESTABLISHMENT of new states after the First World War constituted a revolution for the people affected and had a major impact on every aspect of their lives. The Second Polish Republic was the largest of these new states and also contained the most sizeable Jewish community, numbering some three million. Throughout its existence this state was enmeshed in the contradictions of a nation state aspiring to be a democratic republic in a situation in which one-third of its citizens did not consider themselves or were not recognized as Polish. The term that perhaps most accurately describes the new state’s character and, more specifically, its internal policy towards the Polish majority and its ethnic minorities was that coined by Rogers Brubaker: ‘a nation-oriented state’. The Second Polish Republic was formed in the name of and for an ethnically defined Polish nation, whose interests it was first of all to guarantee....
’Vos Vayter?’ Graduating from Elementary School in Interwar Poland
Authors: Selzer Adva
Published: February 2021

IN 1932 YIVO announced its first autobiography competition for young east European Jews with the goal of learning about the problems they faced. Two years later YIVO established a special department for youth research in order to develop and deepen knowledge of the lives of young Jews, which held two additional competitions in 1934 and 1939:...
’The children ceased to be children’
Authors: Person Katarzyna
Published: February 2021

THE REPORTS prepared by care-givers from the Central Association for the Care of Orphans and Abandoned Children (Związek Towarzystw Opieki nad Dziećmi i Sierotami Żydowskimi; Farband fun Tsentrales far Yesoymim Farsorgung in Poyln; Centos) in December 1941 and copied for the collection of the Ringelblum Archive, the underground archive of the Warsaw ghetto, deal with education in the most extreme circumstances: the Warsaw ghetto....
Gender Perspectives on the Rescue of Jews in Poland
Authors: Michlic Joanna B.
Published: February 2021

HISTORIANS have only recently begun to rectify the neglect of the study of women’s experiences in eastern Europe during the Second World War.1 One area in which there have been very few analytical studies is the role of women in both the rescue and the betrayal of Jewish fugitives during the Holocaust. Little work has been done on the relationships between female rescuers and their Jewish charges,...
Julian Tuwim’s Strategy for Survival as a Polish Jewish Poet
Authors: Tomassucci Giovanna
Published: February 2021

Christian selling trousers: 38 Krucza Street

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Jew buying trousers: 38 Krucza Street

ANTONI SŁONIMSKI and JULIAN TUWIM, W oparach absurdu

From the very start of his poetic career, Tuwim presented his literary alter ego as wandering about the city in search of spontaneous adventures, a twentieth-century flâneur with spare, aimless time on his hands....
Jerzy Tomaszewski
Authors: Polonsky Antony
Published: February 2021

JERZY TOMASZEWSKI, who died on 4 November 2014 at the age of 84, was one of the principal figures in the revival of the study of the history of the Jews in Poland. He was born in Radomsko, a town between Łódź and Częstochowa which, before the war, was the home of a large Jewish community and the court of the Radomsker rebbe. Tomaszewski often remarked that it was the constant presence during his childhood years of hasidim in traditional Jewish dress which made him aware of the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional character of Poland. He was for many years professor and director of the Mordechai Anielewicz Centre for the Study and Teaching of the History and Culture of the Jews in Poland at Warsaw University. After his retirement in 2002 he took the post of professor at the Academy of National Economy in Kutno....
Feliks Tych
Authors: Polonsky Antony
Published: February 2021

FELIKS TYCH, who died on 17 February 2015, was a leading figure in Jewish life in Poland and was, from 1996 to 2007, director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. Born in Warsaw, he grew up in Radomsko in central Poland, the ninth child of the owner of a metal works. The town was the site of the first ghetto to be established in the General Government after the German invasion of Poland in 1939. In the summer of 1942, his parents entrusted him to a non-Jewish friend who brought him secretly to Warsaw, where he survived on false documents as the ‘orphaned’ nephew of a Polish high-school teacher. His parents and siblings were murdered in Treblinka....
Tradition and its Demise
Authors: Magnus Shulamit S.
Published: February 2021

This chapter examines gender and class in Pauline Wengeroff's Memoirs of a Grandmother. In Volume II of Memoirs, Wengeroff asserts a stark, globalized claim of gender disparity about tradition and its loss among modernizing Russian Jews. The chapter then reflects on her life and experience in St. Petersburg. The organized Jewish community that formed in the capital in the 1860s was that of the moneyed elite; the city was the home of the elite that championed selective integration. In St. Petersburg, the Jewish leadership class was literally under the government's gaze, acutely aware of its self-appointed role as the official model for Russian Jewry and as representative of the community's interests before the authorities. The chapter also describes the struggle between Wengeroff and her husband, Chonon, over Jewish observance. It explores the notions of love and marriage in traditional Jewish culture. Whatever the divergence between Wengeroff's depictions and evidence from German Jewry, she echoes one crucial aspect of middle-class German Jewish experience: the domestication of women.
The Jewish Mother’s Prayer: Mothers in Late Nineteenth-Century Hungarian Jewish Women’s Prayer Books
Authors: Frauhammer Krisztina
Published: February 2021

This chapter examines the genre of nineteenth-century Hungarian Neolog Jewish women's prayer books. It argues that the prayer books must be read in the context of emancipation and the increasing secularization of Hungarian society. It also describes the creation of prayers that sanctify a vocation of motherhood and child-rearing, which charged mothers with passing Jewish identity on to their children in the home. The chapter talks about Neolog prayer books that imagine the Jewish mother as a bulwark against secularization and simultaneously invest mothers with the power to recreate tradition in the face of emancipation. It points out how mothers are idealized and entrusted with the past for the sake of the future, enabling fathers to become part of public life outside the home.
Nene Mesl-e Nān—‘Mother is Like Bread’: The Perception of Motherhood and Folklore Expressions among the Jews of Afghanistan
Authors: Tsur Tsila Zan-Bar
Published: February 2021

This chapter focuses on Afghani motherhood that highlights the powerful role that mothers play within Jewish cultures while conforming to idealized notions of the Jewish mother within the family circle. It points out how the mother's praiseworthiness surfaces with husbands and sons glorifying her for serving as a protective force. It also cites that Ottoman mothers played active roles in the legal structure of family life, involving themselves in the betrothals and divorces of their sons and daughters. The chapter captures the ennobling manner in which Afghani mothers turn the everyday chore of bread-making into a protective cultural force. It illustrates family relationships that are conducted through bread and known among the Afghani Jews as nan.
Like Mother Like Daughter: Mother–Daughter Relations in Babylonian Talmudic Stories
Authors: Lavee Moshe
Published: February 2021

This chapter describes a process where mothers are essential to the replication of a particular cultural model of authority and yet also challenge the very structure that they work to support. It refers to the Babylonian Talmud and its depiction of mother–daughter relationships in two cycles of talmudic narratives, which argues that the Talmud uses this relationship to promote the value of father–husbands leaving home to study Torah. It also looks at the centrality and power of the father–son relationship that is disrupted when sons become disciples of male rabbinic masters. The chapter discusses mothers who are portrayed as a success when transmitting to their daughters the value of sending husbands off to study with a master. It emphasizes that the mother–daughter relationship becomes crucial to the creation and replication of a society that valorizes rabbinic authority and the ideal of Torah study.