bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Aaron Menahem Mendel Guterman, the rebbe of Radzymin
Authors: Rabinowicz Harry
Published: February 2021

This chapter focuses on Rabbi Aaron Menahem Mendel Guterman, the rebbe of Radzymin. Guterman is remembered for many things, not least among them the after-effects of his setting up a screen to separate men and women worshippers at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. When his father died, Guterman succeeded him as rebbe of Radzymin near Warsaw, where Jews constituted 55 per cent of the population. Much of his life was spent in the public eye; he was an educator, organizer, and tireless worker for the community. Like the rebbe of Radomsk (Radomsko), Guterman became affluent when many of his hasidim named him their business ‘partner’. He also founded an organization called Shomrei Shabat Kodesh Vehadat, dedicated to the observance of the Sabbath, and became a familiar Friday afternoon figure, urging Warsaw's Jewish shopkeepers to close their shops for the Sabbath. His friendly, fatherly approach and affable manner won him a wide circle of admirers. No rebbe was so informal in his ways, so easily accessible, or less aware of the dignity of his status.
A Pilgrimage from Bobowa to Bobowa
Authors: Bartosz Adam
Published: February 2021

This chapter investigates the world of Bobower hasidim. Those hasidim who had survived the Holocaust had taken with them their hasidic spirit, their customs, and their language, and moved to another geographic dimension. That which in Bobowa itself has become legend is in Brooklyn a physical reality. All of hasidic Bobowa is there, transferred across the ocean. Bobowa itself—the Bobowa near Tarnów—has changed too, of course, but this other Bobowa in Boro Park has changed more. However, the miracle-working tsadik and his court have remained, and so have the faithful hasidim, and their thoughts and prayers: the Messiah did not descend on to the splendid Bobowa soil, where he could have walked on a carpet of grass and herbs, but he will certainly come to the hasidim who await him on the pavements of Brooklyn.
Świat pod kontrolą: Wybór materiałów z archiwum cenzury rosyjskiej w Warszawie
Authors: Shmeruk Chone
Published: February 2021

This chapter assesses a selection of materials from the archive of the Tsarist censorship office in Warsaw, carefully edited by Maria Prussak in 1994 and entitled The World under Control: A Selection of Materials from the Archive of the Russian Censor in Warsaw. This selection bears out the existence of the gaps in people's knowledge of the literature dealing with Jews in the Russian part of partitioned Poland up to the First World War. While it would have been expected that material dealing with Jews existed in the sections of the tsarist censorship office records that handled Hebrew and Yiddish publications and stage productions, it is quite unexpected to find such material in the section of the censorship office which dealt with materials in Polish. The selection by Prussak, understandably fragmentary, shows that even in this section it is possible to find interesting information and observations. The chapter then considers how the Russian censors applied various methods when dealing with literature about Jews.
Felicja Karay Death Comes in Yellow: Skarżysko-Kamienna Slave Labour Camp
Authors: Bialystok Frank
Published: February 2021

This chapter addresses Felicja Karay's study of the slave labour camp at Skarżysko-Kamienna. The study provides an insight into the internal relations of a camp that is unique in the field of Holocaust scholarship. It reveals how private industry profited from the slave labour of Jews while manipulating competing agencies in the Reich. Karay describes the collaboration between industry and government in which Jewish labour became indispensable in the war effort. In time, the Hugo Schneider Aktiengesellschaft (Hasag) was producing one-third of the munitions used on the eastern front, thereby meeting the needs of the Wehrmacht, the GG administration, and Albert Speer's ministry of armaments. Jewish labour was also used for political and economic reasons. Jewish workers could be more easily manipulated than local Poles, Volksdeutsche, or Ukrainians; moreover, they were given far fewer resources than these other groups: they were not even paid. Thus, Jews came to replace Poles as workers in the course of the war.
Meat and Wine
Authors: Toaff Ariel
Published: February 2021

This chapter assesses how Jews faced particular problems in ‘carnivorous Europe’, where meat was eaten every day, servings were generous, and wine was drunk as though it were water. For Jews, consumption of meat and wine was conditional upon their preparation according to strict rules. Adherence to Jewish dietary law thus entailed waste: on the one hand, of animals which had been found to be unfit after ritual slaughter, and on the other, of remains which could not in any circumstances be eaten by Jews. As such, a Jewish community needed a far greater supply of animals than a Christian one, irrespective of the appetites or financial means of individuals. The cost of a pound of kosher meat would have been prohibitive if the relevant butcher had not been able to sell the rejected parts to Christian customers. In summary, then, the presence of a Jewish community in any town was always dependent on the regular availability of kosher meat. As with meat, Jewish law laid down precise rules defining kosher wine. Wine was inevitably found at the tables of the Italian Jews of the period, above all in such a great wine-producing and consuming area as Umbria, whose countryside is today still characterized by extensive vineyards.
Doctors and Surgeons
Authors: Toaff Ariel
Published: February 2021

This chapter focuses on Jewish doctors and surgeons in Umbrian communes in the late Middle Ages. Public records, notarial deeds, and contracts in Hebrew and Latin all bear witness to the presence and activity of a host of Jewish doctors, hired by the communes to treat the people of any given town and contado. The practice appears to have been widespread throughout Italy, and its roots are to be sought less in the supposed Jewish penchant for medical studies than in the fact that such studies were virtually the only ones to which Jews had access in the Italian universities of the time. Moreover, the privileges and prestige which often accompanied the medical profession constituted an appreciable attraction for Jews in search of a social standing that might exempt them from the restrictions that went with their identity. Such advantages included above all the right of citizenship, with its attendant privileges, primarily that of being able to acquire property and enter it in the town's land register; exemption from payment of city tributes and special taxes; authorization to carry defensive weapons; and dispensation from wearing the distinctive badge. However, from the mid-fifteenth century onwards, the employment of Jewish doctors by the communes began to be hotly and openly contested.
Personal Redemption in Hasidism
Authors: Faierstein Morris M.
Published: February 2021

This chapter studies personal redemption in hasidism. The question of messianism or redemption is one area where the distinctions between the popular and élitist aspects of hasidism can be clearly discerned. Though messianism in hasidism has been discussed at length, there is very little discussion of personal redemption, a theme closely related to the élitist aspect of hasidism. Personal redemption is relevant to a small spiritual élite who attempt to attain this state in their personal lives without regard to the redemptive state of the world as a whole. This concept is found in the writings of R. Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye who attributes it to the Baal Shem Tov. The Maggid of Mezhirech relates it to his doctrine of unio mystica. His disciples moved away from this concept as the idea of the popular zaddik grew in prominence. Personal redemption again became a central concern with the rejection of popular zaddikism by the Przysucha-Kotsk school. It reached its fullest development in the writings of R. Mordecai Joseph of Izbica who made it the cornerstone of his teachings.
Torah lishmah as a Central Concept in the Degel maḥaneh Efrayim of Moses Hayyim Ephraim of Sudylkow
Authors: Goetschel Roland
Published: February 2021

This chapter focuses on R. Moses Hayyim Ephraim of Sudylkow, who is one of the most important figures in the second generation of the hasidic movement. This is due in part to his family connections. But an even more important factor in accounting for his status is the numerous passages in his collected teachings, the Degel maḥaneh Efrayim, where he reports statements in the name of such hasidic luminaries as the Baal Shem Tov, R. Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, R. Nahman of Horodenka, and the Maggid of Mezhirech, making him one of the most valuable sources of information on the hasidic doctrine at its earliest stages of development. The Degel maḥaneh Efrayim is also important for another reason, in that it provides an insight into R. Moses Hayyim Ephraim's own method of integrating into his sermons the main themes of hasidic revivalism. The chapter then considers the torah lishmah—study of Torah ‘for its own sake’, without ulterior motives—as a central concept in R. Moses Hayyim Ephraim's work. It also looks at the significance of torah lishmah in the controversy between hasidism and mitnaggedim.
R. Naphtali Zevi of Ropczyce ‘the Ropshitser’ as a Hasidic Leader
Authors: Salmon Yoseph
Published: February 2021

This chapter focuses on R. Naphtali Zevi Horowitz of Ropczyce. What is known of the life of R. Naphtali is drawn mainly from collections of hasidic hagiography published many years after his death. The hagiographical literature of hasidism—a large body of oral traditions committed to writing long after the events they describe—is highly problematic and its validity as historical source material has been frequently questioned. The chapter distinguishes between didactic material, which offers virtually no insight into the historical reality of R. Naphtali, and such concrete historical details as do occasionally occur in the tales, furnishing the background against which the plots are developed. It is worth remembering that R. Naphtali's homiletic writings were published long before any of the hagiographical works about him. His two homiletic works, Ayalah sheluḥzah (Lemberg, 1862) and Zera kodesh (Lemberg, 1868), appeared many years after his death (in 1827) since he did not allow them to be published.
Yitzhak Schiper's Study of Hasidism in Poland
Authors: Shmeruk Chone
Published: February 2021

This chapter discusses Yitzhak Schiper's study of hasidism in Poland. By the beginning of the Second World War, Yitzhak (Ignacy) Schiper was a recognized authority on Polish Jewish history. In the very midst of the war, while incarcerated in the Warsaw ghetto, Schiper kept up his research and continued to write, persisting up to the very end. It now appears that most of Schiper's manuscript on hasidism survived. Two of the original three bulky notebooks into which Schiper had copied his completed work were discovered several years ago by a young student of Hebrew at Warsaw University, Zbigniew Targielski. Schiper's monograph is a brand plucked from the fire, a remnant of the fine historiographical literature produced by Polish Jewry, and testimony to the author's refusal to abandon the historian's mission even in the face of disaster and destruction.
Differences in Attitudes to Study and Work between Present-day Hasidim and Mitnaggedim: A Sociological View
Authors: Meijers Daniel
Published: February 2021

This chapter investigates the differences in attitudes to study and work between present-day hasidim and mitnaggedim. It considers the concept of tsimtsum—a process underlying the work of Creation through which God was concealed on various levels in the process of creation. Thus, God withdrew Himself, as it were, in order to make room for Creation. This view was accepted in principle by both hasidim and mitnaggedim, but each group gave it a completely different interpretation. According to the mitnaggedim, God had withdrawn His essence from the world, so that the material world that remained was less divine. Consequently, any real relationship with God could be established only through the spiritual activity of studying the Torah in which He had revealed Himself. According to hasidic teachings, on the other hand, tsimtsum refers only to the concealment of a certain divine manifestation and not to the withdrawal of God Himself. From this, it follows that God's essence is present in matter as well; His infinity has not been affected by the creation of the world.
Early Hasidism: Some Old/New Questions
Authors: Green Arthur
Published: February 2021

This chapter looks at some old and new questions on early hasidism. In reopening the two great questions—hasidism's origins and its success—contemporary scholarship has negated almost all the once clearly established answers. One can no longer say that hasidism began because of persecution, especially not that it arose in reaction to the Chmielnicki massacre a century earlier or its long aftermath, as was once widely claimed. Nor can one say that hasidism was primarily or necessarily a reaction to Sabbateanism. What, then, is left by way of explanation? The chapter then considers four questions about the beginning and success of hasidism. How and why did hasidism begin? What was the secret of its great success and rapid spread? What, if anything, is new in hasidism? How are the parameters of the movement to be defined—who is and who is not a hasid? From the perspective of the current state of research, the chapter answers each of these questions, identifying the present stand.
Athens in Jerusalem
Authors: Shavit Yaacov
Published: February 2021

According to this book, the Hellenistic tradition played a role as a model for Jewish modernisers to draw upon as they perceived a lack in Jewish culture. The book claims that Greek and Hellenistic concepts are now internalised by the Jewish people. The book begins with the question of a dichotomy between Athens and Jerusalem and approaches the issue by considering how Athens, with its associations of classical antiquity and Hellenism, might have any impact on modern Jewish culture. The book considers what makes Hellenism and Hebraism conceptual twins. Further, it seeks to address why it was also necessary to place the Greek ideal in opposition to Hebraism (Judaism). In conclusion, the book explores the complex reality of the modern Jerusalem as it has been irrevocably influenced by Athens. It considers that, given Athens and Jerusalem are two antipodal entities, can these hostile and contradicting spiritual and cultural entities exist together? It reveals that modern Judaism, namely secular Judaism, inspired by Athens and shaped by the heritage of classical antiquity (and Western values), is a different type of Judaism from the Judaism of previous generations; therefore, the conflict between Athens and Jerusalem in Jerusalem was and is inevitable. This conflict is the core of the struggle over the identity and content of modern Judaism in Palestine.
Jewish Hymnography
Authors: Weinberger Leon J.
Published: February 2021

This book draws on a wealth of material, much of it previously available only in Hebrew, to trace the history of Jewish hymnography from its origins in the eastern Mediterranean to its subsequent development in Western Europe (Spain, Italy, Franco-Germany, and England) and Balkan Byzantium, on the Grecian periphery, under the Ottomans, and among the Karaites. Focusing on each region in turn, the book provides a general background to the role of the synagogue poets in the society of the time; characterizes the principal poets and describes their contribution; examines the principal genres and forms; and considers their distinctive language, style, and themes. The copious excerpts from the liturgy are presented in transliterated Hebrew and in English translation, and their salient characteristics are fully discussed to bring out the historical development of ideas and regional themes as well as literary forms. The book is a valuable source-book for students of synagogue liturgy, Jewish worship, and medieval Hebrew poetry. It provides new perspectives for students of religious poetry and forms of worship more generally, while enabling the general reader to acquire a much-enriched appreciation of the synagogue services.
Synagogue Poets in Balkan Byzantium
Authors: Weinberger Leon J.
Published: February 2021

This chapter explains that Romaniote hymnography in south-eastern Europe reveals a three-stage development that is similar to the Italian experience. The early poets in Balkan Byzantium — Benjamin b. Samuel (11th c.) and his contemporaries, Isaac b. Judah, Benjamin b. Zeraḥ, and Samuel Ha-Kohen Memeli — imitated Solomon Ha-Bavli’s neo-classical revival practices. Like the Italian master, they generally built their hymns in a consistent word metre and with two-morpheme rhyme endings. They also favoured the Qilliric-style neologisms and allusions to rabbinic sources. The chapter then assesses the role of the rabbi-poet in Balkan Byzantium. It is likely that the Romaniote poet served as the congregational cantor. The chapter also discusses the role of Romaniote mysticism and folk practices in Romaniote hymnography.
‘For the Human Soul is the Lamp of the Lord’: The Tkhine for ‘Laying Wicks’ by Sarah bas Tovim
Authors: Weissler Chava
Published: February 2021

This chapter examines the tkhines, the primarily female genre of Yiddish supplicatory prayers. While it is difficult to reconstruct the religious lives of Jewish women in any pre-modern era, one important window into the piety of Jewish women in eighteenth-century Poland is through the tkhines. The chapter considers the work of one author of tkhines, the most famous of them all, Sarah bas Tovim. It begins by discussing what can be gleaned about Sarah from her two authentic tkhine collections, and then go on to focus on the most beloved portion of one of them, her tkhine for making candles of wicks used to measure graves in the cemetery. The chapter then provides a comparison of this tkhine with other contemporaneous material to elucidate the meaning of the ritual and the tkhine that accompanies it.
Knowledge of Foreign Languages among Eighteenth-Century Polish Jews
Authors: Stone Daniel
Published: February 2021

This chapter addresses the knowledge of foreign language among eighteenth-century Jews. Polish Jews were not isolated in the eighteenth century or in previous centuries. They inhabited an international society of business, medicine, politics, and scholarship. Jews published their works in Hebrew and circulated them across the European continent. Jews also took a major part in international business networks, which carried Jewish merchants to other lands with their Jewish servants and labourers. Within Poland, Jewish occupations demanded extensive contact with the non-Jewish world, as did the political requirements of maintaining a Jewish communal identity. As such, the chapter suggests that there were many individual cases of Jews who had learned the language of their neighbours. It then assesses the degree to which Polish Jews knew Polish and European languages such as German, French, and Latin, as well as east European languages such as Russian and Hungarian.
‘That Incredible History of the Polish Bund Written in a Soviet Prison’: The NKVD Files on Henryk Erlich and Wiktor Alter
Authors: Pickhan Gertrud
Published: February 2021

This chapter explores the poignant and disturbing fate of Henryk Erlich and Wiktor Alter at the hands of the Narodni Komitet Vnutriennykh Diel (National Committee for Internal Affairs: the Soviet secret police, NKVD). Erlich had been one of the most important representatives of the General Jewish Workers Union of Poland, known as the Polish Bund. He was also a member of the Central Committee of the Bund, editor-in-chief of the Folkstsaytung, and, with Wiktor Alter, a delegate of the Bund to the Executive Committee of the Socialist International since 1930. He was arrested on October 6, 1939, and charged with anti-Soviet and counter-revolutionary activities. The chapter then looks at Erlich's history of the Bund, which, because of the circumstances of its creation, is unique.
On the History of the Jews in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Poland
Authors: Ta-Shma Israel M.
Published: February 2021

This chapter traces the history of the Jews in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Poland. Jewish traders of Ashkenazi origin passed through Poland on their way to Russia on business as early as the first half of the eleventh century. The Jewish traders who passed through Poland in the twelfth century included scholars and other individuals versed in religious learning. By the last quarter of the twelfth century, there was a well-established Jewish community in Cracow, probably a direct descendant of the community whose existence was recorded some 150 years earlier. The chapter then considers a variety of Hebrew sources that reveal more about the existence of an admittedly sparse Jewish presence, including Jews well versed in Torah, in thirteenth-century Poland; about the continuous existence of this presence throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; and, above all, about its Ashkenazi origins and its special, ongoing contacts with the circles of ḥasidei Ashkenaz in Germany. The extent of the links between Russia–Poland and Ashkenaz, particularly eastern Ashkenaz, was much greater than believed up to the present. Moreover, these links were essentially persistent and permanent, rather than a series of random occurrences.
Exodus from the West
Authors: Israel Jonathan
Published: February 2021

This chapter discusses the mass exodus of Jews from western and central Europe, which began in the later fifteenth century and shifted the focus of European Jewish life to Poland, Lithuania, and the Ottoman Balkans. It was the outcome of a rising tide of anti-Jewish agitation which swept the whole of Europe from Portugal to Brandenburg and from the Netherlands to Sicily. This new and vast process continued relentlessly down to the 1570s, by when the exodus was almost complete. Thus, this new phase, a sequence of expulsions which drastically restricted Jewish life west of Poland, was essentially a product of the dawning modern era — of the age of the Renaissance — rather than of the Middle Ages. Paradoxical though it may seem, this new and more thorough-going rejection of Jews and Judaism coincided with what in other respects represented a dramatic broadening in culture and attitudes, including a deeper Christian involvement in Hebrew and Hebrew literature than had ever been seen previously.
Turning-Point (1570–1600)
Authors: Israel Jonathan
Published: February 2021

This chapter examines the tentative readmission of Jewry into western and central Europe from the 1570s onwards that signalled a reversal of trends which had previously prevailed everywhere west of Poland. This post-1570 shift is, without doubt, a historical phenomenon of the first significance. In several ways, it marks the real beginning of modern Jewish history. For, in a matter of a few years, the whole fixed pattern of restricted interaction between western Christendom and the Jews was transformed in a way which continued to shape subsequent development for some two centuries. The transformation in European Jewry's status was rapid, dramatic, and profound, affecting and affected by much else that was then in flux, for at bottom Jewish readmission was merely a symptom of the more general revolution which convulsed and renewed western life and thought at the close of the sixteenth century. Nor did this change in Jewish status occur first in any one place and then spread. On the contrary, it is remarkable that the change of policy toward the Jews is discernible at pretty much the same moment in the Czech lands, Italy, Germany, France, and the Netherlands.
The High Point (III): ‘A Republic Apart’
Authors: Israel Jonathan
Published: February 2021

This chapter describes how, politically, as in other ways, the period 1650–1713 marked the culmination of a distinctive Jewish culture within Europe. While Jews, at least in many parts of Europe, had always tended to congregate in their own quarters, the changes of the sixteenth century — the vast expansion of Jewish life in Poland–Lithuania and in the Ottoman lands and the compulsory subjection to the ghetto system in Italy — combined to propagate a much more developed and intricate pattern of Jewish self-government than had existed previously. In the political as in the cultural sphere, perhaps the most striking feature of the general transformation was the large measure of conformity and cohesion applying across the continent. This is not to say that there were no significant divergences as between diverse parts of Europe, but by and large the essential similarities in the institutions of Jewish organized life held true everywhere. Moreover, there was a particularly notable uniformity regarding the chronology of the evolution of Jewish self-rule: practically everywhere the system reached its fullest development after 1650 and then gradually waned as from the early years of the eighteenth century.
The High Point (IV): Spiritual Crisis (1650–1713)
Authors: Israel Jonathan
Published: February 2021

This chapter explores how, during the latter half of the seventeenth century, the Jewish world was shaken spiritually more profoundly than at any time since the expulsions of the late fifteenth century. A mounting turmoil of inner pressures erupted in the 1650s and 1660s in a drama which was to convulse world Jewry for decades. Moreover, although this Jewish upheaval had some separate and independent roots, unconnected with the current intellectual preoccupations of Christian Europe, it took place during, and shared some causes with, the deepening crisis besetting seventeenth-century European culture as a whole. Inevitably, the ferment within the Synagogue interacted on the wider upheaval within European devotion and thought, the one chain of encounters pervading the other in a remarkable process of cultural transformation. Ultimately, the upheaval is perhaps best understood as a cultural reaction to the immense disruptions and migrations of the previous two centuries and the many unresolved contradictions the vast treks, first to the East and then to the West, had given rise to. It may be true that the reintegration of Jews was more economic than cultural, yet the rifts and disintegrative tendencies within western Christendom had placed the age-old confrontation of Christianity and Judaism on a totally new basis. The chapter then looks at the Shabbatean movement, Spinozism, philosemitism, and anti-Semitism.
Conclusion
Authors: Israel Jonathan
Published: February 2021

This concluding chapter assesses what the contribution of the Jews was to seventeenth-century European civilization. It is reasonably clear that the general significance of the Jews has to be assessed under two main heads — the economic and the cultural. The problem is to specify the exact nature of the Jewish role. The techniques of Jewish commerce and finance did not differ from other commerce and finance except in that a vast array of restrictions cut the Jews out of most guilds, most retail trade, and the ownership of land and buildings. The key factor which imparted a certain importance to the post-1570 Jewish role was the simultaneous penetration during the sixteenth century of both Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews, as well as of the Marranos living in Portugal and the Portuguese Empire, into maritime and overland long-distance transit trades linking the Levant with Italy, Poland with the Levant, Poland with Germany, and Portugal and the Portuguese Empire with northern Europe. The commercial importance gained by the Jews in the Levant and Poland, largely as a result of the previous expulsion from the West, in other words, formed the basis of the Jewish revival in Italy, Germany, Bohemia–Moravia, and the Low Countries after 1570. This entrenched position in so many crucial but distant markets proved a factor of great potency, especially in view of the close correspondence and intimate cultural contact between western Jewry and the Jews of the Levant and Poland.
Jewish Life
Authors: Temkin Sefton D.
Published: February 2021

This chapter discusses the establishment of Jewish communities and congregations in New York. It shows that there were problems of adjustment and acculturation facing the individual, and they form part of the problems besetting the organized Jewish community. No struggle for emancipation conditioned the religious thinking of the American Jew; they were called upon, however, to confront the fact of emancipation from the moment they set foot on American soil. Language and culture were different; they left a world which was all tradition and found themselves in a world which had no traditions. Just as Gentile prejudices were not always obliterated by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the prolonged Jewish experience of being treated as an outcast left its residue of fear and suspicion; the siege mentality did not disappear overnight; the opportunities for integration did not in all spheres overcome the barriers set up by the instinct for survival.
Organizing American Jewry
Authors: Temkin Sefton D.
Published: February 2021

This chapter depicts Isaac Mayer Wise’s efforts to organize the American Jewry. The task here was to go further than answering such questions on ritual as might arise in the three constituent congregations of the United German Congregations of New York. A comprehensive range of activities was to be initiated including the preparation of a history, catechism, and a Hebrew grammar. To Wise was assigned the task of preparing a Minhag America — a prayer-book offering a ritual which would be available for all the Jewish congregations in America to adopt. However, as this chapter shows, these plans came to naught. Yet Wise had already taken hold of certain ideas — the union of congregations and a ritual for American Jews to use in common which he was to fight for throughout his prime.
The Asmonean
Authors: Temkin Sefton D.
Published: February 2021

This chapter discusses the periodical, the Asmonean. The Asmonean began publication in 1849. Its attitude to Isaac Mayer Wise during the strife at Beth El had been reserved — its quest for straightforward answers to plain questions Wise was ready to attribute to a conspiracy against him. Wise was not one to allow rancour over the past to get the better of him if he could come to an agreement as regards the present; and the Asmonean, for its part, was more concerned to cater for all tastes than to make a stand on issues of policy. Furthermore, Wise’s Asmonean articles display all the rough energy of Young America. It was harnessed first to the author’s voracious appetite for reading, and then to the need, no less compelling, to feed the press week by week. Equally apparent is that the material was not properly digested nor subject to the scrutiny of a tutored mind.
Years of Sorrow and Strife (1869–1874)
Authors: Temkin Sefton D.
Published: February 2021

This chapter considers Isaac Mayer Wise’s involvement in strife as violent and extended as any he had known. The focus of the strife was two sets of conferences called with differing objects by men who had developed strong personal antagonisms. Wise, in pursuit of long-standing aims, brought together a conference of rabbis in Cleveland in July 1870. This adjourned to New York in October and reassembled in Cincinnati in May 1871. It then declared itself to be a permanent body, but in fact never met again. In the meantime, a conference of Reform rabbis had met in Philadelphia in November 1869, and Wise was charged with arranging for the sessions to be resumed in Cincinnati in November 1870. However, he backed away, and this move petered out. In the course of these manœuvrings Wise was solemnly condemned by his colleagues, but out of the ashes of these endeavours emerged the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, brought together by the lay leaders of Wise’s community.
Call to New York (1873)
Authors: Temkin Sefton D.
Published: February 2021

This chapter investigates Isaac Mayer Wise’s appointment in New York. He was invited by the New York-based Congregation Anshe Chesed, causing him to resign from B’nai Jeshurun. Anshe Chesed dated back to 1828. At the time when Wise’s appointment was announced the congregation had been in a turmoil for nearly a year over the appointment of a rabbi. Yet they offered Wise a great deal of opportunities. The first was the 8,000-dollar salary, which was twice what he was receiving in Cincinnati. The second was the new temple which the New York congregation was about to dedicate, which was presumably in a fashionable part of the city, and would give the occupant of its pulpit the possibility of a commanding position. Finally, there was the opportunity of securing a lodgement in the East for his prayer-book and (though they are not mentioned) his ideas as to a union and a college.
Remarriage (1876)
Authors: Temkin Sefton D.
Published: February 2021

This chapter discusses Isaac Mayer Wise’s remarriage. In 1876, the American Israelite announced Wise’s ‘co-partnership’ with Selma Bondi, of New York, the daughter of the late Rev. Jonas Bondi, editor of the Jewish Leader. The chapter explores the controversies this remarriage engendered, turning in particular to the opinions published in the Jewish Times and the Jewish Messenger. It also presents a brief description of Wise’s children and the lives of those who had already reached adulthood by then. When he remarried, Wise had eight surviving children. By his second marriage there were four. In 1876, his older children had reached the adult stage.
Jewish Thought as a Factor in Civilization
Authors: Roth Leon
Published: February 2021

This chapter presents Jewish thought as a coherent system of ideas; but it remains mindful of the fact that the truer the ideas, the more they may be expected to have appeared elsewhere. Nor does this chapter stress the connection between Jewish thought and the individuals known as Jews. It argues that ideas are by nature universal. They arise, presumably, in individuals, and they develop their power through communities. But to speak of them in sole association with one person or community is to belie their character. Indeed, the more general they are, the more their character as ideas is manifested. Moreover, like everything living, ideas are active. They are not mere words to be manipulated at one's convenience. When speaking then of the ideas behind Jewish thought, the chapter treats of their highest development.
Preface to the First Part
Authors: Sahula Isaac Ibn
Published: February 2021

2 For this series of verbs expressing praise, cf. the doxology beginning bemaqhaloth ribeboth 'ammekha which follows the psalmody in the early morning service for sabbaths and festivals, e. g. Singer, Prayer Book, 127. Commencement of a treatise with the praise of God was a medieval literary convention. Ibn Sahula’s exordium echoes, in several points, that of Ibn Gabirol to his ...
The Mitsvot: God-Given or Man-Made?
Authors: Jacobs Louis
Published: February 2021

This chapter highlights the ethical precepts of Judaism that present less of a problem than the purely ritual precepts in which human beings can understand and to which they respond of their own volition. It focuses on a question that is much discussed by religious thinkers that demands whether the good in the ethical sense is good because God wills it to be so, or rather whether God wills it to be so because it is good. The religious Jew, fundamentalist or non-fundamentalist, is not necessarily concerned with theological or historical niceties. A Jew acts out his Judaism within the context of the particular fraternity to which he belongs. The chapter also talks about a Hasid that shouts aloud the words of the Shema that will not only be tolerated but admired by his fellow-worshippers. A different, contemplative type of hasid may be lost in silent contemplation during a good part of the recitation of the Shema.
Conclusion
Authors: Jacobs Louis
Published: February 2021

This chapter defends the theological position of liberal super-naturalism. It shows why there is still reason to believe in a personal God and in “Torah from Heaven,” provided that the latter doctrine is understood in a non-fundamentalist way. The chapter also demonstrates why, for moderns, the fundamentalist attitude, for all its power, witness the large number of intelligent, sophisticated men and women still adopt the “Torah from Heaven.” It argues that a rejection of fundamentalism need not and should not result in a repudiation of halakhah, the legal side of Judaism, provided halakhah is seen in dynamic rather than static terms. Other factors, such as emotional, sociological, and experiential, aside from the cognitive are involved in religious belief. Most peoples are creatures of habit and conformity in religious matters.
Dimensions of a Triangle: Polish–Ukrainian–Jewish Relations in Austrian Galicia
Authors: Himka John-Paul
Published: February 2021

This chapter sketches the relationships between the three major nationalities of Austrian Galicia — Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews — with respect to social and political intercourse, religion, and culture. The discussion is restricted to the problem of interaction between these nationalities. Within these limits the chapter presents an account of the Galician triangle. It shows that while three nationalities constituted different socio-economic communities, with different cultural levels and interests, their interactions involved more than mere difference. These were antagonistic societies — communities whose economic interests frequently collided. The main axis of this antagonism was the landlord–peasant relationship. The Polish-style serfdom that existed in Galicia until 1848 was based on the coercion of labour rents from the peasantry. Like any system of forced labour, it depended on the systemic exercise of violence against the labourers and inspired profound hatred of the landlord class among the peasantry.
Politics, Religion, and National Identity: The Galician Jewish Vote in the 1873 Parliamentary Elections
Authors: Manekin Rachel
Published: February 2021

This chapter considers the national identity of the Galician Jews as part of the Austrian Empire. For the first hundred years after Galicia became part of the Austrian Empire, the Jews of Galicia considered themselves loyal subjects of the emperor. But when Polish nationalist aspirations began to be formally recognized in 1867, and with the subsequent Polonization of Galicia, the Jews had to decide whether to support a range of nationalist demands from the Polish leadership. This chapter reveals the tensions between the Poles and the Jews as a result of this new leadership. In particular, the electoral reform law of 1873 stood in opposition to complete Polish domination of Galicia because it enabled free political expression to the other minorities of Galicia, and especially to the large Ruthenian minority.
A Ukrainian Answer to the Galician Ethnic Triangle: The Case of Ivan Franko
Authors: Hrytsak Yaroslav
Published: February 2021

This chapter tells the story of Ivan Franko, a man once accused of being ‘a Jew; his real name is Frenkel, and he converted to the Christian faith in order to marry a Christian woman’. These seeming paradoxes do not require any scholarly resolution, for they reflect Franko's own ambivalent views, which he never elaborated into a fully developed, coherent system of thought. As a writer, scholar, and political activist, Franko epitomized the intellectual aspect of Ukrainian national revival. His legacy includes some 4,000 writings, in Ukrainian, Polish, and German. Most of these were written in response to contemporary political events and it is often possible to trace the influence of such political events on his literary masterpieces; even his lyrical poetry was to a large extent political. In his political activities, Franko showed a clear ideological evolution, from Marxist socialist to National Democrat, which was largely the result of his changing attitudes towards the Polish and Jewish questions.
Galician Jewish Migration to Vienna
Authors: Hödl Klaus
Published: February 2021

This chapter addresses two aspects of the socio-economic transformations which modernized Galicia in many respects — economic changes and nationalization of the social network — which permanently affected Jewish life in this Habsburg province. Both the economic and social aspects created such hardship for Jews that the effects were apparent internationally, in their massive emigration to western Europe and North America. Here, the chapter focuses on Vienna as one of the destinations of the Galician Jews, and on the special features of the city. It also discusses the ways in which the Galician Jews adjusted to the local culture and the methods the Viennese Jews used to help them acculturate. Although New York claimed the largest number of Galician Jewish emigrants between 1881 and 1910, the numbers choosing Vienna were not insignificant.
The Alphabetical List of Payers of the Communal Tax in Warsaw for 1912
Authors: Hensel-Liwszicowa Joanna
Published: February 2021

This chapter analyses the Alfavitnij ukazatel' plat'elshchikov obshchinnogo zbora za 1912 god (Alphabetical List of Payers of the Communal Tax for 1912). The Alphabetical List of Payers begins with a list of the names of the sixteen members of the Jewish community council who were absolved from paying contributions to the kehilah but gave them voluntarily. The list of those required to pay is in alphabetical order and contains the names of 11,417 heads of Warsaw's Jewish families, each payer's occupation or source of income, his address, the value of the contribution, and the person's registration number in the Warsaw Jewish commune. The amount of the annual contribution is given in silver roubles and the registration number is marked ‘sta'tja’. The chapter shows how approaching the Alphabetical List of Payers statistically reveals many analytical possibilities, and on the basis of this information, it should be possible to describe in detail the economic situation of Warsaw's Jewish bourgeoisie.
‘The City of Illiterates’? Levels of Literacy among Poles and Jews in Warsaw, 1882‒1914
Authors: Corrsin Stephen D.
Published: February 2021

This chapter examines literacy in Warsaw around the turn of the century, using data from the local census of 1882 and the imperial census of 1897, as well as from selected contemporary surveys. It points out the problems in Adolf Suligowski's analysis that made literacy levels look much lower than they actually were. The revised portrait presented here shows that, even though the people of the city were poorly served by the school system and by the educational policies of the Russian government, Warsaw was far from a ‘city of illiterates’. The chapter shows that re-examining these data can present a more realistic, much more complex picture — in particular, one that shows significantly higher literacy levels for Warsaw. This re-examination also points to the need for considerable caution when using data from two particular censuses, which are vitally important for the study of society in the late Russian Empire.
Poles, Jews, and Russians, 1863–1914: The Death of the Ideal of Assimilation in the Kingdom of Poland
Authors: Weeks Theodore R.
Published: February 2021

This chapter attempts to suggest some explanations for why there occurred a major shift in prevailing attitudes regarding the desired form of relations between Poles and Jews between the last major Polish uprising and the outbreak of the First World War. Specifically, this period witnessed a sharp rise of nationalist feelings among both Jews and Poles, the development of strong and widespread antisemitic feelings in nearly all segments of the Polish population, and, correspondingly, growing disillusionment with the previously accepted liberal ideal of assimilation as the answer to the ‘Jewish question’. The chapter examines this period with subsequent developments in mind. It considers whether an exacerbation of problems between Poles and Jews was inevitable, given the historical circumstances in which these two groups found themselves at the end of the nineteenth century. In this sense, this chapter may contribute to the understanding of the roots of modern Polish antisemitism.
Review Essays The Historical Besht: Reconstruction or Deconstruction?
Authors: Etkes Immanuel
Published: February 2021

This chapter reviews Moshe Rosman's book, Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba'al Shem Tov. This is a historical reassessment of the life and work of the Ba'al Shem Tov (known as the Besht). This re-evaluation stems from a comprehensive, systematic study, which focuses critically on both the findings of previous research and the methodological premisses on which that research relied. Unlike scholars whose attention to the beginnings of hasidism arose out of a general interest in Jewish mysticism, Rosman came to the subject from the social and economic history of Polish Jewry. These factors influenced Rosman's work, and the chapter surveys each part of the Founder of Hasidism with that in mind.
On the Bowdlerization of a Holocaust Testimony: The Wartime Journal of Calek Perechodnik
Authors: Engel David
Published: February 2021

This chapter explores the bowdlerization of Calek Perechodnik's wartime journal. It seeks to record the textual history of Perechodnik's journal. In doing so, the chapter attempts to preserve a small bit of historical memory. It shows how some publishers of Perechodnik's journal had taken considerable liberties with its author's own memory. This is done through the outright expurgation of fairly extensive passages and the careful doctoring of others, to the point where the published Polish version could not be taken as an accurate, or even altogether truthful, reflection of Perechodnik's own thoughts. This bowdlerized version, recently reprinted in a ‘corrected and expanded’ edition in which the most serious textual defects of the first edition have for the most part remained without remedy, has already served as the foundation for published translations into French, Italian, and English.
The Damascus Affair: ‘Ritual Murder’, Politics, and the Jews in 1840
Authors: Frankel Jonathan
Published: February 2021

This chapter reviews Jonathan Frankel's The Damascus Affair. Frankel is an experienced Israeli historian, and the chapter reveals how his expertise is employed in the book to create a story that reflects Jewish history, international relations, and sociology. The book analyses the events in Damascus, the fervent activity of individuals and, somewhat later, of various Jewish associations in Europe in favour of the accused and against the blood libel, the press polemics and the changes in public opinion, and the diplomatic activity forming the background of the whole affair. In the last chapters, Frankel presents the views of historians, who in most cases did not consider the episode to deserve a prominent place in Jewish history and gave it scant treatment. He likewise puts forward his own conclusions about the significance of these events for Jewish political, ideological, and social life in the next century.
Obituary
Authors: Shmeruk Chone
Published: February 2021

This chapter is an obituary for Chone Shmeruk. Shmeruk is a celebrated professor who wrote more than a dozen books and studies, as well as numerous articles and reviews, primarily on Yiddish literature and culture. The chapter provides a bibliography of his works as well as a brief biography into his life and career. It looks at how Shmeruk approaches his favourite topics — by combining versatility with great precision; he personified the painstaking approach of a historian with the imagination and erudition of a literary critic. He approached each of his topics with great passion and his works are inspiring: they show how many aspects of Yiddish literature and culture deserve attention, reveal their relationship to other, especially Slavic, literatures and cultures, and point out how much is still to be researched.