bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Chone Shmeruk: The Man and his Work
Authors: Bartal Israel
Published: February 2021

This chapter is a commemoration of Professor Chone Shmeruk of the Hebrew University. In his scholarly work Shmeruk bridged remote eras and combined several disciplines into a unified world of Jewish cultural creativity. He mastered literature, history, and linguistics, knew them thoroughly, and sensed their finest interrelations. This great intellectual figure was at home in many cultures. His erudition knew no boundaries. His studies covered almost every European culture in the vast territory from the Rhine to the Urals. He was well versed in the German, Russian, and of course Polish cultures, as well as in Jewish culture in its linguistic diversity. This broad horizon enabled Shmeruk to see the whole cultural picture as a unified one. Shmeruk’s scholarship transcended political borders and crossed disciplinary limits.
Jan Karski (1914–2000)
Authors: Blejwasm Stanislaus A.
Published: February 2021

This chapter is an obituary for Jan Karski. He was a Polish Catholic who, as a courier for the Polish underground, risked his life and bore witness to the Holocaust and who was hailed as a hero of the Jewish people. He was raised in an ardent Catholic and patriotic family, but one free of the antisemitism characteristic of the political culture of the Polish right at that time. A brilliant student, Karski went on to receive degrees in law and diplomatic studies at Jan Kazimierz University in Lviv in 1935. He did military service in 1935 and 1936 in an artillery training school, and then studied in Germany, Switzerland, and Great Britain, mastering languages. He entered Poland’s foreign service in 1938, a step towards his dream of becoming an ambassador. He was mobilized in 1939 and captured by the Red Army when it joined Nazi Germany in invading Poland.
A Tuml in the Shtetl: Khayim Betsalel Grinberg’s Di khevre-kedishe sude
Authors: Guesnet François
Published: February 2021

This chapter highlights Khayim Betsalel Grinberg's comedy play Di khevre-kedishe sude, oder, Reb arye der bal-menagn (The Burial Society Banquet, or, Reb Arye the Musician), which was published in Warsaw in 1883. The play depicts the chaotic events surrounding the annual banquet of a burial society. This low-priced edition, with its dense typeface, cheap paper, and numerous typographical errors and irregularities, is a good example of the popular literature that Jews were soon to call shund. Here was a book that did not hide the fact that its readership was to be found among the less well-to-do, and that had no claims to higher spiritual values. Within the history of Yiddish literature, it represents a kind of pulp literature avant la lettre, as the term shund was not coined before the end of the nineteenth century.
‘The Time of Vishniac’: Photographs of Pre-War East European Jewry in Post-War Contexts
Authors: Shandler Jeffrey
Published: February 2021

This chapter investigates how pictures taken by photographers from outside the east European Jewish community became widely familiar throughout the post-war period, none more so than the work of one photographer, Roman Vishniac. Taken during a series of trips he made to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania from the mid-1930s until the start of the Second World War, some of these photographs have been republished frequently, including in five books devoted solely to the photographer's work. Vishniac's images figured prominently in the first exhibitions and books of photographs of pre-war east European Jewish life to appear in the United States after the Second World War, and not a decade has passed since without some of these photographs being published or exhibited there, as well as abroad. Although these pictures are the product of a limited phase in Vishniac's career, they are his best-known accomplishment. For many post-war Americans, in particular, some of his images have served as key visual points of entry into the culture of pre-war east European Jewry.
A. Litvin: Chronicler of Jewish Souls
Authors: Steinlauf Michael C.
Published: February 2021

This chapter highlights A. Litvin's anthology, Jewish Souls (1914). Shmuel Hurvits, whose pseudonym was A. Litvin, was born to a poor family in Minsk in 1862. He educated himself in both Jewish and general subjects, and began to work as a teacher. In 1911-12, Litvin began to publish articles based on his travels throughout eastern Europe beginning in 1905. After returning to the United States in 1914, he published these articles in a six-volume anthology entitled Yidishe neshomes (Jewish Souls). In scores of sketches of badkhonim, purim-shpilers, wandering preachers, and musicians; healers and holy men; beggars, pickpockets, and thieves in towns and cities throughout Poland, Lithuania, and Galicia, Litvin constructs an extraordinary panorama of the life of the Jewish masses at the moment when centuries-old traditions engaged modernity and either changed or vanished. He documents this world in the interests of a new generation of Jews who, he believed, needed such knowledge to build a secular yet authentically Jewish modern culture.
Urke Nachalnik: A Voice from the Underworld
Authors: Zlatkes Gwido
Published: February 2021

This chapter focuses on Urke Nachalnik, who began an eight-year sentence in Rawicz Prison in 1927 for a bank robbery in Warsaw. Urke Nachalnik belongs to the underworld, perhaps even more so today than in his own time in Poland between the wars. Equally out of place in the sentimentalized shtetl and among the heroes and heralds of progress, he belongs to the unwritten part of the Jewish past that has nearly faded from collective memory. However, there is very little written about the Jewish underworld or Jewish criminals in Poland. Two reference works, a new dictionary of Polish Jewish history and culture and an essential monograph on Jewish literature between the wars, do not mention Nachalnik at all. There are two accounts of Nachalnik's life, an apologetic one by Abram Karpinowicz and a critical one by Stanisław Milewski. Both, however, are literary in character. They lack sources, they differ in significant details, and they are inconsistent with other sources, including Nachalnik's own autobiography. Even Nachalnik's real name differs in the accounts of his life.
Życiorys Własny Przestẹpcy
Authors: Nachalnik Urke
Published: February 2021

This chapter presents some excerpts from Urke Nachalnik's Życiorys Własny przestępcy (The Autobiography of a Criminal), which was published in 1933. Nachalnik begins his autobiography by describing his childhood and the circumstances that brought about his imprisonment. He recounts his education in a traditional kheyder. After completing kheyder, Nachalnik is sent to the yeshiva in Łomża. While there, he receives news about the death of his mother but is urged not to return home. Nachalnik struggles to support himself and finds board at the house of a prostitute with whom he has a relationship. As a result, he neglects his studies; he returns home for the following Passover. Later, Nachalnik spends several weeks in prison and is finally bailed out by his father. He returns to his town, where his father keeps humiliating him by telling everybody about his thievery. His father then sends him to work for his uncle as an apprentice in his bakery.
Polish ‘Neighbours’ and German Invaders: Anti-Jewish Violence in the Białystok District during the Opening Weeks of Operation Barbarossa
Authors: Rossino Alexander B.
Published: February 2021

This chapter evaluates anti-jewish violence in the Białystok district during the opening weeks of Operation Barbarossa. By employing agitators to whip up anti-Jewish sentiment to the point of explosion, German propagandists were able to depict the massacres among the Lithuanian, Polish, and Ukrainian civilian populations in the regions adjacent to East Prussia and the General Government as spontaneous outbursts of popular violence. Citing outbursts of ‘spontaneous’ violence as evidence that Jews were exploiting and terrorizing the non-Jewish population, the SS was then able to justify its own murderous attacks on Jewish communities. This dynamic of German agitation, Polish ‘pogrom’, and SS killing action was integral to the anti-Jewish policy implemented by the SS in the Białystok district and elsewhere in eastern Poland during the first eight weeks of Operation Barbarossa. The elimination of Jews in regions of Lithuania and eastern Poland along the frontier of East Prussia and the General Government was also central to the progressive radicalization of SS anti-Jewish policy in the summer of 1941 that ultimately resulted in genocide.
Błogosławiony Bóg Izraela
Authors: Weksler-Waszkinel Romuald Jakub
Published: February 2021

This chapter focuses on Romuald Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel's book Błogosławiony Bóg Izraela (The Blessed God of Israel). This book is a collection of texts published from 1992, the year Weksler-Waszkinel achieved ‘full integration’ of his past with his new-found Jewish heritage. The volume is divided by subject into three parts, outlined in the author's introduction. The first contains more specialized, although easily accessible, writings on Catholic theology regarding Judaism. The second part of the book is written, according to the author, to demonstrate the closely rooted relationship of Christianity to the Bible and Judaism. The most moving part, though, is the third part, which reveals the personal lot of the author.
Ideology and Politics at the Establishment of the State of Israel, 1948–1950
Authors: Katzburg-Yungman Mira
Published: February 2021

This chapter deals with the development of Zionist ideology and politics after the establishment of the State of Israel. In the months and years after May 1948, the American Jewish community underwent a process of re-evaluating its relationship with the Jewish community in what was now the State of Israel. In the American Jewish arena in general, and the American Zionist arena in particular, the establishment of the state raised various issues regarding the relationship between the two Jewish communities. Some were practical, such as the division of roles between the Jewish Agency and the government of Israel. Others were more theoretical. For instance, there was concern about dual loyalty; there was the fundamental question of the role of the Zionist movement, now that its primary goal had been achieved; there were debates about who was a Zionist. Other dilemmas arose as time passed.
Was the Traditional East European Jewish Family in the Recent Past Patriarchal?
Authors: Stampfer Shaul
Published: February 2021

This chapter assesses whether the traditional Jewish family in eastern Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was patriarchal. In traditional east European Jewish families, authority over children was not monopolized by fathers; mothers also had a great deal of authority over minor children. Fathers often spent more hours a day out of the house than did mothers, and often they had to work far from their homes. As such, mothers usually determined what went on at home, and even when this was in accordance with their husbands' wishes, it does not imply that it was under their husbands' authority. Perhaps the greatest potential for paternal authority can be found in the marital patterns of their children. Meanwhile, in the area of relations between the male head of the family and his wife in traditional east European Jewish families, male authority could not be taken for granted and male heads of families could not simply force wives to do their bidding. The chapter then defines patriarchy, arguing that the dynamics of the traditional Jewish families in eastern Europe complicate the utility of the term.
Gender Differentiation and the Education of Jewish Women
Authors: Stampfer Shaul
Published: February 2021

This chapter addresses the role, function, and extent of women's education in nineteenth-century east European Jewry, the way this education was integrated into broader gender classifications, and the implications and consequences of women's education. There is a widely held misconception that, in nineteenth-century eastern Europe, almost all Jewish women had a poor Jewish education whereas many received a good general education. Although males and females were provided with very different frameworks for acquiring literacy education, women were not necessarily inferior to men in Jewish knowledge. Women not only knew how to read but read often. It is quite possible that of all the books sold in eastern Europe, the two bestsellers were books specifically intended for a female audience and read only by women: Tsenah urenah and tekhines. The Tsenah urenah is a Yiddish text consisting of a free retelling of aggadic material on the Bible. It is clear, therefore, that in traditional Jewish society, the differences between the educational achievements of boys and girls on the level of elementary education were more perceived than real. The amount of knowledge a boy acquired in a full day of non-intensive study in a ḥeder was not necessarily much more than those of tutored girls who may have studied for an hour or two a day.
Dormitory and Yeshiva in Eastern Europe
Authors: Stampfer Shaul
Published: February 2021

This chapter explores the establishment of dormitories in many Jewish educational institutions, especially in yeshivas, which is a new phenomenon — created to answer new needs in Jewish education. Dormitories became common in yeshivas for a number of reasons. Although in theory students could have continued to sleep in synagogues, this was no longer regarded as respectable. The only acceptable solutions were to support student rentals of private rooms or to open a dormitory. The growing concern about what was seen as the pernicious influences of the surrounding society added a degree of urgency to the adoption of means to isolate yeshiva students from potential contact with problematic individuals and groups. At the same time, the growing use of dormitories fitted in with a general trend for what appeared to be ‘modern’ or ‘systematic’ approaches for dealing with social needs and especially for institutionalization. Dormitories did not usually merit a great deal of attention in pre-Holocaust eastern Europe. However, they reflected some very basic developments in Jewish society; they illustrate the great sensitivity and responsiveness of traditionalist circles to the major changes Jewish society was undergoing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Jews at the Bar from 1918 Until the End of the Second World War
Authors: Cooper John
Published: February 2021

This chapter assesses whether the lack of Jews in the higher echelons of the legal profession had exclusively domestic causes or was connected with the rising tide of antisemitism in Europe. If the number of Jews practising at the Bar increased in the years 1918 to 1939, very few of these new barristers came from east European Jewish families, and the chapter explains why this was the case. In England, between the world wars, the legal professions were ‘the exclusive spheres of the aristocracy and plutocracy’. There was a reluctance among solicitors and their clients to entrust their private and confidential business to a Jew, especially one from an east European immigrant background, who was regarded as a foreigner. Thus, unless the aspiring barrister was a member of the Anglo-Jewish elite and sufficiently Anglicized, he would not have the manners or the social skills to win the confidence of instructing solicitors and their clients.
From La Tentation de Saint Antoine to the Statute of Kalisz
Authors: Ansell Joseph P.
Published: February 2021

This chapter analyses more of Arthur Szyk's artworks during his time in Paris. It reveals the particularities of Szyk's artistry which would remain with him for the rest of his career, such as his tendency to produce in miniatures. His art also demonstrates a wide variety of formats and subject-matter, ranging from stories drawn from Jewish history to a formal portrait of M. de Monzie. The chapter focuses in particular on his pieces for Gustave Flaubert's La Tentation de Saint Antoine (The Temptation of St Anthony). It also looks into the publication of Le Juif qui rit (The Jew Who Laughs), which were small, paperbound volumes containing pen and ink drawings to illustrate brief jokes. Finally, the chapter studies Szyk's illumination of the Statue of Kalisz, which can be considered an indication of his re-entry into the political life of his homeland.
Introduction
Authors: Endelman Todd M.
Published: February 2021

This chapter reviews the transcendent master narratives that structured the telling of Jewish history in earlier generations. It mentions Eli Lederhendler who wrote in 1994 that history on a grand scale is a model no one can longer choose. It also looks at the selection of a red thread of continuity or an “essence” of the Jewish experience, that imposes a superstructure base and then chooses a defining characteristic of each successive “stage” of development. The chapter discusses the expansion of the arena of modern Jewish history that introduces less well-known actors and examines emotional states and mundane behaviours. It explains the normalization of Jewish historiography that was linked to the decline of antisemitism beginning in the 1960s, and in turn to the integration of Jewish studies into American universities and colleges.
The Chequered Career of ‘Jew’ King
Authors: Endelman Todd M.
Published: February 2021

This chapter describes Georgian London, which offered exceptional opportunities for advancement to ambitious Jews who had shed the discipline of traditional Judaism. It explores the Jewish community as a network of voluntary associations rather than a state-backed corporate body on the Continent that exercised no police authority over individual Jews. The chapter demonstrates the hedonistic ethic of consumption and expenditure of English landowners and their healthy regard for the pursuit of wealth in a variety of fields that made London a haven for adventurers and climbers who knew how to satisfy aristocratic needs and exploit aristocratic weaknesses. The chapter mentions John King, who was a moneylender who flourished in the freewheeling atmosphere of late Georgian London. It talks about King's links to other Jews as he was one of the best-known Jews in London between 1780 and 1820.
The Frankaus of London
Authors: Endelman Todd M.
Published: February 2021

This chapter considers the radical assimilation of entire Jewish families as a common occurrence in western and central Europe between the Enlightenment and the Second World War. It analyses drift and defection that removed the names of thousands of families from communal rosters, although immigration often masked the demographic consequences of their departure. It also reviews the case of liberal states like England and France, where no government or church agency gathered data on conversion and intermarriage in which historians must reconstruct the course of radical assimilation on anecdotal evidence. The chapter explains how Jews understood and represented their transformation into Christians and how they regarded their Jewish background in later years. It explores the strategy to overcome the limitations of quantitative data by following the transformation of Jewish practice, affiliation, and self-reflection in a single family over three or more generations.
The Central Jewish Historical Commission in Poland 1944–1947
Authors: Aleksiun Natalia
Published: February 2021

ON 29 AUGUST 1944, five Polish Jews who had just returned from camps and hiding gathered in Lublin to form a historical commission. Despite the dramatic conditions in the newly liberated city, these survivors felt driven to document what had happened to Polish Jewry and to their communities under the Nazi occupation. Noe Grüss, one of the leaders of the Central Jewish Historical Commission (Centralna Żydowska Komisja Historyczna, CŻKH, in Polish; Tsentrale Yidishe Historishe Komisye in Yiddish) in Poland, reporting on the commission’s activities in 1946, underlined the sense of urgency shared by Polish Jewish survivors of the Holocaust:...
Auschwitz and the Politics of Martyrdom and Memory 1945–1947
Authors: Huener Jonathan
Published: February 2021

MORE THAN sixty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, in an era replete with public ceremony, observance, and written recollection, the need for a memorial at the site of Nazi Germany’s largest concentration camp and extermination centre appears obvious. To Poles in 1945, the need was obvious as well, for it was clear in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War that the Auschwitz complex had to be preserved in some fashion and to serve as a memorial to those who had suffered and perished there at the hands of the German invaders. Decisions about the future of the site were driven to a great extent by politics, and the future of the Auschwitz site was at times the subject of a vigorous public conversation. That conversation reflected both the political demands of the time and the dilemmas facing the site’s organizers. Moreover, it set the stage for the pedagogy, iconography, and public reception of Auschwitz in subsequent years and decades....
Rachel Auerbach, Yad Vashem, and Israeli Holocaust Memory
Authors: Cohen Boaż
Published: February 2021

RACHEL AUERBACH (1903–76), an author and publicist of articles and reviews published in a wide range of Yiddish and Polish newspapers, was a central figure in Jewish literary circles in inter-war Poland. After the German invasion of Poland, Auerbach directed one of several soup kitchens in the Warsaw ghetto under the auspices of the Aleynhilf (Self-Help), the large network of Jewish relief organizations, and became a member of the Oneg Shabes archive established and directed by the historian Emanuel Ringelblum. Her writings for Oneg Shabes included an essay about her soup kitchen and some of its regular patrons. At the end of 1942, Ringelblum asked Auerbach to transcribe the testimony of Abraham Krzepicki, who had escaped from Treblinka, which she edited into the most extensive description of the death camp to date. She fled the ghetto in March 1943, a few weeks before the uprising, and hid on the ‘Aryan’ side for the duration of the war. She dedicated herself to aiding Jews in hiding and to writing; her essays and her famous poem ‘Yizkor, 1943’ describe both Jewish life in the ghetto and its destruction....
Holocaust Memorialization in Ukraine
Authors: Golbert Rebecca
Published: February 2021

IN HIS BOOK The Sabbath, Abraham Joshua Heschel writes of Judaism as a religion in time, not in space. Through the commemoration of seasons, historical events, and generations past, Judaism sanctifies time. It consecrates its sacred temples and memorials in the dimension of time. Of the sanctity of space which most religions inhabit, Heschel writes:...
Bearing Witness
Authors: Michlic Joanna B.
Published: February 2021

HENRYK GRYNBERG was born in Warsaw in 1936 into an Orthodox Jewish family, and raised in the village of Radoszyna near Mińsk Mazowiecki in central Poland. He survived the Holocaust in hiding with his mother. He left for the United States in 1967 in protest at the Polish government’s antisemitic practices and the censorship of his writing. He is the author of some thirty books of prose, poetry, drama, and essays, and his work has been translated from Polish into many languages. Titles. translated into English include ...
The Death of an Idea: Political, Historical, and Poetic Visions of Hasidism
Authors: Wodziński Marcin
Published: February 2021

This chapter addresses the ideological crisis among Polish Jewish integrationists at the start of the twentieth century. One of the signs of departure from the old ideological line was the rapidly changing attitude to hasidism. On the one hand, politically involved journalists such as Nachum Sokołów saw a new political threat in the hasidic movement and called for an alliance of all non-hasidic political forces against this group. On the other hand, from the mid-1890s, it became more and more common to idealize the hasidic past, to see the movement as the fascinating creation of folk mysticism, a depository of authentic Jewish folklore, and above all an excellent literary theme. These two attitudes, although they seemed contradictory, frequently coexisted. Usually, they were evident in the belief that the good and beautiful teachings of the fathers of hasidism were later distorted by the tsadikim and had led to the contemporary degenerate form of the political movement. The great interest in the origins of the movement was undoubtedly an attempt to escape contemporary reality and, at the same time, to escape the confrontational attitudes of the maskilim. This was obviously the result of changes in European writings that took place at the turn of the century in relation to the historiographic, philosophical, and literary portrayal of hasidism.
Between Marginalization, Demonization, and Nostalgia
Authors: Wodziński Marcin
Published: February 2021

This concluding chapter explains that the development of the attitude of the Haskalah to hasidism in the Congress Kingdom is important to understanding the history of Jewish society, not only in this part of Poland but in the whole of eastern Europe. The example of the Kingdom of Poland demonstrates that the struggle with the hasidic movement was not an obsession inherent to the entire east European Haskalah and an essential element of its ideology, but rather that it was the result of a confluence of many factors of an ideological and social, internal and external, nature. The breakthrough in attitudes towards hasidism associated with Eliezer Zweifel's views advocating reconciliation with the hasidic movement gains a completely new meaning in the context of similar declarations by Polish integrationists in the early 1860s. However, the significance of this breakthrough lies not so much in where it first occurred historically as in its usefulness as an analogy from which to draw lessons about the wider process taking place in modernizing Jewish circles in the Russian empire and the Kingdom of Poland. The similarities and differences in attitudes towards hasidism may be treated as a convenient starting point for more general studies of the Haskalah and hasidism in eastern Europe, the factors shaping them, and the characteristics that resulted from them. The chapter then summarises this book's findings.
The Polish Revolt of 1863 and the Birth of Russification: Bad for the Jews?
Authors: Klier John D.
Published: February 2021

This chapter addresses how the Polish uprising of 1863 was a traumatic event for Russian society. It was an early warning that the reform era in Russia would not immediately solve all the problems of Russian society. The events of the revolt itself, and the pro-Polish diplomatic effort it produced, provoked a wave of patriotism and heightened national feeling in Russia. A central feature of this new mood was a determination to deal with the Polish Question once and for all. Proposals to this end came to be known collectively as ‘Russification’. A standard assumption in the secondary literature is that policies of Russification had dire consequences for national minorities in the Russian Empire. This claim has been made particularly strongly in the case of the Jews. At the end of the 1850s, Russian public opinion, as represented by the periodical press, was mildly sympathetic to the plight of the Jews in the Russian Empire. By the end of the 1860s, Russian opinion was sharply divided on the Jewish Question and Judeophobia was a visibly growing phenomenon.
The Question of the Assimilation of Jews in the Polish Kingdom (1864-1897): An Interpretive Essay
Authors: Cała Alina
Published: February 2021

This chapter explores the question of the assimilation of Jews in the Kingdom of Poland. What had in fact occurred to 19th-century Polish Jewry? Firstly, the idea developed that its social structure was abnormal. The demand to reform this, understood as calling for changes in economic and political status, had been aired already in the 18th century. Such ideas were strengthened in the 19th century, both in the minds of Poles and some Jews, so that in the wake of the January rising this problem was raised together with the necessity for the Polish caste system to be destroyed. By the end of the century, the specific features of Jewish assimilation in the Polish Kingdom took on quite different forms from those the assimilationist programme itself had assumed. In the 19th century, Jewish assimilation occurred on a widespread scale throughout Europe. The movement generated its own ideology and a large body of literature. In the Congress Kingdom, this ideology was promoted primarily by publicists. In post-insurrectionary conditions in Poland, it was forced to adopt too the role of a quasi-political current.
Norman Davies. Heart of Europe. A Short History of Poland. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1984. Pp. xxi, 511.
Authors: Lewitter L. R.
Published: February 2021

This chapter examines Norman Davies's Heart of Europe (1984). The delicate subject of Polish–Jewish relations in history, not being strictly relevant to the main theme of Heart of Europe, receives little attention. Davies writes with sympathy about the extermination of most of the Jewish community by the Germans during the last war and with restraint about the participation of Jews in the activities of the Communist Party before the war and in those of the political police in the post-war period. Those who regard the Poles as traditional anti-semites will do well to note the autonomy and the scope for economic activity and religious life enjoyed by the Jewish community in the Republic of Poland–Lithuania. In the later 19th and early 20th centuries, a conjunction of pressure and reform opened the flood gates of a reservoir of Jewish talent stored up in those areas, making a unique contribution to Polish, and very soon also to western European culture. Nevertheless, Heart of Europe can be considered as an initiation into the arcane elements of Polish history and politics.
Michael Stanislawski. Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia 1825-1855. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America. 1983. Pp. xvii, 246.
Authors: Pearson Raymond
Published: February 2021

This chapter reviews Michael Stanislawski's Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews (1983). Michael Stanislawski's study is a bold, often provocative attempt to penetrate the self-serving legends of the period 1825–1855 to discover the true nature of Russian Jewish society and its crucial relationship with the regime of Tsar Nicholas I. His achievement in the exercise of historiographical re-evaluation is impressive, exhibiting a richness of content which is taxing to encapsulate in summary. His careful examination of the policy of the tsarist government towards its Jewish population certainly has the effect of exploding a variety of established myths. Rather than simply assuming that the administration was oppressively and irredeemably anti-semitic, Stanislawski sets out to reveal the precise dynamics of tsarist Jewish policy, eventually reaching the conclusion that its attitude was less anti-semitic than dictated by ‘a myopic perception of raison d'etat’.
Shlomo Netzer. Ma'avak Yehudei Polin al Zekhuyotehem ha-Ezrahiyot ve-ha-Leumiyot (1918–1922) (The Struggle of Polish Jewry for Civil and National Minority Rights [1918–1922]). Tel Aviv: Tel-Aviv University Press. 1980. Pp. 338, 4 page English summary.
Authors: Bacon Gershon C.
Published: February 2021

This chapter addresses Shlomo Netzer's The Struggle of Polish Jewry for Civil and National Minority Rights (1918–1922) (1980). In this richly documented study, Shlomo Netzer surveys the formative period of Jewish politics in inter-war Poland. The period under consideration witnessed not only the recovery of Polish independence, but also the elections for the Constituent Sejm, the crystallization of the Polish parliament and constitution, the signing of the Minorities Treaties, the protracted struggle over the borders of the Polish state, the Polish-Soviet war, and the 1922 elections to the Sejm and Senate. All these events influenced the form and direction of Jewish political activity during this critical time, and in his internally directed study, Netzer is careful to keep the historical background in view and avoid becoming lost in the labyrinth of inter-party polemics and editorial broadsides. After a useful short introduction on the history of independent Jewish politics under the various partition regimes, the author chronicles the struggle of Jewish elected representatives to secure civil and national rights for Polish Jewry, a struggle which to some extent has been described elsewhere, if not in such detail.
Yechiel Szeintuch, editor. Yitzhak Katzenelson, Yidishe getoksovim: Varshe 1940-1943 [Yiddish Ghetto Writings: Warsaw 1940-1943]. Israel: Ghetto Fighters' House & Hakibbutz Hameuchad. 1984. Pp. x, 770.
Authors: Roskies David G.
Published: February 2021

This chapter discusses Yitzhak Katzenelson's Yiddish Ghetto Writings: Warsaw 1940–1943 (1984), which was edited by Yechiel Szeintuch. With this scholarly edition of Yitzhak Katzenelson's complete ghetto writings, the study of Yiddish literary creativity during the Holocaust has made a quantum leap forward. Both in his general introduction and in the prefaces to each of the thirty-six works, Szeintuch has thoroughly demystified the Holocaust by making history and biography into the central keys for a proper understanding of its literature. He has grounded each and every text, no matter how fragmentary, both in the personal events of the author's life and in the facts of the Holocaust as they were made known to Warsaw's Jewish intelligentsia. Szeintuch insists on checking each motif against the poet's pre-war writing and against all available sources on the ghetto itself, from the Zionist underground press with which Katzenelson was closely affiliated, to the vast body of memoir literature. What emerges is a unique portrait of one writer's attempt to adapt — linguistically, psychologically, and artistically — to the systematic murder of all that he held dear.
Jewish Women’s History: First Steps and a False Start—the Case of Jacob Katz
Authors: Rosman Moshe
Published: February 2021

This chapter discusses Jacob Katz, the social historian of the mid-twentieth century. He originated some principles, methods, and concepts that have become critical in pursuing the history of Jewish women and in writing gender-conscious historiography. In discussions about Katz's contribution to the study of the history of the early modern Jewish community, it is standard to emphasize his methodological innovation. In his earlier works Katz applied the methods of ‘social history’ to his research and writing about Jewish history. According to Katz, ‘social history’ had a different aim. It used the tools of sociology, but did so in order to understand the development of a particular historical society over time — that is, through history. Katz was not interested in extrapolating universal laws.
From Sacred Symbol to Key Ring: The Ḥamsa in Jewish and Israeli Societies
Authors: Sabar Shalom
Published: February 2021

This chapter examines the development of the ḥamsa from a sacred symbol co-constructed by Arabs and Sephardi Jews into a secular sign of Israeli nationalism. Literally meaning ‘five’, the folk term ḥamsa has become universal. The chapter examines the popularity of the ḥamsa and its various manifestations in Israeli homes and society at large. It also looks at how this symbol became incorporated into Jewish life to begin with. The environment of the traditional Jewish home, and even more so the synagogue, with its holy duties and ritual implements, would appear to be at odds with the ḥamsa's magical and folkloric roots. In the popular imagination, the ḥamsa is associated with Islam. However, while some home practices and objects in the areas of food and dress, for example, were staunchly opposed by the rabbinic establishment, and others sparked controversy and debate, objects such as the ḥamsa apparently underwent a process of ‘Judaization’, which legitimized them and even led to their eventual acceptance by the entire Jewish world. Yet arguably the case of the ḥamsa is exceptional because it was rejected and then reappropriated in a new, pluralistic Jewish state.
770 Eastern Parkway: The Rebbe’s Home as Icon
Authors: Berlinger Gabrielle A.
Published: February 2021

This chapter looks at a reverse transformation — of a secular house front into an icon of hasidic identity. It considers the implications of the house of the seventh leader of the Lubavitch branch of hasidic Judaism, Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson. The house, found at 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, was reconstructed and redesigned in locations around the world. Although it blends into its Brooklyn streetscape, rebuilt elsewhere it causes a material cultural ‘resistance’, and therefore draws attention to itself as a sectarian icon for a group enduring some dissonance after the Rebbe's death. The chapter illustrates how Lubavitch Jews have maintained their identity and practice during their growth, and realized the Rebbe's vision of spreading holiness after his death by sanctifying new centres, or ‘Chabad houses’, around the world. It addresses the theme of the role of ‘home’ for Jews, by examining the ways in which Lubavitch conceptions of space, place, and spirituality are sustaining a core identity for Lubavitch Jews in the absence of a living leader.
From the Nightclub to the Living Room: Gender, Ethnicity, and Upward Mobility in the 1950s Party Records of Three Jewish Women Comics
Authors: Del Negro Giovanna P.
Published: February 2021

This chapter addresses mass-media culture, as the Jewish home-based value of laughing at oneself goes public with the rise of the recording of Jewish comedy acts. It explores the bawdy humour of Belle Barth, Pearl Williams, and Patsy Abbott — three working-class, Jewish, stand-up comics who were hugely popular in the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It looks at how this group of entertainers positioned themselves at the intersection of gender, Jewish ethnicity, class, and whiteness in the 1950s, as well as the significance that their humour had for both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences. With their earthy, shtetl sensibility and their smatterings of Yiddish, these performers, who attained their greatest popularity in their middle years, railed against societal mores that told them to be quiet, well-behaved, and sexually passive. That some of the prominent comedy recordings brought into living-rooms across America were by Jewish women brandishing a racy, Yiddish-tinged humour becomes significant in the context of the middle-class suburbanization that Jews were experiencing during the 1950s.
There’s No Place Like Home: America, Israel, and the (Mixed) Blessings of Assimilation
Authors: Kramer Michael P.
Published: February 2021

This chapter questions whether patterns can be drawn from the American experience or whether it can be set in contrast to that of Israel. It focuses in particular on the remarks regarding Israel in Chapter 10. Here, the differences between Jewish American culture and contemporary Israeli culture are highlighted. The chapter argues that it is not ‘variegatedness’ that distinguishes the two. It goes on to discuss the development of Jewish culture in America and its parallel development in Israel, arguing that American innovations are hardly any more startling than Israeli ones over the last century. Zionism is turned to as an example of a startling, revolutionary break as the chapter explores further and further into Jewish history to reveal that contemporary American Jewishness is not, perhaps, as startling as it is made out to be.
The Use of Reason in Religious Debates
Authors: Lasker Daniel J.
Published: February 2021

This chapter outlines the theoretical basis of the Jewish polemic against Christian doctrines. According to the Jewish philosophical polemicists, one of the main differences between Judaism and Christianity lay in the former's conformity to reason and the latter's irrationality. To support this contention, the polemicists developed methods of distinguishing between their own doctrines, which they claimed to be rational, and Christian beliefs, which, they argued, contradicted the findings of reason. Jewish theologians sought, in the first place, to render an account to themselves of the phenomenon of Christian belief in rationally unacceptable doctrines. They tried to gain some philosophical insight into this kind of belief by pondering the force of training and habit. This insight appears to have been offered first by Judah Halevi in the opening passages of his Kuzari, a philosophical defense of Judaism. The chapter then considers Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed. It also explores the polemical approach of the Jewish Averroists, and identifies the criteria for determining logical impossibility of doctrines.
Introduction
Authors: Naimark-Goldberg Natalie
Published: February 2021

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Jewish women who lived in Berlin at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. They were among the first in Ashkenazi society to undergo an accelerated process of modernization, take an active part in European culture, and adopt early feminist positions on the role of women in society and culture. Based on the numerous sources they left behind — mainly personal letters, but also publications and other writings — this book describes various aspects of their involvement in the intellectual, cultural, and social scene of the time and discusses their thought, which was nurtured in a crucial way by the Enlightenment. However, relatively little has been written about the relationship between Jewish women and the Enlightenment. This omission may be largely explained by the fact that for many years Jewish engagement with the Enlightenment was identified with the Haskalah, which was mainly a male movement, especially in its eighteenth-century central European version. The chapter then suggests a reconsideration of the relationship of these Jewish women to Romanticism, and proposes to uncouple their names from another context with which they have been traditionally tied: the salons.
Private Letters
Authors: Naimark-Goldberg Natalie
Published: February 2021

This chapter discusses the role of personal correspondence as a vehicle for circulating ideas and opinions of enlightened Jewish women. The network of correspondence they sustained with many people in many cities in the German lands and even further afield constituted from their point of view a crucial means of participating in cultural discourse. Personal letters were an important channel through which these women could not only expand their horizons and acquire knowledge, but also demonstrate their intellectual abilities and participate in public discourse on literature, theatre, politics, and religion, among many other subjects. Thus, a study of their correspondence enables one to assess the involvement of these Jewish women in the contemporary world of culture — an involvement at times hidden from the public gaze and partly revealed in their epistles. Women also employed the epistolary form in order to participate in the intellectual activity of the Haskalah, but this happened only in a later period.
Away from a Definition of Antisemitism
Authors: Engel David
Published: February 2021

This chapter highlights the pitfalls of essentializing and explores the hazards of imprecise and irresponsible terminology. It uses medieval historian Gavin Langmuir's Toward a Definition of Antisemitism and History, Religion, and Antisemitism as a reference point in illuminating the case study of the reification of an influential historical descriptor. It reviews how many people have behaved violently towards Jews and have depicted them verbally or artistically in derogatory fashion throughout the centuries. It also argues that self-declared historians of antisemitism have assumed the basis of socio-semantic convention created in the nineteenth-century. The chapter focuses on antisemitism as the popular notion of Jewish assimilation to have lost its clarity and utility in the eyes of various contemporary scholars.
Jewish Cultural History in Early Modern Europe
Authors: Ruderman David B.
Published: February 2021

This chapter examines the innovative call of Jonathan Israel to recognize an 'early modern age' in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European Jewish history. It provides a useful survey of the recent flurry of historical research and identifies five markers of a newly emerging transnational European Jewish cultural experience. It also talks about the surge in the development of powerful Jewish communal structures coupled with the growing laicization of communal authority. The chapter investigates a crisis of religious authority that was accompanied by the related threats of heresy and enthusiasm and epitomized in the contemporaneous phenomena of Spinozism and Shabateanism. It describes social and religious identities, in which Conversos and their descendants, Jewish converts to Christianity, Christian Hebraists, and Shabatean syncretists helped to blur previously sharper boundary lines between Jews and their Christian neighbours.
Re(de)fining Modernity in Jewish History
Authors: Hundert Gershon David
Published: February 2021

This chapter emphasizes how 80 per cent of world Jewry who lived in Poland and Lithuania during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had to de-Westernize and 'de-teleologize' the modern period in Jewish history. It defines the modern era that span the last several hundred years. It also cites the critiques of the anti-essentialists and the vitality of contemporary Jewishness that was embodied in the “magmatic” level of Jewish experience and was somehow beneath or beyond cultural, religious, and political change'. The chapter discusses the source of the inner core of Jewish identity as a continuing positive self-evaluation of Jews that derives from eastern European Jewry. It contends that the criteria for dividing Jewish history into periods should be drawn from majority of the Jewish experience itself.
The Jewish Population of Syria
Authors: Harel Yaron
Published: February 2021

This chapter compares and contrasts the large Jewish communities of Aleppo and Damascus in nineteenth-century Syria, as well as their distinctive features that affect the nature and speed of its response to the Tanzimat. It examines the Jewish population's geographical distribution and demography, the defining characteristics of Jewish social identity and stratification, and the role of Jews in the local economy during the Tanzimat era. It also explores the nature of the Jewish leadership and the communal administration, and both traditional and modern Jewish education. The chapter discusses how the Ottoman regime imposed few restrictions on the economic activity of Jews, who were neither barred from nor forced to pursue particular occupations. It talks about the reorganization and remodelling of the structure of the Syrian Jewish communities under the influence of the Ottoman reforms in the mid-nineteenth century.
Dunash Ha-Levi Ben Labrat
Authors: Goldstein David
Published: February 2021

This chapter discusses the poetry of Dunash ha-Levi ben Labrat. Dunash came from a distinguished Jewish family of the Eastern Caliphate, and was, according to Moses ibn Ezra, born in Fez, in Morocco, in the first half of the tenth century. He studied under the great Jewish grammarian and philosopher, Sa’adia Gaon, in Baghdad, returned to Fez after Sa’adia’s death (942), and later attached himself to the family of Hasdai ibn Shaprut in Cordoba. It was Dunash who first demonstrated both in theory and in practice how Hebrew could be adapted to the writing of poetry in imitation of Arabic usage. His fame as a grammarian, and as a poet, quickly spread throughout the Jewish communities of Spain. However, only a few of his poems have survived. The chapter then presents two of his poems: Reply to an Invitation to a Feast and A Song for the Sabbath.