bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Holy Fire: The Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman Shapira, the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto
Authors: Polen Nehemiah
Published: February 2021

This chapter presents a monograph entitled The Holy Fire, by Nehemiah Polen. This monograph is an analysis of the manuscript ‘Esh kodesh’ by the Piaseczner rebbe of the Warsaw ghetto, Kalonymous Kalman Shapira. For Shapira, the detachment of Jewish traditions from worldliness made Judaism an instrument of defiance. He also viewed the goal of hasidic thought as the transformation of suffering to joy. Polen's analysis provides insight into the mindset of hasidic theorists and practitioners during the Holocaust. After a brief discussion on Shapira's life and work — especially his contributions to Jewish mysticism — the chapter illustrates how Polen provides a powerful and moving exposition of Shapira's spiritual world.
A Scrap of Time and Other Stories
Authors: Fink Ida
Published: February 2021

This chapter reviews Ida Fink's A Scrap of Time. It is a collection which consists of twenty-three stories that offer a haunting, uncompromising view of life in Poland during the Holocaust. The book includes scraps of ordinary lives that have been disrupted and terminated, and many of the stories are narrative slices of family, friends, or helpless bystanders. Here, the stories in A Scrap of Time illustrate Fink's artistry in describing the dilemmas, conflicts, and crises of ordinary families facing the Nazi threat. The stories include no crematoria, no selections, and no merciless views of life in the camps, but their absence does not mitigate the sadness, futility, and the omnipresent ‘why’. The chapter reveals how these are spare, quiet stories that disturb in a far more upsetting way, for they threaten our very beliefs in an essential human dignity and innocence. In addition to the book review, the chapter also provides a brief biography of Ida Fink as well as more focused analyses on some of the stories in the collection.
Żydowskie Okręgi Metrykalne i żydowskie Gminy Wyznaniowe w Galicji
Authors: Michalewicz Jerzy
Published: February 2021

This chapter discusses Jerzy Michalewicz's book, Jewish Register Districts and Jewish Religious Communities in Galicia. This book addresses questions pertaining to Galician Jewish communities, the workings of their institutions, and the correspondence of various towns and villages to specific religious communities. The chapter provides a brief analysis of the work itself and the general contents of the book. It demonstrates that the most important asset of Michalewicz's book is its description and analysis of the Jewish register districts in Galicia. This is the first monograph to deal with these state organs, which recorded demographic changes within the Jewish communities in Galicia.
A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling
Authors: Roskies David G.
Published: February 2021

This chapter presents David G. Roskies's book, A Bridge of Longing. The book focuses on Yiddish literature and Roskies's views on the subject. According to him, the book is ‘all about loss and reinvention’. Yiddish literature, born of a tremendous desire by authors and readers alike to challenge and to meet challenge, has come to be perhaps uniquely susceptible to a certain tendency for wishful reading. Written by and for the ‘millionaires of individuality’, as Isaac Bashevis Singer called the Yiddish-speaking Jews, published in weekly instalments in dozens of competing newspapers and in impressive numbers of book copies, read and discussed everywhere from Kiev to New York, Yiddish literature yet saw its primary function shrink after the Holocaust. It became a mere make-believe repository of tradition, a storehouse of serviceable myths about the Old World, an attic full of humour samples and bedtime stories. Few have come to the rescue of Yiddish in the last several decades, hence the chapter presents Roskies as one of the small coterie of post-Holocaust Yiddishists worthy of reading.
Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1918‒1939 and 1945‒1947
Authors: Michlic-coren Joanna
Published: February 2021

This chapter discusses anti-Jewish violence in twentieth-century Poland. Historical research has tended to focus on descriptions of individual riots, such as the Przytyk pogrom of March 9, 1936 and the Kielce pogrom of July 4, 1946, or on discussion of a particular historical period. There has been no attempt to explore the similarities and differences between the mechanisms of and reactions to anti-Jewish riots. The chapter looks at the link between the myth of the Jew as the ‘Threatening Other’ and eruptions of anti-Jewish excesses between 1918 and 1939 and between 1945 and 1947, concentrating on the extent to which this myth influenced the initiation and evaluation of anti-Jewish violence in these two distinctive historical periods. The term ‘violence’ refers to the following types of actions: inflicting damage on Jewish properties, including private homes, shops, institutions, and synagogues; slander; physical harassment; assaults; and murder. The chapter also outlines the socio-historical context in which the anti-Jewish violent disturbances and riots occurred in both periods.
Psychological Problems of Polish Jews who Used Aryan Documents
Authors: Einhorn-Susułowska Maria
Published: February 2021

This chapter focuses on those Jews who used false Aryan identification papers during the Nazi occupation of Poland. Many towns and cities in occupied Poland were divided into crowded ghettos of displaced Jews and the more fortunate Aryan districts. When it became obvious what was to happen to the ghetto inhabitants, Jews began to flee to Aryan districts. Some Poles provided security and housing to both known and unknown Jews. While some Polish Jews survived on forged documents, others remained in hiding without identification papers, unable to leave their hiding-places. Using Aryan documents successfully meant assuming another identity. Assuming a false identity strongly influences one's own sense of identity, which is necessary for retaining one's sense of individuality, continuity, and mental fitness. As such, the use of false Aryan documents created many complicated psychological problems.
My Two Mothers
Authors: Ficowska Elżbieta
Published: February 2021

This chapter describes the author's two mothers: her Jewish mother, who gave her life, and her Polish mother, who saved that life. Both accomplished something that went beyond ordinary humanity. To save the author in the nightmarish days of July of 1942, her Jewish mother endured the pain of giving up her only child to Żegota, a Polish organization that provided help to dying Jews. Through this organization, she was placed in less-threatening hands: hands that at first had seemed alien but did not turn out so. The author's Polish mother fulfilled the deepest desires of her Jewish mother. She conquered her own fear to save the author, showering great love on her to take the place of the one who brought her into the world and who was soon to leave it. Their presence reminds the author that there is nothing more destructive than hatred and nothing more blessed than human goodness.
Stereotypes of Polish–Jewish Relations after the War: The Special Commission of the Central Committee of Polish Jews
Authors: Gross Jan
Published: February 2021

This chapter describes stereotypes of Polish–Jewish relations after the Second World War. Even though most Polish Jews were killed during the German occupation, the stereotype of Judaeo-communism survived the war. If anything, it was reinforced by a widespread consensus that Jews assisted the Soviets in the subjugation of the Polish Kresy in 1939–41. The establishment of the Lublin government in the aftermath of the war served to perpetuate this stereotype still further. Popular sentiment attributed a nefarious role to the Jews and portrayed them as particularly zealous collaborators with the security police serving the new regime. Was it indeed the case that the dominant post-war Jewish experience in Poland was imposing scientific socialism on reluctant fellow citizens and persecuting ethnic Poles? The chapter argues that the dominant Jewish experience in Poland after the Second World War was fear. It also considers the Special Commission (Komisja Specjalna) established by the Centralny Komitet Żydów w Polsce (Central Committee of Jews in Poland: CKŻP).
Whose Nation, Whose State? Working-Class Nationalism and Antisemitism in Poland, 1945‒1947
Authors: Kenney Padraic
Published: February 2021

This chapter studies working-class nationalism and antisemitism in post-war Poland. It argues that in early post-war Poland, citizen–state relations expressed themselves in part through national identity. In this context, antisemitism took on new meaning in Poland because it became not only an expression of fears about national identity and cultural vulnerability, but also a means of defining the state and citizenship. Thus, national identity paradoxically sharpened as Poland approached homo-ethnicity. Before and during the war, Polish workers had expressed a strong national consciousness, and post-war reconstruction invoked national themes. The professed class nature of the new state, however, and the practical concerns of the workers eventually made allegiance to the state a central issue. That allegiance was potentially based not just upon prosperity or nationalism, but upon agreement with certain programmes and policies of the communist regime.
Polish Jews during and after the Kielce Pogrom: Reports from the Communist Archives
Authors: Michlic-coren Joanna
Published: February 2021

This chapter examines the Kielce pogrom. On July 4, 1946, the most horrifying outbreak of anti-Jewish violence in post-war Poland took place in Kielce. On that day, ordinary citizens of this central Polish town, together with soldiers and militiamen, murdered forty Polish Jews and injured more than a hundred. This was not an isolated act of anti-Jewish violence in this early post-war period, but one of many such events which took place between 1945 and 1947. Nevertheless, it was striking because of its dimensions, because of the brutality with which it was accompanied, and because of the participation of local forces representing the new communist authority. The Kielce pogrom was the most powerful indicator that Jews were not to be welcomed to restore their lives among the ethnic Polish population. The chapter then assesses the extent to which anti-Jewish attitudes were prevalent among Polish society during and after the Kielce pogrom.
A Rainbow in Black
Authors: Chrostowski Waldemar
Published: February 2021

This chapter provides an answer to the argument of the previous chapter, considering the complex matter of Christian–Jewish relations. One must not treat anti-Jewishness and anti-Judaism lightly. Expressions of it have occurred, and still occur, among Christians. However, they should not be equated with racist antisemitism. Most Jews, and their religion, have survived in the Christian world. Their mutual contacts resemble ‘a rainbow in which one can find all colours’. To present it as all black, as a chain of persecution and loathing, is to falsify history and to offend common sense. And that is where the search for the roots of National Socialism in Christianity comes in.
Difficult Remarks to Write
Authors: Krajewski Stanisław
Published: February 2021

This chapter reflects on the essays of Revd Stanisław Musiał and Revd Waldemar Chrostowski. In the light of historical experience, in listening to the Revd Henryk Jankowski, the author cannot but associate him with the Nazis. Were the Revd Jankowski one of thousands of ordinary priests, nobody would care. However, he is a powerful figure. The chapter argues that the Revd Jankowski is a politician. As such, he could become a leader of the extreme right in Poland. The fact mentioned by Revd Chrostowski, that socialism had developed in Germany at the end of the previous century, illuminates nothing. The socialists of that time had done nothing particularly evil. The chapter then asks how the fact that they existed explain (excuse) contemporary antisemitism.
‘You shall not bear false witness’
Authors: Tomaszewski Jerzy , Zaranko Anna
Published: February 2021

STANISŁAW C. NAPIÓRKOWSKI, OFM Conv. (ed.), Abliźniego swego …

Materiał
y z sympozjum ‘Św Maksymilian Maria Kolbe—Żydzi—masoni’

(Lublin: Catholic University of Lublin, 1997); pp. 176

IN the course of 1997 a handful of publications of a distinctly antisemitic character found their way onto the shelves of bookshops in Poland (and, rather more frequently, onto street stalls, since self-respecting bookshops do not, on the whole, stock such literature), and some contain, in all seriousness, the infamous nonsense about ‘ritual murder’. We read about a ‘Jewish–masonic plot’ aimed at world domination (this is based, apparently, on the notorious ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ forged by the tsarist ...
Die Krakauer Jüdische Reformgemeinde, 1864‒1874
Authors: Kozińska-witt Hanna
Published: February 2021

(Berlin: Peter Lang, 1999); pp. 312

In The Kraków Reformed Jewish Community, 1864‒1874 Hanna Kozińska-Witt has tackled an extremely important episode in the history of the Galician Jews. Attempts to establish an independent Reformed commune (gmina) in Kraków coincided with the peak of the development in Galicia of the Haskalah ideology which had emerged from Germany and of great religious, cultural, and social ferment, mobilizing the Jewish élites in their ultimately victorious battle for full civic and political rights. In the Austrian monarchy this campaign continued uninterrupted from the revolutionary year of 1848; however, final success was achieved only with the granting of the new state constitution of December 1867, forced on Franz Joseph by the difficult situation in which the state found itself following defeat in the war against Prussia....
Essential Papers on Jews and the Left(New York: New York University Press, 1997); pp. viii + 552 (paperback)
Authors: Mendelsohn Ezra
Published: February 2021

Ezra Mendelsohn’s book appeared in the series Essential Papers on Jewish Studies and is an excellent continuation of the previous volume, Essential Papers on Zionism. Both books present a complicated picture of the two most significant currents in contemporary Jewish political and ideological life. I would be glad to see a third volume on the traditional, conservative movements (with Agudat Yisrael as the most important) and perhaps another containing the other currents which cannot be represented in the previous books....
Hebrew Poetry in Poland between the Two World Wars
Authors: Weinfeld (ed.) David
Published: February 2021

(Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1997); pp. 496

The Hebrew Nobel Laureate S. Y. Agnon describes in his semi-autobiographical novel A Guest for the Night (1939) a Hebrew writer’s return in about 1930 to the Galician town of his birth. What was once a thriving centre of Jewish culture is now virtually a ghost town, its population depleted and traumatized by war and privation. The writer tries to renew his ties with the past but fails, and in the end returns to Jerusalem, his only true home....
Obcy W Polskim Domu: Nacjonalistyczne Koncepcje RozwiąZania Problemu Mniejszości Narodowych 1918‒1939
Authors: Włodzimierz Mich
Published: February 2021

(Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 1994); pp. 144

The question of how to ensure the rights of ethnic minorities constituted one of the most controversial and troublesome aspects of the Paris peace settlement at the end of the First World War. As early as spring 1919 ongoing peace negotiations revealed a reluctance and even open opposition on the part of the new nation-states of east central Europe towards the implementation of provisions for ethnic minorities. Under pressure from the Allied powers, the new nation-states eventually signed their respective minority treaties, but opposition towards ethnic minorities rights not only remained, but actually increased in many of these states during the course of the next twenty years....
Lost Landscapes: In Search of the Jews of Poland,
Authors: TuszyńSka Agata , Levine Madeline
Published: February 2021

(New York: William Morrow, 1998); pp. viii + 184

In Lost Landscapes Agata Tuszyńska pulls together diverse threads: a literary and historical contextualization of the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer, contemporary Poles’ current views on Jews, and Polish Jewish survivors’ perspectives on Poland and on Singer’s writing. The essays are not connected as a single narrative, but hang together as a book through the implication of the continuing connection between Jews and Poles. For Poles, the old Jewish communities’ absence in most of Poland has left a shadow. For Polish Jews, memories of Poland, its land and language, persist like an echo. The landscapes of the title unite both groups, as surviving expatriate Polish Jews of Singer’s generation remember Poland, and Poles remember their absent and murdered Jewish neighbours....
Introduction
Authors: Feiner Shmuel , Sorkin David
Published: February 2021

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment. The Haskalah provides an interesting example of one of the Enlightenments of eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Europe which also constituted a unique chapter in the social history of European Jewry. It encompasses over 120 years (from around the 1770s to the 1890s), and a large number of Jewish communities, from London in the west, to Copenhagen in the north, to Vilna and St Petersburg in the east. Much scholarship in the past concentrated on the Haskalah's intimate relationship to Jewish modernization: scholars examined the role of the Haskalah in the processes of political emancipation and the integration of Jews into the larger society. A different approach became possible once the modernization of European Jewry came to be viewed as a series of processes that awaited adequate analysis and explanation, the Haskalah being one of the foremost among them.
The Early Haskalah
Authors: Sorkin David
Published: February 2021

This chapter discusses how the cultural developments of the first six decades of the eighteenth century should not be treated as mere anticipations of the Haskalah but rather as constituting an ‘early Haskalah’ which aimed to broaden the curriculum of Ashkenazi Jewry. Figures such as Solomon Hanau and Asher Anshel Worms aimed to revive the study of Hebrew language and grammar as well as biblical exegesis. Meanwhile, Israel Zamosc and Aaron Solomon Gumpertz aimed to renew the discipline of philosophy in Hebrew by harmonizing contemporary science and philosophy with established but hitherto neglected patterns of Jewish thought. These thinkers aspired to a Hebrew-based curriculum capable of absorbing the best of contemporary culture. The chapter then argues that once one recognizes the early Haskalah as an independent cultural trend, one needs to determine to what extent it influenced the Haskalah after 1770, and how far it remained a viable cultural option.
Enlightenment Values, Jewish Ethics: The Haskalah’s Transformation of the Traditional Musar Genre
Authors: Bor Harris
Published: February 2021

This chapter examines Haskalah ethical literature and Jewish ethical writing (musar), and highlights how the Haskalah movement was poised between Jewish tradition and European culture. It shows that moral improvement was a fundamental concern of the Haskalah. Since moral education was meant to serve as a link between the aims of the Enlightenment and Jewish tradition, ethical literature was an index to the balance between the modern and the traditional. The chapter then illustrates the importance of comparative study. By comparing the texts and motifs of the Enlightenment on issues such as the immortality of the soul and civic education with the ethical ideas of such maskilim as Isaac Satanow, Naphtali Herz Wessely, Menahem Mendel Lefin, and Judah Leib Ben Ze'ev, it reveals the extent to which the Haskalah drew upon the educational methods of German reformist educators like Johann Heinrich Campe and Johann Bernhard Basedow.
Strategy and Ruse in the Haskalah of Mendel Lefin of Satanow
Authors: Sinkoff Nancy
Published: February 2021

This chapter focuses on Menahem Mendel Lefin of Satanow, a fascinating maskil, who was a link between the German and the east European Haskalah. Because he often wrote in Yiddish, he has usually been seen as a populist who advanced the maskilim's criticism of east European Jewish life and culture. He attacked the intoxication with mysticism, became involved in the literary battle against hasidism, and proposed the maskilim as leaders who could heal the ills of Jewish society. In contrast to the view of Lefin as a populist, which was rooted in earlier scholarship's nationalist bias, the chapter notes his sophisticated use of literary strategies aimed at different audiences according to the language of the text. It illustrates these strategies in an analysis of a text written for his fellow Jews; an adaptation and translation of a travel story in the New World meant as a tool of social criticism and anti-hasidic polemics; and also in a text written for a wider audience, an anonymous French memorandum that Lefin submitted to the Polish Sejm in 1791.
The Struggle of the Mitnagedim and Maskilim against Hasidism: Rabbi Jacob Emden and Judah Leib Mieses
Authors: Friedlander Yehuda
Published: February 2021

This chapter assesses the struggle of the mitnagedim and the maskilim against hasidism. With its insularity, mysticism, and cult of the tsadik or spiritual leader, hasidism was seen by the maskilim as their chief enemy. The maskilim aimed to delegitimize hasidism in order to enhance their own standing. In this enterprise, they drew on their predecessors, the numerous rabbis who from the last third of the eighteenth century had opposed hasidism, prominent among whom was Jacob Emden. By showing how the Galician maskil Judah Leib Mieses selectively wove Emden's anti-hasidic polemic into his satires, the chapter reveals the literary strategies of the Haskalah and illustrates how the maskilim, in their attack on the hasidic enemy, exploited Emden as a religious authority. It demonstrates how well versed in talmudic and rabbinic texts the maskilim had to be in order to weave the associations and allusions of rabbinic polemics into the fabric of their own writings.
Towards a Historical Definition of the Haskalah
Authors: Feiner Shmuel
Published: February 2021

This chapter studies the long historiographic tradition in search of a definition of the Haskalah. It suggests reducing the historical parameters of the Jewish Enlightenment so that it can be recognized as a trend in which modernizing intellectuals aspired to transform Jewish society. Despite the obvious diversity and dispersion of the Haskalah, and the difficulty in defining it precisely, the chapter enumerates a number of essential criteria, elaborating on the self-consciousness of the maskilim and paying special attention to their militant rhetoric and awareness of belonging to an avant-garde, redemptive, and revolutionary movement. It also sketches a portrait of the typical maskil, surveys the history of the movement and its various centres, and elucidates the dualistic nature of its ideology, explaining its links to the processes of Jewish modernization and secularization. Ultimately, the Haskalah was the intellectual option for modernization that triggered the Jewish Kulturkampf which, still alive today — especially in Israel — separates modernists and anti-modernists, Orthodox and secular Jews.
The Jewish Mystical Library and New Visions of Reality
Authors: Elior Rachel
Published: February 2021

This chapter provides an overview of the corpus of mystical writings in the traditional Jewish world, developed over the course of thousands of years. With all its cultural and historical manifestations, mysticism embraces a rich world of thought, creativity, imagination, and inspiration, transcending existential experience. Mysticism deals mainly with another reality that exists beyond the perceptible world, a reality that is revealed to visionaries when the veils obscuring everyday consciousness are lifted. This hidden reality has different visual realizations in different historical periods. In Jewish mysticism, it relates to secret theological and cosmological systems that add hidden structure, inner sense, depth, flexibility, and secret meaning to revealed reality, a reality assumed not to be subject to any change. The chapter then looks at how the hidden reality was described in the vast library of the mystical tradition. This mystical library was not based on a fixed mode of relating to the sacred text, but rather on a flexible mode relating to its hidden meaning and creative potential, one revealed to the inner eye of the beholder and resonating in their soul.
One Event, Two Interpretations: The Fall of the Seer of Lublin in Hasidic Memory and Maskilic Satire
Authors: Assaf David
Published: February 2021

This chapter turns to the fall of the Seer of Lublin. At the turn of the nineteenth century one of the most revered figures among Polish and non-Polish hasidic leaders and their flock was the tsadik Rabbi Jacob Isaac Horowitz, better known as the Seer of Lublin (1745?–1815). In 1814 the Seer fell out of a window in his house, suffering critical injuries that led to his death nine months later in 1815. Although these bare facts are not disputed, their interpretation, as rendered by hasidic and maskilic writers as well as others, differs substantially. Of these varying interpretations, the maskilic version was the earliest. Written in the style of a journalistic exposé, this satiric account followed upon the heels of the fall itself, making its initial appearance even prior to the Seer’s death. The hasidic counter-version, on the other hand, with its clearly apologetic and polemical overtones is late, dating only from the early twentieth century. The chapter traces the transmission of these opposing traditions, showing how their divergent treatments of the Seer’s fall illustrate patterns of imagery, memory, and dispute.
How Far was Krochmal Influenced by the Gaon Sherira ben Hanina in his Description of the Development of Oral Torah?
Authors: Schlüter Margarete
Published: February 2021

This chapter concerns Nahman Krochmal (1785–1840), a key figure in the development of Jewish spirituality in central and eastern Europe. It examines the extent to which Krochmal’s writings were influenced by the gaon of Pumbedita in Babylonia, Sherira (c.906–1006). Krochmal summed up his spiritual life and work in his incomplete study, Moreh nevukhei hazeman (‘guide of the perplexed of the time’). Its central theme is the Oral Torah, one of the pillars of rabbinic Judaism. In Krochmal’s time the Oral Torah was subjected to heavy criticism. But almost 850 years before Krochmal’s Moreh nevukhei hazeman, Sherira wrote a letter as a response to a series of questions concerning the formation of the Mishnah, the Tosefta, the Talmuds, etc., posed to him by Jacob ben Nissim on behalf of the holy community of Kairouan in North Africa.
The Society for the Advancement of Trade, Industry, and Crafts
Authors: Rudnicki Szymon
Published: February 2021

This chapter tells the story of the Towarzystwo Rozwoju Handlu, Przemysłu i Rzemiosł (the Society for the Advancement of Trade, Industry, and Crafts; Rozwój or Advancement for short). Its establishment was the high point of the campaign to put in place a framework for the economic boycott. No advance information about the founding of the organization was published. In mid-June 1913 an announcement was published stating that the governor’s commission on unions and associations had confirmed the society’s statute. The announcement emphasized the significance of the founding of such an organization. A few days later the statute was published. The society’s purpose, as formulated in the statute, was in accordance with its name: ‘The Society has as its aim the cooperative advancement of industry, crafts, and trade among Christian people, mutual aid in this direction for members of the Society, and the support of the industrial, craft, and trading activities of the Society’.
Jewish Writers in Polish Literature
Authors: Prokop-Janiec Eugenia
Published: February 2021

This chapter explores Jewish contributions to Polish literature in the period between the two world wars. This literary activity mirrored social and cultural processes, such as the democratization of the Polish intelligentsia, with its absorption of members from the middle class, and the acculturation and linguistic Polonization of various Jewish groups. The literary question thus became a symbol of the new — and for the most part complex and difficult — relationship between Poles and Jews. It is not a coincidence that the two groups especially involved in the discussion were acculturated Jews and Polish nationalists. The views of these two groups set the parameters for description, interpretation, and evaluation of the literature to which all other participants had little choice but to conform. In general terms, their discussion ranged from acceptance of Jewish literature in non-Jewish languages as a contribution to world literature to treating it as an infiltration of the host culture; from description of the emerging literary group to examination of literary texts for the national or racial traits that were assumed to appear in them. In the space between these polarities there was room for a whole range of intermediate views.
Moshe Mishkinsky (1917–1998)
Authors: Zimmerman Joshua D.
Published: February 2021

This chapter commemorates Moshe Mishkinsky. Mishkinsky was one of the premier scholars of the history of the Jewish labour movement. Born in Białystok in 1917, Mishkinsky emigrated to Palestine at the age of 19, where he developed an interest in the Jewish workers’ movement. He distinguished himself in the scholarly community as an authority on the Jewish labour movement in general and on the history of the Bund in tsarist Russia in particular. He was among the first scholars to challenge the prevailing view, enshrined in the Bund’s own post-war five-volume Geshikhte fun bund, that the development of a national programme within Jewish socialist circles was the result of pressure from below, from the Jewish masses. Mishkinsky’s second contribution included a pioneering study, published in English in 1969, on the role of regional factors in the formation of the Jewish labour movement.
Mordechai Gebirtig: The Folk Song and the Cabaret Song
Authors: Gross Natan
Published: February 2021

This chapter details how Mordechai Gebirtig engraved his name on the history of Jewish cabaret in Poland between the wars. Every singer had his songs in his or her repertoire. These songs spread from the cabaret stages (kleynkunstbine) of Łódź and Warsaw to all of Poland and to the entire Jewish world. Even today they are alive on the stage and in Jewish homes; they are an indispensable part of the repertoire of Jewish singers. They are also arousing increasing interest among non-Jewish audiences in Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and the United States. Since the destruction of European Jewry, these songs have become a crucial means of learning about Jewish folklore and the life of the Jewish poor, matters inadequately recorded in Yiddish literature and other sources.
Simkhe Plakhte: From ‘Folklore’ to Literary Artefact
Authors: Wolitz Seth L.
Published: February 2021

This chapter evaluates the Polish Jewish folk motif and figure of Simkhe Plakhte. This topic deserves closer attention because of its wide popularity and extensive literary reworking among Polish Jews during the twentieth century. The putative folk tale of Simkhe Plakhte projects a character drawn from the shtetl underclass who not only subverts the established social order of the traditional Jewish world, but also earns respect from the non-Jewish ruling class of the old Polish Commonwealth. While the tale contains maskilic elements of anti-hasidic satire, it is also a conscious expression of Jewish fantasy and wish-fulfilment, reflecting a specific Polish Jewish milieu in the nineteenth century. These elements go far towards explaining the wide interest this material has sustained.
Papers for the Folk: Jewish Nationalism and the Birth of the Yiddish Press in Galicia
Authors: Shanes Joshua
Published: February 2021

This chapter addresses Jewish nationalism and the birth of the Yiddish press in Galicia. Jewish nationalism in Galicia, like its Viennese counterpart, was initially a movement largely of the secular intelligentsia, especially students. Raised in a Polish cultural (and educational) milieu, Jewish students tended at first to identify strongly with Polish nationalist aspirations, but the increasing rejection they experienced from Polish nationalists, among whom antisemitism was sharply rising, made them choice targets for Zionist propaganda. Galician Zionists attacked their 'assimilationist' rivals ferociously, and tried to inspire Galician Jews to support the rebirth of a Jewish national culture instead. At first they relied on the German-language Viennese organ Selbst-Emanzipation, but by 1892, they had begun to publish their own Polish-language literature, including a party organ, Przyszłość (The Future).
Shund and the Tabloids: Jewish Popular Reading in Inter-War Poland
Authors: Cohen Nathan
Published: February 2021

This chapter describes Jewish popular reading in inter-war Poland, looking at shund and the Polish tabloid press. In the first third of the twentieth century, as the Polish press was developing rapidly, sensationalist newspapers began to proliferate. While this type of press had been widespread in the United States and western Europe since the middle of the nineteenth century, it first emerged in Poland only in 1910, with Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny (Illustrated Daily Courier) in Kraków. In Warsaw, the first tabloid newspapers, Kurier Informacyjny i Telegraficzny (Information and Telegraphic Courier) and Ekspres Poranny (Morning Express), appeared in 1922. In 1926, Kurier Informacyjny i Telegraficzny changed its name, now printed in red, to Kurier Czerwony (Red Courier). In time, the colour red became emblematic of sensationalist newspapers in Poland, and they were nicknamed czerwoniaki (Reds), similar to the ‘yellow’ press in the West.
Repopulating Jewish Poland—in Wood
Authors: Lehrer Erica
Published: February 2021

This chapter focuses on sculptor Józef Reguła's wooden Jews. It asks why ‘Jewish culture’ is circulating in almost Jewless, post-communist Poland. And, in particular, what does it mean that Poles carve tiny Jewish figurines and that these days Jewish tourists buy them? Secular American Jews who travel to Poland, purchase Jewish figurines, and display them in their homes, show how symbolic, how iconographic a lot of Jewishness is today. But such Jewishness is not the only kind that Jews bring to Poland. For Max Rogers, a hasidic Jew from London who travels to Poland frequently on business, Jewishness is an encompassing matter of daily practice.
Utwory nieznane. Ze zbiorów Tomasza Niewodniczańskiego w Bitburgu: Wiersze, Kabaret, Artykuły, Listy
Authors: Tuwim Julian
Published: February 2021

This chapter assesses Julian Tuwim's Utwory nieznane (Unknown Works), the title of which is somewhat misleading. The book is largely made up of cabaret pieces that were performed and known to the public; they simply were never published in written form. Still, the book's publication in 1999 was an important event, not only for poetry lovers and historians of literature, but also from a Jewish perspective. Jewish topics appear prominently and in many forms in this collection of poems, facsimiles, juvenilia, cabaret skits and songs, and private letters from various periods of the poet's life. This is in clear contradiction to the stereotype, predominant in Jewish historiography, of the pre-war Polish Jewish intelligentsia as thoroughly assimilated and uprooted. Tuwim's example demonstrates that the opposite was the case. Like many other writers, he was in constant dialogue with his Jewishness, defending it when attacked, but also critical of Jewish obscurantism.
Party na Nalewkach
Authors: Wielanek StanisŁaw
Published: February 2021

This chapter explores Stanisław Wielanek's recording of Yiddish-tinged 'oldies' Party na Nalewkach (A Party in Nalewki Street). Released on vinyl in 1980 and later available on cassette, until recently the album was hard to find in either format. Whatever the reason for its disappearance, Wielanek's album has now reappeared on CD with a new cover and title, and with five new selections added to the earlier version's sixteen. Aficionados of Jewish popular song will find a veritable lost continent of fascinating repertoire attractively arranged and performed by Wielanek and his band, Kapela Warszawska. Something of an archaeologist and troubadour, Wielanek first discovered the genre of szmonces as an ardent collector of musical folklore from Warsaw. The encounter was inevitable, since, as Wielanek says, Jewish songwriters dominated the field of popular music in Poland between the wars.
Sąsiedzi: Historia zagłady żydowskiego miasteczka
Authors: Gross Jan Tomasz
Published: February 2021

This chapter studies Jan Tomasz Gross's Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne. The story that Gross recounts is well known by now. On July 10, 1941, two weeks after the Germans arrived, a pogrom took place in the small town of Jedwabne, near Białystok. But for a few who managed to run away and hide, all the town's Jews perished that day, at the hands of their Polish neighbours. Gross allowed a year to elapse between the publication of the Polish and English editions of his book, to give Poles a chance to debate the matter before the international spotlight fell on it. He was not disappointed: the appearance of Sąsiedzi in May of 2000 set off an unprecedented ‘affair’, which was still simmering more than two years later. Over the next two years, nearly a thousand articles appeared in the Polish press, many of them heatedly polemical; debate raged in public meetings and on the Internet, and there was extensive coverage in the electronic media. An official investigation was launched, and the highest authorities of Church and State became involved. The Jedwabne affair has represented really the first mass public airing of Polish-Jewish issues since the Holocaust.
The Student Body
Authors: Stampfer Shaul
Published: February 2021

This chapter turns to the student body. It takes a look at the variety of reasons and considerations which led young men to travel to Volozhin to study at the yeshiva. The chapter then explores the admission procedure, student activities and solidarity, and the relationship between the students and the staff as well as that between the students and the community. Induction into the yeshiva was not very complicated and was largely informal: the person in charge of the books would give the new student a volume of the Talmud, and that was it. In addition, little can be said about the geographical background of the students of the Volozhin yeshiva for most of the years it existed. Clearly, most of the students it attracted were from the regions of Lithuania and Belarus, the area Jews termed ‘Lite’. However, the students at Volozhin were very conscious of themselves as a group, and had a high opinion of their own worth.
The Leadership
Authors: Katzburg-Yungman Mira
Published: February 2021

This chapter takes a look at the women who led the organization. Between the end of the Second World War and the end of Israel's first decade of statehood in 1958, Hadassah was headed by twelve of the thirty women who sat on the National Board. They can be divided into three groups according to their socioeconomic and cultural background. One group (the largest) comprised members of families that had emigrated to the United States from eastern Europe. These women had been raised and educated in America, most of them in New York. The second group, consisting of women from a German Jewish background, falls into two sub-groups: American-born women of German Jewish origin who were married to men of east European origin, and very well-to-do women who came to the United States from Germany on the eve of the Second World War. The third group consisted of women who were involved in volunteer work in Palestine and, later, Israel. The members of this last group had a totally different background from that of the US leadership, but their work in Palestine over a long period justifies their inclusion in this chapter's review.
Ideology and Politics in the Early Years of the State of Israel, 1951–1956
Authors: Katzburg-Yungman Mira
Published: February 2021

This chapter details further developments within the international Jewish community as well as Hadassah's role in these affairs. Despite Hadassah's unrelenting focus on practical work, it could not ignore the questions about the essence of Zionism that arose as a result of the establishment of the State of Israel. In the context of debates over aliyah and ḥalutsiyut, the question arose whether Hadassah was a Zionist organization or an organization of ‘friends of Israel’; the leaders of Hadassah firmly refused to ‘demote’ the organization to the level of ‘friends of Israel’. Another focus of debate between the Zionists in Israel and American Zionists was the concepts of ‘exile’ and ‘diaspora’. In this respect Hadassah, more than the other Zionist organizations in the United States, supported the view that can be defined as affirming the value and authenticity of Jewish life in the diaspora.
Epilogue
Authors: Katzburg-Yungman Mira
Published: February 2021

This concluding chapter considers developments to 2005. It sets out to assess whether the conclusions reached with regard to Hadassah as an organization remain valid. This question is addressed by considering various developments within Hadassah in the 1970s and the subsequent quarter of a century, years when the organization was affected by significant changes within the wider American Jewish community — specifically, the enormous increase in intermarriage with non-Jews and the impact of the so-called ‘second wave’ of feminism. Notwithstanding these developments and changing circumstances, however, the objectives, goals, and organizational identity of Hadassah as a Zionist organization have remained constant over the years. The focus of its work and investment — the medical projects in Israel — has also remained unchanged.
The Social and Political Context of Conversion in Germany and England 1870–1914
Authors: Endelman Todd M.
Published: February 2021

This chapter focuses on Jews who left Judaism in the decades before the First World War and who were not attracted by the spiritual truths or ethical values of Christianity. It discusses disaffiliation as a hallmark of modern Jewish history in the West in which the flow out of Judaism was not equally strong in all countries and among all strata of Jewish society. It also analyses the characteristic patterns of drift and defection that emerged in every country or region bearing the impress of larger social and political conditions. The chapter talks about the temptation to abandon Judaism, which increased from 1870 to 1914, when rising antisemitism called into question Jewish integration into state and society with unprecedented intensity. It refers to England and Germany as states with dissimilar political cultures and social systems, which illuminates the history of the Jewish communities there.
The Emergence of Disraeli’s Jewishness
Authors: Endelman Todd M.
Published: February 2021

This chapter talks about Benjamin Disraeli and his policies, which elicited strong reactions, and who was known to some as a vulgar, cynical careerist and for others a visionary, patriotic statesman. The chapter emphasizes Disraeli as a Jew, and being Jewish was central to his self-understanding despite having been baptized at the age of 12. It also reviews accounts of Disraeli's Jewishness in which historians and biographers have labelled him variously a proto-Zionist, a Marrano, a racist, a proud Jew, and a self-hating Jew. The chapter examines the complex, ambivalent character of what being Jewish meant to Disraeli at different times in his life. It investigates Disraeli's consciousness of being a Jew as a fixed cultural or biological inheritance that emerged and evolved over several decades in response to external changes in his life and stabilized only when he was in his forties.
The Impact of the Converso Experience on English Sephardim
Authors: Endelman Todd M.
Published: February 2021

This chapter cites the London Jewish Chronicle, which noted in January 1880 that the number of Sephardim in England had decreased in the previous 100 years as immigration from eastern Europe mounted. The chapter points out the conversions to Christianity, defections to the Reform congregation where Sephardi distinctiveness was diluted or lost, and disappearance of 'recruiting grounds' for Sephardi immigration to England as the reasons for the reduction of Sephardim. It also analyses the demographic stagnation of Sephardim in all western European states that had far-reaching consequences for the history of the Western Sephardim. The chapter examines the demographic decline of the Sephardim in England as the outcome of the same currents of radical assimilation that depleted the ranks of acculturated Jews throughout Europe in the modern period. It discusses the historical experience of Sephardim's ancestors as Conversos, which was an experience that the Ashkenazi majority did not share.
Introduction
Authors: Finder Gabriel N.
Published: February 2021

UNDER THE TITLE ‘Making Holocaust Memory’ the chapters gathered in the first section of this issue of Polin examine ways in which Jews and Poles, from the end of the Second World War up to the present, have remembered, represented, and memorialized the Holocaust. This is a salient topic for the twentieth volume of ...
Shabes, yontef un rosh-khoydesh
Authors: Wolitz Seth L.
Published: February 2021

IN HIS WRITINGS Abraham Goldfadn often mused about creating a theatre ex nihilo.
1 He says explicitly that he would have liked to write and perform dramas equal to the world’s great plays, but throughout his short autobiographical writings he stresses that when a secular theatre starts at zero, it can’t go to 100 immediately. And so he was forced to write musical dramas when his heart was in poetic tragedies....
Characteristics of the Haskalah in the Kingdom of Poland, 1815–1860
Authors: Wodziński Marcin
Published: February 2021

This chapter examines the characteristics of the Haskalah in the Kingdom of Poland. In many ways, the Haskalah in the Kingdom of Poland was a movement similar to others in eastern Europe, but it also retained many unique features. In terms of its similarities, the programme of the Polish maskilim was fundamentally in sympathy with the ideological foundations of the entire east European Haskalah. Educational plans and the struggle with Jewish separatism occupied a particularly important place, but so too did the maintenance of Jewish identity through the cultivation of the Hebrew language, Jewish literature, and historical awareness. Meanwhile, differences in the programme were attributable to the Kingdom's specific legal, social, cultural, and even economic context. The opportunity to participate in the government project for Jewish reform and the genuine influence which many maskilim brought to bear on these projects meant that Jewish supporters of modernization in the Kingdom were particularly interested in the socio-political aspect of Haskalah ideology and in putting it into action. As a result, they paid considerable attention to the productivity programme and to changes in the socio-occupational structure of the Jewish population in Poland, while neglecting areas of theory or religion. Another distinguishing characteristic of the Polish Haskalah was the predominance of literature in the Polish language.