Jewish Religion Research Articles

Orthodox Jewry in Israel and in North American

IN COMPARING ORTHODOX JUDAISM IN Israel and in the American Diaspora, it should be kept in mind that Jews in America and other contemporary Diaspora communities in the Western World have much in common.* Therefore, many of the conclusions of this article are also valid with regard to Diaspora Jewish communities in Western Europe and countries like Canada, Australia and New Zealand. term was created in Central Europe in the beginning of the 19th century. It was used to distinguish between those Jews who kept their commitment to the Jewish tradition, and Jews, like the Reform or Conservatives, who sought to make pronounced changes in tradition in response to the far-reaching changes in Jewish life in the wake of the emancipation of European Jewry. It is significant to note that the very term Orthodox Judaism, which is so accepted among most Western Diaspora Jews, is not commonly used in Israel. Its place is taken by the far more prevalent term religious difference between these two terms is more than merely semantic. It reflects important differences in the social and political conditions of Israel and the Diaspora. In contemporary Western countries, particularly in America, most of the Jews consider Orthodoxy to be only one of the legitimate expressions of Jewish religion. By contrast, Jews are perceived by most of the Israelis as the authentic representatives of Judaism. This is true even in regard to many non-religious Israelis. As the Israeli political scientist, Shlomo Avineri said, The synagogue I am not going to

The Holy Letters, and: My Jewish Name (review)

greatunpublished.com, 2000, Title No. 65. 86 pp. $11.99 (p); $7.99 (e-book). greatunpublished.com 2002, Title No. 251. 127 pp. $11.99 (p); $7.99 (e-book). Nancy Shiffrin's poetry, collected in The Holy Letters, is reminiscent such feminist poets as Margaret Atwood, Audre Lorde, and, especially -- because the highlighted Jewish themes -- Adrienne Rich. The Holy Letters is a book to set alongside these other writers' and to cherish for richness emotions and vividness metaphor. There is no shrinking or prudery here; the author confronts the body frankly, patriarchal repression with rightful anger. The contemporary world, environmental depradation, poverty, inner-city suffering, is harsh and cruel, and the poet responds with great sadness and a search for hope, ending her book with a section entitled For Life. Other sections deal with geography and memory, pregnancy and abortion, unhappy or traumatized children, aging, love, death, and multiple longings: for art, for skill, for erotic adventure. Several poems indicate Jewish themes explicitly through their titles -- Yom Kippur, Shabbat, Kosher, Seder, My Holocaust, Yahrzeit, and Rosh Chodesh -- and many others grapple with Jewish culture and history. Interestingly, the poems most concerned with Jewishness are clustered near the beginning and end the volume, suggesting that the author finds her origins in Jewish culture and returns to those origins ineluctably. One poem is actually entitled Return, and describes the poet's visit to Romania, where her zada came from. The penultimate the volume's ten sections, Covenant, deals exclusively with Jewish religion. Shiffrin clearly falls into a tradition politicized Jewish poets alert to abuses power. The little girl who speaks to us in her naive child's voice mysteries such as the Passover story, neighborhood Jew-hatred, and the gas chambers mutates into the grown woman who feels within her own self the universality human cruelty. In Grief, the persona seeems almost faux-naive, observing the savagery cats and nasty children, reading of Pol Pot's Butcher, research[ing] theories evil, witnessing a murder virtually on her own doorstep, yet unable to name or fully inhabit her own response. A few pages later, though, in Gardening, she is haunted even as she weeds by the idea genocide as weeding-out, and feels implicated in such evil merely by her human tendency to seek cleanliness and control, and therefore to destroy some living things while nurturing others. The poem ends in anguished, disappointed hope: I want to place stone on stone, restore myth rebuild grand processional stairways. …

Judische Sprachen in deutscher Umwelt: Hebraisch und Jiddisch von der Aufklarung bis ins 20. Jahrhundert (review)

Reviewed by: Jüdische Sprachen in deutscher Umwelt: Hebräisch und Jiddisch von der Aufklärung bis ins 20. Jahrhundert Jonathan Skolnik Jüdische Sprachen in deutscher Umwelt: Hebräisch und Jiddisch von der Aufklärung bis ins 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Michael Brenner. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2002. 134 pp. 39.00. This conference volume is stimulating reading for anyone interested in the evolution of Jewish languages in Ashkenaz and their renaissance in the modern period. Michael Brenner has assembled a collection of complementary papers which investigate Hebrew and Yiddish in the German-speaking countries. Nils Roemer does an outstanding job of sketching the broader historical framework for understanding German Jewry's linguistic complexity. Drawing on his own research as well as recent scholarship on the Haskalah (especially David Sorkin and Steven Lowenberg), Roemer challenges the mid-nineteenth century mythologization (still a commonplace in many scholarly works) of Moses Mendelssohn as the "Germanizer" of Central European Jewry. Instead, Roemer convincingly situates Mendelssohn at the climax of a longer process of linguistic and social change, emphasizing the evolving roles of Yiddish and German in daily life and the centrality of the Haskalah's language aesthetic for Mendelssohn's thought. Inspired by Amos Funkenstein, Roemer also calls us to re-examine the boundaries between Yiddish and other German dialects before the nineteenth century. Andrea Schatz's thoughtful paper takes up the problem of the secularization of the Hebrew language, exploring precursors of Berlin Haskala in order to better understand the Maskilic notion of a "new holy language." Andreas Gotzmann offers a dense analysis of the inner-Jewish discourse of linguistic identity in nineteenth-century Germany, emphasizing the centrality of evolving Jewish religious practice in the debates. Thomas Kollatz surveys the Hebrew-language press in Germany from the mid-eighteenth century up through the founding of ha-Maggid in 1856. Based on the usage of Hebrew words in the daily language of Jews in Alsace and south-west Germany before 1933, Uri Kaufmann offers some thoughts on the nature of Western Jewish dialects. In view of polemical attacks by some Zionist writers that German-language Wissenschaft des Judentums contributed to Western Jewry's neglect of the Hebrew language, Henry Soussan judiciously discusses the contributions to Hebrew scholarship by nineteenth-century figures like Leopold Zunz and Michael Sachs, as well as the growing rapprochement between Eastern European and Central European Jewish scholarship which contributed to the founding of the journal Dvir in 1924. Barbara Schaefer gives a concise [End Page 168] overview of efforts by Berlin Zionists to promote Hebrew from 1900 through the Weimar period. Rachel Perets' article first examines the 1909 and 1931 Berlin conferences on Hebrew in some detail, then offers a study of Hebrew teaching methods and institutions in Germany before 1933. Delphine Bechtel's excellent portrait of the flowering Yiddish literary scene in 1920s Berlin is an expanded version of an essay published in English in the Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German (1997). Amir Eshel's contribution revisits the question of Franz Kafka's relation to Jewish languages. Although Eshel doesn't explicitly engage with Robert Alter's recent book on Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (which probes the theological dimensions to their relation to Hebrew), he offers a unique dissenting view. For Eshel, Kafka's turn to Hebrew and Yiddish reveals ethical, universalizing concerns more than a wish to experiment with radically new forms of Jewish religion, politics, and culture. Eshel interprets Kafka through a framework that at times seems comparable to Heidegger or, rather, to a Hegelian model divorced from theologies, negative or otherwise: an interplay of "foreign" and "individual" which leads to categories like "eternal" or "universal." The second half of Eshel's article examines Paul Celan's use of Hebrew words in his German poetry, with some reference to the poems of Gertrud Kolmar and Nelly Sachs. Eshel notes Celan's critical distance to Heidegger and the tremendous ruptures which the Holocaust inflicted upon Jewish life and language, yet he still insists on the redemptive, humanizing potential of a meeting of German, Yiddish, and Hebrew in Celan's poetry. Jonathan Skolnik Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies University of Maryland-College...

John Paul II and Hans Urs von Balthasar: The Relationship between the Jews and the Church

The views of two modern Catholic figures, John Paul II and Hans Urs von Balthasar, on the Jewish religion and the State of Israel are informed by their theological reflections that go back to the Christian Scriptures. There they identify the radical newness of Christianity and at the same time its profound roots and continuing debt to the Jewish Scriptures and to the continuing existence of the Jewish people and the Jewish religion. The tortured past history of relations between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people and their religion apparently turned on the political exigencies of ‘protecting’ the daily exercise of Catholicism. In the modern historical period where on the one hand, the independent State of Israel exists and where on the other hand, Catholicism has no intrinsic need of a specific land, the theological principles of the need of and debt to Israel as the ‘elder brother’ and as the ‘stock’ onto which Christianity is inescapably grafted, has come to the fore and has led to a number of agreements, under John Paul II, between the Vatican and the State of Israel.

Bible and Yoga: Toward an Esoteric Reading of Biblical Literature

We live in a post-biblical world-a world that sentimentalizes the Bible, ignores it, or is indifferent about the sacred text of the Christian and Jewish religions. Our daily lives are not shaped by biblical rhetoric, imagery, or practice, but by our everyday efforts of making a living, staying healthy, and raising a family. By we I mean those of us who are part of North America or Western Europe and belong to the culturally and politically dominant group of white, middle-class, educated people. We live in societies that are largely secularized, perhaps even anti-religiously oriented, increasingly digitalized, and economically organized by a capitalist system that eradicates equal and just distribution of wealth nationally and internationally. In our world the Bible plays, at best, a privatized, individualized, and societally marginalized role. Sometimes, especially in the United States, Christian fundamentalists organize politically to foster change, trying to reinstate the Bible's political centrality. The effort to place stone sculptures of the Ten Commandments in the Alabama state courthouse,1 or-related primarily to middle and high school education-the insistence on the validity of creationism are prominent examples for the Christian fundamentalist involvement in the secularizing developments of Western countries. Mostly, however, such reactionary struggles confront an indifferent majority that favors the Western scientific worldview over biblical primacy. And even among many American fundamentalists, the Bible is mainly a privatized source of religious piety. My comments come from and speak to the particularities of the Western secular context. I do not want to be understood as making general statements about locations different from the Western one since they face different priorities. For instance, in Asian countries biblical traditions have never enjoyed a majority position as they did in Europe or North America. Historical, cultural, and religious differences do not, however, imply that other locations have nothing to contribute to the understanding of the Bible in post-biblical societies-on the contrary. But here my comments focus on the situation of the Bible and biblical studies in the West.

Perceptions of Compatibility Between Christianity and Judaism in Pauline Interpretation

AbstractContemporary interpretation of Paul is heir to a tradition of Paulinism in which Paul's gospel is almost universally viewed as being in opposition to Judaism. Even the advent of the New Perspective on Paul has not yet succeeded in convincing the majority of scholars that there is no basic incompatibility between Paul and Judaism. One reason for a negative response to the New Perspective is that the acceptance of this viewpoint seems (necessarily) to imply that the great Reformers were somewhat deficient in their understanding of Paul. Their own basic principle of 'reformed and always being reformed' demands, however, a critique of all traditions, including this one. Moreover, inasmuch as modern Pauline scholarship is dependent upon the 19th century invention of the theory of legalism as a pejorative description of Jewish religion, there is a resultant failure to view the Judaism that nurtured Paul, and in which he was continuously in dialogue, other than apologetically or polemically. This is because Christian Pauline interpretation tends to involve a concern for self-understanding and identity that necessarily differentiates the modern agenda from that of Paul, since this concern springs from Enlightenment categories and is therefore foreign to the Apostle. It is the contention of this essay that Paul's letters demonstrate that he was no sectarian, vilifying Judaism for the promotion of a new religion. Since Paul's identity, even after his vision of Christ, remained distinctly Jewish, scholars cannot justifiably use Judaism as a negative foil for Christian self-understanding. Christian faith as such demands neither the denigration of Judaism nor the subversion of Pauline theology into a subjective search for identity.

KAMPEN FOR OVERLEVELSE: Demografisk bevidsthed og forestillinger om forbundethed i den israelsk-jødiske

To “be fruitful and multiply” is an imperative in Jewish law. Procreation has, therefore,
 a central place in Jewish religion and Jewish life. Since the state’s founding in 1948
 the Israeli government has conducted a pronatalist policy to increase the Jewish
 population by encouraging Jewish childbirth and immigration to Israel. The country
 leads the world with the number of fertility clinics per capita, and treatments are heavily
 subsidized by the national health insurance. The explanation that is given for the scale
 of fertility clinics and the progressive fertility legislation national rests on the fear of
 losing the Jewish majority. The article problematizes this argument by exploring how
 demographic consciousness in Israel not only includes knowledge of the country’s
 demographic composition, but also collective memory of hardship, struggle and of
 origin. These issues answer the question as to who can be included in the national
 family. Central to demographic consciousness is kinship and gender, nationhood,
 Jewishness and citizenship. These notions of relatedness are made explicit and mobilized
 differently in changing situations of fertility treatments. The goal of the article is to
 show that insight into demographic consciousness is necessary to elucidate the complex
 context of fertility treatments in Israel.

Jewish resistance in Poland's eastern borderlands during the second world war, 1939–41

After the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland in September 1939, a network of Jewish underground organizations and active conspiratorial groups was established. Its objective was to resist the violent imposition of the Soviet system, to preserve Jewish culture and religion and, for those with a Zionist orientation, to work for the establishment of a Jewish homeland. The Zionist parties and organizations among them were particularly active, especially the youth groups. The fate of the Jewish population of Eastern Europe under the Soviet occupation of 1939–41 remains understandingly overshadowed by the tragic events of the Holocaust. As a result, the activities of this Jewish underground are not widely known and have received little attention from scholars. Only in recent years have historians researching the history of Jews in eastern Poland begun to look more closely at Jewish resistance and especially at Zionist activity under Soviet occupation. These scholars have, however, relied exclusively on the eyewitness accounts of the few survivors. At the same time, Polish and Russian historians conducting intensive research on the war-time Soviet occupation of eastern Poland have published contemporary Soviet documents that confirm the existence of this Jewish underground. The material currently available shows that the Jewish underground was more widespread than previously thought, and that the Soviet authorities viewed Jewish resistance groups, and indeed any clandestine activity, as a serious threat to their rule.

Robert T. Anderson and Terry Giles. The Keepers: An Introduction to the History and Culture of the Samaritans. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2002. 300 pp.

The Keepers is a concise and informative introduction to the history and religion of the Samaritans, that branch of the Israelite–Jewish religion that has endured from antiquity to the present among a tiny minority in Palestine and Israel. The book is written in an engaging style that will appeal to a public that would not read specialized works on the subject. At the same time, the information contained in the work is reliable and the authors are careful in their discussions of unsolved (and often unsolvable) issues. In an epilogue, Anderson and Giles underline that there remains a “host of unanswered questions about the history and culture of the Samaritan community” and that this book is “only a beginning” (p. 145).

Effect of religious observance on infants' sleep position in the Jewish population.

To describe the effect of the level of religiousness on infants' sleep position in the Jewish population. A longitudinal telephone survey of randomly selected 608 2-month-old Jewish infants repeated at 4 and 6 months. Results were analyzed versus the four levels of Jewish religion observance. A significant correlation was found between the level of religious practice and sleep position (P < or = 0.002). 56.8% (50/88) of ultra-orthodox parents put their babies to sleep in the non-prone position, compared with 79% (411/520) in the other three groups (P < 0.001). Non-prone sleeping decreased when infants grew. Higher parity correlated with the level of religiousness and with prone sleeping in religious families (OR = 1.15, 95% CI 1.00-1.33, P < 0.001). Jews and especially the ultra-orthodox families comply significantly less with recommendations to avoid prone sleeping. Specific measures may be required in this population that rely more on personal experience and belief than on health care provider advice.

Significance of a bar/bat mitzvah ceremony for parents of Jewish children with developmental disabilities.

In the Jewish religion, a bar or bat mitzvah ceremony is the rite of passage from childhood towards adulthood. Twenty-one youngsters who attended two special education schools in Israel participated in group bar/bat mitzvah ceremonies. Parents were interviewed both before the learning process and after the ceremony. Findings showed that the bar/bat mitzvah experience was a positive multidimensional one. Dimensions identified were bar/bat mitzvah as a transition, a normative, and a religious experience; an event leading to a sense of connectedness; an opportunity for the enhancement of self-image; and a peak life experience.

World Religions and Democracy: Judaism and Political Life

Abstract: The question of the relationship between Jews and Judaism, on the one hand, and democracy on the other, is of extraordinary complexity. It requires examining both the Jewish religion, and above all its holy book, the Hebrew Bible, plus three thousand years of Jewish historical and political experience. Today, Jews everywhere are among democracy’s strongest supporters and the Jewish state, modern Israel, is the only securely democratic regime in the entire Middle East. The Bible cannot exactly be called a handbook of modern political democracy, but it does often recommend an ethical approach of working toward the good or righteous with and through flawed human persons and institutions, and approach that has a certain affinity with modern democracy’s need for sobriety, moderation, and prudence.

GERSHOM SCHOLEM’S DIALECTIC OF JEWISH HISTORY

This paper aims to analyse the historiosophical assumptions of Gershom Scholem’s interpretation of Sabbatianism. Scholem’s work is based on the “dialectical” understanding of Jewish history. The concept of dialectic has three different aspects in his works. First, the notion refers to the historical relationship and mutual influences between Sabbatianism (and Judaism in a wider sense) and other religions, notably Christianity. Second, dialectic is understood as the internal structure of Jewish history, in which contradictions are resolved on a higher plane. Finally, the internal dialectic of Jewish history and the external dialectic of the Jewish religion’s relationship to other religions points to the undialectical (unmediated) character of the notion of Redemption in Sabbatianism. This paper discusses these three aspects of Scholem’s understanding of the notion of dialectic, and gives an account of his polemics with R. J. Zwi Werblowski, Baruch Kurzweil, Hans Joachim Schoeps and Franz Rosenzweig.

Judíos y arrianos: el mito de un acercamiento inexistente

According to the author of this article, there is no objective evidence that supports the theory of the Arian pro-Judaism, a theory that has become a myth in the course of time. Neither the Arian emperor nor the king favoured Judaism. The association of Arianism with the Jewish religion developed out of the anti-Arian polemics of the Catholic authors of the 4 th and 5 th centuries. The falsehood of this myth is confirmed by the existence of an anti-Jewish controversy reflected in the Arian literature that has been preserved.

Health professionals, Jewish religion and community structure in the service of the aging holocaust survivor

Many holocaust survivors are now reaching old age and this is accompanied by the increased likelihood of physical frailty and deterioration of their cognitive capacities. These changes can be accompanied by exacerbation of traumatic memories, which might once have been effectively suppressed. This, in turn, may manifest itself in fresh anxieties. Their attitudes towards health professionals, Jewish religious ritual and the community are some of the issues discussed. Possible strategies for the more effective medical and social management of the aged holocaust survivors are also considered.

Authority, Tradition, and the Creation of Meaning in Medieval Kabbalah: Isaac of Acre's Illumination of the Eyes

In medieval Jewish mysticism, interpretive legitimacy was often a function of tradition. If a particular idea or practice was transmitted through reliable sources, if the teacher in question was deemed authoritative, then the content of the tradition was considered to be credible and therefore true. In this article I examine the living dynamic of reception and transmission in the writing of a fourteenth-century kabbalist—a figure who may be considered paradigmatic of a larger phenomenon in medieval Jewish religion. Through analysis of rhetorical tropes and types, I seek to demonstrate the ways in which meaning and authoritative status were construed in kabbalistic culture, how the Jewish mystic aims to determine exegetical and pedagogical legitimacy. This larger conceptual rubric is manifested through a variety of subissues, including orality and textuality in the reception and perception of tradition, the impulse to reconcile seemingly conflicting teachings, and the pursuit of authorial intent by the kabbalist in explaining the received words of a master.

Who Takes Care of the Loved Ones?

Personal Experience as an Introduction My mother died at the end of the nineties. Since had been out of town, arrived at the hospital only the next morning was asked by the man in charge of the morgue, Russian by his accent, whether wanted to see her. Viewing the corpse is objectionable according to Jewish religion (Lamm 2000:29ff.); thus hesitated for a moment before accepting his offer. asked to be left alone with her. he opened the drawer left. And there saw my sweet mother lying peacefully intact. Good bye, dear mother, told her without words. Then, leaving the room thanked the man for his kindness. Shortly afterwards was on the phone talking to the members of The (Hevra Kadisha) in order to arrange the funeral. I just need your services, told them rather impatiently, and with as few prayers as possible. They were very polite agreed to my requests. A young emphatic rabbi dressed with a colorful, open vest, unlike the usual black attire of the members of the Holy Association, conducted a short service. Contrary to my expectations, the ceremony was performed not in ancient incomprehensible language but in fluent eloquent Hebrew. As is customary, he asked the deceased to forgive whatever harm the members of the Association had unintentionally caused her. After she was put in the grave talked to her parted from her once more. Shortly afterward the young rabbi left us. We stayed for a while near the new grave, listening silently to a Sibelius concerto, much loved by my mother. Finally we laid garlands of flowers left the cemetery. Since tradition does not encourage frequent grave visitations (Lamm 2000:193ff.), no other ceremony, besides my private, made-up ceremony, in line with my mother's aesthetic values, was ever conducted, the tombstone was laid in our absence. In the fifties, at the age of ninety-two my grandmother passed away. Following the religious ceremony that took place in the old cemetery the entire family gathered at her small house for the Shiva (the seven days of mourning). During this period the close relatives kept on their torn garments from the funeral, sitting on low inconvenient stools in the living room. As is customary, her sons were unshaven during the Shiva wore soft ballet shoes to symbolize their personal mortification (Lamm 2000:116). Friends relatives came to join the bereaved in their daily prayer, providing companionship loving concern. remember this period, so different from my mother's lonely unattended Shiva, as a happy time when the family was still united. It is not easy to pry into death experience. However, when related to ethnographic studies, it may provide clues to the change from traditional Jewish to secular burial practices that have taken place in the last fifty years in Israel (see also Lamm 2000; Goldberg 1982:124; Meyerhoff 1982:129; Abramovitch 1986; Cytron 1993:113-123). Anthropology has mainly concentrated on the rituals surrounding death their relations to unchanging social worlds (Bloch Perry 1982:36; Taylor 1989:149). Recently, however, a new approach, which focuses on complementary theoretical perspectives, has been taken up (Dubisch 1989:189). This focus includes, first, the emotional experience of death (Taylor 1989:149; Cowell 1986:69-70; Durham 2002:147), which takes into account the diverse human reactions to the deep power resonance of the experience of death. Contrary to the unchangeable social worlds conceived in long-standing attitudes toward death, this new approach concerns the conflict over meaning moral authority related to death. This new perspective therefore adds a dynamic view to the anthropological study of death. second, the new approach includes the material dimension of death, which has formerly been an essential category of evidence for archaeology. This perspective refers to the physical remains as well as to physical space of death, mainly the cemeteries the material objects related to death. …

Authority, Tradition, and the Creation of Meaning in Medieval Kabbalah: Isaac of Acre's Illumination of the Eyes

In medieval Jewish mysticism, interpretive legitimacy was often a function of tradition. If a particular idea or practice was transmitted through reliable sources, if the teacher in question was deemed authoritative, then the content of the tradition was considered to be credible and therefore true. In this article I examine the living dynamic of reception and transmission in the writing of a fourteenth-century kabbalist—a figure who may be considered paradigmatic of a larger phenomenon in medieval Jewish religion. Through analysis of rhetorical tropes and types, I seek to demonstrate the ways in which meaning and authoritative status were construed in kabbalistic culture, how the Jewish mystic aims to determine exegetical and pedagogical legitimacy. This larger conceptual rubric is manifested through a variety of subissues, including orality and textuality in the reception and perception of tradition, the impulse to reconcile seemingly conflicting teachings, and the pursuit of authorial intent by the kabbalist in explaining the received words of a master.

Anglo-Jewish Scientists and the Science of Race

The belief in innate racial differences was well entrenched in Western science by the start of the twentieth century. It was widely believed that the world's population was divided into distinct races and that the physical and cultural differences among them were rooted in biology. For Jewish physicians and academics, for whom science was supposed to be a neutral arena in which their Jewishness was irrelevant, the ubiquity of this belief was a challenge, both to their professional authority and their emotional equanimity. It was not the idea of race itself that was troublesome but rather the subsidiary idea that invariably accompanied it—the belief that races were ranked hierarchically and that Jews were an inferior race, marked by a distinctive mental and physical pathology. Jewish scientists who wanted to think of themselves as neutral observers found themselves in the uncomfortable position of being both the observer and the denigrated object of observation.1 Those who tried to escape this double bind pursued various strategies. Some disputed the stability and permanence of racial traits and the existence of pure races. Others internalized racial thinking and then unconsciously reworked and subverted its premises. Still others accepted the idea of racial differences but turned conventional stereotypes on their head. Jewish scientists in Central Europe experienced the double bind more acutely than their counterparts elsewhere in the West. The stigmatization of Jewishness was more pervasive and the barriers to career [End Page 52] advancement higher than in Western Europe. By comparison, few Jews in early twentieth-century Britain found themselves in a similar position. In part, this was due to the occupational aspirations of the Anglo-Jewish middle class, which did not, as a rule, view the academy and the laboratory as arenas in which to pursue social prestige and material success. This was also due to the relative disinterest of British scientists (with the notable exception of the eugenicist Karl Pearson) in Jews.2 While they were not altogether absent in British social scientific and racial literature, they were not the prime focus of its gaze, which was directed outward to the more "exotic" peoples of the British Empire or downward to the urban poor at home. Events abroad—the India mutiny (1857), the Jamaica revolt (1865), and the Boer War (1899-1902)—and the differential birth rate between the upper and middle ranks, on the one hand, and the lower ranks, on the other, fed and formed British anxieties about "racial fitness" and "racial degeneration" more than concerns about Jewish domination. While John Efron exaggerated when he wrote "Jews as Jews simply failed to arouse British scientific curiosity," he was not altogether wrong.3 Still, it would be a mistake to assume that Anglo-Jewish scientists in the early twentieth century, however small their number, were able to ignore notions of racial difference. Whatever its place in British science, racial discourse was too pervasive in cultural and political life to allow them to escape or ignore its influence. Jewish writers, preachers, and publicists, most of whom were not biological determinists, repeatedly referred to Jews as a race. Their use of the term was imprecise, which is not surprising, given the fluidity and inconsistency of racial thinking. It often functioned as a synonym for Jewish peoplehood, signifying little more than the collective nature of Jewish life and fate. Even liberal integrationist opponents of the nascent Zionist movement were not averse to referring to the Jewish people as a race. In a letter to Israel Zangwill (1864-1926) in 1903, Lucien Wolf (1857- 1930), for example, admitted there was "a Jewish race" as well as "a Jewish religion" while denying there had been "a Jewish nationality" since the destruction of the Second Temple.4 Moreover, even if British science, by comparison with German science, overlooked Jews, the literature of science circulated beyond the national borders within which it was produced. The work of Jewish medical men in Germany, Austria, Russia, and the...

Music in Lubavitcher Life (review)

Reviewed by: Music in Lubavitcher Life Beverley Diamond (bio) Music in Lubavitcher Life. By Ellen Koskoff. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. 2001 pp. Glossary, appendices, bibliography, index. Cloth, $39.95. The ethnomusicologist Ellen Koskoff has produced a long-anticipated study of music in the Lubavitcher Jewish community in America (particularly Crown Heights, New York, but also smaller communities in Pennsylvania and Minnesota). The book is based on fieldwork conducted over a twenty-two-year period. The lengthy engagement with this branch of the Hasidic Jewish religion not only has deepened her knowledge but has also allowed her to reflect on shifts in beliefs within the community and within her own attitudes toward Orthodox Judaism. It is rare that we read products of such extended reflection about an encounter that is effectively cross-cultural. Koskoff was raised in "an upwardly mobile, politically left-wing Jewish family" that had no prior involvement with the Hasidic world. As the specific subject matter of the book is completely outside the experience of this reviewer, I appreciate Koskoff's clear writing about Lubavitcher history and Hasidic theology. The role of the musical genre of nigunim (song) in relation to that history and theology is explicit. But most importantly, the lived experience of the musical performance of nigunim in relation to the laws of Lubavitcher belief, the stages of devekut, and the tensions between tradition and modernity come alive in this engaging book. In the first two parts of her study, Koskoff unfolds an idealized account of Lubavitcher belief and spiritual practice, while the next two look at the inherent tensions and contradictions of life lived, "the untidy ground of culture" (105). Koskoff makes effective use of the strategy of shifting between experiential description and more objectified explanation, a style of representation found in a number of recent ethnomusicological monographs. She includes fieldwork "scenes" to help us understand her relationship to the community and to enliven descriptions of individuals and experiences. These first-person accounts incorporate her questions, some of her insecurities, and even her disagreements with Lubavitcher friends. A vividly crafted opening ethnography of a farbrengen (a spiritual and social gathering) introduces many concepts that recur subsequently. Chapter 2 moves to analytical issues, discussing ethnomusicological approaches, Jewish music scholarship, gender theory, and performance study. Parts of this chapter still read like the literature review in a PhD dissertation, with references that provide a broad framework, rather than a real working of ideas, but she has certainly rethought and updated the material in the long period since she wrote her dissertation on this subject. We learn that this study is rooted in cognitive approaches and studies of culture as performance. She sees "culture as ideational and internal, as well as material and external" (23). Part 2, "Inside the Context," presents core religious beliefs, Lubavitcher Hasidim's history and philosophy, as well as contemporary social contexts. Her account clarifies the meaning of the ten sefirot that symbolize stages of seeking unity with the divine (devekut). A large array of Lubavitcher laws, sometimes described by the metaphor of fences, are described. The challenges they present for modern adherents are [End Page 92] also acknowledged. We also learn of the distinctions between "lifers" (those born Lubavitcher), ba'alei teshuvah (converts), and secular Jews. The hierarchical power of the rebbe and his circle are respectfully presented. The remaining chapters explore music more specifically, explaining its power of redemption and restoration. She analyzes a nigunim (song) collection of central importance, the Sefer Ha-Nigunim, as a window on social and spiritual hierarchy. Chapter 6 describes basic musical features (scales, formal structures, ornamentation) as codes of Lubavitcher belief, and introduces different types of repertoire that are either nearer to or farther from the spiritual core or "crown." Part 3, "Inside the Performance," is the most compelling part of the book. Here the author moves beyond an "idealized" account to explore how Lubavitcher actually use musical performance to "perform their core beliefs into being" (103). She demonstrates how singing reflects fundamental tenets of Lubavitcher belief: (1) the belief that true spirituality is irrevocably linked to the past; (2) the conviction that women are inherently closer to God but...