Eastern Jews Research Articles

Perfect Targets—Antisemitism and Eastern Jews in Leipzig, 1919–1923

Perfect Targets—Antisemitism and Eastern Jews in Leipzig, 1919–1923

‘A Land that Devours its People’: Mizrahi Writing from the Gut

The title of the article refers to the excessive ideological force deployed in Zionism to foster national and religious unity. As a closed and totalizing system, the Zionist enterprise precludes the representation of minority cultures and has yet to provide, if it ever can, an adequate definition of Palestinians, Mizrahim (Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origins) and other minorities – Karaites, Bedouins and Samaritans – much less one of gender sexuality, religion or personhood. Ironically, it was through the contemporization of Hebrew that a distinctive Israeli society was forged, which set the limits of the imagined geography of the body. Modern Hebrew also produced a hierarchy of different literatures, each with its own ideological parameters of inclusion and exclusion. Paradoxically, as I argue, the cacophonous intertextualiy of the Hebrew canon drowns out the voices of minority Jewish writers, who are ‘relegated to constantly repositioning themselves’ within dominant (Ashkenazi) Israeli culture and society. Eli Bachar and Shelly Elkayam are among the Mizrahi poets I introduce here, whose work powerfully illustrates the colonizing aspects of hunger, eating and feeding through the trope of the ma'akhelet, Abraham's sacrificial knife, as a way to rethink intertextuality.

Restaging the Primal Scene of Loss

Sephardim, trapped in a no‐exit situation, have been forbidden to nourish memories of at least partly belonging to the people across the river Jordan, across the mountains of Lebanon, and across the Sinai desert and the Suez Canal… In a sudden historical twist, today it is to the Muslim Arab countries of their origins to whichmost Middle Eastern Jews cannot travel, let alone fantasize a return – the ultimate taboo… This desire for ‘return of the Diaspora’ is ironically underlined… [in]… a kind of reversal of the biblical expression: ‘By the waters of Zion, where we sat down, and there we wept, when we remembered Babylon.’1

BETWEEN LULU AND PENINA: THE YEMENITE WOMAN, HER JEWELRY, AND HER EMBROIDERY IN THE NEW HEBREW CULTURE

Even in its early stages, the Hebrew culture in Eretz Israel molded the image of the Yemenite Jews according to the duality in its perception of Eastern Jews: as exotic types on the one hand, but as bearers of a primitive, materialistic, low-level culture on the other. Their borderline "otherness" had a role to play in the overarching national purpose of "creating a new Jewish man in the ancestral Land of Israel." The characters of Yemenite Jews populate poems, stories, novels, plays, and songs written by male and female writers from the first, second, and third aliyot (waves of Jewish immigration). As early as the beginning of the twentieth century, we meet images of Yemenite Jews that reflect the invented "Yemeniteness" of these figures, both in plastic art and in the domains of the national folk art that was also being invented. The way in which the new Hebrew culture constructed the Yemenite woman's gendered cultural identity, marked as it was by her clothes, jewelry, and embroidery, highlights its instrumentality. The jewelry and embroidery that were received as Yemenite-Israeli were foreign to the Yemenites themselves, and their reception did not aid the process by which the women were supposed to "cross beyond ethnic identity and include national identity within it." The appropriation process activated towards an object that was never seen as a subject created complex dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, resulting in the estrangement of the product within the community with which it had previously been identified.

Immigrant Positioning in Twentieth-Century Mexico: Middle Easterners, Foreign Citizens, and Multiculturalism

Immigrant Positioning in Twentieth-Century Mexico: Middle Easterners, Foreign Citizens, and Multiculturalism

Perfect Targets--Antisemitism and Eastern Jews in Leipzig, 1919-1923

Perfect Targets—Antisemitism and Eastern Jews in Leipzig, 1919–1923 Jon Gunnar Mølstre Simonsen Jon Gunnar Mølstre Simonsen Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, Volume 51, Issue 1, January 2006, Pages 79–101, https://doi.org/10.1093/leobaeck/51.1.79 Published: 01 January 2006

Between Lulu and Penina: The Yemenite Woman, Her Jewelry, and Her Embroidery in the New Hebrew Culture

Even in its early stages, the Hebrew culture in Eretz Israel molded the image of the Yemenite Jews according to the duality in its perception of Eastern Jews: as exotic types on the one hand, but as bearers of a primitive, materialistic, low-level culture on the other. Their borderline "otherness" had a role to play in the overarching national purpose of "creating a new Jewish man in the ancestral Land of Israel." The characters of Yemenite Jews populate poems, stories, novels, plays, and songs written by male and female writers from the first, second, and third aliyot (waves of Jewish immigration). As early as the beginning of the twentieth century, we meet images of Yemenite Jews that reflect the invented "Yemeniteness" of these figures, both in plastic art and in the domains of the national folk art that was also being invented. The way in which the new Hebrew culture constructed the Yemenite woman's gendered cultural identity, marked as it was by her clothes, jewelry, and embroidery, highlights its instrumentality. The jewelry and embroidery that were received as Yemenite-Israeli were foreign to the Yemenites themselves, and their reception did not aid the process by which the women were supposed to "cross beyond ethnic identity and include national identity within it." The appropriation process activated towards an object that was never seen as a subject created complex dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, resulting in the estrangement of the product within the community with which it had previously been identified.

Haya Bar-Itzhak. Jewish Poland—Legends of Origin: Ethnopolitics and Legendary Chronicles. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001. 195 pp.

The author, an Israeli folklorist who teaches at the University of Haifa, has had the excellent idea of scrutinizing the various “legends of origin” of Polish Jewry. She makes use of works by Hebrew and Yiddish authors, published in modern times but based on folk material of considerable antiquity, and of materials collected by ethnographers of pre-Holocaust Jewish Eastern Europe and by researchers in Israel. Her linguistic skills are admirable (she discusses material in German and Polish as well as both Jewish languages), and her book, while it does not altogether avoid professional jargon, is definitely accessible to the nonspecialist.

Did the Israeli State Engineer Segregation? On the Placement of Jewish Immigrants in Development Towns in the 1950s

Israel's development are known to be comparable to U.S. inner cities in all but one respect: while most agree that Blacks are over-represented in the inner cities because of discrimination, there is still disagreement over how Middle Eastern Jews (Mizrahim) came to be over-represented in the towns relative to European Jews (Ashkenazim). Israeli sociologists are divided between those who see an ethnically disinterested process of state- building - in which the state sent weak immigrants to the towns - and those who see one of ethnic formation - in which the state sent ethnic minorities. Findings from Israel's 1961 census largely support the latter. The net effect of ethnicity on the likelihood of being placed in a town was large, and among available schemes of ethnic categorization, placement followed those least associated with weakness. Moreover, the interaction between ethnicity and human capital was such that even high status Mizrahim were as likely to be sent to the towns as low status Ashkenazim.

The German-Romanian Relationship and the Final Solution

On January 14, 1941, Adolf Hitler revealed to the Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu the plan to invade the USSR, and on June 12, 1941 his “Guidelines for the Treatment of the Eastern Jews.” Well before the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942, Antonescu launched Romania’s Final Solution in response to Hitler’s cue. What we know of the Antonescu-Hitler connection argues against the functionalist interpretation of the Final Solution. Though subsequently forgotten, the Antonescu-Hitler understandings were invoked at the 1946 Paris Peace Conference, when the new communist government sought to blame Germany and exonerate Romania of responsibility in the death of the Jews deported to Transnistria in 1941/42.

“Yiddish Literature for the Masses”?; A Reconsideration of Who Read What in Jewish Eastern Europe

In the early 1880s, the staunch Hebraist and bibliophile Ephraim Deinard (1846–1930) became a reluctant witness to the fast-paced growth of modern Yiddish culture that began in his hometown of Odessa. At the time, Deinard owned a Hebrew bookshop that had been sliding toward bankruptcy until he grudgingly adapted his wares to better reflect the market forces of the Jewish reading culture. In Memories of My People (Zikhronot bat עami), he briefly accounts for (in his view) the ill fortune of being forced to sell the Yiddish books that his customers demanded of him rather than the Hebrew literature he held so dear. Although he mentions a host of nineteenth-century Yiddish writers whom the reader will come to know in the following pages, for our present purpose, it is sufficient to remark upon the catalytic agency he assigns to the Yiddish romance novelist Nakhum Shaykevitsh (aka Shomer) (1849–1905) and Avraham Goldfaden (1840–1908), best known as the father of the Yiddish theatre. Deinard writes:

The Holocaust in the Hebrew Poetry of Sephardim and Near Eastern Jews

Many studies of the Holocaust focus exclusively on European Jewry. It is essential to mention what happened at the time of the Holocaust to Sephardim and Near Eastern Jews. The fate of Near Eastern Jews would have been similar to the fate of their brothers in Europe had the Germans been successful on the North African front. One of the means by which Sephardim and Near Eastern Jews reacted to the tragedy of their brothers in Europe was through folk poetry and poetry. Near Eastern Jews expressed deep feelings of brotherhood with the Jewish victims of the Holocaust both at the time and after. Poets from Tunisia, Iraq, Yemen, and other countries wrote poetic responses to it at the time. In Israel, Sephardim and Near Eastern Jews published poetry about the Holocaust. On June 1-2, 1941, there was a pogrom against the Jews in Iraq as a result of Nazi incitement and propaganda and nationalistic-religious instigation. Jews were injured and murdered, Jewish women were raped, Jewish property was looted, and Jewish houses were burnt down. Jewish poets of Iraqi origin wrote poetic responses to this pogrom in Hebrew in Iraq and in Israel. In the poems of Sephardim and Near Eastern Jews about the Holocaust, the poets identify completely with the victims ("Us"—not "them"); the "crime" of the Jews was that they existed. A religious crisis was inevitable for some people, who asked where God was. The yearning and fight for a Jewish state was inevitable.

Language and nation-building in Israel: Hebrew and its rivals*

Abstract. The problem of language preceded the founding of Israel. In the nineteenth century, the emergence of political Zionism was accompanied by a revival of Hebrew. In the early years of Jewish resettlement in Palestine, Hebrew slowly emerged as the popular language, a compromise between the Yiddish spoken by Eastern European immigrants and the Arabic or Ladino current among many Middle Eastern Jews. After World War I, as educational institutions proliferated, the challenge of French and German as languages of instruction was blocked by teachers' strikes. With the establishment of the state and the massive influx of Jewish displaced persons, mostly speakers of Yiddish, that language, regarded as a potential threat to the primacy of Hebrew, was systematically fought by the country's political and cultural elite. Today, the position of Hebrew as the national language of Israel is secure. English, however, has been asserting its influence in an increasingly postindustrial and globalised society.

Cultural Translation and the Problem of Language: Yiddish in Joseph Roth’s <em>Juden auf Wanderschaft</em>

In 2000, W.W. Norton and Company released a new English-language edition of Joseph Roth’s 1927 compilation of essays entitled, Juden auf Wanderschaft. The edition’s dustcover proclaims in large, bold typeface: “A masterpiece of Jewish identity emerges in English 70 years after it was first written.” While it can’t be denied that Roth’s tale, which documents the mass movement of eastern Jews westward across the European continent in the early twentieth century, has today captured both public and scholarly interest in German- and English-speaking lands, the quotation still begs the question: Why are we reading Roth again now? Even the most tentative of answers to this question should include the fact that Roth’s concerns in Juden auf Wanderschaft, including the forcible displacement of a people and their subsequent dispersal throughout the world and Roth’s suggestion of a tyranny inherent in Western culture, find remarkable resonance in our contemporary reality. Global migrations and Westernization today inform research, not just, as the quote above anticipates, on identity politics, but also on topics which seek to move beyond or reinvigorate discussions of identity—topics such as mobility, diaspora, and migration. Written by one who was both an assimilated Viennese and a Galician Jew born in the eastern-most reaches of the Hapsburg Empire, Roth’s work offers an extraordinarily complex and informative perspective on issues that remain current today. And yet, Roth’s Juden auf Wanderschaft is rarely analyzed in a manner which reflects this complexity in all its nuance. Most reviewers, in celebratory response to the work’s topical themes, see it as a poignant declaration of love for the vanishing eastern Jewish culture with which Roth had grown up. Upon closer examination, however, an important part of eastern European Jewish culture does not fall within Roth’s romanticization: the language of eastern European Jewry, the Yiddish language itself. In an age of scholarship increasingly interested in the intersection of multiculturalism and multilingualism, Roth’s (mis)treatment of Yiddish makes Juden auf Wanderschaft a cautionary tale which speaks not only to the themes of contemporary criticism, but also to the very methodologies which seek to shape this criticism.

Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity (review)

T H E J E W I S H QUA R T E R LY RE V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 3 (Summer 2004) 542–544 STEVEN J. ZIPPERSTEIN. Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity. Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999. Pp. xii Ⳮ 139. In this accessible and lucid book, Steven Zipperstein ponders the broad question of the interplay between history and memory, relating it specifically to the reconstruction of the Russian-Jewish past. Zipperstein illuminates the particular historiographic tensions experienced by historians of Jewish Eastern Europe who must balance both being scholars and vessels of collective memory as they reconstruct the past for Jews in America—the cultural and demographic center of the East European Jewish Diaspora—who have been cut off from their past by migration, the devastation of the Holocaust, and the inaccessibility (until recently) of East European archival material. In four essays, Zipperstein summons an impressive array of cultural texts and historical sources as he explores such topics as the image of the shtetl, education and the heder, Russian Jewish life in Odessa, and the Holocaust’s influence on the writing of East European Jewish history. Driving these four discussions is Zipperstein ’s interest in addressing the formidable question of how Jewish historians should ‘‘write about the past in ways that balance critical scrutiny, self-awareness, and engagement’’ (p. 9). The evolving image of Russia in American Jewish consciousness is the focal point of Zipperstein’s first chapter. Drawing on the works of Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierska, and Philip Roth, Zipperstein tries to ‘‘provide insight into moments of Jewish life that fall between the cracks of the more standard historical narratives about American Jewry’’ (p. 19). Through a close reading of a wide assortment of literary sources, Zipperstein contends that the changing image of Russian Jewish life was directly related to developments in American Jewish life. In the first decades of the twentieth century, for example, the image of Russia in Jewish fiction emphasized how Russia was ‘‘merely a noisome, violent, pogrom-ridden backdrop, a place from which to escape,’’ highlighting the chasm between Russia and the United States (p. 23). By the 1960s, Zipperstein argues, the shtetl, rather than the pogrom, emerged as the icon of Jewish Eastern Europe. Zipperstein maintains that this transforThe Jewish Quarterly Review (Summer 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. ZIPPERSTEIN, IMAGINING RUSSIAN JEWRY—KOBRIN 543 mation took place because ‘‘the Holocaust [had] rendered Eastern Europe more conducive to sentimentalization’’ and the disjuncture of suburbanization nurtured in American Jewry a desire to imagine ‘‘a direct , even linear relationship between the East European shtetl and the American suburb’’ (pp. 32, 30). In many ways, what is fascinating about this first chapter, the departure point for Zipperstein’s larger discussion of Russian-Jewish history, is how centered it is on American Jewry, a focal point, in different ways, of the entire book. The study of American Jewry has in the past been relegated to the periphery in the field of modern Jewish history. Zipperstein ’s reflections point to a new trend in field: the unofficial acceptance of American Jewry as an interesting and critical arena of research for historians of Jewish Eastern Europe. Paula Hyman’s emphasis on the United States in her Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History (Seattle , 1995; also part of the Stroum lecture series) provides another illustrative example. By demonstrating how historical visions of Russia were integrally intertwined with the existential needs of American Jewry, this chapter raises important questions about the ways in which local concerns and historiographic traditions intersect to shape our understanding of the past. How was the shtetl imagined differently in other centers of the East European Jewish Diaspora, such as Israel, South America, or even the Soviet Union? By compelling one to wonder how the reconstruction of the Jewish past varies across time and space, this chapter focuses the reader on the perplexing issues central to the entire study. In the second essay, ‘‘Reinventing Heders,’’ a condensed version of an earlier treatment of the issue, Zipperstein transports the reader back to Russia and into the boardroom of the...

Consanguinity, intracommunity and intercommunity marriages in a population sample of Israeli Jews

Background: Changes in the marriage patterns of Israeli Jews have been associated with the mass immigration of Jews from many countries over a relatively short period of time.Aim: This study seeks to document consanguineous, intracommunity and intercommunity marriage patterns, and to observe the changes that have occurred over time, and in relation to the level of education and religiousness.Subjects and methods: During 1990–1992, 4388 Jewish women were interviewed after delivery in maternity wards throughout Israel. Demographic information was received, with special emphasis on country of origin, community and consanguinity of the couples and their parents.Results: The consanguinity rate among the couples was 2.3%, including 0.8% first cousin marriages, with the highest consanguinity rate among Eastern Jews (7.1%). The rate of intracommunity marriages was 64% (25% Ashkenazim, 22% Sephardim and 17% Eastern Jews). The rate of intercommunity marriages was lowest among Ashkenazim. It rose with the level of education and inversely to the degree of religiousness.Conclusion: Over the past decades there has been a decline in consanguineous and intracommunity marriage rates and an increase in intercommunity marriages. Immigrant and ultraorthodox women tended to marry within the community as opposed to Israeli-born women and those with higher educational level who tended to intermarry with other communities as well.

The Great Chain of Orientalism: Jewish Identity, Stigma Management, and Ethnic Exclusion in Israel

This paper explores the role that orientalism has played in shaping ethnic inequality among Jews in Israel. Earlier works usually explain ethnic exclusion as a function of Jewish life on Israeli territory. Here, however, exclusion is located within an earlier history of a Jewish encounter with orientalism and Western European colonialism. It is argued that prior to their immigration to Israel, Jews the world-over had been stigmatized as Oriental. Through a complex process, they accepted this stigma, and they arrived in Israel deeply invested in developing the new country as “western “ and uncomfortable with anything identified as “eastern.” It is the imperatives of this westernization “identity project” that account for the initial impetus to exclude Middle Eastern Jews, as well as non-Jewish Arabs, from emerging Israeli society. Viewing history from this perspective, ethnic cleavages in the Jewish world appear to have a historical stability and consistency that is at odds with the current focus on contingency and historical indeterminacy.

The Great Chain of Orientalism: Jewish Identity, Stigma Management, and Ethnic Exclusion in Israel

This paper explores the role that orientalism has played in shaping ethnic inequality among Jews in Israel. Earlier works usually explain ethnic exclusion as a function of Jewish life on Israeli territory. Here, however, exclusion is located within an earlier history of a Jewish encounter with orientalism and Western European colonialism. It is argued that prior to their immigration to Israel, Jews the world-over had been stigmatized as Oriental. Through a complex process, they accepted this stigma, and they arrived in Israel deeply invested in developing the new country as “western” and uncomfortable with anything identified as “eastern .” It is the imperatives of this westernization “identity project” that account for the initial impetus to exclude Middle Eastern Jews, as well as non-Jewish Arabs, from emerging Israeli society. Viewing history from this perspective, ethnic cleavages in the Jewish world appear to have a historical stability and consistency that is at odds with the current focus on contingency and historical indeterminacy.

Mutations spectrum of GNE in hereditary inclusion body myopathy sparing the quadriceps.

Hereditary Inclusion Body Myopathy (HIBM) is a unique group of neuromuscular disorders characterized by adult onset and a typical muscle pathology. We have recently identified the gene encoding for a bifunctional enzyme, UDP-N-acetylglucosamine 2 epimerase/N-acetylmannosamine kinase (GNE), as the mutated gene in the prototype form of the disease presenting quadriceps sparing, particularly common in Middle Eastern Jews. Interestingly, we have identified the homozygous M712T Middle Eastern Jewish mutation also in two unrelated Middle Eastern Moslem families. We have also evaluated the involvement of GNE in several families from worldwide non-Jewish ethnic origins presenting symptoms similar to the Middle Eastern HIBM prototype. A total of 14 GNE mutations were identified (one nonsense and 13 missense), of which six are novel: an homozygous missense mutation in a consanguineous family from Italy and in a non consanguineous family from USA, and distinct compound heterozygotes in families from Germany, Italy, Ireland, Bahamas, USA and East India. This study brings to 17 the number of reported GNE mutations in quadriceps sparing myopathy, occurring either in the epimerase or the kinase domain of the enzyme. The mechanism leading to this unique phenotype still remains to be elucidated.

Marketing Identities: The Invention of Jewish Ethnicity in "Ost und West"

This work analyzes how Ost und (East and West), first Jewish magazine (1901-1923) published in Berlin by westernized Jews originally from Eastern Europe, promoted ethnic identity to Jewish audiences in Germany and throughout world. Using techniques of modern marketing, such as stereotyping, editors of this successful journal attempted to forge a minority consciousness. Marketing Identities is thus about beginnings of ethnicity as we know it in late 20th century. As a cultural history of pre-Hitler Germany, this book also addresses whether a German-Jewish symbiosis ever existed, revealing possibilities and limitations of multiple identities for turn-of-the-century German Jews. Even though magazine's editors succeeded in creating a public sphere for pan-Jewishness (Gesamtjudentum), they were confronted with serious obstacles such as negative perception of East European Jews (Ostjuden) since Enlightenment by many West European Jews (Westjuden) and non-Jews. Since late 18th century, an elite group of intellectuals and policymakers called on Ostjuden to become less Jewish and to regenerate themselves into a group more like the Germans or the French. The Ostjuden were increasingly caricatured in literature, arts and sciences, a development that had reached a point as Ost und began publication. As a means of correcting these negative images of Eastern Jews, Ost und attempted to legitimize public expressions of Jewishness in West, yet its founders knew they would have to reflect presuppositions of broader Jewish audience if they were to attract more readers. To influence Jews in Germany (and elsewhere) who knew little about Eastern Jewry, editors of Ost und appealed specifically to three main audiences (each subject of a chapter in book): Jewish intellectuals, middle-class Jewish women, and middle-class Jewish men. Judging by its wide circulation - at least 10 percent of 625,000 Jews in Germany at its height - Ost und was a success, bringing Westjuden closer to Ostjuden, at least in public sphere. Such an approach to ethnic identity in early 20th-century Germany is innovative in looking at minority self-stereotyping as an instrument of marketing, not just as a socio-psychological phenomenon to be explained as self-hatred or assimilation. An interdisciplinary study, Marketing Identities illuminates contemporary discussions in Europe and Americas regarding experience of self-understanding of minority groups and combines media and cultural studies with German and Jewish history. Its negotiation of ethnicity, race, nationalism, gender, class and religion makes Marketing Identities appealing to those engaged in debates about multiculturalism and relationship between high and low culture.