Jewish History Research Articles

(Jewish) Rock Stars in a Jewish Museum: Testing the Grounds for a More Inclusive Exhibition at Beit Hatfusot, Tel Aviv

AbstractThis article discusses three exhibitions that took place between 2016 and the present at Beit Hatfusot – The Museum of the Jewish Diaspora (renamed Anu – Museum of the Jewish People in 2021) in Tel Aviv, Israel, and that portrayed three internationally acclaimed (Jewish) rock stars: Amy Winehouse, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. What motivated the museum to curate these exhibitions that clearly deviate from the museum’s traditional narrative of Jewish history, diasporic communities and the establishment of the State of Israel? The article will claim that this can be answered in light of the museum’s recent renovation and new conceptual approach to the portrayal of Jewish culture and identity. The story told in the original exhibition was that Jewish diaspora emerged as a result of destruction and was redeemed with the re-gathering of the dispersed communities in Israel and the formation of the Jewish State; however, the new permanent exhibition, seeks to represent a more contemporary portrayal of Jewish identity. By showcasing internationally renowned and popular Jewish rock stars, the museum moves away from its former traditional, old-fashioned and stagnated mould to suggest a more inclusive and diverse portrayal of Judaism.

Nikolay Gumilev’s The lost tram: literary-mythological and historical-biographical contexts of the tram route

The article discusses various interpretations of Nikolai Gumilev’s poem The Lost Tram. Attention is paid to the nuances of the use of ancient plots in the poem. Important questions about the date of writing the work are raised. Particular attention is paid to the mysterious route through three bridges. The three rivers mentioned in the poem – the Neva, the Nile, and the Seine – are usually regarded as symbols of radical transformations in the life of people and society (the October Revolution, the exodus of Jews from Egypt, and the Great French Revolution). The article suggests that the event associated with the Nile could not have been a page from the Jewish history, but rather the revolution in Egypt in the first half of the 20th century. Thus, the symbolism of the tram expands to the symbol of an abstract world revolution.

Time, Materiality, and History in UK-Based Interfaith Solidarity Work

In this paper, building upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted among members of one initiative of Jewish-Muslim dialogue in the UK, I discuss how my interlocutors thematize the temporal dimension of anti-minority discrimination and perceive remaining historical material heritage associated with it. Using the example of problematic artifacts pertaining to mediaeval Lincoln, such as the so-called “shrine of Little Hugh,” I discuss how in engaging the memory of traumatic past events in Jewish history activists of inter-faith dialogue reflect on their current conditions of minoritization and attempt a projection of their communities’ lives in the UK in the future. I also borrow insight from the presentist theoretical framework in anthropology of time to highlight the impact my interlocutors’ life histories have had on the way they relate to and conceptualize their own and other minoritized groups’ histories and imagine their personal and collective futures based on their experiences in the present. I suggest that in these reflections, narratives of positive historical trajectories in the minority experience sit alongside an anticipation of multiple possible futures, some inflected with anxiety about a repetition of difficult pasts, others imbued with a vision connecting the past, present and future of minoritized communities into a common presence.

Ir ort oyf der velt/ Her place in the world.Irena Klepfisz’s Secular Jewish Identity

This study explores the concept of Jewish secularism through the works of Irena Klepfisz, a Polish-born, New York-based Jewish poet. Rooted in the Jewish workers’ party, the Bund, activein the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Klepfi sz’s identity and poetry are examined against thebackdrop of Jewish history, secularism, and feminism. Her unique notion of secular Jewish identity,shaped by her Bundist upbringing, Holocaust trauma, and engagement with post-war feministmovements, is highlighted. Klepfisz’s poetry, especially her 1986 essay “Secular Jewish Identity”,serves as a focal point, illustrating the role of literary scholarship in forming a post-war Jewishsecular identity. This identity is enriched by her experiences as a Holocaust survivor, feminist,and lesbian. The study aims to present Klepfisz’s version of contemporary secular Jewish identity,offering insights into how her readers might resonate with her radical blend of secularism, feminism,and Jewish cultural heritage.

Childhood in the Jewish History of Southern Ukraine in 1919–1920: Family Experience of Violence during the Pogroms

The article focuses on how the anti-Jewish pogroms of 1919–1920 affected Jewish children through the lens of family history. It explores demographic data and factors that influenced children and families in Southern Ukraine during that period. The article attempts to reconstruct the children's experience through their parents’ testimonies and the memories of individuals who endured the anti-Jewish pogroms during childhood. It also analyzes how the experience of the anti-Jewish pogroms has transformed in historical memory and its current influence on public opinion.

Amalgamation and Regeneration

Abstract This article discusses Israel Zangwill's play The Melting Pot (1908) and Horace M. Kallen's essay ‘Democracy versus the Melting Pot’ (1915) as two different visions of future Jewish inclusion. Zangwill's play and Kallen's response reflect social changes at the time, and both visions consider Jewish history exemplary for the world-to-come. Both show how conceptions of Jewishness were turned into universalist teleologies, but of different kinds. Zangwill's play opened in Washington at the height of immigration, urbanisation and social change, and it swiftly exemplified a vision of the American nation in the making, emphasising concepts of amalgamation more than old historical identities. In opposition, Kallen's response in 1915 emphasised historical identities and rejected the metal melting metaphors, replacing them with a Darwin-inspired spontaneous ‘symphony’. Zangwill and Kallen both imagined the future world as profoundly shaped by Jewishness, albeit with different consequences.

Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust

Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust

Protecting the Deli: Jewish Nostalgia and Social Justice in E. Lockhart's Whistle: A New Gotham City Hero

ABSTRACT: In this article, I analyze E. Lockhart's comic Whistle: A New Gotham City Hero (Burbank, CA: DC Comics, 2021) as a distinctively American Jewish text. I argue that Whistle draws upon nostalgia for an imagined Jewish past by creating an alternative present infused with the material culture of American Jewishness. In so doing, I show how the comic develops features of mainstream American Jewishness—such as eating at Jewish delis, holding a nostalgic attachment to American Jewish history, and working for social justice—in the construction of a superhero narrative. I explore how Whistle's visual depiction of Jewish food and space construct an authentically Jewish environment. Lastly, I suggest that, as a superhero comic book written for teenage readers, Whistle promotes nostalgia and the pursuit of social justice as components of American Jewishness.

Hebrew Manuscripts as a Source of Knowledge

Abstract The Hebrew Manuscripts Catalogue of the National Library of Israel holds a wealth of information about Jewish history, literature, and culture. However, its complex structure and limited accessibility have resulted in underutilized data. This study aims to harness new digital approaches to unlock the potential of this valuable resource. Specifically, we focus on 275 Yemenite Jewish manuscripts related to ‘sciences’ to explore complex relationships within the data. We began by consolidating metadata from the Hebrew Manuscripts Catalogue, often found scattered within the ‘notes’ field of the records. We supplemented this data with information from linked open data (LOD) entities as well as previous research. This comprehensive approach reveals details about copyists, authors, and owners, even identifying lesser-known figures. Our methodology involved using Nodegoat for data management and visualization. This platform allowed us to create a comprehensive data model for manuscript provenance and explore relationships between objects, transactions, persons, and organizations, along with geographical data.

‘The Most Saving Slum in Glasgow, and the Most Abandoned’: Twentieth-Century Materiality and Twenty-First Century Virtuality in the Jewish Gorbals, Scotland

In 1905, Yiddish poet and Glasgow union activist Avrom Radutsky described the Jewish population of Scotland as ‘a mere drop in the ocean’. Nevertheless, by 1920 this drop had swelled to 20,000 people, centred primarily (though by no means exclusively) around the Gorbals in Glasgow. The area was characterised by vibrant community life, but also cramped low-quality housing, poor sanitation and harsh economic inequality. Many of Glasgow’s Jews began to climb a social ladder that would lead them out of the Gorbals and towards more spacious residences in the south-west of the city, but maintained regular contact with its streets, shops and places of worship. Large-scale demolition of the neighbourhood in the 1960s mean that the Gorbals looks very different today, and the Jews are gone. The Jewishness of this space, however, still remains: a remembered or imagined presence in the minds of second and third generations, celebrated through community outreach, or romantically evoked in popular narratives. Equally, an absence of Jewish life in today’s Gorbals has been paralleled by the emergence of wide-ranging and socially minded virtual networks of shared memory. Through analysis of contemporary accounts and archival sources, oral histories, fieldwork interviews, and lively online discussion groups, this article examines how this former densely populated Jewish neighbourhood now functions as an important lieu de memoire, but in a significantly different way to Eastern Europe’s pre-war Jewish spaces. At the geographical edges of more traumatic histories, the Gorbals instead provides an affective link for contemporary, assimilated Scottish Jews, while at the same time the area’s Jewish history becomes part of a wider virtual online community – signifying an emotional connection to immigrant narratives and grounding personal and social histories.

Forgetting the Seleucids

Abstract The place given to Antiochus III’s first edict for Jerusalem (Ant. 12.138–44) in the historiography of Hellenistic period Judea and Judaism, the Maccabean revolt, and the Hasmonean state is exceptional. But this is an internal Seleucid document that is absent of any local Judean perspectives, and in fact does not contain the actual instrument of royal benefaction. In recent years there has been a growing realization that empire and imperial rule relied on the acceptance of local elites that was guaranteed through negotiation. This paper traces Antiochus III’s Judean elite negotiants and the ways in which this decree was received and employed in Judea in Ben Sira, 1 and 2 Maccabees. It thus restores a local perspective to this crucial moment in Jewish history.

Rabbi Nachman’s Sonic Schemes

This article discusses Tzvi Avni’s Second Piano Sonata, Epitaph, a sonic commentary on one of the inner tales in Rabbi Nachman’s “The Seven Beggars”. Written between 1974 and 1979, Epitaph not only marks the composer’s act of translation (from words into music and from a textual tale into a wordless and semantically unmarked piano sonata) but also his very turn to ethnographic sources that defied their negative function in a national territorial culture that vilified otherness while separating art from ethnography. Avni’s turn to Rabbi Nachman was part of a bigger shift that saw composers’ dialectical returns to Jewish histories and cultures that were previously repressed from a national culture which dehistoricized the Diaspora to the point of rendering the times and cultures of diasporic Jews a single temporality—ahistorical, contextless, and outside the teleological time of Zionism. With the (re)introduction of diasporic temporalities, non-redemptive poetics became an affordance in the music of Avni or Andre Hajdu (who is also discussed here) while steadily muting the territorial tropes that constituted Hebrew culture.

Two Judeo-Spanish ‘Marrano’ hymns in the liturgy of the Jews of Cochin

The liturgy of the Jews of Cochin, Kerala, is extant in several manuscripts, the oldest dating back to the end of the seventeenth century. Among the Hebrew pieces, we find two compositions in Old Spanish written in Hebrew characters, Alto dio de Abraham and Todos kiriados . Here we provide for the first time an edition of these texts (from MS. Roth 33 of the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds and MS. Or. 2242 of the Cambridge University Library). A philological analysis reveals that these two texts – a supplication paraphrasing Psalm 121 and a translation of a medieval Hebrew pizmon, Kol bĕruʾe – are orally transmitted versions of prayers belonging to the liturgy of the Hispano-Portuguese New Christians. A comparison with their European counterparts and the study of the linguistic peculiarities of these Indian versions show influences from Portuguese and Malayalam. In the context of the history of Jewish and Marrano migrations to the Malabar Coast, these texts represent an important vestige of a Judeo-Iberian heritage within Indian Jewish culture.

The Non-Believing Jew: A Historical Survey of Judaism’s Engagement with Atheism

Abstract How important is atheism for Jewish history and Jews for the history of atheism? Modern Jewish histories have tended to focus on Jewish secularization rather than atheism, and historical surveys of atheism in the West have tended to neglect the Jewish experience which is subsumed in the Judeo-Christian tradition. It is possible to make the case that the secularization narrative privileges social change over Jewish intellectual engagement with non-belief, and that just as Jewish and Christian conceptions of theism differ, so do their atheisms. Jewish historical attitudes towards atheism are complicated and have shifted over time. Here, skeptical tendencies, that is, attitudes and ideas that would be associated later with atheism, will be considered alongside claims about atheism per se.

Tracing Jewish Ancestry and Beyond—Exploring the Transformative Impact and Possibilities of the Documentation of Jewish Records Worldwide (DoJR) Project

This article analyses the transformative impact of the Documentation of Jewish Records Worldwide (DoJR) project, launched in 2017, on Jewish genealogy. Jewish genealogy, deeply rooted in centuries of tradition and cultural significance, transcends mere ancestral tracing, embodying a comprehensive exploration of Jewish history and heritage. The DoJR project represents a monumental shift in this field, aiming to compile a comprehensive, freely accessible online catalog, JCat, of every existing document of every Jew who ever lived. This endeavor reshapes our approach to Jewish genealogy and profoundly deepens our understanding of Jewish history. This article delves into the historical context of Jewish genealogy, tracing its evolution from ancient times through various challenges, including the Holocaust’s devastating impact on Jewish genealogical records. It highlights the pioneering efforts in the field and the modern advancements that have facilitated the growth of Jewish genealogy, including DNA testing and digital technologies.

Contrasting Conceptions of Teshuvah: Between “Repentance” and “Atonement”—A Case Study of the Beta Israel Community (Ethiopian Jews)

The Ethiopian Jews of the Beta Israel community are unique in the annals of Jewish history. The community maintained its Jewish identity and devotedly upheld observance of the mitzvot, even in the face of grave physical and spiritual difficulties and unrelenting attempts to persuade them to abandon their religion. Yet, their traditions diverge significantly from the accepted Rabbinic halakhic tradition that is the norm in Israel. This paper examines Yom Kippur observances and describes key differences between the Beta Israel tradition, which reflects the centrality of atonement, and the Rabbinic tradition, which reflects the centrality of repentance. These distinctions stand as manifestations of a set of profound differences within the very consciousness that animates the two traditions. Discussion, using the works of thinkers like Rabbis Joseph B. Soloveitchik, his disciple, Prof. Rabbi David Hartman, and Ethiopian sages, will focus on the more theocentric Beta Israel tradition, in which individuals are perceived, and perceive themselves, as a part of a collective, in contrast to the Rabbinic tradition, which places a greater emphasis on the agency of the individual and human reason. We will highlight the difference between the concepts of “repentance” and “atonement” that are at the root of the two communities’ theologies.

Marginalised within a minority: Jews with disabilities in the Jewish press of the Kingdom of Poland (1860s-1914).

This article is the first scholarly research focusing exclusively on the history of Jews with disabilities in the Kingdom of Poland from the 1860s to 1914. It analyses sources drawn from the Jewish press in Yiddish, Polish, and Hebrew. Areas of investigation include the hierarchy of attitudes towards different categories of individuals with disabilities, spiritual perspectives on disability, and the portrayal of disabilities within Jewish literature. The study places particular emphasis on the Jewish deaf community, given the proliferation of available source material. Drawing on the broad conceptual framework of disability studies, the authors examine the phenomenon of medicalisation, tracing its influence on Jewish public discourse over the latter half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth.

Reading Jewish History in the Renaissance: Christians, Jews, and the Hebrew Sefer Josippon, written by Nadia Zeldes

Reading Jewish History in the Renaissance: Christians, Jews, and the Hebrew Sefer Josippon, written by Nadia Zeldes

CONCEPTUALIZATION OF THE HISTORY OF THE JEWS IN THE HISTORIOGRAPHIC PROCESS OF SOUTHERN UKRAINE AT THE END OF THE 19TH - BEGINNING OF THE 20TH CENTURY

The purpose of this article is to study the process of conceptualizing the history of Jews in the historiographical process of southern Ukraine at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. The use of these principles is complemented by a number of special historical methods, in particular: search-specific, cognitive, prosopographic, historical-geographical, problem-chronological, historical-statistical, historical-systemic, structural-functional, comparative and descriptive. Within the framework of the basic methodological principles, such scientific principles as analysis, synthesis, analogy, abstraction and others were applied in the work, which made it possible to fully disclose the chosen topic in a consistent, logical and complete form. To establish the peculiarities of historical views, the works of historians are traditionally an irreplaceable source. They have all the characteristics of a historiographical source: subjectivity, specificity of the author’s style, determined by the circumstances of the time and place of writing and publication, etc. Another group of sources are reviews of these works by contemporaries, which allow them to be included in the historiographical context. Memoir sources, and these are primarily the well-known memories of S. M. Dubnov, in which an introspection of his residence in Odessa is separately carried out, allow one to delve deeper into the circumstances that led to the genesis of the conceptual views of Jewish historians on the past of their people. At the end of the 19th – at the beginning of the 20th century, in the territory of southern Ukraine, the works of several Jewish historians were published. The purpose of these works was to outline the main conceptual foundations of Jewish history. Although these works were not perfect from the point of view of modern historiography, they laid the foundation for the formation of Judaism as a scientific discipline in Eastern Europe, and, in particular, in Ukraine. The appearance of these works was determined by the general development of national movements in the world at that time, in particular, the movement of the Jewish people for self-assertion in the unfavorable conditions of the Russian-imperial policy. The main merit of the authors was that they gave Jewish history and historiography a secular, analytical, and scientific context. The process of conceptualization led to a clearer formulation of the conceptual apparatus, goal and tasks of Jewish historiography and brought it to the level of Judaica as a scientific discipline.

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