Jewish Integration Research Articles

From Pariah to Baboon: Ludwig Robert’s Parody of Michael Beer’s Paria

Abstract Michael Beer’s successful 1823 play Der Paria is famous as an early complaint against the status of Jews as second-rate citizens. As such, it is fundamental to the conception of Jews as pariahs, best known through the writings of Hannah Arendt. Its long reception history has overlooked an important source, that is now uncovered for the first time in a hundred years. Beer’s play was parodied by Ludwig Robert with Der Pavian. Both authors were scions of Berlin’s Jewish elite, and among the first authors of Jewish descent to write in German. Robert’s parody shows why he did not share in the general enthusiasm about Der Paria, how the choice of the parodic genre was a self-referential critique, and how form and content of the parody together intervened in Beer’s use of the genre of Trauerspiel. Thus, it contributes to our understanding of the diverse strategies and self-perceptions of upper-class Berlin Jews, confronted with the limits of their pioneering the Jewish integration into non-Jewish society, showing the role of theater as a means of negotiating contemporary social problems both in private and publicly, stressing the difficult presence of Jews in the German public sphere.

Raúl González Salinero, Military Service and the Integration of Jews into the Roman Empire

Resumen

Armed Jews in the Americas ed. by Raanan Rein and David M.K. Sheinin

Reviewed by: Armed Jews in the Americas ed. by Raanan Rein and David M.K. Sheinin Aaron Welt (bio) Armed Jews in the Americas. Edited by Raanan Rein and David M.K. Sheinin. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2021. xii + 251 pp. America is a society awash in guns. As of 2018, there were 1.2 firearms for every citizen in the United States. With the Constitution's Second Amendment granting a fundamental right, if a highly contested one, to "bear Arms," America has long fostered a gun culture. Though no nation comes close to the US in gun ownership (including ones currently in military conflict or recovering from war), Uruguay and Canada are also [End Page 320] in the top ten list of most armed nations. Other Western Hemisphere countries have low levels of gun ownership, but suffer from high rates of gun violence, such as El Salvador, Venezuela, Guatemala, and Colombia. Countless people in the Americas carry arms, and many wonder what effect the preponderance of guns has had on the culture and politics of those nations. Armed Jews in the Americas, an edited collection of essays from scholars of diasporic Jewish history, attempts to place Jews in this panorama of weapons and violence. A premise of this book is that the relationship of Jews in the Americas to either being armed or (for reasons not fully explored) deciding not to be armed has had a salient impact on the Jewish integration into various societies of the Western Hemisphere. The volume showcases an eclectic and compelling mosaic of armed Jews and the political and cultural debates they elicited. By the end of Armed Jews in the Americas, the reader has gained a rich exploration of Jewish soldiers, police officers, revolutionaries, gangsters, militia members, and weapon-makers, and what their stories tell us about the time and place in which they lived. Several chapters shed new light on Canadian and Argentinian Jewish history and how the perceptions of Jews with guns in those countries served as a reliable indicator of the health of liberal multiculturalism in North and South America. In the opening pages of Armed Jews in the Americas, the editors claim that "this book demystifies the links between Jews [in the Western Hemisphere] and their weapons" (1). This goal is not fully achieved, which is understandable. The chapters of this book do not collectively illustrate that popular ideas of Jews and deadly weapons animated considerable anxieties in the Americas, certainly not when compared to imaginations of, say, Jews and finance, the mass media and popular entertainment, leftist politics (a topic that is intelligently examined in this book), immigration policy, or academia. The vignettes of individual Jews or small groups of Jews with weapons in the myriad settings that Armed Jews in the Americas covers only serve to further mystify the interlinkages between Jews and guns, particularly when considering American Jews. It remains unexplained why, despite the page-turning stories that make up this collection, the vast majority of American Jews, the largest Jewish population in the Western Hemisphere, have historically abstained from gun culture. This underlying reality tells us why armed Jews require demystification in the first place. Individually, each chapter succeeds in bringing to life the experience of an armed Jewish person in the Americas and the political, cultural, and social issues their stories reveal. David Sheinin provides an insightful exploration of armed Canadian Jews by way of the political and law [End Page 321] enforcement career of Phil Givens, Toronto's mayor and top cop over the 1960s and 1970s. The product of Toronto's Jewish immigrant milieu, Givens earned a reputation as a reliable liberal during his time as mayor. But a decade later, with Toronto undergoing its version of late twentieth century urban crisis, Police Commissioner Givens emerged as a prominent face for "tough-on-crime" politics in Canada, a politics that, Sheinin skillfully shows, came up wanting in meeting the challenge of crime in a modern city facing decreasing resources and increasing racial diversity. Another triumph of Armed Jews in the Americas is its findings on the diasporic Jews who enlisted with armed political movements abroad. The several dozen Canadian Jews who joined the...

THE IMAGE OF THE OTHER: THE DISTINCTIVE SIGN OF THE JEWS IN MEDIEVAL GERMANY (13th-16th CENTURIES)

This paper studies the special distinguishing sign of the Jews in the Germany during the 13th-16th centuries. Since early 12th c., Europe saw a large-scale process of rethinking the place of existing social groups and the emergence of new ones, clearly expressed by a set of iconic practices. The legitimization of the Jews’ emblems is its direct consequence. Using semiotic analysis, the authors consider visual signs in written and pictorial sources of various types as elements within the framework of a common sign system, as well as reveal the specifics of emblematic manifestations characteristic of Jewish identity. Most often, the signs were yellow and round. In Germany, the signs were used quite late relative to other European countries. In addition, Jews in Germany were in a better position because they depended on the emperor, and political decentralization had an impact on it. The authors conclude that the church prescription for Jews to wear specific signs was explained by the processes of streamlining the social organization of the Christian world. Finally, the authors state that the emblems were part of two strategies: the distinction between Jews and Christians, and the integration of Jews into the medieval urban space. In addition, the emblems could be a means of defamation or a positive, neutral sign.

Simon Szántó, Nineteenth Century Viennese Writer and Educator: A Study on Integration, Particularism, and the Ideal of Bildung

Abstract Simon Szántó is known as one of the founders of the Jewish press in Vienna, the editor and main author of the Jewish periodical Die Neuzeit, and an influential educator during the high point of Austrian liberalism between the 1860s and the early 1880s. His enormously rich literary legacy covers issues such as the integration of Jews into the Austrian-Hungarian society, religious reform, gender roles, and particularly education. Szántó’s writings offer a unique opportunity to look at the Viennese liberal period of the second half of the nineteenth century and its challenges through the eyes of a mostly overlooked, but highly significant and influential actor of the time. This article will first introduce Simon Szántó’s cultural and educational background that impacted his ideals and his activities, and go on to discuss one of his main concerns, namely Jewish education. Religious education, confessional schooling, and Jewish upbringing at home bore the burden of responsibility for shaping Austrian Jewish women and men. These Jews were to be integrated in an Austrian culture, while at the same time taught to retain a strong Jewish particularity. Szántó aimed to unite this dichotomous reality through the realization of his ideals of Jewish Bildung.

Migrants, Refugees, and Asylum Seekers in Latin America

This edited volume presents a useful contribution to the migration history of Latin America, situated squarely in the transdisciplinary field of migration studies and following the equally interesting 2017 volume by two of the coeditors. As noted in the introduction, the volume seeks to move away from studies of specific ethnic groups—the editors criticize the homogenizing effects of approaches that project a false cohesion onto groups such as “the Italians” or “the Spanish”—and prefers a comparative perspective on national case studies. In this sense the volume's contributors seek to focus on the particularities of national host sites as well as the “diasporic perspective” of, say, Italians in Argentina and Brazil (pp. 3–4). Though the volume successfully fulfills this goal, this is not an entirely new approach; it goes back at least to works such as Fernando Devoto's Historia de la inmigración en la Argentina (2003) or Samuel Baily and Eduardo Míguez's Mass Migration to Modern Latin America (2003). One could also argue the reverse: that methodological nationalism keeps one from seeing the transnational aspects of migration, though this is not a trap that this volume's authors fall into.More originally, and in line with the contributors' previous work, the case studies themselves focus heavily on less studied migratory groups, particularly Jews, Palestinians, and Syrian Lebanese—no doubt a reflection of many of the authors' connections with Tel Aviv University—as well as Chinese and Japanese in Argentina. Though the editors insist rightly on the need to move beyond authors from a given ethnic group writing about their own history, this volume does not entirely escape this and includes a large number of Jewish authors writing about Jewish and Middle Eastern migrants (p. 4). Among the most fascinating chapters are the three that focus on inter-American migratory flows by addressing US immigrants in Costa Rica, Colombian women in Ecuador (many of whom received asylum), and the Franco-Brazilian borderlands. Indeed, these three cases highlight the need for further historical research in order to broaden the focus from the era of mass European migration to the Americas before the world wars and mass Latin American emigration to the north in the latter decades of the twentieth century.Though space does not allow for a summary of all the book's chapters, several themes stand out, including the ways in which gender shaped the migration experience (of Jews to Argentina at the beginning of the twentieth century and Colombians to Ecuador in the beginning of the twenty-first), the imagining of distant homelands after emigration, and the tensions between forces of discrimination and homogenization that pull migrants in different directions. As in many edited volumes, the comparisons between the different case studies are mostly implicit or tackled in the introduction and conclusion. The compelling chapters on Palestinian migration, for example, could have gained from comparisons with the experiences of immigrants from Italy and Spain, for example, who became Italian or Spanish by identifying with an “imagined homeland” (pp. 105–6). An exception is a particularly interesting chapter by Claudia Stern that analyzes Arab and Jewish integration in Chile through the lens of two well-known politicians who represented middle-class intellectuals' rise at the expense of traditional landed elites. The illuminating concluding essay, by Jürgen Buchenau and Jerry Dávila, exemplifies how migration studies can explore the limits of ideologies of mestizaje in Mexico and Brazil by illuminating such ideologies' nationalist, homogenizing, and exclusionist tendencies.I thoroughly enjoyed the volume, and all the chapters are informative, though it should be noted that the volume's title is a misnomer. The book does not analyze in depth refugees and asylum in Latin America. Though several of the chapters deal with the topics in passing, they are not the object of analysis and are not treated as objects of study. This perhaps points to a conceptual blind spot, in that the ethnic studies approach can in some cases overshadow the politics of exile. Though both are related, and the study of refugees and asylum clearly needs to be based on migration studies, a greater attention to the questions of asylum and legal status would have brought to light a different set of issues. This is particularly true given the prominence of recent asylum cases, such as those of Evo Morales and Julian Assange, which also—and perhaps not coincidentally—deal with inter-American politics. This in no way, however, takes away from an informative volume that makes a significant contribution to ethnic and migration studies in Latin America.

Jewish Child Integration in Britain: A Comparative Examination of Russian-Jewish and German-Jewish Refugees

By adopting a comparative approach to the lives of Russian-Jewish and German-Jewish refugee children in Britain, this article explores the extent to which Jewish refugee children were able to successfully integrate into British society. After stating the difference between the integration and assimilation of the Jewish refugees, this article examines how the education, religion and familial relations of the refugee children all acted as indicators of their desire to integrate. As a result of utilising the oral testimonies of both refugee groups, a personal insight is gained in relation to how each individual refugee child navigated the themes of belonging and identity from adolescence to adulthood. These oral testimonies, combined with the use of newspaper articles and autobiographical accounts, illustrate how the refugee children were both voluntarily and involuntarily involved in the integration process. Whilst assimilation did occur, particularly in the case of the German-Jewish refugee children who were placed in non-Jewish foster homes during the Second World War, it did not characterise the experiences of all Jewish refugee children. Instead, across both refugee groups, the children actively adapted their Jewish identity to serve their own individual aspirations. Thus, when evaluating the success of Jewish child integration in Britain, the lives of the Russian-Jewish and German-Jewish refugee children were characterised by their heterogeneity rather than their homogeneity.

The Naomi Cook Book: A Narrative of Canadian Jewish Integration

Canadian Jewish integration was a social process that took place in the political sphere, but was also driven by everyday practices such as preparing and consuming food. Despite this, Jewish food history and the history of Canadian Jewish integration have been mostly investigated separately. This essay ties in with the work of Franca Iacovetta et al. and Donna Gabbaccia, who examined ethnic identity politics and food history in Canada and the USA as interrelated fields. To add to this research, this paper examines a Jewish community cookbook as a moment of Jewish-Canadian integration. By analyzing the Naomi Cook Book, published from 1928 to 1960 by Hadassah-WIZO in Toronto, this paper offers the alternative of exploring integration history as a history of everyday life. It argues that the cookbook is more than a recipe collection. By presenting specific ingredients, menus, and advertisements, it is promoting a narrative of Anglophone Canadian Jewish integration to a larger sociocultural frame of North American consumer culture. In doing so, it presents the history of Jewish-Canadian integration not as a linear sequence of steps on a ladder leading to completion, but as a process with both new and recurrent challenges, contradictions, and contestations.

Евреи в самодержавной России: на пути к статусу «имперской нации»

The article is covering Jewish integration politics to the Russian society: its character, stages, methods. The author comes to the conclusion: imperial nations strategy formation, with the exception of some nuances, was the same, comparative analyses of such politics with that one in connection with indigenous Siberian Buryat ethnos having being investigated. Common style of life preservation tactics inevitably being changed to the administrative unification and stimulation of appeal to the predominant religion, more suitable to the imperial ideology.

How Race Travels: Navigating Global Blackness in J. Ida Jiggetts’s Study of Afro-Asian Israeli Jewry

This article explores the intellectual history of Black scholar (John) Ida Jiggetts in her study of Yemenite Jewish integration efforts in Israel in the 1950s. I begin with a critical look into the scholarship that heavily influenced her: Zionist ethnography and anthropology. Jewish engagement in these fields, then dominated by race scientists, constructed Afro-Asian Jewry as a Black foil meant to highlight the normative whiteness of European Jews. The article then moves on to Jiggetts’s travel memoir, Israel to Me, in which she details her observations on intra-Jewish race relations, how she struggled to navigate race in Hebrew, and how her experiences in Israel pushed her to reflect on her own perceptions of race. Enacting a form of racial diplomacy, Jiggetts shaped Black American perspectives on Israel in the twentieth century as one Black community looked to another as a means of understanding the global color line. Navigating shifting interpellations of her own Blackness while observing the racialization of Mizrahi Israelis, her reflections on race in Israel shed light on the transnational process of racecraft for those who share the experience of the color line.

In their own words: Orthodox Jewish social workers integration of religion and values into practice

ABSTRACT Understanding how different religions are integrated into social work practice is important to enhancing diversity and inclusion within the profession. This article focuses on Orthodox Judaism, and discusses some of the values and tensions that emerge for practitioners. This is accomplished by analyzing four focus groups (N = 18) of practitioners who discussed their reasons for entering the field, how values between their religion and social work are congruent, and how they also conflict. Also discussed is how these tensions are resolved. Implications for practice and social work education are discussed in depth.

Mirror of Competing Claims: Antisemitism and Citizenship in Vormärz Germany

The Haber Affair of 1843 became a cause célèbre within German society as it pitted the traditional elites against more liberal groups who sought inclusion of outsiders and a fundamental re-organization of society along bourgeois lines. Caught between these groups was Moritz von Haber, the son of an ennobled court banker. These groups viewed the Haber Affair through their personal views of Haber and his perceived transgressions, but ultimately as a litmus test of the limits of Jewish integration and whether or not German Jews deserved full emancipation. The Haber Affair also demonstrated how latent Jew-hatred could be re-activated quickly in society and how the German State participated in fomenting this violence.

A Family in Iran: Women Teachers, Minority Integration, and Family Networks in the Jewish Schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Iran, 1900–1950

ABSTRACTThe Alliance Israélite Universelle, an international Jewish educational philanthropy based in Paris, began to establish modern, secularized schools for girls and boys in North Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe in 1862. The first school was established in Iran in 1898. The Alliance saw itself as addressing the big questions of its time that faced Jews: antisemitism, poverty, and perceived backwardness. It sought to promote the integration of Jews as well as to advance the status of girls through educating them and opposing child marriage. This article examines the integration of Iranian Jews and the professionalization of women in Iran in the first half of the twentieth century, using the Alliance’s Jewish female school directors as a case study. It argues that family relationships and networks played a critical role in facilitating both of these modernizing processes.

Politics, Liberal Idealism and Jewish Life in Nineteenth-Century Vienna: The Formative Years of Heinrich Jaques (1831–1894)1

Abstract This article addresses the formative years of the liberal parliamentarian Heinrich Jaques (1831–1894). It traces his family life, social world, education, professional career, and public activities prior to his election to parliament in 1879. The focus is on Jaques's personal perspective as he negotiated various events and influences. The article argues that the combined effects of the 1848–49 revolutions and an intense engagement with German humanist classics forged a strong loyalty and commitment to liberal values. This was manifested both in politics (as a belief in liberal reforms to Austria) and in everyday life (as guiding principles in daily conduct). For Jaques’s generation in particular, the possibility of emancipation, integration, and acceptance was a goal to strive towards. Jaques pursued and articulated this vision in his writings and activities. His impressive achievements in the 1860s and 1870s are an example of the energy and hope of many Jews during the liberal era. For a number of reasons—economic downturn, widening democracy, a mobilized Catholic Church, resentment towards the liberal elites—antisemitism became an increasingly powerful factor in politics from the 1880s onwards. For Jaques and his fellow liberal Jews, the effect was profound. History and progress no longer seemed to be on the side of liberalism and Jewish integration. Nevertheless, for a certain milieu, the dreams of liberal humanism remained a strong and guiding presence in their lives.

The Framing of Kirchnerism Among Jewish Ethnic Entrepreneurs: a Case of the Interrelation Between Ethnicity and Politics

The paper aims at contributing to the studies on religion and politics in Latin America by analyzing the interrelations between Judaism and Kirchnerism in Argentina. In order to accomplish its objectives, the author analyzes the discursive production of ethnicity in both the Llamamiento Argentino Judio and Jewish newspaper Comunidades. These two cases have been chosen because of their placement in opposing sides of the political spectrum. While the Llamamiento sustains Kirchnerist governments, Comunidades expresses a kind of interrelation between Judaism and politics that we have called ethnic anti-Kirchnerism. The study of these processes allows us to reflect on several issues such as: (1) Jewish integration into the national society, (2) the relevance of Jewish affairs in the Argentinean political setting, and (3) the relevance of available political identities in the making of the Jewish field.

Yair Mintzker. The Many Deaths of Jew Süss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. 344 pp.

Reviewed by: The Many Deaths of Jew Süss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew by Yair Mintzker Dean Phillip Bell Yair Mintzker. The Many Deaths of Jew Süss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. 344 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000230 In this thoughtful and well-researched book, Yair Mintzker examines several accounts of the trial of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer in order to uncover the motivations underpinning and unique dimensions guiding those accounts and their authors. While the subject of the book is the trial, the focus is simultaneously narrower—concerned with the context and texture of the individual sources—and broader—piecing together a range of observations to address issues related to the long history of Jewish and Christian relations and Jewish integration in the Holy Roman Empire. Mintzker notes that none of the sources related to the trial solely present "the facts" of the case, since they often disagree about the basic details and, upon closer reading, reveal differing concerns, agendas, and even notions of truth itself. Minzker suggests a new approach to the topic and the sources, which he terms a "polyphonic history," by which he means taking different sources individually and in conversation; combining elements from previous approaches to the topic; and redirecting attention back to the sources, including taking fiction seriously as a historical source. For each of the four sources he considers, Mintzker applies a consistent approach that focuses on the lives and writings of the individuals who provided different genres of narratives about the case, as well as on illustrative passages from the sources. In order to further clarify his approach, at end of his presentation of each of these four sources Mintzker appends "conversations" between him and an imaginary reader. While these conversations do, in fact, surface some interesting methodological and interpretative questions and relate closely back to the chapters they close, they are largely unnecessary and at times even distracting, largely because Mintzker admirably implements his useful approach within the body of the work. The Oppenheimer trial serves as a valuable foil for several larger questions that emerge, Mintzker notes, because of the immense contemporary interest in the story. The trial encouraged as many interpretations as it did interpreters, providing a perfect case for exploring how people understood and leveraged the story for their own purposes. At times, these interpretations appear to have been rather conscious constructions that served specific goals; at other times, they presented significant themes that the narrators may hardly have thought about directly, but that, precisely for that reason, allow us windows into their world. [End Page 226] The first figure Mintzker examines is Dr. Philipp Friedrich Jäger, the judge who composed the verdict in the case. Particularly valuable is Mintzker's juxtaposition of the Oppenheimer case with a previous case involving Christina Wilhelmina von Grävenitz, the mistress of Duke Eberhard Ludwig. Mintzker makes a compelling argument that the similarities between this trial and Oppenheimer's are not only coincidental and structural, but reveal larger concerns. Perhaps more importantly, Mintzker provides evidence that the Oppenheimer trial was not simply a case of anti-Jewish machination—after all, Jäger had earlier in his career been concerned about the treatment of court Jews in Württemberg, and the voluminous materials related to his work on the trial never reference classical blood-libel accusations. Demonstrating a deft reading of inquisitorial sources, Mintzker argues that Jäger had a preconceived idea of what Oppenheimer did, which he drew directly from his experience with the previous case. At times Mintzker teases out some of Jäger's personal background in the sources. Especially poignant is Mintzker's assertion that Jäger ignored or responded violently to evidence that contradicted his preconceived story and that he "edited, amplified, and dramatized" (81) evidence that only partly corroborated his predetermined narrative, at times altering the evidence beyond recognition. What emerges is a nuanced reading of the sources that provides insights into the legal and criminal system of the time and the unique aspects of one of the central figures in the trial. Mintzker then...

The Many Deaths of Jew Süss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew by Yair Mintzker

Reviewed by: The Many Deaths of Jew Süss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew by Yair Mintzker Dean Phillip Bell Yair Mintzker. The Many Deaths of Jew Süss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. 344 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000230 In this thoughtful and well-researched book, Yair Mintzker examines several accounts of the trial of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer in order to uncover the motivations underpinning and unique dimensions guiding those accounts and their authors. While the subject of the book is the trial, the focus is simultaneously narrower—concerned with the context and texture of the individual sources—and broader—piecing together a range of observations to address issues related to the long history of Jewish and Christian relations and Jewish integration in the Holy Roman Empire. Mintzker notes that none of the sources related to the trial solely present "the facts" of the case, since they often disagree about the basic details and, upon closer reading, reveal differing concerns, agendas, and even notions of truth itself. Minzker suggests a new approach to the topic and the sources, which he terms a "polyphonic history," by which he means taking different sources individually and in conversation; combining elements from previous approaches to the topic; and redirecting attention back to the sources, including taking fiction seriously as a historical source. For each of the four sources he considers, Mintzker applies a consistent approach that focuses on the lives and writings of the individuals who provided different genres of narratives about the case, as well as on illustrative passages from the sources. In order to further clarify his approach, at end of his presentation of each of these four sources Mintzker appends "conversations" between him and an imaginary reader. While these conversations do, in fact, surface some interesting methodological and interpretative questions and relate closely back to the chapters they close, they are largely unnecessary and at times even distracting, largely because Mintzker admirably implements his useful approach within the body of the work. The Oppenheimer trial serves as a valuable foil for several larger questions that emerge, Mintzker notes, because of the immense contemporary interest in the story. The trial encouraged as many interpretations as it did interpreters, providing a perfect case for exploring how people understood and leveraged the story for their own purposes. At times, these interpretations appear to have been rather conscious constructions that served specific goals; at other times, they presented significant themes that the narrators may hardly have thought about directly, but that, precisely for that reason, allow us windows into their world. [End Page 226] The first figure Mintzker examines is Dr. Philipp Friedrich Jäger, the judge who composed the verdict in the case. Particularly valuable is Mintzker's juxtaposition of the Oppenheimer case with a previous case involving Christina Wilhelmina von Grävenitz, the mistress of Duke Eberhard Ludwig. Mintzker makes a compelling argument that the similarities between this trial and Oppenheimer's are not only coincidental and structural, but reveal larger concerns. Perhaps more importantly, Mintzker provides evidence that the Oppenheimer trial was not simply a case of anti-Jewish machination—after all, Jäger had earlier in his career been concerned about the treatment of court Jews in Württemberg, and the voluminous materials related to his work on the trial never reference classical blood-libel accusations. Demonstrating a deft reading of inquisitorial sources, Mintzker argues that Jäger had a preconceived idea of what Oppenheimer did, which he drew directly from his experience with the previous case. At times Mintzker teases out some of Jäger's personal background in the sources. Especially poignant is Mintzker's assertion that Jäger ignored or responded violently to evidence that contradicted his preconceived story and that he "edited, amplified, and dramatized" (81) evidence that only partly corroborated his predetermined narrative, at times altering the evidence beyond recognition. What emerges is a nuanced reading of the sources that provides insights into the legal and criminal system of the time and the unique aspects of one of the central figures in the trial. Mintzker then...

Mixed Feelings: Tropes of Love in German Jewish Culture by Katja Garloff

Reviewed by: Mixed Feelings: Tropes of Love in German Jewish Culture by Katja Garloff Jennifer Hoyer Katja Garloff. Mixed Feelings: Tropes of Love in German Jewish Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016. 228 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000308 The history of Jewish-German relations has long been described in terms of an unhappy or failed love affair. Why? Does describing such a fraught sociological and political topic in terms of an emotional relationship reduce it to sentimentality? This is the starting point for Katja Garloff's nuanced and complex study Mixed Feelings, in which she delves into over two centuries of discourse of Jewish-German relations and various text types that use iterations of love to reflect the strain and potential of Jewish integration into German society. [End Page 241] Over 187 pages, Garloff takes a closer look at seventeen different texts and references numerous others. The two major sections are anchored in pivotal moments in Jewish-German relations: the year 1800, straddled by burgeoning emancipation in the late eighteenth century and integration in the early nineteenth century; and the year 1900, around which swirl debates about Jewish assimilation into German society, political and religious Zionism, and the serious onset of racial antisemitic politics on a national level. The conclusion briefly sketches out how Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), and Barbara Honigmann (born 1949) viewed Jewish-German relations after 1945, and the book closes with reflection, vis-à-vis Honigmann's work, on an unfulfilled German-Jewish-Turkish dialogue. In the two primary sections, Garloff traces the use of tropes of love, ranging from filial to romantic to neighbor love, between Jews and non-Jews in Germanlanguage texts from the late eighteenth century to the twenty-first century, demonstrating how the use of the trope reflects larger aesthetic, political, and sociological issues of a given era while making the sustained case for two radically divergent expectations of love. Non-Jewish German-language writers view love as "totalizing": love erases differences to create a bond (13). For Jewish German-language writers, however, love is a bond that accepts and maintains difference. Hence numerous German-language Jewish authors, whatever their position on intermarriage and assimilation, make the case for Jews to be accepted as Jews, without erasing their religious or cultural distinctiveness, while non-Jewish German-language writers make their case for or against Jewish integration, emphasizing the erasure of difference. Garloff defines these divergent understandings of love by way of Giorgio Agamben (born 1942) and Roland Barthes (1915–1980) and draws on Kenneth Rein-hard's explanation of the terms ger (stranger) and reaʿ (neighbor) in Leviticus. The thwarted, ambiguous, and failed loves she then elucidates review the well-known antisemitic argument (for example in the work of Achim von Arnim, 1781–1831) that interfaith (sometimes understood as "interracial") love must fail because Jews must and never can erase their difference and highlight a different reading for the more numerous pro-integration writers: unfulfilled love opens a potential space to rethink Jewish-German relations. Whatever disruption leads to the failure isolates some aspect of the social and political framework that needs rethinking. The book is at its strongest in Garloff's close readings. The comparisons of Moses Mendelssohn's Jerusalem (1783) and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Nathan the Wise (1779), and of Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde (1799) and Dorothea Schlegel's (née Brendel Mendelssohn) Florentin (1801) insightfully show the two parallel trajectories of love against their respective historical backdrops. Mendelssohn is pro-integration but against intermarriage, which would historically necessitate the conversion of the Jewish spouse; instead, he suggests that "brotherly" love through common civic responsibility should make space for Jews as Jews. Lessing is likewise pro-integration, and even posits the potential for successful interfaith romantic love; the potential couple in Lessing's play, however, can never come to be—not because of their religious difference, but because they are revealed to be siblings, marking the easy transition from one kind of love to the other. The key to this family attachment is the emphasis on similarity rather [End Page 242] than making space for difference. The case for Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel's works as...

On Kosher Hamburgers, Yiddish Tangos, and Non-Affiliated Jews: Writing Jewish Latin America into the Americas

On Kosher Hamburgers, Yiddish Tangos, and Non-Affiliated Jews:Writing Jewish Latin America into the Americas Raanan Rein (bio) and Adriana M. Brodsky (bio) During his visit to the United States in 2018 while watching a Miami Heat basketball game, the president of the legendary soccer club Boca Juniors, Daniel Angelici, was impressed by the possibility of eating kosher food at the stadium. It was then that he decided to bring that novel idea to the "Bombonera" (the nickname for Boca Juniors' stadium). In August 2018, a kosher food stand was opened.1 Now, Jews and non-Jews alike will be able to enjoy a kosher version of the choripán, the quintessential and popular sausage snack.2 The inauguration of such a stand in one of Argentina's most renowned soccer temples received worldwide attention. Due to the importance and visibility of the Jewish community in Buenos Aires, and its long-standing involvement in Argentina's national sport, however, this should be no surprise. Indeed, one of the recent trends in Jewish-Latin American historiography precisely highlights how national cultures in the region influenced the elaboration of Jewish identities, and, simultaneously, how Jews ethnicized the larger society. This essay looks at some of the innovative contributions and challenges of Jewish Latin American historiography and what these studies can offer scholars focusing primarily on the Jewish experience in the United States. Current studies of Jewish history in Latin America insist on the importance of comparative studies, both within nations across different ethnic groups, and also across national borders within the Americas. The largest immigration to Latin America, which counted hundreds of thousands of Jews, took place between 1880 and 1930. [End Page 345] These were mainly Ashkenazi Jews driven away by pogroms, poverty, and discrimination. There was also a smaller number of Sephardi immigrants. Argentina, for example, counted only 6,085 Jews in its 1895 census, although the number was probably higher; by the 1930s, there were likely more than 200,000. In Brazil, the 1900 census listed 819 Jews. By the early 1930s, that number rose to around 30,000. And in Mexico, the official number of Jews increased from 134 in the early twentieth century to 9,000 in 1930.3 The richness of Jewish life in Latin America, which currently amounts to at least 500,000 Jews,4 has proved relevant to national histories, the Jewish world, and to the study of the relocation and movement of people and ideas, contributing to the reconfiguration of our understanding of Jewish geographies. While traditional historiography has tended to compare US Jewish experiences with European ones, attention to Jewish Latin America will better highlight the particular and unique in their case studies and what is in fact part of broader New World patterns as far as the social integration of Jews into their new host/home lands. The field of Jewish Latin American studies is a relatively new one compared to US Jewish studies, and it is therefore less bound by tradition when it comes to the historiography of organized Jewish communities and their internal dynamics. The exponential growth of this field, in particular since the foundation of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association (LAJSA) in 1982, does not allow us to refer to most of the studies published on different aspects of Jewish life in this hemisphere. Since there is little continuity between the Jewish experiences during the colonial period and the communities established during the years of Jewish mass migration to the Americas from the late nineteenth century onwards, this essay focuses on the modern period, and leaves the experience of Jews during the colonial period and the Anusim (those forced to convert and their descendants) for another discussion. When possible, we have given priority to material available in English and accessible to the readers of the American Jewish History. We have also mostly focused on historiography, as the existing body of work in literature and cultural studies is vast and deserves its own essay. And since previous historiography overemphasized the supposed importance of antisemitism in the region, this text will refer mostly to studies about [End Page 346] Jewish integration in and contribution to the many societies...

Between Poland and Hungary: The Process of Jewish Integration from a Comparative Perspective

Between Poland and Hungary: <i>The Process of Jewish Integration from a Comparative Perspective</i>