Jewish Collections Research Articles

Research Notes: Comparing Jewish Anarchist Mutual Aid Initiatives in Montreal and Toronto: The Role of Cooperation

Constituting an important element of the Canadian Jewish diaspora, although relatively overlooked by the historiography, the Jewish anarchist movement was instrumental in operating two mutual aid initiatives in eastern Canada in the first half of the twentieth century. Based in Montreal and Toronto, these initiatives and the communities overseeing them were largely inspired by the anarchist humanitarian work for the benefit of political prisoners. The latter was heralded by the universal anarchist Emma Goldman, a frequent visitor of Canada. Locally, however, both groups were rooted in a complex relational network, ranging from the predominantly socialist Jewish organization Workmen’s Circle (Arbeiter Ring) to Zionist milieux and smaller anarchist communities mainly of Russian and Italian origin. Drawing on archival findings from the Jewish collections of Montreal and Toronto, as well as testimonies and scholarship on Jewish radicalism in Canada, the article ambitions to measure the limits of this multi-scale cooperation and its consequences for the local anarchist presence. Through a comparative analysis of the Montreal and Toronto movements, the study attempts to explain the differences in their evolution, as well as to identify the possible, only partly overlapping reasons for their decline circa 1940.

‘The Jews are our Misfortune!’ Contemporary antisemitism as a hydra-headed phenomenon

ABSTRACT Antisemitism has once again proven itself to be an international phenomenon, crossing borders and cultures with ease and adept at finding major issues in the public square, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, upon which to hang its claims. This article argues that antisemitism currently takes four major forms: Anti-Zionist antisemitism, which targets the State of Israel as a Jewish collectivity; Neo-Traditionalism, which revives pre-modern anti-Judaic notions in contemporary guise; Holocaust relativisation, which involves instrumentalizing and distorting the nature of the Holocaust without denying it outright; and anti-Judaism, which manifests in efforts to ban circumcision, kosher slaughter and other core Jewish rituals. The article concludes by examining whether the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism is an adequate tool for engaging with a growing problem, suggesting ways in which the definition might be amended to make it more effective.

Rescue the Surviving Souls: The Great Jewish Refugee Crisis of the Seventeenth Century by Adam Teller

Reviewed by: Rescue the Surviving Souls: The Great Jewish Refugee Crisis of the Seventeenth Century by Adam Teller Joshua Teplitsky Adam Teller. Rescue the Surviving Souls: The Great Jewish Refugee Crisis of the Seventeenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. 408 pp. In Rescue the Surviving Souls, Adam Teller weaves together sources and studies from across central and eastern Europe, the Italian peninsula, and the Ottoman Empire to breathe life into a little-told aspect of early modern Jewish history in the wake of the intense upheavals that followed the Khmelynytski Uprising of 1648–1649 (gezeirot tah ve-tat). The uprisings saw Polish Jews violently assaulted, killed, and subjected to extensive material loss, with a death toll of at least 18,000 lives and some 30,000 Jews forced from their homes. Teller's book picks up where most scholarly treatments end. Focusing not on the dead but rather, as the title proclaims, on the survivors whose lives were thrown into disarray, the book explores the search for solutions undertaken both by victims of the event and by others who offered them solidarity and material relief. The result is a sweeping study that aims to offer fresh paradigms for considering major episodes in early modern Jewish life and for the writing of early modern Jewish history more generally. The book is divided into three parts. The first section deals with the "internally displaced persons" who fled their homes but remained within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Much of this section is engaged with the larger theme of trauma. It begins with a chapter outlining the events of the uprising itself before following the refugees from their homes to the confusion of the roads and into new sites of settlement. Approaching his subject with great humanity, Teller activates fragmentary sources to reconstruct not only the events as they transpired but also the emotional states of individuals. He invokes modern theories of trauma, and even the analysis of dreams, to supplement sources that are often challengingly laconic and partial, and reads individuals' struggles with their own sinfulness and the fulminations of preachers as attempts to exert agency over the most destabilizing of experiences. The second section takes as its geographic focus the Ottoman Empire and the Mediterranean and explores the larger themes of "Capture, Slavery, and Ransom." It follows the Jews who were sold in the slave trades in the Crimea and Istanbul, examining not only the fate of the Jews in those places but also the different energies undertaken across a large transregional network to raise funds for their redemption. He argues that a transregional network to redeem captives was made possible in the early modern period both on account of a more formal [End Page 423] and structured system of Jewish self-governance and through the emergence of a large Sephardic merchant trading diaspora, with a central hub in Italy. Following the trail of material relief—both its successes and failures—Teller compellingly bridges the histories of Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jewish subethnicities, arguing for far-reaching forms of transregional support. In so doing, Teller offers fresh perspectives on Jewish collective identification as expressed through widespread cooperation. He argues that "the increased levels of intercommunal cooperation that developed in the wake of the Polish crisis were thus a new phenomenon" (194), a novelty of the period that predated forms of nineteenth-century Jewish solidarity when it is commonly dated. Teller understands these cooperations as an expression of a Jewish collectivity, which he roots not in a vague sense of peoplehood or protonationalism as mid-century Zionist historians posited, arguing instead that they were formatively shaped by normative religious law and its behavioral frameworks, which resulted in a "single socioreligious system accepted by Jewish communities everywhere" (294, also 158–59). Even as he uncovers sprawling connections, Teller textures this coordination with cultural tensions and competition between different stakeholders. In the third and final section, he turns to the fate of the Jews who fled to the Holy Roman Empire and attempted to make new lives for themselves there, attracting the attention of local territorial rulers, straining Jewish communal resources, and clashing with customs and norms. Beyond its vivid depiction of this important...

Pilgrimage Zionism: The Maccabean Pilgrimage to Palestine and the divergent processes of Zionist meaning making

ABSTRACT This article shows Zionist emergence as processes of meaning making that took place while organizing and enacting a modern Jewish pilgrimage from London to Palestine and back in 1897. Through ‘thick’ descriptions by the pilgrims, the article offers a bottom-up account of the central boundary formations that in early 1897 demarcated Jewish national collectivity, homeland, and homecoming. Following the Danish-Jewish participant, Louis Frænkel, it shows how Zionist meaning making happened before, during, and after his experiences on the pilgrimage, and how this related to the kind of Zionism that Frænkel eventually would push for in Denmark.

A Mortuary of Books: The Rescue of Jewish Culture after the Holocaust by Elisabeth Gallas (review)

Reviewed by: A Mortuary of Books: The Rescue of Jewish Culture after the Holocaust by Elisabeth Gallas Kathy Peiss Elisabeth Gallas. A Mortuary of Books: The Rescue of Jewish Culture after the Holocaust. Translated by Alex Skinner. New York: New York University Press, 2019. 416 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009420000252 A Mortuary of Books is a significant new study of the rescue and restitution of looted Jewish books in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust. Elisabeth Gallas builds on a rich and growing scholarship that explores the response of Allied policymakers, the American military government, and Jewish organizations to cultural devastation. A revised version of her 2013 book, translated from the German, A Mortuary of Books examines the Jewish groups that came together after the war to make a compelling legal and moral claim upon heirless looted books. At the same time, Gallas uncovers the profound meaning of these books for the Jewish intellectuals and scholars who worked tirelessly to save them. She begins with the establishment of the Offenbach Archival Depot, the key American military installation for the salvage of looted and displaced books, supervised by the army's Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Section. Gallas focuses, however, on Jewish organizing and lobbying efforts in the United States, Great Britain, and Palestine, an effort that began during the war. Although the groups did not always see eye to eye, in the end they formed Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc. (JCR), which the US government recognized in 1949 as the legal successor agency to handle orphaned and unidentifiable Jewish books. In three years, they distributed nearly 500,000 volumes and between 8,000 and 10,000 ritual objects. Together the United States and Israel received the bulk of these works, with the remainder allotted to Great Britain and other countries with Jewish populations. Only a small number went to Germany and none to Eastern Europe. Gallas highlights the innovative legal arguments used by JCR and its predecessors. Following long-standing policy, the Allies recognized only nation-states in restitution cases; they had no precedent to follow in the case of European Jews, whose communities had been destroyed and property stolen in Germany and German-occupied countries. Jewish legal experts argued that the restoration of Jewish heritage and communal life could not occur within the existing national framework for restitution. They argued instead for the recognition of a transnational Jewish collectivity as a legal, political, and cultural entity. The struggle over Jewish books was a formative, if largely unrecognized, moment in the evolution of ideas about transitional and restorative justice. An unusual coalition of Jewish scholars and intellectuals led this effort, which helps explain why there was such intense, even obsessive attention to books at a time of dire need among surviving European Jews. They included Salo Baron and Hannah Arendt, as leaders of the JCR; Gershom Scholem, who collected for the Hebrew University and collaborated with Arendt; and Lucy Dawidowicz, representing the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and laboring to identify YIVO books at Offenbach. Gallas eloquently [End Page 460] traces how their deep belief in the need to rescue Jewish cultural heritage shaped their immediate postwar aims and long-term intellectual work. The rescuers perceived books not only in material but also symbolic terms. Animating books with human qualities, they likened looted volumes to the murder of European Jews. "Saving these books," Rabbi Herbert Friedman of the United Jewish Appeal observed, "amounted to saving the People of the Book" (56). The books simultaneously memorialized the Jewish past and served as a spiritual and cultural foundation for the living. They represented historical continuity and rupture, not only as a matter of time, but also place. This is apparent in the shifting meaning of the term "reconstruction," which initially referred to the restoration of European Jewish culture, but by 1946 signified a Zionist and diasporic vision of the Jewish future. Yet the transnational Jewish collectivity was a construction, held together despite tensions over who should receive the books. JCR's American leaders believed US institutions should be a major beneficiary, given the nation's large Jewish population and the military's role in preserving them. Scholem and Judah L...

Collecting Kentucky Jewish History: Covenant and Collaboration

Collecting Kentucky Jewish History:Covenant and Collaboration Abigail Glogower, Sarah Dorpinghaus, and Heather Fox "Building Kentucky's Archives and Collections," a panel at the 2018 Kentucky Jewish History Symposium, featured four presentations by professional archivists on their efforts to cultivate Jewish collections and audiences at their historical societies and university libraries. Following the presentations, moderator Rabbi Dr. Gary P. Zola, executive director of the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, opened the Q&A section by enumerating the dangers that await Jewish historical materials housed in non-Jewish archives. Unless deposited at Jewish institutions and stewarded by archivists specially trained in Jewish history, he worried, such history risks being "lost" either through neglect or misapprehension. This anxiety over the preservation of Jewish history is telling for it cuts straight to core ideological and methodological debates on archiving minority history in general and Jewish history in particular: To whom does Jewish history matter? Where does it belong? Can Jewish communities trust non-Jewish institutions to responsibly store, organize, and facilitate access to their histories? The answers posited by Zola and the American Jewish Archives are that Jewish history matters primarily to Jews, belongs in Jewish institutions, and should not be entrusted to non-Jewish ones. In this essay, the Jewish and non-Jewish Kentucky archivists on that panel argue otherwise: that Jewish history matters to local histories; that its preservation should be a shared endeavor founded on mutual respect between a minority community and area archival institutions; and finally, that this approach to collecting Jewish history offers immense intellectual and logistical benefits for Jews and non-Jews alike. Introduction: Where Does Jewish History Belong? The mistrust and suspicion toward non-Jewish institutions that house Jewish collections has a long, legitimate, and powerful history behind it. [End Page 233] While American Jews have never endured the traumatic material requisitions suffered by European Jewry, such experiences have had an indelible impact on our cultural DNA. Second only to the fear of Jewish bodily harm is the fear of Jewish texts, records, and ritual objects ending up in the hands of authorities who are at best indifferent and at worst violently destructive. The persistence of such catastrophic thinking in the twenty-first-century United States is born of and masks a subtler anxiety about difference and belonging. The guarded impulse springs from age-old tensions between insularity and integration, acceptance and self-preservation. We have difficulty imagining outsiders taking genuine and good-faith interest in our institutions, customs, and communal and individual lives—and we are not alone. Until fairly recently, American Jewish history, like all minority histories, has been treated as ancillary to or deviating from mainstream American history. At best, it has been cast as a secondary gloss or bonus diversity perspective on the real shapers of history—generally white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant men. Minority histories have therefore operated on the margins, struggling simultaneously to cultivate and strengthen minority identities while articulating their legitimacy to a wider audience. As scholar Lara Kelland has recently demonstrated, the production of collective memory and the establishment of shared history authorize communities' presence through ties to the past—so much so that collecting, interpreting, and narrating minority histories was foundational to the great US social movements of the second half of the twentieth century. Gains in social recognition and political rights for women, African Americans, LGBTQ people, and Native Americans relied on the research and collecting of upstart community historians among their ranks, who "understood that mainstream institutions had not represented their struggles and victories in a favorable light" and who "redefined the terms by which liberal institutions interacted with their stories, their artifacts, and their representations."1 So successful were these efforts that by the close of the 1970s, young historians began embracing new, democratized approaches to history that eschewed a biographical emphasis on "great men" in favor of social context and experiences of everyday life.2 They also helped introduce the field of public history, which pivots the practice of history away from rarified scholarship and toward the urgent application of history to real-life problems.3 American Jews were in fact one of the country's first minority...

The Paths of Books of Latvian Jews during World War II

[full article, abstract in English; abstract in Lithuanian]
 The aim of the research is to find out the influence of the Nazi regime on preservation of historical book collections, which were established in Jewish societies, schools, religious organizations and private houses in Latvia until the first Soviet occupation (1940/1941). At the beginning, libraries of Jewish associations and other institutions were expropriated by the Soviet power, which started the elimination of Jewish books and periodicals published in the independent Republic of Latvia. The massive destruction of Jewish literature collections was carried out by Nazi occupation authorities (1941-1944/45), proclaiming Jews and Judaism as their main “enemies”. However, digitized archives of Nazi organizations (mainly documents of the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce) shows that a small part of the Latvian Jewish book collections was preserved for research purposes and after the Second World War scattered in different countries. Analysis of archival documents will clarify the Nazi strategy for Latvian Jewish book collections. It will be determined which book values survived the war and what their further fate in the second half of the 1940s was.

Memórias da ÍdichSchule: movimentos de uma escola judaica, pelas narrativas de estudantes e professores (1922 – 1956, Porto Alegre/RS)

O artigo tematiza processos de educação vividos por uma comunidade judaica em Porto Alegre, tendo como foco a construção de uma escola, a ÍdichSchule. A temporalidade da pesquisa compreende, como marco inicial, o ano de 1922, data de fundação da primeira sinagoga e da escola, até o ano de 1956, quando esta passa por importantes transformações, passando a oferecer o Curso Ginasial. O corpus empírico consiste em narrativas de memória oral de pessoas longevas, a grande maioria de origem judaica, estudantes e/ou professores desta instituição educativa. São entrevistas produzidas entre as décadas de 1980 e 1990 que se encontram arquivadas em um acervo judaico, transpostas para a cultura escrita. O interesse da pesquisa reside no que foi escolhido pelos narradores como lembranças das vivências comunitárias. Por meio da análise documental, produziu-se uma inteligibilidade acerca das memórias desses sujeitos que conservam, quase que visceralmente, o apreço pela cultura escrita. De tudo o que se investigou, pode-se dizer que a construção de um lugar para estudar era tão importante quanto um lugar para rezar. É nessa interface que se constitui a ÍdichSchule, uma instituição que precisou, como muitas outras, superar as oposições para integrar-se à sociedade brasileira. Neste sentido, infere-se que havia uma intenção assimilacionista, em meio às discussões sobre a condição dos judeus na sociedade brasileira. Nas disputas, que se traduziam especialmente nos entendimentos acerca da formação dos estudantes, buscou-se uma conciliação entre aqueles que priorizavam o ensino religioso e aqueles que defendiam uma maior laicização da educação.

Complement or contradiction? British non-Jews in Abraham Schwadron’s autograph collection

ABSTRACTThe National Library of Israel’s Abraham Schwadron autograph collection was established and curated by Abraham Schwadron as a national Jewish collection to celebrate the genius of the Jewish people and link them to their illustrious forbears. Among the thousands of autographs, there are several hundred non-Jewish autographs that Schwadron kept as a separate part of the collection. In the context of collection theory, this article looks at the British non-Jewish autographs and by classifying them according to different characteristics, tries to understand why Schwadron kept them and whether their role in the collection was complementary or contradictory.

A Jewish National Collection for a Jewish National Library: The Abraham Schwadron Collection, Past and Present

The fascinating story of the creation and development of this unique collection is matched only by the collection's importance as a resource of primary material for research in the social sciences, the humanities, and even the exact sciences. With over five and a half thousand leading Jewish personalities represented in their original handwriting, Abraham Schwadron's autograph collection is more than just the first Jewish Who's Who. The inscribed visiting cards, literary manuscripts, handwritten letters, and even musical scores are all evidence of a Jewish social milieu and cultural enterprise that stretches from the sixteenth century to the present day. The collection is a written record of the history of the Jewish people as it unfolded. No less dramatic is the man behind the collection, who from his youth in Galicia decided he would build a national Jewish autograph collection for the Jewish people and bring it to Jerusalem. The National Library of Israel is presently working to make this whole collection accessible to the public, first by rendering the collection searchable through the Library's online catalogue and then by digitizing the entire collection of autographs. This article traces the history of the collection, introduces the intriguing figure of Abraham Schwadron and his rationale for building the collection, and reveals the many ways that the collection's rich and fascinating potential can be used as a resource of original source material. At the end of the article there is brief reference to the National Library of Israel's project for digitizing the collection.

Cultural Currency: Security-Intelligence Services Shape the Strategic Value of Art in Foreign Policy

International conventions that protect cultural property during armed conflict, along with bilateral treaties that target antiquities trafficking, indicate a need for intelligence on foreign cultural patrimony. The 'acquisition' of Jewish collections by Nazi authorities in World War II precipitated cases for restitution of the illicitly acquired artworks, and the international nature of the cases has developed the political clout of cultural property. Similarly, trafficking in antiquities from developing nations during the Cold War era has led to repatriation claims, which increase the significance of cultural property as currency in foreign relations. A simultaneous increase in the financial volume of the art and antiquities market has attracted the attention of transnational organized crime and creates funding opportunities for terrorist groups. This paper examines how security-intelligence services of World War II and the Cold War controlled both the looting and recovery of fine art and antiquities. The examination reveals the value of intelligence on foreign cultural property in diplomacy and countering threats to national security.

A Century of Hebraica at the Library of Congress

A Century of Hebraica at the Library of Congress Brad Sabin Hill (bio) Words Like Sapphires: 100 Years of Hebraica at the Library of Congress, 1912– 2012. Exhibition curated by Peggy K. Pearlstein, with the assistance of Ann Brener. The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. October 25, 2012–March 16, 2013. http://myloc.gov/exhibitions/words-like-sapphires/pages/default.aspx Perspectives on the Hebraic Book: The Myron M. Weinstein Memorial Lectures at the Library of Congress. Edited by Peggy K. Pearlstein. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 2012. Pp. 240. The Washington Haggadah, Copied and Illustrated by Joel ben Simeon. Introductions by David Stern and Katrin Kogman-Appel. Translation by David Stern. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press and the Library of Congress, 2011. Pp. 248. T heH ebraicS ectionof the Library of Congress in Washington comprises the youngest of the world’s great Hebrew collections. That it should rate so highly is nothing short of remarkable. After all, the old European libraries had been gathering Hebrew books for centuries before the decision in 1800 to establish a congressional library in the new American capital. When the Bibliothèque de France was still the [End Page 101]Bibliothèque du Roi, it already held Hebrew manuscripts from the libraries of Catherine de Medici and Cardinal Richelieu. The state libraries of Munich and Berlin similarly incorporated Hebrew books from royal, ducal, or patrician collections from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. University and state libraries in Hamburg, Leipzig, Leiden, and Basel held collections assembled by Christian Hebraists of earlier centuries. The Vatican and Milan’s Biblioteca Ambrosiana had much Hebraica by the early seventeenth century, the royal library in Turin and the Medici library in Florence had large collections by the mid-eighteenth, and a collection assembled before the century’s end by an abbot in Parma soon made its Palatina one of Europe’s richest repositories of Hebrew. 1 In 1829 Oxford’s Bodleian Library acquired an extraordinary collection of books and manuscripts assembled by the bibliophile rabbi David Oppenheim of Prague—an acquisition that was pivotal for the development of Hebraica libraries in the English-speaking world. 2In London, the British Museum’s Hebraica from aristocratic and royal collections was supplemented in the middle of the century by the purchase of exceptional Jewish libraries from Hamburg and Padua and a hoard of manuscripts gathered by the antiquarian Shapira in Jerusalem. 3The English [End Page 102]libraries’ acquisition of Jewish collections was imitated on the continent. Important private libraries went to state institutions in St. Petersburg, Amsterdam, and (in 1905) Budapest, and in like fashion the municipal and university library of Frankfurt grew into a major resource for Judaica. 4With the addition of the immense private Chasanowich collection from Russia, the public library founded by B’nai B’rith in Jerusalem in 1892 became the core of the Jewish National and University Library, now the National Library of Israel. 5By 1900, the Old World and Palestine were replete with national Hebrew collections. At the outset the Library of Congress possessed not a single Hebrew book. Thomas Jefferson’s books, acquired for the nation in 1815, included Spinoza’s Opera posthumawith its Hebrew grammar (Amsterdam, 1677) and an even older Hebrew-Latin Mishnah, Baba kamma . . . de legibus ebraeorum(Leyden, 1637), and a few volumes of Judaica, but the congressional library possessed nothing remotely like the holdings of institutions across the sea. 6Nor, for that matter, did any other American institution of the day. It wasn’t until late in the century that institutional Judaica libraries were launched in America, first at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati and then at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York. 7In 1893 a valuable Hebrew collection built in [End Page 103]Italy went to Columbia University. 8Four years later the New York Public Library opened its Jewish Division, which served as a reading room for generations of Hebrew scholars, students, and laymen. 9Yet the Library of Congress, which by the early twentieth century had Chinese, Japanese, and Russian collections, still had no Hebrew books to speak of...

Two Patterns of Modernization: An Analysis of the Ethnic Issue in Israel

While acknowledging the decisive contribution of conflict sociology to our understanding of the (Jewish) ethnic issue in Israel, this article focuses on the actual political behavior of the Mizrahi population. Instead of developing radical social protest movements as might be expected, the Mizrahim have largely supported right-wing parties and policies. The article argues that in response to their exclusion from full membership in the Jewish-Israeli collective that the veteran Ashkenazim constructed, and from the material and symbolic goods that such membership entails, the Mizrahim have built a counter-collectivity. Using the cultural tool kit that they acquired in their experience of modernization in North Africa and the Middle East, the Mizrahim have created a (semi-)traditional ethno-religious Jewish collectivity from which they have excluded veteran left-wing Ashkenazim, accusing them of disloyalty and delegitimizing their Jewish identity.

The challenges of reconstructing cultural heritage

The digitization of the Freimann Collection, unique works belonging to the Wissenschaft des Judentums (Academic Study of Judaism), was a collaborative, international initiative to virtually reconstruct a cultural Jewish heritage collection that suffered losses during World War II. These works comprised the first engagement with pre-modern Jewish religious texts using modern research methods of academia. Building off a pre-war published catalog, the project brought together remnants of the original library collection in Germany and collections that were gathered in one of the main exile locations of German-speaking Jews in the United States. The freely accessible texts ensure the enhancement of scholarship by providing long-term discovery to an unlimited audience. Digitization and virtual reconstruction are not only crucial from a digital preservation standpoint, but also allow researchers to envision the works in the context of their intellectual and historical significance. The project also generated models for international collaboration and large-scale digitization workflows.

Inside the Museum: A Museum in a museum—the experience of exhibiting Jewish collections in the Russian Museum of Ethnography, St. Petersburg

The permanent exhibition, “Jewish People on the Territory of Russia,” which opened in 2007 in the Russian Museum of Ethnography (RME) in St. Petersburg, presents Jewish collections dedicated to Ash...

Between Iberia, the Dutch Republic and Western Africa: Portuguese Sephardic long- and short-term mobility in the seventeenth century

Most scholarship on early modern Jewish history has used the Portuguese Inquisition archives to study the persecution and diaspora of Jews and New Christians. The Notarial acts of the Amsterdam Municipal archive and its Jewish collection, on the other hand, have been used mainly to reconstruct Jewish migration to the city and its Jewish community. Few studies, however, have utilised these collections to analyse Jewish short-term mobility. When utilised alongside one another, these materials prove to be an effective means to study Jewish movement. This article will shed new light on this topic by looking at seventeenth-century Jewish long- and short-term mobility between Europe and western Africa.

THE GURLITT HOARD: AN APPRAISAL OF THE ROLE OF INTERNATIONAL LAW WITH RESPECT TO NAZI-LOOTED ART

Two years ago, German authorities conducting a routine tax investigation stumbled on the largest trove of missing artworks since the end of the Second World War. The collection of paintings and drawings was discovered in a Munich apartment owned by Cornelius Gurlitt, the late son of Hildebrand Gurlitt, one of the art dealers approved by the Nazis. It is likely that most of these artworks were plundered from German museums and Jewish collections in the period 1933-1945. The discovery triggered heated debates about the obligations of the German State and the property rights over this art collection. This article looks at the ongoing Gurlitt case from an international law perspective and discusses two different but interrelated issues. First, it traces the genealogy and extrapolates the influence of the international legal instruments that have been adopted to deal with the looting of works of art committed by the Nazis. Second, it examines the available means of dispute settlement that can lead to the “just and fair” solution of Holocaust-related cases in general and the Gurlitt case in particular. The objective of this analysis is to demonstrate that international law plays a key role in addressing and reversing the effects of the Nazi looting.

The Argument for an Inclusive and Transparent Approach to Jewish Population Studies

One’s position on the debate over the nature of the Jewish collectivity and its social boundaries profoundly affects how a scholar will approach the study of Jewish demography. I take an inclusive, comparative, and global approach founded on a deep appreciation of the Jewish historical experience. This stand reflects my professional and personal experiences studying and interacting with Jewish communities in Europe, Africa, and North America. In this paper I also outline the academic influences on my attitudes and work, particularly those of my mentors, the leading Jewish demographers of the last century, Professors Roberto Bachi and Sidney Goldstein.

Identificadores Judíos y su manifestación en el Judaísmo Latinoamericano

In this article are described the concepts of ethnic group and identity. Identity as a distinctness unit of certain group and their identifiers as features wich delimit the frontÍers between "Them" and "Us". Identity as a construction that contains essential features, where their contents evolves and adapts as times goes by. The Jewish collectivity is considered within the catcgory of ethnic group, because is a group that has achieved permanency in spite of the internal and external changes. Five general Jewish features are pointed out: religion, traditions, Jewish peoplehood, Israel and Holocaust. These identity elements are beíng briefly described as well as how they are manifested and exhibit within the Latin American Jewish group.

The Priest, the Woman, and the Jewish Family: Gender and Conversion Fears in 1840s France

In 1844, the Jewish physician Lazard Terquem received a Catholic baptism on his deathbed in Paris. His Jewish relatives and various Jewish leaders challenged this conversion, claiming that the barely conscious man had been baptized against his will. While the affair began as a scandal about a man, the Jewish press quickly turned its attention to the earlier conversion of Terquem's wife and daughters. The ensuing controversy—which also extended to several other female conversions from Judaism—quickly turned into a general debate on the weakness of the Jewish woman and the threat of seduction by Catholicism and Catholic clergy. Jewish activists who warned against these threats were not just appealing to their coreligionists' fears about the survival of the Jewish collective, however. Inspired by the works of contemporary anticlerical writers such as historian Jules Michelet, they also invoked a secularist vision which depicted privatized religion practiced within family as the foundation of the nation. With this vision in mind, those Jews who drew upon Michelet's language asserted that the conversion of Jewish women was a threat not just to the Jewish collectivity but also to French society as a whole. As they did so, they clearly positioned themselves within the French liberal camp, while simultaneously employing anticlerical and gendered visions of domesticated religion in order to reinforce the boundaries between Judaism and Catholicism. At the same time, using anticlerical tropes in their campaigns against proselytism allowed Jewish men to champion their ideas about proper gender roles and female domesticity.