Jewish History Research Articles

German Jewish Soldiers and the Celebration of Yom Kippur in Wartime: Patriotic Images and Jewish Aspirations

One of the enduring themes in German Jewish history has been the deep-seated desire of Jews to be fully accepted as equals by other Germans, including the right to worship freely. Their conscription and voluntary service in the military during both the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) and World War I (1914-1918), provided an opportunity for Jews to demonstrate their fealty to the nation. Moreover, their requests for Jewish military chaplains were granted, enabling them to celebrate their traditional High Holy Days services. This article tells the story of Jewish religious worship on Yom Kippur during both wars as depicted by German artists. We examine contemporaneous accounts of the scenes depicted, and find that while some were accurate with respect to venue and mood, the most popular images of throngs of Jewish soldiers worshiping on open air battlefields were fictionalized images of events that never took place. These pictorial images, exaggerated, romanticized, and idealized, portrayed Jews as patriotic Germans, fully engaged with the wartime goals of the German government while practicing their unique forms of worship. German Jews and Jews throughout the diaspora clung to these images which became widely available on postcards, lithographs, and cloth wall hangings. They continued to be proudly displayed in Jewish homes as symbols of Jewish patriotism, until the end of World War I when blatant antisemitism falsely blamed the Jews for Germany’s defeat.

Zoya Cherkassky’s Collection Judaica: Immigration and the “Making Strange” of Jewish Art

ABSTRACT This essay analyzes Zoya Cherkassky’s early project, first presented in 2003, titled Collection Judaica (Kolektziyat yudaikah). I examine Collection Judaica not only in relation to Jewish art history, but also in the context of immigration studies. Collection Judaica aimed to explore Jewish self-perception “through an antisemitic gaze.” By means of defamiliarization (ostranenie), Cherkassky enables her viewers to feel a strong sense of alienation, as experienced by immigrants, from common Jewish practices. Her combination of Jewish and antisemitic visual materials complicates the attempt of creating “pure” Jewish art by stressing the visual danger and unattainability of such efforts.

Futures of Jewish Exemplarity

Futures of Jewish Exemplarity Jakob Egholm Feldt Georg Simmel's "The Stranger" (1908) might be considered an exemplar for the processual relationship between the particular and the general in history. As Elizabeth Goodstein notes in her book on Simmel, the stranger exemplifies Simmel's social theory, holding that over time and across various events, particularities can evolve into general forms or abstractions, and they may become a lens through which we see what has happened and what will happen in a different way.1 Of course, such processes do not constitute a rule; not all particulars become exemplary of an abstraction, a concept, or a historical and social form—but it can happen. This is the reason that, I claim, Simmel makes the example of Jewish history as the classic through which we can understand the meaning of the stranger.2 Strangeness happened to the Jews not because of something essential to Judaism or Jewishness, or because of divine missions, but because of the events, historical processes, and categories that we use, a posteriori, to illuminate the boundaries of present and historical experiences. The Jews and Jewish history became a historical and social form with which to think, to predict, and to make sense of experiences. This is not an organic, essential aspect of Jewish history; yet it has been acted upon as such many times. The Jewish stranger is itself both specific and general. It is a deeply contextual modernist form, ingrained into the historical and social imaginary of Simmel's time, as well as a new way of understanding the becoming of historical and social forms—abstractions that are both contextual and transcendent. With Simmel's framework, we can think of the relation between Jewish history and the stranger as an analogy to the relation between process [End Page 311] and form; we might even paraphrase Simmel and say that the stranger is an inorganic appendix to Jewish history—but is nevertheless treated as an organic part of it.3 Recently, research into the histories and possible futures of cosmopolitanism has revisited this conception of Jewish history, demonstrating how it opens up new expectations for the future.4 Seen from the perspective of its uses by scholars from Simmel to Zygmunt Bauman—who arguably took the stranger the furthest into Jewish history—the stranger has something to say about Jewish history.5 It is productive. Simmel was not the first to see Jewish history in this way, or the last, as Goldberg and others have discussed.6 Since the Enlightenment, historians and philosophers had considered the Jews and Jewish history an anomaly vis-à-vis general historical progress or, more specifically, an entity contributing to universal values such as "justice." Often this "anomaly" was associated with Spinozism—not as a strict following of Spinoza's philosophy but as an outlook on historical and social processes: secular yet prophetic, "one" yet diversified, contingent yet teleological.7 In this context, the example of Jewish history plays a particularly significant role. The example is not "a case," in the sense of "one among many," nor is it unique, as if unrelatable to other instances, but the exemplar is more than itself. It reveals a potentially novel prospect that follows from the dialectic between the example and the generalities that the example represents. Jewish history becomes an entity with more meaning attached to it than its plain example suggests.8 This conception of Jewish history as a theory-practice nexus has had defining impacts on modern Jewish history, from Zionism to cosmopolitan philosophies, which appropriate Jewishness as a central resource for diasporic or nomadic politicocultural ethics. [End Page 312] While Simmel considered Zionism to be unfeasible and unnecessary and his personal association with Jewishness involuntary, his writing nevertheless offers an explanation for one understanding of the trajectory of Jewish history.9 The stranger relies on a German-Jewish indexicality and an already well-established historical and social imagination in which Jewish strangeness played a significant part, but it is also much more than that. Simmel's stranger teaches us that historical events—what happens and has happened—precede the being, the subject, who becomes what it is only after...

The Stranger as a Threshold Figure

The Stranger as a Threshold Figure Amos Morris-Reich Given its subject and Georg Simmel's background, one would think that Simmel's excursus "The Stranger" (1908) and Jewish history could easily be brought into sustained conversation. Widely thought to be the most original social thinker of the turn of the twentieth century in Germany, Simmel was of Jewish descent. In "The Stranger," he refers to European Jews as the "classic example" of this social type. The excursus became a landmark in twentieth-century social theory and sociology. In practice, however, "The Stranger" and Jewish history have developed along two separate intellectual trajectories, and attempts to bring them together are frequently met by indifference or resistance by Jewish historians and Simmel scholars alike. While the former have no need for Simmel's short and indirect account to confirm the association between Jews and strangers, anyone minimally versed in Simmel's writings recognizes the impervious border between the social type of the stranger and actual Jews. Any suggestion to the contrary betrays an elementary misunderstanding of Simmel's perspective.1 Even when contextually expected or required—perhaps due to what each side takes as implied—this barrier remains impenetrable. Bringing the two together can nonetheless reveal a "Spinozist moment" with regard to Simmel and "The Stranger" as a subversive threshold figure. Possibly more than any of Simmel's other writings, "The Stranger" can be read as a queering of his own sociological theory, revealing a moment [End Page 314] of liminality in Jewish history. "Queering" is a helpful term here because, while the mental image of the stranger subconsciously fixed in the cultural imagination is generally not gender-neutral, the subversive quality of "The Stranger" stands out prominently in light of contemporary discussions of sex and gender. This liminality is evinced when we read "The Stranger" with the question of Jewish "strangeness" in mind. Of what does the "strangeness" of the stranger consist? Rather than embodying Christian theological supersessionism, racial/antisemitic doctrine, the gaze of the Other and its internalization by Jews, or Zionism's rejection of Jewish exile as an unnatural anomaly, the stranger belongs exclusively to society (in the singular) due to the interaction between individuals. Simmel's epistemology rules out any reduction of Jews as strangers to essentialist, naturalist terms.2 "The Stranger" appears to destabilize this orthodox Simmelian reading, however. Given that Simmel was the first to establish a notion of sociology free from reliance on preexisting collectivities such as nation, race, or ethnicity, Simmel scholars have learned to ignore or explain away moments that contravene this reading. The most famous lines in the excursus, for example, characterize the stranger by contrasting him—and thereby tying him together—with the wanderer: "The stranger is thus being discussed here, not in the sense often touched upon in the past, as the wanderer who comes today and goes tomorrow, but rather as the person who comes today and stays tomorrow."3 These playful, poetic, and deeply ironic lines not only suggest a social "in" and "out" but also hint at organic differences between autochthonous members of society and late arrivers, granting the latter a degree of permanency. They also seem to imply that another society, place, and time exist where the stranger was, is, or could be more naturally at home. From an orthodox point of view, this is pure blasphemy. Simmel scholars who have noted these tensions and ambiguities tend to explain them in terms of the essay's history. Forming part of the ninth chapter of the Soziologie (1908), it constitutes a short and hastily written detour [End Page 315] in a chapter dealing with space and the spatial dimensions of social organization.4 For no obvious reason, it was translated into English (and other languages), whereupon it gained a life of its own. Reprinted numerous times, it has become a social-theory classic, serving as the cornerstone of the sociological paradigm known as the "marginal man," developed by scholars at the University of Chicago. The tensions can also be read as puncturing a purified interpretation of Simmel's sociology. Although a social type, organic—racial, biological, genetic—elements irreducible to the formal theory...

Hero and Outcast: César Tiempo and the History of Jews in Argentina

Hero and Outcast:César Tiempo and the History of Jews in Argentina Raanan Rein (bio) Keywords Argentina, Jewish-Argentines, Peronism, César Tiempo, Israel Zeitlin In the 1930s, the writer César Tiempo (whose pseudonym was Israel Zeitlin) was a hero of Argentina's organized Jewish community. At the age of 29, Tiempo led the campaign against the antisemitic director of the Biblioteca Nacional, Gustavo Martínez zuviría, the hugely popular novelist known as Hugo Wast. In 1935, Tiempo published his La campaña antisemita y el director de la Biblioteca Nacional (The antisemitic campaign and the director of the National Library), denouncing the bestselling books El Kahal and Oro, in which Martínez Zuviría had woven the plot of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion into a Buenos Aires context.1 The young Jewish-Argentine author instantly became a celebrity in the local Jewish community and was flooded with invitations to numerous events and conferences in a variety of community institutions. Twenty years later, however, Tiempo had become a persona non grata in the community. There were no more invitations to give talks, no reviews of his books, barely any mention of him in the Yiddish or Spanish Jewish press. The change of status from hero to pariah came as a result of Tiempo's acceptance of the editorship of the cultural supplement of La Prensa, the daily newspaper by then highly identified with the Peronist government. Jews—and especially Jewish intellectuals—were not supposed to support the plebian movement headed by Colonel Juan Domingo Perón. César Tiempo's position annoyed many Jewish Argentines as it challenged the image of a homogeneous, unified community opposing the supposedly fascistoid politics of Peronism that served the interests of the working and not the middle class. I was intrigued by this remarkable intellectual many years ago when I came across his first book of poems, Versos de una …, published in 1926 [End Page 512] under the feminine pseudonym Clara Beter.2 This slim volume pretended to be the poetic diary of a Jewish prostitute with social concerns. Tiempo's identification with this humble character led him to include an element of his own family history in the book. Back then, Tiempo had collaborated with the so-called Boedo writers, characterized by their sense of social commitment. This tendency kept drawing him toward "the underdogs" (los de abajo). Members of the Boedo group loved this type of social literature by Clara, who was simultaneously separated from her community of origin (Ukraine) and her host society (Argentina): I give myself to everyone, but I belong to no one;To earn my bread, I sell my bodyWhat must I sell to keepMy heart, my sorrows and my dreams intact? … SometimesI am even ashamed to cryThinking how small my distress isCompared with the enormous universal sorrow.3 Reading these lines, one can easily understand what would later lead Tiempo to embrace Peronism, the self-proclaimed movement of Justicialismo (from the word justicia, justice). Years later, I decided to use the trajectory of César Tiempo as a lens to discuss several issues that either have not been previously addressed or that were studied in traditional ways and therefore warranted a fresh new look. Many history books tell us that despite Juan Perón's efforts to eradicate antisemitism and his cultivation of close relations with the state of Israel throughout the Peronist decade of 1946–55, he failed in his attempts to enlist the support of significant sectors of Argentina's Jewish community. Historians and commentators assert that most Jewish-Argentines remained hostile to Perón, and that Perón's attempts to ingratiate himself with the community—for example, by setting up the Peronist Jewish organization known as the Organización Israelita Argentina (OIA—the Argentine Jewish Organization)—were all to no avail. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, as the extent of the Jewish Holocaust in Europe became clear, Jewish-Argentines, who were mostly of Eastern and Central European origin, were understandably wary of a leader who had supported Argentine neutrality during the war. The support that Perón had...

ЄВРЕЙСЬКІ ПОГРОМИ КІНЦЯ ХІХ – ПОЧАТКУ ХХ СТ. У СУЧАСНІЙ УКРАЇНСЬКІЙ ІСТОРІОГРАФІЇ

The article analyzes modern tendencies in Ukrainian historiography of XIX – and early XX century Jewish pogroms. General works on the history of Ukraine, special works devoted to anti-Jewish violence, and the study of the similar problems, that has been published in the last two decades, are considered. The general context of works, their sources, previous researches influence, conclusions of which the authors came, etc. are analyzed. Reading the intelligence on the pogroms, we can see, that the pogroms were largely the result of modernization, internal migration, the relocation to Ukraine of workers from the Russian provinces of the Romanov Empire and so on. Pogroms are also viewed in the context of social and revolutionary movements. That is, the violence, according to researchers, led to the emergence of Zionism. Also, Jews were actively involved to the left movement, while falling victim to extreme Russian nationalists and chauvinists - the Black Hundreds. We have special works dedicated to the pogroms of the first and second waves, which, however, are not so many. Their authors find out the causes and consequences of the pogroms, the significance of violence for the Jewish community and Ukrainian-Jewish relations, the attitude of the authorities and society to these acts of violence, and so on. Some Ukrainian historians research the problem of pogroms on various issues. Among them are works on the history of Jews from different regions of Ukraine, communities of individual cities, Ukraine as a whole; the history of the Ukrainian peasantry, the monarchical and Black Hundred movement in Ukraine, the revolutionary events of 1905-1907, migration processes in Ukrainian lands, the formation of modern nations, the life and work of prominent figures and more. The authors conduct full-fledged research using a wide source base, including archival materials, which, however, are often factual in nature. This is a disadvantage, because historians are "captured" by the sources on which they rely. We also have conceptual research that refers to a broad historiography of the problem, including foreign. These works often draw the reader's attention to a broader - the imperial, modernization or migration context. It is important, that researchers see actors of Ukrainian history in the Jewish population. Because of this, they are much less interested in the future of the Jews who left the Ukrainian lands than in the researchers of Jewish history.

Maimonides: Flexible Leadership

A leader’s flexibility can be expressed via a multi-dimensional structure containing a variety of dynamics and context-dependent adaptations. Leaders who possess these abilities can inspire a wide range of people to trust and follow them. This article focuses on the leadership style of Maimonides, a medieval scholar who became one of the most influential figures in Jewish history. His success in appealing to and influencing vast and varied populations can be explained through the flexible leadership model. The model of flexible leadership demonstrated by Maimonides will serve as a model for research on other leaders in various fields. In addition, the potential of the model, as well as how it is demonstrated by Maimonides’ leadership style, can inspire leaders in a complex and changing reality.

Siberian Myth in the Jewish History: Jews of Siberia as a Religious Group

The present article aims to analyze the religious practices of Siberian Jews in a broad Jewish context. It presents a review of the religious life of the Jews isolated from traditional centers, with a focus on the models they were guided by in developing their communal life and the ways in which they maintained their connection with the Jewish world. The research is primarily based on the analysis of Jewish periodicals and the material culture of Siberian Jews (synagogue buildings, Jewish cemeteries, and ceremonial objects). The authors contest the view of Siberian Jews as a unique group, widespread in historiography, as untenable. Siberian Jewry developed within the framework of the modernized model, common in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and other cities outside the Pale of Settlement as well as among Jews in large cities of the Pale. The forms of religious observance in Siberia are similar to those typical for regions and cities with a rapid pace of modernization of the Jewish population.

Living under the Evil Pope: The Hebrew “Chronicle of Pope Paul IV” by Benjamin Nehemiah ben Elnathan from Civitanova Marche (16th Cent.). Martina Mampieri. Studies in Jewish History and Culture 58. Leiden: Brill, 2020. xx + 400 pp. €168.

Living under the Evil Pope: The Hebrew “Chronicle of Pope Paul IV” by Benjamin Nehemiah ben Elnathan from Civitanova Marche (16th Cent.). Martina Mampieri. Studies in Jewish History and Culture 58. Leiden: Brill, 2020. xx + 400 pp. €168.

Żydowskie aktorki z Polski w rolach szekspirowskich w teatrze jidysz

Jewish Actresses From Poland in Shakespearean Roles In the Yiddish Theater The article aims at analyzing the role played by Jewish actresses in the development of the Shakespearean Yiddish theater. The paper includes the profiles of artists coming from Poland and/or working in the Polish lands: Bertha Kalisch, Miriam Orleska, and Ester Goldenberg, who contributed to popularization of Shakespeare’s works among the Jewish community. Moreover, the article illustrates their contribution to the changes in the perception of Jewish theater from the “jargon drama” enterprise to an ambitious cultural institution with a Shakespearean repertoire. Among those discussed are the characters of Hamlet performed by Kalisch, Portia (The Merchant of Venice) played by Orleska, Jessica (The Merchant of Venice), and Ariel (The Tempest) interpreted by Goldenberg, and their assessment. The reception of these stage creations of Shakespearean heroes is analyzed on the basis of press materials published in daily newspapers and weeklies in Yiddish, Polish, and English. Some academic studies on the premieres of Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, and The Tempest with participation of Jewish female artists have already been conducted, but their authors did not analyze the roles performed by those actresses and did not refer to the sources in Yiddish at all. The article discusses not only the artistic activities of Kalisch, Orleska, and Goldenberg, but also attempts to analyze the reception of the characters created by the latter two artists from the perspective of the social and political relations in the Second Polish Republic. Moreover, efforts were made to show that Jewish actresses, by impersonating heroines and heroes of Shakespeare’s plays, proved with their style of acting, professional preparation, and understanding of the nuances of the performed characters that Yiddish theater definitely deserved to be called a temple of art. Their creations became an inherent part of the history of Jewish, and thus the world’s Shakespearean theater.

Trends in the Study of Antisemitism in United States History

Trends in the Study of Antisemitism in United States History1 Britt P. Tevis (bio) Identifying trends in the study of antisemitism in American history is a complicated task because historians have mostly focused their attention on other aspects of the American Jewish experience.2 Further, by and large, those works that examine antisemitism in the United States posit that anti-Jewish animus has been relatively fleeting and generally marginal to United States history and the American Jewish experience. Indeed, antisemitism in the United States has most often been framed as an outlier and premodern relic. According to this argument, America's [End Page 255] commitment to religious freedom, democracy, and pluralism has deterred the state from perpetuating anti-Jewish discrimination or bigoty. Thus, understanding antisemitism in America requires studying social spaces and parsing personal interactions between Jews and non-Jews.3 Systemic forms of discrimination such as university quotas, violent incidents such as the lynching of Leo Frank, and the dissemination of anti-Jewish propaganda by influential Americans such as Henry Ford appear as outliers. Simply stated, to the extent that American Jewish historians have examined antisemitism, it has been largely to dismiss it as a serious, lasting problem woven into the fabric of US history. The tendency to present antisemitism in the United States as atypical, momentary, and confined to private realms is especially noteworthy in several important surveys of American Jewish history.4 Trends in scholarship on antisemitism in the United States must be understood in the context of how American Jewish historians have promoted the idea that antisemitism in the United States has been a relatively insignificant aberration.5 As this article shows, conceptualizations of antisemitism as irregular, relatively harmless, and primarily social originated in the 1950s, when academic historians first took an interest in studying American antisemitism in the context of a larger debate about populism, exceptionalism, and objectivity. The essential voices to emerge from this discussion were those of immigration historians Oscar Handlin (1915–2011) and John Higham (1920–2003). Their conceptualizations of anti-Jewish animus became touchstones for discussion of antisemitism in subsequent decades. Though Handlin and Higham disagreed on certain details, they agreed on antisemitism's limited significance and short-lived nature, seeing in it a vestige rather than a manifestation of modernity. Since the 1970s, some historians have advanced an understanding of anti-Jewish animus [End Page 256] that recognizes it as both a persistent force, which existed beyond social realms. Still, Handlin and Higham's ideas (especially Higham's) remain influential, and many American Jewish historians continue to present antisemitism as largely insignificant, momentary, primarily social. Recognizing the weight of Handlin and Higham's claims in American Jewish historical scholarship from the past seventy years renders the state of the field and its attendant trends understandable. Because most historians who have published on the history of antisemitism in American history have done so either as dissenters within the field of American Jewish history or as historians from other fields interested in examining anti-Jewish animus in passing, collectively, existing scholarship presents antisemitism as episodic. Periodic surges in interest have proved short-lived and thus pertinent research has appeared haphazardly. Research exploring given incidents or themes have materialized here and there yet the dynamics and nature of antisemitism in the United States have yet to be sufficiently theorized or explained. At the same time, despite the diffuse nature of relevant scholarship, collectively it suggests that anti-Jewish animus constitutes an integral feature of American history, rather than a momentary and relatively innocuous phenomenon that is unrelated to the state.6 Accordingly, this article concludes by offering some suggestions for future researchers. FORMATIVE SCHOLARSHIP ON ANTISEMITISM IN THE UNITED STATES Academic historians first took interest in antisemitism in the United States in the 1950s just as American Jewry came to the discipline's attention.7 American historians considered anti-Jewish animus in the United States as they engaged in contemporaneous debates about populism, the late nineteenth-century political movement of farmers and laborers, and reassessed 1930s scholarship.8 As they developed their narratives of American history, scholars such as Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, and [End Page 257] others articulated divergent views on...

Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651–1825 by Aviva Ben-Ur

Reviewed by: Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651–1825 by Aviva Ben-Ur Sarah Phillips Casteel (bio) Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651–1825. By Aviva Ben-Ur, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 358 pp. Aviva Ben-Ur's brilliant new history of Suriname's Portuguese Jews not only illuminates the colonial formation of a major Atlantic Jewish community but also maps important new methodological and conceptual directions for the nascent field of Caribbean Jewish studies. Within the Jewish Caribbean, the Surinamese community is a particularly rich subject for the historian because of the unique legal status it enjoyed—one that is reflected in its abundant records. While the exceptionality of Surinamese Jewry has long been recognized, Ben-Ur recasts the terms of that uniqueness, pointing not only to the community's territorial and legal autonomy but also its inclusion of Eurafricans. Only in Suriname did Eurafrican Jews "emerg[e] as a distinct and separate class" with cultural and institutional independence (261). Moreover, Ben-Ur reframes the exceptionality of the famed Jewish agricultural village of Jodensavanne ("the Jews' Savannah"), which she presents less as a haven of religious freedom than a frontier settlement that contained Jewish difference while advancing the interests of empire. Historical scholarship on Caribbean Jewry has grown steadily over the past two decades, often positioning itself against Jewish historiographies that relegate the Caribbean to the margins. In a sign of the field's maturation, Ben-Ur instead largely presents her study as a corrective to previous Caribbean Jewish scholarship. She argues that such scholarship's focus on Jewish identity and perspectives has tended to marginalize enslaved peoples or construct them as passive observers of Jewish life. By contrast, Ben-Ur adopts an Atlantic history model in which the story of Surinamese Jewry becomes inseparable from that of enslaved peoples. With its emphasis on contact and exchange, the Atlantic history lens enables Ben-Ur to attend to the voices of the silenced and to explore the implications of Surinamese Jewish history for the study of Africans in the Americas. This paradigm shift is reflected in the book's structure, which devotes two chapters to Eurafrican Jews and a third to enslaved people. Ben-Ur reminds us that Suriname's status as one of the largest slave societies in the Americas was the fundamental condition of the Jews' presence there. The opening chapter debunks the idealized image of Jodensavanne as a [End Page 431] "new Jerusalem" that can be traced back to Surinamese Jewish historian David Nassy's Essai historique sur la colonie de Surinam (1788). While Nassy described Jodensavanne as a peaceful haven, Ben-Ur emphasizes that the majority of Jodensavanne's inhabitants were enslaved Africans whose labor sustained the village. Situated on the frontier, Jodensavanne "serve[d] as a human bulwark against Indian and Maroon attacks" and later as a military outpost (77). Its synagogue square was the designated site for the violent punishment of enslaved people. The central paradox, captured in the book's title, is that Jewish autonomy in Suriname was bound up with the unfreedom of enslaved Africans. The second chapter further nuances previous accounts of Surinamese Jewish autonomy by examining internal and external challenges to Jewish communal authority, while the third chapter addresses Portuguese Jewish rootedness in Suriname. Ben-Ur shows how Jewishness became "nearly synonymous with settler society" through the community's longevity, demographic presence, and deepening interaction with the African-descended population (136). The subsequent two chapters are devoted to the Eurafrican Jewish population that resulted from sexual exploitation of enslaved women and slave concubinage. Eurafrican children were routinely converted to Judaism and sometimes manumitted and inherited by their Jewish owners, practices that enabled Judaism to survive in Suriname. As Eurafrican Jews grew in number and status, they became increasingly activist, forming their own society, Darhe Jesarim. While Darhe Jesarim's quest for ritual equality has previously been documented, Ben-Ur resituates this episode as part of a larger struggle of free people of color to obtain rights. She further makes the case that Judaism needs to be recognized as a significant religious presence in the lives of...

Antisemitism, American Jewish Historians, and their Publics

Antisemitism, American Jewish Historians, and their Publics

State of the Field: The Animating Tensions of Canadian Jewish Historiography

State of the Field:The Animating Tensions of Canadian Jewish Historiography David S. Koffman (bio) and Pierre Anctil (bio) On November 7, 2018, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau offered an apology for Canada's 1939 federal government decision to deny entry to the MS St. Louis, a German ocean liner that had carried 937 Jewish refugees. The ship would eventually return to Germany and 227 of its passengers would ultimately be caught in the Nazi death dragnet. The refusal of multiple countries to accept these refugees (Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands each accepted asylum seekers) helped solidify the Nazis' confidence that the western world didn't care much for the plight of Jews, already apparent at the Evian Conference a year prior. In Canada, the MS St. Louis became shorthand for the country's abysmal wartime record regarding Jewish refugees. Canada accepted the fewest Jews of any refugee-accepting nation in the world: all told, a meager 7,400 souls.1 Credit for the fact that Canadians remember the St. Louis episode and that Canada's prime minister would acknowledge its dismal Naziera policies on immigration and refugees, is largely due to the scholarly work of the Canadian Jewish historians Irving Abella and Harold Troper.2 None is Too Many became and remains essential reading for Canadian political leaders, academics, and public intellectuals. The book has been credited with influencing humanitarian and immigration policy decisions [End Page 403] since it was first published in 1983.3 (Curiously, it has not yet been translated into French.) Rarely have historians of Canadian Jewish life reached so far into Canadian national public consciousness, but the case allows us to see something of the impact that Canadian Jewish historical scholarship has had on Canadian life.4 This essay aims to introduce readers to the literatures of and debates within the field of Canadian Jewish history, a field we characterize as maturing, if segmented, and one that has remained publicly engaged since the 1980s. WIDE-ANGLE LENSES For a relatively small field, Canadian Jewish history has received an outsized share of attention. There have been several attempts to capture, qualify, and quantify output within the field. A 1992 annotated bibliography by Stuart Schoenfeld and Dwight Daignault5 was soon followed by Morton Weinfeld's sociological analysis of the features that distinguish Canadian Jewry from its American counterpart.6 Weinfeld predicted that the two Jewish communities would ultimately converge into one indistinguishable, continental Jewry. These two works complement Gerald Tulchinsky's 2008 Canada's Jews: A People's Journey, a synthesis of his two previous volumes.7 Until his death in 2017, Tulchinsky was widely [End Page 404] recognized as the preeminent historian of Canadian Jewish life. His long-standing interests in political, labor, and business history shaped his view, and that of others, of the Canadian Jewish past as a history that focused on the social life of Jews as the community developed an institutional grounding for self-preservation and defense. According to this view, immigrants and their descendants worked to integrate into local and national cultures, and to safeguard their interests in the realm of politics, both domestic and international. Other historians have treated areas that Tulchinsky's work ignored or deemphasized, including religious transformation and accommodation; developments in Jewish culture, language and letters; and the histories of non-Ashkenazi, non-Orthodox Jewries. Richard Menkis and Ira Robinson have published important studies on the history of Judaism. Menkis has worked on the history of Conservative and Reform Judaism;8 Robinson has published on the Eastern European rabbinate in Canada;9 and the two together cut an innovative path using sermons as sources for interrogating the ideological, contextual, and circulation of religious ideas.10 Yolande Cohen has published extensively on the Sephardi experience in Canada11 —a sub-field that remains understudied—and Rebecca Margolis, Pierre Anctil, and others have published works on the history of Yiddish culture in Canada.12 [End Page 405] Tulchinsky's efforts in writing wide-angle work have been emulated by others over the past decade and a half. One collection foregrounded studies of Canadian Jewish subjects from disciplines largely foreign to Tulchinsky's social history, including visual arts, literature...

When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation by Paula Fredriksen

Reviewed by: When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation by Paula Fredriksen Anthony Giambrone O.P. When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation by Paula Fredriksen (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 272 pp. By natural disposition, I am inclined to follow the (now not so) New Criticism, but Paula Fredriksen has written a book that begs for a good old-fashioned Freudian reading: When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation. The title hides an autobiographical interest, for Fredriksen is herself a Jew who was a Christian. Still more: she is a former-Catholic Jewish historian of early Jewish Christians, who on her last page rejects her own catchy title as a distorting anachronism. "Christians" did not yet exist in that far-away first generation, she confesses, only misguided Jews who thought that they would be history's last. In the meantime, of course, when the world did not end, these misguided Jews somehow turned into misguided Christians, and the book ends as an ethical thrust aimed at "one of the West's most sustained fonts of anti-Judaism" (183), namely Christianity, a faith built on layer upon layer of illusion. Lamentable as Christian anti-Judaism surely is, one wonders if a moralizing font of vulgarized ex-Christian "Jewish" anti-Christianism, dispensing seductively packaged speculative historical reconstructions, is what better Christian–Jewish relations really needed. At the base of the study stands a sharp variant on a perfectly benign first principle of historical reason: Jesus was a Jew. From here, with characteristic verve, the book—which is a kind of smashed-together summary of positions developed in her previous works (e.g., Jesus of Nazareth, King of Jews [1999] and Paul, the Pagan's Apostle [2017])—launches out upon Fredriksen's long-standing enterprise of rethinking and rewriting the entirety of Christian origins as a fully Jewish story. Such a project is obviously unobjectionable as far as it goes, though it takes many turns and pronounces many judgments that can and really should be disputed and resisted. A few [End Page 303] select issues will be evoked below. In essence, for Fredriksen, Jesus was a doubly duped victim, bilked by the failure of history to end and swindled by a mismanaged political game, a religious enthusiast who, by a bungled act of Roman plotting, unwittingly founded a new Jewish lunatic fringe: a crowd of mentally "marginal Jews" made in his image, a first-century sect of blundering and impervious prophetic dullness. Such a formulation freely sounds unfair and overstated. It is actually rather accurate, however, and at least serves to signal the problem of genre at the outset. Professionally responsible as it strives to be and personal as it inevitably is, the text is in every way a typical trade-book: meant for mass consumption (and mass sales) and thereby sold to (well-selling) sensationalistic views. In this connection it is merely the latest, well-paced and well-written iteration of the "Jesus the Failed Millenarian Prophet" series—which, like Star Wars books, at some point all start to look the same, with some minimal rearrangement of wookiees and death stars. The genus is well-known. Atop the turn to apocalyptic Judaism and a misled Jesus—now classic with its Schweitzerean pedigree—comes the accustomed citation of Leon Festinger and company's When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World. This combination of historical and sociological modeling then spins out the whole paradigm. Jesus was gravely mistaken in his expectation of the imminent end of the world and, on this point, his followers proved to be good disciples—even better than the master. For, again and again, they re-tried the same prophecy, repeatedly getting it wrong in their turn, reinterpreting and reviving the discredited view with a dense ingenuity born of complete and excitable delusion. In Fredriksen's reconstruction, we thus trace the arc through four specific eschatological let-downs: Jesus at his final Passover; then again when the resurrection appearances stopped; once more during the tense showdown with Caligula; and finally, during the Great Revolt against Rome. This chronicle of an unrelieved string of the...

Jewish Historiography Between Socialism and Nationalism: A Portrait of Historian Isaiah Trunk

Isaiah Trunk (1905–81), the author of the classic work Judenrat, was one of the few Polish Jewish historians to survive the Holocaust. His trajectory reflects the key political and intellectual experiences and developments that shaped Jewish historiography in the twentieth century, from the Russian Revolution and the revival of Yiddish culture in the interwar years to Stalinism, the Holocaust, and the period of relative peace and prosperity in the postwar United States. The Holocaust and Stalinism left Trunk disillusioned with socialist internationalism and prompted a shift in his historical thinking “from class to nation.” Nevertheless, his lifelong commitment to Bundism reflected his determination to fight for the preservation of Polish Jewish culture, including its socialist traditions. Moreover, throughout his life, he retained a concern for social equality and the conviction that history, as an empirical science, was an important weapon in the struggle against antisemitism.

The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902: Immigrant Housewives and the Riots That Shook New York City by Scott D. Seligman

Reviewed by: The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902: Immigrant Housewives and the Riots That Shook New York City by Scott D. Seligman Melissa R. Klapper (bio) The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902: Immigrant Housewives and the Riots That Shook New York City By Scott D. Seligman. Lincoln, NB: Potomac Books, 2020. xxxiii + 276 pp. Reviewing The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902 in the summer of 2021, it is impossible not to think about the historical parallels between the "riots" of more than a century ago and the marches following the murder of George Floyd during the summer of 2020. Obviously the direct circumstances and the scale are not at all the same, but the spread of the protests beyond the initial location; the connections between local and national conditions; the conflation of protests and riots; the dismissal of instigating figures as naïfs in over their heads; the wildly varying media coverage; the pronouncements of government officials at the local, state, and national levels; and quite possibly the long-lasting impact of participation are, at the least, reminiscent of one another. Equally central to any review of Scott D. Seligman's book is the bright light still cast by Paula E. Hyman's pathbreaking article "Immigrant Women and Consumer Protest: The New York City Kosher Meat Boycott of 1902," published in American Jewish History in 1980. This was an early example of American Jewish women's history and has arguably remained one of the most influential scholarly articles in the field. While Seligman certainly fleshes out the story of the 1902 protests in much more detail than was possible in an article, it is unfortunate that he did not learn more from Hyman's work than the basic narrative. Even in 1980, without the benefit of the decades of corroborating research to come, Hyman understood that the women she was writing about were savvy political actors who strategically deployed gender within economic and religious constraints to achieve their goals. When they worked with [End Page 287] male allies, as they did during the kosher meat boycott and within the labor movement more generally, they were making a calculated choice rather than bowing to the seemingly inevitable dominance of men. As Hyman would argue in later work, immigrant Jewish women's activism stemmed not only from their immediate circumstances, but also their long experiences as public actors in eastern Europe, where the gender norms were quite different than in their new homeland. Seligman spins a good yarn, but The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902 is fundamentally flawed by its consistent dismissal of the Jewish women on the Lower East Side and in other thickly populated Jewish enclaves as ignorant, uneducated housewives who could not possibly have brought preexisting political acumen to their actions. His thin knowledge of modern Jewish women's history—and American Jewish history more generally—limits the scholarly impact of the book. Still, there are pleasures and contributions to be found in The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902. Seligman provides both a helpful list of the major cast of characters, many of whom will be unknown to most readers, and a detailed timeline of the boycotts, which lasted for several weeks and spread to places other than the Lower East Side. The book is smoothly written and adopts a sort of mini-cliffhanger style so that readers will want to proceed immediately from one chapter to the next. To his credit, Seligman integrates Yiddish periodical coverage of the boycott as well as intensive research into the mainstream press, and he frequently points out the different approaches his various sources took to the events as they unfolded. He also, importantly, highlights the experiences of the Jewish retail butchers who were caught between the demands of consumers and the pressures exerted by the wholesale kosher meat slaughterers, who themselves were at the mercy of the national Beef Trust, which was being investigated under antitrust laws at the very moment of the boycott. The chapters on the history of beef supply chains and the special circumstances of bringing kosher beef to market tell a fascinating tale. Seligman's contribution on this front is significant, as he...

Jews of the Italian Kingdom: from Emancipation to Racial Law (1870—1938)

The article analyzes the socio-economic situation of Jews in the Italian kingdom during the formation of a national state (1870) before the adoption of racial laws in 1938. The issue of the role of education in the life of the Jewish population as a means of integration into Italian society is discussed. A particularly significant event in the life of the Jewish population is the emergence of their own press, thanks to which Italian Jews could broadcast knowledge not only among their fellow tribesmen, but also in non-Jewish environments. However, the radical turn of the fascist regime towards anti-Jewish legislation, which took place in 1938, radically changed this situation. Soon after, Jews were excluded from the life of the Italian nation. One of the most tragic and dramatic periods in the Jewish history of the 20th century will last for seven whole years.

Bricks without Mortar: Looking at Lists

Bricks without Mortar:Looking at Lists Natalie Dohrmann Hair Dye Wet Cat food Bra, tights Vodka So reads a crumpled scrap of paper found in a gutter in Bologna and reproduced in large scale by conceptual artist Angela Lorenz. The note is nothing really, a discarded shopping list. Yet it is also a short story, a haiku, the opening scene in a film—or is it the closing scene? A world is eager to spin out from it, and after it is rescaled, reproduced, and displayed in a Bolognese gallery, the demand for meaning exerted by the scribbled words becomes even more insistent. As they do our own desks or our minds at 3 a.m., lists litter the archives of Jewish history. They appear in court documents and wills, all over the Bible and rabbinic literature, in the margins of literary works, as indices and tables of contents, as genealogies, containing the names of donors, in recipes, and bills of lading. They are utilitarian and ubiquitous, and perhaps for this reason, the list can be the fly-over country within a longer prose document, signaling that the text we are reading is about to get monotonous and the energy of the narrative about to deflate. But pause a minute, and the list will begin to stir. This JQR forum maps a range of ways that the list itself is an assertive literary genre, whose formal elements stake their own claims to the meaning of items enumerated. It may not be an accident that J. Z. Smith grants Judaism the honor of revealing the meaning-generating potential of list-ness that he sees as central to the dynamic experience of the sacred itself. Smith argues that the list contains the Ur-logic of scriptures—a canon is, after all, a list. A closed canon loosens the contents from the constraints of syntax—each of its several parts gaining the resonance of the whole, a transformation that unleashes the recombinant collaging of midrash and the creative profusion of gematria. Daniel Lord Smail observes that lists lack verbs, rendering their elements at first glance as akin to a pile of bricks without mortar. [End Page 335] Our forum shows that a lack of verbs poses no impediment to the form's semantic potential and vigor. On the contrary, it's an accelerant. _____ The scholars in this forum were invited to choose a list from their own field of study, then reproduce it and bring their distinctive lenses to its analysis, paying special attention to the form itself. Many lists are engendered by rupture (one rarely inventories one's property unless that property is in jeopardy or in transition) and, so, mark the joins in time. Others do the epistemological work of classification. Still others do things that are wholly unexpected, like the list you'll read that authorizes a religious performance. Joshua Teplitsky begins with a simple ledger recording the names of Jews who worked to manage a plague outbreak in Prague in 1713. Much can be learned about the Jewish community not only by parsing the list's ordering and implicit valuations, but also by assessing the meaning of its commissioning by and storage in the Bohemian Chancery of the Habsburg Monarchy. Leora Auslander quickens the ghosts in two Holocaust documents, one a ghoulish onomasticon of Jews deported from France to Auschwitz in 1944, the other an inventory of the confiscated furniture belonging to a family that was among those same deportees. She distinguishes the list from the inventory, which, unlike the spare column of names, holds in its weft traces of full humans who once built lives and families and futures. Dina Danon looks at a happier inventory: the contents of the trousseau of a late nineteenth-century Jewish Ottoman bride. Her modest catalog of jackets and undergarments freezes a moment of a world in flux and, in Danon's reading, serves as an unexpected check on grand narratives of Jewish modernity. Daniel Lord Smail's exemplum is a fourteenth-century court inventory of the moveable property of a recently deceased Jewish householder. Uncovering the document's organizing principle affords him an insight into medieval home economics that...

Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries by David Sorkin

Reviewed by: Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries by David Sorkin Simon Rabinovitch David Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2019). Pp. 528; 17 b/w illus., 11 maps. $35.00 cloth. "Jewish emancipation" has a bit of a bad rap. The phrase has come to be associated with, at best, highly contingent political rights in Europe and the futility of Jewish "assimilation," and at worst, failure in the form of the Holocaust. The [End Page 113] success of individual Jews in joining the professions, in economic advancement, and in cultural contributions in places where emancipation was most far-reaching has also been seen as contributing to the birth of modern antisemitism and the antisemites' fear of Jews' infiltration from within European society. But what was, or is, "Jewish emancipation?" Despite the word's connotations today of freedom from bondage by grand declaration, the term "emancipation" as applied to Jews follows the meaning applied to other persecuted religious groups, such as Catholics in England before 1829, and refers to the rather haphazard and variable process of Jews gaining legal rights and joining the body politic. As David Sorkin argues in Jewish Emancipation: A History of Across Five Centuries, when viewed as a long-term process affecting all modern Jews, emancipation is "the principal event of modern Jewish history" (354); to understand modern Jewish history, we therefore need to zoom out and understand the process of how states and Jews struggled to define Jewish rights, individually and as a group. We also need to understand that how states changed the way they governed the political rights of Jews fit into more general processes of modern state formation—as Sorkin convincingly argues, Jewish emancipation cannot be separated from the development of modern citizenship, and modern citizenship cannot be separated from the process in which Europe decorporated its laws and society. When states first created the concept of citizenship, they did not simply shake off the old corporate privileges—religion provided the hierarchy around which modern citizenship was built. While Sorkin identifies regions with politically similar states (he divides Europe into western, central, and eastern parts, and also discusses the Ottoman Empire and the Atlantic world), his main point is that emancipation is hyper-local; in no two places does the process of Jews gaining political rights unfold the same way. Sorkin argues that much of the groundwork for civil equality, and how the process of emancipation would unravel in a given place, was built when societies were still governed by group privileges and disabilities. In city-states where Jews made up one of several merchant colonies, the privileges Jews gained on par with others translated into civil equality as states adopted modern notions of citizenship. Sorkin begins with an overview of how, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a number of European commercial hubs—Ancona, Venice, Livorno, Bordeaux, Hamburg, Amsterdam, and London—gave Jews, or sometimes New Christians who reverted back to Judaism, considerable group privileges. Historians have long focused on Amsterdam's role as an early harbinger of Jewish modernity, but Sorkin suggests that what made Amsterdam, along with London and Bordeaux, remarkable, is that in the transition from corporate legal rights to citizenship, the Jews' corporate parity transformed into equal citizenship. Jews gained similar corporate privileges on par with Christian burghers in cities and towns in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, especially those owned by members of the Polish nobility, but the partitioning of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century put the fate of Jewish rights in the hands of Prussia, Austria, and Russia. In contrast to western and eastern Europe, the Holy Roman Empire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries granted far-reaching individual rights to a tiny Jewish elite, while resisting the extension of corporate privilege and seeking to limit the presence and visibility of Jews. It is Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II (r. 1765–1790) who would provide a model of contingent emancipation: with each legislative act increasing their privileges, Jews were expected to reciprocate through integration in dress, language, and military service. Joseph II's model of a finely managed, localized, and progressively radical process of integrating...