Local Jews Research Articles

The Jews of Beirut: The Rise of a Levantine Community, 1860s–1930s by Tomer Levi (review)

Reviewed by: The Jews of Beirut: The Rise of a Levantine Community, 1860s–1930s by Tomer Levi Dario Miccoli Tomer Levi. The Jews of Beirut: The Rise of a Levantine Community, 1860s–1930s. New York: Peter Lang, 2012. Pp. Xiv + 230. Cloth $82.95. ISBN 9781433117091. Among the Jewish communities of the modern Eastern Mediterranean, that of Beirut is probably the least known and researched. The Jews of Beirut: The Rise of a Levantine Community, 1860s–1930s by Tomer Levi takes on the [End Page 92] challenge of filling this gap, investigating the emergence of what he defines as a Levantine Jewish community in the period from the 1860s to the 1930s. The first chapter gives a historical overview of the Levant and of the Jews of Alexandria, Izmir, and Beirut in the late Ottoman era. Levi clarifies that starting from the mid-nineteenth century these three cities shared a phenomenal economic expansion, which in turn prompted the migration of Jews—and of many other people, too—from neighboring areas, leading to the formation of cosmopolitan and largely middle class Jewish communities. In the second chapter, the author focuses on the communal organization of Beirut Jews, noting that until 1908 a small and unorganized Jewish community lived in the city. It was only in the aftermath of the Young Turk Revolution, with the development of the port of Beirut, that the Jewish community increased in size and underwent a significant restructuring. With the advent of the French mandate over Lebanon in 1920, the Jewish leadership further consolidated its position, entering a period of prosperity and socio-political stability that continued into the late 1940s. As explained in the third chapter, during the French mandate the Jews of Beirut encountered three different ideologies: the French model of assimilation proposed by the Alliance Israélite Universelle, Zionism, and the reformism of the B’nai B’rith, the American-based Jewish fraternal organization, that managed to become the most attractive one to Beirut Jews, thanks to its ideals of community progress and social activism. In the fourth chapter, Levi analyzes the scarce success of the Alliance and the attempts to merge its schools with the communal Talmud-Torah in the 1920s. The Alliance did not gain the favor of Beirut Jews for many reasons, in particular because of its hostility to Zionism. The local Jews tended to support Zionism and the yishuv even as Zionism adapted with some difficulty to an environment such as Lebanon in which the Jews lived as full citizens and as one among many different religious minorities. The final chapter investigates forms of charity and poor relief. Levi analyzes the financing of the Talmud-Torah school and the influence of the B’nai B’rith on the communal welfare system. He argues that in the period under study, the Jews of Beirut elaborated a secular model of philanthropy that substituted the older, religious-driven charity. However, the author aptly underlines that Eastern Mediterranean Jewish philanthropy retained both religious and secular components and eventually became a crucial factor in the socio-political evolution of the Jewish community of Beirut. While The Jews of Beirut makes a welcome addition to the field of Middle Eastern Jewish Studies through significant research on an understudied topic, the work contains several weak spots. First, in the introductory pages the author understands Levantine Jewry and that of Beirut in particular as a distinct kind of community, characterized by its middle class identity, influenced by European colonialism and the socio-economic dynamics of Eastern Mediterranean port cities and by a history that was, by and large, “different and unique.” (xii) But is this really the case? What about the many similarities that Beirut Jews had with fellow Jews not living in Eastern Mediterranean port cities, [End Page 93] like Tunis, Cairo, or even Baghdad? And what about the interconnections with the non-Jewish middle class of, for example, Aleppo or Istanbul? When addressing his object of study, the author seems to ignore the most recent advancements of Mediterranean and late Ottoman historiography. I am thinking in particular of seminal studies by Lois Dubin and David Cesarani on the notion of port Jews; by Keith Watenpaugh on...

Hating Soviets—Killing Jews: How Antisemitic Were Local Perpetrators in Southern Ukraine, 1941–42?

This article intends to contribute to the scholarly debates on the role of popular antisemitism in the annihilation of East European Jewry. It focuses on the situation in part of southern Ukraine that in 1941-44 was occupied by the Romanians, who during that time were responsible for the death, either by killing or as result of starvation and disease, of between 104,000 and 120,000 Jews. (1) The study of perpetrators of crimes against humanity who were local residents of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe and Eurasia has made substantial progress in the past two decades. Drawing on the conceptual apparatus and methodology developed by scholars of German perpetrators and benefiting from the availability of previously classified Soviet-era archival documents, scholars have successfully mapped out new subfield of genocide and Holocaust research as well as of violence in modern Europe in general. (2) The fundamental issues in this subfield appear to be similar to those in the study of German perpetrators: how ordinary were the perpetrators; how representative were they of the local population; were the determinants of their extraordinary cruelty mostly sociocultural or psychiatric; what drove them to participate in the blood-curdling mass murder of apparently harmless civilians? The palette of responses to this last question includes vengefulness (that is, the desire to avenge those who suffered at the hands of the Soviets), careerism/conformism, attempts to expiate service to the Soviets by exaggerated loyalty to the new masters, ideological antisemitism, sadism, and lust for power. (3) Scholars have usually found that a combination of several of these motivations played role within each individual. (4) Still, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the most hotly debated question, and probably the most consequential, both methodologically and culturally/politically, is that of antisemitic ideology as determinant of local perpetrators' behavior. Although hardly anybody denies that antisemitism was one of the factors conditioning the violence, there exists considerable disagreement among scholars as to what kind of antisemitism it was: was it rooted in the unfathomable recesses of European culture, imbued with crazy medieval visions of satanic Christ-killers bleeding babies to death to cook matzoh on the eve of Passover, or was it less obviously paranoid belief system, stemming from the more recent experience of communist rule in which many local Jews supposedly participated willingly and in which they purportedly served as key propagandists, policemen, and executioners? While these varieties of antisemitism are not necessarily mutually exclusive, in practice scholars often favor one over the other. Depending on their choice, they may arrive at vastly different conclusions. Perhaps most famously, Jan Gross dismissed references to the traumatic experience of Soviet occupation and the Jews' purported role in the communist apparatus of repression in eastern Poland as lacking solid evidence. Instead, the age-old antisemitic imagination and traditions of sporadic popular violence against Jews legitimated by Romantic nationalism had incomparably greater heuristic value for Gross's investigation of how Poles turned against their Jewish neighbors in the wake of German occupation. (5) In contrast, Bogdan Musial sees the trauma and shock of Soviet occupation-era atrocities, with some Jews serving as the most trusted agents of the authorities, as an impulse for antisemitic pogroms perpetrated by local Christians with the connivance and support of the Wehrmacht in the summer of 1941, even in the absence (at this early stage) of genocidal order from the German High Command. (6) On the other hand, one renowned historian has recently suggested in well-publicized but controversial book that antisemitism was not an issue in this story at all, arguing instead that local helpers of Nazis were motivated by the need for survival and an all too human tendency to conform to superiors' orders. …

Kako su Jevreji-Sefardi donijeli u Bosnu proizvodnju sira Kačkavalja

After the Spanish Reconquista, Inquisition and exile of Jews from Spain and Portugal (1492–1496) many of the Sephardi-Jews came to the Dalmatian coast. Sultan Bajazit II opened the doors of Ottoman Empire to Jews inviting them to live proudly in his Empire. Spanish Jews settled in Bulgaria after 1494, in the cities where the Jews have already lived. Sephardi brought with them the production of the yellow cheese called cache yall, which became very popular in Bulgaria as Kaskaval.According to the notations from Sijil (protocol) families Papo, Maestro and Levi were producing the cheese in Sarajevo, bringing the tradition from Bulgaria and Albania in 16th century.One of the oldest autochthonous cheese of Bosnia and Herzegovina is cheese Tarenik (Tucanik, Tučenik, Čabrenik), which was kept in the vats. It was produced in the mountainous part of Central Bosnia. In 15th century Spanish Jews brought in Bosnia technology of making Kaškaval cheese, similar to the Kačkavalj. Cheese was made out of sheep milk on the mountains around Sarajeva until the beginning of the Second World War. Cheese was made for the local Jews, as well as for the export. It was made in a form of small bread (without mould) on weight of ½ or ¾ of kilogram.Production of Kaškavalj cheese was not known in this region until the Sephardi came in Bosnia. Some of the families were performing this craft until the Second World War, going in the mountains in the season and buying the milk from the peasants, for cheese making.Unfortunately, Second World War and Holocaust on Jews of Bosnia and Herzegovina have taken 70 percent of this nation. Among them victims were also Sephardi Jews as the last manufacturers of Kačkavalj in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (review)

Reviewed by: Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine Louis Fishman Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine, by Michelle U. Campos. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. 343 pp. During the last decade, scholars working on Palestinian history have opened new doors to our understanding of late Ottoman Palestine—more specifically, the pre-World War era and the subsequent transition from Ottoman to British rule. The recent works emerging on this period present realities which offer an innovative way to approaching the roots of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and shine light on a period before Jews and Arabs were locked in violent competition. In Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth Century, Michelle U. Campos provides a study of Palestine's different religious communities, not as separate, but rather as united in their support of the Young Turk revolution and as Ottoman citizens. Ottoman Brothers rethinks intercommunal relations between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Ottoman Jerusalem and challenges preconceptions about the Jewish-Arab conflict in its early years. Campos believes scholars need to look beyond the conflict and focus on the phenomenon of what she terms "civic Ottomanism," a "grassroots imperial citizenship project that promoted a unified sociopolitical identity of an Ottoman people struggling over the new rights and obligations of revolutionary political membership" (3). This work in facts transcends Palestine and provides a model that will perhaps be useful in understanding the Empire's other multi-ethnic/religious cities, such as Izmir, Salonica, and the Ottoman capital, Istanbul. The author is particularly enlightening in demonstrating the ties between Muslims, Christians, and Jews by looking at such networks as the Freemasons and members of the Committee of Union and Progress, the ruling party of the Young Turks. As she suggests, Freemasonry rapidly took hold in Ottoman Palestine's urban centers, with its membership almost equally divided among the three religious groups, a trend which was widespread throughout the Ottoman Empire. It was especially attractive to the Young Turks. Beyond these intellectual fraternities, Campos draws a captivating [End Page 190] picture of Jerusalem as a shared urban space. She focuses on how the municipality worked to create a modern city for all of its citizens, developing projects such as streetcars, running water, and proper sewage facilities. Furthermore, Jews worked together with Muslims and Christians, concluding business deals and creating economic networks. One point on which Ottoman Brothers leaves ample space for future research is the community she actually dedicates the bulk of her book to, the Jewish community. In her chapter on Ottomans of Mosaic Faith and elsewhere in the book, Campos poses important questions regarding the parameters of Zionism and divisions within the Jewish community, whether Sephardi, Ashkenazi, or Zionist/anti-Zionist, and how these groups perceived the future of their mutual spiritual homeland. It is this point, however, that I find problematic, since the division of the Jewish community into "Zionist" and "anti-Zionist" does not necessarily correlate with their perceptions of their roles as Ottoman citizens. In my view, more research is needed on Zionist Jews, such as the members of the Second Aliyah, who together with the local Jews of Palestine abandoned organized European Zionism for cultural Zionism. These included Gad Frumkin (who she briefly focuses on) and David Ben-Gurion, who formed the Hebrew Students Society in Istanbul following the 1908 Young Turk revolution. Furthermore, while many Sephardic Jews of the Ottoman Empire may have expressed their opposition to Zionism, they still openly supported Jewish migration to their homeland. Likewise, questions concerning early Palestinian identity need to be further scrutinized, such as how the majority of the Arab population fit into the picture of "civic Ottomanism," as this seems only to have captured the attention of specific groups of urban intellectuals. Further, more light needs to be shed on the fact that parallel to this newfound brotherhood she presents between Muslims, Christian, and Jews, among the urban intelligentsia under discussion, new bonds were being created between Muslims and Christians together with the peasantry, with an exclusive sense of Palestinianism emerging that did not include the Jewish community. By the same token, the local Jewish community never...

The Jews in Modon and Coron during the second half of the fifteenth century

The region of Messenia in the south-western Peleponnese, with its two main port towns of Coron and Modon, was under Venetian rule for nearly 300 years, from the early thirteenth to the end of the fifteenth century. The presence of Jews and their occupations are attested by the descriptions of foreign travellers, as well as in Venetian official documents. This study focuses on the last half-century of Venetian rule – the second half of the fifteenth century – a period relatively better documented than earlier ones. The economic occupations of the local Jews are presented in the wider context of Jewish occupations in the Byzantine and post-Byzantine world and the question of whether there were two Jewish neighbourhoods, related to two different social strata of Jewish society, is raised on the basis of the testimony of one traveller. Although Jewish presence in Coron is attested in Jewish sources, nearly all the evidence concerns Modon. The reasons behind this discrepancy remain to be elucidated by further research.

Jewish Ghettos in Sighet and Dąbrowa Górnicza

Jewish Ghettos in Sighet and Dąbrowa Górnicza

Ethnic Identity and Anti-Semitism: Tadeusz Słobodzianek Stages the Polish Taboo

Tadeusz Słobodzianek's play, Our Class, addresses the 1941 massacre in the village of Jedwabne, Poland, where an estimated 1,600 local Jews were rounded up by their neighbors, locked inside a barn, and burned to death. First staged in London at the Royal National Theatre in 2009, and later remounted at Teatr na Woli in Warsaw, the play investigates the relationship between anti-Semitism and Polish national identity, exploring how theatre can shape our understanding of history.

Entangled communities: interethnic relationships among urban salesclerks and domestic workers in Egypt, 1927–61

This paper examines the relationships among salesclerks and other lower-level commercial and domestic employees in inter-war and post-Second World War urban Egypt, especially Cairo. It argues that the Italians, Greeks, local Jews, Armenians, Syrian Christians, Maltese, Coptic Christians and Muslims who often worked side by side on the floors of department stores and private homes participated in multiethnic occupational subgroups, formal unions and leisure cultures that created a series of networks linking lower-middle-class people in workplaces, public and neighbourhood space as well as commerce. These networks spanned ethnic, religious and linguistic boundaries, and they reveal a complex shared Mediterranean culture, underpinned by a juridical system shaped by European colonialism. Although historians have documented the vertical relations within ethnic groups and the horizontal relationships among the business elite of different communities, horizontal relationships among the lower and lower-middle classes of locally resident foreigners or Egyptians, who made up the bulk of the different communities, evidence both deep entanglement and regular conflict. The history of lived Mediterranean or cosmopolitan experiences thus challenges contemporary uses of both terms.

History, Politics, and Messianism: David Ha-Reuveni's Origin and Mission

In the last weeks of 1523, a colorful traveler arrived in Venice from Alexandria: “Dark in aspect, short in stature, gaunt, his language Hagarish [Arabic] and a little Jewish. … He wore striped silk according to the custom of the Ishmaelites, and on his head a white scarf, with which he covered his head and most of himself.” The traveler presented himself to local Jews and community leaders as “David,” the ambassador of an independent Jewish state on the Arabian peninsula, where he claimed that his brother, King Joseph, ruled over the tribes of Reuven, Gad, and half the tribe of Menashe. The “Jewish ambassador” announced that he was on his way to Rome to hold a state meeting with the Pope, as an emissary of the Seventy Elders, the advisers of his brother the king. He added, of course, that he needed money.

Surviving in the Murafa Ghetto: A Case Study of One Ghetto in Transnistria

This study examines the case of the Murafa Ghetto in Transnistria, with a focus on the social processes evolving in the ghetto. It distinguishes between deportees from different places in Romania, who came from different backgrounds and cultures, and the local indigenous Jews who lived all their lives in the ghetto, and their different struggles to survive. The central research question concerns the development of social processes among the different populations in Murafa and the influence of the disparity between these populations on the way of life in the ghetto and on the ability of its residents to endure and survive the harsh living conditions. In connection with this issue, the article deals with the role played by the ghetto leadership and the ghetto management style, which were crucial for the survival of the Jewish population in general.

The midwives ordinance of Palestine, 1929: historical perspectives and current lessons

Until 1929, midwifery in Palestine was relatively open to anyone and only partially regulated by the 1918 Public Health Ordinance, legislated shortly after the beginning of British rule. This article describes the factors that guided the shaping of midwifery and suggests possible sources of inspiration for the British legislator in crafting the Midwives Ordinance in 1929, including American, local (Jews and Arabs), and British ones. The Midwives Ordinance reflects the adjustment of midwifery to changes in the society that evolved under the British Mandate. The ordinance shows how the modern midwife's role contracted relative to the traditional one, in the context of social processes in other countries, east and west. This historical research project is based on interviews, archive documents and research literature. It analyzes the British interests in regulating midwifery, including the rationale of preserving public health and reducing infant mortality, against a background of political power struggles as well as cultural, social and professional diversity in Palestine (the tensions between the powers of doctors, nurses, and pharmacists).

From ‘Little Jerusalems’ to the Promised Land: Zionism, Moroccan nationalism, and rural Jewish emigration

This article provides an ethnographic and historical perspective on the migration of rural Jewish communities from the region of Sous, southern Morocco, to Israel in the early 1960s. Building on theories of the relationship between diaspora, homeland, and nationalism, and using ethnographic data collected among Moroccan Jews and Muslims from the region, I argue that even though the economic factors played a substantial role in persuading rural Jews to migrate to Israel, historical symbols of traditional messianic Zionism played a major role in the migration of rural Jewry. Unlike urban Jews who settled in different Moroccan cities after the Spanish Inquisition, Jews from Akka and other neighbouring hamlets have a particular view of history to which Zionism appealed. In this article, I use a historical narrative to argue that southern Moroccan Jews, whether their memory is based on supposition or fact, imagined their history as connected to Palestine. Accordingly, Zionists invoked these historical messianic symbols to which local rural Jews from Akka and other neighbouring villages subscribed to capture their political, religious, and national support. Henceforth, my contention is that although local and global social, political, and economic stresses in the first half of the twentieth century influenced this migration, the underlying cause is largely attributed to the imagined or real historical roots of these populations towards Palestine as opposed to the roots of Andalusian Jews.

Transmission of Scientific Texts in 15th-Century Eastern Knaan

The study focuses on a little-known chapter in the history of Eastern European Jewry, namely the intellectual endeavors of local Jews before the Ashkenazi expansion into the area totally wiped out the autochthonous tradition. Two main figures are discussed. The first is the Kievan scholar and leader Rabbi ben Jacob the Russian or Moses the Exile, a Constantinople-trained scholar who engaged in biblical exegesis, poetry, grammar, astronomy and kabbalah and is mainly known as the initiator of the Kaffa prayer rite and as the author of the kabbalistic work Sosan sodot . The second is the lesser-known Kievan copyist, annotator, and (apparently) translator Zechariah ben Aaron ha-Kohen, known not only from the colophons of Hebre wscientific and philosophical texts he copied and annotated but also from Russian sources, as the dangerous astrologer and black-magician Scharia, the initiator of the Judaizing heresy in Novgorod and Moscow at the end of the fifteenth century. The scientific and philosophical texts copied and translated from Hebrew into Slavic at that time are listed and an explanation for this surprising enterprise involving Jews and Christians is proposed.

Voices of Outreach: The Construction of Identity and Maintenance of Social Ties Among Chabad‐Lubavitch Emissaries

Fundamentalists typically avoid influences from the outside world and form intense social bonds with members of their own group. Yet, active fundamentalists must create relationships with the objects of their missionary action, the Other. In this article I address the connections between the cultural practice of missionary work and the formation and maintenance of social ties among ultra‐Orthodox Jewish missionaries belonging to the fundamentalist Hasidic sect Chabad‐Lubavitch. These missionaries attempt to bring Jews to the beliefs and practices of Chabad by hosting Jews at Sabbath meals. This missionary act is an utterance that “speaks” with multiple voices, indexing the missionaries as both friendly members of their local Jewish community and ideal Lubavitchers. Through these meals, the missionaries engage not only the local Jews but also other Lubavitchers in dialogue, constructing a community that transcends face‐to‐face interaction.

The British Slave Trade & Public Memory , and: India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display , and: Wondrous Curiosities: Ancient Egypt at the British Museum (review)

Reviewed by: The British Slave Trade & Public Memory, and: India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display, and: Wondrous Curiosities: Ancient Egypt at the British Museum Peter H. Hoffenberg The British Slave Trade & Public Memory. By Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display. By Saloni Mathur. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Wondrous Curiosities: Ancient Egypt at the British Museum. By Stephanie Moser. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006). Europe continues to be haunted by the ghosts of its past, whether those are memories of the Shoah, slavery and the slave trade, and, among other nightmares from which it has yet to awake, overseas conquest and colonial rule. Tony Judt recently noted that post-1945 Europeans lived in a “House of the Dead” after the horrors of Fascist and Communist rule, genocide and the two World Wars, a continent dominated by Hannah Arendt's twin focal points of memory and evil.1 That remains the case today for many reasons on both sides of the English Channel and the Elbe, and whether one walks the streets of Amsterdam, Lisbon, London, or Sarajevo. But reactions to such ghosts vary among and within generations, nations, and classes. Whereas only a few years ago French school teachers were required to teach about the virtues of French imperialism, their colleagues in Germany are prevented by the law from denying the Holocaust. Monuments to the murderers of local Jews are raised in some of the Baltic States while no English grammar school’s curricula is complete without lesson plans on the “Middle Passage.” It is as if William Faulkner were as correct about the Europe and Britain of today as he was about his beloved and tragic South half a century ago: the past is not even in the past and some people have too much history. Or, as German historians would add, where in Europe have men and women truly mastered or come to terms with their past, as the Germans continue to struggle with their own Vergangenheistbewaltigung? Apparently not in England, where its own “History (if not Culture) Wars”' continue to be fought, as they have, perhaps, been for several centuries. The trinity of well-written and provocatively-argued monographs under review are each in their own way about England’s struggle to master its own and others’ pasts, as well as that struggle on the part of those living in independent countries formerly under England’s informal, or formal hubristic grasp. Readers will better understand how English men, women, and students wrestle with their histories, as well as how South Asians, Americans, and Egyptians, among others, grapple with similar if not the same living ghosts. In the cases of these three books, those pasts continue to resonate in various sites of memory about slavery and the slave trade, British rule in South Asia, and the preservation, if not outright theft, and display of Ancient Egypt’s material culture. Such discussed sites of memory include the British and South Kensington Museums, major department stores, popular monuments and festivals, guided walks and, among others, the visual and performing arts. They can even include the televised version of a prominent eighteenth-century novel. Each in their own way addressed and continues to address the powerful and contested relationship to a constantly moving past, if not an equally dynamic present. That was the case with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century archaeologists and “the antiquities” of Ancient Egypt; it is also true today with museums displaying the artifacts of the slave trade. Readers interested in topics such as the politics of display, tourism, memory and representation will not be disappointed; nor will those more attracted to the study of the ideas and practices of race and, for want of a better term, “Orientalism.” The three books contribute to not only how the English thought about and represented other people, but also, not surprisingly, how and what they thought about themselves. As slavery was an often distorting mirror reflecting English liberty; traditional India was a complementary mirror for modern Britain. As Saloni Mathur reminds us, such mirrorings overflow with powerful and at times tragic ironies. Mathur’s India...

Jews and Jesuits in a Confessional Age: Heinrich Heshusius and the Boundaries of Community in Hildesheim

The early age of orthodoxy in German Lutheranism was a crucial period of transi-tion and solidification between the conciliatory Formula of Concord in 1577 and the work of early seventeenth-century dogmaticians such as Johann Gerhard (1582– 1637). During this “confessional age” Lutheran theologians struggled to protect the “pure teachings of Luther” while consolidating religious reforms and engaging in polemical battles with Roman Catholics, Calvinists, Anabaptists, and Jews. This article sheds new light on early orthodoxy by examining the career of Heinrich Heshusius (1556–97), a Lutheran superintendent in the north German city of Hildesheim. Together with the town council, mayor, and a network of Lutheran pastors, Heshusius fought what he saw as the dangerous inroads of local Jews and Jesuits, using a variety of political and polemical tactics. This article explores the confessional literature related to the controversy, explains attempts at conversion as well as expulsion, and contributes to ongoing discussions about how clergymen shaped and controlled community in urban, parish, and academic settings.

On the Unspoken Principles of Herzlian Diplomacy and their Contemporary Relevance

It tells one a good deal about the mood in which contemporary Israel contemplates its affairs well over half a century since its foundation that the man who really and truly started the Zionist bal...

Innocent Culprits – Silent Communities. On the Europeanisation of the Memory of the Shoah in Austria

The Shoah destroyed the substance of Austrian Jewishness. The emigration of the survivors after 1945 and the indignation of the Austrian society resulted in the dislocation of the memory of the Shoah itself. The Shoah provoked a massive social amnesia during the first two to three decades after World War II in Europe. The long silence was broken by the American television series Shoah in 1979 and by the Waldheim affair in 1986. Since the second half of the 1990s, a large‐scale restitution process and a new government program of commemoration have begun. Seemingly, Austria has successfully joined the mainstream of the European culture of memory. However, Austrian Jews as victims or survivors gradually came to be missing or played a minor role in the daily practice of the local and national politics of memory. One has the impression that the ‘local Jews’ have been overshadowed by the Europeanisation of the Shoah. The paper presents an Austrian case as a paradoxical example of ‘creative forgetting’ or ‘forgetting by remembering’.

A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain (review)

Reviewed by: A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain Benjamin R. Gampel Keywords Benjamin R. Gampel, Mark D. Meyerson, A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain, Jewish Renaissance, Spain, Crown of Aragon, Morvedre, Murviedro, Sagunto, Castile, Aragon, Sephardic Jews Mark D. Meyerson. A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain. Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. Pp. xx + 272. Mark Meyerson makes a compelling case for a “Jewish renaissance in fifteenth-century Spain,” a renaissance not of brilliant Jewish scholars or effective polemicists against Christianity but of demographic, social, and economic success. Meyerson has successfully plumbed the resources available in the royal archives of the Crown of Aragon in Barcelona and local Valencian repositories to chronicle the rise of Morvedre (Murviedro in Castilian, presently Sagunto) as an important urban center and the concomitant growth of its Jewish community. He is determined to combat the previously accepted notion that Iberian Jews suffered from a continual decline in their fortunes dating from the riots and forced conversions that beset the Jewish communities of Castile and Aragon during 1391 and 1392 and extending through the expulsions of the Jews from all the Iberian kingdoms at the end of the fifteenth century. Meyerson is equally interested to continue a trend among historians of Sephardic Jews to focus on local history so that eventually the notion of Sephardic Jewry as a homogenous unit will be irrevocably altered. With the publication of his companion volume on the Jews in Morvedre from its founding until 1391, he has successfully traced the fortunes of a particular community from its beginnings to its dissolution. He charts the varying fortunes of these Jews that he convincingly argues owe as much to local dynamics as to the peninsular contours of Sephardic life under Christian rule. The dramatic rise in the economic success of Morvedran Jews resulted from the after-effects of the riots of 1391 that effectively destroyed the Jewish community in the capital city of Valencia just to its south on the Mediterranean coast. The Jews of Morvedre had been protected by local Christians mindful of their significance to the economic health and specifically the credit market of their city, a town that did not exhibit tension toward its Jewish inhabitants in the decades prior to the riots. The castle in Morvedre served as a haven for their persecuted Valencian coreligionists whose support placed a tremendous financial strain upon local Jews. Although Juan I of Aragon expressed concern about the close physical [End Page 409] proximity of Jews and conversos—Morvedran Jews could travel to Valencia, which by 1397 did not have an official Jewish community—his successor Martí instead was more mindful of the infringement by zealous Inquisitors upon the royal prerogative. After the death of Fernando I (the supporter and host of the disputation at Tortosa from 1413 to 1414), the situation of the Jews improved and reflected a measure of stability and even optimism during the reigns of Alfonso IV (1416–58) and Juan II (1458–79). Indeed the Morvedran Jewish population tripled to 700 individuals from 1390 through 1492, owing to immigration and to natural increase. Meyerson masterfully describes how the Jews shifted their financial energies from the credit market to tax farming, which helped protect them from the wrath of the population. They produced, sold, and transported wine—chiefly through Majorca—and were heavily involved in the textile industry. Jewish silversmiths, cobblers, and tailors pursued their crafts. The Jewish quarter was expanded and prosperous Jews cleverly managed their taxation burden. Jews were not compelled to wear an identifying badge and were only occasionally forced to listen to conversionary sermons. Morvedran Jewish merchants working in Valencia pursued relationships with local conversos and the separation of these groups was not enforced. Local authorities prevented the Inquisition from intervening in these relationships. After establishing that the Morvedran Jewish community enjoyed a political and economic renaissance, Meyerson explores a number of issues that, while integral to the history of fifteenth-century Iberian Jewries, do not directly buttress his overarching thesis. For example, Meyerson’s research, based on archival materials, allows him to make tentative observations about the behavior...

Nowogródek – historia sztetlu

The article deals with the history of the shtetl in Nowogródek, where, before the war about 6,500 Jews lived. When the Germans occupied Nowogródek, a ghetto was established in one of the suburbs, where all the local Jews were deported. The author describes everyday life of the Jews in the ghetto and their fate. Most of them were killed in three mass executions: in December 1941, in August 1942 and February 1943. Many managed to escape to the Bielski partisan outfit, operating in the nearby Nalibocki Forest; the most spectacular escape was that of 232 Jews through a tunnel. These Jews had remained in the town after the mass executions.