Western Jewry Research Articles

“A better human being:” Diaspora images of the New Israeli Woman

ABSTRACTThis article explores Western Jews’ admiration for the new State of Israel on the basis of women’s representation. Pamphlets, biographies, and whole series of fundraiser films, produced by Zionist women’s organizations, depicted Jewish-Israeli women as carriers of democratic values, caring mothers for all of Israel’s population, and courageous fighters for their people’s survival. The Jewish-Israeli woman’s image as “a better human being” served as an intriguing symbol through which Diaspora Jews could identify with the Jewish state and overcome feelings of impotence after the Holocaust in Europe. The idealized representation of Jewish-Israeli women primarily suited Western Jewry’s need for Jewish empowerment.

How Early Did We Become Modern?

How Early Did We Become Modern? Elliott Horowitz ‘‘In recent decades a most impressive and steadily mounting corpus of scholarly monographs and articles has vastly enriched our understanding of the history and culture of European Jewry in early modern times . . . There is undoubtedly a crying need for new general interpretations of the role of Jewry within Europe in this period.’’ This quotation is not taken from David Ruderman’s Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History, to which our forum is devoted, but from its predecessor, Jonathan Israel’s European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550–1750, first published in 1985 and reviewed by Ruderman in these pages.1 Although Israel’s book has subsequently appeared in two revised editions (1989 and 1997), Ruderman, shortly before stepping down after two decades as director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, has boldly taken on the formidable task—as scholarly monographs (some reviewed in this issue) and articles have continued to mount even more steadily—of producing yet another synthetic history of early modern Jewry. Whereas Israel’s synthesis focused on a period of two hundred years which it described as ‘‘the age of mercantilism,’’ thus highlighting its economic significance, Ruderman’s volume, which covers a somewhat longer period of time, is no less forthrightly a ‘‘cultural history.’’ In such a work ‘‘the role of Jewry,’’ to quote Israel, is less relevant than the inner dynamics of the Jewish world, in constant dialogue, as its author stresses, with the surrounding cultures among which early modern Jews resided. Indeed, early in his recent book Ruderman explicitly distances himself from Israel’s ‘‘characterization of Jewish social and cultural history . . . as primarily reflective and derivative of general trends located in non-Jewish society.’’ Ruderman’s critique parallels, and perhaps derives from, Robert Bonfil’s 1984 critique of earlier historical presentations— particularly by Israel’s fellow countryman Cecil Roth—of Italian Jewry [End Page 259] during the Renaissance.2 It is perhaps noteworthy that the scholars rebuked for their ‘‘derivative’’ notions of Jewish history were trained in England, and that their criticizers each earned their doctoral degrees at the Hebrew University, where both studied with Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, the centenary of whose birth occurs this year. In his Short History of the Jewish People, first published in 1936, and in a revised edition seven years later, Roth gave expression to the notion widely then accepted that it was only in the late eighteenth century that ‘‘the Jewish Middle Ages were closed.’’3 Roth, who had earned both his undergraduate and doctoral degrees at Oxford (D.Phil. 1924), had good reason to be somewhat perplexed about periodization. When that venerable university’s Faculty of Modern History—which has produced such legendary early modernists as Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre), Lawrence Stone, (Sir) Keith Thomas, and Peter Burke—opened its doors in the mid-nineteenth century, the year 285 (C.E.) was designated as the beginning of ‘‘modern history,’’ and that still continues to be the case. In the first of his two historiographical appendices Ruderman raises the ‘‘obvious’’ question as to why only in the mid-eighties was Jonathan Israel ‘‘the first to take up the challenge of producing . . . a synthesis that clearly laid out the parameters of an early modern period in Jewish history,’’ a question to which not even a tentative answer is provided. One possible explanation, however, may lie in the surprising longevity of the (now strange) historiographical notion that ‘‘the Jewish Middle Ages,’’ as Roth referred to them, did not follow the periodization of Europe as a whole. Similar to Roth’s assertion was that of Jacob Marcus, who wrote in the introduction to his influential source book The Jew in the Medieval World, first published in 1938, that ‘‘the medieval age comes to an end for Western Jewry with the proclamation of political and civil emancipation in France in September, 1791.’’4 That notion was already expressed a decade earlier by Louis Ginzberg, who also provided it with a distinguished pedigree: ‘‘The middle ages, aptly remarks Zunz,’’ he wrote, ‘‘did not terminate for the Jew until the end of the eighteenth century...

Lectures, murder, and a phony terrorist: managing “Jewish power and danger” in 1960s communist Czechoslovakia

The Slánský Affair of 1952 introduced a specific matrix of ideas about Jewish power and the danger that Jews posed to the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. These ideas, with roots in earlier discourses, conditioned Jewish–state relations for decades, providing party-state officials and even Jewish functionaries with a language for articulating demands of the government and a framework for understanding the place of Jewish citizens in the socialist nation. Inter- and intra-ministerial conflicts reveal that differences in purview and philosophy often led officials to prioritise different aspects of the Jewish power–danger matrix. The paternalistic responsibility to protect domestic Jewry from the negative influences of foreign “Zionists” frequently clashed with the objective of appeasing Western Jewry, whose influence in the US Czechoslovak communists overestimated. While the latter consideration – and others – often moved the Ministry of Culture to advocate in favour of the Czechoslovak Jewish communities, the former concern – taken remarkably seriously – led the secret police to oppose them at every turn, often in the most conspiratorial of ways. To that end, this article introduces new information and perspective on the murder of Charles Jordan in 1967 and its repercussions and political uses in the years that followed.

The Israel Lobby: Creating an Engine of Geopolitics

The Israel Lobby is a euphemism for a powerful engine of geopolitics: it is a global conglomerate of national and international Jewish organizations that have drawn upon the intellectual, financial and organizational resources of the Jewish diaspora as well as that of their host societies. Starting in the late 19th century, the Israel Lobby pursued two tasks. It had to persuade the Western Jewry to support the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Since Jews alone could not do this, the Lobby also had to recruit the support of major Western powers. Once Israel was created, the Lobby had to use the resources of Israeli Jews, the Jewish diaspora and the Western powers to quickly develop Israel into the unrivaled military power in the region. This essay will examine how the Jewish lobby acquired the resources and power to achieve these goals.

Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad Y. Michal Bodemann Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad, by Steven E. Aschheim. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2007. 208 pp. $27.95. Steven Aschheim begins his study on German Jewish intellectuals with Hannah Arendt’s observation that the German-speaking Jews were an “altogether unique phenomenon” which calls for urgent investigation. In this richly erudite book with its nearly 500 footnotes, Aschheim has contributed to just that imperative, and while much has been written on the Weimar German Jewish intellectuals, Aschheim has approached his subject in a manner which other studies could not attempt to do. In the first of his three essays, he addresses the role of German-Jewish intellectuals in Palestine, from Martin Buber to Arthur Ruppin, and their brand of bi-nationally oriented humanist Zionism; in the second, he deals with the role of the émigré historians, mostly in the U.S. (which might explain why Eric Hobsbawm, for example, was excluded) and their role in shaping a new brand of cultural history, and in the last chapter, he asks what might have made these intellectuals (Benjamin, Arendt, Scholem, Adorno, and others) so influential and “fascinating” to younger generations of Western intellectuals today. All three of Aschheim’s intellectual incursions, then, address the rich cultural and intellectual environment we associate with the Weimar Republic, itself the culmination of developments from the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Jewish emancipation, democratic patriotism of 1848, and the socialist movement later on. The formation of these German-Jewish intellectuals, their habitus and world views, cannot be explained outside this legacy. And as Jews, they did not even have the chance to become enamored of Weimar’s other strains—antisemitism and völkisch nationalism. Despite their humanist formation, then, Aschheim seems to flirt with the idea, amply contradicted by his own evidence and arguments, that the figures around the Brith Shalom in Palestine were inspired not by German/European liberalism and humanism, but by the negative experiences of European barbarities in World War I and experiences of ethno-nationalism throughout Europe. No doubt the harrowing experiences of the Great War were a catalytic element, but as the author himself points out, there were indeed workable models of ethno-national co-existence in Europe, from Switzerland and Belgium to the Danish minority in Schleswig and most of all, perhaps, Austro-Hungary with the multi-ethnic communities of Prague or Czernowitz. Austro-Marxism provided a model there, as well as the universalistic message [End Page 185] of socialism that influenced many in Brith Shalom and German-Jewish intellectuals (Benjamin, Adorno) elsewhere. These German-Jewish notions are quite distinct, then, from Jabotinsky and his East European followers, and a debate such as Lenin’s discussion of the “Bund in the Party” would have been inconceivable in the West. Moreover, the different assimilationist and universalist habitus of Western Jewry was markedly different from that of their Jewish brothers and sisters in Eastern Europe. Amos Oz’s novels have portrayed that intellectual chasm very powerfully. The “crises of conscience” incurred by members of Brith Shalom in the wake of later developments in Palestine, which made a bi-national solution impossible, are hardly reconcilable with notions of Realpolitik that might have grown out of the negative experiences in Europe per se. In light of recent debates concerning a binational solution in Israel/Palestine, Aschheim makes clear that the ideas of Brith Shalom have not lost any of their power and logic. In the second part, Aschheim shows how a small number of émigré historians have created a quite original form of German cultural history, and he contrasts that to the parallel development of a politically committed social history as it developed in West Germany around the same time, from the 1960’s onwards. The émigré cultural historians, a handful including George Mosse, Peter Gay and Fritz Stern, made it their life’s work to address the question of how Nazism became possible within the cultural traditions of Germany, and they were in a position to examine that subject unencumbered by the contemporary German context and its political discourses of guilt and denial, and without the dubious advantage...

Chaplain with a Star of David: Reverend Leib Isaac Falk and the Jewish LegionsShlomit Keren is an associate professor at the Department of History and Director of the Israel Studies Programme at the University of Calgary. Michael Keren holds a Canada Research Chair in Communication, Culture and Civil Society at the University of Calgary and is visiting professor at Haifa

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Eric J. Leed, No Man's Land: Combat and Identity in World War I, Cambridge, 1979, p. 204. 2. Michael Berkowitz, Western Jewry and the Zionist Project, 1914–1933, Cambridge, 1997. 3. Stuart A. Cohen, English Zionists and British Jews: The Communal Politics of Anglo-Jewry, 1895–1920, Princeton, NJ, 1982, p. 216. 4. Christopher M. Sterba, Good Americans: Italian and Jewish Immigrants During the First World War, New York, 2003. 5. Peter Simkins, Kitchener's Army: The Raising of the New Armies, 1914–16, Manchester, 1988. 6. The Jewish Chronicle, 25 December 1914. 7. Igal Elam, Hagdudim Ha'ivri'im Bemilhemet Ha'olam Harishona (The Jewish Legions in the First World War), Tel Aviv, 1984 (Hebrew); Zeev Jaostinsky, Megilat Hagdud (The Story of the Battalion), Tel Aviv, 1991 (Hebrew). 8. Martin Watts, The Jewish Legion and the First World War, New York, 2004. 9. See Michael Adler (ed.), British Jewry Book of Honour, London, 1922. 10. J.H. Patterson's letter to Col. John Wynne, 7 December 1917, Zahal Archive, Falk Private Papers. 11. J.H. Patterson, With the Judeans in the Palestine Campaign, New York, 1922. 12. War Cabinet Extracts 227 (3 September 1917), Jabotinsky Archive, Tel Aviv, Letters and memos, File 6-26. 13. Evening Standard, 12 September 1917. 14. Jonathan Hyman, ‘Jews in Britain during the Great War’, University of Manchester, Department of History, Working paper 51, October 2001. 15. Rev. L.A. Falk, ‘With the Jewish Battalions in Palestine: Memoirs of a Jewish Chaplain’, The Maccabean, 15 February 1929. 16. Michael Snape, God and the British Soldier: Religion and the British Army in the First and Second World War, London, 2005. 17. Doris L. Bergen, The Sword of the Lord: Military Chaplains from the First to the Twenty-First Century, Notre Dame, Indiana, 2004; Duff Crerar, Padres in No Man's Land: Canadian Chaplains and the Great War, Montreal, 1995. 18. On Jewish chaplains in the British army see British Jewry Book of Honour, and in the American army see Albert Isaac Slomovitz, The Fighting Rabbis: Jewish Military Chaplains and American History, New York, 1999. 19. The Maccabean, 15 February 1929. 20. L.I. Falk, Private papers, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF Archives), Tel-Hashomer, Israel. 21. Letter by Mrs Malkin, L.I. Falk, Private papers, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF Archives), Tel-Hashomer, Israelibid. 22. The Maccabean, 3 May 1929. 23. Richard Schweitzer, The Cross and the Trenches: Religious Faith and Doubt among British and American Great War Soldiers, Westport, CT, 2003, p. 47. 24. Robinson Memoirs, Legions House, Aviha'il, Israel, 38th Legion, file 2b, document 3. 25. H.D. Myer, Excerpts from Letters [of] H.D. Myer 1918–1919, Legions House Library, Aviha'il, Israel, p. 98. 26. The Maccabean, 22 March 1929. 27. The Maccabean, 8 March 1929. 28. The Maccabean, 22 March 1929. 29. The Maccabean, 5 April 1929. 30. The Maccabean, 5 April 1929 31. The Maccabean, 5 April 1929 32. The Maccabean, 26 April 1929. 33. Falk, Private papers 34. Falk, Private papers 35. Falk, Private papers 36. Falk, Private papers 37. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, London, 1975. 38. Clarence L. Abercrombie, The Military Chaplain, Beverly Hills, CA, 1977. 39. The Maccabean, 5 April 1929. 40. Falk, Private papers. 41. Letter by Professor Boris Schatz to Rabbi Falk, 7 Adar Beth, 1919, Falk Private papers. 42. ‘A Temple in the Wilderness: Bezalel in Jerusalem’, Israel Museum online publication, available at http://www.imj.org.il/eng/exhibitions/2006/schatz/bezalel_jerusalem.html 43. Abraham Isaac Kook, ‘The Significance of the Revival’, in Abraham Isaac Kook: The Lights of Penitence, the Moral Principles, Lights of Holiness, Essays, Letters, and Poems, Translated by Ben Zion Bokser, New York, 1978, p. 286. 44. Zvi Yaron, Mishnato Shel Harav Kook (The Philosophy of Rabbi Kook), Jerusalem, 1974 (Hebrew), p. 28. 45. Falk, Private papers. 46. Falk, Private papers 47. Paul Goodman, History of the Jews: Soldiers' and Sailors' Edition, London, 1917. 48. Falk, Private papers. 49. The Maccabean, 15 November 1929. 50. Megilat Hagdud, p. 133. 51. See Arthur Hertzberg, The Jews in America, New York, 1989; Gerald Tulchinsky, Taking Root: The Origins of the Canadian Jewish Community, Toronto, 1992. 52. The Maccabean, 22 February 1929, p. 12. 53. Falk, Private papers. 54. D. Gogol, ‘Bagdudim’ (In the Legions), Kuntres 2 (8 I'yar, 1919), pp. 35–37.

The making of Western Jewry, 1600-1819

The making of Western Jewry, 1600-1819

Judische Sprachen in deutscher Umwelt: Hebraisch und Jiddisch von der Aufklarung bis ins 20. Jahrhundert (review)

Reviewed by: Jüdische Sprachen in deutscher Umwelt: Hebräisch und Jiddisch von der Aufklärung bis ins 20. Jahrhundert Jonathan Skolnik Jüdische Sprachen in deutscher Umwelt: Hebräisch und Jiddisch von der Aufklärung bis ins 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Michael Brenner. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2002. 134 pp. 39.00. This conference volume is stimulating reading for anyone interested in the evolution of Jewish languages in Ashkenaz and their renaissance in the modern period. Michael Brenner has assembled a collection of complementary papers which investigate Hebrew and Yiddish in the German-speaking countries. Nils Roemer does an outstanding job of sketching the broader historical framework for understanding German Jewry's linguistic complexity. Drawing on his own research as well as recent scholarship on the Haskalah (especially David Sorkin and Steven Lowenberg), Roemer challenges the mid-nineteenth century mythologization (still a commonplace in many scholarly works) of Moses Mendelssohn as the "Germanizer" of Central European Jewry. Instead, Roemer convincingly situates Mendelssohn at the climax of a longer process of linguistic and social change, emphasizing the evolving roles of Yiddish and German in daily life and the centrality of the Haskalah's language aesthetic for Mendelssohn's thought. Inspired by Amos Funkenstein, Roemer also calls us to re-examine the boundaries between Yiddish and other German dialects before the nineteenth century. Andrea Schatz's thoughtful paper takes up the problem of the secularization of the Hebrew language, exploring precursors of Berlin Haskala in order to better understand the Maskilic notion of a "new holy language." Andreas Gotzmann offers a dense analysis of the inner-Jewish discourse of linguistic identity in nineteenth-century Germany, emphasizing the centrality of evolving Jewish religious practice in the debates. Thomas Kollatz surveys the Hebrew-language press in Germany from the mid-eighteenth century up through the founding of ha-Maggid in 1856. Based on the usage of Hebrew words in the daily language of Jews in Alsace and south-west Germany before 1933, Uri Kaufmann offers some thoughts on the nature of Western Jewish dialects. In view of polemical attacks by some Zionist writers that German-language Wissenschaft des Judentums contributed to Western Jewry's neglect of the Hebrew language, Henry Soussan judiciously discusses the contributions to Hebrew scholarship by nineteenth-century figures like Leopold Zunz and Michael Sachs, as well as the growing rapprochement between Eastern European and Central European Jewish scholarship which contributed to the founding of the journal Dvir in 1924. Barbara Schaefer gives a concise [End Page 168] overview of efforts by Berlin Zionists to promote Hebrew from 1900 through the Weimar period. Rachel Perets' article first examines the 1909 and 1931 Berlin conferences on Hebrew in some detail, then offers a study of Hebrew teaching methods and institutions in Germany before 1933. Delphine Bechtel's excellent portrait of the flowering Yiddish literary scene in 1920s Berlin is an expanded version of an essay published in English in the Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German (1997). Amir Eshel's contribution revisits the question of Franz Kafka's relation to Jewish languages. Although Eshel doesn't explicitly engage with Robert Alter's recent book on Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (which probes the theological dimensions to their relation to Hebrew), he offers a unique dissenting view. For Eshel, Kafka's turn to Hebrew and Yiddish reveals ethical, universalizing concerns more than a wish to experiment with radically new forms of Jewish religion, politics, and culture. Eshel interprets Kafka through a framework that at times seems comparable to Heidegger or, rather, to a Hegelian model divorced from theologies, negative or otherwise: an interplay of "foreign" and "individual" which leads to categories like "eternal" or "universal." The second half of Eshel's article examines Paul Celan's use of Hebrew words in his German poetry, with some reference to the poems of Gertrud Kolmar and Nelly Sachs. Eshel notes Celan's critical distance to Heidegger and the tremendous ruptures which the Holocaust inflicted upon Jewish life and language, yet he still insists on the redemptive, humanizing potential of a meeting of German, Yiddish, and Hebrew in Celan's poetry. Jonathan Skolnik Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies University of Maryland-College...

Западные евреи? Восточные евреи? Аккультурация как парадигма сравнительной истории евреев в Германии и Восточной Европе

SUMMARY: Since the 19 th century the Jews of Western and Eastern Europe have been perceived as different and opposite types, which represented a dynamic development of modernization and assimilation in the first case, and stagnation in the second. However, during the last two decades the overall perception of the historical development of Jewish minorities has changed. Historians are now emphasizing that German Jews did not entirely assimilate into the German culture but rather formed a specific version of it by combining features of traditional Jewish culture and traits of the host culture they lived in (they developed a German-Jewish culture). Recently, historians have demonstrated how particular groups of Jews in East Central and Eastern Europe underwent a similar development. Moreover, the institutions of Jewish autonomy in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth are viewed in a new perspective, and historians point to the resemblance of Jewish and Polish institutions. Discussing new research and the complexities of cultural development in various parts of Eastern Europe, the author suggests a comparative approach in the study of Eastern and Western Jewry, focusing on the processes of acculturation by these minorities in their respective settings. This discussion implies a reconsideration of the predominant paradigm of the study of Jewish experiences in Eastern and Western Europe, which sees these experiences as belonging to different and opposing histories.

Neither Germans nor Poles: Jewish Nationalism in Galicia before Herzl, 1883-1897

Although galician jewry constituted one of the largest Jewish communities in the world before World War I, it has attracted too little scholarship. Galician Jews sat on the frontier between East and West. Religiously and economically, they were similar to Russian and Romanian Jewry, but since their emancipation in 1867 they enjoyed wideranging civil and political rights akin to those of their Western brethren. Historians focusing either on the numerically more significant Russian Jewry, or the politically and financially more important Western Jewry, have tended to avoid Galicia, even though the region was home to almost a million Jews by the turn of the century. Most Zionist historiography has also underemphasized the importance of this community, particularly in the pre-Herzlian period, by which time Galician Zionists could already boast a considerable degree of organizational infrastructure. This neglect is partly a reflection of the general historiographical trend within modern Jewish history. It also reflects, however, the unusual nature of Galician “Zionism,” which was largely Diaspora-oriented—directed toward national cultural work in the Diaspora as well as political activities designed to secure national minority rights—long before Zionists in either Russia or the West had begun to engage in such activities.

Apocalypticism in the Dead Sea Scrolls (review)

132 SHOFAR Summer 2000 Vol. 18, No.4 peace settlements. Knesset votes are grossly overstated more than once, giving a total of552 for Rabin's accession to the prime ministry in 1974 (p. 130), and 612 in 1978 in the diplomatic prelude to Camp David (p. 180). Hohenberg also refers several times to an alleged history ofmore than 2,000 years ofhostility between Arabs and Jews; so far as is known, Arabs have only resided in the area around the present State of Israel since perhaps the sixth century CE, and if there was hostility between them and JeWs, it was far less severe than that of European Christendom towards western Jewry. Hohenberg writes in a breezy style, painting broad brush strokes and glossing over many details. Such details as are provided tend to take the form of personalized anecdotes, with little or no analytical context. This is especially true of the 50-page description ofthe difficult Camp David negotiations between Egypt, Israel, andthe U.S. in 1978, and the account of the painful Oslo negotiations between Israel and the PLO in 1993, which consumes another 27 pages. The tragic assassination ofYitzhak Rabin is depicted in agonizing detail as well. In short, this account is superficial and lacks substance. There is nothing new in this book. Readers seeking explanation andunderstanding ofthe remarkable 50-yearhistory of the State of Israel fortunately can refer to an abundance ofbetter books. Frank Tachau Department of Political Science University of Illinois at Chicago Apocalypticism in the Dead Sea Scrolls, by John J. Collins. New York: Routledge, 1997. 187pp. $17.99 (p). This book appears as part of a six-volume series (The Literature of the Dead Sea Scrolls) which is designed to introduce the principal literary genres of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The series editor, George Brooke, writes in a preface that while scholars in the field are aware of the various issues arising from the scrolls, "little of the overall significance ofthe whole literary corpus has been put in the public domain.... Students ofall kinds need straightforward guides to the literature to enable them to trace a secure path through the mass of material" (pp. vi-vii). Collins' text on apocalypticism succeeds admirably in this endeavor. Though it is concise it is thorough, and it is written in a clear fashion. Collins provides lucid introductory material (not only at the beginning ofthe book, but at pertinent later stages as well), and the text is filled with his balanced interactions with up-to-date scholarly treatments. The latter discussions do not get out of hand for the lay audience and are presented in a non-intrusive way. Collins, Professor ofHebrew Bible and Post-Biblical Judaism at the University of Chicago, is well suited to his task. He is a recognized authority on both the scrolls and apocalypticism, and he has written several articles andbooks which pave the ground for Book Reviews 133 Apocalypticism in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Ofmost relevance is The Scepter and the Star (AnchorBibleReference Library; New York: Doubleday, 1995), which is a comprehensive treatment of Jewish messianism during the period in which many of the scrolls were written. (For a succinct introduction to the scrolls, see David S. Williams, "Teaching the Dead Sea Scrolls," Shofar 14 [1996]: 76-95.) Apocalypticism in the Dead Sea Scrolls is well organized. In his helpful opening chapters Collins discusses the literary geme, apocalypse, and its relations to biblical prophecy, and sketches an overall apocalyptic worldview, which we find articulated in several works as a distinctive view ofthe world within Judaism ofthe last two centuries before the common era. (It is important for the lay audience ofthe book to note that, in one of its rare typos, on page 7 Collins mistakenly has "last two centuries of the common era" rather than "lasttwo centuries before the common era.") Apocalypses are presented as supernatural revelations, typically mediated by an angel, which invariably· focus on the final end oflife and history. Earthly life is shaped by supernatural forces, which are both good and bad. The course of history is predetermined, although individuals still have some choice as to where they stand. There will be a divine judgment, and the...

JEWISH IDENTITY IN THE FACE OF ANTI-SEMITISM

A history of the Jews in the English-speaking world: Great Britain. By W. D. Rubinstein, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996. Pp. viii+539. ISBN 0-312-12542-9. £65.00.Pogroms: anti-Jewish violence in modern Russian history. Edited by John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. xx+393. ISBN 0-521-40532-7. £55.00.Western Jewry and the Zionist project, 1914–1933. By Michael Berkowitz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xvi+305. ISBN 0-521-47087-0. £35.00.Three books under review deal from different perspectives with the responses of Jews in Western and Eastern Europe to the increasing and more or less violent outbursts of anti-Semitism which they encountered in the years from 1880 to the Second World War. The first two titles consider how deep-rooted anti-Semitism was in Britain and Russia and in what sections of society it was most conspicuous, whereas the third asks how Western Jewry became motivated to support the Zionist project of settlement in Palestine; all three approach the question of how isolated or intergrated diaspora Jews were in their respective countries.

Western Jewry and the Zionist Project, 1914-1933 (review)

Book Reviews 123 Jewish history. Subheadings within chapters, some photographs and charts, and the occasional exemplary anecdote would make this a fine textbook once the price was adjusted. As it stands, Goldstein's book is good and useful but is unlikely to fill the need which it could have in a more appropriate edition. Matt Goldish History and Judaic Studies University of Arizona Western Jewry and the Zionist Project, 1914-1933, by Michael Berkowitz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 305 pp. $59.95. Building on his first book, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry Before the First World War (Cambridge, 1993), Michael Berkowitz continues his analysis ofWestern European Zionism to the disastrous year 1933. He concentrates on questions concerning the perception of Western (German, British, and American) Jews toward Zionism, the role ofphilanthropy, and the image that Zionists attempted to portray, and he explores how some Jews could rationalize being Zionists without making Aliyah. He argues that during this critical period Zionism became styled as a rescue mission whose primary goal was fund raising, which created some dissension within the movement, and Berkowitz questions whether the intense desire to raise money was, in the end, propitious (p. 5). In contrast to the plethora of political histories of Zionism, Berkowitz directs his attention to the cultural concerns of the nascent group as well as its efforts to balance its idealism with the practical necessities ofbuilding a viable and vibrant community in an area that was not always hospitable to Jewish immigrants. The author begins his conclusion with two quotations from German Zionists that epitomize the dichotomy of Zionist thought. The first citation from Robert Weltsch, editor of the influential Judische Rundschau, which Berkowitz makes great use of, opines that Zionism is primarily a moral movement whose political power would be shaken ifits moral content were to evaporate. The second excerpt comes from AdolfBoehm, a prominent Zionist publicist, who asserts that what is needed for the advancement of the colonizing of Palestine is money, money, money! (p. 194). Who is right, and how can one movement smooth over such differences? Berkowitz is critical of the Zionists for some of their hyperbole in trying to raise money by invoking analogies to the crusades or frightening donors with dire consequences of the fate of the Yishuv if money was not forthcoming. In many ways they took advantage ofthe growing hostility between Arabs and Jews in order to build their coffers. One Zionist official went so far as to blame the tragic violence in 1929 in 124 SHOFAR Winter 1998 Vol. 16, No.2 Palestine on the failure of Western Jews to contribute to the cause (p. 89). Yet, as Berkowitz adroitly illustrates, the Zionists had many other means of heightening interest, including portraying Eretz Israel as indeed the land of milk and honey. This attempt to paint Palestine as a wondrous paradise full ofpossibilities took the form of either envisioning, like Herlz had done in the 1890s, a land full of European-type cities with all the modem amenities, or an alternative vision of a rural utopia where Jews could eschew the customary "Jewish occupations" ofthe west and actually cultivate the fertile soil and revel in the freedom of agricultural life. The latter, as the author points out, was also a way to counter the growing antisemitic charge that Jews could not work with their hands. Yet, once again, the Zionists were portraying a contradictory picture. Inextricably bound to raising money was the image that Zionists sought to portray, and here Berkowitz initiates some interesting work on gender. His frrst chapter, entitled "Manly Men and the Attempted Appropriation of the War Experience, 1914-1918," analyzes the language ofsettling Palestine, and he shows how some Zionists likened the settlement ofPalestine to various experiences during the war. Zionists in all countries used the conflict to prove that Jews were indeed valiant soldiers and thus could use this experience to call for more young Jews to fight for the right to make Palestine Jewish. Berkowitz also points out how in many ways the war aided the Zionist cause. In addition to the issuance of the Balfour Declaration and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, both ofwhich helped...

The Shifting Boundary Between Eastern and Western Jewry

La frontiere entre Juifs de l'est et de l'ouest de l'Europe constitue un des lieux communs de l'histoire culturelle du judaisme. La dichotomie se situe sans doute avant tout sur le plan de l'education superieure plus que de la culture populaire. Cependant, les traits du folklore juif etaient diffuses par les migrations et les contacts personnels. Les frontieres politiques modernes ont joue un role assez modeste bien que les expulsions ou les restrictions gouvernementales aient ete importantes. La germanisation fut un facteur decisif de differenciation des communautes d'Europe

Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800-1923

Brothers and Strangers traces the history of German Jewish attitudes, policies, and stereotypical images toward Eastern European Jews, demonstrating the ways in which the historic rupture between Eastern and Western Jewry developed as a function of modernism and its imperatives. By the 1880s, most German Jews had inherited and used such negative images to symbolize rejection of their own ghetto past and to emphasize the contrast between modern enlightened Jewry and its half-Asian counterpart. Moreover, stereotypes of the ghetto and the Eastern Jew figured prominently in the growth and disposition of German anti-Semitism. Not everyone shared these negative preconceptions, however, and over the years a competing post-liberal image emerged of the Ostjude as cultural hero. Brothers and Strangers examines the genesis, development, and consequences of these changing forces in their often complex cultural, political, and intellectual contexts.

The Jew in the Medieval World. A Source Book 315-1791

To gain an accurate view of medieval Judaism, one must look through the eyes of Jews and their contemporaries. First published in 1938, Jacob Rader Marcus s classic source book on medieval Judaism provides the documents and historical narratives which let the actors and witnesses of events speak for themselves. The medieval epoch in Jewish history begins around the year 315, when the emperor Constantine began enacting disabling laws against the Jews, rendering them second-class citizens. In the centuries following, Jews enjoyed (or suffered under) legislation, either chosen or forced by the state, which differed from the laws for the Christian and Muslim masses. Most states saw the Jews as simply a tolerated group, even when given favorable privileges. The masses often disliked them. Medieval Jewish history presents a picture wherein large patches are characterized by political and social disabilities. Marcus closes the medieval Jewish age (for Western Jewry) in 1791 with the proclamation of political and civil emancipation in France. The 137 sources included in the anthology include historical narratives, codes, legal opinions, martyrologies, memoirs, polemics, epitaphs, advertisements, folk-tales, ethical and pedagogical writings, book prefaces and colophons, commentaries, and communal statutes. These documents are organized in three sections: The first treats the relation of the State to the Jew and reflects the civil and political status of the Jew in the medieval setting. The second deals with the profound influence exerted by the Catholic and Protestant churches on Jewish life and well-being. The final section presents a study of the Jew at home, with four sub-divisions with treat the life of the medieval Jew in its various aspects. Marcus presents the texts themselves, introductions, and lucid notes. Marc Saperstein offers a new introduction and updated bibliography.