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The Agony of Greek Jews, 1940-1945

Steven B. Bowman

This book tells the story of modern Greek Jewry as it came under the control of the Kingdom of Greece during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, it deals with the vicissitudes of ... More

This book tells the story of modern Greek Jewry as it came under the control of the Kingdom of Greece during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, it deals with the vicissitudes of those Jews who held Greek citizenship during the interwar and wartime periods. Individual chapters address the participation of Greek and Palestinian Jews in the 1941 fighting with Italy and Germany, the roles of Jews in the Greek Resistance, aid, and rescue attempts, and the problems faced by Jews who returned from the camps and the mountains in the aftermath of the German retreat. The book focuses on the fate of one minority group of Greek citizens during the war and explores various aspects of its relations with the conquerors, the conquered, and concerned bystanders. It contains archival material and interviews with survivors.Less

Barricades and Banners: The Revolution of 1905 and the Transformation of Warsaw Jewry

Scott Ury

This book examines the intersection of urban society and modern politics among Jews in turn-of-the-century Warsaw, Europe's largest Jewish center at the time. By focusing on the tumultuous events ... More

This book examines the intersection of urban society and modern politics among Jews in turn-of-the-century Warsaw, Europe's largest Jewish center at the time. By focusing on the tumultuous events surrounding the Revolution of 1905, this book argues that the metropolitization of Jewish life led to a need for new forms of community and belonging, and that the ensuing search for collective and individual order gave birth to the new institutions, organizations, and practices that would define modern Jewish society and politics for the remainder of the twentieth century.Less

Beyond Expulsion: Jews, Christians, and Reformation Strasbourg

Debra Kaplan

This book is a history of Jewish–Christian interactions in early modern Strasbourg, a city from which the Jews had been expelled and banned from residence in the late fourteenth century. It shows ... More

This book is a history of Jewish–Christian interactions in early modern Strasbourg, a city from which the Jews had been expelled and banned from residence in the late fourteenth century. It shows that the Jews who remained in the Alsatian countryside continued to maintain relationships with the city and its residents in the ensuing period. During most of the sixteenth century, Jews entered Strasbourg on a daily basis, where they participated in the city's markets, litigated in its courts, and shared their knowledge of Hebrew and Judaica with Protestant Reformers. By the end of the sixteenth century, Strasbourg became an increasingly orthodox Lutheran city, and city magistrates and religious leaders sought to curtail contact between Jews and Christians. The book unearths the active Jewish participation in early modern society, traces the impact of the Reformation on local Jews, discusses the meaning of tolerance, and describes the shifting boundaries that divided Jewish and Christian communities.Less

The Business of Identity: Jews, Muslims, and Economic Life in Medieval Egypt

Phillip I. Ackerman-Lieberman

This book explores Jewish commercial partnerships in medieval Egypt, and reveals Jewish merchants to have used economic cooperation as a vehicle for cultural identity formation and maintenance. ... More

This book explores Jewish commercial partnerships in medieval Egypt, and reveals Jewish merchants to have used economic cooperation as a vehicle for cultural identity formation and maintenance. Through a detailed analysis of the legal documents of the Cairo Geniza, the book shows an affinity between Jewish law and the daily life of Jewish merchants filtered through the courts, which educated merchants about the norms of Jewish commercial law without necessarily demanding that the merchants transact their business according to those norms. However, a close reading of the actual documentary evidence shows that they have done so, and even shows how merchants’ choice to do so affirmed their Jewish identity in ways that cut across a number of different cultural domains. The idea that Jewish merchants might have had distinctive business practices reflecting their Jewish identity challenges the regnant wisdom of the “Princeton School” of Geniza scholars, who have used letters from Jewish merchants as a tool for describing the practice of the broad medieval Islamic marketplace. This book examines the historical practice of the Princeton School and questions the “identity” that scholars have understood to exist between the mercantile behavior of Jews and Muslims. The book proposes an alternative to this “identity” which accounts for the evidence from the legal documents of the Geniza and proposes a more complex relationship between Jewish and Muslim commercial behavior in the medieval Islamic world.Less

Confessions of the Shtetl: Converts from Judaism in Imperial Russia, 1817-1906

Ellie R. Schainker

Confessions of the Shtetl explores Jewish conversions to a variety of Christian confessions in nineteenth-century imperial Russia. The book analyzes the surprisingly restrained policy of the Russian ... More

Confessions of the Shtetl explores Jewish conversions to a variety of Christian confessions in nineteenth-century imperial Russia. The book analyzes the surprisingly restrained policy of the Russian state and Orthodox Church toward conversion of Jews which highlights the meaning and management of toleration and religious diversity in imperial Russia more broadly. The book also offers a micro-level sociocultural history of converts, focusing on their motivations and post-baptism trajectories, and on relationships with Christians forged prior to baptism that facilitated religious transfers. It explores the responses of local Jewish and Christian families, communities, and authorities to this extreme form of boundary crossing, highlighting the various measures at the Jewish community’s disposal to contest apostasy. Finally, the book offers a cultural history of Jewish and Russian/Christian public discourses surrounding conversion and the questions it raised, ranging from the grounds of religious toleration to the nature of Jews themselves. Overall, the argument is that the Jewish encounter with imperial Russia was a genuinely religious drama with a diverse, attractive, and aggressive Christianity. The book unsettles the vision of Jews in the Pale of Settlement as a ghettoized community and analyzes the spatial, social, and cultural ties between Jews and Christians. Drawing on previously untapped archival files, the mass circulation press, novels, and memoirs, the book argues that baptism did not constitute a total break with Jewishness or the Jewish community and that conversion marked the start of a complicated experiment with new forms of identity and belonging.Less

An Early Self: Jewish Belonging in Romance Literature, 1499-1627

Susanne Zepp

This book discusses five Early Modern literary texts that emerged in Europe between 1499 and 1627. The 5 texts are: La Celestina, the Dialoghi d’amore by Leone Ebreo, the first picaresque novel, ... More

This book discusses five Early Modern literary texts that emerged in Europe between 1499 and 1627. The 5 texts are: La Celestina, the Dialoghi d’amore by Leone Ebreo, the first picaresque novel, Lazarillo de Tormes, Michel de Montaigne’s Essais, and João Pinto Delgado’s poeticizing treatments of biblical texts. The book understands these text as essential for the epoch, the interpretation of which has hitherto focused mainly on the – alleged or actual – Jewish, “New Christian”, or Marranic affiliation of their authors. The book replaces an origin-focused discussion of Early Modern Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and French literature with another perspective which neither levels the particular character of these texts nor overlooks their encapsulation in a universal historical experience due to a too narrow focus on the authors’ biographies. The individually varying engagement of the five texts with questions of origin and ancestry described in this study reveals components of a Marranic historical experience beyond the authors’ affiliations. These components seem like layers of memory which, although buried, build the foundation for the overlying layers and show through them. The analysis of these texts serves to initiate a fresh discussion of the complicated link between author and text as well as of the relevance of an author’s origin for an insight into aesthetic characteristics. The texts provide an understanding of Jewish History in Early Modern Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian Literatures in the emergence of modernity.Less

Emissaries from the Holy Land: The Sephardic Diaspora and the Practice of Pan-Judaism in the Eighteenth Century

Matthias B. Lehmann

Emissaries from the Holy Land tells the story of a philanthropic network that was overseen by the Jewish community leadership in the Ottoman capital city of Istanbul between the 1720s and the 1820s ... More

Emissaries from the Holy Land tells the story of a philanthropic network that was overseen by the Jewish community leadership in the Ottoman capital city of Istanbul between the 1720s and the 1820s in support of the impoverished Jews of Palestine. Putting the notion of Jewish solidarity, Jewish unity, and the enduring centrality of the Holy Land for the Jewish world to the test, the community leadership in Palestine and their allies in Istanbul dispatched rabbinic emissaries on fundraising missions everywhere from the shores of the Mediterranean to the port cities of the Atlantic seaboard, from the Caribbean to India. This book explores how this eighteenth-century philanthropic network was organized and how relations of trust and solidarity were built across vast geographic differences. It looks at how the emissaries and their supporters understood the relationship between the Jewish diaspora and the Land of Israel, and it shows how cross-cultural encounters and competing claims for financial support involving Sephardic, Ashkenazi, and North African emissaries and communities contributed to the transformation of Jewish identity in the eighteenth century.Less

The Fall of a Sparrow: The Life and Times of Abba Kovner

Dina Porat

This book is the only full biography in English of the partisan, poet, and patriot Abba Kovner (1918–1987), an unsung and largely unknown hero of the Second World War and Israel's War of ... More

This book is the only full biography in English of the partisan, poet, and patriot Abba Kovner (1918–1987), an unsung and largely unknown hero of the Second World War and Israel's War of Independence, born in Vilna, “the Jerusalem of Lithuania.” Long before the rest of the world suspected, he was the first person to state that Hitler was planning to kill the Jews of Europe, and who, along with other defenders of the Vilna ghetto, escaped, only hours before its destruction, to the forest, to join the partisans fighting the Nazis. Returning after the Liberation to find Vilna empty of Jews, Kovner emigrated to Israel, where he devised a fruitless plot to take revenge on the Germans. He then joined the Israeli army and served as the Givati Brigade's Information Officer, writing “Battle Notes,” newsletters that inspired the troops defending Tel Aviv. After the war, Kovner settled on a kibbutz and dedicated his life to working the land, writing poetry, and raising a family. He was also the moving force behind such projects as the Diaspora Museum and the Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature. The book is based on interviews with people who knew Kovner, and on letters and archival material that have never been translated before.Less

From Kabbalah to Class Struggle: Expressionism, Marxism, and Yiddish Literature in the Life and Work of Meir Wiener

Mikhail Krutikov

This book is an intellectual biography of Meir Wiener (1893–1941), an Austrian-Jewish intellectual and a student of Jewish mysticism who emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1926 and reinvented himself ... More

This book is an intellectual biography of Meir Wiener (1893–1941), an Austrian-Jewish intellectual and a student of Jewish mysticism who emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1926 and reinvented himself as a Marxist scholar and Yiddish writer. Wiener's life story offers a glimpse into the complexities and controversies of Jewish intellectual and cultural history of pre-war Europe. Wiener made a remarkable career as a Yiddish scholar and writer in the Stalinist Soviet Union, and left an unfinished novel about Jewish intellectual bohemia of Weimar Berlin. He was a brilliant intellectual, a controversial thinker, a committed communist, and a great Yiddish scholar—who personally knew Lenin and Rabbi Kook, corresponded with Martin Buber and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and argued with Gershom Scholem and Georg Lukács. Wiener's intellectual biography brings Yiddish to the forefront of the intellectual discourse of interwar Europe.Less

The Full Severity of Compassion: The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

Chana Kronfeld

Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000) was the foremost Israeli poet of the 20th century and an internationally influential literary figure. The Full Severity of Compassion is a modular retrospective of ... More

Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000) was the foremost Israeli poet of the 20th century and an internationally influential literary figure. The Full Severity of Compassion is a modular retrospective of Amichai's poetic project. It depicts the poet's life-long struggle against all hierarchical systems of privilege and exclusion, and his search for an alternative “language of love,” as he calls it. The book explores Amichai's fierce avant-garde egalitarianism at it is expressed in a commitment to both accessibility and daring experimentation. Through a series of close readings, the book discusses issues in contemporary literary studies, always theorizing from, rather than into, Amichai's poetry.Less

Germans into Jews: Remaking the Jewish Social Body in the Weimar Republic

Sharon Gillerman

This book turns to an often overlooked and misunderstood period of German and Jewish history: the years between the world wars. It has been assumed that the Jewish community in Germany was in decline ... More

This book turns to an often overlooked and misunderstood period of German and Jewish history: the years between the world wars. It has been assumed that the Jewish community in Germany was in decline during the Weimar Republic. But the author of this book demonstrates that Weimar Jews sought to rejuvenate and reconfigure their community as a means both of strengthening the German nation and of creating a more expansive and autonomous Jewish entity within the German state. These ambitious projects to increase fertility, expand welfare, and strengthen the family transcended the ideological and religious divisions that have traditionally characterized Jewish communal life. Integrating Jewish history, German history, gender history, and social history, the book highlights the experimental and contingent nature of efforts by Weimar Jews to reassert a new Jewish particularism while simultaneously reinforcing their commitment to Germanness.Less

Glory and Agony: Isaac's Sacrifice and National Narrative

Yael Feldman

This book is a history of the shifting attitudes toward national sacrifice in Hebrew culture over the last century. Its point of departure is Zionism's obsessive preoccupation with its haunting ... More

This book is a history of the shifting attitudes toward national sacrifice in Hebrew culture over the last century. Its point of departure is Zionism's obsessive preoccupation with its haunting “primal scene” of sacrifice—the near-sacrifice of Isaac—as evidenced in wide-ranging sources from the domains of literature, art, psychology, philosophy, and politics. By placing these sources in conversation with twentieth-century thinking on human sacrifice, violence, and martyrdom, this study draws a complex picture that provides multiple, sometimes contradictory, insights into the genesis and gender of national sacrifice. Extending back over two millennia, it unearths retellings of biblical and classical narratives of sacrifice, both enacted and aborted, voluntary and violent, male and female: Isaac, Ishmael, Jephthah's daughter, Iphigenia, Jesus. The book traces the birth of national sacrifice out of the ruins of religious martyrdom, exposing the sacred underside of Western secularism in Israel, as elsewhere.Less

A Goy Who Speaks Yiddish: Christians and the Jewish Language in Early Modern Germany

Aya Elyada

This book explores the unique phenomenon of Christian engagement with Yiddish language and literature from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the late eighteenth century. By analyzing the ... More

This book explores the unique phenomenon of Christian engagement with Yiddish language and literature from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the late eighteenth century. By analyzing the motivations for Christian interest in Yiddish, and the differing ways in which Yiddish was discussed and treated in Christian texts, it addresses a wide array of issues, most notably Christian Hebraism, Protestant theology, early modern Yiddish culture, and the social and cultural history of language in early modern Europe. The analysis of a wide range of philological and theological works, as well as textbooks, dictionaries, ethnographical writings, and translations, demonstrates that Christian Yiddishism had implications beyond its purely linguistic and philological dimensions. Indeed, Christian texts on Yiddish reveal not only the ways in which Christians perceived and defined Jews and Judaism, but also, in a contrasting vein, how they viewed their own language, religion, and culture.Less

Historians of the Jews and the Holocaust

David Engel

The Nazi Holocaust is often said to dominate the study of modern Jewish history. This book demonstrates that, to the contrary, historians of the Jews have often insisted that the Holocaust be ... More

The Nazi Holocaust is often said to dominate the study of modern Jewish history. This book demonstrates that, to the contrary, historians of the Jews have often insisted that the Holocaust be sequestered from their field, assigning it instead to historians of Europe, Germany, or the Third Reich. It shows that reasons for this counterintuitive situation lie in the evolution of the Jewish historical profession since the 1920s. This study takes readers on a tour of twentieth-century scholars of the history of European Jewry, and the social and political contexts in which they worked, in order to understand why many have declined to view their subject from the vantage point of Jews' encounter with the Third Reich. The author argues vehemently against this separation and describes ways in which a few exceptional scholars have used the Holocaust to illuminate key problems in the Jewish past.Less

Homes Away from Home: Jewish Belonging in Twentieth-Century Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg

Sarah Wobick-Segev

This book is the first comparative study of Jewish communities in Western, Central, and Eastern Europe. It analyzes how Jews used social and religious spaces to reformulate patterns of fraternity, ... More

This book is the first comparative study of Jewish communities in Western, Central, and Eastern Europe. It analyzes how Jews used social and religious spaces to reformulate patterns of fraternity, celebration, and family formation and expressions of self-identification. It suggests that the social patterns that developed between 1890 and the 1930s were formative for the fundamental reshaping of Jewish community and remain essential to our understanding of contemporary Jewish life. Focusing on the social interactions of urban European Jews, this book offers a new perspective on how Jews confronted the challenges of modernity. As membership in the official community was becoming increasingly a matter of individual choice, Jews created spaces to meet new social and emotional needs. Cafés, hotels, and restaurants became places to gather and celebrate festivals and holy days, and summer camps served as sites for the informal education of young children. These places facilitated the option of secular Jewish belonging, marking a clear distinction between Judaism and Jewishness that would have been impossible on a large scale in the pre-emancipation era. By creating new centers for Jewish life, a growing number of historical actors, including women and youth, took the process of community building into their own hands. The contexts of Jewish life expanded beyond the confines of “traditional” Jewish spaces and sometimes challenged the desires of Jewish authorities. The book further argues that these social practices remained vital in reconstructing certain Jewish communities in the wake of the devastation of the Holocaust.Less

How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms

Marc Caplan

This book argues that the literatures of ostensibly marginal modern cultures are key to understanding modernism. It undertakes an unprecedented comparison of nineteenth-century Yiddish literature and ... More

This book argues that the literatures of ostensibly marginal modern cultures are key to understanding modernism. It undertakes an unprecedented comparison of nineteenth-century Yiddish literature and twentieth-century Anglophone and Francophone African literature and reveals unexpected similarities between them. These literatures were created under imperial regimes that brought with them processes of modernization that were already well advanced elsewhere. Yiddish and African writers reacted to the liberating potential of modernity and the burdens of imperial authority by choosing similar narrative genres, typically reminiscent of early-modern European literatures: the picaresque, the pseudo-autobiography, satire, and the Bildungsroman. Both display analogous anxieties toward language, caught as they were between imperial, “global” languages and stigmatized native vernaculars, and between traditions of writing and orality. Through comparative readings of narratives by Reb Nakhman of Breslov, Amos Tutuola, Yisroel Aksenfeld, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Isaac Meyer Dik, Camara Laye, Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Wole Soyinka, Y. Y. Linetski, and Ahmadou Karouma, the book demonstrates that these literatures' “belated” relationship to modernization suggests their potential to anticipate subsequent crises in the modernity and post-modernity of metropolitan cultures. The book proposes a new theoretical model, peripheral modernism, which incorporates both a new understanding of “periphery” and “center” in modernity and a new methodology for comparative literary criticism and theory.Less

In History's Grip: Philip Roth's Newark Trilogy

Michael Kimmage

This book concentrates on the literature of Philip Roth, one of America's greatest writers, and in particular on American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain. Each of these novels ... More

This book concentrates on the literature of Philip Roth, one of America's greatest writers, and in particular on American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain. Each of these novels from the 1990s uses Newark, New Jersey, to explore American history and character. Each features a protagonist who grows up in and then leaves Newark, after which he is undone by a historically generated crisis. The city's twentieth-century decline from immigrant metropolis to postindustrial disaster completes the motif of history and its terrifying power over individual destiny. This book is the first critical study to foreground the city of Newark as the source of Roth's inspiration, and to scrutinize a subject Roth was accused of avoiding as a younger writer—history. In so doing, the book brings together the two halves of Roth's decades-long career: the first featuring characters who live outside of history's grip; the second, characters entrapped in historical patterns beyond their ken and control.Less

Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France

Maurice Samuels

This book brings to light little-known works of literature produced from 1830 to 1870 by the first generation of Jews born as French citizens. These writers, it asserts, used fiction as a laboratory ... More

This book brings to light little-known works of literature produced from 1830 to 1870 by the first generation of Jews born as French citizens. These writers, it asserts, used fiction as a laboratory to experiment with new forms of Jewish identity relevant to the modern world, and, in their stories and novels, responded to the stereotypical depictions of Jews in French culture while creatively adapting the forms and genres of the French literary tradition. They also offered innovative solutions to the central dilemmas of Jewish modernity in the French context—including how to reconcile their identities as Jews with the universalizing demands of the French revolutionary tradition. While theit solutions ranged from complete assimilation to a modern brand of orthodoxy, these writers collectively illustrate the creativity of a community in the face of unprecedented upheaval.Less

A Jewish Life on Three Continents: The Memoir of Menachem Mendel Frieden

This memoir of Menachem Mendel Frieden, translated from the original Hebrew, edited, and annotated by his historian grandson, recounts the history of the author’s family back several generations and ... More

This memoir of Menachem Mendel Frieden, translated from the original Hebrew, edited, and annotated by his historian grandson, recounts the history of the author’s family back several generations and covers his life from the time of his birth in 1878 until the middle of the twentieth century. The memoir tells of Frieden’s early years in a Lithuanian village; of his schooling, courtship and marriage in Eastern Europe; of his migration to and exploits in America early in the twentieth century; and, finally, of his settlement in Palestine in 1921 and his involvement in the project of nation building in the Land of Israel. Thus, Frieden’s story provides insight into a multitude of topics related to the history of the Jews in all three of the most significant centers of Jewish life during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This memoir, which calls attention to some often ignored aspects of the modern Jewish experience, tells a fascinating personal story of a man who struggled with the encroachment of modern ideas into a traditional society, who faced life-altering choices at several points over the years, and who became involved in a variety of economic ventures as he worked to support his family and to fulfill his ideals. Ultimately, Frieden’s memoir represents both a marvelous source of historical information about a crucial period in Jewish history and a thought-provoking individual narrative.Less