Journal articles on the topic 'Jews – Europe – Identity'
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Szczerbiński, Waldemar. "East European Jews – prejudice or pride?" Studia Europaea Gnesnensia, no. 11 (January 1, 2015): 165–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/seg.2015.11.8.
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Jews from Central-Eastern Europe play a significant role in the formation of individual and social self-awareness in the Jewish world. It seems that in the Jewish world there exists a polarised approach to the Jews from this part of the world. On the one hand, there is pride, on the other, prejudice verging on shame. Some Jews have identified themselves with the group, others did the opposite, denied having anything to do with them. The most important question of our analyses is: what is the role of Eastern European Jews in building Jewish collective identity? Byron Sherwin, an American Jew, is an example of a great fascination with the Yiddish civilisation. Not only does he recognize and appreciate the spiritual legacy of Jews in Poland for other Jews around the world, but also accords this legacy a pre-eminent status in the collective Jewish identity. At the same time, he is conscious of the fact that not all Jews, if only in the United States, share his view. It is an upshot of the deep prejudice towards the life in the European Diaspora, which has been in evidence for some time. The same applies to the Jews in Israel. The new generations see the spiritual and cultural achievements of the Eastern European Jews as a legacy that should be learned and developed. This engenders hope that the legacy of the Jews of Eastern Europe will be preserved and will become a foundation of identity for future generations.
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Baumgarten, Elisheva. "Daily Commodities and Religious Identity in the Medieval Jewish Communities of Northern Europe." Studies in Church History 50 (2014): 97–121. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0424208400001674.
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The Hebrew chronicle written by Solomon b. Samson recounts the mass conversion of the Jews of Regensburg in 1096.’ The Jews were herded and forced into the local river where a ‘sign was made over the water, the sign of a cross’ and thus they were baptized, all together in the same river. The local German rivers play another role in the accounts of the turbulent events of the Crusade persecutions. They were also the place where Jews evaded conversion, drowning themselves in water, rather than being baptized by what the chronicles’ authors call the ‘stinking waters’ of Christianity. Reading these Hebrew chronicles, one is immediately struck by the tremendous revulsion expressed toward the waters of baptism. Indeed, in his analysis of the symbolic significance of the baptismal waters for medieval Jews, Ivan Marcus has suggested that baptism by force in the local rivers was so traumatic that they instituted a ritual response during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. One component of the medieval Jewish child initiation ceremony to Torah study was performed on the banks of the river, expressing Jewish aversion to baptism (see Fig. i).
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Fridjesi, Judit. "The ′ugliness′ of Jewish prayer: Voice quality as the expression of identity." Muzikologija, no. 7 (2007): 99–118. http://dx.doi.org/10.2298/muz0707099f.
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This article is based on the musical material and interviews the author collected in Hungary, France, Czechoslovakia, the USA and Israel in the course of thirty years of her fieldwork among the traditional East-Ashkenazi Jews. It relates to the aesthetic concepts of the prayer chant of the Ashkenazi Jews of East Europe (?East -Ashkenazim?) as it appears to have existed before World War II, survived in the oral tradition until the 1970s and exists sporadically up to the present.
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Christensen, M. Z. "The Unconverted Self: Jews, Indians, and the Identity of Christian Europe." Ethnohistory 58, no. 1 (January 1, 2011): 172–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00141801-2010-080.
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Blakely, Allison. "The Identity Question: Blacks and Jews in Europe and America (review)." American Jewish History 89, no. 2 (2001): 252–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ajh.2001.0022.
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ALBANIS, ELISABETH. "JEWISH IDENTITY IN THE FACE OF ANTI-SEMITISM." Historical Journal 41, no. 3 (September 1998): 895–900. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0018246x98008024.
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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.
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ZALKIN, MORDECHAI. "Can Jews Become Farmers? Rurality, Peasantry and Cultural Identity in the World of the Rural Jew in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Europe." Rural History 24, no. 2 (September 13, 2013): 161–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s095679331300006x.
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Abstract:Based on conventional learning and supported in no small measure by stereotypes, agriculture as a vocation was not considered as part of the occupational profile of Jewish society in Eastern Europe until the Second World War. However, various studies show that in different regions in this area, primarily Lithuania, White Russia, north eastern Poland, and Bessarabia, tens of thousands of Jews made a living from direct engagement in various branches of agriculture, including field crops, orchards, lake fishing, etc. These Jews lived mainly in the rural areas and were a factor, and at times a highly significant one, in the local demographic and economic structure. The first part of this article examines the question whether these Jews, who were part of the general rural society living in the countryside, developed a certain type of rural cultural identity. This question is discussed by examining various aspects of their attitude towards nature. The second part of the article considers the possible influence of the agricultural occupation on the shaping of a unique peasant cultural identity among these rural Jews and the ways they coped with the accompanying religious, social and cultural implications.
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Schorsch, Jonathan. "Jonathan Boyarin: The unconverted self: Jews, Indians, and the identity of Christian Europe." Jewish History 24, no. 3-4 (September 17, 2010): 389–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10835-010-9122-y.
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Green, Abigail. "Nationalism and the ‘Jewish International’: Religious Internationalism in Europe and the Middle East c.1840–c.1880." Comparative Studies in Society and History 50, no. 2 (April 2008): 535–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0010417508000236.
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Jewish cosmopolitanism has long assumed a central place in the ideology of anti-Semitism. Well before the publication of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the idea of international Jewish solidarity served as an argument against Jewish emancipation. In Britain, Sir Robert Inglis famously opposed granting the Jews political rights because “[t]he Jews of London have more sympathy with the Jews resident in Berlin or Vienna than with the Christians among whom they reside.” Likewise, in 1840, the ultramontane Univers saw international lobbying on behalf of Jews accused of ritual murder in Damascus as proof that “the Hebrew nationality is not dead … What religious connection is there between the Talmudists of Alsace, Cologne or the East, and the Messrs. Rothschild and Crémieux?” That L'Univers saw this cosmopolitan fellow-feeling as an expression of Jewish national identity is irrelevant. The point is rather that for anti-Semites Jewish ‘nationalism’ was an inherently international force.
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Williams, John P. "Exodus from Europe: Jewish Diaspora Immigration from Central and Eastern Europe to the United States (1820-1914)." Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 16, no. 1-3 (April 7, 2017): 85–102. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15691497-12341422.
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This article examines one of the largest exoduses in human history. In less than three decades, over five million Jews from Poland, Germany, and Russia journeyed to what they considered to be the “American Promised Land.” This study serves five main purposes: first, to identify social, political, and economic factors that encouraged this unprecedented migration; second, to examine the extensive communication and transportation networks that aided this exodus, highlighting the roles that mutual aid societies (especially the Alliance Israelite Universelle in Paris, the Mansion House Fund in London, and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in New York City) played in the success of these migrations; third, to analyze this diaspora’s impact on the cultural identity of the Jewish communities in which they settled; fourth, to discuss the cultural and economic success of this mass resettlement; and finally, fifth, identify incidents of anti-Semitism in employment, education, and legal realms that tempered economic and cultural gains by Jewish immigrants to America.
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Witriani, Witriani. "The Jews in Hollywood: Altering Image through Religious Movies." Celt: A Journal of Culture, English Language Teaching & Literature 19, no. 2 (July 14, 2020): 202. http://dx.doi.org/10.24167/celt.v19i2.519.
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This article discusses the altering image of American Jews in Hollywood movies. Coming to America during the great migration, mostly from Eastern Europe, this Azkenazic Jews then contributed to the building and transformation of the Hollywood movies as a world icon. Though quite dominant, Jews are quite careful in this industry. Anti-Semitism, the World War and the Great Depression are some of the things that make Jews uncomfortable about being in the spotlight or talking about their identity among the Christian audience of the movies. However, the condition changed after the Second World War and the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Jews and Judaism later appeared in various representations, which does not only change their image in Hollywood, but also the acceptance of American society broadly. Focusing on the movie, Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1959) as the object of research, the study explores how Jewish people represent themselves through films produced, including the negotiations and changes made as part of the American Jews. Using the theory of Stuart Hall’s Politics of Representation and Critical Discourse Analysis from Fairclough and Leuween as an approach, this work focuses on the analysis of text and images as a sign that represents the Jews and Judaism in the movie. Related to movie as a media construction, the filmmakers are able to reconstruct Jews in different image. Through the movie, the represented Jews are found to have conveyed various messages to the audience about their cultural and religious identity.
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Abulafia, Anna Sapir. "The Unconverted Self: Jews, Indians, and the Identity of Christian Europe (review)." Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 29, no. 3 (2011): 164–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/sho.2011.0130.
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Arkin, Kimberly A. "Historicity, Peoplehood, and Politics: Holocaust Talk in Twenty-First-Century France." Comparative Studies in Society and History 60, no. 4 (October 2018): 968–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s001041751800035x.
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AbstractDrawing on ethnographic data from the mid-2000s as well as accounts from French Jewish newspapers and magazines from the 1980s onward, this paper traces the emergence of new French Jewish institutional narratives linking North African Jews to the “European” Holocaust. I argue that these new narratives emerged as a response to the social and political impasses produced by intra-Jewish disagreements over whether and how North African Jews could talk about the Holocaust, which divided French Jews and threatened the relationship between Jewishness and French national identity. These new pedagogical narratives relied on a very different historicity, or way of reckoning time and causality, than those used in more divisive everyday French Jewish Holocaust narratives. By reworking the ways that French Jews reckoned time and causality, they offered an expansive and homogenously “European” Jewishness. This argument works against a growing postcolonial sociological and anthropological literature on religious minorities in France and Europe by emphasizing the contingency, difficulty, and even ambivalence around constructing “Jewishness” as transparently either “European” or “French.” It also highlights the role played by historicity—not just history—in producing what counts as group “identity.”
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Endelman, Todd M. "Derek J. Penslar. Shylock's Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe. The S. Mark Taper Foundation Imprint in Jewish Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. xi, 374 pp." AJS Review 29, no. 2 (November 2005): 384–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0364009405330170.
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In the early modern and modern periods, the occupational profile of Jews in the West diverged dramatically from that of their neighbors and fellow citizens. Commerce, rather than agriculture or artisanal or industrial manufacturing, provided the arena in which Jews labored to make a living. From an economic perspective, this was not a problem. It did not place Jews at a competitive disadvantage. Indeed, the opposite was true. In the context of industrialization, urbanization, and mass consumption, buying and selling was more profitable than tolling in a field, workshop, or factory. Having been forced into a narrow range of occupations earlier in their history, Jews in the West now found themselves in an advantageous position economically. However, for Gentiles, who rarely viewed Jews in a disinterested light, the Jewish distinctive occupational profile was problematic and often viewed as symptomatic of a more profound pathology. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with Jews becoming citizens of the states in which they lived and moving rapidly into the middle class, their economic distinctiveness became a central feature of the debate about their fate and future, what was known at the time as the “Jewish Question.”
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Sułek, Antoni. "Ordinary Poles Look at the Jews." East European Politics and Societies: and Cultures 26, no. 2 (August 3, 2011): 425–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0888325411415402.
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This article constitutes a meta-analysis of sociological surveys conducted between 1967 and 2010 on the attitudes of Poles towards Jews. This analysis covers factual knowledge about Jews, like/dislike feelings, social distance, cognitive schema, and views regarding Polish–Jewish history. The results reflect a general nonacceptance of strangers as well as a specific type of anti-Semitism with strong roots in and encompassing a broad spectrum of Polish society. In this respect, Poland and some of the other Central Eastern European countries are much alike and distinguish themselves negatively in comparison to Western Europe. Nevertheless, in the last decade a positive shift in Polish attitudes towards Jews has been manifesting itself: feelings of closeness are increasing while disapproving cognitive schemes are decreasing. Further changes depend upon the reconstruction of Polish national identity as well as on the public debates delving into Polish–Jewish relations past and present.
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Visacovsky, Nerina. "The Yiddisher Kultur Farband in Argentina: Progressive and Communist Jews (1917–1956)." Science & Society 86, no. 1 (January 2022): 12–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1521/siso.2022.86.1.12.
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Progressive and Communist Jewish identity in Argentina flourished between the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Cold War. In 1937, during the Popular Front period, Jewish Communist intellectuals organized an International Congress of Yiddish Culture in Paris. Twenty-three countries were represented, and the Congress formed the Yiddisher Kultur Farband (YKUF). In 1941, this Congress was replicated in Argentina, where the YKUF sponsored an important network of schools, clubs, theaters, socio-cultural centers, and libraries created by Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. The Ykufist or Progressive Jewish identity reflects a particular construction that is as ethnic as it is political. As “Jewish,” it aimed to transmit the secular heritage of the Yiddishkeit devastated in Europe during World War II, but as “progressive,” “radical” or “Communist,” it postulated its yearning for integration into a universal socialism led by the Soviet model. Progressive Jewish identity was shaped in the antifascist culture and by permanent tensions between Jewish ethnicity and the guidelines of the Communist Party. Above all, it was framed by a fervent aspiration of the immigrants and their children to integrate into their Argentine society.
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Sassenberg, Marina. "The Face of Janus." European Judaism 33, no. 2 (September 1, 2000): 72–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/ej.2000.330209.
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As the unification of contemporary Europe becomes a reality, new questions arise about a common cultural identity. In this context, research on a common European Jewish heritage has achieved wide public interest. Involving economic and political, cultural and religious, social and academic questions, the history of the Hoffaktoren, as they were called in German, was not constrained by European borders. It is the history of those entrepreneurs, bankers, politicians and diplomats, who served their princes throughout seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, which serves perfectly as a research field relating to European identity. Though centred on Germany, Austria and Holland, the history of the Court Jews had a decisive influence on many other countries, such as Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Poland, Hungary, Italy, England and Ireland
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Baiduzh, Dmitrii V., and Victoriia O. Medvedeva. "THE IMAGE OF THE OTHER: THE DISTINCTIVE SIGN OF THE JEWS IN MEDIEVAL GERMANY (13th-16th CENTURIES)." Tyumen State University Herald. Humanities Research. Humanitates 8, no. 4 (2022): 110–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.21684/2411-197x-2022-8-4-110-133.
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This paper studies the special distinguishing sign of the Jews in the Germany during the 13th-16th centuries. Since early 12th c., Europe saw a large-scale process of rethinking the place of existing social groups and the emergence of new ones, clearly expressed by a set of iconic practices. The legitimization of the Jews’ emblems is its direct consequence. Using semiotic analysis, the authors consider visual signs in written and pictorial sources of various types as elements within the framework of a common sign system, as well as reveal the specifics of emblematic manifestations characteristic of Jewish identity. Most often, the signs were yellow and round. In Germany, the signs were used quite late relative to other European countries. In addition, Jews in Germany were in a better position because they depended on the emperor, and political decentralization had an impact on it. The authors conclude that the church prescription for Jews to wear specific signs was explained by the processes of streamlining the social organization of the Christian world. Finally, the authors state that the emblems were part of two strategies: the distinction between Jews and Christians, and the integration of Jews into the medieval urban space. In addition, the emblems could be a means of defamation or a positive, neutral sign.
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Pasieka, Agnieszka. "Niebiali, niemężczyźni i inni nieprawdziwi obywatele. O reprodukcji społecznych nierówności w książce Karen Brodkin „How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America”." Studia Litteraria et Historica, no. 2 (June 30, 2014): 555–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.11649/slh.2013.022.
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Non-whites, non-males and other non-genuine citizens. The reproduction of social inequalities as seen in Karen Brodkin’s 'How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about America'The article offers a review of Karen Brodkin’s How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about America. Brodkin analyses the social and political transformations in America and puts the analysis in the context of her own autobiography. The first issue that Brodkin investigates are the processes that led to the change in the social status of Jews and other immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe in the 20th century. Second, Brodkin tries to understand her own origins, as well as different life styles and ways of perceiving the Jewish identity present in her family. Beside the analysis itself, Brodkin also offers many interesting remarks on the construction of racial and ethnic categories, discrimination, and the interactions between the ethnic, class and gender aspects of one’s identity. Niebiali, niemężczyźni i inni nieprawdziwi obywatele. O reprodukcji społecznych nierówności w książce Karen Brodkin „How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America”Artykuł ten stanowi recenzję książki amerykańskiej antropolożki Karen Brodkin, zatytułowanej How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (‘Jak Żydzi stali się białymi i co mówi to o zjawisku rasy w Ameryce’), która łączy analizę przemian społeczno-politycznych w Stanach Zjednoczonych z autobiograficznym studium własnych doświadczeń autorki. Tym samym Brodkin podejmuje dwa zasadnicze problemy. Pierwszym z nich jest próba zrozumienia procesów, które doprowadziły do zmiany statusu społecznego Żydów oraz innych imigrantów ze wschodniej i południowej Europy w dwudziestowiecznej Ameryce. Drugą analizowaną kwestią jest próba zrozumienia przez autorkę jej własnego pochodzenia, sytuacji rodzinnej, obowiązujących w jej rodzinie rożnych modeli życia i rożnych sposobów postrzegania tożsamości żydowskiej. Podejmując wymienione zagadnienia, Brodkin oferuje szereg cennych refleksji dotyczących konstrukcji kategorii rasowych i etnicznych, zjawiska dyskryminacji oraz relacji pomiędzy tożsamością etniczną, klasową i genderową.
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Kaplan, Robert. "Soaring on the Wings of the Wind: Freud, Jews and Judaism." Australasian Psychiatry 17, no. 4 (January 1, 2009): 318–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10398560902870957.
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Objectives: This paper looks at Freud's Jewish identity in the context of the Jewish experience in Eastern and Central Europe after 1800, using his family history and significant figures in his life as illustration. Sigmund Freud's life as a Jew is deeply paradoxical, if not enigmatic. He mixed almost exclusively with Jews while living all his life in an anti-Semitic environment. Yet he eschewed Jewish ritual, referred to himself as a godless Jew and sought to make his movement acceptable to gentiles. At the end of his life, dismayed by the rising forces of nationalism, he accepted that he was in his heart a Jew “in spite of all efforts to be unprejudiced and impartial”. The 18th century Haskalla (Jewish Enlightenment) was a form of rebellion against conformity and a means of escape from shtetl life. In this intense, entirely inward means of intellectual escape and revolt against authority, strongly tinged with sexual morality, we see the same tensions that were to manifest in the publication by a middle-aged Viennese neurologist of a truly revolutionary book to herald the new 20th century: The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud's life and work needs to be understood in the context of fin-de-siécle Vienna. Mitteleuropa, the cultural renaissance of Central Europe, resulted from the emancipation and urbanization of the burgeoning Jewish middle class, who adopted to the cosmopolitan environment more successfully than any other group. In this there is an extreme paradox: the Jewish success in Vienna was a tragedy of success. Conclusions: Freud, despite a deliberate attempt to play down his Jewish origins to deflect anti-Semitic attacks, is the most representative Jew of his time and his thinking and work represents the finest manifestation of the Litvak mentality.
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Kintzinger, Martin. "Identities and Narratives in Medieval Europe and in European Historical Research." Medieval History Journal 16, no. 2 (October 2013): 371–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0971945813514903.
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In medieval Europe from the late antiquity onwards up to about 1500, social and political identities were constructed by learned men in order to legitimise current developments and prevailing situations. According to this point of view, the older a tradition could be claimed, the better it was suited to explain their own reality. Ancient kings and heroes as well as legendary figures helped to construct a historically based identity which was defined by dynastic continuity. Conflicts and concurrences first emerged from the process of ranking different dynasties within a social hierarchy. The obligation to differ between Christian and non-Christian, antique as well as pagan traditions forced the narrative of a Christian Occident to be rebuilt. Contact with Muslims outside or even in Europe and with Jews in European cities finally led to open questions on how to behave and how to deal with one’s own identity.
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Baumgarten, Elisheva. "Appropriation and Differentiation: Jewish Identity in Medieval Ashkenaz." AJS Review 42, no. 1 (April 2018): 39–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0364009418000053.
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This article discusses the ways scholars have outlined the process of Jewish adaptation (or lack of it) from their Christian surroundings in northern Europe during the High Middle Ages. Using the example of penitential fasting, the first two sections of the article describe medieval Jewish practices and some of the approaches that have been used to explain the similarity between medieval Jewish and contemporary Christian customs. The last two sections of the article suggest that in addition to looking for texts that connect between Jewish and Christian thought and beliefs behind these customs, it is useful to examine what medieval Jews and Christians saw of each other's customs living in close urban quarters. Finally, the article suggests that when shaping medieval Jewish and Christian identity, the differences emphasized in shared everyday actions and visible practice were no less important than theological distinctions. As part of the discussion throughout the article, the terminology used by scholars to describe the process of Jewish appropriation from the local surroundings is described, focusing on terms such as “influence” and “inward acculturation,” as well as “appropriation.”
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Müller, Dietmar. "Orientalism and Nation: Jews and Muslims as Alterity in Southeastern Europe in the Age of Nation-States, 1878–1941." East Central Europe 36, no. 1 (2009): 63–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/187633009x411485.
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AbstractThe process of assigning the place for Jews in the Romanian nation code and for (Albanian) Muslims in the Serbian one is analyzed as Orientalistic. While the Great Powers served as role models in the Romanian and Serbian identity construction, these principal Others were represented as uncivilized and non-European, preventing the nation-states from their European destiny. This discursive construction of the nation in major debates is identified as a first step which was followed by policy recommendations from intellectuals and actual attempts to fulfill the dream of an ethnically homogenous nation-state. This sequence's latter parts are represented by a number of case studies, such as citizenship regulations in the Constitution and other laws, the possibilities for representing political interests and cultural rights for Jews and Muslims, colonization projects in Kosovo and Dobrudja, and measures to “protect Romanian labor”.
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Lederhendler, Eli. "Classless: On the Social Status of Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe in the Late Nineteenth Century." Comparative Studies in Society and History 50, no. 2 (April 2008): 509–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0010417508000224.
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In this paper I examine the economic and political factors that undermined the social class structure in an ethnic community—the Jews of Russia and eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. Compared with the documented rise and articulation of working classes in non-Jewish society in that region, Jews were caught in an opposite process, largely owing to discriminatory state policies and social pressures: Among Jews, artisans and petty merchants were increasingly reduced to a single, caste-like status. A Jewish middle class of significant size did not emerge from the petty trade sector and no significant industrial working class emerged from the crafts sector. Historians have largely overlooked the significance of these facts, in part because they have viewed this east European situation as a mere preamble to more sophisticated, modern class formation processes among immigrant Jews in Western societies, particularly in light of the long-term middle-class trajectory of their children. Those historians interested in labor history have mainly shown interest in such continuity as they could infer from the self-narratives of the Jewish labor movement, and have thus overstated the case for a long-standing Jewish “proletarian” tradition. In reassessing the historical record, I wish to put the Jewish social and economic situation in eastern Europe into better perspective by looking at the overall social and economic situation, rather than at incipient worker organizations alone. I also query whether a developing class culture, along the lines suggested by E. P. Thompson, was at all in evidence before Jewish mass emigration. This paper is thus a contribution to the history of labor—rather than organized labor—as well as a discussion of the roots of ethnic economic identity.
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Hirsch, Richard G. "The Ninetieth Anniversary of the World Union for Progressive Judaism." European Judaism 49, no. 1 (March 1, 2016): 92–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/ej.2016.490110.
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AbstractThe ninetieth anniversary of the World Union enables us to highlight our achievements. In 1973 we moved the international headquarters from New York to Jerusalem and built a magnificent cultural/educational centre there. We pioneered the development of a dynamic Reform/Progressive movement in Israel consisting of congregations, kibbutzim, an Israel religious action centre and educational, cultural and youth programmes. We became active leaders in the Jewish Agency for Israel and the World Zionist Organization. We established synagogues and educational programmes in the Former Soviet Union, Europe, Latin America and the Far East, thus fulfilling our mandate to perpetuate Jewish life wherever Jews live. We formulated an ideology of Reform Zionism as an antidote to the contracting Jewish identity induced by contemporary diaspora conditions. Whereas we encourage aliyah for Jews who want to live in Israel, we are adamantly opposed to those who advocate aliyah as a positive response to anti-Semitism. Instead, we demand that European democracies guarantee equal rights and full security to Jews as well as to all other groups in society.
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Norseth, Kristin. "Raymond Lillevik: Apostates, Hybrids, or True Jews? Jewish Christians and Jewish Identity in Eastern Europe 1860–1914." Teologisk Tidsskrift 4, no. 04 (December 7, 2016): 438–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.18261/issn.1893-0271-2016-04-16.
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Barzilay, Tzafrir. "Shock and Awe: Medieval Northern European Jews and the Language of Violence." Medieval Encounters 28, no. 3 (September 28, 2022): 265–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15700674-12340140.
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Abstract In twelfth-century northern Europe, public declarative violence was often employed to establish and demonstrate authority, lordship and power. This article argues that Jews adopted the Christian language of violence but reshaped it to communicate their own views and culture. The first section focuses on depictions of public violence during the persecution of the First Crusade, and on changes in Jewish liturgical practices supported by violent narratives. It shows that during the twelfth century, these descriptions became blunter and more evocative, and were established as a major feature of Jewish culture. The second section analyses the place of declarative public violence in contemporary Christian culture, while comparing it to Jewish perceptions on this issue. It shows that Jews saw such violence as major means to prove loyalty to their identity, to communicate their values and to claim authority.
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Ostapenko, Raisa. "Beyond the Underdog Mentality: Philo-Semitism amongst Protestant Rescuers in Wartime Ukraine." Harvard Theological Review 115, no. 4 (October 2022): 538–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0017816022000311.
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AbstractIn Ukraine, as was the case across occupied Europe, while most residents of any given locality divided into bystanders, collaborators, and accomplices during the Holocaust, a minority turned to rescue work. Faith-motivated rescue work by large institutions or individuals representing prominent branches of Christianity is well documented; its prevalence exemplifies the critical role that the altruism of individual members of the clergy, laity, and religious orders played in the survival of many Jews. However, rescuers from less prominent denominations of Christianity, amongst them Baptists, Evangelicals, Seventh-day Adventists, and Sabbatarians, are less spoken about, although these rescuers were often equally as motivated to rescue and more poorly resourced to do so due to disadvantageous political circumstances. Some scholars suggest that it was their “underdog” identity that made such groups empathize with persecuted Jews, but primary testimony offers an even more intriguing perspective: it was the philo-Semitic underpinnings of some members of the minority Protestant denominations in question that provided a broad theological basis for rescuing Jews, transcending the sociopolitical phenomenon of the common underdog mentality and even more widespread ecumenical obligations for being a good Christian.
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Harjes, Kirsten. "Stumbling Stones: Holocaust Memorials, National Identity, and Democratic Inclusion in Berlin." German Politics and Society 23, no. 1 (March 1, 2005): 138–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/104503005780889237.
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In 1997, Hinrich Seeba offered a graduate seminar on Berlin at the University of California, Berkeley. He called it: "Cityscape: Berlin as Cultural Artifact in Literature, Art, Architecture, Academia." It was a true German studies course in its interdisciplinary and cultural anthropological approach to the topic: Berlin, to be analyzed as a "scape," a "view or picture of a scene," subject to the predilections of visual perception in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This course inspired my research on contemporary German history as represented in Berlin's Holocaust memorials. The number and diversity of these memorials has made this city into a laboratory of collective memory. Since the unification of East and West Germany in 1990, memorials in Berlin have become means to shape a new national identity via the history shared by both Germanys. In this article, I explore two particular memorials to show the tension between creating a collective, national identity, and representing the cultural and historical diversity of today's Germany. I compare the Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas (Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, or "national Holocaust memorial") which opened in central Berlin on May 10, 2005, to the lesser known, privately sponsored, decentralized "stumbling stone" project by artist Gunter Demnig.
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Levantovskaya, Margarita. "The Russian-Speaking Jewish Diaspora in Translation: Liudmila Ulitskaia's Daniel Stein, Translator." Slavic Review 71, no. 1 (2012): 91–107. http://dx.doi.org/10.5612/slavicreview.71.1.0091.
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Liudmila Ulitskaia's 2006 novel, Daniel' Shtain, pervodchik (Daniel Stein, Translator), explores the experience of the Russian-speaking diaspora in the aftermath of World War II through a focus on Jewish immigrants in Israel who convert to Christianity. The novel's treatment of the divisive topic of Jewish to Christian conversion is enabled by the author's reliance on the theoretical and allegorical values of translation. Evoking advancements in twentieth-century translation studies through its broad treatment of translation and critique of the investment in the notion of fidelity to the original, be it language or identity, the novel advocates for the acceptance of the transformations and the resulting hybridity of the Jewish diasporic self. Daniel Stein, Translator specifically highlights the influence of the Soviet nationalities policies and the Nazi occupation of eastern Europe on the identity metamorphoses of Soviet Jews. By promoting the legitimacy of the expressions of Jewish identity by immigrants from the USSR through her novel, Ulitskaia proposes an expanded and anti-essentialist view of Jewish identity that would include individuals traditionally viewed as apostates.
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Remennick, Larissa. "‘Idealists Headed to Israel, Pragmatics Chose Europe’: Identity Dilemmas and Social Incorporation among Former Soviet Jews who Migrated to Germany." Immigrants & Minorities 23, no. 1 (March 2005): 30–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0261928042000334835.
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Campos, Michelle U. "Between Others and Brothers." International Journal of Middle East Studies 46, no. 3 (July 18, 2014): 585–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0020743814000622.
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Some fifteen years ago, the Israel Museum exhibition “To the East: Orientalism in the Arts in Israel” featured a photograph by the Israeli artist Meir Gal entitled “Nine Out of Four Hundred: The West and the Rest.” At the center of the photograph was Gal, holding the nine pages that dealt with the history of Jews in the Middle East in a textbook of Jewish history used in Israel's education system. As Gal viscerally argued, “these books helped establish a consciousness that the history of the Jewish people took place in Eastern Europe and that Mizrahim have no history worthy of remembering.” More damningly, he wrote that “the advent of Zionism and the establishment of the Israeli State drove a wedge between Mizrahim and their origins, and replaced their Jewish-Arab identity with a new Israeli identity based on European ideals as well as hatred of the Arab world.”
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Teller, Adam. "Hasidism and the Challenge of Geography: The Polish Background to the Spread of the Hasidic Movement." AJS Review 30, no. 1 (April 2006): 1–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0364009406000018.
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One of the most significant phenomena in the course of modern Jewish history is undoubtedly the astonishing success of the hasidic movement in winning and retaining large numbers of followers. What is even more remarkable is that this process took a relatively short time to come to fruition: It is widely agreed that at the death of the Ba‘al Shem Tov (who is often still regarded as the founder of the movement) in 1760, his circle numbered no more than a few dozen initiates, but by the 1820s, the movement had become dominant in the Jewish society of large swathes of eastern Europe, particularly Ukraine and Galicia.1 Many different explanations for this success have been proposed: Hasidism's attraction has been variously perceived as a result of its being a movement of religious revival and reform, a movement of social protest and class struggle, a movement popularizing elite Jewish mystical thought, and a movement of social reconstruction.2 In terms of social structure, all scholars agree that Hasidism's main innovation—and a major factor in its success—was the creation of the figure of the zaddik: a charismatic spiritual leader who acts as an intermediary between the individual hasid and God and provides answers to all problems, whether they are spiritual or earthly.3 However, relatively little attention has been paid to the social organization of the early hasidic movement as a whole, which allowed Jews from all over eastern Europe to find their place and nurture their new identity as hasidim.4 My goal here is to examine the development of Hasidism as a social movement from the perspective of the structures that it created to solidify the bond between the zaddik and the hasid. In particular, I shall focus on the ways in which the new movement overcame the geographic barriers separating Jews in different parts of eastern Europe.
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Betta, Chiara. "From Orientals to Imagined Britons: Baghdadi Jews in Shanghai." Modern Asian Studies 37, no. 4 (October 2003): 999–1023. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0026749x03004104.
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Studies and reminiscences, which dissect the communities of the Baghdadi trade diaspora, have so far tended to over-emphasize the smooth Anglicization process experienced by Baghdadi Jews in British India, Singapore and China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The myth of the Sassoons as the ‘Rothschilds of the East’ has, in particular, distorted and enhanced the representation of Baghdadi Jews as wealthy, Anglicized and thoroughly integrated in British social circles. In reality, if we want to unravel the multi-layered history of Baghdadi Jews from India to Japan we must not only analyse in depth the complexities of the westernization process of the Baghdadi upper classes but also reconstruct carefully class divisions within Baghdadi communities. With this aim in mind, this essay will investigate the various strands of identity developed by Baghdadis during their stay in Shanghai and will especially focus on the local allegiances forged between Baghdadi and British settlers, the so-called Shanghailanders. The following pages will, at the same time, delineate the social structure of the Baghdadi community in Shanghai and will indicate that westernized affluent Baghdadis were forced to confront painfully their own ‘other’: destitute vagrant co-religionists who hailed from the Middle East and India and roamed between the various nodes of the Baghdadi diaspora. The period considered in this essay stretches from 1845, the year the first Baghdadi trader set foot in the city, to the middle of the 1930s when large numbers of Jewish refugees from Europe started to flock to Shanghai in search of a safe haven.
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Wood, Warren C. "S. An-Sky’s The Dybbuk and the Process of Jewish American Identity in 1920s San Francisco." California History 99, no. 2 (2022): 32–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ch.2022.99.2.32.
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In October 1928, an amateur troupe at San Francisco’s Temple Emanu-El performed the most famous play of Yiddish theater, The Dybbuk by S. An-sky (or Ansky). This production, only the third English-language staging of the play in the United States, was a signal event in the evolution of Jewish American identity in California and across the West. The players were a mix of elite San Francisco Jews of Western European descent and recent immigrants from Eastern Europe steeped in Yiddishkait, an approach to Jewish life that sought to transform and fortify the commonplace language and culture of Eastern European Jewry into a growing range of artistic, literary, intellectual, and social movements. The director, Nachum Zemach, had worldwide renown as an artist in Yiddish theater. The backers of the production had intended to bring about a revitalization of Jewish life in the city and the unification of a Jewish community splintered along lines of class, regional origin, and religious practice. Instead, the performance of the play became a catalyst for legitimizing the ongoing process of creating and recreating American Jewish identity out of a variety of cultural, social, and religious practices.
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Ram, Uri. "Postnationalist Pasts: The Case of Israel." Social Science History 22, no. 4 (1998): 513–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0145553200017934.
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National identity is hegemonic among the population of Jewish descent in Israel. Zionism, modern Jewish nationalism, originated in eastern Europe in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. A national movement without a territory, Zionism naturally adopted the ethnic, or integrative, type of nationalism that prevailed in the region (for a basic typology of nationalism see Smith 1986: 79-84). In Palestine the diasporic Jewish nationalism turned into a settler-colonial nationalism. The state of Israel inherited the ethnic principle of membership and never adopted the alternative liberal-territorial principle. To this day the dominant ethos of the state is Zionist, that is, Jewish nationalist. Though Israeli citizenship is de jure equal to Jews and Arabs, a de facto distinction is easily discernible between the dominated minority and the dominant majority and its state.
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Ayzenberg, Shimshon. "Antokolskii’s Inquisition." Images 8, no. 1 (December 4, 2014): 93–104. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18718000-12340029.
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When Mark Antokolskii published his autobiography in a major St. Petersburg monthly, Vestnik Evropy [“The Herald of Europe”] in autumn 1887, it was during unprecedented state anti-Semitism in Tsarist Russia. The autobiography celebrates the liberal culture in St. Petersburg of the 1860s, when he grew into an artist as a student at the Imperial Academy of Art. The translated excerpt below describes how Antokolskii came to make the clay model of the relief, “The Raid of the Inquisition on the Jews during Passover,” as a product of his own search for beauty in art. In the short introduction, I explain that although this specific piece remained unfinished to the end of his life, its artistic concept was the philosophical undercurrent of his artistic creativity and placed his conception of Jewish identity at the very heart of his art.
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Perry, Micha J. "Imaginary Space meets Actual Space in Thirteenth-Century Cologne: Eliezer Ben Joel and the Eruv." Images 5, no. 1 (2011): 26–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/187180011x604625.
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Abstract Eliezer Ben Joel ha-Levi’s Laws of Eruv, a crucial text in the medieval history of the eruv, redefines ancient definitions of space to fit that of a medieval town. It uses talmudic terminology to describe medieval reality; it reinterprets this terminology to fit this reality; and rules in a way that enables the whole Jewish quarter to be seen as one private space. This ruling shows that in medieval Europe the eruv was redefined to encompass the entire Jewish neighborhood. Thus, predating the walled Jewish quarter and Ghettos, the Jews defined their habitats in the town as a close (although not yet an exclusive) Jewish space, and created a city within a city: a Jewish one within the Christian one. This phenomenon corresponds to the rise of the “community” as the boundary line of Jewish identity.
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Nurdyawati, Tika Tazkya. "Western Interest dalam Proses Perkembangan Negara Israel (1917-1948) Sebagai Akar Utama Konflik Israel-Palestina." Ampera: A Research Journal on Politics and Islamic Civilization 1, no. 1 (January 25, 2020): 24–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.19109/ampera.v1i1.5204.
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The Israeli-Palestinian conflict which is often found to continue for more than 7 decades is inseparable from the root of the problem itself, namely; designation of the Palestinian territories as a national home for the Jews which would later lead to Israeli independence in 1948. Referring to the Balfour Declaration 1917 under the British decision, the massive migration of Jews from Europe to Palestine was inseparable from the benefits that were gained by Western hegemonies in the West. the winner of the war at the time. This can be studied using a realism perspective which views the state as a rational actor with all its decisions under the national interest. Using the literature review method, this article tries to answer whether the tension that occurs in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is based solely on differences in religious identity between the two? Or are there interests of several parties that do not appear on the surface? Why can the annexation case in the formation of an Israeli state that violates international law continue without strict sanctions? The economic and political motivated interests of the West and the connection of Zionism in the founding of the state of Israel will be examined as concrete evidence. This article is expected to be useful as a reference for later literature for similar research.
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Arkush, Allan. "Jonathan Boyarin . The Unconverted Self: Jews, Indians, and the Identity of Christian Europe . Chicago : University of Chicago Press . 2009 . Pp. ix, 192. $32.50." American Historical Review 116, no. 1 (February 2011): 215–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/ahr.116.1.215.
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Gruber, Isaiah. "Biblical Languages and National-Religious Boundaries in Muscovy." Russian History 41, no. 1 (2014): 8–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18763316-04101001.
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Inspired in part by conversations with David Goldfrank, this essay considers aspects of how attitudes toward biblical language contributed to representations of national and religious identity in late medieval and early modern Muscovite Russia. At roughly the same time in history that revived Hebrew and Greek study in Western Europe helped to stimulate the Renaissance and Reformation, bookmen in East Slavia also reconsidered the original languages of sacred writings. Contrary to what is sometimes assumed, such interest was neither unknown nor marginal within Muscovite religious culture. Hebrew-Russian glossaries circulated in leading monasteries from at least the thirteenth century; major infusions of Greek (and other) words and definitions in the sixteenth century transformed these texts into multilingual dictionaries. This mainstream tradition in Russian Orthodoxy can be linked to such important religious figures as Nil Sorskii and Maksim Grek. I argue that by “appropriating” biblical languages and terminology, often via inaccurate translations, Muscovite Russian literati created and defended their distinctive identity vis-à-vis Jews and Greeks, who were considered God’s former chosen peoples. These findings suggest reconsideration of the nature and boundaries of faith in Muscovy in the “age of confessionalism.”
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Rubin, Abraham. "Zionism, Pan-Asianism, and the Postcolonial Predicament in the Interwar Writings of Eugen Hoeflich." AJS Review 45, no. 1 (April 2021): 120–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0364009420000446.
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In the early 1920s, the Viennese writer and journalist Eugen Hoeflich promoted a unique vision of Zionism that aligned Jewish nationalism with a set of anticolonial ideologies collectively known as Pan-Asianism. This article explores the poetic and political strategies Hoeflich employed in order to affiliate Zionism with the Pan-Asian idea in general, and the Indian anticolonial struggle in particular. I read Hoeflich's turn to Pan-Asianism as an attempt to work through a conceptual problem that theorist Partha Chatterjee calls the “postcolonial predicament.” That is, how might the Jews assert their collective identity without reproducing the Eurocentric discourses that presuppose their inferiority? Hoeflich's vision of Indian-Jewish solidarity constitutes an imaginative effort to de-Europeanize Jewish nationalism and disentangle Zionism from British imperial designs. On a broader level, this study sheds light on the transnational solidarities that informed central European Zionists in the interwar era, and points to the discursive continuities that linked Jewish nationalists in Europe to anticolonial thinkers in Asia.
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Landgrebe, Alix. "Between Hatred and Nostalgia." Nordisk judaistik/Scandinavian Jewish Studies 31, no. 1 (May 22, 2020): 76–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.30752/nj.85147.
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This article discusses the revival of Polish national thought from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I demonstrate how the so-called Jewish question influenced the debate and the vision of Jewry in Poland after 1989 and how it was used to create a new national identity. I outline why the so-called Jewish question was so crucial in Polish national debates. Furthermore, I demon- strate how the Polish Jewish past was portrayed and commemorated in the Third Polish Republic. This research focuses upon the period of Aleksander Kwasniewski’s presidency (1995–2005), during which the famous debate about the pogrom in Jedwabne took place.
The original version of this article was presented as a paper in January 2019 at a conference in Stockholm entitled ‘Jews in Middle Eastern Europe after the Downfall of the Wall in 1989’, organised by Paideia, The European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden.
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Lopez, Julia Costa. "Beyond Eurocentrism and Orientalism: Revisiting the Othering of Jews and Muslims through medieval canon law." Review of International Studies 42, no. 3 (December 17, 2015): 450–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0260210515000455.
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AbstractWhile the historical turn in IR has produced significant advances in historicising both international relations and the discipline itself, the way in which the Middle Ages have been approached, studied, and referenced even in this historically-informed scholarship unwittingly works to reinforce two myths that these scholars challenge: Eurocentrism and Orientalism. The main goal of this article is to problematise the uses of the medieval that reinforce these narratives by unpacking the linguistic and conceptual constructions that underpinned the interactions between Latin Christendom and rest of the world. In doing so, it makes two closely-connected arguments: first, drawing from the abundant literature on historical sociology and Eurocentrism, it argues that we cannot understand medieval Europe, and particularly European identity-formation, without paying attention to its relations with the non-Christian world. Secondly, and most crucially, it shows that these interactions never rested on the unified idea of an ‘infidel enemy’ that seems to emanate from the IR crusading literature. Rather, an examination of the constructions of Jews and Muslims in canon law shows an extremely nuanced and varied conceptual apparatus that creates several dynamics of Othering – and consequently allows for a variety of ways of relating ranging from toleration and coexistence to conquest.
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Moore, Rebecca. "The Unconverted Self: Jews, Indians, and the Identity of Christian Europe. By Jonathan Boyarin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. ix + 192 pp. $32.50 cloth." Church History 79, no. 4 (November 26, 2010): 910–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0009640710001198.
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Olszewska, Izabela. "‟Wir Deutschjuden”: The Image of Germans and Westjuden in the German-Language Jewish Press of the First World War and the Interwar Period." Colloquia Humanistica, no. 9 (December 31, 2020): 73–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.11649/ch.2020.006.
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‟Wir Deutschjuden”: The Image of Germans and Westjuden in the German-Language Jewish Press of the First World War and the Interwar PeriodThe interwar period was a highly special time in reference to defining and constructing all kinds of cultural identities in Europe. One of the groups building their identity at the time were the so-called Westjuden, a Jewish community culturally defined as Ashkenazi assimilated under the influence of the Jewish Enlightenment (the Haskalah). In German territory, Westjuden considered themselves German citizens of the Jewish faith, thus separating themselves from the remaining groups of Ashkenazi Jews, i.e. the Ostjuden. Also describing themselves as Germans in the German-language Jewish press, Westjuden frequently characterized, analyzed, and searched for confirmation of their belonging to the German cultural circle.The aim of the article is to reconstruct the image of Germans and Westjuden themselves in the German-language Jewish press at the time of the First World War and in the interwar period. „Wir Deutschjuden”: obraz Niemców oraz Westjuden w niemieckojęzycznej prasie żydowskiej z okresu pierwszej wojny światowej oraz dwudziestolecia międzywojennegoOkres pierwszej wojny światowej oraz dwudziestolecia międzywojennego był czasem niezwykle specyficznym, jeśli chodzi o określanie i konstruowanie wszelkich ku lturowych tożsamości w Europie. Jedną z takich grup byli Deutschjuden, tj. zasymilowani pod wpływem oświecenia żydowskiego (Haskali) Żydzi niemieccy. Deutschjuden deklarowali się jako „obywatele niemieccy wyznania mojżeszowego”, separując się tym ostentacyjnie od migrujących do Niemiec Żydów z Europy wschodniej – Ostjuden. Na łamach swojej prasy niemieckojęzycznej Żydzi wielokrotnie charakteryzowali, analizowali, szukali potwierdzenia przynależności do niemieckiego kręgu kulturowego, opisując przy tym siebie, jak i Niemców.Celem artykułu jest rekonstrukcja kulturowego obrazu Deutschjuden oraz pośrednio Niemców ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem dyskursu odnoszącego się do języka, religii, kultury historycznej czy tradycji Deutschjuden.
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Grimm, Juergen, Volodymyr Rizun, Andreas Enzminger, Yurii Havrylets, Sergii Tukaiev, Maksym Khylko, and Bogdana Nosova Bogdana Nosova. "Memorial Culture in Ukraine in the Context of Media Perception of Historical Problems (based on documentaries about the Holocaust and Holodomor)." Current Issues of Mass Communication, no. 20 (2016): 8–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.17721/2312-5160.2016.20.8-22.
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This study sets out the results of media effects experiment of two historical documentaries, conducted within joint research project “Broadcasting History in the Transnational Space” by the Vienna University and Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv researchers’ team. The main objectives of the study were to explore the impact of Holocaust and Holodomor documentaries on personal traits changing, psychological inclinations, as well as on representations of historical issues. Juergen Grimm’s model “Multidimensional-Imparting-of-History” (MIH) was used for assessing imparting history. The method of modelling was the basic method used during the research. It covers empirical indices of humanitarian values, national identity as well as European and Asian identification. Total of 185 student volunteers (1st to 3rd year of studies at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv) were involved in the experiment. Students watched two documentaries about two major historical tragedies of the 20th century: Holocaust (Genocide of Jews) in Europe during 1939–1945 and Holodomor (Great Artificial Famine) in Ukraine during 1932–1933. Before and after being exposed to the documentaries, students filled out a questionnaire that included social-identity, national-identity as well as psychological parts. The main finding of the experiment is the students’ significant predilection to compromise and reduce conflictive and aggression traits. Under the impact of both documentaries, we observed the growth of the disposition for transnational and trans-ethnic community-building (Communitas Skills) and general tendency towards cosmopolitan problem-solving and commitment for universal human rights (Political Humanitas).
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Romeyn, Esther. "Liberal tolerance and its hauntings: Moral compasses, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia." European Journal of Cultural Studies 20, no. 2 (April 5, 2016): 215–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1367549416638526.
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The pro-Gaza demonstrations that marked the summer of 2014 were trailed by a concern over the intensity of anti-Semitism among European Muslims and accusations of ‘double standards’ with regard to anti-Muslim racism. In the Netherlands, the debate featured a nexus between the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, freedom of speech and the limits of tolerance, which beckons a closer analysis. I argue that it indicates the place of the Holocaust in the European imaginary as one of a haunting, which is marked by a structure of dis/avowal. Prescriptive multicultural tolerance, which builds on Europe’s debt to the Holocaust and represents the culturalized response to racial inequalities, reiterates this structure of dis/avowal. It ensures that its normative framework of identity politics and equivalences, and the Holocaust, Jews and anti-Semitism which occupy a seminal place within it, supplies the dominant (and in the case of anti-Semitism, displaced) terms for the contestation of (disavowed) racialized structures of inequality. The dominance of the framework of identity politics as a channel for minority populations to express a sense of marginalization and disaffection with mainstream politics, however, risks culturalizing both the origins and the solutions to that marginalization. Especially when that sense of marginalization is filtered and expressed through the contestation of the primacy of the Holocaust memory, it enables the state, which embeds Jews retrogressively in the European project, to externalize racialized minorities on the basis of presumed cultural incompatibilities (including anti-Semitism, now externalized from the memory of Europe proper and attributed uniquely to the Other); to erase its historical and contemporary racisms; and to subject minority populations to disciplinary securitization. Moreover, it contributes to the obfuscation of the political, social and economic dynamics through which neo-liberal capitalism effects the hollowing out of the social contract and the resultant fragmentation of society (which the state then can attribute to ‘deficient’ minority cultures and values).
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Kijek, Kamil. "Only Ashes? Jewish Visitors to the New Poland in 1946 and the Future of Polish Jewry." Journal of Modern European History 20, no. 1 (January 24, 2022): 111–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/16118944211072649.
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In this article, I will take a fresh look at the allegedly universal belief in the immediate post-war period that the Jews had no future in post-Holocaust Poland. While providing new analysis of reports from Poland in 1946 that were written by Jewish travellers from United States, Western Europe and Palestine, my revisionist goal is to problematize and question the concept of the ‘Holocaust aftermath.’ I seek to demonstrate that the widespread view of post-war Poland as the cemetery of Polish-Jewish civilization in the immediate post-war period did not – contrary to common perceptions today – necessarily lead to the conclusion that the subsequent marginalization of Polish Holocaust survivors and their departure from Poland was inevitable. This logic of inevitability crystallized only over the course of a couple of years. From 1946 to at least the intensification of the Communist dictatorship in 1948–49, such logic was matched by ambivalence and the cautious belief that a collective Jewish life, centred on national expressions of Jewish identity, was still feasible in Poland.
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Métraux, Alexandre. "Opening Remarks on the History of Science in Yiddish." Science in Context 20, no. 2 (June 2007): 145–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0269889707001226.
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When introducing a collection of essays on Yiddish, Joseph Sherman asserted, among other things, that: Although the Nazi Holocaust effectively destroyed Yiddish together with the Jews of Eastern Europe for whom it was a lingua franca, the Yiddish language, its literature and culture have proven remarkably resilient. Against all odds, Yiddish has survived to become a focus of serious intellectual, artistic and scholarly activity in the sixty-odd years that have passed since the end of World War II. From linguistic and literary research in the leading universities of the world to the dedicated creativity of contemporary novelists and poets in Israel and America, from the adaptation of Yiddish words and phrases to the uses of daily newspapers in English to the elevation of Yiddish as a new loshn koydesh by Hasidic sects, from the publication of new writing to the translation of its established canonical works into modern European languages, Yiddish is continually reminding the world of its vibrancy, relevance and importance as a marker of Jewish identity and survival. (Sherman 2004, 9)