The collective past,group psychology and personal narrative: Shaping Jewish identity by memoirs of the Holocaust

Through honing its collective memory, especially after the Holocaust, the Jewish community has attempted to sustain its culture, bolster the Jewish identity of its members, and regain a resolute sense that its narrative is again proceeding. To some degree, all these aims are realized by instilling in its members the Jewish modal character structure: a psychological configuration with two contrastable entities. One chronically discomposed self-structure, defining itself as polluted and helpless, trembles with the appalling imagery of historical and imminent community disasters. The other entity believes in its unmatched capacity for reparative, socially beneficial actions. The paradigm of this psychological organization is found in many children of survivors. The memory of a tragic history abides alongside the community's hopes in the Jewish modal personality. The need to set forth and accommodate these two motifs imprints upon the Jewish "national" character many of its distinctive qualities. The designs of the Jewish community for this particularly Jewish twofold personality formation are augmented by the personal revelations of survivors. Therefore, Holocaustic testimonies are invested with a sacred aura. In measure, these recitals of the disaster with their stark images, plus the clashing affects aroused in the reader toward main characters of the narrative, dictate the way Jews define themselves in the world and the way they live. A confluence of being covertly commissioned by the Jewish community joins with the narrators' more idiosyncratic longings. Together they generate a steady stream of Holocaustic accounts. Complementary vectors drive the reader to peruse these records. The results therefrom, intimate knowledge of the disaster, plus the twofold personality motifs stamp many Jews as scions of the Holocaust.     

A Scottish Millennial Mission to Jews

This paper investigates how the missionaries of the Church of Scotland sought to convert the Jews in Hungary. The research studies carefully Adolph Saphir's change of faith, his theological views, and his work. His family was the first “fruit” of Scottish missionary activity among the Hungarian Jews in 1843. After scrutinizing his conversion, the study proceeds to map his sphere of work as a missionary. In particular, it examines his millennial views, which gave the impetus to his missionary activity. Finally, the paper demonstrates that he became an ardent supporter of mission to the Jews not only in Britain but also in Central Europe.     

“End of the jargon-scandal” – The decline and fall of Yiddish in the Netherlands (1796–1886)

In the nineteenth century the language of the Ashkenazi community in the Netherlands rapidly changed as the Dutch vernacular replaced Yiddish. In the first half of the century a coalition composed of government officials and members of the Jewish elite collaborated in matters of language–politics. The goal was the acculturation of the Jewish community by advocating Dutch and combating Yiddish. Controlling Jewish education and encouraging preaching in the vernacular were the most important means employed, and by the second half of the century, Yiddish disappeared as the language of Dutch Jews. The arguments of the proponents of Dutch were centered on social integration and the belief that Yiddish was not a proper language. The advocates of Yiddish defended their language by stressing it as an international means of Jewish communication.     

Counting on Whiteness: Religion,race, ethnicity,and the politics of Jewish demography

American Jews have long been an anomaly for scholars concerned with understanding how they fit into extant social scientific or historical categories. Sometimes they seem best described as an ethnic group, other times as a religious one. This ambiguity has also vexed Jewish communal leaders whose desire to comprehend their communities has largely been underwritten by their intention to protect it. This intersection of sociological methods and schema and Jewish communal concerns has resulted in decisive omissions regarding how best to account for the racial and ethnic diversity of American Jews. An analysis of survey instruments used in 175 American Jewish population studies and community portraits conducted since 1970 reveals a focus on questions of religious practice and an avoidance of those about race and ethnicity, resulting in a “religio-racial formation” of American Jews as White. This approach to studying American Jewish life has marginalized or excluded non-White Jews while ensuring ongoing Jewish communal access to Whiteness without having to claim it explicitly.     

A baronial aljama: The Jews of Empúries in the thirteenth century

The county of Empúries in Catalonia provides an historical laboratory in which to examine the formation of a small Jewish community (aljama) in an independent baronial enclave. While most studies have assumed that Iberian Jews were directly dependent on the king, the ancient dynasty that ruled the county effectively insulated Jews from royal power during the thirteenth century, when the first communal institutions took shape. In 1238 Count Ponç Hug III of Empúries issued an extensive privilege, edited here for the first time, to the Jews in his territory to extend his protection, attract immigrants, and create the outlines for autonomous institutions. The grant in fact preceded the better-known royal charters that structured Jewish communal institutions in Barcelona and other major towns in Catalonia. Because the Jews of Empúries were not caught up in the expanding structures of royal administration, they were also not subject to heavy fiscal burdens and remained unengaged with the local baronial court. Left relatively undisturbed at first by the fiscal demands of their lord, the Jews of Empúries adapted to a provincial, rural environment in the thirteenth century and created a community distinct in its structure and internal social tensions from the aljames in the large towns.     

PEOPLE OF GOD,CHILDREN OF HAM

Taxonomies inherited from the nineteenth century have shaped the discourse surrounding the racial identity and supposed roots of Ethiopian immigrants to Israel. Through their interactions with just a few colonial actors, some of whom were Christian missionaries, others who were Jewish Zionists, a small group of young Falashas developed an elite status in Ethiopia as the true lost Jews in Africa. While most historians specializing in the history of Ethiopia do not believe the Beta Israel are a “lost tribe” of the ancient Israelites, Ethiopian immigrants have altered their self‐conceptions over the past hundred years and come to see themselves as both black and Jewish. This essay offers an alternative reading of the Beta Israel narrative, and asserts that the transformation of their social identities are embedded in a political process of racialization tied to racial ideology, and both secular and religious institutions and the State. In the process of incorporation into western society, their social identities have been transmogrified from religious others in Ethiopia to co‐religionists yet racial others in Israel.     

Denominational Variations Across American Jewish Communities

This article explores the Jewish identity of different Jewish denominational identification groups using the Decade 2000 Data Set with its 19,800 interviews of Jewish households in 22 American Jewish communities. We relate the Jewish identity of individuals in each denominational group (Orthodox, Conservative, Reform/Reconstructionist) to the denominational composition of the community. Communities are clustered via k‐means cluster analysis based on their denominational profiles. We examine the extent to which individual Jewish identification varies by the denominational composition of the community in which an individual resides, finding that considerable variation exists in Jewish identity measures depending on the type of denominational profile that exists in the individual's community. That is, Orthodox Jews, for example, behave differently in a community with a significant Orthodox population than in a community with few Orthodox, but many Reform Jews. Implications for Jewish communities, as well as for the broader interreligious community, are considered.     

MESSIANIC JEWS AND JEWISH IDENTITY

In recent years Messianic Judaism has grown considerably worldwide and has caused much concern within the contemporary Jewish community. Messianic Jews claim they are completely Jewish, but they are considered by the majority of the Jewish community to be Christian apostates. This paper considers the practices and beliefs of the Messianic community, explores the issue of their identity and reflects on this in relation to Jewish identity throughout the universal Jewish community. It explores the question of placing Messianic Jews outside the Jewish fold, given that the various branches of contemporary Judaism are deeply divided over central tenets of faith and practice. It considers the Messianic belief in Jesus as the Messiah in the light of normative Jewish approaches to aspects of Halakhic teaching.     

Is There a Religious Revival among Hungarian Jews Today?

There are about 100,000 Jews in Hungary today. Most dwell in the capital, Budapest. Few are registered with the official Jewish community and most are assimilated. Since the demise of Communism in 1989, there has been a resurgence of Jewish life. However, can we say that there is a religious revival? There are new forms of Jewish religious life, but I argue that the revival is more cultural than religious in that more Jews are prepared to acknowledge their Jewish identity. In short, Jews are 'coming out'.     

After the Shoah: Continuity and change in the postwar Jewish community of the Netherlands

The Dutch Jewish community is part of Western European Jewry and as such is part of what Bernard Wasserstein describes as the vanishing Diaspora. The community is one of Europe's smallest and it was also the Western European Jewish community most heavily damaged by the Shoah; it lost 75% of its population. It is surprising that the community still exists. It has gone through many changes, most notably in the 1960s. Progressive Judaism and the Lubavitcher Habad movement have made considerable inroads in the religious community, but the population has become largely secular, and new secular Jewish networks have been established. Dutch Jews have redefined their identity, shifting from “Dutchmen of the Israelite religion” to “Jews” or “people with a Jewish background,” belonging to a social and cultural minority. A small population exchange has taken place between Israel and the Netherlands. The brief baby boom after the Shoah and the newly formed networks outside the religious framework have revitalized the community. But most Jews in the Netherlands are married to non-Jews, and in spite of unique efforts to integrate the Israelis into the community, the future seems uncertain. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Self-definition and self-defense: Jewish racial identity in nineteenth-century France

This article examines how and why French Jews began to speak of themselves as a race. Though we often assume that Jewish racial identity was an invention of anti-Semites in the 1880s, Jewish publicists had in fact adopted this language as early as the 1820s. Far from unwittingly appropriating the language of their detractors, Jews borrowed the language of race from scholars neutral or sympathetic to their cause in ways that made sense in light of their larger strategies of self-defense. The scholars who pioneered modern race theory were not the late nineteenth-century Social Darwinists; they were romantic historians like the Thierrys and Michelet, who saw France as a nation composed of a plurality of peoples who had come together over time to form a unified nation. Race thus provided a framework for understanding difference as legitimate, useful and dignified at a moment when anti-Jewish publicists attacked Jews as anti-social and immoral people who brought only harm to France. Looking at what French Jews borrowed from these early historians allows us to see the interconnections between Jewish self-defense and Jewish self-definition. In seeking to guarantee their rights and social status, French Jews appropriated new terms of understanding who they were.     

REVIEWS

This article identifies a previously ignored social movement that existed in London during 1827–1831. The Jewish rights movement, as it will be called here, actually involved a coalition of Jews and Christians. During the movement’s initial phase, London Jews, led by Moses E. Levy (an activist from the United States), joined in solidarity with their oppressed brethren in Russia: their public protests against tsarist policies drew a broad response from the national and international press. This unparalleled movement influenced national political agendas and major legislative reforms, and resulted in striking changes within the Anglo‐Jewish community. By utilising the modern social movement framework as an essential tool to reconstruct this long‐forgotten collective effort, the Jewish rights movement has emerged as a notable chapter in the development of modern Jewish political identity.

“At the present moment, the eyes of England, of Europe, and of a great part of the civilized world seem to be directed toward us, and… men are looking with something approaching anxiety for the result of the Public Meetings of the Jewish Nation that have been called (the first time for many centuries)” (Levy Jewish Community).     

Buon Purim: proselytizing, professing Jews and the Papal Inquisition in Modena

This essay focuses on an Inquisitorial trial in which a Jewish banker, Moise de Modena, well respected in the Modenese community (Christian as well as Jewish), decided in 1625 to make a stand against two constables and refuse them the customary ‘protection money’ which they demanded during the festival of Purim. The event provided a shaky foundation for their charge of proselytizing. De Modena faced persistent Inquisitorial prosecution but chose also to hire Christian legal counsel to defend him. The trial raises questions about Jews who were able to work behind the scenes during Inquisitorial prosecution in early modern Italy to ensure their acquittal. It also examines gift-giving as a specific social practice between Jews and Christians during he Jews’ ‘carnivalesque’ Purim, which in this particular year fell during Holy Week.     

The Lieberman Syndrome: Public and Private Jewishness in American Political Culture

Shortly after the Second World War, Jewish communities in the Czech lands began to remember the Jewish victims of the conflict through a ceremony called the “tryzna”. This article investigates the structure and timing of tryzny to understand how Czech‐Jews memorialized the tragedy that had recently befallen their community. By 1952, it became standard practice for Jewish communities to host a tryzna in March to commemorate the Nazi liquidation of the so‐called “Czech family camp” at Auschwitz‐Birkenau in 1944. The proliferation of tryzny ensured that Czech‐Jews mourned and commemorated the dead of the Second World War in a religious and then increasingly public way. What began as small community events, coalesced and grew into national mourning ceremonies. Tryzny link a national story of loss and an awareness of the larger Jewish genocide with Jewish funerary practices. These tryzny evolved within a communist state, in a world where the concept of the “Holocaust” had not yet entered international consciousness.     

“The Religion We Plant in Their Hearts”: A Critical Exploration of the Religiosity of a German Jewish Family at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century

The long-standing historiographical consensus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century German Jews suggests that they were largely “beyond Judaism.” Most historians concur that German Jews abandoned a particularistic faith and the restricted social life of the autonomous community in exchange for cultural tropes of the dominant bourgeois culture as they strove to integrate into the surrounding society. While most German Jews no longer practiced the Judaism of their fathers or their fathers’ fathers, this did not necessarily mean that religion or belief had become irrelevant. In this essay I explore, through a close reading of a set of diaries, the religiosity of one Jewish family—that of William and Clara Stern and their three children, Hilde, Günther, and Eva. In the process, I seek both to address a gap in the research and to contribute to an ongoing discussion in the historiography regarding modern Judaism. While religiosity among German Jews had increasingly become a matter of individual, and not collective, action and choice, I argue that Jews of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries still engaged in a quest for meaning for themselves and future generations specifically as Jews. The religious worldview and education that Clara Stern aimed to impart to her children reflect precisely this search for personal religious meaning and exemplify the individual nature of early twentieth-century German Jewish religiosity.     

Regional history, Jewish memory: the purim of Narbonne

Records of traumatic events in the Jewish past provide the historian a rare glimpse at how community leaders interpreted and understood the historical conditions of diasporic Jews as well as their own immediate communities. In 1236 a violent altercation between a Jewish traveler and a local Christian precipitated a mass uprising against the city's Jewish community. Rapid intervention by the local viscount, Don Aymeric, restored peace to the Jewish quarter, averting loss of life or valuable property. Modern interpretations of this text have varied significantly since its discovery in the late nineteenth century. Scholars have struggled to reconcile it with their expectations of the shape and meaning of the Jewish past. Because the thirteenth-century author of this brief narrative suggested a typological link between the events in Narbonne and the story of Purim, the dominant modern interpretation has viewed this account as evidence of a very early Second Purim commemoration. However there is little evidence to support this claim. This article reads the narrative of the “Purim of Narbonne” against other medieval Jewish narratives about the history and legacy of Jewish Narbonne*.     

“This passage can also be read differently …?:” How Jews and Christians censored Hebrew texts in early modern Modena

This article focuses on the impact exerted by the promulgation of the Index of Prohibited Books by Clement VIII in 1596 on the Jews in early modern Modena. In order to explore diverse cultural perspectives among Jews and Christians, it considers how they read, interpreted, and censored controversial passages in the commentary of Rashi (Solomon ben Isaac of Troyes, 1040–1105) on the Pentateuch. It shows parallels between censorship and the expurgation of Hebrew books, as well as the physical ghettoization and expulsion of Jews from Italian cities enacted by Church authorities, on the one hand, and political and cultural negotiations conducted by the Jews themselves, on the other. Just as the city could be protected from Jewish pollution only through the segregation and expulsion of Jews, so too could the Catholic community be effectively shielded from the contamination of Jewish blasphemies only through banning the Talmud and expurgating other Jewish texts. At the same time, Jews developed means of self-vindication, including a straightforward defense of the principal tenets of Judaism and a stratagem of avoiding discussions that referred to the superiority of Jews over Christians in some interpretations of Rashi. These methods enabled Jews to engage in social and political negotiations with Church and ducal institutions.     

The publication of Salomon Reinach's ‘Orpheus’ and the question of Christian origins

A covert reason for the decline of ritual wailing among Yemenite-Jewish women in Israel is the community's memory of its stay in Yemen as a period of ‘exile’ manifested in dhimmi status. According to respondents’ oral history, Jewish lamentation was exploited by members of the majority Muslim population to compel Jews – mostly men – to wail in honor of Muslim dead. The article makes its main contribution by revealing this historical episode and analyzing the standing of women's lamentation in the context of religio-political tension. The respondents' narrative reveals that although the wailers mitigated the humiliating effects of this spectacle, the appropriation of their community custom impaired Jewish men's gender status and ability to perform religious differentiation. This, coupled with changes caused by their relocation to Israel, has made women's lament the commemoration of a practice that evokes shame among members of this community, abetting its decline in the past decade.     

Jews as citizens in late medieval and Renaissance Italy: the case of Isacco da Pisa

Our essay begins with an acknowledgment of the seminal contributions of Vittore Colorni and Ariel Toaff but then criticizes their narrow focus on demonstrating that the citizenship status of Jewish inhabitants in central and northern Italy, apart from holding public office and admission to the liberal professions, was basically on par with that of nonJewish citizens. We argue, instead, that not all Jews became citizens of the localities in which they resided; and, moreover, that Jewish inhabitants (habitatores) enjoyed a robust bundle of rights, privileges, and protections under the ius commune, local statutes, and Capitoli, whether or not they acquired citizenship. Even when Jews like members of the da Pisa family acquired local citizenship, they continued to be identified as habitatores. As a matter of law, the status of cives and that of long-term noncitizen habitatores were treated as virtually identical. Citizenship, assuredly a valuable status, was nevertheless only one of the potential sources of the legal rights and obligations of Jews in late medieval and Renaissance Italy. By reconsidering the civic status of Jews within an expansive jurisprudential framework and drawing on untapped sources, our paper provides fresh perspectives that shifts the debate into more productive terrain.     

The modern country house as a Jewish form: a proposition

ABSTRACT

Although the vast majority of modern country houses built or refurbished in the long nineteenth century were owned by non-Jews, Jews owned some of the most magnificent. Thus, these dwellings pose the same question that historians have raised about other aspects of diasporic Jewish practices: Was there anything particularly “Jewish,” about country houses owned by Jews? In this essay I propose a hypothesis – that Jewish country houses were the ideal-type of the modern country house. On the one hand, super-elite Jews took their capital, both cultural and real, their family networks, and their long experience interpreting and navigating the often-hostile worlds in which they found themselves and created country houses that were the model of the genre. On the other hand, I argue that Judaism itself mattered as much as the social and economic positioning of Jews produced by discrimination. Uniquely Jewish conceptualizations, and practices, of home, of time, and of space rendered Jews particularly comfortable with the complex interweaving of public and private intrinsic to the country house.