The other invisible hand: Jews and anarchists in London before the First World War

In the decades before the First World War, London worried about anarchist outrages, and particularly, about Jews said to instigate them. Jewish anarchists were rumoured to have been responsible for the ‘ripper’ murders in Whitechapel (1888), an attempt to blow up the Royal Observatory at Greenwich Park (1894) and the Houndsditch murders (1910)/Sidney Street affair (1911). Jews were a visible population in the East End, and editors, MPs, and police authorities offered Jewishness to explain the ‘who’ and ‘why’ of anarchist violence. Jews were also thought to have the capacity to become invisible, ‘outsiders’ who could pass for ‘insiders’. In the radical press, and fictionalised accounts in novels such as Conrad’s The Secret Agent, the image of the Jewish anarchist became that of agent provocateur paid by police to infiltrate and undermine the movement. Jews were said to operate behind-the-scenes, manipulating the economy and political structure. The invisible hand of the market and the invisible hand of anarchism were attached to a Jewish body. About the author: Paul Knepper (Ph.D. Arizona State) is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield, and Research Fellow, Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Manchester. Recent publications include ```Jewish Trafficking” and London Jews in the Age of Migration’, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies (2008); ‘British Jews and the Racialisation of Crime in the Age of Empire’ British Journal of Criminology (2007); ‘Michael Polanyi and Jewish Identity’ Philosophy of the Social Sciences (2005); ‘Polanyi, “Jewish Problems”, and Zionism’ Tradition and Discovery (2005).     

“NO CONFLICT OF PRINCIPLE”

The period of the Boer, or South African, War (1899–1902) has generated remarkably little interest amongst scholars of Anglo-Jewish history. Historians of British anti-Semitism have found fruitful ground in the controversy of alleged Jewish culpability for the war and the amplified climate of anti-Jewish (ostensibly anti-immigrant) sentiment. But, while telling us a great deal about how some segments of the British public regarded Jews, these studies have done little to illuminate how British Jews themselves thought and behaved. This article will make a first step towards redressing these imbalances, using Jewish sermons as a case study for understanding the established community's response to the war. Though a climate of insecurity undoubtedly existed, I will argue that the clergy's unflinchingly martial posture—which was representative of elite Jewish opinion as well—was not simply defensive or reactive. The clergy also saw the war as providing an ideal opportunity to express genuine gratitude and patriotism, showcase Jewish contributions to the nation and enhance Jewish inclusion. My examination of their rhetoric illustrates how these communal representatives attempted to balance the imperative of self-defence with the quest for fuller integration.     

"Thy People Are My People": Emma Lazarus,Daniel Deronda,and the Ambivalence of Jewish Modernity

This essay examines the role of Jews in Britain’s imperial strategy and asks whether Britain could have built its empire without them. Recent scholarship concerning Jews and the British Empire places Jews in the “informal empire”, in economic and other activities outside political rule. This was the case in nineteenth‐century Malta, where Jews established themselves in commercial activities in support of Britain’s military ambitions in the Mediterranean. They received some political recognition, though this was short‐lived. Despite the efforts of Moses Montefiore, the British government refused to yield space for building a synagogue. The success of Malta’s leading Jews, in the early and mid‐century, meant that they were never above suspicion. In the late nineteenth century, the British government shielded the Jewish community from an accusation of ritual murder, but this had more to do with promoting British interests vis‐à‐vis the Catholic Church in Malta than advancing Jewish interests. Colonial policy concerning Jews did not result from a coherent rationale concerning Jewish interests nor consistent Jewish influence.     

BRITISH JEWISH PREACHERS IN TIME OF WAR (1800–1918)

Beginning in the eighteenth century, occasions related to war became a significant new venue for Jewish preaching. The declaration of war or its conclusion, a government‐proclaimed Day of National Fasting and Prayer or of Thanksgiving, a major victory or defeat of the nation’s armed forces – all generated sermons by Jewish preachers, who not infrequently publicized what they said beyond the synagogue walls. These sermons reflect the patriotic identification of Jews with the nation where they resided, the desire to demonstrate this loyalty to the larger society, the homiletical application of classical texts and historical precedents to new situations, the challenge presented by war to assumptions about human progress, the theological conundrum of enemy nations praying for victory to the same God, the poignant agony of Jews fighting against other Jews. This article reviews Jewish sermons delivered by British preachers mobilizing the rhetorical resources of Jewish and general literatures to express absolute identification with the Crown, the Government and the Empire, as well as sermons that express deep discouragement about the devastating cost of war in material, cultural, psychological and religious terms.     

The effect of the Jews on Jaffa’s economic deterioration from 1936 to 1947

One of the most grievous outcomes of the Arab revolt (1936-1939) was the severe economic damage caused to the Arab community. The worsening relations between Jews and Arabs from the start of the 1936 disturbances and thereafter had distinct consequences regarding the decline in Jaffa’s economic state. The slump that affected Jaffa from 1936 to the end of the Mandate period encroached on the city’s status and strength, as its weaknesses became more marked. This article proposes that the Jews had a significant role in Jaffa’s economic decline, principally due to their preponderance in the city’s commercial life. The article examines and evaluates the extent of the Jews’ influence on Jaffa's economic deterioration in the period from 1936 to 1947. It demonstrates that they constituted a significant factor affecting the city’s economic decline, with evident implications for its condition toward the end of that period.     

“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.     

Jewish-Arab relations in Israel: a psychology of adolescence perspective

Jewish and Arab high school seniors (61 Jewish boys and 51 Jewish girls, 57 Arab boys and 49 Arab girls) participated in a study of future orientation and described their hopes and fears for the future. The present analysis focuses on part of the data pertaining to the respondents' cross-ethnic references. More Arab than Jewish adolescents referred to the other ethnic group. The cross-ethnic references contained hope for peace and fear of war; the Arab statements, however, also showed discontent with Israeli authorities. More Arab than Jewish adolescents referred to collective issues (the people, the state, the world). The percentage of Jewish and Arab adolescents concerned with Jewish-Arab relations relative to the number addressing other aspects of collective concerns were similar (12% for Jews and 16% for Arabs). For Jews, this small number was related to adolescents' egocentrism and for Arabs, to adolescents' ethnocentrism.     

Saint and Countersaint: Catholic Triumphalism and Jewish Resistance in Baroque Prague’s Abeles Affair

In late seventeenth-century Prague, Simon Abeles, a Jewish boy of about eleven or twelve, left the Jewish quarter, studied for conversion to Christianity, returned home without converting, and then died. The boy’s father, Lazar Abeles, was charged with his murder and hanged himself in jail. Löbl Kurtzhandl, a young man who had lived with the family, was accused of being an accomplice and sentenced to death. The case became a cause célèbre as the boy came to be regarded as an unofficial local saint acclaimed in broadsides, pamphlets, and even music. A single Yiddish source, a historical song, tells the story from a Jewish point of view but, surprisingly, does not take up the question of the guilt or innocence of either Kurtzhandl or the elder Abeles, focusing instead on Kurtzhandl’s actions in his final days, hours, and moments. Burning polemics between local Christians and Jews centered on this very question, each population seeking saint-like heroes for its young members to emulate. On the Catholic side, such activity fit within a much broader context of Catholic renewal and triumphalism that capped a decades-long process of ridding Bohemia of Protestant influence. On the Jewish side, it represented active resistance against such trends.     

Jewish agricultural settlement in Brazil

Jewish agricultural colonization in Brazil began in 1904 in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, supported by the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA). The JCA created the first colonies – Philippson (1904) and Quatro Irmãos (1912) – with the intention of resettling Russian Jews during the decisive years of mass immigration from the Russian empire. In 1936, the JCA administration in Brazil proposed a new project to establish a colony for German Jews in Rezende, situated in the state of Rio de Janeiro. Similar to other initiatives undertaken by the São Paulo and Paraná state governments some years before, the Rezende colony did not last long. This essay analyzes the main factors behind the disintegration of the JCA colonies, noting that, in spite of their relative failure, the colonies aided Brazil and helped change the stereotypical image of the non-productive Jew, capable of working only in commerce and finance. The main benefit from these agricultural experiments was the removal of restrictions in Brazil on Jewish immigration from Europe during the twentieth century.     

Judges and Jews: congregational conflict and the Protestant secular in 19th-century America

This article shows how 19th-century Jews embraced the American legal system. In spite of the rhetoric of ‘religious freedom’ the fact that religious congregations were legal corporations meant that they were never fully ‘free’ from government oversight. In the absence of clear religious authorities, American Jews regularly invited state oversight into their religious affairs, and, seeking legal victory, they worked alongside judges to fit the dictates of Jewish law to the Protestant assumptions of American secularism. Three instances of Jewish congregational strife, dealing with practice, employment, and membership, are closely analyzed to demonstrate how outsider religious communities strategically navigated a legal system that was allegedly neutral but presumptively Protestant.     

犹太律法发展历程初探

犹太律法的来源异常复杂,吸收融合了古代近东地区各民族的传统习俗和法律,以《托拉》为律法核心,加之历代犹太教学者不断地解释、扩展和补充,最终形成了以《塔纳赫》、《塔木德》等诸多宗教经典为载体的律法体系。古老的犹太律法的表述是简单而模糊的,随着社会和经济的发展,原有的律法已经不能适应新的社会情况。为了解决这一问题,犹太教学者采用了"实用性的阐释方法",在不违背律法字面意义的前提下,使背离律法的行为合法化,同时这种实用性阐释方法维护了犹太律法的神圣和权威。     

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi,the Royal Alliance,and Jewish Political Theory

This article examines Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s views of the realities and myths of the “royal alliance” in medieval and modern Jewish history as a seminal contribution to Jewish political history and theory as well as a revealing entrée into his overall historiographical approach. Elaborating the ideas of his teacher Salo Baron and drawing upon Hannah Arendt’s insights into the relationship between Jews and modern states, Yerushalmi ultimately used his own understanding of Jewish political experience to argue against her indictment of wartime Jewish leaders. For Yerushalmi, Jews’ awareness of their tendencies to forge vertical alliances with the highest authorities served to fortify and console them; he considered these perceptions generally realistic and, though at times tragically blinding, still ultimately anchored in historical experience. This essay situates the royal alliance within Yerushalmi’s broader conceptions of Jewish community, political agency, and domicile as diasporic survival strategies. It also views this concept as part of his post-Holocaust commitment to chart the paradoxes of Jewish hope and to regenerate Jewish hope, both collective and individual. Yerushalmi is often celebrated as a pioneering thinker who contrasted modern critical historiography to traditional collective memory and who explored the individual, existential, psychological, and skeptical dimensions of modern Jewish identity. Yet, this essay suggests, a traditionalist strain may be heard in his profound identification with the Jewish people and his deriving hope from their political and historical experience—in both its continuities and its ruptures.     

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.     

“JEWISH TRAFFICKING” AND LONDON JEWS IN THE AGE OF MIGRATION

There are excellent accounts of the Jewish response to “trafficking” in women for prostitution during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but recent analyses of the white slavery phenomenon have raised new questions. This article concerns the response of Jews in England, and specifically the motivations and activities of those who founded the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women (JAPGW). The JAPGW set the model for initiatives carried out by Jewish communities throughout the British Empire and was a primary contributor to internationalisation of the issue on the part of the League of Nations after the First World War. The JAPGW’s motivations were complex: they involved a particular religious outlook, the response to antisemitism and assumptions along lines of class and gender. In addressing “Jewish trafficking”, Britain’s established Jewish community sought to take ownership of what it meant to be a Jew in British society.     

Jews, Christians, and the endtime in early modern Germany

This paper examines some of the ways in which early modern German literary culture portrayed Jewish visions of the endtime. Christians employed notions of Jewish deceit to undermine the meaning of Jewish messianism, reshaping the signs of the endtime to carry a far more sinister meaning. Christian writers transformed Jewish messianic claimants into predictable precursors of the Antichrist and mocked Jewish beliefs as the delusions of a nation of deceived deceivers. Notions of Jewish deceitfulness complicated Christian expectations concerning Jewish conversion at the end of time. The Christian perception of Jews as inherently deceitful encompassed all components of the early modern views of Jews and the Jewish religion. Early modern German literary works devoted to the theme of vain Jewish messianic expectations combined with the literature of the Antichrist, turning the demonic Antichrist who would appear at the endtime into the person the Jews expected as their messiah. Failed Jewish messianic movements played right into Christian literary and theological discourse on the Jewish endtime and provided historical confirmation for what would have otherwise seemed like an absurd polemical exaggeration. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Tel Aviv Mizrah

Before immigrating to Israel, first-generation Iraqi Jews were deeply attached to their identity as Mizrahi Jews. Their mother tongue was Arabic and they had grown up in an oriental environment. Therefore, it was not easy for them to adopt the Euro-Israeli identity that the dominant Ashkenazi-European stratum in Israel compelled them to accept. Despite strong Westernizing tendencies in Israeli society, the first generation of Iraqi Jewish immigrants maintained strong links to the Iraqi customs and traditions they had acquired in Iraq, particularly with regard to the musical folklore and oriental cuisine. On the other hand, second-generation Iraqi Jews were more familiar with Israeli society than their parents; they grew up in Israel and learned Hebrew in Israeli schools along with Ashkenazi Jews and other ethnic groups. This paper establishes connections between the historical realities of Iraqi Jewish immigrants and the literary representation of their world in the trilogy Tel-Aviv Mizrah (Tel Aviv East) written in 2003 by the Iraqi Jewish author Shimon Ballas, through a comparison of Ballas's literary vision with the historical realities of Iraqi Jewish identity in Israel over the course of two generations.     

Coming out of the Hasidic closet: Jiří Mordechai Langer (1894–1943) and the fashioning of homosexual-Jewish identity

This essay inaugurates the historical study of the modern homosexual Jewish experience before Stonewall. I begin with a historiographic introduction to the emerging subfield of gay Jewish history. I then turn to reintroduce Jiri Langer, a homosexual and Hasidic writer affiliated with the interwar "Prague circle" (and friend of Franz Kafka and Max Brod) into the purview of modern Jewish Studies. I take up two questions: first, how Langer reconciled his homosexual and Orthodox religious identity; and second, why Langer"s homosexuality became exigent as a Jewish question at this particular historical moment. In his key text, Die Erotik der Kabbala, Langer engages with the dominant interwar debates on homosexuality, but most directly with the work of Hans Blüher, the major theoretician of the German Wandervogelbewegung. In the course of correcting Blüher's antisemitic claims about Jews and homosexuality, Langer managed to delineate a specifically homosexual Jewish identity by renegotiating the relationship between homosexuality and Judaism and by adumbrating a history of "gay" Jews. I contextualize this long-neglected text within Langer's fascinating biography; the debates in the early homosexual rights movement; the particular cultural features of the "Prague circle" in which Langer wrote; and the dislocation and devastation of Langer's beloved eastern-European Hasidic communities caused by World War I—communities that Langer experienced as deeply homoerotic.     

The Montreal Jewish Community and the Holocaust

In 1933 Hitler and the Nazi party came to power in Germany. At the same time, in Canada in general and in Montreal in particular, anti-Semitism was becoming more widespread. The Canadian Jewish Congress, as a result of the growing tension in Europe and the increase in anti-Semitism at home, was reborn in 1934 and became the authoritative voice of Canadian Jewry. During World War II the Nazis embarked on a campaign that resulted in the systematic extermination of millions of Jews. This article focuses on the Montreal Jewish community, its leadership, and their response to the fate of European Jewry. The study pays particular attention to the Canadian Jewish Congress which influenced the outlook of the community and its subsequent actions. As the war progressed, loyalty to Canada and support for the war effort became the overriding issues for the community and the leadership and concern for their European brethren faded into the background.     

From pastoral to georgic: the Dutch Jewish country house as a rhizome

ABSTRACT

Scholars often analyze houses’ “Jewishness” vis-à-vis Jewish law and rituals. For Dutch Sephardic Jews during the long eighteenth century, however, identity is better understood using a model of rhizome in which “Jewishness” consists of the deliberate interbraiding of multiple traditions. Jewish identity was inextricable from the cultures in which Jews lived. Jewish homes along the Vecht River near Amsterdam exemplify the rhizome model. They embody the same braided pastoral ideal found in eighteenth-century Dutch Sephardic literature and material culture. As Sephardic Jews relocated to Netherlands Antilles, the rhizome present in country houses shifted, taking into account Jews’ new role as slave owners. Thus while buitenplaatsen along the Vecht embraced the Jewish pastoral ideal of a retreat from mercantile life, landhuizen in Curaçao evoked a georgic ideal that channelled the residents’ gaze not on rivers, gardens, and grottos, but on guard stations, slave huts, and enslaved workers. Leisure became redefined as an ability to watch rather than retreat from labour. Taken together, Dutch Jewish country houses along the Vecht and in Curaçao challenge the notion that Jewish material culture has a “single root system.”     

THE BRESLAU JEWISH MUSEUM: “DISINTEGRATION OF THE MANIFEST WORLD”

The Breslau Jewish Museum's brief history mirrors the changing identity German Jews held in the national community between 1928 and 1938. The Museum was initially founded by an optimistic group of prominent Breslau Jews who wished to both chronicle and celebrate the place Jews had in Weimar era Silesian and Breslau culture. But the group's ambitions soon had to be reassessed. After Hitler's assumption of power in 1933 it became increasingly clear that Jewishness was not to be flaunted or celebrated publicly, much less institutionally. As Jews came under attack, the Jewish Museum assumed the defensive role of guardian of Jewish heritage, objects and culture. Its new isolation from the non-Jewish Silesian and Breslau communities paralleled the growing marginalization of German Jews generally. The Museum's closure just days before Kristallnacht in 1938 seems prescient; both events signalled the end of Jewish life in Germany and the abrogation of German Jewish identity.