ENVISIONING JEWISH CENTRAL EUROPE: FRIEDRICH TORBERG,THE AUSTRIAN ÉMIGRÉS,AND JEWISH EUROPEAN HISTORY

This essay uses the Viennese remigré writer and journalist, Friedrich Torberg (1908–1979), his Austrian Jewish cohort, and their invented “Central Europe” and “Austrian Literature” to argue for a paradigmatic shift in émigré historiography. The cosmopolitan narrative predominating in émigré historiography has marginalized traditional Judaism. By shifting the focus from the German to the Austrian émigrés, and from the European nation state to the Austrian Empire, historians can reclaim traditional Jewish culture and pluralize the hegemonic narrative. Late imperial Austria, constitutionally federalist and ethnically and culturally diverse, made room for a Jewish national culture in ways that Germany did not. The Austrian émigrés shaped visions of Central Europe that foregrounded Jewishness and provided wider space for Jewish life than comparable visions of leading German émigrés. Yet, even Austrian émigré visions remained largely incognizant of rabbinic culture, the core of traditional Jewish life. To make traditional Jews agents of Jewish European history, European historiography must now move to incorporate rabbinic culture.     

Reclaiming Bonhoeffer After Auschwitz

Abstract : Christians having sought refuge from guilt by claiming Nazi martyr Dietrich Bonheoffer to be their representative have come under critique by Jewish Holocaust thinkers. Was the historical Bonhoeffer complicit in the anti‐Semitism of his era or a model of prophetic heroism in the face of state sponsored racism and genocide? This article traces the early history of Bonhoeffer's thinking on the “Jewish Question” and the implications of his prison writings for the future of Jewish‐Christian relations. Simplistic defenses and simplistic dismissals fall short of understanding this most complex of theological figures.     

The effect of security-related stress on dyadic closeness among Jews and Arabs in Israel: a daily diary study

An important aspect of Israeli life is its continuous state of conflict with the neighboring Palestinian people and Arab countries. Given that security-related stress is so intensely experienced by all Israeli residents, we examined the effects of daily fluctuations in security-related stress on dyadic closeness among Jewish and Arab couples. Time sampling approach was used to study repeated sequences of associations between stress and dyadic closeness. Data were collected from 188 Jewish and 93 Arab couples by means of daily diaries. Hierarchical multivariate linear modeling was used to analyze the data. The findings indicate that stress results in increasing distance between intimate partners, but the effect varies with the level of marital quality and socioethnic affiliation.     

Community and subcommunity in small-town America, 1880–1950

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the American Jewish population was heavily concentrated in the large and mid-size cities of the United States. At the same time, however, tens of thousands of Jews lived in America's smaller cities and towns as well. This essay examines how some of the basic features of Jewish life in the immigrant era were manifested in America's less visible Jewish centers. It discusses the nature of East European Jewish culture in small towns, and demonstrates that factors such as kinship, residential and occupational patterns, the use of Yiddish, and local institutional frameworks all promoted more highly integrated and intensively Jewish ethnic communities than might have been expected in small-town America. The essay also examines the relationship between German Jews and East Europeans in small towns and considers various other aspects of communal dynamics. In doing so, it describes how in some places a kind of cooperation and creative compromise developed that did not emerge in larger communities, and it reveals how in other places communal divisions persisted despite environmental factors that should have promoted their moderation. Ultimately, this essay demonstrates that the communities of America's smaller cities and towns in the decades before World War II were not simply miniature versions of the communities of larger metropolitan areas, and it suggests that for those interested in the dynamics of Jewish communal life, smaller Jewish settlements can provide valuable laboratories in which to study the role of place in conditioning the American Jewish experience. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

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*.     

“A ONE-SIDED LOVE AFFAIR”

Scholem's comparison of the so-called German-Jewish symbiosis to a “one-sided love affair” accurately describes pre-1939 literary accounts of Jews in German-speaking countries. As Jewish emancipation after 1789 led to increased Jew-hatred throughout Europe, Jewish writers—Heine, Stefan Zweig, Schnitzler, Rathenau, Buber, Kafka, Joseph Roth, Lasker-Schüler, Werfel, and Zuckmayer, among others—responded with stories and poems of unrequited love, at times openly allegorical of the Jewish condition. Other writers who closely observed German Jews (for example, S.Y. Agnon, David Vogel, and Ernest Hemingway) also wrote of them in stories of one-sided love. This article explores this literature as a source of insight into the social psychology of European Jews as anti-Semitism grew in the early twentieth century. In contrast with Jewish organizational life, which was mostly patriotically committed to symbiosis, the literature of unrequited love is in retrospect far closer to the reality in depicting European Jewish alienation and rising apprehension for the future.     

Groping for the greats: the strange musical claims of Nathan Ausubel

Nathan Ausubel (1898–1986) achieved unprecedented popularity as a compiler and translator of Jewish folklore during the 1940s and 1950s. Beneath the inspiring stories and charming sayings was a leftist ideologue preoccupied with the demise of Jewish life in Europe and the loss of Jewish identity to capitalist forces in the United States. Ausubel's agenda is elucidated in his polemical essays, which advocate using folklore as a means of bolstering Jewish pride and solidarity. Part of his strategy involved exaggerating the influence of Jewish culture on famous non-Jews, including Bach, Beethoven, and Schubert. This article examines these dubious musical claims and how they furthered Ausubel's activist agenda.     

The Gendered Politics of Public Health: Jewish Nurses and the American Joint Distribution Committee in Interwar Poland

This article examines the gendered politics of public health initiatives among Jews in interwar Poland by focusing on the establishment and activity of the Warsaw School of Nursing (Szko?a Piel?gniarstwa przy Szypitalu Starozakonnych w Warszawie). Founded in 1923 and funded by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the school’s staff believed that they could shape the attitudes and behaviors of Polish Jewish women and use them as a conduit to advance their vision for a Polish state committed to the protection of Jews and their equality before the law. Drawing upon the voices of JDC officials, local Jewish health activists, Polish government officials, and young Jewish women in the Second Polish Republic, the article highlights the multiple and frequently conflicting ways in which gender figured in their political imagination. It also sheds light on the efforts of American Jewish humanitarian activists and Polish Jewish women alike—much like their counterparts throughout Europe and North America—to reframe traditional gendered expectations for women in order to expand their range of professional choices and the roles they could play in public life. The final section of this article recounts the school’s decline and compares its fate to a Jewish nursing school initiative in the city of Vilna. In doing so, it assesses the limits of the Joint Distribution Committee’s interethnic bridge-building initiatives in interwar Poland.     

Earnings Gaps Between Israel's Native-Born Men and Women: 1982 1993

This study examines changes in the earnings gapbetween native-born Israeli Jewish men and women duringthe 1980s and early 1990s. The sample of native-bornIsraeli women was broken into two sub-groups: one of Western origin and the other of Easternorigin. Both were compared to the dominant group in theIsraeli labor market, namely native-born Jewish men ofWestern origin. Three Income Surveys were used for this purpose: 1982, 1987, and 1993. Theresults indicate that almost the entire gender-basedearnings gap is not due to productivity-relatedvariables, and that this figure has not changed muchduring this period.     

Religiosity,Meaning in Life and Suicidal Tendency Among Jews

The study examines the impact that meaning in life, or lack thereof, has on suicidal tendencies among youth, as well as the nexus between level of religiosity, meaning in life and suicidal tendencies. Subjects were 450 students from both Jewish religious and Jewish secular schools aged 15–18. Findings: a significant and negative correlation was found between a sense of meaning in life and suicidal tendencies, beyond gender or level of religiosity. In addition, no difference was found in level of suicidal tendency between Jewish religious and Jewish secular youth; however, among Jewish religious teens, a lower level of depression was reported in comparison with their secular peers. The study therefore concludes that meaning in life is the dominant variable in minimizing suicidal tendencies among youth. The results of this study may promote the establishment of prevention, intervention and therapy plans, especially in the age range that is crucial for suicide. Such programs should be based upon finding meaning in life.     

MUSIC OF THE “FOLKS‐NESHOME”

In their task of creating a style of “Jewish” national art music based on ethnographic research, many of the composers affiliated with the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music wrote arrangements of traditional ethnic songs and dances for small chamber ensembles. These works, generally no longer than the duration of a traditional folk melody, and written with the aim of evoking Jewish village folk culture, occupy a genre that I call the “rural miniature”. This genre was popular in Eastern and Central Europe during this period, and was most commonly composed and performed by musicians who conducted ethnographic fieldwork themselves or studied the findings of other ethnographers of music. The rural miniature was a critical art music genre in the development of state and diaspora musical nationalism. Works in the genre assumed a standard role in the chamber music and solo repertoire during the first four decades of the twentieth century. As the genre’s early proponents moved away from their homes and settled throughout the diaspora, however, the continued survival of rural Jewish life appeared increasingly imperilled by urbanization, emigration, and anti‐Semitism. A discussion of Joseph Achron’s “Hebrew Melody” will demonstrate that, with this cultural migration, the ethnographic component of the rural miniature came gradually to be superseded by the aesthetic elements of propaganda and nostalgia, as the genre was appropriated for fictional idealizations of traditional life in the Eastern European shtetl ¹ 1. David Assaf defines the shtetl as “a physical enclave represented by hundreds of small and midsized towns in Eastern Europe whose Jewish character was in clear evidence”. Assaf, Journey to a Nineteenth‐Century Shtetl, 20. View all notes and expressions of a Zionist longing for the biblical Jewish homeland.     

Talking about Antisemitism in France Before and After <Emphasis Type="Italic">Charlie Hebdo</Emphasis> and Hyper Cacher

This article explores tensions in French Jewish discourses about antisemitism in the post-2000 period. Drawing on commentary from French Jewish intellectuals, national Jewish organizations, and the French Jewish press from the mid-2000s until after the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher attacks, I note a complex relationship between change and continuity in discursive characterizations of French antisemitism. While empirical manifestations of antisemitism were notably transformed by the Toulouse attacks of 2012, much French Jewish discourse insisted on continuity from the early 2000s onward. At the same time, Jewish narrative practices shifted rather dramatically. In a political context where Israel was often depicted as part of a history of violent settler colonialism, early 2000s Jewish discourse divorced French antisemitism from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and (post)colonial racism in France. After 2012, some Jewish commentators linked Israel to French antisemitism by likening terrorism in Israel with Islamic antisemitism in France. These disjunctures between narratives and empirical violence suggest that the “structures of feeling” behind Jewish reactions to contemporary antisemitism cannot be reduced to empirical questions about safety and security. Social scientists thus need to move beyond an empirical analysis of antisemitism itself and attend to the cultural and affective work Jewish discourses about antisemitism do in any particular moment.     

Elijah Levita: a Jewish Hebraist

Elijah Levita’s (c. 1469–1558) study of Hebrew was part of the longtime Jewish occupation with the language of Scripture. Yet much of Levita’s scholarship was at odds with prior Jewish approaches to Biblical language and the transmission of the Biblical text. In his many works, Levita provides a critical account of the development of Hebrew, Aramaic, and the masoretic scribal traditions. This article examines the relationship between Levita’s critical approach to the Bible and the Christian context within which he worked. With the rise of Christian Hebraism, an increasingly sophisticated and sustained discourse on Hebrew developed outside of Jewish circles. This created an alternative setting within which Levita could produce scholarship that challenged prior Jewish notions of language and the Bible. The viability of Levita’s scholarship was no longer contingent on Jewish reception alone, allowing him to express critical ideas without fear of internal censure and without assuming the hermeneutical posture typical of pre-modern Jewish scholarly expression. This article has benefited from conversations with advisors at Columbia University and with colleagues at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. In particular, I would like to thank Wim Smit (z”l) and Jennifer Greenfield for shaping my studies of early-modern European intellectual life and my colleague Naomi Seidman for helping me to better tell the story. Thanks to Kenneth Stow, Arthur Lesley, and unnamed third and fourth readers of this essay for their helpful suggestions.     

Interpretations of Freud's Jewishness, 1924–1974

During the first fifty years of historical and biographical commentary on Freud and the origins of psychoanalysis there were there periods of interpretation of Freud's Jewishness. During the first period, extending from the mid-1920s until the 1950, it was widely assumed, following the works of Wittels, that Freud was essentially Viennese, that his Jewishness was at most incidental. During the second period, extending until the late 1960s, Freud was believed by some, following Bakan, to be essentially Jewish, and to have concealed that important aspect of his life intentionally. During the most recent period, and especially in the early 1970s, psychoanalysis was interpreted as a compromise wrought by Freud to meet the conflicting demands of secular German and scientific modernity and Jewish and othe traditions.     

Division of the Dowry on the Death of the Daughter: An Instance in the Negotiation of Laws and Jewish Customs in Early Modern Tuscany

Tuscan notarial acts permit the exploration of the often elusive relationship of Jewish practice, Jewish law and the corresponding laws of the state. One issue in early modern Italian Jewish marriage negotiations was the eventual disposition of the dowry of a childless wife who predeceased her husband. Jewish law on the succession of the childless woman was complicated by traditional or regional customs and communal ordinances. Moreover, in sixteenth-century Tuscany there was no official code, court or arbiter of Jewish law. Nonetheless, Christian notaries who wrote pre-nuptial stipulations or pacts for Jews worked with the assumption that Jews were allowed to live according to their own law. This essay argues that individual Jews used to advantage the state's assumption that they could follow Jewish law (despite the absence of any universally-acknowledged or applicable law on this specific subject) by employing notaries to write contracts in disregard of both local statutes and well-known Jewish customs. In the second part of this essay I locate the stipulations in the Jewish marriage system and suggest that the process of negotiation over the fate of the dowry was integrally related to the system's emphasis – in contrast to that of contemporary Christians – on universal marriage and procreation.     

Birobidzhan in Khrushchev’s Thaw: the soviet and the western outlook

The present article looks into the little-researched period in the nine-decade long history of the Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR), which is still present atavistically in the administrative-territorial structure of contemporary Russia. The region in the Siberian Far East, better known by the name of its main town, Birobidzhan, never turned into what it was supposed to be, namely the centre of Jewish life in the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, while being demographically and culturally insignificant, the low-statused JAR played a key and essentially detrimental role in determining the entitlements that the Jews had in the Soviet pecking order. The government consistently used the Birobidzhan-centered model of Jewish life as an instrument for justifying internationally its active assimilationist policy. In the 1950s, rumours – first about the liquidation of Jewish autonomy and then about a planned expulsion of Jews to the JAR – attracted the attention and concern of the foreign press and Jewish organizations. International pressure forced Moscow to modify its Jews-related policy, but changed little in the JAR. The 1959 census revealed 14,269 Jews in the JAR’s population. Compared with 1939, the number of Jews in the region had decreased almost by a fifth. This decline continued in the coming years.     

Bringing culture to the nation: Hebraism, Yiddishism, and the dilemmas of Jewish cultural formation in Russia and Ukraine, 1917–1919

Focusing on the pivotal 1917–1919 conjuncture in Russia and Ukraine, this paper analyzes the efforts of the divided Jewish nationalist intelligentsia to disseminate new forms of Jewish culture to a mass audience, the reception of these efforts in the former Tsarist empire’s variegated Jewish population, and the intelligentsia’s parallel exploration of other forms of cultural formation less dependent on popular support. Comparing the cultural programs of Hebraism and Yiddishism, it demonstrates important parallels in their cultural visions and highlights their shared belief in the possibility of implanting a secularist, aestheticist intelligentsia culture in the whole of “the nation.” The paper reconstructs both substantial forms of popular openness to this culture and its sociocultural weaknesses. Finally, it examines experiments made by the intelligentsia with alternative routes to cultural transformation: suppression of popular culture, non-market cultural arrangements, cultural revolution through education, and the uses of the state. The paper seeks a fuller understanding both of the roots of interwar cultural programs in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and of the Jewish nationalist intelligentsia’s underlying conception of “culture,” its own authority, and the evolving relationship between these conceptions and the realities of East European Jewish social, cultural, and political life from the 1890s onward.     

“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.     

IS A MESSIANIC POLITICAL ETHIC POSSIBLE? Recent Work by and about John Howard Yoder

In his landmark monograph, The Politics of Jesus, John Howard Yoder challenged mainstream Christian social ethics by arguing that the New Testament account of Jesus's founding of a messianic community entails a normative politics, not only for early Christianity but for the contemporary church. This challenge is further elaborated in several important posthumous publications, especially Preface to Theology, in which Yoder examines the development of early Christology with attention to its political and ethical implications, and The Jewish‐Christian Schism Revisited, Yoder's proposal for a renewed Jewish–Christian dialogue around the moral meaning of messianism. This article interprets these writings with reference to a range of critical scholarship on and about Yoder, Yoder and Augustine, and Jewish and Christian messianism, paying particular attention to questions of political ethics.     

Mobility and marriage in two medieval Jewish societies

A significant characteristic of pre-modern Jewish life in both the Muslim and Christian realms is geographic mobility. There has been little specific scholarly work on Jewish women and geographic mobility but the available primary sources show that women traveled frequently and for a variety of reasons. This essay focuses on women’s mobility and particularly their migrations due to marriage in both Muslim and Christian milieus. It poses questions about how medieval Jewish communities balanced values of family propinquity versus economic interests. Marriage contracts and letters from the Cairo Genizah demonstrate that marriages over significant distances to cement mercantile or intellectual alliances were not uncommon. Genizah writings also reveal that indigent women were frequent travelers, seeking runaway husbands and financial support. Rabbinic responsa literature of the tenth to thirteenth centuries from France and Germany shows that Jewish women’s mobility in Ashkenaz, both for marriage and for business, was generally within a more limited region. In this society, families tended to move as a group and women often preferred migrating with their parents rather than remaining with a husband. The far more frequent long distance marriages among Jewish women in the Muslim world reflect a more developed system of far-flung scholarly contacts and economic alliances. Similarly, the much larger Jewish population in Islamic realms also meant that there were more women from elite families and more indigent abandoned wives, the two groups particularly likely to travel due to marital prospects and marital woes.