Replenishing the “Fountain of Judaism”: Traditionalist Jewish Education in Interwar Poland

The unexpected revitalization of Polish Jewish traditionalism—Hasidic and non-Hasidic—is particularly visible in the realm of education. During the interwar period, a combined influx of pious refugees from the Soviet Union and generous American Jewish philanthropy bolstered traditionalist Jewish elementary schools (hadarim) and yeshivot. At the same time, traditionalists reformed those hitherto sacrosanct institutions in hopes of competing with emergent secularist Jewish movements while preserving an ostensibly authentic cultural core. Polish Jewish traditionalism was subtly transformed in the process, presenting a striking contrast with its more rigid “ultra-Orthodox” counterpart in neighboring Hungary and offering a viable alternative to secularist Jewish subcultures within Poland. This article highlights the surprising durability and flexibility of Poland’s traditionalist Jewish communities during a period usually conceived as one of secularist Jewish growth and traditionalist decline.     

JCA-ORT-JAS-JDC: one big agrarianizing family

This essay examines ideological and institutional patterns that characterized the four most successful projects in Jewish agrarianism from the 1890s until the eve of the Second World War. These major undertakings included the agricultural settlements created by Baron Maurice de Hirsch in Argentina, colonization efforts in North America supported by the Jewish Agricultural Society, the settlement work of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in the interwar Soviet Union, and parts of the institutional mechanisms that supported Zionist agricultural settlement in the Yishuv. The article studies the forces that drove the world of Jewish philanthropy to support such efforts over several decades and across four continents.     

Wild tribes and ancient Semites: Israelite-Indian identification and the American West

Rabbi Henry Cohen of Galveston, Texas, carefully preserved a 1916 pamphlet that claimed a common history for ‘Wild Tribes’ of Indians and Jews of antiquity. Why would a Jewish author tie the customs of ‘uncivilised’ tribes to his own religion, and why might it capture Cohen's attention? This article suggests that the ‘Indian-Israelite’ identification appealed to acculturated Jews like Cohen as part of a wider embrace of a vision of manhood that at once held ties to Jewishness and American identity. That is, identification with the American West and frontier emphasised the harmony between Jewishness, a particular type of enlightened Judaism, and Americanisation. A brief survey of three movements – the relatively small-scale Galveston Movement, Jewish agricultural communities and the larger, more diverse Zionist movement – then demonstrates how the gendered and nationalist ideologies of Henry Cohen and other acculturated Jews like him aligned with their imagined constructions of Indians.     

Escape through Poland: Soviet Jewish Emigration in the 1950s

The emigration movement among Soviet Jews is usually dated to the 1960s–1990s. This essay focuses on the premovement emigration in the 1950s, which prepared the ground for the massive departure of Jews and non-Jewish members of their families, primarily to Israel and the United States. The parameters for leaving the Soviet Union in the 1950s were in many ways similar to the parameters for returning to Poland in the immediate post–World War II years. On paper, the basic pools of emigrants were the same: Jews who at the outbreak of World War II were Polish nationals. In reality, many repatriates of the 1950s were more Soviet than Polish, leaving the country where they had lived for up to twenty years, which often was a lion’s share of their lives. Those—that is, the majority—who ultimately reached Israel went through two repatriation processes: first, as returnees to their pre–World War II homeland and, second, as Jews going back to their historical homeland. As this essay shows, the contemporaneous political and social climates in the Soviet Union and Poland, the nature of those countries’ mutual relations and of their relations with Israel, not present on the map until 1948, framed a unique context for emigration in the early post-Stalinist period.     

Empowerment, Defiance, and Demise: Jews and the Blood Libel Specter under Stalinism

By examining different cases of blood libels that occurred from the 1920s through the decade following Stalin’s death, this study suggests that the ritual murder accusation in the Soviet Union dwindled at first, then intensified, and eventually underwent an idiosyncratic and secular metamorphosis that culminated with the 1953 “Doctors’ Plot” accusation: the denunciation of a group of prominent and predominantly Jewish doctors for allegedly conspiring to murder Soviet leaders. While the blood libel was generally prosecuted in the interwar period, in the postwar years it was usually ignored, though perhaps indirectly encouraged. Jews—as well as local authorities—reacted in a variety of ways to allegations of ritual murder. But overall, it was the status, power, and influence that Jews held in a given city or town at the time of a concocted accusation that determined their responses to the blood libel and that shaped the legal provisions and enforcement steps taken by the party, police, and civil authorities.     

BEYOND THE PALE: Jewish identity,radical politics and feminist art in the United States

Historians have not yet recognized how the cultural legacy of East European Jews helped change the status of women artists in the United States. Immigrant Jewish women in general reacted to institutionalized patriarchy with a desire for social change and the will to act to that end. Jewish women who were artists had professional reasons to embrace feminism, given women's virtual exclusion from professional notice. This article focuses on two pioneering feminist artists — Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro — and demonstrates the importance of their Jewish heritage, showing how and why they set in motion important changes in the tumultuous 1970s that continue to resonate in the art world today. An unusually large number of American feminist artists of the 1970s were Jewish. Their heritage resembles that of the Jewish feminist activist Betty Friedan, whose father emigrated from Eastern Europe. Once we examine the linked roles played by Jewish identity and leftist politics in the formation of the feminist art movement in the United States, it becomes evident that activism in the community of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and the values that they passed on to the next generations made a significant contribution to the success of this movement.     

“I will bless those who bless you”: Christian Zionism,Fetishism, and Unleashing the Blessings of God

Abstract

This article focuses on the concept of ‘blessing’ Israel that has become common among contemporary American Christian Zionists. After introducing a theological scheme that has dominated discussions of contemporary Christian Zionism, the article critically examines one of the emerging narratives concerning the (re)discovery of Christian Zionists’ Jewish roots and the way the Jewish contribution to Christianity is framed. Following this, the article considers the way Israel and Jews are understood to hold a distinct place in the network of world redemption and how contemporary Israel acts as a marker—what is referred to as a ‘signifier of stability’—that helps Christian Zionists locate God’s ongoing work in the world. Finally, the article discusses how Christian Zionists ‘bless’ Israel in practical ways as a form of submission to God, a reminder of their relationship with God, and a way to locate themselves in the redemptive process.     

Between Private and Public Sectors

This article validates Simon Kuznets’ argument that minorities prefer the private sector to the public sector in order to avoid discrimination. Based on new archival findings, comparative interethnic research shows that majority Greek civil engineers in the interwar years developed close, interlocking relations with the government and national institutions, which elevated their socio-professional status. Despite the absence of anti-Jewish legislation, this process effectively excluded equally qualified Jewish engineers from Greek-controlled power networks and employment. The Greek nationalistic climate of the times permeated the civil engineers’ professional associations and Greece's one higher educational institution (National Technical University of Athens) of engineering. As the professional networks consolidated to protect their interests, Jewish civil engineers and architects, employers and employees alike, were effectively shut out with no possibility of benefitting from professional integration or association with the mainstream community of civil engineers. Jewish civil engineers were, therefore, channelled into restricting their services to Jewish clients and community projects. However, with the newly developing large-scale armaments industries in the 1930s, Jews opted to train as chemical, mechanical, and electrical engineers to fill positions in family-owned firms (as did their fellow Greeks), and also found employment in lower paying jobs that Greek engineers considered unattractive in state-owned facilities.     

THE SECULAR HERO

This article examines the ideas of a number of leading Israeli intellectuals on basic questions of secularism and the link between secular Jews and their Jewish heritage. The secular Jews at the focus of the intellectuals’ thinking are individualists, men and women of outstanding personality and aptitude. Most of the article discusses their trend towards individualism (which is often only implied). The last part of the article tries to classify the reasons for that trend—some of which are rooted in the political tension inherent in questions of identity and tradition in Israeli society, and others that are the apolitical legacy of spiritual Zionism.     

Jewish women in intercommunal political movements in colonial Morocco

ABSTRACT

The goal of this paper is to study Jewish participation in intercommunal – Muslim, Jewish, Christian – Moroccan women’s organizations that promoted national Moroccan socio-political aims, and to analyze their origins, effects, demise and memory. The paper focuses on a unique organization - Union des Femmes marocaines (Union of Moroccan Women) – which, for almost ten years during the colonial period, had carried out intercommunal work for shared Moroccan causes. The study reveals that during the period that intercommunal women’s associations operated (1943–1952), they were first French-oriented and dealt with issues considered, from a gendered perspective, to be within women’s domain (i.e. helping the poor and needy, doing charity, fighting for women’s education), but from 1947, they “Moroccanized” and worked towards general political Moroccan aims. The paper refers to a relatively unknown chapter in Moroccan history, and opens a new perspective of the Moroccan identity of Jews before their massive emigration from the country.     

“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.     

“Where are the Gothic Jewish women? On the non-iconography of the Jewess in the Cantigas de Santa Maria”

No distinctive symbol, costume, or physiognomy was devised for Jewish women in high medieval art, in sharp contrast to Jewish men, who from the late eleventh century were endowed with increasingly graphic—and virulent—marks of identity. This article attempts to explain this fact by comparing the outward appearance, narrative role, and ideological import of Jewish men and women in the Escorial Cantigas de Santa Maria. It argues that the caricatured male Jew epitomizes crucial aspects of Jewish “testimony” as articulated by high medieval theologians: its rigid obsolescence, its blind literalism, the severity and intractability of its law: qualities that female flesh was considered ill-suited to convey. To recognize the inability of the Jewish woman to embody Jewish ritual, exegesis, and law is not, however, to assert that this figure has nothing to say about Judaism. The other component of the doctrine of “Jewish witness”, which served to justify the continued presence of Jews within Christendom, insisted on protecting Jews who respected Christian primacy, and held out hope that they might ultimately turn to Christ. These are notions effectively embodied in the sign of the Jewish woman, whose face and body encode receptivity to dominance and potential for change. By mapping select aspects of Jewishness onto hyper-gendered images, the illuminations of the Cantigas model the ideal—punishment and conversion—while implicitly acknowledging the imperfect real, the necessary compromises of mundane co-existence, reflecting Alfonso?el?Sabio’s meticulously modulated Jewish policy*.     

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.     

Tisha B’Av, “Ghetto Day,” and producing “authentic” Jews at postwar Jewish summer camps

The postwar period brought sweeping changes for American Jews. Communal socioeconomic transitions and the aftermath of the Holocaust triggered intense anxieties among Jewish leaders regarding the preservation of so-called Jewish “authenticity,” and to an increased focus on the moulding of American Jewish youth. This article considers how Jewish summer camps used Tisha B’Av and secular, alternative memorial days, to lead campers toward various, ideologically imbued visions of Jewish authenticity. Through fostering an aura of tragedy in what was otherwise a world of play, songs, and enjoyment, Jewish educators used memorial days as transformative educational tools. Though camps’ ceremonies looked remarkably similar, often including a carefully crafted sombre atmosphere, dirges, and responsive readings, the message of the days proved malleable to different ideological perspectives. This article considers how Zionist, Yiddishist, Reform and Conservative camps came to use memorial days to produce “real,” “ideal,” or “authentic” Jews in accordance with their ideological visions in the decades immediately following the Holocaust.     

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.     

Harmful Ideas,The Structure and Consequences of Anti‐Semitic Beliefs in Poland

The harmfulness of anti‐Semitic beliefs is widely discussed in current political and legal debates (e.g., Cutler v. Dorn). At the same time, empirical studies of the psychological consequences of such beliefs are scarce. The present research is an attempt to explore the structure of contemporary anti‐Semitic beliefs in Poland—and to evaluate their predictive role in discriminatory intentions and behavior targeting Jews. Another aim was to determine dispositional, situational, and identity correlates of different forms of anti‐Semitic beliefs and behavior. Study 1, performed on a nation‐wide representative sample of Polish adults (N = 979), suggests a three‐factorial structure of anti‐Semitic beliefs, consisting of: (1) belief in Jewish conspiracy, (2) traditional religious anti‐Judaic beliefs, and (3) secondary anti‐Semitic beliefs, focusing on Holocaust commemoration. Of these three beliefs, belief in Jewish conspiracy was the closest antecedent of anti‐Semitic behavioral intentions. Study 2 (N = 600 Internet users in Poland) confirmed the three‐factor structure of anti‐Semitic beliefs and proved that these beliefs explain actual behavior toward Jews in monetary donations. Both studies show that anti‐Semitic beliefs are related to authoritarian personality characteristics, victimhood‐based social identity, and relative deprivation.     

Antisemitism,Definitions, and Future Cooperation

The World Council of Churches (WCC) and the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations met formally on 25–27 June 2019, in Paris, under the theme “The normalization of hatred: Challenges for Jews and Christians today.” This article outlines the presentation of WCC policies on antisemitism and the WCC’s work for human rights for all.     

Agreements between neighbours. The ‘ugody’ as a source on Jewish-Christian relations in early modern Poland

The following essay studies the importance of formal agreements (ugody or kontrakty) between representatives of Jewish communities and Christian burghers in early modern Poland. As a specific genre of legal document, these agreements, or contracts, are a unique source for understanding Jewish-Christian relations and the integration of Jews into local social fabrics. These contracts also reflect the importation and continuity of legal traditions that originated in German territories and arrived in Eastern Central Europe, and they corroborate suggestions that there was significant improvement in the legal status of the Jews in Eastern Europe as opposed to that under which they previously had lived in the West. The ugody document, finally, the emergence of what I have called elsewhere the contractual character of Polish-Jewish relations in the early modern period. (See François Guesnet, “Politik der Vormoderne—Shtadlanut am Vorabend der polnischen Teilungen,” Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts 1 (2002), pp. 235–255, and more recently idem, “Political Culture of Polish Jewry: A Tour d’Horizon,” Report of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies 2007–2008, pp. 61–76, 67–68.)     

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.     

“Socialism of the soul:” Holocaust in Saul Bellow’s The Victim

Saul Bellow wrote his second novel The Victim at the Partisan Review group’s instance. In the aftermath of the Holocaust the PR group advocated the assimilation of the American Jews into mainstream American life for their future safety and prosperity. Keeping in view Bellow’s creative potentials and belief in Marxism/Trotskyism, the PR members asked him to educate the Jews in this matter through his fiction. Bellow treated the subject of Jewish assimilation in an allegorical vein, projecting the idea of universal brotherhood based on common human grounds. Here, a Jew, Asa Leventhal, behaves like a Gentile and a Gentile, Kirby Allbee, like a Jew as victim and victimizer of each other. Their repeated encounters mitigate their racial apprehensions and bring the two closer to each other. Both discover one into the other as his inescapable self, bound by a common human connection. Finally they make peace with each other, projecting Bellow’s allegory of inexorable cosmic kinship—“socialism of the soul”—despite their differences of blood, race and religion.