MYTH,HISTORY AND REALPOLITIK: MOROCCO AND ITS JEWISH COMMUNITY

This article is an analytical overview of the history of Moroccan Jewry, from pre‐Islamic times to the present day, exploring the themes of myth, memory and political interests in the multi‐faceted, continuous interactions between the community and Moroccan society as a whole. In referring to seminal developments in Moroccan political history, it analyses the different ways in which the Jews of Morocco experienced them as an integral part of the larger societal mosaic. This survey of the 2,000‐year Jewish presence in Morocco employs a variety of classical and modern sources in order to locate the place of Moroccan Jews within the ebbs and flows of Moroccan dynastic history, particularly following the establishment of the first Islamic dynasty in the eighth century, C.E. It also engages with current historiographical debates on the subject matter. Overall, it provides clarity and order to the subject of Jewish–Muslim inter‐communal relations in Morocco over the longue durée, a matter too often shrouded in myths and half‐truths.     

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.     

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.     

THE CONTRIBUTION OF WORLD JEWISH ORGANIZATIONS TO THE ESTABLISHMENT OF RIGHTS FOR JEWS IN MOROCCO (1956–1961)

The history of the Jewish community during the early years of Moroccan independence is a story of continuous and constant worries regarding an unclear future—as well as fears of possible impending disaster. During this period, the Jewish community was forced to deal with several critical questions, the answers to which would ultimately determine the future of Moroccan Jewry, as well as the future of individual Jews in the community. While the struggle for independence had been waged without much involvement on the part of the Jewish community, the removal of the yoke of colonialism presented each Moroccan Jew with various options, and the choice to be made between them was a fateful one—whether to seek personal and communal success within a democratic progressive country or to escape from the country out of fear of a possible disaster.     

PALIMPSESTS AND QUESTIONS OF CANONISATION

The article analyses the relationship between various modern Jewish encyclopedias published at the beginning of the twentieth century. In particular, it addresses the German‐Jewish encyclopedias of the Weimar period and considers their central linkages between different scholarly and cultural webs. Adapting the concept of “palimpsests” as developed in literary studies, it is possible to illuminate and describe the interdependencies among these scholarly works. Over several decades, the differing trans‐textual relationships, intersections and overlappings of the encyclopedias are viewed as a strategy and means to form a modern Jewish canon of knowledge.     

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.     

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BRITAIN

This article explores the theme of a purported lack of seriousness or superficiality in Anglo‐Jewish historiography. It begins with an analysis of the role this idea played as a catalyst for the first generation of organised or professionalising Anglo‐Jewish historians. It argues that the idea of “success”—whether economic, political or social—has been a thorn in the side of British Jewish historians since the late nineteenth century, and that the conceptualisation of Anglo‐Jewish history has been to a large degree a response to an ambivalence about Anglo‐Jewish “success”. After a consideration of early Anglo‐Jewish historians, the article turns to the work of contemporary historians of Anglo‐Jewry, and explores how this anxiety over success and seriousness has remained a spur, in both senses of the term: “Success” continues to be both an irritant and a catalyst for re‐interpretation.     

BIBLICAL POETRY,SPINOZIST HERMENEUTICS,AND CRITICAL SCHOLARSHIP

This article considers a little known chapter in the long history of the question of the nature of biblical poetry. The debate between the Jewish scholar Raffaele Rabeni and the Christian Hebraist Biagio Garofalo (1710–1714) exemplifies shifting attitudes and concerns of eighteenth century Jewish and Christian polemists. Ostensibly, the exchange concerned an apparently innocuous topic, the “Poetry of the Hebrews”, namely, whether Biblical poetry was rhymed or metrical. At a closer look, the two scholars, equally familiar with Spinoza’s biblical critique and the latest philological and critical scholarship, clashed over the textual authority of the Hebrew Bible.

This Italian polemical exchange not only foreshadows emerging developments in the field of biblical studies, but it also differs from previous examples because of its public ramifications. The debate was publicized by the Giornale de’ Letterati, Italy’s foremost scholarly journal of the time, which sided with Garofalo. For his part, Rabeni actively opposed the publication’s “modern” approach to sacred and profane history by supporting the Jesuit Father, Giovan Antonio Bernardi, in the course of a heated controversy over the journal’s historiographical stance and objectivity.

Unlike most cases of early modern Jewish–Christian polemics examined by researchers, the Rabeni–Garofalo affair and its ramifications reflect the birth pangs that accompanied the emergence of the modern study of sacred and diplomatic history in Italy, and is best understood within the context of historical and philological‐critical studies that characterized the early stages of the Italian Enlightenment.     

Rewriting the flesh of the world for the new human: Merleau-Ponty,Fanon, and Wynter on the ethics of futurity

This article reads Maurice Merleau-Ponty's ontology of the “flesh of the world” alongside the ontology that seems to undergird Frantz Fanon's sociodiagnostics as well as his theory of sociogeny. It argues that reading Fanonian sociogeny in terms of the ambiguity and intercorporeality of the flesh of the world renders the ethical and political imperatives of Fanon's decolonial project all the more pressing, since the “new human” is prefigured—if not totally determined—in the national consciousness obtained by “les damnés” through the decolonization process. It then examines how Sylvia Wynter's Fanonian call to (re)fashion the future of humanness through (re)conceptualizing “being human as praxis,” also seems to rely on this ontology of the flesh of the world. Bringing these arguments together, the article suggests that the conceptual content of the new human can be found in the liberation struggles of les damnés across what Wynter calls the “poverty archipelagos” wrought by colonial humanism. Hence, the “new skin” for which Fanon calls is fashioned through forming international solidarity with les damnés, with the conceptual content of the new humanism emerging sociogenically—and autopoetically—from those struggles themselves.     

ANIMAL SUFFERING,EVOLUTION, AND THE ORIGINS OF EVIL: TOWARD A “FREE CREATURES” DEFENSE

Does an affirmation of theistic evolution make the task of theodicy impossible? In this article, I will review a number of ancient and contemporary responses to the problem of evil as it concerns animal suffering and suggest a possible way forward which employs the ancient Jewish insight that evil—as resistance to God's will that results in suffering and alienation from God's purposes—precedes the arrival of human beings and already has a firm foothold in the nonhuman animal world long before humans are ever tempted to go astray. This theological intuition is conferred renewed relevance in light of the empirical reality of evolutionary gradualism and continuity and in view of the recent findings of cognitive ethology. Consequently, I suggest that taking biological evolution seriously entails understanding “moral evil” as a prehuman phenomenon that emerges gradually through the actions and intentions of “free creatures” which—as evolutionary history unfolded—increasingly possessed greater levels of freedom and degrees of moral culpability.     

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.     

RETHINKING THE SECULAR: SCIENCE,TECHNOLOGY, AND RELIGION TODAY

Abstract. Contemporary tensions between science and religion cannot simply be seen as a manifestation of an eternal tension between reason and revelation. Instead, the modern secular, including science and technology, needs to be seen as a distinctive historical phenomenon, produced and still radically conditioned by the religious history of the West. Clashes between religion and science thus ought to be seen fundamentally as part of a dialogue that is internal to Western religious history. While largely agreeing with Caiazza's account of the “magical” understanding of technology, I suggest that this needs to be seen as part of a more fundamental drift in religion and culture away from canonical meanings to more “indexical,” pragmatic ones—but also that technology is still inflected by soteriological meanings that were coded into modern technology at its very inception in the early modern period. I conclude by arguing that a recognition of science and technology's grounding in Western religious history can make possible a more fundamental encounter with religion.     

SHADOWS OF WAR AND HOLOCAUST: JEWS,GERMAN JEWS,AND THE SIXTIES IN THE UNITED STATES,REFLECTIONS AND MEMORIES

The article reflects on the––muted––“shadows of war and Holocaust” motivating Jewish activists in the civil rights and New Left movements of the “sixties” as well as the women's movement in the 1970s. For children of Jewish refugees from National Socialism, as well as for “red diaper” offspring of American Communists and alienated rebels against the newly comfortable Jewish suburban middle class, participation in these political struggles could serve both as a key form of alternative “Americanization” or “assimilation through protest” and a link to Jewish values of social justice. In a radically forward-looking movement, profoundly influenced by the African-American church, and linked with a few prominent refugee rabbis, the call for “Never Again” admonished young Jews never to be “good Germans,” to reject complicity with unjust policies at home and abroad; the specifically Jewish invocation of “never again a victim” only came later, decades removed from the events of war and Holocaust.     

ORTHODOXY AND THE CHALLENGE OF BIBLICAL CRITICISM

Traditional Jewish theology and practice are predicated on belief in the divinity of the Torah. Biblical criticism has posed increasingly formidable challenges to this belief in modern times. To the extent that Modern Orthodoxy has addressed the problem, it has generally attempted to refute the findings of scientific scholarship on its own terms. This article will suggest that such an approach represents a misplaced framing of the question, by viewing all religious truth claims cognitively as simple statements of fact. Instead of questioning whether the doctrine of Torah from Heaven is true empirically, its “truth” is established via its function within the context of the “form of life” (in the Wittgensteinian sense) that it engenders.     

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.     

FINDING ROTHKOWITZ: THE JEWISH ROTHKO

While Mark Rothko's canvases are renowned for their rich, monumental expanses of colour, he has insisted that his paintings should be appreciated on more than an aesthetic level. “The people who weep before my pictures,” he commented in 1956, “are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.” While various critics and scholars have recognized the importance of this remark, just what Rothko meant by “religious experience” has been highly contested. In this article I will argue that Rothko's Jewish identity—informed by his experiences in Russia and New York—influenced his understanding of “religious experience” in subtle but powerful ways. I will not attempt to spot a raft of Jewish symbols and references in Rothko's work, an endeavour that has yielded spurious results in previous studies. Instead, I will examine Rothko's sense of “religious experience” as an evolving concept in his thought and painting; a process which finds its culmination in the Rothko Chapel, a space informed but not defined by the artist's Jewishness.     

The “Jewish Knight” of Slobodka honor culture and the image of the body in an Ultra-Orthodox Jewish context

Scholarship on Ultra-Orthodox Jewish thought has traditionally assumed that the views of these communities derive from a struggle against the Jewish Enlightenment and Zionism, as well as against any values they identify as “modern.” This article challenges that assumption. Beginning with an examination of Ultra-Orthodox sources that present an image of the religious leader as the “ideal Jew,” the author then focuses on sources concerning the founder of the Slobodka Yeshiva in Lithuania. This rabbi intended his students to internalize “modern” norms found in the European honor culture of his time, while translating them into the language of Jewish Ultra-Orthodoxy. The author chooses to present his argument by tracing the image of the body in the Slobodka method, since it is precisely through the nexus of the body that Ultra-Orthodox Judaism was segregated from general European society and culture.     

Transnational intervention and its limits: the case of interwar Poland*

This article reassesses the efforts by western Jews to rescue their imperilled European brethren in the years before and during the Second World War. It goes beyond the conventional question, “Could more have been done to rescue European Jewry?” Rather, the article explores what Jewish leaders learned about the global practice of philanthropic relief during the decades before the rise of European fascism and hyper-nationalism. It then asks how this accumulated knowledge may have informed their decisions once they understood the dangers faced by Jews in Germany, Poland, and Romania. This holistic analysis of actions taken by transnational leaders accounts for operational precedents, geo-politics, migration regimes, diaspora networks, organizational history, intra-communal relations, and economics and contemporary orientations toward aid. All these create a realistic reckoning of the strengths and limitations of Jewish transnationalism at the time, allowing us to transcend value-based judgements of this painful chapter in Jewish history.     

“On That Day,His Feet Will Stand on the Mount of Olives”: The Mount of Olives and Its Hero between Jews,Christians, and Muslims

This article examines the changing Jewish attitudes toward the Mount of Olives, and toward the identification of its “hero” to come in the last days, in relation to the mount’s changing jurisdiction under Roman, Byzantine, and Muslim authority. It illustrates how the Christian appropriation of biblical ideas about the mountain—transforming the ascent and future descent of the Shekhinah into the ascent and future descent of Jesus—led the Jews to abandon those notions, and how the Muslim conquest then brought about a reinvigoration and expansion of the mountain’s original associations among Jews by relocating the appearance of the Messiah as well as apocalyptic scenes on the mount. In the first of these developments, the Byzantine prohibition against Jews approaching Jerusalem led to a distancing of the Jewish people from the biblical and postbiblical traditions that had been connected with the Mount of Olives and its environs during the Second Temple period. Subsequently, the Muslim occupation of the area neutralized that tension, allowing Jews to return to the mountain and restoring the traditions associated with it to the Jewish consciousness. The reaffirmation of the Jewish connection with the Mount of Olives and its ancient association with the future hero may be seen in two developments that took place under Muslim rule: its choice as the location for a yearly Hoshana Rabbah ceremony and its renewed identification as the site for the resurrection of the dead at the End of Days.