Engineers and the Knowledge Gap Between Andean and Nordic Countries, 1850–1939

One can often hear the question: are there any Jews in Estonia at all? And if there are, is there any reason to speak about Estonian Jewry in the sense we speak about Polish, Lithuanian, Galatian Jewry? Indeed, Estonia has never been a “traditional” land of Jews: during the Russian rule it did not belong to the so-called pale of settlement. Estonia never met with the “Jewish question”, there was no ground either for everyday or for official antisemitism. The Department of Jewish studies in the University of Tartu was the first one of its kind in the Nordic countries. At that time it was not unusual that an Estonian understood some Yiddish, there are also examples of the students who studied seriously the language and the culture of Jews. Pent Nurmekund, a famous polyglot was one of them. Nurmekund had learned a number of Yiddish folksongs and later translated some of them into Estonian. The two songs we are going to speak about are “Toibn” and “Main fraint”. Nurmekund performed both a Yiddish and an Estonian version of the first song. Main fraint was recorded only in Yiddish, the Estonian translation was published in the literary periodical Looming.

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Cultural Zionism in Sweden: Daniel Brick's Judisk krönika

Nordisk Judaistik/Scandinavian Jewish Studies ◽

10.30752/nj.69431 ◽

1988 ◽

Vol 9 (2) ◽

pp. 108-130

Author(s):

Stephen Fruitman

Keyword(s):

International Perspective ◽

Nordic Countries ◽

Spiritual Renewal ◽

Communal Life ◽

Cultural Life

The present study examines the content of the Swedish-Jewish Zionist periodical Judisk Krönika during its earliest years of publication, 1932 to 1950, under the editorship of its founder, Daniel Brick. The focus will be on how the magazine in its brightest and most ambitious years, acted as a conduit through which the ideas of cultural Zionism flowed into Sweden. Through essays, reports, editorial comments, book reviews and debates, the circle of intellectuals grouped around Brick clamored for a revivification of what they considered to be the moribund cultural life of Swedish Jewry, the result (in their eyes) of decades of Reform dominance in communal life. Not wishing to make themselves any less “Swedish”, the cultural Zionists nevertheless insisted that Jews in Sweden and other Nordic countries needed to adopt an international perspective, integrating the proposed idea for a Jewish national home in Palestine into their lives as a source of cultural pride and spiritual renewal.

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