“A Higher and Purer Shape”: Kaufmann Kohler's Jewish Orientalism and the Construction of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 326-360
Author(s):  
Evan Goldstein
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Reform Judaism ◽  
American Jews ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
American Judaism ◽  
Institutional Leader ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ritual Law ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThis article uses the case of Kaufmann Kohler (1843–1926), an intellectual and institutional leader of American Reform Judaism, to explore the relationship between Orientalism and the category of religion in nineteenth-century America. Recent scholarship has shown that the lived religion of nineteenth-century American Jews departs significantly from the ideological hopes of Jewish elites. Connecting the emerging portrait of nineteenth-century Jewish laity with elite arguments for American Judaism, I reconsider Kohler's thought as a theological project out of step with his socioreligious milieu. Kohler is renowned for his theorizing of Judaism as a universal, ethical religion. As scholars have demonstrated repeatedly, defining Judaism as a “religion” was an important feature of Reform thought. What these accounts have insufficiently theorized, however, is the political context that ties the categorization of religion to the history of Orientalism that organized so many late nineteenth-century discussions of religion, Jewish and not. Drawing on work by Tracy Fessenden, John Modern, and Tisa Wenger, I show that Kohler's universal, cosmopolitan religion is a Jewish version of the Protestant secular. Like these Protestant modernists, Kohler defines Reform Judaism as a religion that supersedes an atavistic tribalism bound to materiality and ritual law. Being Jewish, for Kohler, means being civilized; reforming the soul of Judaism goes together with civilizing Jewish bodies and creating a Judaism that could civilize the world in an era in which religion and imperialism were overlapping interpretive projects with racial and gendered entanglements.

Police Records

2019 ◽  
pp. 797-819
Author(s):  
Cristina Vatulescu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Media History ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Police Records ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter approaches police records as a genre that gains from being considered in its relationships with other genres of writing. In particular, we will follow its long-standing relationship to detective fiction, the novel, and biography. Going further, the chapter emphasizes the intermedia character of police records not just in our time but also throughout their existence, indeed from their very origins. This approach opens to a more inclusive media history of police files. We will start with an analysis of the seminal late nineteenth-century French manuals prescribing the writing of a police file, the famous Bertillon-method manuals. We will then track their influence following their adoption nationally and internationally, with particular attention to the politics of their adoption in the colonies. We will also touch briefly on the relationship of early policing to other disciplines, such as anthropology and statistics, before moving to a closer look at its intersections with photography and literature.

The Limited Edition

2017 ◽  
pp. 127-165
Author(s):  
Erika Balsom
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Distribution Model ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Limited Edition ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines the history of the predominant model for the distribution of artists’ moving image today. This chapter traces out the history of this distribution model from the late nineteenth century to the present and offers hypotheses concerning its steps towards success in the 1990s. It explores the relationship between the limited edition model and the rental model of the cooperatives, outlines the various criticisms this artificial rarity has provoked, and discusses the possible benefits it might have for artists and collectors.

"Friese im Innern": Strauss's Public and Private Worlds in the Mis 1930's

2004 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 565-598 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryan Gilliam
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
German Romanticism ◽  
Nazi Regime ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Male Chorus ◽  
Cello Concerto ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Relationship

In the context of the most prolific and tumultuous decade in Strauss's life, the 1930s, this essay focuses on the years 1935-36, a time of significant change in the history of the Nazi regime. This period also saw significant changes in Strauss's life and worldview. Strauss lost a prized librettist (Stefan Zweig) in 1935, the same year that their opera, Die schweigsame Frau, was banned. Strauss was then fired from the presidency of the Reichsmusikkammer and within twenty-four hours was negotiating reluctantly with a new librettist of modest abilities (Joseph Gregor). On a broader level, this period saw the formation of the Nuremberg Race Laws, a reconfiguration of the Reichskulturkammer, and Hitler's four-year plan for war. As the Nazis expanded, Strauss grew inward, turning to his late nineteenth-century roots in German Romanticism and Innerlichkeit informed by Goethe and Nietzsche. The relationship between Strauss's public and private worlds is explored through discussions of his completed works as well as a fragmentary cello concerto and works for male chorus in a sketchbook from this time.

Eastern Libya, Wadai and the Sanūsīya: A Ṭarīqa and a Trade Route

1977 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis D. Cordell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Rapid Transport ◽  
Trade Route ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Eastern Sudan

The caravan route linking Benghazi and Wadai was probably the most important avenue of long-distance trade between the Mediterranean and the eastern Sudan in the late nineteenth century. It remained economically viable well after 1900, after commerce on routes further west had declined.Beginning with the Mejabra trader from Jālū who first found a direct route from Cyrenaica to Wadai in 1809 or 1810, this article traces the history of the route in the nineteenth century with special reference to the effects of Wadaian policies on trans-Saharan commerce. The important role of the Mejabra and Zūwāyā merchants from Libya is also considered.Fluctuating fortunes characterized trading activity along the route between its opening and the years after 1850. Beginning in the 1860s, however, commercial prospects improved steadily. Evidence suggests that the Sanūsīya Muslim brotherhood (ṭarīqa) was largely responsible for increased trade and prosperity along the route at this time. Because the order spanned the route's entire length, it solved many of the problems connected with long-distance commerce. It assured regular communication, relatively rapid transport, the creation of bonds of trust, a system of adjudication and arbitration, and an all-embracing structure of authority to maintain order and respect for judicial rulings. It functioned as a trading diaspora, but its members were not all of the same ethnic group. Rather, adherence to a single ṭarāqa bound merchants together and fostered the security necessary for the trade. The article concludes that the relationship between the brotherhood and commerce was symbiotic. The Sanūsīya sheltered commerce; in turn, the caravan trade brought wealth to the order and united its far-flung domains.

The Imprint of Affect: Humor, Character and National Identity in American Studies

2009 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL EPP
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Affective Labor ◽  
Academic Scholarship ◽  
Disciplinary History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

What is the relationship between American studies and affective production? In what specific ways does our scholarship participate in the creation, circulation, and appreciation of affective practices? These questions provide a foundation for understanding the sometimes obscure connections between academic scholarship and mass culture. I argue that the history of American studies involves a specific and influential imbrication with affective production that has shaped notions of identity and affect since the nineteenth century. Usually this history is understood in terms of how the field used to advocate conservative notions of nativist national identity; this paper brings the history of this advocacy into new focus by histricizing the relationship between scholarship and affective production in the often-overlooked field of humor studies. The first section traces the invention of an academic tradition that articulated humor practice to national character, and identifies this articulation itself as the affective labor of that scholarship. The second section addresses alternative histories that might be written once we recognize this articulation of affective practice to identity as itself a form of affective labor. In three case studies, I briefly explore the relations between humor, mass culture, and politics in the works of the late nineteenth-century humorists David Ker, Marietta Holley, and Bill Nye, whose humor was produced in the same period that saw the durable articulation of humor practice to national identity emerge. These cases gesture, polemically, to the important work American studies can still do with humor, especially as we realize the key role of affective production in our disciplinary history.

Pater's Parerga: Framing the Imaginary Portraits

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-135
Author(s):  
Giles Whiteley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Formal Structure ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Liminal Space ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Similar Operation ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Relationship

Walter Pater's late-nineteenth-century literary genre of the imaginary portrait has received relatively little critical attention. Conceived of as something of a continuum between his role as an art critic and his fictional pursuits, this essay probes the liminal space of the imaginary portraits, focusing on the role of the parergon, or frame, in his portraits. Guided by Pater's reading of Kant, who distinguishes between the work (ergon) and that which lies outside of the work (the parergon), between inside and outside, and contextualised alongside the analysis of Derrida, who shows how such distinctions have always already deconstructed themselves, I demonstrate a similar operation at work in the portraits. By closely analysing the parerga of two of Pater's portraits, ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ (1887) and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893), focusing on his partial quotation of Goethe in the former, and his playful autocitation and impersonation of Heine in the latter, I argue that Pater's parerga seek to destabilise the relationship between text and context so that the parerga do not lie outside the text but are implicated throughout in their reading, changing the portraits constitutively. As such, the formal structure of the parergon in Pater's portraits is also a theoretical fulcrum in his aesthetic criticism and marks that space where the limits of, and distinctions between, art and life become blurred.

The Modernities of H. Lawrence Freeman

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
White Press ◽  
Grand Opera

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.

Editorial Introduction

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Editors of the JIOWS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fourth Volume ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Complex Relationships ◽  
Indian Ocean World ◽  
Shed Light

The editors are proud to present the first issue of the fourth volume of the Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies. This issue contains three articles, by James Francis Warren (Murdoch University), Kelsey McFaul (University of California, Santa Cruz), and Marek Pawelczak (University of Warsaw), respectively. Warren’s and McFaul’s articles take different approaches to the growing body of work that discusses pirates in the Indian Ocean World, past and present. Warren’s article is historical, exploring the life and times of Julano Taupan in the nineteenth-century Philippines. He invites us to question the meaning of the word ‘pirate’ and the several ways in which Taupan’s life has been interpreted by different European colonists and by anti-colonial movements from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. McFaul’s article, meanwhile, takes a literary approach to discuss the much more recent phenomenon of Somali Piracy, which reached its apex in the last decade. Its contribution is to analyse the works of authors based in the region, challenging paradigms that have mostly been developed from analysis of works written in the West. Finally, Pawelczak’s article is a legal history of British jurisdiction in mid-late nineteenth-century Zanzibar. It examines one of the facets that underpinned European influence in the western Indian Ocean World before the establishment of colonial rule. In sum, this issue uses two key threads to shed light on the complex relationships between European and other Western powers and the Indian Ocean World.

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