Jews in German Society: Prague, 1860–1914

1977 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary B. Cohen

The development of social interaction between Jews and Gentiles offers a fertile area of research to historians of modern Central Europe. Examining the place of Jews in Gentile society, of course, furthers understanding of both the proponents and victims of political anti-Semitism. Yet such study is also needed to deepen our knowledge of the values and social structures that characterized German and Austrian liberal society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Too often in recent years historians have studied Central Europe in the half century before World War I merely to seek the roots of the traumatic events of the 1930s and 1940s. Consequently, the rise of the radical right and left has been examined in some detail, and historians have generally emphasized the fragility of liberal culture. One tends to assume that in the late nineteenth century few among the Central European middle classes took liberalism seriously enough to accept extensive or sustained Jewish participation in Gentile society, but in fact little systematic work has been done on the actual social relations between Jews and Gentiles.

Author(s):  
Cecelia Hopkins Porter

This chapter looks into the life of Baroness Maria Bach (1896–1978), her promising professional future, and her lifelong struggle to attract renown and respect as a “serious” woman composer. Born into Austria's late-nineteenth-century privileged “aristocracy”—the affluent upper middle class—the Viennese composer and pianist prided herself on her intellectual and artistic heritage. Her birth in 1896 set her solidly within the imperial capital's golden age—that brilliant constellation of the arts known as Viennese modernism. From the last decade of the nineteenth century to World War I, fin-de-siècle Vienna was a cultural mecca unequaled anywhere else in central Europe.


2017 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Itzchak Weismann

This article argues that there are structural affinities and continuities between the late nineteenth-century modernist reformers and today’s quietist, political, and jihādī Salafī factions. Salafism refers to the basic theological-ideological formation that postulates a return to pristine Islam to overcome tradition and bring regeneration. The Salafī balance between authenticity and modernization promoted by enlightened religious intellectuals in the late Ottoman period was shattered by the events of World War I and its aftermath. This resulted in its bifurcation between conservatives, who adopted literalist and xenophobic Wahhābī positions, and modernists, primarily the Muslim Brothers, who employed innovative means in their religio-political struggle to re-Islamize society and oust colonialism. The Salafī balance was reconstructed after independence on new, unenlightened lines in the Saudi Islamic Awakening (al-Ṣaḥwa al-Islāmiyya), which combined the erstwhile rigorous Wahhābī teachings with radicalized Islamism. Global jihādī-Salafism completed the perversion of the modernist Salafī balance by reducing the authentic way of the salaf to excommunication and violence and by using the most modern means in its war against both Westerners and indigenous Muslim governments.



Author(s):  
Mandy Sadan

This chapter examines the changing political framework of the region from the late nineteenth century through to World War I as fluid political boundaries that were transformed into bordered territories. It describes how local elites in the Yunnan boundary region managed the transition zone of the mountains between Burma and China, and the role that they played in the local political system after the Panthay revolt and just prior to the fall of the Konbaung Dynasty in Burma. The chapter then describes how old and new elites were created in this process of geo-political transformation. It focuses in particular on the eastern borderworld, where great ethnographic complexity became rationalised in line with new and emerging political needs. It describes in detail how a local system of cross-group relations expressed as a ritual system became a model for later Kachin ethno-nationalist ideological expansion influenced by these administrative changes.


Author(s):  
DEJAN D. ANTIĆ ◽  
IVAN M. BECIĆ

Numerous local monetary bureaus owned by shareholders were established in the Kingdom of Serbia in the late nineteenth century. Many of these institutions, such as the Niš Cooperative, not only engaged in banking services but also owned industrial and trade companies. Economic circumstances changed so significantly after World War I that bank managements often were unable to cope with them. The Niš Cooperative was an example of a stable yet not particularly powerful monetary bureau whose reputation depended on the leading members of its Board of Directors. Unlike most other monetary bureaus, the Niš Cooperative continued operating after World War II up until privately-owned monetary bureaus were closed by the socialist Yugoslav government.


1980 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. E. Prestwich

In 1852, when the medical discoverer of alcoholism, Magnus Huss, was being honoured by the Académie française, a spokesman for the Académie wrote that “France has many drunkards, but happily, no alcoholics.” Sixty years later, on the eve of World War I, if one is to believe the reports of parliamentary commissions, economists, hygienists and social reformers, France had few drunks but a plethora of alcoholics, from the Breton peasant who fed calvados to his children to the worker of Paris and the Midi who had abandoned wine, that “natural and hygienic drink”, for the evils of mass-produced industrial alcohol, especially absinthe. By 1914, alcoholism was considered one of the three grands fléaux, or great plagues, that had struck France in the late nineteenth century, and it was blamed for all the ills of society, from a rising rate of criminality, suicide and mental illness to depopulation, revolutionary worker movements and even feminism. Alcoholism was, therefore, not just an individual misfortune, but a national tragedy. It had become, in the words of Clemenceau, “the whole social problem” and as such required the mobilized forces of the country to conquer it.


1977 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 890-910 ◽  
Author(s):  
David F. Good

The process of financial integration has been charted in several studies of the late nineteenth-century U.S. economy but lacks comparable documentation in a European case. This gap is filled through an examination of interregional interest rate trends in the pre-World War I Austrian economy. The Austrian data show a marked trend toward rate convergence beginning in the 1870s. These results are significant for the U.S. case and for the long standing debate on the economic viability of the Habsburg Monarchy before World War I and of the successor states in the interwar period.


Joseph Larmor (1857-1942) was one of the most distinguished British mathematical physicists of the late-nineteenth century. He introduced both the electron and the so-called Lorentz transformations into physics. His book of 1900, Aether and Matter , l helped to establish a research school that guided the development of mathematical electromagnetic theory in Cambridge until the end of World War I. Today, however, Larmor is widely remembered by scientists for just two formulae and one theorem which, although correctly attributed to him, have been seen by historians of science as tangential to his main research interests. Indeed, none of the recent scholarly studies of Larmor’s scientific work even mention the now famous formulae and theorem. In this essay I review Larmor’s contribution to post-Maxwellian electromagnetic theory and explain the origin of the specific results upon which his reputation now rests.


2019 ◽  
pp. 77-92
Author(s):  
Srdjan Vucetic

Contemporary Anglospherism – a convenient shorthand for recent calls for more cooperation and unity between select English-speaking polities – draws considerable potency from the existence of the Five Eyes network, ABCANZ and many institutions and practices that constitute the Anglosphere in security. For some, the connection is self-evident and should be made explicit: ‘we’ are already glued together in security, so why not build a zone of free movement in goods, services and labour, too? The mutual constitution of these two Anglospheres – political Anglospherism on the one hand and the Anglosphere in security on the other – is more than a century old but remains poorly understood. In this chapter I perform three tasks set out to interrogate this relationship. First, I provide a genealogy of the Anglosphere and of the nearby ‘CANZUK Union’. Next, I map out the Anglosphere in security, probing the depth and frequency of coordination and cooperation among Five Eyes states since the Second World War. I then argue that the deep origins of the Anglosphere in security lie in late nineteenth-century inter-racial politics.


Author(s):  
Michael J. Bazyler ◽  
Kathryn Lee Boyd ◽  
Kristen L. Nelson ◽  
Rajika L. Shah

Even prior to World War II and the Holocaust, many Jews emigrated to Palestine. In the late nineteenth century, waves of anti-Semitism swept through Europe, reviving the Zionists’ quest to re-establish a Jewish homeland. An Israeli state was eventually declared in 1948. Even though Israel had not been a sovereign state during World War II, and no property expropriation laws had been passed, in 2005, the Israeli Parliament (Knesset) convened a commission to investigate the issue of property restitution in Israel—movable and immovable—for victims of the Holocaust. In 2006, Israel passed a restitution law addressing private property located in Israel where the owner had disappeared or died during World War II. The law also addressed what would happen if the properties had become heirless. A commission, the Company for Location and Restitution of Holocaust Victims’ Assets (known as “Hashava” in Hebrew), was created in 2006 to return assets of the Holocaust located in Israel (including land). Hashava ceased operations at the end of 2017. Israel endorsed the Terezin Declaration in 2009 and the Guidelines and Best Practices in 2010.


1972 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noel J. Richards

The early years of the twentieth century prior to the outbreak of World War I have been described as a period in which the Liberal Party was in a state of decline. One significant aspect of this decline was the deterioration of what in the late nineteenth century has been labelled as political nonconformity. Gladstone's statement that Nonconformists supplied the backbone of British Liberalism perhaps best symbolises the political significance of this group for the vitality of the Liberal Party.


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