EUROPE AND ITS ORIENTS IN ZIONIST CULTURE BEFORE THE FIRST WORLD WAR

2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 1105-1123 ◽  
Author(s):  
ARIEH BRUCE SAPOSNIK

Zionism’s call for a Jewish return to ‘the East’ was rooted in part in a broader European fascination with ‘the Orient’. This interest in ‘the East’ coincided in time and in much of its imagery with a conceptual division of Europe itself into its ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ parts. The Jews were deeply implicated in these twin conceptualizations of ‘the Orient’ and of Europe’s own orient at home (referred to at times as halbasien, or half-Asia). The notion that Jews – particularly those of eastern Europe – constituted a semi-Asiatic, foreign element in European society became a pervasive trope by the latter part of the century, and one to which Zionist thought and praxis sought to respond in a variety of ways. When Zionists in Palestine, mostly eastern European Jews transplanted further east yet to the ‘Orient’, set out to create a new Hebrew national culture there, competing images of occident and Orient – resonating with a wide range of racial, social, political, and cultural overtones – would play defining roles in their praxis and in the cultural institutions, the rituals, and the national liturgy they would fashion.

2020 ◽  
pp. 516-528
Author(s):  
E. Yu. Semenova ◽  

The article analyzes the newspaper materials published in the Volga region during the First World War as a source for studying culture and leisure. Emphasis is placed on the use of publications that were not official. It is noted that newspapers were the main type of regional periodicals. With their diversity, it has been revealed that publications on the topic were in promotional content (announcements of the institutions activities, their programs); in special columns on the topic bearing characteristic titles (“Sport,” “Theater and music”); in op-ed and critical articles, which were placed in the local chronicle (reports or reviews of events with their description, including the authors’ personal views); as photo with caption (an announcement of the upcoming event). Depending on publication, the structure and arrangement of materials varied. It is noted that periodicals are available in several databases, including digital ones, and can be used by researchers as a source for comprehensive and systematic study of the topic. According to materials of regional periodicals, during the First World War there was a wide range of leisure and cultural programs in the towns of the Volga region. They were typical for uezd and gubernia centers, but the number of leisure facilities (theaters, cinemas, restaurants, park areas) was larger in the gubernia cities. It is revealed that leisure of citizens included active forms of participation (organization) and passive ones (visits). It is proved that materials of regional periodicals can be used in reconstructing and analyzing the cultural and recreational space of the towns. Reconstruction is possible on the basis of the enumeration of data on cultural institutions and places of leisure. The analysis is based on studying the content of programs, composition of visitors, organizers, prices.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Oliver Brown

This thesis investigates the prevalence of anti-Semitism in the British right-wing between the years of 1918 and 1930. It aims to redress the imbalance of studies on interwar British right-wing anti-Semitism that are skewed towards the 1930s, Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. This thesis is the first to focus exclusively on the immediate aftermath of the First World War and the rest of the 1920s, to demonstrate how interwar British right-wing anti-Semitism was not an isolated product of the 1930s. This work shows that anti-Semitism was endemic throughout much of the right-wing in early interwar Britain but became pushed further away from the mainstream as the decade progressed. This thesis adopts a comparative approach of comparing the actions and ideology of different sections of the British right-wing. The three sections that it is investigating are the “mainstream”, the “anti-alien/anti-Bolshevik” right and the “Jewish-obsessive” fringe. This comparative approach illustrates the types of anti-Semitism that were widespread throughout the British right-wing. Furthermore, it demonstrates which variants of anti-Semitism remained on the fringes. This thesis will steer away from only focusing on the virulently anti-Semitic, fringe organisations. The overemphasis on peripheral figures and openly fascistic groups when historians have glanced back at the 1920s helped lead to an exaggerated view that Britain was a tolerant haven in historiographical pieces, at least up until the 1980s. This thesis is using a wide range of primary sources, that are representative of the different sections of the British right-wing.


Modern Italy ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanda Wilcox

Emotion plays a vital role in any rounded history of warfare, both as an element in morale and as component in understanding the soldier's experience. Theories on the functioning of emotions vary, but an exploration of Italian soldiers' emotions during the First World War highlights both cognitive and cultural elements in the ways emotions were experienced and expressed. Although Italian stereotypes of passivity and resignation dominated contemporary discourse concerning the feelings and reactions of peasant conscripts, letters reveal that Italian soldiers vividly expressed a wide range of intense emotions. Focusing on fear, horror and grief as recurrent themes, this article finds that these emotions were processed and expressed in ways which show similarities to the combatants of other nations but which also display distinctly Italian features. The language and imagery commonly deployed offer insights into the ways in which Italian socio-cultural norms shaped expressions of personal war experience. In letters that drew on both religious imagery and the traditional peasant concerns of land, terrain and basic survival, soldiers expressed their fears of death, isolation, suffering and killing in surprisingly vigorous terms.


Author(s):  
Emily Gioielli

THE END of the First World War in eastern Europe could hardly be said to have inaugurated a period of peace. Marked by revolutions, counter-revolutions, renewed foreign warfare, and military occupations, the early post-armistice state-building processes were violent affairs, as political factions wrestled for dominance over their political, ethnic, and religious enemies, and armies battled for territory. This extended period of conflict and violence in the region could be described as the ‘long First World War’. The conflicts that shaped it traced their short-term roots to the preceding years of open warfare and the revolutions that occurred in the wake of the defeat of the Central Powers....


Author(s):  
Shaul Stampfer

This introductory chapter describes the unique aspects of the yeshivas of nineteenth-century Lithuania. These yeshivas represented a major attempt on the part of traditional Jewry to cope with the challenges of modernity. The Jews of nineteenth-century Lithuania thus defined had several distinguishing characteristics. In religious terms, most were traditional, in the sense that they had withstood the innovations of hasidism; in fact, the strength of the opposition to that movement in Lithuania was such that they came collectively to be known as mitnagedim (opponents) — that is, opponents of hasidism. Economically, they were mostly poorer than Jews in other major areas of Jewish settlement, such as Poland or Bukovina, and lived in more crowded conditions. Until 1764, they benefited from self-government under the Va'ad Medinat Lita (Council of the Land of Lithuania). By the beginning of the eighteenth century this body had ceased to function, but the distinction between the Jews of Lithuania and those of the neighbouring regions continued to exist — not least because the Lithuanian Jews spoke a distinctive dialect of Yiddish. These and other factors ensured that they continued to maintain a separate identity among the Jews of eastern Europe until the First World War.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 63-74
Author(s):  
Jarosław Wołkonowski

After the First World War, three concepts clashed in Eastern Europe: the model of the nation state, the expansion of the Bolshevik revolution implemented by Russia and the union of nation-states (Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus and Latvia) according to Piłsudski resulting from the threat. Russia in the years 1920-1921 signed five peace treaties, but only the treaty with Lithuania contained secret arrangements regarding the neutrality of Lithuania in the Bolshevik-Polish war. The analysis of the source material shows that Russia used the secret provisions of the peace treaty in its plans for the expansion of bolshevism, and after the defeat of the Polish army, it was to carry out a Bolshevik coup in Lithuania. Despite the proclaimed neutrality, Lithuania turned out to be on the side of Russia in this conflict, causing additional difficulties for Polish troops in the Battle of Warsaw. The Polish victory over the Vistula impeded the expansion of Bolshevism to Europe.


Author(s):  
E. Le Gall ◽  

The First World War can be examined from the perspective of traditional military history as well as the perspective of the relationship between combatants and the environment. The author reveals based on a wide range of archival materials, printed media and ego-documents (diaries, memoirs, letters) the question of combat peculiarities of the 47th Infantry Regiment of the French Army considering with the influence of environmental conditions on the soldiers. The author demonstrates the dependence of the regiment's intensity and efficiency of combat operations on the terrain, weather and climate changes on the Western Front of the First World War. In the first phase of the conflict, soldiers were extremely vulnerable to even the slightest temperature changes (extreme heat, cold) due to their uniforms' problems. Physical strain from long marches across unfamiliar terrain and an extended stay in the trenches also harmed their health. The combat unit's active influence on the environment is also emphasised, with the pollution of the battlefield by sewage, leftover ammunition and weapons. The soldiers' health being adversely affected by the polluted environment (above all, the spread of contagious diseases, poisoning by chemical and metal warfare agents) is also considered. Severe environmental changes during battles also made combat operations more difficult. Thus, during the First World War, both the soldiers of the 47th Infantry Regiment of the French Army and all the other poilus became hostages to a severely altered environment due to the impact of millions of combatants.


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