Can Jews Become Farmers? Rurality, Peasantry and Cultural Identity in the World of the Rural Jew in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Europe

Rural History ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-175
Author(s):  
MORDECHAI ZALKIN
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
Occupational Profile ◽  
Cultural Implications ◽  
North Eastern ◽  
Second World

Abstract:Based on conventional learning and supported in no small measure by stereotypes, agriculture as a vocation was not considered as part of the occupational profile of Jewish society in Eastern Europe until the Second World War. However, various studies show that in different regions in this area, primarily Lithuania, White Russia, north eastern Poland, and Bessarabia, tens of thousands of Jews made a living from direct engagement in various branches of agriculture, including field crops, orchards, lake fishing, etc. These Jews lived mainly in the rural areas and were a factor, and at times a highly significant one, in the local demographic and economic structure. The first part of this article examines the question whether these Jews, who were part of the general rural society living in the countryside, developed a certain type of rural cultural identity. This question is discussed by examining various aspects of their attitude towards nature. The second part of the article considers the possible influence of the agricultural occupation on the shaping of a unique peasant cultural identity among these rural Jews and the ways they coped with the accompanying religious, social and cultural implications.

War and Genocide 1939–1945

2013 ◽  
pp. 308-379
Author(s):  
Antony Polonsky
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Dual Process ◽  
World War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
North Eastern ◽  
History Of ◽  
Total Separation ◽  
Second World

This chapter explores how the outbreak of the Second World War initiated a new and tragic period in the history of the Jews of north-eastern Europe. The Polish defeat by Nazi Germany in the unequal campaign that began in September of 1939 led to a new partition of the country by Germany and the Soviet Union. Though Hitler had been relatively slow to put the more extreme aspects of Nazi antisemitism into practice, by the time the war broke out, the Nazi regime was set in its deep-seated hatred of the Jews. Following the brutal violence of Kristallnacht on November 9–10, 1938, when up to a hundred Jews were murdered in Germany and Austria and over 400 synagogues burnt down, Hitler, disconcerted by the domestic and foreign unease which this provoked, decided to entrust policy on the Jews to the ideologues of the SS. They were determined at this stage to enforce a ‘total separation’ between Jews and Germans, but wanted to do so in an ‘orderly and disciplined’ manner, perhaps by compelling most Jews to emigrate. The Nazis did not act immediately on the genocidal threat of ‘the annihilation of the Jews as a race in Europe’, but during the first months of the war, a dual process took place: the barbarization of Nazi policy generally and a hardening of policy towards Jews.

Three hundred years of House Sparrow (Passer domesticus) persecution in Germany

2007 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 307-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. SEITZ
Keyword(s):  
Rural Areas ◽  
House Sparrow ◽  
Bird Species ◽  
Passer Domesticus ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Population Increase ◽  
World War ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Urban And Rural Areas ◽  
Second World

Modernization of agriculture, economic development and population increase after the end of the Thirty Years' War caused authorities in many parts of Germany to decree the eradication of so-called pest animals, including the House Sparrow. Farmers were given targets, and had to deliver the heads of sparrows in proportion to the size of their farms or pay fines. At the end of the eighteenth century German ornithologists argued against the eradication of the sparrows. During the mid-nineteenth century, C. L. Gloger, the pioneer of bird protection in Germany, emphasized the value of the House Sparrow in controlling insect plagues. Many decrees were abolished because either they had not been obeyed, or had resulted in people protecting sparrows so that they always had enough for their “deliveries”. Surprisingly, various ornithologists, including Ernst Hartert and the most famous German bird conservationist Freiherr Berlepsch, joined in the war against sparrows at the beginning of the twentieth century, because sparrows were regarded as competitors of more useful bird species. After the Second World War, sparrows were poisoned in large numbers. Persecution of sparrows ended in Germany in the 1970s. The long period of persecution had a significant but not long-lasting impact on House Sparrow populations, and therefore cannot be regarded as a factor in the recent decline of this species in urban and rural areas of western and central Europe.

scholarly journals SPIRITS, POWER AND THE POLITICAL IMAGINATION IN LATE-COLONIAL GABON

Africa ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 82 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Cinnamon
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Colonial Administration ◽  
Political Imagination ◽  
World War ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
North Eastern ◽  
Second World

ABSTRACTThrough narratives of an anti-‘fetish’ movement that swept through north-eastern Gabon in the mid-1950s, the present article traces the contours of converging political and religious imaginations in that country in the years preceding independence. Fang speakers in the region make explicit connections between the arrival of post-Second World War electoral politics, the anti-fetish movements, and perceptions of political weakening and marginalization of their region on the eve of independence. Rival politicians and the colonial administration played key roles in the movement, which brought in a Congolese ritual expert, Emane Boncoeur, and his two powerful spirits, Mademoiselle and Mimbare. These spirits, later recuperated in a wide range of healing practices, continue to operate today throughout northern Gabon and Rio Muni. In local imaginaries, these spirits played central roles in the birth of both regional and national politics, paradoxically strengthening the colonial administration and Gabonese auxiliaries in an era of pre-independence liberalization. Thus, regional political events in the 1950s rehearsed later configurations of power, including presidential politics, on the national stage.

scholarly journals Nation, Ethnicity, and the Geography of British Fiction, 1880-1940

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth F. Evans ◽  
Matthew Wilkens
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
World War ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
British Fiction ◽  
Spatial Imagination ◽  
Second World ◽  
Recent Attention ◽  
Shed Light

Among the most pressing problems in modernist literary studies are those related to Britain's engagement with the wider world under empire and to its own rapidly evolving urban spaces in the years before the Second World War. In both cases, the literary-geographic imagination—or unconscious—of the period between 1880 and 1940 can help to shed light on how texts by British and British-aligned writers of the era understood these issues and how they evolved over time. At the highest level, how can we characterize the international and domestic geographies of British writing? What roles, if any, did cultural identity play in contemporary writers' spatial imagination? What locations were over- or under-represented in their work and how, if at all, does the answer change when we group writers by national origin or by perceived ethnicity? What shifts in geographic attention marked the transition from the late Victorian period to the interwar era of high modernism? These questions, and others like them, have received much recent attention, both popular and academic. In this essay, we explore what we learn when we ask them at scale with computational assistance.

Jedwabne and Wizna

2007 ◽  
pp. 244-270
Author(s):  
Marta Kurkowska
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
North Eastern ◽  
Second World

THE LOCALITIES explored herein, Jedwabne and Wizna, are both situated in the Łomża region of north-eastern Poland, close to each other. Only a few kilometres separate the two and yet what each can contribute and has contributed to local, regional, and national collective memory sets them oceans apart. The inspiration for this article was precisely this simple contrast. How is it that towns inhabited by persons of a similar culture evolve into symbols of radically different attitudes and actions taken by Poles during the Second World War?...

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