Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Anna Hájková
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Holocaust Studies ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Modern Jewish History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Central Claim

The introduction outlines the objectives of the book and contextualizes it in terms of existing Holocaust studies scholarship in general and Theresienstadt in particular. It offers a brief chronology of the ghetto and explains why it was a ghetto and not a concentration camp. It also relates the work to issues pertinent to modern Jewish history, the history of everyday life, and research on ethnicity and Central Europe. Specifically, it shows how ethnicity became the central category of difference in the prisoner society, one directly linked to stratification. This introduction also lays out the central claim of the book that social interaction continues under extreme circumstances and brings Holocaust and Jewish history into the wider context of modern history. It also discusses forms of prisoners’ agency in the everyday of the ghetto.

scholarly journals Jagellonian Ledgers as Sources for Watermark Research and Paper History Studies: The First Papermills of East-Central Europe

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 324-340
Author(s):  
Krisztina Rábai
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Paper Mills ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
Paper Making ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
History Of ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Different Parts

This study is based on the analysis of the paper and the text of royal and princely accounts in which scribes registered the everyday incomes and expenditures of four Jagiellonian courts, located in different parts of East-Central Europe around the turn of the 15th and 16th-century. The period covers the establishment and the very first years of paper mills in Silesia and the Polish Kingdom. Regarding the lack of archival sources preserving the foundation and running of these mills, the cradles of paper-making in East-Central Europe, one should use many different and quite laconic written sources to shed light upon these revolutionary years. Although accounts could preserve mentions of purchasing, trading and using paper, in most cases the textual information is not adequate to reconstruct a detailed and clear image of paper producing; researchers should examine the medium of writing - the paper - itself. Instead of the investigation of single sheets, folded papers, small notebooks and bound books such as accounts proved to be more useful. One can compare the sheets of the volumes and find those traces which lead to the paper mills, the places of their origin. Through the detailed examination of one especially complex and interesting ledger from the courts of Prince Sigismund, the author attempts to demonstrate the opportunities lay in watermark studies. Furthermore, the article purposes to reflect on the huge hiatus clearly perceptible on the field of watermark research and paper history in East-Central Europe and the necessity of developing a database of watermarks reflecting on the history of paper-making in this region. 

scholarly journals Everyday Life Under Communism: Practices and Objects

2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (02) ◽  
pp. 207-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larissa Zakharova
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social Interaction ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Consumer Goods ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Basic Consumer

Why should we consider the everyday life of ordinary citizens in their countless struggles to obtain basic consumer goods if the priorities of their leaders lay elsewhere? For years, specialists of the Soviet Union and the people's democracies neglected the history of everyday life and, like the so-called “totalitarian” school, focused on political history, seeking to grasp how power was wielded over a society that was considered immobile and subject to the state's authority. Furthermore, studies on the eastern part of Europe were dominated by political scientists who were interested in the geopolitics of the Cold War. The way the field was structured meant that little attention was paid to sociological and anthropological perspectives that sought to understand social interaction.

Lloyd P. Gartner. History of the Jews in Modern Times. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. xi, 468 pp.

AJS Review ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 199-200
Author(s):  
Robert M. Seltzer
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Long Range ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
General Reader ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
Professional Historian ◽  
Modern Jewish History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Developments

Lloyd Gartner has written an excellent survey for the serious student and a fine tour d'horizon for the professional historian, delineating long-range historical developments concisely and lucidly, providing apt, fresh illustrations throughout the narrative, and efficiently unpacking terminology and nomenclature that would be obscure to the general reader. His book supersedes previous overviews of modern Jewish history.

American Jewish History

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hasia Diner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Security ◽  
First Century ◽  
American Jewish History ◽  
Modern Jewish History ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Scholarly Inquiry

American Jewish history as a field of scholarly inquiry takes as its subject-matter the experience of Jews in the United States and places it within the context of both modern Jewish history and the history of the United States. Its practitioners see their intellectual project as inextricably connected to both histories. At the beginning of the twenty-first century the enterprise of American Jewish history enjoys a condition of robust health. By the 1990s American immigration history had generally declined in favour within the ranks of American historians. That Jews, outsiders to American culture upon their arrival in the United States, were able to penetrate barriers and enter the mainstream clashes with the way historians want to see the American past. As a group who craved both economic security and respectability, their story lacks the dramatic punch of resisters and rebels to the American ethos.

Polish History through the Eyes of Three Jewish Popular Historians

1998 ◽  
pp. 312-318
Author(s):  
Jerzy Tomaszewski
Keyword(s):  
Large Volume ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Early Period ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
Modern Jewish History ◽  
History Of

This chapter provides a comparison of Howard Sachar's book The Course of Modern Jewish History, which was first published in 1958, with two other general works on Jewish history. One is a large volume entitled A History of the Jewish People, edited by Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, which was first published in Hebrew in 1969. The other is Robert M. Seltzer's Jewish People, Jewish Thought, which is more limited in size and scope and intended for a broad audience. The chapter considers only topics relating to Polish history, not those concerned with exclusively internal Jewish problems or the history of other nations. Nor will there be any general assessment of Sachar's book. Although Ben-Sasson's and Seltzer's works cover Jewish history from ancient to modern times, the story of the Jews in Poland is a relatively recent chapter in this history: it dates only from the creation of the Polish state in the tenth century. Both authors mention the early period of Polish history only briefly, beginning their real narratives of Polish Jewry with the detailed analysis of privileges granted to Jews by Polish kings in the thirteenth century.

Hasidism Reappraised

1996 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Social Functions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Modern Jewish History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Extensive Introduction ◽  
State Of Research ◽  
To Come

Hasidism has been a seminal force and source of controversy in the Jewish world since its inception in the second half of the eighteenth century. Indeed, almost every ideological trend that has made itself felt among Jews since that time has claimed to have derived some inspiration from this vibrant movement. While this is sure testimony to its vitality and originality, it has also given rise to many misconceptions as to what hasidism is about. This book offers a wide-ranging treatment of the subject in all its aspects. The book encompasses a complete field of modern scholarship in a discipline that is central to the understanding of modern Jewish history and the contemporary Jewish world. The book is dedicated to the memory of Joseph Weiss, and its opening section assesses his contribution to the study of hasidism in the context of his relationship with Gershom Scholem and Scholem's long-standing influence on the field. The remaining chapters are arranged thematically under seven headings: the social history of hasidism; the social functions of mystical ideals in the hasidic movement; distinctive outlooks and schools of thought within hasidism; the hasidic tale; the history of hasidic historiography; contemporary hasidism; and the present state of research on hasidism. The book also incorporates an extensive introduction that places the various articles in their intellectual context, as well as a bibliography of hasidic sources and contemporary scholarly literature. It shows an intellectual world at an important juncture in its development and points to the direction in which scholarly study of hasidism is likely to develop in the years to come.

Georg Simmel’s Logic of the Future: ‘The Stranger’, Zionism, and ‘Bounded Contingency’

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (5) ◽  
pp. 71-94
Author(s):  
Amos Morris-Reich
Keyword(s):  
Jewish History ◽  
Georg Simmel ◽  
Critical Thought ◽  
Theoretical Contribution ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Status ◽  
Modern Jewish History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Jewish Descent ◽  
The Stranger

For reasons that have more to do with the historiographical traditions of modern Jewish history and the history of critical thought than history itself, Georg Simmel – of Jewish descent – is rarely discussed within the frame of modern Jewish history. Bringing the two together as a theoretical contribution to Simmel studies and modern Jewish history alike, this article explores Simmel’s logic of contingency in the context of modern Jewish history. Which forms and types could Jews realistically seek to fulfill from the perspective of Simmel’s thought? Which could they hope to escape and what could they expect from the future? The author suggests that in answering these questions we disclose a peculiar notion of ‘bounded contingency’ embedded in Simmel’s positing of a non-binary, ‘gray area’ between the necessary and the impossible. This hypothesis is tested in several distinct contexts: a letter on Zionism from around 1900; an odd passage on love in the excursus on ‘The Stranger’ (1908); and a letter on individuals of Jewish background in German academia (1906). Simmel’s coherency lies in the ‘realist’ approach he adopts to reality as the domain of the contingently possible. When applied to Jewish history in general and Zionism in particular, this notion not only explains why Zionism is unfeasible but also demystifies its emergence as an attempt to escape the status of stranger in Europe. It also evinces why this Jewish national enterprise inevitably carried within it the seeds of the problem it sought to solve.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Jason Lustig
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Community Based ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Future ◽  
Modern Jewish History ◽  
History Of

The introduction presents the book’s core argument that twentieth-century Jewish archives were not just about the past but also about the future: We can look to a process whereby Jews turned increasingly toward archives as anchors of memory in a rapidly changing world. Jews in Germany, the United States, and Israel/Palestine all sought to gather the files of the past in order to represent their place in Jewish life and articulate a vision of the future. It situates these projects in the history of community-based archiving and archival theory and methodology, as well as Jewish history at large. It also dives into the ways we can see archive making as a metaphor for the broader patterns in modern Jewish history, as Jews sought to gather the sources and resources of their culture both before the Holocaust and especially in its aftermath.

The Social and Political Context of Conversion in Germany and England 1870–1914

2010 ◽  
pp. 95-114
Author(s):  
Todd M. Endelman
Keyword(s):  
Jewish History ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
The Social ◽  
The First World War ◽  
State And Society ◽  
Modern Jewish History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
First World

This chapter focuses on Jews who left Judaism in the decades before the First World War and who were not attracted by the spiritual truths or ethical values of Christianity. It discusses disaffiliation as a hallmark of modern Jewish history in the West in which the flow out of Judaism was not equally strong in all countries and among all strata of Jewish society. It also analyses the characteristic patterns of drift and defection that emerged in every country or region bearing the impress of larger social and political conditions. The chapter talks about the temptation to abandon Judaism, which increased from 1870 to 1914, when rising antisemitism called into question Jewish integration into state and society with unprecedented intensity. It refers to England and Germany as states with dissimilar political cultures and social systems, which illuminates the history of the Jewish communities there.

Prekäre Güter: Hofjuden als Heeres- und Münzlieferanten in der Frühen Neuzeit

Aschkenas ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (1-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Rauscher
Keyword(s):  
Public Finance ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
State Building ◽  
Economic Success ◽  
Cultural Aspects ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
Modern Economy ◽  
Modern Jewish History

The economic success of Court Jews during the late 17th and the 18th centuries is one of the major phenomena of early modern Jewish history in Central Europe. After long and controversial debates on the causes of this development and its consequences for Jewish society as well as for the formation of modern economy and state building in Europe, recent studies mostly focus on cultural aspects. This article argues for reintegrating the economy of Court Jews into the broader field of public finance and for rethinking the significance of Jewish merchants and bankers in comparison to other groups of public creditors.

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