“The Most Striking Circumstance”

Hybrid Hate ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 76-98
Author(s):  
Tudor Parfitt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
Color Change ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Physiological Indicators ◽  
Color Spectrum ◽  
Racial Hierarchies

The nineteenth century witnessed the development of a bitter struggle between monogenists and polygenists. Polygenists increasingly looked for confirmation of racial hierarchies and signs of racial immutability in physiological indicators. Change in color within a race seemed to be an unanswerable proof of the effect of nature on racial characteristics and seemed to offer an explanation of racial difference. The color change of Jews from white to black was the best example of this, and increasingly black Jewish communities became the proof monogenists needed of the unitary origins of humankind. James Cowles Prichard was the leading British monogenist, and he was among the first to perceive that the color spectrum in Jews was the strongest weapon in the monogenist armory.

“What Comes From Men and Women Dancing”

2021 ◽  
pp. 173-184
Author(s):  
Sonia Gollance
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Dance Floor ◽  
The Face ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Fictional Representations

The epilogue connects tropes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of Jews, dance, and modernization with late twentieth- and twenty-first-century representations. Popular works such as Fiddler on the Roof (1964), Dirty Dancing (1987), Rebecca Goldstein’s Mazel (1995), Kerry Greenwood’s Raisins and Almonds: A Phryne Fisher Mystery (1997), Helene Wecker’s The Golem and the Jinni (2013), and Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver (2018) reveal the continued efficacy of the mixed-sex dancing trope in fictional representations of Yiddish-speaking Jews. These works are often less didactic than nineteenth-century predecessors; they envision more opportunities for female agency and frequently end happily. Not only is the dance floor a flexible space, the dance trope is a flexible metaphor for the concerns of Jewish communities in the face of cultural transitions. In other words, the trope of Jewish mixed-sex dancing charts the particularities of the Jewish “dance” with modern culture.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 3-16
Author(s):  
Ada Rapoport-Albert ◽  
Marcin Wodziński
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Scholarly Literature ◽  
East European ◽  
Jewish Historiography ◽  
Modern School ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Subsequent Effect

This chapter describes Hasidism’s former reputation as a singular exception to the scarcity of scholarship on the religious dimension of Jewish life in eastern Europe. It cites the nineteenth-century liberal critique of the movement, which contributed to the disproportionate prominence of Hasidism in the scholarly literature about the religious life of east European Jews. It also explains liberal critique that originated in the militantly anti-Hasidic posture adopted by the early nineteenth-century maskilim, which left a deep imprint on the modern school of Jewish historiography. The chapter talks about the Jewish communities of eastern Europe that were divided into the opposing camps: Hasidic and anti-Hasidic. It analyzes the dichotomy that placed the movement at the very heart of an embattled arena and had the subsequent effect of harnessing Hasidism to a wide range of ideologically driven historiographical constructs.

The Missing Rabbis of Eastern Europe

2010 ◽  
pp. 277-301
Author(s):  
Shaul Stampfer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Ashkenazi Jewish ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
East European ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Selection Of

This chapter examines the east European rabbinate. The rabbinate in modern eastern Europe was not significantly different from the rabbinate in other Ashkenazi Jewish communities up to the eighteenth century. In the following years, many aspects of rabbinical authority changed in almost every country of Europe. During the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a number of developments altered the conditions of rabbinic authority in eastern Europe in unique ways, and also made the selection of communal rabbis more complex than previously. Many of these changes contributed to a weakening of the power and status of the rabbinate — a power and status that were not exceptionally strong to start with. By the end of the nineteenth century, the patterns of the east European rabbinate were far from the traditional Ashkenazi model because the community, as a body that collected taxes and had internal authority, had ceased to exist.

A Discussion of Jessica Blatt's Race and the Making of American Political Science

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 808-809
Author(s):  
James Farr
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
Civic Discourse ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
American Political Science

In Race and the Making of American Political Science, Jessica Blatt argues that the professionalization of the discipline was deeply entwined with ideas about racial difference, and the concomitant attempt by leading scholars to define and defend a system of racial hierarchy in the United States and beyond. Although it focuses on the period from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s, the book also raises fundamental questions about the historical legacy of racialist arguments for professional political science, the extent of their continuing resonance, and contemporary implications for both academic and broader civic discourse. We have asked a range of leading political scientists to consider and respond to Professor Blatt’s important call for scholarly self-reflexivity.

“THE INEFFACEABLE CURSE OF CAIN”: RACE, MISCEGENATION, AND THE VICTORIAN STAGING OF IRISHNESS

2001 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 383-396 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Boltwood
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Racial Identity ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
Scientific Communities ◽  
Irish Identity

THROUGHOUT THE NINETEENTH CENTURY both the English popular and scientific communities increasingly argued for a distinct racial difference between the Irish Celt and the English Saxon, which conceptually undermined the Victorian attempt to form a single kingdom from the two peoples. The ethnological discourse concerning Irish identity was dominated by English theorists who reflect their empire’s ideological necessity; thus, the Celt and Saxon were often described as racial siblings early in the nineteenth century when union seemed possible, while later descriptions of the Irish as members of a distant or degenerate race reflect the erosion of public sympathy caused by the era of violence following the failed revolt of 1848. Amid this deluge of scientific discourse, the Irish were treated as mute objects of analysis, lacking any opportunity for formal rejoinder; nonetheless, these essentially English discussions of racial identity and Irishness also entered into the Irish popular culture.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Coward
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
Linguistic Representation

This concluding chapter argues that Indians were portrayed in a number of ways across the last decades of the nineteenth century, most of them following familiar stereotypes and patterns of visual and linguistic representation. In general, the pictorial press represented Indians as racial outsiders and cultural curiosities, usually in an “us versus them” manner where Euro-American standards and values were the norm and Indian standards and values were abnormal and thus deviant. This was a journalistic form of racial simplification and cultural “othering” that almost always separated Indians from whites. This separation, in turn, was the inevitable result of nineteenth-century ideas about race and racial difference and it played out in the pictorial press in Indian images that made Indians nearly always appear “Indian” to one degree or another.

“The young men must blacken their faces”: The Blackface Minstrel Show in Preindustrial South Africa

2013 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 66-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chinua Thelwell
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Racial Hierarchies ◽  
British Colonies

The blackface minstrel troupes who toured preindustrial South Africa contributed to the preservation of both the boundaries of racial difference in the British colonies of that country and the racial hierarchies of the Cape and Natal colonies.

scholarly journals The Creation of Adam and the Biblical Origins of Race in The Slave’s Friend (1836–1838)

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (10) ◽  
pp. 860
Author(s):  
Kerry M. Sonia
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Human History ◽  
Red Clay ◽  
Biblical Narrative ◽  
Racial Theory ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Book Of Genesis ◽  
Racial Hierarchies

The creation of Adam out of dust is a familiar tradition from the Book of Genesis. In abolitionist literature of the nineteenth century, this biblical narrative became the basis for a theory about the origins of race, arguing that because Adam was formed from red clay, neither he nor his descendants were white. This interpretation of Genesis underscored the value of non-white ancestors both in the biblical narrative and in human history and undermined popular theological arguments that upheld color-based racial hierarchies that privileged whiteness in the United States. This article examines the creation of Adam in Genesis 2 and its use in racial theory and abolitionist rhetoric, focusing on the children’s anti-slavery periodical The Slave’s Friend, published from 1836 to 1838.

scholarly journals Female, Black, and Able: Representations of Sojourner Truth and Theories of Embodiment

2012 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Meredith Minister
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African Americans ◽  
White Men ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
Sojourner Truth ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
Racial Hierarchies

<p>Sojourner Truth exists in American popular culture as a strong contributor to the movements for abolition and women&rsquo;s rights. In order to maintain this image of strength and make the case that black women are just as capable as white men, Truth intentionally elided her disabled right hand. This article explores representations of Sojourner Truth in relation to her nineteenth century context and, in particular, social stigmas regarding race, gender and disability. The interpretations of pictures, a painting, and two events contained in Truth's Narrative suggest that Truth argued against gender and racial oppression by operating with an ideology of ability that suggested that both women and African-Americans are strong, powerful, and able. As Truth maintained an ideology of ability in order to subvert gender and racial hierarchies, she offers a case study into the benefits of intersectional approaches to historical studies.</p><p>Key Words</p><p>Sojourner Truth, disability, race, gender, feminism, nineteenth century</p>

A Discussion of Jessica Blatt's Race and the Making of American Political Science

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 807-807
Author(s):  
Natalie Masuoka
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
Civic Discourse ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
American Political Science

In Race and the Making of American Political Science, Jessica Blatt argues that the professionalization of the discipline was deeply entwined with ideas about racial difference, and the concomitant attempt by leading scholars to define and defend a system of racial hierarchy in the United States and beyond. Although it focuses on the period from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s, the book also raises fundamental questions about the historical legacy of racialist arguments for professional political science, the extent of their continuing resonance, and contemporary implications for both academic and broader civic discourse. We have asked a range of leading political scientists to consider and respond to Professor Blatt’s important call for scholarly self-reflexivity.

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