Archival Totality in the Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden

2021 ◽  
pp. 20-51
Author(s):  
Jason Lustig
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Global Network ◽  
Archival Science ◽  
Nazi Regime ◽  
German Jews ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
German Jewish

This chapter uncovers the history of the Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden, the central archive of the German Jews, which operated from 1903 until it was confiscated by the Nazis in 1943. It details the Gesamtarchiv’s attempt to create a singular archive of German Jewish history in Berlin, and also opposition to the project of centralization, and it situates the archive within the wider trends of archival science. It thereby explicates the Gesamtarchiv’s vision of total archives and traces its legacy across the arc of the twentieth century. This archive was intended to help produce the history of Germany’s Jews and also to help manage its communities, but it was ultimately turned into an instrument for the domination of Jewish life by the Nazi regime. Altogether, this chapter offers the Gesamtarchiv as a starting point for a global network of Jewish archives that followed the Gesamtarchiv’s vision of archival totality.

Epilogue

2019 ◽  
pp. 261-266
Author(s):  
Philipp Nielsen
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Life ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
German Government ◽  
German Jews ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Camp System ◽  
German Jewish

THE GERMAN GOVERNMENT might have intended to eliminate Jewish life in Germany, and it succeeded in depriving of their German lives the individuals who illustrated the (im)possibilities of Jews being engaged on and with the German Right in this book. Yet it did not succeed in ending their lives altogether. The majority of the German Jews appearing on these pages managed to survive the Holocaust, through emigration, hiding, or perseverance in the concentration camp system. After the Holocaust they gave testimony, archived their records, and collected those of others. Without their efforts this book on German Jewish conservatives would not exist; and though it ends with their emigration—all but one never returned to Germany for any lengthy period of time—their individual stories were not over. By briefly recounting their lives after 1938, I want to conclude by paying them my respects....

scholarly journals A Parapsychologist, an Anthropologist, and a Vitalist Walk into a Laboratory: Ernesto de Martino, Mircea Eliade, and a Forgotten Chapter in the Disciplinary History of Religious Studies

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 304
Author(s):  
Flavio A. Geisshuesler
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Western World ◽  
Mircea Eliade ◽  
Program Of Study ◽  
Disciplinary History ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Clifford Geertz ◽  
History Of

While the work of the Italian historian of religion, Ernesto de Martino (1908–1965), has frequently been compared to that of Mircea Eliade, Claude Lévi-Strauss, or Clifford Geertz, he has hardly received any attention in anglophone scholarship to date. Taking an all-but-forgotten controversy between de Martino and Eliade at a conference on parapsychology in France in 1956 as its starting point, the article fills part of this lacuna by first reconstructing the philosophical universe underlying the Italian thinker’s program of study. In the process, it introduces the reader to three Weimar scientists, who have never before been inserted within the canon of the study of religion, namely the parapsychologist Albert von Schrenck-Notzing (1862–1929), the anthropologist Leo Frobenius (1873–1938), and the biologist and philosopher Hans Driesch (1867–1941). Contextualizing these thinkers within their historical context, it becomes clear that they were part of a larger scientific crisis that affected the Western world during the first half of the twentieth century. Finally, the article uncovers surprising affinities, particularly the fact that the Romanian thinker had his very own parapsychological phase during his youth.

Locating the Black archive

2020 ◽  
pp. 207-218
Author(s):  
Hannah Ishmael ◽  
Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski ◽  
Kelly Foster ◽  
Etienne Joseph ◽  
Nathan E. Richards
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Archival Science ◽  
Archival Practice ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Intellectual Traditions ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Archival Practices

This chapter takes the concept of ‘living heritage’ as a starting point to show the ways in which focusing on tangibility and intangibility, the formal and the informal, can be used to stretch the concepts of archival practice. It highlights the cultural and intellectual traditions, tangible and intangible, found within the Caribbean, Africa, and across the Diaspora. Accordingly, the institutions, organisations, concepts, and practices discussed here have a ‘pre-history’ both internationally and in the UK — a prehistory inseparable from the development of the intellectual and cultural history of African and Caribbean communities in the Diaspora. Despite this, an archival science capable of dealing with these complexities has yet to be developed. The chapter thus considers the ways in which Black-led archival practices in the UK have historically sought to both disrupt and define heritage practices. It makes a claim for the active, political and cultural incursions, disruptions, and interventions in the heritage sector by Black-led archives and heritage practitioners.

The Historiographical Legacy of Salo Wittmayer Baron: The Medieval Period

AJS Review ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-37
Author(s):  
Robert Chazan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Essential Element ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Almost All ◽  
The Impact

The impact of Salo Wittmayer Baron on the study of the history of the Jews during the Middle Ages has been enormous. This impact has, in part, been generated by Baron's voluminous writings, in particular his threevolume The Jewish Community and–even more so–his eighteen-volume Social and Religious History of the Jews. Equally decisive has been Baron's influence through his students and his students' students. Almost all researchers here in North America currently engaged in studying aspects of medieval Jewish history can surely trace their intellectual roots back to Salo Wittmayer Baron. In a real sense, many of Baron's views have become widey assumed starting points for the field, ideas which need not be proven or irgued but are simply accepted as givens. Over the next decade or decades, hese views will be carefully identified and reevaluated. At some point, a major study of Baron's legacy, including his influence on the study of medieval Jewish history, will of necessity eventuate. Such a study will have, on the one hand, its inherent intellectual fascination; at the same time, it will constitute an essential element in the next stages of the growth of the field, as it inevitably begins to make its way beyond Baron and his twentieth-century ambience.

Franz Rosenzweig, Adele Alsberg Rosenzweig, and the German-Jewish Family*

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Hill Shevitz ◽  
Susanne Hillman
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Life ◽  
Jewish Family ◽  
Franz Rosenzweig ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Good Starting Point ◽  
German Jewish

Abstract The Jewish family was foundational to philosopher and theologian Franz Rosenzweig’s understanding of Jewish life. This article examines his view of the Jewish family in the light of two memoirs, only recently translated into English, written by his mother, Adele Alsberg Rosenzweig, with whom he had a very close yet contentious relationship. The memoirs illustrate the historical contexts of both Adele’s and Franz’s generations, as well as the personal, familial contexts in which Franz was raised, and are thus a good starting point from which to examine the significance of the Jewish family in his experience and thought.

Families

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Dewar
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Behaviour ◽  
Family Law ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Complex Interplay ◽  
Legal Concept ◽  
Dominant Theme ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of

Family law is largely an aggregation of instrumental legislation, designed to achieve specific social and political purposes. Unlike disciplines that take a legal concept as its starting-point — such as contract, trust, or restitution — family law tends to be more than usually susceptible to shifts in politics and social behaviour, and the complex interplay between the two. This means that a dominant theme of family law scholarship has been that of change and transformation. This article offers a brief history of these transformations in family law, and describes how change has been described and analysed. This historical narrative provides a framework for a discussion of the debates that have characterized the discipline in the latter part of the twentieth century.

Mourning, Melancholy and Hexis: Towards a Context for Fritz Yshaq Baer

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-253
Author(s):  
Eleazar Gutwirth
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public History ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Alternative Possibilities ◽  
History Of Reading ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
Ethics Of Reading ◽  
History Of

An examination, annotation and translation of the hitherto unpublished correspondence with Baer in the Baron papers lead to a re-contextualization. Intensified after his demise in 1980, a large stream of publications attempted to contextualize the work of the historian of the Jews of Christian Spain, Fritz Yshaq Baer, against the background of broadly known events of the twentieth century, identifying him with a “School” of Jewish history. Here this notion is traced to the early 1970s and alternative possibilities are explored. First, attention is paid to the role of institutions, networks and models in the production of knowledge without restricting this solely to the universities or to Germany. This leads to valuing the role of Spanish institutions and their intellectual presuppositions and practices. The history of reading raises questions as to the role of intended public, history of the book and genre in his publications. Finally, taking the ethics of reading into consideration, we ask who the participants in the dialogues he was constructing were. This includes his correspondence with Baron which is published as an appendix.

scholarly journals ”The History of Human Stupidity”: Vojtěch Frič and his Program of a Comparative Study of Religions

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-67
Author(s):  
Markéta Křížová
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Comparative Study ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
General Public ◽  
Central European ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Czech Lands ◽  
The Comparative Study

Abstract The present article represents a partial outcome of a larger project that focuses on the history of the beginnings of anthropology as an organized science at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, in the broader socio-political context of Central Europe. Attention is focused especially on the nationalist and social competitions that had an important impact upon intellectual developments, but in turn were influenced by the activities of scholars and their public activities. The case study of Vojtěch (Alberto) Frič, traveler and amateur anthropologist, who in the first two decades of the twentieth century presented to European scientific circles and the general public in the Czech Lands his magnanimous vision of the comparative study of religions, serves as a starting point for considerations concerning the general debates on the purpose, methods, and ethical dimensions of ethnology as these were resonating in Central European academia of the period under study.

Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 174-179
Author(s):  
Jason Lustig
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Information Society ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Community Based ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

This chapter considers the overall impact of the twentieth-century proliferation of archive activities in Jewish life and the rising paradigm of total archives in particular. By looking at the development of Jewish archiving in Germany, the United States, and Israel/Palestine, we see the concrete manifestation of the impulses of a “time to gather” in Jewish cultures around the world. These efforts represent a kind of community-based archives, but also the internal tensions: What happens when there is a widespread understanding of the value of archives, and they represent resources of cultural capital worth fighting for? This conclusion also places the history of Jewish archives and the struggles to “own” the past in the broader context of the emerging information society. Altogether, this history indicates contentious struggles over what it means to have control over history in its most practical terms.

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