The Torah in Jewish Life from the Nineteenth Century until Today

2018 ◽  
pp. 11-18
Author(s):  
TAMARA COHN ESKENAZI
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Life

Conclusion

2012 ◽  
pp. 360-370
Author(s):  
Shaul Stampfer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Young People ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Effect Change ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
Traditional Approaches ◽  
Desire To Change

This concluding chapter examines changes to the role of yeshiva in Jewish society as well as several developments to yeshiva history after the nineteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, the changes and conflicts that had struck the Jewish world had affected the yeshiva too. Contemporary discussion of the yeshiva was frequently in the context of the Haskalah and noted its power to effect change. There is no clear answer as to what it was that persuaded young people to abandon traditional Jewish life, but the wholesale attribution of this to the Haskalah is not self-evident. It seems much more likely that the threat to traditional ways came from indifference to Jewish identity rather than from any desire to change that identity. Indifference is naturally hard to identify, and it was easier for conservatives to battle against a concrete enemy, equally eager to do battle, than to engage with an attitude that was so contemptuous of traditional approaches that it did not even bother to argue with them.

scholarly journals Melodrama and the ‘art of government’: Jewish Emancipation and Elizabeth Polack’s Esther, the Royal Jewess; or The Death of Haman!

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 144-163
Author(s):  
Jo Carruthers
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Political Freedom ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Low Expectations ◽  
Political Value

This article challenges historians’ representations of working-class Jewish attitudes to emancipation in the early nineteenth century through a reading of Elizabeth Polack’s 1835 melodrama, Esther, the Royal Jewess, or the Death of Haman! Low expectations of working-class political engagement and the working-class genre of the melodrama are challenged by the astute political content of Polack’s play. Its historical and political value is revealed by placing the play within the tradition of the purimspiel, the Jewish genre that traditionally explores Jewish life under hostile government. Reading the play alongside Walter Benjamin’s writings on the disparaged German melodramatic genre of the trauerspiel enables a finely articulated reading of its complex exploration of issues of sovereignty, law, and religious and political freedom.

Malarstwo i rzeźba Żydów polskich w XIXi XXwieku

2003 ◽  
pp. 518-521
Author(s):  
Jerzy Malinowski
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Active Part ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
Jewish Origin ◽  
Jewish Art ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Polish Jews ◽  
Polish Art

This chapter focuses on Jerzy Malinowski's Malarstwo i rzeźba Żydów polskich w XIX i XX wieku (The Painting and Sculpture of Polish Jews in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries). Among the men Jerzy Malinowski, an authority on Polish art and Polish Jewish culture, discusses are many unknown or virtually unknown artists. He begins his story in the mid-nineteenth century with the appearance of the first Polish artists of Jewish origin, of whom Aleksander Lesser was the most important. This was an easy decision, but other decisions made by the author are more difficult and more problematic. What exactly does he mean by Polish Jewish artists? More significant is the question of what Malinowski means by ‘Jewish artists’ and ‘Jewish art’. In his very brief introduction, he explains that he has included artists who identified themselves as belonging to the Jewish national camp, and artists who, even if they did not identify themselves in this way, took an active part in Jewish life. Those who qualify on neither of these grounds are branded as ‘assimilationists’ and omitted.

6. The Promised Land

2021 ◽  
pp. 61-69
Author(s):  
Ilan Stavans
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
National Literature ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Jewish State ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
Zionist Movement ◽  
Theodor Herzl ◽  
Palestinian Literature

“The promised land” looks at the Zionist movement at the end of the nineteenth century in its commitment to create a Jewish state that could not only normalize diaspora Jewish life but also establish a national literature. It meditates on the work of Theodor Herzl, Vladimir Jabotinsky, Chaim Nakhman Bialik, Sh. Y. Agnon, and Amos Oz as canonical voices in Israeli literature. It is worth reflecting on Palestinian literature written in Hebrew, as in Anton Shammas’s Arabesques, and ask the question: ought it to be considered part of Jewish literature? Israeli literature, despite argument to the contrary, is another facet of modern Jewish literature in the diaspora.

Aus Nordcarolina: The Jewish American South in German Jewish Periodicals of the Nineteenth Century

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-272
Author(s):  
Anton Hieke
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American South ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Negative Stereotypes ◽  
German Empire ◽  
German Jews ◽  
Southern States ◽  
German Jewish

Abstract For many German Jewish papers of the nineteenth century, the United States of America was held up as an ideal. This holds true especially for the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, then Germany’s most influential Jewish publication. In America, Jews had already achieved what their co-religionists in Germany strove for until complete legal emancipation with the formation of the German Empire in 1871: the transition from ‘Jews in Germany’ via ‘German Jews’ to ‘Germans of the Jewish faith.’ Thus, the experiences of Jews from Germany in America represented the post-emancipation hopes for those who had remained behind.2 When examined for the representation of Jewry living in the American Southern states,3 it becomes apparent that German Jewish papers in their coverage of America largely refrained from a regionalization. Most articles and accounts concerning Jewish life in the South do not show any significant distinctiveness in the perception of the region and its Jews. The incidents presented or the comments sent to the papers might in fact have occurred in respectively dealt with any region of the United States at the time, barring anything that remotely dealt with slavery or secession prior to 1865. When the Jewish South was explicitly dealt with in the papers, however, it either functioned as an ‘über-America’ of the negative stereotypes in respect to low Jewish piety, or took the place of an alternative America of injustice and slavery—the ‘anti-America.’ Jewish Southerners who actively supported the region during the Civil War, or who had internalized the South’s moral values as supporters of the Confederacy and/or slavery were condemned in the strongest words for endangering the existence of ‘America the Ideal.’ As the concept of the United States and its Jewish life is represented in a largely unrealistic manner that almost exclusively focused on the positive aspects of Jewish life in America, the concept of the Jewish South was equally far from being accurate.

The Zhitomir Rabbinical School: New Materials and Perspectives

2001 ◽  
pp. 105-115
Author(s):  
Efim Melamed
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
The Self ◽  
State Archive ◽  
New Materials ◽  
Student Body ◽  
Educational Backgrounds ◽  
Rabbinical School ◽  
New Perspective

This chapter examines the Zhitomir rabbinical school, one of the most controversial institutions in nineteenth-century Jewish life in the tsarist empire. It draws upon the documents of the rabbinical school in the State Archive of the Zhitomir Region. The objective here is to analyse state motivations in creating ‘rabbinical colleges’, the composition and profile of the student body, and the educational backgrounds and goals of its staff and teachers. Here, the internal life of such schools are examined from a new perspective. Indeed, the chapter shows in the case of Zhitomir, that one central reason for the failure of the rabbinical schools lay in the fact that within their walls the self-professed ‘leaders of the Jewish people’ were alienated from the very people they claimed to lead.

The Jewish Soldier between Memory and Reality

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek J. Penslar
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Social Boundaries ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Self Image ◽  
State Authority

This chapter explores the Jews' historic self-image as a people that shuns what the Hebrew writer S.Y. Agnon called “the craft of Esau, the waging of war.” The notion of Jews as wards of divine and state authority derives from both rabbinic tradition and the specific conditions of Jewish life in medieval Christian and Muslim civilizations. Committed to maintaining their faith and community, Jews had little reason to cross social boundaries or endanger their lives through military service. The historical memory of Russian and Polish Jewry is replete with images of harsh military service and tales of fleeing the country in order to avoid it. Like all historical memory, this narrative blends fact with fiction. Eastern European Jews engaged in a variety of paramilitary activities long before conscription into the tsar's army, and once the draft was implemented in the nineteenth century, their experiences were not uniformly miserable.

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