Languages of Community: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands

Author(s):  
Hillel J. Kieval

This chapter explores Hillel J. Kieval's book, Languages of Community: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands. Kieval's Languages of Community demonstrates that the development of the community of Czech Jews in the period before the First World War was fraught with intense struggles against emerging Czech nationalism. In these interlinked essays, Kieval's primary emphasis is on the way in which the conflicts over language shaped the identities of the Czech Jews—a persuasive emphasis given the centrality of language in the definition of nationalisms in the Habsburg Empire. The fact that German was the primary spoken and written language of urban Jews was a particular irritant to Czech nationalists, who in the nineteenth century were seeking to turn Czech into the language of a new national culture. Like other Jews in the multi-ethnic empire, Czech Jews were caught between the German culture of the regime and the culture of their indigenous environment. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a Czech Jewish movement emerged which favoured the adoption of the Czech language and culture. But Kieval argues that this movement had only modest success, which was limited primarily to the abolition of German Jewish schools in the villages.

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Samee Siddiqui

Abstract This article compares the ideas, connections, and projects of two South Asian figures who are generally studied separately: the Indian pan-Islamist Muhammad Barkatullah (1864–1927) and the Sinhalese Buddhist reformer Anagarika Dharmapala (1864–1934). In doing so, I argue that we can understand these two figures in a new light, by recognizing their mutual connections as well as the structural similarities in their thought. By focusing on their encounters and work in Japan, this article demonstrates how Japan—particularly after defeating Russia in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905—had become a significant site for inter-Asian conversations about world religions. Importantly, exploring the projects of Barkatullah and Dharmapala makes visible the fact that, from the late nineteenth century until the outbreak of the First World War, religion played a central role—alongside nationalism, race, and empire—in conversations about the possible futures of the international order.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-106
Author(s):  
Ștefan Baghiu

This article uses quantitative methods to provide a macro perspective on translations of novels in Romanian culture during the long nineteenth century, by modifying Eric Hobsbawm’s 1789-1914 period, and using it as spanning from 1794 (the first registered local publishing of a translated novel) to 1918 (the end of the First World War). The article discusses the predominance of the French novel (almost 70% of the total of translated novels), the case of four other main competitors in the second line of translations (or the golden circle, as named in the article: German, English, Russian, and Italian), the strange case of the American novel as a transition zone, and the situation of five other groups of novels translated during the period (the atomizing agents: the East European, the Spanish, the Austrian, the Nordic, and the Asian novel).


Author(s):  
Jerzy Tomaszewski

This chapter considers a series of books, A to Polska właśnie (This is Indeed Poland). These books introduce their readers to various issues of interest to anyone studying Polish society. The chapter focuses on the volume Żydzi (The Jews), in particular, as it is the first to discuss an important group among Poland's population. The volume covers the period up to the second half of the eighteenth century, political and social problems from the second half of the eighteenth century until the end of the nineteenth, Jewish culture and religion in the nineteenth century, the period from the First World War until 1939, the Holocaust, and Jews in Poland after the Second World War. The chapter contends that this book should be regarded not as just one more study about Polish Jews, but as making a singular contribution to the promotion of knowledge about Jewish traditions, culture, and history in Poland.


Author(s):  
Shaul Stampfer

This introductory chapter describes the unique aspects of the yeshivas of nineteenth-century Lithuania. These yeshivas represented a major attempt on the part of traditional Jewry to cope with the challenges of modernity. The Jews of nineteenth-century Lithuania thus defined had several distinguishing characteristics. In religious terms, most were traditional, in the sense that they had withstood the innovations of hasidism; in fact, the strength of the opposition to that movement in Lithuania was such that they came collectively to be known as mitnagedim (opponents) — that is, opponents of hasidism. Economically, they were mostly poorer than Jews in other major areas of Jewish settlement, such as Poland or Bukovina, and lived in more crowded conditions. Until 1764, they benefited from self-government under the Va'ad Medinat Lita (Council of the Land of Lithuania). By the beginning of the eighteenth century this body had ceased to function, but the distinction between the Jews of Lithuania and those of the neighbouring regions continued to exist — not least because the Lithuanian Jews spoke a distinctive dialect of Yiddish. These and other factors ensured that they continued to maintain a separate identity among the Jews of eastern Europe until the First World War.


Author(s):  
Guy G. Stroumsa

Although most major social anthropologists came from Britain, the new sensitivity to ritual among students of religion, it appears, was felt more powerfully in France than elsewhere. This chapter considers the conditions in which a new intellectual sensitivity to sacrifice appeared towards the end of the nineteenth century, and the immense implications of this sensitivity on new approaches to religion. Although reflection on sacrifice dates back to antiquity, it is only with the emergence of the science of religion as an academic discipline after the mid-nineteenth century that it became grounded in theoretical approaches to religion. We will see how Durkheim’s most gifted students dealt with sacrifice, and call attention to the broader political context, from the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War.


2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 490-498
Author(s):  
Effie Dorovitsa

From the 1870s until roughly the outbreak of the First World War, cargoes of Norwegian ice were shipped to numerous French ports. The ice was crucial for the smooth operation of many industries, especially those in the alimentation sector. The Northern French port of Boulogne-sur-Mer, with its thriving fishing industry, became one of the main entry points for imported Norwegian natural ice blocks. This Research Note is based on the holdings of Boulogne Municipal Archives and the Departmental Archives of the Pas de Calais region. It highlights the significant role that Norwegian ice imports could play in a port whose economy was largely based on the fisheries. It further reveals how concerns about the hygienic quality of natural ice dictated a series of regulations aimed at safeguarding public health in nineteenth-century France, and how these measures were introduced and tackled in Boulogne-sur-Mer. With a regulatory framework that strictly controlled inflows of Norwegian ice into French ports, a few Boulonnaise hygiene officials had to step in to protect the interests of the local fishing industry.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 308-342
Author(s):  
Paul Michael Kurtz

Hellenic language and culture occupy a deeply ambivalent place in the mapping of Jewish history. If the entanglement of the Jewish and the Greek became especially conflicted for modern Jews in philhellenic Europe, nowhere was it more vexed than in the German-speaking lands of the long nineteenth century. Amidst the modern redefinition of what it meant to be Jewish as well as doubts about the genuine Jewishness of Hellenistic Judaism, how did scholars identify Jewish authorship behind ambiguous, fragmented, and interpolated texts – all the more with much of the Hebraic allegedly deprived by the Hellenic? This article not only argues for the contingency of diagnostic features deployed to define the Jewish amidst the Greek but also maintains the embeddedness of those features in nineteenth-century Germany. It scrutinizes the criteria deployed to establish Jewish texts and authors of the Hellenistic period: the claims and qualities assumedly suggestive of Judaism. First, the inquiry investigates which characteristics German Jewish scholars expected to see in Greek-speaking Jewish writers of antiquity, interrogating their procedures and their verdicts. Second, it examines how these expectations of antiquity corresponded to those scholars’ own modern world. The analysis centers on Jacob Bernays (1824–1881) and Jacob Freudenthal (1839–1907), two savants who helped establish the modern study of Hellenistic Judaism. Each overturned centuries of learned consensus by establishing an ancient author – Pseudo-Phocylides and Eupolemus, respectively – as Jewish, rather than Christian or pagan. This article ultimately reveals the subtle entanglements as well as the mutually conditioning forces not only of antiquity and modernity but also of the personal and academic, manifest both in the philological analysis of ancient texts and in the larger historiography of antique Judaism in the Graecophone world.


2020 ◽  
Vol 248 (1) ◽  
pp. 165-207
Author(s):  
Avner Wishnitzer

Abstract: Street lighting was first introduced into Ottoman cities in the second half of the nineteenth century. However, unlike in larger Ottoman cities, where coal gas was used, in Jerusalem it was kerosene that served as burning material, creating the distinct nocturnal reality that is here called the ‘kerosene night’. This reality was the result and, simultaneously, one of the most glaring manifestations of Jerusalem’s economic, administrative and infrastructural peripherality. Between the early 1890s and the First World War, kerosene allowed the Jerusalem municipality an affordable means to respond to inhabitants’ expectations for more light. Both public expectations and municipal action were fanned by a discourse that associated street lighting with Enlightenment, order and progress. Yet, kerosene illumination also set the limits of nocturnal conviviality and frustrated the very expectations it kindled. Measured against larger metropoles, the relative darkness of Jerusalem heightened among residents feelings of provinciality and governmental neglect — feelings that the kerosene lamps, paradoxically, brought to light.


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