Sociability and Acculturation in German Spas

2013 ◽  
pp. 146-179
Author(s):  
Natalie Naimark-Goldberg
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Active Part ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Notable Feature ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Annual Visit ◽  
Theatrical Performances

This chapter assesses an unexamined aspect of the process by which enlightened Jewish women became integrated into non-Jewish European culture and society: the practice of visiting spas. Their letters reveal that these women often chose to spend the summer months at one of the spa centres of central Europe. The spas offered many advantages alongside their original function as places of healing and recuperation: the semi-urban way of life which developed in these resorts over the course of the eighteenth century offered visitors a wide array of pastimes and enjoyments, such as musical and theatrical performances, parties, and walks along the main boulevards and in more rural surroundings. For Jewish women in particular, the unique, liberated atmosphere of the spas offered a space in which they could widen their circle of acquaintances, integrate themselves into non-Jewish society, and take an active part in discussions on cultural and other issues. Thus, the annual visit to one or more spas, which became a notable feature of bourgeois life, constituted an important component in the acculturation of the modernizing Jewish women discussed in this book.

Between Love and Misogamy: Changing Perceptions of Marriage among German Jews, 1750–1800

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Naimark-Goldberg
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
German Jews ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
Traditional Institution ◽  
Love Marriage ◽  
Changing Attitudes ◽  
Attitudes Towards Marriage

Abstract Marriage is a central and binding institution of Jewish life. However, as a historical construct, it was never a static, immutable structure. This article focuses on the changing attitudes towards marriage among German Jews in the second half of the eighteenth century. It discusses how rational considerations external to the couple’s personal needs and desires started losing ground, while its function as a framework for emotional and erotic satisfaction intensified. As marriage was increasingly perceived in terms of self-fulfilment, many pursued happiness through matrimony, embracing the new idea of the love marriage. Although this idea developed from contemporary trends in non-Jewish society, maskilic authors used Jewish sources to maintain this position, trying to present it as consistent with tradition rather than as a break from it. The emergence of a romantic discourse was not the only transformation in the perception of marriage. The individualism that impelled the notion of a love marriage led to another type of discourse among Jewish women and men: the discourse against marriage. Using the perspectives of continuity and change, the article seeks to discern the role that Judaism and Jewish sources played in discourses about misogamy and the modernization of the traditional institution of marriage.

Worlds without Compromise: Reconstructing the Disparities

1997 ◽  
pp. 188-219
Author(s):  
Yaacov Shavit
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Greek Culture ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Binary Model ◽  
New Meanings ◽  
Creative Artists ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Jewish Writers

This chapter addresses the persistent binary between Jewish and Greek culture. It shows how Jewish writers, thinkers, and creative artists of diverse viewpoints adopted the binary model as an appropriate historical code. However, the chapter also reveals that the modern era formulated new conditions and inspired new meanings within tradition, or aroused protest against it for reasons new in nature. Since the eighteenth century, the confrontation or encounter with Greekness (as a metaphor for modern European culture) has neither exhausted nor diminished the debate in matters of philosophy or theology, but rather extended it to all areas of human existence. Gradually, all strata of Jewish society faced the new European culture, and became involved in the process of building and creating the new Jewish world. In the process, the validity of the antinomy was strengthened, and it became all-embracing — a historical and cultural challenge that had constantly to be faced. Paradoxically, as the desire to be regarded as a nation of culture became more intense and the broadening of the antinomy became more pronounced, the chapter reveals that a process of ‘Hellenization’ of thought categories and criteria deepened.

Introduction

2013 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Natalie Naimark-Goldberg
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Social Scene ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Jewish women who lived in Berlin at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. They were among the first in Ashkenazi society to undergo an accelerated process of modernization, take an active part in European culture, and adopt early feminist positions on the role of women in society and culture. Based on the numerous sources they left behind — mainly personal letters, but also publications and other writings — this book describes various aspects of their involvement in the intellectual, cultural, and social scene of the time and discusses their thought, which was nurtured in a crucial way by the Enlightenment. However, relatively little has been written about the relationship between Jewish women and the Enlightenment. This omission may be largely explained by the fact that for many years Jewish engagement with the Enlightenment was identified with the Haskalah, which was mainly a male movement, especially in its eighteenth-century central European version. The chapter then suggests a reconsideration of the relationship of these Jewish women to Romanticism, and proposes to uncouple their names from another context with which they have been traditionally tied: the salons.

The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Eric Hernandez
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Common People ◽  
Ordinary Life ◽  
Emotional Processes ◽  
Critical Account ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Cultural Conversation

This book assembles a body of print and performance concerned with the misfortunes of the middling sort, arguing that these works negotiated tragedy’s vexed relationship to ordinary life. This “bourgeois and domestic tragedy” imagined a particularly modern sort of affliction, an “ordinary suffering” divested of the sorts of meanings, rhetorics, and affective resonances once deployed to understand it. Whereas neoclassical aesthetics aligned tragedy with the heroic and the admirable, bourgeois tragedy treated the pain of common people with dignity and seriousness, meditating upon a suffering that was homely, familiar, realistic, and entangled in the nascent values of capitalism, yet no less haunted by God. Hence, where many have seen aesthetic stagnation, misfiring emotion, and the absence of an idealized tragicness in the genre, this book tracks instead a sustained engagement in the emotional processes and representational techniques through which the middle rank feels its way into modernity. Describing this shift as an episode in the histories of both tragedy and emotion, it revises the standard critical account of eighteenth-century tragedy and reads the genre’s emergence in the period as a vigorous cultural conversation over whose life—and whose way of life—is grievable, as well as how that mourning might be performed.

Elisheva Carlebach. Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism in Germany, 1500–1750. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. xii, 324 pp.

AJS Review ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 388-389
Author(s):  
R. Po-chia Hsia
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
New Haven ◽  
Yale University ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Jewish Historiography ◽  
Modern Germany ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

Unlike the Sephardim, who accepted the concept of taqiyya and the practice of marranism to cope with forced conversions under Islam, the Ashkenazim, especially the Jewish communities of Germanophone Central Europe, developed an uncompromising rejection of Christian baptism. Instead of marranism and deception under Islam, the Ashkenazim, in the persecutions of the Crusades and after, developed a strong sense of martyrdom and detested baptism, whether forced or voluntary, as ritual and spiritual defilement and pollution. The small number of Jewish converts to Christianity were not so much sinners but apostates (meshummadim or the vertilgten). Given this Ashkenazi tradition, it is not surprising that converts were marginalized in Jewish historiography and scholarship. Nevertheless, as Carlebach argues persuasively in this book, they played a significant role in Jewish–Christian relations in early modern Germany; and given the fact that conversions rose rapidly in the late eighteenth century, it is all the more important to understand the prehistory of Jewish conversion and integration in Germany after Emancipation.

Budzhak Population: an experience of a fugitive review of 18th-century observations

2021 ◽  
pp. 53-74
Author(s):  
Nicolai Russev ◽  
◽  
Fedor Markov
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Natural Landscape ◽  
Muslim Population ◽  
Social Crisis ◽  
South Eastern ◽  
Eurasian Steppe ◽  
South Eastern Europe

Budzhak (in modern Moldova and Ukraine) is the western part of the Eurasian steppe, the natural character of which had determined the ways of the local life for centuries. The Ottoman and the Russian Empires had clashed here in the eighteenth century, on the eve of the European Enlightenment. This fight was to determine further prospects for development, while many contemporaries and eyewitnesses tried to guess any signs of these prospects. A profound social crisis in south-eastern Europe contributed to political and ethnic and confessional changes and was changing the natural landscape. The Turkic Muslim population had to leave these lands under the growing pressure of these changes, and the new population was predominantly Christian. Now the Christians determined the way of life in Budzhak, even its flora and fauna.

Aboriginal peoples of Chukotka

2009 ◽  
Vol 31 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 325-341 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larisa Abryutina
Keyword(s):  
Aboriginal Peoples ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Spiritual Culture ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Russian State ◽  
History Of

Abstract Before the Aboriginal peoples of Chukotka were introduced to European culture, they lived a traditional way of life which defined their material and spiritual culture. During the integration into the Russian State, all spheres of their life went through various transformations. This article presents an overiew of the history of Aboriginal peoples of Chukotka (Yupiget, Chukchi, Evens, Koryaks, Chuvans, Yukagirs and Kereks).

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