Jacob Gordin: The Religious Crisis in Jewish Thought

This article offers an English translation of an essay published in 1946 by Jacob Gordin (1896–1947), a Russian-Jewish philosopher of religion, who is considered the founding figure of the postwar Paris School of Jewish Thought (École de pensée juive de Paris). In “The Religious Crisis in Jewish Thought”, Gordin presented a sweeping meta-narrative of the history of Jewish thought, formulated as a history of repeated “religious crises”, both existential and intellectual. In Gordin’s condensed narrative, these crises could be detected in the life and philosophy of the most canonical Jewish thinkers inside and outside the tradition: from Abraham the biblical patriarch to Hermann Cohen, through a diverse list including the rabbinical sage Elisha Ben-Abuyah, Philo, Halevi, Maimonides, and Spinoza. In an introduction to Gordin’s text, I provide a brief biography, locate Gordin in existentialist discourse of the early postwar years, and discuss the affinities between Gordin’s “The Religious Crisis” and Levinas’s and Sartre’s early reflections on the Jewish question.

Czesław Miłosz wobec przemocy i wojny

This article reviews Irena Grudzińska-Gross’s book Miłosz i długi cień wojny [Milosz and the Long Shadow of War], which was published by Pogranicze in 2020. The reviewer analyses the definition of violence and its relation to Polish narratives of wartime solidarity seen as heroism. To this end, she examines the work of Czesław Miłosz, written during the Second World War, and later texts thematising the war experience. An additional layer of the publication is the poet’s take on the Jewish question – both in the context of Miłosz’s poetic works and the subsequent discussions they provoked. The author, taking into account Miłosz’s autobiogeographical predispositions, also analyses the changing images of Warsaw in his works as a space where the poet spent most of the war. For this reason, she examines the poet’s attitude to the Warsaw Uprising and the public perception of his decision not to join the cause.

The “Jewish Question” in Zemstvo Activities of the Liberal Fronda of Northern Ukraine in the 1880s

The article explores the position of the Zemstvo liberal party of northern Ukraine on the Jewish question in the Russian Empire in the 1880s. Based on little-known historical sources, the author reconstructs the public landscape in the north of Left-Bank Ukraine, where vivid discussions of the Jewish problem unfolded. A comparative analysis of the positions of the liberal and conservative Zemstvo circles demonstrated the main initiatives of the progressive Zemstvo, which fundamentally separated the aristocratic opposition fronda from the loyal authorities of the zemstvo environment. A detailed analysis of the primary sources shows that the liberal Zemstvo members strongly opposed the reactionary proposals of the conservatives - including a decisive rejection of punitive measures, the elimination of the civil inequality of the Jewish people in the Russian Empire, a fundamental change in state economic policy with the aim of comprehensive and wide-ranging reforms of social relations in the province, and a search for the harmonization of moral and spiritual relations in society. The publication examined the personal contribution of liberal Zemstvo party members of the Northern Left Bank to the development of a political philosophy for resolving the Jewish problem in the country, at the level of journalism of national importance, and at the level of the activities of the Chernihiv provincial commission on the Jewish question. The author demonstrates that the representatives of the Zemstvo opposition publicly opposed the slightest discrimination and restriction of civil rights and freedoms of Jews, considering such discrimination as manifestations of anti-Semitism and an insult of the Jewish people. The liberal partys reform plan for the conceptual solution of the Jewish question in the Russian Empire was an integral organic component of the broad socio-economic and ethno-political doctrine of state modernization.

Collective help to Jews during the Holocaust in Kremenchuk (1941–1943)

The article examines a still unexplored issue of collective help to Jews during the Holocaust in Kremenchuk. Based on theoretical developments in Holocaust studies, it attempts to investigate the phenomenon of collective help to Jews in the context of the genocidal process unfolding in the city and the vicissitudes of the war in the region. Therefore, the author considers the process of changes in the “solution of the Jewish question” at the time of the Wehrmacht’s entry into Kremenchuk, as well as the dynamics of the Holocaust in the city. The author outlines the definition of “collective help” and offers its analysis through the prism of the activities of both non-Jews and Jews. In this regard, the article analyzes possible ways to obtain information by the local population about the genocide of Jews, as early awareness of the situation could provide more opportunities for action. The author reviewed the available historiographical works on the topic of helping Jews during the Holocaust, collected and systematized the available mentions of assistance to Jews in Kremenchuk, which can be qualified as acts of collective help, and described the specifics of the source base. For the first time, the article considers the actions of Synytsia-Verkhovsky, the first mayor of Kremenchuk under Nazi rule, and underground fighters from the organization “Patriot of the Motherland” under the leadership of Taras Zhvania as acts of collective aid. The article outlines what types of collective help were provided to Jews during the Holocaust in Kremenchuk. In addition, it assumes that during the collective assistance of the members of the organization “Patriot of the Motherland” infrastructural cooperation was established (the First City Hospital, the Red Cross, apartments of members of the underground organization). In this way, the author seeks to complement the historiographical contributions that have discussed help to the Jews of Kremenchuk very briefly and only from the viewpoint of individual acts.