Libyan Jewish Women's Lore: From Homeschooling to Formal Education

The source of Libyan Jewish women's lore was the environment in which they lived, which was shaped—intellectually, socially, and economically—by the gender norms of Libyan Jews. These norms were based on Jewish traditions and the surrounding Muslim society, which since the mid-sixteenth century was under Ottoman rule until the Italian occupation of 1911. Formal education for Jewish girls became available in Libya from the 1870s, first through European enterprises and from the 1930s also by the community. This paper examines Libyan Jewish women's lore and what was the impact of the developing educational, social, and economic opportunities for growing numbers of Libyan Jewish women, mainly in the urban society, on their cultural capital from the late nineteenth century until the mass Jewish emigration from Libya starting in the late 1940s.

George Eliot’s Provincial Novels

The formal innovations in George Eliot’s late work Daniel Deronda transform the style and shape of the provincial novel, the genre she perfected in earlier works. These changes reflect a new way of thinking about mobility and space which derives from the conditions of late nineteenth-century imperialism and the ideology of ‘Greater Britain’. Emigration is central to this. The population of Britons settled in overseas colonies over the century by now constitutes a significant world-wide economic and political force. Concerted political and cultural efforts to consolidate this dispersed group were part of imperialist efforts to exert British domination across the globe. In the novel, white settler emigration is evident in the background, but the spotlight falls instead on Daniel’s Jewish emigration to Palestine. Developing a comparative method borrowed from contemporary historian Henry Maine, Eliot compares different styles of emigration, and in this strikingly anti-semitic work exposes the racism and oppressive power dynamics implicit in white settler ideology. Daniel Deronda’s complex engagement with Jewish theology transforms emigration into a reparative and utopian vision of world renewal. In the novel, Eliot revises formal components of her earlier provincial novels that relied on an underlying rhythm of movement and stasis, by introducing a new kinetic imaginary that emphasizes movement, exile, and dispersal. Eliot’s utopian vision, however, is short lived, and under pressure of the contradictions of a critique of imperialism that repeats many of its own structures, in her final work her formal innovations collapse into a series of mere character studies, and her political ideals slump into cynicism.

Between Institutional Antisemitism and Authoritarianism in the Territory of the Former Galicia, 1935–1939: Discussion of the Problem

In the period 1935–1939, following the death of head of state Marshal Piłsudski, the Polish national government adopted a more authoritarian and nationalist stance. Piłsudski had been considered by some Polish Jews as a protector of national and religious minorities. After his death in May 1935, institutional antisemitism experienced a dramatic increase. In the public sphere, certain newspapers regularly featured antisemitic “news reports,” opinion pieces and cartoons of an extreme nature. The newspaper ABC, for instance, advocated boycotts of Jewish businesses and shops, listing them by name, and encouraged Jewish emigration. In universities, the increasing discrimination against Jews has been well documented. Most Polish universities instituted restrictions on the number of Jewish students they would admit, or else barred them altogether. The education ministry willingly turned a blind eye to the admission policies of the university authorities. At the beginning of the academic year 1938–1939, for example, only three students in the first year of medical studies in Lwów (less than 1% of the new intake) were Jews, and none in Kraków. After discussing antisemitism in newspapers and universities in the late 1930s, this article will examine documents held in the State Archive of Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast (DAIFO) concerning relations between the Jewish communities in the Stanisławów region, and the district, provincial and national authorities, including the national Ministry for Religious Denominations and Public Enlightenment. Much of this documentation concerns the town of Dolina. With the backing of the district authorities, an attempt was made to install as assistant rabbi in the town a certain Ksyel Juda Halberstam. This move was strongly opposed by many members of the Dolina Jewish community, as well as by its senior rabbi. The correspondence sheds light on the protracted struggle between the different parties until the assistant rabbi was finally installed in late 1938. These files on the Dolina episode highlight the desire on the part of the authorities to control the rabbis, and through them the members of their communities. Information was systematically gathered on all the rabbis in the province, with particular emphasis on their moral behaviour, their perceived loyalty to the state, and their fluency in the Polish language. These actions, in turn, reflect an underlying suspicion over the extent of the rabbis’ “Polishness” and a fear, in an era of growing nationalism, of “antinational” behaviour. Such suspicions of loyalty were particularly marked where rabbis were thought to have Zionist links.

Thinking Technocratically

Although Polish politics moved to the right after the death of Józef Piłsudski in 1935, demographic anxieties about Volhynia had already been expressed by academics who supported the Sanacja’s technocratic program in the province. Focusing most particularly on geographical Polesie (which covered the northern part of the province of Volhynia), some scholars fostered the concept of national uncertainty in order to support more aggressive measures of Polonization. By dispensing with the regionalists’ patience for the provincial framework and in line with broader political radicalization across Europe, Polish officials increasingly used scholarly conclusions to advocate for redrawing internal borders and launching internal colonization. By the late 1930s, the army and border guards carried out forced religious conversions (“revindications”) of Orthodox Christian, Ukrainian-speaking populations to Roman Catholicism, based on the idea that these people were descended from Polish Catholics. Their concurrent support for policies of Jewish emigration was based on the opposite assumption—that Jews could never be considered Polish.

Migration spawning migration - on continuity in Jewish emigration from Yugoslavia to Palestine/Israel

The Yugoslav participation in the Jewish emigration to Mandatory Palestine and, after 1948, to Israel, can be defined as a process consisting of six stages. When the migration is observed on the level of socio-political circumstances, the discontinuity between these stages is apparent. However, the same discontinuity is not to be found when the process is deconstructed down to and examined on the level of families and individuals involved in it. The aspiration of individuals to join members of their families already in Palestine, especially after the tragic losses suffered in the Holocaust, has persevered as one of the key motives driving emigration from Yugoslavia. This paper examines the way in which family ties continuously drove emigration to Mandatory Palestine/Israel and pulled its individual stages into an integral whole. It is primarily based on documents kept at the Archives of the Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade.