Local Communities and Separate Space: The Zionist Stance on Jewish Settlement in Arab Cities—The Case of Acre

This article looks at the impact of harsh environmental conditions on the development of the Zionist narrative and the pursuit of Jewish urban settlement in Arab cities, specifically Acre. While overcoming adversity was part of the Zionist farming ethos, settling in areas that were environmentally challenging was one of the factors that kept the Zionist establishment from acknowledging or supporting urban Jewish settlement in Arab towns. In fact, the openly professed ideology of settling in such locations and creating mixed cities was implemented only in the few cases where an economic or political incentive existed. These incentives aside, environmental issues like swampy land and seasonal flooding were major inhibiting factors, not only affecting the scope of Jewish settlement but also the way they were addressed in the Zionist narrative.

The Jewish Working Class in America

Between 1881 and 1924, when federal immigration restrictions were introduced, two and half million Jews from East Europe entered the United States. Approximately half of them settled in New York City where they soon comprised the largest Jewish settlement in the world. The Lower East Side, where families crowded into tenements, became the densest place on the globe. Possessing few skills, Jewish immigrants took jobs with which they had some prior familiarity as peddlers and as workers in the burgeoning garment and textile industries. With the rise of clothing as a mass consumer good, the garment industry emerged as the leading industrial sector in the city. Jewish workers predominated in it. But conditions of sweated labor in shops and factories propelled worker protest. A Jewish labor movement sprung up, energized by the arrival of socialist radicals in the labor Bund. Women workers played a major role in organizing the Jewish working class, spearheading a series of major strikes between 1909 and 1911. These women also staged “meat riots” over inflated beef prices in 1902 and “rent wars” in the early 1930s. To be sure, garment work and the labor movement also shaped the experience of Jewish immigrants in cities such as Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston. Jews notably worked in other apparel industries, but the alternative for many (especially in small cities without a garment industry) was peddling and shopkeeping. Self-employed, but situated within and integrated in the working-class community, both sectors reflected the nontraditional nature of the Jewish working class. Jewish peddlers and petty shopkeepers increasingly morphed in a second generation into a middle class in higher status white-collar work. But despite this mobility, Yiddishkeit, a vibrant Jewish working-class culture of Jewish proletarian theater, folk choruses, journalism, education, housing, and recreation, which was particularly nourished by Bundists, flourished and carried a rich legacy forward in the postwar era.

The British Role in Facilitating Jewish Immigration and Settlement in Jerusalem During the Period 1917 to 1930

The study dealt with the role played by the British authorities in supporting immigration and the Jewish settlement in the city of Jerusalem during the time period extending from 1917 to 1930, the study also dealt with the measures taken by Britain in this aspect since the beginning of the nineteenth century through the British occupation of Jerusalem in 1917 CE, and its issuance of laws and regulations that created conditions for Jewish settlement in the city of Jerusalem. The study concluded that Britain has an active role in pushing the march of Jewish immigration towards the city of Jerusalem and settlement in it.

Der Salzburger Erzbischof und seine Juden

This article analyzes the relationship between the Archbishops of Salzburg and the Jewish inhabitants of their territory. Unlike other prince-(arch)bishops of the Holy Roman Empire who actively promoted their Jewish communities, the Archbishops of Salzburg showed significantly less interest in their Jewish subjects and only seldomly made use of their financial capacities. Nevertheless, they claimed lordship over the Jews of their territory and defined the legal parameters under which Jewish life flourished in the archbishopric’s major towns; individual Jews and their families were given special privileges. After two major persecutions in 1349 and 1404, the latter of which took place at least with the archbishop’s consent, Archbishop Leonhard von Keutschach expelled all Jewish inhabitants in 1498, ending the medieval Jewish settlement in the archbishopric.

Daniel J. Walkowitz, The Remembered and Forgotten Jewish World: Jewish Heritage in Europe and the United States. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2018. xv + 281 pp.

This chapter explores Daniel J. Walkowitz's The Remembered and Forgotten Jewish World: Jewish Heritage in Europe and the United States (2018). This book is in part a family history with a pronounced political twist, and in part a travel narrative intended to reflect upon the author's family's journey from Russia–Poland through Western Europe and then to the United States. It is, in addition, a reflection on heritage installations in major sites of Jewish settlement where the Jewish presence has often disappeared either through emigration, genocide, or social mobility and dispersion. To some degree, Walkowitz's project simply reviews intellectual terrain well combed by others. But throughout the book, Walkowitz brings a persistent and unique critical gaze eschewing the nostalgic sentiments of so much Jewish heritage tourism, along with the false lachrymosity that laments abandoned synagogues or the absence of observant Jews, or the persistent focus on famous men and the well-to-do at the expense of ordinary Jews.

Palestinian Arabic versus Israeli Hebrew Place-Names: Comparative Cultural Reading of Landscape Nomenclature and Israeli Renaming Strategies

This article compares Palestinian (Arabic) and Israeli (Hebrew) names of natural features in Palestine/Israel. Based on postcolonial reading and critical toponymy, I argue that despite the dominance of the Jewish nationalist narrative the nomenclature includes ‘intermediate categories’ that attest to subversive linguistic practices, bottom-up communication aspects, and sociocultural realities. These aspects are analysed through five main categories: unification; uniqueness; male rhetoric replacing female identity; sanitization; and linguistic imitation. The article adds to the literature largely focused on the political aspect of the Jewish settlement names that replaced Palestinian names in that it shows how Zionist naming of natural features included the cultural perspectives of the Palestinian names in order to appropriate them for internal Jewish cultural needs.

West and East in Ashkenaz in the Time of Judah he-Ḥasid

The present study interprets and frames a long-standing question concerning Judah he-Ḥasid’s motivations in migrating to Regensburg against the social and geographical contexts of the Jews of Ashkenaz. By examining the use of Hebrew geographic terminology during the High Middle Ages (Loter, Ashkenaz, Ashkelonia), the article demonstrates that twelfth-century Jews perceived and were engaged in contemporary political and territorial processes of the surrounding kingdom. The Hebrew terms describe the cultural tripartite division of the German kingdom (Regnum Teutonicum) in Lotharingia, the five duchies of the earlier tribes (Saxony, Franconia, Thuringia, Swabia, and Bavaria), and the still Slavic territories of the East. These imperial territories were settled and Christianized by mostly German migrants from the west of the kingdom from the eleventh century onwards. Comparable developments are evident in the movement and expansion of Jewish settlement in the German Kingdom. After many Jewish communities were founded in the Ashkenazic heartlands, beginning in cities on the Rhine, Main, and the Danube, i.e., in the territories of the five duchies (Ashkenaz), Jewish settlers founded new communities and settlements in the still Slavic areas (Ashkelonia), beyond the Elbe and Saale rivers, as part of the German settlement movement. Judah he-Ḥasid’s family’s migration is part of this development. With his relocation to Regensburg, he lived on the border of the Ashkenazic heartland (Old/West Ashkenaz) and the new Ashkenazic settlement areas in Ashkelonia (New/Eastern Ashkenaz). In Regensburg he became one of the central spiritual and halakhic authorities for the communities of the eastern neighboring territories. Through his work Judah he-Ḥasid opened the way to an “Ashkenazation” of the Jewish communities in eastern Central Europe and Eastern Europe.