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This book tells the story of modern Greek Jewry as it came under the control of the Kingdom of Greece during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, it deals with the vicissitudes of those Jews who held Greek citizenship during the interwar and wartime periods. Individual chapters address the participation of Greek and Palestinian Jews in the 1941 fighting with Italy and Germany, the roles of Jews in the Greek Resistance, aid, and rescue attempts, and the problems faced by Jews who returned from the camps and the mountains in the aftermath of the German retreat. The book focuses on the fate of one minority group of Greek citizens during the war and explores various aspects of its relations with the conquerors, the conquered, and concerned bystanders. It contains archival material and interviews with survivors.

The promotion and vernacularization of Hebrew, traditionally a language of Jewish liturgy and study, was a central accomplishment of the Zionist movement in Palestine in the years following World War I. Viewing twentieth-century history through the lens of language, this book questions the accepted scholarly narrative of a Zionist move away from multilingualism, demonstrating how Jews in Palestine remained connected linguistically by both preference and necessity to a world outside the boundaries of the pro-Hebrew community even as it promoted Hebrew and achieved that language's dominance. The story of language encounters in Jewish Palestine is a fascinating tale of shifting power relationships, both locally and globally. The book's study explores how a young national community was compelled to modify the dictates of Hebrew exclusivity as it negotiated its relationships with its Jewish population, Palestinian Arabs, the British, and others outside the margins of the national project and ultimately came to terms with the limitations of its hegemony in an interconnected world.

This book examines the intersection of urban society and modern politics among Jews in turn-of-the-century Warsaw, Europe's largest Jewish center at the time. By focusing on the tumultuous events surrounding the Revolution of 1905, this book argues that the metropolitization of Jewish life led to a need for new forms of community and belonging, and that the ensuing search for collective and individual order gave birth to the new institutions, organizations, and practices that would define modern Jewish society and politics for the remainder of the twentieth century.

Given the vast inventory of verbal and visual images of nonhuman animals (pigs, dogs, vermin, rodents, apes, etc.) disseminated for millennia to debase and bestialize Jews (the Bestiarium Judaicum), this work asks: What is at play when Jewish-identified writers employ such figures in their narratives and poems? Bringing together Jewish cultural studies (examining how Jews have negotiated Jew-Gentile difference) and critical animal studies (analyzing the functions served by asserting human-animal difference), this monograph focuses on the writings of primarily Germanophone authors, including Sigmund Freud, Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka, Gertrud Kolmar, H. Leivick, Felix Salten, and Curt Siodmak. It ferrets out of their nonhuman-animal constructions their responses to the bestial answers upon which the Jewish and animal questions converged and by which varieties of the species “Jew” were depicted. Along with close textual analysis, it examines both personal and social contexts of each work. It explores how several writers attempted to subvert the identification of the Jew-animal by rendering indeterminable the human-animal “Great Divide” being played out on actual Jewish bodies and in Jewish-Gentile relations as well as how others endeavored to work-through identifications with those bestial figures differently: e.g., Salten’s Bambi novels posed the question of “whether a doe is sometimes just a female deer,” while Freud, in his case studies, manifestly disaggregated Jews and animals even as he, perhaps, animalized the human. This work also critically engages new-historical (M. Schmidt), postcolonial (J. Butler and J. Hanssen), and continental philosophic (G. Agamben) appropriations of the conjunction of Jew and animal.

Based on archival and primary sources in Persian, Hebrew, Judeo-Persian, Arabic, and European languages, this book examines the Jews' religious, social, and political status in nineteenth-century Iran. Focusing on Nasir al-Din Shah's reign (1848–1896), it is a comprehensive scholarly attempt to weave all these threads into a single tapestry. This case study of the Jewish minority illuminates broader processes pertaining to other religious minorities and Iranian society in general, and the interaction among intervening foreigners, the Shi'i majority, and local Jews helps us understand Iranian dilemmas that have persisted well beyond the second half of the nineteenth century.

This book is a history of Jewish–Christian interactions in early modern Strasbourg, a city from which the Jews had been expelled and banned from residence in the late fourteenth century. It shows that the Jews who remained in the Alsatian countryside continued to maintain relationships with the city and its residents in the ensuing period. During most of the sixteenth century, Jews entered Strasbourg on a daily basis, where they participated in the city's markets, litigated in its courts, and shared their knowledge of Hebrew and Judaica with Protestant Reformers. By the end of the sixteenth century, Strasbourg became an increasingly orthodox Lutheran city, and city magistrates and religious leaders sought to curtail contact between Jews and Christians. The book unearths the active Jewish participation in early modern society, traces the impact of the Reformation on local Jews, discusses the meaning of tolerance, and describes the shifting boundaries that divided Jewish and Christian communities.

This book explores Jewish commercial partnerships in medieval Egypt, and reveals Jewish merchants to have used economic cooperation as a vehicle for cultural identity formation and maintenance. Through a detailed analysis of the legal documents of the Cairo Geniza, the book shows an affinity between Jewish law and the daily life of Jewish merchants filtered through the courts, which educated merchants about the norms of Jewish commercial law without necessarily demanding that the merchants transact their business according to those norms. However, a close reading of the actual documentary evidence shows that they have done so, and even shows how merchants’ choice to do so affirmed their Jewish identity in ways that cut across a number of different cultural domains. The idea that Jewish merchants might have had distinctive business practices reflecting their Jewish identity challenges the regnant wisdom of the “Princeton School” of Geniza scholars, who have used letters from Jewish merchants as a tool for describing the practice of the broad medieval Islamic marketplace. This book examines the historical practice of the Princeton School and questions the “identity” that scholars have understood to exist between the mercantile behavior of Jews and Muslims. The book proposes an alternative to this “identity” which accounts for the evidence from the legal documents of the Geniza and proposes a more complex relationship between Jewish and Muslim commercial behavior in the medieval Islamic world.

Confessions of the Shtetl explores Jewish conversions to a variety of Christian confessions in nineteenth-century imperial Russia. The book analyzes the surprisingly restrained policy of the Russian state and Orthodox Church toward conversion of Jews which highlights the meaning and management of toleration and religious diversity in imperial Russia more broadly. The book also offers a micro-level sociocultural history of converts, focusing on their motivations and post-baptism trajectories, and on relationships with Christians forged prior to baptism that facilitated religious transfers. It explores the responses of local Jewish and Christian families, communities, and authorities to this extreme form of boundary crossing, highlighting the various measures at the Jewish community’s disposal to contest apostasy. Finally, the book offers a cultural history of Jewish and Russian/Christian public discourses surrounding conversion and the questions it raised, ranging from the grounds of religious toleration to the nature of Jews themselves. Overall, the argument is that the Jewish encounter with imperial Russia was a genuinely religious drama with a diverse, attractive, and aggressive Christianity. The book unsettles the vision of Jews in the Pale of Settlement as a ghettoized community and analyzes the spatial, social, and cultural ties between Jews and Christians. Drawing on previously untapped archival files, the mass circulation press, novels, and memoirs, the book argues that baptism did not constitute a total break with Jewishness or the Jewish community and that conversion marked the start of a complicated experiment with new forms of identity and belonging.

This book discusses five Early Modern literary texts that emerged in Europe between 1499 and 1627. The 5 texts are: La Celestina, the Dialoghi d’amore by Leone Ebreo, the first picaresque novel, Lazarillo de Tormes, Michel de Montaigne’s Essais, and João Pinto Delgado’s poeticizing treatments of biblical texts. The book understands these text as essential for the epoch, the interpretation of which has hitherto focused mainly on the – alleged or actual – Jewish, “New Christian”, or Marranic affiliation of their authors. The book replaces an origin-focused discussion of Early Modern Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and French literature with another perspective which neither levels the particular character of these texts nor overlooks their encapsulation in a universal historical experience due to a too narrow focus on the authors’ biographies. The individually varying engagement of the five texts with questions of origin and ancestry described in this study reveals components of a Marranic historical experience beyond the authors’ affiliations. These components seem like layers of memory which, although buried, build the foundation for the overlying layers and show through them. The analysis of these texts serves to initiate a fresh discussion of the complicated link between author and text as well as of the relevance of an author’s origin for an insight into aesthetic characteristics. The texts provide an understanding of Jewish History in Early Modern Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian Literatures in the emergence of modernity.

Emissaries from the Holy Land tells the story of a philanthropic network that was overseen by the Jewish community leadership in the Ottoman capital city of Istanbul between the 1720s and the 1820s in support of the impoverished Jews of Palestine. Putting the notion of Jewish solidarity, Jewish unity, and the enduring centrality of the Holy Land for the Jewish world to the test, the community leadership in Palestine and their allies in Istanbul dispatched rabbinic emissaries on fundraising missions everywhere from the shores of the Mediterranean to the port cities of the Atlantic seaboard, from the Caribbean to India. This book explores how this eighteenth-century philanthropic network was organized and how relations of trust and solidarity were built across vast geographic differences. It looks at how the emissaries and their supporters understood the relationship between the Jewish diaspora and the Land of Israel, and it shows how cross-cultural encounters and competing claims for financial support involving Sephardic, Ashkenazi, and North African emissaries and communities contributed to the transformation of Jewish identity in the eighteenth century.

Crossing Europe, the Mediterranean, Middle East, North Africa, south and east Asia, as well as the major conflicts of a century, this book takes shape where empires, states, and individuals meet, compete, and collide. It traces interactions between the states of Europe and Ottoman-born Jews who held, sought, or lost the legal protection of a European power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the early modern capitulatory regime gave way to a modern passport regime and the Ottoman Empire to successor states. Some Ottoman Jewish protégés remained in their birthplace as extraterritorial subjects, partaking in a transition from empire to nation-state, protectorate, or mandate regime. Others carried their status as émigrés or passed their legal identity to descendants born outside the empire. All told, protection proved a matter of negotiation and experimentation and a measure of the diffuse and unruly nature of state power: and citizenship a spectrum for individuals to navigate rather than a possession to claim. Extraterritorial Dreams demonstrates that authorities athwart Europe harboured phantasmagorical ideas about the benefits Ottoman Jews offered (or the threat they posed to) the state, particularly at times of war and imperial expansion; that Jewish protégés’ histories resonated with those of non-Jewish protégés, would-be protégés, and colonial subjects; and that Jewish holders and seekers of protection employed creative means of manipulating state law to their advantage. Even as the capitulatory regime and Ottoman Empire were crumbling, protection proved a plastic entity shaped by the competing dreams and nightmares of the parties involved.

This book is the only full biography in English of the partisan, poet, and patriot Abba Kovner (1918–1987), an unsung and largely unknown hero of the Second World War and Israel's War of Independence, born in Vilna, “the Jerusalem of Lithuania.” Long before the rest of the world suspected, he was the first person to state that Hitler was planning to kill the Jews of Europe, and who, along with other defenders of the Vilna ghetto, escaped, only hours before its destruction, to the forest, to join the partisans fighting the Nazis. Returning after the Liberation to find Vilna empty of Jews, Kovner emigrated to Israel, where he devised a fruitless plot to take revenge on the Germans. He then joined the Israeli army and served as the Givati Brigade's Information Officer, writing “Battle Notes,” newsletters that inspired the troops defending Tel Aviv. After the war, Kovner settled on a kibbutz and dedicated his life to working the land, writing poetry, and raising a family. He was also the moving force behind such projects as the Diaspora Museum and the Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature. The book is based on interviews with people who knew Kovner, and on letters and archival material that have never been translated before.

This book is an intellectual biography of Meir Wiener (1893–1941), an Austrian-Jewish intellectual and a student of Jewish mysticism who emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1926 and reinvented himself as a Marxist scholar and Yiddish writer. Wiener's life story offers a glimpse into the complexities and controversies of Jewish intellectual and cultural history of pre-war Europe. Wiener made a remarkable career as a Yiddish scholar and writer in the Stalinist Soviet Union, and left an unfinished novel about Jewish intellectual bohemia of Weimar Berlin. He was a brilliant intellectual, a controversial thinker, a committed communist, and a great Yiddish scholar—who personally knew Lenin and Rabbi Kook, corresponded with Martin Buber and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and argued with Gershom Scholem and Georg Lukács. Wiener's intellectual biography brings Yiddish to the forefront of the intellectual discourse of interwar Europe.

This book reveals the distinctive flavor of Jewish foods in the Midwest and tracks regional culinary changes through time. Exploring Jewish culinary innovation in America's heartland from the 1800s to today, the book examines recipes from numerous midwestern sources, both kosher and nonkosher, including Jewish homemakers' handwritten manuscripts and notebooks, published journals and newspaper columns, and interviews with Jewish cooks, bakers, and delicatessen owners. Settling into the cities, towns, and farm communities of Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota, Jewish immigrants incorporated local fruits, vegetables, and other comestibles into traditional recipes. Such incomparable gustatory delights include Tzizel bagels and rye breads coated in midwestern cornmeal, baklava studded with locally grown cranberries, tangy ketchup concocted from wild sour grapes, rich Chicago cheesecakes, and savory gefilte fish from Minnesota northern pike. The book also considers the effect of improved preservation and transportation on rural and urban Jewish foodways and the efforts of social and culinary reformers to modify traditional Jewish food preparation and ingredients. Including dozens of sample recipes and ample illustrations, the book takes readers on a memorable and unique tour of midwestern Jewish cooking and culture.

Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000) was the foremost Israeli poet of the 20th century and an internationally influential literary figure. The Full Severity of Compassion is a modular retrospective of Amichai's poetic project. It depicts the poet's life-long struggle against all hierarchical systems of privilege and exclusion, and his search for an alternative “language of love,” as he calls it. The book explores Amichai's fierce avant-garde egalitarianism at it is expressed in a commitment to both accessibility and daring experimentation. Through a series of close readings, the book discusses issues in contemporary literary studies, always theorizing from, rather than into, Amichai's poetry.

Elijah ben Solomon, the “Genius of Vilna,” was perhaps the best-known and most understudied figure in modern Jewish history. This book offers a new narrative of Jewish modernity based on Elijah's life and influence. While the experience of Jews in modernity has often been described as a process of Western European secularization—with Jews becoming citizens of Western nation-states, congregants of reformed synagogues, and assimilated members of society—the book uses Elijah's story to highlight a different theory of modernization for European life. Religious movements such as Hasidism and anti-secular institutions such as the yeshiva emerged from the same democratization of knowledge and privatization of religion that gave rise to secular and universal movements and institutions. Claimed by traditionalists, enlighteners, Zionists, and the Orthodox, Elijah's genius and its afterlife capture an all-embracing interpretation of the modern Jewish experience. Through the story of the “Vilna Gaon,” the book presents a new model for understanding modern Jewish history and more generally the place of traditionalism and religious radicalism in modern Western life and thought.

This book turns to an often overlooked and misunderstood period of German and Jewish history: the years between the world wars. It has been assumed that the Jewish community in Germany was in decline during the Weimar Republic. But the author of this book demonstrates that Weimar Jews sought to rejuvenate and reconfigure their community as a means both of strengthening the German nation and of creating a more expansive and autonomous Jewish entity within the German state. These ambitious projects to increase fertility, expand welfare, and strengthen the family transcended the ideological and religious divisions that have traditionally characterized Jewish communal life. Integrating Jewish history, German history, gender history, and social history, the book highlights the experimental and contingent nature of efforts by Weimar Jews to reassert a new Jewish particularism while simultaneously reinforcing their commitment to Germanness.

This book discusses the life and work of the best-known Israeli scholar, the Kabbalah historian of German Jewish descent, Gershom Scholem (1897 – 1982). It offers a new perspective on this seminal figure and on major historical events and ideological struggles that took place during the first part of the 20th century in Europe and the Middle East. The book also makes a certain claim about how new knowledge is created. Scholem, it is here argued, is known beyond the narrow confines of his academic because, beyond being a capable philologist, he was a story-teller of unique talent. The two stories that make up Scholem’s fame are the story he told of himself and the story of Jewish history, told through the lens of his historiography of the Kabbalah. The objective of this book is therefore to critically retell these two stories thus that each story would shed light on the other. Pitting Scholem’s biography over and against his historiography, the book is able to approach questions about nationalism, spiritual revival, and colonialism in the 20th century. The discussion thus reflects the geo-political transformations that took place in Germany and in Palestine during this period. It gives a new perspective on Scholem’s life and his historiographical undertaking. And finally it shows that new knowledge is often the result, not of discovery but of re-reading and invention. Scholem, it is here argued, recreated Jewish mysticism in light of the political, social and spiritual questions of his time.

This book is a history of the shifting attitudes toward national sacrifice in Hebrew culture over the last century. Its point of departure is Zionism's obsessive preoccupation with its haunting “primal scene” of sacrifice—the near-sacrifice of Isaac—as evidenced in wide-ranging sources from the domains of literature, art, psychology, philosophy, and politics. By placing these sources in conversation with twentieth-century thinking on human sacrifice, violence, and martyrdom, this study draws a complex picture that provides multiple, sometimes contradictory, insights into the genesis and gender of national sacrifice. Extending back over two millennia, it unearths retellings of biblical and classical narratives of sacrifice, both enacted and aborted, voluntary and violent, male and female: Isaac, Ishmael, Jephthah's daughter, Iphigenia, Jesus. The book traces the birth of national sacrifice out of the ruins of religious martyrdom, exposing the sacred underside of Western secularism in Israel, as elsewhere.

This book explores the unique phenomenon of Christian engagement with Yiddish language and literature from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the late eighteenth century. By analyzing the motivations for Christian interest in Yiddish, and the differing ways in which Yiddish was discussed and treated in Christian texts, it addresses a wide array of issues, most notably Christian Hebraism, Protestant theology, early modern Yiddish culture, and the social and cultural history of language in early modern Europe. The analysis of a wide range of philological and theological works, as well as textbooks, dictionaries, ethnographical writings, and translations, demonstrates that Christian Yiddishism had implications beyond its purely linguistic and philological dimensions. Indeed, Christian texts on Yiddish reveal not only the ways in which Christians perceived and defined Jews and Judaism, but also, in a contrasting vein, how they viewed their own language, religion, and culture.