Paul Mendes-Flohr
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- January 2022
- ISBN:
- 9780226784861
- eISBN:
- 9780226785059
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226785059.003.0002
- Subject:
- Religion, Judaism
Formal definitions of Jewish identity—membership in a given community, acceptance of its norms, teachings, values, aspirations—are no longer the self-evident criteria. The difficulty of determining ...
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Formal definitions of Jewish identity—membership in a given community, acceptance of its norms, teachings, values, aspirations—are no longer the self-evident criteria. The difficulty of determining the content and definition of a post-traditional Jewish identity is particularly manifest in the State of Israel. Typical of other nationalist movements, Zionists sponsored the view that there is one essential and enduring Jewish national, ethnic identity. Yet, even this definition is fraught with ambiguity. Who is a Jew? Why am I Jew?Less
Formal definitions of Jewish identity—membership in a given community, acceptance of its norms, teachings, values, aspirations—are no longer the self-evident criteria. The difficulty of determining the content and definition of a post-traditional Jewish identity is particularly manifest in the State of Israel. Typical of other nationalist movements, Zionists sponsored the view that there is one essential and enduring Jewish national, ethnic identity. Yet, even this definition is fraught with ambiguity. Who is a Jew? Why am I Jew?
Ellie R. Schainker
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780804798280
- eISBN:
- 9781503600249
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804798280.003.0008
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Jewish Studies
The epilogue summarizes how the phenomenon of Russian Jewish conversion, though marginal in number, left an outsized imprint on the cultural map of East European Jews who grappled with questions of ...
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The epilogue summarizes how the phenomenon of Russian Jewish conversion, though marginal in number, left an outsized imprint on the cultural map of East European Jews who grappled with questions of Jewish identity and the role of religion in the increasingly powerful Jewish secular nationalist ideologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The epilogue explores evolving Jewish attitudes towards baptism, interfaith sociability, and cultural mobility in the late-imperial period, and it puts conversions from Judaism in imperial Russia in conversation with conversions from Judaism in the modern period more broadly. Finally, the epilogue looks ahead to the inter-revolutionary period (1906-1917) and the Soviet period when conversions from Judaism accelerated, accompanied by a growing ethnic conception of Jewish identity whereby national Jewishness found explicit harmony with Christian religious adherence.Less
The epilogue summarizes how the phenomenon of Russian Jewish conversion, though marginal in number, left an outsized imprint on the cultural map of East European Jews who grappled with questions of Jewish identity and the role of religion in the increasingly powerful Jewish secular nationalist ideologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The epilogue explores evolving Jewish attitudes towards baptism, interfaith sociability, and cultural mobility in the late-imperial period, and it puts conversions from Judaism in imperial Russia in conversation with conversions from Judaism in the modern period more broadly. Finally, the epilogue looks ahead to the inter-revolutionary period (1906-1917) and the Soviet period when conversions from Judaism accelerated, accompanied by a growing ethnic conception of Jewish identity whereby national Jewishness found explicit harmony with Christian religious adherence.
