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Writing as Resistance? Bearing Witness in the Warsaw Ghetto

Zoe Vania Waxman

in Writing the Holocaust: Identity, Testimony, Representation

This chapter examines the work of Emmanuel Ringelblum, a trained social historian and teacher, who initiated the Warsaw-based secret archives of Oneg Shabbat (Sabbath Delight: a code-name for the ... More

This chapter examines the work of Emmanuel Ringelblum, a trained social historian and teacher, who initiated the Warsaw-based secret archives of Oneg Shabbat (Sabbath Delight: a code-name for the clandestine Sabbath afternoon gatherings). These archives, which represent the most systematic attempt to record Jewish suffering during the Holocaust, were dedicated to finding the best way to record the uprooting of communities, and the suffering and destruction of Polish Jewry. Ringelblum and his colleagues in the Warsaw ghetto were able to amass a considerable amount of information. By secretly recording Jewish life in Poland during the German occupation, and continuing the Jewish tradition of witnessing, the Warsaw ghetto chroniclers, both individually and collectively, performed important acts of resistance. They believed that what they were experiencing would one day be studied as historically important, and this awareness shaped their writing.Less

Conclusion

Marion A. Kaplan

in Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618-1945

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts from the author. The history of Jewish daily life does much more than provide static snapshots of the past. It opens up new vistas and shows that ... More

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts from the author. The history of Jewish daily life does much more than provide static snapshots of the past. It opens up new vistas and shows that German-Jewish history is not merely a simple, linear story that takes us from the limitations and insecurities of the 17th century to the successful achievement of emancipation in the 19th, back down to the dark days of the Nazi era. The history of daily life also provides a three-dimensional perspective that illuminates gender relations, the interactions among generations, and those between Jews and non-Jews.Less

Early Modern Criticism of the Zohar

Yaacob Dweck

in The Scandal of Kabbalah: Leon Modena, Jewish Mysticism, Early Modern Venice

This chapter argues that Modena's criticism of the Zohar's origins had little to do with its theological contents. It emerged as a reaction to the elevated status of the work among his Jewish ... More

This chapter argues that Modena's criticism of the Zohar's origins had little to do with its theological contents. It emerged as a reaction to the elevated status of the work among his Jewish contemporaries and immediate predecessors; Jews had begun to treat the Zohar as a source of legal authority rather than a collection of stories and biblical glosses. Modena's critique constituted a denunciation of these larger trends in contemporary Jewish life rather than a rejection of the Zohar as a work of exegesis. As such, Ari Nohem offers a case study of how an early modern intellectual worked to prove that a text was pseudepigraphic. It also presents a wealth of information on attitudes toward the Zohar among Jews in Italy, Poland, and elsewhere. Ultimately, Modena rejected the status ascribed to the Zohar in contemporary Jewish life, denied the work's ostensible antiquity, and reflected on the deleterious impact of its packaging as a printed book.Less

The Jewish Soldier between Memory and Reality

Derek J. Penslar

in Jews and the Military: A History

This chapter explores the Jews' historic self-image as a people that shuns what the Hebrew writer S.Y. Agnon called “the craft of Esau, the waging of war.” The notion of Jews as wards of divine and ... More

This chapter explores the Jews' historic self-image as a people that shuns what the Hebrew writer S.Y. Agnon called “the craft of Esau, the waging of war.” The notion of Jews as wards of divine and state authority derives from both rabbinic tradition and the specific conditions of Jewish life in medieval Christian and Muslim civilizations. Committed to maintaining their faith and community, Jews had little reason to cross social boundaries or endanger their lives through military service. The historical memory of Russian and Polish Jewry is replete with images of harsh military service and tales of fleeing the country in order to avoid it. Like all historical memory, this narrative blends fact with fiction. Eastern European Jews engaged in a variety of paramilitary activities long before conscription into the tsar's army, and once the draft was implemented in the nineteenth century, their experiences were not uniformly miserable.Less

Introduction

Marion A. Kaplan

in Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618-1945

This introductory chapter presents an overview of the book. It begins with a discussion of the purpose of the book, which is to examine the qualitative aspects of the life of Jews in Germany. The ... More

This introductory chapter presents an overview of the book. It begins with a discussion of the purpose of the book, which is to examine the qualitative aspects of the life of Jews in Germany. The book begins in the 17th century, the early modern period among Jewish communities in the German states, principalities, and duchies, and concludes in 1945, a caesura in German-Jewish life. Sources range from memoirs, letters, and diaries to rabbinic response (replies by rabbinic scholars applying Jewish law to queries concerning the exigencies of daily life), communal and organizational histories, and Jewish newspapers.Less

Material Culture and Daily Life

CATHERINE HEZSER

in Rabbinic Texts and the History of Late-Roman Palestine

This chapter evaluates the use of rabbinic literature in the study of Jewish daily life and material culture. It explains that one of the main problems associated with research on material culture ... More

This chapter evaluates the use of rabbinic literature in the study of Jewish daily life and material culture. It explains that one of the main problems associated with research on material culture and daily life is the establishment of a proper relationship between rabbinic literary references and archaeological data, between text and object. It suggests that these problems can be resolved by approaching the issues on the basis of a historical-critical study of rabbinic sources in a broad interdisciplinary framework, which takes account of archaeological research within the Graeco-Roman and early Byzantine context and which uses tools, methods and models developed by the social sciences.Less

Translating “Englitch”

Joshua L. Miller

in Accented America: The Cultural Politics of Multilingual Modernism

Diasporic Jewish culture has been multilingual by definition for more than two thousand years of statelessness—until the twentieth century, that is. This chapter juxtaposes two sharply different ... More

Diasporic Jewish culture has been multilingual by definition for more than two thousand years of statelessness—until the twentieth century, that is. This chapter juxtaposes two sharply different textual and intellectual trajectories for multilingual Jewish cultures. Henry Roth and Lionel Trilling were each engaged in projects of representing U.S. Jewish life in the 1920s and '30s, the former in his novel Call It Sleep (1934) and the latter in contributions to the Menorah Journal, his later occasional writings on Jewish culture, and, perhaps counterintuitively, his first scholarly book, Matthew Arnold (1939). While Roth's linguistically defamiliarizing novel depicted multilingual invention within Jewish, modernist, and multiethnic proletarian milieux, Trilling moved from particularist Jewish expression to Arnoldian definitions of culture and modernity that quietly enfolded Jewish ethics and aesthetics within a broader program for cultural institutions.Less

Family Life

Robert Liberles

in Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618-1945

This chapter shows that the dynamics of Jewish family life in early modern Germany did not differ markedly from those of their neighbors. Except for the wealthy, women generally married between their ... More

This chapter shows that the dynamics of Jewish family life in early modern Germany did not differ markedly from those of their neighbors. Except for the wealthy, women generally married between their late teens and late twenties, and men usually wed in their twenties. Family size was not unusually large, nor was it likely to be when the age at marriage was not substantially different from that of non-Jews. Husbands and wives divided their responsibilities in ways that also paralleled the society around them. Residential and economic restrictions caused one fundamental and significant difference between Jewish and Christian family life. Both Jewish males and females were more likely than Christians to move away from their native homes to establish their own families and households, and males, working more in commerce than agriculture, were more likely to be away from the family in order to provide support.Less

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

in Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity

This chapter examines the roles that narrative fiction—primarily orthodox novels and novellas of contemporary Jewish life—played in creating and sustaining a vision of orthodoxy as wedded to German ... More

This chapter examines the roles that narrative fiction—primarily orthodox novels and novellas of contemporary Jewish life—played in creating and sustaining a vision of orthodoxy as wedded to German culture and ideas about modernity as it was to maintaining the continuity with Jewish tradition which orthodox leaders felt reformers had forsaken. As prominent as fiction was in Jeschurun, Der Israelit and other papers, it always occupied a subordinate position in the orthodox world, inferior to Torah and Talmud study, and ranking far beneath more traditional Jewish reading material.Less

Admit Him into the Covenant of Abraham?: Circumcision and Other Birth Rituals

Yaacov Deutsch

in Judaism in Christian Eyes: Ethnographic Descriptions of Jews and Judaism in Early Modern Europe

This chapter focuses on a topic that pertains to the life cycle—birth and its attendant ritual. Birth rituals are indeed among the most popular subjects in our corpus. A case in point is circumcision ... More

This chapter focuses on a topic that pertains to the life cycle—birth and its attendant ritual. Birth rituals are indeed among the most popular subjects in our corpus. A case in point is circumcision (brit mila), which is discussed in thirty-nine of the forty works that cover Jewish life cycle events. The relative abundance of early modern travel works that describe the circumcision ceremony attest to the curiosity that this practice aroused.Less

Towards the Future: Religious, Educational, and Cultural Reconstruction

David H. Weinberg

in Recovering a Voice: West European Jewry After the Holocaust

This chapter assesses how the Jews of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands dealt with the unprecedented religious, educational, and cultural needs of their diverse constituents. The sharp increase in ... More

This chapter assesses how the Jews of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands dealt with the unprecedented religious, educational, and cultural needs of their diverse constituents. The sharp increase in the number of alienated and unaffiliated Jews was a source of deep concern to rabbis and religious educators. In response, Orthodox institutions initiated liturgical changes that they hoped would make religious services more attractive. Liberal Judaism also made new inroads. Many young Jews had lived through the war years without any access to Jewish learning or Jewish communal life. In addressing the needs of this ‘lost’ generation, local Jewish educators not only had to develop innovative pedagogical techniques, such as informal classes, public lectures and discussion groups, and the use of radio, television, and film but also had to find ways of reintegrating young people into Jewish and general society. Thanks to funds received from the Claims Conference in the early 1950s and with the assistance of teachers and curricula supplied by American and Israeli agencies, Jewish pedagogues, rabbis, and administrators in western Europe not only formulated creative strategies to educate children, but also set about training new administrators, spiritual leaders, and schoolteachers.Less

Zion

Yaacob Dweck

in Dissident Rabbi: The Life of Jacob Sasportas

This chapter focuses on Gershom Scholem and Joel Teitelbaum as readers of Jacob Sasportas. Both Scholem and Teitelbaum considered the middle of the twentieth century as a period of crisis, and each, ... More

This chapter focuses on Gershom Scholem and Joel Teitelbaum as readers of Jacob Sasportas. Both Scholem and Teitelbaum considered the middle of the twentieth century as a period of crisis, and each, in his own way, turned to Sasportas's The Fading Flower of the Zevi as part of a larger response to that crisis. If Scholem and his student Isaiah Tishby had engaged in something akin to lower criticism in their editing and analysis of Sasportas, Teitelbaum employed analysis similar to higher criticism in his use of Sasportas. If Scholem saw Sabbatianism as generative of a crisis and fundamental rupture in Jewish history and turned to Sasportas as a witness to this crisis, Teitelbaum experienced the middle decades of the twentieth century as a crisis in and of itself. To him, Sasportas was not an intellectual instrument with which to reconstruct the past; rather, he functioned as a moral resource that served as a guide for the proper rabbinic response to religious messianism in the present. Ultimately, Scholem's and Teitelbaum's readings of The Fading Flower of the Zevi placed Sasportas squarely at the heart of a central debate in modern Jewish life: Zionism.Less

Ambiguous and Interminable Emancipation

David Sorkin

in Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries

This introductory chapter provides a background of the Jews' “emancipation and civil rights.” The very term “emancipation” came to be widely applied to Jews after “Catholic emancipation” in England ... More

This introductory chapter provides a background of the Jews' “emancipation and civil rights.” The very term “emancipation” came to be widely applied to Jews after “Catholic emancipation” in England (1829). Thus, “Jewish emancipation” concerns first and foremost the Jews' inclusion, elevation, or equalization as a distinct religious group. Only in the twentieth century did emancipation come to designate alterations in the Jews' status as a “nation” or a “race.” The book analyzes the complex and multidirectional process whereby Jews acquired civil and political rights and came to exercise citizenship's prerogatives. Once one realizes that emancipation is an interminable process that is an integral aspect of Jews' contemporary experience, one is forced to acknowledge that there are in fact no settled answers to the most pressing political and indeed existential issues of Jewish life. Neither the establishment of the State of Israel nor the flourishing of American Jewry let alone the rebuilding of Jewish life in Europe has definitively answered emancipation's challenges. The larger struggle for political equality and the full exercise of citizenship, for Jews, by Jews, and for other groups, remains pressing. The only thing one can confidently assert is that this struggle is inherently protean: it will be populated by ever new issues and causes, by proponents and opponents whose appearance and actions one cannot predict.Less

Women in Jewish Eastern Europe

Antony Polonsky

in Jews in Poland and Russia: 1881-1914 v. 2

This chapter studies the history of Jewish women in eastern Europe. In the period between 1750 and 1914, the patriarchal character of Jewish society and the inferior position of women within it was ... More

This chapter studies the history of Jewish women in eastern Europe. In the period between 1750 and 1914, the patriarchal character of Jewish society and the inferior position of women within it was increasingly undermined. Initially this created a crisis of the Jewish family with rocketing divorce rates and other social pathologies, including girls running away from home in order to convert to Christianity or becoming involved in prostitution. In the course of the nineteenth century, attitudes changed: more provision was made for the education of Jewish women; attempts were made to deal with social problems like prostitution; and marriage became more stable as the age of marriage rose and a greater degree of equality between its partners was established. However, the apparent impossibility of the Jews achieving full civil rights in the tsarist empire and social integration elsewhere, and the continuing social and economic crisis of the community, impeded the achievement of an appropriate role for Jewish women in religious and social life. As a result, this issue remained a central problem in Jewish life after 1914.Less

Maskilic History in Crisis

Shmuel Feiner

in Haskalah and History: The Emergence of a Modern Jewish Historical Consciousness

This chapter recounts how, in the 1860s, the radical maskilim burst onto the stage of the Haskalah in Russia, provoking a protest from within the maskilic camp. They were young, self-educated men in ... More

This chapter recounts how, in the 1860s, the radical maskilim burst onto the stage of the Haskalah in Russia, provoking a protest from within the maskilic camp. They were young, self-educated men in their twenties and thirties, natives of Lithuania and Belarus, employed in teaching and clerical positions. This radical stream began by criticizing the literature of the Haskalah. The radicals claimed that the works of the Haskalah authors were cut off from the spirit of the time and the real problems of the people. The mission of the Haskalah, they argued, was to inject vitality into Jewish life, acting as a counterweight to the traditional leadership that was suffocating it. Moreover, the radicals believed that Jewish culture was permeated with an excess of spirituality, which they wished to replace with the natural sciences. As far as the moderate maskilim were concerned, radicalism posed a dangerous threat and was a total departure from the Haskalah.Less

Social and Religious Change, 1750–1914

Antony Polonsky

in Jews in Poland and Russia: A Short History

This chapter details how the period between 1750 and 1914 saw significant urbanization in north-eastern Europe. In the towns of Warsaw, St Petersburg, Moscow, Lviv, Kraków, and Poznań, a new Jewish ... More

This chapter details how the period between 1750 and 1914 saw significant urbanization in north-eastern Europe. In the towns of Warsaw, St Petersburg, Moscow, Lviv, Kraków, and Poznań, a new Jewish way of life came into being. Jews earned their living in changed ways, Jewish communal institutions were transformed under the impact of government policies aimed at Jewish integration and the new needs created by the burgeoning of an industrial society, and, in those states where constitutional norms existed, Jews participated in municipal government. Jews also built modernized synagogues and schools and founded monthly, weekly, and eventually daily Jewish newspapers, which also provided a living for Jewish writers in Hebrew and Yiddish. Ultimately, too, it was in these new conurbations that a new pattern of interaction between Jews and non-Jews was created. The Jewish popular culture that emerged in the four decades before the First World War was an international phenomenon that accompanied the emigration of Jews in large numbers from the lands of former Poland–Lithuania to western Europe, the Americas, and even the Antipodes.Less

Jewish Religious Life from the Mid-Eighteenth Century to 1914

Antony Polonsky

in Jews in Poland and Russia: 1881-1914 v. 2

This chapter explores how most of the Jews of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth remained observant in the traditional sense throughout the nineteenth century. This period saw important ... More

This chapter explores how most of the Jews of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth remained observant in the traditional sense throughout the nineteenth century. This period saw important developments in Jewish religious life. Hasidism emerged as a major force, but as it expanded it began to modify itself and to shed its more extreme character in an attempt to win over its Orthodox opponents. In its initial form it aroused strong opposition from those who feared its messianic and antinomian character. These ‘mitnagedim’ (‘opponents’, i.e. of hasidism) also changed significantly in the course of the nineteenth century. While maintaining their stress on halakhah (Jewish law) and talmudic study, they now also began to emphasize the importance of ethical principles and meditation. The two groups were united in their opposition to the maskilim and their reforms, and to the corrosive effect of secularization on normative Jewish observance, particularly as ‘reformed’ versions of Jewish religious practice began to obtain a degree of support among the integrationist minority. This led not only to a significant reduction in the level of conflict between the two groups, but also to the creation of an Orthodox religious culture.Less