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This chapter talks about Jewish social policy, particularly that produced by the simultaneous intertwining of the institutional-administrative and socioeconomic aspects of Jewish society, and engendered by modern social policy parallel to the melding of state and civil society. Even where and when liberalism enjoyed its greatest hegemony in Europe, the nineteenth-century Jewish community as a legal entity had never dissolved, and the provision of charity had remained one of the community's most important functions in the eyes of the host society. The purview of Jewish philanthropy widened considerably in the late 1860s. A fresh wave of crisis galvanized Jewish public opinion, stimulated wide-ranging philanthropic activity, and promoted international Jewish solidarity through concerted action on behalf of one's oppressed brethren. The sense of common fate transcended national boundaries. Despite rivalries between states and between Jews living in those states, expressions of international Jewish brotherhood were frequent and sincere.

This chapter focuses on the reluctance of mainstream Jewish philanthropies to allow for the reality of Jewish diversity. It contrasts the univocal conception of Jewish identity that informs the work of the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), the overseas arm of the United Jewish Appeal (UJA), with the emphasis on diversity of the New Israel Fund (NIF). It scrutinizes the photographs that appear in the 1995 annual reports of these funds. These photos, with their different portrayals of donors, philanthropic officers, and recipients, present the contrasting conceptions of identity.

This chapter talks about Jewish philanthropy, which is an arena of clashing approaches to the study of the Jewish past. These approaches are called “essentialist,” “contextualist,” and “comparative.” The modernization of Jewish philanthropy, like the modernization of Jewish economic perceptions, may have its roots in many lands across a broad swath of time, but it was most clearly adumbrated by the western Sephardim. It was the result of many factors: the economic dislocation of large segments of Ashkezanic Jewry, which brought them under the care of relatively prosperous Sephardim; changes in sensibility among the Sephardim about poverty, labor, and charity; and finally, the vast and tenuous nature of the Sephardic diaspora, which encouraged the development of a Jewish identity defined more by economic and philanthropic activity than by halakhic discourse and ritual observance.

This chapter provides a broad overview of the poor in the early Christian world, and especially considers their relationship to the liturgies (Greek “leitourgia”) of religious and civic practice. It explores examples from Graeco‐Roman euergetism, the Roman food schemes of annona (the grain dole) and alimenta, Jewish philanthropy, including soup kitchens, and early Christian texts about charity ranging from the New Testament to the sixth century. It concludes that early Christian responses to help the poor drew heavily from the general cultural concept of liturgy in late antiquity.

This chapter explains that the central point of the second volume of Pauline Wengeroff's Memoirs of a Grandmother is the consequences of the loss of tradition in Russian Jewish families, exemplified by what transpired in her marital home. Her main narrative line is dramatic, accessible, and seductive. In it, she and her fellow Jewish women are victims — of Chonon/Jewish husbands, and of the overwhelming forces of modernity. Well before all this, however, Wengeroff was a prime agent of subverting tradition. She thus felt culpable and guilty not only for the sins of her youth but for those of her married adulthood that resulted in the failure to transmit tradition to her children. The chapter then considers the complexity of Wengeroff's and Chonon's Jewishness and of their relationship. It also looks at how Wengeroff found outlets for her Judaism as well as her need for meaningful activity outside the home as a bourgeoise before she wrote Memoirs. Both Chonon and Wengeroff participated in the trend of Russian Jewish philanthropy by supporting trade schools for poor children.

By the early decades of the twenty-first century, Jews in Detroit were arguably more invested in urbanism than they had been for many years. Millennial Jewish Detroit activists reinvented the geography of the city, in effect shrinking a city that earlier Jews had helped to extend. Furthermore, millennial activists wed the space of city to their visions of American and Jewish success, as many had before them. These activists helped create an entrepreneurial hotbed in the city, where new ideas, whatever they might be, could attract the power and capital of investors. The activists all believed that cities more than other kinds of places fostered creativity and experimentation, and that gains, in some form, would best be made from entering at the ground floor of urban revitalization and reinvention in Detroit. In this most recent chapter of Jewish urbanism in Detroit, the city remained a generator of contradictory impulses—to love, to redeem, to exploit, to disdain, to remake, to be more Jewish, to be less Jewish—for the Jews in its midst. The circuitous pathways of Jews’ urban journeys generated the character of modern Jewish life in the United States, as Jews oriented and re-oriented themselves to ever-changing city spaces.

This chapter focuses on the mission of a young rabbinic scholar, David ben Natan'el Carcassoni, to visit the major Sephardi communities of Europe in person and raise the funds needed to ransom the Jewish captives from eastern Europe. David Carcassoni's mission plunged him into the complex world of Mediterranean Jewish philanthropy that raised money for a number of different purposes, which formally did not include the needs of the Istanbul Jewish community. In order to succeed, Carcassoni needed to access the general pidyon shevuyim funds collected by most communities and ensure that as much as possible was sent back home to help the ransoming effort. He faced two major problems. First, he was by no means the only person traveling around the Jewish communities asking for money to help relieve the suffering of the Polish Jews. Second, the Jewish communities of Venice were the controlling force of the Jewish Mediterranean philanthropic network; they were the clearing house to which most funds were sent, and one of their roles was to determine where the money was most needed and to send it there. Without Venetian support, Carcassoni would find it very difficult to raise the sums he needed.