Stephan E. C. Wendehorst
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199265305
- eISBN:
- 9780191730849
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199265305.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History, History of Religion
Part I attempts to account for the rise of Zionism in British Jewry at a particular historical juncture. The ascendancy of Zionism in British Jewry from the mid-1930s is explained as the result of a ...
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Part I attempts to account for the rise of Zionism in British Jewry at a particular historical juncture. The ascendancy of Zionism in British Jewry from the mid-1930s is explained as the result of a combination of structural, long-term developments and temporary, but no less decisive factors. Using categories borrowed and adapted from modernist theories of nationalism these are grouped in three categories: first, the disintegration of traditional religious and social frames of reference; second, antagonistic ‘Others’, against which British Jews identified themselves collectively; and third the attractions which the Zionist project held out to British Jews.the enemy without Anti-Semitism refugees League of Nations the shoah Second World War anti-Semitism by default the enemy within liberal assimilationists Communists the Orthodox the Jewish question the Zionist programme memory and oblivion territory language and cultureLess
Part I attempts to account for the rise of Zionism in British Jewry at a particular historical juncture. The ascendancy of Zionism in British Jewry from the mid-1930s is explained as the result of a combination of structural, long-term developments and temporary, but no less decisive factors. Using categories borrowed and adapted from modernist theories of nationalism these are grouped in three categories: first, the disintegration of traditional religious and social frames of reference; second, antagonistic ‘Others’, against which British Jews identified themselves collectively; and third the attractions which the Zionist project held out to British Jews.the enemy without Anti-Semitism refugees League of Nations the shoah Second World War anti-Semitism by default the enemy within liberal assimilationists Communists the Orthodox the Jewish question the Zionist programme memory and oblivion territory language and culture
Ezra Mendelsohn (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 1997
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195112030
- eISBN:
- 9780199854608
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195112030.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, History of Religion
This volume collects chapters on Jewish literature which deal with “the manifold ways that literary texts reveal their authors' attitudes toward their own Jewish identity and toward diverse aspects ...
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This volume collects chapters on Jewish literature which deal with “the manifold ways that literary texts reveal their authors' attitudes toward their own Jewish identity and toward diverse aspects of the “Jewish question.”” Chapters in this volume explore the tension between Israeli and Diaspora identities, and between those who write in Hebrew or Yiddish and those who write in other “non-Jewish” languages. The chapters also explore the question of how Jewish writers remember history in their “search for a useable past.” From chapters on Jabotinsky's virtually unknown plays to Philip Roth's novels, this book provides a strong overview of contemporary themes in Jewish literary studies.Less
This volume collects chapters on Jewish literature which deal with “the manifold ways that literary texts reveal their authors' attitudes toward their own Jewish identity and toward diverse aspects of the “Jewish question.”” Chapters in this volume explore the tension between Israeli and Diaspora identities, and between those who write in Hebrew or Yiddish and those who write in other “non-Jewish” languages. The chapters also explore the question of how Jewish writers remember history in their “search for a useable past.” From chapters on Jabotinsky's virtually unknown plays to Philip Roth's novels, this book provides a strong overview of contemporary themes in Jewish literary studies.
Jay Geller
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823233618
- eISBN:
- 9780823241781
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823233618.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Judaism
This work rummages among the responses to the unresolved question of whether and how Judentum (Judaism, Jewry, Jewishness) could be integrated into Germanophone societies between the Enlightenment ...
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This work rummages among the responses to the unresolved question of whether and how Judentum (Judaism, Jewry, Jewishness) could be integrated into Germanophone societies between the Enlightenment and the Shoah. It examines how these modernizing societies, undergoing processes of identity formation, were confronted by the increasing difficulty to distinguish “German” from “Jew” and the persistence of the supposedly superseded Judentum, which threatened their own claims to autonomy and universality. To counter these threats popular and scientific discourses rendered difference visible by means of fetishizing ethnicity-, race-, gender-, and sexuality-coded representations of “the Jew”'s body (e.g., nose, hair) and body techniques (e.g., circumcision). But those identified as Jewish and immersed everyday in derisory and dehumanizing ascriptions had their own question and other answers. Those denigrating identifications became for some Jewish-identified individuals building blocks for working through their situations and constructing their responses. This book maps the dissemination of and interrelationships among signifiers of Jewish corporeality in Jewish-identified authors, such as Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Karl Marx, Max Nordau, and Walter Benjamin, as well as “Jew”-identifying writers, such as Ludwig Feuerbach, Daniel Paul Schreber, Arthur Dinter, and Adolf Hitler. It also traces the gendered trajectory of Spinoza reception, “Zopf-” (braid) as a nodal-point mediating German Gentile-Jewish relations, and the poisonous correlation of Jews with syphilis and diseased reproduction. The book portrays how Jewish-identified individuals moved beyond introjection and disavowal to appropriate and transform this epidemic of signification to make sense of their worlds and our modernity.Less
This work rummages among the responses to the unresolved question of whether and how Judentum (Judaism, Jewry, Jewishness) could be integrated into Germanophone societies between the Enlightenment and the Shoah. It examines how these modernizing societies, undergoing processes of identity formation, were confronted by the increasing difficulty to distinguish “German” from “Jew” and the persistence of the supposedly superseded Judentum, which threatened their own claims to autonomy and universality. To counter these threats popular and scientific discourses rendered difference visible by means of fetishizing ethnicity-, race-, gender-, and sexuality-coded representations of “the Jew”'s body (e.g., nose, hair) and body techniques (e.g., circumcision). But those identified as Jewish and immersed everyday in derisory and dehumanizing ascriptions had their own question and other answers. Those denigrating identifications became for some Jewish-identified individuals building blocks for working through their situations and constructing their responses. This book maps the dissemination of and interrelationships among signifiers of Jewish corporeality in Jewish-identified authors, such as Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Karl Marx, Max Nordau, and Walter Benjamin, as well as “Jew”-identifying writers, such as Ludwig Feuerbach, Daniel Paul Schreber, Arthur Dinter, and Adolf Hitler. It also traces the gendered trajectory of Spinoza reception, “Zopf-” (braid) as a nodal-point mediating German Gentile-Jewish relations, and the poisonous correlation of Jews with syphilis and diseased reproduction. The book portrays how Jewish-identified individuals moved beyond introjection and disavowal to appropriate and transform this epidemic of signification to make sense of their worlds and our modernity.
Ritchie Robertson
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199248889
- eISBN:
- 9780191697784
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199248889.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter turns to what historians have recently called ‘dissimilation’, the affirmation of Jewishness in response to an unwelcoming society. It inquires into new ways of being Jewish and ...
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This chapter turns to what historians have recently called ‘dissimilation’, the affirmation of Jewishness in response to an unwelcoming society. It inquires into new ways of being Jewish and reinventing Jewish identity: the rediscovery and revaluation of the traditional Jewish communities of eastern Europe; the notion that the Jew was really an Oriental and hence endowed quite differently from the Europeans among whom he was stranded; and finally the Zionist movement, typified by Theodor Herzl, which sought to solve the Jewish question by transporting the Jews to a new, or old, home in the East.Less
This chapter turns to what historians have recently called ‘dissimilation’, the affirmation of Jewishness in response to an unwelcoming society. It inquires into new ways of being Jewish and reinventing Jewish identity: the rediscovery and revaluation of the traditional Jewish communities of eastern Europe; the notion that the Jew was really an Oriental and hence endowed quite differently from the Europeans among whom he was stranded; and finally the Zionist movement, typified by Theodor Herzl, which sought to solve the Jewish question by transporting the Jews to a new, or old, home in the East.
Thomas J. Laub
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199539321
- eISBN:
- 9780191715808
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199539321.003.0009
- Subject:
- History, Military History, European Modern History
At the start of the Occupation, both French and German agencies accepted the fundamental legitimacy of the so‐called Jewish Question (Judenfrage) and adopted anti‐Semitic policies of defamation, ...
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At the start of the Occupation, both French and German agencies accepted the fundamental legitimacy of the so‐called Jewish Question (Judenfrage) and adopted anti‐Semitic policies of defamation, discrimination, and despoliation with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Perceiving Jews as a security threat, the military administration evicted Jews from a security zone along the Channel coast and played a major role in the ‘Aryanization’ of the French economy, but the MBF condemned ‘Aryanization’ on legal grounds and did not believe that Jews stood behind all resistance activity. The Vichy regime defamed and discriminated against Jews on its own accord, created the General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs to despoil Jews, and ordered French police to incarcerate specific categories of Jews, but Pierre Laval objected to the arrest of assimilated French Jews because the roundups undermined support for his government. The SS and German embassy in Paris both championed the entire defamation, discrimination, despoliation, and deportation process, but they lacked the manpower and a legal mandate to act on their own before the summer of 1942. As the fortunes of war turned against the Reich, Hitler championed increasingly ruthless anti‐Semitic measures that culminated in the Final Solution.Less
At the start of the Occupation, both French and German agencies accepted the fundamental legitimacy of the so‐called Jewish Question (Judenfrage) and adopted anti‐Semitic policies of defamation, discrimination, and despoliation with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Perceiving Jews as a security threat, the military administration evicted Jews from a security zone along the Channel coast and played a major role in the ‘Aryanization’ of the French economy, but the MBF condemned ‘Aryanization’ on legal grounds and did not believe that Jews stood behind all resistance activity. The Vichy regime defamed and discriminated against Jews on its own accord, created the General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs to despoil Jews, and ordered French police to incarcerate specific categories of Jews, but Pierre Laval objected to the arrest of assimilated French Jews because the roundups undermined support for his government. The SS and German embassy in Paris both championed the entire defamation, discrimination, despoliation, and deportation process, but they lacked the manpower and a legal mandate to act on their own before the summer of 1942. As the fortunes of war turned against the Reich, Hitler championed increasingly ruthless anti‐Semitic measures that culminated in the Final Solution.
Jay Geller
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823233618
- eISBN:
- 9780823241781
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823233618.003.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Judaism
This chapter introduces terminology and methods that will be used throughout this study. It offers working definitions of Judentum, antisemitism, Jewish-identified individuals, fetish, modernity, and ...
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This chapter introduces terminology and methods that will be used throughout this study. It offers working definitions of Judentum, antisemitism, Jewish-identified individuals, fetish, modernity, and the morphemic/orthographic/semantic/phonemic field. It also describes a physiognomic epidemiological method, a technique for mapping the emergence and distribution of as well as the interrelationships among particular Jewish-associated morphemes and images in German-language verbal and visual texts. The chapter depicts a European modernity characterized by the emergence of medical/biological and national/evolutionary/colonial narratives and accompanying authorizing discourses by which truth was identified and rendered visible on the body—specifically, the body of “the Jew” and the techniques practiced upon it (e.g., circumcision). It situates the socio-politico Jewish Question in Germanophone lands within the unresolved crisis over whether or not Jewish-identified individuals should or could be integrated into the dominant society.Less
This chapter introduces terminology and methods that will be used throughout this study. It offers working definitions of Judentum, antisemitism, Jewish-identified individuals, fetish, modernity, and the morphemic/orthographic/semantic/phonemic field. It also describes a physiognomic epidemiological method, a technique for mapping the emergence and distribution of as well as the interrelationships among particular Jewish-associated morphemes and images in German-language verbal and visual texts. The chapter depicts a European modernity characterized by the emergence of medical/biological and national/evolutionary/colonial narratives and accompanying authorizing discourses by which truth was identified and rendered visible on the body—specifically, the body of “the Jew” and the techniques practiced upon it (e.g., circumcision). It situates the socio-politico Jewish Question in Germanophone lands within the unresolved crisis over whether or not Jewish-identified individuals should or could be integrated into the dominant society.
Benjamin Nathans
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520208308
- eISBN:
- 9780520931299
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520208308.003.0008
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
This chapter traces the genesis of the quotas and examines the way they fostered the emergence of separate Jewish student organizations as the “Jewish Question” insinuated itself into the academy. It ...
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This chapter traces the genesis of the quotas and examines the way they fostered the emergence of separate Jewish student organizations as the “Jewish Question” insinuated itself into the academy. It deals with a collective portrait of Russian-Jewish students in the aftermath of the failed 1905 revolution, based on a series of contemporary surveys conducted at institutions of higher education in Kiev, Odessa, and Moscow.Less
This chapter traces the genesis of the quotas and examines the way they fostered the emergence of separate Jewish student organizations as the “Jewish Question” insinuated itself into the academy. It deals with a collective portrait of Russian-Jewish students in the aftermath of the failed 1905 revolution, based on a series of contemporary surveys conducted at institutions of higher education in Kiev, Odessa, and Moscow.
Ulrike Ehret
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719079436
- eISBN:
- 9781781702017
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719079436.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
This chapter describes how the ‘Jewish question’ and its ‘solution’ were defined in Catholic publications. The call to strengthen Christian values in the modern age and the call to convert the Jews ...
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This chapter describes how the ‘Jewish question’ and its ‘solution’ were defined in Catholic publications. The call to strengthen Christian values in the modern age and the call to convert the Jews were the most common solutions offered in English Catholic newspapers. The Tablet, the Catholic Times and the Catholic Herald did not change their view that the Jews brought their fate upon themselves, despite anger at the brutality of the pogrom. The Gelben Hefte did not share the self-restraint that the papers of political Catholicism tried to practise. National Socialism could tap into a stream of antisemitic stereotypes that were popular and common since the First World War. Most literature on Catholic antisemitism asserts that racial antisemitism was firmly rejected by Catholics. Generally, this discussion shows the nature of anti-Jewish prejudices and times and occasions when the intensity of antisemitic articles was specifically high.Less
This chapter describes how the ‘Jewish question’ and its ‘solution’ were defined in Catholic publications. The call to strengthen Christian values in the modern age and the call to convert the Jews were the most common solutions offered in English Catholic newspapers. The Tablet, the Catholic Times and the Catholic Herald did not change their view that the Jews brought their fate upon themselves, despite anger at the brutality of the pogrom. The Gelben Hefte did not share the self-restraint that the papers of political Catholicism tried to practise. National Socialism could tap into a stream of antisemitic stereotypes that were popular and common since the First World War. Most literature on Catholic antisemitism asserts that racial antisemitism was firmly rejected by Catholics. Generally, this discussion shows the nature of anti-Jewish prejudices and times and occasions when the intensity of antisemitic articles was specifically high.
Anthony Kauders
- Published in print:
- 1996
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198206316
- eISBN:
- 9780191677076
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198206316.003.0008
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
This chapter qualifies statements regarding Adolf Hitler's supposed lack of interest in the ‘Jewish question’ towards the end of the Republic. Not only do such arguments overlook what happened at ...
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This chapter qualifies statements regarding Adolf Hitler's supposed lack of interest in the ‘Jewish question’ towards the end of the Republic. Not only do such arguments overlook what happened at local and regional levels, where National Socialists continued their campaign against the Jews, they also ignore the fact that ‘saturation’ can set in fairly early for an electorate to believe in the contents of a given piece of propaganda. The chapter then attempts to recapitulate some of the developments which led to this confidence on Hitler's part. It is divided into four sections, the first giving an account of the more general attitudes towards the ‘Jewish question’ in both cities, the second discussing possible explanations for differences in approach, the third assessing the extent to which both cities were representative of Germany at large, and the fourth offering concluding remarks on the implications of the discussions above.Less
This chapter qualifies statements regarding Adolf Hitler's supposed lack of interest in the ‘Jewish question’ towards the end of the Republic. Not only do such arguments overlook what happened at local and regional levels, where National Socialists continued their campaign against the Jews, they also ignore the fact that ‘saturation’ can set in fairly early for an electorate to believe in the contents of a given piece of propaganda. The chapter then attempts to recapitulate some of the developments which led to this confidence on Hitler's part. It is divided into four sections, the first giving an account of the more general attitudes towards the ‘Jewish question’ in both cities, the second discussing possible explanations for differences in approach, the third assessing the extent to which both cities were representative of Germany at large, and the fourth offering concluding remarks on the implications of the discussions above.
Jay Geller
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823233618
- eISBN:
- 9780823241781
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823233618.003.0007
- Subject:
- Religion, Judaism
This chapter demonstrates how the role of Judentum in Karl Marx's work cannot be limited to its few explicit discussions such as in “On the Jewish Question.” Though Marx did not self-identify as a ...
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This chapter demonstrates how the role of Judentum in Karl Marx's work cannot be limited to its few explicit discussions such as in “On the Jewish Question.” Though Marx did not self-identify as a Jew, he was regularly confronted by others who, often venomously, identified him as a Jew. By charting Marx's rhetoric, his use of such Jewish-associated morphemes as “Lump-” (rag, rogue) and “Verkehr-” (intercourse, inverted [verkehrt-]), this chapter analyzes how they may have provided the means by which he not only rendered the theories of his rivals (esp. Max Stirner) ludicrous, but, more significantly, also worked out his understanding of capitalism. In addition to analyses of The German Ideology, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (on the Lumpenproletariat), Capital, and other writings, the chapter situates Marx within a society of endemic anti-Jewish polemic in which Jews were perceived as extensively involved in crime, finance, and various rag trades.Less
This chapter demonstrates how the role of Judentum in Karl Marx's work cannot be limited to its few explicit discussions such as in “On the Jewish Question.” Though Marx did not self-identify as a Jew, he was regularly confronted by others who, often venomously, identified him as a Jew. By charting Marx's rhetoric, his use of such Jewish-associated morphemes as “Lump-” (rag, rogue) and “Verkehr-” (intercourse, inverted [verkehrt-]), this chapter analyzes how they may have provided the means by which he not only rendered the theories of his rivals (esp. Max Stirner) ludicrous, but, more significantly, also worked out his understanding of capitalism. In addition to analyses of The German Ideology, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (on the Lumpenproletariat), Capital, and other writings, the chapter situates Marx within a society of endemic anti-Jewish polemic in which Jews were perceived as extensively involved in crime, finance, and various rag trades.
Jay Geller
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823233618
- eISBN:
- 9780823241781
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823233618.003.0008
- Subject:
- Religion, Judaism
This chapter analyzes Max Nordau's best-selling works of 1880s liberal cultural criticism, Conventional Lies of Our Civilization and Paradoxes. Written a decade before his public self-identification ...
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This chapter analyzes Max Nordau's best-selling works of 1880s liberal cultural criticism, Conventional Lies of Our Civilization and Paradoxes. Written a decade before his public self-identification with and affirmation of Judentum when he embraced Theodor Herzl's Zionism, these works demonstrate an obsessive avoidance of the Jewish Question, discussion of which pervaded Germanophone Europe. The chapter argues that Nordau's diagnoses of European modernity were constructed about this (all but total) absence of the Jewish people, especially their contemporary situation and future prospects; that is, he betrays his effort to foreclose his readers' possible identification of him as a Jew by employing puns, wordplays, displacements, conspicuous omissions and inclusions that are replete with references to problematic Jewish attempts at assimilation into European culture and language as well as to antisemitic depictions of the body of “the Jew,” especially as circumcised and diseased (e.g., associated with leprosy).Less
This chapter analyzes Max Nordau's best-selling works of 1880s liberal cultural criticism, Conventional Lies of Our Civilization and Paradoxes. Written a decade before his public self-identification with and affirmation of Judentum when he embraced Theodor Herzl's Zionism, these works demonstrate an obsessive avoidance of the Jewish Question, discussion of which pervaded Germanophone Europe. The chapter argues that Nordau's diagnoses of European modernity were constructed about this (all but total) absence of the Jewish people, especially their contemporary situation and future prospects; that is, he betrays his effort to foreclose his readers' possible identification of him as a Jew by employing puns, wordplays, displacements, conspicuous omissions and inclusions that are replete with references to problematic Jewish attempts at assimilation into European culture and language as well as to antisemitic depictions of the body of “the Jew,” especially as circumcised and diseased (e.g., associated with leprosy).
Holly Case
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780691131153
- eISBN:
- 9781400890217
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691131153.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
This chapter examines the argument about force, which views universal war and genocide, the Final Solution, as representative of the fullest realization of the age of questions. It begins with a ...
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This chapter examines the argument about force, which views universal war and genocide, the Final Solution, as representative of the fullest realization of the age of questions. It begins with a discussion of rhetoric surrounding a “solution” to the Polish question, and how the ideal of emancipation brought with it the longing for an emancipator, an advocate and liberator. It then considers how questions were bundled to suggest or combine solutions, how equilibrium emerged as the prerequisite for a solution to the Eastern question, and how the Jewish question was formulated in the age of questions. It also explores a number of attributes of the age of questions that figured into the trajectory from a Jewish question to the Final Solution before concluding with an analysis of the chain of questions that Adolf Hitler and the Nazis opened during the years and months preceding the Great War.Less
This chapter examines the argument about force, which views universal war and genocide, the Final Solution, as representative of the fullest realization of the age of questions. It begins with a discussion of rhetoric surrounding a “solution” to the Polish question, and how the ideal of emancipation brought with it the longing for an emancipator, an advocate and liberator. It then considers how questions were bundled to suggest or combine solutions, how equilibrium emerged as the prerequisite for a solution to the Eastern question, and how the Jewish question was formulated in the age of questions. It also explores a number of attributes of the age of questions that figured into the trajectory from a Jewish question to the Final Solution before concluding with an analysis of the chain of questions that Adolf Hitler and the Nazis opened during the years and months preceding the Great War.
Jay Geller
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780823282005
- eISBN:
- 9780823284795
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823282005.003.0007
- Subject:
- Religion, Judaism
This chapter addresses the famous joke on “the elephant and the Jewish question,” whose prominence is attested by its many iterations not only in collections of Jewish jokes but also in works of ...
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This chapter addresses the famous joke on “the elephant and the Jewish question,” whose prominence is attested by its many iterations not only in collections of Jewish jokes but also in works of philosophy and theory. Drawing together two seemingly unrelated terms such as Jews and elephants and pointing at their close proximity, jokes do not merely comment on the preposterous character of the “rumor about the Jews” that there is an inherent relationship between Jews and nonhuman animals. The joke also points to what escapes theory and calls out its limitations, for theory takes the Jew as well as the animal as categories, singular as they might be, that can be comprehended only vis-à-vis universals. The chapter then looks at how Jewish authors have called into question the human-nonhuman animal divide in their struggle to think through European modernity.Less
This chapter addresses the famous joke on “the elephant and the Jewish question,” whose prominence is attested by its many iterations not only in collections of Jewish jokes but also in works of philosophy and theory. Drawing together two seemingly unrelated terms such as Jews and elephants and pointing at their close proximity, jokes do not merely comment on the preposterous character of the “rumor about the Jews” that there is an inherent relationship between Jews and nonhuman animals. The joke also points to what escapes theory and calls out its limitations, for theory takes the Jew as well as the animal as categories, singular as they might be, that can be comprehended only vis-à-vis universals. The chapter then looks at how Jewish authors have called into question the human-nonhuman animal divide in their struggle to think through European modernity.
Ritchie Robertson
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199248889
- eISBN:
- 9780191697784
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199248889.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The ‘Jewish Question’, the problem concerning the position of Jews in Germany and Austria, was widely discussed from the 1770s onwards. Emancipation culminated in 1871 with the bestowal of equal ...
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The ‘Jewish Question’, the problem concerning the position of Jews in Germany and Austria, was widely discussed from the 1770s onwards. Emancipation culminated in 1871 with the bestowal of equal rights on all Jewish citizens of the newly formed German Empire. Along with progress towards emancipation, the Jewish presence in German and Austrian culture became increasingly conspicuous, reaching a peak of brilliance and diversity in the Weimar Republic, before being annihilated or sent into exile by the National Socialist regime. The focus of this book is on the Jewish presence in German literature. It aims to render the ‘Jewish question’ more intelligible by looking at its literary expressions. While the main focus is on the period 1880–1930, it also goes back to the eighteenth century to show how the project of Jewish emancipation was closely tied to an Enlightenment philosemitism which was problematic from the outset.Less
The ‘Jewish Question’, the problem concerning the position of Jews in Germany and Austria, was widely discussed from the 1770s onwards. Emancipation culminated in 1871 with the bestowal of equal rights on all Jewish citizens of the newly formed German Empire. Along with progress towards emancipation, the Jewish presence in German and Austrian culture became increasingly conspicuous, reaching a peak of brilliance and diversity in the Weimar Republic, before being annihilated or sent into exile by the National Socialist regime. The focus of this book is on the Jewish presence in German literature. It aims to render the ‘Jewish question’ more intelligible by looking at its literary expressions. While the main focus is on the period 1880–1930, it also goes back to the eighteenth century to show how the project of Jewish emancipation was closely tied to an Enlightenment philosemitism which was problematic from the outset.
Ethan Kleinberg
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780823262090
- eISBN:
- 9780823266388
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823262090.003.0003
- Subject:
- Religion, Philosophy of Religion
This essay explores the divergent though intertwined presentations of Jewish identity in the post World War Two philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. There is a temporal, geographical ...
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This essay explores the divergent though intertwined presentations of Jewish identity in the post World War Two philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. There is a temporal, geographical and cultural gulf that separates these two thinkers but these distances can be bridged at the site of Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1946 text Reflections on the Jewish Question insofar as Levinas and Derrida’s responses to Sartre create a textual intersection between Levinas’s “Being-Jewish” (1947), and Derrida’s “Abraham the Other” (2000). The relation and connection between Levinas and Derrida becomes more clear when one considers the way that Derrida’s essay is implicitly and more importantly a confrontation with the philosophy of Levinas. What’s more the texts by Levinas and Derrida are each predicated on responses to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger in relation to his involvement with the National Socialist party. Despite the separation between the texts, both these thinkers chose to replace, evade, or preempt this “Jewish Question” by instead posing the question of “being-Jewish” in response to the Holocaust, the Nazi Final Solution. This essay explores the ramifications of this connection in relation to Levinas’s ethical philosophy of the other in his “Talmudic writings” and Derrida’s category of the “Marrano."Less
This essay explores the divergent though intertwined presentations of Jewish identity in the post World War Two philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. There is a temporal, geographical and cultural gulf that separates these two thinkers but these distances can be bridged at the site of Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1946 text Reflections on the Jewish Question insofar as Levinas and Derrida’s responses to Sartre create a textual intersection between Levinas’s “Being-Jewish” (1947), and Derrida’s “Abraham the Other” (2000). The relation and connection between Levinas and Derrida becomes more clear when one considers the way that Derrida’s essay is implicitly and more importantly a confrontation with the philosophy of Levinas. What’s more the texts by Levinas and Derrida are each predicated on responses to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger in relation to his involvement with the National Socialist party. Despite the separation between the texts, both these thinkers chose to replace, evade, or preempt this “Jewish Question” by instead posing the question of “being-Jewish” in response to the Holocaust, the Nazi Final Solution. This essay explores the ramifications of this connection in relation to Levinas’s ethical philosophy of the other in his “Talmudic writings” and Derrida’s category of the “Marrano."
Holly Case
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780691131153
- eISBN:
- 9781400890217
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691131153.003.0007
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
This chapter focuses on the argument about farce, which describes the age of questions as a mischievous and often malicious pretense. It chastises the smugness of querism and calls out the querists ...
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This chapter focuses on the argument about farce, which describes the age of questions as a mischievous and often malicious pretense. It chastises the smugness of querism and calls out the querists as spin doctors, first by highlighting the shadowy nature of the origins of questions, including the Jewish question, the Polish question, and the Eastern question. It then examines how period queristic mania caused more than a few to stop believing in the reality of questions, and how querists tried to invoke the empirical certainty of science to legitimate their folly. It also explains how, amid the growing consensus that final solutions were not possible, both the form and the content of interventions on questions began to change. Finally, it explores how academics in various disciplines continued to treat questions as real and assign them histories, noting in particular the proliferation of subject bibliographies on questions.Less
This chapter focuses on the argument about farce, which describes the age of questions as a mischievous and often malicious pretense. It chastises the smugness of querism and calls out the querists as spin doctors, first by highlighting the shadowy nature of the origins of questions, including the Jewish question, the Polish question, and the Eastern question. It then examines how period queristic mania caused more than a few to stop believing in the reality of questions, and how querists tried to invoke the empirical certainty of science to legitimate their folly. It also explains how, amid the growing consensus that final solutions were not possible, both the form and the content of interventions on questions began to change. Finally, it explores how academics in various disciplines continued to treat questions as real and assign them histories, noting in particular the proliferation of subject bibliographies on questions.
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300152104
- eISBN:
- 9780300168600
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300152104.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
In this examination of Lenin's genealogical and political connections to East European Jews, the book reveals the broad cultural meanings of indisputable evidence that Lenin's maternal grandfather ...
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In this examination of Lenin's genealogical and political connections to East European Jews, the book reveals the broad cultural meanings of indisputable evidence that Lenin's maternal grandfather was a Jew. It examines why and how Lenin's Jewish relatives converted to Christianity, explains how Lenin's vision of Russian Marxism shaped his identity, and explores Lenin's treatment of party colleagues of Jewish origin and the Jewish Question in Europe. The book also uncovers the continuous efforts of the Soviet communists to suppress Lenin's Jewishness and the no less persistent attempts of Russian extremists to portray Lenin as a Jew. The book expands our understanding not only of Lenin, but also of Russian and Soviet handling of the Jewish Question.Less
In this examination of Lenin's genealogical and political connections to East European Jews, the book reveals the broad cultural meanings of indisputable evidence that Lenin's maternal grandfather was a Jew. It examines why and how Lenin's Jewish relatives converted to Christianity, explains how Lenin's vision of Russian Marxism shaped his identity, and explores Lenin's treatment of party colleagues of Jewish origin and the Jewish Question in Europe. The book also uncovers the continuous efforts of the Soviet communists to suppress Lenin's Jewishness and the no less persistent attempts of Russian extremists to portray Lenin as a Jew. The book expands our understanding not only of Lenin, but also of Russian and Soviet handling of the Jewish Question.
Michael N. Barnett
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780691165974
- eISBN:
- 9781400880607
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691165974.003.0008
- Subject:
- Political Science, Comparative Politics
This chapter argues that the future foreign policies of American Jews will depend on the future of American Jews, their identity, how they imagine themselves in relation to the particular and the ...
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This chapter argues that the future foreign policies of American Jews will depend on the future of American Jews, their identity, how they imagine themselves in relation to the particular and the universal, and how such projections connect to contemporary practices of tribalism and cosmopolitanism, especially as they relate to the Jewish Problem and the Jewish Question. It sets out two scenarios that are most likely because they represent a combination of the past and the present. One future is defined by tribalism and the overshadowing of the Jewish Question by the Jewish Problem. The alternative to the tribal is the cosmopolitan, which treats the Jewish Question as relatively more important than the Jewish Problem, wants to see a Jewish people that is connected to humanity, and expresses greater ambivalence toward a more nationalistic Israel.Less
This chapter argues that the future foreign policies of American Jews will depend on the future of American Jews, their identity, how they imagine themselves in relation to the particular and the universal, and how such projections connect to contemporary practices of tribalism and cosmopolitanism, especially as they relate to the Jewish Problem and the Jewish Question. It sets out two scenarios that are most likely because they represent a combination of the past and the present. One future is defined by tribalism and the overshadowing of the Jewish Question by the Jewish Problem. The alternative to the tribal is the cosmopolitan, which treats the Jewish Question as relatively more important than the Jewish Problem, wants to see a Jewish people that is connected to humanity, and expresses greater ambivalence toward a more nationalistic Israel.
Jay Geller
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780823275595
- eISBN:
- 9780823277148
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823275595.003.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Jewish Studies
This chapter introduces the conundrum the monograph seeks to work through—Jewish-identified authors drawing upon the Bestiarium Judaicum, with which Jews have been historically associated, ...
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This chapter introduces the conundrum the monograph seeks to work through—Jewish-identified authors drawing upon the Bestiarium Judaicum, with which Jews have been historically associated, identified, and denigrated by non-Jews—and maps the historical and theoretical contexts for both these puzzling deployments and the efforts at making sense of them. It situates the socio-political Jewish Question in Germanophone lands, from roughly 1750 to the Shoah, within the unresolved crisis over whether or not Jewish-identified individuals should or could be integrated into the dominant society. It points out how the need to render purported Jewish difference visible drew upon natural history—the observation, description, categorization, and exhibition of the other-than-human—as mediated by the Bestiarium Judaicum. It provides an overview of contemporary theoretical and historical engagements with the Question of the Animal and with the representation of human (animals) as (nonhuman) animals. It then turns to how the scholarly literature has inadequately examined the associations of Jews and Animals, the Jew-Animal, and instead proposes to turn critical attention to the Jew-as-Animal—how Jewish-identified writers appropriated and reworked these Jew-Animals and gave voice to the Jewish animot. It briefly discusses several of the strategies that are elaborated in subsequent chapters.Less
This chapter introduces the conundrum the monograph seeks to work through—Jewish-identified authors drawing upon the Bestiarium Judaicum, with which Jews have been historically associated, identified, and denigrated by non-Jews—and maps the historical and theoretical contexts for both these puzzling deployments and the efforts at making sense of them. It situates the socio-political Jewish Question in Germanophone lands, from roughly 1750 to the Shoah, within the unresolved crisis over whether or not Jewish-identified individuals should or could be integrated into the dominant society. It points out how the need to render purported Jewish difference visible drew upon natural history—the observation, description, categorization, and exhibition of the other-than-human—as mediated by the Bestiarium Judaicum. It provides an overview of contemporary theoretical and historical engagements with the Question of the Animal and with the representation of human (animals) as (nonhuman) animals. It then turns to how the scholarly literature has inadequately examined the associations of Jews and Animals, the Jew-Animal, and instead proposes to turn critical attention to the Jew-as-Animal—how Jewish-identified writers appropriated and reworked these Jew-Animals and gave voice to the Jewish animot. It briefly discusses several of the strategies that are elaborated in subsequent chapters.
Karine V. Walther
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781469625393
- eISBN:
- 9781469625416
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469625393.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
Chapter 3 analyzes American Jewish activism to help their persecuted brethren during the 1840 Damascus Affair where accusations of a blood libel against Syrian subjects led to an international call ...
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Chapter 3 analyzes American Jewish activism to help their persecuted brethren during the 1840 Damascus Affair where accusations of a blood libel against Syrian subjects led to an international call for intervention. The chapter also focuses on how the Damascus Affair helped prompt the rise of American Jewish organizations dedicated in part to helping their oppressed brethren abroad, including the Board of Delegates of American Israelites. The chapter than analyzes American cooperation with British and French Jewish organizations, including the British Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Alliance Israélite Universelle, to intervene during the Spanish-Moroccan War of 1859 and the Safi Affair in 1863. This chapter analyzes how Jewish Americans attempted to reframe discussions of American identity by emphasizing the United States as a model for religious toleration and secularism, while at the same time distancing themselves from identification with racist depictions of “Oriental” Muslims.Less
Chapter 3 analyzes American Jewish activism to help their persecuted brethren during the 1840 Damascus Affair where accusations of a blood libel against Syrian subjects led to an international call for intervention. The chapter also focuses on how the Damascus Affair helped prompt the rise of American Jewish organizations dedicated in part to helping their oppressed brethren abroad, including the Board of Delegates of American Israelites. The chapter than analyzes American cooperation with British and French Jewish organizations, including the British Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Alliance Israélite Universelle, to intervene during the Spanish-Moroccan War of 1859 and the Safi Affair in 1863. This chapter analyzes how Jewish Americans attempted to reframe discussions of American identity by emphasizing the United States as a model for religious toleration and secularism, while at the same time distancing themselves from identification with racist depictions of “Oriental” Muslims.
