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This chapter discusses Tehilla Lichtenstein’s activities as leader of the Society of Jewish Science; she succeeded her husband Morris Lichtenstein after his death in 1938. She viewed Jewish Science as something that “reveals to the Jew the great treasures contained within Judaism”. She articulated her views in over 500 sermons, essays, lectures, and radio broadcasts.

This chapter begins with an analysis of virtues of peace of mind as extolled by Tehilla Lichtenstein, Alfred Geiger Moses, Morris Lichtenstein, and Clifton Harby Levy. It then examines the reasons behind the lack of membership in the Society of Jewish Science. Finally, the emergence of Jewish community-based healing centers is discussed.

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 discusses the flourishing of commercial and industrial capitalism in nineteenth-century Europe that strengthened the historic association between Jews and Trade. For Jews, as for any ethnic minority that falls into a particular economic niche, economic distinctiveness may engender or reinforce group identity. The Homo economicus judaicus, who was glorified by middle-class Jews in western Europe, was one of their own kind or a heroic progenitor of bourgeois Jewish society. When bourgeois Jews turned their attention from themselves to eastern Europe, their visages darkened. Impoverished eastern European Jews, particularly the millions who traveled westward, became the site of a different kind of Jewish social knowledge and the object of a new academic language: that of scientific philanthropy.

Boder was unique in his taking a wire recorder to the DP camps. But most of Boder's efforts in the aftermath were devoted to getting the interviews into print. This chapter chronicles this process in its evolving stages, from first publishing excerpts of the interviews, to fashioning a hybrid book, I Did Not Interview the Dead, to finally the freedom provided by self-publishing the interviews in Topical Autobiographies. The chapter further argues that Boder worked fastidiously to keep recording in the foreground even while rendering the recorded interviews into print. His indefatigable efforts to find the proper vehicle for the interviews—articles, academic or trade books, self-published manuscript—also illuminate the context of publishing books on the Holocaust in the late 1940s and 1950s, showing that interest was there, though publishers did not always share Boder's idiosyncratic expectations. A close examination of Boder's negotiations with The Jewish Publication Society dramatizes the problems and possibilities of his approach to publishing the DP interviews.

This chapter provides a comprehensive account of Jewish musical organizations in interwar Galicia. It investigates the various types of Jewish musical organizations and how they implemented their cultural policies. It also shows the wealth and variety of the musical life of the Jewish communities from the four south-eastern provinces of the Second Polish Republic: Lwów, Kraków, Stanisławów, and Tarnopol. The chapter looks into the goal of the Jewish Music Society in Lwów in order to unite the local Jewish musical community and represent the Jewish community in the city's musical life. It analyzes different musical interests and visions of society's cultural role that explain the different activities of symphony orchestra, choir, mandolin orchestra, and chamber orchestra.

For the members of the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music, founded in 1908, the rural miniature offered a crucial method of representing Jewish musical traditions including liturgy and klezmer for broad audiences. This chapter investigates early twentieth-century theories about the music of Russian Jewish communities, and considers the metaphorical association, invoked commonly in the writings of members of the Society and in literary and artistic depictions of Jewish culture, between the timbres of the violin and the nationalist concept of a “Jewish voice” expressed in music. The chapter focuses on a case study Joseph Achron’s “Hebrew Melody,” viewing the history of its composition, performance, and reception across the diaspora, following its adaptation in multiple new forms, including its use as a film score and recreation as a concert aria, popular song, and theremin solo.

This chapter studies the long historiographic tradition in search of a definition of the Haskalah. It suggests reducing the historical parameters of the Jewish Enlightenment so that it can be recognized as a trend in which modernizing intellectuals aspired to transform Jewish society. Despite the obvious diversity and dispersion of the Haskalah, and the difficulty in defining it precisely, the chapter enumerates a number of essential criteria, elaborating on the self-consciousness of the maskilim and paying special attention to their militant rhetoric and awareness of belonging to an avant-garde, redemptive, and revolutionary movement. It also sketches a portrait of the typical maskil, surveys the history of the movement and its various centres, and elucidates the dualistic nature of its ideology, explaining its links to the processes of Jewish modernization and secularization. Ultimately, the Haskalah was the intellectual option for modernization that triggered the Jewish Kulturkampf which, still alive today — especially in Israel — separates modernists and anti-modernists, Orthodox and secular Jews.

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.

This chapter examines the subject of love and the family within east European Jewish life. In the nineteenth century, almost every aspect of Jewish life was transformed in one way or another. The structures of Jewish family life in eastern Europe and the place of love and affection in these frameworks were no exceptions. However, to a greater degree than many today realize, there was also a great deal of continuity between what was accepted in traditional Ashkenazi Jewish family life and in the lives of their descendants. In some cases, the attention given to atypical lives of famous and exceptional individuals has led to a skewed picture of the past. Similarly, superficial views of traditional family dynamics have created a distorted picture of what life was like in traditional east European Jewish society. Looking at love and family life in their fullness and as part of the general social environment is one of the best ways to correct these errors and to arrive at a balanced view of realities and developments. Because marriage and love within the context of family life is a very broad subject, the chapter focuses on four major topics: courtship and marriage formation; marital roles and expectations; parenthood; and remarriage.

This chapter discusses the different eras in Russian Jewish history in which Pauline Wengeroff's Memoirs of a Grandmother is set. Wengeroff's two volumes share an overarching theme: Jewish tradition and its loss in modernity. Volume I reflects the years of her childhood and adolescence during the reign of Nicholas I. The Russian Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) took off as a movement and became a potent cultural force and challenge to traditional Jewish society in these years because of policies of Tsar Nicholas I. Volume II spans the years from mid-century to the death of Wengeroff's husband, Chonon, in 1892. It is about the overlapping destinies of her family and Russian Jewry in these decades, when Jewish modernity was no longer emerging but fully unfolding. This was the era of Alexander II, whose policies, liberal and reactionary, profoundly shaped the experience of modern Russian Jewry, and of Alexander III. The chapter then looks at the tsarist Jewry policies and Jewish society under Alexander II and III, considering the 'selective integration' policy and the emergence of the new Russian Jewish elite.

The main source of slaves in antiquity was the enslavement of war captives, which accompanied conquest of foreign territories in the course of imperialist policies. Other forms of enslavement such as natural reproduction, debt slavery, child exposure and sale, and the theft of human beings seem to have been less common and dependent on particular socioeconomic conditions and behavioural patterns. They will have gained in significance in late antiquity, however, when new war captives became scarce. Slaves would be sold at slave markets but also on other occasions, on the basis of mutual sales agreements between owners. Since the category of the slave was markedly distinct from that of the free person in both Jewish and Roman society, the transition from one mode to the other was legally regulated, so that particular forms of enslavement were prohibited and others allowed. However, it is not clear whether and to what extent these legal limitations were actually followed by the populace.

Although the actual number and percentage of slaves in ancient Jewish society cannot be determined any more, one can hypothesise about the social and economic location of slaves amongst the Jewish inhabitants of Roman Palestine. One way to arrive at such a hypothesis is to look at the representations of slave ownership and slaves' activities in ancient Jewish sources. Another, complementary way to assess slaves' location is to look at their structural place in other Roman provinces and to use that model as an analogy. The problem with such an approach is that it may be too generalising, not taking local differences into account. If both of these approaches are combined, they may yield results which may approximate historical reality, although certainty can never be reached in this regard.

This chapter explores the roots of the Sephardic Diaspora, particularly the amorphous structure of the Jewish community (aljama). Hispano-Jewish society was characterized by a loose association of local polities that were themselves divided by internal fissures among various factions and families. These tensions and mutual suspicions also pervaded the relationships among the rabbinic elite, popular preachers, and the general Jewish populace that both groups sought to guide. Although various factions sought leadership over Iberia's Jewish communities throughout the late medieval period, no single group emerged as the primary authority. Recognition of this internal complexity of the medieval Iberian aljama emphasizes that the reorganization of communal life in the Sephardic Diaspora was not the product of a natural solidarity inherited from the Middle Ages, and allows a greater appreciation of the individuality and effective pragmatism of the exiles.

This chapter analyses the Jewish spirit. It approaches the cultural history of a traditional society, as Jewish society was everywhere until the onset of modernity, by examining the history of the interaction of a society and its members with their collective history. Nationalist-inspired scholarship produced a Jewish political history. The Jewish historiography created in the decades after the Shoah and the establishment of Israel has turned in significant measure to social history. The postmodern age that has been so occupied with the deconstruction of symbols and meanings that were previously self-evident would seem to have prepared the ground for a new synthesis of cultural meaning. The chapter thus returns to the study of the spirit; not what it produced, but what it was.

This chapter addresses Pauline Wengeroff's strange tale about her brother Ephraim, who had converted to Christianity while in the United States and then reverted to Judaism during a family conclave in Germany under the agonized plea of their aged mother. After the death of their mother, who had made Ephraim swear not to return to the United States as long as she lived, he returned there. In fact, Ephraim returned to Christianity, too, and more, to proselytizing Jews. Ephraim played a large role in the near-publication of Memoirs of Grandmother in America: first, in translating both volumes into English from the predominant German in which they had appeared; in helping to identify potential publishers and in shopping the volumes around; and then in sinking Wengeroff's promising prospects of having them published by the Jewish Publication Society (JPS) when its publication board learned the truth about him. Wengeroff, who was terrified of pogroms, wished very much to come to America; she also tried mightily to have her memoirs published there. She succeeded in neither goal. Yet in a real sense she did come to America because her attempt to get published there set off a remarkable exchange among American Jewry's most prominent leaders about Jewish boundary lines and the ‘right’ story of Jewish modernity for American Jewry.