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This chapter focuses on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, which emerges from and constantly returns to 1948. For over twenty-five years, ever since Israel's archives made sources from 1948 available for historical research, scholars have striven to understand why Israel emerged victorious in its war against the Palestinians and Israel's neighboring Arab states. There is a broad consensus among scholars that Israel enjoyed relative military strength compared with its Arab foes. Although far smaller in population and land mass than the array of Arab states, Israel was able to field more soldiers, its army was better trained and had higher morale, and, although at a material disadvantage during the war's first months, in time it was able to acquire superior weaponry. In Israel, victory in 1948 was made possible by not only the tenacity and innovative spirit of its fighters, but also the marshaling of credit and capital, both within Israel and throughout the Jewish world.

This chapter explains that alongside the pidyon shevuyim network, there existed another economic and religious system covering the entire Jewish world that was focused on the eastern Mediterranean. This was the philanthropic network dedicated to supporting Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel. Though its goals were different, it overlapped with the pidyon shevuyim network: most communities collected money for both causes, sometimes even combining them into a single fund. The two systems thus acted in parallel, always in tension, and sometimes even in competition with each other. To understand this phenomenon and its broad significance for the Jewish world in both philanthropic and religious terms, the chapter looks at the issue of raising money for the Jews in the early modern Land of Israel. It also considers the spread of Sabbatheanism.

This chapter examines how the transregional aspects of the captive crisis gave it great significance for the Jewish world. The appearance on the slave markets of Istanbul of thousands of Jews, destitute and desperate, as well as the news coming in of the enormous destruction in Poland–Lithuania and the stream of emissaries and refugees traveling from town to town in search of help, forced Jewish communities across Europe to make a concerted effort to step up their charitable activity on their behalf. At the heart of all the activity was a transregional fundraising network run by the Jewish communities of Venice, the major Jewish center in the eastern Mediterranean. The Polish crisis put this system under great pressure. The calls on it multiplied and came from a number of different directions. Averse to turning away these needy Jews empty-handed, it adopted the policy it used for supporting the Jewish communities in the Land of Israel. The needs of the Polish Jewish captives challenged the fundraising network in other ways. For example, the fundraising crossed the cultural border within Jewish society, since Sephardi Jews were being called on to support Ashkenazim. Even more striking, however, was the way the network positioned itself vis-à-vis the political borders of Europe and the Mediterranean world. These were, perhaps, the first steps toward the development of an institutional Jewish world.

This chapter focuses on the Cold War, which split both Europe and its Jews into two camps. The Cold War imposed new barriers, both literally and figuratively. For the Jews of western Europe in particular, Soviet and American threats of unleashing nuclear missiles raised the prospect of a posthumous victory for Adolf Hitler over his ideological and ‘racial’ enemies. Divisions also arose in the communities themselves, reviving political debates from the interwar period that threatened to undo the fragile unity that leaders had attempted to forge after 1945. Yet rising East–West tensions did not totally paralyse west European Jewish communal life. Despite the formidable obstacles, both non-communist left-wing elements in the European Section of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) and mainstream leaders in western Europe worked diligently to steer a middle path between the demands of local political militants and leaders of Jewish organizations in the United States.

This chapter centers on Debora Lewkowicz, a daughter of a village tavernkeeper, who completed her primary school education in the city of Wieliczka in Western Galicia. It discusses Debora's close relationship with a young Pole, as a result of which her father quickly arranged for her to marry a Jewish man. It also refers to Debora's escape on the eve of her wedding and entry into the Felician Sisters' convent, where she was subsequently baptized and prepared for the profession of governess. The chapter explores Debora's ambivalence that reflected her life on the boundary between the Polish-Catholic and Jewish worlds. It reviews the overall impression that Debora left in her letters to her father and to the convent, which is one of a deeply conflicted young woman who was torn between rival loyalties.

This chapter focuses on the State of Israel and the World Jewish Congress, two different political bodies founded by the Jewish people to achieve equality. The role of the State of Israel is to defend against the danger that the World Jewish Congress might come to resemble other exclusively transnational entities, while the role of the World Jewish Congress is to guard the Jewish State from becoming too much like other nations. This chapter explains how this dual set of national and transnational rights and responsibilities was achieved.

This chapter discusses the emergence and rapid expansion of the Jewish community of Poland–Lithuania. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the Jewish community of Poland–Lithuania was the largest in the world, the result of the establishment of a new geography of the Jewish world that had started at the end of the thirteenth century. This was primarily a consequence of the worsening situation of the Jews in the countries of western and central Europe. At the same time, new opportunities opened up for Jews in the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The situation of Jews in pre-modern Poland–Lithuania had a paradoxical character. On the one hand, they were the representatives of a despised minority whose religious beliefs were regarded not only as false, but as harmful to the society around them. On the other hand, they occupied a position in Polish–Lithuanian society that was recognized by law and that gave them a certain amount of economic leverage and security.

This chapter evaluates the Polish Jewish folk motif and figure of Simkhe Plakhte. This topic deserves closer attention because of its wide popularity and extensive literary reworking among Polish Jews during the twentieth century. The putative folk tale of Simkhe Plakhte projects a character drawn from the shtetl underclass who not only subverts the established social order of the traditional Jewish world, but also earns respect from the non-Jewish ruling class of the old Polish Commonwealth. While the tale contains maskilic elements of anti-hasidic satire, it is also a conscious expression of Jewish fantasy and wish-fulfilment, reflecting a specific Polish Jewish milieu in the nineteenth century. These elements go far towards explaining the wide interest this material has sustained.

This chapter examines Rabbi Jehiel Jacob Weinberg's shift from a very public life to a more private one during his final years, which were spent in Montreux, Switzerland. It shows how his failing health and postwar developments have affected him and his intellectual work. Although in the post-war years Weinberg was able to write productively on Talmudic and halakhic themes, it was much more difficult for him to be involved with modern Jewish scholarship. In spite of the logistical difficulties, Weinberg was never totally removed from modern Jewish scholarship, and it was important to him that his views should find favour in the academic community. In addition, the chapter addresses the changes which impacted the Orthodox Jewish world in the aftermath of the war. Finally, the chapter discusses the most important aspects of Weinberg's writings — his postwar responsa.

This chapter presents a statement from the book's editors. Polish Jewry was one of the largest and most important Jewish communities in the world. By the late seventeenth century, nearly three-quarters of the world's Jews lived within the borders of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Polish Jewry provided the basis for the religious tradition of much of the Jewish world, and the territories of the former Polish states were also the source for those movements — Zionism, Socialism, as well as Orthodox ones — which were to transform the Jewish world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As late as 1939, Poland still contained the second-largest Jewish community in the world, while the largest, that in the United States, derived to a considerable extent from the Polish lands. Today, when organized Jewish life barely survives on Polish soil, it is vital for Jews to preserve the memory of a world from which so many of them are descended and from which they derive so many of the vital springs of their being.

This chapter analyzes the ways in which youth movements functioned in the lives of their adherents, suggesting that these organizations came to fill the same roles as religion had for previous generations. It highlights regional differences in the practices of the youth movements. It also reviews how the interwar period treated Poland as a unified state and had been recently cobbled together from the ruins of the pre-war empires. The chapter proposes a new understanding of the mental characteristics of Jewish children and adolescents in Poland between the two world wars. It looks at the youth's feelings regarding the future of the traditional Jewish world and their solidarity and identification with their ethnic community.

This chapter investigates Steven E. Aschheim's Brothers and Strangers (1983). In the 19th century, German Jews made their great social, political, and cultural bid for a sort of assimilation. In becoming Prussian and German citizens and diehard patriots, they desperately tried to minimize or totally break off the already limited relations with the neighbouring Jewish world of Eastern Europe. Around 1850 and later, the term ‘Ostjude’ stood for an image of an uncivilized, superstitious Easterner totally alien to the German Jew. Only when the assimilationist process suffered its first serious setbacks did some doubts, affecting the validity of the stereotype, creep in. For certain Jewish circles, especially Jewish intellectuals drafted into the German eastern front armies during World War I, the Ostjude became the very image of a Jewish cultural hero. Aschheim's book discusses both the stereotypes and the ideological discourse which manifested itself in the relations between these two great Jewish populations.

This chapter discusses the treatment of the Jewish identity of various composers by the Yiddish folklorist and music critic, Menachem Kipnis. It describes Kipnis as a small, energetic man with a soft but beautiful singing voice and considered one of the most popular Jewish folklorists of interwar Poland. It also looks into Kipnis' book World-Famous Jewish Musicians, a collection of biographies of nineteenth-century composers with a Jewish background. The chapter examines the contradictions and idiosyncrasies of World-Famous Jewish Musicians compared with Kipnis's other works. It seeks to understand the balance Kipnis struck between praise for Jewish composers and quasi-nationalist emphasis on their Jewishness on the one hand, and his work as a folklorist in Poland, collecting songs from traditional, Yiddish-speaking Jews on the other.

This chapter discusses how Moses Maimonides expressed a vision of Judaism as a remarkably naturalist religion of radical responsibility. His Judaism is a religion in which concrete behaviour serves the needs of abstract thought; that abstract thought is the deepest layer of the Torah and, at least in Maimonides' day, could be most clearly and accurately expressed in the vocabulary of the Neoplatonized Aristotelianism which Maimonides accepted as one of the highest expressions of the human spirit. This Judaism was simultaneously deeply elitist and profoundly universalist. Maimonides crystallized and expressed his vision of Judaism because the Jewish world in his day was, in his view, debased and paganized. Seeking to purify Judaism from ‘proto-kabbalah’, what he actually succeeded in doing was to force these currents of thought from the subterranean depths in which they had hitherto flowed up to the bright light of day. In that light they flourished, grew, and ultimately became dominant. Kabbalah has long since become the mainstream of Judaism, relegating Maimonideanism to the status of a largely ignored backwater.

Legal groups devoted to building international criminal law between 1919 and 1939 were rarely concerned with the rights of minorities or what are today called “human rights.” During World War Two, an organization that had been involved in minority rights, but not criminal prosecution—the World Jewish Congress—began developing new legal theories to prosecute Nazis who had planned and ordered crimes against Jews inside and outside of Germany. This was a challenging legal problem because many of these crimes were not covered under the Hague and Geneva Conventions. The World Jewish Congress successfully lobbied Allied government to include crimes against the Jews at the first Nuremberg trial and contributed a major legal brief that heavily influenced the U.S. prosecution. However, the Congress’ ultimate impact on the legal judgment was limited. Its main contribution was to advance a new concept of a “victim-centered” justice that included trials, restitution, and reparations

This chapter discusses the contribution of the Germany Jewry to the outer development of modern Judaism. The German Jews not only helped bring about the founding of the Jewish state and the World Jewish Congress, they also helped in shaping Judaism's inner renewal. The accomplishments of German Jewry constitute a rich and exemplary legacy bestowed upon the world's Jewish communities displaying the confident certainty of a Jewish cultural renaissance matching the greatest cultural achievements of Jewish antiquity and the Jewish Middle Ages.

Chapter 3—the second to explore the theme Voice—considers Shabtai Rosenne’s response to Hersch Lauterpacht’s reproach of Israel’s aversion to the individual right of petition. Rosenne castigated Lauterpacht for expressing an ‘extreme non-Zionist, apolitical concept of Jewish public life and the Jewish place on the international scene’ challenging, thereby, Lauterpacht’s representative capacity and ideological credentials. The right of petition and human rights writ large were, for Rosenne, assimilationist projects. Both were premised on individual, not collective, Jewish subjecthood; both were antithetical to how Zionism constructed the legal-political status of Jews and saw the Diaspora as the root cause of the modern Jewish predicament. Moreover, by investing individual Jews with the capacity to appear before international bodies, the right of petition challenged Israel’s sovereign claim to paramount Jewish voice in the world arena; Lauterpacht’s reproach thus challenged the sovereign capacity of Rosenne and Robinson to speak for Jewish interests with authority.

This chapter details how Mordechai Gebirtig engraved his name on the history of Jewish cabaret in Poland between the wars. Every singer had his songs in his or her repertoire. These songs spread from the cabaret stages (kleynkunstbine) of Łódź and Warsaw to all of Poland and to the entire Jewish world. Even today they are alive on the stage and in Jewish homes; they are an indispensable part of the repertoire of Jewish singers. They are also arousing increasing interest among non-Jewish audiences in Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and the United States. Since the destruction of European Jewry, these songs have become a crucial means of learning about Jewish folklore and the life of the Jewish poor, matters inadequately recorded in Yiddish literature and other sources.

This chapter offers a biographical sketch of Rashi. There are numerous folk legends about Rashi's birth, especially the miracles wrought for his mother during her pregnancy, and about his father and his father's journeys outside France and meetings with various sages, including Maimonides. None of these legends is reliably documented, however, and nothing can be gleaned from them about the events of Rashi's life. Ultimately, they reflect the cultural world of Jewish society in the late Middle Ages—a time that saw the composition, in Jewish circles as in Christian, of numerous hagiographical works recounting the miracles performed for holy men. Rashi is renowned throughout the Jewish world not only for his wide-ranging literary productivity but also for his unique character. Five qualities stand out in his warm and radiant personality: humility and natural simplicity, pursuit of truth, concern for human dignity, great confidence in his own abilities, and a sense of mission as a community leader. These qualities are evident in his actions, his relations with other people, his ties to his students, his world-view, his scorn for arrogance, his love of peace, his literary output, and even in his writing style. The chapter then considers Rashi's status and fame.