The Social and Legal Status of Jews in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and its Influence on the Status of Tatars and Karaites

Abstract

At the end of the fourteenth century, when Lithuania was baptized, three non-Christian communities — Jews, Tatars, and Karaites — began to settle in the territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and their legal and social status began to take shape. The segregation of Jews from Christians was legitimized in the first privilege granted for the Jews of Brest in 1388 by the Grand Duke Vytautas (Witold, Vita&?t) the Great. This privilege, which adapted Western variations of the Judenrecht to Lithuanian realities and introduced some local improvements, began the process of the formation of the legal and social status of non-Christians in the Grand Duchy. The expulsion of Jews to the margins of the estate system of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the establishment of the incumbency of the iudex iudeorum and internal community court, and the fully formed relations between the Jews and the legal system of the Grand Duchy were used as reference points in trying to define the legal status of the Tatars and the Karaites. In the case of Karaites, Magdeburg law, which was already known in Lithuania, was adopted. Grand Duke Casimir Jagiellon granted such a privilege to the Trakai (Troki) community in 1441, and the Karaite community’s life was organized according to the principles of the existing model of urban self-government. For some time the legal status of the Karaites differed from that of the Jews. Despite its uniqueness, Magdeburg law was not applied to the community’s everyday life, and the Karaites gradually absorbed the privileges granted for the Jews (especially that of 1646). The Tatars, who were socially stratified within their community and thus had different interests, were never granted a common privilege. Those ‘Jewish’ legal and social models, which were adapted for the Tatar community, were best revealed in the Third Lithuania Statute of 1588, which contained more regulations for non-Christians than its two predecessors. The content of its articles shows similarities of the social and legal status of non-Christians and the entrenchment of the social strata of non-Christians. The features of the model applied for regulating the state’s relations with the Jewish community might also be observed in the state’s relations with the Roma (Gipsy) community, which, although Christian, was considered unacceptable in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania because of its way of life.     

Imagining the Grand Duchy of Lithuania: The Politics and Economics of the Rebuilding of Trakai Castle and the ‘Palace of Sovereigns’ in Vilnius

Abstract

In 1884 the prominent nation-builder Jonas Basanavi?ius declared that castle mounds and literature were the only appropriate elements from which to build the Lithuanian nation. Basanavi?ius’s view, this article suggests, had a lasting influence on the public uses of history in twentieth-century Lithuania. The study explores the construction of two iconic images of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Trakai Castle and the ‘Palace of Sovereigns’ in Vilnius. Built in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Trakai Castle was once the seat of the Grand Duke of Lithuania, but fell into neglect before its reconstruction in the 1960s. Dating back to the thirteenth century, the Palace in Vilnius deteriorated during the eighteenth century, was dismantled at the beginning of the nineteenth, and has been completely rebuilt since 2000. It is striking that the reconstructions of castles were the largest state investments in culture in both the Soviet and post-Soviet regimes. The reconstruction of Trakai Castle was criticized on economic and ideological grounds by Nikita Khrushchev. The rebuilding of the Palace polarized Lithuanian intellectuals. The presentation compares the intellectual, social, and political rationales which underpinned the two projects and explores the changes and continuities in the uses of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania under the Soviet and post-Soviet regimes.     

‘According to the Confession in Which I Die’: Taking the Measure of Allegiances in Seventeenth-Century Wilno

Abstract

The range of multiconfessionalism in early modern Wilno (Vilnius) was unusually wide. This was a place where not only Christians, Jews, and Tatars engaged in more and less structured interactions, but where all (including the Jews and the Tatars) had to be ready to negotiate a Christian landscape of five recognized and openly practising confessions: Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Orthodox, and Uniates. The practice of toleration (not to be confused with tolerance) was one of finding a set of habits — some of them implicated in violence, or at least in adversarial relationships — that allowed individuals and communities to co-exist, sometimes cheek by jowl, with people who were hated, or, at the very least, held for incorrigibly pigheaded. My point of departure is the assumption that all had to find some sort of modus vivendi with people beyond their own confession, but that individual Vilnans represented a large spectrum between zealously exclusionary practices and attitudes, at the one extreme, and a sort of protoecumenicism, at the other. Drawing on evidence such as explicit statements in last wills and testaments, ranges of deathbed bequests to religious institutions and individuals, mixed marriages, and godparenting practices, I sketch out a range of individual practices and their underlying attitudes. These data provide material for concluding considerations of the question whether these crossings of confessional limits were symptoms of the ground-level ‘indifferentism’ that some revisionists have sought to establish as a corrective to, and in some cases in opposition to, the top-down etatism of confessionalization paradigms.     

Constructing National Identity: The Image of the Medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania in Lithuanian Art from the 1920s to the 1990s

Abstract

This article provides an overview of the ways in which the image of the medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania, intended to awaken the national pride and contribute to the building of the national identity, was constructed by artistic means in the Republic of Lithuania during the 1920s and 1930s. It contains a brief discussion on the genesis of the image of the Grand Duchy, including the selection of appropriate historical heroes and events, and the main aspects of their interpretation. The article analyses some of the most striking and influential examples of the image of medieval Lithuania, such as the celebrations of the 500th anniversary of the death of Grand Duke Vytautas the Great in 1930 and art works created for that purpose, the decoration of public buildings (for example, the Museum of War and the Officers’ Club in Kaunas, and Lithuania’s pavilion in the New York World Fair of 1939). It also looks briefly at the dissemination of the image of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in popular culture. The article also touches on isolated efforts by a number of intellectuals to warn of the dangers inherent in the extreme glorification of the past. The image of the medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania, created in interwar Lithuania, was preserved during the period of Soviet occupation. After the restoration of Lithuanian independence in 1990, this image had a significant influence on the mentality and culture of Lithuanian society at the turn of the millennium. In this respect the situation in Lithuania could be treated as a case study, for a similar relation to the past can be encountered in other European post-Communist countries faced with the problem of creating a new identity.     

德国政界对第二次世界大战的历史反思

第二次世界大战结束后,德国,特别是联邦德国的政治家曾对希特勒和民族社会主义给德国和其他受害国人民带来的"灾难"进行过多种多样的反思和探讨。从总体上说,他们的认罪、道歉和赔偿的态度是比较真诚的,但不谐之音时时可闻,争论也非常激烈。政治家们对历史的认识,不仅与其个人修养、价值观和党派立场有密切联系,而且也与国内外的局势变化息息相关,并且往往表现出为现实政治服务的目的。历史反思与现实政治自始至终都是难分难解的。     

二战前后德国历史研究中的民族主义

第二次世界大战结束以后,西方史学研究的理论和方法发生了根本性的转变。自50年代起,美国史学界率先开始的新史学运动倡导结构一功能主义的历史研究方法,主张用系列数据研究人类社会中的各种传统的——不仅政治、军事和宗教的,而且经济、社会及普通民众日常生活的——功能作用,以达到在“总体”上理解和叙述人类过去的全部经历的目的。由此,改变过去的以政治事件和伟大人物串连起历史的方法,     

The Origins of British Military Psychiatry Before the First World War

Abstract

This article discusses the military role of the Moorish units deployed by the Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), and assesses their impact in cultural, social, and religious terms, especially given the image of Muslim troops going back to the Reconquista.     

Violation of the Laws and Customs of War on the Russian Front in the First World War

This article examines wartime efforts by the Russian civil and military authorities to shape public opinion, both at home and abroad, through investigating and publicizing enemy atrocities committed against Russians. An extraordinary investigative commission established in 1915, along the lines of Britain’s Bryce Commission, looked into alleged atrocities against soldiers and civilians as well as crimes against property; chronicled its findings; and publicized them on a wide scale. The ample funding and breadth of this undertaking challenges perceptions of the Tsarist authorities as unable to appreciate the importance of public opinion, even if the results were not always as intended.     

Imagining the absent dead: rituals of bereavement and the place of the war dead in German women's art during the First World War

Drawing on women's visual responses to the First World War, this article examines female mourning in wartime Germany. The unprecedented death toll on the battlefronts, military burial practices and the physical distance from the remains of the war dead disrupted traditional rituals of bereavement, hindered closure and compounded women's grief on the home front. In response to these novel circumstances, a number of female artists used their images to reimagine funerary customs, overcome the separation from the fallen and express acute emotional distress. This article analyses three images produced during the conflict by the artists Katharina Heise, Martha Schrag and Sella Hasse, and places their work within the civilian experience of bereavement in war. By depicting the pain of loss, female artists contested the historical tradition of proud female mourning in German society and countered wartime codes of conduct that prohibited the public display of emotional pain in response to soldiers’ deaths. As a largely overlooked body of sources, women's art adds to our understanding of the tensions in wartime cultures of mourning that emerged between 1914 and 1918.     

The Evolution of the Political Atmosphere in Provincial Society during the First World War

Since the end of the Soviet Union, scholars have conducted far more complex and multifaceted explorations of Russian imperial political parties and their ability to influence public opinion. The changing circumstances that war and revolution wrought on popular support for the monarchy are particularly evident in the Urals region.     

The politics of memory: Commemorating the centenary of the First World War

This symposium examines how the centenary of the First World War has been marked in five countries: Australia, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. Given their distinctive national historical experiences and political cultures, the metanarratives of the war in these countries differ; as does the relationship between the state and sub-state actors in memory making. However, in each case the commemorations of the war have been shaped by a negotiation between the state and other agents of memory at the sub-state level. National memory has also been consciously projected into international relations, through carefully orchestrated anniversary ceremonies and performative memorial diplomacy. But, despite these transnational commemorative practices, the centenary of the war remains predominantly framed within local and national imaginings.

这次研讨会议论了一战百年在奥地利、法国、德国、英国、美国这五个国家是如何庆祝的。考虑到各国不同的历史经验以及政治文化,这些国家关于一战的元叙事各不相同,国家与次国家主体关系的记忆也是如此。不过,每个国家的战争纪念,都是国家与其他次国家层面主体协商的结果。通过精心策划的纪念仪式日以及表演性纪念外交,国家记忆被有意识地投射到了国际关系之中。除了这些跨国纪念活动,一战的记忆主要是在地方以及国家的想象框架内形成的。     

第一次世界大战期间英国士兵分居补贴制度研究

分居补贴制度是第一次世界大战爆发后为保障参战士兵家属的生活而由英国政府实施的一项战时补贴制度.第一次世界大战爆发后,英国对士兵分居补贴制度进行了一系列改革,经历了从慈善机构到政府管理的转变过程.造成这种转变的原因主要有:新自由主义社会思潮的影响、慈善传统与公共行为的转变、适应征募士兵的需要以及SSFA存在诸多问题等.