魏玛共和国犹太人的德国认同

魏玛共和国犹太人在政治、文化和宗教生活方式上都表现出高度的德国认同。德国犹太人的这种国家认同既有重要的历史基础,也是现实的需要和客观环境压力的结果。魏玛共和国犹太人的德国认同突出表现在两个方面:一是将犹太教、犹太文化限定于宗教和文化的而非民族的层面,从而减少其与"德国国家认同"的冲突;二是强调犹太人与德国主流民族、语言、文化和历史的紧密关系。犹太人的德国认同对其族群产生了重要影响:犹太族群中发展出了对东方犹太人的歧视;排斥犹太复国主义;低估反犹主义的危害,以致对大规模地迫害、屠杀犹太人缺乏预见性等。     

Cosmopolitisme et transferts culturels le cas des Juifs allemands

During the XIX^th century, the socio-economic rise and cultural assimilation of the German Jews generated two contradictory tendencies: on the one hand, their integration into the German nation, which they pursued willingly; and, on the other, their cosmopolitanism, which resulted from their location at the center of a socio-economic network on a continental scale and a wide migratory movement. The Jews thus contributed to the development of a cultural concept ofMitteleuropa as opposed to the geopolitical and expansionist concept upheld by Pan-Germanism. German-Jewish cosmopolitanism found its expression on different levels: in the religious field, the school of the «Science of Judaism» (Wissenschaft des Judentums) became a model for the modernisation of Jewish culture in most European countries: in the economic field, emancipated German Jews consolidated their financial and commercial transnational network, which existed from the age of the «Court Jews» (Hofjuden); in the political field, radical German Jews played a leading role in the diffusion of Marxism as a universalist intellectual current, crossing national borders. Generally speaking, German Jews played a pivotal role in a process of cultural transfers stretched on more than a century. After Nazism came to power, German-Jewish cosmopolitanism took the way of exile, trying to preserve the legacy ofAufklärung.     

DOES ANYBODY STILL NEED JUDAISM?

Both of the books under review focus on the tradition of Jewish scholarship and debate. The Genius of Judaism is written from a religious perspective, whereas the authors of Jews and Words envision a future in which Jews live without Judaism; they see Jewishness as a culture that can be divorced from religion. For Lévy, a sense of the divine—including the concept of being a chosen people—is the source of Jewish identity and historical continuity. Lévy also argues that the Jews are chosen to serve non‐Jews. Inspired by the prophet Jonah, Lévy undertook diplomatic missions in the Ukraine and in Libya, and I consider the lessons he draws from these missions. I also discuss the relationship of Judaism to various concepts in the philosophy of history: revolution, progress, messianism, and utopianism, as well as the affinity between Judaism and skepticism.     

The idea of a Jewish nation in the German discourse about emancipation

This article compares the German conservative conceptualization of Judaism and Jewish emancipation with that of liberals, from the Vormärz (1830–1848) to the Neue Ära (1858–1861). It argues that both conservatives and liberals understood Judaism not merely as a religion but also as a nationality. Yet while liberals acknowledged the national dimension of Judaism as a secularized culture, and even supported Jewish emancipation, conservatives developed a different concept. Since the 1830s, conservatives accommodated nationalism while investing the Christian State ideal with national meaning. This national‐religious construction was imposed on Judaism, which was similarly interpreted now as a synthesis between religion and nationality. In accordance with this conceptualization, conservatives rejected Jewish emancipation on national ground while advocating for the establishment of a Jewish nation‐state. This thesis diverges from the existing literature, in which the reluctance of conservatism to embrace nationalism until the 1870s stands as the consensual view.     

The Emancipation 'Pantheon of Heroes' in the German-Jewish Public Memory in the 1930s

The decline of the emancipation of the German Jews in the early1930s and its ending under the Nazi regime motivated their variousspokesmen to reevaluate their past, by discussing the heritageof the major emancipation heroes. Based mostly on the Jewishpress, which was quite free to handle an internal Jewish dialogueuntil 1938, the article examines the representations of MosesMendelssohn, David Friedländer, Rahel Varnhagen, HeinrichHeine and Gabriel Riesser in the Jewish public of this time.It demonstrates how spokesmen of the major German-Jewish politicalcamps—the liberals, the Zionists and the Orthodox—referredto these figures in different ways in their effort to createa useful past for their readers. Thus, whereas radical Zionistand Orthodox Jews presented Mendelssohn's legacy as the beginningof the process of assimilation which was doomed to fail, others,who were mostly but not only liberals, portrayed a much morepositive Mendelssohn. For them, Mendelssohn did not demonstratethe roots of the 1930s German-Jewish decline, but rather thesources of its potential recovery. Friedländer, Varnhagenand Heine were frequently mentioned as betrayers of Jewish honour,but certain spokesmen referred to them differently. Riesser,whose nineteenth-century heroic struggle for emancipation seemedin the 1930s to be a total failure, was still embraced by certainJewish liberals as a hero who did the best for his time. Thearticle also shows how the escalation of the late 1930s moderatedinternal Jewish historical polemics, almost creating a Jewishconsensus about the past.     

The cloak,the cage and the fog of sanctity: the Zionist mission and the role of religion among Arab Jews*

Abstract. This paper examines the Zionist national mission to mobilise Jewish ethnic communities in Arab countries, in the period preceding the establishment of the state of Israel. It draws on archival texts to trace a phenomenon known in Jewish historiography as ‘Shadarut’; a voluntary religious practice of fundraising which was widespread in the Jewish world for hundreds of years. The paper shows how this pre‐national religious practice (to be labelled ‘the cloak’) was adopted and incorporated into the Zionist national project (‘the cage’), first generating tension between the Jewish religious establishment and the Zionist ‘secular’ movement, and then blurring the distinction between Judaism as a religion and Judaism as a national identity. The paper shows how secular emissaries of European origin arrived in Arab countries as religious emissaries (‘shadarim’) and aspired to discover a strong religious fervour among members of the Jewish communities there. This is because in the eyes of the Zionist (ostensibly secular) movement, being religious Jews in Islamic countries was a criterion that demarcated them from their Arab neighbours. This analysis entails two main conclusions: (a) that contrary to the experience of the European Zionist national movement in which secularism and the revolt against the Jewish religion played a central role, in Islamic countries it was particularly the Jewish religion, and not secular nationalism that was used to mobilise the Jewish community into the Jewish national movement; (b) that the ‘shadarut’ practice refuses to yield to the epistemological imperatives and the common divisions that arise from the binary distinction between ‘religiousness’ and ‘secularity’, particularly in the Middle East. Some implications for contemporary Israeli society are discussed.     

Medicalising the Jewish Ritual Bath: Women,Health and Purity in the Late Ottoman Empire

Menstrual impurity is among the most important religious practices in Jewish lore. Examining two case studies of Judeo–Spanish Ottoman Jewry: discussions of the temperature of the ritual bath water; and purity, hygiene and the collective of the Jewish body, this article demonstrates that menstrual impurity in Ottoman Judaism underwent an intensive medicalisation process. This process reframed menstruation from a religious concern to one involving medicine, health and hygiene. This article offers a glimpse of how non-Western Jews dealt with European conceptions of medicalisation, actively debating them according to their Ottoman cultural surroundings. Moreover, it illuminates the mechanisms women used to negotiate their immersion and command their own bodies, emphasising their anxieties, demands and resistance.     

Papal Power and Protection in the Shebet Yehudah

The sixteenth‐century Shebet Yehudah is an account of the persecutions of Jews in various countries and epochs, including their expulsion from Spain in the fifteenth century. It is not a medieval text and was written long after many of the events it describes. Yet although it cannot give us a contemporary medieval standpoint, it provides important insights into how later Jewish writers perceived Jewish–papal relations in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. Although the extent to which Jewish communities came into contact either with the papacy as an institution or the actions of individual popes varied immensely, it is through analysis of Hebrew works such as the Shebet Yehudah that we are able to piece together a certain understanding of Jewish ideas about the medieval papacy as an institution and the policies of individual popes. This article argues that Jews knew only too well that papal protection was not unlimited, but always carefully circumscribed in accordance with Christian theology. It is hoped that it will be a scholarly contribution to our growing understanding of Jewish ideas about the papacy's spiritual and temporal power and authority in the Later Middle Ages and how this impacted on Jewish communities throughout medieval Europe.     

Moroccan Jewish first-places: contraction,fabrication, dissipation

Abstract

The idea of first places is inevitably linked with diasporas. At the heart of this idea and since the very start, there has always been the Jewish case. The diaspora of the Jews of Morocco, in the periphery, was presented by some authors, as a good case with which to relativize the theoretical pertinence and conceptual inspiration of the Jewish model. Focusing on Jewish history, heritage, and travelling in Morocco, I will continue to question the paradigm of social studies based on the bi-polar center-diaspora model. I will testify to the emergence and fabrication of new Jewish ‘first-places’, a process attending the aging and departure of the last Jews of Morocco and with the support of the Kingdom, while following current, and disruptive trends of contraction, commutation and dissipation of ‘first-places’ in different Jewish practices and narratives. The individualization of religious practice in post-secular societies allows and includes – and often merges – secular, ethnic and political approaches of what once was purely designated as religious identity. Heritage Moroccan landscape (and landscaping) allows different approaches and thus probably why one can think of it as an emerging ‘first-place’ for some.     

Into the Spiral of Problematic Perceptions: Modern Anti-Semitism and gebildetes Burgertum in Nineteenth-Century Germany

This article attempts to relate modern anti-Semitism to theincreasingly close interactions of Jews and non-Jews in an ageof political emancipation and social integration. It arguesthat the changing mutual perceptions of Jews and Protestantsin the German educated bourgeoisie are of central importancein this regard. In nineteenth-century Germany, literature movementssuch as realism, and various human sciences such as anthropology,Protestant theology or philology provided ample material fordiscussing the Jewish character. These fields suggest four waysof perceiving Jews: the Jew as parvenu, as Talmudist, as materialistand as nomad. Indeed, bourgeois Jews themselves contributedto these literary and scholarly debates. Their discussions werefrequently shaped by the attempt to confront anti-Jewish misconceptions.Moreover, they propagated their own interpretation of the Jewishcharacter: the figure of the humanistic Jew. This Jewish interpretation,which identifies a universal mission, proves to have a twofoldnature: it is not only a counter-attack against anti-Semiticpolemics, but also a particular result of the peculiar Jewishadaptation of bourgeois culture. As the article argues, however,this humanistic perception of Jewish identity caused concernon the Protestant side, which led to further polemics and thusfurther Jewish defence. The resulting spiral of problematicperceptions was the consequence of the growing social intimacyof bourgeois Jews and Protestants in nineteenth-century Germany.Modern anti-Semitism, it is thus argued, can be interpretedas a specific form of rejection of ambivalence and the establishmentof neat binary codes in the confusing closeness of Jews andnon-Jews.     

The Board of Deputies of British Jews and the initial phase of the Italian Racial Laws: reactions and strategies (1938–1940)

ABSTRACT

This article aims to reconstruct the activities of the Board of Jewish Deputies, the central representative body of British Jewry, in support of the Italian Jews affected by the Fascist Racial Laws of 1938. By analysing the institution’s documents and examining the most widely read Jewish newspaper in the U.K., the Jewish Chronicle, this research investigates how the initial phase of the Italian anti-Semitic campaign was received in Great Britain, and what measures were put in place by British Jewry in their attempts to help the Italian Jews. The Jewish historian, Cecil Roth, played an important role during this phase, in active collaboration with the leadership of the Board and the staff of the Jewish Chronicle, gathering as much information as possible on Italy and its history in order to shed light on the events that were taking place during the first years of the Racial Laws and until the entrance of Italy into WWII (1938–1940). The involvement of certain members of the Foreign Office with links to the Board, and the shared goal of helping Italian Jewry, was also fundamental in this period.     

A European Enlightenment in the Promised Land? The Jewish Kulturkampf at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the European Kulturkampf in the nineteenth century from the points of view of the Russian Hebrew writer Judah Leib Gordon and the founding father of the Zionist movement Theodor Herzl. Gordon’s literary outlook emphasizes the tension between the traditional Jewish religious leadership and the maskilim as an instance of the sweeping all-European Kulturkampf phenomenon, in which the problem of the rabbis was the last issue that had not yet been solved. He believed that the return of the Jews to the Land of Israel, without the elimination of the rabbis’ authority, carried serious dangers. In his dystopian feuilleton published in 1885 depicting the future Jewish state, he argued that the victory of liberalism was a historical necessity in order to avoid a radical orthodox and nationalistic hegemony. Like Gordon before him, Herzl feared that losing the basic humanistic principles of the Enlightenment the Jews had acquired in Europe would be one of the outcomes of their settling in the Land of Israel. In his 1902 utopian novel Altneuland he declared: “Stand by the principles that have made us great: Liberalism, Tolerance, Love of Mankind. Only then will Zion be truly Zion.” Gordon and Herzl both expressed their concerns in their fictional works, probably wishing that these would serve only as warning signs.     

A conspiracy to murder: explaining the dynamics of Romanian ‘policy’ towards Jews in Transnistria

This article offers a comprehensive interpretation of the Romanian ‘policy’ towards Jews in Transnistria in 1941–44. This region in southwestern Ukraine witnessed both a monstrous number of Jewish victims, usually estimated as no fewer than 350,000 and possibly more, and an unusually high survival rate by the standards of the occupied Soviet territory. The article argues that what is sometimes referred to as ‘inconsistency’ in Romanian policy can be best explained within the framework of the structuralist/functionalist approach to the history of the Holocaust that was first developed on German material. The article argues that Romanian leaders never adopted the policy of complete annihilation of Jews; rather, their aim was to expel them from Romania’s national territory. However, they were not opposed to murdering Jews en masse when they believed it was ‘necessary’ from a military point of view or advisable for any other reason. Given the scarcity of resources in the region and the fear of epidemics, murdering interned Jews in the areas of their greatest concentration appeared to be the way to ‘solve’ a number of problems. At the same time, the absence of a fanatical paramilitary force such as the SS in Nazi Germany and Romanian leaders’ unwillingness to leave a paper trail of their criminal orders complicated the logistics of mass murder. Mass murder required either the ready participation of the gendarmerie and police, which was not always forthcoming, or the mobilization of the ethnic German militia, which was not available everywhere. In the absence of pressure from the authorities to kill, some officers and individual gendarmes, cognizant of the criminal nature of such actions, hesitated or even avoided participation in mass murder.     

Enlightenment and Prophecy: The Jews and Neo-Hellenic Nationalism

ABSTRACT

Even before the rise of nationalism and its counterpart anti-Semitism sensu stricto, anti-Judaic prejudices and stereotypes were widespread in the Christian Orthodox communities of the Ottoman Empire. These attitudes arose mainly from the commercial antagonism between the Christian and Jewish communities during the crisis that beset the empire from the seventeenth century onward. To examine these attitudes more closely, this article first focuses on the extreme anti-Judaic discourse in the sermons of eighteenth-century Father Cosmas Aitolos (Cosmas of Aetolia; d. 1779), an itinerant monk, who was canonized in 1961. It then turns to Rhigas Velestinlis’s enlightened vision of a tolerant multi-ethnic, multi-religious republic, which gradually replaced the Sultan’s oriental despotism, in which Jews, Muslims, and Christians were to be equal citizens. But this vision sank into oblivion, as the aspiration to national independence and to ethnical homogeneity prevailed in Greece, as well as everywhere in the Balkans. Although the early advocates of enlightened Greek nationalism embraced the language of citizenship and emancipation, they excluded from it the proviso of multi-ethnicity. Accordingly, they perceived the “Jewish Question” as one of gradually integrating a “foreign” religious minority into the Greek nation by “re-educating them in the values of Hellenism,” in the words of Adamandios Korais (1748–1833), and according them full citizenship only in the generations to come. All three distinctive attitudes towards the Jews are traceable in subsequent ideological trends and conflicts in Modern Greece.     

Die Mathematisierung der Naturwissenschaften vor dem Hinter-grund der Bildungsvorstellungen des 19. Jahrhunderts

Both, astronomy in the first half of the 19th century and physics in the second half of the 19th century functioned as models and paradigms for the other sciences. The paradigmatic character of a theoretical, mathematical astronomy was due mainly to its capability to predict future events. According to the influence of the Romantische Naturphilosophie the mathematization of physics in Germany took place belatedly compared to France. A modified Newtonian research program with its mathematical implications was adopted by German physicists only after the establishment of the principle of energy conservation. German physicists of the late 19th century claimed over and above the results of physicists the successes of German technology for physics and interpreted these achievements as “cultural” achievements. They combined this claim with a request for a better representation of physics in the curricula of secondary schools so as to be comparable to that of mathematics. The resistance of the most prestigious secondary schools, the Humanistische Gymnasien, against this request meant that the concept of Bildung as propagated by physicists was not accepted generally in Germany.     

Exile at home: A matter of being out of place

This article employs Hannah Arendt's theorizing about assimilation to consider how sovereign citizens of a nation state might nevertheless experience a sense of exile. It builds on Aziza Khazzoom's notion of a ‘chain of Orientalism’ to suggest that the assimilation of Europe's Jews to Enlightenment ideals has had ongoing repercussions among Jews in the modern state of Israel. The article focuses on what it means to be Jewish in terms of religious observance, and who feels at home in the Jewish state. Employing vignettes from recent ethnographic fieldwork, it raises questions about the modern nation state's capacity to create conditions in which its own ‘people’ can flourish. In this case, Israel has claimed to make it possible for the Jews to flourish, in Arendt's terms, ‘as Jews’, but it is far from clear what ‘as Jews’ would, could or should mean. This leads the author to suggest that Israel has a Jewish problem.     

Nigeria's Igbo Jews: Jewish identity and practice in Abuja

The now widespread Igbo belief in a Jewish ancestry goes back to the 18th century. However, it was during and after the Nigerian civil war (1967–1970), in which at least one million Igbo died in the failed bid for Biafran independence, that Igbo identification with and as Jews concretized. Igbo saw themselves as sufferers of genocide, like the Jews of World War II in Europe, and as inhabitants of a beleaguered plot of land surrounded by hostile forces, similar to the state of Israel. The civil war and its disastrous consequences initiated a still ongoing period of intense questioning among the Igbo concerning their history, present predicaments, and future prospects. A small number of Igbo began to question why, if they were in fact Jews, they should continue practising Christianity. Their community now numbers between 2,000 and 5,000 people throughout Nigeria. There are three established Nigerian synagogues in Abuja, the federal capital, most of whose members are Igbo. The significance of Biafra, the centrality of the state of Israel, pride in Jewish ancestry and practice, and questions surrounding the range of Jewish skin colour, predominate in Igbo Jews' discussions of their identity. In contrast to the vast majority of Igbo who, if they maintain a sense of Jewish identity, do so while practising Christianity, Igbo Jews have severed themselves from the now dominant religion. Understanding themselves to be part of the global Jewish community of the diaspora and the state of Israel, the Igbo practising Judaism in Nigeria are eager for religious and political recognition from world Jewry and the Jewish state. However, self‐identifying Jewish groups without documented historical connections to more established Jewish communities face considerable challenges in gaining such recognition, particularly as genealogical Jews.     

HOW NINETEENTH‐CENTURY GERMAN CLASSICISTS WROTE THE JEWS OUT OF ANCIENT HISTORY

This essay considers why Jewish antiquity largely fell outside the purview of ancient historians in the Germanies for over half a century, between 1820 and 1880, and examines the nature of those portraits that did, in fact, arise. To do so, it interrogates discussions of Jewish antiquity in this half‐century against the background of those political and national values that were consolidating across the German states. Ultimately, the article claims that ancient Jewish history did not provide a compelling model for the dominant (Protestant) German scholars of the age, which then prompted the decline of antique Judaism as a field of interest. This investigation into the political and national dimensions of ancient history both supplements previous lines of inquiry and complicates accounts that assign too much explanatory power to a regnant anti‐Judaism or anti‐Semitism in the period and place. First, the analysis considers why so little attention was granted to Jewish history by ancient historians in the first place, as opposed to its relative prominence before ca. 1820. Second, the essay examines representations of ancient Judaism as fashioned by those historians who did consider the subject in this period. Surveying works composed not only for the upper echelons of scholarship but also for adolescents, women, and the laity, it scrutinizes a series of arguments advanced and assumptions embedded in universal histories, histories of the ancient world, textbooks of history, and histories dedicated to either Greece or Rome. Finally, the article asserts the Jewish past did not conform to the values of cultural ascendancy, political autonomy, national identity, and religious liberty increasingly hallowed across the Germanies of the nineteenth century, on the one hand, and inscribed into the very enterprise of historiography, on the other. The perceived national and political failures of ancient Jews—alongside the ethnic or religious ones discerned by others—thus made antique Judaism an unattractive object of study in this period.     

On the use of Nazi sources for the study of Fascist Jewish policy in the Italian-occupied territories: The case of south-eastern France,November 1942–July 1943

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the use of Nazi sources for the study of Fascist policy towards Jews in 1940–1943. By exposing the gap between the Nazi perception of and the reality of the Fascist policy towards Jews in Italian-occupied south-eastern France, the article demonstrates that Rome’s refusal to hand over Jews for deportation did not contradict the fundamental anti-Semitic nature of its Jewish policy in that context. Thus, the article highlights the risks for historians to read Fascist Jewish policy through Nazi lenses and thereby fall prey to stereotypical characterizations of the Italians as insubordinate, scheming and driven by what an S.S. official disparagingly labelled a ‘Jewish-friendly attitude’. At the same time, the article shows that, when combined with Fascist sources, Nazi sources can help shed light on the conceptual divide that underpinned the Axis partners’ disagreement over the means by which the ‘Jewish problem’ should be ‘solved’, thereby exposing the analytical limitations of the current prevailing understanding of the Fascist refusal to hand over the Jews as purely the outcome of ‘pragmatic’ opportunistic considerations.     

Being Crypto‐Jewish in Colonial Brazil (1500–1822): Brushing History against the Grain

This paper consists of two parts. In the first, I am going to review and synthesise the history of Jews — or rather various versions of Fuzzy Jews ¹ 1 The term “Fuzzy Jews,” introduced by Charles Meyers and myself in the Preface to our jointly edited Troubled Souls: Conversos, Crypto‐Jews and Other Confused Jewish Intellectuals from the Fourteenth through the Eighteenth Centuries (Hamilton: Outrigger, 2001); it refers to non‐regular sets and categorical anomalies. The term is further developed in my Masks in the Mirror: Marranism in Jewish Experience (New York: Peter Lang Verlag, 2005).
— who settled in Brazil during the time it was a Portuguese colony, including a brief period when part of the nation passed under Dutch control. This overview probably adds nothing new to the history of this topic, except insofar as it stresses the details necessary to develop the argument in the next section. The second part turns to a more difficult and in many ways speculative kind of history, that of the emotional and psychological experience of being a Jew — again in several versions of nominal Catholicism. Here is where I bring to bear insights from psychohistory and the history of mentalities in order to interrogate the sources in Inquisitional archives and archaeological studies in Brazil and elsewhere in South America.