“马斯基尔”与犹太社会——以启蒙视阈下的德国为个案

欧洲启蒙运动发生之后,德国犹太思想家马斯基尔以自由理性为旗帜,批评传统犹太教、发展世俗教育、提倡现代生活方式,引领犹太人走出隔都,对犹太社会产生了极为深刻的影响,也留下了惨痛的教训,越来越多的犹太人背离了民族传统。从此以后,传统与现代性的关系成为犹太史上的核心命题。本文以启蒙视阈下的德国尤其是柏林为个案,探讨社会转型时期犹太思想家对传统社会的重创,分析犹太文化与现代主义、德国主流文化多重汇集之后,犹太知识阶层无所适从的精神困境,从而为研究现代化背景下少数族群的身份认同以及亚文化的存续与发展提供借鉴。     

Redescribing the Enlightenment: The German-Jewish adoption of Bildung as a counter-normative ideal

This essay offers a reconsideration of the ethical vocabulary, social possibilities and religious worldview enabled by the German concept of Bildung, or human self-cultivation, a concept which was enthusiastically adopted by German Jews in the late eighteenth century. By examining the creative use of the concept by German Jewish philosophers such as Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) and, later, in a very different political context, Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), the article challenges a body of scholarship that interprets the German Jewish enthusiasm for Bildung as an assimilationist capitulation by post-emancipation German Jews to the individualism and rationalism of the German Enlightenment. In contrast, I suggest that both Mendelssohn and Cassirer saw Bildung's emphasis on the vita activa as offering a vehicle for multifarious human engagement with the world that inspired not only a movement beyond reified conceptions of tradition, whether religious or secular, but forms of activism that could combine cosmopolitan sympathies with communal affiliation.     

Jewish experiences in the Italian Risorgimento: political practice and national emotions of Florentine and Leghorn Jewry (1849-1860)

Recent political and historical debates in Italy have led to a re-examination of the Risorgimento. This article asks what this revisionist reconsideration of the national past means for Italian Jews and whether Italian-Jewish history needs to be rewritten. Taking Tuscany as a case study, this article examines Jewish experiences in ­Florence and Leghorn during the Risorgimento, from the return to power of Grand Duke Leopold II after the revolution of 1848-9 to 1859, when Tuscany joined the new Italian national state. Tuscan Jews participated enthusiastically in the national movement, playing a decisive role in the development of the new political culture and in creating the emotional appeal of the nation. Jews were deeply integrated into the new national state and shared the same values and political attitudes as their Christian counterparts. Any reconsideration of the Risorgimento must take into account that - from a Jewish point of view - this period had remarkable innovative aspects and promising perspectives.     

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。     

Erasmus

This essay seeks to examine the history of the intellectual comradeship between J.L. Talmon and the philosopher, political thinker, and historian of ideas, Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997). The scholarly dialog between the two began in 1947, continued until Talmon's death in 1980, and is well documented in their private correspondence. I argue that there were two levels to this dialog: First, both Berlin and Talmon took part in the Totalitarianism discourse, which was colored by Popperian terminology, and thus I claim that their ideas should be examined as part of the Cold-War political discourse. The second level stemmed from their similar East-European origin, their mutual Jewish identity, and their attitude towards the Zionist movement.

At times the two levels of discourse conjoined commensurably, but in other cases the juxtaposition of the two created conceptual tensions. Examining Berlin and Talmon's thought from this dual perspective, I argue, can shed new light on the inner conflicts and conceptual tensions that each of them had to face. In particular, I claim that both thinkers tried to integrate their Anglophile liberal heritage with their support of National movements in general, and the Jewish National movement in particular. Nevertheless, the different approaches of Talmon and Berlin present two concepts of liberal Nationalism: While Talmon assumed that Zionism solved the Jewish individual's dilemmas by making Jews members of a commune attached to soil; Berlin sought to preserve the individual in an inviolable sphere and thus was more ambivalent in his attitude towards the state of Israel. In conclusion, I offer to see Talmon as a classic Zionist liberal and Berlin as a supporter of what I call “Diaspora Zionism”, an approach, which would later provide the grounds for Berlin's celebrated pluralism.     

Suicides of German Jews in the Third Reich

This article re-examines Jewish responses towards Nazi racismby studying German-Jewish suicides. Its purpose is twofold.First, it moves beyond the discussion of suicide as a statisticalincidence and asks what motivated German Jews to commit suicide.Statistics, however elaborate, disregard individual fates andcircumstances. While not entirely dismissing suicide statistics,this article is primarily concerned with qualitative questionsof social context and individual motives. It introduces hithertoneglected archival sources, including suicide notes. These sourcesallow us to assess the impact of Nazi racial policies on individualsuicides and to study the emotional effect of Nazi policieson German Jews. This article also takes up the question as tohow far, if at all, German-Jewish suicides can be considereda form of resistance towards Nazism and to what extent theywere an act of despair and hopelessness. The Nazis claimed tobe the arbiters over the lives of Jews once the deportationsstarted in 1941. The vast majority of Jews left in Germany afterNovember 1938 were fairly elderly. They could not be expectedto go into hiding, and their will to live may have been less,as was, undoubtedly, the ability or desire to start a new lifeelsewhere. In this bleak context, the overwhelming majorityof German-Jewish suicides derived from personal despair andthe desire to preserve individual dignity and agency. Nazi racialpolicies coalesced in a condition of anomie, an overturningof normal life and its norms and values that increases the likelihoodof suicide, prompted by the collapse of hope in the possibilityof a future. Emile Durkheim originally developed the conceptof anomic suicide as a way to explain suicide as a social phenomenon.This concept helps us understand the suicides of German Jewsin the Third Reich both in their wider political and privateimplications.     

Arthur Koestler and his ties to Zionism and Jabotinsky

At the end of the nineteenth century, and more pronouncedly between the two World Wars, Jews in Eastern Europe created wide networks of credit cooperatives, which at their peak supported about a third of the non-Soviet Jewish population in Eastern Europe. The establishment and continuous management of these cooperatives were greatly assisted by the two major Jewish philanthropic organizations of the period, the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA) and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). These organizations acted as charitable institutions but also as third-sector organizations which aspired both to assist and to socially engineer East European Jewish society. In British Mandate Palestine a Zionist branch of the movement was established, which was, however, free from the influences of these philanthropic organizations. The article describes and analyzes this little-researched phenomenon while seeking to place it within the theoretical frameworks of philanthropy and transnationalism. It concludes with an observational comparison between the political context in which Jewish credit cooperatives were created, namely East European ethnic regimes, and the Israeli ethnic democracy.     

Gustaf Dalman, Anti-Semitism, and the Language of Jesus Debate

The theory that Jesus of Nazareth spoke and taught exclusively in Aramaic rather than Hebrew achieved its present dominant position just over a century ago due largely to the labour of Gustaf Dalman. His primary motivation was not the recovery of the historical Jesus, however, but to support his deep commitment to the Protestant movement to convert Jews. This movement did not escape the impact of escalating anti-Semitism in society, intensified by rapid progress towards German national unification. One Christian response to anti-Semitism was to "extract" Jesus from Judaism by contrasting him with "Jewish" attitudes and values held by Jewish spiritual authorities. Dalman's contribution was to extract Jesus from the ethnically exclusive Hebrew language by insisting that he spoke only the more widely used lingua franca of the region, Aramaic. By overstating his case and going beyond the evidence, Dalman revealed his indebtedness to the anti-Semitic spirit of his age.     

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.     

Memory,Identity and Aspiration: Early Modern Jewish Maps of the Promised Land

In the sixteenth century Jews began to produce maps showing the Exodus to the Promised Land. My aim in this article is to show that, through unique compositions of written biblical references and pictured symbolism (both Jewish and Christian), maps such as the Mantua map (1560s) and, a century later, the Amsterdam Haggadah [Passover] map (1695) were a means of constructing Jewish cultural memory and identity in the Diaspora and fostering aspiration for a second salvation through a return to Zion. I also explore the Jewish approach towards the biblical land as this was reflected in the maps.     

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.     

Folded wheel-made oil lamps,standing pit burial caves and Judaean ethnic identity in the Hasmonean period

ABSTRACT

Two distinct archaeological phenomena appeared between the middle of the second century BCE and the middle of the first century: the Hasmonean folded wheel-made lamp and the standing pit burial cave. Following an examination of their dating, distribution, and social significance we suggest that this material culture was characteristic of the Jews in Judaea during this time and that it reflects the creation of an ethnic identity. The fact that the Hasmonean folded wheel-made lamp and the standing pit burial cave were typical of Jews in Judea indicates that they were ethnic features of Jewish society. By these means the Jews emphasized their dissimilarity from the rest of the population. The archaic appearance of the lamps and the burial caves, which replicates the cultural characteristics of the Kingdom of Judah during the monarchic/first Temple period, indicates that Jewish society in the Hasmonean period sought to legitimize its existence through the use of its former culture and memory.     

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.     

Language and nation‐building in Israel: Hebrew and its rivals*

Abstract. The problem of language preceded the founding of Israel. In the nineteenth century, the emergence of political Zionism was accompanied by a revival of Hebrew. In the early years of Jewish resettlement in Palestine, Hebrew slowly emerged as the popular language, a compromise between the Yiddish spoken by Eastern European immigrants and the Arabic or Ladino current among many Middle Eastern Jews. After World War I, as educational institutions proliferated, the challenge of French and German as languages of instruction was blocked by teachers' strikes. With the establishment of the state and the massive influx of Jewish displaced persons, mostly speakers of Yiddish, that language, regarded as a potential threat to the primacy of Hebrew, was systematically fought by the country's political and cultural elite. Today, the position of Hebrew as the national language of Israel is secure. English, however, has been asserting its influence in an increasingly postindustrial and globalised society.     

The Jewish Communities of Central Asia in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods

When the Jews first settled in Central Asia is uncertain, but circumstantial evidence clearly indicates that this happened at least two and a half thousand years ago. In the first millennium AD, the Jews lived only in cities no farther than 750?km east of the Caspian sea (in the eighth–eleventh centuries the sea was called Khazarian). Only later did they migrate to the central part of the region, to cities like Samarkand and Bukhara. It is possible that Jews from Khazaria joined them, since they already had tight trade connections with Central Asia and China. There is no trace of evidence regarding the existence of Jews in the entirety of Central Asia in the early sixteenth century. At the very end of the sixteenth century Bukhara became the new ethnoreligious center of the Jews in that region. In the first half of the nineteenth century, thanks to European travelers visiting Central Asia at that time, the term “Bukharan Jews” was assigned to this sub-ethnic Jewish group. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary source materials, this article aims to prove that the presence of Jews in Central Asia was not continuous, and therefore the modern Bukharan Jews are not descendants of the first Jewish settlers there. It also attempts to determine where Central Asia’s first Jewish population disappeared to.     

SUMMARIES OF ARTICLES

Wang Benli, On the Emancipation of British Jews In Britain, it was not until the 1820s, mainly urged by the trend of the times, that the issue of Jewish emancipation was put on the political agenda. Although the emancipation is prominently symbolized by the political emancipation, it is not a synonym of the latter, its process was long and its contents were multiple, even piecemeal. It can be said that the emancipation process of British Jews lasted from the year 1830 till the end of the 19th century. Besides the solution to the problem of equal civil rights for British Jews,     

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.     

Zionist identity and the British Mandate: Palestine's internment camps and the making of the Western native

This paper examines the relationship between British police officers, Jewish guards, and German internees in Palestine's internment camps during World War II. Using the reports of the Jewish guards, the paper investigates the role of Western‐identified actors in the Zionist identity‐making project. The reports evince a surprising rapport between the British and their German prisoners and the mistreatment of the Jewish guards by their British superiors. The paper analyses these Jewish accounts in the context of identity‐ and ethnic boundary‐making and argues that they illustrate Zionism's intent to construct itself as a Western but noncolonial movement and Zionists in Palestine as natives but not “Orientals.” The reports also reveal a breach between the formal hierarchy—British officers, Jewish guards, German internees—and the ethnic order, which situated British and Germans at the apex and the Jews at the bottom. The paper highlights the utility of researching group‐making interactions in different contexts to develop a more nuanced understanding of identity‐making processes.     

Nationalism,Reform Judaism and the Hebrew Prayer Book

ABSTRACT. The Hebrew prayer book (siddur), the oldest of which dates from the ninth century, frequently expresses Jewish chosenness and hopes for the gathering of the exiles and the return to the Land of Israel. In nineteenth‐century German Reform prayer books, such references to Jewish nationalism were altered or eliminated. In an age of growing European nationalism, this attempt to ‘de‐nationalise’ Jewish identity was virtually unique. Responding to accusations that Jewish citizenship in the modern nation‐state was incompatible with Judaism, Reform rabbis, who were engaged in the struggle for Jewish emancipation, claimed that patriotic loyalty to the German fatherland must supersede Jewish national identity. This article discusses the offending nationalist content of the siddur and the historical context in which it was suppressed. It concludes that the German reformers, by drawing attention to the nationalist potential of traditional Judaism, indirectly prepared the way for the rise of Jewish nationalism in reaction to racial anti‐Semitism in the late nineteenth century.     

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.