“A Vigilant Society. Jewish Thought and the State in Medieval Spain”
“A VIGILANT SOCIETY. JEWISH THOUGHT AND THE STATE IN MEDIEVAL SPAIN” State University of New York Press, Albany, NY, 2013, pp. 326, ISBN-13: 978-1-4384-4563-2
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“A VIGILANT SOCIETY. JEWISH THOUGHT AND THE STATE IN MEDIEVAL SPAIN” State University of New York Press, Albany, NY, 2013, pp. 326, ISBN-13: 978-1-4384-4563-2
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The story “At the Outset of the Day” by S. Y. Agnon is short, but contains many meanings. It is a story about a father whose daughter’s dress burns to ashes, and who throughout the story attempts, unsuccessfully, to cover her nakedness. As the article shows, the story can be defined as symbolic, with a connotative level open to interpretation as well as biblical foundations and symbols that express its hidden level.
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This paper aims to establish a framework of discursive narratives about the idea of the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Most of these narrative strategies concern the implementation of this huge project, arrangement of exhibitions, topics presented and the importance of the museum for the community of Polish Jews and Poles. The qualitative analysis of the narratives is conducted based on the content of periodicals published by the Jewish community in Poland: „Midrasz. Pismo Żydowskie” and „Chidusz. Magazyn Żydowski”. The analysis involves 11 speeches given immediately after the ceremonial opening of the Museum in 2013 and later, primarily at anniversary celebrations.
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I characterize Gans’ focus on order in historical time as essentially bound up with his equal concern with order in astronomical space and, in unpublished works, terrestrial space in the sense of mapping the New World. Gans’ focus on order in time and space, and our examination of the relationship between them, will finally lead me to pose a question (which will remain, at least for now, unanswered): was he concerned, as well, with categorization of terrestrial space on a smaller scale of European geography and particularly of the division of the local urban space in which he lived into Jewish and Christian parts, with the boundary apparently transgressed – most laudably, according to his report – by the visit of the Emperor and Empress to Prague’s Jewish Street?
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This paper deals with the Hebrew printing press of Franz Joseph Neumann in Brno in the years 1755–1760. It focuses on a dispute that emerged in 1755 between the printer and the Jesuit censors in Olomouc and Prague. At issue was the censorship of Hebrew books, in particular liturgical works, which were printed by Neumann. On the basis of this dispute, it is possible to show the (non-)functioning of the censorship of Hebrew books in the 1750s in Moravia, when there was a significant change in censorship practice, namely a transfer of implementation powers from the Jesuit order to the state authority. The paper compares the situation regarding Hebrew printing, book censorship and the book trade in Moravia with the conditions and practices that existed in Bohemia at the time. It describes the functioning of the Hebrew book trade and its regulation in Moravia, and provides details about the stamping of Hebrew books for registration purposes. It also gives specific examples of terms and passages that were unacceptable to the censors. Based primarily on an analysis of archival materials, the paper supplements existing overviews and case studies while also correcting some of the claims made so far.
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The paper investigates the symbolical and real borders in the areas of contact between the Jews of the Hungarian countryside and the peasants between the two world wars. The symbolical borders are created principally by differences in mentality. These are the borders which for the most part and inherently separate. Tradition, culture, religion, way of life, in many cases the language, and the minority or majority status all separate. Most of these raise an insuperable barrier between the two social groups although – as we shall see – there are cases when some of these borders can be crossed. In contrast, economic interests and the need for social contacts generally make the Jewish and peasant communities dependent on each other, and here the borders also open up more often.
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Women are far more present in Hasidic tales than they are in Hasidic teachings. Temerl Sonnenberg-Bergson, a famous wealthy patron of Poland’s tsadikim, is the heroine of a number of Hasidic tales. She is esteemed for her support of tsadikim, but is looked upon as a woman who deviates from the rigid social order of which she is a part, making her a threat to community norms. This article focuses on the literary figure of Temerl, who, within Hasidic discourse, comes to represent a kind of hermaphrodite: on the one hand, her wealth augments her material, feminine side and intensifies her sexual attraction; on the other, her power and influence construct her as masculine, casting the tsadik whom she supports in a feminine role which he must strive to overcome.
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The world of this study is the religious-ritual sphere of Hungarian Jewish culture. The different Jewish rituals carry certain basic meanings for the members of the given community through the tradition of Jewish culture. These rituals have basic importance for the members of the community as a means of experiencing their culture. This phenomenon becomes a part of a more general process, the cultural change of the present Hungarian Jewish community. The strengthening position of the synagogue in Jewish ritual life has numerous effects on the cultural changes of the Jewish community.
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A fragment of the Epicurean account of Diogenes of Oinoanda (2nd century AD), which was found in 1997, revealed a mention of the most superstitious and abominable Jews and Egyptians. The fragment is part of A Treatise on Physics and repeats the Epicurean view that gods do not interfere in people’s lives. The aforementioned peoples serve the exemplification that the world of humans is separated from the world of the gods. Both expressions refer to the stereotypical perception of the Jews and Egyptians that is well-known from Greek-Roman literature. However, it seems that the way both ethne imagined their gods – in the form of animals (the Egyptians’ view) and without any cultic statues (the Jews’ view) – was meaningful for Diogenes, who like other Epicureans attached great importance to the worship of images of gods.
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One of the paradoxes of the 1968 antisemitic campaign in Poland was the official designation of war-time rescuers of Jews as new national heroes. Previously largely absent from public discourse, they were now brought to the fore in Władysław Gomułka’s speech that launched the “anti-Zionist” witch hunt. Following the First Secretary’s lead, the mass daily press claimed the subject. Drawing on a wide range of political speeches, press articles, and TV documentaries, the paper analyses rhetorical strategies, distortions of historical truth, and propagandist exploitation of rescuers by the regime. Polish assistance to Jews was represented as a mass phenomenon, cross-cutting social and political divisions, and motivated by sheer altruism. In an atmosphere of growing paranoia about reputed “anti-Polish” attacks by “foreign circles,” rescuers came to serve as a counterproof to allegations of Polish antisemitism. With each publication, the number of rescuers grew. The rhetoric of “Jewish ingratitude” became a staple of antisemitic pieces. Once rooted, that trope flourished. The 1968 echoes today, focusing as it does on numbers, thankfulness, and the nation’s honor.
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This paper presents the tasks and aims that Nahum Sokolow believed Hebrew literature should have in Jewish life and in the Jewish national movement. Before his official joining the Zionist movement, Sokolow believed that the contribution of Hebrew literature to the formation of Jewish nationalism was more significant than the return of the Jews to their historical territory. This position did not change significantly after his joining the Zionist movement in 1897. In addition the paper evaluates Sokolow’s significant input to the development of the Jewish literary center in Warsaw and a new Hebrew literary style.
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The Central Jewish School Organization (CIShO), established in 1921, ran private schools teaching in Yiddish and promoting lay and socialist upbringing. This type of schools flourished in the interwar period, although many obstacles had to be overcome to ensure their success. One stumbling block was the lack of terminology, handbooks, curricula and methods of teaching of a wide range of lay subjects in Yiddish. The activists campaigning for lay Jewish schools set out to fill these gaps, capitalizing in doing so on the riches of the new upbringing model making headway in the world. The author mentioned the discussions related to the program and methods of teaching nature and the goals ascribed to this subject in the context of the new upbringing. Based on the records of teachers’ conferences, articles in pedagogical journals and reminiscences it was demonstrated that CIShO schools sought to reach for the latest teaching methods, adjusting the individual curricula to the needs of the Jewish children. The proponents of the new upbringing criticized the old Jewish school as a backward one, which produced people who were isolated from the mundane realities. The new school was expected to teach the child to discover the laws governing the world and in this manner prepare it for the role of an active and responsible citizen. An important role in that process, according to the active proponents of this “new school,” was played by the teaching about nature, involving the independent discovery and learning of it by the pupils, rather than just assimilating the knowledge found in the handbooks.
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The interest in the tragedy of Shoah demonstrated by Janusz Marciniak, although not devoid of personal motivations, coincided with the emergence of art conceived as “a discourse about the past”. German genocide treated as the most grievous crisis of history and rationalism is the object of a particularly in-depth debate, not merely artistic but also historical, philosophical, and sociological. Today, grief and commemoration of the Holocaust continue to function in Poland as a constant element of culture. Contrary to his oeuvre from the last two decades of the twentieth century, whose characteristic features include a considerable dose of painterly expression, Marciniak avoids affectation in his works dedicated to the Holocaust and is concerned with concise statements. Instead of an art of “the cry and suffering”, revealing the presence of fear, dread, and catastrophe, he proposes the poetic of calmness and reflections, and prefers to the artistic experiment the transparency of the document, the discipline of the text, and finally, the digital image, which became helpful in ridding the gesture of all rhetorical features, depersonalizing the visual stratum, and freeing activity via the image. Both in his undertakings pursued in the building of the public swimming pool in Poznań – originally a synagogue, and in monument projects and realizations an evocative visual effect was created with the assistance of simple means of expression and lucid metaphors. Due to their transparency they referred the recipient to his previous knowledge about the Holocaust and the life of the Jews in Polish lands, to the stories and images carried by all of us. The most essential has not been said, presented or enacted. It came into existence “between” and lasted outside all words. The works of the Poznań-based artist dealing with the Holocaust thus became part of a discourse about the “non-presentability of the Holocaust”, initiated by Theodor Adorno’s famous declaration about writing poetry after the barbarity of Auschwitz.
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The analysis of the prayer contained in the Hebrew-Russian prayer book allows to describe the linguistic image of God and his people — Israel/Jews. Appealing to the patriarchs, to the covenant between God and Israel, to the Torah, Jerusalem and temple worship, that is, the centuries-long Jewish religious tradition, are cultural codes, and at the same time key components of Jewish identity. They are a point of reference in considering so called the Jewish question, taking into account primarily the Jewish perspective, not the Christian one.
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The term “post-Jewish property” has a descriptive function in Polish. It is present in both colloquial speech and academic discourse. This specific collocation usually does not raise semantic suspicions and is considered a carrier of neutral content used to describe certain material assets, that is the property of Jews who were murdered by the Germans during the Holocaust, in particular – the real estate remaining in Poland, whose owners changed. The problem with the term “post-Jewish property” understood in this way is that it is based on false foundations and incorporates functions assigned to it in order to ensure the comfort of the Polish national community. The key objective of this paper is to deconstruct this highly convenient and useful conceptual collocation, indicate its origin and, primarily, to answer the question of what it tries to erase/conceal.
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The aim of the presented article is to show how the memory and the memory politics locate the past Polish-Jewish relations, preceding and unrelated to the holocaust. How they influence the present, the current way of thinking about the future of the Jewish nation and the Polish nation. The paper presents how important for the Jewish history Poland is and how important a part of Polish history the Jews history is, or how diverse, colorful and passionate can modern Jewish culture and society initiatives be.The text calls forth numerous contemporary initiatives of the Jewish-themed organizations,quotes of extraordinary people on the Polish-Jewish relationship.
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The article explores the events known as the “pimp pogrom,” which took place in Warsaw in May 1905, as presented by the Jewish press. The analysis of the sources has provided new insights into the events, which were very complex in their nature. For many years, the Jewish community of Warsaw struggled with a problem of prostitution and white slavery. The inaction of the Russian authorities and police as well as the ineffectiveness of abolitionist organizations provoked the feeling of hopelessness and evoked a rank-and-file initiative of the Jewish working class. The pre-revolutionary turmoil only accelerated the explosion of violence against the marginalized and suspicious elements of the society.
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In 1948 the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw started publishing “Bleter far Geshikhte”, a Yiddish periodical bearing the same title as a pre-war journal which used to be co-edited by Emanuel Ringelblum. The post-war continuation intended to be a forum for Polish Jewish historiography but the postwar conditions as well as emigration of many Jewish researchers turned “Bleter” into a hybrid-like periodical for the Jewish milieu in Poland and a handful of Yiddish-speaking researchers abroad. In the 1950s and 1960s the editorial board, consisting of Ber Mark, Tatiana Berenstein, Artur Eisenbach and Adam Rutkowski, struggled to keep the academic character of the journal while opening it also to authors from other Eastern European countries, mainly the USSR and Romania. Following Mark’s death, Berenstein’s and Rutkowski’s emigration from Poland and the anti-Semitic campaign of 1968, the journal got suspended in 1970 for the next 10 years, although minutes of meetings of the editorial board show that for all these years efforts were made to continue publishing the journal. It eventually reappeared in 1980 but as less and less researchers and editors were able to write and/or edit in Yiddish, the journal got finally closed in 1990. The article discusses the history of the journal as well as one particular case study of publishing excerpts from Zygmunt Klukowski’s wartime diary, regarding the Holocaust in Szczebrzeszyn. These excerpts were published in “Bleter” in 1951 and censored or changed to conform to the official vision of Polish-Jewish relations during the war. In the article the censored and/or changed fragments have been verified against the 1958 edition of the diary in a book-length form.
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