À la recherche… des identités juives multiples
Daniel Baric, Tristan Coignard, Gaëlle Vassogne (Hgg.): Identités juives en Europe centrale. Des Lumières à l´entre-deux-guerres. Tours: Presses Universitaires Franoçis-Rabelais 2014, 276 S.
More...We kindly inform you that, as long as the subject affiliation of our 300.000+ articles is in progress, you might get unsufficient or no results on your third level or second level search. In this case, please broaden your search criteria.
Daniel Baric, Tristan Coignard, Gaëlle Vassogne (Hgg.): Identités juives en Europe centrale. Des Lumières à l´entre-deux-guerres. Tours: Presses Universitaires Franoçis-Rabelais 2014, 276 S.
More...
Polish education, defense ministers place blame elsewhere for massacres in the Jedwabne and Kielce.
More...
A conversation with Tad Taube, Chairman of the San Francisco-based Taube Philanthropies, and Honorary Consul for the Republic of Poland in the San Francisco Peninsula Region.
More...
The paper focuses on the Judeo-Hellenic writers composing in times of Roman occupation, especially on works created by Josephus Flavius. On the basis of his re-written version of events described in the Bible, one can observe various methods used by Josephus and other authors to accommodate their history for the needs of Greco-Roman world. One such method is depicting notable characters from the Bible in a more understandable way, particularly different prophets from the Old Testament. Those Jewish sages are described surprisingly alike to Greek philosophers, orators and commanders – figures that were well-known to Greeks and admired by them. The article presents specific example for that kind of adaptations, presenting at the same time differences between prophets from the times of the Second Temple and those from before the Babylonian thralldom. Understanding these differences is essential for explaining how Jewish scholars could find a common ground with Greek philosophers.
More...
A review of the exhibit titled: "Poland and Palestine: Two Lands and Two Skies" at the Galicia Jewish Museum, Krakow, Poland.
More...
The aim of the article is to describe the interaction between the changing urban landscape of the city of Poznań and the (non)memory of the city inhabitants about its multi-ethnic heritage. The focus is on the cemeteries past and present, some of which were transformed into spaces with new functionalities. The quantitative and qualitative research was conducted in two stages. First, drawing on corpus linguistic methods, articles from two dailies: „Głos Wielkopolski” and „Gazeta Wyborcza” – the local supplement, covering 1990–2014 were analysed. This analysis led to the formulation of topics for the focus group interviews conducted among the four generations of Poznań inhabitants. In this way the collective memory about Poznan Jews and Germans could be investigated in its two dimensions: the public discourse of mass media as well as the semi-private discourses of communicated memory.
More...
The article discusses life and work of Israel Rabon, one of the major writers and creators of literary life in pre-war Lodz. It presents his most important works like Di Gas (The Street), the only one of his book translated into Polish, Bałuty (Balut) and memoirs entitled Farcejchenungen fun jor 1939 (Sketches of the year 1939) written during Nazi occupation. The article also includes Izrael Rabon’s role in Yiddish literature and his activity as an editor of literary journal “Os”.
More...
The paper deals with biographical, ideological and artistic links between Julian Tuwim, Alfred Döblin and Kurt Tucholsky. On the one hand, the basis of comparison are biographical similarities, the Jewish origin of those three writers, their family dramas, the experience of politically opressive school, the trauma of revolution or war, and the exile to name just a few. On the other hand, the article demonstrates the ways the modernity has influenced the attitudes and texts of Döblin, Tucholsky and Tuwim. While talking about modernity, the author focuses on such phenomena as secularisation and urbanization processes, mass political movements, and new cultural challenges. Tuwim, Döblin and Tucholsky were born into assimilated Jewish families. Their perspective on the stereotypical Jews (the orthodox Jews as well as Jewish bankers or manufacturers) is marked with antipathy, or even contempt. The writers’ ambivalence towards the diapora and towards their own origin illustrate “Jewish self-hatred“; however, all three authors change their opinion on Jewry in the face of the growing anti-Semitic and Nazi danger, and especially the Holocaust. Döblin is proud of being Jewish after his visit to Poland in 1924, Tucholsky warns German Jews against the consequences of their passivitivy, and Tuwim publishes in 1944 his agitating manifesto We, Polish Jews. Last but not least, the three authors go into exile because of their Jewish ancestry and sociocultural activities. Therefore, it is no coincidence thatone cannot help having associations with Heinrich Heine: his biography can be interpreted as a prefiguration of a Jewish artist’s biography. Furthermore, Tuwim, Döblin and Tucholsky are notably sensitive to social questions, and their sensitivity to such issues results to some extent from their difficult childhood and youth. Especially significant seem in that respect family conflicts and the moving from city to city, since such experiences increase the feeling of loneliness and the vulnerability to depression. Nevertheless, Döblin, Tucholsky and Tuwim come with impetus into the cultural life of Germany and Poland and work in the areas of literature, cabaret (satire) as well as journalism. They share sympathy for the political left and fears of the orthodox communism. They are simultaneously advocates and ardent critics of great cities. They pay attention to new phenomena (the popularity of cars, the role of the press, the new morality) and react to them. Their aim is creating a culture which appeals to the masses and educates them in a non-intrusive way. However, the awareness of their own intellectual superiority imposes distance towards lower social groups. The distance stems, firstly, from the universal ambivalence artists feel towards the masses, and secondly, from the ideological moderation characteristic of petit bourgoisie and of the political centre. In general, Döblin, Tucholsky and Tuwim are idealists who hope for a humanitarian world which is impossible in the era of extrem political violence leading to the Holocaust.
More...
This article considers Holocaust testimonies and the question of translation, understood here as both exchanges between languages within a text and renditions of a text into another language. According to Imre Kertész, Holocaust has no language that could express its meaning, and no national language has been able to coin words and expressions capable of conveying its catastrophic dimension. Since Holocaust survivors must express themselves in one of the national languages, Holocaust testimony is always a form of translation, even in the case of writers who wrote their memoirs in their native tongues (such as Kertész, Primo Levi, Jean Améry, Paul Celan, Ida Fink, and Hanna Krall, whose work is discussed here). The choice of language in which survivors’ memoirs (as well as other literary forms) were written had a profound impact on their authors’ sense of self-identity, their ability to heal, and the way they remembered the past. The largest number of memoirs appeared in English, the survivors’ second tongue, whose neutrality enabled them to overcome associations with the language in which they experienced traumatic events. Others, such as Elie Wiesel and Isabella Leitner, translated their initial accounts written in their native tongues (Yiddish and Hungarian, respectively) into smoothed-out versions in the languages of their adopted country (France and the United States).
More...
The paper discusses Paul Ricoeur’s theory of translating, which is presented in three short texts published as On Translation. Centred on metaphor, this discussion focuses on the nature of language and translator’s ethical commitment to the other who speaks a different language.First, the article tries to solve the inherent paradox of such a theory: the impossibility of reconciling two contradicory, yet equally justified views which specify that either perfect translation must exist or every attempt to translate must a priori be a failure. Expanding on Ricoeur’s argumentation and referring to some ideas of “late” Wittgenstein, the study tries to weaken this antinomy and to replace it with a dialectic in which radical stances are sublated. This dialectic is built on the notion of similarity, which in turn is a base for the notion of the metaphor. The second part, concerning the ethics of translation, poses the question whether the translator is committed in some way to the other whose utterance is being translated. It defines the conditions a good translation should fulfill (the word “good” is used here primarily in its ethical sense) and concentrates on “linguistic hospitality”. This metaphor suggests thinking about the translator as someone who respects autonomy and otherness of the other, yet at the same time attempting to communicate with the other to learn more about them. The article concludes with the statement that we can know ourselves only through dialogue with others who differ from ourselves. Thus, good translation should be seen as a “live” metaphor of the original.
More...
Oskar Goldberg’s hermeneutical approach eliminates from the text of the Pentateuch concepts crucial for its traditional – “rabbinic” – understanding. Based on deep etymological analysis, apathetical theory of language leads the German scholar to the conclusion that the idea of “sin” – among many others – was alien to the ancient Hebrews, who knew only the concept of “objective mistake”. Taking a diametrically different approach to the language of the Five Books of Moses, Aramaic translators develop the idea of “sin” as transgression and personal responsibility. This disagreement stems not only from two different visions of language of the Scripture, but is also determined by contrasting visions of god, man and their mutual relations.
More...
Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah, Jewish philosophy after Auschwitz, Jewish theodicy,cosmic religion
More...
The religious heritage and millenary common history unite the Jews and Poles. Throughout the centuries, Jewish religion and culture have emanated from Poland all over the world. Plenty of phenomena of the contemporary culture have at least partially Jewish and Christian roots. In the 18th century, Chasidism – a very important religious current in Judaism – appeared in Poland and has lasted till today. It developed under the influence of tradition, mysticism and Slavonic folk culture. The religious and cultural life of the Jews flourished in Poland especially in the interwar period (1918‒1939). Three million one hundred and thirteen thousands of Jews lived in Poland before the World War Second. The assimilated Polish Jews belonged to cultural and intellectual elites of Poland. It was the biggest Jewish community in the world. There were even cities with a Jewish majority such as presented herein Przysucha, where Jewish community played a significant role in economic, business, cultural and educational spheres. The past mutual merging of Jewish and Christian cultures contributes again nowadays to the rapprochement between Christians and Jews and gives a chance to write another awesome chart in the history of our country.
More...
Leonard I. Greenspoon is Senior Professor at Creighton University, Nebraska, USA, and an internationally revered scholar in the field of Septuagint and Qumran Studies. He hold his Ph.D. in Classical and Hebrew Studies from the University of Harvard. In the present essay he analyses the image of God as Divine Warrior in the Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls, with special reference to the history of Palestine in Biblical times.
More...