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‚Maise Jeschurun‘
(2023)
The birth of the Yishuv’s national shipping company, ZIM was preceded by private enterprise; the sea had not traditionally been a focus of the Zionist movement. In the 1930s, a five-year span of private commercial shipping saw three companies in the Jewish community in Palestine – Palestine Shipping Company, Palestine Maritime Lloyd, and Atid – before shipping was cut short by the outbreak of the Second World War. Despite their brief lifespans and their negligible contribution to general shipping, these companies constituted an important milestone. Their existence helped shift the Yishuv leadership’s attitudes about shipping’s importance for the community and the need for it to be supported by national institutions.
Mothers of Seafaring
(2023)
The article aims to trace the contribution of Jewish women in the Yishuv’s maritime history. Taking the example of Henrietta Diamond, a founding member and chairperson of the Zebulun Seafaring Society, the article seeks to explore the representation and role of women in a growing Jewish maritime domain from the 1930s to the 1950s. It examines Zionist narratives on the ‘New Jew’ and the Jewish body and studies their relevance for the emerging field of maritime activities in the Yishuv. By contextualizing the work and depiction of Henrietta Diamond, the article sheds new light on the gendered notions that underlay the emergence of the Jewish maritime domain and illustrates the patterns of inclusion and exclusion in it.
Desperados at Sea
(2023)
Pirates are fortune-seeking fighters at sea. Their exploits fire the imaginations of their victims and admirers, drawing a veil over individuals who rarely bear a real name and pursue their adventurous occupations as buccaneers, filibusters, freebooters, privateers, pirates, or corsairs. Piracy, corsairing, and contraband trade were epidemic among the Egyptians and the Phoenicians, the Greeks and the Vikings, the Spaniards and the Ottomans, the Muslims, and the Christians. And the Jews.
“Israel am Meere”
(2023)
For Jews in Germany, the period following the Nazis’ rise to power in January 1933 was a period of decision-making on many levels: How should they respond to the persecution? If they decided to emigrate, many more decisions had to be made: How does one leave a country, and where should one go? A key moment in the process and in the cultural practice of emigration is the beginning of the sea voyage – when the need for departure and the hope for a new arrival jointly create a period of liminality. Looking at reports from sea voyages of exploration and emigration from the 1930s, this contribution discusses the question whether, and in what ways, such reflections can be read in the context of religious experiences and in the search for Jewish identities in times of turmoil.
“Creating a Maritime Future”
(2023)
This article explores the importance of the port city of Hamburg in the evolving discourses on the creation of a maritime future, a vision which became influential in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. While some Jewish representatives in the city aimed at preserving and intertwining Hanseatic and Jewish traditions in order to secure a Jewish presence in the port city under the pressure of the Nazi regime and thereafter, others wanted to create new emigration opportunities, especially to Mandatory Palestine, and create a Jewish maritime future in Eretz Israel. Different Zionist organizations supported the newly evolving maritime ideas, such as the “conquest of the sea”, and promoted the image of a Jewish seafaring nation. Despite the difficulties in the 1940s, these concepts gained influence post-1945 and led to the foundation of the fishery kibbutz “Zerubavel” in Blankenese/Hamburg. However, the idea of a Hanseatic Jewish future also remained influential and illustrates how differently a “Jewish maritime future” was imagined and used to link past, present and future.
Jacob Brandon Maduro’s Memoirs and Related Observations (Havana, 1953) speak to the lasting yet malleable legacy of Jewish Caribbean/Atlantic mercantile communities that defined early modern settlement in the Americas. A close reading of the Memoirs, alongside relevant archival records and community narratives, lends new perspectives to scholarship on Port Jewries and the Atlantic Diaspora. Specifically concerned with Jacob’s adoption of such leading intellectual and political tropes as the Monroe doctrine, José Martí’s Nuestra America, and a Zionism that evolved from an ideology to a reality, the Memoirs reveal a narrative at once defined by the tremendous upheavals of the first half of the 20th century, and an enduring sense of Jewish diasporic peoplehood defined through a Port Jew paradigm whereby the preservation of Jewish ethnicity is understood as synonymous with the championing of modernity.
Abgelegte Musik
(2023)
Einleitung
(2023)
Schutz und Schaden
(2023)
When the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau opened its doors in 1854, it established a novel form of rabbinical education: the systematic combination of Jewish studies at the seminary in parallel with university studies. The Breslau seminary became the model for most later institutions for rabbinical training in Europe and the United States. The seminaries were the new sites of modern Jewish scholarship, especially the academic study of Judaism (Wissenschaft des Judentums). Their function and goal were to preserve, (re)organize, and transmit Jewish knowledge in the modern age. As such, they became central nodes in Jewish scholarly networks. This case study highlights the multi-nodal connections between the Conservative seminaries in Breslau, Philadelphia, New York, Budapest, and Vienna. At the same time, it is intended to provide an example of the potential of transnational and transfer studies for the history of the Jewish religious learning in Europe and the United States.
This article explores the multi-directional geographic trajectories and ties of Jews who came to the United States in the 19th century, working to complicate simplistic understandings of “German” Jewish immigration. It focuses on the case study of Henry Cohn, an ordinary Russian-born Jew whose journeys took him to Prussia, New York, Savannah, and California. Once in the United States he returned to Europe twice, the second time permanently, although a grandson ended up in California, where he worked to ensure the preservation of Cohn’s records. This story highlights how Jews navigated and transgressed national boundaries in the 19th century and the limitations of the historical narratives that have been constructed from their experiences.
A Secular Tradition
(2021)
This article focuses on the social philosopher Horace Kallen and the revisions he made to the concept of cultural pluralism that he first developed in the early 20th century, applying it to postwar America and the young State of Israel. It shows how he opposed the assumption that the United States’ social order was based on a “Judeo-Christian tradition.” By constructing pluralism as a civil religion and carving out space for secular self-understandings in midcentury America, Kallen attempted to preserve the integrity of his earlier political visions, developed during World War I, of pluralist societies in the United States and Palestine within an internationalist global order. While his perspective on the State of Israel was largely shaped by his American experiences, he revised his approach to politically functionalizing religious traditions as he tested his American understanding of a secular, pluralist society against the political theology effective in the State of Israel. The trajectory of Kallen’s thought points to fundamental questions about the compatibility of American and Israeli understandings of religion’s function in society and its relation to political belonging, especially in light of their transnational connection through American Jewish support for the recently established state.
When he founded Schocken Books in 1945, department store magnate, philanthropist, and publisher Salman Schocken (1877–1959) called his new American publishing business an imitation of its German predecessor, which had functioned from 1931 until 1938. He intended it to replicate the success of the Berlin Schocken Verlag by spiritually fortifying a Jewish community uncertain in its identity. The new company reflected the transnational transfer of people, ideas, and texts between Germany, Palestine/Israel, and the United States. Its success and near-failure raise questions about transnationalism and American Jewish culture: Can a culture be imposed on a population which has its own organs and agencies of cultural production? Had American Jewish culture developed organically to the specific place where several million Jews found themselves and according to uniquely American cultural patterns? The answers suggest that the concepts of transnationalism and cultural transfer complement each other as tools to analyze American Jewry in its American and Jewish contexts.
As mid-19th-century American Jews introduced radical changes to their religious observance and began to define Judaism in new ways, to what extent did they engage with European Jewish ideas? Historians often approach religious change among Jews from German lands during this period as if Jewish immigrants had come to America with one set of ideas that then evolved solely in conversation with their American contexts. Historians have similarly cast the kinds of Judaism Americans created as both unique to America and uniquely American. These characterizations are accurate to an extent. But to what extent did Jewish innovations in the United States take place in conversation with European Jewish developments? Looking to the 19th-century American Jewish press, this paper seeks to understand how American Jews engaged European Judaism in formulating their own ideas, understanding themselves, and understanding their place in world Judaism.
In Search of Belonging
(2021)
More than 200,000 Jews left the Habsburg province of Galicia between 1881 and 1910. No longer living in the places of their childhood, they settled in urban centers, such as in New York’s Lower East Side. In this neighborhood, Galician Jews began to search for new relationships that linked the places they left and the ones where they arrived and settled. By looking at Galicia through the lens of autobiographical writings by former Jewish immigrants who became established residents of New York, this article emphasizes the role of regionalism in the context of transnational conceptions of a new American Jewish self-understanding. It argues that the key to analyzing the evolution of “eastern Europe” as a common place of origin for American Jewry is the constant dialogue between the places of origin and arrival. Specifically, philanthropic efforts during and after the First World War and the proliferation of tourism both enabled these settled immigrants to gradually replace regional notions, such as the idea of Galicia, with a mythical image of eastern Europe to create a sense of community as American Jews.
Foreign Entanglements
(2021)
American occupying forces made the promotion of Jewish-Christian dialogue part of their plans for postwar German reconstruction. They sought to export American models of Jewish-Christian cooperation to Germany, while simultaneously validating and valorizing claims about the connection between democracy and tri-faith religious pluralism in the United States. The small size of the Jewish population in Germany meant that Jews did not set the terms of these discussions, and evidence shows that both German and American Jews expressed skepticism about participating in dialogue in the years immediately following the Holocaust. But opting out would have meant that discussions in Germany about the Judeo-Christian tradition that the American government advanced as the centerpiece of postwar democratic reconstruction would take place without a Jewish contribution. American Jewish leaders, present in Germany and in the US, therefore decided to opt in, not because they supported the project, but because it seemed far riskier to be left out.
Hilfe für Erez Israel
(2020)
Obituary
(2020)
In 1810, Moses Lackenbacher, together with two of his children, Israel and Heinrich, and Moses Löwenstein created the company “Moses Lackenbacher & Compagnie” with headquarters in Nagykanizsa and a branch in Vienna. The main profile of the company was army purveyance. The business activity resulted in a high spatial mobility which led to socio-cultural acculturation and conversions to Christianity within the kinship. This paper explores the connection between kinship and the operation of the company on the basis of the prominent yet little-researched Lackenbachers in the early 19th-century Habsburg Monarchy. Central questions are how the relatives organized a company during the Napoleonic wars, as well as the impact of operating a business; how familial bonds and kinship links were affected, and, in this context, how relatives together evolved into a multi-religious network of kinship.
In 1924, the Berlin ophthalmologist Arthur Czellitzer (1871–1943) and like-minded members of the local Jewish community founded the Society for Jewish Family Research. A year later, the Society launched the journal Jüdische Familienforschung (Jewish Family Research), edited by Czellitzer. The Society was an outstanding platform of professional academic and amateur researchers and promoted a type of Jewish genealogy and family history that was shaped by the historical-medical discourse of the time. The concepts and methods of both the biological sciences and Wissenschaft des Judentums shaped and defined the academic approach to family research and history in Czellitzer’s and the Society’s work. The Society soon became the leading international association for the academic Jewish genealogical research. Despite of its brutal end in 1938, Arthur Czellitzer’s and the Society’s works, the issues raised, and the methods they created shape Jewish family research and genealogy until today.
Squaring the pedigree
(2020)
Arthur Czellitzer (1872 – 1943) embodies the interdependence between eugenics and genealogy in early 20th-century Germany. He developed widely discussed genealogical recording techniques designed both for studies about human heredity and for the use in historical family research. When he shifted his focus from medical family studies to Jewish family research after World War I, he maintained a eugenic agenda which was now primarily targeted at the preservation of the “Jewish race.”
Genealogical documents offer crucial information on various aspects of Jewish history. They are still underappreciated by many historians, and there is little overlap between academic researchers and the genealogical community, for whom such documents serve a different purpose, as they retrieve individual family histories. The article provides an overview of the material held by Leo Baeck Institute Archives and Library as well as other digital resources for family research today.
The paper investigates how cultural and social capital were passed down to the next generations via letters of recommendation. Focusing on fathers recommending their sons to German Jewish banker Gerson (von) Bleichröder, the paper asks how father-son relations were described and which role equivalent backgrounds, especially in terms of Jewishness and social standing, played in this process. Mainly discussed are four different patriarchs approaching Bleichröder on behalf of their sons to further their careers. Making use of methods such as historical network analysis and semantic analysis the paper introduces the letters of recommendation as a complex yet promising practice in order to maintain, strengthen and even further the family’s (social) capital over generational changes. The paper finds trust and tradition to be crucial for successful recommendations. Situated at a liminal point of economic and personal spheres, recommendations shed new light on crucial questions of 19th-century Jewish history, such as acculturation and distinctiveness as well as on intra-familial dynamics in the face of profound social transformation.
The article deals with the family backgrounds and school careers of teachers for religious education at Jewish higher schools during the 19th century. As many of them are known because of their academic publications, our knowledge about their work as teachers is still a desideratum. Therefore, biographies of teachers at both Jewish higher schools in Frankfurt (Main) are presented and compared with the objective to identify typical structures. A key finding is the fact that access to the position as a teacher was not much formalized. Different ways to become a teacher were characteristic for both schools whilst the Modern Orthodox “Unterrichtsanstalt der Israelitischen Religionsgesellschaft” (IRG) was furthermore characterized by close family relations between its teachers. On the other hand, within the liberal network there existed a strong support based on shared convictions which worked as counterpart to the familiar network of the Modern Orthodox School.
Tu felix Camelot nube!
(2020)
This article explores the ways in which the Yiddish Arthurian romance Viduvilt (sixteenth ct.) reworks its Middle High German model text, Wirnt von Grafenberg’s Wigalois (1210/1220), for an early modern Jewish audience. Through seemingly minor changes, the adaptor creates a story world in which family politics play an essential role and become the driving force behind the story development. Part of this change is the reevaluation of female figures, in particular mothers. In contrast to its model, the Arthurian knight in Viduvilt is created as a figure that relies and depends largely on the decisions made by mothers, who are portrayed as powerful matres familias.
This article explores childhood discourses in the Jewish society of the Russian Empire. It focuses on images of parents, while exploring the differences between pre-modern and modern narrative types in Jewish autobiographies. In the pre-modern paradigm, mothers are barely present while fathers appear more often, although neither parent demonstrates emotional affection toward the child. In the modern paradigm, parents are either equally present or the mother is more prominent, they engage in the everyday activities with the child, and do not hesitate to show their emotional love. Moreover, the notions of inner world and child’s individuality emerge. These changes correspond to major shifts in discourses shaping the attitude toward children in the European society.
Rabbi Jacob ben Isaac of Yanova (d. 1623) is best known as the author of the Ze’enah U-Re’enah; the Melits Yosher (“Intercessor before God”) is one of his lesser known works. It was first published in Lublin in 1622 and reprinted once in Amsterdam in 1688. Like the Ze’enah U-Re’enah, it was a Torah commentary, but composed for men who had some yeshivah education, but who could not continue their studies. The commentary on the Song of Songs by Isaac Sulkes is another Yiddish work that addresses the same audience as the Melits Yosher. The purpose of this article is to bring to scholarly attention an audience that has not been noticed or studied in the previous scholarship on early modern Yiddish literature.
This article explores an instructive case of translation critique against the background of the rise of Zionism in Europe at the turn of the previous century. It seeks to answer the question: Why did David Frishman, one of the most prolific Hebrew writers and translators of the late 1890s and early 1900s, criticize Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Russian translation of Hayim Nahman Bialik’s Hebrew poems? Both Bialik and Jabotinsky were major figures in the field of Hebrew culture and Zionist politics in the early 1900s, while Frishman generally shunned partisan activism and consistently presented himself as devoted solely to literature. Frishman perceived literature, nevertheless, as a political arena, viewing translation, in particular, as a locus of ideological debate. Writing from the viewpoint of a political minority at a time in which the Hebrew translation industry in Europe gained momentum, Frishman deemed translation a tool for cementing cultural hierarchies. He anticipated later analyses of the act and products of translation as reflective of intercultural tensions. The article suggests, more specifically, that it was Frishman’s view of the Hebrew Bible that informed his “avant-garde” stance on translation.
Tewje in Deutschland
(2019)
Drawing on the example of Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman, this article covers the history of Yiddish translation and publication in Germany in the 20th century.Following the paradigm of translation as a cultural practice, I demonstrate how the translation reflects aspects of Jewish-German cultural history, focussing on a mainly inner-Jewish identity discourse before the Shoah and a remembrance context after it. Whereas decisive differences and changes characterize 20th-century history in diachronic as well as synchronic respect, the article reflects also on continuities and parallels.
The Ram Bible (Tanakh Ram) is a recently-published Bible edition printed in two columns: the right-hand column features the original biblical Hebrew text and the lefthand column features the translation of the Bible into a high-register literary Israeli (Reclaimed Hebrew). The Ram Bible edition has gained impressive academic and popular attention. This paper looks at differences between academics, teachers, students, media personalities and senior officials in the education system, regarding their attitude to the Ram Bible. Our study reveals that Bible teachers and students who make frequent use of this edition understand its contribution to comprehending the biblical language, stories, and ideas. Opponents of Ram Bible are typically administrators and theoretician scholars who advocate the importance of teaching the Bible but do not actually teach it themselves. We argue that the fundamental difference between biblical Hebrew and Israeli makes the Hebrew Bible incomprehensible to native Israeli speakers. We explain the advantages of employing tools such as the Ram Bible.
Tewje in Deutschland
(2019)
Drawing on the example of Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman, this article covers the history of Yiddish translation and publication in Germany in the 20th century.Following the paradigm of translation as a cultural practice, I demonstrate how the translation reflects aspects of Jewish-German cultural history, focussing on a mainly inner-Jewish identity discourse before the Shoah and a remembrance context after it. Whereas decisive differences and changes characterize 20th-century history in diachronic as well as synchronic respect, the article reflects also on continuities and parallels.