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This article deals with contact between East Asian thought and modern Hebrew Literature from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth century, until today. In the first part, the article suggests that from a historiographical perspective, one may outline three waves of contact between these two cultural phenomena, at opposite ends of Asia. In the first wave, which began in the early twentieth century, Asian influence on Hebrew literature written in Europe was mediated mainly through the philosophers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The second wave, which emerged in the 1950s, relates to the influence of the leaders of the Beat Generation, who, in turn, were influenced by modernist poetry in English, which was colored by contact with Asian poetry. The third wave is part of the glocal New Age phenomenon and its appropriation of certain Buddhist traits.
The second part of the article presents several theoretical possibilities of symbioses between cultures, as they appear within language.
The third part presents the symptomatic example of the work of contemporary Hebrew writer Yoel Hoffmann, who appears to be a representative of the second wave; however, his work maintains dialogue with the first wave, and its current popularity is part of the third wave. Hoffmann’s work serves as an example of how to apply the theoretical possibilities presented in the second part of the article, as an instance of literary contact between two cultures and their respective languages.
Yoel Hoffmann is an Israeli writer born in 1937 in Brasov (Kronstadt), Romania. Brought up in a German-speaking family, already in his first book, Sefer Yosef (1989), he conveys the voice of German-speaking immigrants in Israel (the “Katschen” story, 1986) and that of the East European Jewish community in Berlin in the late 1930s, on the verge of the Second World War. His works are crammed with characters of Jews from Germany gripped by the memory of the language they abandoned following their emigration to Palestine in the 1930s. The classic one is the character of Bernhard, in the eponymous work. The current article focuses on the representation and elaboration of Hoffmann’s unique creation, in a language influenced by his deep identification with Zen Buddhism on the one hand, and his attraction to the modernist, Western style of stream of consciousness on the other. In central sections of his works, Hoffman presents his entire literary corpus as a type of explicit, allusive, or secret Holocaust literature, and invites his readers and his critics to decode the allusions and expose the secret in this theme, a surprising statement in relation to Hoffmann’s work and its analysis so far. Hoffmann represents the Holocaust as a collective Israeli trauma for which his literary fiction creates a special catalogue of representative characters. In the creation of a catalogue, and particularly one that simultaneously classifies and individualizes, Hoffmann’s project resembles the monumental 1920s cataloguing project by the celebrated German photographer August Sander (Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts). Hoffmann included photographs from this project in his works, and even chose some of them for the covers of his books. The article examines the implicit relationships between these two creative artists as conferring a meaning so far not considered in the research of the Holocaust theme in Yoel Hoffmann’s writings.
After the mass immigration to Israel from 1948 to 1950, about 2000 Jews remained
in Yemen. These Jews lived in small communities and continued to maintain their
religious environment as it was. In the years that followed, many of them, however, moved from Yemen to Israel with the assistance of the Jewish Agency and the Joint
Distribution Committee (JDC). The community was of a small size and the fact that it
was dispersed throughout the predominantly Muslim areas, created a certain closeness
between the two groups. About ten percent of the Jews chose to convert to Islam, many
of them in groups. In about twenty cases, the husbands chose to convert to Islam while
their wives emigrated to preserve their Judaism. Some of the converts refused to grant
their wives a divorce, because, according to Muslim law, conversion is enough to sever
the marital relationship. This procedure is called ʿAgunot. Meaning, women bound in
marriage to a husband and they no longer lived together, but the husband didn’t formally
‘released’ her from marriage union. The article follows the efforts undertaken
to release the ʿAgunot, and shows that Jewish and Muslim scholars were able to find
solutions to the ʿAgunot problem and, at times, managed to bridge the gap between the
two religions.
A New Kind of Jew
(2018)
The article examines Allen Ginsberg’s spiritual path, and places his interest in Asian religions within larger cultural agendas and life choices. While identifying as a Jew, Ginsberg wished to transcend beyond his parents’ orbit and actively sought to create an inclusive, tolerant, and permissive society where persons such as himself could live and create at ease. He chose elements from the Christian, Jewish, Native-American, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions, weaving them together into an ever-growing cultural and spiritual quilt. The poet never underwent a conversion experience or restricted his choices and freedoms. In Ginsberg’s understanding, Buddhism was a universal, non-theistic religion that meshed well with an individualist outlook, and worked toward personal solace and mindfulness. He and other Jews saw no contradiction between enchantment with Buddhism and their Jewish identity.
rezensiertes Werk: Leshonot yehude Sefarad ve-ha-mizrach vesifruyotehem / Languages and literatures of Sephardic and Oriental Jews. - Jerusalem : Misgav Yerushalayim, 2009. - 484 S. [hebr.] + 434 S. [lat.], ; Ill.
Immobile Tremor
(2011)
The threshold between the XVth and the XVIth Century represents a historical period during which, both for Christians and for Jews, the geopolitical sceneries and the interior horizons radically change. The modified reality provokes new forms of expectation and the need of new historical interpretations. Ferrara, within this scenery, can be considered, as other Italian cases, as a paradigmatic example, a narrow space where phenomena of spiritual and cultural Jewish rebirth can take shape. The permeability between Christian artistic and cultural world and Jewish intellectual production determines a prosperous context, further strengthened by the introduction of Jewish typography and by a growing claim and restoration of social elective dignity among the Jews of the Este Duchy. After the transfer of the capital city from Ferrara to Modena, the indirect effects of this intellectual resurgence are deeply transformed on a social level, and allows us to catch the persistence of important forms of communication between Christians and Jews in everyday life. The introduction of the Inquisition provides us, through the production of the judicial archive, with the most important instrument to understand social dynamics, which allows us to comprehend a new potential interpretation key for the reality of the ghetto and the choice of its erection. The urban division is nothing else but a new attempt to separate the invisible spaces of the thought. The effective efficacy of the physical separation shows several weak points, which persist during the entire life of the ghetto, since 1638 until 1789.
This article aims to demonstrate the exceptional potential of Habsburg military records for the study of Jewish history during Europe’s Age of Revolution. We begin with the random discovery of six Jewish veterans of Freikorps Grün Loudon – a unit of mercenary freebooters – which fought for the Habsburgs during the first war against the French Republic (1792 – 97). A careful re-reading of the available archival evidence reveals that these men were the survivors of a much larger group numbering at least two dozen Jewish soldiers. While Jewish conscripts had been drafted into the Habsburg army since 1788, the fact that Jews could also serve – even volunteer – as professional soldiers in that period is completely new to us. When considered together, the personal circumstances and service experiences of the Jewish soldiers of Freikorps Grün Loudon enable us to make several observations about their motivation as well as their position vis-à-vis their non-Jewish comrades.
The St. Petersburg Branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy (PFA RAN) contains two manuscript biographies of Daniel Chwolson, the Russian-Jewish Orientalist, advocate of Jewish scholarship, and bridge builder to the Breslau Jewish Theological Seminary. They were written by his pupil and colleague, Pavel Kokovtsov, and his grandson Yevgeny Chwolson, respectively. These two texts are studied against the background of published texts and popular opinion of Chwolson in late Imperial Russia. Apart from some details, these manuscripts offer limited additional information as factual sources, most of their contents being mere variation of published texts. However, the biography of Chwolson written by his grandson is a valuable source on the reception of Chwolson and illustrates the potential of further mythological appreciation of his personality and works in the Soviet time as a defense strategy for Chwolson’s family. It also contains crucial information on the fate of Chwolson’s archive.
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.
This paper explores questions surrounding corporeality and heavenly ascent, in texts ranging from 1 Enoch to the Hekhalot literature, including Philo’s works. It examines both descriptions of the heavenly realms and accounts of the ascent process. Despite his Platonic apophaticism, Philo superimposes cosmological and spiritual heavens, and draws upon the biblical imagery of dazzling glory. Although they do not express themselves in philosophical language, the heavenly ascent texts make it clear that human beings cannot ascend to heaven in their earthly bodies, and that God cannot be seen with terrestrial eyes. In terms of ideas they are not so far from the philosopher Philo as might at first appear.
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.
In the aftermath of the Shoah and the ostensible triumph of nationalism, it became common in historiography to relegate Jews to the position of the “eternal other” in a series of binaries: Christian/Jewish, Gentile/Jewish, European/Jewish, non-Jewish/Jewish, and so forth. For the longest time, these binaries remained characteristic of Jewish historiography, including in the Central European context. Assuming instead, as the more recent approaches in Habsburg studies do, that pluriculturalism was the basis of common experience in formerly Habsburg Central Europe, and accepting that no single “majority culture” existed, but rather hegemonies were imposed in certain contexts, then the often used binaries are misleading and conceal the complex and sometimes even paradoxical conditions that shaped Jewish life in the region before the Shoah.
The very complexity of Habsburg Central Europe both in synchronic and diachronic perspective precludes any singular historical narrative of “Habsburg Jewry,” and it is not the intention of this volume to offer an overview of “Habsburg Jewish history.” The selected articles in this volume illustrate instead how important it is to reevaluate categories, deconstruct historical narratives, and reconceptualize implemented approaches in specific geographic, temporal, and cultural contexts in order to gain a better understanding of the complex and pluricultural history of the Habsburg Empire and the region as a whole.
The issue of determining the time, when the Judaic communities have settled on Romanian land, is one of the most interesting and most delicate details that can be mentioned when talking about this ethnic group. The presence of the first Jewish communities in ancient times on this land was a “taboo” subject during many historical periods until 1989, but even after this year, studies oriented in this direction were more than sketchy. The article does not only bring a surplus of information in this domain, but manages to concentrate – almost didactically – the information and the archaeological proofs known and reknown to the present time. There are depicted material evidences as well as linguistic ones, toponymical and even religious. Also, the author tries to draw a parallel between some layouts of the Dacian state and Dacia Felix, conquered by the Romans, and the presence of some Judaic communities, not very numerous, made out of Judaic population who came together with the Roman conqueror.
Habsburg Central Europe
(2024)
Central Europe is characterized by linguistic and cultural density as well as by endogenous and exogenous cultural influences. These constellations were especially visible in the former Habsburg Empire, where they influenced the formation of individual and collective identities. This led not only to continual crises and conflicts, but also to an equally enormous creative potential as became apparent in the culture of the fin-de-siècle.
The article analyzes the interdependences between the history of the Habsburg Empire and the names of its Jewish inhabitants. Until today, these names tell stories about this close relationship and they are an everlasting symbol of this era. By focusing on names, this paper shows how state policies towards Jews shifted over time, and how the perspective on names and name regulations can be a tool to connect and investigate both Habsburg and Jewish studies.
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.
Messianic Jews are Jewish individuals who syncretically accept both the messianic character of Jesus and the ritual cultic practices provided by traditional Judaism. The present article examines the emergence of this marginal syncretic movement in contemporary Israel, and maintains that it represents a radical development in the bimillenary history of Jewish-Christian relations. This article offers a general introduction to the notion of Jewish-Christian identity, a brief history of the first group of Messianic Jews in the Land of Israel, the cultural influence and religious syncretism of the Messianic Jews in modern Israel, and, finally, the implication that Messianic Judaism is supposed to become the new paradigm within the various branches of Judaism.
rezensiertes Werk: Grossman, David: Eine Frau flieht vor einer Nachricht. - München : Hanser, 2009. - 728 S. ISBN 978-3-446-23397-3
Foreign Entanglements
(2021)
The field of American Jewish studies has recently trained its focus on the transnational dimensions of its subject, reflecting in more sustained ways than before about the theories and methods of this approach. Yet, much of the insight to be gained from seeing American Jewry as constitutively entangled in many ways with other Jewries has not yet been realized. Transnational American Jewish studies are still in their infancy.
This issue of PaRDeS presents current research on the multiple entanglements of American with Central European, especially German-speaking Jewries in the 19th and 20th centuries. The articles reflect the wide range of topics that can benefit from a transnational understanding of the American Jewish experience as shaped by its foreign entanglements.
Even though Salonican Jews are not typically associated with the Habsburg Empire, some of them, nonetheless, lived there. This paper aims to examine the formation of these Salonican Jews’ (self-)identification by studying their social interactions with the local Viennese population such as the Viennese Sephardi or the Greek-Orthodox communities. The change of the milieu within which they found themselves subsequently impacted their self-perception. Thus, the issue of the surrounding environment and their relations with other groups became central to their self-understanding, as will be demonstrated. By examining different aspects, like migration patterns, financial decisions and family ties, one can understand how their intersection influenced Salonica Jews’ self-identification, which, at the same time, shaped and was shaped by the surrounding milieu. Within this framework, these people perceived themselves and were perceived as Salonican, Sephardi, Jewish, and as subjects of the Emperor.
This paper addresses issues of translating both words and rituals as Muslim cemetery keepers care for Jewish graves and recite traditional prayers for the dead in Morocco. Several issues of translation must be dealt with while considering these rare and disappearing practices. The first issue to be discussed is the translation of Hebrew inscriptions into French by cemetery keepers. One cemetery keeper in Meknes has tried to compile an exhaustive index of the names and dates represented on the gravestones under her care. The Muslim guard of the Jewish cemetery in Sefrou, on the other hand, has somewhat famously told visitors differing stories about his ability and willingness to pray the Kaddish over the graves of emigrated relatives who cannot return to mark an anniversary death. These practices provide the context for considering how the act of Muslims caring for Jewish graves creates linguistic and ritual translations of traditional Jewish ancestor care.
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.
The Beruriah Incident
(2014)
The story known as the Beruriah Incident, which appears in Rashi’s commentary on bAvodah Zarah 18b (related to ATU types 920A* and 823A*), describes the failure and tragic end of R. Meir and his wife Beruriah, two tannaic role-models. This article examines the authenticity of the story by tracking the method of distribution in traditional Jewish society before the modern era, and comparing the story’s components with rabbinic literature and international folklore.
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.
rezensiertes Werk: Stephan Dörschel: Fritz Wisten : bis Zum letzten Augenblick : ein jüdisches Theaterleben. - Hentrich & Hentrich : Berlin, 2009. - 112 S. (Jüdische Miniaturen ; 74) ISBN 978-3-938485-85-9
rezensiertes Werk: Schwartz, Yigal: Maamin beli Kenessija : 4 Massot al Aharon Appelfeld. - Tel Aviv : Dvir, 2009.- 181 S.
rezensiertes Werk: Marx, Peter W.:Ein theatralisches Zeitalter : Bürgerliche Selbstinszenierungen um 1900. - Tübingen [u.a.] : A. Francke, 2008. - 429 S. ISBN 978-3-772-08220-7
rezensiertes Werk: Critchfield, Richard D.: From Shakespeare to Frisch: The Provocative Fritz Kortner. - Heidelberg : Synchron, 2008. - 223 S. ISBN 978-3-935025-99-7
The Book of Radiance
(2019)
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.”
Regulating public space
(2009)
This article examines Pierre Nora’s concept of memory using the examples of York and Winchester to demonstrate the individuality of local approaches to the memory of medieval Anglo-Jewries. Overall, this paper will highlight how memory can be rescued from a period of prolonged silence and reintegrated back into a wider historical narrative. Conversely it will also examine how in stark contrast to this new attitude of remembering the silence surrounding Jewish memory continues to exist elsewhere. Finally this paper will ask why this silence remains, and question whether Nora’s theory that memory is constantly evolving is applicable to the experiences of Jewish memory in York and Winchester.
rezensiertes Werk: Shraibman, Yechiel: Sieben Jahre und sieben Monate : meine Bukarester Jahre ; Roman. - Berlin : be.bra, 2009. - 272 S. ISBN 978-3-937233-56-7
The Jewish museums established in the fin-de-siècle Habsburg Empire postulated the unity of “the Jewish people,” with custodians constructing an “us” (Jews) in distinction to the “other” (non-Jews). In the difference-oriented frenzy of the time, Jewish identity was predominantly presented as Central European, enlightened, not overly religious, and middle-class. Then, when the Viennese Jewish Museum opened its doors in 1895, the painters Isidor Kaufmann and David Kohn created an installation called “Die Gute Stube” (The Parlor). This exhibit housed books, furniture, as well as decorative and ritual objects of the kind that were thought to be found in typical Eastern European Jewish households. However, as this article argues, this attempted visualization of the essence of Judaism and the range of Jewish life worlds promoted a paradigmatic stereotype with which Jewish museums would have to struggle for decades to come.
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.