Download or read book The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West 1450 1800 written by Paolo Bernardini and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2001 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jews and Judaism played a significant role in the history of the expansion of Europe to the west as well as in the history of the economic, social, and religious development of the New World. They played an important role in the discovery, colonization, and eventually exploitation of the resources of the New World. Alone among the European peoples who came to the Americas in the colonial period, Jews were dispersed throughout the hemisphere; indeed, they were the only cohesive European ethnic or religious group that lived under both Catholic and Protestant regimes, which makes their study particularly fruitful from a comparative perspective. As distinguished from other religious or ethnic minorities, the Jewish struggle was not only against an overpowering and fierce nature but also against the political regimes that ruled over the various colonies of the Americas and often looked unfavorably upon the establishment and tleration of Jewish communities in their own territory. Jews managed to survive and occasionally to flourish against all odds, and their history in the Americas is one of the more fascinating chapters in the early modern history of European expansion.
Download or read book Virtually Jewish written by Ruth Ellen Gruber and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2002-01-15 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author explores the phenomenon of the Jewish culture in Europe. In this book she askes in what way do non-Jews embrace and enact Jewish culture and for what reasons.
Download or read book Jewish Primitivism written by Samuel J. Spinner and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-27 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Around the beginning of the twentieth century, Jewish writers and artists across Europe began depicting fellow Jews as savages or "primitive" tribesmen. Primitivism—the European appreciation of and fascination with so-called "primitive," non-Western peoples who were also subjugated and denigrated—was a powerful artistic critique of the modern world and was adopted by Jewish writers and artists to explore the urgent questions surrounding their own identity and status in Europe as insiders and outsiders. Jewish primitivism found expression in a variety of forms in Yiddish, Hebrew, and German literature, photography, and graphic art, including in the work of figures such as Franz Kafka, Y.L. Peretz, S. An-sky, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Moï Ver. In Jewish Primitivism, Samuel J. Spinner argues that these and other Jewish modernists developed a distinct primitivist aesthetic that, by locating the savage present within Europe, challenged the idea of the threatening savage other from outside Europe on which much primitivism relied: in Jewish primitivism, the savage is already there. This book offers a new assessment of modern Jewish art and literature and shows how Jewish primitivism troubles the boundary between observer and observed, cultured and "primitive," colonizer and colonized.
Download or read book Orientalism and the Jews written by Ivan Davidson Kalmar and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2005 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating analysis of how Jews fit into scholarly debates about Orientalism.
Download or read book The Economic History of European Jews written by Michael Toch and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2012-09-28 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Economic History of European Jews offers a radical revision of demographics and economics. It explains how the presence of Jews was a limited one and their trade was just that, trade by Jews, not “Jewish Trade”.
Download or read book Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe written by Richard I. Cohen and published by Hebrew Union College Press. This book was released on 2014-12-31 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David B. Ruderman's groundbreaking studies of Jewish intellectuals as they engaged with Renaissance humanism, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment have set the agenda for a distinctive historiographical approach to Jewish culture in early modern Europe, from 1500 to 1800. From his initial studies of Italy to his later work on eighteenth-century English, German, and Polish Jews, Ruderman has emphasized the individual as a representative or exemplary figure through whose life and career the problems of a period and cultural context are revealed. Thirty-one leading scholars celebrate Ruderman's stellar career in essays that bring new insight into Jewish culture as it is intertwined in Jewish, European, Ottoman, and American history. The volume presents probing historical snapshots that advance, refine, and challenge how we understand the early modern period and spark further inquiry. Key elements explored include those inspired by Ruderman's own work: the role of print, the significance of networks and mobility among Jewish intellectuals, the value of extraordinary individuals who absorbed and translated so-called external traditions into a Jewish idiom, and the interaction between cultures through texts and personal encounters of Jewish and Christian intellectuals. While these elements can be found in earlier periods of Jewish history, Ruderman and his colleagues point to an intensification of mobility, the dissemination of knowledge, and the blurring of boundaries in the early modern period. These studies present a rich and nuanced portrait of a Jewish culture that is both a contributing member and a product of early modern Europe and the Ottoman Empire. As director of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Ruderman has fostered a community of scholars from Europe, North America, and Israel who work in the widest range of areas that touch on Jewish culture. He has worked to make Jewish studies an essential element of mainstream humanities. The essays in this volume are a testament to the haven he has fostered for scholars, which has and continues to generate important works of scholarship across the entire spectrum of Jewish history.
Download or read book A Travel Guide to Jewish Europe written by Ben G. Frank and published by Pelican Publishing. This book was released on 1992 with total page 756 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Being Jewish in 21st Century Central Europe written by Haim Fireberg and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-09-07 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jewish life in Europe has undergone dramatic changes and transformations within the 20th century and also the last two decades. The phenomenon of the dual position of the Jewish minority in relation to the majority, not entirely unusual for Jewish Diaspora communities, manifested itself most distinctly on the European continent. This unique Jewish experience of the ambiguous position of insider and outsider may provide valuable views on contemporary European reality and identity crisis. The book focuses inter alia on the main common denominators of contemporary Jewish life in Central Europe, such as an intense confrontation with the heritage of the Holocaust and unrelenting antisemitism on the one hand and on the other hand, huge appreciation of traditional Jewish learning and culture by a considerable part of non-Jewish Europeans. The volume includes contributions on Jewish life in central European countries like Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, Austria, and Germany.
Download or read book Bruno Schulz and Galician Jewish Modernity written by Karen Underhill and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-25 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1930s, through the prose of Bruno Schulz (1892–1942), the Polish language became the linguistic raw material for a profound exploration of the modern Jewish experience. Rather than turning away from the language like many of his Galician Jewish colleagues who would choose to write in Yiddish, Schulz used the Polish language to explore his own and his generation's relationship to East European Jewish exegetical tradition, and to deepen his reflection on golus or exile as a condition not only of the individual and of the Jewish community, but of language itself, and of matter. Drawing on new archival discoveries, this study explores Schulz's diasporic Jewish modernism as an example of the creative and also transient poetic forms that emerged on formerly Habsburg territory, at the historical juncture between empire and nation-state.
Download or read book The Great Jewish Cities of Central and Eastern Europe written by Eli Valley and published by Jason Aronson. This book was released on 1999 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Great Jewish Cities of Central and Eastern Europe: A Travel Guide and Resource Book to Prague, Warsaw, Cracow, and Budapest is the most comprehensive guidebook covering all aspects of Jewish history and contemporary life in Prague, Warsaw, Cracow, and Budapest. This remarkable book includes detailed histories of the Jews in these cities, walking tours of Jewish districts past and present, intensive descriptions of Jewish sites, fascinating accounts of local Jewish legend and lore, and practical information for Jewish travelers to the region.
Download or read book The Origins of the Modern Jew written by Michael A. Meyer and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1972-04-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An excellent overview of the intellectual history of important figures in German Jewry. Until the 18th century Jews lived in Christian Europe, spiritually and often physically removed form the stream of European culture. During the Enlightenment intellectual Europe accepted a philosophy which, by the universality of its ideals, reached out to embrace the Jew within the greater community of man. The Jew began to feel European, and his traditional identity became a problem for the first time. the response of the Jewish intellectual leadership in Germany to this crisis is the subject of this book. Chief among those men who struggled with the problems of Jewish consciousness were Moses Mendelssohn, David Friedlander, Leopold Zunz, Eduard Gans, and Heinrich Heine. By 1824, liberal Judaism had not yet produced a vision of it future as a separate entity within European society, but it had been exposed to and grappled with all the significant problems that still confront the Jew in the West.
Download or read book Toward Modernity written by Jacob Katz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-08 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors to this volume throw light on one of the central problems of modern Jewish historiography: How has Jewry and Judaism survived the crisis of the breakup of Jewish traditional society, the transition from the dosed, ghetto existence into a more or less open environment? The process of development, starting in eighteenth-century Germany, gradually encompassed the entire world of European Jewish experience.Toward Modernity compares modernization in Germany with its counterparts in other countries to see if the German-Jewish development had any influence on what transpired elsewhere. The authors explore the history of Jewish modernization in Russia, Galicia, Vienna, Prague, Hungary, Holland, France, England, Italy, and the United States. Topics covered include: the political and social authority of Jewish community institutions; external impediments and internal inhibitions for Jews to be absorbed by the dominant culture; the relationship of the state to the Jewish community; educational and religious reform; the influence of the rational scientific worldview; and the possibility of inclusion in the emerging middle classes.Contents: Jacob Katz, Introduction; Emanuel Etkes, Immanent Factors and External Influences in the Development of the Haskala Movement in Russia; Israel Bartal, 'The Heavenly City of Germany' and Absolutism a la Mode D'Autriche: The Rise of the Haskala in Galicia; Robert S. Wistrich, The Modernization of Viennese Jewry: The Impact of German Culture in a Multiethnic State; Hillel J. Kieval, Caution's Progress: The Modernization of Jewish Life in Prague, 1780-1830; Michael Silber, The German Jewish Experience and Its Impact on Hungarian Jewry, 1780-1870; Michael Graetz, The History of an Estrangement between Two Jewish Communities: German and French Jewry during the Nineteenth Century; Joseph Michman, The Impact of German-Jewish Modernization on Dutch Jewry; Lois C. Dubin, Trieste and Berlin: The Italian Role in the Cultural Politics of the Haskalah; Todd M. Endelman, The Englishness of Jewish Modernity in England; Michael A. Meyer, German Jewish Identity in Nineteenth Century America.
Download or read book The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination written by Leonid Livak and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-10 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book proposes that the idea of the Jews in European cultures has little to do with actual Jews, but rather is derived from the conception of Jews as Christianity's paradigmatic Other, eternally reenacting their morally ambiguous New Testament role as the Christ-bearing and -killing chosen people of God. Through new readings of canonical Russian literary texts by Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, Babel, and others, the author argues that these European writers—Christian, secular, and Jewish—based their representation of Jews on the Christian exegetical tradition of anti-Judaism. Indeed, Livak disputes the classification of some Jewish writers as belonging to "Jewish literature," arguing that such an approach obscures these writers' debt to European literary traditions and their ambivalence about their Jewishness. This work seeks to move the study of Russian literature, and Russian-Jewish literature in particular, down a new path. It will stir up controversy around Christian-Jewish cultural interaction; the representation of otherness in European arts and folklore; modern Jewish experience; and Russian literature and culture.
Download or read book The Jews of Eastern Europe 1772 1881 written by Israel Bartal and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-06-07 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the nineteenth century, the largest Jewish community the modern world had known lived in hundreds of towns and shtetls in the territory between the Prussian border of Poland and the Ukrainian coast of the Black Sea. The period had started with the partition of Poland and the absorption of its territories into the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires; it would end with the first large-scale outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence and the imposition in Russia of strong anti-Semitic legislation. In the years between, a traditional society accustomed to an autonomous way of life would be transformed into one much more open to its surrounding cultures, yet much more confident of its own nationalist identity. In The Jews of Eastern Europe, Israel Bartal traces this transformation and finds in it the roots of Jewish modernity.
Download or read book Rethinking European Jewish History written by Jeremy Cohen and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2008-11-27 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The major cultural, ideological, and social changes that have occurred in Europe in the past century have generated widespread reassessment of European history in terms of its presuppositions, its methodologies, its directions, its emphases, and its scope. This timely volume looks at the Jewish past in the spirit of this reassessment. It points to a new framework for the study of Jewish history and helps to contextualize it within the mainstream of historical scholarship.
Download or read book A People Apart written by David Vital and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2001-07-26 with total page 970 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This history of the Jews in Europe examines the role played by the Jews themselves, across the whole of Europe, during the century and a half leading up to the birth of the nation of Israel, and the state-sponsored genocide of the Holocaust.
Download or read book Rabbi Leo Baeck written by Michael A. Meyer and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2020-11-20 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rabbi, educator, intellectual, and community leader, Leo Baeck (1873-1956) was one of the most important Jewish figures of prewar Germany. The publication of his 1905 Das Wesen des Judentums (The Essence of Judaism) established him as a major voice for liberal Judaism. He served as a chaplain to the German army during the First World War and in the years following, resisting the call of political Zionism, he expressed his commitment to the belief in a vibrant place for Jews in a new Germany. This hope was dashed with the rise of Nazism, and from 1933 on, and continuing even after his deportation to Theresienstadt, he worked tirelessly in his capacity as a leader of the German Jewish community to offer his coreligionists whatever practical, intellectual, and spiritual support remained possible. While others after the war worked to rebuild German Jewish life from the ashes, a disillusioned Baeck pronounced the effort misguided and spent the rest of his life in England. Yet his name is perhaps best-known today from the Leo Baeck Institutes in New York, London, Berlin, and Jerusalem dedicated to the preservation of the cultural heritage of German-speaking Jewry. Michael A. Meyer has written a biography that gives equal consideration to Leo Baeck's place as a courageous community leader and as one of the most significant Jewish religious thinkers of the twentieth century, comparable to such better-known figures as Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Abraham Joshua Heschel. According to Meyer, to understand Baeck fully, one must probe not only his thought and public activity but also his personality. Generally described as gentle and kind, he could also be combative when necessary, and a streak of puritanism and an outsized veneration for martyrdom ran through his psychological makeup. Drawing on a broad variety of sources, some coming to light only in recent years, but especially turning to Baeck's own writings, Meyer presents a complex and nuanced image of one of the most noteworthy personalities in the Jewish history of our age.
