Bøger i Jewish Culture and Contexts serien

The Holocaust radically altered the way many East European Jews spoke Yiddish. Finding prewar language incapable of describing the imprisonment, death, and dehumanization of the Shoah, prisoners added or reinvented thousands of Yiddish words and phrases to describe their new reality. These crass, witty, and sometimes beautiful Yiddish words - Khurbn Yiddish, or "Yiddish of the Holocaust" - puzzled and intrigued the East European Jews who were experiencing the metamorphosis of their own tongue in real time. Sensing that Khurbn Yiddish words harbored profound truths about what Jews endured during the Holocaust, some Yiddish speakers threw themselves into compiling dictionaries and glossaries to document and analyze these new words. Others incorporated Khurbn Yiddish into their poetry and prose. In Occupied Words, Hannah Pollin-Galay explores Khurbn Yiddish as a form of Holocaust memory and as a testament to the sensation of speech under genocidal conditions. Occupied Words investigates Khurbn Yiddish through the lenses of cultural history, philology, and literary interpretation. Analyzing fragments of language consciousness left behind from the camps and ghettos alongside the postwar journeys of three intellectuals-Nachman Blumental, Israel Kaplan and Elye Spivak-Pollin-Galay seeks to understand why people chose Yiddish lexicography as a means of witnessing the Holocaust. She then turns to the Khurbn Yiddish words themselves, focusing on terms related to theft, the German-Yiddish encounter and the erotic female body. Here, the author unearths new perspectives on how Jews experienced daily life under Nazi occupation, while raising questions about language and victimhood. Lastly, the book explores how writers turned ghetto and camp slang into art-highlighting the poetry and fiction of K. Tzetnik (Yehiel Di-Nur) and Chava Rosenfarb. Ultimately, Occupied Words speaks to broader debates about cultural genocide, asking how we might rethink the concept of genocide through the framework of language.

"In the past, scholars have discussed charges of ritual murder and host desecration levelled against European Jews - from the Middle Ages to the present day - but have not sufficiently studied the common anti-Jewish charge that Jews habitually and compulsively violated Christian images. Christian Images and Their Jewish Desecrators addresses this gap, laying bare the longevity of the charge that Jews committed violence against images of Christ, Mary, and the disciples. By examining how desecration allegations affected Jewish individuals and communities through an investigation spanning Byzantium, Medieval England, France, Germany, and early modern Spain and Italy, historian Katherine Aron-Beller ultimately demonstrates that this charge must be read alongside more well-known anti-Jewish allegations. The book investigates persisting tales, myths and fantasies about Jewish desecration of Christian images, presenting moralist tales, art and iconography, and records from legal proceedings to reveal how these stories reinforced the allegation. Aron-Beller uses these sources to understand why this charge held longstanding popularity in the Christian imagination and to consider Jewish attitudes toward Christian imagery and responses to allegations. Ultimately, this investigation reveals how anti-Jewish tropes of image desecration was understood alongside allegations of ritual murder and host desecration in European history"--

"This book reveals the foundational role philosemitism played in the effort to reimagine urban cultures after the Holocaust. This book uncovers a seldom discussed aspect of the postwar era-a society that continues to consume, redefine, and bestow symbolic meaning on the victims in their relative absence"--

"In this book, historian Avinoam Yuval-Naeh investigates how and why eighteenth-century English society projected anxieties regarding the parallel development of the modern economy and of the re-establishment of the Jewish population upon the other, thus offering new insights into the interface of religious ideas and economic life"--

Between the Bridge and the Barricade explores how translations of non-Jewish texts into Jewish languages impacted Jewish culture, literature, and history from the sixteenth century into modern times. Offering a comprehensive view of early modern Jewish translation, Iris Idelson-Shein charts major paths of textual migration from non-Jewish to Jewish literatures, analyzes translators' motives, and identifies the translational norms distinctive to Jewish translation. Through an analysis of translations hosted in the Jewish Translation and Cultural Transfer (JEWTACT) database, Idelson-Shein reveals for the first time the liberal translational norms that allowed for early modern Jewish translators to make intensely creative and radical departures from the source texts-from "Judaizing" names, places, motifs, and language to mistranslating and omitting material both deliberately and accidently. Through this process of translation, Jewish translators created a new library of works that closely corresponded with the surrounding majority cultures yet was uniquely Jewish in character.As a site of intense negotiation between different cultures, communities, religions, readers, genres, and languages, these translations become an ideal entry point into the complex relationships between early modern Christians and Jews. At the same time, they also pose a significant challenge for modern-day scholars. But, for the careful reader, who can navigate the labyrinth of unacknowledged translations of non-Jewish sources into Jewish languages, there awaits a terrain of surprising intercultural encounters between Jews and Christians. Between the Bridge and the Barricade uncovers the hitherto hidden non-Jewish corpus that, Idelson-Shein contends, played a decisive role in shaping early modern Jewish culture.

"The Hebrew word Zimzum originally means "contraction", "withdrawal", "retreat", "limitation" and "concentration". In Kabbalah, Zimzum is a term for God's self-limitation, done before creating the world to create the world. Jewish mystic Isaac Luria coined this term in Galilee in the 16th century, positing that the God who was "En Sof", unlimited and omnipresent before creation, must concentrate himself in the Zimzum and withdraw in order to make room for the creation of the world in God's own center. At the same time, God also limits his infinite omnipotence to allow the finite world to arise. Without the Zimzum there is no creation, making Zimzum one of the basic concepts of Judaism. The Lurianic doctrine of the Zimzum has been considered an intellectual showpiece of the Kabbalah and of Jewish philosophy. The teaching of the Zimzum has appeared in the Kabbalistic literature across Central and Eastern Europe, perhaps most famously in Hasidic literature up to the present day and in Gershom Scholem's epoch-making research on Jewish mysticism. The Zimzum has fascinated Jewish and Christian theologians, philosophers and writers like no other Kabbalistic teaching. This can be seen across the philosophy and cultural history of the 20th century as it gained prominence among such diverse authors and artists as Franz Rosenzweig, Hans Jonas, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Harold Bloom, Barnett Newman or Anselm Kiefer. This book follows the traces of the Zimzum across the Jewish and Christian intellectual history of Europe and North America in more than four centuries, where Judaism and Christianity, theosophy and philosophy, divine and human, mysticism and literature, Kabbalah and arts encounter, mix and cross-fertilize in the interpretations and appropriations of that fascinating doctrine of God's self-entanglement and limitation"--

"This book traces rabbinic thought on the near-universal phenomenon of legal circumventions, finding licit ways to achieve otherwise illegal outcomes. Rabbinic literature does not fully reject or accept loopholing, but instead determine acceptability based on whether their outcome and their process maintain the values and the integrity of the law"--

"This interdisciplinary volume offers a fresh approach to Jewish thought and culture spanning the fields of literature, history, philosophy, and theology. Its contributors foreground the roles of emotions, senses, and the imagination in Jewish experience, ultimately "unsettling" Jewish studies by pushing it out of its comfort zone"--

Envisioned as a tribe of ruddy-faced, redheaded, red-bearded Jewish warriors, bedecked in red attire who purportedly resided in isolation at the fringes of the known world, the Red Jews are a legendary people who populated a shared Jewish-Christian imagination. But in fact the red variant of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel is a singular invention of late medieval vernacular culture in Germany. This idiosyncratic figure, together with the peculiar term "Red Jews," existed solely in German and Yiddish, the German-Jewish vernacular. These two language communities assessed the Red Jews differently and contested their significance, which is to say, they viewed them in different shades of red. The voyage of the Red Jews through the Jewish and Christian imagination, from their medieval Christian nascence, through early modern Old Yiddish literature, to modern Yiddish culture in Eastern Europe, Palestine, and America, is the story of this book.By studying this vernacular icon, Rebekka Voß contributes to our understanding of the formation of minority awareness and the construction of Ashkenazic Jewish identity through visual cultural encounters. She also spotlights the vitality of vernacular culture by demonstrating how the premodern motif of the Red Jews informed modern Yiddish literature, and how the stereotype of Jewish red hair found its way into Jewish social critiques, political thought, and arts through the present day.Sons of Saviors is a story about power: the Yiddish reappropriation of the Red Jews subverted the Christian color symbolism by adjusting the focus on redness from a negative stereotype into a proud badge of self-assertion. The book also includes in an appendix the full text of a significant Yiddish tale featuring the Red Jews.

"Hasidism, Haskalah, Zionism reveals how political and literary dialogues and conflicts between the Hebrew literature of the Hasidism, the Jewish Enlightenment, and Zionism interacted with each other in the nineteenth century. Author Hannan Hever uses post-colonial theories and theories of nationality to analyze how Jews used literature to tackle the "The Jewish Question," and set forth their own ideas and preferences regarding their status, control, and treatment as European Jews. In doing so, Hever theorizes the Enlightenment's intellectual aims and cultural influences, tracking how the models of integration crucial to Haskalah gave way to Jewish nationalism in the twentieth century. The readings in this book are theoretically informed, setting forward claims based on detailed textual analyses of Hasidic tales, Haskalah satires, and Zionist narratives. Thus, this book tackles a major interpretative problem visible at the core of modern Hebrew literature - its radical difficulty in distinguishing between the theological components of modern Jewish discourse and its national identity"--

The Bible shaped nearly every aspect of Jewish life in the ancient world, from activities as obvious as attending synagogue to those which have lost their scriptural resonance in modernity, such as drinking water and uttering one's last words. And within a scriptural universe, no work exerted more force than the Psalter, the most cherished text among all the books of the Hebrew Bible.A Life of Psalms in Jewish Late Antiquity clarifies the world of late ancient Judaism through the versatile and powerful lens of the Psalter. It asks a simple set of questions: Where did late ancient Jews encounter the Psalms? How did they engage with the work? And what meanings did they produce? A. J. Berkovitz answers these queries by reconstructing and contextualizing a diverse set of religious practices performed with and on the Psalter, such as handling a physical copy, reading from it, interpreting it exegetically, singing it as liturgy, invoking it as magic and reciting it as an act of piety. His book draws from and contributes to the fields of ancient Judaism, biblical reception, book history and the history of reading.

"Living with the Law explores the marital disputes of Jews in medieval Islamic Egypt (1000-1250). Examining the rich documents of the Cairo Geniza, a unique repository of discarded paper discovered in Cairo synagogue, the book recovers the life stories of Jewish women and men working through their marital problems at home, with their families, in the street of old Cairo and in Jewish and Muslim courts. Despite a voluminous literature on Jewish Law, the everyday practice of Jewish courts has only recently begun to be investigated systematically. The experiences of those in legal, social and cultural disadvantage allow us to go beyond the image propagated by legal institutions and offer a view "from below" of Jewish communal life and Jewish law as it was lived"--

"A wave of plague ravaged the cities of northern Italy in 1630-31, ravaging Christian and Jewish communities alike. In Writing Plague Susan L. Einbinder explores the Hebrew texts that lay witness to the event. These Jewish sources on the Great Italian Plague have never been treated together as a group, Einbinder observes, but they can contribute to a bigger picture of this major outbreak and how it affected people, institutions, and beliefs; how individuals and institutions responded; and how they did or did not try to remember and memorialize it"--

If politics is about the state, can a stateless people be political? Until recently, scholars were fiercely divided regarding whether Jews engaged in politics, displayed political wisdom, or penned works of political thought over the two millennia when there was no Jewish state. But over the past few decades, the field of Jewish political thought has begun to examine the ways in which Jewish individuals and communal organizations behaved politically even in diaspora. The King Is in the Field centers writing from leading scholars that serves as an introduction to this exciting field, providing critical resources for anyone interested in thinking about politics both within and beyond the state. From kabbalistic theology to economic philanthropy, from race and nationalism in the U.S. to Israeli legal discourse and feminist activism, this key study of Jewish political thought holds the promise to reorient the field of political thought as a whole by expanding conceptions of what counts as "political." In a world in which statelessness now applies to 100 million individuals, this volume illuminates ways to understand how diaspora Jewish political thought functioned in adopted homelands. This approach allows the book to offer questions and analysis that add depth and breadth to academic studies of Jewish politics while simultaneously offering a blueprint for future volumes interrogating political action through multiple diasporas. Contributors: Samuel Hayim Brody, Lihi Ben Shitrit, Julie E. Cooper, Arye Edrei, Meirav Jones, Rebecca Kobrin, Vincent Lloyd, Menachem Lorberbaum, Shaul Magid, Assaf Tamari, Irene Tucker, Philipp Von Wussow, Michael Walzer.

It is a sign of the accepted evidentiary status of photographs that historians regularly append them to their accounts, Amos Morris-Reich observes. Very often, however, these photographs are treated as mere illustrations, simple documentations of the events that transpired. Scholars of photography, on the other hand, tend to prioritize the photographs themselves, relegating the historical contexts to the background. For Morris-Reich, however, photography exists within reality; it partakes in and is very much a component of the history it records. Morris-Reich examines how photography affects categories of history and experience, how it is influenced by them, and the ways in which our understanding of the relationship between history and photography can be theorized and reoriented.Morris-Reich here turns to five twentieth-century cases in which photography and Jewish history intersect: Albert Kahn¿s utopian attempt to establish a photographic archive in Paris in order to advance world peace; the spectacular failed project of Helmar Lerski, the most prominent photographer in British Mandate Jewish Palestine; photography in the long career of Eugen Fischer, a Nazi professor of genetics; the street photography of Robert Frank; and the first attempt to introduce photography into the study of Russian Jewry prior to World War I, as seen from the post-Holocaust perspective of the early twenty-first century. Illustrated with nearly 100 images, Photography and Jewish History moves beyond a focus on Jewish photographers or the photographic representation of Jews or Jewish visibility to plumb the deeper and more significant registers of twentieth-century Jewish political history.

"Are there Jewish colors? This book examines the changing roles and meanings of the color blue in Jewish life. The book demonstrates how the specific color has constituted a means through which Jews have understood themselves throughout history"--

In Biblical Women and Jewish Daily Life in the Middle Ages, Elisheva Baumgarten examines how medieval Jewish engagement with the Bible-especially in the tellings, retellings, and illustrations of stories of women-offers a window onto aspects of the daily lives and cultural mentalites of Ashkenazic Jews in the High Middle Ages.

Although the Enlightenment had seemed to bring an end to the belief that Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes, charges of the so-called blood libel continued on either side of the turn to the twentieth century. Hillel J. Kieval examines four cases to consider how discredited beliefs became plausible to educated European elites.

Based on the biblical commentaries of rabbis and writers who were exiled from Spain in 1492, The Land Is Mine presents late medieval and early modern Iberian Jewish intellectuals as deeply concerned with questions about human relationships to land.

Frontiers of Jewish Scholarship offers a collection of essays examining how Wissenschaft des Judentums, a nineteenth-century movement to promote a scholarly approach to the study of Judaism and Jewish culture, extended beyond its original German intellectual contexts and was transformed into a diverse, global field.

Presenting a new and accessible history of the Jews of what is now the Czech Republic, Prague and Beyond revises conventional understandings of Central Europe's Jewish past and present and fully captures the diversity and multivalence of life in the Bohemian Lands.

From Europe's East to the Middle East reveals how profoundly Zionism and Israel were shaped by the assumptions of Polish nationalism, Russian radicalism, and Soviet Communism; the unique ethos of the East European intelligentsia; and the political legacies of civil and national strife in the East European "shatter-zone."

In Invisible Enlighteners, Federica Francesconi writes the history of the Jewish merchants who prospered in the northern Italian city of Modena during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their sociocultural transformation and legal and political integration evolved through a dialogue between their Italian and Jewish identities.

What happens when Jewish authors-whether by force or of their own free will, whether in reality or in the imagination-travel from one place to another? Jews and Journeys explores what it is about travel writing that enables it to become a central mechanism for exploring the realities and fictions of individual and collective identity.

Talya Fishman explores the impact of the textualization process in medieval Europe on the Babylonian Talmud's roles within Jewish culture.

In The Jewish Body, Jutte has written an encyclopedic survey of the Jewish body as it has existed and as it has been imagined from biblical times to the present, covering everything from traditional body stereotypes-such as the so-called Jewish nose-to matters of gender, sickness, and health to the end of physicality and death.

Drawing upon a variety of sources, especially his subject's own writings, Michael A. Meyer presents a biography of one of the most significant Jewish religious thinkers of the twentieth century. Rabbi Leo Baeck gives equal consideration to Baeck as an intellectual and as a courageous leader of his community under the shadow of Nazism.

In a polemic against the unexamined foundations and stagnant state of the field, Benjamin Schreier critically analyzes a series of professionally powerful cliches about Jewish American literary history and how they came into being on the way to contesting the foundational ethnological presuppositions of Jewish Studies.