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The article discusses some aspects related to the handling of the Sabbath, and its symbolism. The author has focused on approximate basic principles and an explanation of some of them, in order to familiarize the reader with the idea of the Sabbath, as well as, it’s position in Judaism. There were also raised some doubts and obstacles faced by persons, who would like to faithfully observe all of the Sabbath rules.
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Plato’s Timaeus, a dialogue on the creation of the world and the soul of the world, mentions a hidden mistake or defect inscribed into the structure of the cosmos. Gnostic philosophers examined this passage in the first and second centuries. In the Syrian-Egyptian writings of the Nag Hammadi Library, this mistake, on which matter is founded, becomes key to understanding the world as emptiness (kenoma). A similar perspective can be found in Isaac Luria’s Kabbalistic ideas as well as in the works of Franz Kafka. The latter’s short story ‘The Cares of a Family Man,’ a testimony to spiritual experience in which the author approaches the limits of what is human, has been variously interpreted by Theodor Adorno and other philosophers. Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem have made Odradek a reference point in their theological discussions. Rudaś-Grodzka’s anamorphic approach, meanwhile, presents a new reading of the story.
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The authors of contemporary Polish crime stories frequently use the threads connected with the history of Polish-Jewish relationships, which are full of stereotypes, legends and concealments. This arouses the authors’ interest and makes them write the most intriguing novels. In my article I analyze such solutions used by three Polish crime story authors in some of their novels. The critical assessment concerns both the ways of coping with the stereotypes and the significance, which, in social perception, may be attributed to the fact of working out in crime stories the legends and concealments from Polish-Jewish history.
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Hidden Jewish children”, Holocaust survivors. Traumatisms and mourning. Retrospective studies. This contribution concerning traumatism and the mourning of Jewish children, holocaust survivors hidden in France during WWII, is a retrospective study on the psychological consequences in a situation of genocide in childhood. In this article two different types of research, carried out in France, will be underlined. The first concerns a group of former hidden children who created an association, more than half-century after the end of the war, to establish a self-therapeutic group. The second research studies former hidden children who have remained isolated and generally have had difficulties in metabolizing their traumatic experiences.
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The paper traces and analyses the main highlights in Hannah Arendt’s political ideas as reflected in her various writings. It examines her main concepts of politics, totalitarianism, power, freedom, and violence. With her interesting and unconventional research approach, she established a dominant position as a political thinker of the 20th century, and she continues to be a highly relevant and widely read author in the present day.
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The dispute over ritual slaughter has been going on for years, not only in Polish discourse. It is commonly indicated that this practice is unethical and inhumane. However, this dispute completely ignores the Jewish perspective on this issue. Jews believe that this is the most humane method of slaughtering animals, and has been commanded by God for their protection from suffering. They emphasize that God’s law cannot be subject to change. The aim of this article is to prove that Jewish ritual slaughter is an ethical practice and permissible under positive law in Poland. The author also points out that the discussion on the admissibility of such slaughter is mainly based on economic arguments. The text, first of all, discusses what the shechita is, and then how the rules of the Torah protect animals from suffering. It also shows the current legal status regarding ritual slaughter, Poles’ beliefs regarding this subject as well as the social teaching of the Catholic Church on religious slaughter.
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Since the 1970s, a period marked by a massive aliyah1 of Soviet Jews to Israel, Russian-Israelis have created a distinct literary culture characterized by hybridity and translingualism. While most texts in this corpus are in Russian, they do not fall neatly into the categories of Russian metropolitan literature or literature of the global Russian diaspora. In their thematic repertoire, the range of human experience they reflect, and specific vocabulary they also claim affiliation within Israeli literature. Even those writers from the former Soviet Union who made a linguistic shift away from Russian continue to navigate between literary traditions; their Hebrew has inherited cognitive models and interpretive approaches characteristic of Russian culture, and they project a view of reality that is essentially dualistic or "contrapuntal" (in E. Said's terms1 2). Such works as Boris Zaidman's novels Split Tongue and Hemingway and the Dead-Bird Rain, Alona Kimhi's books Victor and Masha, Weeping Suzanne, and I, Anastasia, or the original Hebrew poetry of Šivan Beskin represent an "accented," cross-pollinated version of Hebrew. This writing in-between the two tongues estranges both languages and at the same time establishes a dialogue between them and the cultural traditions they represent.
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This paper explores one of the most influential conspiracy theories of all time, as described in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, by employing the method of structural analysis. The “master myth” of the Protocols represents a basic structure of the conspiracy narrative, whose motifs were subsequently modified throughout the 20th and 21st centuries according to current events and moods. However, to understand the pamphlet as a whole, it is also important to shed a little light on its specific historical context and the religious, political, and social fervour of the time, which eventually gave rise to this text. The text is one we can still consider a blueprint of contemporary conspiracy narratives about the global cabal that occupies a prominent place within the modern conspiracy culture.
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The aim of this paper is to present a profile of literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki (1920–2013), who lived on the borderland of three cultures: Polish, Jewish, and German. The paper attempts to reconstruct the main phases of Reich-Ranicki’s life in Poland, including an analysis of the critic’s interests and opinions about Polish literature, as well as his concept of a ‘spiritual homeland’.The status of M. Reich is studied in relation to the category of the alien commonly encountered in the discourse of the humanities. Reich’s strangeness is presented in three dimensions: space, culture and mentality. The paper also proves that it was the trauma of the Holocaust that had exerted the major impact on Reich-Ranicki’s personal memories and accounts.
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This paper examines the development of Jewish Hebrew studies in the Czech Lands from the pre-Enlightenment to the Enlightenment period, focusing on the teaching of Hebrew language and grammar at the Main Jewish School in Prague. It introduces the life and work of Wolf Mayer, a prominent Hebrew teacher and grammarian, who authored several textbooks and commentaries on Hebrew and biblical exegesis. It analyzes Mayer's grammar book "Torat Leshon Ivrit", which was based on the works of his predecessors and contemporaries, but also introduced some innovations and modifications. It shows how Mayer applied his knowledge and experience to his pedagogical activities and his contribution to the Haskala movement and the Wissenschaft des Judentums.
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This article presents the children’s magazine „Window to the World. Periodical for children and youth”. It was published in Cracow in the years 1937–1939, and its editor in chief and publisher was Henryka Fromowicz-Stillerowa, and the co-editor was Martha Hirschprung. It describes the most notable people working with the magazine, as well as divisions that were in the newspaper. Attention was drawn to the cause of creating the article and the choice of language. It pointed to the character of the ideological writings – Zionism and the need to create a new model of child recipients. The magazine was formed by adults and children. It published classics of Jewish literature (I.L. Peretz, Ch. N. Bialik), the poetry of the young Jewish writers Anda Eker, Minka Silberman, Maurice Szymel, Martha Hirschprung and children.
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The isolation of Jews in the German states and territories began decreasing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. At the same time, Jews started to represent a ‘problem’ for the enlightened concept of a modern society with its uncompromising demand for cultural homogeneity. Philosophers of the Enlightenment, such as Kant, implied that Jewish religious observance stood for a separatist interpretation of religion and wanted to ‘educate’ the Jews to be Germans. This ‘education’ was also promoted by enlightened Jews, such as the Austro-Bohemian educator Naftali Herz Homberg (1749–1841), who was the superintendent of German-Jewish schools of Galicia. In my paper, I analyze Homberg’s magnum opus Bne-Zion which was meant to function as a catechism for the enlightened Jewish youth. The intention of this paper is to add a new sociological perspective to the Homberg bibliography, with an emphasis on intergroup relations between the Jewish minority and the non-Jewish majority. I look into the assimilationist policies of the German Enlightenment and the Austrian Empire, and try to show how these were internalized by Homberg in his work.
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Review of: Ivo Cerman – Rita Krueger – Susan Reynolds (eds.), The Enlightenment in Bohemia: Religion, Morality and Multiculturalism (= SVEC, 07/2011). Oxford: Voltaire Foundation 2011. Pp. xii, 339. ISSN 0435-2866.
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The paper presents some common motifs of two thinkers who, despite a historical gap of several hundred years, had common roots in the tradition of Judaism. The notion of the Encounter, as analysed by Emmanuel Levinas, and the cosmogonic process of Creation in Isaac Luria’s system of thought have a common motif in the phenomenon of the socalled “contraction” (Hebrew: tzimtzum). Despite the fact that for the first thinker it is the domain of ethics and for the second the domain of ontology, the act of a certain “self-limitation” or “withdrawal” plays in both cases a foundational role.
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The paper focuses on the territory of Moravia between 1708–1728, when the Habsburg state produced a series of legislative measures that had a lasting impact on the status of the Jewish population. The author sees this process as the formation of a monarchical anti-Judaism that gradually abandoned the older models of the Estates State and adopted the principles of absolute monarchies. In addition to formal shifts, the paper focuses primarily on the themes of these measures, the targets of which – the Jewish home, the synagogue, the ghetto, the family – tended to change frequently as the state sought the most an effective method for regulating the Jewish minority. Last but not least, the paper focuses on the actors who initiated the individual measures or were involved in their practical application.
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The decade of Joseph II’s reign was crucial for Jewish history in the Habsburg monarchy. For the firsttime, in the context of the growing Enlightenment-absolutist tendencies of the state and changing attitudestowards members of non-Catholic Christian denominations, the Jewish issue became an importantpart of state policy, and the monarch did not hesitate to intervene in almost all spheres of Jewish lifeduring his reign. He sought to gain greater control over this minority, distinct in both religion and language,to bring it closer to the life of the majority society and make it more useful to the state. The keyarea through which he intended to promote these aims was Jewish education. All of this was closely relatedto the Enlightenment-absolutist state’s efforts to comprehensively reform the monarchy’s educationalsystem, the aim of which was to provide education under state supervision for broad sections ofthe population, thus helping to “elevate them morally” and turn them into useful citizens of the state.However, since Jewish education in its traditional form played a crucial role in the process of preservingJewish identity, most Czech Jews viewed the changes that Joseph II brought about in this area with apprehensionand distrust. The importance of education for the Jewish community was understood by allconcerned – the monarch, the highest central and provincial authorities, the Jewish enlighteners whosupported state policy – but resisted by their opponents within the Jewish community, that is to say adherentsof the rabbinic tradition, which led to a number of clashes related to these developments. Thisarticle first outlines the forms of Jewish education in Bohemia in the second half of the 18th century,then discusses the efforts of the Josephine state to transform them and enforce compulsory secular educationfor Jews in the context of the Habsburg monarchy. Finally, it sheds light on the various Jewish reactionsto these developments and reflects on the outcome of events in this field.
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