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The aim of this paper is to answer some questions concerning the identity of the maskilim of Romania, mainly those of the second generation, called "the generation of 1878" or "the generation of the Congress of Berlin". They called themselves "Romanian Israelites," similarly to the maskilim of other countries, just like the "French Israelites," "German Israelites," "Russian Israelites," and so on. What was it that defined their Jewish identity and what their Romanian one? When did this "Romanian Israelite" identity appear? Under what conditions did the new kind of maskil of the "generation of 1878" emerge, and why did these maskilim struggle for emancipation? Did this identification influence the Romanian Jewish community on issues other than emancipation as well? In fact, the "Romanian Israelite" identity appeared with the maskilim of the first generation of Moldavia and Wallachia, in the fifth decade of the 19th century, under the double influence of the Haskalah ideology and the national-cultural Romanian Renaissance. The refusal of the succeeding Romanian governments to naturalize the Jews gave an impetus to the maskilim to fight for emancipation, mainly after the 1878 Berlin Congress. In their polemics related to Romanian citizenship, they used various arguments to demonstrate that the Jewish presence in Romania dated back to ancient times, that they were descendants of Jews who had lived on these lands from the antiquity and the middle ages. They also tried to convince the entire Jewish community to accept the "Romanian Israelite identity" and apply for individual naturalization. They promoted the idea of a double identity, Jewish ("Israelite") from the viewpoint of religion and ethnicity, and Romanian from that of nationality
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This article discusses human free will from the perspective of three Jewish thinkers of the Middle-ages: Maimonides, Gersonides and Solomon Ben Adret. We commence with understanding the parameters of free will in Jewish thought and then discuss the theological problem of all religionists in the middle –ages, namely, God's prescience and the possibility of human free will. We discuss as well the idea of Divine knowledge of the present and the future from the perspective of the rationalist and kabbalist.
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Does the past have a face? No doubt. One way to conceive it is as a succession of moments that become embedded in the consciousness and unconscious of each one of us, generally in an individualized way. By nature it is a protean and complex face, very personal and different for everyone, hardly reducible to a universal gallery of ‘icons’ à la pantheons of famous persons. In this sense, it is not a singular past, but a multitude of pasts, millions, if not billions, retained in the reservoirs of living memory, not an immutable imprint but one that is constantly transforming along with the vicissitudes of individual experience, the flux of emotions, perceptions, and moods.
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The eighth annual Židé v Čechách [Jews in Bohemia] seminar took place in Jindřichův Hradec on 12 and 13 October 2021. It was organized by the Jewish Museum in Prague in cooperation with the Museum of Jindřichův Hradec. It was originally planned for October 2020, but had to be postponed as a result of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Once again, as usual, the focus of the seminar was on several thematic areas – namely, the history of Jews in Bohemia in the second half of the 19th century and in the 20th century, the history of Jewish communities in the border areas of Bohemia, regional history, Jewish cemeteries, and descriptions of archival materials and archival files that are useful for studying the history of Jews in Bohemia.
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The tradition of regular professional meetings of Czech (previously Czechoslovak) historians with the participation of international guests dates back to as early as 1937. The last such congress was held on 20–22 September 2022 in the northern Czech city of Ústí nad Labem, and its main organizer was the Faculty of Arts of Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem.
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In postwar Europe the remembrance of the Holocaust ( קאַטאַסטראָפע Katastrofe in Yiddish) endows the continent’s societies and politics with a clear-cut moral dimension. All agree that remembering about and researching the Holocaust is necessary for preventing a repeat of the murderous past in the future. Yet, no reflection is really devoted to the most revealing fact that the wartime genocide’s main victims – Jews – exist no longer in Europe as a community with their specific Yiddish language and culture. Due to the twin-like closeness between Yiddish and German, prior to the war, Yiddish speakers ensured a world-wide popularity for the German language. After 1945, Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors and Jewish poets exorcised and reinvented the then-murderers’ language of German, so that poetry could be written in it again. In reciprocation, Germany and Europe – shockingly and quite incomprehensibly – abandoned their duty to preserve and cultivate Yiddish language and culture as a necessary “inoculation” against another genocide. Forgetting about this duty imperils Europe and its inhabitants; the danger now is sadly exemplified by Russia’s ongoing genocidal-scale war on Ukraine. Not a single Yiddish library exists in today’s Europe, which is an indictment in itself.
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The history of the Messiah in Judaism is a history of disappointed hopes. Again and again, there were salvation figures to whom this role was ascribed. But redemption from occupation and foreign rule, exile, oppression and persecution failed to materialize. Therefore, the expectation of the Messiah fell to the periphery of Jewish theology. This article examines in what ways the messianic concept plays a role in modern times and what it contributes to describing the relationship between God and humanity in Judaism. The author intends to show the development from the abandonment of a personal Messiah towards the affirmation of the prophets’ hope for a universal messianic age in which the duty of all people to participate in the healing of the world becomes central. What becomes also clear is: The messiah idea cannot be a bridge between Christianity and Judaism.
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The article looks at the 1812 case of Józef Gedalia, a Karaite from the Crimea, a tobacco merchant, who lived at Senatorska Street in Warsaw, where he also had his shop. Due to the fact that he was ruled to be a Jew, he was ordered to vacate the premises leased by him, which the followers of the Judaic faith were required to do by a decree issued by Frederic Augustus, the Saxon king and Duke of Warsaw. The Karaite filed a protest against the ruling to the police minister and the latter, in turn, referred the matter to the minister of internal and religious affairs. The issue was ultimately resolved by the king in favor of the merchant. It was discovered that documents attached to office correspondence contained interesting additions, such as the “Karaimi” entry in Samuel Bogumił Linde’s Polish dictionary or a list of Karaite people then living in the Duchy of Warsaw, with the names of towns and villages inhabited by them specified. The statistical data concerning the Karaites have been criticized and deemed to be inconsistent with previous knowledge in this respect.
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V příspěvku o sociálním rozměru židovství se nejprve hovoří o sociální spravedlnosti, která má své kořeny v bibli. Praktickým vyjádřením této sociální spravedlnosti jsou cedaka a gmilut chassatim. Dále je popsán vztah k vlastnictví, bohatství a chudobě. Toto se odráží v konkrétních formách milosrdenství. V židovství je také velmi důležitá sociální péče a zahrnuje všechny marginální skupiny – chudé, cizince, sirotky, nemocné, umírající. Za tímto účelem vznikla v průběhu staletí řada spolků. Ačkoliv tato tradice byla v průběhu desetiletí přerušena, začíná se pozvolna s domácí péčí – jak např. dokumentují nově vzniklé agentury „Esra“ v Praze nebo „Tikva“ v Ostravě.
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This text focuses on the peculiar personification of “Jewish Bolshevism” which has been recreated in various circuits of Polish culture since 1989. In order to present current ways in which “Jewish Bolshevism” functions as a demonic collective entity, the authors reached for various sources and to various circuits of Polish culture, including scientific and journalistic articles, academic monographs and fiction, news media coverage, as well as feature films and documentaries. The goal of the article is to demonstrate that in the case of the stereotype analysed here, these discourses resonate and complement each other, constituting a consensual universe of socially produced beliefs. The authors attempt to draw up a map of occurrences of the “Jewish Bolshevism” theme along with the tools used to affix it there (e.g.,rhetorical figures, clichés, templates). Research methods used in the article have been developed by several scientific disciplines: cultural anthropology, sociology of culture, sociology of knowledge, communication studies, and the study of public discourse. It is important to emphasize that this text is not about Jewish communists as individuals who defined themselves as such, but about their symbolic place in Polish culture as produced by the dominant discourse.
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Mojżesz Kaufman is best known, if at all, for his two historical accounts, largely autobiographical, of the Jewish militancy within the ranks of the PPS (Polish Socialist Party) before and during the Revolution of 1905. The texts were published in Polish in the 1930s in the journal Niepodległość (The Independence) edited by former PPS militants. The aim of the paper is to provide re-reading of these accounts informed by (1) the analysis of manuscript versions written both in Polish and Yiddish (Kaufman probably hoped to publish the Yiddish version in the third volume of Historishe shriftn fun YIVO), preserved in the Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto (Ringelblum Archive), and of the typescript of Kaufman’s other texts meant for publication in Niepodległość (The Independence), preserved in the Archiwum Akt Nowych in Warsaw; (2) the review of Kaufman’s biography with a focus on two elements hitherto unnoticed by scholars: his imprisonment for communist activity in 1923, and his involvement in anarchist militancy at the time he wrote his historical essays. The paper explores the tension between last stages of Kaufman’s life and the tone of his historical writings, and – in Hayden White’s terms – traces the transformation of Kaufman’s narration from Metaphoric to Ironic. It suggests regarding Kaufman’s historical works as deeply ironic reflection on failed dreams that fueled his political engagement in the Polish socialist movement at the turn of centuries, and at the same time as an important political manifesto addressed to his old party comrades who in the 1930s were a part of the ruling elite in Poland.
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The article presents the figure of Dina Blond, née Shayne Feygl Szapiro (Szapiro-Michalewicz after marriage to Beinish Michalewicz), one of the most prominent activists of the Bund in interwar Poland. Blond was the chairwoman of the Bundist women’s section established in the mid-1920s, and played a major role in the party; her contribution to the political mobilization of its female members was significant.She was a translator, writer and editor of Froyen-Vinkl, the women’s page of the party newspaper Naye Folkstsaytung. She belonged to the avant-garde of the Bundist intellectual elite. The article discusses Blond’s biography in a broader generational context, as an exemplification of the second-generation Bundist. The paper is based on sources in Yiddish: selected journalistic texts she authored (including the agitational booklet “Shvester mayne…” and radio readings from her post-war radio programme).
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The article reviews the political biography of Esfir Mirer, later Edwarda Orłowska,one of the key figures of the post war women’s movement in Poland and outside. The author looks into Orłowska’s publications and personal documents to investigate how intersecting dimensions of difference, such as gender, nationality, and class shaped her path to communism, and towards becoming a leader of Women’s Department of Polish Workers’ Party and Polish United Workers’ Party after 1945. In the broader context the author argues that given Orłowska’s role in shaping intersectional communist project of women’s emancipation in Poland, and her active engagement in the work of Women’s International Democratic Federation, globally, she can be considered a part of generation of the foremothers of the modern feminist movement.
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The title of British Jewish writer Clive Sinclair's fourth collection of short stories, Death & Texas (2014), is somewhat misleading because Texas is not the local setting for all of the stories, as some of them take place in other parts of the United States, and even in other countries. Death is a central theme in all eight stories, as characters face the threat of death or cope with the death of loved ones. Some stories place the topic of death in the context of historical violence, especially from the perspective of Jewish heroes, writers or artists dealing with world history and the portrayal of historical events in popular culture. This article therefore aims to examine the representation of Judaism and the reflection of world history in the collection of stories in question.
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