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In 1930, Columbia University appointed Salo Baron to be the Nathan L. Miller Professor of Jewish History, Literature, and Institutions—marking a turning point in the history of Jewish studies in America. Baron not only became perhaps the most accomplished scholar of Jewish history in the twentieth century, the author of many books including the eighteen-volume A Social and Religious History of the Jews. He also created a program and a discipline, mentoring hundreds of scholars, establishing major institutions including the first academic center to study Israel in the United States, building Columbia’s Judaica collection, intervening as a public intellectual, and exerting an unparalleled influence on what it meant to study the Jewish past. This book brings together leading scholars to consider how Baron transformed the course of Jewish studies in the United States. From a variety of perspectives, they reflect on his contributions to the study of Jewish history, literature, and culture, as well as his scholarship, activism, and mentorship. Among many distinguished contributors, David Sorkin engages with Baron’s arguments on Jewish emancipation; Francesca Trivellato puts him in conversation with economic history; David Engel examines his use of anti-Semitism as an analytical category; Deborah Lipstadt explores his testimony at the trial of Adolf Eichmann; and Robert Chazan and Jane Gerber, both once Baron’s doctoral students, offer personal and intellectual reminiscences. Together, they testify to Baron’s singular legacy in shaping Jewish studies in America.
For many Jews, for more than a century, the United States has seemed to be a safe haven. There has been antisemitic prejudice, but nothing on the scale of the discrimination, persecution, pogroms, and genocide witnessed in Europe. White American ethnic violence has assailed many targets, but Jews have rarely been among them. Observing what he took to be an American exception, the influential historian Salo Baron challenged the “lachrymose conception” of Jewish history as an unending flow of oppressions, and many have followed him in seeing American Jews as sheltered from violence. But in recent years a spate of antisemitic attacks has cast doubt on this rosy view. The eminent French scholar Pierre Birnbaum offers a timely reconsideration of the tear-stained pages of Jewish history and the persistence of antisemitism. He explores the promise of American tolerance as well as the darkest moments of American intolerance, such as the 1913 lynching of Leo Frank. Birnbaum engages deeply with Baron’s views about Jewish history and tracks the echoes of European antisemitic violence in American culture. He argues that a new and insidious form of antisemitic ideology has arisen, one that sees the state as an instrument of Jewish control—and threatens further bloodshed. Thoughtful and eloquent, Tears of History is an important reflection on the roots of antisemitic violence and hatred.
For as long as historians have contemplated the Jewish past, they have engaged with the idea of diaspora. Dedicated to the study of transnational peoples and the linkages these people forged among themselves over the course of their wanderings and in the multiple places to which they went, the term "diaspora" reflects the increasing interest in migrations, trauma, globalism, and community formations. The Oxford Handbook of the Jewish Diaspora acts as a comprehensive collection of scholarship that reflects the multifaceted nature of diaspora studies. Persecuted and exiled throughout their history, the Jewish people have also left familiar places to find better opportunities in new ones. But their history has consistently been defined by their permanent lack of belonging. This Oxford Handbook explores the complicated nature of diasporic Jewish life as something both destructive and generative. Contributors explore subjects as diverse as biblical and medieval representations of diaspora, the various diaspora communities that emerged across the globe, the contradictory relationship the diaspora bears to Israel, and how the diaspora is celebrated and debated within modern Jewish thought. What these essays share is a commitment to untangling the legacy of the diaspora on Jewish life and culture. This volume portrays the Jewish diaspora not as a simple, unified front, but as a population characterized by conflicting impulses and ideas. The Oxford Handbook of the Jewish Diaspora captures the complexity of the Jewish diaspora by acknowledging the tensions inherent in a group of people defined by trauma and exile as well as by voluntary migrations to places with greater opportunity.
An in-depth exploration of the flight of young Jewish women from their Orthodox homes during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries The Rebellion of the Daughters investigates the flight of young Jewish women from their Orthodox, mostly Hasidic, homes in Western Galicia (now Poland) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In extreme cases, hundreds of these women sought refuge in a Kraków convent, where many converted to Catholicism. Those who stayed home often remained Jewish in name only. Relying on a wealth of archival documents, including court testimonies, letters, diaries, and press reports, Rachel Manekin reconstructs the stories of three Jewish women runaways and reveals their struggles and innermost convictions. Unlike Orthodox Jewish boys, who attended "cheders," traditional schools where only Jewish subjects were taught, Orthodox Jewish girls were sent to Polish primary schools. When the time came for them to marry, many young women rebelled against the marriages arranged by their parents, with some wishing to pursue secondary and university education. After World War I, the crisis of the rebellious daughters in Kraków spurred the introduction of formal religious education for young Orthodox Jewish women in Poland, which later developed into a worldwide educational movement. Manekin chronicles the belated Orthodox response and argues that these educational innovations not only kept Orthodox Jewish women within the fold but also foreclosed their opportunities for higher education. Exploring the estrangement of young Jewish women from traditional Judaism in Habsburg Galicia at the turn of the twentieth century, The Rebellion of the Daughters brings to light a forgotten yet significant episode in Eastern European history.
Winner, 2020 JDC-Herbert Katzki Award for Writing Based on Archival Material, given by the Jewish Book Council The astonishing story of the efforts of scholars and activists to rescue Jewish cultural treasures after the Holocaust In March 1946 the American Military Government for Germany established the Offenbach Archival Depot near Frankfurt to store, identify, and restore the huge quantities of Nazi-looted books, archival material, and ritual objects that Army members had found hidden in German caches. These items bore testimony to the cultural genocide that accompanied the Nazis’ systematic acts of mass murder. The depot built a short-lived lieu de memoire—a “mortuary of books,” as the later renowned historian Lucy Dawidowicz called it—with over three million books of Jewish origin coming from nineteen different European countries awaiting restitution. A Mortuary of Books tells the miraculous story of the many Jewish organizations and individuals who, after the war, sought to recover this looted cultural property and return the millions of treasured objects to their rightful owners. Some of the most outstanding Jewish intellectuals of the twentieth century, including Dawidowicz, Hannah Arendt, Salo W. Baron, and Gershom Scholem, were involved in this herculean effort. This led to the creation of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Inc., an international body that acted as the Jewish trustee for heirless property in the American Zone and transferred hundreds of thousands of objects from the Depot to the new centers of Jewish life after the Holocaust. The commitment of these individuals to the restitution of cultural property revealed the importance of cultural objects as symbols of the enduring legacy of those who could not be saved. It also fostered Jewish culture and scholarly life in the postwar world.
"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"--
Salo W. Baron (1895-1989) was the most important and influential Jewish historian of the twentieth century. This volume explores Baron's biography and life experience, assesses Baron's contributions to the various subdisciplines of Jewish studies, and evaluates Baron's integration of scholarly commitment and communal involvement.
This authoritative biography of Moses Maimonides, one of the most influential minds in all of human history, illuminates his life as a philosopher, physician, and lawgiver. A biography on a grand scale, it brilliantly explicates one man’s life against the background of the social, religious, and political issues of his time. Maimonides was born in Córdoba, in Muslim-ruled Spain, in 1138 and died in Cairo in 1204. He lived in an Arab-Islamic environment from his early years in Spain and North Africa to his later years in Egypt, where he was immersed in its culture and society. His life, career, and writings are the highest expression of the intertwined worlds of Judaism and Islam. Maimonides lived in tumultuous times, at the peak of the Reconquista in Spain and the Crusades in Palestine. His monumental compendium of Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah, became a basis of all subsequent Jewish legal codes and brought him recognition as one of the foremost lawgivers of humankind. In Egypt, his training as a physician earned him a place in the entourage of the great Sultan Saladin, and he wrote medical works in Arabic that were translated into Hebrew and Latin and studied for centuries in Europe. As a philosopher and scientist, he contributed to mathematics and astronomy, logic and ethics, politics and theology. His Guide of the Perplexed, a masterful interweaving of religious tradition and scientific and philosophic thought, influenced generations of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish thinkers. Now, in a dazzling work of scholarship, Joel Kraemer tells the complete story of Maimonides’ rich life. MAIMONIDES is at once a portrait of a great historical figure and an excursion into the Mediterranean world of the twelfth century. Joel Kraemer draws on a wealth of original sources to re-create a remarkable period in history when Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions clashed and mingled in a setting alive with intense intellectual exchange and religious conflict.