scholarly journals Jewish Space Reloaded

2014 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eszter B. Gantner ◽  
Jay (Koby) Oppenheim
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
Institutional Form ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Construction Of Identity ◽  
Research Institutes ◽  
Jewish Intellectuals

In 1996 the historian Diana Pinto published her often since quoted and discussed article on ‘A New Jewish Identity for Post-1989 Europe’. She was one of the first Jewish intellectuals to reflect on the fall of the Iron Curtain and the resulting political changes and their possible consequences for Jewish communities in Europe. In her article, she introduced the term ‘Jewish space’ that motivates the focus of this issue, as well as the term ‘voluntarily Jewish’, which describes the construction of identity free of external prescription. Pinto situates Jewish space in the context of the Erinnerungspolitik European democracies engaged in during the 1980s, when Holocaust memorialisation began to assume an institutional form through the establishment of Jewish museums, research institutes and exhibitions.

Jewish Identity and the Intercommunal Links between Diaspora Jewish Communities in the Second Temple Period

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Jonathan R. Trotter
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Second Temple ◽  
Asia Minor ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Second Temple Period ◽  
Jerusalem Temple ◽  
Shared Identity ◽  
The City ◽  
The Temple

Abstract Many diaspora communities identify not only with a distant homeland but also with others distant from the homeland. How exactly do these intercommunal connections take place and contribute toward a shared identity? What specific aspects of diasporan identity are created or strengthened? What practices are involved? This study will begin to answer these questions through investigating two practices which were widespread among diaspora Jewish communities during the last two centuries of the Second Temple period (1st cent. B.C.E.–1st cent. C.E.). First, we will show how sending offerings and making pilgrimages to the Jerusalem temple from these communities enabled regular intercommunal contact. Then, we will suggest some ways in which these voluntary practices reinforced a cohesive Jewish identity and the importance of the homeland, especially the city of Jerusalem and the temple, for many diaspora Jews, whether they lived in Alexandria, Rome, Asia Minor, or Babylonia.

Setting the Stage: Jewish Identity in the Nineteenth Century and the Impact of the Dreyfus Affair

2007 ◽  
pp. 15-37
Author(s):  
Nadia Malinovich
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Ethnic Nationalism ◽  
Dreyfus Affair ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Jewish Intellectuals

This chapter provides a background on Jewish social and cultural history in the nineteenth century and describes the complex impact of the Dreyfus affair on French Jewry. It looks at the first generations of post-revolutionary Jewish intellectuals and communal leaders that had been primarily concerned with promoting Jewish integration and acculturation. It also recounts how the emergence of ethnic nationalism and the modern antisemitic movement forced French Jews to negotiate between a commitment to universalist Enlightenment principles and the racialized discourses of identity. The chapter investigates the explosion of the Dreyfus affair that openly questioned Franco-Judaism and confronted the complexity of Jewish identity in the modern world head-on. It looks at the antisemitism in France, the affair prompted more sympathetic attitude towards Jews in French leftist circles.

“An Essential Expression of the People”: Interpretations of Hasidic Song in the Composition and Performance History of Ernest Bloch's Baal Shem

2012 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
pp. 777-820 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua S. Walden
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Performance History ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Jewish Music ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance

Abstract This article examines Ernest Bloch's Baal Shem: Three Pictures of Chassidic Life, considering its score, its performance history, and early recordings of the second movement, “Nigun,” by Yehudi Menuhin, Joseph Szigeti, and Mischa Elman, to investigate the idea, promoted by the composer and many of his performers and critics, that the music represented Jewish identity through the evocation of Hasidic song. Bloch's score and Menuhin's performances were described as expressing what was often characterized during the early twentieth century as a self-affirming racial feeling that linked the modern diaspora in America to Eastern European Hasidic Jewish communities. With Baal Shem, Bloch and his performers and listeners participated in a self-conscious effort to construct a modern Jewish identity that they believed could be conveyed in the sounds and structures of art music. Menuhin's lifelong friendship and collaboration with Bloch underscores the crucial roles of Bloch's performers in working with the composer to devise compositional and performance tropes for the representation of Hasidic song, and in creating his broad reputation as a composer of a definitive Jewish music, a reputation Bloch would sometimes embrace and at other times disavow.

Terror, Race, Security

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yulia Egorova
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Security Issues ◽  
Caste Discrimination ◽  
The World ◽  
New Challenges ◽  
Muslim Communities ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
State Of Israel

The chapter engages with the two main themes of the book by focusing on the way in India the relationship between Jews and Muslims and imageries of Jewish and Muslim communities became affected by the Mumbai attacks and the general post 9/11 rhetoric of the “war on terror.” The chapter shows that these events and the securitization discourses that emerged in their aftermath created new challenges for local Jewish and Muslims groups, but it also complicates accounts that reduce Jewish-Muslim relations to problems of security. The ethnographic examples presented in this chapter suggest that concerns about the perceived Muslim threat that some of the Jewish respondents exhibited in relation to Indian Muslims ultimately had very little to do with Islam and were embedded in the wider problematics of security issues facing Jewish communities around the world, the politics of Jewish identity arbitration in the State of Israel, and even the reality of caste discrimination in India.

scholarly journals How do you Jew in Finland?

2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 94-98
Author(s):  
Lars M Andersson
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Vernacular Religion

Review of Mercédesz Czimbalmos's Intermarriage, Conversion and Jewish Identity in Contemporary Finland. A Study of Vernacular Religion in the Finnish Jewish Communities (Åbo Akademi University).

Attraction and Attribution: Framings of Sephardi Identity in Ashkenazi Prayer Books

2018 ◽  
pp. 221-240
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Cultural Identities ◽  
Cultural Goods ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
Cultural Objects ◽  
Prayer Books ◽  
Wissenschaft Des Judentums

This chapter recounts how maskilim and early representatives of Wissenschaft des Judentums divided the shares of Jewish culture between Ashkenaz and Sepharad in order to address questions of Jewish identity arising in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany. It looks at the perception of medieval Jewish culture that affected the views of their contemporaries. It also analyses the acceptance of cultural goods between the Jewish communities of Ashkenaz and Sepharad and the notion of the divide. The chapter reviews studies that show how texts and ideas were transmitted between the different communities that were adapted and incorporated into the regional Jewish cultures. It describes collective cultural identities and their dynamism that can be studied in a nuanced way through examination of the transfer of cultural objects from one region to another.

Christian Non-Jews and the Polis

2020 ◽  
pp. 128-134
Author(s):  
Christopher Stroup
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Acts Of The Apostles ◽  
Christian Identity ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Static Group

This concluding chapter summarizes the findings of this book. It argues that Acts of the Apostles' rhetoric of Jewish and Christian identity should be situated within the context of Roman-era cities, in which ethnic, civic, and religious identities were inseparable. Placing Acts within this broader ethnic discourse emphasizes the Jewishness of Christians, even in Acts. When one reads Acts with an eye to the writer's ethnic reasoning, it becomes clear that Luke did not represent Jews as a static group but instead presented Jewish identity in multiple, hybrid, and complex ways that allowed for the identification of Christian non-Jews as Jews. Luke also employs the ethnic, religious, and civic aspects of Jewish identity to privilege those Jews (and non-Jewish Jews) who follow Jesus. If Acts marks all Christians as Jews and Christian communities as Jewish communities, then the concept of “Christian universalism” should be understood as a particular form of “Jewish universalism.” The chapter then reflects on the use of ethnic reasoning and the challenge of anti-Judaism in the interpretation of Acts today.

scholarly journals The contradictions of Diaspora: A reflexive critique of the Jewish Diaspora’s relationship with Israel

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-106
Author(s):  
Ilan Zvi Baron
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Research ◽  
Theoretical Investigation ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Personal Reflection ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
The World ◽  
Survey Results

This article explores a question that is often assumed but rarely addressed: What does Israel provide ideationally for Diaspora Jews that serves as the basis for Diaspora/Israel relations and justifies the importance of Israel for Jewish identity? Whereas past literature on this topic has either assumed an answer to this question or debated survey results and demographics, this article takes a different approach by not assuming an answer to this question. The article argues that Diaspora Jews’ relationship with Israel is best understood phenomenologically. The significance of Israel for Diaspora Jews is found in a type of obligation that is political but is not based in sovereignty or law but instead in meaning that serves as a form of authority and functions as part of the phenomenological structure characterizing Jewish being-in-the-world in the age of Israel. Using a combination of personal reflection, empirical research, and theoretical investigation, the article concludes by suggesting that critique serves as an activity that reveals the normative character of Israel’s meaningful authority, but that Israel’s authority in this phenomenological sense needs to be undermined if it will be possible to move beyond the increasingly polarizing role that Israel is having in Jewish communities today.

Hegel and the Emergence of Zionism

1982 ◽  
Vol 3 (02) ◽  
pp. 12-18
Author(s):  
Shlomo Avineri
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Religious Affiliation ◽  
Striking Similarity ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Historical Tradition ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Jewish Intellectuals ◽  
Polish Intelligentsia

The connection between Hegelian thought and the emergence of modern Jewish nationalism – Zionism – appears, at first, to be far–fetched and slightly incongruous. Yet some aspects of Hegelian thought became attractive to many secularised, Jewish intellectuals in the 19th century in their quest for self-identity amidst the turmoil of enormous political and social upheavals. Some facets of this receptivity to Hegelian ideas, and especially their extension to the future dimension of history, bear striking similarity to the popularity of Hegelian notions among the Polish intelligentsia in roughly the same period (cf. Ryszard Panasiuk's ‘Hegel in Poland’, in the Spring-Summer 1982 issue of the Bulletin). The context is also similar: political impotence and the reinterpretation of a political historical tradition with overt religious connotations. The main issue facing Jewish thinkers in the post–1789 period was two-fold: the claim for integration, on the basis of equality, into a society based on the ideas of the Enlightenment, and the redefinition of Jewish identity in a mostly secularised world. Zionism appeared historically as one of the answers to this doutfle quest: it claimed that integration into the modern world should be on a collective – i.e. national – and not individual base; that this integration had to be based on auto-emancipation and self-determination, not on emancipation by others; and finally – and most fundamentally – that Jewish identity should be defined in terms of nationhood, not merely religious affiliation.

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