Åbo Akademi: Open Journal Systems
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Moses Hess – jude och socialist
No full textThe first generation of the Jewish emancipation in the 19th century made a considerable contribution to European culture and science. Quite a few of these newly emancipated Jews became prominent leaders in the rising socialist movement. One of these was Moses Hess, the “father of German socialism” and a hailed proto-Zionist. In 1862 Hess published his most famous book, Rome and Jerusalem, which in our century has become a Zionist classic. Contrary to his earlier opinions Hess now gave expression to his opposition to Jewish assimilation and proposed a rebirth of the Jewish nation. The Jewish national question, Hess claimed, could only be solved by creating a socialist Jewish state in Palestine. The nationalistic riots in socialist countries today show that Hess was right when he stressed the importance of nationalities. The bankruptcy of Marxist socialism, so widely admitted today, will perhaps raise interest in the humanistic socialism of Moses Hess
"Min stämma är såsom en flyktig fogels...": Eljakim Jacob Soldin – en dansk-judisk diktare i det gustavianska Sverige
No full textEljakim Jacob Soldin (born c. 1770, Berlin, d. after 1809 in Denmark) began his literary career as a composer of honorary commemoration poems for family members and royal persons. Having trained – according to his own statement – as a book printer, he gained access to Sweden in the mid 1780s as a private tutor in a Jewish family, and during his stay there, he published poems to members of the royal family, a vivid genre of literature in both Sweden and Denmark at this time in history. After his return to Copenhagen, he published additional poems, but also booklets within the Haskalah tradition. In this article, a short overview is given of his life and works, and the contents of his literary production is analysed, in particular with regards to his awareness of the ‘proper’ themes to make use of in his honorary poems
Den banala debatten: Hanna Arendt i Jerusalem
No full textFew books within the field of Jewish studies have caused so much anger and intense debate as Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil. The author was considered to be a self-hating Jew because she accused the Jewish leaders during the Holocaust for having complied with Nazi orders and thus having facilitated the mass murder. Her view of the personality of Eichmann was considered to be wrong, and her way of writing was seen as inappropriate in its lack of humility in dealing with an issue like the Holocaust. Although much of the critique was unfair, Arendt’s non-diplomatic style of writing contributed to the negative reactions
The creation of beauty by its destruction: the idoloclastic aesthetic in modern and contemporary Jewish art
No full textContemporary commentators are well aware that the Jewish tradition is not an aniconic one. Far from suppressing art, the Second Commandment produces it. And not just abstract art; it also uses halakhically mandated idoloclastic techniques to produce figurative images that at once cancel and restore the glory (kavod) of the human. This article suggests that Jewish art’s observance of the Second Commandment’s proscription of idolatrous images (a commandment that belongs indivisibly with the First) is ever more relevant to a contemporary image-saturated mass culture whose consumption induces feelings of both hubris and self-disgust or shame. The article revisits Steven Schwarzschild’s interpretation of the halakhic requirement that artists should deliberately misdraw or distort the human form and Anthony Julius’s account of Jewish art as one that that mobilizes idol breaking. As an aesthetic consequence of the rabbinic permission to mock idols – and thereby render the ideological cults for which they are visual propaganda merely laughable or absurd – distortive, auto-destructive and other related forms of Jewish art are not intended to alienate the sanctity of the human. On the contrary, by honouring the transcendence of the human, especially the face, idoloclastic art knows the human figure as sublime, always exceeding any representation of its form. Idoloclastic anti-images thereby belong to a messianic aesthetic of incompletion that knows the world as it ought to be but is not yet; that remains open to its own futurity: the restoration of dignity, in love
Alterskapet fra Andenes. En liturgisk lesning av skapets ikonografi med hovedvekt på Nådefader-gruppen i skapets corpus
No full textTitle: The Altarpiece from Andenes. A Liturgical Reading of its IconographyThe article discusses the liturgical function of the motif of Notgottes, and the connection between this and the St. Olav iconography. The discussion focusses on the altarpiece from Andenes (Nordland, Norway, about 1500), now in the Tromsø museum’s church collection. It consists of predella, corpus and doors that can be opened, i.e. it could be described as a “hinged triptych”. The corpus consists of wooden sculptures: (from the beholder’s left) a holy bishop, God the Father holding the dead Christ as Schmerzensmann in His arms (a motif also called Notgottes), St. Olav and St. Magnus Earl of Orkney. On the inner side of the doors there are four painted scenes from the Passion of Christ, and the outside likewise figures four passion scenes including a crucifixion, which has been interpreted (by Patrik Reuterswärd 1980) as St. Olav’s passion according to a contemporary text. The altarpiece thus may illustrate St. Olav as imitatio Christi. The sculptural group almost certainly also included an angel with a chalice in his hands collecting blood from the wounds of Christ, represented as red threads (chalice and threads now lost). This detail indicates a nexus between the angel and the content of a prayer in the core of the Eucharistic cycle, the Súpplices te rogámus, asking for God’s acceptance of the gifts lifted by “the hands of an angel to the Altar of Heaven”
A guide for the perplexed: a student's navigation through Jewish studies in Sweden
No full textThis article presents a student’s perspective on Jewish studies in Sweden over the past ten years. By identifying the milestones of her own educational and professional path, the author discusses three questions of particular interest for a student wanting to pursue any kind of Jewish studies in a Nordic country, using Sweden as an example, namely: 1) How to compose a curriculum that leads to doctoral studies? 2) What can be said about the ‘identity’ of Jewish studies in Sweden? 3) Can a degree in the subject field of choice also lead to a career outside the academic framework
Jews of the land of Kedar
No full textAt present, it is safe to say that alongside the Slavic, Finnish, Scandinavian, Turkic, Baltic, Iranian, Caucasian elements the Jewish element has also played its role in the early period of the ethnocultural history of the vast region to the north of the Black and the Caspian seas. According to the medieval Jewish sources, the members of Judaic communities belonged to various social and even racial groups. This fact sheds light on the Jews whom the Jewish traveler Petahyah of Regensburg met in the Land of Kedar in the 12th century. Petahyah traveled from Regensburg to the Middle East via Prague, Kiev, Crimea and Caucasus. What were the origins of these Jews
Jonites och Nimod i Jerahme'els hebreiska krönika
No full textThe medieval Hebrew Chronicle of Yerahme’el contains a story of the meeting of Nimrod and Yonites, the (fourth) son of Noah, attributed to Strabo of Cyprus. Yonites is unknown in Jewish tradition, but can be found in a similar context as in Yerahme’el in Syriac Christian literature – for the first time in the Cave of Treasures (5th cent.). Yerahme’el could not however know the Cave, and therefore one has to look for intermediary pages. One of them is the Syriac Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodios (the end of the 7th cent.) directed against the Muslims, which became very popular among the Syrians and was soon translated into Greek and Latin. The Latin translation as used by Petrus Comestor (d. 1179) in his Historia Scholastica. Since its author lived in Troyes in northern France where contacts are attested between Christian and Jewish exegetes in the 12th cent., one may assume that Yerahme’el’s work came into being in this region and epoch