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The Jews in Kiev, 1859--1914: Community and charity in an imperial Russian city.
No full textThis dissertation examines the socioeconomic makeup and institutions of the Jews of late imperial Kiev in order to understand the nature and dynamics of Jewish community in the Russian Empire. Largely unexplored by historians, the spheres of Jewish communal governance and welfare offer a window into the transformation of Russian Jewry over the half-century before the First World War and the Revolution of 1917. Community and charity were the two arenas in which the most pressing issues within Russian Jewry played out on the local, day-to-day level. The increasingly complex jigsaw puzzle of Jewish politics and culture, widening socioeconomic divides among Jews, relations between Jews and the state as well as with non-Jewish populations of the empire---all were manifest within Kiev Jewry, one of the largest and most diverse urban Jewish populations of the Russian Empire. Within the realm of communal governance and institutional life, acculturated bourgeois Jews sought to preserve a measure of Jewish identity through leadership of and active participation in the official governing body of the community as well as a host of new philanthropic organizations that sprang up at the turn of the century. University-educated and professional Jews who saw in Jewish nationalism and socialism the answers to the Jewish Question in Europe and Russia as well as to their own personal questions of identity and belonging staked their own claim to leadership of the Jewish masses based on democracy and accountability. Yet the Jewish community that both groups professed to represent was itself a body in motion, an entity that is as difficult to define now as it was then, given the economic, social, cultural, linguistic, affiliational, and migratory changes taking place during the period in question. Thus, while attempting to chart the transformation of the community and its institutions, this study also tracks and explain the acculturation and quest for identity of the groups and individuals who constituted that community. Russian Jews were a complicated mixture of both Jewish and Russian identities, and the community they created reflected that fusion.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Columbia University, 2004.School code: 0054
"Our religious future": Girls' education and Jewish identity in nineteenth-century France.
No full textThis dissertation examines the extensive changes that occurred in both Franco-Jewish rhetoric about girls' education and the actual educational experiences of Jewish girls in Paris between 1822 and 1914. Based on close analysis of discussions of girls' upbringing and archival sources relating to a diverse array of Jewish and non-Jewish schools, I argue that changes in girls' instruction played an important and complex role in French Jews' search for a balance between a Jewish and a national identity in the post-emancipation world. In the nineteenth century, many Jewish leaders began to identify women as key to maintaining Jewish identity; in particular, they insisted that a balanced program of religious and secular instruction for girls provided the best means of countering assimilation and ensuring that becoming French would not mean discarding Judaism. I trace this belief to the interaction between traditional Jewish conceptions of gender roles and contemporary French customs as the Jews integrated into French society over the course of the century. Paying careful attention to class differences, I then examine the religious and secular instruction received by Jewish girls in a variety of educational venues, including public and private primary schools, day and boarding schools, vocational programs, and at home by governesses. While Jewish girls' secular education fostered Jewish integration into French society by preparing them for lives largely similar to those of their non-Jewish counterparts, their religious instruction melded French and Jewish characteristics in often subtle ways. Although influenced in form and content by French norms, Jewish girls' religious training remained far more limited than that of girls of the majority Catholic society, a surprising result given the dominant new rhetoric about the importance of women to Jewish life. Rather than representing eagerness to assimilate, however, this lack of intensive religious instruction in fact reflects deep ambivalence in the Jewish community about transforming an important aspect of the Jewish heritage, namely traditional Judaism's privileging of male over female religious learning and practice. This study thus sheds new light on the formation of modern Jewish identity and the roles of women and gender in the process of Jewish acculturation.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Emory University, 2004.School code: 0665
Gender, religion and the Jewish public sphere in mid-nineteenth century America.
No full textBenevolent and mutual benefit societies, associations for the care of the sick and burial of the dead, fraternal lodges, literary associations, Sunday schools, orphan asylums, hospitals and Jewish cemeteries constituted an American Jewish public sphere---the realm of social and civic life identified by social theorists in which participants form opinions, debate issues and rehearse identities. For many nineteenth century American Jews, participation in this sphere became the primary manifestation of their Jewish affiliation, replacing the rituals and observances of traditional Judaism. This dissertation explores the Jewish public sphere in cities across America, from its emergence in the 1820s through America's Centennial in 1876. There are two central arguments: First, gender was a significant organizing principle behind the Jewish public sphere as women and men partnered in its creation and engaged in defining the categories of Jewish manhood and Jewish womanhood. Second, through their institutions, American Jews created a Jewish civil religion, whose beliefs, symbols and rituals they hoped could transcend their ideological differences and unite them as American Jews.This dissertation examines four arenas through which American Jews transformed American Judaism as they attempted to construct a unified vision of Jewish identity---Jewish philanthropy, Jewish fraternal orders, Hebrew literary associations and Jewish cemeteries. The primary purposes of the associations of the Jewish public sphere included the maintenance and promotion of Jewish obligation, cohesion, knowledge and identity. Yet, these Jewish institutions adopted the forms, language, and even values of American civic culture and civil religion as the mechanisms through which to promote their Jewish agenda. Thus, Jewish philanthropy adapted to American gender norms and attitudes towards poverty. Jewish fraternal orders merged the American fraternal form with a newly emerging Jewish civil religion. Jewish literary associations embraced a popular American form to instill in young Jewish men a sense of duty to Judaism and to America. Finally, Jewish cemeteries reflected the continuing desire for Jewish separateness even as the manner of burial reveals an embrace of an American domestic piety.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 2004.School code: 0175
El Llanto: A liturgiological journey into the identity and theology of the northern New Mexican Penitentes and their spiritual siblings.
No full textResearch concerning the Penitentes of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado holds out many unique gifts to scholarship. Unfortunately, because of the difficulties inherent in the study of this population, the information available is incomplete. One of the largest gaps in current scholarship lies in investigation of the medieval roots of Penitente devotion, another in the documentation and examination of their unique tradition of musical worship (the alabados), and a third in the role of women in Penitente society and spirituality. Further, work is still necessary to explore the theology expressed in Penitente art, ritual, and daily living. The area of Liturgical Studies offers the methods and approach necessary to address all of these issues.This dissertation will present an historical analysis of the evolution of the northern New Mexican Penitente cult with an attempt to establish its relationship to the traditions of medieval Spain. This relationship can be revealed especially through the study of Penitente devotional music. The medieval musical roots that evolved into the expression known as Flamenco in Spain (including Arab/Islamic, Jewish/Ladino, and extra-Iberian Catholic/European traditions) appear to have been preserved in their more primitive forms in the isolation of northern New Mexico, perhaps because of the liturgical conservatism of the Penitentes, and reveal much about the group's origin and the genesis of their spiritual world view. Therefore, where the history of the group's development has been disputed (and the prevalent theories will be explored), the arts give insight. In close relationship to this investigation, the dissertation will attempt an inquiry into Penitente understandings of their own unique theology. Finally, it will be the hope of this dissertation to demonstrate an active and even leadership-oriented role in for women in Penitente society and spirituality, which preliminary but extensive field interviews have so far confirmed, and which would be more consistent with the tradition's medieval roots than the more popularly held understanding that the expression and devotion of the Penitentes is an exclusively male endeavor.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Notre Dame, 2004.School code: 0165
The poetics of place: Unraveling home and exile in Jewish literature from Israel and the United States.
No full textThis dissertation examines the multiple place narratives in modern Jewish literature from Israel and the United States, showing that the standard tropes of exile and home insufficiently express the Jewish perception of place.Recently, some scholars have overturned the conventional Zionist model of Jewish place that privileges Israel as the Jewish home and the Diaspora as the place of exile. They articulate an alternative model that posits the sacred text in exile as the Jewish homeland. Despite these resistant readings, however, the paradigm of Israel as home and the Diaspora as exile remains the dominant one. Furthermore, while the alternative model insists on redefining exile as home, it continues to utilize the vocabulary of nationalism. By exploring the diverse possibilities of home in Jewishness, I try to unravel the exile/home dichotomy rather than simply reverse it. This dissertation expands the scholarly resistance against the dominant nationalist narrative of place, by analyzing the variety of alternatives found in fiction.Scholarly dialogue on place among the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, the philosopher Edward Casey, and the literary critic Roberto Dainotto, among others, grounds my study. I also explore themes that remain largely unacknowledged in the discourse on the Jewish notion of place but inextricably linked to it, such as gender and race, widening the relevance of the study beyond Jewish literature.The dissertation reveals the complexity of place in various contexts represented by Philip Roth, Allegra Goodman, Amos Oz, and Orly Castel-Bloom. Hovering between Israel and America, Jewish men question the relationship between "authentic" Jewishness and place. American women discover sites of Jewish spirituality that allow them to position themselves in textual homelands in subversively feminine configurations. In Israel, the opposition between the mythologized desert and the Zionist place parallels the tension between a primeval pre-Zionist state and the nationalist construction of boundaries that attempts to erase it. Imaginary literary worlds characterized by grotesque injustice reflect the flaws of the homeland that cannot function as a home for all its inhabitants, and which necessitates the invention of fantastic worlds at which to direct critical wrath.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Los Angeles, 2004.School code: 0031
The travel motif in contemporary Latin American Jewish literature.
No full textThe purpose of this work is to study: Tiempo al tiempo (1984), by the Peruvian Isaac Goldemberg; Colombina descubierta (1991), by the Venezuelan Alicia Freilich Segal; Mujeres pudorosas (1993), by the Argentinian Silvia Plager; El alma al diablo (1994), by the Argentinian Marcelo Birmajer; and La piel del alma (1996), by the Uruguayan Teresa Porzecanski as Latin American Jewish novels. I have selected these works written by Jewish authors because they present Jewish themes or subjects. At the same time, I examine the literary aspects that allow us to consider them as Latin American, and to illuminate their connections with national, Latin American and universal literature. In other words, I examine both components of the diptych in the phenomenon known as "Latin American-Jewish literature." In order to achieve this goal, I concentrate on the analysis of the literary travel motif in these novels, in its multiple manifestations (real and imaginary, literal and symbolic travel), and its connections with Jewish and Latin American issues. Selecting the literary travel motif as the focus of my analysis has allowed me to observe a level of cohesion among different works. Thus, I study Tiempo al tiempo as a novel of search of identity, as a manifestation of the literary travel motif. Based on the theoretical frame of the Latin American new historical novel I analyze Colombina descubierta as a journey into the past in order to examine conflicts in the present. I show that in Mujeres pudorosas the protagonists' travels represent their attempts to transcend their geographic, personal, social and intellectual milieu in a process of search of expansion of those limitations through love, eroticism, memory, literary creation. I demonstrate that El alma al diablo belongs to the genre Bildungsroman or apprenticeship novel, as a type of travel novel. Finally, I study the travel motif in La piel del alma from different points of view: journey in space and in time; internal trip of self-awareness of the protagonists; persecution and exile; search for a home.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Temple University, 2004.School code: 0225
Presenting Jews: Jewishness and America, 1920--1960.
No full textIn America, Jews had to learn how to explain and present themselves to non-Jews in order to survive and thrive. This dissertation argues that Jewish acts of self-presentation from the 1920s through the early 1960s sculpted the way that Jews thought about being Jewish and being American. Jewish leaders, intellectuals, and institutions remodeled, often self-consciously, Jewishness and Americanness when they articulated what made a Jew a Jew, and what Judaism's relationship was to Christianity, democracy, and America. The people I examine---who traveled under the sponsorship of the Jewish Chautauqua Society to universities with little or no Jewish student body to deliver lectures about Jewish beliefs, history and culture, who engaged in missionary experiments, who used the tools of social science to make Jews, Judaism, and America knowable, and who wrestled with the ban on intermarriage---transformed what it meant to be a Jew and what it meant to be an American in relation to their historical moment, personal proclivities, and ideological positions. Theirs was not only a struggle toward assimilating into American life, a story now well rehearsed in the historiography of American Jews; it was also an effort to assimilate American life into a Jewish framework.Jewishness could not be explained without taking a stake in the core debates of American political life---most importantly the competing values of American unity and American diversity or pluralism. At different moments and in different circumstances, Jewish Chautauqua Society rabbis and leaders, the Reform rabbis who advocated a Jewish mission, Jewish social researchers, and Jewish commentators, including rabbis and sociologists, on intermarriage imagined their destiny merging into America's destiny, and imagined it as somehow distinct. Whether Jewishness would strengthen the unity of America or its diversity, Jewish leaders believed Jewishness itself could represent something essential about American national identity.In the eyes of the Jewish leaders I examine, Jewishness could serve as both a model of America and a model for America. As Jews presented themselves to America, they helped shape the emerging contours of American political and cultural life.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2004.School code: 0265
The transformation of Jewish identity in Vienna, 1918--1938.
No full textThis dissertation examines the ways in which literature, theater, politics and gender not only reflected but also actively shaped the identities of Viennese Jews after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In response to more narrowly defined constructions of Jewish identity, it draws out the subtler patterns of association and socialization that characterized modern Jewish life, including matters of taste, cultural alignment and political membership. Study of these socio-cultural affiliations ultimately shows that for many Austrian authors, dramatists, and politicians---and for their broader audience---a Jewish background mattered a great deal in the process of negotiating and fashioning culture.The first chapter introduces the issues at stake during the insecure, uncertain and volatile years from 1918 to 1938 that profoundly affected all Austrians, but transformed the lives of Jewish Austrians in particular. It investigates the wide spectrum of Jewish responses to the postwar political and social crises as Jews were forced to renegotiate previously comfortable identities. The second chapter explores one such response through the involvement of socialist leader David Joseph Bach in the cultural policies of "Red Vienna," which reflected the emphasis on Bildung already popular among secular Central European Jews. In contrast to this enthusiasm for Bildung, journalist Else Feldmann's position as an impoverished Jewish woman allowed her to make visible the problems of interwar Socialism often glossed over by more idealistic, bourgeois party leaders. The third chapter considers authors Veza Canetti and Mela Hartwig, who likewise maintained critical distances to ideologies supported by many of their male counterparts, including socialism and psychoanalysis. Chapter four argues that new space in the Viennese public sphere allowed women including Eugenie Schwarzwald, Berta Zuckerkandl and Alice Schalek to flourish as journalists, educators, and organizers of social welfare systems, even as the parallel development of antisemitism and misogyny limited their success. The last chapter examines Jewish participation in both Yiddish theater and the baroque Catholic Salzburg Festival, illustrating how the Jewish responses to political and social changes in interwar Austria included both support for and rejection of traditional notions of Jewish and Austrian identities.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2004.School code: 0265
Hashomer Hatzair youth movement, 1918--1924 from eastern Galicia and Vienna to Palestine: A cultural history.
No full textThis Dissertation examines the early, pre-Marxist years of Hashomer Hatzair youth movement from a wider perspective of European intellectual and cultural history. The movement originated in the Habsburg province of eastern Galicia around 1911 and was founded in Vienna in 1916. During World War I the first cohorts of the movement arrived in Vienna as war refugees along with their families. It was in this intellectual maelstrom and thanks to their exposure to the Viennese Jugendkulturbewegung, headed by the Jewish intellectual Siegfried Bernfeld that the movement's members received their intellectual formation. In 1920 the movement began its immigration to Palestine and was one of the founders of the kibbutz movement.In Vienna, the movement was exposed to a number of intellectual currents: Martin Buber's existential approach to Judaism and religiosity, Nietzschean Lebensphilosophie, Gustav Landauer's community oriented anarchism, Hans Bluher's theory of Mannerbund and Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis. These currents were incorporated into the movement's nascent worldview.Part 1 of the dissertation examines the eastern Galician roots of the movement. Part 2 is dedicated to the movement's inculcation of the various intellectual currents in Vienna. Part 3 looks closely at the community of Bitania which the movement founded in 1920 in the Galilee. In this community the movement sought to experiment with the ideas it had brought to Palestine. Bitania was to become an "erotic community," where a set of practices was instrumental in intensifying the bonding experience.In examining the intellectual orbit of Hashomer Hatzair and its peculiar brand of post-traditional Judaism, this dissertation claims that Hashomer Hatzair imported distinctly German and Central European ideas, concerns and modes of thought into its evolving worldview. This may serve to destabilize the preconceived dichotomies between Eastern European Jews as opposed to German Jews, and Jewish modes of thought as opposed to German ones.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Los Angeles, 2004.School code: 0031
The encoding of desire: Reflections of contemporary Messianism in German Expressionist drama.
No full textThis dissertation employs an interdisciplinary approach to address the literary-historical debate surrounding the definition of "Expressionism" in German-speaking literature. Foregrounding the movement's inherently messianic worldview, it argues that what commentators traditionally label "Expressionist" style or thematics is actually a secularized manifestation of the messianism that shapes the Jewish and Christian religions. No understanding of Expressionism as a major Modernist movement (roughly 1910--1925) is complete without an appreciation of its fundamental structuring device: a pervasive search for a Messiah---whether personal or notional---to redeem a highly troubled society. This study focuses on the dramatic genre, since its insistence upon renewal through martyrdom or spiritual rebirth most aptly demonstrates the centrality of messianism within the movement. Analyses of plays by Ernst Barlach, Georg Kaiser, Ernst Toller and Franz Werfel illustrate how the Expressionist desire for redemption is mapped onto the expectation of the Messiah that suffuses the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. Firm in the belief that their society was in need of salvation, these playwrights built their oeuvres around consistently blatant appropriation of rhetorical devices which remain intensely biblical (e.g., prophecy, proclamation). The dissertation takes its structure more from biblical than from other literary models, examining a succession of imagery and motifs from Judeo-Christian salvation history, from the Creation through the Apocalypse, while at the same time problematizing this supposedly continuous trajectory. Since this research is informed by the constant negotiation between sacred and secular in the modern era, the theoretical foundation for this project represents an admixture of literary and religious studies, applying originally biblical hermeneutics to secular texts in order to expose the particularly messianic theology and Christology of the Expressionist movement. Thus, this dissertation illustrates how biblical themes, motifs, imagery and rhetoric remain ingrained in even the most avowedly profane texts, and how the intensely prevalent desire for messianic redemption informs our reading of modern literature.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 2004.School code: 0175