NHISTORY 283JEWISH STUDIES 235

JEWS

IN MODERN TIMES

Syllabus

• http://www.history.umd.edu/Faculty/BCooperman/Modern/283syllabus.html

• http://www.history.umd.edu

History 299c

Films

Tuesday 4-6:30

Skinner 0200

“Birthplace” 47 minutes

How Do You Spell It?

Semitism

• 19th-century linguistic term: Semitic

• linked to ethnography -- description is generalized into categorization

• predictable patterns of behavior

• hierarchies of ethnicities

• pro- and anti-

Racial Argumentation

• linked to arguments for race defining nation– what other categories were available?

• Darwinism/Social Darwinism

• determined nature of “scientific” racism

Definitions

• anti-Semitism is a 19th-cen. terminological invention linked to categories of “scientific” anthropology and physiology that are activated by romanticist nationalist arguments of the period

• easily adapted for other tasks and easily absorbs earlier anti-Jewish rhetorics

(Jewish) Popular Perceptions & Scholarly Approaches

• “Antisemitism”• “halakha -- Esav sonè et Yaakov” -- it is a God-

given principle that gentiles hate Jews• this turns anti-Semitism into a meta-historical

explanatory force instead of a historically bound pattern of meaning and action

• is Slezkine anti-Semitic? (generalized categories; content vs function)

Jewish Nationalisms

Continuity or Rupture?

• nationalism is a modern idea linked to the emergence of the centralized political state

• has the power to impose identity

• has the need to do so

• why?

• an (almost) exclusive legitimizing rhetoric

Suggested Reading

• Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (1983)

• Eric Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition (1983)

• Bernard Lewis, History Remembered, Recovered, and Invented (1975)

Role of Secularization

• powerful rhetoric adopted in reaction to the secularization of the Jewish experience

• co-optation of religious terminology

• note the changing attitude of the Orthodox

Multiple Forms

• Diaspora Nationalism– historical: Simon Dubnow– socialist: Bund

• Zionismpolitical: Herzl

cultural: Ahad ha-Am (Asher Ginzberg)

Zionism wins. When and why?

The Jewish Problem

• physical, economic, legal, political,

• elephants!!

• need/craving for self-definition and self-expression

Diaspora Nationalism

• late 19th and early 20th centuries– attempts to define minority rights within multi-

national empires– nations are defined where none had existed

before– criteria: language, faith, land– fall back on subjective values like common

culture and common destiny

Jewish Minority Rights

• Versailles following W.W. I

• Jews given cultural autonomy and representation in many countries from Greece to Poland

Diaspora Nationalism

• give up claim to independent state in return for national status

Simon Dubnow

• Jewish people evolved from racial-ethnic to territorial-political to cultural-historical

• the last spiritual stage does not need the trappings of a state like land, language, and sovereignty

• the nation must redefine itself now thru secular institutions

• error of religious reformers to define the group religiously

• Volkspartei (People’s Party)

Bund

• Jewish socialists highly Russified• aim to escape particularism and

parochialism• young socialists are shocked by popular

anti-Semitism and its acceptance by the left– (“socialism of the masses”)

• Jewish masses suspicious of assimilationists• Jewish interests are separate

• Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeiter Bund in Lite, Poylin und Rusland (General Worker’s Union in Lithuania, Poland and Russia)

• est. 1897 Russia• as with most modernizing movements in the

East, it is associated with Vilna and Lithuania and then spreads

• reaction to decline of old Jewish craft guilds

Aaron Lieberman

• 1870s begins to spread Marxism in Yiddish• tension between internationalism of

socialism and of these Jews and their Jewish orientation

• Russian language gives way to Yiddish 1890-95

• recognition of separate interests and political needs

Bund and Nationalism

• relations with other socialist organizations

• cooptation

• Polish Bund 1914

• Yiddishist movement

• CySHO schools

Zionism

• precursors

• religious messianism

• Moses Hess -- Rome and Jerusalem 1862

• romanticism

• solution to split identity

• Theodore Herzl

Hovevei Tziyon & Bilu

• organized help for settlers• impact of pogroms on migration -- 1872;

1881• Leon Pinsker, Auto-Emancipation! (1882)

– territorialism

• BILU• First Aliya (1882-1903)

– Alliance Israelite Universelle; Rothschild

Herzl

• Dreyfus trial 1896

• Jewish State 1896

• First Zionist Congress 1897 in Basle

• Israel Zangwill, territorialism

Spiritual Zionism

• Smolenskin

• Ahad Ha’Am (Asher Ginzburg)