Abstract
How can we conceptualize the sheer diversity of Jewish experience in the nineteenth century? An earlier generation of historians turned to the Zionist national narrative, with its emphasis on the unique historical destiny of the Jewish people and the unity of their experience through the ages. Thus the Jerusalem School saw modern Jewish history in terms of the catastrophic impact of the nation-state on traditional Jewish communal and religious structures, as a result of emancipation, assimilation, and their by-product, secularization.1 The opposition between ‘modernizers’ and ‘traditionalists’ in the Jewish world is a fundamental tension within this narrative – a tension only resolved by the Zionist movement, which promised a fusion between the aspirations of the modernizers and the ethnoreligious cultural identity of the traditionalists. This version of Jewish history has been attacked for homogenizing a wide range of experiences and contexts. Most obviously, it privileges the history of European Jewry at the expense of the Jews of Muslim lands.2 Even within Europe, the viability of this overarching narrative has been brought into question by revisionist historians who emphasize not the common European encounter with modernity but the plurality and diversity of the Jewish world.3
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Notes
See David N. Myers, Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995);
Efraim Shmueli, ‘The Jerusalem School of Jewish History (a Critical Evaluation)’, Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, 53 (July 1986), 147–78.
Recent synthetic histories continue to do so: see David Vital, A People Apart: The Jews in Europe 1789–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999);
Lloyd P. Gartner, History of the Jews in Modern Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Exemplified by three landmark collections of essays: Jacob Katz, ed., To ward Modernity: The European Jewish Model (New York: Leo Baeck Institute, 1987);
Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson, eds, Paths of Emancipation. Jews, States, and Citizenship (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995);
Jonathan Frankel and Steven J. Zipperstein, eds, Assimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Examples of local studies include Steven J. Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa. A Cultural History, 1794–1881 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985);
Lois C. Dubin, The Port Jews of Habsburg Trieste. Absolutist Politics and Enlightenment Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). Examples of national studies include
Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England, 1714–1830. Tradition and Change in a Liberal Society (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979);
Eli Lederhendler, The Road to Modern Jewish Politics. Political Tradition and Political Reconstruction in the Jewish Community of Tsarist Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989);
Hasia Diner, The Jews of the United States, 1654–2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
See Phyllis Cohen Albert, The Modernization of French Jewry: Consistory and Community in the Nineteenth Century (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 1977).
See Norman Cohen, ‘Non-Religious Factors in the Emergence of the Chief Rabbinate’, Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, 21 (1968), 304–13.
See Benjamin Braude, ‘Foundation Myths of the Millet System’, in Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis, eds, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, Vol. 1, The Central Lands (New York and London: Holmes & Meier, 1982), pp. 69–88.
On this nexus see Abigail Green, ‘Nationalism and the “Jewish International”: Religious Internationalism in Europe and the Middle East c.1840–c.1880’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 50.2 (April 2008), 535–58, and idem, ‘Sir Moses Montefiore and the Making of the “Jewish International”’, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 7.3 (November 2008), 287–307.
For a classic account of the workings of the early modern Ashkenazi kehilah, see Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages (New York: New York University Press, 1993).
See Niall Ferguson, The World’s Banker. The History of the House of Rothschild (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1998);
Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron. Bismarck, Bleichröder and the Building of the German Empire (Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin, 1977).
But see the argument in Lisa Moses Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity. The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).
The Terra Santa fund for the Holy Land and the Cautivos fund for the redemption of Jewish slaves and prisoners were two of the three earliest charities established by modern Anglo-Jewry; see Albert M. Hyamson, The Sephardim of England. A History of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish Community, 1492–1951 (London: Methuen, 1951), p. 81.
See Andrée Aelion Brooks, The Woman Who Defied Kings. The Life and Times of Doña Gracia Nasi — A Jewish Leader during the Renaissance (St Paul: Paragon House, 2002);
Cecil Roth, Doña Gracia of the House of Nasi (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1977).
See Jacob Barnai, The Jews in Palestine in the Eighteenth Century under the Patronage of the Istanbul Committee of Officials for Palestine, trans. Naomi Goldblum (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992), chapter 7, and more generally.
See Baruch Mevorach, ‘Die Interventionsbestrebungen in Europa zur Verhinderung der Vertreibung der Juden aus Böhmen und Mähren, 1744–1745’, Jahrbuch des Instituts für deutsche Geschichte, 9 (1980), 15–81;
François Guesnet, ‘Textures of Intercession — Rescue Efforts for the Jews of Prague, 1744/1748’, Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook, 4 (2005), 355–75.
See Jonathan Irvine Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-Jews and the World Maritime Empires (1540–1740) (Leiden: Brill, 2002).
Jonathan Frankel, ‘Jewish Politics and the Press: The “Reception” of the Alliance Israélite Universelle’, Jewish History, 14 (2000), 30. More generally on the Jewish press see the rest of this special issue, also Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Making Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004);
David Cesarani, The Jewish Chronicle and Anglo-Jewry, 1841–1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Adam Mendelsohn, ‘Tongue Ties: The Emergence of an Anglophone Jewish Diaspora in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, American Jewish History, 93.2 (June 2007), 177–209.
Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair: ‘Ritual Murder’, Politics, and the Jews in 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
On the Russian mobilization, see Jacob Jacobson, ‘Eine Aktion Für die Russischen Grenzjuden in Den Jahren 1843/44’, in Ismar Elbogen, Josef Meisl and Mark Wischnitzer, eds, Festschrift zu Simon Dubnows siebzigstem Geburtstag (2. Tischri 5691) (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1930), pp. 237–50; on the Mortara Affair, see
David I. Kertzer, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (London: Picador, 1997); on the Romanian situation, see especially
Carol Iancu, Les Juifs en Roumanie (1866–1919). De l’Exclusion à l’Emancipation (Aix en Provence: Editions de l’Université de Provence, 1978), and
Carol Iancu, ‘Adolphe Crémieux, l’Alliance Israélite Universelle et les Juifs de Roumanie au Début du Règne de Carol Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen’, Revue des Études Juives, 133.12 (January–June 1974), 481–502; on the Moroccan agitation, see
Bettina Marx, Juden Marokkos und Europas. Das marokkanische Judentum im 19. Jahrhundert und seine Darstellung in der zeitgenössischen jüdischen Presse in Deutschland, Frankreich und Groβbritannien (Frankfurt a.M., Bern, New York and Paris: Peter Lang, 1991).
‘Great Fire at Smyrna’, VJ (16 September 1841), 6–7; ‘Magdeburg, den 11 September. Leitender Artikel’, AZ (24 September 1842), 573–4. ‘Relief of the Sufferers at Mogador [Leading Article]’, VJ (15 November 1844), 33–4. On Montefiore, see Abigail Green, Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010);
Sonia L. Lipman and Vivian D. Lipman, eds, The Century of Moses Montefiore (Littman Library of Jewish Civilisation; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
See, for instance, ‘Magdeburg, 16. Oktober’, AZ (29 October 1842), 645–6, which refers to earlier articles published in Jost’s Israelitische Annalen in 1840 and 1841. ‘Hebra Terumot Hakodesh’, The Occident and American Jewish Advocate (TO) (March 1847); ‘Hebra Terumot Hakodesh, N.Y.’, TO (April 1847). On Lehren see Aryeh Morgenstern, Hapekidim veha’amarkalim be’amsterdam vehayishuv hayehudi be’erets yisra’el bemaḥatsit harishonah shel hame’ah hatesha-esreh (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University, 1981).
See, for instance, Israel Bartal, ‘The Image of Germany and German Jewry in East European Jewish Society During the 19th Century’, in Isadore Twersky, ed., Danzig, between East and West: Aspects of Modern Jewish History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 1–18.
On the Ashkenazi immigrants of the 1830s, see Sherman Lieber, Mystics and Missionaries. The Jews in Palestine 1799–1840 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992), chapter 10.
See the verdict of Isidore Loeb, Biographie d’Albert Cohn (Paris: Durlacher, 1878), p. 47, who compared its impact to the Damascus Affair. This argument is made more fully in Green, Montefiore, chapter 11, but the importance of the Crimean War has often been overlooked by more recent historians.
Aron Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews. The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860–1925 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 14, is a rare exception.
Matthias B. Lehmann, ‘Rethinking Sephardi Identity: Jews and Other Jews in Ottoman Palestine’, Jewish Social Studies, 15.1 (Fall 2008), 81–109.
Eliyahu Feldman, ‘The Question of Jewish Emancipation in the Ottoman Empire and the Danubian Principalities after the Crimean War’, Jewish Social Studies, 41.1 (Winter 1979), 41–74.
On the interplay between some of these missions and the general climate in which they took place, see A. Schischa, ‘The Saga of 1855: A Study in Depth’, in Sonia L. Lipman and Vivian D. Lipman, eds, The Century of Moses Montefiore (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilisation, 1985), pp. 269–348.
See D. De Sola Pool, ‘Some Relations of Gershom Kursheedt and Sir Moses Montefiore’, Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, 37 (1947), 213–20;
Ludwig Frankl, Nach Jerusalem (Leipzig: Baumgärtner’s Buchhandlung, 1858).
Dr Lil, ‘The Jews in Palestine’, The Israelite (15 August 1856), 44.
Eliezer Lipman Silberman, ‘Kore ahuv’, Hamagid, 1.2 (8 August 1856), 6. More generally,
Gideon Kouts, ‘The First Hebrew Newspapers in Europe. Economic and Organizational Aspects’, Historia y Comunicación Social, 8 (2003), 147–58.
‘Levinyan batei maḥseh le’ani’im vehakhnasat orehim al har tsiyon’, Hamagid (13 April 1859), 58; Azriel Selig Hausdorf, ‘Al devar binyan batei maḥseh le’ani’im vehakhnasat oreḥim al har tsiyon birushalayim’, Hamagid (7 June 1859), 85. For specific assurances about the destination of the money, see
Azriel Selig Hausdorf, ‘Poh ir habirah london arba-esreh sivan 1859’, Hamagid (29 June 1859), 1 (of appendix).
On Sachs’s involvement, see ‘Tirkiyah’, Hamagid (7 November 1860), 172. Sneersohn’s mission to Australia in 1862 also related to the Hausdorf project. See ‘Oystralyen’, Hamagid (29 April 1862), 132 and Haim Zvi beharav Mendel Schneersohn (Sneersohn), ‘Oystralyen’, Hamagid (4 December 1862), 371.
On the Alliance Israélite Universelle see André Chouraqui, Cent Ans d’Histoire. L’ Alliance Israélite Universelle et la Renaissance Juive Contemporaine (1860–1960) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965);
Eli Bar-Chen, Weder Asiaten noch Orientalen. Internationale jüdische Organisationen und die Europäisierung ‘rückständiger’ Juden (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2005). On the Kolonisationsverein, see
Jacob Katz, ‘The Forerunners of Zionism’, in Jehuda Reinharz and Anita Shapira, eds, Essential Papers on Zionism (London: Cassell, 1996), pp. 33–45.
On the role of crisis in international Jewish politics, see Jonathan Frankel, ‘Crisis as a Factor in Modern Jewish Politics, 1840 and 1881–2’, in Jehuda Reinharz, ed., Living with Antisemitism. Modern Jewish Responses (Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press, 1987), pp. 42–58.
See John F. Hutchinson, Champions of Charity. War and the Rise of the Red Cross (Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press, 1996).
For a general overview of the ‘precursors of Zionism’ debate, see Gideon Shimoni, The Zionist Ideology (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1995), chapter 2. See also Jacob Katz, ‘Forerunners of Zionism’, and
Yosef Salmon, ‘The Historical Imagination of Jacob Katz: On the Origins of Jewish Nationalism’, Jewish Social Studies, 5.3 (Spring/Summer 1999), 161–79.
Jody Elizabeth Myers, ‘Zevi Hirsch Kalischer and the Origins of Religious Zionism’, in Frances Malion and David Sorkin, eds, Profiles in Diversity: Jews in a Changing Europe, 1750–1870 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), pp. 267–94.
See Michael Graetz, The Jews in Nineteenth-Century France. From the French Revolution to the Alliance Israélite Universelle, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 249. More generally, see Frankel, ‘Jewish Politics and the Press’.
Israel Bartal, ‘Messianism and Nationalism: Liberal Optimism Vs. Orthodox Anxiety’, Jewish History, 20.1 (March 2006), 5–17.
See M. Mitchell Serels, A History of the Jews of Tangier in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Sepher-Hermon Press, 1991), chapter 3.
On the interplay between Jewish relief and Western imperialism see Abigail Green, ‘The British Empire and the Jews: An Imperialism of Human Rights?’, Past & Present, 199 (May 2008), 175–205, and Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews; also Bar-Chen, Weder Asiaten noch Orientalen.
London Committee of Deputies of the British Jews, Persian Famine Relief Fund. Report and Balance Sheet (London: Wertheimer, Lea & Co., 1873).
Shelomoh Behor Husein, ‘Bagdad’, Hamagid (15 August 1866), 252.
Shelomoh Behor Husein, ‘Bagdad’, Hamagid (22 August 1866), 259. On Camondo see
Nora Şeni and Sophie le Tarnec, Les Camondo, ou l’Éclipse d’une Fortune (Actes Sud, 1997).
Michael Silber, ‘Alliance of the Hebrew, 1863–1875: The Diaspora Roots of an Ultra-Orthdox Proto-Zionist Utopia in Palestine’, The Journal of Israeli History, 27.2 (September 2008), 125–7.
On its subsequent evolution in transnational perspective, see Jeremy Stolow, ‘Transnationalism and the New Religio-Politics: Reflections on a Jewish Orthodox Case’, Theory, Culture & Society, 21.2 (April 2004), 109–37.
On the Ladino press see above all the pioneering Olga Borovaya, Modern Ladino Culture: Press, Belles Lettres, and Theater in the Late Ottoman Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), chapter 12; idem, ‘The Emergence of the Ladino Press: The First Attempt at Westernization of Ottoman Jews (18421–846)’, European Judaism, 43.2 (Autumn 2010), 617–3; idem, ‘Jews of Three Colors: The Path to Modernity in the Ladino Press at the Turn of the Twentieth Century’, Jewish Social Studies, 15.1 (Fall 2008), 110–130. See also Stein, Making Jews Modern. Also of interest are Borovaya’s numerous entries on journalists and publications in Norman Stillman, ed., Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World (Leiden: Brill, 2010).
See, for instance, Chaim Bermant, The Cousinhood (New York: Macmillan, 1971).
Less so later, see Mary McCune, ‘The Whole Wide World without Limits’. International Relief, Gender Politics, and American Jewish Women, 1893–1930 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005).
On Jewish women as engaged newspaper readers in the New World see, for instance, Mendelsohn, ‘Tongue Ties’, pp. 177–8. On Jewish women as pioneers of Anglo-Jewish literature see Michael Galchinsky, The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer. Romance and Reform in Victorian England (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996).
F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980). See also
Anne Summers, Female Lives, Moral States. Women, Religion and Public Life in Britain 1800–1930 (Newbury: Threshold Press, 2000);
Jean H. Quataert, Staging Philanthropy. Patriotic Women and the National Imagination in Dynastic Germany 1813–1916 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001).
On Judith’s involvement, see Margalit Shilo, Princess or Prisoner? Jewish Women in Jerusalem, 1840–1914, trans. David Louvish (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2005), pp. 130–1; on Betty’s involvement, see
Laura S. Schor, The Life and Legacy of Baroness Betty de Rothschild (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), pp. 122–4.
C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), chapter 9, provides a useful introduction to these issues.
On this ‘inner orientalism’, see Yaron Tsur, Mavo letoledot hayehudim be’artsot ha’islama batekufah hamodernit 1750–1914 (Tel-Aviv: Open University Provisional Edition, 2004), chapter 9; also Borovaya, ‘Jews of Three Colors’. More generally, see
Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar, ed., Orientalism and the Jews (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2005).
Isidore Cahen, ‘Mélanges. Le Droit de Légitime Défense’, Archives Israélites de France (March 1859), 149.
Jonathan Ray, ‘New Approaches to the Jewish Diaspora: The Sephardim as a Sub-Ethnic Group’, Jewish Social Studies, 15.1 (Fall 2008), 10–31.
See Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora, and Miriam Bodian, ‘“Men of the Nation”: The Shaping of Converso Identity in Early Modern Europe’, Past & Present, 143 (1994), 48–76.
See, for instance, Rebecca Kobrin, ‘Rewriting the Diaspora: Images of Eastern Europe in the Bialystok Landsmanshaft Press, 1921–1945’, Jewish Social Studies, 12.3 (2006), 1–38. Lehmann, ‘Rethinking Sephardi Identity’, emphasizes the exclusionary aspects of the Ashkenazi diaspora in an earlier period.
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Green, A. (2012). Old Networks, New Connections: The Emergence of the Jewish International. In: Green, A., Viaene, V. (eds) Religious Internationals in the Modern World. The Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137031716_3
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