East European Jews in Modern Times

European Enlightenment and its vision of the new society. Place of the Jewish community in the projected society after reform. Between enlightened reforms and old prejudices. Partitions and their impact on the situation of the East European Jews. Emergence of the Jewish Enlightenment. Alternative paths of Jewish modernity. Non-ideological modernization – what was it? The Haskalah, pseudo-Haskalah, post-Haskalah.

Literature:

• 2.2. Wodziński Marcin, ‘“Civil Christians”: Debates on the Reform of the Jews in Poland, 1789–1830’, in Benjamin Nathans and Gabriella Safran (eds.), Culture Front: Representing Jews in Eastern Europe (Philadelphia, 2008), 48-76.

Hasidim, mitnagdim, and the others. On the composition of traditional segment of the Jewish community in Eastern Europe. What is the Jewish Orthodoxy and when does it emerge? Orthodox reactions to the modernity. What is anti-modernist modernity and how does it work? Fundamentlization.

Literature:

• 3.1. Moshe Rosman, ‘Hasidism as a Modern Phenomenon — The Paradox of Modernization without Secularization’, Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts/Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 6 (2007), 215-224.

Is Jewish politics a modern phenomenon? What is modern about it? How does it change and what does it change in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? What are the major trends in modern Jewish politics in Eastern Europe?

Literature:

• 4.1. Ezra Mendelsohn, On Modern Jewish Politics (New York–Oxford, 1993), chap. 1.

Two world wars and their effect on East European Jews. Demographic, social, and cultural changes and their far reaching consequences. Jewish religious life during and between the two world wars. Anti-Jewish violence between symbolic exclusion and the Holocaust. Emigration.

Literature:

• 5.1. David Biale, ‘A Journey Between Worlds: East European Jewish Culture from the Partitions of Poland to the Holocaust’, in David Biale (ed.), Cultures of the Jews. A New History (New York, 2002), 799-860.

Periodization of the post-Holocaust Polish-Jewish history. Major turning points, major trends.

Literature:

• 6.1. Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska and Magdalena Ruta, ‘From Jewish Culture to Culture about Jews’, in Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska and Feliks Tych (ed.), Jewish Presence in Absence: The Aftermath of the Holocaut in Poland, 1944-2010 (Jerusalem, 2010), 823-846.
• 6.2. Moshe Rosman, ‘Categorically Jewish, Distinctly Polish: The Museum of the History of Polish Jews and the New Polish-Jewish Metahistory’, Jewish Studies Internet Journal 10 (2012), 361–387.