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Leadership, Charity, and Literacy
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This book is a history of Ottoman Jews that challenges prevailing assumptions about Jews’ arrival in the empire, their relations with Muslims, and the role of religious and lay leaders. The book argues that rabbis played a less prominent role as communal and spiritual leaders than we have thought; and that the religious community was one of several frameworks within which Ottoman Jews operated. A focus on charitable and educational communal practices shows that with time Jews preferred to avoid the scrutiny of rabbis and the community, leading to private initiatives that undermined rabbinical and lay authority.

Abstract

Martin Luther concerned himself with Kabbalah at two points during his long career as a theologian. From 1513 to 1519, he first considered and then rejected Kabbalah as a kind of spiritual ‘ladder’ that allowed believers a fuller experience of the otherwise ‘hidden’ God. Later, in 1543, he wrote against the Jews’ ‘superstitious’ beliefs about the tetragrammaton and kabbalistic ‘magic’ generally. This essay will consider the sources of Luther’s kabbalistic knowledge, his understanding of what Jews believed about Kabbalah, and how Kabbalah fit into Luther’s own views concerning Jews and Judaism more generally. Luther believed that the devil was involved in promoting Kabbalah and Jewish magical practices both to deceive its practitioners and their followers, and as a way of redirecting worship away from the true God.

In: Zutot
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Abstract

This article analyses Jewish reactions to post-Holocaust hostility and discrimination in Norway, through three case studies: (1) Trials against Nazis and Norwegian collaborators in the National Legal Purge of the immediate postwar years. (2) The 1960 ‘Swastika Epidemic,’ characterized by graffiti on properties and threats against Jewish individuals, which prompted Jewish community efforts to promote an anti-racist bill. (3) The trial against neo-Nazi high school teacher Olav Hoaas in 1976, among the first to be convicted in accordance with the new Article 135a of the law against incitement to racial hatred. Using archival records from the Jewish community and press material, this study explores how the actors defined and developed response strategies against antisemitism. The article explains the integrationist function of combatting antisemitism, as individuals asserted themselves as part of the national community by defending Norway’s democratic values. It highlights collective action and alliances in countering antisemitism, marking Norway as an early example legislating against racism in Europe after 1945.

Open Access
In: European Journal of Jewish Studies
A Biography of Alberto Gerchunoff
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Translator:
How can a child born in the Russian Pale at the end of the 19th century become one of the most celebrated journalists in Latin America and a writer admired by Jorge Luis Borges? In this biography, Mónica Szurmuk, delves into the different aspects of the life of writer, journalist, and politician Alberto Gerchuinoff. Thoroughly researched in four different continents, this book is as much an account of the life of Alberto Gerchunoff, as an investigation into the Jewish world of the first half of the twentieth century, and the different spaces where Jewish and Latin American cultural and political life intersect.

Abstract

Legal experts and lawyers in particular, had a uniquely important role in the process of state-building and modernization of the Habsburg Empire. After the collapse of the Monarchy, their contribution to the transition from a multinational empire to a nation-state was crucial, too. New states with different political contexts had various impacts on the profession itself and its inner life as well. Chambers were struggling to maintain their autonomy against the state, and at the same time, radically anti-Semitic ideologies were emerging within the profession and eventually came into power. This group of professionals could serve as an excellent proxy to study the complex process of social, political, and cultural developments of the elites from the imperial to interwar years and also to explore encounters between Jews and non-Jews and their changes. This paper aims to reexamine the success of the social integration of Jews in the legal profession, particularly among lawyers and the Budapest Bar Association.

In: European Journal of Jewish Studies
Author:

Abstract

During the revolutionary era, Jews in the new Grand Duchy of Baden were given hope that full citizenship and integration would eventually be achieved. However, not every location or space in the Grand Duchy was inclusive, as Jews were excluded from most areas in civil society and the state. The Rhein-Neckar region (including the cities of Mannheim and Heidelberg), however, proved to be a location where close contact between Jews and Christians was not only more regular, but an important facet of the developing liberal society—whether that was in the newspapers, the classroom, or bourgeois associations. These so-called ‘fraternal spaces’ shaped the individuals and were shaped by those individuals who came through them. In the case of the Rhein-Neckar region, this led to Jewish-Christian relationships that had an indelible impact on the blossoming liberal movement of the Vormärz as well as the lead-up to the 1848 revolutions.

In: European Journal of Jewish Studies
In: Unbridled Calling
In: Unbridled Calling