New Perspectives on Jewish Cultural History: Boundaries, Experiences, and Sensemaking 2019020524, 2019981274, 9780367341244, 9780429324048

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New Perspectives on Jewish Cultural History

This book presents original studies of how a cultural concept of Jewishness and a coherent Jewish history came to make sense in the experiences of people entangled in different historical situations. Instead of searching for the inconsistencies, discontinuities, or ruptures of dominant grand historical narratives of Jewish cultural history, this book unfolds situations and events, where Jewishness and a coherent Jewish history became useful, meaningful, and acted upon as a site of causal explanations. Inspired by classical American pragmatism and more recent French pragmatism, we present a new perspective on Jewish cultural history in which the experiences, problems, and actions of people are at the center of reconstructions of historical causalities and projections of future horizons. The book shows how boundaries between Jewish and non-Jewish are not a priori given but are instead repeatedly experienced in a variety of situations and then acted upon as matters of facts. In different ways and on different scales, these studies show how people’s experiences of Jewishness perpetually probe, test, and shape the boundaries between what is Jewish and non-Jewish, and that these boundaries shape the spatiotemporal linkages that we call history. Maja Gildin Zuckerman is the Jim Joseph Postdoctoral Fellow at Education and Jewish Studies at Stanford University. Jakob Egholm Feldt is Professor of Global History at Roskilde University, Denmark.

Studies for the International Society for Cultural History Series Editors: Howard Chiang and Filippo Carlà-Uhink

In both research and teaching, the study of cultural history is burgeoning, with a variety of interpretations of culture cross-fertilizing between disciplines – history, critical theory, literature and media, anthropology and ethnology, and many more. This series focuses on the study of conceptual, affective and imaginative worlds of the past, and sees culture as encompassing both textual production and social practice. It seeks to highlight historical and cultural processes of meaning-making and explore the ways in which people of the past made sense of their world. Philosophies of Multiculturalism Beyond Liberalism Edited by Luís Cordeiro-Rodrigues and Marko Simendić Humour in the Arts New Perspectives Edited by Vivienne Westbrook and Shun-liang Chao Excavating Modernity Physical, Temporal and Psychological Strata in Literature, 1900–1930 Edited by Eleanor Dobson and Gemma Banks Cultural History in France Local Debates, Global Perspectives Edited by Evelyne Cohen, Anaïs Fléchet, Pascale Gœtschel, Laurent Martin, and Pascal Ory New Perspectives on Jewish Cultural History Boundaries, Experiences, and Sensemaking Edited by Maja Gildin Zuckerman and Jakob Egholm Feldt For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Studies-for-the-International-Society-for-Cultural-History/bookseries/SISCH

New Perspectives on Jewish Cultural History Boundaries, Experiences, and Sensemaking Edited by Maja Gildin Zuckerman and Jakob Egholm Feldt

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Maja Gildin Zuckerman and Jakob Egholm Feldt to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Zuckerman, Maja Gildin, editor. | Feldt, Jakob, editor. Title: New perspectives on Jewish cultural history : boundaries, experiences, and sensemaking / edited by Maja Gildin Zuckerman and Jakob Egholm Feldt. Description: New York : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Studies for the International Society for Cultural History | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This book presents original studies of how a cultural concept of Jewishness and a coherent Jewish history came to make sense in the experiences of people entangled in different historical situations. Instead of searching for the inconsistencies, discontinuities, or ruptures of dominant grand historical narratives of Jewish cultural history, this book unfolds situations and events, where Jewishness and a coherent Jewish history became useful, meaningful, and acted upon as a site of causal explanations. Inspired by classical American pragmatism and more recent French pragmatism, we present a new perspective on Jewish cultural history in which the experiences, problems, and actions of people are at the center of reconstructions of historical causalities and projections of future horizons. The book shows how boundaries between Jewish and non-Jewish are not a priori given but are instead repeatedly experienced in a variety of situations and then acted upon as matters of facts. In different ways and on different scales, these studies show how people’s experiences of Jewishness perpetually probe, test, and shape the boundaries between what is Jewish and non-Jewish, and that these boundaries shape the spatiotemporal linkages that we call history”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2019020524 (print) | LCCN 2019981274 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367341244 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429324048 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Jews—History—Study and teaching. | Jews—Historiography. | Jews—Civilization. | Jews—Identity. | Judaism and culture. Classification: LCC DS115.95 .N48 2020 (print) | LCC DS115.95 (ebook) | DDC 909/.04924—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019020524 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019981274 ISBN: 978-0-367-34124-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-32404-8 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Figures Preface 1

Experience, Space, and Time in Jewish Cultural History: A Pragmatist Perspective

vii viii

1

JAKOB EGHOLM FELDT AND MAJA GILDIN ZUCKERMAN

2

En Route to Palestine: Jewish Mobility and Zionist Emergence

27

MAJA GILDIN ZUCKERMAN

3

The Death of the Renegade: On Jewish Experience in the Twentieth Century

54

MIRJAM ZADOFF

4

Tropical Territorialism: Displaced Persons, Colonialism, and the Freeland League in Suriname (1946–1948)

73

LAURA ALMAGOR

5

Autoethnographic Cosmopolitanism: Jewish Travel Writers Among Their Coreligionists

96

MICHAEL HARBSMEIER

6

The Presence of Past Struggles: The Jews and the Boundaries of Enlightenment

120

JAKOB EGHOLM FELDT

7

“It Is Hellas and Israel to Which Europe Owes Its Culture”: Georg Brandes and His Athens vs. Jerusalem Reinterpretations SØREN BLAK HJORTSHØJ

143

vi

Contents

8

From Jewish Separateness to Jewish and Non-Jewish Entanglement: A Shift to a “New Jewish History”?

164

KLAUS HÖDL

9

To Walk in the Footsteps of Your Ancestors: Roots Tourism in Yiddishland

188

KARIN COHR LÜTZEN

Notes on Contributors Index

212 214

Figures

2.1 2.2 5.1 9.1 9.2 9.3

Herbert Bentwich’s copy of the itinerary and program of the Maccabean Pilgrimage A map from the program of Cook’s different Palestine tours offered in 1897 J. J. Benjamin II, Drei Jahre in Amerika 1859–1862. Hannover 1862, Selbstverlag des Verfassers. page II My grandfather’s mother, Yetti Leibovitch, on a collective tombstone at Bagneux cemetery in Paris The marriage certificate of my grandmother’s parents from the Bucharest archives Photos of tombstones at the Jewish cemetery in Botoșani, Romania

31 32 103 192 197 199

Preface

This book is the outcome of several interwoven collaborative threads. In 2013, the Danish Independent Research Council for the Humanities generously awarded Jakob Egholm Feldt a grant enabling him to establish a research group at Roskilde University named “Identifying Jews and Jewishness, 1783–1939.” Between 2013 and 2018, the grant made it possible for us to devote more time than usual to research, to travel, to hold workshops, and to invite people to Roskilde. For this we are deeply grateful. The research program was to study humanistic practices of identifying Jewishness which emerged in this period within the new sciences of anthropology, culture studies, history, and religion. In the same period, Maja Gildin Zuckerman was pursuing a PhD at the Center of Contemporary Middle East Studies at University of Southern Denmark. Maja’s doctoral research was about the cultural, historical, and social practices which made Palestine a natural home for Jews in early Zionism; we quickly came to see the many overlapping interests between our different research projects and Maja was soon an active part of the research group. Our collaboration, however, goes back almost 15 years. As a doctoral student in Hebrew language and Jewish culture at Copenhagen University, Jakob taught a course in Jewish history which Maja attended as a first-year student. The conversation we began back then has never ended, and hopefully it never will. Since then, life has taken us to different universities and continents, but the energy and will to keep asking and collaboratively exploring critical and constructive questions to Jewish history, new and old theories, and political and social life remain intact. Many inspiring people have contributed to the making of this book, often without knowing it. The research group in Roskilde was the central platform for discussing the joint agenda and the individual contributions. The members of this group were, besides ourselves: Cecilie S. Simonsen, Karin Lützen, Michael Harbsmeier, Rune Larsen, Morten Thing, and Søren Blak Hjortshøj. Other people have commented on specific parts of the collective project or participated in PhD committees. We would particularly like to thank Dietrich Jung, David Myers, and Michael Berkowitz for their helpful and important comments and for the inspiration from

Preface

ix

their outstanding work in general. Moreover, Maja Gildin Zuckerman would like to thank Ari Y. Kelman and the Jim Joseph Foundation for granting her a two-year postdoc fellowship at the Concentration of Education and Jewish Studies at Stanford University that allowed her, among other things, to concentrate on writing and editing this book. We are also very grateful for the support from our editor at Routledge, Max Novick. Series editors Howard Chiang and Christopher E. Forth have supported the book project with encouragement, guidance, and patience. Here it is also in place to thank the anonymous reviewers for very constructive criticism and helpful comments which really made a difference. Caitlin Murphy Brust has copyedited this book with great skill. It is always a challenge to bring authors together with different native languages and with different acquired styles of academic English. Caitlin has made the book immensely more readable. Finally, we would like to thank Liv Egholm. Over the years, a routine has developed in Maja and Jakob’s collaboration. When we reach a crucial point in our work, we ask Liv to read the piece or offer her opinion on the status of our problem. This is about trust on several levels and it is also about recognizing her sharp intellect, her skills as a reader and a scholar, and her fearlessness in saying what needs to be said. The responsibility of the book as a whole is still ours. Maja Gildin Zuckerman & Jakob Egholm Feldt

1

Experience, Space, and Time in Jewish Cultural History A Pragmatist Perspective Jakob Egholm Feldt and Maja Gildin Zuckerman

Ten years ago, historian Moshe Rosman asked, What is Jewish in Jewish history? This is a question that, in different forms, has been posed and examined again and again in Jewish historiography.1 Rosman asked this question against the backdrop of what he described as a postmodern era of historiography in general and Jewish historiography in particular. The moment, he argued, begged a fundamental question: Could there still be said to exist “a recognizable object for the subject of Jewish studies to study? If nothing can be defined objectively, how can we identify a unitary, continuous, coherent Jewish People with a distinct culture and history?”2 The question that Rosman and other scholars have been grappling with is, in other words, whether it is still possible, valid, and relevant to identify something specifically Jewish within an academic discourse that is increasingly concerned with polyphonic, decentralized, and deconstructed narratives of social groups and cultural identities. In the specific context of cultural history, can we still in any legitimate and convincing way treat a multicultural, multifarious, multi-temporal, multi-sited, and even multi-ontological subject like Jews and Jewishness as a single object of study? If so, how should we approach this troublesome actor that, through various times and places, has behaved like a tribal sect, a global religion, a territorial nation-state, a loosely tied group of diasporic intellectuals, a minority movement, and as insistently nonaffiliated, non-Jewish Jews? And more to the point, what is gained by such an approach? In the following, we will describe our approach to the central question that guides this book: How is Jewish cultural history continuously recreated in space and time, despite the multitudes of historical and social contingencies that constantly twist and deform the boundaries of what Jewishness is? We offer a perspective that we argue has relevance not only for Jewish history but also for historical research in general. Fundamentally, we want to make a radical break from one of the core tenets of modern historical research: that the past is a different ‘country,’ one that is now inaccessible to us as it really was because it is different, done,

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and gone. Instead, the past is encoded in this very ‘country,’ which we could call the present.3 This perspective of a barrier between the past and the present has been equally important to both traditional historians, who deal with it via methodology, such as source criticism, and postmodernists, who deal with it via theories inspired by semiotics and linguistics. The barrier reproduces generations of the same questions, just set out in different vocabularies. That being said, it is important for us to clarify that we do not mean that all historical work created prior to today should go into the bin. Quite the opposite. Historiography is inseparable from the formation of history. We will do away with the barrier between past and present with a rather banal and pragmatic turn: the past is in and of the present. Our pasts are part of the problems of our presents. We continuously recreate the trajectories of our inheritance. It simply does not make sense to talk about a barrier between the past and the present since all sources, remains, ruins, and artifacts exist and are dealt with in a present— and with this particular present’s conceptions, expectations, tools, and vocabularies. In our view, doing away with this barrier enhances the significance of the past for the present and for the future, and it gives us the opportunity to skip beyond the dichotomies of social construction, such as reality vs. representation, real vs. construction, and experience vs. discourse.4 To renew the question posed by Rosman and many others about what Jewish history is, we need to reach beyond the inherent dichotomy within it: objectivity, on the one hand, and instability, on the other. It is crucial that we consider questions of how temporality works in making sense of human experiences and interpretations of past presents, so that we can understand how Jewish cultural history is continuously recreated as a meaningful entity or object. First of all, we need to take more seriously what all historians already know—namely, that the past is unstable despite its doneness. New events and experiences in present moments change the order, meaning, and causal implications of the past all the time.5 Accordingly, the past is a process of reconstruction of spatiotemporal trajectories that provide meaning, logic, laws, causalities, and grounds for actions, which shape the future for people. In the following pages, we employ concepts such as experience, topology, and boundaries in order to bridge notions of change and stability, as well as contingency and structure. These concepts, we believe, point to the processual character of how we make sense of a possible future with regard to what happens and what has happened. Experiences of Jewishness perpetually probe, test, and shape the boundaries between what’s Jewish and what’s non-Jewish, and these boundaries shape spatiotemporal linkages that we call topologies.6 By topology, then, we mean shapes that uphold their central properties under deformation, an issue to which we will return ahead.

Experience, Space, and Time

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Pragmatist History We follow what we will call a pragmatist approach to Jewish history, and history in general, which aspires to identify experiences and events in which Jewish differences and similarities came into play and were acted upon as matters of fact. Thus, the contributions in this book set out to show how Jewish cultural history is a continuous process of the becoming of Jewish trajectories—that is, how experiences with Jewishness have shaped Jewish spatialities, temporal trajectories, and future horizons. Jewishness is then continuously both how and what it becomes. Some, such as archaeologist Michael Shanks, call pragmatist history “pragmatology,” meaning the study of people and things, including acts, encounters, contingencies, and beliefs involved with acting in and engaging with the world.7 Engaging with the world is both practical and imaginative. Sociologist Andrew Abbott characterizes such an approach as a search for the boundary-making processes which make things “entities” which can be seen as inhabiting certain spatio-temporalities or topologies.8 Studying engagement with the material and social world—and how such engagements shape historical topologies—is fundamentally an actorand event-centered approach to history. History comes after the events. Individual actors inhabit and experience the historical world in multiple “presents,” which have different pasts and futures than our own as historians. Rather than seeking to define the issues that have held Jews and Jewishness together in cultural history, we explore encounters of boundaries that, for the actors in question, emphasized the distinctions between Jewishness and non-Jewishness, or differentiated between various forms of Jewishness. The pragmatist perspective on Jewish cultural history seeks to explore how truth happens in specific times and places. In pragmatist philosopher William James’s own words, “Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation.”9 This is a fundamentally processual approach to understanding how people validate, corroborate, and enact things that they come to experience as true.10 Such an approach seeks constantly to explore how things become real and authentic by looking at the practical effects that lead people to certainty, or at least some form of verification. Truth and meaning are concepts that in a pragmatist perspective work as construction tools. They work for the purposes of action, of addressing problems, and of dealing with life’s potentially endless uncertainties. In this way, truth, meaningfulness, and purpose can be considered valuable and marketable items. They are exchanged and shared, and often, they reshape previously held beliefs as they are incorporated and rearticulated through a new vocabulary. Some ideas will prove to work better than others when related to experiences people actually have.

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Jakob Egholm Feldt and Maja Gildin Zuckerman

Thus, rather than presupposing that we know who the Jews were, when they acted Jewish, or enacted their Jewishness—assumptions that are all based on preconceived notions of stable borders between what’s Jewish and what’s non-Jewish—a pragmatist position aims to trace accounts of how Jewishness became true in the eyes and minds of the actors involved. This is not, however, only a phenomenological question of perception and different life worlds where we bracket out any notion of material and objective reality. Pragmatism often operates with an ear to the interplay between truth and reality: reality exists despite our individual and social truth claims, yet the process of making sense of reality is where radical variations of understandings manifest themselves. It is crucial in any pragmatist study, then, to focus on the sensemaking process of how people see and experience the reality that they are facing; such a study should center on the practices that turn experiences into truths. Accordingly, we consider “human experience” a “firstness” and starting point of history, which is a process of making sense of what happens, what has happened, and what will happen. Experiences of the factuality and truth of Zionism, which figure prominently in several chapters of this book, were paramount to people across Europe, the Middle East, and America early in the twentieth century, and these experiences were acted upon as reconstruction processes of temporal trajectories. Such reconstructions were both micro-historical as individual biographies and macrohistorical as science. The chapters in this book all emphasize how actors experienced Jewishness, encountered boundaries and controversies of Jewishness, and reconstructed Jewish historical topologies on different but related scales. Each of them experienced events after which the future and the past looked different, and the difference, newness, and change that they encountered were—despite their often revolutionary character— reconstructions which upheld a connected Jewish historical topology.

Rethinking Jewish Cultural History Many discussions within cultural history since the late 1980s have revolved around questions of monolithic, essentialized vs. polyphonic, deconstructed cultural perceptions, as Rosman also elaborates on in his book. From different strands, scholars have tried to rearticulate an approach to culture and cultural identities that redirects these studies away from what they saw as a position that was overly concerned with stasis, uniformity, sedentarism, and elitist expressions and worldviews. It has now become an almost truistic assumption to see culture as an unbound, partial, and constantly emerging process that both undergirds and suppresses ephemeral community unity. As historian Stephen Greenblatt notes,

Experience, Space, and Time

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Notions of wholeness, teleological development, evolutionary progress, and ethnic authenticity were said to have been dismantled forever. . . . [M]ost scholars energetically grappled with brave new theories of hybridity, network theory, and the complex “flows” of people, goods, money, and information across endlessly shifting social landscapes.11 In other words, the study of culture and cultural identity has crystallized into a paradigm that conceives of its objects as always hybrid, and always emerging. Another paradigmatic move away from monolithic cultural perceptions has emerged through the framework of multiculturalism. In general terms, this perspective rests on an assumption that culture changes over time and place. Thus, rather than understanding Jewish culture as a singular entity spread around the globe through the ages, we should understand it as a multifarious phenomenon. This perspective foregrounds studies of diverse and distinct Jewish cultures—in plural—that each need to be understood on their own terms and not as a subgroup of a generic sense of Jewish culture. Sociologist Jeffrey Alexander suggests that the concept of multiculturalism today “appears ineluctably connected . . . with the reconstruction, rehabilitation, and protection of separate cultural discourses and sometimes very separated interactional communities.”12 In an academic framework, such a conception often calls for the study and incorporation of multiple distinct cultural narratives, so as to denaturalize and destabilize the notion of one geopolitical history. However, in contrast to the hybrid cultural perspective, it posits that we indeed can examine distinct cultures and cultural expressions. Both perspectives—the hybridity or deconstruction of culture and the multiplicity of cultures—have evolved since the 1980s into new “turns” and conceptualizations, but we suggest that their distinct ways of approaching cultural history in general and Jewish cultural history are particularly still salient for the study of what was Jewish and Jewishness. In what follows, we see how the hybridity perspective informs studies that focus on Jewishness through the lens of performativity and visibility, while the multicultural perspective has expanded into studies of Jewish materiality and consumption. And just as there have been studies at the convergence of the hybrid and multicultural perspectives, there are currently plenty of epistemological intersections at play between, for instance, visibility and consumption studies of Jewishness.13 Still, in the brief overview ahead, we find it important to emphasize their distinctions in order to flesh out how different epistemological approaches to Jewishness have formed the study object and where we see this book’s central contribution among these strands.

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From Hybrid to Performed Jewishness Scholars who were inspired by concepts of hybrid and deconstructed identities and subjectivities present one answer to Rosman’s questions about how Jewish is Jewish history. An important anthology that explicitly embraces such an approach is “Mapping Jewish Identities” from 2000, which historian Laurence J. Silberstein edited. In the introduction, Silberstein, quoting Judith Butler, writes, One alternative to fixed, essentialist notions of Jewish identity is to think of identity, in Butler’s formulation, as “an undesignatable field of difference, one that cannot be totalized or summarized by a descriptive identity” . . . such as religion, ethnicity, or nationality. One result of this approach is to reconfigure such essentially contested terms like Jew, Judaism, and Jewish into a site of “permanent openness and resignifiability”.14 Deconstruction of any notion of preconceived Jewish essence and authentic uniformity is thus at the core of this anthology. Each of its contributions tries to break down hegemonic representations of this supposedly Jewish essence by disclosing—or “mapping”—silenced or marginalized voices that have so far been left out when Jewish history has been told from a specific uniform perspective. As seen from the paraphrasing of Judith Butler earlier, the hybridity paradigm in Jewish cultural studies drew inspiration from gender studies and its insistence on deconstructing the convergent categorizations and power structures that form and inform Jewish identity formations. In this sense, hybridity meant mapping and disclosing the fragmented and ongoing process whereby people consolidated—or were forced to consolidate— around identity markers such as “woman,” “Jewish,” or “Israeli.” While the post-structural language of hybridity and deconstruction has somewhat waned among publications within Jewish cultural history in the recent decade, some of its key components still function as central conceptual guidelines for a new generation of cultural historians.15 These are concepts such as intersectionality, performativity, visibility, and convergence that—though well established by now in cultural studies at large—have recently made headway in Jewish cultural history.16 These studies return once again to questions of what has been and should be the boundaries and definition of Jewishness. Important examples of this recent approach can be seen, for example, in the works of Lisa Silverman and Kerry Wallach, who both study pre– World War II Central Europe.17 Silverman explores, in her own words, how categories of Jewish difference were invoked in texts and events in interwar Austrian culture. Silverman suggests that the concept of “Jewish difference” should be deployed as an analytical tool to better understand

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how the very categories of “Jewish” and “non-Jewish” were performed and how, in this act, boundaries were evoked. Silverman even insists on the quotation marks around each category to emphasize that each one is merely a socially constructed ideal. She argues in her work that experiences of Austrian Jews should be understood without Jewish selfidentification as “the ontological foundation of Jewish experience,” since the differentiation of the Jewish from the non-Jewish took place in many levels and within a number of intersecting frameworks.18 Silverman thus compels us to ask how, when, and where Jewish difference was performed and what intersecting categories facilitated, bolstered, or rejected it. Within a similar analytical framework, Kerry Wallach examines Jewish visibility and concealment in Weimar Germany. Wallach, also inspired by gender theory, explores how Jews coded themselves and were coded by others as Jewish—even when they deliberately tried to pass as nonJewish. Jewishness in this understanding is about legibility, about how a person appears and is read by others. It is fluid, convergent, dependent on power structures and discourses, and also malleable to the extent that the person can work around the foundational categories. Wallach uses the theoretical concept of “passing” as it was developed within gender and race studies, relating it to the case of Weimar Jews and their practices of “passing” as Jews and non-Jews. She sums up the aspirations of this project: Encounters during which conspicuous displays of Jewishness, or absences thereof, became relevant are at the heart of this book. Representations of how Jewishness became perceptible during such encounters—of how, when, and why different figures engaged with visibility by coming out as Jewish, being outed by others, passing for non-Jewish, or covering certain elements of Jewishness—drive my inquiry into a culture of perception, embodiment, performance, spectacle, and consequent judgment and repercussions.19 Wallach altogether circumvents usual concerns within Jewish cultural history about issues such as assimilation, acculturation, and integration. Instead, she changes the conversation about Jewish hybridity to questions of display, perception, and embodiment. Both of these studies explicitly take their lead from the same conceptual universe as the earlier hybridity scholars, yet they insist on focusing their gaze on more “low-brow” cultural expressions than their predecessors. Canonical Jewish texts and central political events and figures have been moved to the background, and instead phenomena such as advertisements, fashion, festivals, and cabarets become subjects of analysis. Moreover, while gender studies run as a central thread in both hybridity and performativity studies, the critical theme of Jewish nationalism and national subjugation, which comprised an important backbone in earlier

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studies, seems now to have somewhat faded. Still, both earlier and recent studies within this hybrid/performativity paradigm grapple with the subject of Jewishness in ways that aspire to destabilize hegemonic stabilities in representations of Jewish culture and history and to thus evoke a much more contingent and intersected definition of what constitutes Jewish difference. In Silverman’s words, The consistency of the “Jewish content” in the subjects of our analyses is not denied or ignored, but the anchoring of its definition becomes much less of a concern, while the boundaries separating what is considered “Jewish” from that which is “Non-Jewish” come to the fore.20 Alongside the contributions that these studies bring to Jewish cultural history with their focus on the “unarticulated aspects of ‘Jewish experience,’”21 we see a parallel trend emerging that, in many ways, has reinvigorated the paradigm of multicultural Jewishness and the focus on the material basis and patterns of Jewishness.

From Multicultural to Material Jewishness While laymen and some scholars use the terms “hybridity” and “multiculturalism” somewhat interchangeably, the latter concept is in fact theoretically distinct with regard to Jewish history.22 Moreover, inspired by the concept of multiculturalism, a number of scholars have re-approached Jewish history with the aspiration to present the geographically and periodically diverse ways in which Jewishness has been enacted, and not primarily to illustrate the fragmented and elusive nature of Jewish identity or difference. In simplistic terms, one could say that these studies again focus more on the content that comprised Jewish cultures in different times and locations than the boundaries that separated them from the non-Jewish. The anthology Cultures of the Jews from 2002, which was edited by historian David Biale, presented a significant contribution to the study of Jewishness as a phenomenon of cultural multiplicity.23 In the preface of the book, Biale argues for what he sees as the potential of the study of Jewish cultures in the plural: And by looking in the mirrors of the many and diverse Jewish cultures over the centuries, we may hope to see reflections of who the Jews were, what they are now, and, perhaps, some shards that they may use in fashioning what they will become.24 The call to examine Jewish existence in diverse manifestations, which meant both beyond the canonical place and periods of Jewish high culture and without a unified point of reference, inspired a new generation of Jewish historians and cultural scholars. In the last two decades, it has

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become almost axiomatic to understand Jewish culture as a multicultural phenomenon—or more precisely, to understand Jewish cultures as representing many different and diverse ways of life that can be understood on their own terms. A recent overhaul of this paradigm, we contend, can be seen in the new wave of Jewish material and consumption studies that are being published these years.25 Leora Auslander’s work illustrates this point when she explores interwar Jewish identity in Berlin and Paris through the aesthetic practices and choices that Jews made everyday in their homes. Following cultural theoretician Jean Baudrillard and anthropologist Daniel Miller, Auslander suggests seeing aesthetic practices, consumption, and objects not only as a reflection of identity but also as the modes which form people’s sense of self. . . . The buildings, furnishings, paintings, food, cars, cutlery, rugs, music, odors, clothing with which people are in daily, bodily, contact—contact which is shared by others—shape the contexts in which people feel “at home.”26 In similar terms, Gideon Reuveni, Paul Lerner, and Sarah Wobick-Segev show how Jewish consumption objects, patterns, and practices in different places did not merely reflect or express Jewish culture as an already given and monolithic entity, but rather helped form new distinct expressions of Jewish cultures related to their specific context. Reuveni notes that “consumer culture not only provided new venues to imagine cultural belonging beyond existing domination of political and cultural differences, but also insinuated ways in which Jews were expected to practice their Jewishness.”27 To sum up, hybrid, intersected, and performed identities, on the one hand, and multiple cultural existences, on the other, have thus constituted some of the prevailing approaches in Jewish cultural history from the millennium onwards. However, as Greenblatt also notes when he writes about the proliferation of seeing cultural identity as hybrid and unstable, “we need to account for the persistence, over very long time periods and in the face of radical disruption, of cultural identities.”28 Historians of Jewish culture have reached the same conclusion as they were depicting and analyzing Jewish hybridity and multiplicity. Acknowledging a stalemate, or at least a significant confinement, in what deconstructed or partial accounts can say about the recurrent enactment and navigation of unity and oneness as a leading theme among Jewish actors across time and place, historians have asserted the need to also explore that which seems presumably undivided and continuous. Biale also wrestles with this question in the preface to Cultures of the Jews: Culture would appear to be the domain of the plural.  .  . . And, yet, such a definition would be missing a crucial aspect of Jewish

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Jakob Egholm Feldt and Maja Gildin Zuckerman culture: the continuity of both textual and folk traditions throughout Jewish history and throughout the many lands inhabited by the Jews. . . . In a similar way, we can speak of a dialectic between, on the one hand, the idea of one Jewish people and of a unified Jewish culture, and, on the other, the history of multiple communities and cultures.29

Paraphrasing sociologist John Law, the question that in our mind keeps hovering over these studies is this: Can the cultural history of Jews and Jewishness can be understood and written as a connected account that is “more than one and less than many?”30 Does the divide Biale draws between the idea of one Jewish people and the history of multiple communities and cultures make sense from the point of view of the historical actors? Through the study of Jewish cultural history, can we see the emergence of hybridity and multiculturalism as lived and central experiences, or were there other more apposite and timely terms and events that can inform us of the boundaries of Jewish cultural life? Can we, in other words, approach Jewish cultural identification without defining a priori what Jewish unity comprises, but still see it as potentially related to Jewishness in a broader sense?

The Integrity of Experience The status of “experience” for cultural-historical research is a contested matter. Experience can mean many things in academic discourse: from the most basic element of a theory of science, such as “we experiment with things and learn from what happens,” to a personal opinion worth little for research. When we in this book emphasize experiences of and with Jewishness, we think of it as being aligned with a fundamentally experimental and pragmatic logic. We learn how Jewishness becomes and un-becomes by observing outcomes of experiences that people have, and how new experiences bend histories in other directions, give new purposes, and form new causalities in Jewish cultural history. Accordingly, experience is a fundamental category. Experience is the stimulus to action. Experiences oscillate between what is subjective and objective, which means that they, to an extent, always are both. There is always something common to the process of making sense of experiences—namely, frames of references, trajectories, vocabularies, concepts, shared problems, and shared similarities. These processes are processes of objectification.31 Important strands of historical research are deeply critical of reliance on experience.32 People’s experiences are seen to either pollute past realities with subjective interests and opinions or represent mere reflections of structures they do not control or realize, whether they are discursive, economic, cultural, or religious. In this way, too, notions of “Jewish experiences” can be criticized on exactly the same grounds as notions of “women’s experience” or “homosexuals’ experience.”33 Jewish

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experiences also risk becoming naturalized and de-historicized, as though such experiences reflect an objective and stable reality. We recognize this central critique of experience-oriented perspectives. Considered as positivist “data” or subjective phenomena, experiences are indeed representations not of an objective reality but of classifications, concepts, power, knowledge, and whatever repertoires and registers were at the disposal of the historical actors. Jewish experiences cannot be separated from their constitutive relationship with concepts. Sometimes we as historians see these concepts as indicating Jewishness, and at other times we see them as factors shaping Jewishness, when in reality they are both at the same time. Historian Joan W. Scott’s research has played an indispensable role in Jewish cultural history by arguing for the distrust of experience.34 In Scott’s words, it is important “to attend to the historical processes that, through discourse, position subjects and produce their experiences.”35 Then, the job of the historian is to account for experience itself, and not to see experience as a source of historical accounting. In other words, to focus on Jewish experiences risks essentialization and stabilization, and the critical thrust towards liberation from categories that define what is a “woman” or a “Jew” is lost. In both streams of recent perspectives on Jewish cultural history that we have outlined earlier, the hybridity/ performativity stream and the multiculturalist/materiality stream, Jewish experiences are conceptually a boundary phenomenon in between reality and representation. Sometimes Jewish experiences explain things, and at other times they are explained. While we recognize the profound impact of the contributions from these experience-critical perspectives, we see them to a certain extent caught in a stalemate. These perspectives, which we exemplified by reference to Joan W. Scott, operate with a number of dichotomies, such as objective reality-representation, discourses-experiences, and social processesindividuals. We might even say that they have produced a positivism in the reverse: the referent is not objective reality but instead discourses. While positivists explain experiences with reference to data from reality, social constructivists explain experiences with reference to discourses. Experiences in social constructivist perspectives become tokens for discourse, and their individuality must be sifted away. The same goes for positivism, for which individual data is useless. Strong methodologies are designed to carry out this process of separation, but for experience-oriented perspectives, such sifting methods are blind to their own rationalizing effects, and they miss what Bruno Latour, with reference to Alfred North Whitehead and William James, calls being faithful to experience and the “buzzing world.”36 Historian Klaus Hödl addresses important aspects of this problem in his work. Hödl seeks to move beyond the dichotomies by showing how “difference” is situational and fluid, and has no clear boundaries to its

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otherness.37 Moreover, inspired by actor-network theory (ANT) perspectives, he argues that its opposite, “similarity,” can be seen to result from encounters.38 Difference, or particularity, is a presupposed ontological condition in Hödl’s perspective, and “the social” occurs when similarities are experienced by actors. Indeed, it is the social, the stabilities, and the similarities that require explanation. Hödl shows how Jewish musicians in Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century became aware of their similarity to non-Jewish Viennese when their shared problems and interests came to light in particular situations. Gradual and situational similarities expose the Jewish differences that are not absorbed, leaving these differences fluid but not invisible or meaningless.39 It is the experienced similarities which link boundaries into “entities” or identities, while the unabsorbed differences become linked to other similarities. The culturalhistorical world is a complex topological folding of time and space. The discussion about Jewish experience, we propose, should be redirected from the opposition between realism/phenomenology and social construction/materialism into a more constitutive constructivism, like the one indicated by Hödl’s work. While cultures can seem, from an analytical and historical point of view, like unstable and even redundant containers of coherent and logical belonging, they are seldom recounted as such by the people living them. With this book, we wish to approach the experiences and events that actors themselves describe as formative or crucial for their own sense of Jewish self. We aspire to offer accounts of how Jews made sense of and enacted their own particularities within the larger boundaries of “Jewishness.” We do not, however, define a priori what their particularities would have comprised, nor do we confine this to a question of religious, political, social, or cultural difference. How actors explored, related, constructed, rejected, and acquired a Jewishness that seemed valid and coherent in their time and place is key to the explorations in question. The experience and enactment of Jewishness not only pertain to what usually is considered small-scale, such as individuals’ life experiences but also relate to the organization of Jewish time and space. Thus, in this book we agnostically place a Jewish individual’s experience of the boundaries between Jewish and non-Jewish events, sites, practices, and perceptions on equal footing with grand-scale speculation about the role played by Jews in the history of civilization, or the crystallizations of modern definitions of Jewishness over longer periods of time. The historical construction process of modern essentialized notions of Jews and Jewishness in relation to modern humanities, social science, and natural science plays a crucial role in modern Jewish boundary work, but it is usually considered a macro process. We consider such seemingly macroscopic endeavors, like doing scholarship and science on Jewish community, culture, history and religion, to be central aspects of how actors explored, related, or constructed Jewishness. Modern milestone work on

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Wissenschaft des Judentums, Zionist historiography, or Jewish mysticism testifies to the inherent problems of scale.40 Accordingly, some boundary experiences are, a posteriori, extended to represent truth experiences for masses of people, while other boundary experiences remain personal. We see macroscale tendencies realized in the multitude of specific particularities in any person’s life experience. What becomes macroscale, however, are extensions of experience and invariably reductions of the complexity that unfolds when looking closely at Jewish/non-Jewish boundaries from an individual perspective. The complexities that made up the lives and work of early well-known Zionists protagonists, such as Ahad Ha’am and Theodor Herzl, or less well-known leaders, such as Horace M. Kallen or Louis Fränkel, could be, and were, “extended” into abstract and general positions.41 To spell out our claim even more directly, we contend that it is not only possible to study Jewish identity construction through specific encounters and events where the boundaries of Jewishness in different ways were elicited and reassembled for the actors involved—it is actually advantageous to do so. These moments give us crucial insights into both the human and material efforts that were put into keeping Jewishness alive, as well as the very networks of actors that were needed to give and uphold meaning and substance to the marked existence of Jews and Jewishness. From this perspective, Jewish identity in and of itself does not compose a study object worth pursuing. It is only when, in the words of Bruno Latour, a controversy arises that demands and elicits tenets of differences, mobilization, alignments, and solutions that we see Jewishness materialized as a detectable “assemblage.”42

Zionist Experiences and Boundary Making From the outset, we would like to make clear what a focus on experience can do to our existing understanding of Jewish space, belonging, technology, and boundary making. One of the most controversial subjects in modern Jewish cultural history is the study of the manifestations and meanings of Zionism and, specifically, its ramifications in and for Israel and Palestine. It seems that every decade new camps emerge that historically and normatively try to settle whether the Jewish/Zionist settlement and colonization of Palestine, and later Israel, were a positive or negative accomplishment for the region, for the inhabitants, and for the Jews in general. Discussions arise about whether the establishment of a Jewish state was indeed a necessity and what economic, social, political, and/ or psychological factors led to its creation. In various ways, these discussions can be seen as attempts to unpack the meanings of the establishment of the modern Jewish nation-state. However, they most often do so by breaking down the Zionist experience into separate pieces that can be examined and assessed one by one. It seems to us that only a few scholars

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approach the process of Jewish nation-building as a phenomenon that also can be seen as an existentially total and coherent experience, despite its deep interwovenness with a range of supposedly non-Jewish and conflicting elements. To grasp such experiences, we must use methods of assembling and integrating experiences of the past, rather than parceling them out as inauthentic leftovers of a whole that we see only in the light of retrospection. We would like here to highlight a few studies that in different ways show how something as supposedly amorphous and ambiguous as “Zionist experience” gradually crystallized and became a decisive, ontological reality for a generation of Jews that either consciously or unconsciously got entangled in this process. Thus, rather than using “Zionist” as an adjective or a noun that describes a group of specifically ideologically minded people or practices that we supposedly identify by their connection to Zionism, we see here how the inquiry can be turned around: if Zionism was such a crucial factor in forming Jewish life in general and Jewish Palestine in particular, how were practices, people, and places recognized as markedly Zionist for these people, and how was Zionism something experienced as deeply Jewish, despite its modernist, secularist, socialist, or even cosmopolitan character? How did certain experiences become identifiably Zionist?43 Historian Boaz Neumann provides a highly illuminating historical account of what it can entail to explore Jewish history through the lens of experience.44 Neumann re-examines one of the most studied groups and periods of modern Jewish history—namely, the early twentieth-century Jewish-Zionist immigrants to Palestine, also known as Halutzim (Hebrew for “pioneers”). By recounting the numerous expressions of desire in the creation and consolidation of Jewish Palestine, Neumann focuses on the Halutzim’s self-proclaimed attachment to the Land of Israel. One of Neumann’s major points is to grasp the scope and intensity of the desire to build and be built by the land without compartmentalizing this desire into separate, more commonly used analytical categories, such as political, social, or material dimensions. Instead, he insists on the need to “present the pioneers’ most central experience—the existential reality of being-in-the-Land-of-Israel and their basic desire for the Land—without reducing this desire.”45 The Halutzim accounted for these experiences as so deeply existential that they unified them in a comprehensive and ontological way with one place—they became part of the land. By describing as richly as possible the way the Halutzim experienced this connection to the land—without explaining it primarily or solely as either a political manifestation, a material, economic necessity, or a psychological reaction in and of itself, as the historians have tended to do—Neumann argues that we finally get closer to understanding the existential revolution that these people

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ignited in twentieth-century Jewish life—namely, as “an attempt to redefine the meaning of “being in place” in Jewish consciousness.”46 In a different historical style than Neumann, sociologist Ronen Shamir approached the emergence and consolidation of Zionist experience of the Land of Israel by looking at the electrification process of Tel Aviv and Jaffa in the early 1920s and tracing the various components that were involved, affected, and created for electricity to happen.47 In his own words, Shamir explores “how electrification ‘makes politics’ rather than merely transmits it—how electrification participates in the formation of distinct ethno-national groups rather than simply reflecting it.”48 In this study of how electricity “makes politics” and shapes ethno-national group formations, Shamir shows how spatial and social boundaries were created that gradually but tangibly distinguished Jewish/Zionist places and people from Arab. The experiences that Shamir deals with emerge from a heterogeneous range of actors, such as wires, lampposts, engineers, electricians, municipal workers, consumers, and city planners, that, together, changed practices and embodiment of space as the electrification took form—changes that made lasting technological, spatial, political, and existential differences for what it meant to be Jewish and Arab in Jaffa and Tel Aviv in the 1920s onwards. Shamir shows how, with electrification, new truths emerged about social life in Palestine, and those truths prompted people to think and act differently than before. These two studies highlight the fact that focusing on experiences brings new actors and actions into the picture and, more to the point, allows them to make sense of events on their own terms. We get empirically closer to how certain events were constituted by incorporating a whole network of actors’ experiences of how reality came into being. From the foregoing examples of Zionist history, this means recounting experiences of making Zionism and Zionist assumptions true in Palestine. Obviously, this truth was contentious or non-existing for many people both inside and outside the region at the time, yet through technological, emotional, spatial, and political configurations, it gradually became a reality with which adherents and critics alike had to deal. More than a phenomenological and ephemeral sensation, these studies show how experiences can be seen as crucial historical configurations whose materializations are important sites for historical research and knowledge. Thus, the historical examples of Jewish boundary work and meaningmaking that we offer in the following pages should be seen as illuminating cases of how ideas, emotions, and relations of Jewishness were enacted in spatial and temporal variations. We show how concepts relating to Jewishness were used as both tools and weapons for specific purposes, for marking or changing boundaries of Jewish experience, and for opening up new possibilities of actions for the future. Efforts to define, identify, and use such concepts as diaspora, citizenship, nation, religion, and Jew

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in indexical relation with each other were enacted and molded by Jews through both mundane and exceptional experiences. These examples emphasize the conditions, practices, and elements that made certain ideas true and relevant for Jewish sensemaking as both an individual and collective endeavor.

Geographical Reorientation Juxtaposing the terms “Jewish” and “experience” in a modern context often recalls connotations of migration, displacement, and uprootedness. Implicitly or explicitly, this connection often sets modern Jewish experiences against a bleak and uncertain backdrop that outlines Jewishness as essentially linked to geopolitical displacement and marginalization.49 While studies of these historical experiences provide us with important lessons about the power dynamics of European religious, cultural, and political structures and the spaces that were formed for its marginalized Other, they often employ as a matter of fact a specific normative framework through which these experiences inevitably should be understood. While experiences of migration and movement, on the one hand, and disenfranchisement, on the other, inevitably have played a prominent role in many Jewish lives in the last centuries, these phenomena tell us little about how the Jews involved made sense of the situation, or how the situation made them Jewish. Displacement and marginalization are terms that refer to both a center and a forceful push away from it. Moreover, they also both often allude to normative ways in which such a push was likely experienced—namely, as a negative and ontological blow: loss of meaning, identity, and lifeworlds.50 Nonetheless, as several of the chapters in this volume show, though movement was a crucial factor in Jewish historical experience and sensemaking, it did not automatically entail a loss of meaning or an experience of powerlessness. When zooming in on how Jewishness was experienced in movement, these contributions illuminate the intriguing ways in which meaning, collectivity, and space took form. Rather than relating, a priori, displacement and meaninglessness as dominant themes in Jewish movement, the chapters bring forth a rich and intriguing analysis of how movement did not necessarily entail discontinuity, but often included quite the opposite—associating it with Jewish history in new ways. Furthermore, the chapters show how mobility fertilized creativity in the redrawing of boundaries and the sensemaking of new experiences. Relatedly, these chapters re-examine the role of space and geography. As several scholars have noted in the last decade or so, questions of spatiality have often been ascribed at best a tacit and at worst a fully neglected role in Jewish historiography, with notable exceptions in studies of Zionist colonial practices and studies of the Pale.51 Rosman contends that Jewish geography has existed as “an unacknowledged assumption underlying

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Jewish historical narratives, rarely raised as an analytical issue it its own right.”52 As such, he argues that this “unacknowledged assumption” has produced research that generally classifies Jewish history within two formations of spatiality: transgeographical or geopolitical. Understanding Jewish collectivity as a transgeographical reality presupposes Jewishness as an inherently related unity that has developed in correlation despite or across geographical diversity. A geopolitical perspective, in contrast, examines the history of Jews and Jewishness through its geographical particularity, specifically by perceiving this geography as composed by established territorial polities, such as the nation-state, the city, or the empire. While a new cohort of scholars on Jewish spatiality is emerging to examine the construction of Jewish space beyond these two categories, the very topology through which Jews experienced, engaged, and enacted often remains unexamined.53 The conceptualization and usage of “topological thinking” have recently been adopted from geometry to social science and cultural studies.54 Topology deals with the description of nonEuclidian space, which means space that cannot be adequately described as “territory,” “void,” “container,” or by geometrics, such as stable borders, distances, and one-dimensional geographical surfaces. Topological space can thus be defined as “a geometry of position,” meaning that the relation between different points or knots that make up an identifiable form is in focus. The “flat” geometry of the form can change, but the form nevertheless remains the same. The classic mathematical examples of this are geometrical forms like squares or triangles, which, no matter how they are turned, twisted, or bent, uphold certain properties of space. In other words, topological space is a space that retains space consistency under deformation. One classic example is Euler’s solution to this problem: Is it possible to cross Königsberg’s seven historical bridges by crossing all bridges once? Euler concluded that no measurements or geometry could solve the problem because only the information about connection is relevant: how many bridges to which land masses. In this way, topological space is a materialization that occurs as a response to a question or a problem. Euler’s practical problem became, how were bridges and land masses in Königsberg connected? It was the connections between points or knots that defined the properties of this Königsberg space—not stable geometrics. Accordingly, it is not the shape of the spaces themselves that is interesting but how the spaces are put together via “bridges and landmasses”—how parts of the space relate to the whole (shape consistency under deformation), and how the space defines insides and outsides. The key elements of topological space are then connections, relations, dimensions, insides, and outsides. How are connections connected, what is the character of relations, and what are the dimensions? A culturalhistorical topology would direct its fundamental problem-orientation (as

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opposed to a law-giving, a priori character) towards “experience.” It suggests a method of mapping what has happened and what happens in a multidimensional perspective—to describe contingencies of the flow of experience. Moreover, a topological inquiry would explore how such a flow continuously knots the past as “experiences” into an ever-changing fabric. As sociologist Rob Shields describes this fabric, “The strangeness of everyday life is precisely its disequilibrium as a knotting of topographies that entwine local with global, present with past and future.”55 The core issue permanently at hand for cultural topology, then, is how relative stability of identity over time and space is maintained in spite of radical changes of flat geometrics, surfaces, and appearances. The adoption of topology to social and cultural studies thus, firstly, brings a sustained focus on relationality between everyday experiences, social formations, and spatial configurations. Secondly, it elucidates how cultural similarities and differences behave under various spatiotemporal conditions. In Shields’s words, the conceptualization of topology allows one to rigorously approach situations where the order of things is deformed by any given force. That is, it provides the mental handfolds for working with situations where relationships are changed, distanciated, collapsed or distorted, reshaping the “diagram” one might draw of the situation.56 Tracing how actors perform, enact, and/or navigate in various topological realities should not, however, be confused with a renewed call for partial and deconstructed histories, since the potential for tracing these coordinates per definition overrides any sense of, at least, regional particularity. Establishing how sociocultural entities, even a tiny entity like one communist, Galician Jew, make sense in and of specific topological frameworks can lay claim on global, metaphysical, and multi-temporal coordinates that only vaguely relate to physical regionalism or individual solipsism. The book’s individual chapters are not theoretical discussions of pragmatism, Jewish experience, or topology but instead exemplifications of what such sources of inspiration could mean for studies in Jewish cultural history in a more practical way. All chapters demonstrate various aspects of the perspective we outlined earlier, and they emphasize the productivity of different concepts within a wider pragmatist historical perspective. Seen as a whole, the chapters of this book grapple with the boundaries between Jewish and non-Jewish in a variety of empirical contexts and emphasize how experiences become Jewish a posteriori in relation to sensemaking processes and (re-)enacted boundaries. This we have called boundary work. Boundary work connects “bridges and landmasses” between Jewish pasts, presents, and futures, and it manifests itself equally in the life experiences of individuals and in ambitious speculation over

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Jewish contributions and places in the history of civilization. In the individual chapters of this book, such boundary work is in focus where it illustrates how Jewish cultural history is continuously deformed and (re-) enacted, yet it still upholds recognizable properties of space.

The Bridges and Landmasses of This Book After this introduction, Maja Gildin Zuckerman explores how different political visions about Jewish collectivity, nationhood, and territory were gradually formed through experiences of mobility and homecoming during the first Zionist pilgrimage to Palestine in April 1897. She shows some of the intersecting points of consensus and controversies that were present when Western Jews began deciding whether to support or reject Zionism and Jewish nationhood. The chapter thus illuminates some of the crucial boundary work that Zionism instigated and compelled Western Jews—Zionists as well as non-Zionists—to answer and engage in. While Gildin Zuckerman expounds on how travelling to Palestine created boundaries of Jewish insiders and outsiders which Zionism later would bolster, Mirjam Zadoff analyzes the inclusion and, especially, exclusion of the lives of three “historical Jews,” individuals whose experiences relate to the liminal spaces of modern Judaism and who to date have been accorded but a peripheral presence in Jewish memory and Jewish history: the literary critic Reuben Brainin, a supporter of Jewish colonization in Russia; the German communist politician Werner Scholem; and his non-Jewish wife, Emmy, who began her life as a revolutionary and ended it as a member of a Jewish community. Through the juxtaposition of these three individuals’ biographies, Zadoff outlines central features of what retrospectively became accepted and rejected as twentieth-century “Jewish experiences and lives.” Laura Almagor presents us with a case study of the surprising alliances, aspirations, and limitations of Jewish political identity following World War II. In her chapter, “Tropical Territorialism: Displaced Persons, Colonialism, and the Freeland League in Suriname (1946–1948),” Almagor focuses on the efforts of a New York–based Jewish organization, the Freeland League, to settle a group of 30,000 Eastern European Jewish refugees or displaced persons (DPs) in the Dutch colony of Suriname in the years 1946–48. This analysis of a never-materialized Jewish political endeavor sheds unexpected light on geopolitical developments related to decolonization, migration policies, Cold War dynamics, and Jewish political (self)definition—and reveals the importance of the Jewish DP question in the creation of a post-Holocaust Jewish topology and the changing boundaries of Jewishness during the second half of the 1940s. Finally, Michael Harbsmeier ties together the issues of geographical explorations and experience of space with Jewish self-definition in his chapter, “Autoethnographic Cosmopolitanism: Jewish Travel Writers

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Among Their Coreligionists.” Here he offers an overview and insights into the genre of Jewish travel accounts from its emergence around the Jewish Enlightenment in the late eighteenth century onwards. Harbsmeier demonstrates how Jewish travel accounts from around the world have stood out as emphatically autoethnographic—that is, he shows how most of these accounts by Jewish travellers turned out to be depictions of other Jews and Jewish communities. As autoethnographic sources, the chapter argues, Jewish travel accounts can provide us with rare insights into the changes in the history of Jewish identifications and self-understanding. Next, Jakob Egholm Feldt traces in his chapter, “The Presence of Past Struggles: The Jews and the Boundaries of Enlightenment,” two significant junctions where the limits of and the vocabulary about the special Jewish relation to the boundaries of Enlightenment were shaped. The first junction is the late Enlightenment’s debates over what defines the Enlightenment, which formed modern discourses of Jewish reformation and reconstruction. The second junction is the massive Jewish immigration wave to America between 1880 and WWI, which produced a vivid and optimistic proliferation of social thought pertaining to the Jews as ideal citizens of the modern world of mobility and the modern city. These two junctions mark two boundaries where Jewishness collide or converge with the Enlightenment—respectively, as the negative exemplarity, the other within, or the positive exemplarity, the avant-garde. Søren Blak Hjortshøj presents another European Jewish intellectual, the Danish literature scholar Georg Brandes, in his efforts to restructure the European history of ideas with the purpose of pointing to an ongoing, indispensable, Jewish contribution to the present and the future. Hjortshøj outlines the historically significant “Athens vs. Jerusalem” dichotomy, which, since early Christianity, identified Jerusalem and the Jews as a false civilizational start, while Athens and Greece were identified as civilization’s true outset. Hjortshøj shows Brandes’s attempts to evade this order by circumventing the dichotomous premise. In this way, Brandes’s reconstructions of Jewish history were present-oriented boundary work, aligning Jewishness with the Enlightenment and its future horizons. Klaus Hödl also discusses larger assemblages of Jewish cultural history in his chapter, “From Jewish Separateness to Jewish and non-Jewish Entanglement.” Hödl points to a growing research interest in non-conflictual, even convivial, relations between Jews and non-Jews across periods and geographies. Such research explicitly and implicitly describes shared worlds, shared problems, shared visions, and shared actions between Jews and non-Jews even in periods with strong discrimination against Jews. Looked at from the perspective of Jewish/non-Jewish entanglement, the Jewish past might look significantly different than from the perspective of traditional narratives. Emphasizing non-conflictual encounters between Jews and non-Jews also opens new questions about the appropriateness of the concepts we employ when assembling narratives of Jewish history.

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Karin Cohr Lützen rounds off the book with the chapter “To Walk in the Footsteps of Your Ancestors: Roots Tourism in Yiddishland.” Lützen offers a reflection on the possibility of connecting with a lost Jewish past, presenting us with an embodied exploration of historiography through her family history. Based on autoethnographical journeys to her own recently discovered Jewish past in France and Romania, the author reflects on such phenomena as heritage travel and roots tourism vis-à-vis experiencing the past as a personal history and identity. Through Lützen’s journeys, we see how Jewish historical experiences might emerge and how a historical landscape can be reconstructed. However, questions of how to make sense of such experiences remain caught somewhere between mindful reconstruction and kitsch imitation.

Notes 1. Moshe Rosman, How Jewish Is Jewish History? (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2007); for new contributions to this discussion, see, e.g., Cynthia M. Baker, Jew (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2017); Scott Spector, Modernism Without Jews: German-Jewish Subjects and Histories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017); Jay Geller, The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2011). 2. Rosman, How Jewish, 1. 3. Georg Herbert Mead, The Philosophy of the Present (Chicago: Prometheus Books, 2002). 4. Andrew Abbott, Time Matters: On Theory and Method (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 5. Tor Hernes, “Process as the Becoming of Temporal Trajectory,” in The Sage Handbook of Process Organization Studies (London: Sage, 2017). 6. The concept of topology is rather new to historical studies. In cultural studies, social science, and organization studies it has been employed variously in the past decade or so to introduce a perspective on spatio-temporality as something fundamentally processual, subject to change yet stable. Pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce was also occupied with the concept as a non-Euclidian type of geometrics—that is, as a perspectivism on geometry and time. Recent usage, however, mostly refers to cultural geography and actor-network theory (ANT) perspectives; see, e.g., Rob Shields, “Cultural Topology. The Seven Bridges of Königsberg, 1736,” Theory, Culture & Society 29, nos. 4–5 (2012). 7. Michael Shanks, The Archaeological Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2012). 8. Andrew Abbott, “Things of Boundaries (Defining the Boundaries of Social Inquiry),” Social Research 62, no. 4 (1995). 9. William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 97; original emphasis. 10. Ibid. 11. Stephen Greenblatt, “Cultural Mobility: An Introduction,” in Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, eds. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1. 12. Alexander, Jeffrey, The Civil Sphere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 396.

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13. See, for example, Mary Gluck, The Invisible Jewish Budapest: Metropolitan Culture at the Fin de Siècle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016); Kerry Wallach, Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017). 14. Laurence J. Silberstein, “Mapping, Not Tracing: Opening Reflection,” in Mapping Jewish Identities, ed. Laurence Silberstein (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 13. 15. For an overview of the shift in Israeli Jewish cultural history, see David N. Myers, “Is There Still a ‘Jerusalem School?’ Reflections on the State of Jewish Historical Scholarship in Israel,” Jewish History 23, no. 4 (2009): 389; Assaf Likhovski, “Post-Post-Zionist Historiography,” Israel Studies 15, no. 2 (2010): 1–23. 16. For the resistance or delay of cultural theory in Jewish studies, see Paul Lerner, “Round Table Introduction: Jewish Studies Meets Cultural Studies: New Approaches to the German-Jewish Past,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 8, no. 1 (2009): 41–6. On a brief overview of gender and Jewish studies, see Kerry Wallach, “Jews and Gender,” The German Quarterly 91, no. 2 (2018). 17. See, for example, Lisa Silverman, Becoming Austrians: Jews and Culture Between the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Wallach, Passing Illusions. 18. Silverman, Becoming Austrians, 6; see also Lisa Silverman and Deborah Holmes. “Jewish Difference in the Austrian Context. Introduction,” Austrian Studies 24 (2016): 1–12; Lisa Silverman, “Reconsidering the Margins: Jewishness as an Analytical Framework,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 8, no. 1 (2009): 103–20. 19. Wallach, Passing Illusions, 6. 20. Silverman, Reconsidering the Margins, 110. 21. Ibid., 109. 22. See Jakob Egholm Feldt, Transnationalism and the Jews: Culture, History and Prophecy (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016); Sander Gilman, Multiculturalism and the Jews (New York: Routledge, 2013). 23. See also David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel, eds. Insider/ Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 24. David Biale, “Introduction,” in Cultures of the Jews: A New History, ed. David Biale (New York: Schocken Books, 2002), xxxi. 25. Some of the scholars that we group here as successors of the multicultural paradigm see themselves as aligned with many of the performative scholars that we mentioned earlier. While some of the scholars in the two groups share both common research field—modern Central European Jewry—and research interests, such as everyday history and lowbrow cultural expressions, they nevertheless differ to some degree in epistemological approach to culture, as we shall show. 26. Leora Auslander, “Jewish Taste? Jews and the Aesthetics of Everyday Life in Paris and Berlin, 1933–1942,” in Histories of Leisure, ed. Rudy Koshar (Oxford: Berg Press, 2002), 300. 27. Gideon Reuveni, “Advertising, Jewish Ethnic Marketing, and Consumer Ambivalence in Weimar Germany,” in Longing, Belonging, and the Making of Jewish Consumer Culture, eds. Gideon Reuveni and Nils H. Roemer (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 115, 113–38. 28. Greenblatt, “Cultural Mobility,” 2. 29. Biale, “Introduction,” xxiv. 30. John Law, “After ANT: Topology, Naming and Complexity,” in Actor Network Theory and After, eds. John Law and John Hassard (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 2.

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31. We draw on the perspectives on experience from pragmatist positions, such as G. H. Mead or John Dewey; see John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1938), 42–59. 32. For an influential perspective, see Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (1991). We consider structuralist historical perspectives in general to be critical towards “experience.” 33. See, for example, Silverman, Becoming Austrians, 6–7. 34. Joan W. Scott, “Gender. A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (1986). 35. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” 779. 36. Bruno Latour, “What Is the Style of Matters of Concern,” in Spiniza Lectures (Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 2008), 9; Bruno Latour, An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 179. 37. Klaus Hödl, “The Elusiveness of Jewishness: Jews in Viennese Popular Culture Around 1900,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 12, no. 3 (2013): 379–97. 38. Klaus Hödl, ““Jewish History” Beyond Binary Conceptions: Jewish Performing Musicians in Vienna Around 1900,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 16, no. 3 (2017): 377–94. 39. Ibid., 381. 40. Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998); David Myers, Re-inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and Zionist Return to History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and CounterHistory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). 41. Feldt, Transnationalism and the Jews; Maja Gildin Zuckerman, “Broadening Home: The Emergence of Danish Zionism and its Topological Expansion of Danish Jewishness, 1897–1914” (PhD diss., University of Southern Denmark, 2017). 42. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 43. See also Derek Jonathan Penslar, Zionism and Technocracy: The Engineering of Jewish Settlement in Palestine, 1870–1918 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 44. Boaz Neumann, Land and Desire in Early Zionism (Lebanon, NH: UPNE, 2011). 45. Ibid., 1. 46. Ibid. 17; see also Zali Gurevitch and Gideon Aran, “The Land of Israel: Myth and Phenomenon,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 10 (1994): 197–9. 47. Ronen Shamir, Current Flow: The Electrification of Palestine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). 48. Ibid., 10. 49. As the editors of the anthology Jewish Topographies sum up, “The interrelated motifs of the ‘people of the book’ and the book as the ‘portable homeland’—together with the stereotype of ‘the wandering Jews,’ have conveyed the pervasive impression that the Jewish experience—except the Israeli one—is one of profound displacement, lacking not only a proper territory but also a substantial spatiality or attachment to place”; see Anna Lipphardt, Julia Brauch, and Alexandra Nocke, “Exploring Jewish Space: An Approach,” in Jewish Topographies: Visions of Space, Traditions of Place, eds. Julia Brauch and Anna Lipphardt (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 1. For a wider discussion of this topic, see Feldt, Transnationalism and the Jews. 50. See Liisa Malkki, “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity Among Scholars and Refugees,” Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1 (1992): 24–44.

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51. See, for example, Lipphard et al., “Exploring Jewish Space”; Ethan Katz, Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud S. Mandel, “Introduction: Engaging Colonial History and Jewish History,” in Colonialism and the Jews, eds. Ethan Katz, Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud S. Mandel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017). 52. Moshe Rosman, “Jewish History Across Borders,” in Rethinking European Jewish History, eds. Jeremy Cohen and Moshe Rosman (Portland: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2009), 16. 53. See, for example, Julia Brauch et al., Jewish Topographies; Charlotte Fonrobert and Vered Shemtov, “Introduction: Jewish Conceptions and Practices of Space,” Jewish Social Studies 11, no. 3 (2005): 1–8; Barbara Mann, A Place in History: Modernism, Tel Aviv, and the Creation of Jewish Urban Space (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); Barbara Mann, Space and Place in Jewish Studies (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012); Simone Lässig and Miriam Rürup, eds., Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017). 54. Celia Lury, Luciana Parisi, and Tiziana Terranova, “Introduction: The Becoming Topological of Culture,” Theory, Culture & Society 29, nos. 4–5 (2012): 3–35. For an earlier “adoption,” see Annemarie Mol and John Law, “Regions, Networks and Fluids: Anaemia and Social Topology,” Social Studies of Science 24, no. 4 (1994): 641–71. 55. Rob Shields, “Cultural Topology: The Seven Bridges of Königsburg, 1736,” Theory, Culture & Society 29, nos. 4–5 (2012): 55. 56. Ibid., 48.

Bibliography Abbott, Andrew. “Things of Boundaries (Defining the Boundaries of Social Inquiry).” Social Research 62, no. 4 (1995). Abbott, Andrew. Time Matters: On Theory and Method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Alexander, Jeffrey. The Civil Sphere. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Auslander, Leora. “Jewish Taste? Jews and the Aesthetics of Everyday Life in Paris and Berlin, 1933–1942.” In Histories of Leisure, edited by Rudy Koshar. Oxford: Berg Press, 2002: 299–318. Baker, Cynthia M. Jew. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2017. Biale, David. Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1982. Biale, David, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel, eds. Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Dewey, John. Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1938. Feldt, Jakob Egholm. Transnationalism and the Jews: Culture, History and Prophecy. London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016. Fonrobert, Charlotte, and Vered Shemtov. “Introduction: Jewish Conceptions and Practices of Space.” Jewish Social Studies 11, no. 3 (2005). Geller, Jay. The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity. New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2011. Gilman, Sander. Multiculturalism and the Jews. New York: Routledge, 2013. Gluck, Mary. The Invisible Jewish Budapest: Metropolitan Culture at the Fin de Siècle. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016.

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Greenblatt, Stephen. “Cultural Mobility: An Introduction.” In Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Ines Županov, Reinhard MeyerKalkus, Heike Paul, Pal Nyíri, and Friederike Pannewick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Gurevitch, Zali, and Gideon Aran. “The Land of Israel: Myth and Phenomenon.” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 10 (1994). Hernes, Tor. “Process as the Becoming of Temporal Trajectory.” In The Sage Handbook of Process Organization Studies. London: Sage, 2017. Heschel, Susannah. Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998. Hödl, Klaus. “The Elusiveness of Jewishness: Jews in Viennese Popular Culture Around 1900.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 12, no. 3 (2013). Hödl, Klaus. “‘Jewish History’ Beyond Binary Conceptions: Jewish Performing Musicians in Vienna Around 1900.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 16, no. 3 (2017). James, William. Pragmatism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Katz, Ethan, Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud S. Mandel. “Introduction: Engaging Colonial History and Jewish History.” In Colonialism and the Jews, edited by Ethan B. Katz, Lisa Moses Leff, and Maud S. Mandel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. Lässig, Simone, and Miriam Rürup, eds. Space and Spatiality in Modern GermanJewish History. New York: Berghahn Books, 2017. Latour, Bruno. An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2013. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Latour, Bruno. “What Is the Style of Matters of Concern.” In Spiniza Lectures. Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 2008. Law, John. “After ANT: Topology, Naming and Complexity.” In Actor Network Theory and After, edited by John Law and John Hassard. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999. Lerner, Paul. “Round Table Introduction: Jewish Studies Meets Cultural Studies: New Approaches to the German-Jewish Past.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 8, no. 1 (2009). Likhovski, Assaf. “Post-Post-Zionist Historiography.” Israel Studies 15, no. 2 (2010). Lipphardt, Anna, Julia Brauch, and Alexandra Nocke. “Exploring Jewish Space: An Approach.” In Jewish Topographies: Visions of Space, Traditions of Place, edited by Julia Brauch and Anna Lipphardt. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Lury, Celia, Luciana Parisi, and Tiziana Terranova. “Introduction: The Becoming Topological of Culture.” Theory, Culture & Society 29, nos. 4–5 (2012). Malkki, Liisa. “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity Among Scholars and Refugees.” Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1 (1992). Mann, Barbara. A Place in History: Modernism, Tel Aviv, and the Creation of Jewish Urban Space. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Mann, Barbara. Space and Place in Jewish Studies. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012. Mead, Georg Herbert. The Philosophy of the Present. Chicago: Prometheus Books, 2002.

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Mol, Annemarie, and John Law. “Regions, Networks and Fluids: Anaemia and Social Topology.” Social Studies of Science 24, no. 4 (1994). Myers, David N. “Is There Still a ‘Jerusalem School?’ Reflections on the State of Jewish Historical Scholarship in Israel.” Jewish History 23, no. 4 (2009). Myers, David N. Re-inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and Zionist Return to History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Neumann, Boaz. Land and Desire in Early Zionism. Lebanon, NH: UPNE, 2011. Penslar, Derek Jonathan. Zionism and Technocracy: The Engineering of Jewish Settlement in Palestine, 1870–1918. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Reuveni, Gideon. “Advertising, Jewish Ethnic Marketing, and Consumer Ambivalence in Weimar Germany.” In Longing, Belonging, and the Making of Jewish Consumer Culture, edited by Gideon Reuveni and Nils H. Roemer. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Rosman, Moshe. How Jewish Is Jewish History? Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2007. Rosman, Moshe. “Jewish History Across Borders.” In Rethinking European Jewish History, edited by Jeremy Cohen and Moshe Rosman. Portland: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2009. Scott, Joan W. “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (1991). Scott, Joan W. “Gender. A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (1986). Shamir, Ronen. Current Flow: The Electrification of Palestine. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. Shanks, Michael. The Archaeological Imagination. London: Routledge, 2012. Shields, Rob. “Cultural Topology. The Seven Bridges of Königsberg, 1736.” Theory, Culture & Society 29, nos. 4/5 (2012). Silberstein, Laurence J. “Mapping, Not Tracing: Opening Reflection.” In Mapping Jewish Identities, edited by Laurence Silberstein. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Silverman, Lisa. Becoming Austrians: Jews and Culture Between the World Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Silverman, Lisa. “Reconsidering the Margins: Jewishness as an Analytical Framework.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 8, no. 1 (2009). Silverman, Lisa, and Deborah Holmes. “Jewish Difference in the Austrian Context. Introduction.” Austrian Studies 24 (2016). Spector, Scott. Modernism Without Jews: German-Jewish Subjects and Histories. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. Wallach, Kerry. “Jews and Gender.” The German Quarterly 91, no. 2 (2018). Wallach, Kerry. Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. Zuckerman, Maja Gildin. “Broadening Home: The Emergence of Danish Zionism and Its Topological Expansion of Danish Jewishness, 1897–1914.” PhD diss., University of Southern Denmark, 2017.

2

En Route to Palestine Jewish Mobility and Zionist Emergence Maja Gildin Zuckerman

When the 29-year-old Danish Jewish physician Louis Frænkel arrived in London from Copenhagen on April 1, 1897, to participate in the first “modern Jewish pilgrimage” to Palestine that would set out a few days later, he was deeply impressed not only by London’s modern appearance and pace but also by the space that some Jewish Orthodox families had created in its midst.1 Thus, upon his first visit to the home of the tour organizer, the lawyer and Jewish community leader Herbert Bentwich, Frænkel noted in his diary, “The house Orthodox Jewish but to the highest degree civilized in any aspect.”2 Frænkel was himself an Orthodox Jew who had grown up in an upper-middle-class home in the Danish capital of Copenhagen, yet, based on the wonderment expressed in this diary line, the seamless juxtaposition of Orthodox Judaism and the “high degree of civilization” in the middle of London took him by surprise. Perhaps he was also in awe of the fact that it was a representative of this household, Herbert Bentwich, who initiated the travel in order to explore the potential for a modern Jewish homeland in Palestine—an idea that Zionist leader Theodor Herzl had proposed the year before in the publication Der Judenstaat.3 As Frænkel, along with the other 20 participants, would soon experience during their journey from London to Palestine and back, what tied the group together was precisely the nexus of Jewish belonging and religious practices, expressions of Western culture and comfort, and interest in Palestine. However, the moment the group actually arrived in Palestine, disagreements and divisions emerged, as the pilgrims disputed what constituted essential features of Jewish collectivity and nationhood and how this related to the territory under scrutiny. Travelling in Palestine, in other words, aroused questions about the extent and boundaries of Jewish unity and solidarity. The pilgrimage, then, reveals some of the intersecting points of both consensus and controversy that presented themselves when Western Jews began to consider whether to support and engage in Zionism or to reject and distance themselves from the cause and, later, the movement. Rather than treating these converging and diverging opinions as expressions of abstract, ideological, and preconceived standpoints, this

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chapter explores how different political visions about Jewish collectivity, nationhood, and territory were gradually formed through experiences of mobility and homecoming. The Maccabean Pilgrimage to Palestine, which was the official name of the tour, took place a few months before the convention of the first Zionist Congress in Basle in August 1897 and the subsequent formal establishment of the Zionist Organisation (ZO). Theodor Herzl, whom the Congress would elect as the first chairman of the ZO, strongly encouraged the implementation of the pilgrimage. He saw it as a first step for a band of modern, cultured Jews of all professions, with a distinct leading idea, make their way to the land of our fathers in order to personally explore it. It is a national enquiry commission, singular of its kind—one calculated to raise our hopes.4 Herzl thus implicitly assumed that travelling as a “modern, cultured” Jewish group and encountering Palestine in this capacity would generate positive results. Even more, he assumed that this form of Jewish travelling would confirm, bolster, and disseminate the idea of a Jewish nation and its territorialization in Palestine. While Bentwich himself had less ambitious and concrete objectives for the tour, as we shall see, he also believed in the mobilizing and strengthening value of modern Jewish travel to “the ancient homeland.” A study of this intriguing pilgrimage speaks directly to some of the core issues that would dominate twentieth-century Jewish identification and sensemaking, as well as the issues that are central to this anthology. As an embodied response to Herzl’s proposal for solving the Jewish question—and thus the Jewish future in the framework of a Jewish state—the pilgrims explored what such a political structure might entail, what relationships between community, religion, homeland, and territory it necessitated, and how it felt for these self-defined Western Jews to be temporally involved in such an endeavor.5 As seen in the rich paper trail left behind by the pilgrims, the pilgrimage as a whole illuminates some of the boundary work that these questions posed for the Jewish pilgrims in particular and Jews in general—questions that enabled them to identify Zionism and the Zionist cause as potentially real, necessary, and/or relevant for them and their lives.6 In his reflections about the relation between boundaries and changing social entities, sociologist Andrew Abbott begins his inquiry by tracing how and when specific differences emerge and become important boundaries that define a social entity: These locally random sites of differences become proto-boundaries only when they line up into some kind of extended opposition along some single axis of difference.  .  . . It is rather that a dimension of

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difference . . . emerges across a number of local settings to produce a proto-boundary.7 Rather than assuming that social groups, such as Jews, consistently relate to a specific core that defines them in times of change or stability, Abbott argues here for the need to not only identify when and what differences appear in specific contexts but also determine if and how they line up along specific axes and thus enact a distinct boundary. As we shall see, boundary work was constantly needed for the Jewish pilgrims to understand why they were going, who they were meeting with, how the sites that they visited related to each other and themselves as individuals and as a group, and why at all a distinct notion of Jewish unity had anything to do with them and their European or American lives. The tour as a whole can hardly be seen as manifesting what “core” Zionist values were or should be. However, through the enactment of new forms of modern Jewish collectivity, the tour emphatically introduced to its participants different possible attachments to Palestine and to Jewish nationhood—distinctions that would later crystallize into Zionist and non-Zionist positions. In this chapter, I trace how the various distinctions felt important at different stages of the tour and how they were expressed and experienced. I begin by eliciting some of the discussions that surrounded the very implementation of the tour and its supposed objectives. Following these preconceived schemes of how the pilgrims supposedly would embrace their Jewishness as they ventured to Palestine, I present some of the pilgrims’ own accounts of the feelings and thoughts that were generated about moving as a Jewish group across Europe and the Middle East. While the experiences of mobility generally unified a sense of Jewish collectivity, I show in the final part of the chapter how the encounter with Palestine instigated a new and complex set of differences that began outlining a “proto-boundary” of Zionist and non-Zionist positions.

Planning for Unity From the outset there were disagreements about the purpose and aims of the Maccabean Pilgrimage to Palestine. In fact, the decision to organize and implement the tour had materialized only as a series of tacit compromises that needed to bridge multiple interests: from political propaganda to new Jewish middle-class tourist desires.8 These disagreements were visible when ideologue Theodor Herzl first approached the Anglo Jewish society the Maccabean Club to convince its members to act in the name of Zionism and, later, in the confrontation between Herzl and the tour organizer, Herbert Bentwich. In Der Judenstaat, Herzl depicted in detail why and how a Jewish state should be established (preferably in Palestine) and what this national

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project would entail for modern Jewry. Particularly relevant for Herzl’s relation to the Maccabeans and the materialization of the pilgrimage, Herzl believed, firstly, that the Jews constituted one united people, regardless of their geographical, religious, and social differences, and, secondly, that a group of inspired Western individuals, a body he called “The Society of the Jews,” should take the lead in inquiring, administering, and safeguarding the fruition of “the Zionist idea.”9 Herzl initially anticipated this society to be composed of a confined circle of Anglo Jewish intellectuals, specifically including members of the Maccabean Club, where he had previously presented his ideas.10 Following the publication of Der Judenstaat, he thus spoke before the Maccabeans in the summer 1896 in the hope, if not with the straightforward expectation, that the members would accept this task and, consequently, initiate a range of policies and activities to implement the central components of the scheme. The Maccabean Club was created in 1891, when 44 English Jews convened to establish a forum whose noted aim “shall be social intercourse and co-operation among its members, with a view to the promotion of the interests of the Jewish race.”11 While “a promotion of the interests of the Jewish race” might appear to have aligned with Herzl’s wish of unifying and organizing Jewish interests under one political umbrella, the Maccabeans specifically tried to circumvent any notion that they constituted a distinctively political assembly. They wished to advance the civic standing and social life of “Jews of letters” across Europe, though this work was never meant to exclude or separate itself from its British context, nor to promote any separatist political agenda.12 As the name also implied, the Maccabeans had an explicit interest in the history and cultures of Palestine, though so had other members of the British fin de siècle intellectuals.13 With an insistently liberal view of national differences and Jewish subordination, the Maccabean Club had invited Herzl to speak in their club as “a Jew of letters,” even as the Maccabeans’ and Herzl’s perceptions of contemporary Jewish collectivity could not have been further apart.14 However, these differences were not yet clear, since no specific cause had so far presented itself in a way that distinguished Herzl’s emerging ideas about Jewish ethno-nationalism from the Maccabeans’ Jewish liberalism—that is, until Herzl requested the Maccabeans to act on behalf of his scheme. The Maccabean Pilgrimage to Palestine became the most concrete offshoot of Herzl’s visit to the Maccabean Club in the summer of 1896 (see Figure 2.1). Herzl had spoken passionately about the need for British Jews to engage in the future of European Jewry, as well as the need for creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The members had hesitantly decided to establish a commission to inquire into Herzl’s plan for a Jewish state and to send an expedition to Palestine to explore its potential.15 The fact that the tour was implemented at all was solely due to the unyielding efforts of Herbert Bentwich, who not only organized what became known as

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Figure 2.1 Herbert Bentwich’s copy of the itinerary and program of the Maccabean Pilgrimage Source: A100/2–2, The Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem.

“the Maccabean Pilgrimage to Palestine” but also became its tour leader during the six weeks of travelling (see Figure 2.2). Bentwich outlined and organized the tour in a way that obscured the distinctions between Herzl’s and the Maccabeans’ positions, but in this effort, Bentwich also transgressed any clear notion of the very purpose of the trip. Thus, when announcing the tour, he stated, The Pilgrimage is going to be one of more than local or personal concern.  .  . . Not that we are going for any specifically religious, much less for any political, purpose, nor are we going as prospectors or philanthropists—and yet not as mere curiosity hunters or sightseers; . . . We shall . . . go as Western Jews evidencing only by our participation in the Pilgrimage the great truth of a feeling of identity and brotherhood between our people wherever they may be spread, and of interest in our Land however far we may be removed from it.16 According to this announcement, the tour should not be defined as a personal, religious, political, business, or philanthropic endeavor. These were all different labels that could have satisfied (or upset) both Herzl and the Maccabeans. Instead, Bentwich opted for a framework that outlined the purpose in terms of “identity and brotherhood” between the

Figure 2.2 A map from the program of Cook’s different Palestine tours offered in 1897 Source: A100/2–2, The Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem.

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Jewish people and “their” land, yet without clearly defining or prescribing the nature of these relations. The importance of framing the tour in such vague terms became evident when Herzl shifted from endorsing the tour to publicly prescribing the very purpose of it. Herzl wrote a lengthy speech titled “The Return to Palestine,” which he asked the English journalist Jacob de Haas to read aloud at a meeting in London and subsequently publish in the leading Anglo Jewish newspaper, The Jewish Chronicle (hereafter JC), on January 22, 1897. Here it read, Political Zionism sets to work armoured with all the means of the present day. In this sense the pilgrimage of Mr. Bentwich is of a significance which cannot be underrated. For the first time a band of modern, cultured Jews of all professions, with a distinct leading idea, make their way to the land of our fathers in order to personally explore it. It is a national enquiry commission, singular of its kind— one calculated to raise our hopes. Therefore, it is well at the outset to make clear to ourselves and others the nature of the Bentwich expedition. Where Bentwich had carefully omitted the explicit connection between the pilgrimage and Zionism, Herzl highlighted it as the central purpose of the tour. Also, he repeated his belief that the English Jews should be seen as personifying modern life, means, and practices through which, he proposed, the Jewish homeland would be reborn. He, moreover, called it “a national enquiry commission,” and an “expedition”—terms that suggested the pilgrimage was created by or represented some sort of national entity or, alternatively, was designed to inquire into the existence of a nation. Both suggestions tied the pilgrimage to a national and a colonial project. The following week, Bentwich rejected outright Herzl’s redefinition of the pilgrimage in JC. He wrote, It is due . . . to those who are taking part in the pilgrimage to say that they have no such far-reaching scheme on foot as Dr. Herzl’s fervid imagination would attribute to them, and that they have neither political objects to serve, nor even scientific researches to make.17 In other words, while Bentwich insisted on organizing a modern, Jewish pilgrimage to Palestine in order to inspire pride in the land and in the Jewish people, he refused to frame this journey as a political or colonial project. He maintained that as a starting point, a Jewish rediscovery of Palestine should be an emotional, social endeavor that was not tethered to any specific political agenda. Thus, the group of people whom Herzl treated as collaborators on the first national inquiry commission to the

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future Jewish homeland willfully denied the very existence of both the national framework and its commission status to investigate and report. Thus, from the outset, no consensus existed about what travelling to and experiencing Palestine meant for Zionism, or about what supposedly Zionist convictions, in turn, meant for the practice of travelling. Both Bentwich and Herzl, however, presumed that they could plan and steer an utterly new form of Jewish travelling in advance and, consequently, inspire in the participants specific emotional or ideological visions about Jewish brotherhood or nationhood.18 Reality, however, did not materialize according to these men’s preconceived desires. The tour was, therefore, initially created based on inaccurate projections about what encountering “the Jewish homeland” would entail. At the same time, these advocates also completely eschewed a definition of Jewishness. In other words, the tour was organized based on the assumption that there was something inherent that connected Jews and Palestine, yet its exact definition of this connection seemed unsettled and open for interpretation—for the idealists, organizers, and travellers alike.

Moving in Unity While obvious discrepancies existed about the objectives of the tour, both Herzl and Bentwich explicitly framed the tour as a form of Jewish unification, such that the encounter with Palestine served as the crucial moment when the participants would experience deep nationhood or brotherhood. They both assumed that an innate feeling of land attachment and collectivity between the pilgrims, Jewish peoplehood, and Palestine would arise when the travellers set foot on “the ancient homeland.” However, it proved to be the travel, rather than the destination itself, that united the pilgrims around experiences of Jewishness. The journey inspired, first of all, a sense of unbound Jewish homecoming and solidarity between the travellers and some imagined or experienced greater Jewish community, as opposed to more sedentary and geopolitically divided forms of Jewishness. Upon departure for Palestine, the 21 pilgrims shared no central ideological, political, or even religious commitment. The group of participants who ended up joining the pilgrimage was not the group that either Bentwich or Herzl had envisioned. While Bentwich had hoped for Maccabeans and Anglo Jewish intellectuals who had already shown interest and engagement in “the Palestinian cause,” Herzl anticipated a specifically qualified group of scientific-minded and intellectual English Jews, who would be able to conduct a professional inquiry of the land. However, only three Maccabean members signed up, and of those, only two, including Bentwich himself, were of some considerate standing in the Anglo Jewish community (though not in the realm of science and exploration), most notably the writer and public intellectual Israel Zangwill. Quickly, Bentwich was

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forced to send out invitations to Jews and Jewish communities around the world. Twenty-one pilgrims ended up going: there were 16 men and 5 women, 4 of the pilgrims were Americans and 1 was Danish, the rest were British, 1 was Christian, and 1 was brought along as a maid.19 The open invitation meant that the participants came with a plethora of motivations, expectations, and intentions. In fact, it was rather unknown and uncoordinated what these different participants’ objectives were. As the American pilgrim Fannie Muhr noted in her reminiscence of the tour, “Some went from religious enthusiasm, some to look into the Zion colonies, and some, like ourselves, from love of travel.”20 However, the lack of explicit agreement about the purpose of the tour did not stop the pilgrims from enjoying themselves and one another’s company. More to the point, it intensified the need for many of the travellers to make sense of what it meant to travel to Palestine as a (predominantly) Jewish group. In fact, the lack of alignment meant both recurrent meetings along the tour, during which the pilgrims discussed the very purpose of the trip, and open, individual reflection about the experiences along the way and the meanings these evoked for a modern, Jewish pilgrimage. Most of the pilgrims recounted, both during and after the trip, that they felt rapid and joyful sensations as travellers belonging to a special kind of group. Fannie Muhr vividly depicted these experiences of oneness and kindness among the pilgrims: So that small, incongruous party was made up of so many sorts, and yet, in the few weeks that we shared all with each other, there was nothing but kindness on the part of one and all—a severe test on the tempers of people. . . . The six days on the beautiful blue Mediterranean, with its varied shores of Italy and Sardinia, were a most delightful part of our journey. We were all well acquainted by this time, having been together more in those days than years of ordinary life. So ended those quiet, peaceful, happy times.21 The Danish participant, Louis Frænkel, was even more enthusiastic about what he saw as tying the group together and how it made him feel: It is a pleasure to be part of this trip, where everyone, men and women, are such good friends. It would have been impossible to gather 20 people from Denmark on a tour like this without some of them shirking and eating treife at another table [or] smoking on Schabbes. . . . One does not have room for homesickness; one is completely at home here, and that in the middle of the sea, where we see no living creatures other than ourselves.22 In Frænkel’s account, the mutual Jewish recognition and shared practices made the travellers’ ties stand out for him. He described it as a home

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away from home that was even more fulfilling than his Danish Jewish community. Muhr’s depiction underscores the experiences of the group coming together as an “incongruous party [that] was made up of so many sorts” that so quickly merged as a happy and peaceful community. Thus, internal differences were recognized but also immediately subordinated to the strong sense of Jewish belonging and community that emerged throughout their travels. In the anthropological literature on pilgrimage, this sensation is often described as “communitas”: the shared and tedious journey together supposedly creates unique, equalizing bonds that evade hierarchical social, economic, and political structures, which normally divide and separate people in everyday life.23 For anthropologist Victor Turner, the experience of communitas is a central part of the transforming effects of pilgrimage—a liminal or antistructural space in which pilgrims can review and reflect from a distance on (at least temporarily) the prevailing social and cultural values and practices at home. Rather than speculating on the future configurations of Jewish nationhood or the blueprint of the political framework of the Jewish state that the pilgrimage supposedly had set out to examine, the pilgrims took pleasure in experiencing a strong sense of immediate Jewish community. As the last line in the foregoing Muhr citation suggests, the harmony was challenged when the party had to disembark from their ship. She emphasized this point when they finally reached the harbor of Jaffa and had to leave behind the ship that had carried them from Marseilles: “It was like a home-coming, so endeared had those days on the good ship become.” Although the sensation of homecoming arose at the sight of Palestine, Muhr wrote, the sense of home grew from her attachment to the other travellers on board the ship, and to the ship itself. Similarly, the poetic passenger Frænkel wrote to his mother about the joys on the sea, There was some king who said that if he had not been king at the place where he was, he would have liked to be something else, and thus I say that had I not been a doctor in Copenhagen, I would have liked to be a servant on a Mediterranean boat, so sweet I find life here between heaven and earth where you spit in the water if you like and leave the cigars burning.24 Both pilgrims recounted, among other things, that they felt something precious and meaningful towards life on board the boat in particular, and towards travel in general. While Muhr described it as a homecoming that consisted of more generic feelings of kindness and community, Frænkel specified this feeling as a particular experience of Jewish homecoming. Both travellers not only omitted Palestine from their accounts but also depicted the sensation specifically as a homecoming that took place in motion and unrelated to territory.25

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These expressions of Jewish happiness and communitas through moving experiences demonstrate that there was a Jewish space unrelated to geopolitical and nation-state belonging. Within this space, the people could acknowledge Jewish similarities and affinities across nation-state borders. Celebrating and cherishing such transnational or stateless experiences of Jewishness ran noticeably counter to more than a century of Jewish emancipatory struggles for inclusion into the emerging European nation-states and national populations.26 The travel to Palestine, however, did more than elicit a new sense of boundless Jewish communitas among the pilgrims; it also manifested a clear expectation that this community was inevitably connected to Western accommodation and comfort.

Jewish Western Movement We have passed Dijon and Lyon in the darkness of the night; it continues with a tremendous pace; it is the night-express train . . . that only contains 1st class wagons. . . . One puts on his tefillin in the train and conducts his morning prayers here, so upon arrival in Marseille at 9.25 one can immediately go out and see the city.27

Noting these observations in his diary, Louis Frænkel wove together the experiences of the “tremendous pace” at which the night-express covered far distances, the fact that he could enjoy the comforts of a first-class carriage, and the efficiency of conducting one’s morning prayer among a group of Jews—a minyan—so that one was ready to experience new adventures the moment the train stopped. His account represents the common entanglement between first-class class comfort and opportunities, on the one hand, and Jewish practice and community, on the other, which appears in the pilgrims’ descriptions not merely as a background feature of more important aims. Rather, it seemed crucial for the pilgrims to link expressions and impressions of Western modernity with bourgeois Jewish sites, places, and people. This moving form of Jewishness, therefore, became a social unit in its own right and correlated with Western traits, as we shall see. Frænkel’s writings are full of descriptions that tie together the feeling of moving as a Jew and taking part in modern comfort, beauty, leisure, and efficiency. From the first arrival in Paris, he noted to himself, Lunch and Dinner served ‫שׁר‬ ֵ ‫[ ָ ּכ‬kosher] in the Hotel. Between these two meals visited Musée de Cluny as cicerone for part of the group. Nota bene, the Jewish collection of the Museum. Was as representative with a few others at Baron Eduard Rothschild to consult with him about his colonies and colonization plans in Palestine. He is a man around 40 years old, speaks beautifully English, is exceptionally

38

Maja Gildin Zuckerman amiable, entertained himself with us for 3 quarters of an hour, mentioned new construction of tobacco and tea plantations in Palestine. A visit afterwards in Luxembourg was a matchless joy. . . . Visit to Collins Magazine . . . where I ordered different items.28

As seen in this diary entry, the visit at Baron Rothschild and the discussion of Palestine merged seamlessly with Parisian museum excursions and shopping experiences. Frænkel did not linger over Rothschild’s visions for Palestine, but instead paid heed to the man’s civil, bourgeois character. Thus, from the very first stop of the pilgrimage in Paris, the entwinement of Jewishness and bourgeois modernity stood out as noteworthy, enjoyable, and important. While Frænkel paid attention to how Jewish elements were woven into the travel as a whole, Fannie Muhr repeatedly observed and depicted the social sceneries that the pilgrims entered and experienced. Like Frænkel, Muhr praised those settings that lived up to or exceeded what she considered to be a modern bourgeois standard. From the visit at Baron Menaces in Alexandria and afterward in Cairo, Muhr happily described the surprising encounter of luxury: The dining hall, on the other side of this great hall, with its beautiful outlook on a luxurious garden, was just as spacious, with all its curious and gorgeous hangings. The table was a mass of flowers: the numberless Turks that served the sumptuous meal were all in white attire. At least ten or twelve courses of Oriental and modern dishes were served, with [t]he most delicious wines.29 And on Thomas Cook’s choice of an apposite “pilgrimage hotel” in Cairo, Muhr concluded, Shepherd’s Hotel, as modern as any of our own hotels, gave us the much needed rest. After so full and laborious a day, no matter how charming, and how much the soul enjoys, yet our physical life has its demands, and we retired early. The next day we said good-bye to beautiful and luxurious Cairo.30 While the former quotation illustrated the joy of exceeding luxury, the latter testified to a sense that the pilgrims felt entitled to a certain level of comfort in order to be able to carry out their mission. It is clear from the organization, implementation, and experiences of the pilgrimage that they ascribed great importance to the tour being unquestionably modern and Western, and within this framework, also Jewish. This was a nexus that Bentwich had underlined already in his programmatic text in the itinerary—“we shall go as Western Jews”—and that Herzl had wished for in his repeated efforts to get the Maccabeans to become “the Jewish

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Society,” so that they would represent a rather imagined colonial exploration to Palestine. Although it may seem that aiming for the highest level of comfort would be a “natural” part of modern travel planning, the very phenomenon of Jews partaking in this travel as a Jewish group was, in fact, controversial. Moreover, this novelty was notably linked with the first Zionist, or Zionistrelated, Palestine trip. Herzl envisioned the establishment of a Jewish homeland as a cure for what he saw as Jews’ “abnormal” life as a supposedly homeless and rootless people, as “the wandering people.” With a state of their own, Herzl argued, Jews could finally be “planted” in their own soil and thus be molded into real, sedentary, national citizens.31 Jewish mobility, by this reasoning, could be seen as something pathological that Jews needed to be redeemed from—and certainly not something they were encouraged to do. However, the Maccabean Pilgrimage turned mobility into something that was experienced as both distinctly Jewish and Western. It is clear from the pilgrims’ accounts that during the voyage, they did not associate notions of “homelessness” and uprootedness with their form of travelling. While recognizing that they were travelling as Jews and as a Jewish group, they experienced their mobility as leisurely, modern, and, to the degree that they identified it with something Jewish, a new way of collectively being and acting Western Jewish. They drew a clear connection between travel and comfort and luxury, which allowed them to establish a new form of assertively Jewish travelling that could pass fluidly between Western and Jewish. However, as Muhr’s reminisced about the tour in the foregoing lines—“So ended those quiet, peaceful, happy times”—the positive experience of Jewish mobility and collectivity changed when the group arrived to Palestine. The encounter with Jewish Palestine challenged the whole experience of Jewish mobility linked to Western traits and comfort, since, on the one hand, it was expected to reflect innate ties to the group, and, on the other hand, it presented more questionable practices of comfortable travel.

Palestine and the End of Unity The tour had until that point united these individual pilgrims, instilling a sense of Jewish collectivity that, in many aspects, was compatible with Herzl’s scheme of Jewish nationhood. This included a sense of Jewish communitas, through which internal Jewish differences, such as geographical, religious, and political distinctions, were pushed into the background, and unbound Jewish solidarity and unity were brought into the foreground. The string of differences among them, however, was closely linked to Western-identified settings and affordances. Their travels in Palestine, especially with their aim to discover and relate to the place as an ancient Jewish homeland, called this constellation into question. It forced upon the pilgrims either more expansive boundary work

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that connected Jewish-Western collectivity with experiences in Jewish Palestine, or an altogether new framework that potentially omitted Palestinian Jewish sedentary and political sentiments. Upon arriving in Palestine, Muhr noted her first impressions of the place: [T]he arrival on shore, where Eastern life in all its degrading aspects met us in reality—the walk through the town, amidst great filth, happened to be market day—the human beings, animals, vegetables, meats and fruits, formed one mass that, reviewing it from the balcony of the hotel, was entire conglomeration. The street is narrow, and, as I said, very filthy.32 Like European travellers before the Maccabean pilgrims and Zionist visitors afterwards, the arrival on the shore of Jaffa became associated with Orientalist terminology and representations described by the literature scholar Edward Said.33 Whereas Muhr had depicted Alexandria and Cairo’s “Eastern” character as interlaced with luxury and charm in the eyes of the travelling pilgrims, she saw no room for such indulgence upon her initial impression of Jaffa. Instead, she observed chaos, filthiness, and claustrophobic imageries as part of the town’s “Eastern nature,” which was contrasted with the pilgrims’ own sense of self and worth. In a lecture Frænkel held a year after the journey, he depicted his arrival to Jaffa in a similar language. The town with its filthy, narrow streets offers nothing interesting. We encounter the colorful life as everywhere in the Orient. Dirty Arab merchants, who sit lazily outside their stand and smoke their nargilah, veiled women whose typically ugly faces can be glimpsed through the dense, adorned with flowers, black veil and half naked kids who intrusively pursue you with the cry Bachschich Bachschich, while they stretched their thin hands towards you and dilate their wise piercing eyes.34 The first encounter with Palestine was thus depicted as a meeting with a “backward” Arab country, from which the pilgrims chose to distance themselves. Two essentially different perspectives emerged among the pilgrims during their six days of travel in Palestine. One perspective expanded and uplifted their experiences of Jewish collectivity hitherto, so that they now included, if not centered around, a Jewish national home in Palestine. The other perspective came to see Palestine as unconnected to the Jewishness that they had experienced on the trip, so they considered it to be outside the framework of any future talk about the foundation of Western Jews.

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While most of the pilgrims shared this first impression of Jaffa, it nevertheless incited various processes of sensemaking among members of the group. In this “backwardness,” Frænkel and Bentwich quickly came to see the backdrop for the changes that “modern Jews” had already begun making and needed to expand. They perceived a significant contrast between Eastern deprivation and Western Jewish modernity and order—a dichotomy that was firmly emphasized in Frænkel’s description of the new Jewish colonies in Palestine, particularly in the very feelings it aroused in the Western Jewish traveller. Upon his arrival at Mikveh Israel, the Jewish agricultural school that was founded in 1870, Frænkel wrote, “As we approach it the road is getting better and better and now we are rolling through their widespread wine yards, which on both sides are enclosed with big cactus bushes.”35 The depiction of the following visit to the colony of Rishon Lezion underscored Frænkel’s dichotomy between the order of the Jewish colonies, on the one hand, and the Eastern surroundings and decay, on the other: As we drive away from Mikveh Israel the road worsens and worsens until we approach the proximity of the colony [of Rishon Lezion], where we once again have a good road to drive on. The drive goes through great moors, only seldom exists a cultivated lot, only seldom a tree is seen. Differently as soon as we get in the proximity of the colony, where green fields and well-tended gardens spread widely around the pretty little gathering of houses, which comprises the colony.36 While these descriptions were written almost a year after the return to Copenhagen and presented to an audience who, for the most part, had never travelled to the Middle East, Frænkel still chose to couple the representation of Jewish order and Eastern decay with the embodied feelings of moving across this topography. In other words, he offered them insights into how it felt to be moving across Jewish modernity and Eastern decline respectively. Thus, Frænkel differentiated between various forms of mobility—a Western Jewish course that entailed orderly, smooth, and pleasing movement and views, and an Eastern course that meant a bumpy, uncultivated journey across unnamed territory. Additionally, Bentwich took great pains to describe the beauty and opportunities of the land, despite its “Eastern character,” when he outlined the findings of the pilgrims in JC upon his return to London: They [the pilgrims] found the land a garden, their path for days edged by a very garland of flowers.  .  . . It was indeed a country which might be said to “flow with milk and honey,” and the scenery through which they passed had every variety of charm in it, from the imposing grandeur of the Alps to the softness and diversity of our

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Maja Gildin Zuckerman English lakes. . . . Jerusalem—the much maligned—was still a beautiful city; a Eastern city, no doubt, and suffering, as all Eastern cities do, from internal bad management, or a want of any management at all.37

Though Bentwich here acknowledged that the country was not only “milk and honey,” he used this characterization as an opportunity to insert the need for Western management and instructions (i.e., colonization). It had all the basic potentials, but it needed “the proper structures.” He defined this as “Western management,” but also as the development of Jewish autonomy in the country: The people—our people in all events—were in the towns clamouring, not for money, but for work or instruction. . . . In the country parts they constituted the only sights of progress and hope with their wonderful adaption to the native life . . . with their development of habits of independence, . . . and, above all, with their growing pride in the use of the mother tongue, Hebrew.38 Thus, Bentwich promoted a form of synergy between Western colonization and Jewish autonomy as the way forward for Palestine and for Jewish pride. Again, it seemed essential to constantly link any current and potential Jewish nationhood with what Bentwich considered to be Western practices and expressions. Among the travellers, Frænkel most emphatically believed that the experiences of Jewish homecoming as mobility and unboundedness could be expanded to include (and not contrasted with) experiences of Palestine. He articulated these ideas on his second day in the country, when he wrote to his mother, Even though we have not yet seen milk and honey flow, I don’t believe that I have ever seen such a fertile country nor have been in such a lovely climate. You feel that you belong here and I can almost compare us with flowers that have been standing in a pot but now are planted where they were taken from. The comparison is not mine but it is pretty and it is true.39 Applying the most nationalist figurative expressions—the botanic language of being rooted (or uprooted) in one’s own intrinsic soil and thus feeling an organic, natural link between territory, peoplehood, and belonging—Frænkel evidently experienced Palestine as truly connected with his and the group’s sense of being Jewish.40 He saw the pilgrims as flowers being replanted in their original soil of Palestine. Of all the pilgrims, Bentwich and Frænkel most explicitly connected their experiences to and in Palestine with a newfound belief in Zionism.

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Upon their return to Europe, they became active members of the Zionist movement, though they remained more engaged as founders of and leaders in their regional branches—the British Zionist Federation (established 1899) and Dansk Zionistforening (established 1903)—than in the ZO.41 In these local organizations, they both advocated for Jewish unity and solidarity framed in Western Jewish values; they also promoted support for Jewish autonomy in Palestine. Personally, they were more hesitant to move to Palestine themselves: Frænkel continued living in Denmark, while visiting Palestine again on a few occasions, most notably at the opening ceremony of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1925. Bentwich finally decided to resettle in Palestine in 1929, when most of his 11 children had already moved there. However, even though relocating to Palestine seemed like an extremely difficult decision for these men to make, the Zionist position that grew from the tour remained a benchmark in their lives.42

Hopelessly Sad or Sadly Hopeless? Experiencing Palestine did not, however, turn everyone into committed Zionists. For most of the other pilgrims, the destination of Palestine evoked disgust, doubt, and a fundamental disbelief in Herzl’s idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. For some of these pilgrims, Palestine came to represent a sharp contrast to the joy of Western Jewish mobility that they had experienced so far. One particularly vocal critic became the British Jewish writer Samuel Levy Bensusan, who due to illness had been forced to leave the group on the last part of the journey from Marseilles to London.43 Publishing his impressions to JC already on May 14, 1897, under the heading “A Disillusioned Pilgrim,” he rejected any positive association between contemporary Palestine and a modern Jewish homeland: The people who pray for the return to Jerusalem, who hope that Israel may again “become a nation”, who are enthusiastic about the city of our forefathers, would do well to spend a short time in the town. . . . None the less, to the man of ordinary intelligence and education, whose reverence and respect for what is sacred are tempered by experience of the facts of life, Jerusalem, through the medium of a first impression, is a city hopelessly sad, and sadly hopeless, and though there is a perceptible quiver of new life in the younger generation, it is as yet too faint to justify an anticipation of the return of ancient glories. Legitimizing his views on Palestine and Jewish nationhood through the same methods as Frænkel and Bentwich—namely, “the medium of a first impression”—Bensusan insisted that any idea and enthusiasm for

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Jewish statehood in Palestine would fizzle out when confronted with the lived reality of the region. Bensusan asserted that spending time in Palestine should fill any “man of ordinary intelligence and education” with hopelessness vis-à-vis its political and social future. In stark contrast to the views of some other pilgrims, Bensusan wrote, “[W]hile Turkish rule continues, while the Chassidim flourish, while work is at a discount, and pious laziness is highly esteemed, the truth is difficult to seek, and almost impossible to find.”44 Conflating Jewish and non-Jewish components alike, Bensusan did not identify any Western Jewish benchmarks to which he could or would relate. If there were some kind of “Jewish truth” or essence located in the country, Bensusan deemed it “almost impossible to find.” Travelling to Palestine, then, moved him to renounce any association he felt with Jewish collectivity or with the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. He thus carved out his anti-Zionist position, though he did not repudiate the strong feelings of community and solidarity that he had experienced along the way. On their way back to Europe, Bensusan, together with the rest of the group, signed earnest thank-you letters to the leading figures of the tour—namely, Bentwich and Frænkel—acknowledging the deep and meaningful ties that they had experienced along the way.45 The most complex account of how the pilgrims related to Palestine and to the larger question of Jewish nationhood came from Anglo Jewish author and intellectual Israel Zangwill. He was the most famous and influential person among the pilgrims within both the Anglo American cultural scene and Jewish politics writ large.46 Having become a literary sensation with the novel Children of the Ghetto in 1892, Zangwill was a well-known and respected figure in the English and English Jewish fin de siècle intellectual milieu. In fact, as Mari-Jane Rochelson also points out, the French Jewish writer and Zionist advocate Max Nordau initially connected Herzl with Zangwill as the gatekeeper of Anglo Jewry in 1895. Zangwill, in turn, introduced Herzl to the Maccabean Club.47 Zangwill’s personal affiliation with Herzl notwithstanding, following the tour, Zangwill provided the English Jewish public with an account of his observations on Palestine, which left more questions than answers about the future of Jewish nationhood in Palestine. To begin with, Zangwill rejected outright Bentwich and Frænkel’s overly positive accounts of the country; instead, he depicted it as “a ruined country, in which one rode for hours amid rocks and stones that made him feel himself in the presence of the rib of mother earth.”48 Palestine was, from Zangwill’s perspective, certainly not the beautiful country teeming with opportunities that Frænkel and Bentwich had described. Yet, unlike Bensusan and his sweeping criticism of any Western Jewish affiliation with Palestine, Zangwill described how he identified with some of the people and places that he encountered. In this way, he painted a picture of a Jewish collectivity that included—though did not center

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around—a Jewish Palestine. A case in point was Zangwill’s double take on Jerusalem. He wrote that it “is by the abuses wrought in the names of all of them [the three greatest religions of the world], the unholiest city under the sun.”49 However, on a more positive note, he also stated that “Jerusalem exhibited fascinating types of both kinds of Dreamers, those who dream with their eyes shut, and those who dream with their eyes open.” While describing and categorizing these people, Zangwill, for better or worse, tried to understand and relate to them not merely as a traveller looking at “others,” but as someone who discovers new parts of himself—as an exercise in autoethnography, a phenomenon that Michael Harbsmeier describes in his chapter on Jewish travel writing. Zangwill’s sense of relation to, yet distance from, Jewish Palestine was clearly articulated when he began to evaluate the political potential of the country under Herzl’s visions. Upon returning to London, Zangwill concluded, The Jews had no national unity, for they were patriots in their different countries. They had ceased to have any religious unity. The only unity was psychological, and that was shown to the bond of sympathy between the pilgrims coming from different lands and having different ideas. . . . There were only two possibilities for Judaism, one was a spiritual force, the other as a political and perhaps a third, a combination of the two. The idea of a political unity was more practical than that of religious unity.50 Zangwill pointed to several things here: Firstly, the tour had not been able to convince him of the existence of any national collective that supposedly tied Jews together in unity. Secondly, he assessed that the religious ties that could be said to unify Jews had also withered away. He discovered that among his fellow travellers what he called a “psychological” unity showed itself as “the bond of sympathy between the pilgrims coming from different lands and having different ideas.” This bond was, from Zangwill’s perspective, neither national nor religious, but some sense of boundless solidarity—a psychological disposition—that tied Jews together despite geographical and ideological differences. Zangwill rationalized that the most viable option for the survival of a Jewish collectivity, when both nationality and religion seemed impotent as unifying forces, was the formation of “political unity” among Jews. The pilgrimage to and in Palestine had thus made two different concerns clear for Zangwill, both of which would become paramount for his political work onwards: firstly, the journey in Palestine had shown him that the country was largely incompatible with Western Jewish life and standards, at least as a place for residence. It was composed of something undeniably Jewish that Zangwill could relate to, but not celebrate as a political ideal. Secondly, the relationship between the pilgrims

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on the journey had demonstrated for him that a political community could be created among Jews, though not necessarily, if at all, centered in Palestine. Both insights allowed him to differentiate between political, national, and territorial configurations and sentiments. Zangwill did join the Zionist movement and participate in the founding congress of the organization in August 1897. However, when Britain tentatively offered ZO land in East Africa, Zangwill sided with Herzl in favor of accepting the offer, and when the majority of the organization rejected this policy, Zangwill decided to form the Jewish Territorial Organization (JTO) in 1905. JTO aspired to obtain land for Jewish settlement and to create an autonomous Jewish homeland where it was possible—not excluding Palestine but also not focusing on it.51 Zangwill’s lifelong pursuit of these aims was consistent with his initial experiences in and of Palestine as well as Jewish travelling. He insisted on enacting the differences that he experienced “on the ground” during his Jewish travels. These enactments would, in collaboration with other actors, events, and networks, turn the subtler differences within Jewish nationalism into more clear-cut boundaries between Zionism and Territorialism, state-centered and counter-state nationalism—boundary work that would have ramifications far beyond the Maccabean pilgrims.52

Conclusion: Developing Political Distinctions While in time Zionism, anti-Zionism, and Territorialism developed into clearly distinctive positions that one could hold without ever setting foot in Palestine, these divides were obviously not present around the turn of the century, as this chapter has shown. In order for people to become Zionist or anti-Zionist (or something in between), differences first had to be seen and experienced. Their initial stances were not ideologically rooted, stemming from party politics, opinion pieces, or writings. From the outset, most of the pilgrims were optimistic about the idea of exploring the possibilities of Jewish Palestine, though hesitant about the political framing that Herzl suggested. However, it was precisely the experiences in Palestine that clarified for the pilgrims a series of differences that Zionist and non-Zionist positions would entail. The variation among the pilgrims’ accounts showed that encountering the country as a Jewish group initiated diverging processes of boundary work, rather than bringing them together around a sense of shared Jewishness. For some, the experience of a mobile Jewish collectivity was strengthened when they arrived in Palestine, as they were able to root their sense of Jewish belonging in the national imageries of the land. Moreover, for these pilgrims it bolstered their perception of the intrinsic connection between Westernness and Jewishness, since it was through this lens that they related to the place and its future potential. For others, however, the meeting with Palestine turned their journey into a troublesome

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and alienating experience; it created dissonance between the “Western,” unbound Jewish collectivity that they had cherished along the way and the “Eastern” territorial Jewishness that they confronted and, ultimately, rejected as related to any visions for Jewish collectivity and the future. While Herzl imagined this pilgrimage as one of the first steps to fulfil his vision of Jewish nationhood, I propose that it was one of the first steps for a group of self-declared Western Jews to explore what new sets of distinctions, connections, and boundaries were needed to make this nationhood true, or alternatively, to reject it. Their travelling unravelled this supposedly nation-building project and initiated a comprehensive process of boundary work that, rather than “simply” connecting the travellers to their supposed homeland in Palestine, made many of them acutely aware of the undesirable aspects of Zionism. The tour, therefore, both made salient and forged opposing proto-boundaries for what Jewish collectivity, unity, and solidarity could and should amount to. As the pilgrims returned to Europe and began discussing the future of Palestine and the European Jewish people, these still-emerging boundaries quickly turned into more fortified positions about the truth claims of Herzl’s project of a Jewish state and the very perception of a unified Jewish national or ethnic belonging. Different political visions about Jewishness and Jewish collectivity thus began crystallizing through real experiences of Jewish homecoming as both an unbound trajectory and a territorial attachment. To members of the tour, the difference between an unterritorial or territorial connected Jewish collectivity appeared to be negligible; however, as they travelled to and explored Palestine, they gradually experienced the many “locally random sites of differences,” as Abbott reminds us. These differences extended to the wider Jewish civil sphere. Zionism under Herzl’s national scheme prior to the pilgrimage was an ambiguous idea that liberal British Jewish circles and beyond were merely willing to listen and relate to, but the returning pilgrims provided much more concrete and distinct analyses of what it meant to attach oneself to Zionism. Now, controversies over Palestine and ideas of Jewish territoriality overshadowed the other forms of Jewish collectivity that had also emerged during the tour, though the pilgrims did prove that it was possible to cultivate a sense of Jewish unity without territorial boundaries— through travel. The Maccabean Pilgrimage to Palestine—from its very inception to its implementation and the later reflections it evoked—instigated the processes of differentiation, or boundary work, that a group of Western Jews used to understand their journey to Palestine. They sought to make sense of themselves, the Jewish future, and its relation to Palestine and Jewish nationhood before their differences were spelled out in political movements and publicly antagonistic positions. To unpack these processes, as this chapter has done, we must understand that the actors in these events

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needed to continually validate and make sense of their political present, past, and future, especially as Herzl and Zionism proposed radically new claims about their national, cultural, and geographical belonging. While the journey as a whole dissolved some prior distinctions, such as geographical and religious differences among the Western Jews, it generated and illuminated others, such as Western vs. Eastern, Europe vs. Palestine, nationhood vs. territory, and Zionist and non-Zionists. Moreover, we should not treat the pilgrims’ unique reflections and personal takeaways as private and ephemeral residue of a journey abroad. Instead, I suggest that these accounts are part of a larger process through which the whole Zionist project was being assessed: in terms of both validity and possibilities. That is, while only a few of the pilgrims ended up becoming active members of ZO, many others discovered new forms of Jewish groupness that transcended their local community. At the same time, the pilgrimage also illuminated the potential existential and political ramifications of territorial and nation-state mobilization.

Notes 1. On Louis Frænkel, see Maja Gildin Zuckerman, “Palæstina tur/retur-dansk zionismes Palæstina-rødder,” Rambam 24, no. 1 (2015); Maja Gildin Zuckerman, “Broadening Home: The Emergence of Danish Zionism and Its Topological Expansion of Danish Jewishness, 1897–1914” (PhD diss., University of Southern Denmark, 2017), 54–9. On the pilgrimage and its larger implications, see Zuckerman, “Broadening Home,” 68–110; Stuart A. Cohen, “The First Anglo-Jewish Pilgrimage to Palestine: 1897,” Studies in Zionism 2, no. 1 (1981): 71–85. Journalist Ari Shavit also described the pilgrimage in his bestseller “My Promised Land.” He uses the tour that was organized by his great-grandfather, Herbert Bentwich, to frame a larger narrative about European Jews’ presumably single-minded attachment to the Land of Israel. My chapter should be read as a corrective of Shavit’s work, since my study shows that the participants were anything but single-minded about what they experienced along the journey, in Palestine, and in their subsequent reflections about and actions in relation to their “Palestine pilgrimage.” 2. Diary, 4 April 1897, file 19–20, Frænkel Papers, the Danish State Archives (Rigsarkivet; hereafter, RA). 3. On Herbert Bentwich and his lifelong and influential engagement with Zionism, see Margery and Norman Bentwich, Herbert Bentwich: The Pilgrim Father (Jerusalem: Hozaah Ivrith Limited, 1940); Theodor Herzl, Der Judenstaat (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1920 [1896]). 4. Theodor Herzl, “The Return to Palestine,” Jewish Chronicle, January 22, 1897. 5. As Dmitri Shumsky has recently argued, it is important to remember that neither Herzl nor many of the other early Zionist thinkers and leaders unequivocally related their quest for a Jewish state with nation-statism or necessarily with full Jewish sovereignty. Reading against the grain, Shumsky discloses among these men an array of ambiguous and ingenious thinking about future Jewish nationhood and political consolidation and rights. It is in this context that the pilgrims’ varied political responses should be seen. See Dmitry Shumsky, Beyond the Nation-State: The Zionist Political Imagination From Pinsker to Ben-Gurion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).

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6. I focus in this chapter specifically on the hitherto unstudied papers of the Danish participant, Louis Frænkel, and the American participant, Fannie Muhr. Frænkel left behind two detailed travel diaries of the pilgrimage that begins in Copenhagen in March 30, 1897, and somewhat fizzles out as the group begins its horseback ride through Palestine. However, throughout his journey, including the days in Palestine and his return trip to Europe, he writes daily (sometimes twice a day) to his mother about his observations and thoughts. Moreover, Frænkel would continue to write and talk about the pilgrimage in various context, so I also include his meticulous manuscript notes from a lecture titled “A Palestine Journey,” which he held in the winter 1897. Upon her return to the US, Fannie Muhr published “Reminiscences of the Maccabean Pilgrimage: April 1897,” which in 37 pages depicts the pilgrimage and the pilgrims from her perspective. Besides these personal accounts, the tour was followed by the Jewish press in England, Germany, and Palestine, and I thus juxtapose and integrate the relevant newspaper articles and opinion pieces from 1897 with Frænkel’s and Muhr’s observations. 7. Andrew Abbott, “Things of Boundaries (Defining the Boundaries of Social Inquiry),” Social Research 62, no. 4 (1995): 868. 8. On the emergence of modern tourism to Palestine, see, for example, Doron Bar and Kobi Cohen-Hattab, “A New Kind of Pilgrimage: The Modern Tourist Pilgrim of Nineteenth Century and Early Twentieth Century Palestine,” Middle Eastern Studies 39, no. 2 (2003): 131–48. 9. Herzl, Der Judenstaat, 43. Herzl specifically writes, “Für die Reinheit der Idee und die Kraft Ihrer Ausführung sind Bürgschaften nötig, die sich nur in sogenannten “moralischen” oder “juristichen” Personen finden lassen.  .  . . Als moralische Person . . . stelle ich die Society of Jews auf.” (“For the purity of the idea and the power of its execution require guarantees that can only be found in so-called ‘moral’ or ‘legal’ bodies. As a moral body, I set up the Society of Jews.”) See Herzl, Der Judenstaat, 16. 10. See Theodor Herzl, Theodor Herzls Tagebücher, 1895–1904 (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1922–23), 313. On Herzl’s love for England and English values, see Steven Beller, “Herzl’s Anglophilia,” Austrian Studies-Edinburgh (1997): 54–61. 11. “Printed Rules and Regulations and Lists of Members,” 1893, AJ 17, 1/1, The Maccabean Papers, Southampton Library, UK. 12. Cohen, “The First,” 72–7. 13. Ibid., 75. Herzl himself also drew what he thought were some obvious connections based on the name, when he wrote in his diary, “Dieser Klub ist aber ganz einfach das ideale Organ, das ich brauche: Künstler, Schriftsteller, Geistesjuden aller Art bilden ihn. Der Klubname sagt eigentlich schon genug.” (“This club is quite plainly the ideal instrument for my needs: artisans, writers, Jewish intellectuals of all kinds compose its membership. The name of the club really tells enough.”) See Herzl, Tagebücher, 313. 14. Herzl was in 1896 still primarily known within both Jewish and non-Jewish intellectual circles as an acclaimed journalist and editor from the Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse. On this role and its relation to Zionism, see Edward Timms, “Ambassador Herzl and the Blueprint for a Modern State,” Austrian Studies-Edinburgh (1997): 12–26; Michael Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin de Siècle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism From Nordau to Jabotinsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 1–18. 15. Cohen, “The First,” 76–7; see also Nahum Sokolow, History of Zionism, 1600–1918, vol. 2 (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1919), 246–7. 16. The Maccabean Programme and Itinerary, p. 9, Bentwich Papers, file A100/2, Central Zionist Archives, Israel (hereafter, CZA). 17. JC, January 29, 1897.

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18. Similar assumptions were later deployed and organized as different types of “Israel Experience” trips—tours that are now a cornerstone in the mobilization of young diaspora Jews, especially in their attachment to Israel and Zionism. See Shaul Kelner, Tours That Bind: Diaspora, Pilgrimage, and Israeli Birthright Tourism (New York: NYU Press, 2012). 19. Some accounts, including the pilgrims’ own, set the number of participants to 20 since they omitted counting the maid as a pilgrim. Neither Muhr nor other pilgrims noted whether the maid was Jewish or Christian. The number of the participants varies somewhat in different accounts, since some also counted the ones joining the party along the way—for example, Baron Menache, who joined them from Alexandria to Beirut, and Heinrich Loewe, who travelled around with them in Palestine. 20. Fannie Muhr, Reminiscences of the Maccabean Pilgrimage: April 1897 (Philadelphia: Self-published, 1897), n.p. 21. Ibid. 22. Diary, 12 April 1897, file 19–20, Frænkel Papers, RA. 23. Victor Turner, “The Center Out There: Pilgrim’s Goal,” History of Religions 12 (1973): 191–230; Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives (New York: Columbia University, 1978); for a critique, see John Eade and Michael Sallnow, eds., Contesting the Sacred (London: Routledge, 1991). 24. Louis Frænkel to Bellamine Frænkel, letter, 4 May 1897, file 19–20, Frænkel Papers, RA. 25. Dmitry Shumsky identifies a similar pattern in his analysis of Herzl’s book Altneuland (1902), where he writes, “Zion was thus established on the journey, or more precisely—as the journey, the very journey from Europe to Palestine, which need not even reach its destination.” Moreover, he argues that the Promised Land of Herzl’s novel could be seen as “mobile floating Zion.” See Shumsky, “‘This Ship Is Zion!’: Travel, Tourism, and Cultural Zionism in Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland,” Jewish Quarterly Review 104, no. 2 (2014): 478. 26. On the British Jewish emancipation struggles, see, for example, David Feldman, Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture, 1840– 1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). 27. Diary, 8 April 1897, file 19–20, Frænkel Papers, RA. 28. Diary, 7 April 1897, file 19–20, Frænkel Papers, RA. 29. Muhr, Reminiscences, n.p. 30. Ibid. 31. See, for example, Todd Presner, Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and The Politics of Regeneration (New York: Routledge, 2007), 155–86. 32. Muhr, Reminiscences, n.p. 33. Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Representations of the Orient (New York: Pantheon, 1978); on Jewish Orientalism, see Ivan D. Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar, eds., Orientalism and the Jews (Lebanon, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005); Michael Berkowitz, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry Before the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 34. Lecture “En Palæstina-rejse,” first written winter 1897, later revised, March 8, 1908, file 19–20, Frænkel Papers, RA, 13. 35. Ibid., 21. 36. Ibid., 26. 37. “Palestine Pilgrims on Their Pilgrimage,” The Jewish Chronicle, June 4, 1897. 38. Ibid. 39. Louis Frænkel to Bellamine Frænkel, letter, 16 April 1897, file 19–20, Frænkel Papers, RA.

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40. Liisa Malkki, “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity Among Scholars and Refugees,” Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1 (1992): 24–44. 41. On the emergence of English Zionism, see Cohen, Stuart, “English Zionists”; on early Danish Zionism and the role of Frænkel in this movement, see Zuckerman, “Broadening Home”. 42. On Bentwich’s life, see Bentwich, Margery, and Norman Bentwich, Herbert Bentwich: The Pilgrim Father (Jerusalem: Hozaah Ivrith Limited, 1940). 43. See, for example, Muhr’s note on this incident, Reminiscences, n.p. 44. Samuel Levy Bensusan, “A Disillusioned Pilgrim,” Jewish Chronicle, May 14, 1897. 45. A signed thank-you letter (including Bensusan’s signature) addressed to Doctor Frænkel, May 11, 1897, on board the ship Orinoque, Bentwich Papers, A100/2/1, CZA. 46. On Zangwill’s celebrity within both the Jewish and non-Jewish anglophone world, see Meri-Jane Rochelson, A Jew in the Public Arena: The Career of Israel Zangwill (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010). 47. Ibid., 77. 48. “Palestine Pilgrims on Their Pilgrimage,” The Jewish Chronicle, June 4, 1897. 49. Ibid. This part of the text was originally published in Hebrew in the Palestinian Jewish newspaper Ha-Zvi on May 5, 1897. 50. Ibid. 51. Rochelson, A Jew in the Public Arena, 151–70. On the history of the territorial movement, see Laura Almagor, “Forgotten Alternatives. Jewish Territorialism as a Movement of Political Action and Ideology, 1905–1965” (PhD diss., Florence: European University Institute, 2015). 52. See Noam Pianko, Zionism and the Roads Not Taken: Rawidowicz, Kaplan, Kohn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).

Bibliography Archives Bentwich Papers, Central Zionist Archives, Israel. Frænkel Papers, the Danish State Archives, Denmark. The Maccabean Papers, Southampton Library, United Kingdom.

Literature Abbott, Andrew. “Things of Boundaries (Defining the Boundaries of Social Inquiry).” Social Research 62, no. 4 (1995). Almagor, Laura. “Forgotten Alternatives. Jewish Territorialism as a Movement of Political Action and Ideology, 1905–1965.” PhD diss., European University Institute, Florence, 2015. Bar, Doron, and Kobi Cohen-Hattab. “A New Kind of Pilgrimage: The Modern Tourist Pilgrim of Nineteenth Century and Early Twentieth Century Palestine.” Middle Eastern Studies 39, no. 2 (2003): 131–48. Beller, Steven. “Herzl’s Anglophilia.” Austrian Studies-Edinburgh (1997): 54–61. Bentwich, Margery, and Norman Bentwich. Herbert Bentwich: The Pilgrim Father. Jerusalem: Hozaah Ivrith Limited, 1940.

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Berkowitz, Michael. Zionist Culture and West European Jewry Before the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Cohen, Stuart A. English Zionists and British Jews. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. Cohen, Stuart A. “The First Anglo-Jewish Pilgrimage to Palestine: 1897.” Studies in Zionism 2, no. 1 (1981): 71–85. Eade, John, and Michael Sallnow, eds. Contesting the Sacred. London: Routledge, 1991. Feldman, David. Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture, 1840–1914. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Herzl, Theodor. Der Judenstaat. Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1920 (1896). Herzl, Theodor. Theodor Herzls Tagebücher, 1895–1904. Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1922–23. Kalmar, Ivan D., and Derek J. Penslar, eds. Orientalism and the Jews. Lebanon, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005. Kelner, Shaul. Tours That Bind: Diaspora, Pilgrimage, and Israeli Birthright Tourism. New York: New York University Press, 2012. Loeffler, James. “‘The Famous Trinity of 1917:’ Zionist Internationalism in Historical Perspective.” Simon-Dubnow-Institut Jahrbuch 15 (2016): 211–238. Malkki, Liisa. “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity Among Scholars and Refugees.” Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1 (1992): 24–44. Muhr, Fannie. Reminiscences of the Maccabean Pilgrimage: April 1897. Philadelphia: Self-Published, 1897. Myers, David. “Rethinking Sovereignty and Autonomy: New Currents in the History of Jewish Nationalism.” Transversal: Journal for Jewish Studies 13 (2015): 44–51. Pianko, Noam. Zionism and the Roads Not Taken: Rawidowicz, Kaplan, Kohn. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010. Presner, Todd. Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration. New York: Routledge, 2007. Rochelson, Meri-Jane. A Jew in the Public Arena: The Career of Israel Zangwill. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010. Said, Edward. Orientalism: Western Representations of the Orient. New York: Pantheon, 1978. Shumsky, Dmitry. Beyond the Nation-State: The Zionist Political Imagination From Pinsker to Ben-Gurion. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. Shumsky, Dmitry. “‘This Ship Is Zion!’: Travel, Tourism, and Cultural Zionism in Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland.” Jewish Quarterly Review 104 (2014): 471–93. Shumsky, Dmitry. “Tzionut u-medinat le’om: ha’arakhah mi-hadash [Zionism and the National State: A Reevaluation].” Zion 77 (2012): 223–54. Sokolow, Nahum. History of Zionism, 1600–1918, vol. 2. London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1919. Stanislawski, Michael. Zionism and the Fin de Siècle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism From Nordau to Jabotinsky. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Timms, Edward. “Ambassador Herzl and the Blueprint for a Modern State.” Austrian Studies Edinburg (1997): 12–26.

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Turner, Victor. “The Center Out There: Pilgrim’s Goal.” History of Religions 12 (1973): 191–230. Turner, Victor, and Edith Turner. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives. New York: Columbia University, 1978. Zuckerman, Maja Gildin. “Broadening Home: The Emergence of Danish Zionism and Its Topological Expansion of Danish Jewishness, 1897–1914.” PhD diss., University of Southern Denmark, 2017. Zuckerman, Maja Gildin. “Palæstina tur/retur—dansk zionismes Palæstina-rødder.” Rambam 24, no. 1 (2015).

3

The Death of the Renegade On Jewish Experience in the Twentieth Century Mirjam Zadoff

In October 1964, Hannah Arendt was asked a probing question during a now famous interview on West German television: To what extent, in your opinion, is philosophical knowledge based on an individual’s personal experience? She replied, “I don’t think there’s any mental process possible without personal experience. All thinking is re-flection, postpondering about something.”1 Elsewhere, Arendt argued that historical experience is ultimately dependent on the perspectives of the present. In her eyes, history was a process determined, above all, by discontinuity and contingency. To find meaning in what is experienced, to read and interpret history, is to reflect—through the present lens—on the astonishment and unease called forth by unpredictable events. Even more, Arendt stressed, such events often become part of historical recollection based upon political decisions that shape individual and collective memory. In her view, efforts to discern some sense of history were always driven at their core by an attempt to align one’s life with what was past, to draft a future, and to position one’s own identity within the world.2 During the twentieth century, such processes of “appropriating the world” (Weltaneignung) emerged as a major challenge, which Arendt, a thinker in exile, described as “experience with the presence of absence.”3 At the same time, that century became an era of establishing new blueprints for society and for life—a time of revolutions, both political and personal. Arendt termed the new beginning every birth brings into the world “natality,” a term that also pointed to the capacity of human beings to live in pluralistic societies: to be able to begin, to rethink, to reinvent themselves, to be unpredictable.4 In his reflections on “historical experience,” the Dutch theorist and philosopher of history Frank R. Ankersmit differentiates between two levels that, in my view, serve as parallel concepts with the ideas shared by Arendt, who was both a witness of her time and a historian. These levels of historical experience are, on the one hand, the subjective and individual experience of the past and, on the other, the idea of “a sensuous experience,” of traces of the past instead of the past itself.5 In line with the views of Johan Huizinga, Ankersmit argues that such experiences are

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comprehended as episodic, as “the ebriety of the moment,” as an “almost ekstatic moment” of the living encounter between the historian and the historical subject, as a kind of sensuous rendezvous with the past.6 What, then, is significant about Jewish experience in the twentieth century—and the experience of the “palpation,” or “feeling out,” of this past? Reflection on Jewish experience in the past century resembles, in many ways, a reflection on what is unpredictable. During no other era was it so difficult to define a “Jewish experience,” or to articulate the aspects of a life as Jewish; never before had the divergence between selfimage and external perception been so vast—a disjunct that complicated any person’s attempt to forge a viable identity. An exceptionally paradoxical phenomenon in this context was the fact that in the totalitarian regimes of National Socialism and Soviet Stalinism, a life lived as a non-Jew could culminate in death as a Jew. That fate might strike down all those who had assimilated to a national culture and who had felt themselves, totally and completely, to be Germans, Poles, French, Russians—or those who had committed themselves heart and soul to the internationalism of communist or socialist ideologies. Over a long period of disinterest in this particular history, the stories of Jewish communists left few traces in collective Jewish memory and in academic studies of Jewish history. Yet, it is precisely these life stories that can illuminate the complex relationship between perceptions of the self and the perceptions of others, shedding light on how these often contradictory perceptions influenced one another. How can such lives be remembered—lives that had positioned themselves willingly and consciously beyond the perimeters of Jewish spaces, and yet nonetheless existed on the boundaries of those spaces? To what cultural memory are they ascribed, and what place do they find in historical inquiry?

On the (Non)Jewish Character of Life and Death If a life meets a violent end as the result of antisemitic or anti-Jewish aggression, the death casts a darkening shadow on this life, imbuing it retroactively with a specific character. Long before the twentieth century, this applied in particular measure to the case of Jewish martyrdom. I would like to embark on a brief excursion in time and place, back to the distant spaces of Ashkenazi communities in early medieval Germany. During the Crusades, a time of severe existential danger for the Jews, the liturgy for the High Holidays adopted a new prayer, Unetanneh tokef, a piyyut, still recorded in the Ashkenazi machzor and recited today for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. This liturgical poem describes the idea that the future of every person is inscribed in the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in the Book of Life: who in the coming year will live, who will die, who will be born, who will fall ill, and who will have happiness and find satisfaction

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and good fortune.7 Historical research has proven that Unetanneh tokef is not a poem crafted in the High Middle Ages but a literary script most likely written sometime between the fourth and seventh centuries of the Common Era. Yet, in communicative Jewish memory, it is still closely associated with perhaps the most famous legend of the Jewish medieval period: the martyr Amnon of Mainz.8 Amnon of Mainz had fallen prey to the temptation of conversion to Christianity. However, he soon regretted his doubts about Judaism, and he decided not to appear on the appointed day for conversion. As punishment, the archbishop of Mainz ordered that his hands and feet be amputated. Amnon, seriously mutilated, asked to be brought to the synagogue for the Rosh Hashanah service, and there he interrupted the communal prayers at their highpoint, just before the Kedushah, in order to recite Unetanneh tokef. A few moments later, he passed away. Because he died as a martyr, it was forgotten that, for a brief moment, Amnon had considered renouncing his Jewish faith.9 The function of this legend was to justify the change in the liturgy. Yet, it also reflects the self-understanding of the Ashkenazi Jews at that time, when, as a result of the Crusades, they saw forced conversion as a daily existential threat. In the view of historian Ivan Marcus, Jewry at that juncture believed it was exposed to still another threat—namely, the magnetic power emanating from Roman Catholicism as a mature religious culture.10 In the legend of Amnon of Mainz, this temptation was juxtaposed with martyrdom, Kiddush Hashem, or death for the sanctification of the Jewish God. This death, as a Jewish death, would emerge as a powerful tool in the medieval struggle for the survival of Jewish identity, since it was able to accord to every life an indubitable Jewish character. Although the original text of this late classical prayer was not altered in any way, the poem took on a new meaning through the legend of Amnon of Mainz and his martyrdom. The piyyut remained unchanged for centuries, until 40 years ago when the Canadian singer and poet Leonard Cohen published a radically modernized and secularized version of the liturgical text: “Who by fire, who by water?”11 Not by accident, the Cohen album was entitled New Skin for the Old Ceremony. In his poem, Leonard Cohen quotes the central section of Unetanneh tokef, but he extends his inquiry beyond who would experience martyrdom by fire or water. The artist asks two new questions—who would die by powder, and who by his or her own hand— pointing to drug addiction and suicide as part of his own experiences in the rock scene of the 1970s. In this version of the liturgical poem, death is universalized and distanced from a Jewish space of experience. Thus, at the end of each verse, following his apocalyptic visions of death, Cohen inserts the ironic question, who was calling? Who, then, is phoning at the other end of the line, and what divine-messianic authority is the interlocutor in this dialogue? And in which divinity do listeners believe—listeners

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whose lives are at stake here, whose fates are being negotiated? Cohen’s question appears to be directed to all fragmented, modern identities, who are unable to give a clear answer. Indeed, Cohen describes himself as a practicing Buddhist, whose songs and poetry repeatedly take up Christian motifs, but who has never renounced his Jewish religion, and who also does not perceive the simultaneity of these experiences as a contradiction. The space of Jewish experience has never been as pluralistic as in the past 100 to 150 years. Never before has it been so difficult to discern what constitutes a “Jewish” life—or a Jewish death. And who is a Jew. Or who was. In 1958, David Ben-Gurion, the Israeli prime minister, asked the question, “Who is a Jew?” of 50 famous Jewish scholars across the world. On the tenth anniversary of the foundation of the State of Israel, the Knesset was debating the question with regard to the Law of Return: should children of Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers be given the right to immigrate to the Jewish state, even if from a traditional religious perspective they are not Jews? Since this question included religious, social, and philosophical considerations, a Knesset committee prevailed upon the prime minister for answers, and he sent out his inquiry to Jewish scholars within Israel and beyond.12 In August 1959, Gershom Scholem, during his morning reading of the daily paper Ha-boker, learned about the answers supplied by some of his colleagues—and he was unable to agree with them. That same day, the intellectual and scholar of Jewish mysticism sent a letter to the newspaper’s editor, stating that Ben-Gurion’s question about who is a Jew reminded him of Leopold Bloom, the hero in James Joyce’s Ulysses: But this hero is Jewish “only” in the eyes of the authors, in the eyes of his Irish surroundings and in the eyes of all the readers of the book (which includes the signatory to the present letter). Yet in the eyes of the Jewish scholars, he is not a Jew at all, since in the book it is stressed that the hero is the son of a Jew and a non-Jewish mother. He was educated totally as a goy and lived as such. Nonetheless, all regard him as a Jew.13 Several years ago, as a commentary on Scholem’s letter, the Israeli historian Joseph Gorny proposed an alternative scientific concept: the model of the “historical Jew.” Referring to Scholem’s observations of Leopold Bloom, Gorny suggested that anyone should be considered a “historical Jew” who, on the basis of collective experience and memory, could be ascribed to a Jewish space of experience.14 The twentieth century, as a “Jewish century,” to cite historian Yuri Slezkine,15 provides various exemplary biographies of “historical Jews,” whose lives can be understood as permanent religious, ethnic, or social boundary experiences— that is, existing on the boundaries of Jewish religion, ethnicity, or social

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relations. These lives are often too individual, fractured, or incoherent to be assigned beyond doubt to a given group. Nonetheless, they can be brought into close connection with certain spaces of experience and horizons of expectation, such as radical assimilation, political ideologies in the spheres of socialism and communism, interfaith relations, and conversion. Gorny’s definition of “historical Jews” refers to “boundary experiences” that extend beyond what the historian David Biale has termed “Jewish secularism.”16 In contrast with “secular Jews,” who in Biale’s view are in permanent debate with Jewish topics, “historical Jews” take on a far broader definition that includes both non-Jewish Jews and Jewish non-Jews: the first group as Jews who have left their Judaism behind, and in overstepping this boundary, recognize a central aspect of their own identity; the second as relatives-by-choice of Leopold Bloom, whose identity—be it defined by themselves or by others—has taken on Jewish aspects in the course of their lives. In what follows, I would like to introduce three biographies of “historical Jews,” individuals whose experiences demonstrate the liminal spaces of modern Judaism, and who have been accorded but a peripheral presence in Jewish memory and history to date: the literary critic Reuben Brainin, a supporter of Jewish colonization in Russia; the German communist politician Werner Scholem; and his non-Jewish wife, Emmy, who began her life as a revolutionary and ended it as a member of a Jewish community. Their lives document the exceptional and often tragic embrace of the extreme left by Jewish men and women, a phenomenon that has led to considerable irritation in Jewish memory and historiography. A closer look at their biographies not only introduces us to revolutionaries on the verges of Judaism but also reveals their ability to form various ties between essentially non-Jewish spaces and central areas of modern Jewish cultures—and to alternate between them.

On the Margins of Russia My first case study involves travelling to Crimea. In 1925, the Hebrew publicist, literary critic, and writer Reuben Brainin received an unexpected and most generous invitation: the New York Yiddish newspaper Der Tog, a liberal and Zionist daily, offered him and his wife, Masha a journey to Europe and Palestine. The paper would cover all their expenses in exchange for regularly dispatching articles and travel reports. Brainin, who was by then 63 years old, and who had made a name for himself as a Zionist orator and as vice president of the Zionist Organization of America, accepted the offer gladly.17 This trip, which lasted no less than 16 months, would turn out to be the most important of the many journeys Brainin had undertaken. It would change not only his entire life but also his afterlife.

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Reuben ben Mordechai Brainin was born in 1862 into a pious family in Lyady, south of Vitebsk. In the nineteenth century, this little town had been a center of Jewish life since Shneour Zalman, the founder of the Chabad movement, had chosen to settle there and maintain a Chassidic court. Brainin left these surroundings and his family at a very young age in order to become a Hebrew writer. At universities and rabbinical seminaries, he learned European languages, literature, and Hebrew, and within a short period of time he advanced to become one of the central protagonists of the Hebrew Enlightenment and early Zionism. As the editor of Hebrew newspapers and a close friend of Theodor Herzl, Ahad Haam, Nathan Birnbaum, Max Nordau, and Saul Tchernichovsky, he saw himself as a link in the chain between the Eastern and Western European Jewish worlds.18 Among his favorite activities was crafting written sketches of the local Jews in his travel diaries wherever he went. In fact, he filled 106 notebooks with these sketches, principally written in Hebrew.19 His reports, however, describe more than actual events and encounters; they also document his own inner search for a Jewish utopia—a solution to the so-called Jewish Problem. In that respect, his travelogues not only draw a map of Zionist Europe at the time but also depict the potential he saw in that moment for the future of the Jewish people. He asked himself the question of how this heterogeneous people, comprising intellectuals, proletarians, Yiddishists and Hebraists, Zionists, and pious believers, could ever fuse together into one Jewish nation.20 In 1909, Brainin lived in the US and Canada, from where he departed on his trip to Palestine and Europe. He was one of the first Zionist emissaries to receive permission to visit the Soviet Union, where he met with persecuted Zionists and promised them his help in their efforts to emigrate.21 Still, he harbored a negative view of those Jews who were committed to the idea of Soviet communism. This was all to change, however, when his journey took him to Crimea. There, Brainin inspected the recently launched Evsektsiia Jewish agricultural settlement project run by the Soviet state. He also visited the Jewish colonies of Mishmar and Tel Chai.22 Although he encountered friendly farmers who were not unhappy, he was disillusioned by what he saw, as his travelogues document: in many of the colonies, Judaism was dying, as people feared pogroms and were afraid to even speak Hebrew.23 At the same time, Brainin realized that these people would not be helped by the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. As he learned during his travels, many Russian Jews believed that the Zionist movement was profoundly indifferent to their fate. Rumors spread that the great Hebrew poet Chaim Nachman Bialik had said that if the Jews of Russia ceased to be Jewish, so be it.24 In fact, the situation of these nearly 3 million, mostly impoverished Russian Jews in the mid-1920s was desperate: Before the revolution, most of them had made their living from commerce, and now

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many had fallen into dire poverty. Emigration from Russia was difficult, just as immigration to the US had become, and getting to Palestine was not easy either. After long conversations with Russian Jewish officials, Brainin became convinced that it was of the utmost importance to first secure the physical survival of Russian Jewry; their cultural or religious Jewish renaissance would have to follow in a next step. Further, he held the view that Jews were safer in the countryside than in the cities, where aggressive anti-Jewish hostility prevailed.25 Agricultural colonization seemed to be the solution for making Russian Jews a productive part of the new society—a scheme that, particularly in the US, was considered a means for fighting antisemitism and traditional stereotypes of the “unproductive Jew.” It meant that, with the support of American and Canadian Jewish organizations, it was possible to find a solution for them on Soviet territory, in Crimea, Belarus, Ukraine, and later, in the autonomous Jewish region of Birobidzhan in the remotest eastern reaches of Soviet Russia.26 Consequently, Brainin kept his dismay over the conditions in the Jewish colonies to himself, becoming instead a vehement defender of the Soviet Jewish settlement projects. He did not regard this initiative as competition for Zionism and Jewish life in Palestine. Rather, he was convinced that both projects would prove mutually fruitful one for the other.27 When Brainin embarked upon his mission, he was well aware of the fact that most Zionists were opposed to Jewish colonization in Russia. He could barely have anticipated, however, how isolated and alone he would eventually become. In fact, the so-called Brainin Affair was splitting the Zionist movement: in the summer of 1929, Chaim Nachman Bialik, as the chairman of the Hebrew Writers’ Association, publicly criticized his efforts, calling his former colleague a “traitor and renegade” and denouncing his actions as “horrid and vile.”28 The dispute between Bialik and Brainin received a lot of public attention, and the case was brought in front of a court of honor under the auspices of the German Zionist organization, with the writer and lawyer Samy Groneman serving as a judge. The court ruled more or less in favor of Bialik, although it also criticized the great poet for having overstepped the boundaries of good taste. From that moment on, Reuben Brainin’s isolation from the Zionist world was sealed, and his support for Palestine slowly vanished to the benefit of his tireless work for Birobidzhan, as well as for the Yiddish language and culture.29 He did not live long enough, however, to see that his vision eventually failed: the Stalinist regime chose to execute the entire Jewish leadership of Birobidzhan, which consequently extinguished Yiddish culture in Soviet Russia. Driven by the same messianic belief as many Jewish communists, Brainin had considered the destructive sides of Bolshevism and Stalinism as mere obstacles on the way to a new and better world.

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When Reuben Brainin died in the late 1930s, his adherents mourned the passing of an ignored prophet and ostracized martyr of the Soviet Jewish utopia. By contrast, his death was scarcely noted in the wider Jewish world, although he had once been described as an interim king of Zionist culture.30 Although he had lived a life as a “Jewish Jew” in every respect, his experience in Crimea had led him into a space external from the Zionist mainstream of his time. Today, this formerly famous Zionist and Hebraist is largely forgotten. His commitment to the Russian settlement projects had resulted in his exclusion from the Zionist world, and thus from collective Jewish memory.

From the Reichstag to Buchenwald My second case study, from the annals of German history, leads us initially to the central spaces of the Weimar Republic—to the German Reichstag and the social hubs of the time, proletarian neighborhoods and revolutionary street culture. In the center stands Werner Scholem, one of the outstanding protagonists and activists of early German communism and the elder brother of the historian and scholar of religion Gershom Scholem. Werner Scholem was very much the black sheep of his family. At the age of 21, he spent an entire year in solitary confinement in prison, after he had demonstrated, in public and in uniform, against the First World War. As if that were not enough, after his release from prison he married a socialist, non-Jewish girl from Hanover, who, to the horror of his good bourgeois father, Arthur Scholem, had been born and raised outside of wedlock in a working-class household. Subsequently disinherited by his father, Werner felt forced to break off his studies and to begin a career as a party journalist, speaker, and politician in the Independent Socialist Party (USPD). Radical, ready for revolution, and, for the circumstances of the time, very young, he switched in 1921 to the German Communist Party, and rose rapidly through its ranks.31 As a communist member of the Prussian parliament and later of the German Reichstag, Werner Scholem was known for his sharp tongue. He was editor of the communist daily Die Rote Fahne, and his barbed pen was a source of some notoriety in the media. By 1924, he had become a household name in Berlin and across Germany, and he appeared in defamatory caricatures in the posters of his direct enemies, the National Socialists.32 In the same year, Joseph Goebbels mentioned his name in his diary together with Karl Marx, referring to them as two of the most important advocates of internationalism within the communist world.33 In the Reichstag, members of the right-wing parties regularly reviled Scholem as a “Jew-boy scoundrel” and an “insolent damn Jew.”34 They accused him of being an Eastern European Jew who had emigrated to Germany and was hence still alien on its soil. His Jewish-sounding family

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name—which, unlike other communists, he had not discarded—and, even more, his supposedly “typical Jewish facial features” were used to vilify and brand him as the ideal stereotype of the Jewish intellectual. He himself neither denied his Jewishness nor explicitly referred to it.35 Contrary to his communist—and therefore universalist—convictions, Scholem frequently saw it as his duty to take positions in plenary debates on Jewish issues and to offer internationalist solutions. In the infamous Ostjudendebatte of 1922 and 1923, the German parliament discussed the deportation of thousands of Eastern European Jews back to their homelands. Werner Scholem participated in the debate with a long speech, in which he pointed out the antisemitic rhetoric used by conservative politicians and powerfully defended the rights of Eastern European Jews in Germany.36 With irony and wit, he bluntly confronted the Reichstag with the many layers of antisemitism present in the sacred halls of the young republic. In doing so, he turned the parliament into a space of Jewish experience against the will of many. Werner Scholem’s steadfast and intrepid belief in a post-revolutionary Germany was intertwined with a conspicuous lack of awareness regarding his own highly exposed position. Already in 1919, his brother Gershom had pointed out to him that people were commenting on far more than the content of his regular evening political speeches and lectures. Gershom Scholem recalled in his memoirs, “Don’t fool yourself,” I told him, “they applaud your speech and probably they’ll elect you as a member of parliament at the next election (which was his ambition) but behind your back nothing will change.” I heard one of the workers say to his colleagues, “The Jew (not ‘our comrade’) makes a nice speech.”37 This image of the Jewish-bourgeois intellectual as an alien, a diametrical opposite to the leaders of the workers, who often stemmed from the metropolitan slums, clung obstinately to Werner Scholem. And so, he began to increasingly accustom himself to his role as an outsider. As a leftist opposition dissident, he spoke out against the mounting control of the party from Moscow, thus emerging as an open adversary of Stalin himself. In 1925, at only 29 years of age, his outspoken views led to his removal from the Central Committee of the German KPD, his denunciation as a Trotskyist, and, a year later, his expulsion from the party. He then decided to set out on a new career path, and studied law, finishing his studies in 1932.38 During the last visit from his brother to Berlin in the autumn of 1932, Werner Scholem waxed prophetic, telling Gershom that the “night of the long knives” was still to come—referring not just to National Socialism but also to his own personal future.39 Although in 1926 he had terminated all his functions in the KPD party, and in 1928 had also withdrawn

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from the Reichstag, in the eyes of the Nazis he remained the “GermanJewish Bolshevik poster boy”—quite literally so. Werner Scholem’s gloomy prophecy was fulfilled: he was among the very first individuals to be arrested by the Nazi regime.40 Without any reasons given for his arrest, he was held in “preventive detention” and waited two years for a trial by the Nazi Volksgerichtshof, the so-called people’s tribunal, a specially engineered National Socialist kangaroo court that sentenced thousands of opponents of the regime. In early 1935, he was finally told that the reason for his arrest was his love affair during his legal studies with Marie-Luise von Hammerstein, the daughter of the commander-in-chief of the Reichswehr. Given the fact that another daughter of the general had been accused of espionage for the Bolsheviks, the Gestapo alleged that he was part of a communist conspiracy. The connection to the Hammerstein family, however, remained unmentioned in his case, which was built entirely on false evidence. Consequently, even the National Socialist Volksgericht was forced to find him not guilty.41 Nonetheless, immediately after the trial, he was deported to concentration camps, first to Lichtenburg in Saxony, then to Dachau, and finally to Buchenwald. His famous name and face rendered life in the camps more difficult for him, and he was exposed to ridicule by SS officers. Stalinist inmates regarded him as a betrayer of the communist cause and punished him for his political “self-will” by isolating him within the camp society. His situation worsened dramatically in September 1935, when Joseph Goebbels, in his famous Nuremberg speech, referred to him most prominently as the head of the Berlin Jewish “communist press.”42 In November 1937, a huge antisemitic exhibition entitled Der Ewige Jude (The wandering Jew) was opened in the Museum of Technical Science in Munich; it contained a plaster mask of Werner Scholem which had been made in Dachau.43 In the summer of 1940, Werner Scholem was shot dead by an SS officer in the notorious stone pit at the Buchenwald concentration camp. His family had undertaken numerous attempts to have him freed; although they were repeatedly successful in obtaining all the necessary permits in order to bring him to Palestine, England, or even Shanghai, it was always at the very last moment that the Gestapo refused to release him without further explanation.44 From that moment on, Werner Scholem dropped from the radar of German memory. His presence in postwar historiography in the German Democratic Republic was limited to a few footnotes: as a Trotskyite dissident, he appeared there as a defector from the true communist cause. In West Germany, from the 1960s onward, he was mentioned principally as a close ally of Ruth Fischer, who had also been a key KPD activist. Only his brother Gershom Scholem accorded Werner and his complex personality a central place in his autobiographical writings. However, like many other Jewish communists, Werner Scholem was largely forgotten in

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Jewish and Israeli memory as well, given only peripheral mention.45 After 1945, no one wanted to touch upon the subject of Jewish communism anymore. First, the Nazis had used any Jewish affirmation of the revolution for their propaganda, creating the image of the Jewish Bolshevik as their ultimate enemy and using this notion to propagate their deadly scheme. Then, the Cold War further stigmatized the Jewish embrace of the left as an act of immaturity and misguidance, carried out by a few unfortunate dissidents. In Israel, David Ben-Gurion declared the communist party—together with the radical right-wing party Herut—as having left the consensus, and in the US, Jewish communists were feared as a result of the growing tension with the Soviet Union. Consequently, the history of the “extremist” sons and daughters was, in large part, erased from the space of collective Jewish memory.

A Jewish Cemetery in Hannover Werner Scholem’s post-history is also reflected in the life story of his wife. But Emmy Scholem is interesting in her own right, and she will be my third and final case study. Emmy Scholem was an extraordinary woman. Born outside marriage and raised in the proletarian quarters of Hanover, she became an activist in the revolutionary leftist movement at a very young age. Today, she is remembered merely as the wife and companion of Werner Scholem. Unlike her husband, Emmy was never at the center of public attention, but she seems to have personified the classical muse in a revolutionary comrade’s disguise, supporting and inspiring her husband in his work as a professional revolutionary. Often described as not very pretty, Emmy Scholem nevertheless embodied the counterimage of Weimar’s sophisticated new woman; as a result, her fresh-faced appearance, unpretentious and free of makeup, was perceived as exceedingly charming. She was also admired for her sensible and refined character, a product of her own difficult upbringing as an “illegitimate” child, and her desperate wish to leave the proletarian neighborhood of her youth through education, which she achieved by attending night school.46 In 1933, Emmy Scholem was challenged to prove her strength and assertiveness when her husband was arrested for espionage and she was forced to act, quickly adopting the dominant role in the relationship. In 1934, she fled via Czechoslovakia and Paris to London, from where she campaigned for the release of her husband. In British exile, under the guiding hand of Jewish organizations, she began to absorb elements of Jewish culture, building them into her own fractured identity.47 Thus, when she returned to live in her hometown of Hanover in the 1950s, she decided to work and live in the home for the elderly of the Jewish community. Together with German rémigrés who had returned from Israel, England, and the US, as well as Jewish DPs from Poland, Emmy lived there in a “different” Germany. As she told her brother-in-law

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Gershom Scholem, she could “in today’s Germany . . . only live in a Jewish Community.”48 Explaining to him why she thought that way clearly appeared superfluous to Emmy, but it is clear that it was a matter of antisemitism and the presence in the Federal Republic of German nationalist elements, old and new. Despite everything Emmy had experienced, Gershom Scholem reacted with surprise to a letter from his sister-in-law in April 1968, in which she informed him that, she, the former communist, with the help of the state rabbi of Lower Saxony, had at the age of almost 70 converted to Judaism. She wrote that she had prepared thoroughly for the conversion, had passed the rabbi’s exam, and had been accepted into the fold “with all due ceremony.” The rabbi had decided that because of her advanced age, he would spare her the effort of learning Hebrew.49 As is customary, Emmy took a Jewish name, deciding on Miriam, the name of the prophetess and Moses’s sister, who together with the Israelites had returned from exile in Egypt. Her own exile in Britain and the persecution and murder of her husband had brought her to Judaism. Emmy Scholem had returned to Germany, but to a Jewish-Polish-Israeli Germany, in which she felt at home, and where she later died, buried in a Jewish cemetery in Hanover.

The Heirs of Sabbatai Sevi For some considerable time, there was no consistent, probing analysis of the unequal and often highly tragic relationship between Judaism and communism. No one wished to approach the subject—not the Jewish communists themselves, nor historians of Jewish history.50 It was a politically and emotionally loaded topic, contaminated in significant measure by Nazi propaganda of a “Jewish-Bolshevik world conspiracy.” The fact that Jews were overrepresented among the ranks of the communists compared to their representation in the general population continues to be a matter of debate for historians. Yet, it can barely be described as an unexpected phenomenon: for one, other ethnic minorities were also overproportionately represented; for another, the number of Jewish communists declined as soon as a communist party or a regime had been solidly established. Nonetheless, many of those communists were cast in a historical role as scapegoats and renegades consumed by Jewish self-hatred.51 The British historian Isaac Deutscher, who stemmed from Eastern Europe, had engaged as early as 1958 with the difficulty of the communist Jews when he presented his concept of the “non-Jewish Jew” to the World Jewish Congress.52 He refused to accept the then-widespread view in Jewish historiography, which held that communist Jews had consciously crossed the boundary beyond the Jewish world, and for that reason could not be a subject of inquiry in “Jewish” history. Deutscher, whose own biography had led him from being a Jewish Jew to a nonJewish Jew, was fascinated by this movement out into an exposed and

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vulnerable position, motivated by the longing for universal solidarity. He therefore looked for a way to integrate Jews on the extreme left into a space of Jewish experience. For Deutscher, his own life history had been proof enough to claim that there was no leaving Judaism behind, for inner and outer reasons—and that most Jewish leftists had lingered on the verges of Jewish space for the rest of their lives. In 1970, the same year that Deutscher’s article was published in a posthumous collection of essays, the anti-Marxist Israeli historian Jacob Talmon described the connection between Jews and revolution as a “charged, infinitely sensitive, not to say explosive subject”—a subject that is “disquieting because any discussion of it is bound . . . to lay bare some of the most massive contradictions and unbridgeable antinomies in the human situation.”53 For the Cold War liberal Talmon, the close involvement of Jews in revolutionary movements had ultimately brought about their destruction by counter-revolutionary Nazi Germany. Interestingly, Jacob Talmon described the connection between Jews and the revolution as “a foundling, a waif, an abandoned child. No one is willing to claim it for its own sake.”54 Despite his criticism of Jewish Marxism, Talmon put his finger on the question of belonging and Jewish space in this context. Nobody wanted to claim this outcast, the Jewish revolutionary—but on the other hand, who could deny this abandoned child its heritage? Gershom Scholem embarked on a similar enterprise as that of Isaac Deutscher, though the two scholars could hardly have been more different. In 1973, the English translation was published of Scholem’s great work on the Jewish heretic Sabbatai Sevi, the “false” Messiah of the seventeenth century. Scholem wrote a new introduction to the volume, in which he declared that he was not “a follower of that school which proceeds on the assumption that there is a well-defined and unvarying ‘essence’ of Judaism, especially not where the evaluation of historical events is concerned.”55 In his view, such an “essence” could be defined only in the specific historical context, and always had to be questioned anew. At the same time, Scholem pointed to the high price, in his view, that the Jewish people had paid for the messianic idea. He was thinking here not only of the followers of Sabbatai Sevi but also, perhaps especially, of many younger Jews who felt fateful sympathy for radical leftist utopias in the first half of the twentieth century. Both his brother and his friend Walter Benjamin had been victims of the “secular messianism,” which, for a time, had also fascinated him.56 Gershom Scholem had transformed his own political interest in the topic into the academic study of messianic currents and heresies, which he also saw as a warning, pointing to the magnetic, attracting power exerted by the messianic utopian idea.57 His personal experiences with communism, in combination with the perspectives of a historian of messianism, had induced him to extend the space of Jewish scholarship and memory, so that it included the fate of his friend Walter Benjamin and that of his

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older brother Werner. His insights into Jewish identity explored both the experience of understanding of one’s own life and the experience of being externally defined by others—a factor not to be underestimated. This ultimately led Gershom Scholem to likewise incorporate all “Jewish nonJews,” from Leopold Bloom to Emmy Scholem, into that same expanded historical space. And what of Reuben Brainin—the Jewish Jew and Zionist Jew and, yet, not Zionist enough? He and Gershom Scholem had met in a barber’s shop during Brainin’s trip to Palestine. Brainin was fascinated by this secular German Jew, a Jecke who had ended every second sentence with “borukh ha-shem” (praise the Lord).58 Maybe the two would have had a lot to say to one another, but who knows? Scholem, who was increasingly moving into the ranks of the critics of political Zionism, and Brainin, the homeless prophet, had only a brief encounter.59

Conclusion: On the Verges of Judaism In my research on Jews in health spas and resorts, I have described Jewish space in modernity as a space of Jewish encounter—a moment of Jewish experience based on communication and performance. Although fleeting and temporary, such brief experiences of Jewishness often proved to be crucial for secular modern Jews, whose lives differed from the lives of non-Jews sometimes only by perimeters of inclusion and exclusion. Often polemically defined as “part-time Jews” by religious or more traditional Jews, they themselves would describe such temporary experiences of Jewish space as central aspects of their—modern and fragmented—identities.60 If we expand the space of historical interest further, the borderlines of Jewish life and culture come into sight. There we encounter those who not only happened to live a mostly non-Jewish life but also consciously chose to do so—as converts to other religions, national identities, or internationalist ideologies. They had turned their backs on the Jewish religion, but nonetheless remained at the threshold of Jewish life, networks, and culture. And the surrounding non-Jewish world would make sure that they remained at this threshold and continued to live their lives on the verges of Judaism. This liminal space amounts to a moment of exposure, in which Jewish experiences and identities were discussed in public, in front of a mixed and often unsympathetic audience. Being caught in between Jewish and other worlds proved to be a fatal trap for many. As a result of the antisemitic atrocities of the twentieth century, from Auschwitz to the Gulag, many of them died a Jewish death—an event that inevitably casts its retrospective shadow on their lives and experiences. In this chapter I have referred to four life stories that illustrate the variety of possible Jewish experiences in the early twentieth century as a moment of pluralization in

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Judaism: Gershom Scholem, the “Jewish Jew”; his brother Werner Scholem, the “non-Jewish Jew”; Emmy Scholem, the “Jewish non-Jew”; and Reuben Brainin, a “Jewish Jew,” but a renegade of the dominant secular Jewish culture—the Zionist culture, and in that sense a “non-Zionist Zionist.” My concluding argument is that situational Jewish experiences unite these leftist renegades—or, in the case of Emmy Scholem, converts-byfate—with Jewish Jews like Gershom Scholem. Consequently, the space of Jewish memory needs to expand to the verges of Judaism in order to include the countless life stories located there. Today, in a time when many societies are characterized by the presence of fragmented and manifold identities, we are accustomed to this kind of diversity in Jewish and other cultures; it seems commonplace. Nonetheless, until recently, definitions of what constitutes a historical Jewish experience were rather narrow, and lives like those of Werner Scholem, Reuven Brainin, and Emmy Scholem remained, at best, at the periphery of research. Yet, these lives offer us fascinating insights into the boundary zones of Jewish and nonJewish spaces.

Notes 1. Hannah Arendt, Interview With Günter Gaus, October 28, 1964, Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg, Archive, www.rbb-online.de/zurperson/interview_ archiv/arendt_hannah.html; in English: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsoIm QfVsO4. 2. Claudia Althaus, Erfahrung denken. Hannah Arendts Weg von der Zeitgeschichte zur politischen Theorie (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), 75–6, 270–1, 372–4. 3. “Erfahrung mit der Gegenwart von Abwesenheit,” in a letter to Mary McCarthy, January 22/25, 1972, in Hannah Arendt/Mary McCarthy, Im Vertrauen. Briefwechsel 1949–1975 (Munich: Piper, 1995), 441. 4. Claudia Althaus, Erfahrung denken, 271–80. 5. Frank R. Ankersmit, Die historische Erfahrung (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2012), 7–15. 6. Frank R. Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 126. 7. The central section of the prayer reads, “On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed—how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die; who will die at his predestined time and who before his time; who by water and who by fire, who by sword, who by beast, who by famine, who by thirst, who by upheaval, who by plague, who by strangling, and who by stoning. Who will rest and who will wander, who will live in harmony and who will be harried, who will enjoy tranquility and who will suffer, who will be impoverished and who will be enriched, who will be degraded and who will be exalted.” 8. Israel Yuval, “Gedichte und Geschichte als Weltgericht. Unetanne tokef, Dies irae und Amnon von Mainz,” Kalonymos 2004/4, 1–6. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid.; Ivan G. Marcus, “Jews and Christians Imagining the Other in Medieval Europe,” Prooftexts 15, no. 3 (1995): 209–26, here 215–17.

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11. Leonard Cohen, “Who by Fire,” in New Skin for the Old Ceremony (Audiodisc, 1974). 12. Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Jewish Identities: Fifty Intellectuals Answer Ben-Gurion (Leiden: Brill, 2002), xix–xx. 13. “Gershom Scholem,” in Ben-Rafael, Jewish Identities, xi. 14. Joseph Gorny, “Foreword,” in Ben-Rafael, Jewish Identities, xvi. 15. Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 16. David Biale, Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), xii–xiii. 17. Henryk Felix Srebrnik, Jerusalem on the Amur. Birobidzhan and the Canadian Jewish Communist Movement 1924–1951 (Montreal: McGill Queen’s University Press, 2008), 132–50; Naomi, Caruso, Reuven Brainin: The Fall of an Icon (Montreal: Canadian Jewish Congress Charities Committee, 2007). 18. Stanley Nash, “Brainin, Re’uven,” in YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Brainin_Reuven; Eisig Silberschlag, “Brainin, Reuben,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed., vol. 4, eds. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007), 119. 19. Reuben Brainin Archive, Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People (CAHJP), Jerusalem/Israel. 20. Reuben Brainin, diary entry 30 June 1910, Reuben Brainin Archive, File no. P 8/7, 96–97, and diary entry 22 August 1910, File no. P 8/8, 13, CAHJP. 21. Reuben Brainin, diary entry 30 May 1926, Reuben Brainin Archive, File no. P 8/108, 2, CAHJP. 22. Evsektsiia—Jewish section of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. 23. Reuben Brainin, diary entries 6 and 7 July 1926, Reuben Brainin Archive, File no. P 8/108, 102–5, and 6, 7, and 8 July 1926, P 8/97, CAHJP. 24. Reuben Brainin, diary entry 19 May 1926, Reuben Brainin Archive, File no. P 8/108, 55, CAHJP. 25. Reuben Brainin, diary entry 24 May 1926, Reuben Brainin Archive, File no. P 8/108, 65–66, CAHJP. 26. Jonathan Dekel-Chen, Farming the Red Land: Jewish Agricultural Colonization and Local Soviet Power 1924–1941 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 9–33. 27. Henry Felix Srebrnik, Jerusalem on the Amur, 133; Naomi Caruso, Reuven Brainin, 18–21. 28. Naomi Caruso, Reuven Brainin, 21–30. 29. Ibid., 31–42; Reuben Brainin, Fun Mayn Lebens-bukh, ed. Naḥman Mayzil (New York: Ikuf, 1946); Henry Felix Srebrnik, Jerusalem on the Amur, 132–50. 30. Aaron Kurz, “Der Vayzer Grayz,” in Reuben Brainin, Umshterblekhe Reyd. Tsum Hunderṭsṭn Geboyrnṭog fun Re’uven Braynin, ed. Naḥman Mayzil (New York: Icor, 1962). 31. To read his biography in greater detail, see: Mirjam Zadoff, Werner Scholem: A German Life (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). 32. Zadoff, Werner Scholem: A German Life, 164–6; NSDAP election poster, Bundesarchiv Berlin/Germany, PLak 002–039–007. 33. Diary entry, 14.7.1924, in Joseph Goebbels, Tagebücher. Vol. I: 1924–1929, ed. Ralf Georg Reuth (Munich and Zurich: Piper, 2008), 102–3. 34. Sitzungsberichte des Preußischen Landtags. Vol. 11. Berlin, 1923, p. 14926, and Vol. 12. Berlin, 1924, 17695. 35. Ibid., Vol. 10. Berlin, 1923, 13556–13568. 36. Ibid., 13556–13622, esp. 13580–13588.

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37. Gershom Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memoirs of My Youth (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2012), 144. 38. Zadoff, Werner Scholem: A German Life, 166–86. 39. Ibid., 198 and 186–97; Werner Scholem to Gershom Scholem, November 14 1932, Israeli National Library Jerusalem/Israel, Archiv G. Scholem Arc. 4/1599. 40. Vossische Zeitung, Evening Issue, February 28, 1933; Betty Scholem to Gershom Scholem, February 28, 1933, in Betty Scholem and Gershom Scholem, Mutter und Sohn im Briefwechsel 1917–1946, eds. Itta Shedletzky and Thomas Sparr (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1989), 278. 41. Zadoff, Werner Scholem: A German Life, 236–51. 42. Joseph Goebbels, “Welt-Bolschewismus ohne Maske. Kernstück der Rede des Dr. Goebbels auf dem Reichsparteitag in Nürnberg 1935,” in Fichtebundblätter Nr. 791 (Hamburg [1935]), 2. 43. Zadoff, Werner Scholem: A German Life, 275–8. 44. Ibid., 251–89. 45. Ibid., 17–19; Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Hammerstein oder Der Eigensinn. Eine deutsche Geschichte (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2008), 145; Ulrich Weißgerber, Giftige Worte der SED-Diktatur. Sprache als Instrument von Machtausübung und Ausgrenzung in der SBZ und der DDR (Muenster: LIT Verlag, 2010), 335; Martin Broszat, Einleitung zum Vortrag von Gershom Scholem am 15.3.1973 (Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Archive Munich/Germany, Sign. D 562); Reiner Zilkenat, “Das Schicksal von Werner Scholem,” Neues Deutschland, July 14, 1990. 46. Zadoff, Werner Scholem: A German Life, 8–17. 47. Ibid., 214–28. 48. Emmy Scholem to Gershom Scholem, February 7, April 4, 1967 and January 26 1968, INB Archive G. Scholem. 49. Emmy Scholem to Gershom Scholem, 12 April 1968 and 18 February 1968, Israeli National Library, Archive G. Scholem Arc. 4°1599. 50. Dan Diner and Jonathan Frankel, Dark Times, Dark Decisions: Jews and Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 8; Jacob Talmon, Israel Among the Nations (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970), 2. 51. André W. M. Gerrits, “Jüdischer Kommunismus: der Mythos, die Juden, die Partei,” Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung (2005): 243–64, here 234– 44, 246–7, 253; Walter Grab, “Sozialpropheten und Sündenböcke: Juden in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung 1840–1933,” in Juden als Träger bürgerlicher Kultur, ed. Julius H. Schoeps (Stuttgart: Burgverlag Sachsenheim, 1989), 357–78; Adam Kirsch, “The End of the Jewish Left,” Tablet, May 2012. 52. Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968); Marci Shore, “Children of the Revolution: Communism, Zionism and the Berman Brothers,” Jewish Social Studies 10, no. 3 (2004): 23–86, here 61. 53. Talmon, Israel Among the Nations, 2. 54. Ibid., 1. 55. Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676, trans. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), xi. The Hebrew original was published in 1957. 56. Mirjam Zadoff and Noam Zadoff, “From Mission to Memory: Walter Benjamin and Werner Scholem in the Life and Work of Gershom Scholem,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 13 (2014): 1. 57. David Biale, “The Threat of Messianism: An Interview with Gershom Scholem,” The New York Review of Books 27 (1980): 13, 22; Gershom Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays (New York: Schocken

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Books, 1976), 25–6; Gershom Scholem, “Zionism—Dialectic of Continuity and Rebellion. Interview,” in Unease in Zion, ed. Ehud Ben-Ezer (New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Company, 1974), 295–6; see also Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Im Schatten des Weltkrieges,” in Deutsch-jüdische Geschichte in der Neuzeit, Vol. 4: Aufbruch und Zerstörung 1918–1945, eds. Michael A. Meyer and Michael Brenner (C.H. Beck: Munich), 15–36, here: 31. 58. Reuben Braining, diary entry December 6, 1925, Reuben Brainin Archiv, CAHJP, Sign. P 8/40. 59. On Scholem’s critique of Zionism, see: Noam Zadoff, “Zion’s Self-Engulfing Light”: On Gershom Scholem’s Disillusionment with Zionism,” Modern Judaism 31, no. 3 (2011): 272–84. 60. Mirjam Zadoff, Next Year in Marienbad: The Lost Worlds of Jewish Spa Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).

Bibliography Althaus, Claudia. Erfahrung denken: Hannah Arendts Weg von der Zeitgeschichte zur politischen Theorie. Goettingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000. Ankersmit, Frank R. Die historische Erfahrung. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2012. Arendt, Hannah, and Mary McCarthy. Im Vertrauen. Briefwechsel, 1949–1975. Munich: Piper, 1995. Ben-Rafael, Eliezer. Jewish Identities: Fifty Intellectuals Answer Ben-Gurion. Leiden: Brill, 2002. Biale, David. Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Biale, David. “The Threat of Messianism: An Interview With Gershom Scholem.” The New York Review of Books 27 (1980). Brainin, Reuben. Fun Mayn Lebens-bukh. Edited by Naḥman Mayzil. New York: Ikuf, 1946. Caruso, Naomi. Reuven Brainin: The Fall of an Icon. Montreal, Quebec: Canadian Jewish Congress Charities Committee, 2007. Dekel-Chen, Jonathan. Farming the Red Land: Jewish Agricultural Colonization and Local Soviet Power 1924–1941. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Deutscher, Isaac. The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968. Diner, Dan, and Jonathan Frankel. Dark Times, Dark Decisions: Jews and Communism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. Hammerstein oder Der Eigensinn. Eine deutsche Geschichte. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2008. Gerrits, André W. M. “Jüdischer Kommunismus: der Mythos, die Juden, die Partei.” Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung (2005): 243–64. Goebbels, Joseph. Tagebücher. Vol. I: 1924–1929. Edited by Ralf Georg Reuth. Munich and Zurich: Piper, 2008. Gorny, Joseph. “Foreword.” In Jewish Identities: Fifty Intellectuals Answer BenGurion, edited by Elizer Ben-Rafael. Leiden: Brill, 2002. Grab, Walter. “Sozialpropheten und Sündenböcke: Juden in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung 1840–1933.” In Juden als Träger bürgerlicher Kultur, edited by Julius H. Schoeps. Stuttgart: Burgverlag Sachsenheim, 1989: 357–78. Kirsch, Adam. “The End of the Jewish Left.” Tablet, May 2012.

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Kurz, Aaron. “Der Vayzer Grayz.” In Umshterblekhe Reyd: Tsum Hunderṭsṭn Geboyrnṭog fun Re’uven Braynin, edited by Naḥman Mayzil. New York: Icor, 1962. Marcus, Ivan G. “Jews and Christians Imagining the Other in Medieval Europe.” Prooftexts 15, no. 3 (1995). Mendes-Flohr, Paul. “Im Schatten des Weltkrieges.” In Deutsch-jüdische Geschichte in der Neuzeit, Vol. 4: Aufbruch und Zerstörung 1918–1945, edited by Michael A. Meyer and Michael Brenner. Munich: C.H. Beck, 1996: 15–36. Scholem, Betty, and Gershom Scholem. Mutter und Sohn im Briefwechsel 1917– 1946. Edited by Itta Shedletzky and Thomas Sparr. Munich: C.H. Beck, 1989. Scholem, Gershom. From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memoirs of My Youth. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2012. Scholem, Gershom. On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays. New York: Schocken Books, 1976. Scholem, Gershom. Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676. Translated by R. J. Zwi Werblowsky. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973. Scholem, Gershom. “Zionism—Dialectic of Continuity and Rebellion. Interview.” In Unease in Zion, edited by Ehud Ben-Ezer. New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Company, 1974. Shore, Marci. “Children of the Revolution: Communism, Zionism and the Berman Brothers.” Jewish Social Studies 10, no. 3 (2004): 23–86. Silberschlag, Eisig. “Brainin, Reuben.” In Encyclopaedia Judaica. 2nd ed. Vol. 4, edited by Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007. Slezkine, Yuri. The Jewish Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Srebrnik, Henryk Felix. Jerusalem on the Amur: Birobidzhan and the Canadian Jewish Communist Movement 1924–1951. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s-University Press, 2008. Talmon, Jacob. Israel Among the Nations. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970. Weißgerber, Ulrich. Giftige Worte der SED-Diktatur. Sprache als Instrument von Machtausübung und Ausgrenzung in der SBZ und der DDR. Muenster: LIT Verlag, 2010. Yuval, Israel. “Gedichte und Geschichte als Weltgericht. Unetanne tokef, Dies irae und Amnon von Mainz.” Kalonymos 8, no. 4 (2004): 1–6. Zadoff, Mirjam. Next Year in Marienbad: The Lost Worlds of Jewish Spa Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Zadoff, Mirjam. Werner Scholem: A German Life. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Zadoff, Mirjam, and Noam Zadoff. “From Mission to Memory. Walter Benjamin and Werner Scholem in the Life and Work of Gershom Scholem.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 13, no. 1 (2014): 58–74. Zadoff, Noam. “‘Zion’s Self-Engulfing Light’: On Gershom Scholem’s Disillusionment With Zionism.” Modern Judaism 31, no. 3 (2011): 272–84.

4

Tropical Territorialism Displaced Persons, Colonialism, and the Freeland League in Suriname (1946–1948) Laura Almagor

Between 1946 and 1948, a New York–based Jewish organization sought to settle a group of 30,000 Eastern European Jewish displaced persons (DPs) in the Dutch colony of Suriname.1 This body, the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization, was established in 1934 as the heir to Israel Zangwill’s Jewish Territorial Organisation (ITO), which had been active between 1905 and 1925. The main Territorialist aim was the pragmatic search for places for Jewish settlement outside both Europe and Palestine. As will become clear throughout this analytical plunge into a never-materialized Jewish political endeavor, even if it did not have direct political effects, the Territorialist “Saramacca scheme” in Suriname sheds unexpected light on geopolitical developments related to decolonization, migration policies, Cold War dynamics, and Jewish political (self-)definition. This chapter illuminates the plan’s revelatory power for understanding the importance of the Jewish DP issue in creating a postHolocaust Jewish topology. In this way, the Saramacca scheme problematizes a purely Zionist narrative that primarily considers the DP camps to have been repositories of Jewish immigrants to Palestine, and, therefore, predominantly instrumental for the creation of the Jewish state.2 In other words, the following analysis helps to advance this volume’s aim of dismantling the institutionalized form of nationalism, Zionism, that has largely suppressed a Jewish pluralism of political identities, while also revealing how non-Zionist Jews made sense of migration challenges in relation to their own Jewishness. Lastly, the Suriname scheme further complicates the Jewish relationship to colonial and postcolonial modes of thinking: at the time of the Suriname negotiations, the Territorialists showed themselves to be both colonial and postcolonial. In sum, a focus on the Freeland League’s activities in Suriname helps to sharpen our definition of the changing boundaries of Jewishness during the second half of the 1940s. At first glance, the Saramacca plan seems anomalous within the context of the ever-narrowing trajectory of Jewish nationalism. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the early manifestations of this nationalism had initially cast a broad gaze upon the various existing

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political options, allowing for a multicolored spectrum of possibilities in the Jewish political imagination. As time progressed, these options became evermore limited within the dominant discourse of Jewish political behavior, until eventually only a Jewish state in Palestine was seriously considered by the majority of politically conscious Jews. The Saramacca scheme arose at the end of this funnel-shaped evolution that led to the conflation of Jewish politics with Palestino-centric Zionism, thus helping to problematize the seeming one-dimensionality of the eventual Jewish political identity. What happens to our understanding of the strong Jewish territorial attachment to Palestine once we shift our focus to an equally territorially defined Jewish settlement project on the other side of the world, explored just moments before and after the declaration of the State of Israel in May 1948? In order to answer this question, the following analysis latches on to this volume’s goals of shifting the scholarly attention to marginalized voices—in this case, both Jewish and colonial—and reassessing the boundaries of what has made up Jewish identity, not by deconstructing what such an identity could mean in abstracto but by exposing the fluidity of the Jewish political and cultural identities of concrete historical actors. I argue that the multidimensionality of the actors involved in the Saramacca scheme not only challenges the Zionism-dominated interpretation of Jewish political history but also merges two different spheres that were both crucial for defining Jewish political identities in the directly post–Second World War period: the so-called Jewish refugee or DP issue, and the advent of the postcolonial era. In both the shorter and longer term, the DPs posed a challenge for the rebuilding process of war-torn Europe. This challenge, which introduced the new separate categories of economic migrants and political refugees, helped to shape postwar population politics and international refugee and human rights regimes.3 Considering the size and visibility of the Jewish segment of the DPs, it is remarkable that only recently scholars have begun to focus on the experiences of these individuals, while most scholarship has jumped straight from Holocaust history to Jewish life after resettlement in Palestine, the US, or elsewhere.4 In reality, the Jewish DPs constituted the continuum between pre-Shoah and post-Shoah Jewish geopolitical history.5 Because the Suriname scheme was explicitly presented as part of the DP project, this Territorialist settlement plan helped to forge a connection between the European DP camps and the Latin American Dutch colony. The Freelanders came to see themselves as intermediaries between the hegemonic and the oppressed, which included both the persecuted European Jew and the subaltern colonial subject. Specific to the Saramacca case was the fact that Suriname had experienced a long and troubled past with its own Jewish population: some of the most ruthless slave-owners had been Jews, a fact not easily forgotten by the increasingly politically

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independent Surinamers. The Freelanders were aware that such sentiments mattered in the new postcolonial reality, and they attempted to address them, albeit at times uneasily, and not always with the required degree of sensitivity. Still, the Freeland League’s active engagement with the looming new postcolonial world order offers a novel perspective on the supposed exclusion of political Judaism from this postcolonial realm. Contrasting the dominant narrative, Territorialism in the 1940s and 1950s exposes an alternate Jewish imagination in which Jewish politics and nationhood belonged to the postcolonial universe as well. The Suriname plan bridges the gap between the “transgeographical” and the “geopolitical” themes posed as conceptual adversaries in the introduction to this volume: the scheme was a never-materialized transnational movement of Jews to a concrete geographical space—a plan that was defined and limited by geopolitical realities. In the story told here, the Territorialists reacted to the traditionally Western hegemonic character of the non-Jewish world, but their reaction is problematized by the perspective of the local Surinamese interlocutors in the Saramacca negotiations. Zooming out, the negotiations took place in a larger global context defined by Cold War anxieties, (post)colonial power shifts, paradigmatic alterations in the fields of migration policies and human rights, and, last but not least, the establishment of the State of Israel. Once these larger trends and events are brought into connection with the specific history of the Freeland League’s activities in Suriname, a Jewish topology is revealed that contributes to an increased understanding of Jewish political and cultural behavior in the mid-twentieth century.

The Freeland League and the Saramacca Plan The Jewish Territorialist movement was first organized in 1905 as the ITO, under the leadership of the Anglo Jewish writer and, until then, prominent Zionist Israel Zangwill. The Territorialists disagreed with the Zionist rejection of the so-called Uganda offer of the British government, and they now dedicated themselves to finding places of settlement for Jews outside of Palestine. After 20 years of intensive labor with only minor successes, Zangwill disbanded the ITO in 1925. The organization was reinstated less than a decade later, in 1934 in Warsaw, as the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization, in reaction to growing antisemitism throughout Europe. The Freeland League soon moved its headquarters to London, and, until the outbreak of the Second World War, the Freelanders negotiated with the British government regarding British Guiana, and with the French government regarding French Guiana and other French colonial possessions, most notably (and notoriously) Madagascar. Dutch Guiana, more popularly known as Suriname, came into Dutch hands in 1667. Subsequently, the “Jodensavanne” (Jews’ Savanna), located

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slightly inland from the capital Paramaribo, became an important factor in the early economic life of the colony, as well as in the later Surinamese collective memory of Jewish slave ownership: by 1694, the Jewish population of about 570 individuals owned 40 plantations and circa 9,000 slaves.6 By the eighteenth century, as a result of urbanization, Surinamese society became a hotchpotch of cultures and religions,7 which was the situation the Freeland League encountered when it started exploring its settlement plan in the late 1930s. The idea of settling Jews in Suriname surfaced several times during the decades before the Second World War, in both Jewish and staunchly antisemitic circles.8 In 1939, JewCol, a Jewish colonization organization based in The Hague, launched an expedition to explore the region. This Swellengrebel-Vink-Dyk Committee returned with predominantly positive conclusions regarding settlement options for Jews.9 These findings would form the basis for the Freeland League’s interest in the region. The following year, Boris Raptschinsky, a Russian-born historian residing in The Netherlands, also pitched the idea of Suriname as a Territorialist destination. After the German occupation of The Netherlands in May 1940, the Dutch Freeland activities came to a standstill, but in 1944, Tanhum B. Herwald, one of the central British Freelanders, contacted a Dutch journalist exiled to the UK to discuss the Suriname option.10 Not long thereafter, Herwald termed Dutch Guiana one of the most realistic options of the moment.11 These tentative explorations paved the way for the Freelanders’ official proposal in 1946 to the Dutch and Surinamese governments for the colonization of an unpopulated part of the colony by a group of Eastern European Jewish refugees. In March 1946, the Freeland League’s new leader Isaac Steinberg12 had a chance meeting with the governor of Suriname, Johannes Brons, and that very same month, the Dutch prime minister, Willem Schermerhorn, received Raptschinsky in The Hague.13 During the following months, the JewCol activities were taken over by the Freeland League, just as Raptschinsky and fellow JewCol member Henri van Leeuwen joined the now New York City–based organization. On January 28, 1947, Brons presented the proposal to the Staten van Suriname, the Surinamese legislative body. A period of heated debate commenced in the Dutch colony, and a three-man Freeland League delegation, headed by Steinberg, travelled to Paramaribo in April 1947. Their aim was not just to negotiate with those in power positions—the pre-war Territorialist approach—but also to engage in a hearts-and-minds campaign to win over a larger segment of the Surinamers. All the while, the Zionist movement was suspicious of the Territorialist activities, which they considered to be harmful competition to their Palestine work. “It could not be otherwise,” Steinberg wrote to Raptschinsky, “because by the very nature of their desperate movement they must be deadly against us. There is no doubt that our work and the eventual

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success is [sic] a danger to them.”14 Interestingly, whereas the Dutch Zionist federation condemned the Freeland League plan in the press,15 the Surinamese Zionists were mildly receptive to the idea. Nevertheless, American Zionists teamed up with the Nationalist Party of Suriname to “work with fury” against the Freeland scheme.16 In March 1948, supported by American Zionist leader Stephen Wise, the relentless Zionist activist Ida Silverman (née Camelhor), who prided herself on a notorious track record of torpedoing non-Zionist settlement projects (including an earlier Freeland League project in the Australian Kimberley District), travelled to Suriname to discredit both the Territorialist work and the “terrible Russian revolutionary” Steinberg.17 As we will see, even fiercer Zionist opposition to the Suriname plan occurred far away from Latin America, in the European displaced persons camps. Despite these challenges, on April 20, 1947, The Freeland League delegation and a Surinamese governmental advisory committee issued a joint statement announcing the intention of creating a Jewish settlement. The Staten van Suriname officially agreed “in principle” with this plan for the initial colonization of 30,000 Jews on June 27, 1947. However, this did not mean that the project was a done deal. On November 26, 1947, three days before the Palestine partition vote was scheduled in the United Nations General Assembly, the Dutch representative to the UN announced that an agreement had been reached between the Dutch government and the Freeland League.18 In the eyes of Dutch politicians in The Hague, this announcement was a premature transgression, as they had been skeptical about the plan from the very outset. The Freeland League, on the other hand, spoke of the historical connection between the Dutch and the Jews, which would now be turned into an “eternal covenant.”19 A few months later, on December 4, 1947, Governor Brons sent an encouraging letter to the Freeland League, which was again not appreciated in Dutch political circles: it would give the Territorialists false hope. Indeed, the Freelanders applauded the letter, as “this significant document gives the colonization project of the Freeland League the necessary legal basis and opens great prospects for the Jewish settlement there. The great dream of territorialists is about to become reality.”20 In late 1947, a Commission of Experts was sent to Suriname, consisting of several specialists, including a civil engineer and a soil scientist. Isaiah Bowman, the famous geographer and president of Johns Hopkins University, acted as an advisor in the formation process of this commission, giving the endeavor the stamp of approval of a respected and politically influential American scientist.21 After having spent months collecting data, the Commission produced an extensive report, presented to the Surinamese government in April 1948, that deemed the Saramacca district economically promising and scientifically suitable for Jewish colonization purposes.22 The general mood towards the plan, however, was changing, and on August 14, 1948, the Staten decided to suspend negotiations with the

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Freeland League. This decision was officially made because of the turbulent international developments of the moment: the creation of the State of Israel in May 1948, and the onset of what was soon to be termed the Cold War. The Dutch, influential behind the scenes, were also reluctant to antagonize the Zionist movement,23 as well as Muslims around the world. After all, The Netherlands had its hands full with the so-called Police Actions in the Dutch East Indies (in reality a colonial guerilla war), harboring the largest Muslim population in the world. Even those sympathetic to the Freeland League were anxious not to harm the Dutch cause in Asia.24 The Freeland League was extremely disappointed and continued for some years to plead with the interested parties to move them to reconsider their decision, but to no avail. David Dubinsky’s International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) had contributed a significant sum to the Commission of Experts. The union was therefore not amused by the Staten’s dismissal of the scheme. Unfortunately for the proponents of the plan, even the powerful workers’ union could not change the politicians’ minds.25

Displaced Persons The Territorialist Suriname project explicitly connected the European refugee crisis to an overseas colony in the process of decolonization. The Freeland League corresponded with different agencies that were involved with DPs, first and foremost the International Refugee Organization (IRO). An important complicating factor for the Territorialist work was its growing rivalry with Zionism, manifesting itself both in the DP camps and in Suriname itself. In addition to this conflict, Cold War anxieties and postcolonial warfare in Indonesia defined the course of the Saramacca scheme’s development and eventual failure. The current analysis, therefore, proposes a tripartite understanding of the Territorialist Suriname scheme, bringing together (de)colonial history and the history of the European DPs, under the overarching framework of Jewish and nonJewish geopolitics in the directly post-1945 years. In order to fully illustrate this interconnected picture, I will now turn to the Freeland League’s direct engagement with the Jewish displaced persons issue. During the years following liberation, the allied victors were faced with an unprecedented number of uprooted people. These refugees crowded together in DP camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy. By 1951 there were still 175,000 individuals in the camps, the last of which closed its doors as late as 1957.26 A significant number of these people were Jews, which is why in their correspondence and publications, the Freelanders repeatedly used the DP argument to underline the necessity of their project.27 Like Zionism, Territorialism did not become an exclusively DP-focused endeavor,28 but the exact nature of its connection to the displaced persons

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issue still set the Freeland League apart from Zionism. There is no doubt that the Zionists played the biggest and most visible role in the Jewish DP universe, but in essence, for Zionism, “refugees in the story of return were secondary to national self-determination.”29 By contrast, for the Territorialists, refugee issues were the priority, setting the agenda for their movement. While the DPs awaited their unknown future emigration, the camps became important arenas for competing Jewish political factions. In July 1947, Izak Kaczerginski, a DP in the Austrian camp in Steyr, stumbled across a copy of the Freeland League’s periodical Oifn Shvel, which contained an article about the Suriname scheme. Inspired by the idea, Kaczerginski formed his own Freeland League group, soon to be followed by similar groups in other camps. On December 22, 1947, Kaczerginski reported the existence of groups in eight different camps with a total of more than 500 members.30 Two hundred DPs in Steyr alone had written down “Suriname” as their wished-for destination on an IRO questionnaire. By late 1948, in the German and Austrian camps, some 3,000 people had openly expressed their wish to emigrate under a Territorialist scheme, most preferably to Suriname. In May 1948, the Freeland League was said to be one of the biggest Jewish organizations among the DPs in Austria.31 Because of the potential danger of immigrants moving to Suriname rather than to Palestine, the influential Zionists tried their best to exclude Territorialism from the political life in the camps. This tendency persisted in the Zionist refusal to award Territorialism its modest place in the historiography of Jewish DP politics. In later accounts of the period, all Jewish DPs were considered to be part of the same group, the “She’erit Hapletah,” the surviving remnant of European Jewry that actively contributed to the founding of the Jewish state.32 In this dominant narrative, the overwhelming majority chose the Zionist path, perhaps because of a lack of viable alternatives, but mainly because of an almost universal Zionist zeal, strengthened by the recent experiences of the Shoah.33 This account paints too limited a picture. Without denying the importance of Jewish DPs in the Zionist project, it is important to acknowledge that non-Zionist political life in the camps was not all marginal and “nonbelonging.” The Bund, the Orthodox Mizrahi and Agudath Israel, non-Zionist socialist parties, and the Freeland League also “existed in the political spectrum of the DP camps.”34 Moreover, a DP could be in favor of the Zionist project but still decide to move elsewhere than Palestine.35 Even as several surveys held in the DP camps in Germany showed a clear win for Palestine as the wishedfor destination, in some of these surveys up to 20 percent of respondents did not name either Palestine or the US, thus revealing a substantial group potentially interested in a Territorialist solution.36 Some of these interested individuals attended the first Freeland conference of DP camps on October 5, 1947, held in Upper Austria in an

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overall tense political atmosphere, in which rivaling Jewish political groups vied for the allegiance of the Jewish DPs. The Zionists, claiming Jewish refugees as immigrant “material” for the future Jewish state, formed the most powerful group. In response, the Freeland League conference’s conveners diplomatically stated that their movement demanded that the United Nations facilitate the immediate admittance of 150,000 Palestine-bound immigrants. However, they added, because this would leave the remaining Jewish DPs without a solution, the 25 representatives from seven camps proposed to support the establishment of a Jewish settlement in Suriname.37 Despite this bold statement, the DP Freelanders remained aware of the Zionist-dominated context, through which they were forced to navigate very carefully. On the occasion of the proclamation of the State of Israel, the attendees of the Second Country Conference of the Austrian Refugee Freeland League congratulated the founders of the new state, objected to Arab aggression, and openly supported their “heroic brothers and sisters” fighting for the Israeli cause.38 They even drew direct inspiration from Zionist DP activities. Already in the middle of 1946, nearly 11,000 individuals had been trained in Zionist “kibbutzim”: training farms set up mainly for groups of unaccompanied minors in preparation for their pioneering work in Palestine.39 In 1947, the Territorialist group in Bergen-Belsen developed plans to follow this example and to set up its own training farm.40 The Zionists were not convinced of the harmlessness of Territorialism: despite the Freelanders’ caution and flattery, Zionist forces actively tried to thwart their work, as well as all non-Zionist political activities. Suspicions rose that Zionist propagandists, “shlichim,” were sent to the camps from Palestine to “brainwash” the DPs. The Zionist “kibbutzim” were also seen as hotbeds of indoctrination and anti-individualist attitudes.41 Under the guise of “combatting factionalism,” and speeding up the process of terminating the camps, non-Zionist activities were discouraged or counteracted.42 Only in March 1948 did the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (the Joint or JDC) reorganize its relief operations to prevent preferential treatment of certain committees on a political basis.43 The sociologist Koppel Pinson ascribed part of the seeming enthusiasm for Zionism to propaganda and “subtle terrorization.”44 As he observed already in 1946, “Totalitarianism has left its impress even upon Jews.”45 As of 1948, young Jews who refused to join the military forces organized by the Hagana (the Jewish paramilitary organization in British Mandate Palestine) were taken off Joint ration lists.46 In a similar vein, by the fall of 1950, in the US Zone in Austria, US Army authorities, in cooperation with Jewish aid organizations, increased pressure on Jewish DPs to move to Israel by denying aid to those who did not comply.47 Indeed, members of the Jewish Labor Bund reported mistreatment by Zionists,48 as did the Territorialists, one of whom complained about the repeated “kacn-jomer” (cat lamentations) of the Zionists.49 Even though

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the camp authorities officially denied allegations,50 reports reached the Freeland League’s headquarters in New York that non-Zionists were denied work and food packages sent by the Joint.51 Zionists physically intimidated DPs who were openly interested in the Suriname project.52 Kaczerginski wrote to New York that his movement had consciously refrained from any open registration for DPs who were willing to go to Suriname. Nonetheless, he had been called to the local Zionist federation to publicly distance himself from what was termed the “Suriname Affair.” The Zionists wanted the DP Freeland League to be disbanded and its members to take up the fight for Palestine. According to Kaczerginski, the Jewish Central Committee had issued an order to start a campaign against the Territorialists. He himself had been fired from his post as director of camp registration, and he anticipated that such measures would be applied to Freelanders in other camps as well. Kaczerginski feared that these Territorialists would be forced to leave the camps and settle in private homes, which would make it much harder for them to obtain food and clothing.53 Meanwhile, growing desperation about Jewish homelessness loomed large. As one DP leader exclaimed in April 1948, “Take us to Madagascar until you can take us to some other place.”54 Another survivor declared, “I want to get out. So whatever will come first, there we will go.”55 Such an indiscriminate view on emigration destinations was not based on despair alone, nor was it unrealistic. After all, there was large institutional support for different types of settlement plans. In 1948, the Preparatory Commission for the IRO (PCIRO) expressed its intention to establish a US$5 million fund for large-scale settlements by selected groups of displaced persons in “undeveloped” areas. As for Territorialism specifically, the IRO offered to finance the transportation of future immigrants. It also promised to donate US$2 million if the Freeland League raised a similar sum.56 The (PC)IRO, unable to find sufficient new homes for the Jewish DPs,57 was interested in participating in the Freeland League project in Suriname if a final agreement with the relevant governments could be reached.58 While such promises were encouraging, the Freelanders unsuccessfully sought official recognition from the American military authorities for their representatives to travel around freely.59 Without this freedom, they were limited to letter writing: pleas were sent to different officials, and the DP Freelanders addressed their American brethren in an open call for support.60 In May 1948, just a few days before the proclamation of the State of Israel, 166 members of the Freeland group in Vienna sent a letter to Herbert Lehman, former governor of New York and later senator, and former director general of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). They asked him to acknowledge the wish of certain DPs to shape their future within a Territorialist scheme. “Why . . . when a ray of hope does appear for these unfortunate brethren, is it overlooked by everyone?”61

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Two of the parties overlooking this “ray of hope” were the Dutch and Surinamese governments when they finally suspended negotiations with the Freeland League in August 1948. In fact, it was the explicit focus on Eastern European DPs in the Saramacca plan that raised suspicion among the policy makers involved. C. Adriaanse, head of the Administrative Affairs department of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, wrote to a colleague in early 1948 that he “smell[t] a rat,” as he did not believe that the Freeland League had the DPs’ interests in mind. Instead, he claimed, the Freelanders ran a purely commercial enterprise aimed at transporting Jews from their Eastern European countries of birth.62 It was expected that only individuals with some connection to communist authorities would be allowed to leave, and such people might turn the Jewish settlement into a bolshevist bulwark.63 Even bona fide DPs could become a problem from a reliability perspective, the Dutch argued, as Eastern European Jews were known to constitute an unwieldy “race.”64 The establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948, as well as growing Cold War tensions, created a geopolitical situation that supported the Dutch concern that “unwanted elements” might slip through the net. The suggested solution was to broaden the scope of the settlement to also include non-Jews. Implicit in this proposal was the Dutch government’s prejudice that Jewish DPs had a higher tendency of harboring unwanted political convictions.65 These and other objections became irrelevant after the Suriname negotiations were suspended in the summer of 1948. Despite this setback, the Freelanders continued to believe in Territorialism’s relevance. As the new decade began, their focus on displaced persons turned into an engagement with “migration issues.” In 1954, Ada Siegel, Steinberg’s daughter and an influential Territorialist herself, pointed out that the recently established Intergovernmental Committee on European Migration (ICEM) termed “surplus population” rather than “refugees” the main issue of the day. These “surplus” people, a significant number of whom were Jewish, were in need of an emigration solution, which could not be satisfactorily offered by Zionism alone.66 The Freeland League continued to take its task seriously throughout the 1950s, as it explored numerous settlement options, mostly in Latin America. However, none of these plans would ever come as close to realization as the Saramacca scheme.

Changing Times: Decolonization The DP camps were to be the source and breeding ground for the future Territorialist Jewish settlers, while the Saramacca settlement was to be the final destination for these homeless people. With their Suriname plan, the Territorialists built an explicit bridge between two pressing concerns: first, the European refugee problem, and second, the changing political and cultural agency of indigenous peoples in a colony on the threshold

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of decolonization. In that context, the Surinamese experiences helped the Freeland League to redefine its aims and outlooks in relation to changing colonial and racial realities. The Freelanders were forced to reassess their political strategies, but they also encountered more fundamental questions. For instance, how did mid-twentieth century Jews relate to the newly enfranchised, formerly colonized peoples of the world? And what status did the Territorialists seek for their future settlements? Freeland League leader Steinberg, a Russian former Socialist Revolutionary politician and a lifelong anti-statist thinker, was aware that an explicit demand for political autonomy would spell the immediate end of the Territorialist endeavors. This was due to not only colonial powers’ anxieties over Jews creating a “state within a state” but also general concerns within a postcolonial context: “In the World at large the peoples in the Colonies have risen against the old rule,” Steinberg noted, and they would never agree to a Jewish, politically autonomous settlement on their newly independent lands.67 In order to forge good relations with the Surinamese people, an explicit recognition of the new and fragile Surinamese local autonomy was therefore of the utmost importance.68 This postcolonial approach was based on both moral69 and realpolitiker considerations: at the same time that Steinberg paid lip service to Surinamese decolonization, he also tried to nudge French colonial minister Marius Moutet in August 1946 to make a public declaration about the French willingness to offer parts of its colonial territories for Jewish settlement. Such a plan had already been on the table before the war, and after 1945 French politicians continued to show lukewarm interest.70 Strikingly, in the French case, the Territorialists did not discuss the wishes of colonial subjects, as these did not yet have the political agency that the Surinamese had acquired. This difference in approach shows that the Territorialist negotiating activities were still partly done in the old colonial spirit. This seeming dichotomy, between sympathy and indifference regarding indigenes, can be partly explained when we consider the difference between “colonialism,” which refers to the domination of people, and “colonization,” which refers only to a territory.71 It is clear that the Territorialists aspired to create the latter: Jews were to become colonists, but not colonizers. Also, by focusing on the land, the question of the people could more easily be ignored altogether. However, the Freelanders were not blind followers of the “empty space” logic. They did realize that every suitable piece of land already had at least some inhabitants. Numbers featured more prominently than ever before in the different publications regarding the Suriname scheme: according to the Freeland League’s own report, the Saramacca district had 12,648 inhabitants of different ethnic backgrounds.72 This number made the Saramacca district one of the lesser-populated districts of the colony, with most of the people living outside of the proposed area for Jewish colonization.73 Still, since

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the claim that the district was “empty” did not hold true, it was crucial to stress the “sparseness” of the population.74 Another example of the limit to the Freelanders’ sensitivity to postcolonial sensibilities presents itself in the negotiations between the Freeland League delegation and the Surinamese government in April 1947. The Surinamers were worried that no clearly fixed number of settlers was mentioned in any of the initial proposals. However, with a Surinamese population of less than 200,000, numbers were crucial—a fact the Freeland League failed to acknowledge. This issue almost led to a stalemate in the negotiation process, as the Freelanders feared that a small colonization plan would hurt their fundraising activities. After all, as we have seen, the organization aspired to offer one of the larger available emigration schemes for DPs and communicated in that spirit with international bodies like the IRO. The Surinamers, for their part, were anxious to keep the Jewish settlement numerically smaller than the smallest existing Javanese minority of about 35,000 individuals. With this number in mind, the final agreement mentioned 30,000 future immigrants.75 A second reason for the Surinamese desire to establish fixed numbers was voiced by advisory committee member Julius C. De Miranda, who mentioned the general fear of a politically and economically influential Jewish presence, reminiscent of the deplorable former role of Jewish slave-owners in the colony. A similar sentiment underlay a published letter that warned of a mere 200,000 Surinamese “weaklings” never being able to withstand the influx of a group of “Herculeses” of the Jewish “race.” The predominance of this “reversed” form of anti-Jewish prejudice (the Jew as ruthless and strong rather than weak and degenerated) was one of the reasons why the Surinamese negotiation partners considered it imperative to include a provision in the final agreement that stipulated a prohibition for the settlers to be employed by, or to employ, non-Jews.76 Relying on a slightly different set of arguments, an anonymous commentator explained the generally felt creole hesitance, while still showing some sympathy for the Jewish case: like the Jews, the creoles had also been homeless for centuries. However, the author asked rhetorically, did their initial status as slaves not gain them more rights than the Jews to settle the unsettled parts of Suriname?77 Steinberg was aware of the creole fear of “the white man” and of “the Jew,” and he travelled to Suriname yet another time to impress upon the local population the Freeland League’s good intentions.78 Personal contacts were forged, and small favors were granted. On one occasion, the Freeland League arranged car parts for the head of the Surinamese Department of Social Affairs.79 More objections to the project were raised during the heated debate in the Staten van Suriname on June 27, 1947, leading up to the final vote about the plan. The partly ethnically inspired political sectarianism in Suriname made it difficult for politicians to divert from their main party line.80 During the preceding two months, the Creole Union of Suriname

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and the Suriname Mine Workers Union had declared themselves opposed, while the Progressive Surinamese People’s Party was in favor. Now, during the June 27 debate, several arguments were raised that demonstrated both the anticolonial and the anti-Jewish dimensions of the negotiation process. Staten members Percy Wijngaarde, Sewraam Rambaran Mishre, and J. E. Ho A. Sjoe revealed their attachment to the old stereotype of Jews as bad farmers. They wondered what guarantee there was that the Jewish settlers would be suitable agriculturists. In the same breath, Wijngaarde doubted the settlers’ motivation and perseverance. After all, he claimed, Palestine would always have a stronger appeal than Suriname.81 Other attendees did acknowledge the potential advantages of a Jewish settlement, and they formulated their endorsements to show its benefits to increasingly independent Suriname. Staten chair Henry L. de Vries had already declared that the initiative would bring in foreign currency, materiel, and expertise, and that it would help to settle thus far uncultivated land, the profits of which would also benefit the “Land’s Children.”82 Whatever the outcome of the negotiations, De Miranda added during the June 27 discussion, inviting a committee of experts would mean obtaining useful scientific information. Asgar Karamat Ali mentioned the positive attitude of his Surinamese Muslim Party, while the Javanese Ming Doelman expected that a larger Jewish influx might lead to an increase in the general wage level in the colony. E. Th. L. (Thomas) Waller lashed out at the opposition that even if “little individual interests” might be hurt, the tide of progress could not be stopped. The Freeland League proposal was eventually accepted, with seven to five votes. Internal skirmishes and subsequent walkouts notwithstanding, this was the most advanced stage any Territorialist project had ever reached.83 Unfortunately for the Freeland League, the official Surinamese governmental support did not ensure a smooth process. The Dutch gratefully used the changing situation in Suriname’s colonial status to officially pass on all responsibility for decision-making,84 but behind the scenes Dutch politicians were still instrumental in creating a negative attitude towards the proposal. Even if the Dutch publicly supported Suriname’s path to independence, behind closed doors Dutch diplomats considered the Surinamers to be unruly, irrational actors.85 For the Freeland League, somewhat aware of the political games that were being played,86 this tenuous situation meant that its leadership could never fully identify their responsible negotiation partners. Eventually, the negative Dutch role in the process would contribute to the failure of the project. The negotiations surrounding the Saramacca plan reveal the complex nature of the reasoning for and against the project on the part of the Surinamers: in essence, they were receptive to the idea of housing a group of Eastern European Jewish refugees. Such a settlement project would help the tide of modernity arrive to their soon-to-be politically independent shores. (As it turned out, full independence came only in 1975.) At

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the same time, the arguments raised against the proposal touched upon deeply ingrained anti-Jewish sentiments, based on the history of slavery in Suriname, and fed by European-style antisemitic ideas imposed from The Netherlands. More importantly, the Surinamers did not want to jeopardize their newly attained partial independence by risking opening their doors to a new, powerful group of outsiders. These reservations and the eventual failure of the plan notwithstanding, the fact that the proposal received such serious consideration brings together two previously unconnected historical events: the Jewish European DP problem and the early period of Surinamese decolonization.

Conclusion A diverse set of reasons led to the rejection of the Saramacca plan. After the project’s suspension, the new Dutch governor to Suriname acknowledged that the official list of motivations had mostly served to avoid openly addressing more emotional, colonial, and even antisemitic arguments.87 As we have seen, such antisemitic sentiments, especially concerning Eastern European Jews, did play a role in the Dutch pressure on the Surinamese to dismiss the plan. This is not wholly surprising in the directly post-Shoah context, especially since these anti-Jewish feelings were framed as “anti-Communist.” Partly due to these perspectives, the end-calculation of the Dutch and Surinamese politicians remained negative. Still, this did not mean that the idea of settling refugees in Suriname was perceived as wholly unrealistic. Even after the plan was officially rejected, the Dutch still considered providing a refuge in Suriname for non-Jewish DPs residing in Shanghai.88 Putting aside the project’s political tensions and eventual collapse, the Freeland League activities in Suriname help to challenge the exclusive Zionist claim to Jewish territoriality: Zionism was not the only territorial option to be seriously considered during the first half of the twentieth century. At the same time, Territorialism helped the Zionist movement to sharpen its focus on Palestine, as the Zionists were forced to actively reject the Territorialist alternatives that were being discussed in the Jewish political sphere. In a way, the Zionist experiences with Territorialism made Zionism more concrete and “true.” Moreover, by connecting the European Jewish DP question to the burgeoning story of Surinamese decolonization, this case study helps to broaden and reframe our accepted Jewish geopolitical topology. For the Territorialists, the Shoah served as the ultimate confirmation that a territorial solution needed to be found for the Jewish plight, while Palestinecentered political Zionism was not able to offer such a comprehensive solution. According to the Territorialists, the answer to the territorial conundrum, further strengthened by the DP crisis, was to be found in a colonial framework.

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The ambivalent relationship between Zionism and colonial thinking was more straightforward in the Territorialist case. From its outset, Territorialism had looked to a diverse array of colonial settings to find locales for Jewish settlement. As the Saramacca scheme demonstrates, this colonial focus persisted after 1945, while entering a phase of rapid adjustment to the changing world order. “Suriname” appeared in the midst of this mental transition and helped to hasten it. This is why an exploration of the Freeland League plan reveals both a traditional colonial approach, often ignoring the presence of indigenous peoples (albeit never directly aimed at oppressing them), and a growing awareness of the rights and powers of increasingly enfranchised colonized groups. The latter attitude eventually prevailed when Freeland League leader Steinberg hailed the new postcolonial realities as a welcome revolutionary turn in world history. Several years after the end of the Suriname negotiations, Steinberg considered the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung as the ultimate proof that a new era was dawning in which Jews had an important role to play.89 Zionism eventually triumphed, in part thanks to the appeal of its tunnel vision towards Palestine, which carried the spiritual weight necessary to garner the required amount of interest and international support. After all, there was “no Grave of Rebecca or Rachel in Guiana,” and “no Holy Land quality to stir the zeal of the settlers.”90 Once the Jewish state became a fact, alternative territorial projects were nearly impossible to pursue. Nonetheless, Territorialism as a movement and an idea persisted. As world politics became further removed from the trauma of the Second World War, “migration” became a key word in international political discourse. Moreover, the meaning of “space” did change over time, but never lost its connection to actual geographical territories; world politics were in flux, but never became “aspatial.”91 Their eventual near-disappearance into historiographical oblivion notwithstanding, the Territorialists’ efforts in Suriname represent a crucial piece in the puzzle of a global, spatially defined understanding of the reshaping of the post1945 Jewish and non-Jewish worlds.

Notes 1. The first scholarly overview of the Freeland League activities is given in Michael C. Astour, Geshikhte Fun Der Frayland-Lige (Buenos Aires/New York: Frayland-lige, 1967). Astour and his father, Joseph Czernichow, had been members of the movement. An in-depth study focusing mostly on the Dutch diplomatic aspects of the project is Alexander Heldring, Het Saramacca Project. Een Plan van Joodse Kolonisatie in Suriname (Hilversum: Verloren, 2011). See also my MA thesis on the same topic: Laura Almagor, Een Vergeten Alternatief. Het Freeland League Plan voor Joodse Kolonisatie in Suriname (MA thesis, Utrecht: Utrecht University, 2007), as well as Adam Rovner’s chapter: “Welcome to the Jungle: Suriname (1938–1948),” in In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands Before Israel (New York: NYU Press,

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2.

3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

Laura Almagor 2014), 183–218. The Saramacca scheme also features in my doctoral dissertation: Laura Almagor, “Forgotten Alternatives. Jewish Territorialism as a Movement of Political Action and Ideology, 1905–1965” (PhD diss., Florence: European University Institute, 2015). Examples of studies that almost exclusively consider the Jewish DP history in the context of its contribution to the Zionist project are: Hagit Lavsky, “The Experience of the Displaced Persons in Bergen-Belsen. Unique or Typical Case?,” in “We Are Here”: New Approaches to Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany, eds. Avinoam Patt and Michael Berkowitz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), 245–6; Zeev W. Mankowitz, Life Between Memory and Hope: The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Anna Holian, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism: Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 16; Tara Zahra, The Great Departure: Mass Migration From Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2016), 19. Jeffrey Veidlinger, “One Doesn’t Make Out Much With Furs in Palestine: The Migration of Jewish Displaced Persons, 1945–7,” East European Jewish Affairs 44, nos. 2–3 (2014): 241. Avinoam J. Patt and Michael Berkowitz, “Introduction,” in “We Are Here”: New Approaches to Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany, eds. Avinoam Patt and Michael Berkowitz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), 7. Unknown author, Jodensavanne. Een Historische Plaats in het Oerwoud van Suriname (Paramaribo, circa, 1975), no page numbers. Rudolf van Lier, Samenleving in een Grensgebied (Amsterdam: S. Emmering 1977, 1st ed. 1949), 64; Frederik Oudschans Dentz, De Kolonisatie van de Portugeesch Joodsche Natie in Suriname en de Geschiedenis van de Joden Savanne (Amsterdam: Menno Hertzberger, 1927), 20; Rudolf van Lier, “The Jewish Community in Surinam: A Historical Survey,” in The Jewish Nation in Surinam, ed. Robert Cohen (Amsterdam: S. Emmering, 1982), 22; Robert Cohen, Jews in Another Environment: Surinam in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 176–9. Rovner, In the Shadow of Zion, 184, 143. Elisabeth van Blankenstein, Dr. M. van Blankenstein: Een Nederlands Dagbladdiplomaat 1880–1964 (Leiden: Sdu Uitgevers, 1999), 168–71. Curiously, Anton Mussert, the leader of the Dutch National Socialist movement (NSB), suggested a Dutch-led resettlement scheme of Jews to Suriname, subsequently entailing a colonial redrawing of the world: Anton Mussert, The United States of Guiana: The Jewish National Home (n.p., 1939). J. Felhoen Kraal to B. Raptschinsky, 27 February 1946, University of Amsterdam, Special Collections, Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana, Archive of Boris Raptschinsky (UvA BC, ROS, ABR), inv. no. 668; Rovner, In the Shadow of Zion, 197–9. Herwald to A. Milhado Jr. (of Vrij Nederland, the periodical of the Dutch resistance), 20 September 1944; Milhado to Herwald, 21 September 1944; Herwald to M. Sluizer, 29 September 1944, all in YIVO RG255, Tanhum Ber Herwald Papers, YIVO, New York City, Box 1; Boris Raptschinsky, Het Joodsche Wereldprobleem (Den Haag: H. P. Leopold, 1941). Lesser Fruchtbaum acknowledged Raptschinsky’s influence: Lesser Fruchtbaum, “Surinam,” Freeland 2, no. 6 (November–December 1946), 11–12, 15. For an overview of Raptschinsky’s life and works, see (in Dutch): Jana van Eeten-Koopmans, “Boris Raptschinsky (1887–1983),” Studia Rosenthaliana 30, no. 2 (1996): 282–303.

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11. Memorandum T.B. Herwald for ITO to Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry for Palestine, 4 February 1946, YIVO RG366, Isaac Steinberg Papers, YIVO Archives, New York City, folder 27. 12. For a further exploration of Steinberg’s crucial influence on the ideology and activities of the Freeland League, see Laura Almagor, “A Territory, But Not a State: The Territorialists’ Visions for a Jewish Future After the Shoah (1943– 1960),” S:I.M.O.N.—Shoah: Intervention, Methods, Documentation 4, no. 1 (2017): 93–108. 13. Rovner, In the Shadow of Zion, 201–2; Felhoen Kraal to Raptschinsky, 27 February 1946, UvA BC, ROS, ABR, inv. no. 668; Prof. Dr. C.I Ariëns Kappers to Raptschinsky, 25 March 1946, UvA BC, ROS, ABR, inv. no. 670. 14. I. Steinberg to Raptschinsky, 14 May 1947, UvA BC, ROS, ABR, inv. no. 695. 15. Joodsche Coördinatie Commissie (Nederlandse Zionistenbond/Dutch Zionist Union), “Memorandum voor de Anglo-Amerikaanse Commissie van Onderzoek Inzake het Joodse Vraagstuk in Europa en de Toekomst van Palestina,” Bulletin van de Nederlandse Zionistenbond (4 February 1946). 16. Copy letter Raptschinsky to Freeland Executive, 22 July 1948, UvA BC, ROS, ABR, inv. no. 838a. Arieh Saposnik demonstrates how at the time of the Uganda debate even in Palestine a significant part of the yishuv supported the pro-Uganda camp, despite (or maybe in part because) these Jews had made Aliyah themselves. Arieh Saposnik, Becoming Hebrew: The Creation of a Jewish National Culture in Ottoman Palestine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 44–55. One of the plan’s most prominent supporters in the yishuv was Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the father of the revival of the modern Hebrew language and incidentally also a close friend of Zangwill’s. 17. Heldring, Het Saramacca Project, 190–3, 197, 277; Rovner, In the Shadow of Zion, 212–5. 18. Rovner, In the Shadow of Zion, 205. 19. “The Netherlands Delegation at the U.N.,” Freeland 3, no. 3 (November– December 1947), 15. 20. “Surinam Government Officially Welcomes Jewish Settlement,” Freeland 3, no. 3 (November–December 1947), 3. 21. Isaac Steinberg to Robert Bowman, 11 January 1950, YIVO RG366/195. For more on Bowman’s important role in twentieth-century American politics, see Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 22. “Colonization Site Selected: Expert Commission in Surinam,” Freeland Bulletin 2, no. 1 (February 1948), 1, 7; Rovner, In the Shadow of Zion, 205–10. 23. L. Götzen (Minister of Overseas Possessions, OGD) to the Governor of Suriname, 22 June 1948, Dutch National Archives, The Hague, Gouverneur van Suriname, Geheim Kabinetsarchief 1887–1951 (GS), Verzoeken van de Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonisation om in Suriname Landbouwvestigingen te Mogen Oprichten, met Bijlagen, 1946–1950 (FL), collection no. 2.10.18, inv. no. 704; Prime Minister L. Beel to Minister of Foreign Affairs (BZ) P. van Boetzelaer, 27 April 1948, Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (ABZ), 1945–1954, Plannen van de Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization in New York om een Joodse Kolonie op te Richten, 1946–1950, inv. no. 1201. 24. J.H.A. Logemann to Raptschinsky, 19 March 1947, UvA BC, ROS, ABR, inv. no. 1685b. 25. Rovner, In the Shadow of Zion, 216. Ambassador to the US E.N. van Kleffens to Minister of Foreign Affairs D. Stikker, 5 January 1949, ABZ, 1945– 1954, inv. no. 12015. 26. Michael Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 357.

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27. See, for instance, Editors, “Who Will Go To Surinam?,” Freeland 4, no. 2 (May–June 1948), 19. 28. “Washington Testimony,” Freeland 2, no. 2 (March 1946), 3, 4, 12–13, esp. 3. 29. Howard Adelman and Elazar Barkan, No Return, No Refuge: Rites and Rights in Minority Repatriation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 156. 30. “Freeland League in Europe Reports: Austria,” Freeland Bulletin 2, no. 1 (February 1948), 3, 8; Mordkhe Schaechter, “The Refugee Freeland League in Austria,” Freeland 6, no. 2 (November–December 1951), 8–9. 31. Second Freeland Conference, 9–10 October 1948, “A Call to the Jewish People,” YIVO RG366/167; “A Call to the Jewish People!,” Freeland 5, no.  1 (January–February 1949), 20; Schaechter to Freeland League in the U.S., 4 May 1948, YIVO RG682, Mordkhe Schaechter Papers, YIVO, New York City, folder 860. 32. Atina Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 5–6. 33. Veidlinger, “One Doesn’t Make Out Much,” 241; Lavsky, “The Experience of the Displaced Persons,” 245–6; Mankowitz, Life Between Memory and Hope; Margarete Myers Feinstein, Holocaust Survivors in Postwar Germany, 1945–1957 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 307. 34. Michael Brenner, After the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Lives in Postwar Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 35, 47. Also: Laura J. Hilton, “The Reshaping of Jewish Communities in Frankfurt and Zeilsheim in 1945,” in “We Are Here”, 199; Feinstein, Holocaust Survivors, 205, 283, 262; Rolinek, Jüdische Lebenswelten, 70–1. 35. Hilton, “The Reshaping,” 214; Feinstein, Holocaust Survivors, 279; Susanne Rolinek, Jüdische Lebenswelten, 1945–1955. Flüchtlinge in der amerikanischen Zone Österreichs (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2007), 121. 36. Angelika Königseder and Juliane Wetzel, Waiting for Hope: Jewish Displaced Persons in Post–World War II Germany (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 205. 37. “Resolutions of the first Freeland conference of the D.P. camps held in Upper Austria on October 5th, 1947,” YIVO RG366/114; “Voice of D.P.’s. Resolutions of the First Freeland Conference of the D.P. Camps held in Upper-Austria on October 5th, 1947. Twenty-five representatives of seven camps took part in the conference,” Freeland 3, no. 3 (November–December 1947), 2. 38. Translation of “Resolutions made at the second Country Conference of the Austrian ‘Refugee Freeland League’,” (1948), YIVO RG366/529. 39. Antony Polonsky, The Jews in Poland and Russia, Vol. III: 1914 to 2008 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 628. 40. “Freeland Activities,” Freeland 2, no. 2 (May–June 1947), 19. 41. Feinstein, Holocaust Survivors, 192, 81 n. 61, 299–300. 42. Mankowitz, Life Between Memory and Hope, 36, 73; Rolinek, Jüdische Lebenswelten, 42; Koppel S. Pinson, “Jewish Life in Liberated Germany: A Study of the Jewish DP’s,” Jewish Social Studies 9, no. 2 (April 1947): 116. 43. Königseder and Wetzel, Waiting for Hope, 76. 44. Pinson, “Jewish Life,” 117. 45. Quoted in Mankowitz, Life Between Memory and Hope, 136. 46. Thomas Albrich, “The Zionist Option: Israel and the Holocaust Survivors in Austria,” in Escape Through Austria: Jewish Refugees and the Austrian Route to Palestine, eds. Thomas Albrich and Ronald W. Zweig (London: Frank Cass, 2002), 126. 47. Rolinek, Jüdische Lebenswelten, 42. 48. Tamar Lewinsky, “Dangling Roots? Yiddish Language and Culture in the German Diaspora,” in “We Are Here”, 323, 333 n. 45; Myers Feinstein,

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52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66.

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Holocaust Survivors, 271–2; Rolinek, Jüdische Lebenswelten, 100. See the folder devoted to this controversy: Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Archives (JDC), New York, 1945–1954: Records of the New York Headquarters of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, NY AR194554/4/17/8/110, as well as several related documents in JDC Archives, Records of the Geneva office of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1945–1954, G 45–54/4/20/3/AU.72, especially “Excerpt from a letter of Z. Cooper, Secretary of the ‘Bund’ group at camp Puch near Salzburg, Austria,” 6 June 1947. A. Tempelman to Freeland League, 23 June 1948, YIVO RG366/106. Helen Wilson (Voluntary Agency Liaison Officer PCIRO) to Steinberg, 18 June 1948, YIVO RG366/114. “Report of the Second Freeland Convention,” 9–10 October 1948, YIVO RG366/167; “Protokol. Fun der 2-ter Landes-Konferenc, ‘Plejtim-FrajlandLige, in Estrajch’,” 10 July 1948, YIVO RG366/529. For the Joint’s perspective, see the JDC file on the Freeland League’s Suriname Scheme: JDC Archives, G 45–54/4/47/2/DG.1. Mordkhe Schaechter, “The Refugee Freeland League in Austria,” Freeland 6, no. 2 (November–December 1951), 8–9, esp. 8. Izak Kaczerginski to Freeland League, New York, 21 May 1948, YIVO RG366/527; “Freeland League Intensifies and Expands Activities,” Freeland 5, no. 1 (January–February 1949), 9. Quoted in Königseder and Wetzel, Waiting for Hope, 69. Quoted in Myers Feinstein, Holocaust Survivors, 152. UN Information Center Geneva, Excerpts from IRO-announcements, 2 February 1948, YIVO RG366/23. Point 19 of “Report on the progress and prospect of repatriation, resettlement and immigration of refugees and displaced persons,” submitted by the PCIRO to the UN Economic and Social Council, 10 June 1948, YIVO RG366/114 and YIVO RG682/600. R. Innes (Director of Resettlement PCIRO) to Goodman, 23 February 1948; W.A. Wood, Jr. (Chief PCIRO) to Steinberg, 18 March 1948, both in YIVO RG366/114. “Freeland League In Europe Reports: Austria,” Freeland Bulletin 2, no. 1 (February 1948): 3, 8. “Ruf zum Amerikaner yidn,” [1948], YIVO RG682/600. Also: Letter to Max Weinreich from DP camp Arzberger, 22 June 1948, YIVO RG682/600. Freeland group Vienna to Herbert H. Lehman, 4 May 1948, YIVO RG366/ 527 and YIVO RG682/600. Adriaanse to De Kanter, 26 January 1948, ABZ, 1945–1954, inv. no. 12015. Ibid.; Secretary General Ministry of Foreign Affairs J. Kiveron to Minister OGD, 17 February 1948, ABZ, 1945–1954, inv. no. 12015. Internal Message Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 11 September 1947, ABZ, 1945– 1954, inv. no. 12015. Götzen to Governor of Suriname, 22 June 1948, ABZ, 1945–1954, inv. no. 12015. Several other internal exchanges in the Dutch ministerial archives show expressions of antisemitism: Minister OGD to Minister BZ, 23 March 1948; Department General Affairs of BZ to Minister BZ, 8 May 1948; Minister OGD L. Götzen to Prime Minister, 5 May 1948; Minister BZ to Dutch Embassy Washington DC, June 1948, ABZ, 1945–1954, Plannen van de Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization in New York om een joodse kolonie op te richten, 1946–1950, inv. no. 12015. Ada Siegel, “Trends In Migration,” Freeland 8, no. 7 (May–July 1954), 9–10. Also: Fruchtbaum, “An Evaluation of Territorialism,” Freeland 8, no. 8 (September–October 1954), 5–6.

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67. Isaac Steinberg, “Political Negotiations and Prospects,” Freeland, 3, no. 1 (January–February 1947), 4, 16, esp. 4. 68. “In the Freeland League,” Freeland 7, no. 1 (January–February 1953), 16. Admittedly, Steinberg also attempted to travel to The Hague, but was denied a Dutch visa: Raptschinsky to Logemann (5 June 1948), UvA BC, ROS, ABR, inv. no. 814; Goodman to Van Leeuwen, 30 June 1948, UvA BC, ROS, ABR, inv. no. 820; Minister of Foreign Affairs Boetzelaer to the Freeland League, 12 June 1948, ABZ, 1945–1954, inv. no. 12015. 69. Lesser Fruchtbaum, “Evaluation of Dr. I.N. Steinberg,” [1957], YIVO RG682/327. 70. Copy letter Steinberg to M. Moutet, 2 August 1946, UvA BC, ROS, ABR, inv. no. 676. 71. Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York: Palgrave, 2010), 14. 72. Boris Raptschinsky, “The Guianas Are the Territory,” Freeland 2, no. 5 (September–October 1946), 5–7, 19, esp. 5–6; Freeland League Poster, “We Demand a Free Land for Homeless Jews: What We Testified Before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry,” text taken from New York Post, 8 February 1946, YIVO RG682/600; Preliminary Report on the Possibilities of Jewish Colonization in Surinam by the Commission of Experts Appointed by the Freeland League (February 1948), 13. 73. Preliminary Report, 14–15, 58. 74. Boris Raptschinsky, “The Guianas Are the Territory,” Freeland 2, no. 5 (September–October 1946), 5–7, 19, esp. 5–6; Preliminary Report, 13. 75. “Overleg met de Freeland League 1947,” ABZ, 1945–1954, inv. no. 19631. 76. Ibid. 77. Anonymous in De Surinamer. Nieuws- en Advertentieblad, 24 April 1947. 78. Steinberg to Raptschinsky, 10 June 1947, UvA BC, ROS, ABR, inv. no. 703. 79. Steinberg to M. de Groot, 24 March 1948, UvA BC, ROS, ABR, inv. no. 803. 80. Goodman to Raptschinsky, 21 July 1948, UvA BC, ROS, ABR, inv. no. 836. 81. “Verslag der Handelingen van de Staten van Suriname, zittingsjaar 1947– 1948,” ARA, Ministerie van Koloniën: Handelingen van de Staten van Suriname (gedrukt) 1866–1968 (HSvS), collection no. 2.10.44, inv. no. 82, f. 173–80. 82. “Verslag der Handelingen van de Staten van Suriname, zittingsjaar 1946–1947,” inv. no. 81, f. 274. 83. “Verslag der Handelingen van de Staten van Suriname, zittingsjaar 1947–1948,” f. 175–84. 84. See, for instance, Van Kleffens to Freeland League, 17 February 1949, and W. Huender to Minister OGD, 13 January 1949, ABZ, 1945–1954, inv. no. 12015. 85. Götzen to Governor, 5 May 1948, ABZ, 1945–1954, inv. no. 12015. 86. See, for instance, copy letter Raptschinsky to Logemann, 8 October 1948, UvA BC, ROS, ABR, inv. no. 874. 87. Governor M. de Niet to Minister OGD, 6 July 1948, ARA, GS, FL, inv. no. 704. 88. Corrie K. Berghuis, Geheel Ontdaan van Onbaatzuchtigheid: Het Nederlandse Toelatingsbeleid voor Vluchtelingen en Displaced Persons van 1945 tot 1956 (Amsterdam: Rozenberg Publishers, 1999), 65, 116–7. 89. For more on Steinberg’s reflections on Bandung, see Laura Almagor, “Fitting the Zeitgeist: Jewish Territorialism and Geopolitics (1943–1960),” Contemporary European History, 27, no. 3 (August 2018): 351–69. 90. A. Johnson to Steinberg, 9 July 1947, UvA BC, ROS, ABR, inv. no. 721. 91. Smith, American Empire, xviii.

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Bibliography Adelman, Howard, and Elazar Barkan. No Return, No Refuge: Rites and Rights in Minority Repatriation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Albrich, Thomas. “The Zionist Option: Israel and the Holocaust Survivors in Austria.” In Escape Through Austria: Jewish Refugees and the Austrian Route to Palestine, edited by Thomas Albrich and Ronald W. Zweig. London: Frank Cass, 2002: 105–31. Almagor, Laura. “Een Vergeten Alternatief. Het Freeland League Plan voor Joodse Kolonisatie in Suriname.” MA thesis., Utrecht University, Utrecht, 2007. Almagor, Laura. “Fitting the Zeitgeist: Jewish Territorialism and Geopolitics (1943– 1960).” Contemporary European History 27, no. 3 (August 2018): 351–69. Almagor, Laura. “Forgotten Alternatives. Jewish Territorialism as a Movement of Political Action and Ideology, 1905–1965.” PhD diss., European University Institute, Florence, 2015. Almagor, Laura. “A Territory, But Not a State: The Territorialists’ Visions for a Jewish Future After the Shoah (1943–1960).” S:I.M.O.N.—Shoah: Intervention. Methods, Documentation 4, no. 1 (2017): 93–108. Astour, Michael C. Geshikhte Fun Der Frayland-Lige. Buenos Aires/New York: Frayland-lige, 1967. Berghuis, Corrie K. Geheel Ontdaan van Onbaatzuchtigheid. Het Nederlandse Toelatingsbeleid voor Vluchtelingen en Displaced Persons van 1945 tot 1956. Amsterdam: Rozenberg Publishers, 1999. Brenner, Michael. After the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Lives in Postwar Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Cohen, Robert. Jews in Another Environment: Surinam in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century. Leiden: Brill, 1991. Grossmann, Atina. Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Heldring, Alexander. Het Saramacca Project: Een Plan van Joodse Kolonisatie in Suriname. Hilversum: Verloren, 2011. Hilton, Laura J. “The Reshaping of Jewish Communities in Frankfurt and Zeilsheim in 1945.” In “We Are Here”: New Approaches to Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany, edited by Avinoam Patt and Michael Berkowitz. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010: 194–226. Holian, Anna. Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism: Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Joodsche Coördinatie Commissie (Nederlandse Zionistenbond/Dutch Zionist Union). “Memorandum voor de Anglo-Amerikaanse Commissie van Onderzoek Inzake het Joodse Vraagstuk in Europa en de Toekomst van Palestina.” Bulletin van de Nederlandse Zionistenbond, 4 February 1946. Königseder, Angelika, and Juliane Wetzel. Waiting for Hope: Jewish Displaced Persons in Post-World War II Germany. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001. Lavsky, Hagit. “The Experience of the Displaced Persons in Bergen-Belsen. Unique or Typical Case?” In “We Are Here”: New Approaches to Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany, edited by Avinoam Patt and Michael Berkowitz. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010: 227–56.

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Lewinsky, Tamar. “Dangling Roots? Yiddish Language and Culture in the German Diaspora.” In “We Are Here”: New Approaches to Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany, edited by Avinoam Patt and Michael Berkowitz. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010: 308–34. Mankowitz, Zeev W. Life Between Memory and Hope: The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Marrus, Michael. The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Mussert, Anton. The United States of Guiana: The Jewish National Home. n.p., 1939. Myers Feinstein, Margarete. Holocaust Survivors in Postwar Germany, 1945– 1957. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Oudschans Dentz, Frederik. De Kolonisatie van de Portugeesch Joodsche Natie in Suriname en de Geschiedenis van de Joden Savanne. Amsterdam: Menno Hertzberger, 1927. Patt, Avinoam J. and Michael Berkowitz. “Introduction.” In “We Are Here”: New Approaches to Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany, edited by Avinoam Patt and Michael Berkowitz. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010: 1–13. Pinson, Koppel S. “Jewish Life in Liberated Germany: A Study of the Jewish DP’s.” Jewish Social Studies 9, no. 2 (April 1947): 101–26. Polonsky, Antony. The Jews in Poland and Russia, Vol. III: 1914 to 2008. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Preliminary Report on the Possibilities of Jewish Colonization in Surinam by the Commission of Experts Appointed by the Freeland League. N.p., February 1948. Raptschinsky, Boris. Het Joodsche Wereldprobleem. Den Haag: H. P. Leopold, 1941. Rolinek, Susanne. Jüdische Lebenswelten, 1945–1955: Flüchtlinge in der amerikanischen Zone Österreichs. Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2007. Rovner, Adam. In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands Before Israel. New York: New York University Press, 2014. Saposnik, Arieh. Becoming Hebrew: The Creation of a Jewish National Culture in Ottoman Palestine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Smith, Neil. American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Unknown Author. Jodensavanne: Een Historische Plaats in het Oerwoud van Suriname. Paramaribo: CIRCA, 1975. Van Blankenstein, Elisabeth Dr. M. Een Nederlands Dagbladdiplomaat 1880– 1964. Leiden: Sdu Uitgevers, 1999. Van Eeten-Koopmans, Jana. “Boris Raptschinsky (1887–1983).” Studia Rosenthaliana 30, no. 2 (1996): 282–303. Van Lier, Rudolf. “The Jewish Community in Surinam: A Historical Survey.” In The Jewish Nation in Surinam, edited by Robert Cohen. Amsterdam: S. Emmering, 1982: 19–28. Van Lier, Rudolf. Samenleving in een Grensgebied. Amsterdam: S. Emmering, 1977, 1st ed. 1949. Veidlinger, Jeffrey. “One Doesn’t Make Out Much With Furs in Palestine: The Migration of Jewish Displaced Persons, 1945–7.” East European Jewish Affairs 44, nos. 2–3 (2014): 241–52.

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Veracini, Lorenzo. Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. New York: Palgrave, 2010. Zahra, Tara. The Great Departure: Mass Migration From Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2016.

Archives Archives of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Hague. Collection no. 2.10.18, Gouverneur van Suriname, Geheim Kabinetsarchief 1887–1951, Ministerie van Koloniën: Handelingen van de Staten van Suriname (gedrukt), 1866–1968. Collection no. 2.10.44 1945–1954, Plannen van de Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization in New York om een Joodse Kolonie op te Richten, 1946–1950. Dutch National Archives, The Hague. G 45–54 Records of the Geneva office of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1945–1954. Inv. no. 668 Archive of Boris Raptschinsky. Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Archives (JDC), New York City. NY AR194554 Records of the New York Headquarters of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1945–1954. RG255 Tanhum Ber Herwald Papers. RG366 Isaac N. Steinberg Papers. RG682 Mordkhe Schaechter Papers. University of Amsterdam, Special Collections, Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana. YIVO Archives—Center for Jewish History, New York City.

Periodicals Freeland (1944–1973), periodical of the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization, New York City, NY. Freeland Bulletin (1946–1948), published by the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization, New York City, NY. De Surinamer. Nieuws- en Advertentieblad. Paramaribo: J. Morpurgo.

5

Autoethnographic Cosmopolitanism Jewish Travel Writers Among Their Coreligionists Michael Harbsmeier

Writing about the “geographical literature” of the Jews in 1841, Leopold Zunz, one of the founders of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, became the first scholar to study Jewish travel writing as a subject in its own right. He deplored the notion that the Jews had almost no share in “the development of geographical knowledge and acquaintance with foreign countries” deriving from the general “extension of universal commerce and the increase of civilisation.”1 But as the world became more globalized, he also explained that the Jews, isolated, dispersed, regarded with ill-will or oppressed almost universally .  .  . of necessity became indifferent towards every object not strictly Jewish, and the hatred, which enclosed them on every side, pointed out their own nation as the only study worthy of being pursued.2 Despite his analysis of Jewish insularity, Zunz was able to offer a list of no fewer than 161 items of Jewish geography, spanning from the earliest Hebrew writings to contemporary Jewish contributions to geography textbooks for schools and universities. In fact, many of these texts, and particularly most of the travel accounts among them, primarily describe objects, places, and people “of their own nation,” dealing with only one set of foreign countries namely, those inhabited by other Jews. Thus, to a large extent, Jewish travel writing as it was first registered by Leopold Zunz—and nearly a century later anthologized and canonized by Elkan Adler and the Encyclopedia Judaica, and subsequently explored and studied by many others3—consists of accounts of Jewish travellers visiting and describing other Jewish communities. In the spirit of Zunz and many of his successors, Jewish travel accounts, rich with travellers’ details and reflections, have been explored as goldmines of information about Jewish communities. Like many other traditions of travel writing, Jewish travel accounts are ethnographic in that they describe cultures and societies other than those of the traveller and his readers. Unlike other travellers, however, Jewish travellers seem to deal

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almost exclusively with other Jewish communities. Therefore, rather than being simply ethnographic, Jewish travel accounts stand out as autoethnographic accounts of other Jews, written by travellers defining themselves as Jews as well. Of course, if we were to treat these texts as a series of ethnographic studies of the manners and customs of Jews living in various places all over the world, we would need to evaluate their reliability and trustworthiness, to compare information across texts and other sources in order to discern the accuracy of the representations. Differently, however, I will examine the same texts as a series of autoethnographic accounts of what the travellers themselves defined and understood as being Jewish, and of what they claimed to have in common with all the Jews whom they described as “others”—living under other conditions in other parts of the world with other forms of livelihood, as well as other forms of worship. As autoethnographic sources, I will argue, Jewish travel accounts offer unique perspectives on changes and developments in the history of Jewish identification and self-understanding. In what follows, I will begin with a closer look at how travel accounts were formed around the time of the Jewish Enlightenment in the late eighteenth century, which will provide a clearer understanding of how autoethnography can work in practice. Having identified the basic mechanism involved as a kind of allochronism, a transformation of differences experienced in space as in reality being distances in time, I will go on to show how this mechanism also was at play in many of the earlier Jewish travel accounts, from the Middle Ages through the early nineteenth century. Finally, with the account of Benjamin II, I will arrive at the main and most important representation of the cosmopolitan version of Jewish ethnographic writing in the middle of the nineteenth century. I will focus on his writings in order to trace his influence on Jewish and other cosmopolitan styles of writing, as well as a departure from autoethnographic travel writing, in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

Haskalah in Morocco and in Berlin To find the most obviously autoethnographical accounts within the long series of Jewish travel accounts, one should turn towards the late eighteenth century and Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment. Easily recognizable as an ethnographic study on the Jews and Arabs of Morocco, where the author did what we can rightly call his extended “involuntary fieldwork” from 1786 to 1790, Samuel Romanelli’s Massā’ Ba’rāv or Travail in Arab Land was published in Berlin in 1792.4 Romanelli was on his way from England to Italy when he became stranded in Gibraltar, where he then decided to take to the Maghreb for purposes of business. Having lost his passport, he was forced to stay there long enough to study the

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language and customs of his coreligionists—and while there, he engaged in a series of adventurous encounters and negotiations with curious local Arabs and Europeans. Finally being able to escape, he went to Berlin, where he joined the circles of the Haskalah, and allowed the press of the Jüdische Freischule to publish his account. Romanelli’s personal experiences with the Jews of Morocco were instrumental in redefining Jewish identity in the context of the Haskalah. By exploring the diversity of beliefs, rituals, ways of life, and, not least, ways of suffering and dealing with local Arabs and Europeans, Romanelli made it possible for both himself and his readers to identify as Jews, in similarity and in difference to those in Morocco. Seen from a postcolonial perspective, as found in many studies inspired by Edward Said’s Orientalism or Mary Louise Pratt’s influential Imperial Eyes,5 Romanelli’s ethnography of the Jews of Morocco resembled many other contemporary European accounts of foreign people living in “backwardness”—under deplorable conditions in need of progress, improvement, and enlightenment. Romanelli did not shy away from reporting about his active interventions as a teacher, preacher, and even judge for “his” Jews, but as historian Asher Salah has demonstrated in his enlightening analysis of Massā’ Ba’rāv, Romanelli’s own identity at the same time remained vulnerable, fragile, and unstable throughout all his experiences and adventures.6 Ethnography as a scholarly discipline was developed on a basic assumption: the peoples and nations analyzed and described in one way or another represented earlier stages of progress and development in the history of mankind. In his accounts of both Jews and Arabs of the Maghreb, Romanelli appeared to hold this assumption while, at the same time, clearly identifying himself as a contemporary of the Jews (as well as the Europeans), as opposed to the Arabs. Here we begin to see the potential that autoethnography had in undermining the typical allochronism of modern and enlightened ethnographies—by carving out a space that allowed for both identification or empathy and differentiation or “otherness.” Salomon Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, or autobiography, which was published by Karl Philipp Moritz in Berlin the very same year as Romanelli’s Massā’ Ba’rāv, can perhaps be taken not as a travel account but as another example that showed the complex role of allochronism in autoethnographic work. At the beginning of the first of his two volumes, he provided an extended description of contemporary living conditions and ways of life of the Jews and people in Poland.7 Interestingly, his reflection fit so well with the later autobiographical accounts of his youth and upbringing in Poland, prior to his painful and humiliating experiences when arriving at the scene of the Haskalah in Berlin, in which he was to become a prominent participant. Thus, Maimon’s account can be taken as further evidence of autoethnography as a kind of allochronism,

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in which the author paradoxically identifies with the diverse world that he encounters and describes.8 On the basis of these examples, one might think that earlier Jewish travel accounts, from before the times of Haskalah and emancipation, were largely exercises in autoethnography. Ample proof of this notion can be found in the rich, apologetical Italian texts from Venice from the early seventeenth century, such as Simone Luzzatto’s Discorso circa il stato degli Hebrei et in particolar dimoranti nell’inclita città di Venezia from 1638 and, more famously, Leone da Modena’s Historia dei Riti Ebraici, Vita e Osservanze degli Hebrei di Questi Tempi from 1637. Undeniably ethnographic, both of these texts dealt with contemporary Jewish particularities aiming at normative identification, rather than trying to describe difference and variation. The explanation for this, however, can be easily found: neither Simone Luzzatto nor Leone da Modena visited Venice as outsiders, but on the contrary, tried to convince their readers to properly and rightfully belong to that city and its ghetto.9

Predecessors Among pre-modern Jewish travel accounts, from even before Benjamin of Tudela and the twelfth century onwards, there were many examples of what we have called autoethnography: descriptions of Jews and Jewish communities living in other places, in other ways, and under other conditions than the traveller himself. Interestingly, these accounts added a temporal or historical dimension to understanding these communities, describing settings that have either remained the same for centuries with immemorial structures and practices, or experienced more or less recent changes in the surroundings. Noticing this historical context, writers would often include interpretations of these conditions as a warning or promise of times to come. Benjamin of Tudela’s Sefer ha-Masa’ot, to name the most famous example, was full of accounts of the communities and rabbis whose hospitality he enjoyed on his extended travels, and like most of the other Jewish travellers who left written records, he also paid much attention to buildings, ruins, and remains that were relevant to Jewish history he found on his way. On the basis of a number of recent studies on Jewish travel writing from medieval to early modern times,10 it is now much easier to follow the development of Jewish autoethnographic endeavors in greater detail. Even more, other recent studies allow us to take a closer look at individual travel writings that have played a crucial role in early modern Jewish history, including Mechullam da Volterra from the end of the fifteenth century;11 David ha-Re’uveni from the sixteenth century;12 Antonio de Montezinos and his contribution to Menasseh ben Israel’s The Hope of Israel from seventeenth-century Amsterdam;13 and Rabbi David Azulai, the emissary from the Holy Land, whose visits to

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an endless number of Jewish communities—both under Ottoman rule and throughout Europe—underpinned the network of pan-Judaism of the eighteenth century. Much less scholarly attention, however, has so far been devoted to the increasingly diversified Jewish travel accounts from the first threequarters of the nineteenth century. In order to illustrate the range of Jewish travel writing within this period, I will briefly present a few examples before coming to the most versatile writer and influential virtuoso among them, a traveller who called himself Benjamin II. To begin, Mordecai Noah was the author of a volume of Travels in England, France, Spain, and the Barbary States in the Years 1813–14 and 1815, which came out in 1819. He was perhaps better known for his later plans for a Jewish settlement—to be called Ararat—on Grand Island near Niagara Falls, and for his obsession with the Jewish origins of some of the American Indian tribes.14 Nonetheless, coming to Barbary at the end of a larger diplomatic mission, Mordecai Noah explained that he “was desirous of obtaining the most authentic information, in relation to the situation, character, resources, and numerical force of the Jews,” claiming that Benjamin of Tudela should be “the only Jewish traveller in those countries, whose works are extant.”15 He explained at the beginning of the disappointingly few pages devoted to this subject, “I should not omit noticing the Jews,”16 since “more will be expected from me than from casual observers.” Although trying to place himself firmly within the tradition of Jewish autoethnography, Mordecai Noah ultimately demonstrated that Travels was just as much, or even more so, part of a broader tradition of Western—and in this case American—travel writing about the rest of the world. This was also arguably the case with Joel Samuel Pollack and his New Zealand, being a narrative of travels and adventures during a residence in that country between the years 1831 and 1837 (two volumes, 1838) and Manners and customs of the New Zealanders; with notes corroborative of their habits, usages, and so forth, and remarks to intending emigrants (two volumes, 1840). Of course, these texts would not have been mentioned here if Leopold Zunz had not included Pollack on his list of Jewish geographical writings. Even more, Solomon Carvalho, famous for his many painted portraits of Native American leaders, likewise wrote his Incidents of Travel and Adventure in the Far West without at any point referring to his Jewish background. His book from 1857,17 however, was published by a “library of Jewish contributions to American democracy,” and Rachel Rubinstein has argued that his empathetic—and, as she calls it, non-hegemonic—portrayals of Native Indians and Mormons should be explained in terms of his own experience of belonging to a minority group. His self-identification, however, appeared in the text only as a remark about some prohibited food.18

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In the middle of the nineteenth century, two of the most substantial Jewish travel accounts turned out to have quite a lot in common, in spite of the diametrically opposed directions of their expeditions. Ludwig August Frankl, prolific journalist, writer, and secretary for one of the Jewish congregations in Vienna, left his hometown in 1856 with plans and funds to build a home for children in Jerusalem. He visited Jewish communities in a large number of cities in Greece, Turkey, Syria, and Egypt, and in 1858 published in two volumes his very detailed account of this expedition.19 Jacob Saphir, who was born in Romania but had settled in Jerusalem in 1836, went on his expedition in 1858 as a meshulach, or rabbinical emissary, to collect charity and funds for the construction of a synagogue in Jerusalem. Starting from Frankl’s ultimate destination, David Saphir went all the way from Jerusalem to Yemen, British India, Egypt, and Australia. He managed to describe his encounters with all the Jewish communities on his way in his Even Sapir, a travelogue in two volumes published in Hebrew in Mainz in 1866 and 1874.20 According to historian Matthias Lehmann, Sapir’s “description of distant and exotic, yet interconnected Jewish communities in faraway lands conveyed a synchronic experience of participating in a larger, contemporaneous, pan-Jewish world.”21 Much the same can be said about Ludwig August Frankl’s account, even though the communities he described were a bit less distant and exotic, and closer to home. Moreover, when Lehmann claimed that “Sapir’s travelogue represented a novel approach to Hebrew travel literature, reading more like a work of ethnography than a collection of fantastic tales of exotic lands traversed in the quest for a sign of the ‘ten tribes,’”22 this analysis also very directly applied to Frankl. Instead of searching for signs of the lost tribes and traces of the past, Sapir and Frankl were motivated by philanthropic ambitions and an interest in progress, enlightenment, and improvement. It was this interest that allowed them to distinguish so precisely between Jews and non-Jews in their autoethnographic writings. Rather than focusing on the future and the well-being of his contemporary coreligionists, David D’Beth Hillel seemed primarily dedicated to search for traces of the past in his eight-year quest for the remnants of his ancestors. Like Jacob Saphir, Rabbi David Hillel had moved from Lithuania to Safed near Jerusalem before embarking on his voyage from Jerusalem in 1824—though unlike Saphir, he travelled not as a meshulach or emissary but on his own initiative. The book that came out of this journey, his From Jerusalem, Through Arabia, Koordistan, Part of Persia and India, was published in Madras in 1832. Even though this translation contained only a fraction of the 600 pages of the lost Hebrew manuscript, it contained a veritable encyclopedia of the Jewish communities of the Arab world, as well as the Asian provinces of the Ottoman

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Empire, including “Koordistan,” Persia, and the cities of Cochin and Madras in India.23 For each of the 73 cities he visited, Hillel gave us not only the number of synagogues (from zero to five in Baghdad) and Jewish families (anywhere from 2 or “some” to 6,000) but also an often detailed description of the legal and political status, economic influence and capacities, and relative number of artisans, farmers and agriculturalists, and merchants inhabiting these communities. Starting from a list of products and commodities for sale, the descriptions continued with accounts of measures, weights, coins, and currencies, followed by the languages spoken and written. And when describing how to get from one place to the other, David Hillel used a similar scheme, providing information about the price of food, the climatic conditions, the agricultural products, the cost of hiring a boat, a horse, a mule, a camel, and other means of transportation, the hotels (caravansaries), the amount to be paid for bridge-tolls, security of the road, and the taxes paid by the minority groups to the government.24 Speaking Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Hindustani, English, and also Portuguese, as indicated by the dictionary at the end of his work, David Hillel made it seem as if he always had easy access to the beliefs, traditions, and customs of the various communities. He explained, “Being a Jew and understanding the Hebrew language and customs, and having an opportunity to examine their books, prints, and manuscripts, they could not have easily deceived me, even had they any inducement to do so.”25 These qualifications, however, did not sway his inclination to at once “identify the beliefs, customs, languages, and manners of whatever group or sect he met, with old Jewish or Israelite traditions, drawing somewhat hasty and mostly unfounded conclusions concerning their connections”26—to put it in the words of Walter J. Fischel, the otherwise loyal editor of Hillel’s Travels. Hillel’s work marked a major step forward in the history of Jewish autoethnography, as his account offered a unique combination of approaches to travel writing: first, his close attention to the demographic, social, economic, and worldly and secular ethnographic aspects of life, and second, his insatiable appetite for identifying and counting all sorts of groups—“Christian Assyrians, Kurdish, Bucharian and Chinese Jews, the Moslem sect of the Dawudiya, and even the Hindus”27—as descendants of the ten lost tribes. With modern ethnographic curiosity, he was able to liberate himself from the institutional and organizational constraints of such rabbinical emissaries as David Azulai and his almost-contemporary Jacob Sapir. Still, in what follows, we will see how Israel Joseph Benjamin extended his work even further in a cosmopolitan direction that initially undermined but ultimately stabilized the autoethnographic tradition—a

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legacy to which he claimed to belong when he proudly proclaimed himself to be Benjamin II.28

Benjamin II Israel Joseph Benjamin was born in Falticeni, a small town in Moldavia, now northeastern Romania, in 1818 (see Figure 5.1). Having lost all of his money that he earned from trading trees and other products at the age of 25, he left home in January 1845, leaving behind his 5-year-old son

Figure 5.1 J. J. Benjamin II, Drei Jahre in Amerika 1859–1862. Hannover 1862, Selbstverlag des Verfassers. page II Source: Reprint Historical Collection from the British Library n.d. (The Royal Library of Denmark).

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and pregnant wife, whom he would not see again until eight years later.29 Via Austria and Constantinople, he made his way to Smyrna, and from there to Jerusalem, Hebron, and other Palestinian cities. After visiting Damascus, Aleppo, and Diabekir, he undertook a series of expeditions to various parts of the mountains of Kurdistan. Continuing to Baghdad, then venturing through Persia to Bombay and Cochin (Kochi) in India, he also managed to visit Shiraz, Isphahan, Teheran, and Hamadan on his way back to Constantinople, where the Asian part of his journey ended in 1851. When his attempt to get back to his hometown and family failed, he then spent another three years on a trip to North Africa, travelling from Tripoli to Tunis, Algiers, and, finally, Morocco. The first version of his travel account, a French translation of the original Hebrew covering the five years of what he called “the Asian” or “Oriental” part of his journey, appeared in Paris in 1856.30 Back in Germany, Benjamin completed and published a second version in German as his own publisher in 1858,31 as well as an English translation the following year, likewise entitled Eight Years in Asia and Africa From 1846 to 1855.32 Though ostentatiously emulating the work of his medieval predecessor from Tudela, Benjamin II also laid claim to quite another tradition— namely, that of the Jews who played important roles in the Portuguese voyages of discovery and exploration from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. For that reason, he was able to engage an expert in the history of the Portuguese, the prolific historian and rabbi Meyer Kayserling, to create special chapters at both the beginning and the very end of his Eight Years in Asia and Africa: first, a portrait of the Marrano Pedro de Teixeiro,33 who went to India in Portuguese service, and second, a longer, almost conclusive essay entitled The Portuguese Conquests and Discoveries With Respect to the Jews.34 Kayserling, perhaps, wanted only to underline that “the Jews have not been created merely for suffering and endurance, but likewise everywhere and under all circumstances have proved themselves active and useful, helpful and efficient.”35 For Benjamin, however, this framing of his account allowed him to consider the Jewish traveller within the line of European discoverers and explorers of Africa, Asia, and America. On the one hand, Benjamin clearly distinguished himself from a “European traveller,” who, accustomed to cultivated countries, to intercourse with civilized people and to the conveniences of life, will, on entering the East, feel as if he had been transplanted into quite another world, into a world which it exceeds my power to describe.36 On the other hand, as a Jewish traveller, Benjamin finds himself placed in very different circumstances. The kindness, the confidence, the love and attention with which he everywhere is

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received in these countries by his brethren in the faith, make him forget the many sufferings and hardships of his journey. All kinds of privileges are allowed him, and the respect which is shown him amounts almost to general veneration.37 Writing of himself as a “European Jew,” Benjamin found it difficult to distinguish the hospitality he so much enjoyed from his brethren as one of the “learned men, and particularly those who come from the Holy Land or from Europe” from the hospitality applying to everybody else: But it is not only to their own people that the Jews of the East grant such a generous reception. Every traveller, every tourist, of whatever religion he may be, everywhere receives from them the same assistance and protection, every possible information he may require as to the manner and difficulties of his journey, the providing of guides or any other help. This generous hospitality is extended to everybody without exception, notwithstanding the numerous travellers who pass through the East; it is considered as a sacred duty, and carried out in a truly patriarchal manner.38 As if wary of contradicting himself, however, Benjamin hastened to add, But travelling in the East is made considerably easier for the Jews than for others, by one great advantage, which they alone possess. This is a knowledge of the Hebrew language. It is a powerful bond, the sole mysterious means which enables them to enter everywhere, and to overcome every difficulty.39 In his attempt to live up to what he saw as contemporary scholarly standards in his writing about the Jews of the East, Benjamin had to redefine himself as a European traveller, whose only advantage over other Europeans turned out to be his command of the language of his coreligionists. Compared to his predecessors, with respect to the substance of his descriptions of the Jewish communities, Benjamin’s contributions can mainly be measured in quantitative terms: he undoubtedly travelled over longer distances, and he described far more cities, villages, and synagogues than even the most widely travelled earlier autoethnographers. Benjamin can also be credited with paying attention to many more aspects of the economic, social, political, and religious life of the communities who actually hosted him, thus enabling him to describe in great detail the complex relationships among neighbors—whether symbiotic, transactional, hostile, or friendly. On several occasions, Benjamin also took active part in the improvement and reform of Jewish practices in the field. For example, he noticed in Birzani, a village in Kurdistan, that “there was no proper bath for the women, as prescribed by the religious laws.” He talked to the Elders of

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the community, who promised to deal with “this deficiency.”40 Coming back to the village a little later “to see if the promised bath . . . had been constructed,” he took part in an assembly that solemnly consecrated the bath, adding that after this experience he “made several improvements in their rites and ceremonies, which were not in accordance with our customs and rules.”41 More ambitiously, in the conclusion of his account of the utterly unbearable situation of the Jews in Palestine, Benjamin speculated whether giving just a little portion of the land now, so that it was completely in the hands of the Arabs, would allow the Jews “to obtain a livelihood” there. But why should they cultivate the land, he continued, “if the Arabs rob them of the harvest?”42 Instead of speculating further, Benjamin moved on “to raise a cry for help to my brothers in the faith in Europe.” He continued with a discussion of the advantages of the charitable institutions recently founded in Jerusalem by “Sir Moses Montefiore, of London,” as opposed to “the old system of yearly almsgiving” which was “of little benefit,” since “the mere improvement in their (the recipients’) personal condition .  .  . was unaccompanied by any elevation of their moral worth.”43 Benjamin summarized the wretchedness and oppression of the Persian Jews under no less than 15 headings: they were obliged to live in a separate part of town; they had no right to carry out trade of goods; even in their own quarters, they were not allowed to keep any shop open; when entering a street inhabited by Mussulmans, they were pelted by the boys and mob with stones and dirt; they were forbidden to go out when it rained; if recognized as a Jew on the street, they were subject to the greatest insults, with passers-by spitting in their faces and beating them unmercifully; if entering a shop to buy anything, they were forbidden to inspect the goods, but had to stand at a respectful distance and ask the price; if travelling in Persia, they were taxed in every inn and every caravanserai they entered; and daily and hourly, new suspicions were raised against them, in order to obtain excuses for further extortions.44 Dissatisfied with only giving his readers insight into all of these persecutions, insults, and oppressions, Benjamin then turned to higher authorities with a petition he claimed to have sent not only to “His Imperial Highness the Grand Sultan of the Sublime Ottoman Porte” but also to the emperor of the French and the Queen of England. Reproducing the text of this petition both in French and in English on the following pages,45 Benjamin once more tried not only to describe the situation of his Oriental coreligionists but also to advocate to their advantage, to the best of his abilities. Benjamin summed up the wealth of his ethnographic information in a series of chapters dealing with the more general situation of the Jews in the various regions. He eloquently contrasted the wealth, influence, and high level of civilization of the Jews of Baghdad46 to the utter poverty

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and wretchedness of the Jews living as slaves in the mountains of Kurdistan.47 And between these two extremes Benjamin unfolded an expansive panorama of the similarities and differences in the status, well-being, and prospects for the future of the Jews in Persia,48 Palestine,49 and North Africa.50 Benjamin also wrote about communities he had not visited himself, but had heard and read about, thus augmenting his already impressive list of Jewish cultural knowledge across regions of the world. Even more, Benjamin offered a great many insights about what he claimed to have seen and heard about Jewish history, genealogies, and stories of origins and migration—far more than any of the previous travellers in search of the descendants of the ten lost tribes. Like David D’Beth Hillel, Benjamin rarely doubted his own claims or those of his informants about the Jewish origins, even regarding groups showing almost no sign whatsoever of such descent and belonging. In Kurdistan, for example, the Jews had so much in common with the Nestorian Christians that the absence of the cross and the Sabbath seemed to be the only evidence of their Jewish identity. Benjamin explained: It is an historical fact that the ten tribes possessed but few learned men, and that they easily gave themselves up to strange worship, and adopted foreign customs and usages; therefore we may be well justified in the belief that these unhappy exiles, transplanted into unknown countries, and moving in a perfectly new and strange sphere, either willingly or unwillingly imitated those who had become their masters, and thus adopted their customs, manners and habits, particularly as being slaves, they were obliged to obey. Thus it is quite possible that up to a certain extent the Jews have mixed and could mix with the primitive nations of Kurdistan. I myself hold them to be the descendants of the tribes of Zebulun and Naphtali.51 Benjamin rarely shied away from using questionable arguments and dubious sources to identify people as likely descendants from any of the ten lost tribes. At the same time, however, he did all that he could to legitimize his expedition as a scholarly and scientific enterprise, calling for the support of the authorities of contemporary scholarship, which he modestly admitted that he was not always able to live up to.52 As a result, in the second German and English versions of his travel account, Benjamin included a series of supplementary questions and requests by a number of “learned men and Orientalists of France and Germany,” mostly from Paris and Breslau. On the basis of the first French version and “for the furtherance of the cause of science,” these consultants wanted Benjamin to undertake a number of further examinations and investigations if he, as he intended, were to make a second journey to the Orient.53 A similar gesture towards contemporary European geographical and Oriental scholarship is also found at the very beginning of Benjamin’s

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book, in the Author’s Preface, where he allowed himself to quote “several of the most renowned men of science” for their comments on parts of his work. Here, “His Excellency Baron Alexander v. Humboldt” praised Benjamin’s portrayal of the “conditions of degradation in the oppressed, and of arbitrary power in the oppressors, which are but little known in Europe.”54 This was followed up by short comments and recommendations for Benjamin’s next journey by the professor of geography Carl Ritter, the geographer Heinrich Petermann, the Protestant philosopher Adolph Hefferich, all from Berlin, as well as the professor of Eastern and rabbinical literature E. J. Magnus, who was from Breslau. The autoethnography of Benjamin II not only appealed to the scholarly public and men of science but also aimed to reach Benjamin’s “European brethren,” as he emphatically called them in his conclusion. First, addressing his readers—“to my brethren in Poland, Russia, and the Moldau”—Benjamin referred to “our sacred law . . . as the sole, highest, and most invaluable which truly has the power of establishing and ensuring salvation and peace on Earth.” But then, he moved on with a warning not “to close our ears to general knowledge”—to science and enlightenment. Even in Germany and France, “where truth and justice were in advance more than half a century,” the precept that “knowledge of the law must go hand in hand with general knowledge . . . was forgotten, and it was foolishly believed that one could shut oneself up, as it were, against the progress of European enlightenment.”55 With the final words of his travel account, he declared, “May thus our Russian, Polish and Moldavian brethren learn from Germany and France how much the neglect of the above precept avenges itself, and what glorious fruits spring from its observance!”56 With these words, Benjamin himself reminded us that his expansive ethnographies of the Jews of Asia and Africa could best be understood as a fundamental reorganization of Jewish identity and selfunderstanding in both Eastern and Western Europe. When talking about the others, then, Benjamin was actually speaking of himself. Benjamin’s plans for a second and better-prepared journey to the East were never realized. Three years after his return, however, he embarked on yet another voyage, this time in the opposite direction to the United States of America. In terms of size and page numbers, the account to come out of this expedition under the title Drei Jahre in Amerika 1859–186257 was even more voluminous than that of his eight years in Asia and Africa. In terms of substance and ethnographic insights on the Jewish people and institutions of the New World, however, there is not much to be said in favor of these three volumes of almost 700 pages. After registering all signs and traces of Jewish life and presenting lists of notable individuals, philanthropic clubs and societies, synagogues, schools, and cemeteries, Benjamin seemed to have slowly lost interest in these cultural issues. Instead, he moved on to air his misogynist misgivings

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about the prominent—and, in his eyes, ridiculously dominating—role of women in America.58 Further on in the text, he engaged in a critical discussion of “the spirit of America in our times,”59 complaining about the brutal materialism, obscene luxury, vulgar veneration of wealth, and seemingly universal absence of scholarship and Bildung. While describing a long list of philanthropic societies and their members in Virginia, he interjected with an unfortunate story: Benjamin served as a lecturer at one of these societies, as he decided to collect funds for his second Oriental expedition. A few weeks later, however, the promised 900 dollars were withdrawn.60 A little later still, a group called the “Benjamin Society” was founded to fund his next journey. Each of its 25 members initially paid 5 dollars, but Benjamin soon discovered that 18 dollars were missing to cover the rent for the room of the society’s meeting. In a different kind of confrontation in New Orleans, Benjamin played a crucial role in the local debate about establishing a statue for the recently deceased, influential Jew of Portuguese descent Judah Touro. Upset about the idea of devoting a statue to one of his coreligionists, Benjamin got in touch with a number of rabbis in Germany to determine that such a statue was incompatible with Mosaic law—a request which they then confirmed in reply.61 Throughout the still remaining 300 pages, an increasing number of which, admittedly, were copied from other publications, such as Wilhelm Rapp’s chapters on California in his Illustrierte Geographie von Nord- und Südamerika from 1854, Benjamin’s attention turned completely away from issues having to do with his Jewish identity. He instead became fascinated with the origins of the Indians, emphatically denying thoughts of any of the lost tribes, and he provided a lengthy biographical sketch of John Smith and the history of the sect of Mormons he founded.62 Benjamin’s experiences in the New World seemed to have had two unforeseen results: In the first place, he was reminded of his identity as a representative of German Bildung and idealist values, in opposition to American materialism. In the second place, he became curious about other ethnic and religious minorities as a result of his encounters with Mormons, broadening his once-exclusive interests in Jewish cultures around the world. Benjamin embodied cosmopolitanism not only because he travelled to many places in the Old and New Worlds alike but also because he gained self-understanding—on the one hand, as a member of only one of the many tribes and religions he encountered while, on the other, as an ethnographer of himself and his own people, writing and acting on behalf of humanity as a whole. Even at the very end of his journey to the New World, he was still obsessed with his dream to once again visit “the cradle of human kind” in the Orient.63

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Cosmopolitan Conclusion Certainly representing a peak in the long history of Jewish travel writing, Benjamin II also represents a beginning of new, and perhaps less easily recognizable, forms of autoethnographic travel writing. Less than a generation later, Mendele Moicher Sforim ironically styled himself as Benjamin III in what has become known as “the Jewish Don Quijote.” It was a Yiddish story about the adventures of a hero who broke from his shtetl in search of the lost tribes and the red Jews of the Orient—only to realize that he actually had come no farther than to the nearest barracks, where he and his friends, to their surprise, were interrogated, cleansed, and examined to be recruited as soldiers.64 Less easily recognizable as discontinuations of the autoethnographic tradition are two other travel accounts from around the time of Benjamin III. One of them was claimed not to have been written by a Jew at all, but could be seen as one of the first ethnographies of the emancipated, secular Jews of Western Europe. The other described no Jews whatsoever, while only revealing the author as a Jew at the very end. Both the Tartar Memoir of a Voyage to Europe, authored by the Hungarian Jewish Orientalist Arminius Vambéry, and the two volumes of “Kulturstudien” that were entitled Vom Kreml bis zur Alhambra, authored by Max Nordau (who would later play a central role in the Zionist movement), appeared around 1880, at a time when Jewish cosmopolitanism was about to lose its religious roots and anchorage. The Tartar Memoir of a Voyage to Europe65 was about the experiences of a Muslim pilgrim who, instead of returning home from Teheran to Samarkand, turned westward. Through these travels, he delivered a series of vivid descriptions of contemporary changes in living conditions for Jewish communities in Asia and Eastern and Western Europe. As a comparative ethnography of the Jews of Western Europe, this account continued the cosmopolitan tradition by giving the voice to a neutral outsider—a witness and observer of the Jewish experience. Throughout the two volumes of Max Nordau’s Vom Kreml bis zur Alhambra one could search in vain for anything having to do with Jews and Jewish communities. Instead, one would be confronted with enthusiastic appreciation for the power of a strong national consciousness in various countries, particularly in Denmark and Iceland in Volume 1 and in England, France, and Spain in Volume 2. Only at the very end, in a postscript called Wahrheit und Dichtung, did the old man converse with the author-traveller and complain about having to continue to travel forever, unable to return and settle at home—bearing the name of Ahasverus on his visiting card.66 Both of these accounts apparently have moved beyond the autoethnographic tradition, by removing either Jewish authorship or the focus on Jews and Jewish communities at all. We would need more pages to

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establish that many of the later Jewish travel accounts, such as those historian Nils Roemer has analyzed in his pioneering article Jewish Traveling Cultures and the Competing Visions of Modernity from 2009,67 could actually be understood as continuations and expansions of cosmopolitan writing. That is, a trained cosmopolitan had the will and capacity to identify with individuals and people living in other places and under other conditions, but retain the sense of belonging to one and the same humanity. From the Middle Ages onward, numerous Jewish travellers described in great detail both real and invented Jewish communities all over the world. With their increasingly nuanced and comprehensive accounts of ways of life and living conditions, beliefs and practices, and social relationships—both with their own neighbors and between local community members—these Jewish travellers left a rich archive of information. Their accounts tell us not only about the communities they visited but also, and more importantly for us today, about the interactions and connections, contrasts and similarities, encounters and exchanges linking these communities to their surroundings and to the travellers themselves.

Notes 1. Leopold Zunz, “Essay on the Geographical Literature of the Jews, From the Remotest Times to the Year 1842,” in Benjamin of Tudela, The Itinerary, trans. A. Asher, 2 vols. (London and Berlin, 1842), Bd. 2, S. 230–317. Original: Geographische Literatur der Juden von den ältesten Zeiten bis zum Jahr 1841, in Gesammelte Schriften, Band 1, s. 146–216, 1. 2. Ibid. 3. Elkan Nathan Adler, Jewish Travellers (801–1755) (London: G. Routledge 1930, Reprint New Delhi, 1995). See also Zacharias Frankel, “Galerie jüdischer Reisebeschreiber,” Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums, Jg 1, Nr 14 (1852): S. 523–41. Zacharias Frankel, “Zur Charakteristik neuerer Reisebeschreibungen,” Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums, Jg 4, Nr 7 (1855): S. 250–6. Adolph Kohut, “Berühmte jüdische Weltreisende,” Ost und West, Jg 3, Nr 9 (1903): Sp. 611–15. Adolph Kohut, “Berühmte jüdische Weltreisende,” Ost und West, Jg 3, Nr 11 (1903): Sp. 751–6. More recently: Alanna E. Cooper, “Conceptualizing Diaspora: Tales of Jewish Travelers in Search of the Lost Tribes,” AJS Review 30, no. 1 (2006): 95–117 and Nimrod Zinger, “Away From Home: Travelling and Leisure Activities Among German Jews in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 56, no. 1 (2011): 53–78. 4. Samuel Romanelli, Travail in an Arab Land, translated from the Hebrew with Introduction and Notes by Yedida K. Stillman and Norman A. Stillman (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 1989). 5. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). 6. Asher Salah, “The Otherness of the Self: On Samuel Romanellis Travelogue,” European Journal of Jewish Studies 5, no. 2 (2011): 219–39. Moshe Pelli, “The Literary Genre of the Travelogue in Hebrew Haskalah Literature: Shmuel Romanelli’s Masa Ba’Rav,” Modern Judaism 11, no. 2 (1991): 241–60.

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7. Interestingly, these passages have a close parallel in Heinrich Heines’s Über Polen from 1844. Being famous for its few remarks about the Jews, it begins with a long account of the political and social conditions in Poland. 8. Salomon Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte. Von ihm selbst geschrieben und herausgegeben von K. P. Moritz. In zwei Theilen. Berlin 1792. Solomon Maimon, An Autobiography, translated from the German by I. J. Clark Murray (London 1888, 2nd ed. Chicago, 2001). About early modern Jewish autobiography, see also Stefan Litt, “Mobilität und Reisen in Selbstzeugnissen aschkenasischer Juden in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Selbstzeugnisse und Ego-Dokumente frühneuzeitlicher Juden in Aschkenas—Beispiele, Methoden und Konzepte, eds. Birgit E. Klein and Rotraud Ries (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2011). And J. J. Schacter, “History and Memory of Self: The Autobiography of Rabbi Jacob Emden,” in Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, eds. Elisheva Carlebach, John M. Efron, and David N. Myers (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1998). And not least, the study of Glückl von Hameln / Gliks Bas Judah Leib by Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth Century Lives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 5–62. 9. Particularly if contrasted to the ethnographies of Christian converts studied by Yaacov Deutsch in his Judaism in Christian Eyes: Ethnographic Descriptions of Jews and Judaism in Early Modern Europe from 2012 and his article “Jüdische Merckwürdigkeiten: Ethnography in Early Modern Frankfurt,” Jewish Culture and History 10, nos. 2–3 (2004): 81–94. 10. That is, studies after my own premature “Reisen in der Diaspora. Eigenes in der Fremde in der jüdischen Reiseliteratur des Mittelters.” Das Mittelalter 3 (1998), 2, S. 63–80, from 1998. See also Annelies Kuyt, “Die Welt aus sefardischer und ashkenazischer Sicht: Die mittelalterlichen hebräischen Reiseberichte des Benjamin von Tudela und des Petachja von Regensburg,” in Erkundung und Beschreibung der Welt. Zur Poetik der Reise und Länderberichte, eds. X. von Ertzdorff and G. Giesemann (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2003), 211–31. And with a more particular focus on ethnography and autoethnograhy: María José Cano Pérez, “Tania María García Arévalo: Nosotros, vosotros, ellos: relatos de viajeros judíos del siglo xv a la luz del concepto de alteridad,” Sefarad 75, no. 2 (julio–diciembre 2015): 299–316. See particularly Martin Jacobs’s Reorienting the East: Jewish Travellers to the Medieval Muslim World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) and Matthias B. Lehmann’s Emissaries From the Holy Land: The Sephardic Diaspora and the Practice of Pan-Judaism in the Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014). 11. Daniel Jütte, Meshullam da Volterra. Von der Toskana in den Orient. Eine Renaissance-Kaufmann auf Reisen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2012). See also Abraham David, In Zion and Jerusalem: The Itinerary of Rabbi Moses Basola (1521–1523) (Jerusalem: C.G. Foundation Jerusalem Project Publications of the Martin [Szuez] Department of Land of Israel Studies of Bar-Ilan University, 1999). And Abraham David, “Jewish Travelers From Europe to the East, 12th–15th Centuries,” Miscelánea de Estudios Árabes y Hebraicos, Sección Hebreo 62 (2013): 11–39. 12. Martin Jacobs, “Martin 2002 David ha-Re’uveni: Ein ‘zionistiscxhes Experiment’ im Kontext der europäischen Expansion des 16. Jahrhunderts?,” in An der Schwelle zur Moderne: Juden in der Renaissance, eds. Giuseppe Veltri and Annette Winkelmann (Leiden, Brill 2002), 191–206. 13. Menasseh ben Israel, The Hope of Israel. The English Translation by Moses Wall 1652. Hg. von Henry Méchoulan und Gérard Nahon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Yosef Kaplan, Henry Méchoulan, and Richard H. Popkin (Hrsg.), Menasseh ben Israel and His World (Leiden: Brill, 1989).

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14. His Discourse on the Evidences of the American Indians Being the Descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel from 1837 was followed up in 1844 by a Discourse on the Restoration of the Jews, which after the failure of the Ararat-project looked for Palestine instead. 15. “Benjamin, of Tudela in Spain, who travelled in the thirteenth century”. Mordecai Noah, Travels in England, France, Spain, and the Barbary States in the Years 1813–14 and 1815 (New York: Kirk and Mercein, London: John Miller, 1819), 1. 16. Noh, Travels, 307–13. 17. Solomon Carvalho, Incidents of Travel and Adventure in the Far West, edited and with an introduction by Bertram Wallace Korn [The Jacob R. Schiff Library of Jewish Contributions to American Democracy, 1857] (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1954). 18. Rachel Rubinstein, Members of the Tribe: Native America in the Jewish Imagination (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), 34–40. 19. Ludwig August Frankl, Nach Jerusalem (Leipzig 1858, 2 Bde.) A third volume devoted to Egypt, Aus Aegypten (Vienna, 1860). 20. The English translation of selected passages of Sapir’s travelogue, My Footsteps Echo: The Yemen Journal of Rabbi Yaakov Sapir (rendered into English, introduced, edited, and annotated by Yaakov Lavon [Mishnas Rishonim: Targum Press, 1997]), does not live up to even minimal editorial standards. I therefore rely on and quote from Lehmann’s discussion of Sapir in Lehmann, Emissaries From the Holy Land, 261–73. 21. Lehmann, Emissaries From the Holy Land, 263. 22. Ibid. 23. The Travels of Rabbi David D’Beth Hillel; From Jerusalem, Through Arabia, Koordistan, Part of Persia and India 1824–1832 (Madras 1832). Walter J. Fischel, “David d’Beth Hillel: An Unknown Jewish Traveller to the Middle East and India in the Nineteenth Century,” Oriens 10, no. 2 (December 31, 1957): 240–7. Walter J. Fischel, ed., Unknown Jews in Unknown Lands, the Travels of Rabbi David D’Beth Hillel (1824–1832) (New York: Ktar Publishing House, Inc., 1973). 24. Fischel, Unknown Jews in Unknown Lands, 15. 25. Ibid., 124. 26. Fischel, “David d’Beth Hillel,” 243. 27. Ibid. 28. An interesting continuation and parallel: Jacob Samuel, The Remnant Found: Or, The Place of Israel’s hiding discovered. Being a Summary of Proofs Showing That the Jews of Daghistan on the Caspian Sea Are the Remnant of the Ten Tribes. The Result of Personal Investigation During a Missionary Tour of Eight Months in Georgia, by Permission of the Russian Government, in the Years 1837 and 1838. By the Rev. Jacob Samuel, Senior Missionary to the Jews for India, Persia, and Arabia. Author of a “Hebrew Sermon on the Christian Evidence” and “A Journal of Five Months’ Residence in Cochin” (London: J. Hatchard & Son, 1841). 29. Israel-Joseph Benjamin, Acht Jahre in Asien und Afrika. Von 1846 bis 1855 (Hanover: Selbstverlag des Verfassers, 1858), 1–2. 30. Israel-Joseph Benjamin II, Cinq Anees de Voyage en Orient 1846–1851 (Paris: Michel Levy Freres, 1856). Interestingly, the long list of subscribers of this volume contains mostly French colonials from Algier. According to Stefan Schreiner, Benjamin first wrote an exposé in Hebrew and then published his own Arabic translation after returning home in 1854. Schreiner also mentions translation into Hebrew (by David Gordon) from 1859 and a Ladino version from 1863. See Stefan Schreiner, “Benjamin II. über die Juden in Masqat. Ein Kapitel aus Israel Benjamins Reisebericht Acht Jahre

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31.

32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

44. 45.

46.

Michael Harbsmeier in Asien und Africa,” Judaica. Beiträge zum Verstehen des Judentums Band 67 (2011): 384–98. Benjamin, Acht Jahre in Asien und Afrika. Von 1846 bis 1855. Von I. J. Benjamin, aus Folitscheny in der Moldau (Hanover: Selbstverlag des Verfassers, 1858), 2. Auflage, nebst einem Vorwort von Berthold Seemann. Mit vergleichenden Notizen aus Benjamin de Tudela, R. Pethachia, Pedro Teixeira und Ritter’s Erdkunde. 1858. 3. vermehrte und verbesserte Auflage, Mit vergleichenden Notizen aus Benjamin de Tudela, R. Pethachia, Pedro Teixeira und Ritter’s Erdkunde. 1860. J. J. Benjamin (=Benjamn II), Eight Years in Asia and Africa From 1846 till 1855 (Hanover: Published by the author, 1859, 2nd edition, Hanover, 1863). Kayserling refers to: Pedro Teixeira, Relaciones de Pedro Teixeira d’el Origin Descendencia y Svccession de los Reyes de Persia, y de Harmuz, y de vn Viage hecho por el mismo Avtor dende la India Oriental hasta Italia por tierra (Antwerpen: 1610). Later editions in French, Paris 1681, and in English, London 1715 and London 1902. Benjamin II, Eight Years, 289–305. This piece was taken from Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums, December 1858. Benjamin II, Eight Years, 290. Ibid., 222. Ibid. Ibid., 223. Ibid., 224. Ibid., 78–9. “In a word the state of the Jews in Palestine, body as well as mind, is an unbearable one; and yet there the land yields most abundantly. If the possession of it were not to completely in the hands of the Arabs,—if one could only secure for the Jews some little portion of it and give them the means for its cultivation, sufficient sources of industry would be open to them, werewith to obtain a livelihood. But does it benefit them to cultivate the ground, if the Arabs rob them of the harvest?” Benjamin II, Eight Years, 82. Benjamin II, Eight Years, 33–4. Ibid., 34. Montefiore is mentioned more than once in Benjamin’s travels. Montefiori himself undertook a whole series of expeditions to Jerusalem between 1827 and 1875. His diaries about these expeditions and his often also widely publicized philanthropic and diplomatic visits to other Jewish communities in Italy, Rumania, and Morocco were first published in 1890. Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore Comprising Their Life and Work as Recorded in Their Diaries From 1812 to 1883, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1890). Benjamin II, Eight Years, 211–13. Ibid., 214–18. It would sure have been a better idea to send a petition to the shah of the Quajar dynasty of the time, Naser al Dhin, rather than the Ottoman Abdülmecid I. But Benjamin assured us that his petition reached its addresses: “The petition to the Sultan I sent through Mr. Loeb Kaufmann, leather merchant at Galata in Constantinople; the one to the Emperor of the French I presented myself at the Tuileries, and the one to the Queen of England I delivered at the office of the English Embassy at Paris” (Benjamin II, Eight Years, 217). “With respect to superstition, the fruit of ignorance, and the result of the numerous traditions, which people of the East imbibe from their earliest youth, the Bagdad Jews may be considered the ideal of the ideal of the Jewish population of the East. They have noble principles, are hospitable, enlightened and benevolent to all those with whom they come in contact. By continual intercourse with strangers, they have acquired good manners and

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47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

54.

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politeness, and they possess a knowledge of the world, which places them on a level with the most civilised nations of Europe. Their Rabbis are well informed men, and are treated with the greatest respect” (Benjamin II, Eight Years, 110). And: “In no other country I visited did I find my brethren in the faith so void of care, so happy, so free from persecutions and oppressions of intolerance, as at Bagdad. Often when looking with sorrow at the misery and profound ignorance of my brethren, when I saw how under the yoke of despotism they wandered like mere shadows of that once celebrated, great and learned people and compared their conditions with that of their brethren in Bagdad, then the hope took possession of me, that soon for them also a better and happier future would dawn” (Benjamin II, Eight Years, 113–14). Benjamin II, Eight Years, 93–104. Ibid., 210–19. Ibid., 31–5. Ibid., 279–89. Ibid., 95–6. See also the recent re-evaluation of Benjamin’s account of the Jews of Kurdistan. Benjamin’s reputation among later students of the Jews of Kurdistan apparently confirms that he was not. “His journey was the undertaking of a person entirely devoid of scientific education,” we can read in a footnote in Eric Brauer’s The Jews of Kurdistan (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993, p. 371, note 52). Bauer introduced Benjamin as “among the most celebrated sources for material on the Kurdish Jews” (p. 46). Erich Brauer nevertheless has his hesitations: “Since his book was the only available source for material on the Kurdish Jews, it acquired the reputation of being a reliable report; and its author was reckoned among the very few outstanding Jewish travelers. The book should, however, have been approached, and the true value of its contents weighed, bit by bit. Benjamin’s account of his journey is without question an important document and bears witness to no inconsiderable daring on his part. It is to be regretted that a man who saw so much and lived in a period that had plenty of examples of excellent travel books should have left so vague and unscientific a description of his journeys. The book undoubtedly contains many important items; but only after all the material has been subjected to methodical and critical investigation will it be possible to use them in a scientific book” (Brauer, The Jews of Kurdistan, 47–8). Benjamin II, Eight Years, 308, the list 309–16. Short questions and comments from: Dr. Munk, Paris, Mr. Goldberg, Paris, Dr. Derenbourg, Paris, Mr. Landau, Paris, Dr. Jost, Frankfurt am Main, Mr. Geiger in Breslau, Dr. J. C. Magnus, Breslau, Mr. Stenzler in Breslau, and Mr. Schmölders and Mr. R. Gosche, most of them identifiable as prominent rabbis and orientalists. Benjamin’s second journey to the Orient comes closer after negotiations with the chief rabbis of Rotterdam and The Hague as “a journey to the East Indies in the Nethwerlands (Java), in order to establish there a Jewish community” (Benjamin II, Eight Years, 316). Trying to find the necessary funds, Benjamin went “to the Professors of Oriental languages at the universities of Leyden and Delfzyl, on whose especial recommendations, permission was granted to me by the Minister to proceed to the Dutch East-Indies, without being called upon to produce the required sum.—But as a definite decision on the part of Chief-Committee was delayed, I travelled to Frankfurt on the Maine, and learnt there, for the purposes of my second journey, photography and stereoscopy, and likewise provided myself with the necessary apparatus” (Benjamin II, Eight Years, 332). The German original is much better: praising “den schönen und edlen Zweck . . . , welchen Herr Benjamin auf seinen Reisen mittelst der Erforschung

116

55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65.

66. 67.

Michael Harbsmeier und Durchforschung der mosaischen Ansiedlungen oder Gemeinden verfolgt, die in jenen fernen Gegenden, Opfer politischer Unduldsamkeit, ein trauriges Dasein fristen” (Drei Jahre, p. V). Benjamin II, Eight Years, 307. Ibid., 308. J. J. Benjamin II, Drei Jahre in Amerika 1859–1862 (Erster Theil. Die östlichen Staaaten der Union und San Francisco. Hanover: Selbstverlag des Verfassers, Hannover, 1862. Zweiter Theil. Reise im Innern von Californien. Hannover, 1862. Dritter Theil. Die Nordwestgegenden Nordamerika’s. Hannover, 1862). An English translation came out in 1956: Three Years in America 1859–1862, translated from the German by Charles Reznikoff (The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1956; New York: Arno Press, 1956). Benjamin II, Drei Jahre, Erster Theil, 64–7. Ibid., 68–7. Ibid., 362–3. Ibid., 370–9. See also Hess, Jonathan. “Off to America and Back Again, or Judah Touro and Other Products of the German Jewish Imagination,” Jewish Social Studies 19, no. 2 (2013): 1–23, 151. Benjamin II, Drei Jahre, Dritter Theil, 50–83. Ibid., 132. At the very end he yet again reminds us of his real project, “meinen Pilgerstab wiederum nach dem Orient, der Wiege des Menschen-geschlechts, zu richten und Arabien, Afghanistan, China und Malabar zu durchwandern”. Mendele Moicher Sfurim, Die Fahrten Binjamins des Dritten, Roman. Die Übersetzung aus dem Jiddischen besorgte Efraim Frisch (Olten: Walter Verlag,1962, 2. Auflage 1983). For more about Yiddish travel writing see Garrett Leahr, Journeys Beyond the Pale: Yiddish Travel Writing in the Modern World (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). Arminius Vambéry, “From the Memoirs of a Tartar: Translated by David Mandler,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 25, no. 3 (2007): 22–31. Continued under the same title with two additional chapters: “The Aristocracy” (pp. 1–7) and “General Education” (pp. 8–14). I would like to thank Karin Cohr Lützen for having found Mandler’s translation and David Mandler for having made the last two chapters available for me. Max Nordau, Vom Kreml bis zur Alhambra, Kulturstudien. 2 Bde. (Leipzig, 1880), here vol. 2, p. 351. Nils Roemer, “Jewish Traveling Cultures and the Competing Visions of Modernity,” Central European History 42, no. 3 (2009): 429–49.

Bibliography Adler, Elkan Nathan, ed. Jewish Travellers (801–1755). London: G. Routledge, 1930. (Reprint New Delhi 1995). Benjamin, Israel-Joseph. Acht Jahre in Asien und Afrika. Von 1846 bis 1855. Hanover: Selbstverlag des Verfassers, 1858. Benjamin, Israel-Joseph. Cinq Années de Voyage en Orient 1846–1851. Paris: Michel Levy Freres, 1856. Benjamin, Israel-Joseph (=Benjamin II). Drei Jahre in Amerika 1859–1862. Erster Theil. Die östlichen Staaaten der Union und San Francisco. Hanover: Selbstverlag des Verfassers, 1862. Zweiter Theil. Reise im Innern von Californien. Hannover 1862. Dritter Theil. Die Nordwestgegenden Nordamerika’s. Hannover, 1862. Benjamin, Israel-Joseph (=Benjamn II). Eight Years in Asia and Africa From 1846 til 1855. Hanover: Published by the Author, 1859.

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Benjamin, Israel-Joseph (=Benjamin II). Three Years in America 1859–1862. Translated from the German by Charles Reznikoff. New York: The Jewish Publication Society of America, Arno Press, 1956. Brauer, Eric. The Jews of Kurdistan. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993. Carvalho, Solomon. Incidents of Travel and Adventure in the Far West. Edited and with an introduction by Bertram Wallace Korn [The Jacob R. Schiff library of Jewish contributions to American democracy, 1857]. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1954. Cooper, Alanna E. “Conceptualizing Diaspora: Tales of Jewish Travelers in Search of the Lost Tribes.” AJS Review 30, no. 1 (2006): 95–117. David, Abraham. In Zion and Jerusalem: The Itinerary of Rabbi Moses Basola (1521–1523). Jerusalem: C.G. Foundation Jerusalem Project Publications of the Martin (Szuez) Department of Land of Israel Studies of Bar-Ilan University, 1999. David, Abraham. “Jewish Travelers From Europe to the East, 12th–15th Centuries.” Miscelánea de Estudios Árabes y Hebraicos, Sección Hebreo 62 (2013): 11–39. Davis, Natalie Zemon. Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth Century Lives. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Deutsch, Yaacov. Judaism in Christian Eyes: Ethnographic Descriptions of Jews and Judaism in Early Modern Europe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Deutsch, Yaacov. “Jüdische Merckwürdigkeiten: Ethnography in Early Modern Frankfurt.” Jewish Culture and History 10, nos. 2–3 (2004): 81–94. Fischel, Walter J. “David d’Beth Hillel: An Unknown Jewish Traveller to the Middle East and India in the Nineteenth Century.” Oriens 10, no. 2 (December 31, 1957): 240–7. Fischel, Walter J., ed. Unknown Jews in Unknown Lands, the Travels of Rabbi David D’Beth Hillel (1824–1832). New York: Ktar Publishing House, 1973. Frankel, Zacharias. “Galerie jüdischer Reisebeschreiber.” Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums, Jg 1, Nr 14 (1852): 523–41. Frankel, Zacharias. “Zur Charakteristik neuerer Reisebeschreibungen.” Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums, Jg 4, Nr 7 (1855): 250–6. Frankl, Ludwig August. Nach Jerusalem. 2 vols. Leipzig: Baumgärtner’s Buchhandlung, 1858. A third volume Aus Aegypten. Vienna, 1860. Harbsmeier, Michael. “Reisen in der Diaspora. Eigenes in der Fremde in der jüdischen Reiseliteratur des Mittelters.” Das Mittelalter 3, no. 2 (1998): 63–80. Hess, Jonathan. “Off to America and Back Again, or Judah Touro and Other Products of the German Jewish Imagination.” Jewish Social Studies 19, no. 2 (2013): 1–23. Hillel, David D’Beth. The Travels of Rabbi David D’Beth Hillel; From Jerusalem, Through Arabia, Koordistan, Part of Persia and India 1824–1832. Madras, 1832. Jacobs, Martin. “David ha-Re’uveni: Ein ‘zionistiscxhes Experiment’ im Kontext der europäischen Expansion des 16. Jahrhunderts?” In An der Schwelle zur Moderne: Juden in der Renaissance, edited by Giuseppe Veltri and Annette Winkelmann. Leiden: Brill, 2002: 191–206. Jacobs, Martin. Reorienting the East: Jewish Travellers to the Medieval Muslim World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Jütte, Daniel. Meshullam da Volterra. Von der Toskana in den Orient. Eine Renaissance-Kaufmann auf Reisen. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012.

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Kaplan, Yosef, Henry Méchoulan, and Richard H. Popkin, eds. Menasseh ben Israel and His World. Leiden: Brill, 1989. Kohut, Adolph. “Berühmte jüdische Weltreisende.” Ost und West, Jg 3, Nr 9 (1903): Sp. 611–15 and Nr 11, Sp. 751–6. Kuyt, Annelies. “Die Welt aus sefardischer und ashkenasischer Sicht: Die mittelalterlichen hebräischen Reiseberichte des Benjamin von Tudela und des Petachja von Regensburg.” In Erkundung und Beschreibung der Welt. Zur Poetik der Reise und Länderberichte, edited by X. von Ertzdorff and G. Giesemann. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2003: 211–31. Leahr, Garrett. Journeys Beyond the Pale: Yiddish Travel Writing in the Modern World. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. Lehmann, Matthias B. Emissaries From the Holy Land: The Sephardic Diaspora and the Practice of Pan-Judaism in the Eighteenth Century. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. Litt, Stefan. “Mobilität und Reisen in Selbstzeugnissen aschkenasischer Juden in der Frühen Neuzeit.” In Selbstzeugnisse und Ego-Dokumente frühneuzeitlicher Juden in Aschkenas—Beispiele, Methoden und Konzepte, edited by Birgit E. Klein and Rotraud Ries. Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2011. Maimon, Saloman. An Autobiography. Translated from the German by I. J. Clark Murray. London: A. Gardner, 1888. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Maimon, Salomon. Salomon Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte. Von ihm selbst geschrieben und herausgegeben von K. P. Moritz. In zwei Theilen. Berlin: Friedrich Vieweg, 1792. María José Cano Pérez. “Tania María García Arévalo: Nosotros, vosotros, ellos: relatos de viajeros judíos del siglo xv a la luz del concepto de alteridad.” Sefarad 75, no. 2 (julio–diciembre 2015): 299–316. Menasseh ben Israel. The Hope of Israel. The English Translation by Moses Wall 1652. Edited by Henry Méchoulan und Gérard Nahon. Oxford: Liverpool University Press, 1987. Montefiori, Sir Moses and Lady. Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore Comprising Their Life and Work as Recorded in Their Diaries From 1812 to 1883. 2 vols. London, 1890. Noah, Mordecai. Discourse on the Evidences of the American Indians Being the Descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel. New York: J. van Norden, 1837. Noah, Mordecai. Discourse on the Restoration of the Jews. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1845. Noah, Mordecai. Travels in England, France, Spain, and the Barbary States in the Years 1813–14 and 1815. New York: Kirk and Mercein; London: John Miller, 1819. Nordau, Max. Vom Kreml bis zur Alhambra. Kulturstudien. 2 Bde. Leipzig: Schlicke, 1880. Pelli, Moshe. “The Literary Genre of the Travelogue in Hebrew Haskalah Literature: Shmuel Romanelli’s Masa Ba’Rav.” Modern Judaism 11, no. 2 (1991): 241–60. Polack, Joel Samuel. Manners and Customs of the New Zealanders: With Notes Corroborative of Their Habits, Usages, etc., and Remarks to Intending Emigrants. 2 vols. London: James Maddon & Hatchard and Son, 1840. Polack, Joel Samuel. New Zealand, Being a Narrative of Travels and Adventures During a Residence in That Country Between the Years 1831 and 1837. London: Richard Bentley, 1838.

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Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Roemer, Nils. “Jewish Traveling Cultures and the Competing Visions of Modernity.” Central European History 42, no. 3 (2009): 429–49. Romanelli, Samuel. Travail in an Arab Land. Translated from the Hebrew with Introduction and Notes by Yedida K. Stillman and Norman A. Stillman. Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 1989. Rubinstein, Rachel. Members of the Tribe: Native America in the Jewish Imagination. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010. Salah, Asher. “The Otherness of the Self: On Samuel Romanellis Travelogue.” European Journal of Jewish Studies 5, no. 2 (2011): 219–39. Samuel, Jacob. The Remnant Found: or, The Place of Israel’s Hiding Discovered. Being a Summary of Proofs Showing That the Jews of Daghistan on the Caspian Sea Are the Remnant of the Ten Tribes. The Result of Personal Investigation During a Missionary Tour of Eight Months in Georgia, by Permission of the Russian Government, in the Years 1837 and 1838. By the Rev. Jacob Samuel, Senior Missionary to the Jews for India, Persia, and Arabia. Author of a “Hebrew Sermon on the Christian Evidence” and “A Journal of Five Months’ Residence in Cochin”. London: J. Hatchard & Son, 1841. Sapir, Even. My Footsteps Echo: The Yemen Journal of Rabbi Yaakov Sapir. Rendered into English, introduced, edited and annotated by Yaakov Lavon. Mishnas Rishonim: Targum Press, 1997. Schacter, Jacob J. “History and Memory of Self: The Autobiography of Rabbi Jacob Emden.” In Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, edited by Elisheva Carlebach, John M. Efron, and David N. Myers. Hannover: University of Brandeis Press, 1998. Schreiner, Stefan. “Benjamin II. über die Juden in Masqat. Ein Kapitel aus Israel Benjamins Reisebericht Acht Jahre in Asien und Africa.” Judaica. Beiträge zum Verstehen des Judentums Band 67 (2011): 384–98. Sfurim, Mendele Moicher. Die Fahrten Binjamins des Dritten, Roman. Die Übersetzung aus dem Jiddischen besorgte Efraim Frisch. Olten: Walter Verlag, 1962 2. Auflage 1983. Teixeira, Pedro. Relaciones de Pedro Teixeira d’el Origin Descendencia y Svccession de los Reyes de Persia, y de Harmuz, y de vn Viage hecho por el mismo Avtor dende la India Oriental hasta Italia por tierra. Antwerpen: Hieronymo Verdussen, 1610. Vambéry, Arminius. “From the Memoirs of a Tartar, translated by David Mandler.” Shofar. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 25, no 3 (2007): 22–31. Continued under the same title with two additional chapters: The Aristocracy (pp. 1–7) and “General Education” (pp. 8–14). Zinger, Nimrod. “Away From Home: Travelling and Leisure Activities Among German Jews in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 56, no. 1 (2011): 53–78. Zunz, Leopold. “Essay on the Geographical Literature of the Jews, From the Remotest Times to the Year 1842.” In Benjamin of Tudela, The Itinerary, translated by A. Asher. 2 vols. London and Berlin, 1842, Bd. 2, S. 230–317. Original: Geographische Literatur der Juden von den ältesten Zeiten bis zum Jahr 1841. In Gesammelte Schriften, Band 1, s. 146–216.

6

The Presence of Past Struggles The Jews and the Boundaries of Enlightenment Jakob Egholm Feldt

In the Enlightenment era, historical Christian anti-Judaism was translated into a secularized language, as well as into the cultural and social problems of the expanding European and global civil spheres. The question of the Jews became tied to questions of the civil sphere: Which cultural traits, histories, values, habits, religious practices, and so forth were natural, and which were particular? What cultural and social characteristics were good for (the possibility of) society, and which were bad? The historical relationship between the Jews and the Enlightenment should, I contend, be seen as an important boundary of modern Jewish history: the Jews became exemplary for probing the boundaries of the Enlightenment in both theory and practice, and this exemplary role also became productive for boundaries of modern Jewishness. In this way, modern Jewish history is invariably tied to a series of Enlightenment struggles over normative and universalized values in the civil sphere.1 Here I will turn to two examples of how the Enlightenment’s struggles over Jews and Jewishness came to be crucial knots connecting modern Jewish cultural history. As my first example, I will turn to philosopher and reformer Moses Mendelssohn’s argument in the late Enlightenment for the civil legitimacy of Jews and Judaism—an argument directly opposed to the common Enlightenment argument that the Jews had nothing to contribute to the future, since their historical contribution to civilization had been superseded by Christianity. Mendelssohn’s persona, his legacy as an early leader and tragic hero of the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment), and his book Jerusalem, oder über religöse macht und Judentum (1783) mark the beginning of Jewish enlightened responses to the challenges that Enlightenment ideas of religion, reason, emancipation, and progress presented for the Jews.2 Mendelssohn understood that the convergence of Enlightenment and Christian universalism would put a stain on Jews in the public space, or in the public sphere, as it was later termed in social theory. In a famous essay where he answered the question, “What is Enlightenment?”, Mendelssohn created an inverted version of Immanuel Kant’s answer to the same question, a version which is not that far from what we today would call pluralism or multiculturalism.3

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My second example will be taken from the context of Jewish mass immigration to America in the early twentieth century. This massive wave of immigration virtually invented a new Jewishness that emerged alongside, and, in many ways, within, twentieth-century visions of what America stood for.4 Jewish migrants and the Jewishness they developed in America became exemplary for optimistically modernist notions like transnationalism, and for concepts like the “marginal man,” which found a model example in newly arrived American Jews as the modern city dwellers. In this American variation, singling out the Jews was a reversal of European antisemitism, but it still operated within the boundaries of Enlightenment discourse. The Jews were, in a positive sense, seen as the most modern. I present this example as an important event that probed the boundaries of Enlightenment in a new way, but still appropriated the Jews by designating them a special role vis-à-vis modernization. Together, the two examples demonstrate how the Jews, both as abstraction and concept, and as a practical reality, have been important for illuminating the boundaries of Enlightenment. But, furthermore, this majority attention and over-determination of the Jews not only objectivized them but also produced Jewish subjectivities. In this sense, the boundary work between what is Jewish and non-Jewish is closely related to the boundary work between what is particular and universal, between civility and uncivility, between enlightened and primitive.

In Defense of Jerusalem Moses Mendelssohn is most often considered to be the father of Jewish Enlightenment, the Haskalah, and modernizing reforms within German Jewry. He is also often portrayed as a Jewish Socrates of Berlin, which, in many ways, is a convergence of seemingly contradictory identities and spatialities.5 From the Enlightenment and through the nineteenth century until the Second World War, “Jewish” and “Greek” civilizations and historical spaces were cast as distinct opposites in many forms of cultural and historical representations—in art, literature, philosophy, and politics. In a nutshell, Greek (Athens) represented rationality, science, and the world, while Jewish (Jerusalem) represented religion, sentiment, and communities of kind; one stood for principles, the other for revelation. Through Enlightenment philosophy and modern theology, Christianity was converted into the heir of Athens, while its historical origin in Jerusalem remained a problem most clearly reflected by heated, socially significant debates over the Jewishness of Christ and pan-European controversies over Jewish emancipation.6 In these discussions of European cultural hierarchies and their historical trajectories, Moses Mendelssohn’s efforts focused not on bridging the divides between Athens and Jerusalem, but on rethinking religion and Enlightenment in ways that kept open the doors to civility and the future for the Jews—and even promoted Jerusalem over Athens.

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Mendelssohn was, as I mentioned, a highly significant and high-profiled Enlightenment figure. He communicated with many of the most influential philosophers and scholars in Europe and had personal ties with several of them, most famously Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781). Nevertheless, his Jewishness remained, in Willi Goetschel’s words, “a scandal.”7 Mendelssohn’s philosophy and his personal character were seen as polluted by his Jewishness, which signalled a potential uncivility or breach in his otherwise noble character. So, even though Mendelssohn collaborated with reformers like Christian Wilhelm von Dohm (1751–1820) about the desirability of Jewish emancipation in Enlightened Europe, his particular character was stained by Jewishness, which both directly and indirectly challenged his public status. In other words, Mendelssohn could be accepted as a person, an individual, but the qualities of his cultural particularities could not. This discrimination emerged at many times in Mendelssohn’s life, but never more clearly than during the so-called Lavater affair in 1769, when Protestant minister and physiognomist Johann Caspar Lavater openly called on Mendelssohn to either refute the central beliefs of Christianity or convert.8 Lavater’s call to Mendelssohn was not an expression of simple anti-Judaism, but a reflection of a common, enlightened way of perceiving universality: the call addressed Mendelssohn’s polluted public figure and implied that he could not be a citizen both of Athens and of Jerusalem. In this way, Lavater’s challenge illustrates the controversy of constructing legitimate Jewish and civil space in the wake of the Enlightenment. To grasp this controversy, it is important to recognize how universal perspectives and natural, universal civility grew progressively out of Athens and Rome through Christianity into a universal world history.9 The history of Athens and Christianity held that the particular—the primordial—existed inside the universal, rational Enlightenment. This notion made it logical for Lavater to think that the natural next step for a Hellene such as Mendelssohn would be to convert from the particular to the universal. In a sense, Mendelssohn’s crooked, historical body and his beautiful, eternal, Hellenic soul could be salvaged through Christianity, which dissolves both Athens and Jerusalem into a higher non-pagan, universal order of truth based on reason, rather than revelation. Thus, even though Mendelssohn was allied with Enlightened thinkers and reformers, such as Lavater, Lessing, Dohm, Kant, and many others, regarding the Enlightenment’s political and civil consequences— including granting liberties to Jews and other minorities—he was nevertheless significantly at odds with them regarding two related issues: One was the a priori understanding of the Jews needing Verbesserung (“improvement”) before their equal entrance and acceptance in society; the other was the entire underlying scheme of a unified historical progression that created architectures, progressive logo-histories, or historical

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teleologies, in which Jewishness only inhabited a historical space on the progressive path towards the future.10 Taking Immanuel Kant as the best example of this perspective, true, natural, religion had to, within reason, concord with universal morality. All religions, including Christianity, should reform away from their historical particularities and towards their universal moral values. Ideas, such as the immortality of the soul, and experiences, such as miracles and revelations, could not be proven within reason, but they could serve practical purposes to motivate human action in the world. Kant did not consider Judaism to be a natural religion.11 In his view, Judaism was not even a religion; it was a polity. Judaism, in Kant’s view, existed because a group of people followed despotic laws as though these laws were divine, but they did not follow these laws because of their universal moral applicability or their commitment to the afterlife of the world.12 This particularity disqualified Judaism from contributing to civility and culture within the limits of reason. Still, this did not mean to Kant that Jews should be discriminated against or should not enjoy equal liberties with other citizens, but it meant that Judaism was not legitimate in the universal, civil space of cultural progress. Mendelssohn’s solution to rescuing Judaism from irrelevance in the modern world—and from both the implicit and explicit Christian triumph of civilization—was to criticize the teleological view of history, as well as its corollary visions of a universal, singular history, where “reason” or “spirit” could be mapped from the primitive towards the more absolute. In his 1783 “Jerusalem oder über religiöse Macht und Judentum,” Mendelssohn devised an alternate universalism that was fundamentally skeptical of the universalists’ ability to see the potential universality of different beliefs and practices, since universalist conquerors observed difference “with the eyes of barbarians and from their own point of view.”13 This critique of universalist “imperialism” targeted the blindness of rationality vis-à-vis the practical ethics of other nations and religions whose symbols were taken as deities, and accordingly these others were deemed primitive and historical. Of course, Mendelssohn used this critique to address the prevailing notion that Judaism belonged to the past and lower stages of cultural development, suggesting that barbarism and blindness might be the companions of certain universalist imaginations that rendered them blind to the otherness of Others. A way of avoiding the potential barbarism of Enlightenment would be, Mendelssohn argued, to take another view of history. In “Jerusalem” Mendelssohn posited, In reality, the human race is—if the metaphor is appropriate—in almost every century, child, adult, and old man at the same time, though in different places and regions of the world. . . . Progress is for the individual man, who is destined by Providence to spend part of his eternity here

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Jakob Egholm Feldt on earth. Everyone goes through life in his own way. . . . But it does not seem to me to have been the purpose of Providence that mankind as a whole advance steadily here below and perfect itself in the course of time.14

Here Mendelssohn advocated for a pluralistic view of history that differed from the singular universal history promoted by most of his peers. History and progress, in Mendelssohn’s perspective, were always relative to individual man and his community, relative to places and countries— and so, accordingly, the human race was the child, adult, and old man at different paces in different places, and all over again in every century. This was not an argument against reforms of Judaism and Jewish integration into civil society, in which Mendelssohn was deeply engaged; it was an argument for the exemplarity of Judaism through its unique historicity. Instead of understanding history in terms of distances and layers, natural continuities and historical contingencies, Mendelssohn presented a plurality of human histories existing in multiple temporalities, where distances between past and present were largely irrelevant. The exemplary value of Judaism as a form of legislation, as a code of action, could be purified into a model for freedom of conscience, and this particular model could promote an ethical way of living in a universalizing world. We thus find two quite distinct interpretations of history, conflicting over concepts of Jewishness: one “Kantian” view, where “historical” means “contingent,” and history gradually progresses and supersedes historical particularities towards universality; and another “Mendelssohnian” view, where “historical” means carrying attitudes and embodied codes of action, being historical in a particular way, and being representative of a mode of living that contributes to present and future. Mendelssohn distinguished between the historical truths that bound a nation together and the laws of a nation that served as practical instantiations of natural religion.15 In this latter variety, the particular and the universal are not dichotomies; they are different degrees of purification, of willingness to universalize the particular. If purified to its essence, Judaism would constitute an exemplary ethical code, but not the hegemonic code to be followed by all, because Judaism’s historical truths are truth only for the Jews. Mendelssohn made a distinction between “word and script,” which creates cohesiveness and historical identity for a collective, and “things and concepts,” which creates universality because “things and concepts” are accessible for all through reason. Principles of “word and script” do not have to be the same for all people, as long as their idea in “things and concepts” is universally reasonable.16 Thus, in Mendelssohn’s universalism, there are many paths to civility. To understand Mendelssohn’s “Jerusalem” as an early instance of pluralism, it is very important to recognize that Mendelssohn was relatively

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critical towards theoretical knowledge and abstract philosophy.17 From Mendelssohn’s perspective, practical knowledge could be sensed as truth, as beauty and happiness, while abstract knowledge had to have an embodiment in practice, whether in ceremonial laws or historical practices known to be true by members of a community, in order to reach “eternal” truth.18 Universal, eternal, or divine truths were thus not universally recognized in the same way at different times, in different places, by different people. Accordingly, a vision like Lessing’s education of mankind on collective terms from “childhood to maturity” would not have been possible, since it was abstract in its notion of how knowledge works. Mendelssohn instead considered all progress towards felicity to be ultimately individual, believing Man to exist at different levels of maturity at different times and in different places, independent of historical chronologies.19 Thus, ancient Greece had, in Mendelssohn’s view, a perfect balance between private and public felicity, while ancient Judaism had completely dissolved the distinction between religion and state, which Mendelssohn also considered an ideal state of governance without governance.20 Mendelssohn’s arguments in “Jerusalem” for a legitimate Judaism in an Enlightened world centered on the idea that beliefs and abstractions cannot ensure either individual or collective progress and happiness; such virtues have to be concretely realized in practices. Judaism embodied, for Mendelssohn, such a practical ethics. Its ceremonial laws did not require belief, its historical truths happened to the Jewish people and bound them together, and the practice of these ceremonial laws led to contemplation of theory. Jewish laws and practices were grounded in natural religion, but understanding this occurred through practice, not through belief. In sum, Mendelssohn argued that the practical ethics of Judaism did not disclose unknown knowledge and, therefore, it could not monopolize the path to salvation, but neither could Christianity. In the Enlightenment perspective, religion—as a publicly relevant frame of reference, as something vibrant with a legitimate role to play in the world, and as more than a space in a museum in the parade of dead civilizations—had to have a reasoned argument for its universal relevance. As long as Jews could be accepted as individuals, or, to paraphrase Lessing, could be Jews that were not really Jews, their cultural and historical particularity was polluted by Jewishness; Jewishness would be a burden or a stain.21 Mendelssohn’s contribution to the construction of modern Jewish history centered on his attempt to devise an alternate universalism, such that Jewishness was a model example of practical ethics, where Jerusalem was as relevant for the future as Athens. Jewishness, to Mendelssohn, represented a different way of being historical. In a way, he tried to reverse the qualities between “historical” and “natural,” turning the Jewish historical burden into its claim for universality. Mendelssohn’s efforts, the controversies he was a part of, the early Haskalah, and the

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competing visions of the late Enlightenment constitute an arch language of the modern problem of Jewish civility. This period between 1770 and 1800 marked a defining time in global Jewish history, when Jews and Jewishness became a more secular, alternative, historical topology and physiognomy than the Greek-Christian. These competing Enlightenments revolved around universalizing the values of the civil sphere, which was reflected in legal, philosophical, and political discussion over the position of the Jews, and over the passage points of the history of the civil spirit—from Athens or from Jerusalem. The alternative, “minoritarian,” Enlightenment proposed by Mendelssohn, the Haskalah, and many Jewish secularists later balanced and probed the limits of the Enlightenment project in general, through its insistence that a Jewish particularist universality was legitimate and relevant for the future of the world.

Competing Enlightenments As James Schmidt and others have shown, Mendelssohn and Kant had very different notions of what Enlightenment should entail, what it should mean, and, not least, what possible courses of action were valuable in an enlightened society.22 Much has been written about Mendelssohn and Kant’s answers to the question of what Enlightenment is, which was posed by the editor of Berlinische Monatsschrift in 1783, but the fact is that Kant’s answer was the lasting one. His perspective continued to occupy philosophers and historians, all the way through modern day—not only for historical reasons but also for its continued actuality vis-à-vis contemporary problems of social and cultural critique, as well as normative delimitations of state power and personal autonomy. Fundamentally, Kant devised a negative answer to what Enlightenment is: in the public sphere of journals, newspapers, books, and readers people should be able to argue in complete freedom using their own reason and judgment, while in the private sphere, contracts should be kept.23 Theoretically, this could mean that as a teacher, you should teach what the church and the state told you to teach, but you can freely argue against such ideas in the public sphere. Kant’s perspective on Enlightenment has often been neatly summarized as “sapere aude,” dare to know, and “you can argue as much as you want, but obey!” Famously, Kant defined the enemy of Enlightenment as self-incurred immaturity: the lack of will and resolve to use your own judgment without the guidance of others.24 Accordingly, in Kant’s perspective Enlightenment is about having the courage to use your own judgment. Your possible courses of action, though, are set by the contracts you have established with your relations. Ideally, then, in Kant’s Enlightenment, the public sphere should not be polluted with particularist loyalties, dogma, statuary laws, or religious authority—meaning, in principle, that neither Christianity nor Judaism would enjoy any special status. The

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difference lies elsewhere in the distinction between historical and natural. Many Enlighteners, including Kant, believed that Christianity could be reformed and abstracted into its Pauline promise of a universal brotherhood of man, while Judaism carried no such hope or potential. Judaism was inside the scope of tolerance, but outside the promise of the future. Mendelssohn’s answer to the question of Enlightenment was significantly different. He stayed within a positive frame of reference to the destiny of man, which had been a widely used, speculative dogma that the so-called religious Enlightenment of the Leibnitz-Wolffian tradition, to which Mendelssohn belonged, used to draw the lines between faith and reason.25 Mendelssohn claimed that there were different essential fates of man as a member of society and as a Man. The essential fate of Man was to reach a level of Bildung where he could live a life of goodness, being for others, and for eternity (essentially for God); the fate of man as a citizen was to live with others in a cultured way (Kultur).26 Mendelssohn thus divided the issue of Enlightenment into a theoretical aspect, which had to do with knowledge and reason—Aufklärung in a pure form—and a social aspect, which had to do with the refinement of social behavior, Kultur. Man’s destiny with regard to these two aspects was different. The task, Bestimmung, of Man as Man was to ultimately reach clarity and purity, for which enlightened reason was a tool. Differently, the task of man as a citizen was to balance between society’s different interest groups, to which end cultural refinement was the best tool. In Mendelssohn’s positive definition of Enlightenment, severe conflicts between man as Man and man as citizen could arise from too rigorous and radical insistence on knowledge and reason—in which case, Enlightenment must bow to social order.27 Clearly, Mendelssohn’s argument for Enlightenment revolved around a different private-public axis than Kant’s. In Mendelssohn’s Enlightenment, “private” was a realm of conscience, light, purity, and beauty, while “public” was a space of various interests, powers, and balances. To Kant, the total opposite was the case: in the private sphere existed all sorts of contracts and allegiances that one must respect in spite of one’s knowledge and use of critical reason, but in the public sphere, reason, science, and knowledge should be able to wrestle in total freedom. Despite the overt differences between Mendelssohn’s and Kant’s Enlightenments, it is not the answer to the question of Enlightenment that marks the primary division between these two thinkers. According to James Schmidt, Mendelssohn and others in the circle of the Wednesday Society and the pantheism controversy were confused or surprised by Kant’s (at the time) peculiar distinction between private and public, which seemed to completely ignore any positive determination of both categories.28 But it was nevertheless striking that Kant considered public space to be the arena for mature arguments directed only by a person’s reason, implying that this space would be polluted if religious or communal arguments

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could overrule reason and science. In principle, this was equally critical of both Christians and Jews alike, but this equality ran contrary to the experiences of Mendelssohn and, later, Jewish and other minority experiences. Paraphrasing Jeffrey Alexander, such universalities, as the one Kant imagined, always used to belong to a particular community. As an interesting anecdote, Mendelssohn believed that ancient Greece was the only historical example of a perfect balance between the determination of man as Man and the determination of man as citizen.29 I think it is possible to see Mendelssohn’s Enlightenment as deeply influenced by the empirical problem that purifying the public sphere would pose an even greater challenge for Jewish public legitimacy. Thus, Mendelssohn’s Bildung perspective protected the Jews in the public sphere, while in the private sphere, a man could pursue clarity of conscience as radically as he would like. In the following, I will present another controversy, which, to my mind, constitutes an equally important bridge between Jewish historical landmasses. Early in the twentieth century, American social thought and academic anthropology and sociology bent Jewish historical topology and developed a new cultural and social physiognomy of the Jews—and, in general, turned the negative attributes of the Jews into positive ones.

Athens vs. Jerusalem #2 Primarily caused by the massive immigration to America between the 1880s and the First World War, as well as the concomitant development of the American cities into modern metropoles in the same period, American social thought pioneered a new attitude towards mobility and diversity.30 American social thinkers, anthropologists, and sociologists did not invent a new sociology from scratch—but, inspired by Europeans such as Georg Simmel, Henri Bergson, and many others, they turned well-known notions of life in the modern, industrialized world away from ambivalence and dystopic prophecies into a descriptive, pragmatic mode focused on constructive, peaceful cohabitation of differences.31 In Chad Goldberg’s words, American social thinkers were concerned with questions of social cohesion, and with the possibility of society itself. Accordingly, their perspectives were tied to the American reality of mass migration, mobility, mass production, and hugely expanding cities.32 Old Europe and its religious and social struggles, as well as historically transmitted sedentarist values that were reflected in European social thought, did not color important strands of American social thought with a sense of loss. Instead, the scale of change, social organization in the city, cultural reconstruction, social experimentation, and education for the future occupied the most dynamic environments of social thought, including the University of Chicago and The New School in New York. Many of the leading figures of this original American social thought were, in different ways,

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inspired by the new philosophy of the time, known as American pragmatism.33 In particular, the inventor of the name “pragmatism,” Charles Sanders Peirce (from the 1860s), and William James (from the 1880s) developed variations of pragmatism, which eventually inspired Horace M. Kallen, John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, and many others who shaped important aspects of social thought that turned the meaning of “Jewish” into more or less the same as the meaning of “modern.”34 In the first decades of the twentieth century, such American Jewish journals as The Maccabean and The Menorah Journal widely discussed various issues of Jewish life in America in the context of Jewish mass migration and industrialized urban life. Prominently featured debates explored Jewish reconstruction, Jewish lifestyles, racist antisemitism, new Jewish political and religious movements in the wake of migration from Europe, and new national movements for Jews, such as Zionism and later Territorialism.35 Many contributors and editors were immigrants themselves, and they actively engaged in both Jewish cultural politics and general movements for social justice, progressive education, pacifism, or consumer policy. Despite widespread discrimination against Jews in civil society, and at the universities, most of these Jewish reformers considered America to be a place of freedom—maybe not from factual discrimination, but freedom to pursue individual and collective self-determination and social justice. In this way, Jewish leaders, reformers, and intellectuals envisioned a Jewish reconstruction in America in close dialogue with wider debates about the character of America and the American idea.36 In the following, I will discuss how specific reconstructions of Jewish history and Jewish contributions to the history of civilization merged with social theory in a way that turned earlier Enlightenment debates over the Jews upside down. At the forefront of these reconstructions stood Jewish debates about the character and purpose of the newly established Zionist organization. When Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, and other central figures of the first Zionist Congress in 1897 convened and founded the organization, there was no consensus about what Zionism meant. For some, such as Herzl and Nordau, it was a liberal, cosmopolitan movement that would liberate the Jews—but in the spirit of secular, liberal, enlightened values. For others, such as Ahad Ha’am, it was a movement meant to revive the specifically Jewish national spirit.37 The relationship between Jewish national values and characteristics and non-Jewish values and influences was central to the struggle for the future of Zionism. Jewish religion and traditional Jewish cultural education were particularly controversial issues that many leading Zionists believed should have no or very little influence on the developing modern Jewish peoplehood. New terms and ideas in Jewish history were invented that diminished Jewish religion as a covenant with God and sets of religious practices and, instead, emphasized the historical experiences of the Jewish people as the reflection of a particular national character with its own unique genius.38

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This unique genius gave the Jews not only their particular character but also something significant to civilization in general. Throughout the nineteenth century, numerous Jewish intellectuals, scholars, and reformists had argued for the centrality of the Jews for the history of civilization, though not generally for the centrality of Judaism as a religion.39 As a people, though, the Jews had given birth to monotheism, the prophets, Jesus, Spinoza, and invaluable notions such as justice, the nation, science, but also secularism. These core stepping stones of the history of civilization were Jewish contributions, and they could not be dismissed by successionist discourse—that is, it was not possible to claim that these stepping stones did not exercise a lasting and living influence in the world. An oft-used name for this influence was Hebrew or Hebraic, which from a philological perspective rooted both Jews and Judaism in a language and a literature reflecting a worldview and a history.40 Hebrew literature in this perspective reflected both the spirit and the practical relationship to the world of the Jewish people. Religion and religious practices were then functions of Hebrew literature and its interpretations over time, and not vice versa. In early twentieth-century America, these discussions of the Jewish contribution to civilization and to the future were weaved into discussions about the role of America in the world and the American idea. Jewish authors and intellectuals wrote novels, autobiographies, plays, newspaper columns, and books that made a significant imprint on American public discourse on immigration, the integration of minorities, equality, social justice, and the nature of the American promise. Israel Zangwill’s play The Melting-Pot, which was staged in 1908–1909 in New York, portrayed an America that generously transformed old identities into new ones looking to the future instead of the past. The Melting-Pot was very popular, and it integrated easily into existing discourses of America as a promised land with semi-messianic overtones.41 Jewish journals and organizations, including Zionist circles, participated vigorously in these debates, interweaving questions of Jewish reconstruction, Jewish cultural, social, and educational questions, and the cultural and social ethos of America in general. Seen from today’s perspective, it might seem peculiar that the American Zionists were so concerned with the character of American society, but in America, Zionism took on a different accent than in Europe and Palestine. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, Zionism in America was more an expression of Hebraism than of a Jewish national movement seeking political sovereignty for the Jews. One of the Jewish intellectuals who most comprehensively worked to weave Hebraism, Zionism, and the American idea into a fabric of the same sources was Horace M. Kallen (1882–1974). Today, Kallen is somewhat overlooked as a social thinker, while his efforts as an educator and activist for a variety of causes over the long span of his life are widely

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recognized.42 Kallen and his family were migrants from Poland from a traditional background, but as a young man, Kallen rejected his family’s traditional Judaism and rushed into a great mission to reconstruct Jewishness as a progressive impulse—as a secular, experimental, pluralist, scientific, and justice-oriented stream in the history of civilization. As a student at Harvard University, Kallen was integrated into pragmatist and progressive milieus, and eventually William James became his doctoral supervisor. James’s variation of pragmatism colored most texts Kallen ever wrote in the rest of his life. In this way, Kallen’s work is an expression of an almost complete convergence of pragmatism and a Hebraist reconstruction, which, as we shall see, bears many resemblances to how later sociologists conceived of the role of the “marginal man” in modern society. Kallen preferred the term “Hebraism” because it was, in his mind, anchored in a wish for creating an equal, even a superior, model of inspiration for the future than Hellenism and Christianity. In his view, Judaism was a religious practice and philosophy, while Jewishness and Hebraism more or less synonymously represented wider models of attitudes to life relevant for all people. In 1869, Matthew Arnold, in his influential Culture and Anarchy, positioned Hellenism and Judaism in opposition as two distinct civilizational heritages that represented different cultural, historical, and intellectual characters.43 These -isms not only represented different cultural sign systems in a wider sense but also constituted a particular way of thinking, imagining, and practicing life that manifested itself in the specific lives of Western Christians and Jews. Arnold claimed that more or less everything creative in the West had its source in Hellenism, while Judaism represented a strict and a moralist culture, counter-balancing both Hellenism and Christianity.44 Kallen used Arnold’s depiction of the roles of the great Western civilizational forces as the offset to promote his rethinking of the particular contribution of Hebraism to the world. In the article “Hebraism and Current Tendencies in Philosophy” from 1909, Kallen attacked “Hellenism” via Arnold’s definitions and declared that to be Hellenic meant to explain all variations of the world as mere aspects or appearances of static and structural forces, and to define all mutations with identity to something else.45 Kallen’s argument was that Hellenism represented an un-modern worldview, where everything is given in advance and, accordingly, all experiences, observations, and functionalities must represent something we already know when looking at it from the “universal” perspective, from the perspective of structure and form. The deathblow to this way of thinking, accordingly to Kallen, came with Darwin and The Origin of Species, which proved that to give species an origin is to abandon the notion of the eternity of forms and of the structural order of the universe. It is to espouse

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Kallen simply appropriated Darwin for a pluralist cultural Darwinism that removed the lid on the possible variations of the future universe. Spontaneous generation counted for human cultural variation, as well as for animal species at the Galapagos. Newness entered the world as mutation, an event, a happening, as a practical, unplanned, solution to functional issues: how to survive, how to prosper. In the same way, survival of the fit could be enlisted for the pragmatist-pluralist cause by way of its fundamentally practical character. The fit were the individuals and the groups who managed to come up with solutions, who mutated relevantly to and with their environments. Thus, the pluralist variation of Darwinism did not emphasize strength as in masculine power—the dinosaur— but strength as adaptability, as the ability to function and prosper under continuously changing circumstances. And the Jews were the opposite of a dinosaur. They were the cultural group that was the most adaptable, the best at functioning and prospering under changing circumstances, and the best at mutating to function well in all environments—and, accordingly, true moderns. Of all the people coming to America, the Jews have shown themselves to be the most eager to adapt to new circumstances. “They do not come to the United States from truly native lands, lands of their proper natio and culture. They come from lands of sojourn, where they have been for ages treated as foreigners, at most as semi-citizens, subject to disabilities and persecutions,” Kallen wrote of the Jews, and he continued: Of all immigrants they have the oldest civilized tradition, they are longest accustomed to living under law, and are at the outset the most eager and the most successful in eliminating the external differences between themselves and their social environment. Even their religion is flexible and accommodating, as that of the Christian sectories is not, for change involves not change of doctrine, only in mode of life.47 The Jews were already on the move and not dependent on “truly native lands” for their cohesion and group togetherness. Their particular trait of homelessness did not impede their home-feeling, their sentimental bonds, and their self-consciousness about being a particular group. The Jews are both perfectly amendable and perfectly parochially loyal; accordingly, in Kallen’s words, “In sum, the most eagerly American of the immigrant groups are also the most autonomous and self-conscious in spirit and culture.”48

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Marginal Man In 1928, sociologist Robert Ezra Park wrote the article “Human Migration and the Marginal Man” in the American Journal of Sociology. His argument, in most ways, confirmed Kallen’s and other Jewish reconstructionists’ view of the Jewish minority as the best example of a model American social type.49 This view of the Jews in American sociology had been underway since the 1910s with the growing academic literature on migration and immigrant groups. Anthropological and sociological articles and books on immigrant groups, including the Poles, Italians, and Jews, were written, and typologies were made over how well these groups fared in their new homeland. Pragmatist sociologists, such as Park, were particularly interested in how the Jews in America established Jewish organizations, such as the New York Kehilla, which existed from 1909 to 1922, to deal with Jewish cultural, educational, and social questions. Such organizations were seen as a type of assimilation into the American public sphere, and not as self-segregation. In this school of sociology, assimilation did not mean assimilation into specific ethnic-cultural traditions, but into the public sphere. Assimilation meant participation in the various sectors of public life, providing bridges between loyalties to the parochial community and loyalties to the values of the common public.50 This normative vision of pragmatist sociology was completely in line with the culturally pluralist visions of Kallen, John Dewey, and Randolph Bourne, who in 1916, gave a speech for the Menorah Society declaring that the Jews were the ideal types for the future transnational America.51 American social thought not only studied how the Jews fared in America compared to other minority communities. They also relied on existing European discourses about the Jews that related the Jews directly to the Enlightenment, and that afforded them a special role that other minorities did not have. Numerous European social thinkers had already given the Jews a special role for European social development, a “good to think” pattern culminating in the blossoming of modern sociology in the fin de siècle. It is noteworthy that Georg Simmel’s view of the Jews from his essay Exkurs über den Fremden (1908), as the classic example of a type of contributing and productive strangers, was reproduced by Robert Park and others to show a broader shift in a root metaphor in modern society from sedentarism to mobility.52 As for Simmel, also in pragmatist sociology, the Jews were the best example not in any culturally or racially essentialist way but pragmatically, in practice, their example demonstrated something significant about wider social developments. Park, Stonequist, and others understood the Jews to be playing a double role in the history of Enlightenment and modernity. With emancipation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Jews lost their cultural safety and parochial community behind the ghetto walls, and they became the first marginal men with a “double consciousness”—or the first social group

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existing in double estrangement, both from their own heritage and from majority society. At the same time, the Jews played the role of fertilizers, as they were producers of marginality and strangeness, through trade, mobility, and their presence as strangers within. Accordingly, the enlightenment of the Jews marginalized them, but they also became agents of enlightenment and marginality.53 In his article of 1928, Park explained how human migration forces change, crisis, and conflict into the receiving societies. Migration leads to disasters and wars, but also to innovation and a general release of creative forces. New things are developed and learned because of migration. There is a significant difference, however, for the modern world in comparison to historical population movements. In the modern world, migration is more peaceful and closely related to business and trade, and more than groups, it is now common for individuals to move. Migration still produces crisis, but now, in the modern world, this crisis is more subjective and becomes manifested in the production of a new type of personality. The migrant breaks from his former culture because the new society cannot uphold old customs and traditions, and this leads to a release of energies but also to a lack of control—to some degree of cultural and social unrest. It is important to notice that this period of unrest, the transitional crisis, was temporary in Park’s view. The normative sociological goal was reintegration, or reconstruction. But the release of energy was considered to be fundamentally creative: Inevitably, however, this release is followed in the course of time by the reintegration of the individuals so released into a new social order. In the meantime, however, certain changes take place—at any rate they are likely to take place—in the character of the individuals themselves. They become, in the process, not merely emancipated, but enlightened.54 Not all moving people qualify, in Park’s view, as migrants of the form that produces a new type of personality. Gypsies, hobos, or other people for whom mobility is their stability—that is, nomadic peoples—are not interested in social reintegration. The new personality type is a product of a sequence of breakdowns of a traditional organization of society, followed by an emancipation of the individual, and concluded by a reconstruction and a reintegration into a new society, which leaves the individual enlightened in the way Georg Simmel understood the idea: distanced, objective, rational, and never completely at home. To Robert Park, Everett Stonequist, and other sociologists, this personality type was historically Jewish: When, however, the walls of the medieval Ghetto were torn down and the Jew was permitted to participate in the cultural life of the peoples among whom he lived, there appeared a new type of personality,

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namely a cultural hybrid, a man living and sharing intimately in the cultural life and traditions of two distinct peoples; never quite willing to break, even if he were permitted to do so, with his past and his traditions, and not quite accepted, because of racial prejudice, in the new society in which he now sought to find a place. . . . The emancipated Jew was, and is, the historical and typical marginal man, the first cosmopolite and citizen of the world.55

The Jews and the Boundaries of Enlightenment What is it, then, that ties the Jews to Enlightenment concepts like historical progression, civility, emancipation, and social justice? As mentioned earlier, many scholars have grappled with this question, but here I will highlight one type of explanation that I think offers the strongest argument for why Jews and Jewishness are still tied to questions of the boundaries of Enlightenment. Inspired by structuralist anthropology, particularly Claude Levi-Strauss, I argue that the relationship between Christianity and Judaism, Christians and Jews, represents a variation of so-called totemism.56 Famously, Levi-Strauss argued, in opposition to Malinowski and other anthropologists, that clans and tribes related to various totem animals not because of their intrinsic qualities but because of these totem animals’ differences from other animals. While Malinowski claimed that totems were “good to eat,” Levi-Strauss argued that they were “good to think.”57 Accordingly, it is the historical relation between Christians and Jews, and its translation into universalized enlightenment discourses, that has made this relation “good to think”—thus, making a defining aspect of the development of insides and outsides, and in-betweens, of Christiandominated public spheres, but also of the Christian-dominated public spheres’ universalization into the concept of civility. In classical anthropological terms, this monotheistic tribe split up into different clans in a long process over centuries, and a centrally defining aspect of their historical identities is the divergence, or convergence, of closeness and difference. Most obviously, for Christians and Christianity-based societies, the Jews have been good to think with. But as Susannah Heschel has shown with her research on Abraham Geiger and Wissenschaft des Judentums, this dynamic has also functioned in the inverse way: Heschel famously argues that Christian scholarship, in fact, invented modern “Judaism.”58 Why do Enlightenment struggles over the civility of Jewishness keep on surfacing, then, even in the post-Holocaust era? Sociologist Andrew Abbott discusses in his work on temporality how “the present” is not an instance without duration but a period in which fundamental questions are still answered, or measured, in fundamentally the same way.59 The Enlightenment is such an important present in which the Jews are still good to think with about archtypes, social roles, capitalism, globalization, mobility, religion, civil society—and the Jews and Israel are still at

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the center of countless conspiracy theories. Still today, Jewishness is a highly politicized identity that many people feel entitled to have opinions about, often related to perceived Jewish networks, “power,” or Jewish support for Israel and Zionism. Arguments about the Jews being a religious community, and not a nation or a people, are widespread in diverse movements and groups who have an anti-Zionist agenda. The integration of anti-Zionist positions within a wide variety of leftist and radical agendas testifies to the relevance of the “good to think” perspective, but also to how Zionism and Israel provoke the release of types of debates that go beyond criticism of Israel’s policies. To many people in the global public sphere’s debates over global justice (for the Palestinians) or financial justice (against “Jewish” bankers, philanthropists, and cosmopolitans), the Jews are on the line between being represented as runaway capitalistic modernity, on the one side, and being represented as particularist, clannish, and uncivil visà-vis universal justice claims, on the other.60 What this chapter has shown is that Jewish civility has been a prominent issue in European as well as global public spheres since the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is an important knot that ties Jewishness together across modernity and across a globalizing world. The late Enlightenment’s debates over what is Enlightenment, its reform treatises, its tolerance essays, and its stories and plays, and the legal reforms during the nineteenth century across German-, French-, and English-speaking Europe established the Jews as the classic example of what Robert Park would later call the “marginal man.” In the development of public spheres in Europe, but also in America, the Jews played a significant role as the object of discussions over the limits of equality, tolerance, difference, decorum, and civility. This was the case in both practice and theory. What to do with real Jews was a problem closely related to what to learn from the theoretical Jews defined by the sciences of history, theology, philology, psychology, and sociology. In his seminal work The Civil Sphere, Jeffrey C. Alexander unpacks how the history of a minority such as the Jews is a defining aspect of the struggle for normative and normalizing values of the civil sphere, the common space of society. The Jews were the example that tested the elasticity of universality, and so they lit up the boundaries between insiders and outsiders of enlightened society.61 Moses Mendelssohn’s work, I hope to have shown, illustrates how emancipation, reforms, and open public spheres, albeit in Mendelssohn’s own time only theoretically, formed a new problem— namely, the irrelevance and even illegitimacy of Judaism and Jewishness for Enlightenment and progress. A sign of Jewishness became a stain on a person’s purity, his/her civility. The other example that I have presented represents a reversal of the evaluation of the properties of Jewishness. Jewish reconstructionists in America in the early decades of the twentieth century debated a Jewishness

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detached from religion and tradition, but as a cultural and social attitude or civilizational impulse that pertained both to a Jewish particularity and to the world as a whole. At the same time, pragmatist American sociology developed new theories of the relations between self, culture, society, mobility, and the city, which almost completely converged with how important strands of American Jewish reconstruction saw the future of Jewishness. Cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, Zionism, cultural pluralism, and progressiveness on questions of education, equality, and social justice, but also Americanism, were central issues with overlapping networks and meanings. This reversal of the value of the properties of Jewishness was not without forerunners in old Europe, but it came into its own as a Jewish cultural politics and social theory in America in this period. But, most importantly for my argument here, it bent the topology of modern Jewish history—it did not break it. The reversal remained within the discourse of Enlightenment, though now the Jews were not objects demonstrating the boundaries of Enlightenment but rather the Enlightenment personality itself, the subjectivity, pushing emancipation forward by way of their good example. The “marginal man” became the personality of modernity. While Levi-Strauss’s view on totemism might be outdated in the field of anthropology, it is anchored in a basic semiotics, making it a stillusable metaphor: the Jews have been “good to think” because of the interwovenness of Jewish and Christian history, and because of this relation’s translation into central struggles of European and American civil spheres. I hope to have illustrated here through these two cases how debates over the boundaries of Enlightenment are important knots or bridges connecting the modern cultural history of the Jews. Paraphrasing sociologist Andrew Abbott, we should not search for boundaries between pre-existing cultural groups but instead investigate how people make cultural groups by experiencing, creating, and linking boundaries.62 In important instances, such as the late Enlightenment and America during and after the great migration, boundaries of Jewishness and boundaries of Enlightenment were linked. This link helps us a long way towards explaining how poor Ostjüdische migrants, Zionist Jews, secularists, radicals, communists, and Jewish-American cosmopolitans are part of the same entangled history.

Notes 1. Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Civil Sphere (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). In line with Alexander, I see the civil sphere as the space where struggles over cultural and historical values and hierarchies take place. In the historical struggles over the values of the Western civil spheres, the Jews have a special place. 2. David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840, Studies in Jewish History (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); David

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3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

Jakob Egholm Feldt Sorkin, Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (London: Halban, 1996). Jakob Egholm Feldt, Transnationalism and the Jews, Culture, History and Prophecy (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). Daniel Greene, The Jewish Origins of Cultural Pluralism, the Menorah Association and American Diversity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). Miriam Leonard, Socrates and the Jews: Hellenism and Hebraism From Moses Mendelssohn to Sigmund Freud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Miriam Leonard, “Greeks, Jews, and the Enlightenment: Moses Mendelssohn’s Socrates,” Cultural Critique, no. 74 (2010): 183. Ibid.; Willi Goetschel, Spinoza’s Modernity, Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004); Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, Chicago Studies in the History of Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Goetschel, Spinoza’s Modernity, 3. Lavater’s letter is translated in Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (London: Routledge, 1973), 292. For a theoretical perspective on how the civil sphere is de-primordialized, see Alexander, The Civil Sphere. For how Greece and Christianity were/are central for European historical teleology, while Judaism belongs to moments of the past, see Leonard, Socrates and the Jews: Hellenism and Hebraism From Moses Mendelssohn to Sigmund Freud; Dirk Westerkamp, “The Philonic Distinction: German Enlightenment Historiography of Jewish Thought,” History and Theory 47, no. 4 (December 2008): 533–59. Which is clear from primarily the second section of: Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem: Or on Religious Power and Judaism, ed. Allan Arkush (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 2013). Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, and Other Writings, eds. Immanuel Kant, Allen W. Wood, and George Di Giovanni, Vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 130. Reinier Munk, “Mendelssohn and Kant on Judaism,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 13, no. 3 (2006): 215–22. Mendelssohn, Jerusalem : Or on Religious Power and Judaism, 114. Ibid., 96. Ibid., 90–1. Ibid., 90. David Sorkin, “The Case for Comparison: Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Englightenment,” Modern Judaism 14 (1994): 127. The basic argument through the second part of his work: Mendelssohn, Jerusalem: Or on Religious Power and Judaism, 77–96. Mendelssohn, Jerusalem: Or on Religious Power and Judaism, 96. Mendelssohn in James Schmidt, What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 54. Lessing, cf. Leonard, Socrates and the Jews, 60. James Schmidt, “What Enlightenment Was: How Moses Mendelssohn and Immanuel Kant Answered the Berlinische Monatsschrift,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 30, no. 1 (1992): 77–101. Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? (London: Penguin, 2009). Ibid., 1. Schmidt, “What Enlightenment Was: How Moses Mendelssohn and Immanuel Kant Answered the Berlinische Monatsschrift,” 88.

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26. Mendelssohn in Schmidt, What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, 53–7. 27. Ibid., 56. 28. Schmidt, “What Enlightenment Was: How Moses Mendelssohn and Immanuel Kant Answered the Berlinische Monatsschrift,” 94. 29. Ibid., 88. 30. Fred H. Matthews, Quest for an American Sociology, Robert E. Park and the Chicago School (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1977). 31. Howard O. Mounce, The Two Pragmatisms, From Peirce to Rorty (London and New York: Routledge, 1997); Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001). 32. Chad Alan Goldberg, Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 76. 33. Ibid. 34. Jakob Egholm Feldt, “New Futures, New Pasts: Horace M. Kallen and the Contribution of Jewishness to the Future,” European Review of History: Revue Européenne D’histoire 23, nos. 5–6 (2016): 847–62. 35. Lewis Fried, “Creating Hebraism, Confronting Hellenism. The Menorah Journal and Its Struggle for the Jewish Imagination,” American Jewish Archives Journal (2001): 147–74. 36. Greene, The Jewish Origins of Cultural Pluralism, the Menorah Association and American Diversity; Feldt, Transnationalism and the Jews, Culture, History and Prophecy. 37. Michael Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin-de-Siecle. Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism From Nordau to Jabotinsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 38. David N Myers, Re-Inventing the Jewish Past, European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History, Studies in Jewish History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 39. Leonard, Socrates and the Jews: Hellenism and Hebraism From Moses Mendelssohn to Sigmund Freud. 40. Willi Goetschel, “Tangled Genealogies: Hellenism, Hebraism, and the Discourse of Modernity,” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 21, no. 3 (2014): 181–94. 41. Joe Kraus, “How Stirred America: The Reception of Zangwill’s Play and Theater’s Role in the American Assimilation Experience,” MELUS 24, no. 3 (1999): 3–19; Israel Zangwill, The Melting-Pot; Drama in 4 Acts (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1909). 42. Egholm Feldt, “New Futures, New Pasts: Horace M. Kallen and the Contribution of Jewishness to the Future”; Pianko, “The True Liberalism of Zionism”: Horace Kallen, Jewish Nationalism, and the Limits of American Pluralism,” American Jewish History 94, no. 4 (2008): 299–329. 43. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 44. Ibid., 152–4. 45. Reprinted in Horace M. Kallen, Judaism at Bay: Essays Towards the Adjustment of Judaism to Modernity (New York: Block Publication Co, 1932), 10. 46. Ibid., 11. 47. Horace M. Kallen, “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot I+II,” The Nation, 1915, 218. 48. Ibid., 218. 49. Robert E. Park, “Human Migration and the Marginal Man,” American Journal of Sociology 33, no. 6 (1928): 881–93.

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50. Goldberg, Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought; Chad Goldberg, “Robert Park’s Marginal Man. The Career of a Concept in American Sociology,” Laboratorium 4, no. 2 (2012): 10, 15–16, 199–217, 285–6, 289. 51. Randolph Bourne, “The Jew and Trans-National America,” The Menorah Journal, no. II (1916): 277–84. 52. Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in On Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971), 144–49. 53. Park, “Human Migration and the Marginal Man”; Everett V. Stonequist, “The Problem of the Marginal Man,” American Journal of Sociology 41, no. 1 (1935): 1–12. 54. Park, “Human Migration and the Marginal Man,” 888. 55. Ibid., 892. 56. I have borrowed this clue from Goldberg, Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought. 57. Claude Levi-Strauss, Totemism, Reprint (London: Merlin Press, 1991), 89. 58. Susannah Heschel, “Revolt of the Colonized: Abraham Geiger’s ‘Wissenschaft Des Judentums’ as a Challenge to Christian Hegemony in the Academy,” New German Critique, no. 77 (1999): 61. 59. Andrew Abbott, Time Matters, on Theory and Method, ed. Andrew Abbott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 209–39. 60. Paul A. Silverstein, “The Context of Antisemitism and Islamophobia in France,” Patterns of Prejudice 42, no. 1 (2008): 1–26; Brian Klug, “Is Europe a Lost Cause? The European Debate on Antisemitism and the Middle East Conflict,” Patterns of Prejudice 39, no. 1 (2005): 46–59; Robert Fine, “Fighting With Phantoms: A Contribution to the Debate on Antisemitism in Europe,” Patterns of Prejudice 43, no. 5 (2009): 459–79; Jonathan Judaken, “So What’s New? Rethinking the ‘New Antisemitism’ in a Global Age,” Patterns of Prejudice 42, nos. 4–5 (2008): 531–60. 61. Alexander, The Civil Sphere. 62. Andrew Abbott, “Things of Boundaries (Defining the Boundaries of Social Inquiry),” Social Research 62, no. 4 (1995): 857.

Bibliography Abbott, Andrew. “Things of Boundaries (Defining the Boundaries of Social Inquiry).” Social Research 62, no. 4 (1995). Abbott, Andrew. Time Matters, on Theory and Method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Alexander, Jeffrey C. The Civil Sphere. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Altmann, Alexander. Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study. London: Routledge, 1973. Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Bourne, Randolph. “The Jew and Trans-National America.” The Menorah Journal, no. 2 (1916). Feldt, Jakob Egholm. “New Futures, New Pasts: Horace M. Kallen and the Contribution of Jewishness to the Future.” European Review of History: Revue Européenne D’histoire 23, nos. 5–6 (2016). Feldt, Jakob Egholm. Transnationalism and the Jews, Culture, History and Prophecy. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. Fine, Robert. “Fighting With Phantoms: A Contribution to the Debate on Antisemitism in Europe.” Patterns of Prejudice 43, no. 5 (2009).

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Fried, Lewis. “Creating Hebraism, Confronting Hellenism. The Menorah Journal and Its Struggle for the Jewish Imagination.” American Jewish Archives Journal LIII, nos. 1–2 (2001). Goetschel, Willi. Spinoza’s Modernity, Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Goetschel, Willi. “Tangled Genealogies: Hellenism, Hebraism, and the Discourse of Modernity.” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 21, no. 3 (2014). Goldberg, Chad. Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Goldberg, Chad. “Robert Park’s Marginal Man: The Career of a Concept in American Sociology.” Laboratorium 4, no. 2 (2012). Greene, Daniel. The Jewish Origins of Cultural Pluralism, the Menorah Association and American Diversity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Heschel, Susannah. Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Heschel, Susannah. “Revolt of the Colonized: Abraham Geiger’s ‘Wissenschaft Des Judentums’ as a Challenge to Christian Hegemony in the Academy.” New German Critique, no. 77 (1999). Judaken, Jonathan. “So What’s New? Rethinking the ‘New Antisemitism’ in a Global Age.” Patterns of Prejudice 42, nos. 4–5 (2008). Kallen, Horace M. “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot I+II.” The Nation, 1915. Kallen, Horace M. Judaism at Bay: Essays Towards the Adjustment of Judaism to Modernity. New York: Block Publication Co, 1932. Kant, Immanuel. An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? London: Penguin, 2009. Kant, Immanuel. Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, and Other Writings. Edited by Immanuel Kant, Allen W. Wood, and George Di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Klug, Brian. “Is Europe a Lost Cause? The European Debate on Antisemitism and the Middle East Conflict.” Patterns of Prejudice 39, no. 1 (2005). Kraus, Joe. “How Stirred America: The Reception of Zangwill’s Play and Theater’s Role in the American Assimilation Experience.” MELUS 24, no. 3 (1999). Leonard, Miriam. “Greeks, Jews, and the Enlightenment: Moses Mendelssohn’s Socrates.” Cultural Critique, no. 74 (2010). Leonard, Miriam. Socrates and the Jews: Hellenism and Hebraism From Moses Mendelssohn to Sigmund Freud. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Levi-Strauss, Claude. Totemism. London: Merlin Press, 1991. Matthews, Fred H. Quest for an American Sociology, Robert E. Park and the Chicago School. Montreal Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1977. Menand, Louis. The Metaphysical Club. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. Mendelssohn, Moses. Jerusalem: Or on Religious Power and Judaism. Edited by Allan Arkush. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2013. Mounce, Howard O. The Two Pragmatisms, From Peirce to Rorty. New York: Routledge, 1997. Munk, Reinier. “Mendelssohn and Kant on Judaism.” Jewish Studies Quarterly 13, no. 3 (2006). Myers, David N. Re-Inventing the Jewish Past, European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

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Park, Robert E. “Human Migration and the Marginal Man.” American Journal of Sociology 33, no. 6 (1928). Pianko, Noam. “‘The True Liberalism of Zionism’: Horace Kallen, Jewish Nationalism, and the Limits of American Pluralism.” American Jewish History 94, no. 4 (2008). Schmidt, James. “What Enlightenment Was: How Moses Mendelssohn and Immanuel Kant Answered the Berlinische Monatsschrift.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 30, no. 1 (1992). Schmidt, James. What Is Enlightenment?, Eighteenth-Century Answers and TwentiethCentury Questions. Edited by James Schmidt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Silverstein, Paul A. “The Context of Antisemitism and Islamophobia in France.” Patterns of Prejudice 42, no. 1 (2008). Simmel, Georg. “The Stranger.” In On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971. Sorkin, David. “The Case for Comparison: Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment.” Modern Judaism 14 (1994). Sorkin, David. Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment. London: Halban, 1996. Sorkin, David. The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Stanislawski, Michael. Zionism and the Fin-de-Siecle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism From Nordau to Jabotinsky. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Stonequist, Everett V. “The Problem of the Marginal Man.” American Journal of Sociology 41, no. 1 (1935). Westerkamp, Dirk. “The Philonic Distinction: German Enlightenment Historiography of Jewish Thought.” History and Theory 47, no. 4 (December 2008). Zangwill, Israel. The Melting-Pot; Drama in 4 Acts. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1909.

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“It Is Hellas and Israel to Which Europe Owes Its Culture” Georg Brandes and His Athens vs. Jerusalem Reinterpretations Søren Blak Hjortshøj

Introduction The Danish Jewish fin-de-siècle intellectual Georg Brandes (1842–1927) and his writings represent a distinctive archive in the intellectual history of the Athens vs. Jerusalem dichotomy. In his later writings, during the period when different European antisemitic-based nationalistic movements were growing, Brandes argued for reshaping the dichotomy so that Jerusalem was denoted as an indispensable part of Western civilization.1 At the same time, while Brandes accentuated the Jewish contributions to European civilization, he also emphasized a juxtaposed relationship between Athens and Jerusalem. As he wrote in “Jobs Bog” (The Book of Job) (1893), “It is Hellas and Israel to which Europe owes its culture.”2 Since the Enlightenment period, esteemed European philosophers, including Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, and later Ernest Renan and Friedrich Nietzsche, had depicted the role of ancient Jewish civilization as a “false start” for European civilization and, even more, treated Judaism as a fossilized tradition in modern times.3 By juxtaposing Athens and Jerusalem, Brandes contended with the typical representations of how the ancient Jewish civilization and the ancient Greek culture had influenced Western civilization and Christianity. To examine this debate, this chapter will provide the reader with the intellectual historical background for the dichotomy, and then provide three examples of how Brandes reshaped the dichotomy so that Athens vs. Jerusalem became Athens and Jerusalem.

Revitalizing Georg Brandes: A Significant Trans-European Fin-de-Siècle Intellectual In intellectual and global history studies, Georg Brandes seems to be a somewhat forgotten actor. However, from the 1870s and until 1927, Georg Brandes was one of the most important European intellectuals, particularly due to his main work on nineteenth-century European literary history, recorded in six volumes: Hovedstrømningerne i Det Nittende Aarhundredes Europæiske Litteratur (Main Currents in Nineteenth

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Century European Literature; from now on: Main Currents), which Thomas Mann called “the Bible of young, intellectual Europe.”4 Moreover, as a leading European fin-de-siècle arbiter of taste, Brandes played a leading role in the transformation of Friedrich Nietzsche into a European philosopher king. Thus, Brandes was an active and vivid intellectual who embodied what Charles S. Maier has recently deemed the first wave of globalization, the period from 1870 to 1914.5 From the late 1860s, Brandes engaged in fertile trans-European intellectual networks by visiting and taking part in letter correspondences with historically significant figures, including Stuart Mill, Moritz Lazarus, Ernest Renan, Theodor Herzl, Henrik Ibsen, Berthold Auerbach, and Georges Clemenceau. He also wrote for influential newspapers and magazines, such as Deutsche Rundschau and Neue Freie Presse. In a Danish cultural and political context today, Brandes is particularly known for his Modern Breakthrough project. Through a series of lectures in 1871, which led to the publication of the first volume of the Main Currents series, Emigrantlitteraturen (1872) (The Emigrant Literature), Brandes proclaimed that Denmark should leave behind the still-dominating structures and dogma of the Old World (he was particularly critical of still-dominating religious dogma) and develop into a modern society based on liberal Enlightenment values. Despite his influence as a significant fin-de-siècle intellectual, Brandes also endured a lifelong struggle to be accepted and treated as an equal to individuals (or rather: men of the bourgeoisie) of Christian descent because of his Jewish background, in Denmark as well as on the broader European stage.6 As far back as Brandes’s first participation in a seemingly open public debate in 1867 and up until his death in 1927, numerous actors would claim that Brandes could not contribute original or innovative ideas to any European-based cultural tradition because he was of Jewish descent.7 Consequently, it was also a prominent feature of Brandes’s work that he, both in his early and later writings, examined different aspects of the so-called Jewish question. He engaged these discussions by continuously emphasizing the Jewish contributions to Western civilization. Often, in fact, there was an unclear distinction between Brandes’s advocacy for his own work and for broader Jewish contributions to modern life.8 Accordingly, in Brandes’s reinterpretations of the Athens vs. Jerusalem dichotomy, his reflections on how Jews and Jewishness had always been a founding and continuously contributive part of European civilization, from ancient to modern times, mirrored his own lifelong struggle with gaining proper recognition for his work. As demonstrated substantially in the research on Brandes, one of the primary ideals throughout his oeuvre was also Hellenism. Consequently, as we will see in his reinterpretations of the dichotomy, Brandes did not neglect to emphasize the importance of Athens. Much of Brandes’s fascination of Hellenism was arguably derived from J. J. Winckelmann, as well as Hegel’s (Winckelmann-inspired) idealization of Athens. In fact,

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particularly in his early writings, Brandes did not question or seek to reshape the dichotomy. However, as modern antisemitism and the various European nationalistic movements grew from the 1880s, Brandes would indeed reshape the Athens vs. Jerusalem dichotomy. But before we come to Brandes’s reinterpretations, let us first examine more thoroughly how the dichotomy was developed.

The Intellectual Historical Background for the Athens vs. Jerusalem Dichotomy Aligned with Brandes’s admiration for Athens, the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century “philhellenism” was to a large extent driven by J. J. Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1755.)9 In this book, Winckelmann portrayed the ancient Greek human being as a simple but proud, optimistic, strong, and rationally clever individual.10 Thus, Winckelmann’s ideal male Hellene figure came to stand as the authentic predecessor to the Enlightenment’s modern human being. The Athens vs. Jerusalem dichotomy was predominantly developed during the Enlightenment period, in the German-speaking areas of Europe, where the idealization of Athens and ancient Greek culture was promoted as part of the modern creation of history as a science. In particular, the early modern founders of history and historicity argued to extricate Christianity from Judaism, rendering Christianity a fully independent religious tradition. As Susannah Heschel writes, Historicism was not only on the rise in Europe, it was identified as a quintessentially European project, distinguishing the colonizer from the colonized . . . as much as theology gave rise to historicism, it was through the great nineteenth-century historicist project of determining the origins and originality of Christianity that Judaism’s “inferiority” was transferred from the theological to the historicist realm.11 The typical components of the topology were the ancient Jewish civilization, the ancient Greek culture, and how these two civilizations had influenced Christianity and Western civilization. The Roman civilization was constructed either as an additional independent component or as a logically causal branch of the ancient Greek civilization, so that Athens and Rome together constituted the solid ground of Europe. Thus, in many of the Athens vs. Jerusalem discussions, Jewish particularity and the Jewish religious tradition were rejected as a constructive basis for an enlightened human being. A good example of this Jewish rejection can be found in the debate between the German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and the Swiss theologian and philosopher J. C. Lavater. Similar to Brandes, Mendelssohn idealized Hellenism and, by writing Phaidon (1867), had already

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become known as “the German Socrates.”12 In fact, Phaidon was a philosophical bestseller.13 In Switzerland, Mendelssohn had also impressed Lavater. Lavater, one of the founders of modern physiognomy, decided to contact Mendelssohn via letter in 1869 because of Mendelssohn’s merits. In particular, Lavater had become convinced that by writing Phaidon, Mendelssohn had now matured enough that a conversion to Christianity was the next logical step for his life.14 In this letter, Lavater asked of Mendelssohn either to convert to Christianity or to refute Charles Bonnet’s idea that Christianity could be proven to be true scientifically.15 In an open letter answering Lavater, Mendelssohn was able to refute this challenge through his argument that equalized the status of Christianity and Judaism by claiming that both religions were so-called natural religions. According to Mendelssohn, both Christianity and Judaism centered on a core of eternal reason, reflected in the practices of both religions.16 Although Lavater had to accept that Mendelssohn had delivered a sufficient answer, he would not give up his negative view of Mendelssohn’s Jewish background. Later in his famous Essay sur la Physiognomie (1775– 1778), Lavater presented his theory of physiognomy based on a method through which he could detect the underlying character of any individual by reading his or her facial features. Through a reading of Mendelssohn’s facial features, Lavater believed he was able to see that “the antithesis of Mendelssohn’s Jewish body and Greek soul was resolved in the synthesis of Christianity.”17 Thus, according to Lavater, Mendelssohn followed a religious tradition that was fossilized in modern times. However, none of the investigations into the origins of European civilization and Christianity were more controversial than the question of the Jewish particularity/identity of Christ. As we will see in the second of Brandes’s reinterpretations of the dichotomy, in the last book he wrote before his death, Brandes was also highly occupied with Jesus’s Jewish origins, arguing that Christ should mainly be viewed as a fictional character based on older Jewish prophecies. However, since the Enlightenment period, the typical Athens vs. Jerusalem tendency was to de-Judaize Jesus and to represent his Jewish origins as an aberration. Instead, the influence of the Greek cultural tradition on the ancient Jewish world was highlighted. An example of this perspective appeared in Hegel’s essay “Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal” (1798–99), in which Hegel characterized the Jews in Jesus’s time as a reactionary people, trapped within the dogma of Orthodox Judaism. In the essay, Hegel wrote, In this miserable situation there must have been Jews of a better heart and head who could not renounce or deny their feelings of selfhood or stoop to become lifeless machines, there must have been aroused in them the need for nobler gratification than that of priding themselves on this mechanical slavery.  .  . . Acquaintances with

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foreign nations introduced some of them to the finer blossomings of the human spirit.18 In other words, Hegel did project it as possible that Jews could experience an “awakening to self-consciousness,” and that the Jews, as Jews, had “the potential for self-improvement.”19 Yet, this transformation could not occur without the positive influence and shaping of an external culture. To Hegel, and to many of these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Christian thinkers and writers, Jesus was a Hellenized Jew: the positive elements of his teachings were derived from Hellenism.

Friedrich Nietzsche and Slave Morality as a “False Start” Still, one should be wary of valorizing such esteemed philosophers and their belief systems based only on their adherence to a cultural code, such as Athens vs. Jerusalem. It is important to consider nuanced perspectives, as we will see in Friedrich Nietzsche’s interpretations of the dichotomy, which this chapter suggests highly influenced Brandes’s elaborations on the dichotomy. In this context, it is relevant to begin with Georg Brandes’s unique role in the transformation of Friedrich Nietzsche from (having grown into) a pariah in the German-speaking countries’ academic world into a European philosopher king. When Friedrich Nietzsche in 1886/87 sent his writings to Georg Brandes, Nietzsche had become desperate to reach his goal of revolutionizing philosophy and the philological tradition. Upon reading his work, Brandes quickly became fascinated by this eccentric German scholar’s peculiar writings. Due to Brandes’s status as a leading European arbiter of taste, and particularly because of the German translation of his introductory essay on the aspiring philosopher, Nietzsche’s work from 1889 to 1890 was circulated among central actors and in-groups of the North European intellectual and artistic circles.20 It has been substantially argued that Brandes drew upon Nietzsche’s ideas in his later writings, especially regarding Brandes’s fascination with great men in this period.21 Moreover, Nietzsche’s concept of slave morality, I will argue, significantly influenced Brandes to reflect on how this trait was originally Christian—and not Jewish. According to Nietzsche, slave morality is the ethical framework of the defeated, of those who are oppressed. Thus, the set of slave morality values is an inversion of the set of master/Superman morality values: instead of strength, nobility, and the celebration of individual glory, slave morality highlights compassion, kindness, sympathy, and humility as positive virtues. Nietzsche represented this struggle between slave and Superman morality as something that any society and culture experiences. Slave morality, then, is a label for all those who oppose and struggle against the strong individualism of Nietzsche’s master/Superman ideal. Thus, in this context, what has been termed as Nietzsche’s “anti-antisemitism” is

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a relevant, nuanced perspective on how Nietzsche continued the tradition of dichotomizing Athens vs. Jerusalem. As part of his representation of Jewishness, Nietzsche scorned the contemporary antisemitic movement he witnessed in Germany, since in Nietzsche’s mind, antisemites were true representatives of slave morality.22 Accordingly, as Reinhard Rürup has demonstrated, the dominating actors of the modern antisemitic movement identified themselves as victims of a Jewish-influenced haut bourgeoisie domination.23 The slave morality of the antisemites, in Nietzsche’s view, was based upon their resentments and rebellions against feelings of oppression and defeat.24 Still, under Nietzsche’s key concept of slave morality, he clearly constructed Judaism as the hub of this set of values, while Christianity only reproduced the slave moral. In this way, departing from the Enlightenment tendency to create a distinction between Judaism as a historic religion and Christianity as a natural religion, Nietzsche did not view Judaism and Christianity as two somewhat separated religious traditions, such that Christianity represented a positive break from Hellenism.25 Nevertheless, in Nietzsche’s slave morality concept, Jerusalem ultimately continued to be seen as a “false start,” while Athens again was idealized through Nietzsche’s admiration of the pre-Platonic Greek world.26

The Danish Cultural Tradition as Fossilized Ancient Jewish Civilization To begin the analysis of Brandes’s reinterpretations of the dichotomy, I first must clarify that Brandes, similar to Nietzsche, also made inconsistent claims when crediting Athens and Jerusalem with the origins of European culture. In some cases, particularly in his early writings, Brandes clearly reproduced stereotypical representations of the dichotomy. For example, as we will see next, in the first reinterpretation of Athens vs. Jerusalem of Brandes of this article, he asserted the typical Athens vs. Jerusalem argument by designating Judaism as a fossilized tradition in modern times, just as Lavater established in his dispute with Mendelssohn. Nevertheless, Brandes also argued that the ancient Jewish civilization was the foundation of Christianity and Western civilization, and, moreover, he did not represent the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Danish cultural tradition as being any more civilized than the ancient Jewish civilization. This degrading view of Danish society and the Danish cultural tradition was a particular focal point for Brandes in his early writings. In the first volume of his Main Currents series, Emigrantlitteraturen (The Emigrant Literature) (1872), and as a fundamental part of his Modern Breakthrough project, Brandes represented Denmark as a backwards and reactionary country at this time in history. In Emigrantlitteraturen, Brandes held the opinion that if Denmark were to develop into a genuinely

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modern liberal society, a significant cultural and political change had to occur. Specifically, Brandes observed that Denmark had isolated itself as a nation after it had lost the war against Prussia in 1864.27 Subsequently, Denmark experienced isolation economically, politically, and culturally, since, earlier in the nineteenth century, it had been more closely connected to the southern German-speaking states compared to other great European nations of this period. In 1872, however, according to Brandes, the time had come for Denmark to move forward and out of its withdrawal, which had obstructed genuine liberal democracy from materializing in the nation. Consequently, Brandes’s key argument in Emigrantlitteraturen was that certain groups of people were better positioned to demonstrate for the population of Denmark how the nation was still caught in the dogma and prejudices of the Old World: first, Danes who lived abroad for a shorter or longer period, and second, individuals who had already developed an positively alienated, cosmopolitan outlook due to their inherently “inside-outside” position in society (e.g., individuals of Jewish descent).28 Such views were considered to be highly provocative in Denmark in the 1870s. Particularly, it was noticed that this outspoken critique came from an individual of Jewish descent and thus from someone who, according to most commentators of this book, should not be considered Danish.29 Following the publication of Emigrantlitteraturen, then, Brandes endured attacks from leading Danish actors, who characterized his work as a threat to the order of society and as an attempt to subvert the national tradition.30 In the following years, mainly because of the stir that Emigrantlitteraturen had caused, it became difficult for Brandes to even earn a living in Denmark. As a result, he moved to Berlin in 1877, and he lived in the German capital until 1883, making a living by writing journalistic articles for German, Austrian, French, and the few Danish newspapers and magazines that would still publish his work. Brandes later returned to Copenhagen in 1883, when a group of men in the Copenhagen bourgeoisie (the majority of whom were also of Jewish descent) offered him a monthly salary if he were to come back and work as a Danish scientist and intellectual.31 Brandes accepted this offer and moved back to Copenhagen. However, the same national conservative/national liberal Danish newspapers that had made a strong effort to stigmatize Brandes as subversive in 1872 reacted by publishing a wave of inflammatory articles, criticizing this offer as well as Brandes as a person. Consequently, in the first example of Brandes’s reinterpretations of the Athens vs. Jerusalem dichotomy (taken from his autobiography Levned I–III (Recollections of My Childhood and Youth I–III), 1905–08), Brandes also recounted this wave of accusations against him in 1883. According to Brandes, his opponents framed the conflict as follows: “My standpoint was Jewish, theirs was national.”32 Through this stance, he argued, his critics treated Jewishness as a synonym for

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not-Danishness—that is, for not being rooted in and part of the Danish national tradition. In the first reinterpretation of the Athens vs. Jerusalem dichotomy of this article, Brandes grappled with the complexity of Jewishness after these newspapers delivered such harmful allegations against him.33 In response to the accusation of being an un-Danish Jew, Brandes turned the derogations into a history lesson, in which Jewishness came to signify the civilizational foundation of Denmark and Europe as a whole: Never in my life had I emphasized or so much as drawn attention to any Jewish view. . . . Without wavering in the slightest . . . I had, from that day when I made a public appearance, positioned myself, as almost the only person in the country, in clear opposition to Judaism with all of its offshoots, including Lutheranism. The entire country was steeped in Judaism, ancient Jewish culture, ancient Jewish barbarism. All was Jewish, even the peasant names, Hans and Jens (. . .) The children were taught Jewish legends before they were taught Danish legends, Jewish history before Danish history, but above all the Jewish religion. A Jewish God was worshipped, as was the son of a Jewish woman as the son of God and God Himself. The festivals of the people were the Jewish festivals, Easter and Whitsun, and Christmas celebrated the son of a Jewish mother seated at the right hand of the Creator. The priests preached to me from the country’s pulpits. They stood up for the venerability of Jewish books, nay their  .  .  . infallibility, their eternal value. Their conception of law was Jewish from the year 5000 BC, their notion of grace Jewish from the year 50 AD. . . . To me, however, they talked as though Christianity had sprung from Denmark, as though it was anything but Judaism converted and further developed with added mysticism.34 In this quotation, Brandes initiated his response with the claim that he had a Jewish mind-set by distancing himself from Jewishness: “Never in my life had I emphasized or so much as drawn attention to any Jewish view.” However, in the lines that followed, it becomes clear that while Brandes distanced himself from Jewishness, he also highlighted the Jewish contributions to European civilization. Thus, Brandes identified the underlying civilizational basis for Danish society in his time (culturally, juridically, and theologically) as an invention of the ancient Jewish people. In this way, according to Brandes, it was absurd that his ideas were reduced and stereotyped as negatively “Jewish,” since everything in Denmark at this time was based on Jerusalem. Also in this passage, Brandes alluded to the degradation of the Jewish/ Danish civilization, as he called this civilizational tradition “Jewish barbarism.” Yet, Brandes did not situate the Jewish civilizational stage solely

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within ancient times, nor did he label Christianity as a more developed civilizational stage than Judaism. On the contrary, he labelled Christianity as “Judaism . . . with added mysticism.” Thus, Brandes claimed that most of contemporary Danish culture and society were still based on premodern dogma and—unlike the typical Enlightenment view that Lavater displayed—Brandes repudiated the notion that the Christian tradition should be any more developed and rationally civilized than Judaism. Furthermore, Brandes did not count himself as part of the still visible Jewish/ Danish stage of civilization. Even more, it could be argued that Brandes drew influence from Nietzsche’s distinction between slave and Superman morality. Brandes believed that he had developed a superior, modern, individualistic mindset, while the majority of the Danish population and the Danish cultural tradition were still bound in a fossilized and backwards mind-set. In the second version of his reinterpretation of the Athens vs. Jerusalem dichotomy, in “Jøderne i Finland” (The Jews in Finland), he elaborated on this characteristic: How droll! The one thing I am not, in the deeper sense, is that! (a Jew). The whole of Denmark . . . is steeped in Judaism, its God is Jewish, its celebrations are Jewish, its religion is Judaism converted and further developed with a few mystical trappings. . . . The Old Testament is . . . written by Jews. . . .There was once a time when I was almost the only person in the country who was not a Jew. And yet one could say that the one thing which is universally known about me in this country and the one thing which is continually communicated about me abroad is that I am that . . . , and although I was the first to return to Athens, they never rest from tracing me back to this Jerusalem, which they cannot let go of.35 As we can see, in both examples, Brandes operated within two civilizational stages. The second, more advanced civilization seemed to be driven by a modern individualistic mind-set, which connoted both elements of Nietzsche’s Superman ideal and radical Enlightenment virtues. Brandes was clearly of the opinion that most Danes had not transformed themselves according to this modern individualistic mind-set, as he wrote, “[T]hey never rest from tracing me back to this Jerusalem, which they cannot let go of.” In addition, in both versions, Brandes described how these two different civilizations were struggling with each other at that time in history. Again, however, Brandes elevated the Jewish contributions to European civilization, since he clearly identified the ancient Jewish civilization and religion as the underlying basis for Denmark. As such, he did not view Judaism as a “false start,” as if Christianity came to stand as a more accurate beginning.36

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Brandes’s Reinterpretation of the Concept of Nazarenism The second reinterpretation of the Athens vs. Jerusalem relationship, I will demonstrate, served as a distinct counter-reaction to stereotypical depictions of the dichotomy. However, it was actually Brandes’s own stance—his previously degrading view of Jerusalem—that became crucial for him to alter. Hence, in the latter part of the 1920s when European nationalistic movements were more popular than ever, Brandes revised his former stereotypical views on so-called Nazarenism. He does this through his last four books before his death in 1927, in which Brandes more generally focused on the historical role of Jews and Jewishness in the history of Western civilization by reflecting on the different books of the Old Testament and on the development of early Christianity.37 Thus, instead of representing Jews and Jewishness as negative aliens in the history of various European national traditions, as the increasingly popular nationalistic movements would do, Brandes highlighted how Jews and Jewishness had been a founding and continuous part of Western civilization. Brandes first addressed the concept of Nazarenism through the Nazarenism vs. Hellenism dichotomy in Det unge Tyskland (1890) and Heinrich Heine (1897) (the portrait of Heinrich Heine in 1897 was mostly a reproduction of the depiction of Heine in Det unge Tyskland [1890]). In these two books, Brandes characterized Heine as the leading figure of the literary movement Das junge Deutschland, and he presents the dichotomy as part of Heine’s characterization of another German Jewish writer, Ludwig Börne:38 The reader doubtless remembers the passage in Heine’s book on Börne in which he writes on Börne’s Nazarenic narrow-mindedness. He tells us that he calls it “Nazarenic” to avoid using the words Jewish or Christian, as to him these words convey the same meaning, and he does not use them to designate a faith but a natural disposition; and he contrasts the word Nazarenic with the word Hellenic, which to him also signifies an innate or acquired disposition and general point of view. In other words, all of humanity is divided into Nazarenes and Hellenes, either people of ascetic, image-hating disposition, inclined to morbid spiritualization, or people of cheerful, realistic temperament, inclined to self-development. And he designates himself a Hellene.39 Although the initial characterization of Börne was Heine’s and not Brandes’s, Brandes was drawn to the Nazarenism vs. Hellenism dichotomy in Det unge Tyskland, and Brandes revisited this exact same passage in his biography on Heine. Thus, in this book, the passage further framed Brandes’s description of Heine as a unique and genius Hellenized German

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Jewish writer.40 Even more, in these books, Brandes explained that in his account of Nazarenism vs. Hellenism, Heine in fact paraphrases Hegel’s view, which held that Hellenism was the positive foundation for Western civilization, while Jerusalem merely represented negative traits.41 Initially, when Brandes represented the dichotomy of Nazarenism vs. Hellenism, miming Heine (miming Hegel), it seemed that he agreed with Hegel’s original negative view on ancient Jewish civilization, rendering Judaism a “false start” for European civilization.42 However, particularly in two of the four last books he wrote before he died in 1927, Sagnet om Jesus (The legend of Jesus) (1925) and Urkristendommen (Early Christianity) (1927), Brandes again called attention to the term “Nazarenism.” In both books, Brandes was oddly engaged with the etymological and historical background for the term. In his view, “the Nazarenes” denoted a minor, radical Jewish sect that interpreted Judaism in a much more extreme way than the majority of the ancient Jewish people did. Brandes explained this new-angled view of the term “Nazarenism” most extensively in the following passage from Sagnet om Jesus: The second chapter concludes by saying that Joseph came to live in a town called Nazareth so that it should come to pass what the prophets had said. He shall be called a Nazarene. It has been noted in studies that there is no mention anywhere in the Old Testament, in the works of Josephus or in the Talmud of a place called by such name. With the exception of the Gospels, the name is unknown until the fourth century. Recent theologians have certainly wanted to assert the firm belief of first-century Christians that Jesus originated from Nazareth. . . . In all likelihood there was no such place by the name of Nazareth. . . . William B. Smith, upon studying the Epiphanius, proved that a Jewish sect called the Nazarenes existed before the Christian era. In their orthodoxy they recognized no later figure than Joshua, whose name is indeed the same as Jesus, and they seem in some way or another to have merged with the Christians, who merely pronounced their name Nazorean instead of Nazarene.43 In Sagnet om Jesus and Urkristendommen, Brandes did not change his view on Nazarenism as a purely negative mind-set. However, Nazarenism was no longer identical with the whole civilization and the whole religious tradition of the ancient Jewish people. Rather, Nazarenism was a particular interpretation of Judaism, which originally stemmed from members of this extreme sect, who deliberately broke free from the majority interpretation of Judaism.44 Later, according to Brandes, this small sect merged with the early Christian movement.45 This view was highly controversial in the Danish civil sphere of the 1920s, and through these final books, Brandes once again—one last time before he died—found himself in the midst of a heated debate when they

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were published in 1925–1927. In particular, Brandes held that the figure of Jesus should be viewed mainly as a fictional character based on older Jewish prophecies. In fact, Brandes’s claim pointed to one of the most classic discussions in the intellectual history of the Athens vs. Jerusalem dichotomy. As seen in Hegel’s essay “Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal,” the typical Enlightenment tendency was to de-Judaize Jesus and instead Hellenize him. By contrast, historically, Brandes’s stance in Sagnet om Jesus and Urkristendommen was a typical pre-modern Sephardic Jewish assertion, which later became an essential part of the early radical and moderate Enlightenment Bible criticism—as, for example, Martin Mulsow has shed light upon in Enlightenment Underground— Radical Germany, 1680–1720 (2015).46 By redefining the term “Nazarenism” in Sagnet om Jesus and Urkristendom, Brandes wrote himself into both an old Sephardic Jewish and early modern radical Enlightenment tradition. For example, in Marquis d’ Argens’s radical writing Lettres Juives (1738–42), the Sephardic Jewish travelling narrators also labelled the Christians as Nazarenes.47 According to Adam Sutcliffe, Marquis d’Argens in this way participated in an intellectual trend, in which radical thinkers and writers adopted the Muslim and Jewish tradition of calling Christians “Nazarenes” to subordinate Judaism to Christianity.48 Thus, “Argens inverts the conventional understanding of the relationship between the two faiths, casting Judaism as the more universal creed, and Christianity as its schismatic offshoot.”49 In the eighteenth century, the radical tradition of using the Nazarene term for Christians was a way of challenging the Christian clerical authoritarian power. To sum up, it is striking that in the last books Brandes writes before his death, he focused so heavily on the historical role of Jews and Jewishness in the history of Western civilization. In Urkristendommen and Sagnet om Jesus, and in another of these books, Petrus (1926), Brandes often reflected on how the antisemitism of his time was driven by early Christianity’s negative representation of the Jewish religious tradition and, particularly, the early Christians’ creation of the fictional character of Judas.50 Moreover, as part of the Athens vs. Jerusalem discussions, in all of these books, Brandes again clearly denied that Christianity was a more rational and enlightened religion than Judaism. Instead, Brandes represented Christianity as the product of extreme, narrow-minded Nazarenism—and as an accidental and irrational “schismatic offshoot” of Judaism.51

And Justice for All The two interpretations of the Athens vs. Jerusalem dichotomy presented so far have been complex, revealing Brandes’s ambivalent and evolving views on the subject. In his writings “Jobs Bog” and “Kohélet” (The Book of Ecclesiastes) (1894), however, Brandes argued with greater certainty about the historical influences and relations of Athens

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and Jerusalem. Specifically, he claimed that the books of the Tanakh and the Old Testament projected universal values and virtues upon which the modern world is built. In this context, Moshe Rosman’s discussion in How Jewish Is Jewish History? (2008), which describes the European Jewish nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tendency to accentuate and even overestimate the Jewish contributions to Western civilization, could reasonably counter Brandes’s assertions. However, as part of what Rosman calls the European Jewish minority contribution discourse,52 it is important to point out that, rather than claiming a type of Jewish superiority, Brandes aimed to primarily defy the modern antisemitic representations of the European Jews as negative aliens—as people who always had been positioned outside the progressive development of European civilization. Furthermore, in these two texts, Brandes also seemed to be specifically reacting to certain elements of Nietzsche’s philosophy, especially Nietzsche’s perception of slave morality. In both writings, Brandes projected one specific Jewish characteristic, traceable back to the ancient Jewish world, as the most central virtue that influenced the Jewish cultural tradition since ancient times: universal justice. Thus, Brandes tied this question of universal justice to a fundamental Western heritage that originated in the Jewish tradition. Brandes’s treatment of this virtue as originally Jewish aligned with another European Jewish nineteenth-century intellectual, Heinrich Graetz, whom Brandes described in “Kohélet.”53 However, whereas Graetz tended to create an inverted dichotomy where Athens was diminished, Brandes insisted on valuing both of these ancient civilizations.54 In fact, in “Jobs Bog,” Brandes established the juxtaposition of Athens and Jerusalem at the very beginning of the text—signifying the direction of his argument to reposition the dichotomy of these civilizations. Already, on the first pages, he wrote, “It is Hellas and Israel to which Europe owes its culture.”55 In the following text, we see Brandes’s reflections on the virtue of universal justice in his “Jobs Bog”: The question examined in the Book of Job is the central question of Judaism, namely this: How is it that under the righteous rule of God, evil so often has good fortune on its side, while the righteous is no less often struck by undeserved misfortune? For the Israelite this is the fundamental question. The struggle against this conundrum constitutes the entire inner history of Judaism.56 Following this statement, Brandes philologically determined that the version of the Book of Job that appeared in the Old Testament was the work of more than one author. Brandes was mainly interested in the oldest, original part of the text, which he determined to be written before Judaism was clerically institutionalized.57 Brandes then went on to disqualify the parts of the Book of Job that, in his view, appeared to have

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been dictated later by clerical authorities in order for the work to fit into a certain religious-clerical system.58 Next, in Brandes’s “Kohélet,” he determined that this work was written by a rational-minded spirit who celebrated free thinking and living a joyous life, in addition to holding universal justice as a central virtue.59 According to Brandes, the text was probably written around the first century BC, and he suspected that it had a primarily ideological purpose of criticizing a specific orthodox interpretation of Judaism that became influential at the time.60 Even more, Brandes compared this interpretation of Judaism to the Protestant movement of Pietism.61 On this view, self-abnegation was preached in this period, and the leading authorities of the Jewish state supported this Puritan interpretation of Judaism. Still, Brandes believed that the author of the Book of Ecclesiastes did not write the text to criticize Judaism. Instead, he argued, this unknown ancient author’s objective was to demonstrate that, historically, a different interpretation of Judaism existed that celebrated the principles of universal justice, free thought, and rational thinking. This was the interpretation of Judaism to which Brandes wished to call to attention in “Kohélet.” Accordingly, Brandes argued that this line of thinking in the ancient Jewish civilization and religion had continued to exist after the second temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. In the European diaspora, the question of universal justice continued to be a key element in Jewish thought, and in this way, it had continuously contributed to developing European civilization since ancient times: Not resisting evil is a Christian concept, in which many, from antiquity to Tolstoy in our day, see the essence of Christianity. Never has subjection to injustice been a virtue for the Jew. . . . The man whom the Jew extols is not the holy one; it is the righteous one . . . since Jews have wished to realise the ideal of righteousness here on Earth, they have, in the modern era, had a hand in revolutions. Kabbalistic Jews were instrumental in the establishment of Freemasonry, the Jews in France (again in Paris), few in number, were participants in the revolution . . . half of the founders of Saint-Simonianism were Jews. . . . At the emergence of liberal thinking, Manin becomes its hero in Italy, Börne its spokesman in Germany, Jellinek its agitator and martyr in Austria, Moritz Hartmann its spokesman in Frankfurt and its champion in Vienna. German socialism is founded by Karl Marx and Lassalle. Russian nihilism has been heavily subscribed to by young Jewish students, many of whom have sacrificed their lives.62 Of course, Nietzsche and the concept of slave morality were not mentioned in any of Brandes’s books that analyze the texts of ancient Judaism. However, when Brandes reflected on the will to fight for universal

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justice as a particular Jewish trait, his reasoning reshaped Nietzsche’s idea of slave morality as an originally Jewish virtue. In the foregoing text, Brandes repositioned how and by whom slave morality was founded, for he wrote that the sacralized subjugation and the rebellions based on feelings of defeat and victimization were, originally, a reflection of Christian virtues. Thus, according to Brandes, the virtue of universal justice was originally a Jewish virtue. And, by the listing of central nineteenthcentury European Jewish political actors, such as Manin, Börne, Jellinek, Karl Marx, and Lassalle, Brandes further emphasized that it was a particularly Jewish approach to respond to this virtue of universal justice with a practical struggle to realize this ideal. Moreover, in “Kohélet,” the characteristic of fighting for universal justice as a central virtue was linked to the trait of free rational thinking: He (the author of The Book of Ecclesiastes) is the first clear type characterized by liberal, refined Israelite intelligence. After him come Philo and the Alexandrians, after them the Jewish polemicists, who inspired Celsus . . . after them follow the group of Talmudists who, in the tenth century, wished to uphold religion through a philosophy emphasizing that the authority of reason existed alongside religion. . . . They are followed in the eleventh century by Ibn Gabirol . . . and Maimonides, who in his principal work attempted to unite and reconcile Aristotle’s philosophy with Judaism . . . from the tenth century to the fifteenth century we see Jewish rationalists and thinkers preoccupied with preparing for that revolution in human history which was the Renaissance.  .  . . The thousand-year preoccupation with the Bible by interpreters of Jewish scripture lays the foundation for Luther’s translation of the Bible and leads to the principle of free study. In the seventeenth century, this tradition culminates in Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise.63 Again, Brandes’s view that Judaism was the source of this modern virtue of free rational thinking can be interpreted as a response to Nietzsche’s philosophy. According to Nietzsche, Plato and Socrates were the first philosophers to idealize rational thinking. Consequently, Nietzsche idealized the time before Plato and Socrates when the Dionysian and Apollonian elements were most adequately balanced. However, instead of developing an intellectual history in which this core Western value belonged solely to Athens, Brandes located the source of the European tradition of free rational thinking in Jerusalem. Even more, Brandes depicted this Jewish practice of rational thinking as a coherent tradition running from the ancient to the modern world, including Talmudists of the tenth century who emphasized “that the authority of reason existed alongside religion,” and ultimately, according to Brandes, “this tradition culminates in Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise.”

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Thus, in establishing the Jewish origins of the virtues of justice and free rational thinking, Brandes was able to reposition the influence of Jerusalem in his later writings. In this period, when the new and popular nationalistic movements had become increasingly dominant in the European civil spheres, it became essential for Brandes to create new connections between Jerusalem and modern Europe—thus ensuring that Jerusalem was fully inside and an indispensable part of Western civilization. In this way, Brandes advocated that the fundamental values of any modern Western liberal society, universal justice and rational thinking, originated in Jewish civilization. However, as seen in “Jobs Bog” and “Kohélet,” Brandes did not invert the dichotomy by degrading Athens on behalf of Jerusalem. Instead, he maintained that Athens and Jerusalem, together, should be seen as the positive basis for Europe. As Brandes wrote in “Jobs Bog,” “It is Hellas and Israel to which Europe owes its culture.”64

Conclusion As we have seen, the Athens vs. Jerusalem dichotomy is not merely an abstract intellectual topos discussed among unworldly philosophers. It is useful to examine the European Jewish response to this stereotypical dichotomy, for such analysis sheds new light on the complex so-called Jewish question, as well as subsequent discussions at the boundaries of Jewishness. As demonstrated through the specific case of Brandes’s reinterpretations of the dichotomy, the positions of Athens and Jerusalem were not determined as oppositional relations a priori—and in all three examples, we have seen how Brandes successfully reshaped the relation between Athens and Jerusalem. Brandes bridged the historical influences of Athens and Jerusalem so that Europe owed its culture to both of these ancient civilizations. Furthermore, in each case, Brandes reconfigured the connections between Athens, Jerusalem, and modern Europe, making his representation of Jewishness a site of “permanent openness and resignifiability.”65 Across all three reinterpretations, Brandes focused on the historical role of Jews and Jewishness in Western civilization. Of course, his emphasis on the ancient Jewish civilization likely stemmed from his reaction to the rise of modern antisemitism and nationalism in his later writings. In the different “purified” nationalist versions of the European history, Jews and specifically Georg Brandes himself were reduced to being non-European and non-contributive aliens. By contrast, Brandes’s reinterpretations of the dichotomy demonstrated that the ancient Jewish civilization, together with Athens, was the positive foundation of Europe. However, Brandes did not only focus on the ancient period. As we have seen in “Jobs Bog” and “Kohélet,” Brandes also has traced the Jewish tradition’s continuous contributions throughout the rise of European civilization, from ancient times and up until modern day.

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Notes 1. Doubtlessly, Brandes was far from the only European Jewish nineteenth-century intellectual who engaged in reshaping the Athens vs. Jerusalem dichotomy. As Richard I. Cohen notes, already in 1822, Eduard Gans asserted “that Jerusalem must take up its rightful position in civilization beside Rome and Greece” without elaborating on this statement, and later, the German Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz would also accentuate the contributions of the Jewish religious tradition to Western civilization. See Richard I. Cohen, “‘Jewish Contribution to Civilization’ and Its Implication for Notions of ‘Jewish Superiority’ in the Modern Period,” in The Jewish Contribution to Civilization: Reassessing an Idea, eds. Jeremy Cohen and Richard I. Cohen (Portland: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008), 11–23. 2. Translated by Nancy Aaen (NA) from Georg Brandes, “Jobs Bog,” Tilskueren, 10 (1893): 656. 3. See Miriam Leonard, Socrates and the Jews: Hellenism and Hebraism From Moses Mendelssohn to Sigmund Freud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 117. 4. Julie K. Allen, Icons of Danish Modernity: Georg Brandes and Asta Nielsen (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), 68. Brandes’s key work will from now be called Main Currents in this chapter. 5. Charles S. Maier, Once Within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth and Belonging Since 1500 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 185–232. 6. For example, in 1880 in the German Reichstag, one of the founding fathers of modern antisemitism, Adolf Stoecker, warned against Jewish influence and put forward Georg Brandes as a primary example of what Stoecker denoted as “kirchenverachtende moderne Judenthum.” See Jørgen Knudsen, I modsigelsernes tegn (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1988), 85–6. 7. Jørgen Knudsen’s monumental biography work on Brandes documents how Brandes would be continuously stigmatized because of his Jewish background. Particularly, Knudsen focuses on the negative focus on Brandes’s Jewish background in Jørgen Knudsen, Frigørelsens Vej 1842–1877 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1985) and Volume 1 of Magt og Afmagt (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1998). 8. See, for example, Georg Brandes, “M. Goldschmidt,” in Kritiker og Portraiter (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1870); Georg Brandes, Benjamin Disraeli (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1878). 9. See Damian Valdez, German Philhellenism: The Pathos of Historical Imagination From Winckelmann to Goethe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 1–56. 10. Ibid. 11. Susannah Heschel, “Judaism, Islam, and Hellenism: The Conflict in Germany Over the Origins of Kultur,” in The Jewish Contributions to Civilization, 101. 12. See Amos Elon, The Pity of It All: A Portray of the German-Jewish Epoch 1743–1933 (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 33–64. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Leonard, Socrates and the Jews, 47. 18. Ibid., 73–4. 19. Ibid., 74–5.

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20. See Jørgen Knudsen, Georg Brandes: Symbolet og Manden, Vol. 2 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1994), 381–6. 21. See, for example, Paul Rubow, “Georg Brandes’ forhold til Taine og SainteBeuve,” in Litterære Studier (København: Levin og Munksgaards Forlag, 1928), 38–101; Sven Møller Kristensen, “Georg Brandes, Liberalist and Activist,” in The Activist Critic, eds. Hans Hertel and Sven Møller Kristensen (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1980), 9–20. 22. As Jakob Egholm Feldt writes, “To struggle against Jewish-Christian slave morality and turn over its values was a struggle against ressentiment and for life. Anti-Semites became the mirror image of the insecure, fear ridden ‘priestly Judaism’ that gave rise to Christianity while modern secular Jews became the antipode.” See Jakob Egholm Feldt, Transnationalism and the Jews (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 97. 23. Reinhardt Rürup, “Die ‚Judenfrage‘ der bürgerlichen gesellschaft und die Entstehung des modernes Antisemitismus,” in Emanzipation und Antisemitismus: Studien zur “Judenfrage” der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Göttingen: Fischer Verlag, 1975), 74–94. 24. See Feldt, Transnationalism and the Jews, 97. 25. Nietzsche’s perception of the genealogical relation between Judaism and Christianity can be observed from this quote from the Vorrede to Die Geburt der Tragödie: “Christentum was von Anfang an wesentlich und gründlich. . . . Der Hass auf die ‚Welt‘, der Fluch auf die Affekte, die Furcht vor der Schönheit und Sinnleichkeit, ein Jenseits . . . hin zum ‚Sabbat der Sabbate‘—dies Alles dünkte mich, ebenso wie der unbedingte Wille des Christenthums, nur moralische Werthe gelten zu lassen, immer wie die gefährlichste und unheimlichste Form aller möglichen Formen eines ‚Willens zum Untergang,‘ zum Mindestens ein Zeichen tiefster Erkrankerung, Müdigkeit, Missmuthigkeit, Erschöpfung, Verarmung an Leben.” See Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie, 7. 26. Leonard, Socrates and the Jews, 117. 27. See Georg Brandes, Emigrantlitteraturen (1872) (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1972), 11–22. 28. See ibid. 29. See Knudsen, Frigørelsens Vej, 1842–77, 237–80. 30. See ibid., 202–83. 31. See Georg Brandes, Levned III (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1908), 31–2. 32. Ibid., 38–40. 33. Ibid. 34. Translated by NA from Brandes, Levned III, 38–40. 35. Translated by NA from Georg Brandes, “Jøderne i Finland,” in Samlede Skrifter 18 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1910), 439. 36. Cf. Leonard, Socrates and the Jews, 117. 37. See Georg Brandes, Sagnet om Jesus (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1925); Georg Brandes, Hellas (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1925); Georg Brandes, Petrus (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1926); Georg Brandes, Urkistendommen (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1927). 38. See Jørgen Knudsen, Symbolet og Manden 1883–95, Vol. 2 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1994), 378–87. 39. Translated by NA from Georg Brandes, Det Unge Tyskland (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1890), 312; Georg Brandes, Heinrich Heine (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1897), 29–30. 40. Brandes believes that Hegel was the primary source of inspiration for Heine’s ideal of Hellenism. See Brandes, Heinrich Heine, 29–32. 41. Ibid.

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47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

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Cf. Leonard, Socrates and the Jews, 117. Translated from Brandes, Sagnet om Jesus, 50–1. Brandes, Sagnet om Jesus, 51. Ibid., 50–1. See Martin Mulsow, Enlightenment Underground : Radical Germany, 1680– 1720 (London: University of Virginia Press, 2015), 29–60, 78–109. More specifically, it seems that Brandes has mainly been inspired by nineteenthcentury biblical studies of, for example, Abraham Dirk Loman and Friedrich Christian Baur and the Tübingen School, which Baur founded. Brandes also refers to contemporary writers, such as the Nietzsche-influenced Arthur Drews and James Frazer. See Brandes, Sagnet om Jesus, 24; Brandes, Urkristendommen, 43, 93–7. See Adam Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 210–11. In fact, Sutcliffe demonstrates that the first of the early enlighteners to pick up the term “Nazarene” and use it as a synonym for “Christian” was John Toland. Toland’s use of the term was not particularly positive regarding his representation of Jewishness—on the contrary, Toland “draws a sharp distinction between the Nazarene Jews who acknowledges Jesus and those others who did not” in the way that he favors the “Nazarene Jews”/early “Christians” who acknowledged Jesus. It is thus not until later that the use of “Nazarene” from an earlier Enlightenener, such as Marquis d’ Argens, reflects what could be defined as a positive representation of Jewishness. See Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment, 203–10. Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment, 210–11. Brandes, Sagnet om Jesus, 57–8; Brandes, Petrus, 34; Brandes, Urkristendommen, 28, 115–16, 126–7. Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment, 210–11. Rosman, How Jewish Is Jewish History (Portland: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008), 115–16. For Brandes’s references to Graetz see Brandes, “Kohélet” in Tilskueren, Vol. 11 (1894): 820, 836. Heinrich Graetz also accentuated the contributions of the Jewish religious tradition, and similar to Brandes, he also emphasized that the ancient Jewish civilization had founded modern and secular-orientated Western core values, including the tradition of rational thinking. See Cohen, “‘Jewish Contribution to Civilization,’” 18–20. However, unlike Brandes, Heinrich Graetz tended to create a reversed dichotomy where he, in comparison to Jerusalem, downgraded the contributions of Athens, as Susannah Heschel points out. See Heschel, “Judaism, Islam, and Hellenism: The Conflict in Germany Over the Origins of Kultur,” 101–2. Translated by NA from Georg Brandes, “Jobs Bog,” 656. Ibid., 661. Brandes, “Jobs Bog,” 664–5. Ibid., 664–5. Brandes, “Kohélet,” 817–23. Ibid., 837. Ibid. Translated by NA from Brandes, “Kohélet,” 827. Ibid., 829. Ibid., 656. Laurence J. Silberstein, “Mapping, Not Tracing: Opening Reflection,” in Mapping Jewish Identities ed. Laurence Silberstein (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 13.

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Bibliography Alexander, Jeffrey C. The Civil Sphere. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Allen, Julie. Icons of Danish Modernity, Georg Brandes and Asta Nielsen. Seattle: University of Washington Press/Museum Tusculanum Press, 2012. Brandes, Georg. Benjamin Disraeli. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1878. Brandes, Georg. Det Unge Tyskland. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1890. Brandes, Georg. Emigrantlitteraturen (1872). Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1971. Brandes, Georg. Heinrich Heine. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1897. Brandes, Georg. Hellas. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1925. Brandes, Georg. “Jobs Bog.” Tilskueren 10 (1893): 653–71, 737–54. Brandes, Georg. “Jøderne i Finland.” In Samlede Skrifter 18. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1910: 437–46. Brandes, Georg. “Kohélet.” Tilskueren 11 (1894): 817–38. Brandes, Georg. Levned I. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1905. Brandes, Georg. Levned II. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1907. Brandes, Georg. Levned III. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1908. Brandes, Georg. “M. Goldschmidt.” In Kritiker og Portraiter. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1870: 387–409. Brandes, Georg. Petrus. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1926. Brandes, Georg. Sagnet om Jesus. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1925. Brandes, Georg. Urkistendommen. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1927. Cohen, Richard I. “‘Jewish Contribution to Civilization’ and Its Implication for Notions of ‘Jewish Superiority’.” In The Jewish Contribution to Civilization: Reasssessing an Idea, edited by Jeremy Cohen and Richard I. Cohen. Portland: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008: 11–23. Elon, Amos. The Pity of It All: A Portray of the German-Jewish Epoch 1743–1933. New York: Penguin Books, 2002. Feldt, Jakob Egholm. “Forskellige i Fællesskab. Moses Mendelssohn og Frigørelsen.” In Jøderne som frie borgere, edited by Bent Blüdnikow. Copenhagen: Det Jødiske Samfund, 2014: 24–35. Feldt, Jakob Egholm. Transnationalism and The Jews. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. Heschel, Susannah. “Judaism, Islam, and Hellenism: The Conflict in Germany Over the Origins of Kultur.” In The Jewish Contributions to Civilization: Reassessing an Idea, edited by Jeremy Cohen and Richard I. Cohen. Portland: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008: 98–124. Knudsen, Jørgen. Georg Brandes. Frigørelsens Vej 1842–1877. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1985. Knudsen, Jørgen. Georg Brandes. I Modsigelsernes Tegn 1877–1883. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1988. Knudsen, Jørgen. Georg Brandes: Magt og Afmagt. Vol. 1 and 2. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1998. Knudsen, Jørgen. Georg Brandes: Symbolet og Manden. Vol. 1 and 2. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1994. Knudsen, Jørgen. Georg Brandes: Uovervindelig Taber 1914–27. Vol. 1 and 2. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2004. Kristensen, Sven Møller. “Georg Brandes, Liberalist and Activist.” In The Activist Critic, edited by Hans Hertel and Sven Møller Kristensen. Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1980: 9–20.

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Leonard, Miriam. Socrates and the Jews: Hellenism and Hebraism From Moses Mendelssohn to Sigmund Freud. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Mack, Michael. German Idealism and the Jew: The Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and German Jewish Responses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Maier, Charles S. Once Within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth and Belonging Since 1500. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Mulsow, Martin. Enlightenment Underground: Radical Germany, 1680–1720. London: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Rosman, Moshe. How Jewish Is Jewish History. Portland: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008. Rubow, Paul. “Georg Brandes’ forhold til Taine og Sainte-Beuve.” In Litterære Studier. Copenhagen: Levin og Munksgaards Forlag, 1928: 38–101. Rürup, Reinhardt. “Die ‘Judenfrage’ der bürgerlichen gesellschaft und die Entstehung des modernes Antisemitismus.” In Emanzipation und Antisemitismus: Studien zur “Judenfrage” der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Göttingen: Fischer Verlag, 1975: 74–94. Silberstein, Laurence J. “Mapping, Not Tracing: Opening Reflection.” In Mapping Jewish Identities, edited by Laurence Silberstein. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Sutcliffe, Adam. Judaism and Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Valdez, Damian. German Philhellenism: The Pathos of Historical Imagination From Winckelmann to Goethe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Westerkamp, Dirk. “The Philonic Distinction: German Enlightenment Historiography of Jewish Thought.” In History and Theory. Vol. 47. Wesleyan University, 2008: 533–59.

8

From Jewish Separateness to Jewish and Non-Jewish Entanglement A Shift to a “New Jewish History”? Klaus Hödl

In large parts of Europe, the High Middle Ages were a turning point in the history of Jewish and Christian relations.1 With the exception of their mistreatment at the hands of Visigoths on the Iberian Peninsula,2 Jews had lived in relative peace with their social surroundings until the late eleventh century.3 Their situation changed dramatically during the First Crusade (1096–1099), when they were tortured and killed in Worms, Speyer, and other cities.4 From the mid-twelfth century onwards, Jews regularly faced ritual murder accusations, and later had to deal with charges of host desecration as well.5 In 1290, they were expelled from England, and shortly afterwards from France. The future of Jewish existence in Europe looked somber. Yet, despite these tribulations, “the Jewish community continued to function in a hostile but relatively stable environment. From a cultural perspective, the period was one of dazzling perspective.”6 This was possible because daily life was not solely characterized by anti-Jewish harassment and discrimination; there also existed an attitude of tolerance towards the religious “other.” This made for courteous—probably even complaisant— interactions. Various findings, such as those by Harvard historian Daniel Lord Smail, support this postulation. In an essay on late medieval Marseilles, he draws attention to the fact that intracommunity conflicts among Jews were fairly common, whereas “Jew-Christian confrontations were relatively infrequent.”7 Little seemed to disrupt the smooth coexistence of the two groups. Research on non-hostile, even convivial Jewish and non-Jewish interactions has come to preoccupy Jewish studies scholars only in the last third of the twentieth century.8 In contrast to investigations from the turn of the twenty-first century onward, many of which explore individual encounters and the ways in which ethnically and religiously diverse people have gotten along with each other,9 the early works laid the foundation for a historiography focusing primarily on processes of cultural exchange and transfer.10 The central question in this context addressed the mutual influence that Jews and non-Jews exerted on each other.11 What could be convincingly demonstrated was the fact that Jews and

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non-Jews were both part of the societies in which they lived; Jews did not lead an insular existence. Yet, this category of studies continued to stress clear boundaries between Jews and non-Jews, however permeable they might have seemed at particular times or in certain contexts. Jews, as Debra Kaplan describes, “were still seen as others by their Christian neighbors, and they continued to see Christians as other.”12 An illuminating case is that of the Christian Hebraists, who, in order to advance their studies of Hebrew and of Judaica, sought to connect with erudite Jews. Even though their interactions attest to a remarkable cultural exchange, the two groups ridiculed and scorned the respective other.13 While studies on such mutual influence and cultural exchange have been taken up within the realms of intellectual, economic, and religious history, the investigations of personal interactions often take the approach of a social history.14 Instead of writing an elite history, these scholars are interested in the mundane experiences of ordinary people. They explore the everyday in a local setting. In addition to providing evidence that Jews and non-Jews did not inhabit two distinct lifeworlds, works in this venue also question the assertion of distinct, salient boundaries between Jews and non-Jews. Much to the contrary, scholars such as Daniel Jütte and Magda Teter demonstrate that the differences between Jews and nonJews frequently lost their significance—and such differences were subordinated to what they shared.15 These two strands of writing the Jewish past dominate current Jewish historiography. This is not to say that until the late twentieth century scholars had entirely ignored agreeable interreligious and interethnic relations.16 Yet, these topics did not dominate the research agenda. Instead, encounters were predominantly dealt with in the context of Judeophobia or the— sometimes similarly dreaded—process of assimilation.17 From the late twentieth century onward, however, the neglect of Jewish and non-Jewish encounters has given way to close scrutiny. In line with this shift in research, the conception of Jewish and non-Jewish relations, as well as the historical picture of the Jewish past, has also changed. Historians have not only provided ample evidence of interreligious and interethnic connectivity but also inferred from these interactions that there was much more common ground between Jews and non-Jews than previously supposed.18 Recent research on Jews during the High Middle Ages illuminates this argument. Historians have convincingly demonstrated, for example, that Jewish and Christian women frequently crossed religious lines and engaged in dialogue with each other.19 They did this for practical reasons, such as borrowing small loans or seeking help for medical issues. Throughout the course of their interactions, they discovered common interests and concerns, which rendered differences between them secondary. They did not disappear, but instead underwent a loss in relevance. In this context, the questions raised by this chapter ask about the impact of the shift in research on the historiography of Jews: How exactly has it

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changed the conception of the “Jewish past,” in particular the relations between Jews and non-Jews? Has our understanding of Jewish history undergone a sea change, or do these changes merely cause minor revisions to widely accepted narratives? Further, does the altered perspective on the history of Jews necessitate a new conceptual approach in order to adequately explore interethnic relations? If so, what would such a new approach look like? In the following, I explore some of the consequences of the shift in Jewish studies research and question the widely held assumption among scholars that this shift has ushered in a new Jewish history. The reasons that I identify concern the maintenance of binary classifications. I try to eliminate dichotomous Jewish and non-Jewish categories by employing the model of similarity, which focuses on feelings of togetherness between people belonging to different ethnic or cultural groups. In order to render similarity applicable to an exploration of Jewish and non-Jewish interactions, I associate it with studies on interethnic encounters undertaken by scholars of a wide range of academic disciplines. Finally, I seek to align the theoretical writings with concrete evidence of Jewish and non-Jewish encounters in Vienna around 1900.

A New History of Jews? One of the most obvious, and self-evident, answers to this question— whether the focus on Jewish and non-Jewish interactions has altered the understanding of the history of Jews—comes from an increase in knowledge of their daily life in the past. Historians have discovered a vast number of findings on Jewish and non-Jewish intermingling, which previous scholars had either overlooked or disregarded.20 In some cases, such findings brought about a revision of long-held propositions. One such revision responds to Jacob Katz’s assertion that pre-modern Jewish and non-Jewish relations hardly extended to the private realm but remained restricted to business matters.21 Given the ample evidence to the contrary that historians have subsequently excavated by ploughing through archival documents, Katz’s conclusion proves flatly fallacious. Based on this reorientation of research in Jewish studies, a second area of revision is the set of assimilation/acculturation narratives, still predominant in many historical accounts of the “Jewish past.” The terms of assimilation and acculturation assume that Jews adapt to the cultures of their so-called host societies. A growing number of scholars, however, have expressed doubts that this adequately describes the complexity of interactions between Jews and non-Jews.22 I strongly support their criticism. Ahead, I elaborate upon two aspects of particular relevance in this context. The first aspect concerns many historians’ undue, and thereby somewhat sloppy, employment of the assimilation/acculturation models. The broad use of these models transformed them into catch-all terms,

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referring to all changes in Jewish customs and traditions—even adaptations that resulted from social developments caused by both Jews and non-Jews. In many cases, there was no evidence that Jews were adjusting only to non-Jewish cultural settings. The processes of modernity represent a case in point for such developments.23 In this context, the use of the term “acculturation” for Jews is utterly inappropriate because it calls attention to their adaptation to a culture that they had co-constituted, and in which they already had a share. A second reason to scrutinize the assimilation/acculturation models pertains to their implication that all Jews were born into their own culture, as though it were clearly distinct from that of their social environment. The usage of the term “assimilated Jew” is indicative of this assumption. It is applied to Jews who were neglectful of their Jewishness, irrespective of whether they replaced it—assumedly—with a sense of belonging to “majority” society, or they actually grew up in a so-called non-Jewish cultural realm and thus never felt attached to “things Jewish.”24 For any particular Jew under these models, the “biological descent” thus serves as sufficient reason to consider their disregard of Jewishness as a lapse from their supposed cultural origin. More recently, historians have pointed out additional inadequacies within the assimilation/acculturation narratives. Consequently, some scholars have argued that methodological approaches based on the ethnic pluralism model or the racial turn are more suitable to find reasons behind the changes in people’s cultural identifications than the concept of assimilation.25 Much criticism of the assimilation/acculturation models has been provoked by their static understanding of culture, one at odds with widely accepted contemporary conceptions of culture as dynamic and fluid.26 Against this backdrop, the picture of Jewish and non-Jewish intimacy critiques the assimilation/acculturation model from a different, more radical angle. It discards the idea of the Jews’ adaptation altogether, focusing instead on their share in constituting the society’s cultures. According to this view, Jews were part of the societies in which they lived. Jewish existence was strongly affected by the social environment, and Jews impacted that environment in turn. Both Jews and gentiles engaged in weaving the cultural and societal fabric that they shared. Such a society, therefore, cannot be genuinely differentiated into Jewish and non-Jewish pieces. Thus, the notion of Jewish acculturation as an explanatory model is starkly insufficient. A third impact of the historiographical focus on Jewish and non-Jewish encounters can be found in the growing rift between scholars who advocate for this shift in research and those who oppose it. This division, however, is not based primarily on the opposition’s concern that focusing on Jewish and non-Jewish interactions neglects the historical persistence and impact of anti-Judaism. Indeed, scholars such as Elisheva Baumgarten, Ruth Mazo Karras, and Katelyn Mesler, in their work on Jewish and

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non-Jewish entanglement, acknowledge that restricting the phenomenon of anti-Judaism from research on Jewish and non-Jewish cultural encounters would elucidate only a fragmentary part of historical Jewish lifeworlds. Jews of course experienced agreeable contacts as well as hostility, expulsion, and persecution.27 The skeptics of research on the coexistence of Jews and non-Jews are not most concerned that it could relativize anti-Judaism. Rather, they worry that it draws upon conceptions and terminology that misread, wrongly essentialize, or dramatically deconstruct Jews.28 There is much fear among critics that Jews could be deprived of their particularism and thus disappear, at least in theory, as a distinct ethnic or cultural entity.29 Undeterred by this censure, many historians continue to push for an investigation of Jewish and non-Jewish entanglement. They view their work as contributing to a realignment of the “Jewish” with the conceptual framework of “general historiography,” thereby causing a break with traditional narratives. A case in point of a scholar stressing the innovation of such research is the German Judaic studies scholar Rebekka Voß.30 In a review article published in The Jewish Quarterly Review, Voß maintains that this shift in research replaced exclusionary historical accounts of Jews, which emphasized their separateness, with “a new Jewish history . . . told in relationship to that of the surrounding society.”31 Undoubtedly, Voß’s assertion of a “new Jewish history” is consequential. There is no question that scholarly interest in Jewish and non-Jewish involvement affected the composition of historical narratives. It is far from certain, however, that this brought about a “new Jewish history.” The adjective new would be justified, arguably, only if Jewish studies scholars had drawn proper conclusions from the reorientation of research and thus discontinued binary classifications. Yet, they have continued to describe the entanglement of Jews and non-Jews in a way that strongly confirms their separateness. Voß’s usage of the term “Jewish history” instead of “history of Jews” is a revealing case in point.32 In this chapter, I argue to eliminate dichotomous Jewish and non-Jewish categorizations by applying the model of similarity. The concept of similarity seeks to establish a sense of togetherness between people of different ethnic and cultural self-understandings that renders their differences secondary. A perception of similarity may, but does not necessarily have to, result from encounters between individuals or groups. Whether it is achieved strongly hinges on the spaces where these encounters take place.

The Concept of Similarity Similarity is a radical new concept. While studies on cultural overlap, alterity, or hybridity are based on the conception of (more or less clearly) distinguishable groups, and therefore—at least implicitly—perpetuate binary categorizations, the similarity model seeks to instill perceptions

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of familiarity as a first priority, and only subsequently recognizes differences. Similarity, then, changes our perspective on the past.33 Although similarity is an innovative concept, its application to examining Jewish and non-Jewish encounters is also fraught with problems. These problems arise from the widely accepted understanding of similarity as a transient experience, as if only a momentary sentiment.34 While aligning well with the widely accepted understanding of culture as highly fluid and dynamic, the idea of similarity has various implications: First, it presupposes that people are extremely malleable and can change their attitudes towards other people from one instant to the next. This notion, however, cannot be reconciled with the well-founded conception that people possess biographical narratives and undergo processes of socialization that provide them with some kind of stable self.35 Second, the idea of similarity as elusive and ephemeral seems to be highly self-restrictive, in that it focuses on an isolated occurrence and neglects repercussions beyond the moment at hand. This means that similarity excludes the consequences of its realization. For this reason, similarity is a largely descriptive category, one hardly applicable to an in-depth exploration of Jewish and non-Jewish relations. The third difficulty historians face when working with similarity, when understood as a fleeting sentiment, is related to its ascertainment in research. Unless explicitly articulated by the person experiencing it—for example, by noting it in a memoir—a momentary awareness of similarity leaves no traces. It is a subjective sentiment not easily accessible to other people. In order to successfully apply similarity to the examination of Jewish and non-Jewish encounters, it is necessary to dismantle its momentary character. I aim to accomplish this by linking similarity to processes and settings that allow for its realization. Its application, then, no longer focuses on elusive, fleeting sentiments, but on its development and the spatial conditions that foster it. This conception of similarity connects with the aforementioned assertion that its realization depends on the spaces where interactions occur.36 Only some encounters between Jews and non-Jews are indicative of common ground between them. Others may leave the participants indifferent to the respective other, or even strengthen extant prejudices. Therefore, research on Jewish and non-Jewish relations that sets out to revise their dichotomous classifications must distinguish between different forms of intermingling. In most historical accounts of Jewish and non-Jewish encounters, this differentiation is starkly missing. Consistently, accounts do not offer analytical tools essential for making a distinction. Such tools have been described, however, in a wide range of investigations of interethnic association conducted by scholars of geography, urban studies, psychology, sociology, and other disciplines. Jewish studies research on interreligious and intercultural associations can draw upon these analytical tools to examine the interactions between

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Jews and non-Jews. Linking these diverse studies is feasible, for example, by using terms employed by all of them. Such terms include bonding and bridging: bonding refers to practices that facilitate the development of intimacy and friendship among people. Bridging, on the other hand, encompasses interactions that merely help to tackle ethnic and cultural differences. Bonding and bridging are largely congruent with our revised notion of similarity and the interactions having no lasting impact on people involved in them. They are, therefore, very useful in Jewish studies research. Bonding and bridging also align with processes promoting respect and tolerance, which are central to geographical and sociological studies on interethnic encounters. Bonding and bridging are thus suitable terms for connecting research on the effects of intercultural encounters from a wide range of academic disciplines. Distinguishing between these types of interactions not only benefits work on Jewish and non-Jewish encounters per se but also provides an explanatory framework for a wide range of issues within Jewish studies. Such distinctions would help to explain, for example, why Judeophobic outbursts happen among people who had already experienced close contact with Jews.37 Usually, scholars fail to account for a sudden reversal in behavior from socializing to discriminating, as demonstrated in a ritual murder case in the Russian town of Velizh in the early nineteenth century. Eugene M. Avrutin, a historian at the University of Illinois, painstakingly describes the incident and stresses that Jewish and non-Jewish inhabitants had closely interacted before the latter group accused Jews of killing a little boy for religious reasons.38 Non-Jews were strikingly unanimous in their rash judgment. Present-day historians are baffled by how easily the change of attitude unfolded. They tend to interpret it by drawing on general explanations—in this particular case, on “intense economic rivalries.”39 However, as Avrutin stresses, even though business competition may explain many anti-Jewish incidents, this does not seem to sufficiently account for the occurrence in Velizh. A closer assessment of Jewish and non-Jewish relations better illuminates the underlying problem. It brings to light that their interactions were mostly shallow. They seemed to engage in merely bridging, rather than bonding. And it was this lack of bonding experiences, I would infer, that primarily motivated the acceptance of the ritual murder myth. Prior contact between Jews and non-Jews had not forged intimate ties between them.

Studies on Interethnic Encounter Studies on interethnic and intercultural encounters conducted over the last half century overwhelmingly centered on the contact hypothesis, established by Gordon Allport in 1954.40 While some subsequent scholars confirmed its central claim—that contacts between individuals identifying with different ethnic groups increase positive attitudes towards

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one another and the group to which they respectively belong—and others have criticized some of Allport’s conclusions, his model has remained a principal reference. The contact hypothesis strongly relies on the effects of cognitive processes, claiming that interethnic encounters reduce the prejudices people harbor if they learn about the cultural background of the respective other.41 Backed by a large range of studies, the contact hypothesis drew the attention of politicians and urban architects worried about interethnic conflicts and segregation in culturally diverse cities. From the 1960s onward, they began to designate urban areas as contact zones in order to strengthen a sense of interethnic togetherness. However, the measures fell short of expectations. Investigations into the causes for the failure revealed various shortcomings of the contact hypothesis. The most important one concerns the conditions under which research pertaining to the contact hypothesis had been conducted. Its findings stem from clinical experiments performed by social psychologists. The hitch of this procedure lies with the fact that laboratory settings strongly differ from the “real” world. The outcome of clinical studies tells us little about how everyday practices in an urban environment unfold, and consequently has only limited significance for daily life.42 Scholars took issue with further aspects of the contact hypothesis. Two of them bear mentioning, as both are relevant to research on Jewish and non-Jewish encounters. The first point of criticism challenged the proposition that public spaces designed as contact zones motivate interethnic encounters and alleviate biases. A study by Durrheim and Dixon on beachgoers at a seafront in South Africa serves as a key example of the critical position. Durrheim and Dixon point out that even though black and white people frequented the same beach, they did not intermingle. Instead, they kept their distance from each other and thereby maintained segregation.43 As inferred from these findings, people may use public spaces in ways that counteract the ambitions of politicians and architects to increase interethnic encounters.44 The second, and probably most important, challenge to the classical contact hypothesis relates to the finding that affective—instead of cognitive— processes cause changes in the attitudes towards the “other.”45 Without emotional ties, people often retain their prejudices against other ethnic groups, irrespective of whether they are in possession of intimate knowledge of their cultures and traditions. Affective bonds prove more effective in disrupting biases.

“Meaningful Contacts” The studies that corrected some of the premises of the traditional contact hypothesis did not question its core propositions. However, such studies did engage in some necessary fine-tuning, adjusting Allport’s model to be

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better suited to “real-life” applications. The revised contact hypothesis informs us that mere encounters between people belonging to different ethnic groups do not necessarily forge common ground between them. Particular forms of intermingling and togetherness may aggravate hostile attitudes, rather than promote tolerance or respect.46 One of the foremost scholars who differentiated between various forms of encounters, and thus identified the conditions under which they may erode prejudices, is Amin Ash. In a seminal paper published in 2002, Ash argues that many public spaces meant to promote socializing among ethnically diverse people are easily transformed—either into spaces of transit where people pass without noticing one another, or into spaces occupied by particular groups, who, by their sheer presence, render them inhospitable to other people.47 The sites where people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds do interact, and thereby develop a mutual sense of respect, are so-called micro-publics. They include workplaces, schools, weekend leisure clubs, and similar spaces where people get involved with one another by necessity.48 These sites, Ash contends, induce cultural displacements. When people of different cultural backgrounds engage with one another, long-held conceptions of “others” get disrupted and substituted by various forms of attachment to them.49 Ash’s findings emphasize that affective, rather than cognitive, processes undermine prejudices and establish sustainable and lasting ties between people. Ash’s approach was taken up and further developed by Gill Valentine, a geographer at the University of Sheffield. In a widely cited paper published in the journal Progress in Human Geography, Valentine criticizes the “naïve assumption that contact with ‘others’ translates into respect for difference.”50 Mere proximity, so she claims, does not lead to “meaningful contact.” Rather, meaningful interactions are necessary for transforming tolerance into respect. Tolerant behavior is indispensable in ethnically and culturally diverse societies, yet reveals nothing about the person’s actual attitude towards other people.51 Tolerance must not be equated with acceptance; this is the case only with respect. Valentine holds that respect is generated in “spaces of interdependence,” which are similar to Ash’s micro-publics.52 Interacting on the sidewalk, taking a stroll in the park, and attending large-scale events do not imply fertile ground for the development of respect.53 The myriad studies on the reduction of prejudices through intercultural encounters demonstrate that an increasing number of scholars question the sweeping generalizations of the traditional contact hypothesis. They distinguish between the fleeting interactions and the mutual involvement of people from different ethnic backgrounds. The former helps to develop behavioral skills that allow for navigation through a culturally diversifying world, whereas the latter potentially cultivates sustainable relations between members of different ethnic groups. A study on daily subway commuting in New York City can confirm the effects of

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ephemeral encounters. The study concludes that “passengers learn to deal with difference, density, diversity, . . . It fosters cooperation and trust.”54 Yet it seldom leads to lasting relations, let alone friendship. In the following section, I attempt to shed light on Jewish and nonJewish encounters in Vienna around 1900. I aim to bring the findings on Vienna in line with the distinction between bonding and bridging. This enables me to either falsify or corroborate Valentine’s and Ash’s theses on meaningful interactions and micro-publics.

Jewish and Non-Jewish Encounters in Vienna Around 1900 Fin-de-siècle Vienna was a paradigmatic pluricultural city. Most of its inhabitants were born outside the Habsburg capital and had brought their cultural traditions and customs along with them to their new home.55 The Viennese thus could not help but experience cultural and ethnic diversity on a daily basis. During this emerging—and soon, flourishing—era of mass popular culture, people flocked to diverse sites of entertainment. In doing so, they voluntarily shared a growing part of their leisure time with one another, as foreign and peculiar the respective others may have appeared to them.56 There is ample evidence, for example, that people of all faiths, ethnicities, and social statuses came together and enjoyed cultural performances.57 Vaudevilles and movie theaters drew the masses, as did circus performances, exhibitions of indigenous peoples, public festivities and parades, balls and concerts, and many other events.58 The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the era of the spectacle, providing occasions for interethnic encounter. Jews and non-Jews alike partook in these events.59 All of these interactions notwithstanding, antisemitism remained a salient characteristic of the Habsburg capital, which even gained infamy as the only city in Western and Central Europe to elect an outspoken antisemite, Karl Lueger, as mayor.60 The reason for the perseverance of, and perhaps even the rise in, Judeophobia may be found in the aforementioned distinction between transient interactions in public spaces and deeper interpersonal encounters in semipublic or institutional locations. Vienna provided too small a number of spaces where Jews and non-Jews could experience “meaningful contacts” and establish sustainable, amicable ties. This presumption correlates, for example, with the adoption by various Viennese societies, particularly student fraternities, of the so-called Judenparagraph—a clause that dismissed Jews as members and banned them from joining these associations.61 Similar restrictions, although not so explicit, were in place within the occupational realm.62 Jews thus lost, or had not gained sufficient access yet, to those institutions that served as particularly fruitful micro-publics. When dealing with mundane Jewish and non-Jewish encounters in Vienna around 1900, historians face a major problem: a dearth of

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evidence for particular and concrete cases of intermingling. Most reports on Jews and non-Jews attending cultural events remain very general, noting their presence without analyzing their social dynamics.63 Some of these references even emphasize that the two groups kept their distance from each other: they indeed frequented the same spaces, such as coffeehouses or the amusement area at the Prater, but they remained largely among themselves at these sites.64 It is no surprise, then, that the prevalent narrative, based on these documents, holds that Jews and non-Jews in Vienna around 1900 did not develop familiar relations.65 I wish to argue, however, that this interpretation is due less to actual boundaries between Jews and non-Jews, and more to the fact that the primary sources describing interactions, ego-documents, are not very reliable in the Viennese case. Many of these documents were composed after the Holocaust—at a time when it was highly inappropriate to celebrate closeness between Jews and non-Jews. Even more, historians used to think along these same lines. They showed only very little or no interest in looking for contra-narrative evidence that could potentially revise the post-Holocaust paradigm. In order to corroborate my doubt of this narrative in Vienna, then, it is necessary to find indications of Jewish and non-Jewish socializing. I sought to find evidence in court records at Vienna’s city archives. Although my findings are of too small a number to establish a solid pattern of intermingling between Jews and non-Jews, they are nonetheless sufficient for questioning predominant narratives of Jewish and non-Jewish separateness.

Meaningful Contacts in Vienna A crucial example illuminating the gap between my findings and widely accepted historical accounts of Viennese Jews is found in their residential patterns. According to customary scholarly writings, Jews clustered in certain districts, and within these districts on certain streets and even in specific buildings.66 Admittedly, this assessment has not gone entirely unchallenged. A few scholars took issue with this formulation and sought to revise it. However, their attempts did not resonate well with many other historians.67 The notion of Jewish residential segregation has, therefore, remained predominant—even though it lacks factual corroboration. There are no data from the 1860s onward that actually confirm the composition of inhabitants within individual buildings. The claim that Jews clung to themselves and avoided having non-Jewish neighbors is thus merely speculative. It fits well, however, into the narrative of isolated Jewish existence and particularity. My analysis of court records produces evidence sufficient to strongly dispute the assumption that Jews and non-Jews lived segregated lives in Vienna. The outcome of my research suggests instead that a sizable

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proportion of Jews and non-Jews resided close to, and with, each other— enabling many different kinds of interactions. The case of Samuel Schönfeld may help to illustrate this intercultural exchange.68 Schönfeld, a Jew from Bohemia, had moved to Vienna in order to earn a better living. His paltry income, so it seems, did not allow him to rent an apartment by himself. Consequently, he tried his luck as a bed lodger and found a place with a Catholic family, whose kitchen served as his sleeping place. His lodging arrangement is starkly inconsistent with the prevailing narrative of Jewish residential separateness. If Schönfeld were a rare exception of the overall Jewish pattern of living, his experiences would not be of importance. Yet, Schönfeld appears to have been one of many other Jews dwelling with or next to non-Jews.69 Even if some Jews preferred Jewish neighbors, others did not care about their neighbors’ ethnic or religious affiliation.70 According to the court documents, Schönfeld sexually abused the daughter of the family with whom he lived. Before he moved to the apartment, the mother had opposed her husband’s decision to take Schönfeld in. The husband, however, overrode her objection. The reason for his stubbornness is not explicitly indicated in the documents and can only be inferred from other statements. What seems to have played a decisive role was the acquaintance of the two men. They were both employed by the Franz-Joseph railway and had routinely interacted and cooperated with each other. Such experiences, as mentioned earlier, are central to the bonding process—and indeed, they seem to have promoted a strong connection that dissolved any religious or ethnic boundaries between the men. The case of Samuel Schönfeld, then, supports Amin Ash’s proposition that micro-publics, in this particular case the workplace, can forge sustainable ties between people of different backgrounds. Weiner Moschkowitsch is another example of a Jew whose dwelling in Vienna runs counter to the narrative of segregated Jewish residential patterns. Moschkowitsch was a migrant from Russia. In Vienna, he lived with some non-Jews in an apartment in the city’s nineteenth district— sharing a room with a Christian of similar geographic background.71 Their ties to their original homeland surpassed Jewish and non-Jewish differences. Moschkowitsch, it seems, treated Jews as a target of his criminal behavior, rather than as a group with which he identified. The court records shed light on various forms of Jewish and non-Jewish socializing. They reflect a sense of Jewish and non-Jewish communality that clearly goes beyond mere bridging experiences caused by fleeting encounters. This can be inferred from the friendship of Julius Süss, a Jew from Moravia, with Viennese Catholics Rudolf Hirsch and Franz Jelinek.72 The three enjoyed spending their leisure time together in pubs. There is no indication that their friendship was in any way diminished by ethnic or religious reservation towards one another. This is not to say,

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however, that interethnic relations never turned sour and degenerated into violent brawls. But they did not necessarily have to be provoked by people’s different ethnic or cultural identification. More often, they were triggered by mundane issues. This was the case, for instance, with Jacob Klein, who worked as a waiter in the Prater, Vienna’s fairgrounds. From time to time, he would get into fights with a non-Jew named Eisen.73 One of the reasons for their conflicts was Eisen’s jealousy—his mistress was once romantically involved with Klein, and Eisen suspected that they still had warm feelings for one another. Another example of Jewish and non-Jewish intermingling at pubs, also counter to the narrative of segregated Jewish life, involves Adolf Adler, a Jew of Hungarian extraction. He spent the night from November 22 to 23, 1911, with a Catholic laborer at a bowling place in the Prater. They caught sight of a guest who appeared to be in possession of a significant amount of money. When he left the inn, Adler and his friend followed and robbed him.74 Jews and non-Jews, as can be inferred, interacted with each other in multifarious ways, and crime was a common, boundary-crossing experience. In this sense, Adolf Adler’s cooperation with his friend was hardly exceptional. My examination of court records gives insight into the daily life of Vienna. The documents at hand describe a wide variety of Jewish and non-Jewish interactions. Such contact reflects a familiarity with each other indicative of bonding rather than bridging. Although explicit indications of similarity are missing from within the archival texts, the various forms of intermingling that are found suggest feelings of togetherness that fleeting encounters usually do not generate.

Conclusion This chapter deals with major changes in the historiography of Jews. I draw upon the observation that the closing decades of the twentieth century have incited a shift in Jewish studies research. Scholars no longer concentrate on anti-Jewish hostility, discrimination, and persecution, but stress the interrelatedness between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors. The central conclusion of this shift in research is that Jews did not exist apart from their non-Jewish social surroundings, but were fully part of the societies in which they lived. In the 1990s, an offshoot of the new trend in Jewish studies gained momentum. It focused on personal encounters between Jews and nonJews. The question at the heart of research was no longer how they culturally, intellectually, and religiously impacted each other but how individual contacts eroded lines of demarcation still stressed by other revisionist historians. I find that both approaches are only partially innovative, for they both presuppose a dichotomous distinction between Jews and non-Jews. I have

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thus outlined an approach to erase binary categorizations by applying the model of similarity. In order to apply it to an exploration of Jewish and non-Jewish contacts, I have aligned it with studies on interethnic encounters conducted by scholars of urban studies, geography, and other disciplines. In the last section of this chapter I describe the findings of my examination of court records in the Viennese municipal archives. The documents at hand indicate a wide variety of relations between Jews and non-Jews. These interactions reflect a familiarity with each other indicative of bonding, or a meaningful sense of togetherness that renders differences between Jews and non-Jews secondary. A distinction between bridging and bonding, absent in most works on Jewish and non-Jewish encounters, as well as greater emphasis on bonding encounters, points the way towards a history of Jews that is not constrained by binary categorizations. While this approach does not eliminate differences between Jews and non-Jews, it does emphasize, first and foremost, their similarities. Such a perspective has the potential to relegate the notion of the Jews’ otherness to the dustbin of historiography.

Notes 1. Michael Brenner, A Short History of the Jews (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 98–110. 2. Jeffrey Gorsky, Exiles in Sepharad: The Jewish Millennium in Spain (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 12–15; Larry J. Simon, “Jews, Visigoths, and the Muslim Conquest of Spain,” UCLA Historical Journal 4 (1983): 5–33. 3. Elisheva Carlebach and Jacob J. Schacter, eds., New Perspectives on JewishChristian Relations: In Honor of David Berger (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2012), 1. 4. Léon Poliakov, Geschichte des Antisemitismus I. Von der Antike bis zu den Kreuzzügen (Worms: Verlag Georg Heintz, 1979), 36–43; this view has been contested. See Robert Chazan, European Jewry and the First Crusade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 197–222. 5. Robert C. Stacey, “From Ritual Crucifixion to Host Desecration: Jews and the Body of Christ,” Jewish History 12, no. 1 (1998): 11–28; David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The History of a Way of Thinking (London: Head of Zeus, 2013). 6. David Berger, “Mission to the Jews and Jewish-Christian Contacts in the Polemical Literature of the High Middle Ages,” The American Historical Review 91, no. 3 (1986): 576–91, 578. 7. Daniel Lord Smail, “Hatred as a Social Institution in Late-Medieval Society,” Speculum 76, no. 1 (2001): 90–126, 118. 8. Debra Kaplan, Beyond Expulsion: Jews, Christians, and Reformation Strasbourg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 2. For Germany in the early twentieth century, see Marion Kaplan, “Friendship on the Margins: Jewish Social Relations in Imperial Germany,” Central European History 34, no. 4 (2001): 479. 9. See, for example, Eugene M. Avrutin, “Jewish Neighbourly Relations and Imperial Russian Legal Culture,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 9, no. 1 (2010): 1–16.

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10. David Ruderman, ed., Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (New York: New York University Press, 1992); Israel Jacob Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Elisheva Carlebach, Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). 11. Glenn Dynner, Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 12. See Debra Kaplan, “Jews in Early Modern Europe: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” History Compass 10, no. 2 (2012): 195. 13. Stephen G. Burnett, “Distorted Mirrors: Antonius Margaritha, Johann Buxtorf and Christian Ethnographies of the Jews,” Sixteenth Century Journal 25, no. 2 (1994): 275–87. 14. Todd M. Endelman, “In Defense of Jewish Social History,” Jewish Social Studies 7, no. 3 (2001): 52–67. 15. Daniel Jütte, “Interfaith Encounters Between Jews and Christians in the Early Modern Period and Beyond: Toward a Framework,” American Historical Society 118, no. 2 (2013): 378–400; Magda Teter, “‘There Should Be No Love Between Us and Them.’ Social Life and the Bounds of Jewish and Canon Law in Early Modern Poland,” Polin 22 (2010): 249–70. 16. The groundbreaking book Cultures of the Jews, edited by David Biale, was a, if not “the,” landmark publication in this realm. See David Biale, ed., Cultures of the Jews: A New History (New York: Schocken Books, 2002). It was published in 2002 and relied on previous research. 17. See Adam Teller and Magda Teter, “Introduction: Borders and Boundaries in the Historiography of the Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,” Polin 22 (2010): 3–46, 5; Glenn Dynner, Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor, & Life in the Kingdom of Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 1–8; Israel Bartal and Scott Ury, “Between Jews and their Neighbours: Isolation, Confrontation, and Influence in Eastern Europe,” Polin 24 (2012): 3–30; see above all David Berger, “A Generation of Scholarship on Jewish-Christian Interaction in the Medieval World,” Tradition 38, no. 2 (2004): 4–14. 18. See Jonathan Elukin, Living Together, Living Apart: Rethinking Jewish-Christian Relations in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 19. Monica H. Green, “Conversing With the Minority: Relations Among Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Women in the High Middle Ages,” Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008): 105–18, 109–10; Victoria Hoyle, “The Bonds That Bind: Money Lending Between Anglo-Jewish and Christian Women in the Plea Rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, 1218–1280,” Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008): 119–29. Carmen Caballero-Navas, “The Care of Women’s Health and Beauty: An Experience Shared by Medieval Jewish and Christian Women,” Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008): 146–63, 148. 20. See, for example, Leonard Victor Rutgers, “Archaeological Evidence for the Interaction of Jews and Non-Jews in Late Antiquity,” American Journal of Archaeology 96, no. 1 (1992): 101–18, 101. 21. Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages (New York: Schocken, 1993): 22. 22. Steven E. Aschheim, “German History and German Jewry: Boundaries, Junctions and Interdependence,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book XLIII (1998): 315–22; Till van Rahden, “Weder Milieu noch Konfession. Die situative Ethnizität der deutschen Juden im Kaiserreich in vergleichender Perspektive,” in Religion im Kaiserreich: Milieus—Mentalitäten—Krisen, Religiöse Kulturen in der Moderne, vol. 2, eds. Olaf Blaschke and Frank-Michael Kuhlemann (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1996), 409–34.

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23. Elana Shapira, ed., Design Dialogue: Jews, Culture and Viennese Modernism (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2018). 24. See Ernst Gombrich, Jüdische Identität und jüdisches Schicksal. Eine Diskussionsbemerkung (Vienna: Passagen, 1997). 25. See John J. Bukowczyk, “The Racial Turn,” Journal of American Ethnic History 36, no. 2 (2017): 5–10. 26. Erika Fischer-Lichte, Ästhetische Erfahrung. Das Semiotische und das Performative (Tübingen: Francke, 2001): 9; Susan Stanford Friedman, Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 134; Martin Fuchs, “Erkenntnispraxis und die Repräsentation von Differenz,” in Identitäten. Erinnerung, Geschichte, Identität, vol. 3, eds. Aleida Assmann and Heidrun Friese (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1998), 110. 27. Elisheva Baumgarten, Ruth Mazo Karras, and Katelyn Mesler, “Introduction,” in Entangled Histories: Knowledge, Authority, and Jewish Culture in the Thirteenth Century, eds. Elisheva Baumgarten, Ruth Mazo Karras, and Katelyn Mesler (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 4. 28. Bruno Chaouat, Is Theory Good for Jews? French Thought and the Challenge of the New Antisemitism (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016); a case in point for such concepts is the theory of intersectionality. See Tom Bartlett, “The Intersectionality Wars,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 21, 2017, www.chronicle.com/article/The-Intersectionality-Wars/240095; Leslie McCall, “The Complexity of Intersectionality,” Signs 30, no. 3 (2005): 1771–800. 29. Bryan Cheyette, Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 6. 30. See, for example, Perry, J. Micha and Rebekka Voß, “Approaching Shared Heroes: Cultural Transfer and Transnational Jewish History,” Jewish History 30, nos. 1–2 (2016): 1–13. 31. Rebecca Voß, “New Chapters in the History of Early Modern Ashkenaz,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 104, no. 2 (2014): 307–14, 307. 32. See Moshe Rosman, How Jewish Is Jewish History? (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2007): 106–7. 33. Similarity is constituted within the framework of manifold encounters and contacts. It is the result of dynamic interactions. In this sense, the model of similarity is related to associative theoretical approaches regarding the constituting of society, developed by Bruno Latour and other sociologists, related to actor-network theory (e.g., see Bruno Latour, Eine neue Soziologie für eine neue Gesellschaft. Einführung in die Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie [Frankfurt am Main: suhrkamp taschenbuch wissenschaft, 2014]). According to this theory, society is understood as “the sum total of processes . . . of the assimilation of social relations with other people” (Andreas Langenohl, “Ähnlichkeit als differenztheoretisches Konzept: Zur Reformulierung der Modernisierungstheorie,” Ähnlichkeit: Ein kulturtheoretisches Paradigma, eds. Anil Bhatti and Dorothee Kimmich [Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2015], 111–12). The society emerges as the result of constant contacts, associations, and contingencies, all of which make similarity tangible. Society does not already “pre-exist,” in the sense of an abstract context to which we may simply refer. 34. Aleida Assman, for example, writes, “[S]imilarity is created in the eye of the beholder, and is therefore contingent, ephemeral, unpredictable and perhaps even intangible. It has been disconnected from substances and migrated into situations.” See Aleida Assmann, “Similarity as Performance: A New Approach to Identity Construction and Empathy Regimes,” in Similarity: A

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36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

Klaus Hödl Paradigm for Culture Theory, eds. Anil Bhatti and Dorothee Kimmich (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2018), 160. Gill Valentine and Joanna Sadgrove, “Biographical Narratives of Encounter: The Significance of Mobility and Emplacement in Shaping Attitudes Towards Difference,” Urban Studies 51, no. 9 (2014): 2049–63, 2059. About the role of storytelling that defies the postmodern decentering of the subject, see Paul Steege, Andrew Stuart Bergerson, Maureen Healy, and Pamela E. Swett, “The History of Everyday Life: A Second Chapter,” The Journal of Modern History 80, no. 2 (2008): 358–78, 373–7. Space is understood as a relational arrangement of objects, places, and people. See Martina Löw and Gunter Weidenhaus, “Borders That Relate: Conceptualizing Boundaries in Relational Space,” Current Sociology Monograph 65, no. 4 (2017): 553–70, 554. It represents the context that could lead up to feelings of connectivity, as opposed to a setting where people remain indifferent to each other. Jan T. Gross, Neighbours: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, 1941 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 37. Eugene M. Avrutin, “Ritual Murder in a Russian Border Town,” Jewish History 26, nos. 3–4 (2012): 309–26, 317f. Ibid., 318. Gordon Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Cambridge: Addison-Wesley, 1954). Tatiana Matejskova and Helga Leitner, “Urban Encounters With Difference: The Contact Hypothesis and Immigrant Integration Projects in Eastern Berlin,” Social & Cultural Geography 12, no. 7 (2011): 717–41, 719. Ibid., 720. Kevin Durrheim and John Dixon, Racial Encounter: The Social Psychology of Contact and Desegregation (London: Routledge, 2005). Matejskova, “Urban Encounters,” 720. This phenomenon has already been elaborated on by Michel de Certeau in his essay “Walking in the City” from his book The Practice of Everyday Life; see also Roland Lippuner, “Sozialer Raum und Praktiken: Elemente sozialwissenschaftlicher Topologie bei Pierre Bourdieu und Michel de Certeau,” in Topologie: Zur Raumbeschreibung in den Kultur- und Medienwissenschaften, ed. Stephan Güntzel (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2007), 265–77. See page 273; another premise of the contact hypothesis states that people who intermingle should be considered by the respective other as representatives of the group they belong to. See Terje Wessel, “Does Diversity in Urban Space Enhance Intergroup Contact and Tolerance?” Geografiska Annaler: Series B. Human Geography 91, no. 1 (2009): 5–17, 7. Otherwise the reevaluation of stereotypes nurtured against ethnically or culturally others would remain limited to the person included in the interaction, and not be extended to his/her group. This is likewise a precondition difficult to be met in an urban contact zone. Thomas F. Pettigrew and Linda R. Tropp, “How Does Intergroup Contact Reduce Prejudice? Meta-Analytic Tests of Three Mediators,” European Journal of Social Psychology 38, no. 6 (2008): 922–34, 929. Despite the new research on the conditions of fruitful encounters, there are still some scholars who support the view that mere, even superficial, daily interactions generate tolerance towards the other. Sophie Watson, for example, claims that a form of limited encounter, that she calls “rubbing along,” such as the “recognition of different others through a glance or a gaze, seeing or being seen, sharing embodied spaces in talk or silence,” has the potential to challenge prejudices and biased attitudes. See Sophie Watson, “The Magic of the Marketplace: Sociality in a Neglected Public Space,” Urban

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54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

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Studies 46, no. 8 (2009): 1577–91, 1582; see also Helen F. Wilson, “Passing Propinquities in the Multicultural City: The Everyday Encounters of Bus Passengering,” Environment and Planning A 43, no. 3 (2011): 634–49, 634; a study on the interaction of visitors in coffeehouses that focuses on mere gestures, on the perception of appearances, can also be mentioned in context of such studies. See Eric Laurier and Chris Philo, “Cold Shoulders and Napkins Handed: Gestures and Responsibility,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. New Series 31, no. 2 (2006): 193–208. Amin Ash, “Ethnicity and the Multicultural City: Living With Diversity,” Environment and Planning A 34, no. 6 (2002): 959–80, 967. Ibid., 969. Ibid., 970. Gill Valentine, “Living With Difference: Reflections on Geographies of Encounter,” Progress in Human Geography 32, no. 3 (2008): 323–37, 325. Ibid., 329. Ibid. An excellent example of encounters on the street that seem to solidify boundaries between Jews and non-Jews has been described by Joseph Ehrlich. He grew up as a Chassidic Jew in the Galician city of Brody. One day he took a walk and passed some (non-Jewish) Germans. Their secular conduct strongly enraged him. See Josef R. Ehrlich, Der Weg meines Lebens: Erinnerungen eines ehemaligen Chassiden (Vienna: Verlag L. Rosner, 1874), 24–5. The study is mentioned in Eric Klinenberg, Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life (New York: Crown, 2018), 18. Twenty years earlier, the proportion of migrants in the city was even higher. It comprised almost two thirds of the residents. See Moritz Csáky, Das Gedächtnis der Städte. Kulturelle Verflechtungen—Wien und die urbanen Milieus in Zentraleuropa (Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2010), 133. Vienna’s ethnic and cultural heterogeneity is particularly stunning when compared to other metropolises, such as the French capital. Almost 94 percent of the population of Paris was born in the city. Susanne Korbel, “From Vienna to New York: Migration, Space, and InBetweenness Im Weißen Rößl,” Jewish Culture and History 17, no. 3 (2016): 233–48. Klaus Hödl, “The Quest for Amusement: Jewish Leisure Activities in Vienna Circa 1900,” Jewish Culture and History 14 (2013): 1–17. Birgit Peter, “Schaulust und Vergnügen. Zirkus, Varieté und Revue im Wien der Ersten Republik” (Humanities diss., University of Vienna, 2001). Klaus Hödl, “Das ‘Jüdische’ in der allgemeinen Populärkultur. Zur Einführung,” in Nicht nur Bildung, nicht nur Bürger: Juden in der Populärkultur, ed. Klaus Hödl (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2013), 7–19. George E. Berkley, Vienna and Its Jews: The Tragedy of Success, 1880s–1980s (Boston: Madison Books, 1988), 99. Robert S. Wistrich, The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1990), 217, 367–8. John W. Boyer, Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 80–8. Brigitte Dalinger, “Verloschene Sterne,” in Geschichte des jüdischen Theaters in Wien (Wien: Picus Verlag, 1998), 46. See Charlotte Ashby, “The Cafés of Vienna: Space and Sociability,” in The Viennese Café and Fin-de-siècle Culture, eds. Charlotte Ashby, Tag Gronberg, and Simon Shaw-Miller (New York: Berghahn, 2015), 26; Charlotte

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67.

68. 69.

70.

71. 72. 73. 74.

Klaus Hödl Maria Toth, “‘Gemma schaun, gemma schaun . . .’ Vergnügen als Verpflichtung? Untersuchung zu den Freizeiträumen und Freizeitaktivitäten des Wiener Bürgertums in den Jahren 1890–1910” (Humanities Diploma, University of Vienna, 1986), 69. Steven Beller, “The City as Integrator: Immigration, Education and Popular Culture in Vienna, 1880–1938,” German Politics and Society 15, no. 1 (1997): 117–39, 120–1. Marsha Rozenblit, Juden in Wien 1867–1914. Assimilation und Identität (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1989), 83; see also Michael John and Albert Lichtblau, Schmelztiegel Wien—einst und jetzt: Zur Geschichte und Gegenwart von Zuwanderung und Minderheiten (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1990), 115. Ivar Oxaal, for example, writes that according to the Viennese census of 1857, residential patterns in Vienna represented an epitome of integrated living. See Ivar Oxaal, “Die Juden im Wien des jungen Hitler: Historische und soziologische Aspekte,” in Eine zerstörte Kultur: Jüdisches Leben und Antisemitismus in Wien seit dem 19. Jahrhundert, eds. Gerhard Botz, Ivar Oxaal, and Michael Pollak (Buchloe: Verlag Obermayer, 1990), 47; Heinrich Berger, “Social Structure of the Jewish Quarter in Vienna During the Liberal Era (1850–1900),” History of the Family 8, no. 4 (2003): 531–44, 536. WStLA, Landesgericht für Strafsachen, A11-Vr-Strafakten: 769/1890. See Berger, “Social Structure of the Jewish Quarter in Vienna,” 534. Berger points out that in the 1850s, only in 3 of 61 buildings examined in his study on parts of the second Viennese district “were more than two-thirds of the occupants Jews.” This is to say that only a very small minority of Jews had exclusively Jewish neighbors; Blumenkranz, a member of a gang that comprised mostly Catholics and specialized in theft and dealing in stolen goods, represents another instance of a bed lodger. See WStLA, Landesgericht für Strafsachen, A11–2480 /1905. Blumenkranz was a bed lodger. Whether he lived in an apartment with other Jews or Christians cannot be determined. The janitor of the building, however, who lived on the first floor, was a Catholic woman. This again is an example that undermines the assumption that Jews even lived in buildings without Jews. In the recent past, increasing evidence contradicting the assumption that Jews and non-Jews lived segregated has been brought to light for other European cities as well. Concerning Vilnius in the seventeenth century, see, for example, David Frick, “Jews and Others in Seventeenth-Century Wilno: Life in the Neighborhood,” Jewish Social Quarterly 12, no. 1 (2005): 8–42, 21; with regard to Budapest in the twentieth century, see Erika Szívós, “Bonds Tried by Hard Times: Jews and Christians on Klauzál tér, Budapest, 1938–1945,” Hungarian Historical Review 1, nos. 1–2 (2012): 166–99, 173–9. WStLA, Landesgericht für Strafsachen, A11–243, 10946/1908. WStLA, Landesgericht für Strafsachen, A11–243, 10256/1908. Ibid. WStLA, Landesgericht für Strafsachen, A11–8777/1911.

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Ashby, Charlotte. “The Cafés of Vienna: Space and Sociability.” In The Viennese Café and Fin-de-siècle Culture, edited by Charlotte Ashby, Tag Gronberg, and Simon Shaw-Miller. New York: Berghahn, 2015. Assmann, Aleida. “Similarity as Performance: A New Approach to Identity Construction and Empathy Regimes.” In Similarity: A Paradigm for Culture Theory, edited by Anil Bhatti and Dorothee Kimmich. New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2018. Avrutin, Eugene M. “Jewish Neighbourly Relations and Imperial Russian Legal Culture.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 9, no. 1 (2010): 1–16. Avrutin, Eugene M. “Ritual Murder in a Russian Border Town.” Jewish History 26, nos. 3/4 (2012): 309–26. Bartal, Israel, and Scott Ury. “Between Jews and Their Neighbours. Isolation, Confrontation, and Influence in Eastern Europe.” Polin 24 (2012): 3–30. Bartlett, Tom. “The Intersectionality Wars.” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 21, 2017. www.chronicle.com/article/The-Intersectionality-Wars/240095. Baumgarten, Elisheva, Ruth Mazo Karras, and Katelyn Mesler. “Introduction.” In Entangled Histories: Knowledge, Authority, and Jewish Culture in the Thirteenth Century, edited by Elisheva Baumgarten, Ruth Mazo Karras, and Katelyn Mesler. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Beller, Steven. “The City as Integrator: Immigration, Education and Popular Culture in Vienna, 1880–1938.” German Politics and Society 15, no. 1 (1997): 117–39. Berger, David. “A Generation of Scholarship on Jewish-Christian Interaction in the Medieval World.” Tradition 38, no. 2 (2004): 4–14. Berger, David. “Mission to the Jews and Jewish-Christian Contacts in the Polemical Literature of the High Middle Ages.” The American Historical Review 91, no. 3 (1986): 576–91. Berger, Heinrich. “Social Structure of the Jewish Quarter in Vienna During the Liberal Era (1850–1900).” History of the Family 8, no. 4 (2003): 531–44. Berkley, George E. Vienna and Its Jews: The Tragedy of Success, 1880s–1980s. Boston: Madison Books, 1988. Biale, David, ed. Cultures of the Jews: A New History. New York: Schocken Books, 2002. Boyer, John W. Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Brenner, Michael Brenner. A Short History of the Jews. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Bukowczyk, John J. “The Racial Turn.” Journal of American Ethnic History 36, no. 2 (2017): 5–10. Burnett, Stephen G. “Distorted Mirrors: Antonius Margaritha, Johann Buxtorf and Christian Ethnographies of the Jews.” Sixteenth Century Journal 25, no. 2 (1994): 275–87. Caballero-Navas, Carmen. “The Care of Women’s Health and Beauty: An Experience Shared by Medieval Jewish and Christian Women.” Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008): 146–63. Carlebach, Elisheva. Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Carlebach, Elisheva, and Jacob J. Schacter, eds. New Perspectives on JewishChristian relations: In Honor of David Berger. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2012.

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Chaouat, Bruno. Is Theory Good for Jews? French Thought and the Challenge of the New Antisemitism. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016. Chazan, Robert. European Jewry and the First Crusade. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Cheyette, Bryan. Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Csáky, Moritz. Das Gedächtnis der Städte. Kulturelle Verflechtungen—Wien und die urbanen Milieus in Zentraleuropa. Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2010. Dalinger, Brigitte. “Verloschene Sterne.” In Geschichte des jüdischen Theaters in Wien. Wien: Picus Verlag, 1998. Durrheim, Kevin, and John Dixon. Racial Encounter: The Social Psychology of Contact and Desegregation. London: Routledge, 2005. Dynner, Glenn. Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Dynner, Glenn. Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor, & Life in the Kingdom of Poland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Ehrlich, Josef R. Der Weg meines Lebens. Erinnerungen eines ehemaligen Chassiden. Vienna: Verlag L. Rosner, 1874. Elukin, Jonathan. Living Together, Living Apart: Rethinking Jewish-Christian Relations in the Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Endelman, Todd M. “In Defense of Jewish Social History.” Jewish Social Studies 7, no. 3 (2001): 52–67. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Ästhetische Erfahrung. Das Semiotische und das Performative. Tübingen: Francke, 2001. Frick, David. “Jews and Others in Seventeenth-Century Wilno: Life in the Neighborhood.” Jewish Social Quarterly 12, no. 1 (2005): 8–42. Friedman, Susan Stanford. Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Fuchs, Martin. “Erkenntnispraxis und die Repräsentation von Differenz.” In Identitäten. Erinnerung, Geschichte, Identität. Vol. 3, edited by Aleida Assmann and Heidrun Friese. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1999. Gombrich, Ernst. Jüdische Identität und jüdisches Schicksal. Eine Diskussionsbemerkung. Vienna: Passagen, 1997. Gorsky, Jeffrey. Exiles in Sepharad: The Jewish Millennium in Spain. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. Green, Monica H. “Conversing With the Minority: Relations Among Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Women in the High Middle Ages.” Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008): 105–18. Gross, Jan T. Neighbours, The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, 1941. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Hödl, Klaus. “Das ‘Jüdische’ in der allgemeinen Populärkultur. Zur Einführung.” In Nicht nur Bildung, nicht nur Bürger: Juden in der Populärkultur, edited by Klaus Hödl. Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2013: 7–19. Hödl, Klaus. “The Quest for Amusement: Jewish Leisure Activities in Vienna Circa 1900.” Jewish Culture and History 14 (2013): 1–17. Hoyle, Victoria. “The Bonds That Bind: Money Lending Between Anglo-Jewish and Christian Women in the Plea Rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, 1218– 1280.” Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008): 119–29.

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John, Michael, and Albert Lichtblau. Schmelztiegel Wien—einst und jetzt. Zur Geschichte und Gegenwart von Zuwanderung und Minderheiten. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1990. Jütte, Daniel. “Interfaith Encounters Between Jews and Christians in the Early Modern Period and Beyond: Toward a Framework.” American Historical Society 118, no. 2 (2013): 378–400. Kaplan, Debra. Beyond Expulsion: Jews, Christians, and Reformation Strasbourg. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. Kaplan, Marion. “Friendship on the Margins: Jewish Social Relations in Imperial Germany.” Central European History 34, no. 4 (2001): 471–501. Katz, Jacob. Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages. New York: Schocken, 1993. Klinenberg, Eric. Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life. New York: Crown, 2018. Korbel, Susanne. “From Vienna to New York: Migration, Space, and In-Betweenness Im Weißen Rößl.” Jewish Culture and History 17, no. 3 (2016): 233–48. Laurier, Eric, and Chris Philo. “Cold Shoulders and Napkins Handed: Gestures and Responsibility.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. New Series 31, no. 2 (2006): 193–208. Lippuner, Roland. “Sozialer Raum und Praktiken: Elemente sozialwissenschaftlicher Topologie bei Pierre Bourdieu und Michel de Certeau.” In Topologie. Zur Raumbeschreibung in den Kultur- und Medienwissenschaften, edited by Stephan Güntzel. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2007: 265–77. Löw, Martina, and Gunter Weidenhaus. “Borders that Relate: Conceptualizing Boundaries in Relational Space.” Current Sociology Monograph 65, no. 4 (2017): 553–70. Matejskova, Tatiana, and Helga Leitner. “Urban Encounters With Difference: The Contact Hypothesis and Immigrant Integration Projects in Eastern Berlin.” Social & Cultural Geography 12, no. 7 (2011): 717–41. McCall, Leslie. “The Complexity of Intersectionality.” Signs 30, no. 3 (2005): 1771–800. Micha, Perry J., and Rebekka Voß. “Approaching Shared Heroes: Cultural Transfer and Transnational Jewish History.” Jewish History 30, nos. 1–2 (2016): 1–13. Nirenberg, David. Anti-Judaism: The History of a Way of Thinking. London: Head of Zeus, 2013. Oxaal, Ivar. “Die Juden im Wien des jungen Hitler. Historische und soziologische Aspekte.” In Eine zerstörte Kultur. Jüdisches Leben und Antisemitismus in Wien seit dem 19. Jahrhundert, edited by Gerhard Botz, Ivar Oxaal, and Michael Pollak. Buchloe: Verlag Obermayer, 1990. Peter, Birgit. “Schaulust und Vergnügen. Zirkus, Varieté und Revue im Wien der Ersten Republik.” Humanities Dissertation. University of Vienna, [Wien], 2001. Pettigrew, Thomas F., and Linda R. Tropp. “How Does Intergroup Contact Reduce Prejudice? Meta-analytic Tests of Three Mediators.” European Journal of Social Psychology 38, no. 6 (2008): 922–34. Poliakov, Léon. Geschichte des Antisemitismus I. Von der Antike bis zu den Kreuzzügen. Worms: Verlag Georg Heintz, 1979. Rosman, Moshe. How Jewish Is Jewish History? Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2007.

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Rozenblit, Marsha. Juden in Wien 1867–1914. Assimilation und Identität. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1989. Ruderman, David, ed. Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. New York: New York University Press, 1992. Rutgers, Leonard Victor. “Archaeological Evidence for the Interaction of Jews and Non-Jews in Late Antiquity.” American Journal of Archaeology 96, no. 1 (1992): 101–18. Shapira, Elana, ed. Design Dialogue: Jews, Culture and Viennese Modernism. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2018. Simon, Larry J. “Jews, Visigoths, and the Muslim Conquest of Spain.” UCLA Historical Journal 4 (1983): 5–33. Smail, Daniel Lord. “Hatred as a Social Institution in Late-Medieval Society.” Speculum 76, no. 1 (2001): 90–126. Stacey, Robert C. “From Ritual Crucifixion to Host Desecration: Jews and the Body of Christ.” Jewish History 12, no. 1 (1998): 11–28. Steege, Paul, Andrew Stuart Bergerson, Maureen Healy, and Pamela E. Swett. “The History of Everyday Life: A Second Chapter.” The Journal of Modern History 80, no. 2 (2008): 358–78. Szívós, Erika. “Bonds Tried by Hard Times: Jews and Christians on Klauzál tér, Budapest, 1938–1945.” Hungarian Historical Review 1, nos. 1/2 (2012): 166–99. Teller, Adam, and Magda Teter. “Introduction: Borders and Boundaries in the Historiography of the Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.” Polin 22 (2010): 3–46. Teter, Magda. “‘There Should Be No Love Between Us and Them.’ Social Life and the Bounds of Jewish and Canon Law in Early Modern Poland.” Polin 22 (2010): 249–70. Toth, Charlotte Maria. “‘Gemma schaun, gemma schaun . . .’ Vergnügen als Verpflichtung? Untersuchung zu den Freizeiträumen und Freizeitaktivitäten des Wiener Bürgertums in den Jahren 1890–1910.” Humanities Diploma. University of Vienna [Wien], 1986. Valentine, Gill. “Living With Difference: Reflections on Geographies of Encounter.” Progress in Human Geography 32, no. 3 (2008): 323–37. Valentine, Gill, and Joanna Sadgrove. “Biographical Narratives of Encounter: The Significance of Mobility and Emplacement in Shaping Attitudes Towards Difference.” Urban Studies 51, no. 9 (2014): 2049–63. Van Rahden, Till. “Weder Milieu noch Konfession. Die situative Ethnizität der deutschen Juden im Kaiserreich in vergleichender Perspektive.” In Religion im Kaiserreich: Milieus—Mentalitäten—Krisen, Religiöse Kulturen in der Moderne. Vol. 2, edited by Olaf Blaschke and Frank-Michael Kuhlemann. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1996: 409–34. Voß, Rebecca. “New Chapters in the History of Early Modern Ashkenaz.” The Jewish Quarterly Review 104, no. 2 (2014): 307–14. Watson, Sophie. “The Magic of the Marketplace: Sociality in a Neglected Public Space.” Urban Studies 46, no. 8 (2009): 1577–91. Wessel, Terje. “Does Diversity in Urban Space Enhance Intergroup Contact and Tolerance?” Geografiska Annaler: Series B. Human Geography 91, no. 1 (2009): 5–17.

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Wilson, Helen F. “Passing Propinquities in the Multicultural City: The Everyday Encounters of Bus Passengering.” Environment and Planning A 43, no. 3 (2011): 634–49. Wistrich, Robert S. The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph. Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1990. Yuval, Israel Jacob. Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

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To Walk in the Footsteps of Your Ancestors Roots Tourism in Yiddishland Karin Cohr Lützen

Introduction Is it possible to visit a place where Jews once lived and thus get a sense of the life that was lived at that time? This is a recurring question in much of the research literature that examines heritage tourism and roots tourism to Yiddishland. It is not a country in the true sense of the word, but rather denotes the area of land that, before the Holocaust, extended from the Baltic Sea to the western part of Russia. It included thousands of Jewish communities with a population of 11 million Yiddish-speaking Jews. It was from this area that countless Jews, from the 1880s onwards, emigrated to America or Western Europe, and it was there that the remaining Jews were wiped out during the Holocaust. Afterwards, the communist iron curtain was lowered across the border to the area, and many surviving Jews hid their backgrounds and became secular Soviet citizens. The area became practically impossible for tourists to visit, and perhaps it was because of these barriers that Yiddishland became an object of desire. It came to be seen like the mythical land of Atlantis: a utopia that had now sunk into the sea but lived on in memory. In particular, it lived on in nostalgic memory, and the small shtetl where everyone knew and helped one another has since become romanticized through artistic expressions. The best known is the 1960s American musical Fiddler on the Roof, which takes place in the fictitious shtetl of Anatevka and centers around the milkman Teyve and his daughters. After the fall of the Soviet Union, it became possible to visit the area as a tourist, and descendants of those Jewish emigrants could now realize their dream of walking in the footsteps of their ancestors. They could either go on a group trip and visit important Jewish places in Eastern Europe as a form of heritage tourism, or participate in roots tourism and visit the exact places where their own ancestors had lived. Of course, Jews are not the only people who go on roots tours, since it has become a popular form of travel in the last 20–30 years for descendants of all kinds of emigrants. The interest in searching for one’s roots is said to have become widespread after African-American Alex Haley

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published his extensive book Roots in 1976, in which he claimed to have unearthed his family history back to seventeenth-century Gambia. Subsequently, genealogy became a widespread hobby, and as genealogy researchers discovered their emigrated ancestors, the desire to travel “back” to their “original” country emerged. American descendants of emigrants flocked to Scotland, Ireland, Italy, and other emigrant countries on the trail of their great-grandparents, and anthropologists and geographers followed them in order to study the phenomenon.1 Jewish roots tourism to Yiddishland is so special because it creates a hopeful journey—albeit, to an Atlantis that was eradicated during the Holocaust, making it virtually impossible to find any traces of personal roots. At the same time, however, visitors will be confronted with a revival of the old Yiddish culture.2 Kazimierz in Poland is often mentioned as an example of a place where many Jews lived before the Second World War, but under communism became a slum. In 1993, when Steven Spielberg was shooting the film Schindler’s List and had to find a neighborhood that could represent a ghetto during the war, Kazimierz was derelict enough to be the perfect setting. Soon after, the neighborhood became famous and cleaned up, and now there are cafés and meeting places with a Jewish theme. Jews are not necessarily running these places, a point that has led some critics to consider all of this eagerness to revive a dead Jewish culture as a Jewish Disneyland.3 In contrast, others see it as an expression of a new form of Jewish life. It is not only in the old Yiddishland that Jewish places are being revived. It is also happening in the Marais district in Paris, the Lower East Side of New York, and neighborhoods in other Western metropolitan areas where the emigrating Eastern European Jews settled. As a rule, they lived in these Jewish streets for only one generation before they climbed up the social ladder and could afford to move to the suburbs. This created room for new immigrant groups to settle in the former Jewish quarters, which then changed the neighborhood character. However, here and there in back gardens, there were still signs of a past Jewish life: a recess in a door frame where a mezuzah had been fixed, or faded shop signs with Hebrew letters. But what can you experience when you walk around in these settings of past Jewish life? Is it really possible to get a sense of the life lived? After all, only the streets and sometimes restored buildings remain; the people are gone. The smell of their food does not float in the air, the sound of their sewing machines has ceased, nobody speaks Yiddish on every street corner, and all their institutions—the Jewish school, their innumerable associations, and synagogues—are closed and shut down. Nevertheless, this does not discourage a great many heritage tourists from travelling to these Jewish places. And this in no way dissuades roots tourists from walking in the footsteps of their ancestors while they search for their homes and burial places in big cities or in small shtetls. And

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without knowing that I was a part of this new form of tourism, I threw myself into a similar journey of discovery with great enthusiasm. In 2004, I discovered that my late French mother had a Jewish background she had never mentioned. I was both baptized and confirmed in the Danish Lutheran Church, to which my father belonged, and I knew nothing of Judaism or Jewish traditions. Culturally, I was thus a goy, but halachically, I was a Jew. My Own Roots Tour in Paris My mother was born in Montmartre in Paris in 1923 as an only child and lived in France right up until 1947, when she married my Danish father in Denmark. Until 1935, she had lived with her parents in the same apartment in Montmartre where my grandfather had spent all his childhood. That year the family moved to the provinces, where my grandfather continued his work as a travelling fabrics salesman. After the liberation of Paris in 1944, my mother moved back to Paris to go to university. In all the 46 years that I had known my mother, I never heard her speak of anywhere other than France as her homeland. She was very proud of being French, which I also became—well, at least, half French. Her mother died before I was born, but I knew my grandfather, and, if it were possible, he was an even greater French patriot. Both highlighted the splendid republican thought of “laïcité,” and so did not belong to any religious community. Six years after my mother’s death, I decided to investigate where in France her ancestors were born. It was, therefore, a great surprise to me when I saw on my mother’s birth certificate that her parents had not emigrated from a province of France, but from Romania. It said that my grandmother was born in Bucharest, while my grandfather was born in Brăila—one being born in a capital city and the other in a very large provincial town. Suddenly, I had to understand that my mother’s Frenchness went back only one generation. Based on her birth certificate, which I had asked the town hall at Montmartre to send me, I did further genealogy research. My maternal great-grandparents all had Jewish names—Landau, Hercovici, Leibovici—and Jewish professions, such as tailors. The witnesses on the French certificates also had Jewish names and were tailors, furriers, and cap makers. My grandfather’s surname was Lupu, perhaps a Romanianization of the name Wolf, but it did not have a particularly Jewish sound to it, and so it never occurred to me that my mother’s family was not French. I now had to acknowledge that both of her parents were Jews and that they had several siblings, about whom I had never known. In the spring of 2005, I was given the opportunity to stay in Paris for two months, and when I was not in the archives finding information, I walked around the city in my ancestors’ footsteps. My discovery of my

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mother’s secret was so exciting that I immediately decided that I would write an autoethnographical book about it. It would be unique in Denmark, but in an international context, my story and journey to discover it were just one of many. The most famous and award-winning books are Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer from 2002, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn from 2006, and The Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal from 2010, but in the last 20 years several of these kinds of Jewish autoethnographical travel accounts have been published. What was special about my story (which I had in common with Madeleine Albright) was that I did not know my Jewish history and first discovered it when I was over 50 years old. Thus, I arrived as an ignorant stranger and had to learn my new, unknown Jewish culture. However, in the beginning, I was still in disbelief because I could not comprehend how my mother had been part of a Yiddish culture in interwar Paris without me knowing about it. Maybe my great-grandparents had also distanced themselves from their Jewish background, I thought, and so I was curious to see their burial place in Paris. I wanted to investigate whether they were buried at a Jewish burial site and thus acknowledged their Jewishness. I had sent their death certificates to the central office of cemeteries in Paris and was informed that they, and several others in the family, were buried at Cimetière parisien de Bagneux, located south of Paris, near Montrouge. After the French Revolution, churchyards were also secularized, meaning that newer burial sites were not designed for a particular religious community. Both Christians and Jews were thus buried in the same cemetery, but each in their own area. Bagneux was established in 1886 and was so new and spacious that it became an ideal place for many immigrants in Paris to buy a burial plot. It was here that I not only found out that my unknown relatives had been buried Jewish but also discovered a very special form of organization among immigrant Eastern European Jews. As I walked around to find the various Jewish areas, I was surrounded by meter-high gravestones, where just under 40 deceased were listed (see Figure 9.1). Their names were written on sandstone with black paint, each had a portrait photograph inserted, and they were buried in chronological order. Both my grandfather’s and my grandmother’s relatives lay in these common graves, and all had been buried by the association L’Avenir Fraternel. It was founded in 1902 by a group of men, all of whom had just immigrated to Paris from Romania, and who had settled in Montmartre.4 Perhaps my two great-grandfathers contributed to the founding of the association, and, if not, they certainly joined shortly thereafter. Like the countless similar associations that immigrants in other countries founded in these years, L’Avenir Fraternel provided a safety net for the members. It was a mutual support association or

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Figure 9.1 My grandfather’s mother, Yetti Leibovitch, on a collective tombstone at Bagneux cemetery in Paris Source: Photo by Karin Cohr Lützen.

mutual insurance association, which in French can be summed up in a single word: mutualité. Immigrants who were not penniless, who could just get by, paid a small amount to the association every month. Still, they could be sure to get help in the event of illness and death, and possibly even in the event of unemployment. The associations were formed before the public social system was expanded in these immigrant countries, and they functioned as a guarantee for not ending up in misery. In Yiddish, a mutual support association founded by Eastern European Jews from the same region is called a landsmanshaft, where landsman means a person who comes from the same shtetl or from the same town. That is, it is the local region that is important, rather than the home country. One of the first things a landsmanshaft did when it had enough capital was buy a burial plot. It would often be the only form of real estate that an association and its members owned. Thus, the burial plots came to symbolize that the immigrants were now rooted in the new country, just as the plots showed that they were faithful to Jewish traditions.5 In the landsmanshaftn in Paris, New York, and the other immigrant regions, every funeral was a matter for the whole association. When a member, his wife, child, mother, or mother-in-law died and was to be buried, all the

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members of the association were obliged to follow the coffin to the grave. If they failed to attend, they received a fine.6 The landsmanshaftn also maintained the Eastern European Jewish tradition of visiting the graves once a year. At each burial place, the names on the gravestones were read aloud, and a kaddish was said. Once a year, then, each member was immortalized, and even though it could be many years since he or she had passed away and there were perhaps no relatives left, they were now remembered by the association’s community.7 I even had the opportunity to participate in such a ceremony at Bagneux. My persistent genealogy research had put me on the tracks of descendants of my great-grandparents, and my grandfather’s youngest brother’s daughter was still a member of L’Avenir Fraternel. The association had clearly had its golden age before the Second World War, where it not only managed the members’ funerals but also served as a health insurance fund. It was very much a social association, where networks could be made and where young people of marrying age could meet— like my grandparents, who certainly met each other in this association. In the 1920s, my grandfather had been the treasurer of the association, and according to his nieces, the whole family had participated in the annual galas. But as the immigrant generation died and their descendants became integrated into the French community, these landsmanshaftn gradually became redundant. Several closed due to lack of support, and eventually even L’Avenir Fraternel had only members who were very old. The deceased were no longer buried in common graves, and parties for the members were rarely held. However, once a year they still met to attend this ceremony, and on September 26, 2006, I was invited to participate. It was not easy to gather people for the ceremony, especially because the vast majority of members were elderly. With difficulty, ten male members had been persuaded to meet this day to form a minyan, which could say a kaddish. Eventually, some female members came, but there were only five women and me. Also, the group included a rabbi from a synagogue in Montmartre, but the association’s previous chairman led the ritual. We went chronologically and began with the oldest gravestone, where my grandmother’s mother was buried. First, the rabbi said the prayer El Mole Rahamim and modulated the words with a singing voice. When the prayer was finished, he addressed the ten men: kaddish! And then these men began to recite the prayer for the dead: “Yisgadal véyiskadach chémé rabo . . . etc.” They had been given the text, and only one of them could read it in Hebrew letters. They stuttered and stammered through it, their mobile phones rang in their pockets, and everyone laughed cheerfully as the rabbi tried in vain to explain when to say “omen,”—and when we should absolutely not say it. When the prayer was finished, the master of ceremonies gave a list of the names of all the deceased who lay in the grave we were now standing

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in front of, and one of the ten men was asked to read. Now, the names of the long-since deceased members of the association were spoken again. I thought it was very beautiful that even though my great-grandmother had died 80 years ago and I had never known her, the memory of her was being kept alive by the living members. In truth, the association was a chosen kinship, because even when there were no longer blood-related descendants of the deceased, the members of the association would be there and remember them. However, women had no duties in this ritual, and the master of ceremonies did not give the list of names to them. But he spotted me and my mother’s cousin pointing to different names and explaining to each other how we were related to them. As a result, he said to the small gathering, “There are members of the association living a few meters from here who have not come today. But amongst us we have a sister who has come all the way from Denmark to be with us.” He then addressed me: “Madame, you should also read some names. Do you want to read aloud the names on this stone?” Everyone smiled kindly at me, the rabbi said his prayer, the ten men said their kaddish, and then I was given the list of the names of the 32 men who were buried here from 1957 to 1972. I began reading and did my best to pronounce the Eastern European names in as French a way as possible: “Lewman, Moïse; Herpstu, Jacques; Libling, Jacques; Gumpelson, Léon . . . etc.” Every single gravestone that L’Avenir Fraternel had established for its members was a testament to the closely knit network that existed between all of these Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the first half of the twentieth century. And here was I, who just two and a half years ago had no idea that I was a descendant of all these people. On April 2, 2004, I had sat in Copenhagen and gawped at my mother’s birth certificate, sensing that an Eastern European Jewish immigration story was hiding in there without knowing how I should unravel it. Now, on September 26, 2006, I was standing in Paris, having unveiled all of my mother’s family history, dating back two generations. At the same time, I was invited to join this association’s community, which my relatives had embraced and which held such great meaning in their lives. In every way, it was a world of yesterday. In a few years, there will no longer be any members of the association, let alone the other landsmanshaftn in Paris, and every one of the deceased will no longer be remembered once a year. Now, I had discovered yet another Paris. I no longer had only the Paris of my grandfather’s and my mother’s stories, or the Paris I had experienced in my childhood trips and during my year as an au pair. Now, I also knew the immigrants’ Paris, the Jewish Paris, and I knew that around the city there were streets on which my many relatives had once walked. But it was all history. I had found tracks in the sources, documents, old letters, photographs, faded gravestones, and apartment buildings where quite different people now lived. I had also been told stories of the relatives

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that I had found. But I will never come to experience life as it was lived by my mother, her parents, and all their relatives. I tried to get a sense of it by buying CDs with old songs in Yiddish, and I read memoirs and novels that brought to life the time period and this Eastern European Jewish world in Paris that no longer existed. It made me all the wiser, but I had never been a part of it, and now it was too late. My Roots Tour to Romania Nevertheless, my forefathers’ immigrant life in Paris was much more alive to me than the life they had left in Romania. After all, I could look at family photographs from the interwar period, and I could visit the family’s graves and residences. Differently, Romania was a completely unknown country, and the family had no photographs or documents about their lives there. My two pairs of great-grandparents, who were tailors, had immigrated to France from Romania, and they had reported to the French authorities that they were born in Romania. But whether their ancestors had lived there for generations or had emigrated from Poland or Russia is difficult to discern. Like many of the other Jewish emigrants from Romania, my two pairs of great-grandparents left the country in 1899, when there was a significant exodus. My grandmother was then 6 years old, and her two younger brothers were 3 and 1, while my grandfather was 4 years old and his little sister was 2. Afterwards, they both had siblings who were born in Paris. I got in touch with relatives who had known the immigrant generation, but they could not remember life before immigrating ever being discussed, and no one spoke of Romania with a sense of longing. It was a country they had turned their backs on, and now France was their new homeland. With great difficulty, I received a copy of my grandmother’s birth certificate from 1893 from the Romanian National Archives, confirming that she was born in Bucharest, which was also stated in her French documents. When my grandfather’s parents applied for French citizenship in 1913, they had no Romanian civil-law documents to show. Therefore, an Acte de Notoriété had to be drawn up, which stated that my grandfather Marco Lupu was born in Bucharest in 1869 and that my grandmother Yetti Leibowitch was born in Botoşani in 1872. Thus, my great-grandparents themselves had stated where and when they were born—testimony that was witnessed by seven Frenchmen, who could not possibly know if it was true, and instead simply trusted this information. Perhaps my great-grandparents themselves did not even know where and when they were born, because the Romanian record offices I have contacted have not been able to find their birth certificates using this information. Nor could the certificates be found for their two children, my grandfather and his little sister, and these facts would otherwise

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be of great value in reconstructing the migration story for that part of the family. After having worked with this genealogy research for several years and having placed my family’s immigration story into the great European story, I wrote my autoethnographical account, which was published in 2009.8 But I could not completely let go of the detective work, and just as I had been on several roots tours to Paris to gain insight into my relatives’ lives, I also wanted to travel to Romania and walk in the footsteps of my ancestors. However, a prerequisite for being able to do this is knowing exactly where one’s ancestors walked, and especially where they lived. Though I had the addresses of my grandmother’s and her parents’ homes in Bucharest, that was the extent of my knowledge (see Figure 9.2). In the summer of 2017, I had the opportunity to go on a roots tour to Romania. I contacted a guide who specialized in these kinds of trips and who offered to organize a trip based on my background information.9 In order for the trip to explore areas beyond Bucharest, we also planned to visit Brăila, where my grandfather was said to be born, and Botoşani, where his mother was said to be born. At both places, we had to try to find their birth certificates in the archives. I was now a typical roots tourist, with very little ancestral information and without the ability to speak the country’s language, and so I was dependent on a guide who was also an interpreter. It was quite different than when I wandered around Paris, where I not only spoke the language but also knew the city. In contrast, Bucharest was an unknown city, and so everything was interesting. At the end of the nineteenth century, at the same time the Jews of the country were being persecuted, boulevards and buildings were being constructed according to French design, which gave the city the nickname Eastern Europe’s little Paris. During communism, several buildings were demolished and concrete monstrosities were erected, but there were still many places left that gave an impression of what the city had looked like. However, unlike in other Eastern European cities, no special Jewish heritage tourism had emerged in Bucharest.10 Now, we went to Strada Rosetti to walk in the footsteps of my ancestors. My grandmother’s parents had lived there with their parents before they married in 1892—she in number 19, and he in number 9. The witnesses listed on their marriage certificate lived on the same street in numbers 3, 7, and 8. The young couple had made their home in number 6, where my grandmother had been born, and one of the witnesses on her birth certificate lived next door in number 4. This settlement pattern was very reminiscent of what I had seen in Paris: immigrants from the same network lived close to each other, and the witnesses on documents were neighbors. I was therefore very excited to find all of these house numbers. There was just one problem: there was not one but two Rosetti streets that were a continuation of each other, both named after a husband and wife who

Figure 9.2 The marriage certificate of my grandmother’s parents from the Bucharest archives Source: Photo by Karin Cohr Lützen.

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were politically active in the nineteenth century. These numbers could be found in both Strada Maria Rosetti and Strada C. A. Rosetti, but now they consisted of either large ugly concrete buildings or decrepit houses from the beginning of the twentieth century. My guide and I went back and forth looking for clues, but the street had changed a lot more than my mother’s childhood street in Montmartre. Frankly, it was very difficult to imagine what it had looked like when Jewish tailors lived there 124 years earlier—that is, if they had lived there, because perhaps there had been another Strada Rosetti somewhere else in Bucharest. Maria Rosetti died in 1893, and it is doubtful that she got a street named after her while she was alive. My guide and I also paid the national archive a visit in the hope of finding birth certificates for others in the family who were said to have been born in Bucharest. After reviewing several registers, however, we had to give up. Unfortunately, we also had to give up in the archives in both Brăila and Botoşani, where the archivists were extremely helpful and tried every possible strategy for searching. Perhaps my grandfather’s parents had named these provincial towns because they were the nearest large cities, but they were in fact born in a small shtetl. Perhaps my grandfather’s mother had made up her birthday because she did not know the exact date. In Paris, my grandfather’s mother had the first name Yetti. But this is a French name, and so what could it be in Romanian? It was important to know, because in Botoşani the registers of births were ordered by first name, but we did not find her under Etti or similar female names. The head of the archive fetched several registers to help us, and in the end, through my interpreter, said that she was glad that I had come to find my roots—and not to find proof that my family had owned a house that I would now demand back. As I said, the prerequisite for being able to go on a roots tour is that you know the place where your ancestors lived. Otherwise, it is rather difficult to walk in their footsteps. This opportunity now became very limited, because I could not know for certain where my grandfather and his parents had lived. However, it was these two towns, Brăila and Botoşani, that they had stated to the French authorities, and not any of the other towns in Romania. In both Brăila and Botoşani, there had been a large Jewish population, and my guide had also made sure that I met the presidents of the local Jewish communities and visited the synagogue and the cemetery. Both presidents told the same story: the local Jewish community became smaller and smaller and eventually consisted exclusively of elderly people. Therefore, much of the organizational work focused on helping them with medicine and other necessities. At the large cemetery in Botoşani, I searched for gravestones with the family name Leibovici. There were a lot—you would think that everyone in the city had that name—so at least I was sure that my great-grandmother’s family could very well have lived in this city (see

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Figure 9.3 Photos of tombstones at the Jewish cemetery in Botoșani, Romania Source: Photo by Karin Cohr Lützen.

Figure 9.3). But I did not get the same sense of connectedness here as I had at Cimetière parisien de Bagneux, and so I cannot say that my roots tour to Yiddishland gave me a feeling of my ancestors’ lives in the way that other travellers might have felt. The longer it is since one’s ancestors walked on the ground one visits, the harder it is to find signs. Others on Roots Tours After the fall of the Soviet Union, it became possible for descendants in the West to go on these kinds of roots tours to the old Yiddishland, and they have done the same as me: got in touch with a guide who specializes in such trips and who can help with genealogy research, make contact with locals, and serve as an interpreter. After returning home, many people have written down their experiences and conveyed them to friends and family, but since the Internet has become more widespread, many have also created blogs where they report in detail about their journey, add photographs, and share good advice for other travellers. One of these storytellers is the American archivist Mimi Klausner, who in the summer of 2016 travelled to Poland, Belarus, and Lithuania in order to visit the places where her seven great-grandparents were born. By using a variety of sources, she identified 11 shtetls and four cities where her ancestors originated. They emigrated in the second half of the

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nineteenth century and had not stayed in contact with their relatives in the old country, so Mimi Klausner did not expect to find descendants on her journey. Her goal was to physically experience the places in which her foremothers and fathers had been—“to walk on roads on which they had tread, to view the same forests, fields and rivers they must have seen, to look up at the same sky.”11 She also wanted to look for cemeteries and remnants of nineteenthcentury buildings. One of her great-grandmothers was from a shtetl in Poland, and Mimi Klausner found the small path that led to the Jewish cemetery on the outskirts of the village: “Sadness and joy immediately filled my body and tears started rolling down my face. Here was an undeniable physical connection to my deep past.”12 She did not expect to find burial places for her family, because surnames were not used on gravestones in the nineteenth century, and she could not read Hebrew. But she felt compelled to photograph as many stones as she could. “Great forces have tried to erase my people and I was going to do what I could to make permanent the traces that remain.”13 Mimi Klausner had no stories handed down of great-grandparents’ lives in Yiddishland, but other roots tourists are only second- or thirdgeneration descendants, and so they have heard more about life in the alte haym. It does not need to be a pretty story to give descendants an incentive to walk in the footsteps of their ancestors. Wayne Hoffman is the executive editor of Tablet Magazine, and in April 2013, together with his colleagues, he travelled to Warsaw for the seventieth anniversary of the uprising in the ghetto. Just after the end of the First World War, his grandfather Hanoch had left the town of Plock in Poland with his parents and siblings, and in the US, he changed his name to Henry. When his daughter asked him about the old country, he responded that it was terrible and that if it had been a nice place, they would not have left. Therefore, no one in the family had ever visited Poland, and even though Wayne Hoffman had travelled in many other countries, it had never occurred to him to go to Poland. Since his grandfather had not told him anything about the town, he had to try to imagine what it looked like—and in his young mind, it was Anatevka, the fictional setting of Fiddler on the Roof. Now, he was in Warsaw and discovered that Plock was nearby, and so he went. Even though he did not know precisely where his grandfather had lived in the former Jewish quarter of Plock, he knew with certainty that he had walked down the same streets. He closed his eyes and tried to picture Henry—who at that time still was the boy Hanoch—on this spot, but he felt that something was not right. Around the city, there were memories of the time when many Jews lived there, but now there were no Jews left and no Jewish life. His grandfather’s town had no fiddlers on roofs, no Tevye and his daughters. What it had instead was Henry, living his life in the town.

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And that, it turns out, is what’s missing now. Not an old mikveh or an overgrown cemetery. The people. The ones who were killed and the ones like my grandfather who—for whatever reason—got out of what they thought of as an awful place before it was too late.14 Many Eastern European Jews did not manage to travel before it was too late, and for their descendants, the Holocaust stands as a wound that has never healed, as the archaeologist Aron Mazel wrote about his trip to Lithuania in 2011. His father had immigrated to South Africa in 1929, but his grandparents had stayed, and together with thousands of other Jews they were killed by the Nazis and the Lithuanian collaborators. Aron Mazel writes that as he had anticipated, the journey was associated with considerable hurt and anger because of the devastation the Holocaust had inflicted on both his paternal and maternal families, as well as the ongoing emotional and psychological suffering it has caused. “However, the trip also presented the upwelling of a feeling of homecoming inside me.”15 This was because his father’s friends in Cape Town were Jewish emigrants from the same town, and Aaron Mazel had heard many stories about it throughout his childhood. Now, he visited it on the massacre’s seventieth birthday to say kaddish for his relatives who were killed. Together with his daughter, he walked down the street where his ancestors had owned several houses. As they walked, they considered that perhaps some of the houses on the street might have belonged to his great-grandfather. They also wondered whether his father was raised in one of the houses and whether there might still be items belonging to his family in one or more of them. He reflected: These were unsettling thoughts. As we walked down the street people emerged from a few houses and watched us. I believe they were aware that we were not there as conventional “tourists.” This is not a tourist area of the town and we were walking slowly, with cameras, stopping intermittently and clearly discussing the houses. Furthermore, it is very possible that they would have identified us as being of Jewish origin. We did not avert our eyes, but watched back.16 Neither had Nina Strochlic heard anything good about Poland from her grandparents. They were Holocaust survivors who, after the war, met in a camp for displaced persons before hurrying to immigrate to the US. Nina Strochlic knew that her grandparents had hated Poland, that her mother expected to hate it, and that she herself was supposed to hate it, too. Nevertheless, in 2010, she and her mother decided to travel to her grandmother’s home city of Krakow, where they found the building her grandmother had lived in before the war. She recalled, “‘Did you feel anything? A connection?’ my mom asked as we walked outside. I shook

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my head. I had imagined our encounter involving shadowy figures of our family in period costumes drifting out of the walls.”17 They also walked the route that Nina’s great-grandparents had done from the apartment to their fur shop, marvelling that they walked the same cobblestone streets their ancestors once had. “Still, the feeling of attachment that we longed for was absent.” But the journey had not been wasted, as Nina Strochlic concluded that she and her mother had now “gained an understanding of our heritage.”18 These various stories are typical of the many accounts that descendants of emigrant Eastern European Jews have told about their roots tours. Everyone travels in order to get an impression of their ancestors’ lives, and they imagine that they can step into Anatevka from the good old days as if nothing had happened. But everything has happened— first, there was the Holocaust and then communism, and now, there is not much left of Jewish life from before the extermination of the Jews. When the French historian Ivan Jablonka recently travelled to the Polish shtetl where his grandparents had lived, he could not find any trace of Jewish life. The old Jewish cemetery was now a public park, and something had also happened to the synagogue from the late 1800s. He described it thus: “On the building recently repainted in a golden yellow, one floor high and with windows formed like the Tablets of the Law is placed a poster: ‘Used clothes imported from England’ and, next to it a sign announcing a 50% discount.”19 However, the building was still standing, but it had now become an outlet for cheap clothes. Elsewhere in Yiddishland, the old synagogues can serve as bingo halls or car workshops. Yiddish Revival Of course, life in Eastern Europe has not stood still, and when there are no longer Jews to keep Yiddishland alive, these Jewish places decay or are used for other purposes. Roots tourists do not always see this; they have eyes only for everything that is no longer found and for the people who are now gone. The German historian Joachim Schlör writes that when he took a group of students to Ukraine in 2002, they met a historian from L’viv who informed them that they were just one of countless groups who travelled around his country and searched for clues. “Please,” he said, “if you are looking for traces of Jewish history and culture here, and maybe you do not find them, or you find just ruins and no actual sign of life and continuation, please don’t declare my country empty!”20 Eastern Europe is not empty, because Eastern Europeans live there who, although not Jewish, have their own history in the area. But Eastern Europe is also in the process of reviving Eastern European Jewish culture, and Jews are not always the driving forces behind it. Countless Jewish

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tourists have visited Kazimierz in Krakow and did not know whether to laugh or cry, just like sympathetic non-Jewish tourists have the impression that they have now experienced a fragment of an authentic Jewish culture. As a result, Kazimierz has been the subject of several researchers’ studies as the clearest example of this Jewish revival.21 The American journalist Erin Einhorn travelled to Poland in 2001 to find out what had happened to her mother’s childhood home in a small town. She settled in Krakow and, as she writes, did what most Jews do: explored the old Jewish quarter. She had read about the Jewish quarter’s infamous spectrum of kosher-style restaurants that serve matzo ball soup and potato kugel to the high-pitched strains of Jewish klezmer tunes. But actually seeing these places had an effect on her that she hadn’t anticipated. I stood in the center of Kazimierz, on a plaza that was once the beating heart of a sixty thousand-strong Krakow Jewish community, and gawked at storefronts—once home to Jewish tailors and butcher shops—that now boasted an odd assemblage of gentile-owned Jewishthemed cafés. At home, I’d been to Mexican restaurants adorned with plastic cactuses and pink sombreros. I’d seen Chinese restaurants painted with cartoonish murals of people in triangular hats. I’d seen many cultures adopted and appropriated, but I had never seen my own culture used that way. And here, in a city of fewer than two hundred Jews, half a mile from what had been the Jewish ghetto during World War II and roughly an hour’s drive from Auschwitz, was an entire plaza full of these restaurants: Noah’s Ark, Klezmer Hois, the Alef, the Ariel, the Esther.22 Now she saw how Jewish symbols were used as visual attractions; it was like a blooming commercial flower of ethnic kitsch that had pushed through the soil of what really belonged there. The old city and its vanished inhabitants were now little more than nutrients for an opportunistic organism that found a way to repackage the past, to resell it, to thrive off it, regardless of why the old city had died. It was unsettling, but it was also harmless.23 Several times she encountered such a revival of the old Jewish culture, and to find out more, she obtained a press card for Krakow’s annual Jewish Culture Festival, which was created in 1988 by a non-Jew. Erin Einhorn followed the many non-Jewish participants for lessons in Yiddish, Hasidic dance, and Jewish cooking and asked them what attracted them. The festival impressed her, both because of its remarkable size and

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because, unexpectedly, she enjoyed herself. With a few notable exceptions, her fears about mocking kitsch were unfounded. There was no one in costume and very few caricatures. She reflected: When I let myself relax and experience the festival, I was actually rather moved by the sound of Jewish music played so vibrantly and skilfully in this place where it so intensely belonged. Some of the Jewish musicians and artists who came from abroad to perform had been playing the festival for as many as ten years. They came here, they told me, because the music and art needed to be here even now—especially now. And that was when I stopped seeing the crowd at the festival as culture stealers and started seeing them more as preservationists—people invigorating a culture that otherwise would be nearly dead here.24 With these few examples, Erin Einhorn expresses the confusion that many Jews experience when they encounter the revival of the old Jewish culture over the last 20 to 30 years. Several Jewish researchers have investigated what is going on and how one should understand it, and they all refer to the historian Diana Pinto.25 She was one of the first Jewish intellectuals who reflected on the fall of the Iron Curtain, the resulting political changes, and the possible consequences for Jewish society in Europe. In her often quoted text from 1996, A New Jewish Identity for Post-1989 Europe, she introduced the concept of “Jewish space,” writing: There is now a new cultural and social phenomenon: the creation of a “Jewish space” inside each European nation with a significant history of Jewish life. There are two aspects to this “Jewish space.” The first is the gradual integration of the Holocaust into each country’s understanding of its national history and into twentiethcentury history in general. And the second is the revival of “positive Judaism.”26 This interest in what is Jewish, she argues, is not even dependent on Jews: It is important to stress that a rich “Jewish space” containing a multitude of “things Jewish” is not dependent on the size or even presence of a living Jewish community in any particular country. Indeed, it is possible that the larger the “Jewish space,” the smaller the number of actual Jews.27 In 1995, when American journalist Ruth Ellen Gruber heard Diana Pinto present these thoughts at a conference in Prague, she was already interested in Jewish heritage. Three years earlier, she had published a travel guide to Jewish heritage sites in Eastern Europe and was now

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investigating this emerging interest among non-Jews for all things Jewish. In 2002, this resulted in the book Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe, and with this she means “an intense, visible, vivid Jewish presence in places where few Jews live today.”28 In several subsequent articles, she further developed this notion and started a dialogue with her critics.29 I did not, for example, posit that non-Jewish interest in Jewish culture in Europe has produced a “virtual” Jewish world devoid of “real” Jews, but instead suggested essentially the opposite—that in post-Holocaust places already now devoid or nearly devoid of living Jews, non-Jewish interest in Jewishness has had this effect.30 Particularly in a Polish context, it makes sense to see “virtually Jewish” as “a place where Jewish culture is no longer Jewish property, but rather an open field in which anybody can use the props and as they see fit.”31 But what interest can non-Jews have in embracing a Jewish culture with which they have no experience? Why do they want to go to klezmer concerts and maybe even learn Yiddish? Some of the non-Jews that Ruth Ellen Gruber has met in Europe who were professionally engaged in Jewish culture expressed a feeling that they were inspired to search for the roots of their own culture by the 1,000-year-old Jewish culture.32 In this way, what is Jewish has become a modern form of Orientalism, like the earlier idolization of the Orient as an alluring and exotic place. In Germany, Ruth Ellen Gruber has met non-Jews who themselves play klezmer or who enjoy listening to it, and for them it is a symbolic attempt to right the injustice: to reconstruct the Jewish culture that was destroyed in the Holocaust (by their parents’ generation), to “retrieve,” to “revive,” to “heal.”33 At the same time, klezmer has become part of the entire avantgarde scene, both as a musical expression and as an outlook on life.34 Klezmer also attracts those who prefer to live in an alternative way, and for them the Jews’ “otherness” is something with which they can identify. Other researchers have argued that ever since Europe became Christian, “the Jew” has been Europe’s “Other”—that is, the people against whom Christians have contrasted themselves. But after World War II, many other foreigners have come to Europe, including inhabitants of the empires’ former colonies or guest workers who have stayed. These new “Others” are much more alien than “the Jew,” who gradually became a part of European culture. Thus, “the Jew” has become “our Other,” while “the foreigners” have become “the Others.”35 Some Jews, however, remain skeptical and see philo-semitism and antisemitism as two sides of the same issue. The vast majority of non-Jews find it easier to relate to dead Jews than to those living, and they can better simplify, exoticize, and see the Jews from a historical distance. Thus, Jewish culture can run the risk of being limited to symbols and food.

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Isolated from its context, Jewish culture loses its meaning and merely becomes a piece of folklore that people recognize and call “Jewish” without any deeper understanding or connection.36 Still, Eastern Europe, especially Poland, is in no way completely empty of Jews. After the Holocaust, many Polish survivors hid their Jewish identity, and their children and grandchildren have grown up without knowing their Jewish roots. But here in the twenty-first century, young people are discovering them, and now they emerge as Jews and want to live as Jews. Katka Reszke was born in 1978, and as a teenager she found out that her grandparents were Jewish. She not only took on the Jewish identity but also began to study the phenomenon and in 2013 published the dissertation Return of the Jew: Identity Narratives of the Third PostHolocaust Generation of Jews in Poland. She interviewed 50 young Poles who, like her, had discovered their Jewish background themselves, and she got them to talk about their path towards this new identity. Several of them changed the Polish-sounding surname that their grandparents had invented to be able to live unobtrusively. “Never before in Polish history—or perhaps in European history,” Katka Reszke writes, “have Jews deliberately taken on more Jewish-sounding names. It is in that sense a profoundly de-assimilationist act. It is one of the most explicit forms of Jewish ‘coming out’ in the modern world.”37 For American and Israeli Jews living with the belief that Jews no longer existed in Poland, meeting with these young new Jews is a surprise to which they sometimes do not respond with open minds. In the book, Joanna explains that those groups come here, and they look at you like you’re a monkey in a zoo, and ‘What do you mean you found out that you’re Jewish when you were 15?’ But we should talk about this, so that they have an awareness of this. . . . It pisses me off when Israelis say, ‘How can you live in this huge cemetery?’ . . . and so on, but I think it’s important for Jews to live in Poland.38 I started this chapter by asking the question, is it possible to visit a place where Jews once lived and thus get a sense of the life they lived at that time? The answer, then, must be both yes and no. The past is dead and can never be revived, and it is impossible to completely familiarize oneself with great-grandparents’ way of life, occupation, housing, celebrations, and association meetings. Even if the buildings remain, they are now inhabited by other people or are used for other purposes. Therefore, roots tourists can walk in the footsteps of their ancestors, but they will never be able to have exactly the same experience as their ancestors had when they walked down those same streets. This is not to say that roots tours are meaningless, because as many of the examples have shown, a lot of those people travelling felt that they

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had, in spite of everything, gained some sense of their ancestors’ world. Heritage tourists do not seek their own family history but are interested in a broader Eastern European Jewish cultural history, and for them, the revived and virtual Jewish culture is exciting and lively. If more and more young people in Eastern Europe come out as Jews, they will be able to take part in creating a completely new Jewish culture that is not a Disneyland or a kitsch imitation of something past, but is something new and different.

Notes 1. Paul Basu, “My Own Island Home: The Orkney Homecoming,” Journal of Material Culture 9, no. 1 (March 2004); Paul Basu, “Route Metaphors of ‘Roots-Tourism’ in the Scottish Highland Diaspora,” in Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in Motion, eds. Simon Coleman and John Eade (London: Routledge, 2004); Gregory Higginbotham, “Seeking Roots and Tracing Lineages: Constructing a Framework of Reference for Roots and Genealogical Tourism,” Journal of Heritage Tourism 7, no. 3 (August 2012); Kevin Meethan, “‘To Stand in the Shoes of My Ancestors’: Tourism and Genealogy,” in Tourism, Diasporas and Space, eds. Tim Coles and Dallen J. Timothy (London: Routledge, 2004); Dallen J. Timothy, “Genealogical Mobility: Tourism and the Search for a Personal Past,” in Geography and Genealogy: Locating Personal Pasts, eds. Dallen J. Timothy and Jeanne Kay Guelke (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). 2. Alain Guillemoles, Sur les traces du Yiddishland: Un pays sans frontières (Paris: Les petits matins, 2010). 3. Iris Weiss, “Jewish Disneyland: The Appropriation and Dispossession of ‘Jewishness’,” Golem. European-Jewish Magazine, 3 (2002). 4. Myriam Isabelle Nuk, L’Avenir fraternel: Société de Secours mutuels (Paris: Bibliothèque Medem, 2000). 5. Daniel Soyer, Jewish Immigrant Associations and American Identity in New York, 1880–1939 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 89; Didier Epelbaum, “Autodéfense sociale,” in Les enfants de papier. Les Juifs de Pologne immigrés en France jusqu’en 1940 (Paris: Grasset, 2002), 163. 6. Soyer, Jewish Immigrant Associations, 90; Nancy L. Green, “Mutual Aid Societies,” in The Pletzl of Paris: Jewish Immigrant Workers in the Belle Epoque (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986), 88; Jean Laloum, “La vie associative et d’entraide,” in Les Juifs dans la banlieue parisienne des années 20 aux années 50 (Paris: CNRS éditions, 1998), 72. 7. Jonathan Boyarin, Polish Jews in Paris: The Ethnography of Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 138–40; Nuk, L’Avenir fraternel, 13; Patricia Hidiroglou, Rites funéraires et pratiques de deuil chez les juifs en France, XIXe–XXe siècles (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1999), 345; Irving Howe, “The Inner World of the Landsmanshaft,” in World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made There (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 190. 8. Karin Lützen, Mors hemmelighed: På sporet af en jødisk indvandrerhistorie (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2009). Review by Tone Hellesund in Ethnologia Scandinavica 2010, 176–7,“Tracing Jewish Immigration History,” http://kgaa. nu/tidskrifter/bok/ethnologia-scandinavica-2010. 9. Thanks to Elena Klabin for a beautifully organized roots tour. 10. Andrea Corsale, “Jewish Heritage Tourism in Bucharest: Reality and Visions,” The Geographical Journal 183, no. 3 (September 2017).

208 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

Karin Cohr Lützen Klausner, “Trip to Ancestral Homelands,” 2016. Ibid. Ibid. Wayne Hoffman, “Ghosts of My Grandfather’s Village,” Tablet, April 19, 2013. Aron Mazel, “Troubled ‘Homecoming’: Journey to a Foreign Yet Familiar Land,” in Displaced Heritage: Responses to Disaster, Trauma, and Loss, eds. Ian Convery et al. (Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2014), 152. Mazel, “Troubled ‘Homecoming,” 156. Nina Strochlic, “Journeys Abroad: Poland,” Ethos (online student publication at the University of Oregon), 2010, n.p. Ibid. Ivan Jablonka, Histoire des grands-parents que je n’ai pas eus (Paris: Seuil, 2012), 16–17. Joachim Schlör, “From Remnants to Realities: Is There Something Beyond a ‘Jewish Disneyland’ in Eastern Europe?” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 2, no. 2 (October 2003): 152. Shelley I. Salamensky, “Culture, Memory, Context: Reenactments of Traumatic Histories in Europe and Eurasia,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 26, no. 1 (2013); Shelley I. Salamensky, “Diaspora Disneys: ‘Jewface’ Minstrelsy and ‘Jewfaçade’ Display in East-Central Europe and Eurasia,” in Jews and Theater in an Intercultural Context, ed. Edna Nahshon (Leiden: Brill, 2014); Erica T. Lehrer, Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); Magdalena Waligórska, Klezmer’s Afterlife: An Ethnography of the Jewish Music Revival in Poland and Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Olivia Sandri, “City Heritage Tourism Without Heirs: A Comparative Study of Jewish-Themed Tourism in Krakow and Vilnius,” Cybergeo: European Journal of Geography (2013); Jack Kugelmass and Annamaria OrlaBukowska, “‘If You Build It They Will Come’: Recreating an Historic Jewish District in Post-Communist Kraków,” City & Society 10, no. 1 (June 1998). Erin Einhorn, The Pages in Between: A Holocaust Legacy of Two Families, One Home (New York: Touchstone, 2008), 57–8. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 107. Eszter B. Gantner and Jay “Koby” Oppenheim, “Jewish Space Reloaded: An Introduction,” Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 23, no. 2 (2014). Diana Pinto, A New Jewish Identity for Post-1989 Europe (London: Institute for Jewish Policy Research, 1996), 6; Diana Pinto, “Epilogue: Jewish Spaces and Their Future,” in Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland, eds. Erica Lehrer and Michael Meng (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). Pinto, A New Jewish Identity, 7. Ruth Ellen Gruber, “Real Imaginary Spaces and Places: Virtual, Actual, and Otherwise,” in Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History, eds. Simone Lässig and Miriam Rürup (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017), 298. Ruth Ellen Gruber, “Beyond Virtually Jewish: New Authenticities and Real Imaginary Spaces in Europe,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 99, no. 4 (2009); Ruth Ellen Gruber, “‘Non-Jewish, Non Kosher, Yet Also Recommended’: Beyond ‘Virtually Jewish’ in Postmillennium Central Europe,” in Philosemitism in History, eds. Jonathan Karp and Adam Sutcliffe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Gruber, “Real Imaginary Spaces,” 300. Ibid.

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32. Ruth Ellen Gruber, Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe (Berkeley: California University Press, 2002), 48–9. 33. Ibid., 194. 34. Jonathan Freedman, Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 18; Sander L. Gilman, “There Ain’t No There There: Reimagining Eastern European Jewish Culture in the 21st Century,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 25, no. 1 (2006): 3. 35. Kugelmass et al., “‘If You Build It They Will Come’,” 342. 36. Gruber, Virtually Jewish, 236–8. 37. Katka Reszke, Return of the Jew: Identity Narratives of the Third PostHolocaust Generation of Jews in Poland (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013), 91. 38. Ibid., 123.

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Contributors

Laura Almagor is Teaching Fellow (History of International Relations) at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of International History. She was the 2017/2018 Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at the Central European University in Budapest and a 2016/2017 Prins Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Jewish History in New York City, as well as a 2015/2016 Junior Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies. In 2015, Almagor defended her doctoral dissertation, dealing with the history of the Jewish Territorialist movement, at the European University Institute in Florence. She has published in the fields of modern Jewish studies, religion studies, and military history. Jakob Egholm Feldt is Professor of Global History at Roskilde University, Denmark. He currently convenes the research group for Global and Trans-National History at Roskilde University and co-directs Roskilde University’s research center for problem-oriented learning, RUC-PPL. Over the past ten years, he has published widely on cultural and historical theory, Orientalism, and Jewish history, including the books The Israeli Memory Struggle: History and Identity in the Age of Globalization (2007), Lived Space: Reconsidering Transnationalism Among Muslim Minorities (with Kirstine Sinclair, 2011), and Transnationalism and the Jews: Culture, History and Prophecy (2016), as well as edited volumes and articles. Michael Harbsmeier is Professor Emeritus at Roskilde University and has published widely about various traditions of travel writing. Søren Blak Hjortshøj is External Lecturer at Roskilde University, where he teaches modern European intellectual and cultural history. He has a PhD in history from Roskilde University and wrote his dissertation on the Danish Jewish fin-de-siècle intellectual Georg Brandes. Dr. Hjortshøj has published in the fields of both comparative literature and history, including the books Borges og Gauchofortællingerne (Borges and the gaucho stories), Forlaget Spring (Copenhagen, 2012); and

Contributors

213

Georg Brandes’ Representations of Jewishness: Between Grand Recreations of the Past and Transformative Visions of the Future, Aarhus Universitetsforlag (Aarhus, 2020). Dr. Hjortshøj holds a MA and BA in comparative literature from Copenhagen University. Klaus Hödl is Associate Professor in History at the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Graz/Austria. His current research deals with Jewish and non-Jewish encounters in Central Europe. His next book, Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, will be published with Berghahn in summer 2019. Karin Cohr Lützen is Associate Professor at Roskilde University, where she researches in the history of sexuality, women, urban life, philanthropy, Jewish immigration, and silverware. Mirjam Zadoff has been Director of the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism since spring 2018. Since 2014 she has held the Alvin H. Rosenfeld Chair for Jewish Studies and is Associate Professor at the Department of History at Indiana University Bloomington. She was a visiting professor at ETH Zurich and Augsburg University. From 2007 to 2014 she was Assistant Professor at LMU Munich. Her publications include Der rote Hiob: Das Leben des Werner Scholem, Munich 2014 (Engl. 2018; transl. into Heb. in preparation); Nächstes Jahr in Marienbad: Gegenwelten jüdischer Kulturen der Moderne, Göttingen 2007 (Engl. 2012; Czech 2018; transl. into Heb., in preparation), and “From Mission to Memory: Walter Benjamin and Werner Scholem in the Life and Work of Gershom Scholem,” in: Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 13 (2014), no. 1, 58–74 (together with Noam Zadoff). Maja Gildin Zuckerman is a Jim Joseph Postdoctoral Fellow at Education and Jewish Studies at Stanford University. Her main research focuses on questions of modern Jewish identification, belonging, citizenship, and spatiality. With an anthropological and sociological approach, she currently explores how students at European Jewish schools experience and perceive the rise in antisemitism and terror prevention related to Jewish institutions. She has also published a number of articles and anthology chapters on early Scandinavian Zionism, Jewish ethnification, and Jewish cultural politics, her latest being “Early Danish Zionism and the Ethnification of the Danish Jews,” Journal of Israeli History (forthcoming). She holds a PhD from University of Southern Denmark in Middle Eastern studies (2016) and a MA in sociology and anthropology from Tel Aviv University (2012).

Index

Note: Figures are indicated by page numbers in italic type. Abbott, Andrew 3, 28–29, 47, 135, 137 acceptance 172 acculturation 166–67 Acte de Notoriété 195 actor-network theory (ANT) perspectives 12 adaptability 132 Adler, Adolf 176 Adler, Elkan 96 Adriaanse, C. 82 affective bonds 171 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung 87 agriculture 60 Agudath Israel 79 Albright, Madeleine 191 Alexander, Jeffrey C. 5, 128; The Civil Sphere 136 Alexandrians, the 157 Ali, Asgar Karamat 85 allochronism 97–99 Allport, Gordon 170–72 Almagor, Laura 19 alte haym 200 America 108–9, 128–32 American Journal of Sociology 133 Amnon of Mainz 56 Amsterdam 99 Anglo Jewry 29–30, 34, 44 Ankersmit, Frank R. 54–55 ANT (actor-network theory) perspectives 12 anthropology/anthropologists 36, 128, 133, 135, 137, 189 anti-Judaism 122, 164, 168 antisemitism: American Jews and 121, 128–29; in Austria 173; Freeland

League against 75–76; in Germany 62, 65; Judas effect on 154; modern 155, 158; nationalistic movements and 143–45; Nietzsche’s view of 147–48; in Russia 59–60; in Suriname 84, 86 anti-Zionism 44, 46, 136 appropriating the world (Weltaneignung) 54 Arabs 97–98, 106 Ararat settlement 100 Arendt, Hannah 54 Argens, Marquis d’ 154 Aristotle 157 Arnold, Matthew: Culture and Anarchy 131 Ash, Amin 172, 175 Ashkenazi Jews 55–56 assimilation 133, 165–67 Athens vs. Jerusalem 121–22, 128–32 Athens vs. Jerusalem dichotomy 143–63; background 143; of Danish cultural tradition 148–51; Friedrich Nietzsche interpretation of 147–48; Georg Brandes and 143–45; history of 145–47; and justice for all 154–58; Nazarenism concept 152–54 Auerbach, Berthold 144 Aufklärung 127 Auschwitz 67 Auslander, Leora 9 Australia 101 Austria 7, 78–80 Austrian Refugee Freeland League 79–80 authors, Jewish 130 autoethnography 45

Index autonomy, political 83 Avrutin, Eugene M. 170 Azulai, Rabbi David 99–100, 102 backwardness 98 Baghdad 106–7, 114–15n46 Bandung, Indonesia 87 Basle, Switzerland 28 Baudrillard, Jean 9 Baumgarten, Elisheva 167–68 bed lodgers 175, 182n69 Belarus 60 Ben-Gurion, David 64; “Who is a Jew?” 57 Benjamin, Israel Joseph (Benjamin II) 102–9, 113–14n30, 115n52–53; Drei Jahre in Amerika 1859–1862 108; Eight Years in Asia and Africa From 1846 to 1855 104 Benjamin, Walter 66–67 Benjamin III (Sforim, Mendele Moicher) 110 Benjamin of Tudela: Sefer ha-Masa’ot 99–100 Benjamin Society 109 Bensusan, Samuel Levy: “A Disillusioned Pilgrim” 43–44 Bentwich, Herbert 27–31, 33–35, 38, 41–43 Bergen-Belsen 80 Bergson, Henri 128 Berlin 97–98 Berlinische Monatsschrift 126 Bestimmung (task) 127 Biale, David 58; Cultures of the Jews, ed. 8–10 Bialik, Chaim Nachman 59–60 biases 171 Bible, the 157 Bible criticism 154 Bildung 109, 127–28 biological descent 167 Birnbaum, Nathan 59 Birobidzhan, Soviet Union 60 Birzani, Kurdistan 105–6 Bloom, Leopold (hero in Ulysses) 57–58, 67 Bolshevism/Bolsheviks 60, 64 bonding 170, 175 Bonnet, Charles 146 Book of Ecclesiastes, The (“Kohélet”) (Brandes) 154–58 Book of Job, The (“Jobs Bog”) (Brandes) 143, 154–56, 158

215

Book of Life 55–56 Börne, Ludwig 152, 156–57 Botoşani (Romania) 195, 198–99 boundaries 3, 12–16, 18–19, 28–29, 48n6, 57–58, 135–37 bourgeois modernity 37–38 Bourne, Randolph 133 Bowman, Isaiah 77 Brãila, Romania 198 Brainin, Masha 58 Brainin, Reuben 19, 58–61, 67–68 Brainin Affair 60 Brandes, Georg 20, 143–45, 147–58; Det unge Tyskland 152–53; Emigrantlitteraturen (The Emigrant Literature) 144, 148–49; Hovedstrømningerne i Det Nittende Aarhundredes Europæiske Litteratur (Main Currents in Nineteenth Century European Literature) 143–44, 148; “Jobs Bog” (The Book of Job) 143, 154–56, 158; “Jøderne i Finland” (The Jews in Finland) 151; “Kohélet” (The Book of Ecclesiastes) 154–58; Levned IIII (Recollections of My Childhood and Youth IIII) 149–51; Petrus 154; Sagnet om Jesus (The legend of Jesus) 153–54; Urkristendommen (Early Christianity) 153–54 bridging 170, 173, 175–77 British Freeland 76 British Guiana 75 British Zionist Federation 43 Brons, Johannes 76–77 Bucharest, Romania 196, 198 Buchenwald concentration camp 61–64 Bund, the 79 Butler, Judith 6 camps, displaced persons 78 Carvalho, Solomon 100; Incidents of Travel and Adventure in the Far West 100 Celsus 157 cemeteries 64–65, 191 ceremonial laws 125 Chabad movement 58 Children of the Ghetto (Zangwill) 44 Christ 121, 130, 146, 153–54 Christian Hebraists 165

216

Index

Christianity/Christians 120–23, 126–27, 131, 135, 143–46, 148, 150–54 Cimetière parisien de Bagneux 191, 199 cities, growth of 128 citizens 39, 122–23, 127–28, 135 civility 120–24, 126, 136 civilization, Jewish contributions to 130 Civil Sphere, The (Alexander) 136 Clemenceau, Georges 144 coding 7 cognitive processes 171 Cohn, Leonard: New Skin for the Old Ceremony 56–57 Cold War 64, 66, 73, 75, 78, 82 colonialism 73–75, 78, 83 colonization 76, 83; of Palestine 13, 37, 42; of Russia 13, 58, 60; see also Suriname, Territorialist project in Commission of Experts 77–78 communism 55, 59, 61, 64–66, 189, 202 communitas 36–37, 39 communities, Jewish 35, 55–56, 96–102, 105–7, 110–11, 133, 188 concentration camps 63 conflicts, interethnic 171 conspiracy theories 136 consumer policy 129 consumption studies 9, 22n25 contact hypothesis 170–73 conversion 56, 65, 122, 146 cosmopolitanism 45, 96–119; background 96–97; Benjamin II 103–9; Haskalah and 97–98; predecessors to 99–103 Creole Union of Suriname 84–85 Crimea 58–61 Crusades, the 55–56 cultural displacements 172 culture, Jewish 4–5, 129 Culture and Anarchy (Arnold) 131 Cultures of the Jews (Biale, ed.) 8 Dachau concentration camp 63 Dansk Zionistforening 43 dare to know (“sapere aude”) 126 Darwin, Charles: The Origin of Species 131–32 Darwinism 132 Das junge Deutschland literary movement 152 de-assimilation 206

death, Jewish 55–58, 67 decolonization 73, 78, 82–86 deconstruction 5–6 De Miranda, Julius C. 84–85 Denmark 144, 148–51 deportations 62 Der Ewige Jude (The wandering Jew) 63 “Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal” (Hegel) 146–47, 154 Der Judenstaat (Herzl) 27, 29–30 Der Tog newspaper 58 destiny 127 Det unge Tyskland (Brandes) 152–53 Deutscher, Isaac 65–66 Deutsche Rundschau newspaper 144 de Vries, Henry L. 85 Dewey, John 129, 133 Die Rote Fahne newspaper 61 differences, Jewish 6–7, 11–12 Discorso circa il stato degli Hebrei et in particolar dimoranti nellinclita città di Venezia (Luzzato) 99 discrimination 122, 129, 164 “Disillusioned Pilgrim, A” (Bensusan) 43 displaced persons (DPs) 16, 73–74, 78–82 diversity 17, 68, 98, 128, 173 Dixon, John 171 Doelman, Ming 85 donations 81 DPs (displaced persons) 16, 73–74, 78–82 Drei Jahre in Amerika 1859–1862 (Benjamin, I) 108 drug addiction 56 Dubinsky, David 78 Durrheim, Kevin 171 Dutch government 75–78, 82, 85 Dutch Guiana see Suriname Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs 82 Dutch Zionist federation 77 Early Christianity (Urkristendommen) (Brandes) 153–54 East Africa land offer 46 Eastern character 41–42 Eastern European Jews 62, 73, 76, 82, 85–86, 189–95, 201–2, 207 education 129 Egypt 101 Eight Years in Asia and Africa From 1846 to 1855 (Benjamin, I.) 104

Index Eight Years in Asia and Africa (Kayserling) 104 Einhorn, Erin 203–4 electrification process 15 El Mole Rahamim (prayer) 193 emancipation 99, 121–22, 133–37 Emigrantlitteraturen (The Emigrant Literature) (Brandes) 144, 148–49 emigrants/emigration 81, 100 empty space logic 83–84 Encyclopedia Judaica 96 English Jews 30, 33–34 Enlightenment 120–42; America and 128–32; background 120–21; Jews and the boundaries of 135–37; migration and 133–35; Moses Mendelssohn and 121–26; perspectives on 126–28 Enlightenment Underground-Radical Germany, 1680–1720 (Muslow) 154 entities 3 Epiphanius, the 153 equality 130 Essay sur la Physiognomie (Lavater) 146 ethics 124–25 ethnic minorities 65 ethnic pluralism model 167 ethnography 96–99, 108 Euler’s method 17 European Jews 30, 47, 59, 74, 79, 86, 105, 155, 157–58; see also Eastern European Jews; Western Jews Even Sapir (Sapir, D.) 101 Everything Is Illuminated (Foer) 191 evil 155–56 Evsektsiia Jewish agricultural settlement project 59 Exkurs über den Fremden (Simmel) 133 experiences 10–16, 18, 54–55, 57–58 factionalism 80 fate of Man 127 Federal Republic of Germany 65 Feldt, Jacob Egholm 20 Fiddler on the Roof 188 First Crusade 164 First World War 61 Fischel, Walter J. 102 Fischer, Ruth 63 Foer, Jonathan Safran: Everything Is Illuminated 191

217

Frænkel, Louis 13, 27, 35–38, 40–43 Frankl, Ludwig August 101 Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization 19, 73–79, 81–87; see also Jewish Territorial Organization (JTO) Freemasonry 156 French Guiana 75 From Jerusalem, Through Arabia, Koordistan, Part of Persia and India (Hillel) 101–2 Gabirol, Ibn 157 Gambia 189 Geiger, Abraham: Wissenschaft des Judentums 135 gender theory 7 genealogy 189 geography/geographers 16–19, 96, 189 geopolitics 75, 78 German Communist Party (KPD) 61–63 German Democratic Republic 63 German Jews (Jeckes) 67 German rémigrés 64–65 Germany 55–56, 63, 65, 78, 104 German Zionist organization 60 Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (Winckelmann) 145 Gibraltar 97–98 globalization 96, 136, 144 Goebbels, Joseph 61, 63 Goetschel, Willi 122 Goldberg, Chad 128 Gorney, Joseph 57–58 Gospels, the 153 governance 125 Graetz, Heinrich 155 graves 191 Greece 101, 121–22, 125–26, 128 Greenblatt, Stephen 4–5, 9 Groneman, Samy 60 Gruber, Ruth Ellen 204–5; Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe 205 Gulag, the 67 Ha’am, Ahad 13, 59, 129 Haas, Jacob de 33 Ha-boker newspaper 57 Hagana (paramilitary organization) 80 Hague, The 76–77 Haley, Alex: Roots 188–89

218

Index

Halutzim (pioneers) 14 Hannover, Germany 64–65 Harbsmeier, Michael 19–20 ha-Re’uveni, David 99 Hare With Amber Eyes, The (de Waal) 191 Hartmann, Moritz 156 Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) 97–99, 120–21, 125–26 Hebraism 130–31, 165 “Hebraism and Current Tendencies in Philosophy” (Kallen) 131 Hebrew Enlightenment 58 Hebrew language 42, 59, 105, 130 Hebrew University in Jerusalem, The 43 Hebrew Writers’ Association 60 Hefferich, Adolph 108 Hegel, G.W.F. 143–44, 153; “Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal” 146–47, 154 Heine, Heinrich 152–53 Heinrich Heine (Brandes) 152–53 Hellenism 131–32, 144–48 heritage tourism 188–89, 207 Herut party 64 Herwald, Tanhum B. 76 Herzl, Theodor 13, 34, 59, 144; Der Judenstaat 27, 29–30; on the pilgrimage 28, 38–40; “The Return to Palestine” speech 33; and Zangwill 44, 46; and Zionist Congress 129 Heschel, Susannah 135, 145 High Holidays 55 High Middle Ages, the 164–65 Hillel, David D’Beth, Rabbi 107; From Jerusalem, Through Arabia, Koordistan, Part of Persia and India 101–2 Hirsch, Rudolph 175 Historia dei Riti Ebraici, Vita e Osservanze degli Hebrei di Questi Tempi (da Modena) 99 historical Jews 57–58 history: Enlightenment and Jewish cultural 120–26; geopolitical 74; Jewish contributions to 130; pragmatist 3–4; reflection on 54; see also Jewish/Christian relations Hjortshøj, Søren Blak 20 Hödl, Klaus 12–13, 20 Hoffman, Wayne 200–201 Holocaust, the 74, 174, 188–89, 201–2, 204, 206

homecoming, Jewish 34, 36–37, 42, 47, 50n25 homeland, Jewish 33–34, 39, 43 homelessness 81, 84, 132 Hope of Israel, The (Menasseh ben Israel) 99 hospitality, Jewish 104–5 host desecration 164 hostility 172 Hovedstrømningerne i Det Nittende Aarhundredes Europæiske Litteratur (Main Currents in Nineteenth Century European Literature) (Brandes) 143–44, 148 How Jewish Is Jewish History (Rosman) 155 Huizinga, Johan 54 “Human Migration and the Marginal Man” (Park) 133 Humboldt, Alexander v. 108 hybridity 5–11 Ibsen, Henrik 144 ICEM (Intergovernmental Committee on European Migration) 82 identities, Jewish 6, 74, 98, 107 ILGWU (International Ladies Garment Workers Union) 78 Illustrierte Geographie von Nord- und Südamerika journal (Rapp) 109 Immigration 121, 128, 130, 133 immortality of the soul 123 Imperial Eyes (Pratt) 98 improvement (Verbesserung) 122 Incidents of Travel and Adventure in the Far West (Carvalho) 100 Independent Socialist Party (USPD) 61 India 101 Indians 109 indigenous peoples 83–84 Indonesia 78, 87 insularity 96 interethnic associations 169–71, 175–76 Intergovernmental Committee on European Migration (ICEM) 82 intermingling 166, 169, 171–72, 174, 176 internationalism 61–62 International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) 78 International Refugee Organization (IRO) 78 Iron Curtain 188, 204

Index Israel 14, 57, 74–75, 78, 82, 87 Italy, displaced persons camps in 78 ITO see Jewish Territorial Organization (JTO) Jablonka, Ivan 202 Jaffa, Palestine 15, 40–41 James, William 3, 129, 131 Javanese peoples 84 JC (Jewish Chronicle, The) 33 JDC (Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) 80–81 Jeckes (German Jews) 67 Jelinek, Franz 175–76 Jellinek, Adolph 156–57 Jerusalem 43, 45; see also Athens vs. Jerusalem; Athens vs. Jerusalem dichotomy Jerusalem, oder über religöse Macht und Judentum (Mendelssohn) 120, 123–25 Jesus 121, 130, 146, 153–54 JewCol 76 Jewish barbarism 150–51 Jewish Central Committee 81 Jewish century 57 Jewish/Christian relations 164–87; background 164–66; new history of 166–68; similarity concept and 168–70; studies on 170–73; Vienna encounters and 173–76 Jewish Chronicle, The (JC) 33 Jewish cultural history 1–26; background 1–2; geographical reorientation 16–19; from hybrid to performed Jewishness 6–8; and the integrity of experience 10–13; from multicultural to material Jewishness 8–10; overview 19–21; pragmatist approach to 3–4; rethinking 4–5; on Zionist experiences and boundary making 13–16, 46–47 Jewish Culture Festival (Krakow) 203–4 Jewish Disneyland 189 Jewish experience in the twentieth century 54–72; background 54–55; Emmy Scholem 64–65; life/death and the 55–58; Reuben Brainin 58–61; Sabbatai Sevi heirs and the 65–67; Werner Scholem 61–64 Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (the Joint or JDC) 80–81

219

Jewish Labor Bund 80–81 Jewishness/Jews: American 121; assimilation/acculturation and 133, 165–67; and the boundaries of Enlightenment 135; and bourgeois modernity 37–38; Brandes on 150–51, 158; disregard of 167; experiences of 16, 23n49, 29; historical progression of 122–23; Lessing’s views on 125; material 8–10; Mendelssohn’s views on 123–24; migration challenges related to 73; multicultural 3–8; Vienna 173–76 Jewish non-Jews 1, 7, 58, 65–66, 68 Jewish past, the 166 Jewish political (self-)definition 73 Jewish Problem 59 Jewish Quarterly Review, The 168 Jewish question, the 28, 144 Jewish Territorial Organization (JTO) 46, 73; see also Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization Jewish Traveling Cultures and the Competing Visions of Modernity (Roemer) 111 Jewish Western modernity 37–39 Jodensavanne (Jews’ Savanna) 75–76 “Jøderne i Finland” (The Jews in Finland) (Brandes) 151 Johns Hopkins University 77 Joint, the (Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) 80–81 Josephus 153 Joshua 153 Joyce, James: Ulysses 57–58 JTO (Jewish Territorial Organization) 46, 73; see also Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization Judaism: centrality of 130; civil legitimacy of 120; under communism 59; conversion to 65; experiences of 67–68; extrication from Christianity 145; Kant’s views on 123–24, 126–27; modern 19, 58; Orthodox 27, 146–47; pan- 100; Puritan interpretation of 156 Judas 154 Judenparagraph restrictions 173 Judeophobia 165, 170, 173 judgment 126 Jüdische Freischule 98 justice 130, 136, 154–58 Jütte, Daniel 165

220

Index

Kabbalistic Jews 156 Kaczerginski, Izak 79, 81 kaddish 193 Kallen, Horace M. 13, 129–33; “Hebraism and Current Tendencies in Philosophy” 131 Kant, Immanuel 120, 123–24, 126–28, 143 Kantian view 124 Kaplan, Debra 165 Karl Philipp Moritz, publisher 98 Karras, Ruth Mazo 167–68 Katz, Jacob 166 Kayserling, Meyer: Eight Years in Asia and Africa 104 Kazimierz, Poland 189, 202–3 Kehilla New York 133 kibbutzim 80 Kiddush Hashem (martyrdom for God) 56 kitsch 21, 203–4, 207 Klausner, Mimi 199–201 Klein, Jacob 176 klezmer music 203, 205 Knesset 57 knowledge, philosophical 54, 125 Königsberg bridges 17 KPD (German Communist Party) 61–63 Krakow, Poland 201–3 Kultur 127 “Kulturstudien” (Nordau) 110 Kurdistan 107 land offers for settlement 46 landsmanshaft (mutual support association) 192–94 language 42, 59, 105, 130 Lassalle, Ferdinand 156–57 Latour, Bruno 13 Lavater, Johann Caspar 122, 145–46, 148, 151; Essay sur la Physiognomie 146 Lavater affair 122 L’Avenir Fraternel association 191–94 Law, John 10 Law of Return 57 Lazarus, Moritz 144 Lebensgeschichte (Maimon) 98 legibility 7 Lehman, Herbert 81 Lehmann, Matthias 101 Leibnitz-Wolffian tradition 127 Leibowitch, Yetti 195

Lerner, Paul 9 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 122, 125 Levi-Strauss, Claude 135, 137 Levned IIII (Recollections of My Childhood and Youth IIII) (Brandes) 149–51 Lichtenburg concentration camp 63 lifestyles, Jewish 129 literature 130, 133 liturgy 55–56 lodging preferences 175, 182n70 London 27 Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, The(Mendelsohn) 191 Lower East Side (New York) 189 Lueger, Karl 173 Lupu, Marco 195 Luther, Martin 157 Lützen, Karin Cohr 21 Luzzatto, Simone: Discorso circa il stato degli Hebrei et in particolar dimoranti nellinclita città di Venezia 99 Maccabean, The journal 129 Maccabean Club, The 30, 44 Maccabean Pilgrimage to Palestine 27–53; background 27–29; emotions experienced 43–46; itinerary and program of 31; and Jewish unification 34–37, 39–43; and Jewish Western modernity 37–39; planning for the 29–34; political distinctions developed from 46–48 Madagascar 75, 81 Maghreb, the 97–98 Magnus, E. J. 108 Maier, Charles S. 144 Maimon, Salomon: Lebensgeschichte 98 Maimonides 157 Main Currents series 144 Mainz 56, 101 Malinowski, Bronislaw 135 Manin, Daniele 156–57 Mann, Thomas 144 Mapping Jewish Identities (Silberstein, ed.) 6 Marais district (Paris) 189 Marcus, Ivan 56 marginalization 16 marginal man 121, 131, 133–37 marriage certificate 197 Marseilles 164 martyrdom, Jewish 55–56

Index Marx, Karl 61, 156–57 Marxism 66 Massā’ Ba’rāv (Travail in Arab Land) (Romanelli) 97–98 mass production 128 master/Superman morality 147 material and consumption studies 9, 22n25 Mazel, Aron 201 Mead, George Herbert 129 meaningful contacts 171–76 Mechullam da Volterra 99 Menaces, Baron 38 Menasseh ben Israel: The Hope of Israel 99 Mendelsohn, Daniel: Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, The 191 Mendelssohn, Moses 120–28, 136, 145–46, 148; Jerusalem, oder über religöse Macht und Judentum 120, 123–25; Phaidon 145–46; “What is Enlightenment?” 120 Menorah Journal 129 Menorah Society 133 meshulach (rabbinical emissary) 101 Mesler, Katelyn 167–68 messianism 66, 130 micro-publics 172–73, 175 migration/migrants 128–29, 133–34, 137, 173, 181n55 migration politics 73, 82, 87 Mikveh Israel 41 milk and honey 41–42 Mill, Stuart 144 Miller, Daniel 9 minoritarianism 126 minorities 130, 133 minyan 193 Mishmar colony 59 Mishre, Sewraam Rambaran 85 mobility 28–29, 39, 41–43, 128, 134 Modena, Leone da: Historia dei Riti Ebraici, Vita e Osservanze degli Hebrei di Questi Tempi 99 Modern Breakthrough project 144 modernization 121 monotheism 130 Montefiore, Sir Moses 106 Montezinos, Antonio de 99 morality 123, 147 Mormons 100, 109 Morocco 97–98 Moschkowitsch, Weiner 175 Moutet, Marius 83

221

Muhr, Fannie 35–36, 38, 40 Mulsow, Martin: Enlightenment Underground—Radical Germany, 1680–1720 154 multiculturalism 3–9, 120 Munich 63 Museum of Technical Science (Munich) 63 Muslims 78, 110 mutation 132 mutual support associations 191–94 natality 54 nation, the 130 nationalism 7, 30, 46, 73–74, 129, 152, 158 National Socialism (Nazi) 55, 61, 63, 65 nationhood, Jewish 39, 42–44 Native Americans 100 Nazarenes 152–54, 161n48 Nazareth 153 Nazi (National Socialism) 55, 61, 63, 65 Nestorian Christians 107 Netherlands, the 76, 78, 86 Neue Freie Presse (newspaper) 144 Neumann, Boaz 14 new history of Jews 166–68 New Jewish Identity for Post-1989 Europe, A (Pinto) 204 newness 132 New Orleans 109 New School in New York, The 128–29 New Skin for the Old Ceremony (Cohen) 56–57 New World 108–9 New Zealand 100 Nietzsche, Friedrich 143–44, 147–48, 151, 155–57, 160n25 night of the long knives 62 nihilism 156 Noah, Mordecai: Travels in England, France, Spain, and the Barbary States in the Years 1813–14 and 1815 100 non-Zionists 29, 46, 68, 73, 77, 79–81 Nordau, Max 44, 59, 129; “Kulturstudien” 110; Vom Kreml bis zur Alhambra 110 obedience 126 Oifn Shvel periodical 79

222

Index

Old Testament 151–53, 155–56 Old World 144, 149 organizations, Jewish 133 Orient, the 40, 103–9 Orientalism (Said) 98 Origin of Species, The (Darwin) 131–32 Orthodox Judaism 27, 146–47 Orthodox Mizrahi 79 Ostjudendebatte of 1922/1923 62 otherness 11, 98, 123, 164–65, 171–72, 205 Ottoman Empire 101–2 outsiders 62 pacifism 129 Pale, studies of the 16 Palestine 106; Baron Rothschild vision for 37–38; Cook’s tours of 32, 38; and the end of unity 39–43; Jewish attachment to 74; Jewish experience in 13–16, 44, 106; partition vote 77; pilgrimage to 27, 48n1; resettlement of 74 pan-Judaism 100 pantheism controversy 127 Paramaribo, Suriname 76 paramilitary organization (Hagana) 80 Paris 190–95 Park, Robert Ezra 134, 136; “Human Migration and the Marginal Man” 133 part-time Jews 67 passing, concept of 7 PCIRO (Preparatory Commission for the IRO) 81 Peirce, Charles Sanders 129 people’s tribunal (Volksgerichtshof) 63 perceptions 55 performed Jewishness 6–8 Persia 106, 114n45 Phaidra (Mendelssohn) 145–46 philanthropy 101, 108–9 philhellenism 145 Philo 157 philo-semitism 205 philosophy/philosophers 129, 143, 147, 157–58 physiognomy 146 Pietism 156 pilgrimage see Maccabean Pilgrimage to Palestine pilgrims 34–36, 50n19 Pinson, Koppel 80

Pinto, Diana: A New Jewish Identity for Post-1989 Europe 204 pioneers (Halutzim) 14 piyyut (liturgical poem) 55–56 Plato 157 Plock, Poland 200 pluralism 73, 120, 124–25, 133 pogroms 59 Poland 98, 203, 206 politics 45, 73, 80, 129, 136 Pollack, Joel Samuel 100 Portugal 104 Portuguese Conquests and Discoveries With Respect to the Jews, The (Teixeiro) 104 postcolonialism 73–75, 78, 98 post-Holocaust paradigm 174 pragmatism/pragmatists 3–4, 73, 129, 131–33, 137 Pratt, Mary Louise: Imperial Eyes 98 prayer (Unetanneh tokef) 55–56 prejudices 82, 84, 169, 171–72; see also antisemitism Preparatory Commission for the IRO (PCIRO) 81 presents 3 private-public axis 126–27 Progress in Human Geography 172 Progressive Surinamese Peoples Party 84–85 promised land, the 130 propaganda 65, 80 prophets 130 Protestant movements 156 proto-boundaries 29 proximity 172 public spaces 172 purification 124 rabbinical emissary (meshulach) 101 racial turn 167 Rapp, Wilhelm: Illustrierte Geographie von Nord- und Südamerika journal 109 Raptschinsky, Boris 76–77 reality 4 real-life applications 172 reason 123 reconstruction, Jewish 20–21, 129–31, 133–34, 136–37 refugees 74, 76 Reichstag 61–64

Index religion 123, 125, 129–30 Renaissance, the 157 Renan, Ernst 143–44 representations, Greek vs Jewish 121 residential patterns 174 residential segregation 174 respect 43, 105, 170, 172, 181n53 Reszke, Katka: Return of the Jew: Identity Narratives of the Third Post-Holocaust Generation of Jews in Poland 206 “Return to Palestine, The” speech (Herzl) 33 Reuveni, Gideon 9 revolutionary movements 66 righteousness, ideal of 156 Ritter, Carl 108 ritual murder 164, 170 Rochelson, Mari-Jane 44 Roemer, Nils: Jewish Traveling Cultures and the Competing Visions of Modernity 111 Roman Catholicism 56 Romanelli, Samuel: Massā’ Ba’rāv (Travail in Arab Land) 97–98 Romania 195–99 Romanian National Archives 194 Rome 122, 145 Roots (Haley) 188 roots tourism: other destinations 199–202; in Paris 190–95; to Romania 195–99; Yiddish revival and 202–7 Rosman, Moshe 1, 4, 6, 16–17; How Jewish Is Jewish History? 155 Rothschild, Baron Eduard 37–38 Rubinstein, Rachel 100 Rürup, Reinhard 148 Russia 58–61 Sagnet om Jesus (The legend of Jesus) (Brandes) 153–54 Said, Edward 40; Orientalism 98 Saint-Simonianism 156 Salah, Asher 98 “sapere aude” (dare to know) 126 Saphir, David: Even Sapir 101 Saphir, Jacob 101–2 Saramacca plan 73–78, 82–87 Schermerhorn, Willem 76 Schindler’s List (film) (Spielberg) 189 Schlör, Joachim 202 Schmidt, James 126–27 Scholem, Arthur 61

223

Scholem, Emmy 19, 58, 64–65, 67–68 Scholem, Gershom 57–58, 61–62, 65–68 Scholem, Werner 19, 58, 61–64, 67–68 Schönfeld, Samuel 175, 182n69 science 130 Scott, Joan W. 11 Second World War 74–76, 87 secularism 58, 130 sedentarism 34, 128, 133 Sefer ha-Masa’ot (Benjamin of Tudela) 99 segregation 133, 171, 174 self-abnegation 156 sentiments 169 Sephardic Jews 154 settlements 76–77, 81, 83, 100 Sevi, Sabbatai 65–67 Sforim, Mendele Moicher (Benjamin III): “Jewish Don Quijote” 110 Shamir, Ronen 15 Shanghai 86 Shanks, Michael 3 “She’erit Hapletah” group 79 Shepherd’s Hotel, Cairo 38 Shields, Rob 18 Shoa, the 74, 79 Siegel, Ada 82 Silberstein, Laurence J.: Mapping Jewish Identities, ed. 6 Silverman, Ida 77 Silverman, Lisa 6–8 similarity concept 168–70, 179n33 Simmel, Georg 128, 134; Exkurs über den Fremden 133 Sjoe, J.E. Ho A. 85 slave morality 147–48, 151, 155–57 slavery 74–76, 84 Slezkine, Yuri 57–58 Smail, Daniel Lord 164 Smith, John 109 Smith, William B. 153 social groups 28–29 socialism 79, 156 socializing 170, 172, 174–75 social justice 129–30 social thought/thinkers 128, 133–34 Society of the Jews, The 30 sociology/sociologists 128–29, 133, 137 Socrates 157 soul, the 123 Soviet Jewish settlement projects 60 Soviet Union 59–60, 64, 188, 199–202

224

Index

space 16–19, 27, 36–37, 56–57, 62, 169, 172, 204 Speyer 164 Spielberg, Steven: Schindler’s List (film) 189 Spinoza, Baruch 130; TheologicalPolitical Treatise 157 spirit 123 spontaneous generation 132 Stalin, Joseph 62 Stalinism 55, 60 statehood, Jewish 28–30, 48n5 Staten van Suriname (legislative body) 76–78, 84 Steinberg, Isaac 76–77, 83, 87 stereotypes 62, 85, 148 Steyr, Austria 79 Stonequest, Everett 134 Strochlic, Nina 201–2 structuralist anthropology 135 suicide 56 Superman morality 147, 151 Suriname, Territorialist project in 73–95; decolonization of 82–86; displaced persons in 78–82; Freeland League and Saramacca Plan for 75–78; history of 75–76; Jewish population in 74–75 “Suriname Affair,” the 81 Suriname Mine Workers Union 85 Surinamese Department of Social Affairs 84 Surinamese Muslim Party 85 surplus populations 82; see also refugees survival of the fit 132 Süss, Julius 175 Sutcliffe, Adam 154 Swellengrebel-Vink-Dyk Committee 76 synagogues 102 Syria 101 Talmon, Jacob 66 Talmud, the 153 Tanakh, books of the 155 Tartar Memoir of a Voyage to Europe (Vambéry) 110 task (Bestimmung) 127 Tchernichovsky, Saul 59 Teixeiro, Pedro de: The Portuguese Conquests and Discoveries With Respect to the Jews 104 Tel Aviv 15 Tel Chai colony 59 ten lost tribes 102, 107

Territorialism 46; see also Suriname, Territorialist project in Teter, Magda 165 Theological-Political Treatise (Spinoza) 157 things and concepts 124 time and space: organization of 12 tolerance 164, 172, 180–81n46 Tolstoy, Leo 156 tombstones 192, 199 topologies 2, 17–18, 21n6, 73, 75, 127 totalitarianism 80 totemism 135, 137 tourism 188–211 Touro, Judah 109 traditions 102, 104, 154–55 transgeographical themes 75 transnationalism 121, 133 Travail in Arab Land (Massā’ Ba’rāv) (Romanelli) 97–98 travel books, autoethnographical 191 Travels in England, France, Spain, and the Barbary States in the Years 1813–14 and 1815 (Noah) 100 travels/travelers 27–28, 34–35, 39, 46, 50n18, 81; see also cosmopolitanism Trotskyites 62–63 truth 3, 44, 122, 124–25 Turkey 101 Turner, Victor 36 Uganda offer 75 Ukraine 60, 202 Ulysses (Joyce) 57–58 Unetanneh tokef (prayer) 55–56 unification, Jewish 29–37, 39–43 unique genius of the Jewish people 129–30 United Nations 77, 80 United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) 81 United States of America 108–9, 128–32 universalism 123–25, 135 University of Chicago 128–29 unpredictability 54 UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) 81 urban life 129 Urkristendommen (Early Christianity) (Brandes) 153–54 USPD (Independent Socialist Party) 61 utopias 60–61, 66

Index Valentine, Gill 172 values 120, 129, 136, 147 Vambéry, Arminius: Tartar Memoir of a Voyage to Europe 110 Van Leeuwen, Henri 76 Velizh, Russia 170 Venice 99 Verbesserung (improvement) 122 Vienna 12, 81, 101, 173–76 Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe (Gruber) 205 Visigoths 164 Vitebsk, Russia 58 Volksgerichtshof (people’s tribunal) 63 Vom Kreml bis zur Alhambra (Nordau) 110 von Dohm, Christian Wilhelm 122 von Hammerstein, Marie-Luise 63 Voß, Rebekka 168 Wallach, Kerry 6–7 Waller, E. Th. L. (Thomas) 85 wandering Jew, The (Der Ewige Jude) 63 Waterman, Heinrich 108 Wednesday Society 127 Weimar Germany 7 Weimar Republic 61 Weltaneignung (appropriating the world) 54 Western civilization 131, 143–45, 148, 152–55, 158, 159n1 Western Jews 27–28, 31, 38–41, 44–48 West Germany 63 “What is Enlightenment?” (Mendelssohn) 120 “Who by fire, who by water?” liturgal text 56

225

“Who is a Jew?” (Ben-Gurion) 57 Wijngaarde, Percy 85 Winckelmann, J. J. 144–45; Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums 145 Wise, Stephen 77 Wissenschaft des Judentums (Geiger) 96, 135 Wobick-Segev, Sarah 9 women 109, 165, 193–94 word and script 124 World Jewish Congress 65 worldview 130–31 Worms 164 Yemen 101 Yiddishland see roots tourism Yiddish language and culture 60 Zadoff, Mirjam 19 Zalman, Shneour 58 Zangwill, Israel 34, 44–46, 75; Children of the Ghetto 44; MeltingPot, The (Zangwill) 130; The Melting-Pot 130 Zionism/Zionists: American 129–32; Brainin and 59; descriptions of 4, 13–16; Herzl and 29–30; idea of 30; political 33, 74; questions about 28, 44, 49n6; and Territorialism 76–80, 86–87; Zangwill and 46 Zionist Congress, first (Basle, August 1897) 28, 129 Zionist European 59 Zionist Organisation (ZO) 28, 43, 46 Zionist Organization of America 58 Zuckerman, Maja Gildin 19 Zunz, Leopold 96, 100