Journal articles: 'Jewish neighbours' – Grafiati (2024)

Abstract:

This article examines Arabic instruction in Israeli Hebrew schools with regard to the political, social, cultural, historical and pedagogical issues shaping it. It examines challenges facing Arabic instruction in Israel's education system, emphasising the dissonance between potential benefits of studying Arabic and its overall marginalised status in Israel. This article argues that that the main factors shaping Arabic instruction in Israeli-Jewish schools since 1948 are official security considerations and security claims — Arabic is studied as the language of the enemy and not the neighbour. A radical policy shift is required to ‘civilianise’ and demilitarise Arabic instruction and transform it into a bridge for understanding between Israeli-Jews, Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel, in particular, the Palestinians, in general, as well as Israel's Arab neighbours in the Middle East.

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Henry Ellis Daniels was born in London in 1912, the second child of a Jewish family that had come from the Russian territories of Poland and Lithuania as refugees from the pogroms there. His father's family had come from Poland to London, whereas his mother's were Litvak Jews who had arrived in Scotland; the herring boats that sold fish to the Baltic ports returned with many immigrants to Leith. When Henry was two years old, at the time of the Zeppelin raids on London, the family moved to Edinburgh to join the branch there. The life of the Jewish community in Edinburgh at that time is described by Daiches (1971), whose family were neighbours.

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THROUGHOUT THIS CENTURY, THE STRUGGLE FOR AND consolidation of Jewish territorial sovereignty in the ancient Land of Israel has been characterized by two complementary processes: waves of Jewish immigration from throughout the diaspora, and a succession of violent conflicts with Israel's Arab neighbours. Both of those processes were at work during 1990 — 91 when Israel became reluctantly involved in the Gulf war while also having to cope with an influx of hundreds of thousands of Jews seeking escape from the crumbling Soviet empire, as well as a few thousand emigrants from Ethiopia and from South America. For many Israelis, the surrealistic spectacle of immigrants being greeted at Ben-Gurion Airport with gas-masks designed to protect them from the Iraqi Scud missiles raining down on major Israeli cities, represented highly dramatic evidence of the fulfilment of Zionism's aspirations.

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This article analyses the function and symbolic currency of Poland’s recent literary and artistic motif of the returning Jew, which brings the nation’s Jewish Holocaust victims back to their homes as ghosts, spectres and reanimated corpses. It explores the ability of this trope—the defining feature of what I call ‘Polish Holocaust horror’—to cultivate the memory of complicitous and collaborative Polish behaviour during the Holocaust years, and to promote renewed Polish-Jewish relations based upon a working-through of this difficult history. In the article I explore Władysław Pasikowski’s 2012 film Aftermath as a self-reflexive product of this experimental genre, which has been considered ethically ambiguous for its necropolitical treatment of Jews and politically controversial for its depiction of Poles as perpetrators. My analysis examines haunting as central to these popular cultural constructions of Holocaust memory—a device that has been used within the genre to mourn but also expel guilt for the previously forgotten or supressed dispossession and murder of Jews by some of their Polish neighbours.

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The subject of Jews as slave owners and traders throughout history received much greater attention in the last few decades. But there is no research that focuses on the Persian and Hellenistic periods and their relevant findings. This current article hopes to do exactly that. This article shows that Jews owned slaves and even traded them throughout the Persian period and during the Hellenistic period until the rise of the Hasmonean Kingdom. The slaves themselves were not only gentiles but also Jews, who received no special treat-ment from their co-religionists. Regarding the ownership of slaves, it was found that each Jewish owner treated his slaves differently, showing a huge gap between the biblical laws on the matter and the reality. The different texts and finds brought here are a testimony to the disregard of the Biblical laws on slaves, and the subsequent similarity between the Jews and their gentile neighbours in both ownership and trade of slaves.

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Once upon a time, probably in the first half of the seventeenth century, David Curiel, a prominent member of the Amsterdam Sephardi community, was attacked by a German robber. Although seriously wounded, Curiel managed to overcome his attacker with the help of his Christian neighbours. The robber was tried and sentenced. After his execution, the States of Holland sent Curiel a letter expressing their regret at the incident and inviting him to witness the medical lesson on the corpse of the robber in the anatomical theatre of Leiden University. This legend has been handed down in at least five different manuscripts, preserved in Jewish libraries. It was probably read at the feast of Purim, which, of course, commemorates an earlier attack on the Jews and the spectacular destruction of their enemy.

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The files of the Ciechanów (Zichenau) Gestapo – one of the few remaining archives of this kind from German-occupied Poland – offer interesting insights into the social policy of the Nazi state. The Germanisation of Polish territories occurred by deporting and exterminating the Jews, depriving Poles of their rights and supporting the local Germans and the ethnic Germans resettled from the East. The German minority living in this ethnically mixed region was required to adhere to strict codes of behaviour and was held accountable for all unauthorised contacts with their Polish and, even more so, their Jewish neighbours. The system of control and repression strove to isolate the various ethnic (‘racial’) groups, encouraging denunciations and thus instilling fear in the populace. This article pays particular attention to the actions of German citizens who fell under the scrutiny of the Secret Police.

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As is well known, Islam arose in Arabia, which, alongside the pagan Communities, had a large number of tribes and groups which professed Judaism and Christianity. So far as we know, the relations between the Jews and Christians and their Arab neighbours in pre-Islamic times were cordial, or were not at any rate adversely affected by differences of faith. In its self-view Islam represented both a continuation and a supersession of the two earlier Semitic faiths. The Jewish Gospel as well as the New Testament had originally represented divine messages, and so those who follow them were ‘People of the Book’, to be distinguished from the ‘Infidels’. But the Gospel texts, the Quran itself had claimed, had suffered from unauthorized deletions and insertions; and this claim, of course, created a fundamental point of disagreement between the Muslims, on the one hand, and the Jews and Christians on the other. Nonetheless, early Muslims seemed fairly well familiar with both the earlier Semitic religions.

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There are three good reasons at the present time to try to arrive at an historical model to explain the development of anti-Jewish stereotyping and prejudice, and in this way, provided it is worked out at a sufficiently high level of abstraction, at an historical model of racism.Thefirstreason is that both the Netherlands and its neighbours are increasingly faced with racism and that for a good line of action it is necessary to collect all kinds of knowledge. Moreover, it is desirable that historians prove willing to co-operate by making their particular contribution to this collection of knowledge. Thesecondreason is that in contemporary thinking about history a tendency seems to have made itself felt that considers the narrative element of history as the only true activity of the historian, so that a hypothetical-deductive, one might say Popperian, approach to the past seems to be wrong. Although I do not want to enter into a methodological discussion, which I am glad to leave to my friend P. H. H. Vries, who has very capably formulated a point of view that I subscribe to, my intention is to show the usefulness of an abstract, partially mathematical, model in this article. By the way, in the framework of an article it is impossible to present an extensive test of the predictions of the model by means of source material. It can only be hinted at. This article is not non-narrative because I want it to be non-narrative, but because of lack of space. A full exposition would need a book. I shall only present in summary what I hope is the logical argument that lies at the basis of the model.

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A New tale entered the circle of commonplace narratives about Jews which were known to men and women in the thirteenth century: the tale of Host desecration. This new narrative habitually unfolded (i) an attempt by a Jewish man to procure (buy, steal, exchange) a consecrated Host in order to (2) abuse it (in re-enactment of the Passion, in ridicule of bread claimed to be God), (3) only to be found out through a miraculous manifestation of the abused Host, which leads to (4) punishment (arrest and torture unto death, lynching by a crowd). The tale was a robust morality story about transgression and its punishment, and it always ended with the annihilation of the abusing Jew and often of his family, neighbours, or the whole local Jewish community. It was a bloody story, both in the cruelty inflicted on the Host/God and in the tragic end of the accused abuser and those related to him. This basic narrative was open to myriad interpretations and combinations, elaborations at every stage of its telling. It is a particularly interesting narrative inasmuch as it was often removed from the context of preaching and teaching, of exemplification, into the world of action and choice. The Host-desecration tale was not only a poignant story about Jews, it was also a blueprint for action whenever the circ*mstances of abuse suggested themselves in the lives of those who were reared on the tale. The story’s fictionality was masked from the very beginning of its life: it was always told as a report about a real event, with no irony or explicit elaboration. It was a concrete, new tale, which provided tangible knowledge about Jews, and through the actions of Jews, about the Eucharist.

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Productions, adaptations and spinoffs of The Merchant of Venice since 1945 generally employ one of four strategies: continuing, historicizing, decentring and universalizing. Continuing means following nineteenth-century English productions in making Shylock a sympathetic outsider. Immigrant Shylocks still appear on English-speaking stages, but often seem sentimentalized and anachronistic. Historicizing means making the play reflect historical circ*mstances, such as the Holocaust, so that Shylock, however sharp-edged, automatically attracts sympathy. Decentring means making Jessica’s story at least as important as Shylock’s. Many recent productions and prose adaptations explore Jessica’s plight as immigrant’s daughter, belle juive, forlorn wife or remorseful child. Universalizing means mapping the play’s Jewish-Christian conflict onto other racial, religious or ethnic antagonisms, as in The Merchant ON Venice, about a Muslim ‘Shylock’ and his Hindu neighbours in Los Angeles.

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ABSTRACTThis article evaluates the presence of Muslim communities in the Kingdom of Navarre in the late Middle Ages. Following the Christian Reconquest of the Navarrese bank of the Ebro in 1119, a sizeable Muslim community remained in Christian territory until 1516. This article focuses on the fifteenth century, a period for which religious coexistence in the smallest of the Iberian Christian kingdoms is in need of further contextualisation. An analysis of existing scholarship and new archival evidence throws light on the economic activities of the Muslims in Tudela as well as on their relationship with the Navarrese monarchy, their collective identity, their legal systems and their relationships not only with their Christian and Jewish neighbours, but also with other Iberian Muslim communities including those of Al Andalus, or Moorish Iberia.

Abstract:

Abstract Productions, adaptations and spinoffs of The Merchant of Venice since 1945 generally employ one of four strategies: continuing, historicizing, decentring and universalizing. Continuing means following nineteenth-century English productions in making Shylock a sympathetic outsider. Immigrant Shylocks still appear on English-speaking stages, but often seem sentimentalized and anachronistic. Historicizing means making the play reflect historical circ*mstances, such as the Holocaust, so that Shylock, however sharp-edged, automatically attracts sympathy. Decentring means making Jessica’s story at least as important as Shylock’s. Many recent productions and prose adaptations explore Jessica’s plight as immigrant’s daughter, belle juive, forlorn wife or remorseful child. Universalizing means mapping the play’s Jewish-Christian conflict onto other racial, religious or ethnic antagonisms, as in The Merchant ON Venice, about a Muslim ‘Shylock’ and his Hindu neighbours in Los Angeles.

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AbstractFew months after the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada, Safar al-Hawālī, one of the most prominent and controversial Islamic scholars of Saudi Arabia, published his book Yawm al-gadab, "The Day of Wrath", which has enjoyed a wide readership both for its Arabic and English versions in the internet. Engaging with the current wave of Christian and Jewish apocalyptical literature, he challenges the widespread view that the biblical prophecies predict the final victory of the Israel over its neighbours. The book claims that, quite to the contrary, they can be read as indications of the violent end of that state and its allies. The article analyses Safar al-Hawālī's unusually close reading of the Bible which even transfers the biblical promises of return to the Palestinians. His fierce accusations against Israel and the U.S.A., which are orchestrated with extensive quotes from the biblical Prophets, testify to a new stage of the sacralisation of political language in the Middle East.

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The Jewish Tandelmarkt in Prague's Old Town was a nonresidential Jewish exclave, situated outside of Prague's Jewish Town. This thriving marketplace afforded Jewish merchants and peddlers an opportunity to ply their wares in the Old Town, but it also left them unprotected in the face of physical and verbal attacks. This article examines memoirs, travelogues, guidebooks, newspapers, novels, and visual images to understand how the Tandelmarkt (junk market) functioned in various discourses about Prague Jewry, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jews were vulnerable and exposed in the Tandelmarkt, but the centrality and visibility of this marketplace also allowed non-Jews to observe their “exotic” Jewish neighbors. A nineteenth-century novelist described the Tandelmarkt as a “theater” where passersby could “lose themselves” for half an hour in its disarray and commotion. At times it was a theater of violence, where Jews fell victim to attack. It was also a theater of emancipation, where Jews could show their Christian neighbors that they were capable of self-improvement and change.

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AbstractRecurrences of ancient ship carvings and drawings in Jewish burial caves are curious phenomena, which rarely capture the attention of scholars. Few narrative Jewish texts, which might otherwise illuminate this pattern, explicitly describe any link between ships and death. The ubiquity of nautical images in graffiti and monumental art throughout the ancient Mediterranean, moreover, obscures their particular significance in any mortuary context, whether associated with Jews or their neighbors. This article suggests that consistent appearances of ship imagery in Jewish burial contexts throughout time and across distant regions, attest to the varied iconographic and ideational significances of ships to Jews within mortuary settings. Cross-cultural similarities between acts of drawing, carving, and commissioning ship images inside and around commemorative spaces, this article argues further, document corresponding continuities between the mortuary activities and beliefs of Jews and their Egyptian, Greco-Roman, and Christian neighbors throughout the ancient Mediterranean.

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This paper reports a study of the complex associations between older people's participation in activities and their wellbeing in later life using data from a national sample of 1,334 Jewish-Israeli retirees. Confirmatory factor analysis substantiated a division of the activities into solitary, formal and informal categories, as postulated by activity theory. The outcome measure, the latent construct wellbeing, was compiled from scores on the 12-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12), a global measure of life satisfaction, and a measure of satisfaction with the use of time. The analysis also examined the influence of socio-economic status, health status and the quality of inter-personal relationships. ‘Social relationship quality’, also a latent construct, was a composite of measures of satisfaction with children, friends and neighbours and a self-rated loneliness scale. Path analysis using structural equation modelling was employed. The results showed that when the quality of social relationships was taken into account, the amount of activity had no independent effect on the respondents' wellbeing. Moreover, it was social relationship quality, a facet of informal activity that has generally been neglected in activity research, that emerged as the most influential variable in the association between activity and wellbeing. Thus, the findings provide empirical backing for the assertion that the quality of social ties matters more than activity participation per se as predictors of a good old age.

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In this forum on Neighbors by Jan T. Gross (Princeton, 2001), four scholars respond to the book and to the issues of evidence, causality, and interpretation that it raises. Janine P. Holc summarizes the contents and the book's approach and explores the roles of individual choice, on the one hand, and ethnic identity categories, on the other, in Gross's presentation of the causes of the massacre of the Jewish residents of Jedwabne by their non-Jewish neighbors. She argues for an approach to reading Neighbors that links the emotive mode in which some of the narrative is expressed to a productive engagement with traumatic or violent historical episodes. This type of history resists finality and closure and creates an avenue for active engagement by members of ethnic (or other) communities with violent and traumatic pasts. Wojciech Roszkowski discusses three aspects of the debate on Neighbors in Poland: the credibility of the book, the facts of 10 July 1941 and their moral meaning, and the representativeness of the Jedwabne case and the question of “innocence” or “guilt” of nations. While arguing that the credibility of Neighbors is low and that Gross's thesis that “one half of the Jedwabne inhabitants killed the other half” has not been proven, he writes that it is impossible to deny Polish participation in the massacre. Yet, as with other documented cases of Polish wartime evildoing, it is unfair to blow this incident out of proportion and produce unwarranted generalizations. Past and present realities are always more complicated than simple stereotypes that “Poles” or “Jews” are to blame or that they have always been innocent. William W. Hagen argues that Gross vacillates between a robust positivism promising that “a reconstruction” of “what actually took place” is possible, such that guilt and motive may confidently be assigned, and an interpretive pessimism suggesting that “we will never 'understand' why it happened.” In his assignment of causality, Gross offers a largely unconnected, in part inferential or speculative, array of determinants and motives. Although some of the causes Gross adduces are certainly persuasive, his analysis does not address the Jedwabne perpetrators' and witnesses' perception of the cultural meaning of the inhuman violence their Jewish neighbors were suffering. Hagen offers some suggestive historical evidence on the Poles' subjective response to the Jewish genocide and to their own wartime fate, arguing that the Jedwabne Poles' participation in the mass murder of the Jews must be conceived as a response, mediated by the penetration of ideological anti-Semitism into the countryside, to profound anxiety over the individual and social death menacing Polish identity under Soviet and Nazi occupation. Norman M. Naimark argues that the appearance of Gross's Neighbors has created an entirely new dimension to the historiography of World War II in Poland. The book demonstrated, as has no other work, the extent to which the Poles were directly involved in the genocide of the Jews. The clarity and force of Gross's presentation provides Polish historiography with an unprecedented opportunity “to come to terms with the past.” The essay also suggests that the Jedwabne massacre needs to be looked at in the context of overall German policy “in the east” and in comparison to similar horrors taking place roughly at the same time in Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, and Latvia. The Nazis intentionally (and surreptitiously) sought to incite pogroms in the region, filming and photographing the horrific events for audiences back home. Their own propaganda about the “Jewish-Bolshevik” menace both prompted and was ostensibly confirmed by the pogroms. In his response, Jan T. Gross replies to Roszkowski's criticism concerning historical credibility.

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Herodas' Mimiamb 7 has often attracted scholarly attention on account of its thematic preoccupation with the sexuality of ordinary people, thus offering a realistic and exciting glimpse of everyday life in the eastern Mediterranean of the third century b.c.e. In addition, his obscure reference in lines 62–3 to the obsession of women and dogs with dild*s has been the focus of long-standing scholarly debate: while most scholars agree that the verses employ a metaphor, possibly of obscene nature, their exact meaning is still to be clarified. In response, this article offers an additional paradigm which stresses the cultural osmosis between the Greeks and their eastern neighbours in the Hellenistic period; in my view, Herodas' peculiar choice of expression could be explained more aptly through this hitherto unnoticed perspective. Despite having frustratingly little information about the poet and his life, his familiarity with the Hellenistic East is often implied in his poetic settings: for example, Cos in Mimiamb 2 and probably locations in Asia Minor in Mimiambs 6 and 7 are considered likely to reflect the places where he lived. Hence, it is reasonable to assume that Herodas spent periods of his life in areas of the eastern Aegean where cultural interaction was practically unavoidable. Moreover, his first poem exhibits a certain amount of knowledge and admiration for Ptolemaic Egypt and, although this does not necessarily mean that he lived there, he must have been very familiar with Alexandria and its erudite circles. After all, Herodas, a contemporary of Theocritus who subscribed to his preference for short, elegant poetic forms, shared the latter's interest in the lowly mime, which both of them invested with learned language. Thus, specific motifs, such as the visit of an abandoned mistress to the witches in a desperate attempt to coax back a cruel lover, are treated by both poets and ultimately derive from the literary corpus of mimes by the influential Sophron. Theocritus was also familiar with locations in Cos, an island that appears to have been culturally diverse. One of the foreign communities that increasingly made its presence felt in third-century b.c.e. Asia Minor and the nearby islands of the eastern Aegean was that of the Jews, although the history of particular communities is often difficult to recover. Nevertheless, we do know that as early as the third century b.c.e. ‘various Jewish authors writing in Greek had adopted the prevailing patterns of Greek literature in its many forms, filling them with Jewish content’. The Jews had a prominent and well-documented presence at Alexandria, where their interaction with the Greeks was promoted by the Ptolemies. There, already by the middle of the third century b.c.e., the Pentateuch (the Hebrew Torah) had been translated into Koine Greek by royal request, which probably indicates a sizeable community able to participate dynamically in the cultural interface of Ptolemaic Alexandria. In the following pages, I shall revisit the past interpretations of the aforementioned verses in Mimiamb 7 before arguing that the key to their understanding lies in the interaction of the Greeks with near eastern cultures, particularly the Jews, who seemed to have employed a distinctive metaphor about ‘dogs’ and their perceived sexual habits.

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A time there was when it was de rigueur for the self-respecting English composer to sample the life and art of our Germanic neighbours. A little time in the Land der Musik, it seemed, might help them make their own a little less ohne. Elgar supped at the springs in the Bavarian Highlands; Sullivan, Stanford and others in the Leipzig low-lands. It remains perplexing to the German mind that a reference to the ‘Frankfurt School’ in conversation with an Englishman can elicit praise for Percy Grainger, Roger Quilter and Co., but not a word about Adorno. Even Britten would have studied with Alban Berg, had the RCM not declared him ‘immoral’, thus forcing Ben to seek out immorality closer to home. To be sure, the rise of National Socialism reversed the tide for a while (the present writer is typical of his generation in that he owes the quality of his musical education to German-Jewish émigrés). But Gemiania proves today as seductive as ever to the English. Thanks to better pay and employment prospects, our finest graduates are regularly lured across the water to join their countrymen in maintaining the high standards of provincial German opera houses and orchestras. Our composers might on the whole be not as popular; but mentioning the name of Brian Ferneyhough still elicits the same mixture of awe, reverence and enthusiasm in German conservatories and radio studios as would a reference to the Pope in Cracow or to David Beckham at Old Trafford.

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Abstract This study of the afterlife of “abandoned” Jewish property in National Socialist Germany analyzes the emotional impact on Jewish families of the loss of personal belongings, and those belongings’ emotional impact on the Gentile families that acquired them. This property could be movable and intimate: jewelry, furniture, porcelain, and the like; as well as immovable: apartments and houses illegitimately wrested from their residents or owners. The author asks how Gentiles’ behavior changed in relation to the escalating Holocaust of the Jews. She argues that the reactions of both ordinary Germans and government authorities changed when the mass deportations started, indicating that non-Jewish Germans were very much aware of the experience of their Jewish neighbors.

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This article explores the associational life of late imperial Kiev to gauge the extent of Jewish participation in the city's civil society and the nature of interethnic relations in the voluntary sphere. Natan Meir demonstrates that, despite political and societal circ*mstances that often discouraged positive interactions between Jews and their Russian and Ukrainian neighbors, the voluntary association made possible opportunities for constructive interethnic encounters. These opportunities included a range of experiences from full Jewish integration to a segregation of Jewish interests within the sphere of activity of a particular association. While taking into account the central role of intergroup tensions and hostility in Kiev, Meir notes that the frequency of contacts between Jews and non-Jews was higher than most scholars have assumed. By placing the case of Kiev against the larger framework of the Russian empire as well as other European states, Meir contributes to our understanding of the development of late imperial civil society and of the modern Jewish experience in the late Russian empire and across urban Europe.

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Studies of Jewish-Christian relations in the nineteenth century have largely centered on anti-Semitism, missionary endeavors, and processes of Protestantization. In this literature, Jews and Judaism are presented as radically separate from Christians and Christianity, which threaten them, either by reinforcing their difference or by diminishing it, whether as a deliberate project or as an unconscious outcome of pressure or attraction. And yet, Jews and Christians interacted with one another’s religious traditions not only through literature and discussion, but also within worship spaces. This paper will focus on the practice of churchgoing by Jewish individuals, with some attention to Christian synagogue-going. Most Jews went to church because of curiosity, sociability, or experimentation. Within churches, they became familiar with their neighbors and with Christian beliefs but also further clarified and even strengthened their own understandings and identities. For Jews, as for other Americans, the relationship between identification and spatial presence, belief and knowledge, worship and entertainment, were complicated and religious boundaries often unclear. The forgotten practice of Jewish churchgoing sheds light on the intimacies and complexities of Jewish-Christian relations in American history.

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The author discusses the most important phenomena in Polish historiography and the selected publications about the Holocaust released during 2003–2013. Similarly to ‘narrativists’, Krupa is interested in the shape, the language, the storytelling manner, and the metaphors used. Having indicated the most important scholarly centres and publications of sources, the author concentrates on the camp monographs, syntheses and regional studies produced during that period, and then concludes that most of them are written in a very traditional way. The year 2000, when [the Polish edition] of Jan Tomasz Gross’s book Neighbours was released, proved to be a breakthrough year for [Polish] historiography. Before analysing the far-reaching consequences of this publication, Krupa briefly discusses the polemics surrounding the other books by that author. On the one hand, they led to the birth of the historiographical ‘shadow cabinet’ – a mobilisation of the milieu concentrated mostly around the IPN and directed at disparaging the significance of Gross’s publications. On the other hand, the most important consequence of Gross’s critical thinking about the Polish stances was the birth of the ‘peasant trend’ in [Polish] historiography. The books by Andrzej Żbikowski, Barbara Engelking, Jan Grabowski, as well as the collective works such as Prowincja noc and Zarys krajobrazu described, in a committed and interdisciplinary way, the shameful stances of the rural community – the denunciations, rapes, and even murders of Jews, with Tadeusz Markiel’s shocking testimony holding a special place among these publications. The works that acclaim the Polish stances and stress the Polish engagement in the rescuing of Jews (particularly those published within the framework of the IPN project „INDEX – In memory of Poles murdered or prosecuted by the Nazis because of their assistance to Jews”) are to constitute a counteroffer to the critical “peasant trend” within the framework of the “shadow cabinet.” At the end of the article Krupa discusses the books that regard the unknown pages of the Holocaust history in Warsaw written by Agnieszka Haska, Barbara Engelking, Dariusz Libionka, or Libionka’s collaboration with Laurence Weinbaum, which are not revolutionary in the sphere of language but nonetheless broaden the knowledge on the Holocaust. The author ends his discussion with a reference to the monumental work Jewish Presence in Absence. The Aftermath of the Holocaust in Poland, 1944–2010, without which, just as without reflecting on the consequences of the Holocaust in general, it is impossible to understand Poles and the situation in Poland.

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Ḥam Ribi Avram Finci’s Ladino Translation of Selected Texts from the Zohar as a Rare Glimpse into the Methodology of Traditional Bosnian Sephardic Yeshivot (Adult Learning Clubs) and Its Relation to the Local Sufi Islamic Tradition of DersIn traditional Sephardic culture, theoretical Kabbalah was an exclusive patrimony of the rabbinic elite. From the 17th century onward, many Sephardic laymen found even the Hebrew liturgical, and especially speculative, texts to be impenetrable and incomprehensible. Consequently, the rabbinic elite began to translate liturgical texts and halakhic works into popular Judeo-Spanish. However, the Zohar was usually not included in these projects of cultural intermediation. Consequently, a Judeo-Spanish translation of the integral text of the Zohar, or even of one of its volumes, does not exist to this day. At the same time, different Sephardic rabbis translated selected excerpts from the Zohar into the vernacular. This paper analyses one such anthology, Avram ben Moshe Finci’s Leket a-Zoar, published in 5619 (1858/9) in Belgrade. The anthology contains 246 excerpts from the Zohar, 121 of which conclude with Finci’s own reflections and a resumé of the moral of the story. Many of Finci’s discourses are masterpieces of the traditional Judeo-Spanish oral genre of darush. Finci was not interested in explaining theoretical kabbalistic terms and concepts. Rather, he reads the Zohar as if it were a work of Mussar. The traditional learning of Bosnian Sephardim seems to resemble, in both methodology and content, the learning traditions of their Muslim neighbours, showing once again that settled communities such as the Ottoman Sephardim cannot be researched only in the context of their affinity to the Jewish world. It is impossible to understand the way the Ottoman Sephardim developed Jewish concepts, practices and institutes without acknowledging the common Ottoman culture they shared with their Muslim and Christian neighbours. Przekład Ḥam Ribi Avrama Finciego wybranych tekstów Zoharu na ladino jako rzadkie spojrzenie w metodologię pracy tradycyjnych bośniacko-sefardyjskich jeszybot (klubów edukacyjnych dla dorosłych) oraz jej związek z lokalną, islamsko-suficką tradycją homiletyczną W tradycyjnej kulturze sefardyjskiej kabała teoretyczna była dziedzictwem wyłącznie uczonej elity rabinów. Od wieku XVII dla wiernych należących do niewykształconych mas bardziej skomplikowane teksty liturgiczne (nie wspominając o spekulatywnych) były niezrozumiałe, dlatego też elita rabiniczna podjęła się zadania tłumaczenia podstawowych pism liturgicznych i halahicznych na język żydowsko-hiszpański. Ponieważ dzieła Zohar zwykle nie włączano do tego kulturalno-mediacyjnego projektu, do chwili obecnej nie powstał integralny, żydowsko-hiszpański przekład ani jednej z jego ksiąg. Różni rabini sefardyjscy przekładali na żydowsko-hiszpański jedynie własny wybór najbardziej pouczających tekstów pochodzących z tego ogromnego korpusu. Niniejszy artykuł analizuje jeden z takich zbiorów wybranych fragmentów, słynny Leket a-Zoar autorstwa Ḥam Ribi Avrama (syna Mojżesza) Finciego, wydany w Belgradzie w 5619 (1858/9) roku. Antologia Finciego zawiera przekład 246 fragmentów ksiąg Zoharu, z których 121 kończy się własnymi refleksjami i komentarzami Finciego. Wiele z tych wykładów Finciego to arcydzieła tradycyjnego sefardyjskiego gatunku ustnego darush (‘kazanie’). Finci, jako komentator, nie był zainteresowany wyjaśnianiem zagmatwanych kabalistycznych terminów i konceptów. Chętniej czytał i tłumaczył Zohar jak dzieło musar – dzieło żydowskiej etyki. Jak się wydaje, w tym podejściu połączyły się tradycyjny bośniacko-sefardyjski sposób czytania, uczenia i tłumaczenia ksiąg Zoharu oraz lokalna bośniacko-muzułmańska tradycja czytania, uczenia i tłumaczenia klasycznych tekstów sufickich. Dowodzi to faktu, że wspólnoty żydowskie, zakorzenione w określonym kontekście cywilizacyjnym, nie mogą być studiowane jedynie przez pryzmat ich wyjątkowości wobec reszty świata żydowskiego ani przez pryzmat kongruencji z nim. Niemożliwe jest zrozumienie rozwoju sefardyjskich idei, praktyk i instytucji bez brania pod uwagę wspólnej osmańskiej cywilizacji, w tworzeniu i rozwoju której Sefardyjczycy przez prawie 500 lat brali udział razem ze swoimi muzułmańskimi chrześcijańsko-prawosławnymi sąsiadami.

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In this forum on Neighbors by Jan T. Gross (Princeton, 2001), four scholars respond to the book and to the issues of evidence, causality, and interpretation that it raises. Janine P. Holc summarizes the contents and the book's approach and explores the roles of individual choice, on the one hand, and ethnic identity categories, on the other, in Gross's presentation of the causes of the massacre of the Jewish residents of Jedwabne by their non-Jewish neighbors. She argues for an approach to reading Neighbors that links the emotive mode in which some of the narrative is expressed to a productive engagement with traumatic or violent historical episodes. This type of history resists finality and closure and creates an avenue for active engagement by members of ethnic (or other) communities with violent and traumatic pasts. Wojciech Roszkowski discusses three aspects of the debate on Neighbors in Poland: the credibility of the book, the facts of 10 July 1941 and their moral meaning, and the representativeness of the Jedwabne case and the question of “innocence” or “guilt” of nations. While arguing that the credibility of Neighbors is low and that Gross's thesis that “one half of the Jedwabne inhabitants killed the other half” has not been proven, he writes that it is impossible to deny Polish participation in the massacre. Yet, as with other documented cases of Polish wartime evildoing, it is unfair to blow this incident out of proportion and produce unwarranted generalizations. Past and present realities are always more complicated than simple stereotypes that “Poles” or “Jews” are to blame or that they have always been innocent. William W. Hagen argues that Gross vacillates between a robust positivism promising that “a reconstruction” of “what actually took place” is possible, such that guilt and motive may confidently be assigned, and an interpretive pessimism suggesting that “we will never 'understand' why it happened.” In his assignment of causality, Gross offers a largely unconnected, in part inferential or speculative, array of determinants and motives. Although some of the causes Gross adduces are certainly persuasive, his analysis does not address the Jedwabne perpetrators' and witnesses' perception of the cultural meaning of the inhuman violence their Jewish neighbors were suffering. Hagen offers some suggestive historical evidence on the Poles' subjective response to the Jewish genocide and to their own wartime fate, arguing that the Jedwabne Poles' participation in the mass murder of the Jews must be conceived as a response, mediated by the penetration of ideological anti-Semitism into the countryside, to profound anxiety over the individual and social death menacing Polish identity under Soviet and Nazi occupation. Norman M. Naimark argues that the appearance of Gross's Neighbors has created an entirely new dimension to the historiography of World War II in Poland. The book demonstrated, as has no other work, the extent to which the Poles were directly involved in the genocide of the Jews. The clarity and force of Gross's presentation provides Polish historiography with an unprecedented opportunity “to come to terms with the past.” The essay also suggests that the Jedwabne massacre needs to be looked at in the context of overall German policy “in the east” and in comparison to similar horrors taking place roughly at the same time in Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, and Latvia. The Nazis intentionally (and surreptitiously) sought to incite pogroms in the region, filming and photographing the horrific events for audiences back home. Their own propaganda about the “Jewish-Bolshevik” menace both prompted and was ostensibly confirmed by the pogroms. In his response, Jan T. Gross replies to Roszkowski's criticism concerning historical credibility.

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A wife's right to divorce her husband does not exist in Jewish law, or so claims virtually every textbook on Jewish law. Over the years scholars have, of course, noted exceptions to this absolute assertion. In Jewish marriage contracts from Elephantine, for example, women have a right to divorce equal to that of men. Another example is the Gospel of Mark's logion on divorce, which apparently implies that either a woman or a man can initiate divorce procedures. Josephus, moreover, relates that Salome, King Herod's sister, sent her husband a bill of divorce. Mainstream scholarship has too often brushed aside these pieces of evidence as nonrepresentative actions or misunderstandings on the part of a transmitter. The Elephantine community was thus remote and had lost contact with the center of Jewish life many years earlier, living a pagan existence and following the legal practices of its neighbors. Mark was a non-Jewish author describing the actions of Palestinian Jews in light of more familiar Roman legal practices. Salome's actions contradicted Jewish law and succeeded only because of her Roman citizenship.

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The extensive attention that Timothy Snyder’sBloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalinhas attracted since its publication in 2010 has raised our overall awareness of the structural might that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany displayed as they reshaped the territories that had separated the two states during the interwar period. In addition to earning widespread acclaim, the volume has been widely criticised by scholars who have exposed the extent to which non-German populations in Eastern Europe participated in the violent persecution of unwanted minority communities during the Second World War. Jan Gross, whoseNeighborsunearthed that the Poles of Jedwabne murdered their Jewish neighbours without significant prompting from the German occupiers, has argued that Snyder deprives the inhabitants of his ‘bloodlands’ of agency by blaming wartime violence in the region almost exclusively on Hitler, Stalin and their overlapping policies of state destruction. The evident tensions between micro-historical approaches that stress the importance of local agency and macro-level analyses of larger geographical spaces have obscured how profoundly the interplay of broader structural factors and local variables shaped the course of the Second World War in different locations. Four recent micro-historical works help to partially reconcile the two seemingly oppositional approaches by providing new frameworks for thinking about the complex interactions that occurred between smaller groups of people and the broader forces that shaped their lives during the 1930s and 1940s. The four volumes show that global, national, regional and local agendas overlapped to make ordinary people reconfigure how they saw themselves and how they interpreted the world around them. The identities and perceptions that emerged from these interactions enhance our understanding of the multiple factors that determined people’s actions during the Second World War and the Holocaust.

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In an anonymous Jewish anti-Christian polemical tractate from the thirteenth century we find the Hebrew formulation of what seems to be a common sneer by Christians at their Jewish neighbors: “Why do you not seek the aid of the great the way we do? (for they seek the aid of their saints).”1 The assumption behind this question is that medieval Jews indeed refrained from visiting the shrines of Christian saints and from beseeching them to heal the sick or mediate between the human and divine realms. In this paper I wish to question this assumption and suggest the possibility that some Jews did approach the shrines of the saints and seek their assistance, especially in healing physical disabilities. Given the strong appeal of the cults of healing saints in medieval European societies, it seems likely that Jews not only were well aware of this practice and displayed a measure of curiosity toward it, but possibly participated in the rituals as well.2

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In the early modern and modern periods, the occupational profile of Jews in the West diverged dramatically from that of their neighbors and fellow citizens. Commerce, rather than agriculture or artisanal or industrial manufacturing, provided the arena in which Jews labored to make a living. From an economic perspective, this was not a problem. It did not place Jews at a competitive disadvantage. Indeed, the opposite was true. In the context of industrialization, urbanization, and mass consumption, buying and selling was more profitable than tolling in a field, workshop, or factory. Having been forced into a narrow range of occupations earlier in their history, Jews in the West now found themselves in an advantageous position economically. However, for Gentiles, who rarely viewed Jews in a disinterested light, the Jewish distinctive occupational profile was problematic and often viewed as symptomatic of a more profound pathology. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with Jews becoming citizens of the states in which they lived and moving rapidly into the middle class, their economic distinctiveness became a central feature of the debate about their fate and future, what was known at the time as the “Jewish Question.”

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AbstractIn this paper I critically examine the conflation of Turk with Muslim, explore the Turkish experience of Nazism, and examine Turkey's relation to the darkest era of German history. Whereas many assume that Turks in Germany cannot share in the Jewish past, and that for them the genocide of the Jews is merely a borrowed memory, I show how intertwined the history of Turkey and Germany, Turkish and German anti-Semitism, and Turks and Jews are. Bringing together the histories of individual Turkish citizens who were Jewish or Dönme (descendants of Jews) in Nazi Berlin with the history of Jews in Turkey, I argue the categories “Turkish” and “Jewish” were converging identities in the Third Reich. Untangling them was a matter of life and death. I compare the fates of three neighbors in Berlin: Isaak Behar, a Turkish Jew stripped of his citizenship by his own government and condemned to Auschwitz; Fazli Taylan, a Turkish citizen and Dönme, whom the Turkish government exerted great efforts to save; and Eric Auerbach, a German Jew granted refuge in Turkey. I ask what is at stake for Germany and Turkey in remembering the narrative of the very few German Jews saved by Turkey, but in forgetting the fates of the far more numerous Turkish Jews in Nazi-era Berlin. I conclude with a discussion of the political effects today of occluding Turkish Jewishness by failing to remember the relationship between the first Turkish migration to Germany and the Shoah.

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The subtitle tells it all: the book is not about bioethics, business ethics or communal ethics, but about the kind of ethics one should establish for one's personal life. Starting with issues of privacy, the book moves us through sexual ethics, relationships within families, forgiveness, and finally, hope. Although traditional Jewish sources are mined for their insights, in the end, this is one person's notion about what Jewish ethics can (and should) say about issues of personal ethics. Dorff acknowledges this right in his preface, “throughout the book, I present what I take to be an authentic reading and application of the Jewish tradition but surely not the only one. I therefore take care to use judgment [emphasis in the original] in assessing how the tradition should be best applied to modern circ*mstance, by providing arguments from the tradition and from modern sources and circ*mstance to justify [emphasis in the original] my reading of the tradition and arguing against alternative readings” (p. xii). In short, the book is not descriptive of the Jewish tradition but prescriptive, laying out how one should think about these issues as a modern American Jew who wants to think “Jewishly.”

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Amid sporadic anti-Jewish violence whipped by a crusading frenzy, Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki (“Rashi”) composed a commentary on the Hebrew Bible that was destined to become a vast navigational aid for God’s scriptural plan. Many of Rashi’s glosses invited medieval Jews on a spiritual pilgrimage that would dispel their sense of subjugation to temporal Christian powers. From the advent of Christianity, Jewish communities increasingly steered a course between Jewish autonomy and welfare, on one hand, and accommodation of Christian and feudal strictures, on the other. Wondering whether the cataclysmic destruction of the Second Temple in 70 c.e. signaled God’s abandonment of his people, medieval Jews’ scriptural interpretations intensified the themes of survival and internal social cohesion. To guide medieval Jewry through a middle ground between a characteristically triumphant scriptural landscape and the dispiriting Christian counterpart, Rashi frequently incorporated into his glosses French terms he transliterated into Hebrew characters. This incorporation of French was both purposeful and well-informed. As a minority community in Rashi’s Troyes, Jews lived two distinct experiences: in one, they spoke vernacular French with Christian neighbors, while, in the other, they prayed and studied the Pentateuch and Prophets in Hebrew. In this setting, the laazim communicated to Jewish readers in a specialized language akin to a password or a special handshake. Yet the glosses, because they were enveloped in Hebrew commentaries and disguised in Hebrew letters, would have eluded French-speaking Christians who could not have identified fragments of their own language hiding in plain sight.

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It was a ghetto, undeniably,’ concluded the American political journalist, Garry Wills, when recalling from the safe distance of 1971 his ‘Catholic Boyhood’. ‘But not a bad ghetto to grow up in.’ Wills’s ghetto was defined by the great body of shared experiences, rituals, relationships, which gave Catholics a strongly felt common identity, and separated them from their Protestant and Jewish neighbours who knew none of these things. Wills talked about priests and nuns, incense and rosary beads, cards of saints and statues of the Virgin, but in this essay said very little about Catholic organisations (apart from a brief reference to the Legion of Decency). In many European countries, by contrast, any reference to the ‘ghetto’ from which many Catholics were seeking to escape in the 1960s and ’70s inevitably focused on the network of specifically Catholic organisations which was so characteristic of central and north-west European societies in the first half of the twentieth century. The Germans even have a pair of words to describe this phenomenon, Vereins- or Verbandskatholizismus, which can be defined as the multiplication of organisations intended to champion the interests of Catholics as a body, and to meet the special needs, spiritual, economic or recreational, of every identifiable group within the Catholic population. So when in 1972 the Swiss historian Urs Altermatt wrote a book on the origins of the highly self-conscious and disciplined Swiss Catholic sub-culture, the result was an organisational history, as stolid and as soberly objective as Wills’s book was whimsical and partisan. Its purpose was to determine how it came about that so many a Catholic ‘was born in a Catholic hospital, went to Catholic schools (from kindergarten to university), read Catholic periodicals and newspapers, later voted for candidates of the Catholic Party and took part as an active member in numerous Catholic societies’, being also ‘insured against accident and illness with a Catholic benefit organisation, and placing his money in a Catholic savings bank’.

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Souvenir, Talisman, Toy or phantom JewsThe exhibition Souvenir, Talisman, Toy, prepared by Erica Lehrer and shown in Cracow’s Ethnographic Museum in Summer 2013, deals with the phenomena of Jew figures production and currently extremely popular the "Jew with a coin" image. The phenomenon bears full characteristics of folk art. However, it is Holocaust that took place in Poland during the German occupation that should be its valid reference. This historical context that results in, for example, stereotypical way of portraying the exterminated neighbours (this way is often perceived as intentionally anti-Semitic), is not fully analysed or worked through at the exhibition. The rich ethnographic material shown in Cracow is calling for a comment that would include scientific descriptions of Polish-Jewish relations that are being formulated at, for example, the Polish Centre for Holocaust Research. The phenomena of the evoked images production, which became more intense in the last twenty or thirty years, has all the qualities of "phantom memory" or post-memory, which character, as well origins, should be thoroughly analysed. Pamiątka, Zabawka, Talizman, czyli Żydzi fantomowiPrzygotowana przez Ericę Lehrer wystawa Pamiątka, Zabawka, Talizman, którą można było oglądać w salach krakowskiego Muzeum Etnograficznego latem 2013 roku, traktuje o fenomenie produkcji figurek Żydów i niezmiernie popularnych dzisiaj wizerunków „Żyda z pieniążkiem”. Zjawisko to ma wszelkie cechy twórczości ludowej, jednakże istotnym odniesieniem jest dla niego Zagłada, która rozegrała się na terenie Polski w czasie okupacji niemieckiej. Ten historyczny kontekst, którego efektem jest np. stereotypowy sposób prezentowania wyglądu zgładzonych sąsiadów (odbierany często jako tendencyjnie antysemicki), nie został w pełni na przywołanej ekspozycji zanalizowany czy też przepracowany. Pokazany w Krakowie niewątpliwie bogaty etnograficzny materiał domaga się komentarza uwzględniającego naukowe opracowania dotyczące polsko-żydowskich relacji, jakie powstają np. w Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów. Fenomen produkcji wspomnianych wizerunków, którego nasilenie obserwować można w ostatnich dwudziestu, trzydziestu latach, posiada wszelkie cechy „pamięci fantomowej” czy ewentualnej post-pamięci, której charakter (a także źródła) powinien być poddany gruntownej analizie.

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AbstractIn the mystery plays, in the Miracles of the Virgin, and in the work of Chaucer, Marlowe, and Shakespeare, Jews are seen in light of Christian teachings which depicted them as corporeal, often depraved, beings unwilling to accept the spiritual truths embodied in Christ. This paper analyzes the lamentations/kinot written by Hebrew liturgical poets to mourn the Jewish victims of the crusaders who, on their way to fight the Muslim infidels, decided to rid themselves of the Jewish infidels in their midst. When the images that the Jews used to describe themselves and their enemies in these poems are juxtaposed alongside the images of the Jews in one salient example of anti-Semitism in early English literature, Chaucer's Prioress's Tale, a picture of the theological and spiritual battle between medieval Jews and Christians, underlying the literary works produced by poets of both faiths, emerges. In addition, an analysis of these Kinot introduces a voice long ignored in English studies, that of the Jews, who were not merely convenient images of the adversary, but living beings who had their own understanding of themselves, far different from that of their Christian neighbors, and of the faith for which they were willing to renounce their lives.

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The paper considers the memories of Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust in Poland in the aftermath of the intense public debate about the Jedwabne massacre of July 10, 1941, since 2002 till the present. Jan Tomasz Gross’s slim monograph Neighbors, published in May 2000, triggered a debate that generated a process of self-critical assessments of the Polish national past in relation to Jewish and other ethnic minorities, the so-called cultural renewal of public memory. Ten years later there is still a sharp split between groups of Polish politicians, public intellectuals, journalists, historians and members of society at large in how they evaluate the dark aspects of the Polish-Jewish relations during and after WWII. The paper examines the main modes of remembering Jews and the Holocaust: “remembering to remember”, “remembering to benefit”, and “remembering to forget”, and the different manifestations of these three modes, and discusses what has made it difficult for Poles to integrate the dark past into popular historical consciousness and public memory.

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A Debate between Efraim Inbar and Ian S. LustickTime is on Israel's Side Efraim InbarFrom a realpolitik perspective, the balance of power between Israel and its neighbors is the critical variable in the quest for survival in a bad neighborhood. If Israel’s position is improving over time and the power differential between the Jewish State and its foes is growing, then its capacity to overcome regional security challenges is assured. Moreover, under such circ*mstances there is less need to make concessions to weaker parties that are in no position to exact a high price from Israel for holding on to important security and national assets such as the Golan Heights, the settlement blocs close to the “Green Line,” the Jordan Rift, and particularly Jerusalem.With a Bang or a Whimper, Time Is Running Out Ian S. Lustick Israel’s existence in the Middle East is fundamentally precarious. Twentieth- century Zionism and Israeli statehood is but a brief moment in Jewish history. There is nothing more regular in Jewish history and myth than Jews “returning” to the Land of Israel to build a collective life—nothing more regular, that is, except, for Jews leaving the country and abandoning the project. Abraham came from Mesopotamia, then left for Egypt. Jacob left for Hauran, then returned, then left with his sons for Egypt. The Israelites subsequently left Egypt with Moses and Joshua, and “returned” to the Land. Upper class Jews who did not leave with the Assyrians left with Jeremiah for Babylon, then returned with Ezra and Nehemiah.

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The Decalogue was central to religious education in Reformation England, but this had not always been the case. The early Christian communities sought to distance themselves from the Ten Commandments and what they saw as the legalism of the Jewish faith, while the Middle Ages saw the ascendency of a parallel moral tradition: that of the seven deadly sins. Although the Decalogue never disappeared entirely from Christian life, by the fourteenth century, the parson from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales could remark of the Commandments that ‘so heigh a doctrine I lete to divines’. The eventual triumph of the Decalogue over the sins during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was enormously significant, for the Ten Commandments not only taught religious doctrine; they also conditioned personal and communal devotions and moral and ethical behavioural norms. To an unparalleled extent, the Ten Commandments engendered a sense not only of the individual’s bond with God but also of the social and familial bonds they shared with mother and father, brother and sister, master and servant, and the broader community of neighbours wherein they dwelt. This essay will argue that one unintended consequence of the increasing prominence of the Decalogue in the households of sixteenth-century England was that it not only reinforced traditional understandings of household authority: it also modified them significantly. Understandings of gender relations in early modern England have been framed in a number of different ways over the past forty years: in terms of the essential stability of the household, the tightening of patriarchal control, and even in terms of crisis. But what these approaches fail to recognize is that, while the Decalogue undoubtedly reinforced parental (and particularly patriarchal) authority, it did so by stressing in equal measure the responsibility that was also inherent in authority, and the duties of care owed by superiors to inferiors. In both senses of the word, the commandments came to constitute a new, universal ‘moral system of the west’, given authority by Scripture and ubiquity through catechesis. An important aspect of this system was a much more nuanced understanding of patriarchal responsibility than has often hitherto been recognized.

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The percentage of victimization of Dutch Jewry during the Shoah is the highest of Western, Central and Southern Europe (except, perhaps of Greece), and close to the Polish one: 75%, more than 104.000 souls. The question of disproportion between the apparent favorable status of the Jews in society – they had acquired emancipation in 1796 - and the disastrous outcome of the Nazi occupation as compared to other countries in general and Western European in particular has haunted Dutch historiography of the Shoah. Who should be blamed for that outcome: the perpetrators, i.e. the Germans, the bystanders, i.e. the Dutch or the victims, i.e. the Dutch Jews? The article first surveys the answers given to this question since the beginnings of Dutch Holocaust historiography in the immediate post-war period until the debates of today and the factors that influenced the shaping of some basic perceptions on “Dutch society and the Jews”. It then proceeds to detailing several facts from the Holocaust period that are essential for an evaluation of gentile attitudes. The article concludes with the observation that – in spite of ongoing debates – the overall picture which has accumulated after decades of research will not essentially being altered. Although the Holocaust was initiated, planned and carried out from Berlin, and although a considerable number of Dutchmen helped and hid Jews and the majority definitely despised the Germans, considerable parts of Dutch society contributed to the disastrous outcome of the Jewish lot in the Netherlands – through a high amount of servility towards the German authorities, through indifference when Jewish fellow-citizens were persecuted, through economically benefiting from the persecution and from the disappearance of Jewish neighbors, and through actual collaboration (stemming from a variety of reasons). Consequently, the picture of the Holocaust in the Netherlands is multi-dimensional, but altogether puzzling and not favorable.

Abstract:

The author deconstructs Mirosław Tryczyk’s monograph entitled Miasta śmierci. Sąsiedzkie pogromy Żydów [Towns of death. Pogroms of Jews organized by their neighbors]. This book on the anti-Jewish violence inflicted by Poles in the Białystok region in 1941 was received as revealing and innovative. It gained prominence in the media and a favorable reception in the intellectual milieus, and eminent scholars opined it as excellent. Eventually, however, it proved a cognitively reproductive work lacking professional research methodology and formulating theses unable to withstand scholarly criticism. Using the case of Tryczyk’s book’s popularity, Persak inquires about the condition of scholarly criticism and the quality of the public debate in Poland.

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Abstract Jerzy Andrzejewski wrote the novella Holy Week at the time of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. This real-time Polish fictional response immediately raised critical controversy. Whereas some critics saw it as an inadequate representation of the Holocaust, others considered the 1945 version a product of socialist realism. Here the author argues that Andrzejewski’s wartime fiction investigates the viability of his Catholic existentialist orientation during a time of terror. While his wartime essays and his correspondence with Czesław Miłosz reflected Andrzejewski’s struggle to maintain his faith in human brotherhood, his fiction traced the disintegration of Grace-given faith in the commonality and dignity of all human beings. The stories progress from a tragic ending of friendship to the failure of spiritual resistance and ultimately to the complete moral collapse of the Polish community. The unflinching depiction of the failure of Catholic Poles before their responsibility to extend neighborly love to their doomed Jewish neighbors communicates Andrzejewski’s insistence on the Catholic obligation to love one’s neighbor.

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From the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe supported the development of musical theater in Yiddish. Given the difficulties of life in the shtetl, comprising isolation from non-Jewish neighbors, limited educational opportunities, poverty and political oppression, Yiddish opera functioned as a statement of Jewish nationalism. In this paper, I will discuss the historical conditions under which it was presented, including the following factors: effect of folk music styles documented in the field research of ethnomusicologists in Eastern Europe; topicality of subject matter in Yiddish opera as definition of the growing Jewish nationalist political movement; and identity and background of important composers and performers of the genre, and the effect of emigration to the United States on the style and content of their work.

Abstract:

The duty to "love one's neighbour as oneself" has been carried over from the biblical tradition into subsequent moral and legal philosophy, as a helpful way of signalling commitment to the common good. When secular theorists appeal to this principle, they typically strip "love" of its emotional intensity and sacrificial dimensions and reduce the principle of "neighbour-love" to the negative duty of not interfering unduly with the rights and freedoms of others. But if we consider what Jesus understood neighbour-love to involve, as evident particularly in his dialogue with a Jewish lawyer in Luke 10:25-37, an altogether more demanding or thicker conception of the common good emerges.

Abstract:

This article looks on Jedwabne and the debate on Polish involvement in the Holocaust from the perspective of the Jedwabians. The author shows that until the erection of the national monument to the murdered Jews in Jedwabne in 2001, the Jedwabians’ memory of their Jewish neighbors was a part of local memory. Jedwabians commemorated the Jews in accordance with their frames of memory. The point is that the people in Jedwabne are first of all a members of parish community, so their memory is religious in nature. This has a profound effect on their relationship to the past and their perception of the role of monuments and memorials. By reconstructing the history of the erection of selected monuments in Jedwabne, the author shows which events of the past Jedwabians want to commemorate and what social function is played by memory of the commemorated events. She also considers to what degree memory of the group’s past lies at the base of the Jedwabians’ contemporary identity.