Jewish Culture and History
Abstracts of
articles in Issue 10.1
- Jacob Selwood, Jewish Immigration,
Anti-Semitism and the Diversity of Early Modern London
- The response of early modern Londoners to
Jewish immigrants unfolded in a context of ethnic and religious diversity.
Jews arriving in London from the 1650s on found their reception coloured
by prior reactions to both French and Dutch Protestants and Spanish
Catholics. Such attitudes towards previous migrants from the Continent
were at least as important as anti-semitism or philo-semitism. These
factors point to the complexity of early modern migration, to the links
that Londoners drew between different immigrant groups, and to the
fact that no single stereotype existed in isolation. Early modern English
people created difference relationally, reflecting the everyday population
movements and the longstanding multiculturalism of the city in which
they lived.
- Gur Alroey, Journey to New Palestine:
The Zionist Expedition to East Africa and the Aftermath of the Uganda
Debate
- The Uganda Scheme was the subject of
a bitter debate that split the Zionist movement. The expedition that
set out on behalf of the Zionist Organization in December 1904 to explore
the designated region in East Africa and submit its conclusions was
supposed to lead to a final decision as to whether to accept or reject
the British offer. This paper aims firstly to trace the history of
the Zionist expedition to East Africa from the moment it set out until
the publication of the report and to explore the reactions of the supporters
and opponents of the Uganda Scheme to the conclusions of the delegation.
Second, by studying the debate over the expedition and the Uganda question
at the Seventh Zionist Congress, it examines the factors that led to
the formation of the Jewish Territorial Organization, headed by Israel
Zangwill, in August 1905.
- Judith Lewin, Transgressive Mobility,
Gender and Jewish Patronage: The Case of Ludwig Robert’s Die Tochter
Jephthas
- Ludwig Robert is best known today as the
brother of salonnière Rahel Levin Varnhagen. Through Baroness
Sophie von Grotthuß he came to have his first play performed
in Goethe’s Weimar. The play was called Die Tochter Jephthas
[Jephthah’s Daughter]. Set in biblical times, the play actually
dramatises the transgressive nature of nineteenth-century Jewish women’s
mobility. In this essay I analyse the correspondence surrounding Robert’s
play and read the play in relation to Bible stories, Goethe’s
literary creations and German adaptations of Shakespeare. The circumstances
surrounding the play’s production, the flouting of some representational
conventions, and the heritage of the playwright and his patroness combine
to provide insight into the complexity of German–Jewish and gendered
relations in the early 1800s.
- Meir Chazan, Force, Commemoration, and Morality
in the Worldview of Manya Shohat and Yosef Aharonovitch
- Mania Shohat and Yosef Aharonovitch represented
opposing attitudes within the Zionist Labour Movement to the use of
force in the struggle for a Jewish homeland, and the related issue
of who was worthy of commemoration among the Zionist pioneers. Their
personalities, outlooks, and lifestyles reflected attitudes to the
use of force and to the way of commemorating the Zionist enterprise
that led them sometimes to converge and sometimes to collide. The themes
addressed here – violent force and commemoration – were
crucial elements in the establishment of the Labour Movement’s
hegemony in the Yishuv.