Jewish Culture and History Abstracts

Jewish Culture and History
Abstracts of articles in Issue 2.2

Israel Zangwill and Women’s Suffrage by Meri-Jane Rochelson
- As a political activist in the Zionist, pacifist, and feminist movements of the early twentieth century, Israel Zangwill eluded easy classification and courted opposition. A leading male figure in the women’s suffrage movement, he did not hesitate to applaud feminist tactics that appalled the mainstream, criticise tactics he saw as counter-productive, and change his own mind on various points over the course of a decade in the movement. Between 1907 and 1916 Zangwill gave speeches for the suffragettes, wrote impassioned letters to the press, and prepared lengthy reflective essays for intellectual periodicals, reprinting some of them in his collection The War for the World (1916). Zangwill’s participation in the suffrage movement was significant in the progress towards woman’s suffrage in the early twentieth century and integral to the larger body of his life and work. Moreover, while a cursory first glance at his suffrage writings in mainstream publications reveals little of his Jewishness, in fact his activism was informed by his religious outlook; his Jewish identity and place as a Jewish celebrity, in turn, enabled him to help bring the Jewish community into discussions of the suffrage issue
‘The Jews’ in Chinese Cultural Debate, 1915–30 by Xhou Xun
- Representations of ‘the Jews’ in modern China are complex: while they seem to correspond to images of ‘the Jews’ in Europe, it would be superficial to reduce them purely to ‘Western influence’. In China, representations of ‘the Jews’ have been endowed with indigenous meaning by modernising élites. By constructing ‘the Jews’ as a homogenous group, or ‘the Jew’ as a constitutive outsider, who embodies all the negative as well as positive qualities that were feared or desired by various social groups in China, the Chinese, as a homogenous ‘in-group’, were able to project their own anxieties onto the figure of the outsider. In this respect, representing ‘the Jews’ corresponds to a widespread fear of, as well as need for an ‘other’, which can be found in many cultures and societies. However, my interest here does not lie in determining the boundary between the real and fictional aspects of these images. Rather, it focuses on the implications associated with ‘the Jew’ as an ‘other’, which remains a distant mirror in the construction of the ‘self’ amongst various social groups in modern China
Transmitting Yiddishkeit: Irving Howe and Jewish-American Culture by Julian Levinson
- In 1952, the American literary critic Irving Howe collaborated with the Yiddish poet Eliezer Greenberg on a project of translating Yiddish short fiction into English, conceived as a ‘recovery’ of the East European Jewish literary tradition and functioning as a tacit response to Jean-Paul Sartre’s claim in Anti-Semite and Jew (1948) that the Jew ‘possesses nothing that can be called a history’. Howe’s manifesto-like introduction to the Treasury of Yiddish Stories (1954) was his first articulation of the secular Jewish identity he would champion throughout his life. Howe’s ethnic Jew – identified by the Yiddish term dos kleine menschele [the little man] – enjoys a ‘view from the rear’ of society, and as such he understands the inner workings of social power. Howe maintains that as American Jews enter the middle class the kleine menschele becomes increasingly a figure of the past. While works written in English by postwar American Jews bear a family resemblance to Yiddish literature, this continuity represents but a transitional moment: Jewish American literature cannot ultimately survive the dissolution of the immigrant community. This narrative of Jewish decline allows Howe to position himself as the ‘last in line’, the authoritative speaker at the end of a tradition; and to represent Jewish assimilation as a seamless and uncomplicated process, the end of which is already in sight.
Going against the Grain: Two Jewish Memoirs of War and Anti-War (1914–1918) by Mark Levene
- Utilising two unpublished memoirs of the seminal Great War period, this article seeks to consider the impact of compulsory military service on a British Jewish community, two-thirds of whom were recently arrived, mostly Russian Jewish immigrants. Its aim is two-fold. Firstly, it challenges a cherished received communal wisdom regarding the ‘patriotic’ nature of enlistment and ‘sacrifice’ as portrayed not only in the official British Jewry Book of Honour but also in Vladimir Jabotinsky’s alternative, Zionist version, The Story of the Jewish Legion. Secondly, it seeks to argue that the writing of Jewish history as if national ideology – assimilationist or Zionist – were the dominant discourse, fails to account for human experiences which do not fit its predetermined, collectivist contours. The richness of the narratives by Arnold Harris and Henry Myer lies in the very fact that these two young men facing the crisis of war did not act according to straightforward national ‘type’, but instead responded in ways which must necessarily complicate rather than simplify our understanding of the Jewish encounter with modernity.
The Politics of the ‘Last Days’: Bolshevism, Zionism and ‘the Jews’ by Alyson Pendlebury
- This article examines the use of apocalyptic imagery and the role ascribed to ‘the Jews’ in religious and secular discourses in First World War Britain. After 1917, the relationship between Christianity and Judaism began to be articulated in political terms, as the themes of apocalypse, Antichrist and crucifixion entered into secular discourse in relation to political events. This article traces the development of secular apocalyptic in Britain, from the Bolshevik revolution and the Palestine campaign into the post-war years, and compares this with mainstream and marginal Christian theological writing. In secular writing, two apocalyptic themes became dominant: the appearance of the Antichrist and the return of the Jews to the Promised Land. I explore these themes through press portrayals of ‘Bolshevik Jews’ as the enemies of the Christian nation, and the Balfour Declaration and Jewish battalions as heralding the prophesied restoration of Israel. I then argue that the ‘Zionism’ of the British government was perceived by some of its supporters as a conversionist drive, prompted by practical and political concerns, the aim of which was to convert the Jews not to Christianity but to nationhood.
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