Jewish Culture and History Abstracts

Jewish Culture and History

Abstracts of articles in Issue 7.3

Harvey E. Goldberg, The Oriental and the Orientalist: The Meeting of Mordecai Ha-Cohen and Nahum Slouschz
- There has been growing interest in orientalist constructions of Jewish groups. One claim is that orientalist scholars assume the right to speak for those they deem incapable of representing themselves. An opportunity to examine this claim appears in the work of Nahum Slouschz regarding Jews in Libya in the early twentieth century, as his travel in and research on the country were both enmeshed in the work of a local scholar, Mordecai Ha-Cohen, who wrote about his community. Their meeting and work enable an in-depth case study of Jewish orientalism that raises general questions concerning the notion.
Alan Rosen, ‘Strong Enough to Carry Experience’:The Holocaust, Multilingualism and the Problem of English
- This article examines the special status of the English language in representing the Holocaust. To this end, I look first at three authors who wrote in the late 1940s – David Boder, John Hersey and Ruth Chatterton – and argue that they, in different ways, evoke anxiety in writing about the Holocaust in English. I contrast this early post-war writing with the more recent approach of Anne Michaels in Fugitive Pieces, where one finds a celebration of English as a language of the Holocaust. The move from anxiety to celebration takes place, however, only at the expense of other languages, particularly Yiddish. More generally, I submit that attention to the specific role of a language in representing the Holocaust points to a multilingual approach to language and the Holocaust.
Oren Soffer, Zionist Discourse and the Rabbinic Genre
- The Zionist movement saw the Bible as the main source of the Jewish political tradition, national symbols and political terminology. Rabbinic literature, which was associated with exilic eras, was largely disregarded. This article focuses on the possible influences that rabbinic tradition nonetheless had on early Zionist political discourse. Using Bakhtin’s genre theory and his dialogical perspective, I analyse statements made by Herzl, Nordau, Sokolov, and others, and argue that there is evidence of an explicit awareness among the Jewish elite of the influence of rabbinic discourse on the communication patterns and characteristics of the Zionist discourse in eastern European communities. References to rabbinic influence on the political sphere usually arose in response to what was seen as the application of religious derash and pilpul perceptions of text – perceptions that aim to uncover the concealed truths within the text – to secular political Zionist discourse. These references posited that Zionist debates in eastern Europe were characterised by a tendency towards circuitous argumentation, negation and opposition.
Marvin J. Heller, He should be called Sama’el: Michael Levi Rodkinson – The Life and Literary Career of a Jewish Scoundrel Revisited
- Michael Levi Rodkinson is an arresting figure. Generally forgotten today, he was, in his time, a controversial, certainly colourful, if reprehensible, individual. Born to a distinguished Hasidic family, and the author or compiler of Hasidic tales, Rodkinson subsequently became a maskil. As such, he edited early Hebrew radical journals, wrote works that, in the guise of explaining, challenged traditional Jewish beliefs, and later undertook the first major English translation of the Talmud. This article revisits Rodkinson’s life, varied literary output, and the criticism of his detractors, who may be said to have hounded him. His influence is to be discerned in his earliest work, that is, the Hasidic tales, from which Rodkinson later distanced himself.
Guy Miron, Document: Conversations on the Jewish Question in Hungary, 1925–26
- ‘Conversations on the Jewish Question’ is a series of three interviews, which were published in the Hungarian-Jewish periodical Múlt és Jövö in the years 1925–26. The interviews, which were only published in Hungarian, were conducted with Lajos Biró, Tamás Kóbor and Bernát Alexander, three leading Hungarian-Jewish intellectuals of the period. Aladár Komlós, who initiated the three conversations, was not a neutral interviewer. His own attitudes are clearly expressed in the dialogues as well as in the introductory paragraphs. The conversations, whose historical and biographical background are presented in the introduction, vividly raise key problems relating to post-emancipation European Jewry in the interwar period.