In Poland at the turn of 19th and 20th century a modernizing Jewish family appears quite frequently in anti-Semitic and non-anti-Semitic “Jewish novels”. In both cases a Jewish family is presented in rather pejorative light as a point of reference to a Polish family. In such comparison Polish culture and Poles are presented as a more attractive, more civilized and that is why their way of living is followed by the Jews. Jewish families try to undergo the process of assimilation but their effort are depicted in rather pejorative or even ridiculous way.

There are some Jewish heroes presented as a role model, but they only prove the role. There is a huge gap between Poles and Jews who have to make an effort to change their personality and behaviour according to Polish expectations.

In anti-Semitic novels a description of the process of modernization and assimilation of Jews had to prove its negative consequences. Jews were treated as enemies and novels’ plot revealed their main goal – the conquest of Poland. This kind of writing can be also seen as a warning against mix marriages to prevent Polish society from the integration with Jews, who are presented as the main threat of homogeneity of Polish nation.

The author analyses Isaac Leib Peretz’s play Bay nakht afn altn mark (A Night in the Old Marketplace) through the lens of the ambivalences of the carnival, which give rise to various transgressions of socio-political and cultural, as well as metaphysical and existential, orders. The carnival category positions Peretz’s drama in the dialectic of beginning and end, and it suggests the violation of the existing normative order in order to expose the tension between the traditional world of the shtetl and the modernity that is impinging on it. Moreover, the carnival spectacle reveals metaphysical and historiosophic dimensions, since it tackles the question of the human condition, which is defined by the opposition of life and death and is entangled in the course of history.

* Artykuł powstał przy wsparciu finansowym POB Heritage w ramach Programu ID.UJ (edycja specjalna I).

Translated by Jessica Taylor-Kucia

The influx of Eastern European Jewry into London stirred controversy within British society and within the Anglo-Jewish community. Newly arrived Jews became part of the debate over the “alien problem,” which resulted in the passing of the Aliens Act in 1905. This paper will examine the disputes over the poverty and “dirtiness” of Jewish immigrants in the context of the British imperial and racial discourse. The aim is to show how the controversy over the poverty of immigrants and the sanitary conditions of the Jewish quarter exposed deeper social anxiety over the position of the British Empire. The paper will focus on accusations against Jews from Eastern Europe of impoverishing and polluting the “heart of the Empire,” thus contributing to the collapse of the ideals of British progress and superiority.

The article presents the childhood years of Jewish female students of the medical department of the Kyiv Higher Courses for Women, as described in their own autobiographies. The study of their autobiographical images of childhood reveals transformations in the relationships between parents and daughters in Jewish families in the modern period, the variability of the home upbringing of girls, and the obligatory component of their education. The admission of daughters to the educational institutions determined by their parents symbolized the end of childhood.

Translated from Ukrainian by Mariia Maletska

This study aims to reconstruct the self-perception of the Karaite community in Vilnius during 1913–1939. The research is based on a review of two Karaite periodicals, Караимскоеcлово (Karaite Word), published in Russian from 1913–1914, and Myśl Karaimska (Karaite Thought), published in Polish from 1924–1939. Both periodicals served to develop national selfawareness and a spiritual revival of the whole Karaite nation by covering history, politics and literature. In Karaimskoye Slovo, Karaites identified themselves as Israelites; in Myśl Karaimska, some high-level representatives openly emphasized their Turkic origins. State and institutional discrimination against the Jewish population had become a major issue over the years, creating a volatile platform for change while breaking with the eternal sense of Karaite identity as people of Israel. This paper contributes to the literature on the history of the Karaite community in Vilnius in the early decades of the twentieth century.

The article explores the genre of immigrant narrative, comparing two early-twentieth century novels written by the Jewish-American writers Mary Antin and Anzia Yezierska with a contemporary novel penned by the Chinese-American author Jean Kwok. Taking adaptation theory (Sanders 2006 and Hutcheon 2006) as a starting point, I examine how Kwok’s novel adapts, revises, and reimagines a familiar pattern across time and cultures in order to make it representative of Chinese Americans. The analysis draws attention to experiences of Chinese immigrant women, their class membership and socio-economic status.

In the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century Galician Jews gradually left the isolated world of traditional culture for the open worldwide culture. At the start, they knew only one path of life, based on many centuries of tradition, but at the end it provided many paths to self-realization. Some of them were still devoted, other secular, some of them felt Jews, others felt Poles of Mosaic faith or Germans of Mosaic faith, some were involved in the Zionist movement, others in socialism. Many of them considered Galicia to be their own little motherland and manifested the features of local patriotism. It was possible thanks to the modernization of their lifestyle, and public education turned out to be one of the most important factors in this process. It was possible also thanks to the country authorities creating conditions which encouraged Jews to send their children to public school. Consequently, the majority of Jewish boys and girls completed compulsory education. It was the first step towards the modernization of their life.

The article describes the charitable activities of Jews in Drohobych during the Habsburg monarchy and at the beginning of the Polish state. The associations described, run predominantly by women, worked mainly for the benefit of Jewish orphans and children of impoverished families. The significant presence of Jews among the owners of oil companies largely contributed to the development of charity activities in the form of institutions meeting the needs of specific social groups.

In the areas that became part of the Second Polish Republic, manifestations of antisemitism became more pronounced at the end of World War I and at the beginning of the interwar period. These manifestations often turned into acts of violence against Jews, as became apparent in many towns with Jewish populations. The Lviv pogrom on 22–23 November 1918 was particularly devastating. The Jewish Rescue Committee, established in Lviv at that time, was very active in providing help to the injured, determining the number of casualties and wounded, and in assessing the extent of material damage resulting from the robberies and acts of destruction, including arson. According to the findings of the Jewish Rescue Committee, 73 people died and 443 were wounded as a result of the pogrom. The estimated material damage amounted to 102,986,839 Kr,with a total of 13,375 people affected. The actions taken by the Jewish Rescue Committee to help the victims were extremely important and effective, but they did not fully satisfy the existing social needs.

Caricature journals in the interwar period had a special genre niche, giving the masses, through funny cartoons, a simplified understanding of internal and external political processes. Zyz and Komar were the largest Ukrainian satirical humor journals in interwar Galicia. They mainly covered the internal political life in the Second Polish Republic and international relationships. These journals are primarily intended for people from the countryside, and the editors and owners of these journals used anti-Semitism for the political mobilization of the rural population. I use elements of Serge Moscovici’s theory of social representations to track these processes. A key aspect here is how the image of the Rudnytskyi family was shaped on the pages of these journals. The family was of mixed Ukrainian-Jewish origins, and its members became prominent figures in various spheres of Ukrainian social and political life in interwar Galician Ukrainian socjety (in politics, literature, music, and the women’s movement). The behavior of the Rudnytskyi family was explained to the readers through their Jewish origins. Zyz and Komar both created an image of the Rudnytskyis as an integral Jewish group occupying different spheres of Ukrainian life. The study of visual caricature images thus enables us to explore the channels of the formation and spread of anti-Semitic images of Jews and the use of the image of “the Jew” in the Galician Ukrainian society in interwar Poland.

This article proposes a study of the usage of the concept of “Galicia” in the leading Jewish political newspaper of interwar Eastern Galicia (southeastern Poland), the Zionist daily Chwila. The use of “Galicia” is analyzed along with its main concurrent in the public sphere, the term “Małopolska” (Lesser Poland). Each term had its realm of usage, while each was caused by a distinct kind of motivation. “Lesser Poland” dominated the political and common sphere as the name of the former Austrian part of Poland, while “Galicia” was reserved mostly for writing about cultural issues and stereotypes. “Lesser Poland” was supposedly accepted by Galician Zionists as a tool to express their loyalty to the newly restored Polish Republic, while “Galicia” was preserved as an instrument for communication with other Galician Jews abroad and their common Austrian past, as well as an instrument of othering them from the outside. Both terms continued to be used in such a way throughout the entire interwar period.

The fledgling processes of the single-state governmental system of the reborn Polish state in 1920 were intended to deal with many current challenges and historical backgrounds. The article analyses the causes and different contexts and conditions which were forged to initiate the Polish-Jewish negotiations of 1925. The primary attention is focused on the solutions to the economic crisis and its consequences. Also, we consider the in-house situation between different factions in the Jewish Club to better understand all the pros and cons that made the future agreements possible. To provide such analysis of the Polish-Jewish negotiations, we use the Rogers Brubaker’s nationalising  approach, which lets us examine the interactions between the Polish state nationalismand the nationalism of East Galician Zionists. We also apply multiple situational analysis to investigate the ample variety of reasons behind those negotiations. This approach allowed us to consider the 1925 Agreement in the broad geopolitical context in which both sides were interested.

In the period 1935–1939, following the death of head of state Marshal Piłsudski, the  Polish national government adopted a more authoritarian and nationalist stance. Piłsudski had been considered by some Polish Jews as a protector of national and religious minorities. After his death in May 1935, institutional antisemitism experienced a dramatic increase.

In the public sphere, certain newspapers regularly featured antisemitic “news reports,” opinion pieces and cartoons of an extreme nature. The newspaper ABC, for instance, advocated boycotts  of Jewish businesses and shops, listing them by name, and encouraged Jewish emigration. In universities, the increasing discrimination against Jews has been well documented. MostPolish universities instituted restrictions on the number of Jewish students they would admit, or else barred them altogether. The education ministry willingly turned a blind eye to the admission policies of the university authorities. At the beginning of the academic year 1938–1939, for example, only three students in the first year of medical studies in Lwów (less than 1% of the new intake) were Jews, and none in Kraków.

After discussing antisemitism in newspapers and universities in the late 1930s, this article will examine documents held in the State Archive of Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast (DAIFO) concerning relations between the Jewish communities in the Stanisławów region, and the district, provincial and national authorities, including the national Ministry for Religious Denominations and Public Enlightenment. Much of this documentation concerns the town of Dolina. With the backing of the district authorities, an attempt was made to install as assistant rabbi in the town a certain Ksyel Juda Halberstam. This move was strongly opposed by many members of the Dolina Jewish community, as well as by its senior rabbi. The correspondence sheds light on the protracted struggle between the different parties until the assistant rabbi was finally installed in late 1938.

These files on the Dolina episode highlight the desire on the part of the authorities to control the rabbis, and through them the members of their communities. Information was systematically gathered on all the rabbis in the province, with particular emphasis on their moral behaviour, their perceived loyalty to the state, and their fluency in the Polish language. These actions, in turn, reflect an underlying suspicion over the extent of the rabbis’ “Polishness” and a fear, in an era of growing nationalism, of “antinational” behaviour. Such suspicions of loyalty were particularly marked where rabbis were thought to have Zionist links.

The exhibition “Traces of Memory” presents about 150 present-day large-format colour photographs of the Jewish heritage still to be seen in many different towns in that part of Galicia which is today in Poland. The exhibition is innovative in museological terms. It does not present  the Jewish history of Galicia using conventional chronology; nor is it comprehensive. Rather it isdivided into a simple five-part set of ideas intended to help visitors make sense of the complex, conflicting realities relating to Jewish heritage 75 years after the Holocaust: that Polish Galicia is full of the abandoned ruins of the Jewish past; it is also full of surviving fragments of pre-Holocaust times; full of places where the mass atrocities of the Holocaust took place; it is also full of post-war attempts to restore (or to abandon) sites of Jewish significance; and full of individuals, from all walks of life, contributing to a new visibility of Jewish culture in the Polish landscape. But piecing together the present-day evidence into a coherent five-part exhibition, by assigning such socio-cultural meanings to what the photos are deemed to represent, is not a straightforward matter. How “typical” are they as illustrations of one of those five ideas? How far can one generalize on the basis of decontextualised visual evidence - architecturally typical, historically typical, socio-culturally typical? The problem is that a photograph can simultaneously have multiple meanings; and this paper includes numerous examples. Part of that is because of the cultural displacement caused by the Holocaust and its after-effects. Just as a “synagogue” marked on a tourist map may in fact no longer really be a synagogue, so too one strategy of memorialising a devastated Jewish cemetery has often been to turn it into a lapidarium - a collection of surviving tombstones. In other words, when re-presented as heritage, such places may no longer “mean” what they were originally intended to mean. So often the Jewish heritage as presented through photographs is treated as self-evident. But in fact the same place, or the same photo, may mean different things to different people: meaning may thus be a matter of emphasis and interpretation, an ambiguity which is not always made fully explicit.

The article presents types of sources which have thus far not been used, castle court books kept in the archives of the Ukrainian cities of Lviv and Kyiv. The author emphasizes the importance of these sources for research on the history and culture of Polish Jews in the 17th and 18th centuries. He also specifies the types of documents related to Jewish issues authenticated in these books (e.g. manifestations and lawsuits, declarations of the Radom Tribunal), as well as current source publications and internet databases containing selected documents from Ukrainian archives.

The literary output of the Polish-Yiddish writers who survived WWII in the Soviet Union  is mostly a literary mirror of the times of exile and wartime wandering. The two major themes that reverberate through these writings are: the refugees’ reflection on their stay in the USSR, and the Holocaust of Polish Jews. After the war, some of them described that period in their memoirs and autobiographical fiction, however, due to censorship, such accounts could only  be published abroad, following the authors’ emigration from Poland. These writings significantly complement the texts produced during the war, offering plentiful details about life in Poland’s  Eastern Borderlands under Soviet rule as it was perceived by the refugees, or about the fate of specific persons in the subsequent wartime years. This literature, written in – and about – exile  is not only an account of what was happening to Polish-Jewish refugees in the USSR, but also a testimony to their coping with an enormous psychological burden caused by the awareness (or the lack thereof) of the fate of Jews under Nazi German occupation. What emerges from all the literary texts published in post-war Poland, even despite the cuts and omissions caused by (self)-censorship, is an image of a postwar Jewish community affected by deep trauma, hurt and – so it seems – split into two groups: survivors in the East (vicarious witnesses), and survivors in Nazi-occupied Poland (direct victim witnesses). The article discusses on samples the necessity of extending and broadening of that image by adding to the reflection on Holocaust literature (which has been underway for many years) the reflection on the accounts of the experience of exile, Soviet forced labour camps, and wandering in the USSR contained in the entire corpus of literary works and memoirs written by Polish-Yiddish writers.

The article examines the usefulness of the genealogical method in research on the Kielce pogrom. An analysis of the stories of individual people – victims of the pogrom will reveal a broader background of this tragic event. In the text, we will also try to answer some important research questions. Is the list of victims complete? Does it include the names of people who did not, in fact, perish during the pogrom? In addition, the article presents new research areas within the described issues.

* This text offers a development of the conclusions articulated in Joanna Tokarska-Bakir’s book Pod klątwą. Portret społeczny pogromu kieleckiego (Cursed: A social portrait of the Kielce pogrom), and it should be read together with this work. The English translation of Cursed penned by Ewa Wampuszyc will be published next year by Cornell University Press (co-edited by the USHMM).

The third generation survivors of the World War II genocide of the European Jews  withstand, analyse and create literary texts about the Holocaust, a historical event, which was not endured by them directly but experienced through scientific papers and creative literature. Thanks  to Nathalie Skowronek, a novelist living in Brussels, and her publication of Max en apparence (2013) and La Shoah de Monsieur Durand (2015), we can gain some insight into the social and literary reality of Jewish genocide memory and into its intergenerational transmission. Firstly, we will carefully analyse the approach used by this author in the composition of a biographical text about her grandfather’s reconstruction of events. After that, using an intertextual approach, we will analyse formal and moral narrative considerations of the authoress which govern the literary reconstruction grandfather’s biography.

The article examines the various presentations of Ashkenazi Jews in Israeli fiction. Ashkenazi identity in Israel is controversial both in everyday life and in fiction. However, the literary and artistic manifestations of Ashkenazi Jews are quite different from their political and social image. Ashkenazi Jews are usually portrayed as the intellectual, economic, and professional elite, and also as those who were responsible for the inequality between Jews who immigrated to Israel from Europe and Jews from Arabic countries. They are depicted by the Israeli media as those who forced the oriental Jews to settle in remote towns in Israel, thus denying them the ability to move up the social ladder.

The arrogant, upper-middle-class Ashkenazi is often absent from Israeli literature. Israeli artists of Ashkenazi origin present themselves in autobiographical literature as “weak” or “problematic” and they add a “fragile” aspect to the Ashkenazi identity. The Ashkenazi Jew is depicted as an insecure figure who agonizes over fears and childhood traumas. The image of the “fragile Ashkenazi,” appears in some of the most prominent Israeli writing: Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness, David Grossman’s A Horse Walks into a Bar, and Gila Almagor’s book and film Avia’s Summer.

In 1902, Theodor Herzl, a prominent Jewish thinker and founder of political Zionism, published a utopian novel entitled Altneuland, in which he envisioned, based on ideas of egalitarianism, modern Jewish society in Palestine. In 2011, more than a hundred years after the utopia of Herzl was published, the contemporary Israeli writer Eshkol Nevo, in a way referring to the book of the Zionist ideologist, wrote a moving Israeli family saga entitled Neuland. Since the establishment of the State of Israel, Israeli literature has developed, expressing the experiences and expectations of the young society. Modern Israeli literature developed from realism and a strong Zionist character, through revaluation of the Zionist myth up to the representatives of postmodernism focusing on the personal experiences of the protagonists, detached from the socio-political reality. Modern Israeli literature and in particular Eshkol Nevo’s novel, propose new approaches to literature in general and to Jewish and Israeli identity in particular.

The Sinai Peninsula remains a vital security, strategic, and political focus of Israel. In addition to the Palestinian population residing there is Hamas, an Iran-backed militant group that actively commits acts of terror. Since 1979 and the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, peace returned to the peninsula after decades of conflict between the two nations over this territory; and since 2015, Israel has conducted air strikes in conjunction with Egypt against elements of the Islamic State in the Sinai. The Golan Heights remains of contemporary relevance for Israeli security, strategy, and politics. Seized by Israel from Syria in the closing stages of the 1967 Six-Day War, the territory is an important buffer zone against the terrorist group Hezbollah. Additionally, its relevance is daily displayed in the direction and consequences of the ongoing Syrian civil war, and recognition of the Golan Heights as under Israeli sovereignty by the Trump Administration in March 2019. The following paper is a case study of these two geographic areas and how both hold political, security and geographic value for Israel, offering justification for Israeli strategic and security actions within each.

This article examines the immigration policy in Israel 70 years after the nation’s Declaration of Independence. Israel was established in an attempt to create a shelter for Jews in the Diaspora. Therefore, the policy of Israel towards immigrants has been sometimes criticized as being racist, discriminatory, or undemocratic. But is there a coherent immigration policy in Israel? In fact, aside from the Law of Return of 1950, which refers exclusively to Jewish immigrants, Israel still lacks a proper legal framework that can regulate foreign immigration. In many cases, immigration policy in Israel seems to be unclear and incoherent. With today’s reality of the global migration crisis, this legal vacuum represents a dangerous gap that prevents the State of Israel from effectively coping with the problem with respect to international law and humane standards.

This paper will critically review the major features of current immigration policies, such as the policy of “direct absorption,” the expulsion of African immigrants, and the new procedures of the asylum seekers’ process in Israel. 

The necessity of creating new curricula for teaching foreign languages (including Hebrew) and adjusting them to the requirements of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFRL) is a result of implementing the Bologna Process in the Polish system of higher education. The whole approach to teaching Hebrew to Polish students, as well as methods of assessment, had to be changed according to the new requirements.

In this paper, I wish to study some challenges and difficulties which might be faced by Hebrew instructors in Europe and by the authors of Hebrew certificate exams. First, I will present the main assumptions of CEFRL and its certification system. Then, I will compare it with the Hebrew language curriculum and methods of assessment, as developed and applied in ulpanim (Hebrew language schools) in Israel. Next, I will present some challenges which might be faced by teachers preparing course participants to pass their certificate exams at appropriate levels, adjusting the curriculum’s goals to the assumptions of the CEFRL, strongly modifying the learning resources, or even developing them from scratch.

In conclusion, I will try to evaluate both the European and the Israeli systems of Hebrew language teaching and testing, in view of contemporary assumptions of glottodidactics. 

This article analyses the economic structure and partnerships of the Vilnius Jewish community from the second half of the 17th until the end of the 18th centuries. The article focuses on the economic partnerships and patronages formed by Jews in Vilnius. It also highlights the importance of the immediate hinterland for their business opportunities.

* This article was supported by a GEOP Research Fellowship at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute, within the POLIN Museum Global Education Outreach Program, funded by the William K. Bowes Jr. Foundation, Taube Philanthropies, and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland. The statements made and views expressed herein, however, are solely the responsibility of the author. 

This paper presents the reception of Heinrich Heine’s “Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen” in Yiddish translation. For many of his younger colleagues he was “der grester liriker fun 19tn jorhundert, der sharfster humorist und biterster satiriker in der daytsher literatur” [the greatest poet of the 19th century, the sharpest humorist and bitterest satirist in the German literature]. My aim is to show on the example of Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen [Germany. A Winter’s Tale] (1844) how Heine’s subversive drawing on Romantic ideas and language is rendered into Yiddish in the first half of the 20th century by Moyshe-Leyb Halpern and Moyshe Khashtshevatsky.

In the Second Polish Republic, from the mid-1930s, manifestations of antisemitism became more and more pronounced, and were met with protest from Jewish people. The Union of Jews Participants of Combat for Polish Independence, functioning in 1929–1939, was one of the organizations that fiercely opposed antisemitism. It was the only combatant organization in Poland that represented a national minority. While intensely fighting against the manifestations of antisemitism that encompassed various aspects of life, they condemned antisemitic riots in cities, towns and in universities, while also declaring and manifesting their loyalty and commitment to Poland itself.

This article discusses the early life of Maksymilian Boruchowicz (1911–1987), a Jewish writer, publicist, and literary critic known in interwar Kraków, who changed his name to Michał Borwicz after the Second World War. Biographical information on his life before the outbreak of the war focuses mainly on his studies of Polish language and literature at the Jagiellonian University, where he was actively involved in student literary and cultural circles, as well as political journalism. During his studies and immediately thereafter, Borwicz published prolifically in various magazines and literary journals, and before the war published the novel Miłość i rasa (Love and Race), which was received positively by literary critics.

The Jewish Autonomous Oblast known as Birobijan in the USSR attracted the interest of the British diplomacy. This is reflected in the correspondence between British missions in the USSR and Israel and the Foreign Office. This analysis covers five documents from 1952–1958 kept in the National Archives in London. The documents pertain to two matters: (1) a discussion about the current status of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast (whether rumours of its disappearance were true) and (2) reflections on the actual character of the oblast (to what extent it was Jewish and autonomous). The significance of these documents can be analysed on several levels – from the viewpoint of Birobijan’s history, the nature of British-Soviet relations, and the operating methods of diplomatic services. Reading the documents leads to several questions: why was Great Britain interested in the oblast? How was it perceived in the West? How did the Foreign Office obtain information about it? 

This paper analyses the image of Poland and gentile Poles in the texts of Jewish immigrants and their descendants in French-speaking Belgium. The centre of interest are its literary forms, as well as its historical roots. If the geographical and cultural Polish space appears alternatively as locus amoenus and locus horribilis, the inhabitants of the country are quite clearly represented as populus horribilis. Their antisemitism appears as one of their main features, although sometimes it is problematized. Jewish immigrants and their descendants distance themselves from Poland and gentile Poles. They mainly create a negative image, very different from the traditional image of Poland and Poles in Belgian literature.

* L’auteur de cette étude bénéficie d’un financement octroyé par le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique Polonais (National Science Centre, Poland, research project 2018/30/M/HS3/00153). 

Tokens are nongovernmental circulating media of exchange, as opposed to coins and other official currencies, which are an exclusive prerogative of sovereign authorities. As a commercially active minority community within Poland, Jews of course utilized official nationally issued monies, but they also issued and circulated many forms of tokens to serve varied social, religious, charitable, and commercial purposes. Tokens of non-precious metals and paper were issued by principal Jewish communal authorities; by societies active in maintaining services such as burial, ritual slaughter, education, care of the sick and elderly, and the distribution of alms; and by prominent merchants. The relatively small value and humbleness of such objects, and the fact that their acceptability did not extend beyond the town of their issue, has meant that they were rarely saved and preserved in the course of Jewish migration and during the tumult of wars and pogroms. Therefore, unlike obsolete national coinages, such local tokens have remained virtually unknown and have never previously been collected and studied, either privately or by museums. Recently, metal detectorists at sites of former Jewish habitation have uncovered considerable quantities of metallic Jewish tokens which display a remarkable geographic range and variety of form and function. This paper, based largely on such newly discovered material, presents this rich trove of artifacts for the first time, and attempts to describe and situate their functions within the social and economic context of Jewish communal life in Poland prior to the World War II.

R. Hayyim Volozhin, the main disciple of the Vilna Gaon, set up the Volozhin Yeshiva in 1802. Unlike his mentor, R. Hayyim was not interested in perpetuating the animosity between Hassisdm and mirthnagdim, welcoming Hassidic students in his yeshiva. Despite this, R. Hayyim had a major ideological dispute with the Hassidic world. This is obvious from the collections of questions and answers we have from him, the sheiltot, in which he spells out his differences with Hassidism. His Nefesh Ha-Hayyim, his only autographic work published posthumously, was both a polemic on Hassidism as well as an alternative Judaic-Kabbalistic world view to Hassidism. R. Hayyim’s polemic strengthens the point of view that the Vilna Gaon and his students were more ideologically than politically opposed to Hassidism.

The article discusses the process of the introduction in Galicia of a new law regulating the relations between Jewish communities and the authorities of the territorial administration. Unlike in the Galician provinces, where the Josephine patent of 1789 continued to be applied, certain Jewish communities in the cities here had developed new statutes previously, leading to partial changes in the elections for community councils. The first was the Krakow community (1870), whose Orthodox rabbi Szymon Schreiber (Sofer) attempted to withdraw the implemented changes, designing his own version of the new statutes (1882). The struggle over the form of the new law ultimately culminated with the Viennese government’s issue of relevant regulations in 1890.

Rola was the first periodical in Poland of an unequivocally anti-Semitic profile. An essential element of its ideological programme was combatting Jewish assimilation. According to Rola, processes of assimilation were responsible for generating a new type of Jew – liberal, assimilated and unprincipled – and therefore much more perilous to Polish national interests than the model of a traditional, Orthodox Jew.

The article focuses on the issue of Jewish bourgeoisie’s artistic patronage in Łódź at the the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The selected time range (1890–1907) covers the period of both the city’s rapid development and flourishing of culture and artistic life until the outbreak of the 1905 Revolution. What’s characteristic of the Jewish bourgeoisie patronage in Łódź, is the tendency to finance projects that not only created a sense of community in a multiethnic city, but also emphasized the significant but distinctive role of Jews among townspeople. In this article, the issue of patronage is discussed on selected examples, taking into account shaping of public space and private initiatives in both architecture and fine arts.

Between the years 1918 and 1939, philanthropic associations played a major social role in L’viv, as did in other large Jewish communities in Central and Eastern Europe. The aim of this research paper is to present and discuss selected Jewish associations providing assistance to children, students in secular schools and youth studying at universities. It has to be pointed out that their high level of activity was an expression of the modernization processes taking place among the Jewish population and, clearly, the enhancement of these processes.

The author of the following article analyses development of the construct Ostjuden in the language of German anti-Semites in 1920–1932. For this discourse analysis, two main primary sources were chosen: the daily newspaper Völkischer Beobachter and archives of parliamentary debates of the Reichstag. Immigration and the presence of Eastern European Jews in Germany after the World War I played an important role in the anti-Semitic propaganda and speeches of right-wing politicians. Within the period of the Weimar Republic, the construct Ostjuden underwent certain semantic changes. Use of the term and its connotations in the anti--Semitic discourse were examined and are presented in this article.

This article discusses the housing situation of Holocaust survivors returning to post-war Kraków and Łódź – cities which were home to two of the largest pre-war Jewish communities in Poland, and which were not destroyed during the Second World War. The author indicates and describes factors which shaped the housing situation, including wartime and post-war displacements, the plunder of Jewish property during and after the war, Polish legislation regarding its restitution, as well as the post-war housing policy of the Polish state. Personal literary accounts by Jewish people reveal not only the creation and functioning of ‘camp families,’ but also the peculiar, neighbourly communities full of tensions, misunderstandings and, sometimes, violence.

In my paper entitled Seeking a return to Poland. The case of “Gomulka Aliyah” immigrants in Israel (1956–1960) I describe the emigration of Polish citizens of Jewish origin to Israel in the second half of the 1950s. From October 1956, when Wladyslaw Gomulka came into power in Poland, it became possible for Polish Jews to relocate in to Israel. Leaving Poland was not obligatory for Jews in that period, but a rise in anti-Semitism and disappointment with the communist regime in Poland led a number of Polish citizens of Jewish origin to make the decision to emigrate. In the period of 1956 to 1960 approximately 50,000 Jews went to Israel. However, after few months of living in the New Homeland, some of the new immigrants from Poland were seeking to return. Difficult living conditions, an unfamiliar language, and unemployment led Polish Jews to request repatriation. That was in most of the cases impossible, as most of them had given up on Polish citizenship while immigrating to Israel.

After World War II, the Communist regime took over power directly after the liberation of Poland in 1945. Jewish survivors, having stayed in the country for a certain period of time, tried to revive their multilingual cultural life. Literary works of writers in that community are a fascinating testimony of their struggles: how to be loyal to the Socialist state (condition sine qua non to take part in the official cultural life) on the one hand, and on the other how to express their feelings, thoughts and convictions which they could not and did not want to ignore. Their struggles can be observed on the sample of the three most important motifs of postwar Polish-Yiddish literature: the Holocaust, Communism itself, and Polish-Jewish relations. The article discusses selected literary works of the most prominent Polish-Yiddish writers, whose main character or lyric subject is the ‘new Jewish man’ shaped according to the Communist principles. The author attempts to answer the question of what the most important features of a personality formed by Communist doctrine are, and also to learn about the circumstances of the communist world in which that literary hero lives. Close reading of the programmatic literary pieces of some Communist writers also enables observing whether and how Polish Jewish Communists managed to find a compromise between the mutually exclusive Communist internationalism and their attachment to Yiddish-language culture, and how they reacted when information of Stalinist crimes came to light and their party comrades turned the blade of antisemitism against them. The ambitious project to build a new model of secular progressive Yiddish culture (the so-called ‘nusekh Poyln’), failed to bring the expected results. In spite of concerted attempts to meet the unrealistic demands of Socialist Realism, it soon transpired that Polish-Yiddish literature under Communism was unable to deal with the lack of space afforded by Communist ideology for mourning its murdered nation or with the spasms of unease that were the reaction to the periodic antisemitism in the non-Jewish environment.

The article is devoted to a brief biography, scientific achievements and views of Meir Korzennik, a writer, publicist and Ph.D. laureate of the Jagiellonian University, as well as a teacher and tutor of Jewish youth. The study describes his doctoral thesis on the reception of Montesquieu in Poland, and addresses the legal category of orphan works.

Dr Przemysław Dec (1969–2018) was a lecturer at the Department of History of Judaism and Jewish Literature in the Institute of Jewish Studies of the Jagiellonian University for more than a decade. He was a passionate Qumran scholar and charismatic teacher. He died prematurely in September 2018. The Jagiellonian University has lost an exceptionally talented Hebrew philologist and lecturer on ancient Judaism.

The text reviews the first evaluation of Martin Heidegger’s philosophical project in light of the Black Notebooks by Peter Trawny, the editor of those notebooks. Trawny poses questions about the status of the Black Notebooks and their place within the entire body of Heidegger’s works. The book deserves the attention of ordinary readers and specialists, offering a platform for further discussion.

This article proposes a reading of three stories from the Hebrew morality book Tzemach Tzadiq [The Righteous Shoot], composed by Leon Modena (1571-1648) and based upon the 13th century Italian treatise Fiore di Virtu [The Flowers of the Virtues]. These stories, which present plots with female protagonists, demonstrate women’s mystique in this early Modern Hebrew compilation and reveal the attitude of Modena and his readership towards women who deviated from the norm. Although Tzemach Tzadiq is a hegemonic patriarchal text, it reveals an intra-gender relationship where these female protagonists protest against their social inferiority by means of self-violence.

This article presents and analyses legal acts that influenced the situation of Jews in Galicia and shaped the local co-existence of Jewish communities and municipalities. It concentrates on subsidies provided to Jewish charities and welfare institutions by municipal funds. The subsidizing policy of Krakow is compared with that of Lwów.

This article explores Josephus’s account of Seleucid history in Antiquities 13.365-371. In this passage, Josephus focuses on the Seleucid monarchs Seleucus VI, Demetrius III, and Antiochus X Eusebes and their fight for control of Syria. The difficulty in understanding this section is that it interrupts Josephus’s narrative of the reign of Alexander Jannaeus and does not fully explain events in Syria that led to the endless civil wars there. Through the use of historical and numismatic data unavailable to Josephus, this study examines the background of the Seleucid rulers to explain why their struggle was important for understanding Hasmonean history. Josephus begins this section on Seleucid history with Seleucus VI because his death created the political instability that led to a prolonged civil war between the remaining sons of Grypus (Antiochus XI Philadelphus, Philip I Epiphanes, Demetrius III, and Antiochus XII Dionysus) and the son of Antiochus IX Cyzicenus (Antiochus X Eusebes). For Josephus, this conflict was important since the fraternal civil war between these rulers led to the dissolution of the Seleucid Empire and its takeover by the Romans: a fate shared by the Hasmonean state. By placing this account of Seleucid history in his narrative of Jannaeus’s reign, Josephus uses events in Syria to foreshadow the fraternal strife in the Hasmonean state that likewise made it vulnerable to the Roman legions of Pompey.
 

 In this paper, I argue that the coins of the Jewish war of 66-70 C.E. demonstrate the theocratic conception of the Zealots and of the faction of Simon bar Giora. They are designed as responses to Roman issues and, therefore, are influenced by Roman currency. This minting is a powerful affirmation of independence for a so-called Jewish “State.” The divisions into several factions make it impossible to recognize a unanimous conception of what the political system among the Jews must have been. However, each coin seems to support the theocratic ideal, focalized either on the temple of Jerusalem or on the redemption of the people.
 

There is no scholarly discussion on the impact of the Barbarian invasions on the Jewish communities of Roman Italy. Roman Italy fell victim to a series of invasions. First the invasion of Alaric’s Visigoths in 410 C.E., and then that of Genseric’s Vandals in 455 C.E., which culminated in the sack of Rome. These were followed by the establishment of the Roman-Barbaric Kingdom of the Ostrogoths, and the subsequent disastrous Gothic War (535-554 C.E.), which brought Italy back under Justinian’s rule. The Barbarian conquest of Italy ended with the Lombard invasion in the second half of the sixth century, around 568 C.E.
The purpose of this article, therefore, is to demonstrate that the Barbarian invasions brought profound changes to the geographic distribution and the demographic development of the Jews living in Late Antique Italy. Thus, a close look at epigraphic data shows that the destruction that came in the wake of the Barbarian invasions probably resulted in the total destruction of the various Jewish communities established in northern Italy, and a substantial decrease, even decline in the Jewish population of Rome, sacked twice by the Barbarians during the fifth century, and much damaged by Justinian’s Gothic wars in the middle of the sixth century. On the other hand, it is possible to observe a slow demographic and geographic increase, albeit one that is difficult to measure, of the Jews living in southern Italy. This part of the peninsula suffered much less damage than the rest of the peninsula as a consequence of the Barbarian invasions, as attested in the epigraphic evidence from Venosa. Thus, by the end of the Barbarian invasions, the geographical distribution of the Jewish communities in southern Italy anticipated that of the early Middle Ages, attested in the eighth and ninth centuries C.E.
The research leading to these results received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) / ERC Grant Agreement no. 614 424. It was part of the ERC Judaism and Rome, and was realized within the framework of the CNRS and Aix-Marseille University, UMR 7297 TDMAM (Aix-en-Provence).
 

 This article contains a brief description of the Codex of Petrarch, which is located in the Czartoryski Library in Kraków. Preliminary analysis proves that the Codex comes from Italy or France. The Czartoryski family bought it in the nineteenth century. The Petrarch Codex contains two incomplete biblical books: Genesis 23:8 – Exodus 14:28, i.e. Hebrew text and Aramaic translation. The analysis is focused on three main aspects: historical, paleographical and linguistics. The detailed analysis proved that the Aramaic text was in some aspects very similar to Targum Onkelos, and in others it was very similar to Targum Pseudo-Jonathan. Most importantly, the text contains an unknown version of Targum Onkelos. Therefore the article also shows morphological and grammatical differences between the official edition of the Targum Onkelos and the text.
 

 The article presents the activities of a preacher and teacher Szymon Dankowicz (1834-1910). In the 1860s Dankowicz was active in progressive circles in Warsaw. He had bonds with several institutions such as the Warsaw Rabbinic Seminary, the Lomdei Torah association, and the salon of the young Jewish intelligentsia; he also published in two Polish-Jewish periodicals Jutrzenka and Izraelita. In 1865 he unsuccessfully applied for the preacher position in the Daniłowiczowska Street synagogue. After 1868 he served as a preacher in the Kraków progressive synagogue. There he delivered sermons in the Polish language and manifested his pro-Polish attitude. In this city he also developed extensive pedagogical and charitable work. In later years Dankowicz applied for a preacher position at the Tempel in Lviv (1890) and served for several years in the Tarnopol Tempel (1895-1898). His biography, especially when compared to the biographies of other preachers, is an important example of the activities of a progressive preacher in partitioned Polish lands.

 In the early 1880s, when Russian politics took a strong anti-Semitic turn, a campaign was initiated in order to limit the number of Jews in the bar. The anti-Semitic weekly Rola took active part in this campaign. Rola claimed that a once respected profession had lost its social prestige because of the inflow of Jewish members into the bar, to which they had introduced the logic of financial profit. Its journalists condemned the moral relativism of Jewish lawyers, who had begun to “infect” Polish social life when they gradually took over public offices. This was facilitated by the professional and social links between Jewish and Polish barristers, who together formed a “Jewish-atheist clique.” According to Rola, the Polish bar was to be healed by elimination of unhealthy competition through the limitation of the general number of licensed barristers, introduction of official limits on the number of Jews in the barrister profession, and outlawing of the so-called private barristers with no formal legal education, whose members were mostly Jewish. When in 1889 the numerus clausus was officially introduced into the bar, Rola ceased to be interested in this topic. This sudden change of direction invites a suspicion that the weekly could have been inspired from the outside, while its activities were part of the persecution campaign of Jewish barristers organized by the Russian authorities.
 

A translation of a Polemic essay by Cantor Pinchas Szerman, second cantor at the Great synagogue of Warsaw. The essay discusses the many difficulties experienced by cantors in his time, especially the ones who had not be educated. In Szerman’s opinion, the only way to ease the burden – especially the financial burden – was to create a class of educated and professional cantors. The many customs of Polish Jewry that are forgotten today have been annotated as well as basic biographical data on highly influential earlier cantorial masters.
 

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of radical assimilation in the late 19th century. The author focuses on the Markusfeld family, who had lived in Kraków since at least the mid-18th century. The study is an attempt to show the history of family against the background of the history of Galicia, in the second half of the 19th century, when the idea of integration was finally abandoned, and integration ceased to be seen as solution of “the Jewish question.” The paper is based on Bauman’s analysis of the general sociological mechanisms of modern assimilatory processes, and refers to the category of radical assimilation (T. Endelman). It seeks to answer the question of why most family members chose to convert at the end of the 19th century. The author shows that the choice of “default” religion, “universal” values, and “right” idiom was not tantamount to their affirmation – but it was a way to look for happiness and fulfillment, which was (unlike in France), according to some Jews not accessible while staying Jewish. Baptism was also a form of protection – the Second World War would prove it effective.
 

 Hirsch Herman Hescheles, a Jew born in Lvov, was the owner of private companies in Vienna and a philanthropist. As his life was associated with two cities – Lvov and Vienna – it was there that he decided to organize his philanthropic activities. The article is devoted to the history of the Herman Hescheles House of the Poor Israelites in Lvov, which was opened in 1896. In this house poor Jewish people of different ages and various states of health, lived over the decades, having been guaranteed accommodation. This was the only foundation of its type to operate in Lvov before World War II.
 

Article describes participation of Jewish councilors in Kraków city council and identifies political milieus where they came from. The interwar is divided in three sub-periods that were characterized by different conditions for municipal political participation. These changes influenced the composition of Jewish councilors: their political belonging and even their cooperative strategies.
 

The story “At the Outset of the Day” by S. Y. Agnon is short, but contains many meanings. It is a story about a father whose daughter’s dress burns to ashes, and who throughout the story attempts, unsuccessfully, to cover her nakedness. As the article shows, the story can be defined as symbolic, with a connotative level open to interpretation as well as biblical foundations and symbols that express its hidden level.
 

The article is devoted to the pro-Polish integrationist group, an important part of the modernizing section of the Jewish community in Poland, in the second half of the 19th century. The author focuses on Ojczyzna, a Polish-language bulletin and the first regular Polish-language newspaper of the pro-Polish integrationist group in Galicia. The study is an attempt to show how the idea of integration was finally abandoned at the turn of the century, and integration ceased to be seen as the solution to “the Jewish question.”

The article summarizes and highlights some sections of the autobiography of Abraham Stub, a Jew born in Bobowa into a family of adherents of the Bobower Rebbe. In his early childhood Stub migrated with his parents to Mainz in Germany, later escaping the Shoah to Palestine, where he managed to establish a store in the center of West Jerusalem (Ma‛ayan Stub). The autobiography, written in Hebrew, was until recently unknown, although it contains interesting information about the relationship of Jews from Bobowa with their home town after migration, as well as transmitting remarkable biographical details about Rebbe Ben Zion Halberstam’s life in Bobowa. Stub depicts himself as a traditional Jew who during and after World War I and his service in the Austrian army became more and more a religious Zionist. His book thus also provides many insights into the early development of the Mizrahi movement in Germany, where Jews from Eastern Europe, especially from Galicia, were often discriminated against by German Jews and therefore established their own small prayer circles (Mahzike ha-das). Stub’s life story developed from this traditional Hasidic Diaspora background into a typical religious Zionist, so to speak Israeli orthodox biography. It might serve as an example for further studies about migration from the East to the West and further on to Israel, where Jews from Poland or a Polish background still play a dominant role in the political and religious public sphere.

This article discusses the Bund’s gender politics present in Tsukunft, the youth organization of the party. In the interwar period Tsukunft grew into one of the most active and dynamic organizations within the Bundist movement in Poland. The author analyzes Tsukunft’s discourse to find out the actual position of the women in the organization. By confronting the organization’s material with the sources produced by the movement’s women activists, the author tries to find out more about women’s experience in Tsukunft. The article therefore incorporates the marginalized narrative of and on Jewish women into modern historiography.

The article examines Yiddish-Polish writers’ response to the Holocaust in their poetry written in the years 1941-1948 and published in Poland in the early postwar years, when the country enjoyed relative political freedom. Special attention is given to a highly interesting theme appearing in the wartime lyrics written by Jewish survivors in the East (like B. Heller, H. Rubin, R. Żhikhlinsky, A. Zak), i.e. their call to arms addressed to the Jews living in Nazi-occupied Poland. The refugees could not bear the thought that whole masses of Jews died without putting up a fight in the ghettoes and camps in the West. It was probably this helplessness that evolved into their poetic appeal addressed to their ghettoized brethren, their call for resistance and punishment of the Nazi German murderers. Interestingly, the works of some writers who survived in the ghettos (such as Y. Shpigl, Y. Katsenelson and others), prove that ghettoized Jews who were tormented by the “docile death” complex also dreamed about being involved in an armed struggle against the Nazi Germans, but were aware of their weakness in the face of a much stronger enemy. Immediately after the war, this discrepancy of experience and knowledge led to a serious lack of understanding between those Jews who had survived in Poland and those who had survived in the East. The article examines these difference of experiences as it is reflected in the poetry.

After an overview of the historiography of North African Jews, the article presents Dario Miccoli’s book Histories of the Jews of Egypt: An Imagined Bourgeoisie, 1880s-1950s, published in 2015. In this recent study, the author proposes an interesting thesis on the construction of the collective identity of Egyptian Jews in line with the “bourgeoisie” reference model, idealized regardless of the objective reality of their economic condition. Based on archival and literary sources of the time, individual trajectories and social practices, but also social, political and cultural broader contexts are analyzed to outline the construction of this unique collective imagination that has survived in the diaspora.

In this article I shall present an in-depth study of the condition of the Jews living in the city of Rome during the Middle and Late Republic. I shall make use mainly of epigraphic and literary sources, such as Appianus, Cicero, Josephus, Philo, Suetonius, and Varro. It seems to me, according to a careful reading of epigraphic data as well as the literary evidence presented by Valerius Maximus, that the first record of a Jewish presence in Rome ought to be dated no earlier than the second half of the second century B.C.E. According to Philo, only by the middle of the first century B.C.E. is there evidence of a much larger Jewish presence in Rome. Most of the Jews arrived as slaves in the wake of Pompey’s conquest of the Hasmonean kingdom in 63 B.C.E. and in the aftermath, during Aulus Gabinius’ consulate in 58 B.C.E. Yet there were also some liberti and a few peregrini, or immigrants. Most of them probably settled in the Subura. A hint of how Judaism and Jews were perceived during the Late Republic is given by the writings of Varro and Cicero. It seems that Varro was very impressed by the lack of images in the Jewish religion, an attitude which suggested a certain similarity to earlier Roman cultic practices. On the other hand, Cicero’s Pro Flacco reflects a negative attitude towards Judaism. Judaism is therefore characterized as a Barbarian superstition, opposed to Rome’s traditional values. It seems that the Jews as a group played a very negligible part, yet they were active in the politics of the Late Republic. A careful reading of Cicero’s Pro Flacco can show that during this period Jews still had no communitarian institutions, although they grouped together. Moreover, they were probably clientes of their conqueror patronus, Pompey, and as such they could create political pressure. Most of the Jews supported Pompey until the battle of Pharsalus. However, another group did form, which supported Aulus Gabinius, who had once been a cliens of Pompey. Later on, when Gabinius transferred his allegiance from Pompey to Julius Caesar during the Civil War, most of the Jews of Rome did the same, and switched their allegiance, following the steps of their leader in Judaea, the High Priest Hyrcanus II. According to a careful reading of a passage of Josephus’ Antiquities, which reports the decree of Publius Servilius Isauricus to the city of Parium, Julius Caesar recognized the Jewish communities, till then informal institutions, as collegia licita through the Lex Iulia.
 

A fragment of the Epicurean account of Diogenes of Oinoanda (2nd century AD), which was found in 1997, revealed a mention of the most superstitious and abominable Jews and Egyptians. The fragment is part of A Treatise on Physics and repeats the Epicurean view that gods do not interfere in people’s lives. The aforementioned peoples serve the exemplification that the world of humans is separated from the world of the gods. Both expressions refer to the stereotypical perception of the Jews and Egyptians that is well-known from Greek-Roman literature. However, it seems that the way both ethne imagined their gods – in the form of animals (the Egyptians’ view) and without any cultic statues (the Jews’ view) – was meaningful for Diogenes, who like other Epicureans attached great importance to the worship of images of gods.
 

This article presents a concise overview of the most relevant information that can be gleaned from the approx. 4000 Jewish inscriptions from antiquity (c. 300 BCE – 700 CE). Special attention is paid to those areas and topics about which inscriptions are our only (or main) source of information because the ancient Jewish literary sources are silent about them. The stones turn out to be especially relevant to the study of the western diaspora in the Roman and early Byzantine periods.
 

At the end of the fourth century and beginning of the fifth century AD, there were numerous acts of violence between Christians and Jews. This background exposes the especially interesting, isolated message of Socrates Scholasticus concerning the events at Inmestar in Syria (HE VII 16), where some drunken Jews murdered a Christian boy. Although many details of Socrates’ narrative seem unclear, it appears that the murder itself did not occur on the occasion of the feast of Purim, as was often assumed in the older literature concerning this topic. Consequently, the event is further proof of the local conflicts between believers of the two religions.
 

This article analyzes the rescue campaign of unemployed Jewish workers in 1898-1899 in the Galician oil industrial area. The professionalization of the oil industry and reforms, connected with new safety requirements in the last decades of the 19th century, led to mass unemployment of unskilled, mainly Jewish workers. The catastrophe of the workers aroused the attention of prominent Vienna political leaders, including Theodore Herzl and Saul Raphael Landau. An analysis of the information campaign in the Galician and Vienna Jewish press shows how its leaders, mainly Vienna philanthropists and intellectuals, used the case of Boryslav’s Jewish workers to support socialist or Zionist theories about the Eastern European Jewry. At the same time, the campaign exposed a lack of understanding of the local Galician context and the inability of local elites to react adequately, which led to utopian and non-effective aid projects.
 

The author attempts to analyze the life and creative work of Joseph Roth within the functioning and crisis of tripartite identity and to construct an oriental ghetto image in his works as a reaction to the social stigmatization of the writer’s Jewish identity.
Tripartite identity, the phenomenon which was investigated by Marsha Rozenblit, was spread among Austrian Jews and designated identity in which the Jews of the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy were Austrian by political loyalty, German or Czech or Polish by cultural affiliation and Jewish in an ethnic sense. This means that Joseph Roth, like many other representatives of the middle city class of Jewish population of the empire, felt comfortable as an Austrian, Jew and German at the same time.
Functioning of tripartite identity was possible only in the context of the liberal supranational Austrian-Hungarian Empire. The city of Brody, where the future writer was born, owing to the domination of the Jewish people and their integration in German culture and the Austrian political system, was the last favorable environment in Galicia for the formation of tripartite identity. The growth of nationalism, downfall of the empire, and development of anti-Semitism and Nazism resulted in the fact that Joseph Roth and the other Jews, who identified their civil belonging to the Habsburg monarchy and were representatives of the German culture, felt a crisis of identity. This was characterized by the feeling of connection to a non-existent state – the Austrian empire – as well as the new political system’s denial of the right of a Jew to represent the German culture and, above all, social stigmatization of Jewish religious identity. Religious and ethnic Jewish identity, which had to belong to the private sphere according to the principles of liberalism, was perceived as a central negative characteristic of a person – a stigma.
The nostalgia for the lost world, struggle with Nazism and anti-Semitism and reaction to the Jewish identity as a stigma created the special fictitious oriental world of Joseph Roth’s Volhynian and Galician shtetl. Its main features were isolation, being beyond space and time, the principal “difference” of its residents and their spiritual and intellectual superiority over what were in the terms of everyday conditions more civilized western adherents.

Paper deals with organizations, which were mostly created by the more affluent members of the Jewish community in Lvov for improvement of the hygiene and sanitary conditions of their poorer fellow citizens and medical prevention. The aim of paper is to present their history and characteristics of different forms of assistance, recreation and treatment which the above-mentioned organizations of the Jewish population in Lvov provided in the interwar period (winter and summer camps for children and young people, day camps, the Dębina sanatorium, summer camps for adults, family stays).
 

The initiative of establishing B’nai B’rith in Lvov was put forward by Samuel Horowitz,
a prominent member of the local Jewish community. On 5 October 1899, the statute of the “Leo-polis” Humanitarian Society was registered with a rescript issued by the Lvov Governorship. On 29 October of the same year, the establishing meeting took place. This way, the Order’s presence in what was at the time the capital of Galicia, and after 1918 a provincial city of the Second Republic of Poland, was officially approved.
This analysis offers an image of an organization gathering people of high social trust, excellent educational background, and wealth. The majority of them were people who had built their professional position consistently and laboriously. The abovementioned data justifies the claim that the people gathered in Leopolis were not careerists seeking the chance to make a mark. Membership did not open their careers, but was rather a crowning achievement. The exclusive character of the Order sealed the high social and professional standards of its members. Crossing the threshold of the lodge was viewed as a distinction, and serving a function there was a true honor. In this matter, we can see a similarity between Leopolis and other Polish lodges. Another similarity is related to the range of basic activities undertaken by the Lvov brethren, among which was giving scientific and popular lectures, propagating reading, and caring for the poor and the orphaned. The charity activity of the brethren was mainly aimed at Jews, but Christians became its beneficiaries as well.

Holocaust teaching is a foundation for deepening Jewish identity. Despite the stated goals of the trips to Poland, studies involving participating youngsters indicate that Holocaust education per se does not significantly affect their sense of Jewish identity. Nonetheless, Holocaust teaching through the journey to Poland enhances participants’ self-concept as Israelis, possibly because their Israeliness is associated with emotions such as power, pride, and hope. In view of these findings, the aim of this study is to examine whether and to what degree faith plays a role in the Holocaust teaching that is part of public and public-religious schools’ efforts to reinforce Jewish identity.

In this paper author explores Semyon Dubnov’s position on Zionism and Diaspora Autonomism in the years after he left Soviet Russia in 1921. In particular Horowitz asserts that Dubnov must have been aware of the fact that his ideas were receiving their broadest application not in Eastern Europe, as he hoped, but in Palestine. The paper treats Dubnov’s reaction to this ideological challenge.

Twentieth-century events in Russia and Eastern Europe resulted in complex definitions of Jewish identity and communal relations. When the Soviet Union disbanded, foreign agencies pushed funds and resources to rebuild Jewish communities and institutions. One of the avenues for this funding is the creation and support of academic research centers responsible for training students and scholars. Organizations interested in Russia’s “unaffiliated Jews”and the research centers responsible for the revival of Jewish Studies form unique partnerships that bridge academic and public arenas. Reclaiming Jews who do not identify with Judaism or Jewish culture (unaffiliated Jews) in Russia is a significant goal of some Jewish funding agencies in the United States and Israel. An examination of mission statements by these philanthropic agencies reveals narrow definitions of “Jews”that ignore major contributions from Jewish Studies scholars focused on understanding a diverse population with disparate self-understandings.

The tradition of Jewish studies in Poland has been drastically interrupted by the Second World War and the Holocaust. In the immediate postwar period the process of re-establishing research on Jewish history and heritage was undertaken by the Jewish Historical Commissions and later Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. More examples of the individual and group initiatives can be traced only in the 1970s and 1980s. The real happened in the late 1980s with Krakow as one of the first and main centers of revitalized Jewish studies in Poland. The first postwar academic institution in Krakow specializing in Jewish studies –Research Center for Jewish History and Culture in Poland –was established already in 1986 in the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. More than a decade later, in 2000, it was transformed into the first Poland’s Department of Jewish Studies (Katedra Judaistyki) –now the Institute of Jewish Studies. Nowadays there are more similar programs and institutions –at the universities in Warsaw, Wrocław and Lublin (UMCS). Also other academic centers tend to have at least individual scholars, programs, classes or projects focusing on widely understood “Jewish topics.”Jewish studies in Poland, along with the revival of Jewish culture, reflect the contemporary Polish attitude to the Jewish heritage, and their scale and intensity remains unique in the European context. The growing interest in Jewish studies in Poland can be seen as a sign of respect for the role of Jewish Poles in the country’s history, and as an attempt to recreate the missing Jewish part of Poland through research, education and commemoration, accompanied by slow but promising revival of Jewish life in Poland.

Jewish Studies in Germany reflects the tremendous demographic transformations of the Jewish community since 1990. Yet, this article also posits that non-Jewish Germans too have changed substantially due to immigration and new generational views on the legacy of the Holocaust. As such, Jewish Studies has to communicate the history of the German Jewry to Jews and Gentiles mostly unfamiliar with its rich legacy. It needs to comment on Holocaust memorialization to educate new generations of Gentiles as well as Jewish immigrants, for whom the end of the Cold War bears more significance than the Holocaust. Finally, it needs to be part of new conversations between Christians and Jews that also includes the large Muslim minority in Germany. While the changing audiences in Germany dictate a focus on Jews in Germany, Jewish Studies also needs to embrace a more European perspective reflective of the more comparative and transdisciplinary scholarship abroad. Despite the significant growth of Jewish Studies in Germany over the last two decades, these challenges call for even greater efforts.

In the research on the Bar Kokhba revolt (132-136 CE); one of the central subjects that were given prominent attention was the territorial extent of the second revolt. During all the years of research on this geographical question, two schools of thought were formed. One of them is that of the maximalists, who claim that the revolt spread through the entire Provincia Judaea and even beyond it into neighboring provinces such as Provincia Arabia in the south and Provincia Syria in the north. The second one is that of the minimalists, who restrict the revolt to the area of the Judaean hills and their immediate environs. The role of the Galilee region in the second revolt was discussed in great depth and centered on the question of whether the Galilee had taken part in the revolt. Since 1999, Professor Werner Eck of the University of Cologne focused on the power and range of this revolt from the Roman perspective. His general conclusion was that the second revolt was a central event in the history of the Roman Empire. Large military units participated in the event, which spread all over the province and even beyond. The rebels caused the Romans enormous casualties. They were forced to subdue the revolt savagely, causing the rebels massive losses. The revolt had a strong influence on the Roman Empire, and caused heavy damage to the Roman army that had immediate effects as well as long-term implications. His conclusions were based on a study of a variety of subjects including the archaeological discoveries from Tel Shalem, situated in the Beth Shean Valley, two kilometers south of Kibbutz Tirat Zvi and about 12 kilometers south of Scythopolis. The finds consisted of parts of a bronze statue and a head that was identified as that of the Roman emperor Hadrian, and a monumental inscription which had been inscribed in three lines on an arch that was 11 meters wide. According to W. Eck, these findings testify to the participation of the north, the Jordan Valley and the Galilee in the Second Revolt; and that the “Galilee felt the revolt more than has hitherto been conceded. A decisive battle may have been won here, not far from Caparcotna, the camp of the Second Legion in Judaea”(Eck 1999). This paper will re-examine the evidence from Tel Shalem, and other places in Galilee, mainly the findings from Kh. El-hamam in eastern Galilee, findings that were used to include the Galilee Region in the geographical expansion of the revolt. We will study anew the historical background for the erection of the Tel Shalem inscription, the various epigraphic interpretations, and other evidence and its implications for the study of the revolt. Our study will question some of the broadening assumptions of the revolt, and will leave out Galilee in general, and Tel Shalem in particular, from the geographical scope of the Bar Kokhba Revolt.

This article concerns the events that occurred in Sofia, Bulgaria, in the late 1880s and the early 1890s when the position of the Chief Rabbi of Bulgaria was granted to an Ashkenazi rabbi Szymon Dankowicz (1834-1910). Dankowicz was able to obtain this title thanks to the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) which intensified its activities in Bulgaria after the country had been liberated from the Turkish occupation in 1879 and the Principality of Bulgaria had been formed. The main focus of this article is to present the activities of Dankowicz in Bulgaria as well as the relations between the Sephardic and the Ashkenazi Jews in that period as they are depicted in the sources stored in the archives of the AIU in Paris.

The article presents the rare and unknown collection of Rabbis at The National Museum in Krakow. In Poland, ravaged by so many wars and pogroms, such objects are extremely rare. The National Museum in Cracow has a relatively sizeable collection of lithographic portraits of rabbis, composed of 28 items, which were mostly donated by the great benefactors of the Museum, Wacław Lasocki and Władysław Bartynowski. A social position of Rabbi in Jewish community has been described. The names and the biographies of the Rabbis have been established. The information about their lives has been given, together with the descriptions of the portraits. The text is the first scientific information, description and interpretation of these portraits.

K.u.K.Militar-Kommando Krakau (established as a part of Kriegsgraberabteilung) built 400 cemeteries in Western Galicia. For Jewish members of the Austro-Hungarian Army 15 war cemeteries were erected. This paper presents a short historical overview of Jewish military cemetery from Cracow (Miodowa Street) till 1939. This cemetery (no. 387) was a part of Jewish cemetery from 1804. The article also outlines the creation of the monument, which was built on this cemetery in 1937.

The purpose of this article is to present the activities of the Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst [hereafter: OD] in Nazi-occupied Krakow during the years 1940-1945. This period includes OD organizations in Krakow’s Jewish district, Kazimierz, in 1940, in the Krakow ghetto in 1941-1943 and in the German concentration camp at Płaszow in 1942-1945. Rounding off these topics is a paragraph touching on the post-war fate of OD officers under Polish law. Trials of OD members were held before the Special Criminal Court [hereafter: SCC] in Krakow in 1945-1947. In discussing the issue, the author has sought to explain the reasons for which Jews joined the OD in light of the moral dilemmas facing OD members. The problems raised in this article are also an attempt to understand the role of the OD in the implementation of the German government’s policy towards the Jews in the years 1940-1945, i.e. for the duration of the Jewish formation’s existence. Holocaust studies lacks sufficient research on the history of the OD in Krakow, and it is therefore very important to fill this gap in the literature. In German-occupied Poland, several terms referring to the Jewish police were used interchangeably. In printed and archival sources, the organization is often called Ordnungsdienst, OD, Jewish Order Service (literal translation from German), Order Service, or, simply, the Jewish police. Its members are commonly called odemani [translation: OD-men] or Jewish policemen.

Given the historical proximity of Polish and Jewish groups, it is possible to identify their mutual interconnectedness. This paper presents one such example of the stereotypical Jewish Mother, in Israel known as a “Polish woman,”both in its sociohistorical and cultural aspect. Drawing from the theory of gendered and stereotypical representations, author traces a changing portrayal of the Jewish Mother on her way from the ghetto penury to middle-class affluence. Embodied by popular characters such as Molly Goldberg, the Jewish mother also became a target of bitter criticism, best rendered in the depiction of Sophie Portnoy—the iconic protagonist of Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint (1967). Feminist re-readings of this popular stereotype offer an interesting insight into its construction and try to explain its viability.

The thesis that the Khirbet Qumran community was a branch of the larger Essene movement has dominated scholarship since the discovery of the first Dead Sea Scrolls. The number of books and articles challenging the theory that the Scrolls found in the caves belonged to a sectarian community that lived at Khirbet Qumran – and that these sectarians should be identified as Essenes – indicates that we are far from a consensus concerning the history of the Qumran history. What has largely been neglected in this debate is Flavius Josephus, who alone among the extant Second Temple Period authors claims to have been an Essene.
This article examines the importance of Josephus as an eyewitness to Essene beliefs and practices in the first century C.E. It suggests that his descriptions of the Essene admission procedure matches the latest version of the Serek ha-Yahad, which documents changes in the practices and beliefs of this sect during the first century C.E. The study seeks to show that the Serk belonged to a sectarian library that is archaeologically connected with Khirbet Qumran and that this library was more widely dispersed among the caves than previously recognized. The article builds on this evidence to propose that we can connect the Serek and Josephus to Khirbet Qumran, and that this text was used as a sort of archaeological blueprint for this settlement. The evidence examined in this article reveals that Josephus is our only extant witness to life at Khirbet Qumran during its later occupational phase (Periods II–III, ca. 4 B.C.E.–73/4 C.E.).

A previous paper on the titulus Tiburtinus re-opened the debate concerning the notorious ignotus, then generally thought to be P. Sulpicius Quirinius (cos. 12 BC), suggesting instead that he might be identified with C. Sentius Saturninus (cos. 19 BC). This suggestion was subsequently challenged in favour of L. Calpurnius Piso (cos. 15 BC), who had originally been argued by Sir Ronald Syme. Since the identification of the consular concerned is significant for Augustan prosopography and for the history of Asia, among other provinces such as Syria and Germany, a detailed and wide-ranging restatement of the case for Saturninus is made here. Piso (unlike Quirinius) is really a non-starter, and it is surprising that he would have been supported by formidable Syme. The rex of the titulus could not have been Rhescuporis I or Rhoemetalces I. The iterum would not have referred to the second legateship of Piso (presumably that of Syria) given Piso’s early career. The binas, referring to two public thanksgivings, does not inspire confidence in Piso receiving a second supplicatio. Piso the Pontifex is not attested as proconsul of Asia, nor is he attested as governor of Syria, and the reconstruction of the fasti of this province is much more reasonable than previously thought. By contrast, all points in Saturninus career can be successfully compared with the information in the titulus. Origins of the Sentii from an area near Tibur is a bonus, if dispensable. Saturninus could not have been proconsul of Africa at the time inferred from Tertullian (29 BC), and hence Asia is open for him in c. 14/13 BC. His office in Syria (c. 12–8 BC) is well-attested, as it is that in Germany (c. AD 3–6). He was awarded ornamenta triumphalia in the company of Tiberius, after ‘two’ victories and no doubt supplicationes binas. Finally, a flexible understanding of the word iterum can accommodate also the meanings ‘for another time’ and ‘twice’, either of which can work with the career of Saturninus. As for deprived Quirinius, among various problems, no two thanksgivings can be conceived for a war such as that of the Homonadenses, and, most condemningly, a reference to his important office under Gaius will never have been omitted in the titulus.

One of the activities of the Inquisition most visible to ordinary people was called the auto-da-fé – a public confession of faith. Such ceremonies, held by the Inquisition Tribunal, were composed of several parts. One of the most significant parts of the ceremony was the sermon. Many of these sermons seemingly focused on Jewish issues, even if only a few of the condemned were accused of converting to Judaism. To whom, and for what purpose, were the sermons addressed? What were their character, role, and impact on society? Can we interpret them as a typical example of anti-Jewish literature, and a specific “invitation to intolerance”? This article aims to outline the subject matter of the sermons delivered during the auto-da-fé ceremony in Portugal, particularly their anti-Jewish aspect. Reference is made to texts of ten sermons made during autos-da-fé held in the three biggest centers of 17th-century Inquisition activity in Portugal (Lisbon, Coimbra and Évora), as well as the colony of Goa.
 

The present article reviews the historical background that had generated the devastation of the Jewish community in the Ukraine in the second half of the 17th century and the rising of Sabbatianism in this period that was followed by the emergence of Hasidism in the second third of the 18th century. The literary evidence, dating from 1650 onward until the end of the 18th century, reveals that the Jewish writers were concerned with the documentation of the tragic devastation that followed the Chmielnizki revolt as well as expressing profound hopes for divine vengeance and a profound hope for messianic redemption.
The discussion is focused on two spiritual responses to the tragic circumstances: Sabbatianism and Hasidism, describing the uniqueness of each one of the two major mystical-messianic-charismatic movements in the Jewish community of the modern era. The discussion includes an analysis of the inner social reality of the Jewish community, where leaders were often chosen among the members of the wealthiest families. The economical-intellectual alliance created a situation where an alternative charismatic leadership was chosen by many members of the Jewish community, who were disappointed with the rabbinic leadership and its social responsibility.
The article presents also the 12 principles of the Hasidic thought and describes the unique circumstances that affected the activity of the Baal Shem Tov in relation to the thirty five blood libels that were recorded in his life time in the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth.

This article analyses the social structure and composition of Hasidic groups at the level of the community, i.e. the elementary social unit of the Hasidic movement. As it demonstrates, the emergence of such groups usually followed the pattern of several stages, beginning with splintering individuals escaping from the control of the kahal, followed by the establishment of a Hasidic prayer hall, known as a shtibl, by far the most important institution of Hasidism outside of the Hasidic court. The two most typical compositions of the Hasidic group centered around the shtibl were peer groups, usually dominated by young men, and interest groups. Most importantly, women were consistently excluded from any participation in the Hasidic group and its activities.
 

The article is focused on the involvement of Kraków’s lodge B’nei B’rith (Solidarity) in local Jewish musical life in the interwar period. On the basis of information contained in documents preserved in State Archive in Kraków we may conclude that the activity of the most outstanding Jewish musical institutions would not have been possible without financial support of Solidarity. However, it seems to be the expectation of the lodge that all musicians and groups supported by B’nei B’rith had to derive from the environment of the progressive Jews and were also involved in the promotion of the new ‘Hebrew music’. There are no doubts that both of these features of the lodge Solidarity’s activity had a profound influence on the shape of Jewish musical life in the interwar Kraków.

In 63 BCE the army of the Roman General Pompey the Great invaded ancient Palestine, destroyed part of the Jerusalem temple, and ended the nearly eighty-year-old Hasmonean state. The Romans thereafter ruled ancient Palestine either directly or through a series of client kings. The great Jewish War against the Romans of 66–70 CE was largely an effort to restore independent Jewish rule. The Jewish historian Josephus, who served as a general in this conflict, tells us that a messianic oracle inspired many Jews to take up arms against the Romans.1 This nearly five-year conflict ended with the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the Jewish temple. Sixty-two years later, Simeon bar Kochba – presumed by many Jews to be the messiah – led Jewish rebels in a second ill-fated revolt against Roman rule. After this failed war, the Jewish community abandoned nationalism and the active hope that a messiah would violently overthrow their oppressors.

The former Jewish quarter (16th to 20th century) of Nowy Wiśnicz (henceforth: Wiśnicz, Yid. ווישניצא Vischnitsa) has so far only been mentioned on a few occasions and with little precision, in the books by Stanisław Fischer (1927/28), Mieczysław Książek (1976, 1979, 1988, 1990), and Adam Bartosz (1992). The last decades saw a handful of publications regarding this subject. The first one to touch upon it was Iwona Zawidzka, who described the cemetery and gave a brief account of the town’s history. She was followed by Elżbieta Ostrowska, who focused on relations between Christian and Jewish inhabitants of the town from the 17th to the 19th centuries. Adam Bartosz, Stanisław Fischer, Mieczysław Książek and Iwona Zawidzka incorrectly ascribed the lack of any photographic record of both synagogues and the public buildings to having been demolished by Germans during the Nazi occupation. I. Zawidzka1 mentions an essay by Julia Goczałkowska2 in which the author describes what she refers to as the Wiśnicz “Jerusalem.”

The Jews and Armenians inhabiting the Poland of days gone by had much in common, despite their different beliefs. Previous research has, however, devoted little attention to this problem, and even when it has the discussion has not been entirely objective. In recent times, the problem was discussed by Krystyn Matwijowski and Nadzieżda Bańczyk and Karina Mkrtczian. While in the last twenty years studies on the history of Jews have been thorough, the history of Armenians has to a large extent been neglected by Polish historiography (with the exception of the works of M. Zakrzewska-Dubasowa and K. Stopka).

Über Bertha Pappenheim (1859–1936) wird auf zweierlei Art und Weise berichtet, und selten gelingt es, ihre zwei Geschichten in ein Personenleben zusammenfließen zu lassen. Zunächst wird über ihre Jugend in Wien geschrieben, als sie eine hysterische, „indirekte“ Patientin von Sigmund Freud war. Freud sollte anhand der Berichte über ihren Fall und der von ihr selber entwickelten Heilmethode, die Psychoanalyse als Therapie entdeckt haben.

The origin of the concept of the American Dream is attributed to James Truslow Adams, whose The Epic of America (1931) was the publication that launched the popularity of the phrase. Adams referred to a dream of a better, happier, and richer life, which should be attainable for all people, and, in his view, America was the place which offers such an opportunity:

„That dream of the land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. [...] It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position (415).”

In diesem Artikel fasse ich Befunde zusammen, die ich in einem Projekt erarbeitete, das die Teilnahme der Juden an den Stadtparlamenten der oben genannten Städte analysierte. Diese Zusammenfassung erfolgt in vier Schritten.
Erstens: möchte ich erklären, warum das Thema so und nicht anders formuliert wurde. Zweitens: stelle ich die Voraussetzungen der jüdischen Aktivitäten in den kommunalen Stadtparlamenten vor. Drittens: gehe ich auf die Wahl von Krakau als eines der Untersuchungsobjekte näher ein, viertens: stelle ich Befunde bezüglich des Krakauer Stadtparlaments vor.
Da die Untersuchungsergebnisse in einer Monographie publiziert werden sollen, schränke ich mich an dieser Stelle bei den Literaturangaben auf ein Minimum ein. Dafür zitiere ich alle Beiträge, die im Umfeld der Projektarbeit entstanden sind.

Dans la période d’entre-deux guerres, la Communauté Juive de Cracovie comptait environ 39 000 membres. Un quart des habitants de la ville de Cracovie était juif. Dans la voïvodie de Cracovie, la moitié des résidents d’origine juive étaient de nationalité polonaise, 26% de Juifs considéraient le polonais comme langue maternelle (troisième place dans le pays en matière de nombre); 18% de Juifs déclaraient, que l’hébreu est leur langue la plus proche (premier résultat en Pologne, je cite après Samsonowska 2005). Ces données résultaient du panorama politique et social de la communauté juive de Cracovie, à l’intérieur de laquelle dominait le courant assimilatoire et où se développaient d’une manière systèmatique les organisations et les parties sionistes (Brzoza 1997). L’activité de toutes ces groupes avait une forte influence sur la vie culturelle des Juifs à Cracovie.

Being one of the leading cultural and literary periodicals, Wiadomości Literackie [“Literary News”] played an important role in shaping the literary tastes of members of the Polish intelligentsia, and was a peculiar institution in literary life itself. The primary goal assumed by the journal was to elevate the level of Polish culture and literature and to present the most recent phenomena of European culture to its readers. Starting from the first issue published on January 6, 1924, the weekly declared war on any phenomena that its editors considered parochial. It would have certain, significant consequences in the future, especially in relation to the Jewish issues presented by the periodical. The publisher’s brochure announcing the first issue of the periodical was published in December 1923, and contained an outline of Wiadomości Literackie. The weekly was addressed to a wide readership, which was meant to trigger free discussion on matters of Polish literary life, lead to its growth and stimulate the newborn movements in art. The periodical was meant to present reliable information and objective evaluation of various phenomena

In the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th, many Jews belonging to high society and undertaking freelance occupations began to assimilate with their usually Christian environment. This was often a necessary prerequisite (also legally) for their social advancement. Nevertheless, their assimilation was rarely complete. In most cases, it was only partial and concerned clothes, everyday habits and education. The change in religion did not become a mass phenomenon in either Europe or America – quite the opposite. This limited assimilation was testament to the Jewish attachment to their religion, regardless of the centuries-long life in the Diaspora. Although numerous changes had occurred in the world, many of the rules respected by Jews throughout history remained valid. For instance, in their hierarchy of importance, education remained higher than wealth

On June 23, 2011, in Milan, Italy, The Holocaust Art Looting and Restitution symposium was presented by Christie’s, auction house, and Art Law Commission of the Union Internationale des Avocats (UIA). This was a first, a conference focused on the Holocaust art restitution, to take place in Italy. The symposium convened leaders of the restitution community as well as government officials, scholars, and collectors

This paper describes S.Y. Agnon’s ironic, dual, modern attitude to the Song of Songs, as a traditionalist and as one who identifies himself with the doctor’s statements: “We are enlightened individuals, modern people, we seek freedom for ourselves and for all humanity, and in point of fact we are worse than the most die-hard reactionaries.” Agnon’s attitude to the world of love is the attitude of a young Jewish artist of the late 19th century who lives in a world of revolutionary changes that also affect the Jewish world. Agnon’s work stands as a tombstone of the gradually unraveling Jewish shtetl and its institutions and values, specifically, the declining status of love and its significance for the values of family, society, and the Jewish nation. The young Jewish man experiences the changing seasons of the late 19th century and early 20th century, reflected in the vacillation between the traditional conception of love by the traditional world, and the modern perception that views love as an element in individual self-realization. “They say that love exists in the world” – but what is love in Agnon’s world? What are the sources of the gap that many of Agnon’s protagonists experience – the gap between yearning, dreams, and heart’s desires, and the potential for their realization in practice?

The conquest of the Near East by Alexander of Macedon began a new era in the history of this region. This pregnant event was quite differently perceived and judged by contemporaries in conquered lands, Palestine among them. To those, the Macedonian’s victory over the Persians meant little more than one hegemonist replacing another. It must have been with concern, or perhaps with hope, that they awaited possible changes under the new political arrangement. We know little about Alexander’s direct rule over Palestine, but the historical evidence we have suggests that the behavior of local populations in the area did not always meet the expectations of Macedonian conquerors. One example may be seen in the attitude of the Jerusalem Temple’s high priest, who, despite Alexander’s superiority at arms, firmly declared his loyalty to the Persian king (Jos. AJ 11, 317–319), while some in Samaria’s elites chose to follow their self-interest and did not hesitate to join the conqueror (Jos. AJ 11, 321–324; 340–345). Although local elites and communities declared their willingness to cooperate with the Macedonian monarch, there were no avoiding tensions and conflicts between locals and newcomers. One such instance was a mutiny in Samaria city against the Macedonians, during which the Syrian governor Andromachus was killed. In retaliation, the rebellion was quenched in blood and Macedonian settlers were brought into Samaria.

* This text was delivered at the 9th Congress of the European Association for Jewish Studies, Ravenna, July 25–29, 2010.

Eusebius’ Chronika was a remarkable achievement in the field of ancient chronography, not least as the conclusion of extensive research running since the beginning of the Hellenistic period. It was a double work, composed some time before AD 311 and expanded shortly after AD 325. The first part, now usually called Chronographia, was a detailed introduction, aiming at collecting the raw material from all sources then available, and setting out the plan of the project. The second part, known as Kanones (Chronikoi Kanones), which carried its own preface, was a grand exposition (utilising the data of the first part) in the form of a table consisting of up to nine parallel columns to be read across, thus presenting a synchronistic universal history at a glance. Only fragments survive of the Greek original, primarily in George the Syncellus (ca. AD 800) and an anonymous excerptor (known as ‘Excerpta Eusebiana’ from a MS of the 15th century AD). But we have a nearly complete Armenian translation (earliest copy ca. 13th century AD), a Latin translation of the second part by Jerome (with his own preface and extended to AD 380/1), as well as two Syriac epitomes, one of which is believed to have been compiled by Joshua the Stylite (8th century AD), and other witnesses including two very early Arab chroniclers, one being Agapius of Hierapolis, ca. AD 942.

The city of Dura-Europos in modern day Syria provides a microcosm of multi-ethnic and multi-religious life in the late ancient Near East. Although there are debates as to the exact date of the conquest of the city, the year 256 CE appears to be the most plausible date in which the King of Kings, Šāpur I took Dura. In the third century, the city was abandoned and so the life of Dura came to an end after more than half a millennium of existence. Its apparent sudden abandonment has made it a wonderful archaeological playground for studying life in the third century CE on the border of the Irano-Hellenic world of antiquity. The city had changed hands several times since its creation in the fourth century BCE by the Seleucids to when Mithradates II (113 BCE) conquered it and brought it into the Arsacid imperial orbit, where it remained for three centuries. The Arsacid control of a trading town or as it was once called a caravan town, works well with the story that Mithradates II, several years before the takeover of Dura-Europos, had concluded an agreement with the Chinese Emperor Wudi for trade cooperation. In the larger scheme of things, these activities, no matter how accurate the dating is, suggest the idea that the Arsacids may have been thinking of the creation of a large trade network as part of what modern historians have called the “Silk Road.” Dura was subsequently conquered in the second century CE by Emperor Trajan (115–117 CE) and later, in 165 CE, by Avidius Cassius, after which it stayed in Roman hands for almost a century. The Sasanians in turn conquered the city in 256 CE.

The present article deals with the problem of the presumably Hebrew inscription on the coronation sword of Polish kings, known as the “Szczerbiec”. Our objective is not to recall or reconstruct the complexity of its history. It is rather to expose some elements of the sword’s bizarre haps and mishaps, as far as they may cast some light on the emergence of the inscription and its meaning. The main purpose of our attempt is to present one possible consistent reading of the inscription, taking into account some historical and linguistic data. Our proposal draws from some previous reconstructions, both past and current. Finally, however, we hope to offer an original interpretation of the inscription.

There is no need to prove the significant role played by legends, myths and stereotypes in the history of the world. Also in the Polish lands, we can find many stories connected with the history of the Jews. There is still no comprehensive study on legends concerning Jews in mediaeval Poland, but we already have the book by Haya Bar-Itzhak, a professor of Comparative Hebrew Literature at the Haifa University. An exception here may be the well-known legend about the love affair between King Kazimierz Wielki (Casimir the Great) and the Jewish girl Esther, which has been widely described in many works. Of special importance is the book written by the eminent literary historian and linguist, Chone Shmeruk, entitled “Legenda o Esterce w literaturze jidysz i polskiej” (The Legend of Esther in Yiddish and Polish Literature).

When I came to Kraków for the first time several years ago and tried to get some information about the Jewish Kraków, among the first-hand information I was offered in the bookshops were a few small booklets with legends about the Jews in this town. This is nothing special, for wherever one goes as a tourist one gets the same genre of literature: local legends and tales. It seems, therefore, that the popular legends indeed offer the first-hand information about the specific climate and the self-estimation of the inhabitants at a specific place. It is obviously the tales of a city that infuse life to its stones and places more than all exact historical data one can gather. The legend gives, so to speak, a short-hand résumé of the most typical and central features as well as the spirit of a place.

The year 1815 saw the emergence of a new State on the map of Europe – the Free City of Kraków, which, because of its affiliation to the small group of European Republics, was also referred to as the Republic of Kraków. The Free City of Kraków stretched along the left bank of the River Vistula, bordering to the west with the Kingdom of Prussia, to the north and east with the Kingdom of Poland and to the south with the Austrian Empire. Its total surface area was 1150 km², which – apart from Kraków which became the capital – also contained three small private towns, Chrzanów, Nowa Góra and Trzebinia, as well as 244 villages.

La littérature française est prodigue en figures de femmes juives. Au fil du temps, l’image de « la Juive » se fixe dans la mentalité occidentale, mythe reflétant de grandes tendances politiques, historiques, sociales et intellectuelles et évoluant avec elles. Elle émerge au Moyen Âge et au XIXe siècle et connaît l’épanouissement comme la « belle Juive ». Ce personnage fictif et polymorphe porte certains traits constants qui constituent l’essence même de sa figure exemplaire et traduisent le rapport ambivalent de l’Occident à l’Autre. Car « chaque époque et chaque société recréent ses propres “autres” » (Said 2005: 358) et le Juif est l’Autre par excellence. Sa marginalisation s’opère par l’exclusion religieuse, par la juridiction antijuive, par une certaine imperméabilité culturelle, qui obère les échanges. Dans ce contexte, la « belle Juive » révèle le degré d’interdépendances et d’interactions entre les sociétés non juive et juive. Parallèlement, cet archétype traduit aussi, dans une sphère plus individuelle, le fantasme de l’Autre comme objet du désir et de l’interdit, d’autant plus troublant que le Juif, bien que socialement identifié, se (con)fond physiquement.

* This is a slightly revised version of my paper held at the international conference “700 Years of Jewish Presence in Kraków” organized by the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences and Department of Jewish Studies of the Jagiellonian University: Kraków, 26–28 September, 2005.