The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-century France

The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-century France PDF Author: Jay R. Berkovitz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description

The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-century France

The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-century France PDF Author: Jay R. Berkovitz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description


The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth–Century France

The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth–Century France PDF Author: Jay R. Berkovitz
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814344070
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Focusing on the ideology of regeneration, Jay Berkovitz traces the social, economic, and religious struggles of nineteenth-century French Jews. Nineteenth-century French Jewry was a community struggling to meet the challenges of emancipation and modernity. This struggle, with its origins in the founding of the French nation, constitutes the core of modern Jewish identity. With the Revolution of 1789 came the collapse of the social, political, and philosophical foundations of exclusiveness, forcing French society and the Jews to come to terms with the meaning of emancipation. Over time, the enormous challenge that emancipation posed for traditional Jewish beliefs became evident. In the 1830s, a more comprehensive ideology of regeneration emerged through the efforts of younger Jewish scholars and intellectuals. A response to the social and religious implications of emancipation, it was characterized by the demand for the elimination of rituals that violated the French conceptions of civilization and social integration; a drive for greater administrative centralization; and the quest for inter-communal and ethnic unity. In its various elements, regeneration formed a distinct ideology of emancipation that was designed to mediate Jewish interaction with French society and culture. Jay Berkovitz reveals the complexities inherent in the processes of emancipation and modernization, focusing on the efforts of French Jewish leaders to come to terms with the social and religious implications of modernity. All in all, his emphasis on the intellectual history of French Jewry provides a new perspective on a significant chapter of Jewish history.

Rites and Passages

Rites and Passages PDF Author: Jay R. Berkovitz
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812200152
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
In September 1791, two years after the Revolution, French Jews were granted full rights of citizenship. Scholarship has traditionally focused on this turning point of emancipation while often overlooking much of what came before. In Rites and Passages, Jay R. Berkovitz argues that no serious treatment of Jewish emancipation can ignore the cultural history of the Jews during the ancien régime. It was during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that several lasting paradigms emerged within the Jewish community—including the distinction between rural and urban communities, the formation of a strong lay leadership, heightened divisions between popular and elite religion, and the strain between local and regional identities. Each of these developments reflected the growing tension between tradition and modernity before the tumultuous events of the French Revolution. Rites and Passages emphasizes the resilience of religious tradition during periods of social and political turbulence. Viewing French Jewish history through the lens of ritual, Berkovitz describes the struggles of the French Jewish minority to maintain its cultural distinctiveness while also participating in the larger social and economic matrix. In the ancien régime, ritual systems were a formative element in the traditional worldview and served as a crucial repository of memories and values. After the Revolution, ritual signaled changes in the way Jews related to the state, French society, and French culture. In the cities especially, ritual assumed a performative function that dramatized the epoch-making changes of the day. The terms and concepts of the Jewish religious tradition thus remained central to the discourse of modernization and played a powerful role in helping French Jews interpret the diverse meanings and implications of emancipation. Introducing new and previously unused primary sources, Rites and Passages offers a fresh perspective on the dynamic relationship between tradition and modernity.

Building a Public Judaism

Building a Public Judaism PDF Author: Saskia Coenen Snyder
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674070577
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Nineteenth-century Europe saw an unprecedented rise in the number of synagogues. Building a Public Judaism considers what their architecture and the circumstances surrounding their construction reveal about the social progress of modern European Jews. Looking at synagogues in four important centers of Jewish life—London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Berlin—Saskia Coenen Snyder argues that the process of claiming a Jewish space in European cities was a marker of acculturation but not of full acceptance. Whether modest or spectacular, these new edifices most often revealed the limits of European Jewish integration. Debates over building initiatives provide Coenen Snyder with a vehicle for gauging how Jews approached questions of self-representation in predominantly Christian societies and how public manifestations of their identity were received. Synagogues fused the fundamentals of religion with the prevailing cultural codes in particular locales and served as aesthetic barometers for European Jewry’s degree of modernization. Coenen Snyder finds that the dialogues surrounding synagogue construction varied significantly according to city. While the larger story is one of increasing self-agency in the public life of European Jews, it also highlights this agency’s limitations, precisely in those places where Jews were thought to be most acculturated, namely in France and Germany. Building a Public Judaism grants the peculiarities of place greater authority than they have been given in shaping the European Jewish experience. At the same time, its place-specific description of tensions over religious tolerance continues to echo in debates about the public presence of religious minorities in contemporary Europe.

Sacred Bonds of Solidarity

Sacred Bonds of Solidarity PDF Author: Lisa Moses Leff
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804752510
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Sacred Bonds of Solidarity is a history of the emergence of Jewish international aid and the language of "solidarity" that accompanied it in nineteenth-century France.

The Jews in Nineteenth-Century France

The Jews in Nineteenth-Century France PDF Author: Michael Graetz
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804725712
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
This work on the history of French Jewry, follows the reshaping of Franco-Jewish identity from legal emancipation after the French Revolution, through to the creation in 1860 of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, the first international Jewish organization devoted to the struggle for Jewish rights throughout the world.

French and Jewish

French and Jewish PDF Author: Nadia Malinovich
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1800345399
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
This study of Jewish cultural innovation in early twentieth-century France highlights the complexity and ambivalence of Jewish identity and self-definition in the modern world. This stimulating and original book makes a major contribution to our understanding of modern Jewish history as well as to the history of the Jews in France and to the larger discourse about modern Jewish identities.

Challenges of Equality

Challenges of Equality PDF Author: Jeffrey Haus
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 9780814333808
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Explores the relationship between Judaism, state, and education in France from the establishment of the Jewish Consistory in 1808 until the separation of church and state in 1905.

Amsterdam's People of the Book

Amsterdam's People of the Book PDF Author: Benjamin E. Fisher
Publisher: Hebrew Union College Press
ISBN: 0878201890
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
The Spanish and Portuguese Jews of seventeenth-century Amsterdam cultivated a remarkable culture centered on the Bible. School children studied the Bible systematically, while rabbinic literature was pushed to levels reached by few students; adults met in confraternities to study Scripture; and families listened to Scripture-based sermons in synagogue, and to help pass the long, cold winter nights of northwest Europe. The community's rabbis produced creative, and often unprecedented scholarship on the Jewish Bible as well as the New Testament. Amsterdam's People of the Book shows that this unique, Bible-centered culture resulted from the confluence of the Jewish community's Catholic and converso past with the Protestant world in which they came to live. Studying Amsterdam's Jews offers an early window into the prioritization of the Bible over rabbinic literature -- a trend that continues through modernity in western Europe. It allows us to see how Amsterdam's rabbis experimented with new historical methods for understanding the Bible, and how they grappled with doubts about the authority and truth of the Bible that were growing in the world around them. Amsterdam's People of the Book allows us to appreciate how Benedict Spinoza's ideas were in fact shaped by the approaches to reading the Bible in the community where he was born, raised, and educated. After all, as Spinoza himself remarked, before becoming Amsterdam's most famous heretic and one of Europe's leading philosophers and biblical critics, he was "steeped in the common beliefs about the Bible from childhood on."

Opera, Liberalism, and Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century France

Opera, Liberalism, and Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century France PDF Author: Diana R. Hallman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521038812
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
This is a comprehensive critical study of the nineteenth-century French grand opéra La Juive, by Halévy.