Victor Karady
Jews in Modern Central and East European Societies. ( 4 credits)
The course is intended as a presentation of major problem areas of the Jewish presence in emerging contemporary societies and nation states of our region as well as an introduction into related methodological problems of comparative social history. Besides attending the course students will be expected
to prepare critical reports of each of the mandatory readings to be discussed in class (second part of each session)
to study the relevant historical documents and the files (whether statistical, anthro-pological or literary) that may occasionally be handed out for interpretation in class
to write an original essay on a topic fixed with the Professor or based on recommended readings in one of the major topics of our READER (10 + pages)
to prepare in the last session of the course a written exam paper (1 hour and a half) on one of several optional questions studied in class.
Participation in the course discussions, course paper and exam paper will count equally for the final grade.
The 16 sessions of three academic hours each (150 minutes) will consist of
an exposé by the Professor on the topic of the day (for which some lecture notes will be accessible to students upon their demand)
the discussion of the mandatory (and possibly other specially listed) readings, to be prepared by each student individually
occasionally, the interpretation of special documents and files as well as related methodological problems
Course programme
Problems of modern Jewish identity. (A general introduction)
Reasons to dedicate a special course to modern Jewry in Central Europe, representing only one of major ethnic diasporas in the region (like Germans, Armenians, etc.). The unique historic fate and social role of Jews in the framework of the stratification of European societies. Jews can be defined as a particularistic status group (one based on cultural or symbolic assets, as against economic classes or professional strata) following various criteria of ethnicity, religion, race and other attributes which are differently constructed in (social) space and time. The collective references commonly used for this construction – however variable they may be – display though some core elements. But those ascriptions vastly differ when they are due to members of the Jewish cluster itself or to outsiders. Self-definition and outside definitions delineate as a rule a permanent conflict area. Jewry as a historical status group (as against non historical ones). Difference of status ascriptions in feudal and post-feudal societies. Modern Jewry is less and less defined by ethnicity and religion and more and more by (ascribed or constructed) common memory. The ‘community of fate’ as the central piece of the social definition of modern Jewry. Individual or sub-cultural patterns of the relationship to the consensual definition of Jewry. Heritage, option and strategy in the experience of modern Jewish identity. Main functions of status groups : community integration (intimate social link), collective distinction (honor), moral control over members, security and self-reliance, socio-professional advancement or self-assertion, self-reproduction (self-perpetuation in the historical continuity of the group) .
The Prehistory of the European Jewish Diaspora (up to the 18th century). The medieval foundations of Jewish settlements in the Iberian Peninsula, the German States and (since the 13th century) the Polish-Lituanian Commonwealth. The legal and economic status of Jews in feudal Christian and Muslim Europe. Religious anti-Judaism and the upsurge of bloody persecutions following the Crusades (12-14th century). Jewish secular and religious culture in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance : poetry, philosophy, the codification of costumary law (Caro, Issserles). The catastrophy of expulsions from Western Europe and Christian Spain. The new diaspora in the East and the rise to Sephardi and Askenazi civilizations. The regional divisions of pre-modern Jewish populations. Ghettoisation and the marranos phenomenon in the West. Reformation and Christian anti-Judaism. Protestant Judaizers and philosemites. Reformation, Counter-Reformation and the Jewish policies of modernizing absolute monarchies. Jews as ‘serfs of the Royal Chamber’ and economic partners of estate owing aristocracies. The court Jew in early modern Europe. Cromwell’s Britain, the Netherlands and the (mostly Protestant) state policies of toleration. The philosophy of natural right and the programme of Jewish emancipation in Western and Central Europe. Moses Mendelssohn and the Berlin Haskalah as a response to the appeal for Jewish religious modernization. Hassidism, the new popular religious movement in Eastern Jewry (Poland, Ukraine, Moldavia, Eastern Hungary), as a challenge to Orthodox rabbinism.
3. Traditional Jewish society.
A network of independent but inter-related communities. The community as a framework for total social integration. Communal services : organization and control of religious practice (kosher meat included), care for the poor, the orphans and widows, arrangement of marriages and burials, etc. Oligarchical and rabbinical authority as foundations of community order. Submissiveness to and respect for the Christian State as against toleration and reserved economic niches. Jewish occupations : trade, money-lending (usury), crafts, communal services, medicine. The wealthy, the Luftmenschen and the social obligation of philanthropy. Forms of political representation of Jews in Poland (stadtlanut, the Council of Four Regions). The ‘Jewish Quarter’, the ghetto (especially in theWest) and the stettl. The cultivation of alterity, separate Lebenswelt and strong particularistic identity. Home cult and synagogue services. Strictly gender specific division of religious activities and obligations. The paramount importance of religious literacy, intellectualism and the obligation of learning (lernen) for males. The dual social hierarchy of learning and wealth. The patriarchal family, the qualified preeminence of males and the prevalence of symbolic violence (as against physical coercion) in matters familiar and communal.
Population movements and settlement patterns in Europe (from the 18th century to the Shoah).
Unequal progress of toleration, civil emancipation and the freedom of migrations. Inter-regional migrations : earlier mostly from West to East, then from East to the South and to the West. The USA, Western Europe, South America and South Africa as well as Palestine, main regions of (re)settlement since the late 19th century. From the exclusion of Jews from cities before emancipation to a unique degree of over-urbanization afterwards (often before full legal equality). The special case of the Russian Pale of settlement till 1915. Residential specificities inside cities. Cases of Amsterdam, Antwerpen, Budapest, Cracow, London, Paris, Prague, Vienna and Warsaw.
Aspects of comparative demography of Jews and non Jews (since the 18th century).
Unequal demographic modernization and natural growth. Marriage customs and rules (mean age, age relation between bride and groom, out-marriage). Differential evolution of birth-rates, illegitimate births and the nuclear family. Cluster specific patterns of mortality, morbidity, suicide and ‘natural deviance’ (mental illnesses, blindness). Marriage patterns and the evolution of the social role of women. Gender differentials in the process of modernization. The duality of the subsistence of patriarchal family patterns and Jewish women as paragons of ‘modern women’ and feminism in Central Europe.
The politics of unconditional emancipation in West European nation States.
Ambiguities of the ideologues of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution : the pattern of more or less unconditional emancipation in France, the Netherlands and French occupied Europe. The aftermath of the revolutionary experience and the emergence of patriotic Franco-Judaism with large scale social integration of French Jewry, including those of the French colonies during the III. Republic – 1871-1940 - (in salons, politics, State services, cultural institutions, universities). The successful adoption of the French model in Italy from unification till Fascism (included). Similar but step by step developments in Britain and Scandinavia. The increasing admission and self-assertion of Jews in Western European elites : in the entrepreneurial bourgeoisies, civil services, armies, intellectual and political power structures.
The paradigm of conditional emancipation in Central European empires and nation states.
The legal modernization of the state and the contradictions of eman-cipation in Prussia (1812). Antisemitism, Jewish embourgeoisement, social exclusion and the policies of reluctant emancipation in the German states (with 1848 and 1871 as decisive stages). Austrian ambiguities from the Toleranzpatent of Joseph II. to 1867 and the protective Jewish policies of the Dualist period. The special case of Jews in Bohemia, between hostile Czech nationalism, imperial protection and the political alliance with German urban elites in the 19th century. Hungarian independentist liberal gentry and the ‘assimilationist social contract’. Stages of Hungarian emancipationist policies (1840, 1849, 1867) and the ‘nationalization’ of Hungarian Jewry. Official philosemitism and its limitations in Hungary up to 1919. Emancipation and the legal consolidation of Balkan nation states liberated from Ottoman rule, especially after the Berlin Congress (1878) : Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece.
8. The politics of non emancipation in tsarist Russia and Romania.
The politics of exclusion (pale of settlement, professional and political incapacities) from Catherine II. till the February Revolution (1917). The ‘cantonist’ military regime (1827-1856), efforts of state managed school integration, the wave of pogroms in the 1880s, the 1904-5 revolutionary turmoil - as focal points of changing tsarist policies. Limited social mobility and assimilation, social exclusion and (since the 1880s) massive emigration to America, the West (as well as Palestine). ‘Self-emancipation’, attraction of Leftism and the birth of Jewish nationalism in the Pale (Zionism, Folkism, Bund). Ambiguities of independentist liberal nationalism in Romania Prior to 1848. The ‘Christian Clause’ of the Romanian Constitution after the unification of Moldavia and Valachia. The sabotage of the legal emancipation of Jews after the Berlin Congress and the persistence of Jewish incapacities both legal and professional. Jewish reactions : exit (emigration), Jewish nationalism (Zionism) and cluster-specific political mobilization (self-defence, Jewish parties).
From traditional religious anti-Judaism to modern political anti-semitism .
The Christian heritage in Jewish-Gentile relations. Regional and national inequalities of popular anti-Judaism : its prevalence in most of the central areas of the continent (from France to Russia, via Germany and Austria), its weakness in the European periphery (including Italy, Britain, The Netherlands, Scandinavia and countries formerly under direct Ottoman rule). The questionable impact of demographic, economic, cultural, political and religious factors. The self-generating and perpetuating ‘relative autonomy’ of anti-Jewish imagery and discourse. The spread of stereotypical ideological formulations in the 19th century and the birth of political anti-semitism in the 1870s. Cultural and nationalist exclusivism, racist social Darwinism and the elaboration of the ‘Aryan myth’ from Gobineau to Chamberlain. Variants of anti-semitic hysteria in the outgoing 19th century in Germany (Stöcker), France (Drumont, Dreyfus Affair), Austria (Lueger, von Schönerer), Hungary (Tiszaeszlár trial), Congress Poland (Dmowski) and Romania.The anti-semitic turn in post-world war Central Europe from the 1918-19 revolutions to Nazism. The ‘Brown Plague’ and the Shoah in East Central Europe.
Assimilation, religious divisions and patterns of modern Jewish identity.
Temptations of modernity and the 18th century Jewish heritage : Haskalah in the West and in East Central European cities. The diffusion of Hassidism in Galicia, the Ukraine, Moldavia and Eastern Hungary. Tensions between rabbinical orthodoxy (Hatam Sofer in Pozsony/Pressburg) and Hassidism. The birth of religious reform (‘conservative Jewry’) in Germany and Austria-Hungary. The schism in Hungary after emancipation (1868) and the emergence of ‘neolog’ communities oriented towards controlled assimilation and Magyar nationalism. The different significations of indicators of secularization : mixed marriage, baptism, desertion of synagogues, abandonment of ‘Jewish languages’, change of traditional surnames and first names. Assimilation endured as a constraint and as a collective strategy of modernization and social integration.
Assimilation, social mobility and professional restratification.
Emancipation and the opening of new middle class activities and markets for Jews. Inter-relation between global economic dynamism of the country concerned, its political modernization and chances of Jewish professional mobility. Three major patterns : growth along traditional tracks (from peddler to wholesale trade, from petty craftsmen to industrial entrepreneurship, from usury to merchant banking), conversion to and entry into the professions (doctors, lawyers, engineers), secularization of religious intellectual assets in lay scholarship, the arts and sciences. Specialization and unequal occupation of various economic branches by Jews inside trade, industry and the professions in various countries and legal conditions. Exclusion from or limitation of access to civil service in most of Central and Eastern Europe and emergence of Jewish politicians and high level civil servants in Western governments, armies, administrations.
Assimilation and educational strategies.
Jewish over-schooling as part of the process of assimilation. Persistent differences between educational investments among ‘modern’ and Orthodox Jewry. Quantitative over-schooling as measured by frequencies of school attendance in various levels of education (gymnasium, Realschule, Bürgerschule, Normal schools (for teacher training), industrial and commercial secondary schools, universities and vocational higher education). The problem of global or apparent and ‘pure’ measures of quantitative over-schooling, free from the incidence of differences between Jews and Gentiles in class stratification, urbanization, demographic modernization (family size), regional settlement, etc. Assimilation and the differential option for Christian or state schools (when available, like in France or Hungary). Qualitative over-schooling : scholarly excellence, preference for ‘hard’ subjects, neglect of physical education, stress of religious and scholarly discipline, regularity and shorter duration of studies. Specific Jewish options in higher education and the variable professional market chances of Jewish graduates.
Assimilation as strategic status mobility.
Elements of a socio-historical theory of assimilation : patterns of unilateral ‘rapprochement’ in the dynamics of modernization and secularization. Mutual ‘rapprochement’ and ‘reversed assimilation’ as a paradigm of unequal modernization (Jews as modernizers against Gentiles). Incompleteness and reversibility of the assimilationist process. Jewish ‘guest nationalism’. The differential socio-historical implications and meanings of mixed marriage, nationalization of self-presentation (surnames, first names, behaviorial and eating habits), residential mixing in non Jewish quarters, assumption of Gentile elite habits (like duelling, `voluntary` military service), participation in `mixed` social movements (like free-masonry) and political parties (especially in liberal ones), adoption of universalist social salvation ideologies (liberalism, socialism, feminism, esperantism, communism), etc. Sources of the study of these indicators of assimilation. The social reception or exclusion of assimilees in Jewish and Gentile environments.