Secular Jews: Lives and Choices from 1750 to the Present
Dr. Antony Polonsky
Course Outline:
A
survey of the lives of those Jews who in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries saw their identity in new ways, either as individuals without
religious faith but still identified as Jews or as adherents of new
ideologies, above all, nationalism and socialism, which provided new
definitions of Jewish identity.
Description
Can
a Jewish identity exist without religion? Are there secular Jews? Is it
possible for people to consider themselves Jewish without any formal
affiliation with either a religious or other specifically Jewish
institution? If so, what sort of Jews are they? These questions concern
all those interested in the history, present position and future
prospects of the Jews as a people. There have been many answers:
Zionist, non-Zionist, cultural, ethnic, sociological, and theological
(both Christian and Jewish). We have no answers but we have a different
way of posing the question, a biographical way, which may help to
define the parameters of a possible answer. In this course we ask how
have individual Jews defined themselves and how have they chosen to
live their lives.
Such choices only became possible in the
Western world after the Enlightenment, the American and the French
Revolutions created the category of ‘citizen’, a new, free, universal,
abstract person, who had the right to be what he or she chose. The
governments of the Enlightenment and their liberal successors believed
that the emancipation of the Jews, the granting to them of the rights
of citizens, would break down the division between Christian and Jew,
undermining the separate status of the Jews as members of a community
linked by a common set of religious, moral and cultural values, which
transcended national boundaries and making them into Frenchmen,
Englishmen, Germans and even Poles or Russians of the Jewish faith. The
process by which governments, politicians and a section of the Jewish
community attempted to incorporate the Jews and Judaism into European
society was painful and protracted, and it took place against the
background of what Karl Polanyi has called the ‘Great Transformation’,
the process by which European society was transformed by the double
impact of the principles of liberalism and popular sovereignty and of
the industrial revolution.
Some Jews thought that they could
simply shed their old identities and become members of the new
community of citizens. In many countries, whatever Jews thought they
were, the host populations saw them as Jews. The most violent and
terrible of those rejections ended in the Holocaust, which made ‘Jews’
of communists, socialists, believers and non-believers, rich and poor,
assimilated and orthodox. A national home for the Jews arose out of the
ashes but it could not agree on a definition of Jewish identity to
ground its Law of Return and the ‘Jewish’ identity of many groups of
immigrants to Israel remains contested. In the USA and Western Europe,
inter-marriage rates have risen. In what sense can mixed couples or
their children still be ‘Jewish’? This course will try to address these
questions in a strictly historical way, following a selection of lives
of important Jews who at different times and places attempted their own
answers to these questions. These lives will be drawn mainly from
Europe, where until the Second World War, the majority of Jews lived.
We shall also consider some American lives since during the twentieth
century the American Jewish community became the place where choice of
identity became an unusually important issue. We shall also look at the
lives of some who adopted a ‘national’ answer to the question of
Jewish identity and some who chose socialism or communism as the way to
‘solve the Jewish Question’.
Course Requirements
Three short papers (5-6 typed pages)
Final take-home exam.
75% of the assessment will be based on the essays, 25% on the final take-home examination.
Required Reading
All students should, if possible, purchase the following books:
Paul Mendes-Flohr, and Jehuda Reinharz (eds.), The Jew in the Modern World. A Documentary History, Second Edition, New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995.
David Biale (ed), The Cultures of the Jews, Volume 3, New York, 2002.
George L. Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism, Cincinnati, 1985.
Ezra Mendelsohn, On Modern Jewish Politics, New York, 1993.
Ezra Mendelsohn, Essential Papers on Jews and the Left, New York, New York University Press, 1977.
Arthur Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader, Jewish Publication Society, New York, 1959.
Recommended Reading
Marcus Moseley, Being for Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography (Stanford, 2006).
Alan Mintz, Banished from His Father’s Table: Loss of Faith and Hebrew Autobiography (Bloomington, 1989)
Michael Stanislawski, Autobiographical Jews: Essays in Jewish Self-Fashioning (Seattle, 2004).
Erik Erikson, Life History and the Historical Moment, (New York, 1975).
Paul Mendes-Flohr, Divided Passions Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity,
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press. 1991) particularly ‘The Study
of the Jewish Intellectual: A methodological Prolegomenon’ 23–53.
Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, 2006).
Course Schedule
Introduction to the Course
Week 1:
Jews and Secular Society
*Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation (Syracuse, 1998) 1-41.
Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (New York, 1968).
Uriel Acosta, A Specimen of Human Life (New York, 1967).
*Yirmiyahu Yovel, ‘Spinoza, the First Secular Jew?’ Tikkun, vol. 5, no.1, 40-42, 94-96.
Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza : the renegade Jew who gave us modernity (New York, 2006).
*The Writ of Excommunication against Baruch Spinoza (July 27, 1656) and Baruch Spinoza, ‘Letter to Albert Burgh’, in The Jew in the Modern World, 57-8.
*David Sorkin, Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (London, 1996) 120-155.
*Christian Wilhelm von Dohm, Concerning the Amelioration of the Civil Status of the Jews and the debate it provoked in The Jew in the Modern World, 28-48.
Solomon Maimon, An Autobiography, with Introduction by Michael Shapiro (University of Illinois Press, 2003)
*Richie Robertson, ‘From the Ghetto to Modern Culture: The Autobiographies of Salomon Maimon and Jakob Fromer’ in Polin. A Journal of Polish-Jewish Studies, 1992
*Biographies of Spinoza, Da Costa, Moses Mendelssohn and Maimon in Encyclopedia Judaica.
Weeks 2 and 3:
Dilemmas of Integration in Western and Central Europe
Jewish Attempts to Achieve Integration
*The Jew in the Modern World, 112-154.
*Michael Meyer, ‘Jewish Self-Understanding’, in Michael Meyer (ed.), German-Jewish History in Modern Times, volume 2 (New York 1997), 128-167.
The
Society for the culture and Science of the Jews: Statutes, Eduard Gans,
‘A Society to Further Jewish Integration’ and Immanuel Wolf, ‘On the
Concept of a Science of Judaism’ in The Jew in the Modern World, 213-220.
*Rahel Varnhagen, ‘O how painful to have been born a Jewess’, in The Jew in the Modern World, 260-1.
Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen : the life of a Jewess (edited by Liliane Weissberg; translated by Richard and Clara Winston (Baltimore, 1997).
*Hannah Arendt, ‘Writing Rahel Varnhagen. From a Letter to Karl Jaspers’, in The Portable Hannah Arendt (New York, 2000) 68-72
Jews in the Arts
*Michael Meyer, ‘Becoming German, Remaining Jewish’, in in Michael Meyer (ed.), German-Jewish History in Modern Times, volume 2 (New York 1997), 199-250.
*Heinrich Heine, Jewish stories and Hebrew melodies; with a new introduction by Elizabeth Petuchowski (New York, 1987).
Ezra Mendelsohn, ‘On the Jewish Presence in Nineteenth-Century European Musical Life’, in Ezra Mendelsohn (ed.), Studies in Contemporary Jewry volume IX (New York, 1993), 3-16.
Jeffrey S Sposato, The Price of Assimilation: Mendelssohn and the 19th century Anti-Semitic Tradition (New York, 2006).
*Meyerbeer letters to Heine, letters about Wagner. in Heinz and Gudrun Becker, Giacomo Meyerbeer. A Life in Letters (London, 1989).
*Richard Wagner, Judaism in Music (1850) and other essays (Lincoln, Nebraska and London 1995).
James Harding, Jacques Offenbach: a biography ( New York, 1980).
*Articles from New Groves’ Dictionary of Music and Musicians on Mendelssohn, Offenbach and Meyerbeer.
Weeks 4/5:
Jewish Nationalism and Zionism
Zionism in Central Europe
*Carl Schorske, Fin de Sičcle Vienna. Politics and Culture (Cambridge, 1981),146-175.
*Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State. Translated from the German by Sylvie D’Avigdor, This edition published in 1946 by the American Zionist Emergency Council.
Theodor Herzl, Altneuland (Old-new land, a novel), translated by Paula Arnold.
(Haifa, 1961).
Michael Stanislawski, Zionism and the fin-de-sičcle : cosmopolitanism and nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky (Berkeley, 2001).
Zionism and Nationalism in Eastern Europe
*Steven
Zipperstein, ‘Representations of Leadership (and Failure) in Russian
Zionism: Picturing Leon Pinsker’, in Jehuda Reinharz and Anita Shapira
(eds.) Essential Papers on Zionism, (New York, 1996), 191-209.
Leo
Pinsker, ‘Auto-emancipation: An appeal to his people by a Russian Jew’,
in Arthur Hertzberg, ‘The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and
Reader (New York, 1959), 181-198.
*Steven Zipperstein,
‘Symbolic Politics, Religion, and the Emergence of Ahad Haam’, in
Shmeul Almog, Jehuda Reinharz and Anita Shapira (eds.) Zionism and Religion (Hanover, NH, 1998) 55-66.
Ahad
Ha-am, ‘Extracts from his work’, in Arthur Hertzberg, ‘The Zionist
Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader (New York, 1959), 249-277.
*Simon Dubnow, Nationalism and History: Essays on old and new Judaism (Philadelphia, 1958).
The Zionist Cultural Project
*Itamar
Even-Zohar, ‘The Emergence of a Native Hebrew Culture in Palestine,
1882-1948’, in Jehuda Reinharz and Anita Shapira (eds.) Essential Papers on Zionism, (New York, 1996), 727-744.
Chaim Rabin, ‘The National Idea and the Revival of Hebrew’, in Jehuda Reinharz and Anita Shapira (eds.) Essential Papers on Zionism, (New York, 1996), 745-762.
*Gershon
Shaked, ‘Shall All Hopes be Fulfilled: Genre and Anti-genre in the
Hebrew Literature of Palestine’, in Jehuda Reinharz and Anita Shapira
(eds.) Essential Papers on Zionism, (New York, 1996), 763-789.
Adam Rubin, ‘“Like Black Pearls Whose String Is Broken”:Bialik’s Aron Ha-Sefarim and the Politics of the Jewish Literary Canon’.
*Poems by Khaim Nakhman Bialik, Shaul Tchernichowsky and Uri Zvi Grinberg (to be provided by instructor)
Weeks 6/7:
Jews and Socialism
Socialism in Western and Central Europe
*Karl Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question’ (1844) http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/
Jack Jacobs, On Socialists and and ‘The Jewish Question’ after Marx (New York, 1992).
*Rosa Luxemburg. ‘No Room in my heart for Jewish suffering’, in The Jew in the Modern World, 161-2.
*Robert
S. Wistrich, ‘Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogiches and the Jewish Labour
Movement, 1893-1903’, in Ada Rapoport-Albert and Steven J. Zipperstein
(eds.), Jewish History. Essays in Honour of Chimen Abramsky (London 1986) 529-545.
Hannah Arendt‚ Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919)’ [book review of J.P. Nettl’s Luxemburg biography] in The Portable Hannah Arendt, 419-437.
The General Jewish Labour Bund
*Nora Levin, Jewish Socialist Movements 1871-1917: While Messiah Tarried (London, 1978), 219-373.
*Antony Polonsky, ‘The Bund in Polish Political Life, 1935-1939’, in Ada Rapoport-Albert and Steven J. Zipperstein (eds.), Jewish History. Essays in Honour of Chimen Abramsky (London 1986) 547-77.
Jews and Bolshevism
*Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, 2004), 104-369.
Leon Trotsky, My life; an attempt at an autobiography (With an introd. by Joseph Hansen, New York, 1970).
Antony Polonsky, ‘Jewish Writing in Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union 1917-1941’.
Soviet Yiddish Writers (to be provided by instructor)
Week 8:
Jews and Modernism
*Carl Schorske. Fin de Scičcle Vienna. Politics and Culture, 181-207
Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867-1938: a cultural history (Cambridge, 1990).
* Sigmund Freud, The History of the Psycho-analytic Movement. German original first published in the Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse, 4. Translation first published in the Nervous and Mental Disease Monograph Series (No. 25). New York: Nervous and Mental Disease Pub. Co.
Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (London, 1939).
Yosef Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New York, 1991).
Peter Gay, A Godless Jew: Freud, atheism, and the making of psychoanalysis (New Haven, 1987).
Klara Moricz, Jewish Identities: Nationalism, racism and utopianism in twentieth century music (Los Angeles, 2009).
*Articles in Groves’ Dictionary of Music and Musicians on Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg.
Ritchie Robertson, Kafka : a very short introduction (Oxford, 2004).
Weeks 9/10:
Varieties of Polishness and Russianness.
*Antony
Polonsky and Monika Garbowska, ‘Caught in Half-Sentence’: Polish-Jewish
Writing before World War 1 and in Interwar Poland’, in Rodział współnej historii: Studia z dziejów Żydów w Polsce, Festschrift for Professor Jerzy Tomaszewski (Warsaw, 2001) 129-151.
*Antony Polonsky, ‘Julian Tuwim: The Polish Heine’.
*Antony Polonsky, ‘Jewish Writers in Independent Poland’.
Ephraim Sicher, Jews in Russian Literature after the October Revolution, Cambridge, 1995.
Maxim D. Shrayer, An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Dual Idenitity in Prose and Poetry, 2 volumes, New York, 2007.
Joshua Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties. The Life and Time of Ilya Ehrenburg, New York, 1996.
*Biographies of Isaac Babel, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam, Ilya Ehrenburg,
Genrikh Sapgir and Aleksandr Galich (to be supplied by instructor)
Week 11/12:
The American Jewish Identity
*Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism: a history (New Haven, 2004), 208-376.
*Jonathan Sarna, ‘America as it ought to be: the conflict between Jewish rhetoric and American realities’.
Mordecai M. Kaplan, The Greater Judaism in the Making. A Study of the Modern Evolution of Judaism, (New York, 1960), 450-511.
Andrea Most, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Cambridge, MA, 2004)
Sylvia Fishman, The way into the varieties of Jewishness (Woodstock, Vt., 2007).
Mary Antin, The promised land (introduction and notes by Jules Chametzky; New York, 2001).
Henry Roth, Call It Sleep.
Saul Bellow, Mr Sammler’s Planet.
Philip Roth, Operation Shylock.
Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated.
*Ruth Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon (Chicago, 2000), Chapters 8 and 9.
Week 13:
Israeli Identities: Secular and Religious
Amos Elon, The Israelis : founders and sons (New York, 1983).
*Shlomit
Levy, Hanna Levinsohn and Elihu Katz, ‘Beliefs, Observances and Social
Interaction Among Israeli Jews’, in Charles S Liebman and Elihu Katz
(eds.), The Jewishness of Israelis. Responses to the Guttman Report, 1-37.
Deborah Dash Moore and S. Ilan Troen (eds.), Divergent Jewish cultures : Israel and America (New Haven, 2001).
Week 14:
Summing Up: Is there Secular Jewish Identity?
Stephen Pinker, ‘Why nature and nurture won’t go away’ Daedalus fall 2004, pp. 1-13.
David Biale, ‘Between Jewish Culture and Multi-culture: Historical and Contemporary Reflections on Jewish Identity’ Lecture
*Yuri Slezkine, ‘The Jewish Century’, 327-371.
David A. Hollinger, ‘Jewish Intellectuals and the De-Christianization of American Public Culture in the Twentieth Century’, in Science, Jews, and Secular Culture. Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 17–41.
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