The core courses are intended to provide students with essential information on the major historical and cultural phenomena of the Jewish past over the last three centuries as seen from the perspective of the development of Jewish secular and modern identities. It consist of two closely interrelated courses, of which one focuses on the social, political, and intellectual history of the Jewish people and the another on the literary history seen as a prime expression Jewish creativity in the 19th-20th- century Europe. They are intended as supplementing each other and presenting together a consistent, broad picture of the cultural, intellectual, and social achievements of the modern, mostly secularized, Jewish society in Europe, Israel and Americas.
As a rule, each course at Polish universities consists of 30 teaching hours delivered over the period of one semester in 15 weekly meetings. The set of two courses creates, thus, a block of 60 teaching hours delivered over one semester (15 weeks) of two meetings a week, two hours each.
1. Modern Jewish History: Secularism and its Enemies
Professor Marcin Wodziński
The course covers a period from the beginning of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) in the eighteenth century to the creation of secular Jewish culture in the early decades of the twenty century. This is essentially a period of a deep social transformation of all societies and states in Europe from pre-modern, corporate- based states and societies to much more egalitarian modern forms of social organization. One of the most important changes with profound social implications was a dramatic increase of availability of social and cultural options and resulting
from these new alternate forms of identification. The course will focus on this very transformation and its profound influence on the creation of modern Jewish identities in nineteenth-twenty-century world, resulting from the transformation of the Jewish life from traditional religious norms and values towards secularized categories of the contemporary world. More specifically, the course will discuss the development of concept of secularism within Jewish society, the debates it sparkled, and strategies of resistance against inroads of secularization by segments of traditional, mostly orthodox Jewish society. Ideally, each class of the course (except for two introductory ones) will be divided into two parts, of which the first will discuss the development of the modern, secular ideas and forms of life, while the second part will be devoted to the analysis of the anti-secular tendencies and movements, their anti-modernist discourse and social strategies emerging as a response to the challenges of the secularizing world.
Class 1
Introductory lecture. Definition of major categories: modernity, Jewish modernity and the problem of its periodization, secularism, specific issues of Jewish secularism, identity, types of identities, their historical context and development, religious versus secular identities, chronological and geographical span of the course.
Class 2
Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jewish communities in early modern times. The roots and distinctive cultural patterns of Sephardic vs. Ashkenazi communities. Sephardim in Northern Europe: At the crossroads of Jewish and Christian worlds – the case of Ouderkerk am Amstel. Intellectual trends within Sephardic Jewish community in the 17th an 18th centuries.
Sources:
Powerpoint presentation on the Jewish cemetery in Ouderkerk am Amstel
Reading:
Joseph J. Lévy, Yolande Cohen, Zydzi sefardyjscy, trans. Krzysztof Pruski, Warszawa 2005.
Class 3
Spinoza’s precedessors: Uriel d’Acosta. Benedetto Spinoza: life and ideas. Herem and anti-Spinozian opposition. Spinoza in history: debates, imitations, rejections
Sources:
*Baruch Spinoza, Traktaty, trans. I. Halpern-Myslicki (Kety, 2000), chapter: Traktat teologiczno-polityczny, Etyka.
Reading:
Steven Nadler, Spinoza (Warsaw, 2002).
David Biale, “Baruch Spinoza: The Last Medieval Heretic or the First Secular Jew?” in: http://jbooks.com/secularculture/Spinoza.htm
Optional reading:
Jerzy Ochman, Filozofia oswiecenia zydowskiego, Kraków 1995 [chapter on Spinoza].
Class 4
European Enlightenment and the Jews: Religious and anti-religious trends in European Enlightenment and their implications for the concept of Jewish secularism. Eighteenth-century reforms in Europe and the Jews. Between ancient regime, enlightened absolutism and reactionary policy of European states, their politics in regard of Jews; European Enlightenment and its invention of a “modern Jew;” major programmes of the reform of the Jewish society, their ideological background, implications and consequences for the transformation of the early modern Jewish society in Europe;
Reading:
Artur Eisenbach, Emancypacja Zydów na ziemiach polskich 1785-1870 na tle europejskim (Warsaw, 1989), 26-124.
Arthur Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews. The Origins of Modern Anti-Semitism (New York and Philadelphia, 1968), 314-368.
Optional reading:
Case study of the Toleranzpatent:
Toleranzpatent (Edict of Tolerance by Emperor Joseph II) (photocopy)
Janusz Spyra, ‘Józefinskie reformy statusu ludnosci zydowskiej na Slasku
Austriackim i ich konsekwencje,’ Studia Judaica 6/2 (2003), 19-45.
Class 5
Emergence of the Jewish Enlightenment; ideology of the Jewish Enlightenment and its major forms of activity, Moses Mendelssohn: Image and reality, development of the German Haskalah from the early circle of Moses Mendelssohn, through radical anti-clericalism of the Me’asefim, to David Friedlaender and his post-Enlightenment projects of political and social emancipation. The focus: pseudo-Haskalah and the
maskilic debate on the secularizing tendencies in the Jewish community
Sources:
Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, or On religious power and Judaism (Hanover, 1983) [selection].
Reading:
David Sorkin, Religious Reforms and Secular Trends in German-Jewish Life: An Agenda for Research,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 40 (1995), 169- 184.
Shmuel Feiner, “The Pseudo-Enlightenment and the Question of Jewish Modernisation,” Jewish Social Studies 3/1 (1996/97), 62-88.
Optional reading:
David Sorkin, “Between messianism and survival : secularization and sacralization in modern Judaism,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 3,1 (2004), 73-86.
Shmuel Feiner, Jewish Enlightenment, trans. Chaya Naor (Philadelphia, 2002).
Class 6
Emergence of the Haskalah as a social and cultural formation, maskilic program of modern Jewish culture, educational initiatives. Development of East European Haskalah: Its major ideas and tendencies, both religious and secular. Geographical diversification of the Haskalah and its dependency on the socio-political context:
Congress Poland, Galicia and Russian Pale of Settlement as new centres of the Jewish Enlightenment. Radicalization and disappearance of the Haskalah in the second half of the 19th century
Sources:
*Selection of the East European maskilic text on the new Jewish culture and the issue of secularization.
Reading:
Marcin Wodzinski, Oswiecenie zydowskie w Królestwie Polskim wobec chasydyzmu (Warsaw, 2003), 46-80.
Optional reading:
Rafael Mahler, Hasidism and the Jewish Enlightenment: Their Confrontation in Galicia and Poland in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia, 1985), 31-67 [draft translation into Polish available].
Class 7
Integration, Acculturation, Secularization. Non-ideological forms of modernization. Patterns of integration and acculturation of the Jews in the nineteenth-century Europe and North America, terminological problems of assimilation, acculturation, assimilation and emancipation as partly overlapping but distinctive social phenomena
Source:
*Selection of programmatic articles from Polish-Jewish periodicals "Jutrzenka” and "Izraelita”
Reading:
Agnieszka Jagodzinska, Pomiedzy. Akulturacja Zydów Warszawy w drugiej polowie XIX wieku (Wroclaw, 2008).
Optional reading:
Todd Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England 1714-1830: Tradition and Change in a Liberal Society (Philadelphia, 1979) [selected chapters].
Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale. The Jewish Encounter with late imperial Russia (Berkeley, 2002).
Class 8
Emergence of Orthodoxy. What is defensive modernization? The context of German neo-orthodoxy. Development of Ultra-Orthodoxy in Eastern Europe as a response to the development of Jewish modernity and secularism. Anti-modernist and anti- secularist strategies, invention of tradition.
Reading:
Israel Bartal, “Responses to Modernity : Haskalah, Orthodoxy, and Nationalism in Eastern Europe,” in: Zionism and Religion, ed. Shmuel Almog, Jehuda Reinharz, and Anita Shapira (Hanover & Jerusalem, 1998, 13-24.
Michael K.Silber, “The Emergence of Ultra-Orthodoxy: The Invention of a Tradition,” in: The Uses of Tradition: Jewish continuity in the Modern Era, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York, 1992), 23-84.
Walter S. Wurzburger, “Confronting the challenge of the values of modernity,” Covenantal Imperatives (2008) 202-211.
Class 9
Development of Hasidism in the 19th-century Eastern Europe. Role of the confrontation between the Haskalah and Hasidism for the polarization of the Jewish society and creation of modern identities, the case of Josef Perl and his anti-Hasidic campaign
Sources:
*Hasidism and Haskalah in Poland: Selection of sources (typescript)
Reading:
Marcin Wodzinski, Oswiecenie zydowskie w Królestwie Polskim wobec chasydyzmu (Warsaw, 2003), 81-120.
Ignacy Schiper, Przyczynki do dziejów chasydyzmu w Polsce, ed. Zbigniew Targielski (Warsaw, 1992) [chapter 1].
Optional reading:
Rafael Mahler, Hasidism and the Jewish Enlightenment: Their Confrontation in Galicia and Poland in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia, 1985), 3-29.
David Assaf, Hasidism [in:] YIVO Encyclopaedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. Gershon D. Hundert, Yale University Press, 2008 [forthcoming].
Class 10
Secularization and the Issue of Gender. The place of women in the modernizing Jewish society. The burgeouis cultural models of the Haskalah. The development of the reading female community. The influence of the reading Jewish women on the cultural changes in the later part of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries
Reading:
Yehuda Mirsky, “Modernizing Orthodoxies: The Case of Feminism,” in: To Be a Woman: Proceedings of the Four International Conference Woman and Her Judaism, ed. Tovah Cohen (Jerusalem, 2007), 37-51.
Iris Parush, Reading Jewish Women: Marginality and Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Eastern European Jewish Society, trans. Saadia Sternberg (Waltham, Mass., 2004).
Class 11
Short test (30 minutes)
In the remaining part of the class: Emergence of modern Jewish politics. Politics, culture and identity. Influence of various forms of modern Jewish politics on the modernization and secularization of Jewish life and on development of modern Jewish identities, from liberal politics of the early nineteenth century to the mass
politics of the post-liberal era, Jewish political participation and political representation in Western and Eastern Europe
Reading:
Ezra Mendelsohn: On Modern Jewish Politics, New York 1993, p. 3-91, 147- 154.
Class 12
Zionism as ideology, political formation and cultural pattern. Precursors of Zionism in Europe: Tsvi Hirsh Kalisher, Juda Alkalai, Hibat Zion, programmatic writings of Moses Hess and Leo Pinsker, Herzl versus Ahad Ha’am and political versus cultural Zionism, later development of the Zionist ideology and its diversification: from Nahum Sokolow to Dov Ber Borochov, to David Ben-Gurion, to Zeev Wlodimir Zabotinski.
Sources:
*Teodor Herzl, Panstwo zydowskie (Warsaw, 1917), introduction and selected sections.
Reading:
Gideon Shimoni, Zionist Ideology (Hanover & London, 1995), 29-105.
Michael Berkovitz, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry Before the First World War (Chapel Hill and London, 1996).
Optional reading:
Walter Laquer, The History of Zionism (New York, 1976), 3-40.
Jerzy Tomaszewski, Syjonizm, [in:] Zydzi w Polsce. Dzieje i kultura. Leksykon, ed. Jerzy Tomaszewski, Andrzej Zbikowski (Warsaw, 2001), 447-460.
Class 13
Development of the Jewish settlement in North America. Migrations, new forms of social organization and Jewish collective, 1881 as a turning point in the history of the Jewish emigration – myth and reality, cultural life of American Jewry on the road from marginality to centrality
Reading:
Jenna Weissman Joselit, The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture 1880-1950 (New York, 1994).
Eli Lederhendler, ‘America: A Vision in a Jewish Mirror,’ [in:] id., Jewish Responses to Modernity: New Voices in America and Eastern Europe (New York and London, 1994), 104-139.
Optional reading:
Konrad Zielinski, ‘Emigracja zydowska Rosji i Królestwa Polskiego do USA (1881-1918).Zarys problematyki,’ Kwartalnik Historii Zydów 52/1 (2002), 16- 35.
Piotr Wróbel, ‘Przed odzyskaniem niepodleglosci,’ [in:] Najnowsze dzieje Zydów w Polsce w zarysie (do 1950 roku), ed. Jerzy Tomaszewski (Warsaw, 1993), 29-30, 88-89, 67-8.
Class 14
Yiddishism and the modern Jewish culture. Between politicization of language, language of politics and linguistic politics in Jewish society in Eastern and Central Europe, Itshok Leib Peretz and a political leader and cultural hero, attitudes toward Yiddish and Yiddishism among Zionists and integrationists
Reading:
Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish (Stanford, 1990), chapter 5: The Modern Jewish Revolution, chapter 6: The Historical Perspective of Modern Yiddish Literature.
Jidyszland: Przestrzenie jezyka jidysz w Polsce, ed. Ewa Geller (Warsaw, 2008), here introduction and chapters 3-5.
Optional reading:
Ruth Wisse, I.L. Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Seattle & London, 1988).
David E. Fishman, ‘Judaizm swieckich jidyszystów,’ in: Duchowosc zydowska w Polsce Materialy z miedzynarodowej konferencji dedykowanej pamieci Profesora Chone Shmeruka. Kraków 26-28 kwietnia 1999, ed. Michal Galas (Kraków, 2000).
Class 15
Final test and summary of the course
The Role of Women in Jewish Modernization Process
Dr. Joanna Lisek
The aim of the seminar is to show a key role of women in the Jewish secularization and modernization process in the 19th and 20th centuries. The analysis of literary and scientific texts will show how the marginality of Jewish women in the patriarchal system of Judaism opened them the way to the modern secular culture and made
from them the emissaries of radical social and customary changes. The course will focus on women’s contribution in the process of secularization and the feminist operations in: the Zionism movement, Yiddishism, and traditional culture.
The seminar has an interdisciplinary character and uses the historical, sociological and philological methodology and scholarly literature. Analysis will imply extensive use of categories of gender studies, in addition to elements of psychoanalysis, symbolism and intertextuality.
Class 1
Jewish Women’s Studies – an introduction
Reading:
Tal Ilan: "Jewish Women’s Studies,” in: Martin Goodman, Jeremy Cohen, David Sorkin (eds.): The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, Oxford 2005
Class 2
The position of women in the traditional Jewish community
Reading:
Rachel Biale: Women and Jewish Law. The Essential Texts, Their History, & Their Relevance for Today, New York 1984
Iris Parush: "The Benefit of Marginality: Gender Differences in Traditional Educational System”, in: I. Parush: Reading Jewish Women, trans. Saadya Sternberg, Brandeis University Press, 2004
Class 3
Jewish women in a public sphere
Reading:
Daniel Boyarin: "Femminization and Its Discontents: Torah Study as a System for the Domination of Women”, in: D. Boyarin: Unheroic Conduct. The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London 1997
Class 4
The underground of high culture – the salons of Jewish women as a vehicle of female emancipation and modern secular culture
Reading:
Jewish Women and Their Salons. The Power of Conversation, eds Emily D. Bilski, Emily Braun, The Jewish Museum – New York, Yale University Press – New Haven & London, 2005.
Class 5
Androcentric character of the Haskalah
Reading:
Shmuel Werses: “Portrait of the Maskil as a Young Man,” in: New Perspectives on the Haskalah, ed. Shmuel Feiner, David Sorkin, The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization 2001.
Tova Cohen: “Reality and its Refraction in Descriptions of Women in Haskalah Fiction,” in: New Perspectives on the Haskalah, ed. Shmuel Feiner, David Sorkin, The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization 2001.
Class 6
Mame-loshn towards loshn-koydesh: the potential of Yiddish language in the Jewish modernization process.
Reading:
Naomi Seidman: A Marriage Made in Heaven. The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London 1997
Class 7
The popular literature for women and customary revolution in 19th century.
Reading:
Iris Parush: "This Whole Trouble Is the Fault of the Little Story Books: Women Who Read Yiddish, in: I. Parush: Reading Jewish Women, trans. Saadya Sternberg, Brandeis University Press, 2004
Class 8
Jewish women as emissaries of social changes
Reading:
Sholem Aleykhem: Dzieje Tewji Mleczarza, Wroclaw 1989.
Ken Frieden: "Tevye the Dairyman and His Daughters’ Rebelion”, in: K. Frieden: Classic Yiddish Fiction. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, & Peretz, New York 1995.
Class 9
Women towards questions of an assimilation and conversion
Reading:
Paula E. Hyman: Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History. The Roles and Representation of Women, Seattle, London 1995.
Chaeran Freeze: "When Chava Left Home: Gender, Conversion, and the Jewish Family in Tsarist Russia”, Polin. Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. XVIII, ed.
Ch. Freeze, P. Hyman, A. Polonsky, Oxford 2005.
Class 10
Froyen frage on the pages of Jewish women press.
Reading:
Joanna Lisek: “Feminist Discourse in Women Yiddish Press,” Pamietnik Literacki 2008/4
Eva Plach: Feminism and Nationalism on the Pages of "Ewa: Tygodnik, 1928 – 1933”, Polin. Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. XVIII op.cit.
Class 11
The fight for Jewish women’s rights – the profiles of Jewish feminists. I: The founder of the Jüdischer Frauenbund - Bertha Pappenheim
Reading:
Marion Kaplan: The Jewish Feminist Movement in Germany. The Campaigns of the Jüdischer Frauenbund, 1904 – 1938, Contributions in Women’s Studies, Number 8, Westport: Greenwood 1979.
Daniel Boyarin: "Retelling the Story of O.; Or, Bertha Pappenheim, My Hero”, in: D. Boyarin: Unheroic...op.cit.
Class 12
The fight for Jewish women’s rights – the profiles of Jewish feminists. II: To be a feminist in the antyfeministed Zionism movement – the history of Pua Rakovsky
Reading:
Puah Rakovsky: My Life as a Radical Jewish Woman. Memoirs of a Zionist Feminist in Poland, ed. Paula E. Hyman, trans. Barbara Harshav, Paula E. Hyman, Bloomington, Indianapolis 2002
Class 13
The fight for Jewish women’s rights – the profiles of Jewish feminists. III: Is it possible to be a religious feminist? – the case of Sara Shenirer
Reading:
*Sara Shenirer: Tsu vos darf men Beys-Yaakev-shulen, trans. Joanna Lisek [typescript]
Hilel Seidman: Renesans religijny kobiety zydowskiej – Sara Szenirer – czlowiek i dzielo, Lódz 1936
Class 14
Women make the sexual revolution in Jewish literature.
Reading:
Dan Miron: Why Was There No Women’s Poetry in Hebrew Before 1920?, in: Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature, eds. Naomi B. Sokoloff, Anne Lapidus Lerner, Anita Norich, The Jewish Theological
Seminary of America, New York & Jerusalem 1992.
Janet Hadda: The Eyes Have It: Celia Dropkin’s Love Poetry, in: Gender and Text...op.cit.
Kathryn Hellerstein: The Metamorphosis of the Matriarchs in Modern Yiddish Poetry, in: Yiddish Language and Culture Then and Now, ed. Leonard Jay Greenspoon, Creighton University Press, Omana, Nebraska 1998
Selected poems of Celia Dropkin, trans. Joanna Lisek [typescript]
Class 15
The first modern Hebrew woman writer – the scandal around Dvora Baron’s stories.
Reading:
Shachar Pinsker: “Unreveling the Yarn: Intertextuality, Gender, and Cultural Critique in the Stories of Dvora Baron,” Nashim Spring, 11 (5766/2006). Dvora Baron: "The first day” and Other Stories, trans. Naomi Seidman, Chana Kronfeld, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London 2001.
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