Category: Focus

Focus

The Great Depression and its Effect on Hungarian Jews

ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of the Great Depression on Jews in Hungary, with a specific focus on university students and lawyers—two fields in which the presence of Jews was highly contested. Instead of focusing on the Jewish economic elite, we discuss two groups that were targets of the most vehement attacks of the antisemitic middle class. Our aim is to present the direct and indirect consequences of the Great Depression on Jews, as well as its impact on the rise of political antisemitism. We also explore how far it can be understood as a catalyst of radicalization, as the Hungarian economy’s deterioration led to the swift rise of the radical right-wing into power.

issue 26 / n. 2 (2024) by Péter Buchmüller and Ágnes Kelemen

Jewish News and Reflections on the Great Depression in Czechoslovakia

ABSTRACT The article explores how the Great Depression was reflected in Jewish newspapers, particularly the Czech-language Zionist periodical Židovské Zprávy (Jewish News). It highlights the key issues that Zionists considered crucial during the economic crisis. Additionally, the article provides an overview of the status and economic situation of the Jewish minority in the former Czech lands, including their integration into the Czechoslovak economy. The crisis exacerbated disparities between the Czech lands, Slovakia, and Subcarpathian Rus, as well as between internal and border regions. Alongside topics related to the impact of the crisis and the differing conditions of the Jewish minority in various regions of Czechoslovakia, Zionists also addressed the effects of the crisis on Palestine.

issue 26 / n. 2 (2024) by Daniela Bartakova

Jews, the Great Depression, and the “Lithuanianisation” of the National Economy

ABSTRACT The article examines how the Great Depression affected the Lithuanian Jews, their relationship with ethnic Lithuanians, and their relationship with the Lithuanian state. It places particular emphasis on how the depression shaped the state’s core project—the “Lithuanianisation” of the national economy. Through case studies ranging from Jewish agricultural credit across labor migration to Klaipėda to the Lithuanian Businessmen’s Union’s (LVS) efforts to strengthen ethnic Lithuanians economically, the article argues that both the government’s and the LVS’s responses to the depression dramatically reshaped the lives of Lithuanian Jews. The “Lithuanianisation” of the national economy transformed formerly predominantly Jewish towns economically, socially, and culturally. However, as Jewish migration to Klaipėda shows, Lithuanian economic nationalism also provided opportunities for Jews seeking a livelihood outside of the shtetls. At the same time, the rise of the Nazis in Germany made Lithuanian Jews more dependent than ever on the existence of an independent Lithuania.

issue 26 / n. 2 (2024) by Klaus Richter

The World Economic Crisis. Jewish Experiences and Responses in Latvia

ABSTRACT The chapter explores the Jewish experience of the economic crisis in Latvia. Due to local socio-economic structures, Latvian Jews were overtly represented within economic sectors hit most severely by the crisis and therefore suffered differently than non-Jewish Latvians. Combining quantitative and qualitative research methods and sources in Latvian, Russian, German and Yiddish, the chapter presents examples for Jewish reactions to the crisis on a collective and individual level: the Jewish credit cooperative, the Jewish soup kitchen, and the activities of Mordehai Dubin, leader Latvia’s Agudas Israel party. These show that although Jews in Latvia were a heterogeneous group, they often confronted the crisis with united efforts which were rooted in civil society and sometimes organized beyond ethnic borders. Nevertheless, Latvian nationalists and fascists used the crisis to stir hatred against Jews. Particularly the politics of Kārlis Ulmanis’ authoritarian regime after 1934 hit the Jews often more severely than had the economic crisis.

issue 26 / n. 2 (2024) by Paula Oppermann

Looting and Killing are Permitted: Rumors in the November 1918 Pogrom in Lviv

ABSTRACT The extensive violence of November 1918 in Lviv, the Eastern Galician capital, left hundreds of Jews injured and dozens of dead. The presented paper is an attempt to understand a critical aspect of the dynamics that drove the violence of the pogrom. It seeks to illustrate the mechanism and role of rumors, shedding light on their influence and significance in driving the violence of the pogrom. Based on rich primary sources, it describes the rumors that were circulated and how people perceived the violence. One of the main goals of this paper is to emphasize the unintentional role of the Jewish militia in creating fear, uncertainty, and paranoia in the minds of Poles. The paper examines the key role of the print media in the process of validating the rumors. The investigation considers the significance of Poles’ knowledge about Jews based on prejudice.

issue 25 / n. 1 (2024) by Jan Kutílek

David Diringer’s Refugee Itinerary: From Foreign Student in Fascist Italy to Academic in Post-War Britain

ABSTRACT While David Diringer (1900-1975) is known for his contribution to the history of the alphabet, his life is presented here as a case study in intellectual migration in the first half of the twentieth century. Numerus clausus restrictions in the newly independent countries of Eastern Europe and the lack of provision for higher education in Palestine prompted many Jewish students including Diringer to take up the advantageous conditions offered to foreign students by the new Fascist government in Italy. As one of the small cohort successful in obtaining the requisite Italian citizenship to launch a university career, Diringer’s trajectory was disrupted by the loss of his position and his expulsion from Italy following the 1938 racial legislation. As a refugee academic in Britain, unsuccessful in attempts to reach the US or return to post-war Italy, he was precariously dependent on grants until he finally obtained a university position in 1948.

issue 25 / n. 1 (2024) by Anna Teicher

“Good Moral Conduct” in an Italian Concentration Camp: Women’s Daily Lives in Ferramonti di Tarsia, 1940‒1943

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the situation of female inmates in the Italian internment camp of Ferramonti, 1940-1943. Women formed a minority among the internees, who consisted largely of Jews from central and eastern Europe. Historical accounts of the camp of Ferramonti have been based mainly on the testimony of male members of the camp’s Jewish self-administration, who focused on the camp’s successful institutions and the flourishing social and cultural life among the internees. A somewhat different picture emerges from the testimony of former female internees. Based on female voices from Ferramonti, this article examines women’s lives in the camp: their work, health, daily chores, and gender relations. It argues that women’s bodies in Ferramonti were subject to rigid surveillance by both the camp inmates and the Fascist authorities. It also shows that the specifically male and rather positive perspective on Ferramonti promoted the postwar myth of Italians as “brava gente.”

issue 25 / n. 1 (2024) by Susanna Schrafstetter

Wilhelma, Israel: An Interface of Israeli and German Settlement Histories

ABSTRACT The article deals with two settlements, Wilhelma and Atarot, whose histories are connected: the settlers of Wilhelma were deported by the British Mandate authorities in 1948 and became refugees, and the settlers of Atarot had to leave their settlement as it fell in the same year and also became refugees. They were re-settled in Wilhelma as it was vacated by the British. The German settlers of Wilhelma were deported to Australia where they were naturalized, mostly in Melbourne and Sydney. The name Wilhelma was replaced with Bnei Atarot by the Jewish settlers from Old Atarot.
The article opens with an introduction describing the relations between Jews and Germans in Palestine from the beginning of the German settlement until the Germans were forced to leave the country. It follows with an encounter with the Luz family, in Bnei Atarot and their narrative of the events that led to the evacuation of Old Atarot in 1948; the acts of settlement in Old Atarot and Wilhelma; the impact of the 1948 War of Independence on both communities, the heavy fighting in Atarot and Neve Yaakov; what happened to the lands of Wilhelma; and other Jewish refugees who joined for the re-settlement of Wilhelma. The article ends with an epilog, surveying the events in Old Atarot, to the cemeteries of Wilhelma and Old Atarot, and the Luxemburg Agreement (1952) and its significance to both communities.

issue 25 / n. 1 (2024) by Danny Goldman

Conversion and Masculinity in Thirteenth-Century England: One Man’s Decision to Leave the Priesthood for Judaism

ABSTRACT In 1222, an anonymous Christian deacon was executed for heresy in Oxford after converting to Judaism and marrying a Jewish woman. The first known execution in England for heresy, this paper explores how devout masculine standards in Judaism had the potential to create incentives and rationales for Christian clerical conversion to Judaism at a time when the Church was showing a new determination to enforce clerical celibacy and eradicate father-son religious relationships. This paper argues that his conversion to Judaism might be understood as a reclamation of a masculine identity that had come to be forbidden by the Church. It further suggests new points of contentions between Jews and the Church during the thirteenth century in that the Church seems to have had reasons to regard Jewish masculinity itself as threatening as it offered secular clergymen something they wanted but which the Church now withheld: legitimacy for married, religious men.

issue 24 / n.2 (2023) by Rebekah Sewell

Between Rabbinic and Knightly Masculinities: Constructing Gendered Identities Among Jewish Young Men in Medieval Ashkenaz

ABSTRACT A vivid depiction of a jousting scene in an illuminated Hebrew prayerbook allows a unique pictorial representation of a custom common among Jewish young men in Northwestern Europe during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: jousting-like tournaments at Jewish weddings. The article contextualizes this image more broadly with contemporaneous sources originating in different genres, including rabbinic literature, vernacular documents, illuminated Hebrew manuscripts, frescos that decorated affluent Jewish homes, epitaphs, and archaeological findings, to describe the lives, self-image, and social expectations of medieval Ashkenazic men. Moreover, the article sheds light on the influences of the surrounding culture on medieval rabbinic gender constructs and on the constructions of gendered identities among these young men, and particularly on two indicators of identity: daily conduct and clothing. The article argues that these Jewish young men were navigating two masculinities, and that they internalized complex identities, which enabled them to identify as Jews and at the same time to feel that they were part of mainstream urban culture to some degree.

issue 24 / n.2 (2023) by Eyal Levinson