Category: Focus

ABSTRACT
A Hebrew language periodical opposing the nascent Reform movement in Germany, Shomer Tziyon Hane’eman ran from 1846 through 1855. It was the first Hebrew-language, self-consciously Orthodox Jewish periodical. Formed by a small contingent of like-minded German rabbis, the periodical expanded the geographic scope of its contributors through its run. In an effort to win the ideological contest against the Reform movement, the periodical also featured forms of written content found in maskilic literature. This article begins by exploring the cultivation of a network of contributors and then examines how that content and the distribution model of a periodical cultivated a reading public similar to others found in 19th-century Europe. It posits that the formation of a reading public should be understood among the techniques used in the early stages of modern Orthodoxy in order to retain power in the face of shifting structures of confessional authority.

ABSTRACT
In 1855, the Badia affair, the sequel to a blood libel against a Jewish businessman in a Veneto town, temporarily put in question relations between state, society and the Jewish minority in the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom. After reconstructing the stages of the episode, the present article analyzes the strategies of response to the crisis resorted by the Jewry of Hapsburg Italy, then in the process of emancipation nearly achieved. With the support of state authorities, community leaders and Jewish intellectuals together with some Catholics, Venetian liberalism urged in favor of an apologetic explication to undermine majority prejudice. The effort led to the creation of a text, published as a supplement in the authoritative Eco dei Tribunali, which used the trial minutes against the slanderer, making the legal proceedings into a refutation of the ritual murder stereotype.

ABSTRACT
This article presents and discusses the representations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict produced in Italy during the long 1970s by the most important organizations of the New Left. The goal is to reconstruct the often radical and prejudiced discourses of the extreme left, highlighting how in the middle of the Seventies we can identify a break in the ways in which the Italian New Left chose to interpret the Middle Eastern political scenario.

ABSTRACT
This paper aims to contribute to a theoretical, as opposed to a historical, understanding of the dynamics of assimilation by elucidating some of the paradoxes of imitative situations through recourse to Genette’s theory of hypertextuality. The difference between the two textual modalities of “forgery” and “fake” is shown to be relevant to the anti-Semites’ attitudes towards assimilated Jews, and the anxiety generated by the blurring of fundamental social distinctions which is a consequence of undetected imitative practices is shown to be a component in the “new anti-Semitism” which arose after Emancipation.

ABSTRACT
In January 2016, the EHRI project launched a Document Blog, an experimental space for project partners, historians and archivists to discuss and test new digital approaches to Holocaust documentation. As a work in progress, the blog allows not only to develop new methods and share ideas, but also to assess the needs and issues of at least a part of digitally engaged Holocaust scholars and archivists. Building on this experience, the proposed article will, apart from providing general information about the Document Blog and the technology used, discuss the platform from two perspectives.

ABSTRACT
Although concentration camps constituted a densely populated social world, historians still largely approach them as being composed of isolated individuals. This interpretative premise is sustained by the inherent linear organization of most audiovisual archives and the prominence of the individual survivor testimony as their organizing unit. However, taking the social relation rather than the individual and his/her testimony as the organizing principle of a rethought digital Holocaust archive leads to a more historically faithful understanding of the Holocaust survivor as a networked self. A pilot digital reconstruction of social networks of Jewish Holocaust survivors from the Greek city of Salonica/Thessaloniki demonstrates how the linear digital audiovisual archive can support the digital documentation of the multiple forms and structures of relatedness, thus helping historians better understand how Holocaust survivors managed to reconstruct a social universe in the camps and navigate within it under extremely adverse circumstances.