Tag: Jews

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

“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

Jewish Converts’ Inheritance Rights in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany: The Case of a Nun in the Convent of Santa Scolastica in Buggiano

ABSTRACT
“As defined by the Fortunati-Ergas case, catechumens and neophytes have a right to their allotted share of the estate of their parents, even while their mother and father are still alive, notwithstanding the privileges accorded the Jews of Livorno by Grand Duke Ferdinando I in 1593.” This claim, written in Florence in 1825, tried to depict the Fortunati-Ergas case as a bridgehead breaking the guarantees offered to the Jews living in Livorno since the end of the 16th century. Papal laws explicitly offered converted Jews the right to immediately inherit from one’s parents, as if they were orphans. On the other side, the so-called Livornine, issued in 1593, opposed this principle and stated that converted Jews could not inherit from their Jewish relatives. In the 18th century, the Fortunati-Ergas case became the battleground among canon laws and civil laws, defending or contrasting the right to inheritance of converted Jews. Sara Ergas was a Jewish woman from Livorno who did not follow the decision of her husband Moisè Ergas, a rich Jewish merchant who converted to Christianity together with their small child, taking the new names of—respectively—Francesco Xaverio Fortunati and Maria Maddalena Fortunati. Sara remained fiercely Jewish, and never satisfied the claims over her goods made by the apostates in Florence (where they had moved after their conversion), engaging in a legal battle that, as shown in this article, proved the Livornine to remain a strong pillar defending the Jewish privileged status in Livorno till the unification of Italy.

issue 22 / n.2 (2022) by Samuela Marconcini

Hachsharah Training Centers in Czechoslovakia and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia

ABSTRACT
Immediately after the foundation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, activities, focus groups, bureaucratic structure, and organization of hachsharah training centers had to change considerably. Chances to emigrate became more and more limited. Since the completion of the hachsharah training became a prerequisite for obtaining the emigration certificate, the reorganization of hachsharah training centers became a crucial task for Zionists. Various agricultural training centers, vocational training, and requalification courses were established and organized with unprecedented intensity. For these activities, He-Halutz department of the Palestinian Office was responsible, and organized these places mostly on farms and manors of Czech farmers; this became a part of the economic exploitation of the Jews. The paper will analyze changes in age groups, social status of emigration candidates and trainees, reorganization of training camps from the perspective of the Zionist movement as well as temporal changes of Jewish geography in the former territory of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

issue 21 / n.1 (2022) by Daniela Bartakova

Prussian Jews: Between Nationalism and Tradition. The “strange case” of Posen/Poznań, 1800-1918

ABSTRACT
The peculiarity of the Jewish community of the city of Posen (Poznań) has been acknowledged in several studies. This pertains on the one hand to its sheer size, as until the end of the nineteenth century Jews accounted almost constantly for between 15 and 20 percent of the overall population—by far above the average of any other German district; on the other hand, it pertains to its composition, since so-called Ostjuden constituted a considerable share of the minority. These were mainly unassimilated orthodox Polish Jews, a unique feature for any German State and later for the German Reich, which forced the new authorities (Posen was assigned to Prussia in the late eighteenth century) to enforce specific integration measures.
This article shows how, as a consequence, the Jewish inhabitants of the area were drawn into a conflict of nationalisms and had to keep the balance between two conflicting cultures, that of the new ruling power, Germany, which sought to “germanize” them, and the traditional Polish culture. Against this background, and for fear of losing their financial independence as well as their cultural and religious identity, more than 30,000 Jews left the region from 1848 up to the end of the nineteenth century and emigrated to the United States or elsewhere.

issue 20 / December 2021 by Francesco Di Palma

Casablanca la juive: Public and Private Architecture 1912-1960

ABSTRACT
During the French Protectorate in Morocco, the Jewish presence in the country’s economic capital Casablanca was massive, as migrants coming from the coastal cities and the interior regions, or from Algeria and Tunisia, joined the already significant population present in the city’s Mellah when Hubert Lyautey’s administration was put into place in 1912. Once the law made it legal for them to build on the land they owned, Jewish developers embarked on the creation of the highest structures of the city, with bold forms then unknown in France. Among the architects who designed numerous apartment houses and villas, from the most modest to the more sumptuous, were Jews such as the Suraqui brothers. After having contributed in the 1930s to the emergence of local modernism, in the 1950s the Jewish bourgeoise emulated Californian stereotypes in its residences, while innovative social housing cared for the poorest component of the community.

issue 19 / June 2021 by Jean-Louis Cohen