Building A Public Judaism

Nineteenth-century Europe saw an unprecedented rise in the number of synagogues. Building a Public Judaism considers what their architecture and the circumstances surrounding their construction reveal about the social progress of modern European Jews. Looking at synagogues in four important centers of Jewish life—London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Berlin—Saskia Coenen Snyder argues that the process of claiming a Jewish space in European cities was a marker of acculturation but not of full acceptance. Whether modest or spectacular, these new edifices most often revealed the limits of European Jewish integration. Debates over building initiatives provide Coenen Snyder with a vehicle for gauging how Jews approached questions of self-representation in predominantly Christian societies and how public manifestations of their identity were received. Synagogues fused the fundamentals of religion with the prevailing cultural codes in particular locales and served as aesthetic barometers for European Jewry’s degree of modernization. Coenen Snyder finds that the dialogues surrounding synagogue construction varied significantly according to city. While the larger story is one of increasing self-agency in the public life of European Jews, it also highlights this agency’s limitations, precisely in those places where Jews were thought to be most acculturated, namely in France and Germany. Building a Public Judaism grants the peculiarities of place greater authority than they have been given in shaping the European Jewish experience. At the same time, its place-specific description of tensions over religious tolerance continues to echo in debates about the public presence of religious minorities in contemporary Europe.

Coenen Snyder considers what the architecture and construction of nineteenth-century European synagogues reveal about the social progress of modern European Jews. The process of claiming a Jewish space was a marker of acculturation but not full acceptance, she argues. The new edifices, even if spectacular, revealed the limits of Jewish integration.

Wisse is a leading scholar of Yiddish and Jewish literary studies and a fearless public intellectual on issues relating to Jewish society and culture. In this celebratory volume, her colleagues pay tribute with a collection of critical essays whose subjects break new ground in Yiddish, Hebrew, Israeli, American, European, and Holocaust literature.

Alexei Sivertsev examines the nature of the Jewish aristocratic households and their public functions during the later Roman and Byzantine periods (third to fifth centuries C.E.). The author first discusses the nature of the Jewish patriarchate during the third century C.E. He argues that the family of patriarchs ( nesi'im ) is best understood as a local city-based aristocratic clan. It emerged, along with other contemporary clans, as a result of the gradual conversion of the national aristocracy of the once independent Judean state into the municipal aristocracy of the Roman province of Palaestina in the course of the first to second centuries C.E.In the second part of this book Alexei Sivertsev addresses the specific public functions performed by Jewish aristocratic clans, such as judicial, religious, administrative and legislative. He also demonstrates the continuity that existed in this respect between the Second Commonwealth aristocratic clans and those of the rabbinic period. Finally, the third part of this study deals with the process leading to the integration of the local native aristocracies of the Roman Near East into the centralized administrative system created by the Emperors, starting with Constantine the Great. This process is analyzed specifically regarding the example of the Jewish ruling elite. The main question in this section is the degree to which the local administrative apparatus of the newly created Byzantine bureaucracy developed out of the traditional and clan-based public institutions which had existed locally throughout the Roman period.

The Institute of Jewish Studies, founded in 1954 by the late Alexander Altmann, is dedicated to the promotion of all aspects of scholarship in Jewish Studies and related fields. Its programmes include public lectures, seminars, and annual conferences. All lectures and conferences are open to the general public. Jewish history has been extensively studied from social, political, religious, and intellectual perspectives, but the history of Jewish consumption and leisure has largely been ignored. The hitherto neglect of scholarship on Jewish consumer culture arises from the tendency within Jewish studies to chronicle the production of high culture and entrepreneurship. Yet consumerism played a central role in Jewish life. This volume is the first of its kind to deal with the topic of Jewish consumer culture. It gives new insights on Jewish belongings and longings and provides multiple readings of Jewish consumer culture as a vehicle of integration and identity in modern times

Two related essays describing the history the development of a religious fellowship and the public ceremonies that contributed to and highlighted many moments of that history in this Reform New York congregation. A significant portion of the research was done in Central Synagogue's Archives. Many historic photographs (B&W) are included.

What is a homeland and when does it become a national territory? Why have so many people been willing to die for such places throughout the twentieth century? What is the essence of the Promised Land? Following the acclaimed and controversial The Invention of the Jewish People, Shlomo Sand examines the mysterious sacred land that has become the site of the longest-running national struggle of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Invention of the Land of Israel deconstructs the age-old legends surrounding the Holy Land and the prejudices that continue to suffocate it. Sand’s account dissects the concept of “historical right” and tracks the creation of the modern concept of the “Land of Israel” by nineteenth-century Evangelical Protestants and Jewish Zionists. This invention, he argues, not only facilitated the colonization of the Middle East and the establishment of the State of Israel; it is also threatening the existence of the Jewish state today.