Judaism I. Группа авторов

century.

      8 Modern Judaism 1750–1930

      In this chapter, Dr. Dominique Bourel of the Centre Roland Mousnier at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (Sorbonne), considers Jewish modernity from the time of Spinoza (1632–77) until the post-World War I period. He writes of five changes of paradigm after the cultural revolution of the Eighteenth Century in Europe: 1) Moses Mendelssohn and the Jewish enlightenment (Haskalah), 2) the birth and solidification of Hasidism, 3) Wissenschaft des Judentums (Jewish studies), 4) the debate between Orthodoxy and Reform, and 5) the emergence of Zionism. These paradigms also operated in cultures of the Jews in the East, in Poland and in Russia. They were a new attempt to negotiate entry into European modernity.

      Bourel sees a strong cultural hegemony in German-Jewish institutions and leadership. He describes how they navigated from an inner-focus on Judaism to a post-Enlightenment movement toward the non-Jewish world. Although these attempts at modernity did not succeed in integration into the German milieu (witness the Shoah), nevertheless, the five paradigmatic shifts sufficed to bring Judaism into modernity in the United States and the State of Israel. Bourel also briefly considers the role of Jewish women in advancing the community to modernity.

      9 The Holocaust and Antisemitism

      Dr. Michael Berenbaum of the American Jewish University in Los Angeles surveys the years before and during the Holocaust. Economic, social, populist, religious, and governmental conditions facilitated Hitler’s rise. Enmity toward the Jews was expressed by the church’s teachings of contempt. The Nazis’ racial definition meant Jews were persecuted not just for their religious practices, but because of their so-called racial identity. The Nazi Party destroyed democracy from within. By the time emigration was prohibited, more than six in ten German Jews had fled into exile.

      In March 1938, German troops entered Austria. The persecution of Jews began the night of 9‒10 November 1938, known as Kristallnacht. More than a thousand synagogues, their Torah scrolls, bibles, and prayer books were burned. 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps in Germany. In 1940, Germany attacked Belgium, France, Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Norway. With each conquest, more Jews came under German control. With the exception of Amsterdam, ghettos were not present in Western Europe. Further east, after June 1941, ghettos were imposed after the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing units, had done their murderous work. Except for Denmark, western Jews were persecuted, rounded up, incarcerated in transit camps, and sent to death camps in occupied Poland.

      The Final Solution became policy in 1941. Six »death factories« allowed the Nazis and their collaborators to murder Jews, confiscate their goods, and dispose of the bodies to hide their crimes. The final stage was an attempt by the perpetrators to evacuate the Jews from the most horrific concentration camps—where German troops and their collaborators could be caught in war crimes. In the waning days of World War II American troops discovered the concentration camps of Ohrdruf, Mauthausen, Nordhausen, Buchenwald, and Dachau.

      The Nuremberg Trials, convened by President Harry S. Truman, were undertaken by the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and France. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish émigré to the United States and international lawyer, wrote of the need to name and outlaw the crime. The word he chose was »genocide«—the murder of a people. He pushed The Convention on Genocide through the United Nations in December 1948.

      10 Zionism and the State of Israel

      Dr. Martin Kloke of Cornelsen Publishing, Berlin, notes the biblical roots of Zion before considering nineteenth-century Zionism and Herzl’s vision. Between 1882 and 1903, twenty- to thirty-thousand Jews came to Palestine. This number doubled between 1904 and 1914. Ottoman pressures radicalized Jews. Chaim Weizmann lobbied for British recognition. Following World War I, in which the Ottomans aligned with Germany, the Zionist-friendly Balfour declaration was promulgated.

      The British invasion of Palestine in 1918 ended the four-hundred-year reign of the Turks. In 1919, Emir Feisal of Mecca accepted Jewish immigration to Palestine. But by 1928, the economic recovery of the Jewish Yishuv caused fear among the Arabs. Muslims and Jews engaged in street battles, while the authorities stood aside. Organized labor was important for the socio-economic development of the Yishuv. When in 1933, the Nazis began systematic discrimination against Jews, around 38,000 new immigrants came to Palestine. They were followed by 197,000 refugees from Poland. Zionists intensified efforts to smuggle Jewish refugees. World opinion could no longer overlook the murder of six million European Jews.

      On 29 November 1947, the UN General Assembly partitioned the land into Jewish and Arab states. Immediately after the resolution, an Arab uprising tried to prevent the Jewish state. The Haganah fought to secure the areas that the UN allocated to the Jews. When the Palestine Mandate expired without an agreement, on 14 May 1948, the Jewish National Council proclaimed the State of Israel.

      The declaration resulted in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948–49, in which between 600,000 and 750,000 Arabs fled or were driven from their homes. In the face of hostilities in Palestine between 1945 and 1952, more than 600,000 Jews fled from Arab countries to the Jewish state. The so-called law of return allowed all Jews and their non-Jewish partners or children to immigrate to Israel as citizens.

      In 70 years, Israel’s population multiplied from approximately 800,000 to 9 million. Although Israel defines itself as »Jewish and democratic,« the Jewish majority accounts for 75 percent of the population, while the Arab minority constitutes 20 percent. Integration of the territories conquered in 1967 will either lead to Jewish minority rule over a majority Palestinian population or to a binational community.

      11 Judaism in America

      University of Michigan Professor Deborah Dash Moore begins in 1654, when Governor Peter Stuyvesant received orders from the Dutch West India Company to allow Jews in the colony. Before the century ended, New York Jews created the first synagogue. During the early republic, Charleston, South Carolina attracted the largest concentration of Jews. In 1824, a group of young Jews there petitioned for shorter services, explanations of Hebrew prayers, and a sermon in English. When the leaders rejected their requests, the young men and women established a Reformed Society of Israelites. They introduced female voices, instrumental accompaniment, and revised the prayer book.

      After the Civil War, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise established the Hebrew Union College to train Reform rabbis. But at the 1883 banquet honoring the first graduates, non-kosher shellfish was served, infuriating several rabbis. They guided congregants away to establish the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), which shaped Conservative Judaism.

      As a generation of American Jewish women matured, they initiated activism. Occupying pews with their husbands, women began synagogue attendance. Hannah Greenberg Solomon organized Jewish women for the 1893 Columbian Exposition. She recruited for a Jewish Women’s Congress. The National Council of Jewish Women embodied a politicized conscience.

      The American Jewish Committee was formed to »prevent infringement of the civil and religious rights of Jews …« Mordecai Kaplan organized Friday night lectures on the Lower East Side that attracted modern Orthodox Jews. Within a year that congregation became Young Israel. It received guidance from Rabbi Bernard Revel, who came to lead immigrant religious educational institutions, which reorganized as Yeshiva College. Kaplan also established the Society for the Advancement of Judaism and its movement, Reconstructionism. He had already introduced the Bat Mitzvah to mark the equality of Jewish girls.

      American Jews emerging from World War II created »a culture of commemoration« memorializing the six million Jewish victims of the Nazis and turned to Zionism, partly in response to the suffering of survivors. They integrated Israel into their consciousness. The three Jewish movements all included youth groups, summer camps, and sisterhoods. By the end of the postwar period, over five and a half million American Jews had transformed Judaism.

      12 Judaism in Europe after the Second World War

      Dr.