Author: Eugene M. Avrutin
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253026571
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 303
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Book Description
A collection of essays exploring the history of an antisemitic accusation that haunted Jewish people in Europe and Russia, and how it spread. This innovative reassessment of ritual murder accusations brings together scholars working in history, folklore, ethnography, and literature. Favoring dynamic explanations of the mechanisms, evolution, popular appeal, and responses to the blood libel, the essays rigorously engage with the larger social and cultural worlds that made these phenomena possible. In doing so, the book helps to explain why blood libel accusations continued to spread in Europe even after modernization seemingly made them obsolete. Drawing on untapped and unconventional historical sources, the collection explores a range of intriguing topics: popular belief and scientific knowledge; the connections between antisemitism, prejudice, and violence; the rule of law versus the power of rumors; the politics of memory; and humanitarian intervention on a global scale. “This important contribution to our understanding of the evolution of ritual murder charges in Eastern Europe brings together a number of innovative studies on the topic, several of which could become standard reading on the subject.” —Glenn Dynner, Sarah Lawrence College “While the topic was not exactly novel to me, I enjoyed reading this book and I was constantly learning from the significant new information and fresh insights from the authors’ analyses.” —Shaul Stampfer, Hebrew University
Author: Eugene M. Avrutin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190640529
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
The Velizh case was the longest ritual murder investigation in the modern world. Drawing on newly discovered trial records, historian Eugene M. Avrutin looks beyond antisemitism as the single most important factor in understanding ritual murder accusations, and in the process, provides an intimate glimpse of small-town life in eastern Europe.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004686428
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 365
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Book Description
This book is the first to deal with documentary aesthetic practices of the post-war period in Eastern Europe in a comparative perspective. The contributions examine the specific forms and modes of documentary representations and the role they played in the formation of new aesthetic trends during the cultural-political transition of the long 1960s. This documentary first-hand approach to the world aimed to break up unquestioned ideological structures and expose tabooed truths in order to engender much-needed social changes. New ways of depicting daily life, writing testimony or subjective reportage emerged that still shape cultural debates today.
Author: Robert Weinberg
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253011140
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
This “riveting history . . . brings us face to face with this notorious trial” of a Russian Jew who was framed for ritual murder in 1913 (Jewish Book World). On Sunday, March 20, 1911, children playing in a cave near Kiev made a gruesome discovery: the blood-soaked body of a partially clad boy. After right-wing groups asserted that the killing was a ritual murder, the police, with no direct evidence, arrested Menachem Mendel Beilis, a thirty-nine-year-old Jewish manager at a factory near the site of the crime. Beilis’s trial in 1913 quickly became an international cause célèbre. The jury ultimately acquitted Beilis but held that the crime had the hallmarks of a ritual murder. Robert Weinberg’s account of the Beilis Affair explores the reasons why the tsarist government framed Beilis, shedding light on the excesses of antisemitism in late Imperial Russia. It is a gripping narrative culled from trial transcripts, newspaper articles, Beilis’s memoirs, and archival sources, many appearing in English for the first time.
Author: Hillel J. Kieval
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812298381
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 309
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Book Description
Although the Enlightenment had seemed to bring an end to the widely held belief that Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes, charges of the so-called blood libel were surprisingly widespread in central and eastern Europe on either side of the turn to the twentieth century. Well over one hundred accusations were made against Jews in this period, and prosecutors and government officials in Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia broke with long established precedent to bring six of these cases forward in sensational public trials. In Blood Inscriptions Hillel J. Kieval examines four cases—the prosecutions that took place at Tiszaeszlár in Hungary (1882-83), Xanten in Germany (1891-92), Polná in Austrian Bohemia (1899-1900), and Konitz, then Germany, now in Poland (1900-1902)—to consider the means by which discredited beliefs came to seem once again plausible. Kieval explores how educated elites took up the accusations of Jewish ritual murder and considers the roles played by government bureaucracies, the journalistic establishment, forensic medicine, and advanced legal practices in structuring the investigations and trials. The prosecutors, judges, forensic scientists, criminologists, and academic scholars of Judaism and other expert witnesses all worked hard to establish their epistemological authority as rationalists, Kieval contends. Far from being a throwback to the Middle Ages, these ritual murder trials were in all respects a product of post-Enlightenment politics and culture. Harnessed to and disciplined by the rhetoric of modernity, they were able to proceed precisely because they were framed by the idioms of scientific discourse and rationality.
Author: Jonathan Dekel-Chen
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253004780
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
Although overshadowed in historical memory by the Holocaust, the anti-Jewish pogroms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were at the time unrivaled episodes of ethnic violence. Incorporating newly available primary sources, this collection of groundbreaking essays by researchers from Europe, the United States, and Israel investigates the phenomenon of anti-Jewish violence, the local and transnational responses to pogroms, and instances where violence was averted. Focusing on the period from World War I through Russia's early revolutionary years, the studies include Poland, Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania, Crimea, and Siberia.
Author: Elissa Bemporad
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190466456
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253
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Book Description
"Pogroms and blood libels constitute the two classical and most extreme manifestations of tsarist antisemitism. They were often closely intertwined in history and memory, not least because the accusation of blood libel, the allegation that Jews murder Christian children to use their blood for ritual purposes, frequently triggered anti-Jewish violence. Such events were and are considered central to the Jewish experience in late tsarist Russia, the only country on earth with large scale anti-Jewish violence in the early twentieth century. Boasting its break from the tsarist period, the Soviet regime proudly claimed to have eradicated these forms of antisemitism. But, alas, life was much more complicated. The phenomenon and the memory of pogroms and blood libels in different areas of interwar Soviet Union-including Ukraine, Belorussia, Russia and Central Asia-as well as, after World War II, in the newly annexed territories of Lithuania, Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia are a reminder of continuities in the midst of revolutionary ruptures. The persistence, the permutation, and the responses to anti-Jewish violence and memories of violence suggest that Soviet Jews (and non-Jews alike) cohabited with a legacy of blood that did not vanish. This book traces the "afterlife" of these extreme manifestations of antisemitism in the USSR, and in doing so sheds light on the broader question of the changing position of Jews in Soviet society. One notable rupture in manifestations of antisemitism from tsarist to Soviet times included the virtual disappearance-at least during the interwar period-of the tight link between pogroms and blood allegations, indeed a common feature in the waves of anti-Jewish violence that erupted during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries." --
Author: Jeffrey Veidlinger
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253022974
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
The story of how the Holocaust decimated Jewish life in the shtetls of Eastern Europe is well known. Still, thousands of Jews in these small towns survived the war and returned afterward to rebuild their communities. The recollections of some 400 returnees in Ukraine provide the basis for Jeffrey Veidlinger's reappraisal of the traditional narrative of 20th-century Jewish history. These elderly Yiddish speakers relate their memories of Jewish life in the prewar shtetl, their stories of survival during the Holocaust, and their experiences living as Jews under Communism. Despite Stalinist repressions, the Holocaust, and official antisemitism, their individual remembrances of family life, religious observance, education, and work testify to the survival of Jewish life in the shadow of the shtetl to this day.
Author: Avriel Bar-Levav
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197516491
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 400
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Book Description
Jewish culture places a great deal of emphasis on texts and their means of transmission. At various points in Jewish history, the primary mode of transmission has changed in response to political, geographical, technological, and cultural shifts. Contemporary textual transmission in Jewish culture has been influenced by secularization, the return to Hebrew and the emergence of modern Yiddish, and the new centers of Jewish life in the United States and in Israel, as well as by advancements in print technology and the invention of the Internet. Volume XXXI of Studies in Contemporary Jewry deals with various aspects of textual transmission in Jewish culture in the last two centuries. Essays in this volume examine old and new kinds of media and their meanings; new modes of transmission in fields such as Jewish music; and the struggle to continue transmitting texts under difficult political circumstances. Two essays analyze textual transmission in the works of giants of modern Jewish literature: S.Y. Agnon, in Hebrew, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, in Yiddish. Other essays discuss paratexts in the East, print cultures in the West, and the organization of knowledge in libraries and encyclopedias.
Author: Robert Weinberg
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350129186
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 184
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Book Description
Tracing the evolving nature of popular and official beliefs about the purported nature of the Jews from the 18th century onwards, Russia and the Jewish Question explores how perceptions of Jews in late Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union shaped the regimes' policies toward them. In so doing Robert Weinberg provides a fruitful lens through which to investigate the social, economic, political, and cultural developments of modern Russia. Here, Weinberg reveals that the 'Jewish Question' and, by extension anti-Semitism emerged at the end of the 18th century when the partitions of Poland made hundreds of thousands of Jews subjects of the Russian crown. He skillfully argues the phrase itself implies the singular nature of Jews as a group of people whose religion, culture, and occupational make-up prevent them from fitting into predominantly Christian societies. The book then expounds how other characteristics were associated with the group over time: in particular, debates about rights of citizenship, the impact of industrialization, the emergence of the nation-state, and the proliferation of new political ideologies and movements contributed to the changing nature of the 'Jewish Question'. Its content may have not remained static, but its purpose consistently questions whether or not Jews pose a threat to the stability and well-being of the societies in which they live and this, in a specifically Russian context, is what Weinberg examines so expertly.
