Search

The book by the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, eclipsed in secret by the French publisher Fayard, is available again thanks to La Fabrique éditions, commented by the historian and independent journalist, Dominique Vidal. It is an important work to know the conditions for the foundation of a state by the Zionist movement, marked by the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians between 1947-1950: excellent news for those interested or seeking to understand the history of Palestine and the State of Israel.

Spinoza has gained acceptance into Hebrew culture in the last two centuries, a period that includes the Jewish Haskalah in Europe, the culture created in Eretz Yisrael in the pre-statehood days, and contemporary Israeli culture. This acceptance is rather intimate by nature. Hebrew authors and their readers turned to Spinoza to clarify their own problems. To these audiences, Spinoza was not only a great philosopher, whose writings are worth interpreting and spreading. He was also perceived as someone who could help formulate what Judaism is and learn the possible meaning it can find in the world of Jews who had moved away from a religious lifestyle.

In many ways, the travelogue Journey to Poland reveals Döblin’s ambiguous relationship to political and religious otherness and an approach to the Eastern Jewish world that, in changing ways, conjures up many antisemitic images and ideologies, without the reader always being able to make a clear distinction between the author’s intention and the intentionality of the literary text. From a phenomenological perspective, this paper discusses Döblin’s reflections on the cultural differences between Western and Eastern Jews as a “confrontation with otherness” (B. Waldenfels) and as an attempt to reconnect with his Jewish roots.

This report delves into the current socio-political landscape in Israel, shedding light on the growing opposition to government reforms and heightened tensions during the formation of the new government. It explores the temporary pause in internal debates following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack, with an expectation that these discussions will resume post-conflict. The primary focus is on depicting Israeli society and politics before the war and analysing the key elements that have defined its recent history.

Rosa Sonneschein (1847–1932) was an important figure in late nineteenth-century American journalism, activism, and fiction. While a few brief studies were dedicated to her biography and to her role as a Jewish social activist, editor, and contributor to The American Jewess, no critical work has been devoted as yet to her literary production. The aim of this essay is to rectify this critical neglect by examining Sonneschein’s wide literary opus and by investigating its connection, if any, to the views she expressed as a journalist and a public speaker. This essay will explore Sonneschein’s threefold literary oeuvre, consisting of the following genres: Jewish fiction, non-Jewish fiction, and literary sketches. It will also try to explicate Rosa’s often conflicting stance with regard to Judaism, feminism, and Zionism, a standpoint which should be examined in the context of the fin-the-siècle’s turbulent changes American society had to cope with, especially pertaining to massive immigration, religious and social reforms, suffrage and temperance movements, etc.

The article discusses early 20th-century Zionist education inspired by nature, labor, secularism and a reinterpretation of the Bible. Topics include the thought of Jewish thinker, writer, and educator Aaron David Gordon as well as Isaac Epstein, a Belarusian linguist and author of books devoted to Hebrew education. The introduction of a new subject in the Jewish school curriculum aimed at teaching about the Land of Israel is noted. The development of religious Zionism and Chief Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook are also mentioned.

This commentary describes a virtual seder (the ceremonial Passover meal) as it is reformatted by Covid-19. Dwelling on a shift in the closing lines of the socially-distanced digital dinner from “next year in Jerusalem” to “next year, together,” the essay explores the politics of place in articulations of hope and the role of ritual in potentially rewriting them.

This paper critically examines Theodore Herzl’s canonical Zionist novel, Altneuland /Old New Land as a frontier narrative which depicts the process of Jewish immigration to Palestine as an inevitable historical process aiming to rescue European Jews from persecution and establish a multi-national Utopia on the land of Palestine. Unlike radical Zionist narratives which underlie the necessity of founding a purely Jewish state in the holy land, Altneuland depicts an egalitarian and cosmopolitan community shared by Jews, Arabs and other races. The paper emphasizes that Herzl’s Zionist project in Altneuland is not an extension of western colonialism par excellence. Herzl’s narrative is a pragmatic appropriation of frontier literature depicting Palestine as a new frontier and promoting a construct of mythology about enthusiastic individuals who thrived in the desert while serving the needs of an enterprising and progressive society. Unlike western colonial narratives which necessitate the elimination of the colonized natives, Herzl’s novel assimilates the indigenous population in the emerging frontier community.

Copyright of Revue d'Histoire Moderne & Contemporaine is the property of Societe d'Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Études Rurales is the property of Editions EHESS and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Albert Cohen, a committed writer? It is difficult to answer this question, so much the writer is difficult to classify, as he refuses to belong to any aesthetic movement. But the Zionist cause and the love of the Jewish people have marked his life as a man and as a writer. We will try to specify what is the Cohenian commitment from the analysis of some minor texts, in particular Projections ou Après-minuit à Genève et Mort de Charlot. Albert Cohen chose an aesthetic that is that of laughter, derisory and grotesque to express a dull pain that only humor can translate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the metamorphoses of a book: The Guide for the Perplexed by Moses Maimonides. The receptions of the book from the time of its publication (1191), and especially his translation into Hebrew (1224) were diverse and went through many changes during the last eight centuries. From its publication the book caused a storm among Jewish thinkers and rabbis, and was accused of being a profanation, was banned, and even burned. These facts are particularly intriguing taking into account the authoritative role of Maimonides in the Jewish world, who was considered as the second Moses, was named the “great eagle”, and his book Mishneh Torah, a comprehensive code of Halakhah (Jewish law) is a canonical book since then. Acceptance and rejection of this book can be observed in the Jewish world till today. The book was understood as the source for very different philosophical and theological approaches. Therefore, it has a sense to talk about ‘many Guides for the Perplexed’. The article is concentrated particularly, on modern times: Haskalah and Zionism.

This article aims to analyze the place of the Negev Bedouins in the Israeli society, based on preliminary results from a field survey. This study is the first step of a doctoral thesis project and introduces thoughts on the meaning of the Bedouins’ condition within a young state still worried about justifying its existence. Indeed, the political mechanisms occurring in the state’s construction seem to be the reason why Israel refuses to take into account the Bedouins’ claims, even though they are Israeli citizens.

This article aims to analyze the relations between the trial of Adolf Eichmann and the Israeli national identity. It analyzes a trial which has its roots in the ius gentium and continues until the reappropriation of the memory of the Holocaust by Israel. The trial of Nazi criminal represents the moment when the Jewish state integrates his national experience to the memory of the destruction of European Jewry during the Second World War. Through the trials against Eichmann and its consequences on the Israeli public opinion, Ben Gurion strove for a nationalist rewriting of the Holocaust. The role of justice and law is central to the development of the national identity of Israel, providing a renewed civil identity that makes Israel the ‘guardian’ of memory and shifting the focus from the classic themes of Zionism.

This essay examines the ways in which Israeli philosophy has approached the question of war. Because of the influence of the neo-Kantian pacifism on the first generation of Israeli philosophers, it is only in the aftermath of the 1982 Lebanon war that a punctual reflection on issues of military ethics develops (as for instance in Weiler’s and Casher’s thought). The problem of the peculiarity of Israel’s wars, however, has been the focus of other Israel thinkers only in the light of the relationship between State and religion (as in Leibowitz and Margalit) as well as between the civil society and the political institutions (as in Adi Ophir). In conclusion and in spite of its unquestionable originality, Israeli philosophy differs from other Western intellectual traditions only in the fact that it has generally avoided the question of war at the expense of other issues perceived as more urgent.

The occasion of Ben-Gurion’s declaration of the establishment of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948, was one of the most exciting and moving moments in the long history of the Jewish people. This was a moment that the Jews had hoped for, yearned for, and prayed for throughout their two thousand years of exile. However, we should not understand from this that the declaration and the actual establishment of the Jewish State were not accompanied by difficulties and crises. Just the opposite is true. Ben-Gurion’s declaration and the establishment of the State created a chain of reactions and counter-reactions in the society and culture developing in Eretz Israel that can be characterized as post-traumatic. In this article, I will discuss the responses apparent in much Israeli fiction to the following phenomena: the traumatic passage from the “Yishuv society” to a state; the difficulty of coping simultaneously with renewed nationalism (which had already been dealt with in Europe) on the one hand and with modernism and postmodernism on the other; the unresolved struggle between the narrative of redemption and the narrative of the Diaspora and the complicated passage from a “melting pot” society to a multicultural one. In conclusion, I present the issues in a political context. I attempt to indicate the similar/different approaches of the authors of the Zionist left and the Zionist right to the practical implementation of the Zionist meta-narrative.

Alphonse Dupront analysed in Le mythe de croisade the survival of the idea of Crusade until the contemporary era. In this history, the 19th century has a special interest, since it actualized this latent virtuality of the western collective consciousness, and gave it new directions. The rediscovery of Palestine was made possible by the conjunction of very different factors such as the revolution in transportation, the rise of European imperialism, or the internal reforms in the Eastern countries (Egypt and the Ottoman Empire). The episteme of the Western sciences was also transformed by the emergence of new disciplines (biology, geology, philology), and the gradual formation of archaeology. The Christian and biblical Holy Land was rediscovered by the biblical archaeologists, and its image disseminated well beyond the scholars and learned men. This article studies some of the mechanisms of dissemination of these discourses, overall in the protestant world, and points to the connection to the birth of the Zionist movement: it has given more and more importance to the matter of the land, which has become in the 20th century the main issue, and has largely used not only results from the biblical archaeology, but also its methods for naming and framing the territory. Thinking about the birth of a Western protestant way of seeing the Holy Land lets us understand better the relations between Israel and the West since World War II, and we must finally remember of Alphonse Dupront's wider project, who tried to promote history as a psychoanalysis of the western collective consciousness and consequently a way of mutual understanding. This article is a contribution to such a project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Vingtième Siècle is the property of Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article intends to examine the reception of the first Zionism by the Italian Catholic press close to the Holy See: "Osservatore Romano" and "Civiltà Cattolica". Three years are analysed in this study: 1897, birth of Zionism; 1904 visit of the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl to the Pope in Rome; 1917, Balfour Declaration. Particular attention has been paid to the 1897, crucial moment for the political European Anti-semitism. For this year have been examined also some local intransigent Catholic newspapers. Principal aim of this research is highlighting how the Holy See reacted to the Zionist project of settling a Jewish State in Palestine.

The article discusses writings by Zionist women in Palestine from 1880 to 1939. These letters, diaries, memoirs, and personal accounts speak to the social conditions for Jewish women settling in Palestine in hopes of the creation of a Jewish nation. Topics include gender inequality in the Yishuv, which refers to the Jewish population which immigrated to Palestine in the 1880s, before the creation of Israel; domestic relations and daily life for women in Palestine; and the writings of feminists who contradict the traditional views of the Yishuv as a community of harmony and equality.

Copyright of Sociologie & Sociétés is the property of Presses de l'Universite de Montreal and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Terrain is the property of Mission Patrimoine Ethnologiq and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In 1918, the Jewish community in Transylvania had 32 elementary schools and 2 civilian schools, with Hungarian as the language of instruction. In the city of Cluj, presently the center of Jewish Transylvanian culture, Jews accounted for 13-15% of the population (16,700 inhabitants in 1941). When Tarbut Gymnasium closed down in 1927 (it had been established in 1920 as the third Jewish high school in Transylvania, after those in Timişoara and Oradea), no Jewish pre-university education institution remained in the city, following the Romanianization of Jewish primary mid secondary schools in Transylvania. The high school was reopened during the Hungarian occupation (1940-1944). In 1927, Neologue rabbi Mátyás Eisler drew up a religious education project meant to produce "Jewish individuals who would be a credit, in all situations, to Jewish religion and national dignity." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study synthetically presents the situation of Transylvanian Jews--in demographic, economic, social, and cultural terms--at the time of Austria-Hungary. After being granted equal civic rights (Law XVII/1867), the Jews in Transylvania experienced a period of unprecedented development: demographic increase (118.5% between 1869 and 1910), economic prosperity, an increase in the number of community institutions (also in the urban areas), the construction of synagogues, the development of education and culture (rabbinic literature, Jewish studies, history, poetry, press and printing, painting). In parallel, soon after the emancipation, the first signs of anti-Semitism began to appear and, in defense, some tendencies towards cultural-linguistic assimilation and integration within Hungarian society. The Zionist movement emerged in the early 20th century, but it remained a minority trend in Transylvania when compared to the traditionalist, Hasidic, and assimilationist positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This part of the article describes Saul Mezan's life upon his return to Bulgaria in 1920. Working as a doctor, Mezan continued his literary activities, studying all aspects of Jewish social and political life in Bulgaria and abroad. In his publications, Mezan wrote about the history and language of various Jewish groups before and after their arrival to the Balkans. After the Nazis came to power, Mezan fought against fascism in his publications and, when the war broke out, worked in a Greek hospital. He was jailed in Jannina, Greece; freed during a jailbreak in 1943; and killed, probably in the same year, in an ambush by a local band.

The article is dedicated to the life and writings of a largely forgotten Bulgarian Jewish intellectual, Dr Saul Mezan (1893-1943). A physician by training, as well as a published poet, journalist, editor and historian, Saul Mezan is one of the pioneers of the Zionist movement in Bulgaria in the first decades of the XX Century. His works are of interest to researchers as documents on the history of Jews in Bulgaria and more specifically on the Zionist movement and its leaders.

The article discusses the development of Zionist views of Jerusalem among Zionists before 1948. Topics include the views of Zionist leader Theodore Herzl, the opening of the Zionist Office in Jerusalem - the Palestine Office, directed by Arthur Ruppin in Jaffa in 1908, and the Zionist view of Jerusalem versus the Zionist view of Tel Aviv.

The article presents a chapter from the thesis "L'extension de la colonisation sioniste en Syrie de 1930 à 1938," by Denis Hermann.

The article discusses the Jewish settlements in Palestine before the creation of the State of Israel, with reference to the Communist Party and its development of Zionist ideology. Topics include the relationship between the Palestinian Communist Party and the international communist Komintern, the "proletarian Zionism" of Zionist theorist Ber Borokhov, and the 1936 to 1939 Palestinian Arab Revolt.

The article discusses the boundaries between Antizionism and Antisemitism, and the definitions of terms relating to Jews, Judaism, and Zionism. Topics include varieties of Zionism, varieties of opposition to Zionism, and potential reasons for the attraction of Zionism for many Jews in the 21st century.

This article intends to examine the reception of the first Zionism by the Italian Catholic press close to the Holy See: “Osservatore Romano” and “Civiltà Cattolica”. Three years are analysed in this study: 1897, birth of Zionism; 1904 visit of the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl to the Pope in Rome; 1917, Balfour Declaration. Particular attention has been paid to the 1897, crucial moment for the political European Anti-semitism. For this year have been examined also some local intransigent Catholic newspapers. Principal aim of this research is highlighting how the Holy See reacted to the Zionist project of settling a Jewish State in Palestine.

An homage for French anthropologist and author Jacques Gutwirth is presented. The author discusses his Jewish origins and opposition to Zionism, his ability to speak many languages including Portuguese and English, and their working relationship which included managing the Anthropologie Urbaine laboratory (UPR 34). Also mentioned is their research in urban anthropology and Gutwirth's book "La renaissance du hassidisme de 1945 à nos jours."