An eye-opening reexamination of Handel's beloved religious oratorio Every Easter, audiences across the globe thrill to performances of Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus," but they would probably be appalled to learn the full extent of the oratorio's anti-Judaic message. In this pioneering study, respected musicologist Michael Marissen examines Handel's masterwork and uncovers a disturbing message of anti-Judaism buried within its joyous celebration of the divinity of the Christ. Discovering previously unidentified historical source materials enabled the author to investigate the circumstances that led to the creation of the Messiah and expose the hateful sentiments masked by magnificent musical artistry-including the famed "Hallelujah Chorus," which rejoices in the "dashing to pieces" of God's enemies, among them the "people of Israel." Marissen's fascinating, provocative work offers musical scholars and general readers alike an unsettling new appreciation of one of the world's best-loved and most widely performed works of religious music.

World War I utterly transformed the lives of Jews around the world: it allowed them to display their patriotism, to dispel antisemitic myths about Jewish cowardice, and to fight for Jewish rights. Yet Jews also suffered as refugees and deportees, at times catastrophically. And in the aftermath of the war, the replacement of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Russian and Ottoman Empires with a system of nation-states confronted Jews with a new set of challenges. This book provides a fascinating survey of the ways in which Jewish communities participated in and were changed by the Great War, focusing on the dramatic circumstances they faced in Europe, North America, and the Middle East during and after the conflict.

Between the 1933 Nazi seizure of power and their 1941 prohibition on all Jewish emigration, around 90,000 German Jews moved to the United States. Using the texts and images from a personal archive, this Palgrave Pivot explores how these refugees made sense of that experience. For many German Jews, theirs was not just a story of flight and exile; it was also one chapter in a longer history of global movement, experienced less as an estrangement from Germanness, than a reiteration of the mobility central to it. Private photography allowed these families to position themselves in a context of fluctuating notions of Germaness, and resist the prescribed disentanglement of their Jewish and German identities. In opening a unique window onto refugees' own sense of self as they moved across different geographical, political, and national environments, this book will appeal to readers interested in Jewish life and migration, visual culture, and the histories of National Socialism and the Holocaust.

These essays, written in the course of half a century of research and thought on German and Jewish history, deal with the uniqueness of a phenomenon in its historical and philosophical context. Applying the "classical" empirical tools to this unprecedented historical chapter, Kulka strives to incorporate it into the continuum of Jewish and universal history. At the same time he endeavors to fathom the meaning of the ideologically motivated mass murder and incalculable suffering. The author presents a multifaceted, integrative history, encompassing the German society, its attitudes toward the Jews and toward the anti-Jewish policy of the Nazi regime; as well as the Jewish society, its self-perception and its leadership.

The Yudisher Theriak [Jewish Theriac] by Zalman Zvi of Aufhausen, first published in Hanau, in 1615, was a response to an anti-Jewish work titled Judischer abgestreiffter Schlangenbalg [Jewish Shed Snakeskin], written by a Jewish convert to Chistianity, Samuel Friedrich Brenz, and published in Nurnberg and Augsburg in 1614. Brenz's work was part of a genre of anti-Jewish books and pamphlets written in German and addressed to Christians that purported to reveal how Jews mocked and blasphemed against the Christian religion, cursed their Christian neighbors, and engaged in magic and witchcraft in order to inflict damage to their possessions and livelihoods. The name of Zalman Zvi's book is a direct allusion to Brenz's title, but it also hints at a larger purpose. Theriac is a Greek and Latin term that means "the antidote to the bite of a venomous snake." Perhaps Zvi hoped that his book would also serve as a theriac for the scourge of anti-Judaism, which was prevalent in his generation. The Yudisher Theriak presents an interesting picture of how a learned Jew might respond to the many accusations against Jews and Judaism that became standardized and were repeated from author to author. The Yudisher Theriak makes a passing appearance in most scholarly books and many articles written about Christian-Jewish relations. Its existence is acknowledged and occasionally a fact or idea is cited from it, but its arguments and ideas have not been integrated into the scholarly literature on this subject. One reason that it has not received the attention it deserves is its language. It is written in a form of Early Modern Yiddish, more influenced by German and less familiar than its contemporary eastern European variant. In addition, Zalman Zvi was a learned Jew who interspersed Hebrew phrases, rabbinic terminology, and allusions to rabbinic literature in his work. Morris Faierstein's goal in this work is not to respond to all the references and allusions in the scholarly literature that the original text touches on, but rather to make the work available in an annotated translation that can be a useful tool in the study of Jewish-Christian relations in the Early Modern period and, more broadly, for Early Modern Jewish historical and cultural studies. The analysis and clarification of the many issues raised in the Yudisher Theriak await further studies. Faierstein has taken the first step by making the work available to an audience wider than the very narrow band of specialists in Early Modern Yiddish literature. Scholars and students of Jewish-Christian relations and Early Modern Jewish historical and cultural studies will appreciate the availability of this previously inaccessible text.

The significance of religion for the development of modern racist antisemitism is a much debated topic in the study of Jewish-Christian relations. This book, the first study on antisemitism in nineteenth-century Sweden, provides new insights into the debate from the specific case of a country in which religious homogeneity was the considered ideal long into the modern era. Between 1800 and 1900, approximately 150 books and pamphlets were printed in Sweden on the subject of Judaism and Jews. About one third comprised of translations mostly from German, but to a lesser extent also from French and English. Two thirds were Swedish originals, covering all genres and topics, but with a majority on religious topics: conversion, supersessionism, and accusations of deicide and bloodlust. The latter stem from the vastly popular medieval legends of Ahasverus, Pilate, and Judas which were printed in only slightly adapted forms and accompanied by medieval texts connecting these apocryphal figures to contemporary Jews, ascribing them a physical, essential, and biological coherence and continuity - a specific Jewish temporality shaped in medieval passion piety, which remained functional and intelligible in the modern period. Relying on medieval models and their combination of religious and racist imagery, nineteenth-century debates were informed by a comprehensive and mostly negative "knowledge" about Jews.

This is the first study of the military experience of some one to one-and-a-half million Jews who served in the Russian Army between 1827, the onset of personal conscription of Jews in Russia, and 1917, the demise of the tsarist regime. The conscription integrated Jews into the state, transforming the repressed Jewish victims of the draft into modern imperial Russian Jews. The book contextualizes the reasons underlying the decision to draft Jews, the communal responses to the draft, the missionary initiatives directed toward Jews in the army, alleged Jewish draft evasion and Jewish military performance, and the strategies Jews used to endure military service. It also explores the growing antisemitism of the upper echelons of the military toward the Jews on the eve of World War I and the rise of Russian-Jewish loyalty and patriotism.

A book like this is long overdue because not many are aware of the numerous intersections between Philip Roth's fiction and world literature. In highlighting these intersections and uneasy passages, this comparative approach offers an important contribution to Philip Roth studies as well as to comparative literary study in general. The fourteen chapters on this book summon Roth's intertextual links to authors ranging from the anonymous writer of the medieval play Everyman, through Thoreau, Hawthorne, Crane, Ellison, Coover, and the New York intellectuals in the United States, to Swift, Chekhov, Svevo, Kafka, Schulz, Gombrowicz, Camus, and Klima in Europe, and on to Coetzee in South Africa. The book does not deal with all the works in Roth's canon, but it offers a selection of works representing the different stages of Roth's development as a writer. By offering new readings of both well-studied and lesser-studied works, sometimes in unexpected company, the book discloses the critical difference that comparative scholarship can affect. The uneasy passages the book opens will not exhaust the numerous intersections between Roth and the work of other writers. The book's contribution is to place Roth's fiction firmly in a larger transnational context. Far from insular, Roth's work appears as deeply rooted in the American canon while at the same time showing a remarkable openness, a persistent need for contact with his European forebears, and true engagement with contemporary world literature. The transnational perspective of the book makes it important for the rapidly growing field of transatlantic and transnational American studies. The book will be value to collections in American literature and Jewish studies, comparative literature and criticism, and transatlantic and transnational American studies.

Twelve contentious legal cases serve as definitive markers in the ebb and flow of modern Jewish history. Ranging from the blood libel trials of the late-nineteenth century until the trial of the Holocaust at the beginning of the twenty-first century legal battles have consumed the Jewish community worldwide. Beginning with the infamous Dreyfus affair, continuing through the story of Leo Frank, the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann, and the lengthy incarceration of Jonathan Pollard, we can view the sweep of modern Jewish history.

The postwar decades were not the "golden era" in which American Jews easily partook in the religious revival, liberal consensus, and suburban middle-class comfort. Rather it was a period marked by restlessness and insecurity born of the shock about the Holocaust and of the unprecedented opportunities in American society. American Jews responded to loss and opportunity by obsessively engaging with the East European past. The proliferation of religious texts on traditional spirituality, translations of Yiddish literature, historical essays , photographs and documents of shtetl culture, theatrical and musical events, culminating in the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof, illustrate the grip of this past on post-1945 American Jews. This study shows how American Jews reimagined their East European past to make it usable for their American present. By rewriting their East European history, they created a repertoire of images, stories, and ideas that have shaped American Jewry to this day.

The Jews from Aleppo, Syria, and their descendants compose a remarkable but little-known community that has spread throughout the world during the past two centuries, adapting to myriad social settings from Kobe to Buenos Aires. Aleppan Jews are known for their strong Jewish identity and commercial acumen, as well as their learning and piety. The religious leadership of Aleppan Jewry, unlike other Sephardim, is also noted for its militant conservatism.

A Global Community is the first comprehensive scholarly interpretation of the historical experience of this unusual community in Syria and in the other places to which Aleppan Jewry have immigrated. Their incorporation into the nation-states in the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas has forced Syrian Jews to change their modes of identification as Jews and reshape their culture while maintaining international familial and communal ties. A Global Community is pertinent to current discussions and debates concerning ethnic persistence and assimilation, transnational diasporas, and nationalism.

Walter P. Zenner points to the social, economic, and cultural links that the various Syrian Jewish communities have made for the unique persistence of community throughout the diaspora. He pisces special interest on the communities in Israel and the United States but also studies the communities in England and Latin America. He utilizes rabbinical responses, travelers' writings, secondary sources, interviews, and oral histories to provide a unique look into this Middle Eastern Jewish community for those interested in Ashkenazic as well as Sephardic Judaism.

An exploration of the work of Jewish women graphic novelists and the intricate Jewish identity is complicated by gender, memory, generation, and place-that is, the emotional, geographical, and psychological spaces that women inhabit. Victoria Aarons argues that Jewish women graphic novelists are preoccupied with embodied memory: the way the body materializes memory. This monograph investigates how memory manifests in the drawn shape of the body as an expression of the weight of personal and collective histories. Aarons explores Jewish identity, diaspora, mourning, memory, and witness in the works of Sarah Lightman, Liana Finck, Anya Ulinich, Leela Corman, and more. Memory Spaces begins by framing this research within contemporary discourse and reflects upon the choice to explore Jewish women graphic novelists specifically. In the chapters that follow, Aarons relates the nuanced issues of memory, transmission of trauma, Jewish cultural identity, and the gendered self to a series of meaningful and noteworthy graphic novels. Aarons's insight, close readings, and integration of contemporary scholarship are conveyed clearly and concisely, creating a work that both captivates readers and contributes to scholarly discourse in Jewish studies, women's literature, memory studies, and identity.

What was the role played by local police volunteers in the Holocaust? Using eye witness descriptions from the towns and villages of Belorussia and Ukraine, this text reveals local policemen as hands on collaborators of the Nazis. They brutally drove Jewish neighbours from their homes and guarded them closely on the way to their deaths. Some distinguished themselves as ruthless murderers. Outnumbering German police manpower in these areas, the local police were the foot soldiers of the Holocaust in the east.

Given the dearth of non-messianic interpretations of Psalm 110:1 in non-Christian Second Temple Jewish texts, why did it become such a widely used messianic prooftext in the New Testament and early Christianity? Previous attempts to answer this question have focused on why the earliest Christians first began to use Ps 110:1. The result is that these proposals do not provide an adequate explanation for why first century Christians living in the Greek East employed the verse and also applied it to Jesus's exaltation. I contend that two Greco-Roman politico-religious practices, royal and imperial temple and throne sharing-which were cross-cultural rewards that Greco-Roman communities bestowed on beneficent, pious, and divinely approved rulers-contributed to the widespread use of Ps 110:1 in earliest Christianity. This means that the earliest Christians interpreted Jesus's heavenly session as messianic and thus political, as well as religious, in nature.

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.

aMasterfully weaving together stories of adolescent girls based on an analysis of their diaries, personal letters, and memoirs, Klapper illuminates the ways these young women grappled with contradictory feelings about their friends, family, and future...This compelling narrative deeply enriches our understanding of the intertwined roles played by gender, ethnicity, religion, and education in fostering American identity at the turn of the century.a
--"American Historical Review"

aMelissa R. Klapper has succeeded handsomely in surmounting the hurdles of her topic to create a coherent narrative of cultural change. She brings to her subject sensitivity to the stress of adolescence, mastery of her materials, and genuine affection for the experience of growing up female, Jewish, and American.a
--"Journal of American History"

aDrawing on diaries and magazines, historian Klapper recreates the world of Jewish girls in late 19th- and early 20th-century America. . . . This book's charm lies in its innovative and engaging focus on girlhood. Klapper . . . offers grace notes to a familiar narrative about the tensions between assimilation and tradition.a--"Publishers Weekly"

"Provides a revealing glimpse into the lives of adolescent girls at the turn of the century. Klapper's exhaustive search for the diaries of young Jewish women has produced a harvest of insights into their relationships to religion, to education, to domestic lives, and to girl culture."
--Alice Kessler-Harris, author of "In Pursuit of Equity"

"Melissa Klapper's pioneering volume, based on an astonishing wealth of primary sources, uncovers more than wehave ever known about the upbringing and education of Jewish girls in America from the Civil War to World War I. Covering everything from religious education to sex education, it explores what it meant to be a Jewish girl aged 12-20 during one of the most tumultuous eras in American history."
--Jonathan D. Sarna, Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History, Brandeis University

"Brings to life the lives of the 'ordinary' young women whom we encounter in these pages. By exploring the diaries of Jewish girls who used these private and personal sources to think about their conflicting ideas about identities, families, and futures, Melissa Klapper has shown them to be historical actors, and as such anything but ordinary. By combining intellectual matters of several literatures-the history of education, women's history, American Jewish history, the history of the United States over the course of a crucial six decade period-Klapper has made a substantial contribution to our understanding of the past and those who peopled it."
--Hasia Diner, Paul S. and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History, New York University

"Klapper offers a thoughtful book on subjects too often ignored in both the literature of Jewish-Americans and of American girls."
-- "Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era"

Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860-1920 draws on a wealth of archival material, much of which has never been published--or even read--to illuminate the ways in which Jewish girls' adolescent experiences reflected larger issues relating to gender, ethnicity, religion, and education.

Klapper explores the dual roles girls played as agents ofacculturation and guardians of tradition. Their search for an identity as American girls that would not require the abandonment of Jewish tradition and culture mirrored the struggle of their families and communities for integration into American society.

While focusing on their lives as girls, not the adults they would later become, Klapper draws on the papers of such figures as Henrietta Szold, founder of Hadassah; Edna Ferber, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Showboat; and Marie Syrkin, literary critic and Zionist. Klapper also analyzes the diaries, memoirs, and letters of hundreds of other girls whose later lives and experiences have been lost to history.

Told in an engaging style and filled with colorful quotes, the book brings to life a neglected group of fascinating historical figures during a pivotal moment in the development of gender roles, adolescence, and the modern American Jewish community.

Until the mid 1950s, the Jews of Egypt lived in a multicultural and diverse society, which constituted a model of conviviality and tolerance, using French as its lingua franca. The Jews constituted a respected and well-integrated urban community of about 80 to 100,000, and made an impressive contribution to the socioeconomic modernization of the country. Together with the rise of Arab nationalism and the growth of Islamic fundamentalism, the escalating Arab-Israeli conflict brought about the rapid demise of Egyptian Jewry. Like the other Jewish communities of Arab lands, these people were either expelled or forced into exile in the aftermath of the 1948, 1956, and 1967 Arab-Israeli wars. As a consequence, close to half of the Jewish population of Egypt found refuge in Israel while the rest dispersed throughout the Western world, mainly in France, Brazil, and the United States. This book focuses on a group of about two thousand who settled in Australia, the "Edge of the Diaspora." It also examines the migration experience of Egyptian Jews who settled in France, in order to compare and contrast their integration in a non Anglo-Celtic environment. Although the Jews of Egypt, like most refugees, suffered the trauma of dispossession, expulsion, and dislocation, their particular experience did not attract the attention of Australian sociologists or historians. Even within the context of Australian Jewry, their story was largely unknown even though there has been much discussion about the postwar migration of European Jews. The author Racheline Barda believes that it is important to give them a voice, to tell their stories, and delve into their past history, thereby discovering the richness of their cultural heritage which ultimately gave them the tools for a successful integration in Australian society. One of the crucial concerns of this work was the preservation and transmission of the rich and dynamic history of this unique group to successive generations, through the oral testimonies of first-hand witnesses of a vanished world. This book makes an important contribution to the study of contemporary Australian society as well as diaspora studies. It deals with a topic that has rarely been reported on or studied in Australia--the migration experience of a small and unique ethnoreligious population such as the Jews of Egypt. It is the first comprehensive research on their immigration and integration into Australian society. Traditionally, sociohistorians have mostly concentrated on the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe or on the long established local Jewish community, which was historically of British and German origin. The Jews of Egypt constitute one of the largest Jewish communities to settle in Australia from outside European societies, in response to the rise of Arab nationalism and hostility to Israel. Based on a series of comprehensive interviews conducted mainly in Australia and France, this study reconstructs the history of a Jewish community and the circumstances of its demise. It takes the innovative approach of systematically analyzing the ethnic, religious, and cultural characteristics of both sample groups, highlighting the diversity that is inherent to the group as a whole. By specifically targeting the issue of identity, it provides an insight into the dynamics of a multilayered identity, which performs as a vehicle of integration and acculturation for a migrant group in any host society. Apart from individuals studying the particular history of Egyptian Jews wherever they settled after their forced emigration from Egypt, the book would be of interest to scholars specializing in diaspora studies, ethnic and immigrant studies, and social history.

With works by over 100 poets, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry celebrates contemporary writers, born after World War II , who write about Jewish themes. This anthology brings together poets whose writings offer fascinating insight into Jewish cultural and religious topics and Jewish identity. Featuring established poets as well as representatives of the next generation of Jewish voices, it includes poems by Ellen Bass, Charles Bernstein, Carol V. Davis, Edward Hirsch, Jane Hirshfield, David Lehman, Jacqueline Osherow, Ira Sadoff, Philip Schultz, Alan Shapiro, Jane Shore, Judith Skillman, Melissa Stein, Matthew Zapruder, and many others.