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Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 29 - Writing Jewish History in Eastern Europe (Paperback)
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Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 29 - Writing Jewish History in Eastern Europe (Paperback)
Series: Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, 29
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Historiography formed an unusually important component of the
popular culture and heritage of east European Jewry in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was a period of
social, economic, and political upheaval, and for the emerging
class of educated Jews the writing and reading of Jewish history
provided not only intellectual but also emotional and moral
sustenance. Facing an insecure future became easier with an
understanding of the past, and of the Jewish place in that past.
This volume is devoted to the development of Jewish historiography
in the three east European centres-Congress Poland, the Russian
empire, and Galicia-that together contained the majority of world
Jewry at that time. Drawing widely on the multilingual body of
scholarly and popular literature that emerged in that turbulent
environment, the contributors to this volume attempt to go beyond
the established paradigms in the study of Jewish historiography,
and specifically to examine the relationship between the writing of
Jewish history and of non-Jewish history in eastern Europe. In
doing so they expose the tension between the study of the Jewish
past in a communal setting and in a wider, regional, setting that
located Jews firmly in the non-Jewish political, economic, and
cultural environment. They also explore the relationship between
'history'-seen as the popular understanding of the past-and
'scholarly history'-interpretation of the past through the academic
study of the sources, which lays claim to objectivity and
authority. The development of Jewish historical scholarship grew
out of the new intellectual climate of the Haskalah, which
encouraged novel modes of thinking about self and others and
promoted critical enquiry and new approaches to traditional
sources. At the same time, however, in response to what the
traditionalists perceived as secular research, an Orthodox
historiography also emerged, driven not only by scholarly curiosity
but also by the need to provide a powerful counterweight in the
struggle against modernity. In fact, east European Jewish
historiography has undergone many methodological, thematic, and
ideological transformations over the last two centuries. Even
today, east European Jewish historiography revisits many of the
questions of importance to scholars and audiences since its
emergence: how Jews lived, both within the narrow Jewish world and
in contact with the wider society; the limits of Jewish insularity
and integration; expressions of persecution and anti-Jewish
violence; and also Jewish contributions to the societies and states
of eastern Europe. Many challenges still remain: questions of the
purpose of the research, its ideological colouring, and its
relevance for contemporary Jewish communities. The fruit of
research in many disciplines and from different methodological
points of view, this volume has much to offer scholars of modern
Jewry trying to understand how east European Jews saw themselves as
they struggled with the concepts of modernity and national identity
and how their history continues to be studied and discussed by an
international community of scholars.
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