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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.
In Russian Idea-Jewish Presence, Professor Brian Horowitz follows
the career tracks of Jewish intellectuals who, having fallen in
love with Russian culture, were unceremoniously repulsed. Horowitz
relays the paradoxes of a synthetic Jewish and Russian
self-consciousness in order to correct critics who have always
considered Russians and Jews as polar opposites, enemies, and
incompatible. In fact, the best Russian-Jewish intellectuals-Semyon
Dubnov, Maxim Vinaver, Mikhail Gershenzon, and a number of Zionist
writers and thinkers-were actually inspired by Russian culture and
attempted to develop a sui generis Jewish creativity in three
languages on Russian soil.
The book argues that Jews were not a people apart but were
culturally integrated in Russian society. In their diasporic
cultural creations Russia's Jews employed the general themes of
artists under tsars and Soviets, but they modified these themes to
fit their own needs. The result was a hybrid, Russian-Jewish
culture, unique and dynamic. Few today consider that Jewish Eastern
Europe, the "old world", was in fact a power incubator of modern
Jewish consciousness. Brian Horowitz, a well-known scholar of
Russian Jewry, presents essays on Jewish education (the heder),
historiography, literature and Jewish philosophy that intersect
with contemporary interests on the big questions of Jewish life.
The book lets us grasp the meaning of secular Judaism and gives
models from the past in order to stimulate ideas for the present.
In Russian Idea-Jewish Presence, Professor Brian Horowitz follows
the career tracks of Jewish intellectuals who, having fallen in
love with Russian culture, were unceremoniously repulsed. Horowitz
relays the paradoxes of a synthetic Jewish and Russian
self-consciousness in order to correct critics who have always
considered Russians and Jews as polar opposites, enemies, and
incompatible. In fact, the best Russian-Jewish intellectuals-Semyon
Dubnov, Maxim Vinaver, Mikhail Gershenzon, and a number of Zionist
writers and thinkers-were actually inspired by Russian culture and
attempted to develop a sui generis Jewish creativity in three
languages on Russian soil.
Vladimir Jabotinsky is well remembered as a militant leader and
father of the right-wing Revisionist Zionist movement, but he was
also a Russian-Jewish intellectual, talented fiction writer,
journalist, playwright, and translator of poetry into Russian and
Hebrew. His autobiography, Sippur yamai, Story of My Life-written
in Hebrew and published in Tel Aviv in 1936-gives a more nuanced
picture of Jabotinsky than his popular image, but it was never
published in English. In Vladimir Jabotinsky's Story of My Life,
editors Brian Horowitz and Leonid Katsis present this much-needed
translation for the first time, based on a rough draft of an
English version that was discovered in Jabotinsky's archive at the
Jabotinsky Institute in Tel Aviv. Jabotinsky's volume mixes true
events with myth as he offers a portrait of himself from his birth
in 1880 until just after the outbreak of World War I. He describes
his personal development during childhood and early adult years in
Odessa, Rome, St. Petersburg, Vienna, and Istanbul, during Russia's
Silver Age, a period known for spiritual searching, but also
political violence, radicalism, and pogroms. He tells of his escape
to Rome as a youth, his return to Odessa, and his eventual adoption
of Zionism. He also depicts struggles with rivals and colleagues in
both politics and journalism. The editors introduce the full text
of the autobiography by discussing Jabotinsky's life, legacy, and
writings in depth. As Jabotinsky is gaining a reputation for the
quality of his fictional and semi-fictional writing in the field of
Israel studies, this autobiography will help reading groups and
students of Zionism, Jewish history, and political studies to gain
a more complete picture of this famous leader.
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