Bohemia’s Jews and Their Nineteenth Century
Bohemia’s Jews and Their Nineteenth Century

Author: Jindřich Toman

Publisher: Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press

Published: 2023-05-01

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 8024652889

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This book on Jewish culture and literature focuses on the “quiet” decades of the nineteenth century, a scarcely written-about period of time in Bohemian Jewish history. Using a myriad of sources, including travelers’ accounts, poems, essays, short stories, guides, and newspaper articles, the volume explores Jewish expression, Jewish-Czech relations, and the changing attitudes toward Jews between the 1820s and 1880s. It offers close readings of writers like Karel Havlíček Borovský, Ján Kollár, Siegfried Kapper, and Jan Neruda, as well as lesser-known authors and sources. Combining skillful sustained analysis, judicious argumentation, and elegant writing, the book is a truly enriching reading experience.

Popular Bohemia
Popular Bohemia

Author: Mary Gluck

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-07-01

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 0674037677

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A radical reconceptualization of modernism, this book traces the appearance of the modern artist to the Paris of the 1830s and links the emergence of an enduring modernist aesthetic to the fleeting forms of popular culture. Contrary to conventional views of a private self retreating from history and modernity, Popular Bohemia shows us the modernist as a public persona parodying the stereotypes of commercial mass culture. Here we see how the modern artist—alternately assuming the roles of the melodramatic hero, the urban flâneur, the female hysteric, the tribal primitive—created his own version of an expressive, public modernity in opposition to an increasingly repressive and conformist bourgeois culture. And here we see how a specifically modern aesthetic culture in nineteenth-century Paris came about, not in opposition to commercial popular culture, but in close alliance with it. Popular Bohemia revises dominant historical narratives about modernism from the perspective of a theoretically informed cultural history that spans the period between 1830 and 1914. In doing so, it reconnects the intellectual history of avant-garde art with the cultural history of bohemia and the social history of the urban experience to reveal the circumstances in which a truly modernist culture emerged.

The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia
The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia

Author: Wilma Iggers

Publisher: Wayne State University Press

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 9780814322284

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While much has been written about East European and German Jewry, relatively little attention has been given to the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia, although they played an important role in the industrial, economic, and cultural life of central Europe. This book examines the social and cultural history of the Jewish community in Czechoslovakia from the Age of Enlightenment to the middle of the twentieth century. From family histories, newspaper and magazine articles, wills, and letters, Wilma Iggers has culled descriptions of life, customs, and local color; portrayals of important individuals and families; stories of individuals depicting the transition of a culture and a people from the Middle Ages to modern times; an examination of complaints about the deterioration of the religious communities and of religious instruction; and the history of anti- Semitism. Practically all reports reflect the difficult struggle for survival as Jews. The texts also address special legislation regarding the Jews, industrialization and urbanization, changes in religious and familial structures, growing involvement in the culture and politics of the worldly communities, cultural assimilation, changes in stereotypes about the Jews, and the effects of political forces from outside. The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia begins with the expulsion of the Jews from Prague by Empress Maria Theresa in 1744, an event which caused a shock that remained in the Jewish consciousness for a long time. The book concludes with texts from the middle of the twentieth century dealing with the most recent generation of Bohemian and Moravian Jews. Despite fluctuations and radical breaks, the time span from 1744 to 1952 constitutes a single unit that encompasses striking cultural and economic developments as well as anti-Semitism and cynicism unmatched even in the Middle Ages. With their strong emotional ties to the land of their birth, Bohemian and Moravian Jews are closer to the Central and West Europeans than to the Jews from Eastern Europe. Although Jews are often criticized for adapting themselves easily to other countries--meaning that they have no real roots--their strong emotional ties to their countries of origin are clearly expressed in a number of documents included in this book.

Gustav Mahler
Gustav Mahler

Author: Jens Malte Fischer

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2011-08-09

Total Pages: 721

ISBN-13: 0300172192

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A best seller when first published in Germany in 2003, Jens Malte Fischer's "Gustav Mahler" has been lauded by scholars as a landmark work. He draws on important primary resources--some unavailable to previous biographers--and sets in narrative context the extensive correspondence between Mahler and his wife, Alma; Alma Mahler's diaries; and the memoirs of Natalie Bauer-Lechner, a viola player and close friend of Mahler, whose private journals provide insight into the composer's personal and professional lives and his creative process.Fischer explores Mahler's early life, his relationship to literature, his achievements as a conductor in Vienna and New York, his unhappy marriage, and his work with the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic in his later years. He also illustrates why Mahler is a prime example of artistic idealism worn down by Austrian anti-Semitism and American commercialism. "Gustav Mahler" is the best-sourced and most balanced biography available about the composer, a nuanced and intriguing portrait of his dramatic life set against the backdrop of early 20th century America and fin de siecle Europe.

The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000
The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000

Author: Hasia R. Diner

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2004-08-23

Total Pages: 484

ISBN-13: 9780520939929

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Since Peter Stuyvesant greeted with enmity the first group of Jews to arrive on the docks of New Amsterdam in 1654, Jews have entwined their fate and fortunes with that of the United States—a project marked by great struggle and great promise. What this interconnected destiny has meant for American Jews and how it has defined their experience among the world's Jews is fully chronicled in this work, a comprehensive and finely nuanced history of Jews in the United States from 1654 through the end of the past century. Hasia R. Diner traces Jewish participation in American history—from the communities that sent formal letters of greeting to George Washington; to the three thousand Jewish men who fought for the Confederacy and the ten thousand who fought in the Union army; to the Jewish activists who devoted themselves to the labor movement and the civil rights movement. Diner portrays this history as a constant process of negotiation, undertaken by ordinary Jews who wanted at one and the same time to be Jews and full Americans. Accordingly, Diner draws on both American and Jewish sources to explain the chronology of American Jewish history, the structure of its communal institutions, and the inner dynamism that propelled it. Her work documents the major developments of American Judaism—he economic, social, cultural, and political activities of the Jews who immigrated to and settled in America, as well as their descendants—and shows how these grew out of both a Jewish and an American context. She also demonstrates how the equally compelling urges to maintain Jewishness and to assimilate gave American Jewry the particular character that it retains to this day in all its subtlety and complexity.

Reconstructing a National Identity
Reconstructing a National Identity

Author: Marsha L. Rozenblit

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 0195176308

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This book explores the impact of war and political crisis on the national identity of Jews, both in the multinational Habsburg monarchy and in the new nation-states that replaced it at the end of World War I. Jews enthusiastically supported the Austrian war effort because it allowed them to assert their Austrian loyalties and Jewish solidarity at the same time. They faced a grave crisis of identity when the multinational state collapsed and they lived in nation-states mostly uncomfortable with ethnic minorities. This book raises important questions about Jewish identity and about the general nature of ethnic and national identity.

Demographic Avant-Garde
Demographic Avant-Garde

Author: Jana Vobecka

Publisher: Central European University Press

Published: 2013-09-10

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 6155225338

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This book studies the unique demographic behavior of Jews in Bohemia (the historic part of the Czech Republic), starting from a moment in history when industrialization in Central Europe was still far away in the future, and when Jews were still living legally restricted lives in ghettos. Very early on, however, from the 18th century onwards, Jews developed patterns of decreasing mortality and fertility that was not observed among the gentile majority in Bohemia; patterns which established them as a demographic avant-garde population in all of Europe. Demographic Avant-Garde elucidates what made Jews in Bohemia true forerunners of the demographic transition and why this occurred when it did. It scrutinizes demographic statistics from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century, and examines what made Bohemian Jews? data distinct from the trends observed in the gentile community and among Jews in other lands. In search for the answers, Vobeck ?s analysis touches also upon the cultural, social, political and economic environment.

Arnošt Frischer and the Jewish Politics of Early 20th-Century Europe
Arnošt Frischer and the Jewish Politics of Early 20th-Century Europe

Author: Jan Lánícek

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2016-11-17

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 1472585917

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In this analysis of the life of Arnošt Frischer, an influential Jewish nationalist activist, Jan Lánícek reflects upon how the Jewish community in Czechoslovakia dealt with the challenges that arose from their volatile relationship with the state authorities in the first half of the 20th century. The Jews in the Bohemian Lands experienced several political regimes in the period from 1918 to the late 1940s: the Habsburg Empire, the first democratic Czechoslovak republic, the post-Munich authoritarian Czecho-Slovak republic, the Nazi regime, renewed Czechoslovak democracy and the Communist regime. Frischer's involvement in local and central politics affords us invaluable insights into the relations and negotiations between the Jewish activists and these diverse political authorities in the Bohemian Lands. Vital coverage is also given to the relatively under-researched subject of the Jewish responses to the Nazi persecution and the attempts of the exiled Jewish leadership to alleviate the plight of the Jews in occupied Europe. The case study of Frischer and Czechoslovakia provides an important paradigm for understanding modern Jewish politics in Europe in the first half of the 20th century, making this a book of great significance to all students and scholars interested in Jewish history and Modern European history.

Rabbis and Revolution
Rabbis and Revolution

Author: Michael Miller

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2010-11-02

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 0804776520

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The Habsburg province of Moravia straddled a complicated linguistic, cultural, and national space, where German, Slavic, and Jewish spheres overlapped, intermingled, and sometimes clashed. Situated in the heart of Central Europe, Moravia was exposed to major Jewish movements from the East and West, including Haskalah (Jewish enlightenment), Hasidism, and religious reform. Moravia's rooted and thriving rabbinic culture helped moderate these movements and, in the case of Hasidism, keep it at bay. During the Revolution of 1848, Moravia's Jews took an active part in the prolonged and ultimately successful struggle for Jewish emancipation in the Habsburg lands. The revolution ushered in a new age of freedom, but it also precipitated demographic, financial, and social transformations, disrupting entrenched patterns that had characterized Moravian Jewish life since the Middle Ages. These changes emerged precisely when the Czech-German conflict began to dominate public life, throwing Moravia's Jews into the middle of the increasingly virulent nationality conflict. For some, a cautious embrace of Zionism represented a way out of this conflict, but it also represented a continuation of Moravian Jewry's distinctive role as mediator—and often tamer—of the major ideological movements that pervaded Central Europe in the Age of Emancipation.

Czechs, Germans, Jews?
Czechs, Germans, Jews?

Author: Kateřina Čapková

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 0857454749

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The phenomenon of national identities, always a key issue in the modern history of Bohemian Jewry, was particularly complex because of the marginal differences that existed between the available choices. Considerable overlap was evident in the programs of the various national movements and it was possible to change one's national identity or even to opt for more than one such identity without necessarily experiencing any far-reaching consequences in everyday life. Based on many hitherto unknown archival sources from the Czech Republic, Israel and Austria, the author's research reveals the inner dynamic of each of the national movements and maps out the three most important constructions of national identity within Bohemian Jewry - the German-Jewish, the Czech-Jewish and the Zionist. This book provides a needed framework for understanding the rich history of German- and Czech-Jewish politics and culture in Bohemia and is a notable contribution to the historiography of Bohemian, Czechoslovak and central European Jewry.