Jews and the French Revolutions of 1789, 1830 and 1848
Author: Zosa Szajkowski
Publisher: KTAV Publishing House, Inc.
Published: 1970
Total Pages: 1222
ISBN-13: 9780870680007
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Forging Freedom
Author: Margaret R. O’Leary
Publisher: iUniverse
Published: 2012-06-05
Total Pages: 458
ISBN-13: 9781475910155
DOWNLOAD EBOOKForging Freedom is the first full-length biography of Cerf Berr of Mdelsheim (17261793), the formidable eighteenth-century emancipator of the French Jews. His early business providing forage for thousands of horses of the French military garrisoned in Alsace grew into a huge military supply business that earned him the profound respect of French Kings Louis XV and XVI. After receiving his French naturalization papers from Louis XVI as a reward for his service to the French Crown, Cerf Berr worked tirelessly on behalf of his Ashkenazi co-religionists to win their political emancipation in France on September 27, 1791.
Rites and Passages
Author: Jay R. Berkovitz
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2010-08-03
Total Pages: 342
ISBN-13: 0812200152
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn September 1791, two years after the Revolution, French Jews were granted full rights of citizenship. Scholarship has traditionally focused on this turning point of emancipation while often overlooking much of what came before. In Rites and Passages, Jay R. Berkovitz argues that no serious treatment of Jewish emancipation can ignore the cultural history of the Jews during the ancien régime. It was during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that several lasting paradigms emerged within the Jewish community—including the distinction between rural and urban communities, the formation of a strong lay leadership, heightened divisions between popular and elite religion, and the strain between local and regional identities. Each of these developments reflected the growing tension between tradition and modernity before the tumultuous events of the French Revolution. Rites and Passages emphasizes the resilience of religious tradition during periods of social and political turbulence. Viewing French Jewish history through the lens of ritual, Berkovitz describes the struggles of the French Jewish minority to maintain its cultural distinctiveness while also participating in the larger social and economic matrix. In the ancien régime, ritual systems were a formative element in the traditional worldview and served as a crucial repository of memories and values. After the Revolution, ritual signaled changes in the way Jews related to the state, French society, and French culture. In the cities especially, ritual assumed a performative function that dramatized the epoch-making changes of the day. The terms and concepts of the Jewish religious tradition thus remained central to the discourse of modernization and played a powerful role in helping French Jews interpret the diverse meanings and implications of emancipation. Introducing new and previously unused primary sources, Rites and Passages offers a fresh perspective on the dynamic relationship between tradition and modernity.
The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth–Century France
Author: Jay R. Berkovitz
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Published: 2018-02-05
Total Pages: 311
ISBN-13: 0814344070
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFocusing on the ideology of regeneration, Jay Berkovitz traces the social, economic, and religious struggles of nineteenth-century French Jews. Nineteenth-century French Jewry was a community struggling to meet the challenges of emancipation and modernity. This struggle, with its origins in the founding of the French nation, constitutes the core of modern Jewish identity. With the Revolution of 1789 came the collapse of the social, political, and philosophical foundations of exclusiveness, forcing French society and the Jews to come to terms with the meaning of emancipation. Over time, the enormous challenge that emancipation posed for traditional Jewish beliefs became evident. In the 1830s, a more comprehensive ideology of regeneration emerged through the efforts of younger Jewish scholars and intellectuals. A response to the social and religious implications of emancipation, it was characterized by the demand for the elimination of rituals that violated the French conceptions of civilization and social integration; a drive for greater administrative centralization; and the quest for inter-communal and ethnic unity. In its various elements, regeneration formed a distinct ideology of emancipation that was designed to mediate Jewish interaction with French society and culture. Jay Berkovitz reveals the complexities inherent in the processes of emancipation and modernization, focusing on the efforts of French Jewish leaders to come to terms with the social and religious implications of modernity. All in all, his emphasis on the intellectual history of French Jewry provides a new perspective on a significant chapter of Jewish history.
The Jewish Eighteenth Century, Volume 2
Author: Shmuel Feiner
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2023-04-04
Total Pages: 646
ISBN-13: 0253065151
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe second volume of Shmuel Feiner's The Jewish Eighteenth Century covers the period from 1750 to 1800, a time of even greater upheavals, tensions, and challenges. The changes that began to emerge at the beginning of the eighteenth century matured in the second half. Feiner explores how political considerations of the Jewish minority throughout Europe began to expand. From the "Jew Bill" of 1753 in Britain, to the surprising series of decrees issued by Joseph II of Austria that expanded tolerance in Austria, to the debate over emancipation in revolutionary France, the lives of the Jews of Europe became ever more intertwined with the political, social, economic, and cultural fabric of the continent. The Jewish Eighteenth Century, Volume 2: A European Biography, 1750-1800 concludes Feiner's landmark study of the history of Jewish populations in the period. By combining an examination of the broad and profound processes that changed the familiar world from the ground up with personal experiences of those who lived through them, it allows for a unique explanation of these momentous events.
The Abbe Gregoire and the French Revolution
Author: Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2021-06-08
Total Pages: 356
ISBN-13: 0520383060
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this age of globalization, the eighteenth-century priest and abolitionist Henri Grégoire has often been called a man ahead of his time. An icon of antiracism, a hero to people from Ho Chi Minh to French Jews, Grégoire has been particularly celebrated since 1989, when the French government placed him in the Pantheon as a model of ideals of universalism and human rights. In this beautifully written biography, based on newly discovered and previously overlooked material, we gain access for the first time to the full complexity of Grégoire's intellectual and political universe as well as the compelling nature of his persona. His life offers an extraordinary vantage from which to view large issues in European and world history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and provides provocative insights into many of the prevailing tensions, ideals, and paradoxes of the twenty-first century. Focusing on Grégoire's idea of "regeneration," that people could literally be made anew, Sepinwall argues that revolutionary universalism was more complicated than it appeared. Tracing the Revolution's long-term legacy, she suggests that while it spread concepts of equality and liberation throughout the world, its ideals also helped to justify colonialism and conquest.
Obstinate Hebrews
Author: Ronald Schechter
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2003-04-14
Total Pages: 346
ISBN-13: 0520235576
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAnnotation A path-breaking study of the Jews in France from the time of the philosophies through the Revolution and up to Napoleon. Examines how Jews were thought of during this time, by both French writers and the Jews themselves.
Rethinking Modern Judaism
Author: Arnold M. Eisen
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 1998
Total Pages: 358
ISBN-13: 0226195295
DOWNLOAD EBOOKArnold Eisen here calls for a fundamental rethinking of the story of modern Judaism. More than simply a study of Jewish thought on customs and rituals, Rethinking Modern Judaism explores the central role that practice plays in Judaism's encounter with modernity. "Fascinating . . . an insightful entrance point to understanding the evolution of the theologies of America's largest Jewish denominations."—Tikkun "I know of no other treatment of these issues that matches Eisen's talents for synthesizing a wide variety of historical, philosophical, and social scientific sources, and bringing them to bear in a balanced and open-minded way on the delicate questions of why modern Jews relate as they do to the practices of Judaism."—Joseph Reimer, Boston Book Review "At once an incisive survey of modern Jewish thought and an inquiry into how Jews actually live their religious lives, Mr. Eisen's book is an invaluable addition to the study of American Judaism."—Elliott Abrams, Washington Times
Hostages of Modernization
Author: Herbert Arthur Strauss
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Published: 1993
Total Pages: 688
ISBN-13: 9783110107760
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe series was designed in response to the research experiences accumulated by the Center for Research on Antisemitism of Berlin Technical University since 1982. The first two volumes presented normative thinking on the social and psychological mechanisms effective in antisemitism. The present volum
Cerf Berr of Médelsheim 1726–1793
Author: Margaret R. O’Leary, MD
Publisher: iUniverse
Published: 2014-07-31
Total Pages: 471
ISBN-13: 1491734183
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOn December 7, 1793, an old man lay motionless at last, surrounded by his family, rabbis, and members of the society who would prepare his body for Jewish burial. Sixteen days after he was sentenced to jail, his family would go to extraordinary efforts to bury him in a Jewish cemetery ordered destroyed by the French government just two weeks earlier. The old man was Cerf Berr of Mdelsheim, the tenacious eighteenth-century Ashkenazi emancipator of the French Jews. Margaret R. OLeary, MD, presents Cerf Berrs life story, recognizing his profound contributions to the liberation of the Jews of France. While chronicling his incredible journey, OLeary not only highlights Cerf Berrs scrupulous honesty and reliability that earned him the deep appreciation of the French Crown, but also details how he besieged authorities in both Strasbourg and Versailles to grant political, social, and economic equality for all of his coreligionists in France. Cerf Berr achieved that milestone on September 27, 1791, only to die two years later after imprisonment by sadistic French revolutionaries. Cerf Berr of Mdelsheim is the biography of a man who was faithful to his people, sought the good for the community, and cherished justiceall while making a momentous contribution to the history of France and the Jews.
