Nationalism, War and Jewish Education
Nationalism, War and Jewish Education

Author: David Aberbach

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-10-04

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0429779933

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Nationalism, War and Jewish Education explores historical circumstances leading to the emergence of a Jewish religious school system lasting to modern times and the process by which this system was broken down and adapted in secular form as Jewish nationalism grew in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In the Roman period, education became an essential part of rabbinic pacifist accommodation following Jewish defeats, while in the modern period, secular education was associated with nationalism and increasing militancy of emerging states. In both periods there was a revival of Hebrew and the creation of an educational system based on Hebrew texts. Both revivals were responses to anti-Semitism, which pushed large numbers of Jews away from assimilation into the dominant culture to a renewed Jewish national identity. The book highlights the centrifugal and centripetal shifts in Jewish identity, from messianic militarism to pacifism and back. It shows how changes in Jewish education accompanied these shifts. While drawing on historical scholarship for background, this book is essentially a literary study, showing how literary changes at different times and places reflect historical, socio-psychological, economic and political change. Nationalism, War and Jewish Education is original in showing how ancient Jewish education affected modern Jewish society, therefore it is a valuable resource for students and researchers interested in Jewish history and literature, education, development studies and nationalism.

Jews and Diaspora Nationalism
Jews and Diaspora Nationalism

Author: Simon Rabinovitch

Publisher: UPNE

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 1611683629

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An anthology of Jewish diaspora nationalist thought across the ideological spectrum

The Hebrew Bible, Nationalism and the Origins of Anti-Judaism
The Hebrew Bible, Nationalism and the Origins of Anti-Judaism

Author: David Aberbach

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-10-31

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 1000708276

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In the attempts to unify divided peoples on the basis of a shared past, both historical and mythical, this book illumines aspects of cultural nationalism common since the Middle Ages. As an edited work, the Bible includes texts mostly depicting long-gone historical eras extending over several centuries. Following on from Aberbach’s previous work National Poetry, Empires, and War, this book argues that works of this nature – notably the Mujo-Halil songs in Albania, the Irish stories of Cuchulain, the songs of the Nibelungen in Germany, or the Finnish legends collected in The Kalevala – have an ancient precedent in the Hebrew Bible (to which national literatures often allude and refer), a subject largely neglected in biblical studies. The self-critical element in the Hebrew Bible, common in later national literature, is examined as the basis of later anti-Semitism, as the Bible was not confined to Jews but was adopted in translation by many other national groups. With several dozen original translations from the Hebrew, this book highlights how the Bible influenced and was distorted by later national cultures. Written without jargon, this book is intended for the general reader, but is also an important contribution to the study of the Bible, nationalism, and Jewish history.

Bialik, the Hebrew Bible and the Literature of Nationalism
Bialik, the Hebrew Bible and the Literature of Nationalism

Author: David Aberbach

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-05-25

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1000857395

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This book explores the life and poetry of Chaim Nachman Bialik (1873–1934) in the context of European national literature between the French Revolution and World War I, showing how he helped create a modern Hebrew national culture, spurring the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language. The author begins with Bialik’s background in the Tsarist Empire, contextualizing Jewish powerlessness in Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century. As European anti-Semitism grew, Bialik emerged at the vanguard of a modern Hebrew national movement, building on ancient biblical and rabbinic tradition and speaking to Jewish concerns in neo-prophetic poems, love poems, poems for children, and folk poems. This book makes accessible a broad but representative selection of Bialik’s poetry in translation. Alongside this, a variety of national poets are considered from across Europe, including Solomos in Greece, Mickiewicz in Poland, Shevchenko in Ukraine, Njegoš in Serbia, Petőfi in Hungary, and Yeats in Ireland. Aberbach argues that Bialik as Jewish national poet cannot be understood except in the dual context of ancient Jewish nationalism and modern European nationalism, both political and cultural. Written in clear and accessible prose, this book will interest those studying modern European nationalism, Hebrew literature, Jewish history, and anti-Semitism.

Baghdadi Jewish Networks in the Age of Nationalism
Baghdadi Jewish Networks in the Age of Nationalism

Author: S. R. Goldstein-Sabbah

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-05-25

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 900446056X

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Baghdadi Jewish Networks in the Age of Nationalism explores different components of Baghdadi participation in global Jewish networks through the modernization of communal leadership, satellite communities, transnational Jewish philanthropy and secular education during the Hashemite period (1920-1951).

Babel in Zion
Babel in Zion

Author: Liora Halperin

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2015-01-01

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 0300197489

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The promotion and vernacularization of Hebrew, traditionally a language of Jewish liturgy and study, was a central accomplishment of the Zionist movement in Palestine. Viewing twentieth-century history through the lens of language, author Liora Halperin questions the accepted scholarly narrative of a Zionist move away from multilingualism during the years following World War I, demonstrating how Jews in Palestine remained connected linguistically by both preference and necessity to a world outside the boundaries of the pro-Hebrew community even as it promoted Hebrew and achieved that language's dominance. The story of language encounters in Jewish Palestine is a fascinating tale of shifting power relationships, both locally and globally. Halperin's absorbing study explores how a young national community was compelled to modify the dictates of Hebrew exclusivity as it negotiated its relationships with its Jewish population, Palestinian Arabs, the British, and others outside the margins of the national project and ultimately came to terms with the limitations of its hegemony in an interconnected world.

German as a Jewish Problem
German as a Jewish Problem

Author: Marc Volovici

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2020-07-14

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 1503613100

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The German language holds an ambivalent and controversial place in the modern history of European Jews, representing different—often conflicting—historical currents. It was the language of the German classics, of German Jewish writers and scientists, of Central European Jewish culture, and of Herzl and the Zionist movement. But it was also the language of Hitler, Goebbels, and the German guards in Nazi concentration camps. The crucial role of German in the formation of Jewish national culture and politics in the late nineteenth century has been largely overshadowed by the catastrophic events that befell Jews under Nazi rule. German as a Jewish Problem tells the Jewish history of the German language, focusing on Jewish national movements in Central and Eastern Europe and Palestine/Israel. Marc Volovici considers key writers and activists whose work reflected the multilingual nature of the Jewish national sphere and the centrality of the German language within it, and argues that it is impossible to understand the histories of modern Hebrew and Yiddish without situating them in relation to German. This book offers a new understanding of the language problem in modern Jewish history, turning to German to illuminate the questions and dilemmas that largely defined the experience of European Jews in the age of nationalism.

Jewish Education and History
Jewish Education and History

Author: Moshe Aberbach

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2009-06-02

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1134009569

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Education is at the centre of Jewish life and this book charts that development from the earliest periods through to the present. With a special emphasis on the key Talmudic period the author has carefully scrutinised both Jewish texts as well as the Greco-Roman sources to provide a comprehensive history.

Religious Zionism and the Six Day War
Religious Zionism and the Six Day War

Author: Avi Sagi

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-12-12

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 0429757239

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This book offers a new insight into the political, social, and religious conduct of religious-Zionism, whose consequences are evident in Israeli society today. Before the Six-Day War, religious-Zionism had limited its concern to the protection of specific religious interests, with its representatives having little share in the determination of Israel’s national agenda. Fifty years after it, religious-Zionism has turned into one of Israeli society’s dominant elements. The presence of this group in all aspects of Israel’s life and its members’ determination to set Israel’s social, cultural, and international agenda is indisputable. Delving into this dramatic transformation, the book depicts the Six-Day War as a constitutive event that indelibly changed the political and religious consciousness of religious-Zionists. The perception of real history that had guided this movement from its dawn was replaced by a "sacred history" approach that became an actual program of political activity. As part of a process that has unfolded over the last thirty years, the body and sexuality have also become a central concern in the movement’s practice, reflection, and discourse. The how and why of this shift in religious-Zionism – from passivity and a consciousness of marginality to the front lines of public life – is this book’s central concern. The book will be of interest to readers and scholars concerned with changing dynamic societies and with the study of religion and particularly with the relationship between religion and politics.

Literature and Poverty
Literature and Poverty

Author: David Aberbach

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-02-21

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0429655355

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Literature and Poverty offers an engaging overview of changes in literary perceptions of poverty and the poor. Part I of the book, from the Hebrew Bible to the French Revolution, provides essential background information. It introduces the Scriptural ideal of the ‘holy poor’ and the process by which biblical love of the poor came to be contested and undermined in European legislation and public opinion as capitalism grew and the state took over from the Church; Part II, from the French Revolution to World War II, shows how post-1789 problems of industrialization, population growth, war, and urbanization came to dominate much European literature, as poverty and the poor became central concerns of major writers such as Dickens, Dostoyevsky, and Hugo. David Aberbach uses literature – from the Bible, through Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Zola, Pushkin, and Orwell – to show how poverty changed from being an endemic and unavoidable fact of life, to a challenge for equality that might be attainable through a moral and rational society. As a literary and social history of poverty, this book argues for the vital importance of literature and the arts in understanding current problems in International Development.