Ritual Murder in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Beyond
Ritual Murder in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Beyond

Author: Eugene M. Avrutin

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2017-07-12

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 0253026571

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A collection of essays exploring the history of an antisemitic accusation that haunted Jewish people in Europe and Russia, and how it spread. This innovative reassessment of ritual murder accusations brings together scholars working in history, folklore, ethnography, and literature. Favoring dynamic explanations of the mechanisms, evolution, popular appeal, and responses to the blood libel, the essays rigorously engage with the larger social and cultural worlds that made these phenomena possible. In doing so, the book helps to explain why blood libel accusations continued to spread in Europe even after modernization seemingly made them obsolete. Drawing on untapped and unconventional historical sources, the collection explores a range of intriguing topics: popular belief and scientific knowledge; the connections between antisemitism, prejudice, and violence; the rule of law versus the power of rumors; the politics of memory; and humanitarian intervention on a global scale. “This important contribution to our understanding of the evolution of ritual murder charges in Eastern Europe brings together a number of innovative studies on the topic, several of which could become standard reading on the subject.” —Glenn Dynner, Sarah Lawrence College “While the topic was not exactly novel to me, I enjoyed reading this book and I was constantly learning from the significant new information and fresh insights from the authors’ analyses.” —Shaul Stampfer, Hebrew University

Documentary Aesthetics in the Long 1960s in Eastern Europe and Beyond
Documentary Aesthetics in the Long 1960s in Eastern Europe and Beyond

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2023-12-18

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 9004686428

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This book is the first to deal with documentary aesthetic practices of the post-war period in Eastern Europe in a comparative perspective. The contributions examine the specific forms and modes of documentary representations and the role they played in the formation of new aesthetic trends during the cultural-political transition of the long 1960s. This documentary first-hand approach to the world aimed to break up unquestioned ideological structures and expose tabooed truths in order to engender much-needed social changes. New ways of depicting daily life, writing testimony or subjective reportage emerged that still shape cultural debates today.

The Velizh Affair
The Velizh Affair

Author: Eugene M. Avrutin

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0190640529

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The Velizh case was the longest ritual murder investigation in the modern world. Drawing on newly discovered trial records, historian Eugene M. Avrutin looks beyond antisemitism as the single most important factor in understanding ritual murder accusations, and in the process, provides an intimate glimpse of small-town life in eastern Europe.

Blood Inscriptions
Blood Inscriptions

Author: Hillel J. Kieval

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2022-02-15

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 0812298381

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Although the Enlightenment had seemed to bring an end to the widely held belief that Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes, charges of the so-called blood libel were surprisingly widespread in central and eastern Europe on either side of the turn to the twentieth century. Well over one hundred accusations were made against Jews in this period, and prosecutors and government officials in Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia broke with long established precedent to bring six of these cases forward in sensational public trials. In Blood Inscriptions Hillel J. Kieval examines four cases—the prosecutions that took place at Tiszaeszlár in Hungary (1882-83), Xanten in Germany (1891-92), Polná in Austrian Bohemia (1899-1900), and Konitz, then Germany, now in Poland (1900-1902)—to consider the means by which discredited beliefs came to seem once again plausible. Kieval explores how educated elites took up the accusations of Jewish ritual murder and considers the roles played by government bureaucracies, the journalistic establishment, forensic medicine, and advanced legal practices in structuring the investigations and trials. The prosecutors, judges, forensic scientists, criminologists, and academic scholars of Judaism and other expert witnesses all worked hard to establish their epistemological authority as rationalists, Kieval contends. Far from being a throwback to the Middle Ages, these ritual murder trials were in all respects a product of post-Enlightenment politics and culture. Harnessed to and disciplined by the rhetoric of modernity, they were able to proceed precisely because they were framed by the idioms of scientific discourse and rationality.

Legacy of Blood
Legacy of Blood

Author: Elissa Bemporad

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 0190466456

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In Legacy of Blood, Elissa Bemporad traces the legacies of the two most extreme manifestations of tsarist antisemitism-pogroms and blood libels-in the Soviet Union, from 1917 to the early 1960s. By exploring the phenomenon and the memory of anti-Jewish violence under the Bolsheviks, this book sheds light on the changing position of Jews in Stalinist society.

Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures
Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures

Author: Avriel Bar-Levav

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-02-27

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0197516491

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Jewish culture places a great deal of emphasis on texts and their means of transmission. At various points in Jewish history, the primary mode of transmission has changed in response to political, geographical, technological, and cultural shifts. Contemporary textual transmission in Jewish culture has been influenced by secularization, the return to Hebrew and the emergence of modern Yiddish, and the new centers of Jewish life in the United States and in Israel, as well as by advancements in print technology and the invention of the Internet. Volume XXXI of Studies in Contemporary Jewry deals with various aspects of textual transmission in Jewish culture in the last two centuries. Essays in this volume examine old and new kinds of media and their meanings; new modes of transmission in fields such as Jewish music; and the struggle to continue transmitting texts under difficult political circumstances. Two essays analyze textual transmission in the works of giants of modern Jewish literature: S.Y. Agnon, in Hebrew, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, in Yiddish. Other essays discuss paratexts in the East, print cultures in the West, and the organization of knowledge in libraries and encyclopedias.

Jews under Tsars and Communists
Jews under Tsars and Communists

Author: Robert Weinberg

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2024-02-08

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 1350129186

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Tracing the evolving nature of popular and official beliefs about the purported nature of the Jews from the 18th century onwards, Russia and the Jewish Question explores how perceptions of Jews in late Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union shaped the regimes' policies toward them. In so doing Robert Weinberg provides a fruitful lens through which to investigate the social, economic, political, and cultural developments of modern Russia. Here, Weinberg reveals that the 'Jewish Question' – and, by extension anti-Semitism – emerged at the end of the 18th century when the partitions of Poland made hundreds of thousands of Jews subjects of the Russian crown. He skillfully argues the phrase itself implies the singular nature of Jews as a group of people whose religion, culture, and occupational make-up prevent them from fitting into predominantly Christian societies. The book then expounds how other characteristics were associated with the group over time: in particular, debates about rights of citizenship, the impact of industrialization, the emergence of the nation-state, and the proliferation of new political ideologies and movements contributed to the changing nature of the 'Jewish Question'. Its content may have not remained static, but its purpose consistently questions whether or not Jews pose a threat to the stability and well-being of the societies in which they live and this, in a specifically Russian context, is what Weinberg examines so expertly.

Embodied Differences
Embodied Differences

Author: Henrietta Mondry

Publisher: Academic Studies PRess

Published: 2021-03-02

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 1644694875

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This book analyzes the ways in which literary works and cultural discourses employ the construct of the Jew’s body in relation to the material world in order either to establish and reinforce, or to subvert and challenge, dominant cultural norms and stereotypes. It examines the use of physical characteristics, embodied practices, tacit knowledge and senses to define the body taxonomically as normative, different, abject or mimetically desired. Starting from the works of Gogol and Dostoevsky through to contemporary Russian-Jewish women’s writing, broadening the scope to examining the role of objects, museum displays and the politics of heritage food, the book argues that materiality can embody fictional constructions that should be approached on a culture-specific basis.

The Damascus Affair
The Damascus Affair

Author: Jonathan Frankel

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1997-01-13

Total Pages: 516

ISBN-13: 9780521483964

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A Jewish delegation led by Sir Moses Montefiore and Adolphe Cremieux was sent to the Middle East in the hope of discovering the real murderers.

Pogroms
Pogroms

Author: Eugene M. Avrutin

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-09-24

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0190060115

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From the 1880s to the 1940s, an upsurge of explosive pogroms caused much pain and suffering across the eastern borderlands of Europe. Rioters attacked Jewish property and caused physical harm to women and children. During World War I and the Russian Civil War, pogrom violence turned into full-blown military actions. In some cases, pogroms wiped out of existence entire Jewish communities. More generally, they were part of a larger story of destruction, ethnic purification, and coexistence that played out in the region over a span of some six decades. Pogroms: A Documentary History surveys the complex history of anti-Jewish violence by bringing together archival and published sources--many appearing for the first time in English translation. The documents assembled here include eyewitness testimony, oral histories, diary excerpts, literary works, trial records, and press coverage. They also include memos and field reports authored by army officials, investigative commissions, humanitarian organizations, and government officials. This landmark volume and its distinguished roster of scholars provides an unprecedented view of the history of pogroms.