Related Papers
Pardes: Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies in Germany
Intersections between Jewish Studies and Habsburg Studies
2024 •
Tim Corbett
Edited by Tim Corbett, Björn Siegel, and Mirjam Thulin. In the aftermath of the Shoah and the ostensible triumph of nationalism, it became common in historiography to relegate Jews to the position of the “eternal other” in a series of binaries: Christian/Jewish, Gentile/Jewish, European/Jewish, non-Jewish/Jewish, and so forth. For the longest time, these binaries remained characteristic of Jewish historiography, including in the Central European context. Assuming instead, as the more recent approaches in Habsburg studies do, that pluriculturalism was the basis of common experience in formerly Habsburg Central Europe, and accepting that no single “majority culture” existed, but rather hegemonies were imposed in certain contexts, then the often used binaries are misleading and conceal the complex and sometimes even paradoxical conditions that shaped Jewish life in the region before the Shoah. The very complexity of Habsburg Central Europe both in synchronic and diachronic perspective precludes any singular historical narrative of “Habsburg Jewry,” and it is not the intention of this volume to offer an overview of “Habsburg Jewish history.” The selected articles in this volume illustrate instead how important it is to reevaluate categories, deconstruct historical narratives, and reconceptualize implemented approaches in specific geographic, temporal, and cultural contexts in order to gain a better understanding of the complex and pluricultural history of the Habsburg Empire and the region as a whole.
Pardes: Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies in Germany
Towards Pluricultural and Connected Histories: Intersections between Jewish and Habsburg Studies
2024 •
Tim Corbett
By Tim Corbett, Björn Siegel, and Mirjam Thulin. In the aftermath of the Shoah and the ostensible triumph of nationalism, it became common in historiography to relegate Jews to the position of the “eternal other” in a series of binaries: Christian/Jewish, Gentile/Jewish, European/Jewish, non-Jewish/Jewish, and so forth. For the longest time, these binaries remained characteristic of Jewish historiography, including in the Central European context. Assuming instead, as the more recent approaches in Habsburg studies do, that pluriculturalism was the basis of common experience in formerly Habsburg Central Europe, and accepting that no single “majority culture” existed, but rather hegemonies were imposed in certain contexts, then the often used binaries are misleading and conceal the complex and sometimes even paradoxical conditions that shaped Jewish life in the region before the Shoah. The very complexity of Habsburg Central Europe both in synchronic and diachronic perspective precludes any singular historical narrative of “Habsburg Jewry,” and it is not the intention of this volume to offer an overview of “Habsburg Jewish history.” The selected articles in this volume illustrate instead how important it is to reevaluate categories, deconstruct historical narratives, and reconceptualize implemented approaches in specific geographic, temporal, and cultural contexts in order to gain a better understanding of the complex and pluricultural history of the Habsburg Empire and the region as a whole.
Studia Judaica
Introduction [to the special issue of Studia Judaica with articles on Polish-Jewish and Czech-Jewish Studies]
2016 •
Katerina Capkova
Jewish History, 19 (2005), p. 347-373
The beginning of modern Jewish historiography: Prague–A center on the periphery
2005 •
Louise Hecht
Building the Past: Historical Writing on the Jews of the Bohemian Crown Lands in the Early Modern Period
Rachel L Greenblatt
Scholarship on the history of Jews in the early modern period, especially European Jewry, has flourished in recent years, clearly demonstrating that the period from c.1500 to c.1750 should be seen as distinct from both medieval and modern Jewish history. Mobility of people and information, changing relationships among rabbinic leaders and communal organizations, and the evolving nature of Jewish identity are among the characteristics that have been noted as unique to this period. This article surveys how historical scholarship related to Bohemian Jewry fits in that context, and suggests directions for moving that scholarship forward. Today's historiography has grown from foundations laid in the late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Wissenschaft des Judentums framework, by way of the establishment of the Jewish Museum in Prague and scholarly activities undertaken there, through the difficult years of World War II and Communist rule. Building on that tradition, the strengths of current historical writing on early modern Bohemian Jewry include material and print culture. Room remains for the development of broader, more synthetic analyses that link this regional history more closely with its central European and Jewish early modern surroundings. More research on specific areas such as Bohemian Jewish history through the lens of gender analysis, wide-ranging social history, and more, together with improved integration with broader historiographical trends, would both shed light on historical processes in the Bohemian Lands and improve understanding of early modern Jewish history as a whole.
Prague and Beyond. Jews in the Bohemian Lands
2021 •
Katerina Capkova, Benjamin Frommer, Michal Frankl, Martina Niedhammer
Prague and Beyond presents a new and accessible history of the Jews of the Bohemian Lands written by an international team of scholars. It offers a multifaceted account of the Jewish people in a region that has been, over the centuries, a part of the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg Monarchy, was constituted as the democratic Czechoslovakia in the years following the First World War, became the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and later a postwar Communist state, and is today's Czech Republic. This ever-changing landscape provides the backdrop for a historical reinterpretation that emphasizes the rootedness of Jews in the Bohemian Lands, the intricate variety of their social, economic, and cultural relationships, their negotiations with state power, the connections that existed among Jewish communities, and the close, if often conflictual, ties between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors. Prague and Beyond is written in a narrative style with a focus on several unifying themes across the periods. These include migration and mobility; the shape of social networks; religious life and education; civic rights, citizenship, and Jewish autonomy; gender and the family; popular culture; and memory and commemorative practices. Collectively these perspectives work to revise conventional understandings of Central Europe's Jewish past and present, and more fully capture the diversity and multivalence of life in the Bohemian Lands.
Czechs, Germans, Jews? National Identity and the Jews of Bohemia
2012 •
Katerina Capkova
*Prague and Beyond Jews in the Bohemian Lands*, eds. Kateřina Čapková and Hillel J. Kieval (Philadelphia: Penn Press, 2021)
Hillel J. Kieval, Katerina Capkova
Modernity, Identity, and Beyond: Historiography on the Jews of the Bohemian Lands in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
Ines Koeltzsch
The author discusses the main developments in the historiography on the Jews of the Bohemian Lands in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which has expanded considerably since the 1980s. The historiographical debates have been focused mainly on conceptions of modernization/modernity and iden-tity/loyalty and are characterized by a desire to avoid linear and hom*ogeneous ascriptions. Nevertheless, a number of gaps still exist in the research. So far, the Jewish history of the Bohemian Lands has been focused mainly on its center , Prague, and lacks distinct studies in comparative history, the history of cultural transfer and/or entangled history. These analytical restrictions need to be overcome in order to achieve a more succinct contextualization within modern European Jewish history.
*Connecting Histories: Jews and Their Others in Early Modern Europe*, eds. Francesca Bregoli and David B. Ruderman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019)
David B. Ruderman
