Jewish Social Studies

Sociology against Zionism?

Sebastien Mosbah-Natanson — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Zionism before the WWII was largely rejected by the French Jewish community. Prominent Jewish intellectuals, such the Reinach brothers, epitomized this rejection which was based on the Franco-judaïsme model of integration which denied any political dimension to the Jewish identity which was seen as a purely religious one. Among these Jewish intellectuals, a sociologist, René Worms, who competed with another Jewish sociologist, EmileDurkheim, in the development of academic sociology around 1900, took a very strong stance against Zionism. He was the founder of the first French scientific society dedicated to sociology, the Société de sociologie de Paris. During the debates organized by this society in 1920-21, he exposed his sociological opposition to Jewish nationalism while other participants discussed the case of Palestine and Zionism. This article aims at showing how René Worms used sociological arguments of his time in order to contradict Zionist claims. After describing Worms intellectual and professional trajectory, we analyze how sociology was understood by him as a weapon against Zionism. His sociological stance was based on a mix of racial science, positivist conception of religion and political sociology. Strongly influenced by biology and raciology, his first argument was to deny that there was a jewish race. A second sociological argument was founded on his sociological understanding of the evolution of modern religions influenced by Auguste Comte and Emile Durkheim, while the third argument is based on Worms’ sociological theory of nationality. For each of this argument, we discuss its relevance for the Jews and compare it with other speaker's use of similar arguments, showing the ambiguity of such an ideological use of socioloy against jewish nationalism.

On Ashkenazi Integration in the Arab Levant

Yair Wallach — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This article calls for a rethinking of Ashkenazi migration to the Middle East in the late-Ottoman period, through the categories of integration and acculturation. Tens of thousands of Ashkenazim migrated from Central and Eastern Europe to the Middle East and North Africa from the 18th century to 1914. The large majority of these migrants settled in Ottoman-ruled Palestine, with smaller numbers in Egypt and Lebanon. This migration is typically understood as ideologically driven by Zionist or proto-Zionist sentiments. Zionist scholarship presents this migration as a Jewish return to an ancestral land, motivated by religious connection and a quest for national self- determination, while critical historiography analyses it as a form of European settler colonialism. In both approaches, the relationship between the migrants and their environment is understood as essentially antagonistic, framed through dichotomies of Jews and Arabs, Europe and the Orient, settlers and natives. The possibility of Ashkenazim integrating in the majority Arab-Ottoman societies is implicitly or explicitly denied by the historiography.
Several studies from the last decade have questioned this view, demonstrating everyday aspects of acculturation, such as Ashkenazim adopting Arab clothes, acquiring Arabic language skills, and forming neighbourly relations. Building on these studies, I argue that Ashkenazi migrants in urban centres pursued a range of pathways towards finding their place within the local political, social and economic orders. These forms of substantive integration occurred in parallel to the development of Jewish national identity, as well as Jewish colonisation efforts, but the tensions between those different vectors were not always obvious, and could still be bracketed out or mitigated. Through five biographical narratives, of a businessman, a local public figure, a physician, a soldier and a socialist, I explore the diverse routes of integration for Ashkenazi migrants in Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt.

Between Regulation and Emotion: Mourning Children in Early Modern Ashkenaz

Debra Kaplan — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This article addresses a lacuna in scholarship: the rites surrounding Jewish children’s deaths in early modern German-speaking lands. Analyzing bylaws, custom books and epitaphs, the article explores two facets of children’s death rituals: the detailed regulations that differentiated children’s deaths from those of adults, and the acknowledgment and facilitation of parental grief.Lay leaders struck a balance between regulation and emotion, creating on the one hand a hierarchy of deaths, and on the other, a space in which parents could mourn their children.

Meshovah Niẓaḥat: Jewish-Christian Polemics in Kaf Naki by R. Kalifa Ben-Malka (1650?–¬¬175?) of Agadir

michal ohana — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The fifth part of R. Kalifa Ben-Malka’s 'Kaf Naki': 'Meshovah Niẓaḥat' dwells on a series of interreligious disputations that the author conducted with his Christian colleagues (both Catholics and Lutherans) in Agadir during the first half of the eighteenth century.

'Meshovah Niẓaḥat' paints a picture of the very lively atmosphere and sheds light on eighteenth-century, Jewish Morocco’s, intellectual history, a topic that has been largely ignored in academic scholarship.

Ben-Malka was well-versed in the intricacies of theological debate and was familiar with the most sophisticated tools the medieval polemical tradition had to offer, as well with the later Jewish anti-Christian literature. The debates that Ben-Malka participated in were a direct continuation of medieval Christian polemics, as were the other interreligious disputations that took place in the early modern period. Nevertheless sometimes the traditional arguments took on a new garb, such as those proofs that relied on the era’s geographical or scientific discoveries.

Images of Italian Jewish Emancipation

Edna Barromi Perlman — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The movement for the unification of Italy, the Risorgimento, led to the consolidation of the different Italian states into the single Kingdom of Italy in 1870. For Roman Jews (Ebrei Romani), the Risorgimento resulted in liberation from a life of crushing poverty, disease, and abuse under the Papal State. This period coincided with the invention and development of photographic technology. The outcome of the conflation of these two significant events, liberation and the ability to photograph and document the Jews’ changing reality, is brought forth in this study. The study explores how liberation from ghetto life and emancipation influenced image construction and photographic portraiture of Roman Jews through an analysis of one family album.

"The Last Act in the Tragedy of Judaism": Stalinist Antisemitism, the American Jewish Committee, and French Holocaust Memory in the Cold War

Emma Kuby — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Beginning in 1952, the New York-based American Jewish Committee (AJC) spearheaded a transatlantic effort to stigmatize Stalinist antisemitism through historical comparison with the recent Nazi genocide. In France, home to the AJC's European headquarters, the project of tarring Stalin with Hitler's brush spurred an unprecedented flood of discourse about the Holocaust. However, the narrative that emerged among participating French intellectuals, statesmen, and journalists -- Jewish and non-Jewish -- elided the genocidal violence that had occurred in Western Europe, minimizing France’s own complicity in the deportation and murder of tens of thousands of Jews. This article analyzes the AJC's French-language journal Évidences comparatively alongside its American sister journal, Commentary, and contextually against documentation from the AJC archives in order to argue that the politics of the early Cold War did not simply preclude Holocaust memory in the West; rather, antitotalitarian sentiment produced framings of the genocide that relied on and replicated the Cold War's own temporal and geographic logics.