Transnationalism and the Jews of the Nineteenth Century

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Level: 
Master's
CEU credits: 
2
Academic year: 
2009/2010
Semester: 
Winter
Start and end dates: 
20 Nov 2009
Co-hosting Unit(s) [if applicable]: 
Department of History
Nationalism Studies Program
Stream/Track/Specialization/Core Area: 
Ethnicity, Nations, Nationalism and Empires in History
CEU Instructor(s): 
Carsten L. Wilke
Additional information: 
The course will outline the Westernizing ideology of Jewish political universalism and focus upon selected contexts of its implementation. These are, for example, the revolutionary activities of 1848, the coordinated pressure of European Jewish public figures in favor of the Jews of the Maghreb, the Orient and the Balkans, and finally the institutionalization of this intervention by means of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in 1860 and other similar agents of world wide philanthropy. By studying the parallel evolution of, on the one hand, Jewish ideals regarding the global defense of civil rights and, on the other hand, anti-Semitic myths about Jewish world conspiracy, the course will explore the dilemma the liberal forms of Jewish cosmopolitanism presented to their adherents and the efforts that were made to resolve it.
Learning Outcomes: 
By taking into account the transnational patterns of thought and organization, students should acquire a new comprehension of the period of major confrontation and competition between European nations, and learn to see cosmopolitan and nationalist aspirations in their interdependence. The course shall allow participants to encompass the historical reasons why the Jewish collectivity was seen not only as the paradigmatic diaspora community, but also as an ambivalent agent of the imagined global civilization. The history of transnational contacts among Jews shall serve as an instructive example of the constant interaction between image, self-image and very different levels of social reality, such as demography, economy, consumer culture, religious and political ideology, communication and organization in accordance with the new models forged in the industrial and colonial age.
Assessment : 
Grades are equally divided between oral participation in class (including a short presentations) and a final essay of ca. 4000 words.
Full description: 

1. Diaspora, transnationalism, cultural transfer: fundamental concepts

Richard I. (Yerachmiel) Cohen, "The 'Wandering Jew' from medieval legend to modern metaphor", in: Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jonathan Karp (ed.), The art of being Jewish in modern times, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008, p. 147-175. [link]

Shulamit Volkov, "Jewish history: the nationalism of transnationalism", in: Gunilla Budde, Sebastian Conrad and Oliver Janz (eds.), Transnationale Geschichte: Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006, S. 190-201. [savepdf]

Optional readings in methodology:

Sarah J. Mahler, "Theoretical and empirical contributions toward a research agenda for transnationalism", in: Michael Peter Smith and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo (eds.), Transnationalism from below, New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1998, p. 64-100. [savepdf]

Alejandro Portes, Luis Eduardo Guarnizo and Patricia Landolt, "The study of transnationalism: pitfalls and promise of an emergent research field", Ethnic and Racial Studies 22,2 (1999), p. 219-237. [savepdf]

Ewa Morawska, "Exploring diversity in immigrant assimilation and transnationalism:   Poles and Russian Jews in Philadelphia", International Migration Review 38,4 (2004), p. 1372-1412. [savepdf]

Philipp Ther, "The Transnational Paradigm of Historiography and Its Potential for Ukrainian History", in: Georgiy Kasianov and Philipp Ther, ed., Laboratory of Transnational History: Ukraine and Recent Ukrainian, Budapest: Central European University Press, 2009, p. 81-116. [savepdf]

 

2. Diaspora, patriotism and national fragmentation

Richard I. Cohen, "Jews and the State: the historical context", in: Ezra Mendelsohn (ed.), Jews and the State: dangerous alliances and the perils of privilege, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 3-16. [savepdf]

Michael R. Marrus, The politics of assimilation: the French Jewish community at the time of the Dreyfus affair, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980, p. 98-119. [savepdf]

Jehuda Reinharz, Fatherland or Promised Land: the dilemma of the German Jew, 1893-1914, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, p.70-89. [savepdf]

 

3. Global economy, capital and consumerism

Sam N. Lehman-Wilzig, "The House of Rothschild: prototype of the transnational organization", Jewish Social Studies 40, 3-4 (1978), p. 251-270. [jstor]

Rainer Liedtke, "Modern communication: the information network of N. M. Rothschild & Sons in nineteenth-century Europe", in Gerald D. Feldman and Peter Hertner (ed.), Finance and modernization: a transnational and transcontinental perspective for nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Farnham: Ashgate, 2008, p. 155-161. [link]

Paul Lerner, "Circulation and representation: Jews, department stores and cosmopolitan consumption in Germany, ca. 1880s-1930s", European Review of History 12,2 (2010, forthcoming). [savepdf]

 

4. Non-Jewish models of internationalism

Allen W. Wood, "Kant's project for perpetual peace", in: Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (eds.), Cosmopolitics: thinking and feeling beyond the nation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998, p. 59-76.[savepdf]

Friedrich Meinecke, Cosmopolitanism and the National State, trl. by Robert B. Kimber, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970, p. 21, 73-75. [savepdf]

Robert A. Graham, Vatican diplomacy: a study of church and state on the international plane, Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1959, p. 297-302.[savepdf]

Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, "Nationalism and the quest for moral universalism: German freemasonry, 1860-1914", in: Martin H. Geyer, (ed.), The mechanics of internationalism: culture, society, and politics from the 1840 to the First World War, London: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 259-284.[savepdf]

Optional reading (tables)

Carsten Holbraad, Internationalism and nationalism in European political thought, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, p. 7-10.[savepdf]

 

5. Religious constructions of ethic universalism in Germany and Italy

Elijah Benamozegh (1823-1900), Israel and Humanity, transl. by Maxwell Luria, Mahwah NJ: Paulist Press, 1995, p. 237-239. [link]

Joseph Leon Blau, "Problems of modern Jewish thought: tensions between particularism and universalism", Journal of Reform Judaism 25 (1978), p. 47-62.[savepdf]

Rory Schacter, "Hermann Cohen's secular messianism and liberal cosmopolitanism", Jewish Political Studies Review 20,1-2 (2008), p. 107-123. [savepdf]

Optional reading:

Novak, David, "Jewish theology and international society", in: David R. Mapel and Terry Nardin (eds.), International society: diverse ethical perspectives, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998, p. 185-200. [savepdf]

 

6. The intersection of Jewish solidarity and the universal "civilizing mission" in France

Lisa Moses Leff, Sacred bonds of solidarity: the rise of Jewish internationalism in nineteenth-century France, Stanford CA 2006, p. 117-156. [savepdf]

Silvia Cresti, "'Kultur' and 'civilisation' after the Franco-Prussian war: a debate between German and French Jews", in: Michael Brenner, Vicki Caron, and Uri R. Kaufmann (eds.), Jewish emancipation reconsidered: the French and German models, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003, p. 93-109. [savepdf]

 

7. Beyond nationalisms in Central Europe

Marsha L. Rozenblit, Reconstructing a national identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 14-38. [savepdf]

"A Jew's attitude toward the 'nationality fraud'", in: Wilma Abeles Iggers (ed.), The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia: a historical reader, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992, p. 144-145, 220-223. [savepdf]

Ludwik Lazar Zamenhof, Dr. Esperanto's International Language, Warsaw: Zamenhof, 1889, p. 3-24. [link] 

 

8. Modern "shtadlanut" and global philanthropy

Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair: "Ritual murder", politics, and the Jews in 1840, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 239-256. [savepdf]

Carol Iancu, Jews in Romania 1866-1919: from exclusion to emancipation, New York: Columbia University Press, 1996, p 38-50. [savepdf]

Derek Penslar, "From social policy to social engineering", in: Penslar, Shylock's children: economics and Jewish identity in modern Europe, Berkeley 2001, p. 225-245. [savepdf]

 

9. The Alliance Israélite Universelle

Alliance Israélite Universelle, "Appeal to all Israelites" (1860), in: Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (eds.), The Jew in the modern world: a documentary history, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 316-321. [savepdf]

Michael Graetz, The Jews in nineteenth century France: from the French Revolution to the Alliance Israélite Universelle, translated by Jane Marie Todd, Stanford, 1996, p. 259-269. [savepdf]

Paula E. Hyman, "French Jews and world Jewry", in: Hyman, The Jews of modern France, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, p. 77-90. [savepdf]

 

10. The Jewish vision of East-Western reconciliation

Eli Bar-Chen, "Two communities with a sense of mission: the Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden", in: Michael Brenner, Vicki Caron and Uri R. Kaufmann (eds.), Jewish emancipation reconsidered: the French and German models, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003, p. 111-121. [savepdf]

David A. Brenner, Marketing identities: the invention of Jewish ethnicity in 'Ost und West', Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1998, p. 22-28, 40-42, 63-71. [savepdf]

John M. Efron, "From Mitteleuropa to the Middle East: Orientalism through a Jewish lens", Jewish Quarterly Review 94,3 (2004), p. 490-520. [jstor]

 

11. Extremists in search of the stateless utopia

Emma Goldman, "Minorities versus majorities", in: Goldman, Anarchism and other essays [1910]. With a new introduction by Richard Drinnon, New York: Dover Publications, 1969, p. 69-78. [savepdf] 

Martin Buber, "Three theses of a religious socialism (1928)", in: Asher D. Biemann (ed.), The Martin Buber reader: essential writings, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, p. 258-259. [savepdf]

Uri Zilbersheid, "The utopia of Theodor Herzl", Israel Studies 9,3 (2004), p. 80-114. [link]

Michael Löwy, Redemption and utopia: Jewish libertarian thought in Central Europe. A study in elective affinity, trl. by Hope Heaney, London: The Athlone Press, 1992, p. 14-26; optional reading: p. 47-66. [savepdf]

 

12. The anti-Semitic myth of Jewish transnationalism

Hermann Goedsche, "The rabbi's speach: the promise of world domination" (1872) / "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" (c. 1902), in: Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (eds.), The Jew in the modern world: a documentary history, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 360-367.[savepdf]

Semion Goldin, "The image of 'Jewish cosmopolitanism' in late 19th century nationalist thought in Eastern Europe", European Review of History 17,2 (2010, forthcoming).[savepdf]

Lisa Moses Leff, "The End of an Era?", in: Leff, Sacred bonds of solidarity: the rise of Jewish internationalism in nineteenth-century France, Stanford CA 2006, p. 226-229. [savepdf]

Optional reading:

Norman Cohn, "Against Satan and the Alliance Israélite Universelle", in: Cohn, Warrant for genocide: the myth of the Jewish world-conspiracy and the protocols of the Elders of Zion, London: Serif, 1996, p. 46-65. [savepdf]