Modern European Jewish Cultural Studies

Imagining a destiny similar to the fate of Jerusalem, a synecdoche for Israel, is the widespread perception resulting from the single-minded interest in the Jewish example that characterized the Romantic 19th century. This volume examines the use and spread of Old Testament paradigms in nineteenth-century culture, starting from the study of Joseph Salvador, a French historian of Jewish origin, who authored treatises on the political institutions of Ancient Israel. Building upon the 17th-century precedents regarding the "respublica hebraeorum", this book analyzes the notion of "Mosaism" and its relative fortunes in France, within socialist and literary circles, and in Italy during the turbulent events of the Risorgimento.Through a wide range of sources, including some unpublished or underexplored ones, the research focuses on various thematic areas, from politics to religion, contextualizing the "Mosaic" biblical inspiration. Additionally, the volume investigates how interpretations of Salvador's intellectual system played a central role in the development of philosophies of history, ideas related to radical politics, and the rise of Zionism.

Immaginare di avere un destino simile alle sorti di Gerusalemme, sineddoche di Israele, è la percezione diffusa dall'interesse monocorde verso l'esempio ebraico che caratterizza l'Ottocento romantico. Partendo dallo studio dello storico francese di origini ebraiche Joseph Salvador, autore di trattati sulle istituzioni politiche dell'Antico Israele, il volume esamina trasversalmente l'uso e la diffusione di paradigmi veterotestamentari nella cultura del XIX secolo. A partire dagli ante-cedenti seicenteschi sulla respublica hebraeorum, si analizza la nozione di «mosaismo» e della sua relativa fortuna in Francia, in ambiente sociali-sta e letterario, e in Italia durante le turbolente vicende risorgimentali. Tramite un ampio ventaglio di fonti, alcune delle quali inedite o scar-samente approfondite, la ricerca si sofferma su vari ambiti tematici, dalla politica alla religione, contestualizzando l'afflato biblista «mosaico». Il volume indaga inoltre le modalità con cui le interpretazioni del sistema intellettuale di Salvador abbiano giocato un ruolo centrale nella costruzione di filosofie della storia, di idee inerenti la politica radicale e nell'ascesa del sionismo.

Since 2014, JPR's European Jewish Research Archive (EJRA) has consolidated social research on post-1990 European Jewish populations within one single, freely available, online resource. EJRA is designed to be a service to community leaders, policymakers and researchers, as well as a resource to help inform the European Jewish research agenda going forward.

Drawing on an innovative methodology, this report presents a detailed statistical analysis of EJRA's holdings. Through this analysis, we are able to pinpoint specific strengths and weaknesses in social research coverage of particular issues in particular countries.

The report finds a clear increase in the research coverage of European Jewish populations since 1990. The amount of coverage in each country is broadly in line with the size of each country’s Jewish population. The majority of the research is produced by researchers whose work is not confined to this field, with a small ‘core' of committed Jewishly-focused researchers. Academia provides the primary base for researchers, but there has been a significant increase in recent years in research reports produced by non-academic institutions, particularly those concerned with monitoring antisemitism.

Approximately 20% of EJRA items concern antisemitism and this proportion has more than trebled since 1990. Research on ‘living’ Jewish communities - as opposed to research on antisemitism and Holocaust remembrance - is far less developed in countries with small Jewish populations. At 8% of the collection, Jewish education appears to be underdeveloped in all European countries with the exception of the UK.

Drawing on the research findings, the report goes on to raise questions regarding possible strategic priorities for European Jewish research for discussion by researchers and organisations that sponsor research. In particular, we ask how and whether research across Europe could be better coordinated and what countries and topics require further support to develop a stronger research infrastructure.

The figure of the Daughter of Germany reflects a widespread phenomenon of writing
in Israel and the diaspora, not just in Germany and Austria, where Jewish writers
began in the 1990s to explore their fraught relations with their adopted, readopted, or abandoned Heimat. In the uneasy encounters with present-day Germans, who may have to deal with their suppressed family and national past, Jewish
writers find it impossible to free themselves from a history not of their making. This article discusses what the staging of erotic fantasies says about the grappling
with the traumatic past. The fetish of the German woman has to do more with
sexual stereotypes in cinema and popular culture than with anti-Semitism and the
Holocaust, but it projects social and cultural anxieties, in particular about ethnic
and racial difference. The power relations at play here in the imagination of male
and female Jewish writers reflect constructions of Jewish sexuality and masculinity. The German woman as an erotic object of love has a deep and complex history in
German-Jewish writing and in the Jewish imaginary in general, which cannot be
erased. Although newly arrived Israelis tried to think of Berlin in the 2010s as a
place like any other, relations between Germans and Jews remain tainted by their
entangled histories and the traumatic past.

Seventy years of communist rule repressed a complex history of Odessa’s multiple cultural spaces and a trilingual cultural system that operated among its Jews. This essay shows the multiethnicity of Odessa’s cultural history and raises issues of determining the ethnicity of cultural spaces, issues that have been obscured by a mythologized narrative. The ‘Odessa myth’ tends to define Odessa culture as exclusively Russian or as Hebrew, but history tells a more complex story.