Allan Arkush | Binghamton University (original) (raw)
Papers by Allan Arkush
Jewish History, Jan 24, 2007
This essay examines the initial stages of the relationship between Jewish nationalism and modern ... more This essay examines the initial stages of the relationship between Jewish nationalism and modern biblical criticism. Its point of departure is Ahad Ha_am, the founder of cultural Zionism, who kept his distance from biblical criticism, and proceeds with Joseph Klausner, Ahad Ha_am_s successor as the editor of Ha-shiloah, who moved in the opposite direction by incorporating biblical criticism into his own writing and teaching. After examining the opposition to Klausner, the essay turns to the work of Ben-Zion Mossinson, who introduced the results of biblical criticism into the teaching of the Bible in the modern schools of the Yishuv. This initiative generated controversy and broad opposition, especially in the European Hebrew press. Shortly before World War I, and in this controversy_s immediate aftermath, Joseph Klausner, then in Palestine, published a small pamphlet in Hebrew making the case for biblical criticism. At about the same time, in Russia, Max Soloveitchik made a similar argument in a book of his own. Neither of these two works had resounding significance, but each testifies to the growing self-confidence of the exponents of cultural Zionist in promoting modern biblical criticism in the Jewish school.
American Jewish Archives, 2024
The outbreak of World War I was as much of a shock to European Jewish leaders and intellectuals a... more The outbreak of World War I was as much of a shock to European Jewish leaders and intellectuals as it was to anyone else, but it did not leave them in a quandary. With a small number of notable exceptions, they lined up in support of their respective lands and participated in their war efforts, usually without reservation. This was true even of most Zionists, whose worldwide organization proclaimed its neutrality even as its members, scattered across the continent, donned different uniforms and suited up to fight one another. In the United States, the situation was different-until April 1917, when the country belatedly entered the war. Before that its people stood outside the fray, generally heeding the admonition of its president to remain neutral in "thought as well as action." By and large, American Jewry's most notable figures did so for years, even though most of them tended to support the Central Powers, sometimes out of genuine sympathy but more often out of hatred of their enemy to the east, Tsarist Russia. America's Zionists for the most part shared these feelings, but not unanimously. Some of the thoroughly acculturated academics among them were, in the words of Ben Halpern, "inclined to share Anglophile, pro-Allied leanings" that prevailed among the East Coast elites. Among these people, however, Halpern identified a significant outlier. "Professor Richard Gottheil," he wrote, "was particularly outspoken in supporting the Allied cause." 1 During the war years, he often created something
Jewish History, Jan 24, 2007
This essay examines the initial stages of the relationship between Jewish nationalism and modern ... more This essay examines the initial stages of the relationship between Jewish nationalism and modern biblical criticism. Its point of departure is Ahad Ha_am, the founder of cultural Zionism, who kept his distance from biblical criticism, and proceeds with Joseph Klausner, Ahad Ha_am_s successor as the editor of Ha-shiloah, who moved in the opposite direction by incorporating biblical criticism into his own writing and teaching. After examining the opposition to Klausner, the essay turns to the work of Ben-Zion Mossinson, who introduced the results of biblical criticism into the teaching of the Bible in the modern schools of the Yishuv. This initiative generated controversy and broad opposition, especially in the European Hebrew press. Shortly before World War I, and in this controversy_s immediate aftermath, Joseph Klausner, then in Palestine, published a small pamphlet in Hebrew making the case for biblical criticism. At about the same time, in Russia, Max Soloveitchik made a similar argument in a book of his own. Neither of these two works had resounding significance, but each testifies to the growing self-confidence of the exponents of cultural Zionist in promoting modern biblical criticism in the Jewish school.
American Jewish Archives, 2024
The outbreak of World War I was as much of a shock to European Jewish leaders and intellectuals a... more The outbreak of World War I was as much of a shock to European Jewish leaders and intellectuals as it was to anyone else, but it did not leave them in a quandary. With a small number of notable exceptions, they lined up in support of their respective lands and participated in their war efforts, usually without reservation. This was true even of most Zionists, whose worldwide organization proclaimed its neutrality even as its members, scattered across the continent, donned different uniforms and suited up to fight one another. In the United States, the situation was different-until April 1917, when the country belatedly entered the war. Before that its people stood outside the fray, generally heeding the admonition of its president to remain neutral in "thought as well as action." By and large, American Jewry's most notable figures did so for years, even though most of them tended to support the Central Powers, sometimes out of genuine sympathy but more often out of hatred of their enemy to the east, Tsarist Russia. America's Zionists for the most part shared these feelings, but not unanimously. Some of the thoroughly acculturated academics among them were, in the words of Ben Halpern, "inclined to share Anglophile, pro-Allied leanings" that prevailed among the East Coast elites. Among these people, however, Halpern identified a significant outlier. "Professor Richard Gottheil," he wrote, "was particularly outspoken in supporting the Allied cause." 1 During the war years, he often created something