Constructing and Experiencing Jewish Identity (original) (raw)
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History as the rise of a modern Jewish identity
History has always held an important place in the forming, inflection and reflection of Jewish identity. The emancipation movement and subsequent Jewish enlightenment in 19th-century Germany brought about a major crisis in Jewish identity regarding issues around integration to modern German society. From this emerged both an intellectual and a religious movement that sought different ways to negotiate Judaism within a Christian hegemony. But these movements were in conflict with one another, each vying to support the correct means of social participation and integration without assimilation. History, more precisely historiography, became the central element of delineating one form of modern Jewish identity upon which this conflict was waged. In this article, I will outline the important role historiography took in the rise of the scientific study of Judaism or Wissenschaft des Judentums in modern Germany, the emergence of the Jewish Reform movement and its impact on Jewish socio-religious identity, and conclude by delineating the second-generation of Wissenschaft des Judentums and its negation of the Reform movement. This essay underscores the connections between historiography and identity. Reform Judaism developed out of the 19th-century emancipation movement in Germany that allowed Jews, and other ethnic minorities, to participate openly in civil society as citizens. Within this inclusivist social thrust, the German Jewish community were offered new opportunities to engage modes of cultural production—i.e. academia, art, governance, economics and business. This, along with new secular-modernist definitions of citizenship and an identification with the nation-state, developed a need to reinterpret Judaism from its conceptions of the past to fit modern views. However, Jewish emancipation came with the price of assimilation to Christian society. Jewish scholars and liberal reformers aimed to negotiate Jewish identity within this modern social context without succumbing to assimilation. By mid-century, this caused an irreparable rift between liberal Jewish reformers and conservative Jewish scholars. History and historiography became the rhetorical tool in this polemic between social engagement and ethnic differentiation. I wish to discuss the relevancy and impact of 19th-century Jewish historiography on the Jewish Reform and counter-reform movements, and the forging of a modern Jewish identity. This thesis will be argued in three major sections. The first section will engage the definition, historical context and experience of Jewish emancipation and the Jewish Enlightenment within a German context. In so doing, we will understand the emergence of Wissenschaft des Judentums or the scientific study of Judaism. The second section will investigate the burgeoning Reform movement by underscoring its relationship to Wissenschaft and modernity, its founders, and its core values and concerns. In order to gain the clearest view of these developments, I will explore the work and worldview of Abraham Geiger, considered the progenitor of the modern Jewish Reform movement. This will lead to the third and final section that questions the impact the Reform movement had on Jewish historiography, or the writing of Jewish history, at the height of the 19th-century. This discussion is most concerned with the place of historiography in the counter-movement against Jewish Reform. I will discuss the second generation of Wissenschaft scholars focusing on the historian Heinrich Graetz. I will outline his conception of history and delineate how he used historiography to counter Geiger's Reform movement and make epistemological innovations. This, ultimately, will explain how this very influential religious movement impacted the writing of Jewish history and, moreover, the forging of a modern Jewish identity. 1 I would like to thank Dr. Ira Robinson for his guidance and mentorship in writing this article, Dr. Rebecca Margolis for her comments and editing, and David Walsh for his insight and patience in reviewing this material.
Two conceptions of Jewish identity
Polity, 2024
A striking characteristic of the aftermath of the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 is the sharp divide in the way Jews reacted to it. On one side, political and military officials of the state of Israel carried out a genocidal attack on Palestinian civilians in Gaza, while the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and illegal settlers incarcerated, killed and displaced Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem at an accelerated pace. On the other side, Jews have played a pivotal role in campaigning for a ceasefire in Gaza, recognition of the Israeli military campaign there as genocide, and a long-term solution that safeguards the human and democratic rights of Palestinians in the whole of historic Palestine. Each group has accused the other of antisemitism. This paper examines their arguments.
Post-Traditional Jewish Identities! "Jews are a peuple who most widely differ among themselves." Elias Cancnt, Crowd and Power, 178. "What have lin common wlth Jews? I have hardly anything in common with mysele Kafka, Diary, Jan. 8, \914 Contemporary Jews variously conflgurate their Jewish identity. Since the Enlightenment and Emancipation Jewish identity is no longer exclusively defined by loyalty to the Torah and God's commandments. Indeed, formal definitions of identitymembership in the community, acceptance of its norms, teachings, values. aspirations-are no longer self-evident criteria of Jewish identity-. The ambiguities of Jewish identity in the modern period are, of course, well documented. indicatively often in fiction-and cinemas. In this paper I will seek both to compound and celebrate this ambiguity by noting that as moderns, Jews are continuously reconfigurating their identity. Indeed, the Jews of modernity are members of numerous communities-residential, vocational, cultural, professional, political, recreational-which are not necessarily coterminous. Moreover, the boundaries of these communities are often fluid. The upshot is that one is no longer exclusively Jewish. For one who wishes to grant his or her Jewish identity salience without forfeiting a dedicated membership in other communities, the challenge is to define a Jewish identity that is engaging yet not exclusive. With the concept of »cultural memory«, developed by Aleida and Jan Assmann, I shall seek to explore one possible model of a passionate, non-exclusive Jewish identity.
Decentering the Study of Jewish Identity: Opening the Dialogue With Other Religious Groups
Sociology of Religion, 2006
While social science research in Jewish studies is important for the particular knowledge it conveys about and for Jews, it also raises more general questions about the complicated and sometimes ambivalent nature of contemporary ethnic and religious identity in the sociological study of reli~on and ethnicity. This article focuses on Jewish identity asa way of raising questions about the relationship between religiosity and ethnicity; the dialectical nature of assimilation; and the methodological implications raised by defining identity subjectively or objectively for both qualitative and quantitative research. Our aim in sharing these explorations is to raise questions about the ways in which particularistic concerns and explorations of one group can deepen andlor provoke similar explorations in other contemporary religious and ethnic groups and vice versa.
Cutting off and Re-attaching Jewish Identity in the Modern Era
2018
When thinking about German history over the extended nineteenth century (up to World War Two), the Jewish Question is continually debated. For many individuals, German Jewish identity was something with which each person had to come to grips. The collective identity of German Jews was also complex; however, there was not necessarily a common way to express such identity, regardless of the creation of Jewish organizations, such as the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbuerger juedischen Glaubens (Central Organization of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith). Identity formation was a seemingly individualized process, something that was constrained and shaped by contemporaneous discourses. Jay Geller’s book, The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity, follows these discourses through a series of nine chapters that trace how Jews, non-Jews, and Jewish apostates dealt with the interrelated ideas about Jewishness that circulated within their respective time pe...