Introductory description

This second year module 30 CAT offers an introduction to early moderm and modern European Jewish history. We will chart the development of both Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jewry, noting the important social, religious, cultural, and political characteristics of each community. We will investigate how European Jewish communities responded to the demands of an ever-modernizing world. We will explore the Jewish experience from the middle ages to the rise of Hasidism, Haskallah (Jewish enlightenment), reform Judaism, Jewish nationalism, and the emergence of secular Judaism. We will also discuss the Shoah as one of the modern Jewish experiences, but not its endpoint. While the course explores Jewish history from the European perspective, the course will touch on postcolonial and global aspects of modern Jewish history.

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Week 1 Before modernity
Week 2 Antijudaism: Spain and blood laws; Pogroms
Week 3 “Out of the ghetto”
Week 4 Haskalah: The Jewish Enlightenment
Week 5 One man’s path to Enlightenment: Salomon Maimon’s Autobiography
Week 6 Reading week
Week 7 Jewish Life in 18th century Britain
Week 8 Emancipation in Russia
Week 9. Reform Judaism: Birth of a movement
Week 10 Assimilation
Week 11 Antisemitism
Week 12 Citizenship for the French Algerian Jews
Week 13 Jew’s Body: medicine
Week 14 Birth of Zionism
Week 15 Eastern Jews
Week 16 Reading Week
Week 17 WWI
Week 18 History of Jewish Antifascism and Radicalism
Week 19 Shoah
Week 20. Postwar Jewish life in Europe
Week 21 Are Jews White?
Week 22 Revisions

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate a detailed knowledge of historical interpretations of Jewish history from the 17th to the end of the 20th century, particularly regarding ideas of class, gender, religion, and race.
• Communicate ideas and findings, adapting to a range of situations, audiences, and degrees of complexity.
• Generate ideas through the analysis of a broad range of primary source material related to early modern and modern Jewish history.
• Examine and evaluate the contributions made by existing historiographies of Jewish studies.
• Act with limited supervision and direction within defined guidelines, accepting responsibility for achieving deadlines.

Indicative reading list

The life of Glückel of Hameln, 1646-1724, written by herself (London : East and West Library, 1962)
Yuri Slezkine, "Mercury's Sandals: The Jews and Other Nomads," The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
David Biale, ed., Cultures of the Jews: A New History
Lloyd P. Gartner, History of the Jews in Modern Times
Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, eds., The Jew in the Modern World
Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday
Derek Penslar, “Teaching Jewish History as Universal History,” in What Do We Want the Other to Teach About Us?, ed. David Coppola (Center for Christian-Jewish Understanding and Sacred Heart University Press, 2006): 127-50
Jerome Friedman, “Jewish Conversion, the Spanish Pure Blood Laws and Reformation: A Revisionist View of Racial and Religious Antisemitism,” The Sixteenth Century Journal Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring, 1987), pp. 3-30
Magda Teter, The Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020),
Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770-1870
Gershom Sholem, Devekut, or Communion with God,” in Gershon Hundert, ed., Essential Papers on Hasidism (New York: New York University Press, 1991).
David Sorkin, Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (Berkeley, 1996).
Todd Endelman, “Bankers and Brokers, Peddlers and Pickpockets (1700-1800)” in Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 1656-2000 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002).
Pauline Wengeroff, Memoirs of a Grandmother: Scenes from the Cultural History of the Jews of Russia in the Nineteenth Century.
Deborah Hertz, Emancipation Through Intermarriage in Old Berlin, in: Judith Baskin, ed.,
Jewish Women in Historical Perspective (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991): 182-201
Shulamit Volkov, "Antisemitism as a Cultural Code," Leo Baeck Institute Year Book XXlll (1978), 25-45.
Steven Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German-
Jewish Consciousness, 1800-1923 (Madison, 1982).
Marion A. Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York, 1991),
Puah Rakovsky, My Life as a Radical Jewish Woman: Memoirs of a Zionist Feminist in Poland, edited, annotated and with an introduction by Paula E. Hyman, trans. by Barbara Harshav with Paula E. Hyman. (Bloomington, Indiana: 2001).
Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1945, vol. 2.
Herman Kruk, The last days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna ghetto and the camps, 1939-1944
Michael Meng and Erica Lehrer, eds, Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland. Indiana University Press, 2015.
David Schraub, “White Jews: An Intersectional Approach,” AJS Review 43:2 (November 2019), 379–407.

Interdisciplinary

If English department would like to cooperate in the future, this course would be easily taught together with Rochelle Sibley's EN2K6/EN3K6 Yiddish Literature in Translation: A World Beyond Borders.

Subject specific skills

analytical reading and writing
research
independent thinking
contextualization of minority history

Transferable skills

antiracism
analytical reading and writing
research
independent thinking