By Elisheva Carlebach

All of us who were still children thirty years ago can testify to the incredible changes that have occurred both within and outside us. We have traversed, or better still flown through a thousand-year history.
—Isaac Markus Jost, 1833

No single volume can address the entire sweep of a multifaceted culture and hope to render it in full, in all its layered complexity and dynamism. This is particularly true of a volume covering almost a century and a half in which every aspect of Jewish life underwent the most profound changes to have occurred since antiquity. Rather than attempting to be exhaustive, this volume intends to trace a trajectory. Each item, as well as the collection in the aggregate, tells the tale of a people who refused to sit on the sidelines while others did the work of culture, be it literary, visual, material, musical, or intellectual. There is virtually no field of human culture in this period in which Jews only participated enthusiastically; they often pioneered, introducing new techniques, innovative approaches, and fresh ways of looking at the world.

Most often, Jews were able to do this out of the deep wellsprings of Jewish identity and creativity itself. It is no exaggeration to claim that the very concept of a Jewish culture that was not primarily religious arose and was articulated first in the period covered in this volume. A truly Jewish total culture that was secular at heart while incorporating some traditional elements did not come to fruition until the advent of Jewish nationalisms (Zionism and diaspora nationalism), beyond the scope of this volume. What we have before us is a more inchoate and, in some ways, more interesting picture. The breakaway from traditional patterns took place both in the form of an embrace of non-Jewish cultural idioms and forms, on the one hand, and in the conscious reshaping of Jewish traditional culture into something modern, on the other. Both of these movements are in full evidence in this volume. They are intertwined and cannot, and ought not, be easily separated. Often the same artist or writer who made his or her mark in a fully neutral vein also pioneered new modes of representing aspects of Jewish culture. The cultural production of Jewish women and men was often distinctive and original because they were among the first Jews to participate creatively in their fields. This allowed them to bring fresh perspectives into the larger culture. Simultaneously, their efforts remade the very concept of Jewish culture. Thus, the volume does not include only material that looks or sounds “Jewish,” however that might be defined. To the contrary, it attempts to represent the full range of cultural creation by Jews regardless of whether such expressions contain identifiably Jewish content. As Richard I. Cohen writes with great insight, “Artists were so involved in their own radical break with Jewish traditional society and pattern, so concerned with coming to grips with the new surroundings into which they had been thrown [ . . . ] that much time was needed before a return to the past could be contemplated.”¹ Even when writers and artists “returned” to a Jewish past, it was not the same as the primal and original engagement. In the words of Ammiel Alcalay, “The ‘Jewish’ world depicted becomes just that: subject matter, and not the very material of a way of life that is simply practiced from within.”²

If there is one thread that connects the multifarious entries in this volume, it is the sense of great possibility and openness. In some parts of the world civil barriers to equality before the law had begun to fall, Jews of the West had finally been granted citizenship, and others believed they would soon follow suit. Jews not only ventured into the world around them but also allowed the world to penetrate their thinking, their dreams, their very definitions of self, in ways they had scarcely done before. In places with large concentrations of Jews, the Jewish population continued to face hostility and prejudice in this period. This volume closes just before some of the worst depredations of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries were unleashed with violent fury upon the world in general and on the Jews in particular. Thus, this period was one of creativity borne aloft by hope, a sense that the gates of the broader world of culture were finally opening to Jews, that their voices and their contributions could be judged on the basis of merit alone. European Jews embraced the opportunities with dazzling results.

Jews living in the Ottoman Empire, whether in North Africa, the Middle East, or the Balkans, encountered European culture in a far more complex set of circumstances. Just as Western powers spread their imperial message through their culture, their Jewish citizens, newly acculturated themselves, attempted to “enlighten” their indigenous coreligionists in colonial and semicolonial contexts. The synthesis of cultural strands they wove is multilayered and complex. Jewish culture in the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century emerged newly invigorated, drawing on the Middle Eastern and Iberian cultures to which it was heir. As European states expanded their footholds within the Ottoman Empire, growing numbers of European merchants settled in the empire, missionaries traveled its length and breadth, and scholars took to the study of its languages and texts.

The effect of Westernization coupled with new avenues for professional advancement changed the face of Ottoman Jewish culture. Although the political and economic fortunes of Jews in Islamic lands declined in the eighteenth century, the classes of merchants whose services were necessary for the Europeans seized the opportunity to advance. They became translators, intermediaries, and agents for European interests. They supported European-style education and vocational training for Jews. French Jews established a vigorous defense organization, the Alliance Israélite Universelle, in 1860 to protect the interests of Jews. This organization established a chain of schools that sought to intensify the Westernization process, opening a rift between Europeanized “francos” and native Jews, who often held different legal status and cultural positions. These developments ultimately accelerated the cultural gap between Jews and local Muslims in much of North Africa and the Middle East.³

During the period covered in this volume, Jews lived in and between a changing cast of ambitious empires built at the expense of weaker empires, whether neighbors or distant colonial outposts. The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth fell prey to its expanding imperialist neighbors, as Russia, Prussia, and Austria partitioned it out of existence in the last decade of the eighteenth century. As a result, the three-quarters of a million Polish Jews were divided among these empires, with the largest number falling to the tsarist Russian Empire. The Ottoman Empire, which predated all of these, began to sustain serious losses during this period, although it continued to rule over much of the Middle East, North Africa, and southeastern Europe throughout the period covered in this volume. The sun never set on the British Empire in this period; the ambitious French Empire expanded its borders to distant shores, touching Egypt and conquering Algeria by 1830. The Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal engaged in empire building across the Atlantic and in the Pacific, gaining and losing colonies in Asia and the Americas. Cultural and linguistic shifts accompanied each political turn in every one of these polyglot and multiethnic societies. Jews, never a majority and often a marginal minority, were often caught between the shifting borders. Their decisions regarding choice of language, which to write in, or to educate their children in, often had serious political ramifications. What might seem like a curricular preference could easily lead to alienation or even charges of treasonous departure.

When the partition of Poland brought the region of Galicia under Habsburg Austrian rule in 1772, a great population of Yiddish-speaking Polish Jews found themselves virtually overnight in a very different cultural sphere: German-speaking, Enlightenment-influenced, and Catholic rather than Christian Orthodox. Under Austrian influence, many Galician Jews adopted German language and culture, which Poles regarded as a shameful and traitorous choice, and Jewish culture increasingly came under Enlightenment influences, parallel to that of modernizing German Jews. A far greater rupture befell the Polish, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian Jews whose fate was to come under Russian rule. Largely restricted to the western frontier that came to be called the Pale of Settlement, the population of largely Yiddish-speaking Jews suffered the vagaries of an inconsistent and ambivalent government whose policies shifted among measures designed to forcibly integrate, convert, or segregate them.

Beyond the political transfers triggered by imperial brinkmanship, another ubiquitous change supported the emergence of new cultural forms. In the period under consideration, Jews underwent demographic shifts of staggering proportions. In some parts of the world Jewish populations declined while in others, the numbers soared. Particularly noteworthy is the growing number of cities in the Russian and Ottoman empires whose Jewish populations accounted for as much as one-third of the overall population. As Jews left the countryside and small villages for expanding cities, this had a great effect on their cultural production. The urban bustle, the proximity to stimulating images and ideas, the public sphere offered by cafés, parks, boulevards, and taverns in which to exchange views and learn about the lives of others—all these nurtured multiple forms of cultural productivity, both intensely Jewish and decidedly not.

This volume spans the two most foundational events in United States history, the American Revolution of 1776, which liberated the states from British colonial domination, and the Civil War, of 1861–1865, which was fought to unify the states and abolish the way of life made possible by slavery. As Jonathan Sarna and Jonathan Golden say of the American Revolution, it was a turning point not only in world and U.S. history, but in Jewish history as well: “Never before had a major nation committed itself so definitively to the principles of freedom and democracy in general and to religious freedom in particular. Jews and members of other minority religions could dissent from the religious views of the majority without fear of persecution.”⁴ The years between and around these events saw two primary waves of Jewish immigration to the United States, although no group was exclusive in either period. The first small group of North American Jews arrived as refugees from Recife, Brazil, in 1654. When Brazil fell to Portugal, these Sephardic Jews fled the Inquisition and headed for greater religious freedom in New Amsterdam (later, New York). Others soon followed. The Sephardic pioneers profoundly shaped public Jewish culture through the early nineteenth century. The second wave (ca. 1820–1880) is loosely dubbed the “Central European” migration. Jews fleeing Europe often came from socially disadvantaged classes and adjusting to the opportunities of America took time. Women often ventured beyond home and hearth to help with family finances and ultimately found independent voices in public forums.⁵ This created a unique space for cultural production that differed in context and content from the European models.

At the outset of the period covered by this volume, most Jews lived within the framework of religious tradition. Religion constituted one of the primary components of Jewish identity and the central modes of Jewish cultural expression. With some notable exceptions, this had not changed profoundly since the medieval period. Similarly, most Jews lived within Jewish communal structures that governed many aspects of their social lives and civil status. By the end of the nineteenth century, the pillars of these institutions were greatly weakened; in parts of the world they were completely shattered. In the West, as Jews were socially integrated and legally emancipated, community lost its holistic and authoritative structure. In Russia, particularly under the reign of Tsar Nicholas I (1825–1855), conscription of Jewish boys into Cantonist camps at very young ages, and the cooperation of Jewish leaders in providing recruits, made Jews fear and distrust the Jewish communal elite. Although for some Jews breaks with the past occurred almost overnight, for others changes took place far more gradually and imperceptibly. Improvements in the standard of living in the West toward the beginning of the nineteenth century also spurred changes in the cultural lives of Jews. A prosperous middle class that included lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs, and civic leaders soon emerged as a new type of patron of the arts. In Eastern Europe, Hasidic Jews supported lavish courts for their leaders while deeply traditional Jews continued to support hundreds of yeshivot and study halls where rabbinic scholarship was advanced.

In many parts of the world, as cultural endeavors by Jews were no longer rooted in religion, Jews experimented with different definitions of Jewish identity. The quest to find a positive Jewish identification that was not exclusively religious yielded fascinating and varied new results. This volume traces the course of Jewish culture during a period of constant transformation. For some Jews, this period was marked by the transition into modernity, for others into a new form of colonial rule, and for others yet, a growing confidence that they could put down roots in lands of relative civic equality and freedom. Many of those who steadfastly championed religious tradition could nevertheless be seen as making conscious religious and cultural choices within the marketplace of competing identities, options that were themselves creations of modern times.

The dizzying array of choices about their very identity and the means of expressing it, as well as continuing hostility to Jews and Jewish culture through the nineteenth century, propelled some Jews to abandon their Jewish identities entirely. For others, social, religious, and cultural bonds to Jews and Judaism diminished over the course of generations, leading to a process that Todd M. Endelman has called “drift and defection.”⁶ This happened frequently enough that conversion out of Judaism in this period can be seen as one of an array of choices made by Jews, one that characterized the Jewish experience in this period no less than intense attachments. Religious conversion to another faith generally led to a historical dead end for an individual’s progeny as members of the Jewish people. The volume nevertheless includes the contributions of converts if their work could be seen as having been nourished in some way by their Jewish background. The poet Heinrich Heine, statesman Benjamin Disraeli, composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, salonnière Rahel Varnhagen, Russian schoolteacher Jacob Brafman, and founder of communism Karl Marx provide some of the more renowned examples of this category. In many cases converts knew and interacted with one another, sometimes over several generations, and many placed the struggle to define themselves at the center of their creative work. Familial ties ran strong in convert families who often socialized with one another both out of preference and as a result of subtle discrimination. Their transformations of Jewish identity and the allusive references to it allow us to include such figures in this volume not just because of the accident of their birth, but also because their Jewishness remained an elemental and enduring aspect of their lives, their art, and their work.

Developments over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries provided more than new opportunities for Jewish encounters with non-Jewish cultures: they completely transformed the fields on which these interactions played out. The traditional templates of Jewish culture as existing within the framework of majority–minority relations, of those who belonged and barely tolerated aliens, receded. Instead, a growing Jewish self-consciousness emerged, with new definitions and articulations of the self. Where premodern life writing by Jews located the self firmly within the communal sphere, Western, and later Eastern European Jewish, autobiography emphasized the individual’s break from community and tradition.⁷

Jews embarked on this odyssey along utterly different pathways depending on national community, geography, and individual proclivities. For some Jews, this passage meant mobility from village to urban settings, from economic margins to bourgeois prosperity, from old world to new, and in some parts of the world, from pariah to civic equal. In Western Europe, the demise of the kehilah (structured Jewish community) and its traditional authority, largely accomplished over the course of our period, meant the disappearance of a holistic Jewish life and culture that did not depend on the world outside it for validation. It opened the way for Jews to embrace the culture of the majority directly and consciously, and to do so in ways that ranged from the superficial to the profound, from head coverings, facial hair, and dress style to social, linguistic, economic, and occupational choices. Introduced to European philosophy, scientific and intellectual achievements, art, music, and theater, Jews immersed themselves in, and soon mastered, these genres. In nineteenth-century Russia, deep fissures characterized Jewish society. The vast majority of Jews became increasingly impoverished, with limited access to economic and educational means to improve their lot. Wealthier Jews migrated to St. Petersburg, where they lived like urban elites. The best of the Talmud scholars flocked to cities with famous yeshivot, as in Vilna, while a cadre of official rabbis administered to the religious needs of their often disenchanted flocks. By the second half of the nineteenth century, as Nicholas I’s reign ended, Jewish ideologues embraced multiple paths designed to bring Russia’s Jews to a more dignified existence.

In the Ottoman Empire, a different cultural pathway appeared. Within the Jewish court system traditional rabbinic leaders had to compete with state-supported (or appointed) rabbis. While state backing would appear to have strengthened these rabbinic courts, this was not the case. The rise of new “mixed” state courts alongside the existing Islamic and consular courts, where Jews also historically went to adjudicate various cases, made for a system of legal pluralism that weakened the hold of the Jewish courts over Jews in the empire. Nevertheless, religion resided far more closely with features of modern Western life and this is reflected in the cultural production of the period. The comfortable accommodation of state, religion, and culture in the Muslim sphere contrasted with the antagonistic relationship of state, religion, and culture in the Christian world.⁸

New models of Jewish leadership emerged in this period: maskilic intellectuals, Hasidic rebbes, writers, artists, and a secular intelligentsia. They shared a rejection of the traditional model in which a combination of piety and rabbinic scholarship, with emphasis on the latter, formed the primary basis of authority. By overturning models of leadership, Jews challenged long-standing traditions of hierarchical values in Jewish society.

Two central themes intersect at the very foundations of the Jewish experience in this period. In the West they are traditionally termed Enlightenment and Emancipation. This volume construes these concepts in the broadest possible way, such that they embrace the Jewish experience without borders. The former term refers here to engagement with the larger culture, the adoption of new modes of Jewish self-definition, and a reconfigured relationship to the larger culture. The strong and varied forms of resistance, in many parts of the Jewish world, to such engagement were inextricably intertwined with these developments. The term emancipation refers broadly to the constantly shifting relationship of Jews to their states and to the societies of which they formed an integral part. This volume traces the emergence of cultural, religious, and political movements, as well as new individual identities, representations, and expressions of the Jewish self vis-à-vis the community and within the non-Jewish world. These movements and choices often appeared in innovative configurations that had little precedent in Jewish culture. They alternately embraced, rejected, or revised the Jewish elements that emerged from the crucible of self-examination, public deliberation, and the private agony of modernization.

Organization

This volume appears in a series whose title is the Posen Library, the latter an apt word, as it intends to provide readers with an experience similar to that of browsing through a curated library collection. Regardless of their previous knowledge, readers will encounter familiar landmarks, well-known touchstones of Jewish culture, perhaps even “usual suspects” previously anthologized. By reverse token, all readers are bound to find new treasures, unexpected juxtapositions, previously unknown texts, and objects that will enrich their understanding of the role Jews played in world culture of the period. The volume includes culture and civilization both high and low, the familiar and the strange, the exquisite alongside the coarse. It includes voices of women and men calling out to us from the past. They are rich and poor, learned and simple, thrilling or dull—all elements in a glorious collection.

The decision to organize material primarily by genre allows the volume to defy hierarchical and well-known cultural clusters and to encourage readers to make new connections. For example, Nachman of Bratslav, charismatic Hasidic leader in Ukraine; French classicist Auguste Widal (writing under the name Daniel Stauben); and Jacob Frank, Podolian charlatan and messianic pretender, all used inventive tales as the creative vehicle for their teachings. Each set of tales belongs to a different worldview and finds its first context within its own cultural milieu. Yet their juxtaposition in this volume allows us to see something of the appeal of complex storytelling in very different settings of the same period.

Language

One of the complicating and constitutive elements in any discussion of Jewish culture is the question of language and how to convey it in a volume of translated texts. Jews have always been multilingual, but in this period the very choice of languages Jews employed became freighted with ideological weight as never before. Which languages Jews should employ, in which contexts, became the subject of contentious debate and discussion. Most Jews through the eighteenth century employed as the language of their daily discourse, written and oral, a form of the vernacular that differed slightly or entirely from that of their non-Jewish neighbors. The Jewish variation on these vernaculars often contained elements from all strata of classical Jewish culture, including biblical and rabbinic literature, and were sometimes written in Hebrew characters. As the speakers of these languages migrated, they often incorporated new layers and new colorations. Names such as Judezmo (another name for Ladino) and Yiddish testify to the fact that both Jews and non-Jews viewed these languages as Jewish. Such vernacular Jewish languages, which had been molded and shaped unselfconsciously by Jews, became the subject of fierce public polemic. This contention turned on whether hyphenated or hybrid languages were legitimate in their own right or were imagined versions of some “pure” main language. Some Jews advocated a return to Hebrew, and the argument centered on whether Hebrew, which had been preserved as a sacred language of prayer and rabbinic scholarship, could be adapted for nonsacred writing. Could a language that had been used primarily by rote for prayers, and with comprehension by a small number of scholars, be revived to express the fullness of modern life? If Jewish languages did not suffice for communication in modern times, which would be the best non-Jewish language to employ? In an age of crumbling empires and emerging nationalisms these choices were laden with political and cultural consequences.

As Jewish culture modernized and Westernized, distinctive Jewish languages began to lose their special features, and ultimately many ceased to be used altogether. But their existence is central to the narrative in this volume, because the embrace of these hyphenated Jewish languages, and their acceptance by the writers and literati as languages of literary discourse, opened the way for a secular and vernacular literature that could be understood by more Jews. Thus, as Yiddish became a literary language and secular works were written in it, more traditional Jews had access to these ideas. Similarly, as Ladino became a respectable medium for both religious and secular writers, their ideas could reach a far broader audience.

Just as Yiddish itself was spoken in many regional variants, Sephardic Jews used a rich variety of Judeo-Spanish dialects. In Ottoman southeastern Europe and the Levant, Sephardic Jews spoke a Judeo-Spanish dialect known variously as Ladino and Judezmo, with admixtures from different Romance languages, Hebrew, and other neighboring tongues, such as Turkish, Greek, and Bulgarian. Some variants were even identified with particular cities, such as Salonika and Adrianople (Edirne). Sephardim in northern Morocco spoke their own version of Judeo-Spanish known as Haketia, which had a greater number of Arabic borrowings. Ladino presses arose in mid-eighteenth-century Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, Mexico, Argentina, and the Middle East; the standardization of the languages began to erase some of the most distinctive variants. The arrival of the Alliance Israélite Universelle introduced French into the mix, although the presses flourished in Ladino throughout the Ottoman era. Linguistic acrobatics characterized Jewish life across the globe. Kurdish Jews used Hebrew for liturgy, neo-Aramaic for paraliturgical occasions such as weddings, and Kurdish for folklore. As they modernized, Arabic became their dominant language.⁹

Another important element in our period is the enormous amount of cultural energy that went into translating non-Jewish texts into and between Jewish languages. The texts in this volume (aside from those that appeared in English first) originally appeared in Hebrew, in hybrid Jewish languages such as Yiddish and Ladino, and in a host of other languages and dialects, including Arabic, Czech, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, and Russian. The enterprise of translation represents one of the important channels of cross-fertilization and intercultural exchange. The difficulty of conveying language in a volume in which all the texts are presented in translation also provides one of the justifications of this enterprise. Here, for the very first time, these Jewish voices of the past exist in proximity and in conversation with one another and with us.

Literature

Life Writing: Biography, Autobiography, and Ego Documents

The section “Life Writing” can be thought of as snapshots in words, glancing testimonies to Jewish lives.¹⁰ Although first-person accounts are mediated in multiple ways, these excerpts provide us some insight into what it meant to live, and to live as a Jew, in this period. The entries are arranged chronologically. This allows for precisely the unexpected juxtapositions that this volume intends to provoke. The famous and the obscure, women and men, in epitaphs and private letters, ethical wills, cookbooks, and religious reflections, all reflect aspects of Jewish life in a period of great transition.

The literary genre we call autobiography is one of the signal innovations in this period among Jews across the spectrum.¹¹ The “Life Writing” section includes many accounts that chart the development of the self; an individual’s coming of age; his or her realization that the self is formed, in positive and negative ways, by the culture into which it was born; and revelations about the inner journey of the self to become the character who writes. In particular, the self-conscious use of the narrative of a life came into its own as a signature of Enlightenment writing and moved quickly from the European world into Jewish literature. While many Jews continued to write about their private lives in traditional modes, in letters, travel accounts, and rabbinic introductions, the maskilic (Jewish Enlightenment) autobiography in both Western and Eastern Europe became a virtually formulaic literary genre in which the writer depicted, often with humor and pathos, the journey from childhood into adult awareness as parallel to his awakening out of the world of backward and superstitious traditional Jewish life to one of reason and beauty. Haskalah writers targeted the one-room schoolhouse, its boorish teachers and exclusive emphasis on Talmud study, as a failed pedagogical system. They skewered the traditional system of arranged marriages at a young age as contrary to nature and lampooned the general level of ignorance, even as it served as backdrop for their emergence into the light of reason.

Just as the individual figured in writings about the self, so, too, did the genre of biography and admiring hagiography arise in this period. Thus, the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn’s acolyte wrote about his life, and Hasidic followers wrote about their masters. Ostensibly worlds apart, the two movements shared a literary genre that elevated the exemplary life of a leader.

Life writing as defined in this volume includes far more than formal narrations of a life in history. It includes every genre of writing that reveals something of the individual life: letters, diaries, and reminiscences of every kind. Jews plied every trade, from the expected (peddler, teacher, homemaker, midwife) to the surprising (Civil War soldier, pugilist, wine merchant). From wealthy merchant slaveholders to the starving and destitute, Jews around the world belonged to every class and expressed something of their lives in their written legacies. Learned philosophers poured out their souls in their personal correspondence while boxers recalled learning their art and women wrote about keeping house on the American frontier. Salon hostesses in Berlin and Vienna, brilliant conversationalists who broke social and class barriers by inviting people of every background into their homes, agonized over their tortured decision to convert out of Judaism. A superb rabbinic scholar erupted in incredulous fury when someone proposed a new match for him shortly after the death of his beloved wife. (Not to worry, dear reader: he recovered and had nine children with the next wife.) Each excerpt presented here provides us with a distant glimpse of the contours of a unique life, a Jewish life, at once greatly removed from our time, yet always human and somehow familiar.

Travel Writing

The proliferation of the press and travel by steamship (and toward the end of the period, railroad) brought descriptions of far-flung parts of the world and reports about Jews living in them from one corner of the globe to another. Accounts in this section were primarily written by people who traveled for the joy of expanding their horizons. They acted on dreams of exploring different civilizations and unfamiliar climates with exotic flora and fauna, accumulating rich experience and colorful impressions that they then recorded in their enduringly appealing works. Jews had always been highly mobile, traveling for commerce, for scholarship, for refuge, and for adventure. As the expense and danger of travel diminished, motives for traveling increased. New forms of pilgrimage arose not only to stone monuments but to human ones as well. People traveled to visit the great savants, even briefly, and bask in their aura. Some had excuses for their peripatetic lives. Rabbi Ḥayim Joseph David Azulai was an emissary, collecting and channeling funds for destitute Jews in his native Holy Land. This did not stop him from visiting zoos, palaces, and gardens as he traversed Europe, Africa, and the Middle East and recorded the details of each place and its people.¹² Samuel Romanelli left Italy, where he was born, and traveled through England and Germany, distinguishing himself as a man of letters in many languages. He is best known for his detailed account of his journey through Morocco. His language drips with condescension when he regards the primitive and exotic Jews of North Africa, but he preserved a priceless picture of their lifeways. Judith Cohen Montefiore traveled the world to advocate for Jews in trouble. She accompanied her husband, Moses, to Russia to protest the expulsion of Jews from Polish border areas. Her travel diary preserves a sense of what the Holy Land was like in the nineteenth century, as she sought to alleviate the neediness of its impoverished Jewish community.

Joseph Solomon Lutski was a leader of nineteenth-century Karaites, venerable Jewish sectarians. He petitioned the tsar to exempt the Karaites from the Cantonist decrees (1825) that required Jews to deliver young boys to be trained in the tsarist army. Most never returned home. His Epistle recounting his travels opens the panorama of the Russian Empire, with St. Petersburg and its fabulous palaces. His Hebrew account was published along with a Judeo-Tatar translation, the vernacular of his Crimean people.¹³

Christian Hebraists with interest and curiosity in antiquities and exploration contributed as well to the impetus for contact and research into the conditions of Jewish communities that had grown apart from the mainstream Jewish world. Among the former we may count the Samaritans (who figured prominently in the Christian Bible), Karaites, Khazars, as well as the Falasha of Ethiopia and the Jews of Kai Feng in China. Jews traveled for many reasons, and travel brought with it a sense of Jewish lifeways that differed radically around the world. In the farthest outposts, new permutations of Jewish identity remained to be discovered.

Folktales and Fiction

The “return to history” of Jews in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and engagement between Jews and their majority cultures offered new models for imaginative writing beyond those within their ancestral traditions. Belles lettres were cultivated by Jews in many cultural milieus in the past, but perhaps none with the ardor and all-encompassing passion of this period in which literature became one of the chief ways of entering (as well as countering) modernity. Far more than in other realms of cultural creativity, such as visual fine arts and music, Jewish writers tended to engage with openly Jewish characters, themes, and stories. Jews of the past wrote polemics and poetry, midrash and miracle tales, scholarship and manuals, but they had not yet written novels.

Scholars of literature differ over how and where to locate the origins of the novel, the literary genre most closely identified with European modernity itself. Some argue for unbroken continuity since antiquity, whereas others name Cervantes, Defoe, or Richardson as the first modern novelists. Early novels tended to mimic existing prose genres such as diaries, epistolary exchanges, or travel writing. Richardson’s Pamela (one candidate for the first “real” novel) was an epistolary novel, as is the first selection in this section. Isaac Euchel’s Igrot Meshulam (1790; Epistles of Meshulam) modeled after Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1721) embodies the search for new genres by writers in Hebrew. The first attempts by Jews tended to serve didactic or ideological ends. The “realistic” novel, the genre whose purpose was to transport the reader to an alternative yet familiar world for the sake of the imagination alone, emerged gradually as a mature field of Jewish creativity. By the later decades of the nineteenth century, Jewish authors had mastered the art of novel writing in European languages.

Writers faced questions not only concerning the best language to reach their readers but also on how to shape their story, how to portray their characters, and how to balance their message with the aesthetic value of their prose. Ruth Wisse has argued that while European novelists exalted the “man of action” who influenced his own and others’ destiny, Jewish writers could not easily “acclaim the man of action as their authentic Jewish hero.”¹⁴ They did not have the political or military experience that European Christians had, and so they ended up creating what she calls the comic hero, a compromise of sorts. Apropos of her remarks, it is notable that one of the most accomplished statesmen represented in the volume, both as political thinker and as writer, Benjamin Disraeli, often did choose “men of action” as his literary heroes.

Writing a novel requires an author to conjure an entire world with language. This was a daring venture in any language, but it was doubly so for Hebrew and the Jewish vernaculars, each for different reasons. As Robert Alter notes, “To write a novel in Hebrew . . . was to constitute a whole world in a language not actually spoken in the real-life equivalent of that world, yet treated by the writer as if it were really spoken.”¹⁵ The first Hebrew novels were written in biblical idiom, some even based on biblical characters, as authors searched for the noblest language in which to create, then reached back several millennia to find usable precedents. Decades later, as authors added rabbinic and other registers of Hebrew to the literary palette, Hebrew novels lost their stiff diction and became far more linguistically rich and supple. Still, novels written in the Hebrew of the nineteenth century would always remain the province of a very small and committed readership, mainly educated, secular, yet Hebraically literate young men.

In Eastern Europe, the lingua franca of the masses was Yiddish, and to create fine literature in that language presented its own challenges. For all its widespread use in the daily life of millions of Jews in Ashkenazic Europe, west and east, Yiddish was thought of by literary arbiters as a lowly jargon, a coarse pidgin dialect with no grammatical structure, no beauty, no literary past, and no future. Isaac Meyer Dik was one of the first enlightened writers to seize on Yiddish narrative as a way to rival and combat what he saw as twin problems: the ignorance of the masses and Hasidism. His stories have a direct, unadorned, and sometimes heavily didactic style, yet his descriptive power and sense of humor made them enormously popular. “The Panic, or The Town of Hérres” (hérres meaning “havoc” in Hebrew) describes the tumult when an “evil” decree prohibiting child marriages hits the town and the parents rush to avert it by marrying off all their children at once. Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh pioneered writing in Yiddish as a creative, exuberant, and lively literary language. His story “Dos kleyne menshele” (“The Little Man,” 1864–1865) introduced his literary alter ego Mendele Mokher Sforim (Mendele the Book Peddler). In a language dense with Jewish literary allusions, Abramovitsh (Mendele) conjured entire fictional worlds with vivid characters whose foibles evoked both sympathy and ridicule. Abramovitsh opened the way for others who wove the unpromising language into a literary fabric of unanticipated depth and richness.

Folktales reappeared in the nineteenth century, sometimes as sophisticated replicas of their naïve early selves, having been appropriated by savvy masters to play their nostalgia value for ideological ends. Writers and storytellers living in (or trying to capture the bygone flavor of) traditional societies used folktales as a means to reach the largest readership and to convey lofty messages with their stories.

Jewish writers used literature not only to reckon with a Jewish past many wished to jettison or reshape; they also addressed the multiple and entangled aspects of their new reality. Thus the figure of Jews serving in the military appears in the art and letters of this period. Reversing a centuries-long aversion on both sides, Jews entered the armed services of various nations and distinguished themselves in combat, learning to graft their military training onto their Jewish identities. Some writers and artists evoked the pride felt by Jewish families in the West for whom serving in the military signaled the most honorable place in society. Moritz Oppenheim’s now-iconic painting The Return of the Jewish Volunteer from the Wars of Liberation to His Family Still Living in Accordance with Old Customs (1833–1834) portrays a range of emotions from pride to ambivalence as various family members regard their young man just returned from the front. This one painting conveys many messages about the benefits of integration and emancipation as well as the inner conflicts they provoked. Although the painting itself is a positive portrayal, and some of the family members admire the act of sacrifice and patriotism of the son, the father looks up from the text he is studying on the Sabbath with consternation. Other artists evoked a darker side, particularly of the horrors of forced conscription of young children in tsarist Russia.¹⁶

Novels and short stories advanced a host of ideologies through their characters, from enlightenment to nationalisms in all their complexity, as well as socialism and communism. They explored the consequences of romantic love, class disparity, and the glories of the natural world as they invented a vocabulary for a reality that had seemed beyond their grasp only a short while earlier. Heinrich Heine, one of the most versatile and gifted stylists writing in German in the nineteenth century, left no subject untouched, although he frequently returned to Jewish themes.

Jewish women played important roles in the creation of Jewish literature in the vernacular. Eugénie Foa of Bordeaux, France, was one of the first Jewish French fiction writers, one of the first Jewish women to publish fiction in any language, and the first to support herself entirely from her writings. Foa’s novels featured strong protagonists, Jewish women who forged their own way, independent of fathers or husbands. Scion of a prominent Sephardic family, abolitionist, feminist, and champion of children’s rights, Foa lived the paradox of so many Jews of this period. She championed strong-willed women who refused to convert in her novels; she converted to Christianity later in her life.¹⁷ In England, Grace Aguilar wrote poems, stories, and histories, with special emphasis on the converso experience, Sephardic history, and Jewish women. In the United States, Emma Lazarus produced an astonishing bounty of literary works in multiple genres. Although she is remembered today primarily for her famous sonnet “The New Colossus,” inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, she and Aguilar can be considered among the most important nineteenth-century Sephardic writers in English.

Poetry

Poetry is the literary genre that most defies translation. If the elasticity of meaning is lost in translation of prose, how much more so for poetry, built from the marrow of words: their sounds, their cadences, their accents, their meters, lost in the journey to a different tongue. Allusion, intertext, the music of language—all but one plain meaning out of many are sloughed off by the necessity of translation. So why include poetry in this anthology if so much of it is anglicized from the original? Despite the caveats, poetry in this volume reaches places that prose cannot: from personal emotion—love, despair, joy, shame, rage; to the political—triumph and disaster of a people as well as calls to ideological arms. Masterful poetry conferred authority on its writers as tellers of deep truths and as seers of penetrating vision. Even in translation we can sense the stiffness of the first attempts to breathe new life into Hebrew, as well as its subsequent growth and maturation over time and place. Jewish poets throughout Europe and the Americas created in the languages of their native tongues. From folk-song lyrics to wedding riddles and synagogue hymns, poetry, even in translation, allows us access to voices and moments, particular and collective, that we would otherwise not hear.¹⁸ To Rachel Luzzatto Morpurgo’s plaintive cry—“I’ve looked to the north, to the south and east, and west; // in each a woman’s word is lighter than dust. // Years hence, will anyone really remember // her name, in city, province, any more // than a dead dog’s?”¹⁹—Emma Lazarus’s confident voice provides the ultimate rejoinder. It continues to echo in millions of ears even today.

Intellectual Culture

The emergence of new definitions of citizenship, of state, and of individual identities within them, along with ideas formulated by the leading European philosophers and statesmen of the age, presented a direct challenge to Jewish educated elites—writers, thinkers, teachers, and rabbis. Western European states offered inclusion into the polity if Jews changed enough about themselves to lose their distinctiveness. Governments would reverse centuries-long policies of discrimination that kept Jews from acculturating. In return, the states expected Jews to abandon their intense devotion to a distinctive Jewish culture, although they would be allowed to retain their religious identity. Russia fluctuated between promoting strategies aimed at pressuring the Jewish masses to convert to Orthodox Christianity and policies designed to turn them into enlightened subjects, however defined. They were to be educated alongside everyone else, to speak and write the language of the nations, and to pursue economic and professional activities that were deemed “productive.” Russian society itself was deeply polarized between aristocrats and peasants, with a scant middle class for Jews to integrate into.²⁰ Nevertheless, Jewish thinkers of all stripes saw this offer of redemption as a momentous turning point, away from a past filled with persecution and segregation, toward a new age of acceptance and inclusion. Most felt that this was an offer they could not refuse, and they were filled with a sense of urgency. They penned hundreds of passionate essays, each claiming to have the very formula that would change Jews sufficiently to enable them to participate in the new society while retaining aspects of their Jewish identities.

In their manifold works, European Jewish writers addressed several readerships. They wrote to convince themselves, to persuade their fellow Jews, and to prove to the gentile intellectuals that they were serious about transforming a people whose habits, religion, and culture had been shaped for millennia as a society apart. In contrast to the “drift and defection” pattern of disengagement, members of the literate vanguards were the first to articulate their struggle to define precisely which elements of Jewishness and Judaism were worth conserving, which needed transformation in order to remain vital, and which should be consigned to oblivion.²¹ Some proponents of change advocated for their vision with conscious deliberation and programmatic manifestos; others advocated resistance to all changes with equal awareness and staunch positions that nevertheless signaled that they were responding to a new set of circumstances. Jewish responses to the conditional welcome into equality in the legal, civic, and social spheres included total abandonment of Judaism (in the nineteenth century this still usually meant conversion to another religion), programs to enlighten the Jewish masses, movements of spiritual renewal, and the division of Western Judaism into different denominations. These positions mattered immensely to those who advocated for them; they articulated and disseminated their ideas with ferocious zeal. They hoped to reshape the very concepts and images of Jews and Judaism for all time. Many believed that they were the first to face such a radically reconfigured world, the first to take the measure of all of Jewish culture in all the preceding ages and judge it on the altar of the future unknown.

This volume aims to include an array of voices, the well known alongside the obscure, ranging across an eventful century and a half, across diverse contexts and political circumstances. German Jews were perhaps the most self-conscious and highly articulate in this period; although there was often a time lag of decades before their work was translated and taken up, their writings were hugely influential in distant parts of the Jewish world. Access to education and literacy—academic, scientific, rabbinic—was very limited for women. They are less present in this section of the volume than in others because in every one of the ideological movements, from Hasidic thought and rabbinic scholarship to religious denominationalism and pedagogical reform, men’s voices dominated the discourse.

Rabbinic and Religious Thought

Rabbinic scholarship stood at the apex of the hierarchy of values of traditional Jewish society. Despite the challenges to its status and the erosion of its authority beginning in the early modern period, it flourished with figures of coruscating brilliance in Central and Eastern Europe in the latter half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century. The period opened with a spectacular controversy when, in 1751, noted rabbi Jacob Emden accused Jonathan Eybeschütz, chief rabbi of Altona-Hamburg-Wandsbek, of secretly harboring heretical tendencies. Eybeschütz was then one of the most renowned rabbinic scholars of his time, author of brilliant Talmudic novellae. When Emden accused him of writing amulets that called upon the spiritual powers of Shabetai Tsevi, heresiarch and leader of a failed messianic movement a century earlier, their clash riveted the traditional Jewish world and provoked interest in the European Christian press as well. Pressured to defend his honor, Eybeschütz reproduced an affidavit from the burial society of Metz attesting to the efficacy of his amulets in reducing the number of Jewish women who died in childbirth.

Other rabbinic figures in this volume, such as Elijah, Gaon of Vilna; Jacob Ettlinger in Altona; and Akiva Eger of Posen, commanded the respect of learned Jews across Europe for their mastery of the entire Jewish corpus and their pathbreaking scholarly interventions. They are represented in this volume not by the highly technical works of rabbinic scholarship for which they are best known but by works that expand our understanding of these eminent religious leaders. Far from being rigid and monolithic legalists, as their opponents caricatured them, the rabbis themselves presented multifaceted profiles to their publics. Rabbinic scholarship remained a creative magnet for some of the best minds in the traditional Jewish world. This vitality enables us to better contextualize the ferocity of the polemics in this era. Many of the most important movements envisioned an alternative to the rabbinate as Jewish leadership and to rabbinic scholarship as the apex of valued knowledge.

Hasidism

Hasidism, with its focus on pietism and spirituality, is one among the genuinely new forms of Jewish identity to develop in the period covered by this volume. It burgeoned in Eastern Europe into a popular mass movement that offered alternative leadership models, new social organization, and a hierarchy of spiritual ideals different from rabbinic values.²² Earlier scholarly assessments of the Hasidic movement as appealing to semiliterate Jewish masses and led by leaders lacking scholarly bona fides have now been revised by scholars. Israel ben Eliezer (1700–1760), known as the Ba‘al Shem Tov (often known by the Hebrew acronym Besht) considered the founder of the movement, left few writings but was on the community payroll as a scholar, and many of his early adherents were rabbinic scholars as well.²³ Thus, the movement was deeply rooted in the communities and included the elite from the outset.

Hasidism’s rapid spread and the deep roots it struck throughout the nineteenth century cannot be pinned down to one factor.²⁴ By the late eighteenth century, Poland was a polity in crisis, and the Jewish communal structure that depended on its kings and magnates either folded completely, as did the supraregional organization known as the Council of Four Lands in 1764, or lost the respect of the people as did the magnate-appointed rabbis. Many Jews, across classes and in every corner of Eastern Europe, were attracted to the Hasidic emphasis on joy in the worship of God and the power of every Jew to create a relationship with the divine creator. Eventually, Hasidism built its own institutions, with dozens of spiritual leaders known as tsadikim or admorim. Each one built a center, known as a court, that attracted male adherents to celebrate the holidays together. Each Hasidic court emphasized a slightly different spiritual approach in prayer, thought, and song. Collectively, Hasidic thinkers produced a ramified homiletic literature that reflected their individual interpretation of Hasidic ideas and integrated and popularized elements of Jewish mystical teachings.

As the movement grew in popularity, it was attacked from many sides. Adherents of Haskalah saw it as a regression from rationalism as well as from the progress Jews were making toward integration into the civic sphere. Rabbinic opponents (beginning with the ban of Elijah ben Solomon, Gaon of Vilna, in 1772) condemned it as a deviation from the ideal of Torah study as the highest expression of Jewish values. Given that the Jewish population in Poland on the eve of the partition (in the 1760s, approximately three-quarters of a million) was the largest population of Jews in the world at the time, its religious and cultural character was highly consequential. Such numbers, coupled with high concentrations of Jews in large cities and many villages, shaped the posture of East European Jewry as a powerful and confident minority.²⁵ At a time when Enlightenment ideals became the yardstick of human progress in the West, the appearance and success of a Jewish movement that looked inward to Jewish tradition for its inspiration came as a surprise to its contemporaries. It remains something of a challenge for historians to the present day.²⁶

The strength of Hasidism sparked an outpouring of writing critical of the movement. From the hilariously satirical Revealer of Secrets by the maskil Joseph Perl, to the bitter reminiscences of an ex-Hasid such as Abraham Ber Gottlober, to the denunciations of Hasidism as a suspicious cult by rabbinic leaders beginning with Elijah, Gaon of Vilna, Hasidism came under attack from many quarters. It stimulated countermovements within rabbinic circles.²⁷ That despite these attacks it remained a powerful magnet for generations of Jews throughout Eastern Europe testified to its power as a meaningful response to the challenges of modernization.

In the West, and particularly among German-speaking Jews, in the nineteenth century, Jewish rituals, synagogue spaces, and the prayer service itself came under increasing scrutiny in light of the call for modernization. A search for the “essence of Judaism” prompted an outpouring of religious writings and a spectrum of responses that left Western Ashkenazic Jewry religiously divided along rigid lines: Reform or Liberal, Positive Historical (closely aligned with American Conservative), Neo-Orthodox, and Ultra-Orthodox were just some of the movements that crystallized the varied positions. In addition, many Jews belonged to no formal denomination. In rural areas, filial pietism dominated, whereas in many urban areas some Jews chose the path of radical assimilation.

Unlike these divisions in the West, Jewish modernization in the Ottoman Empire followed a different and distinctive trajectory.²⁸ Just as Muslim societies, even as they modernized, did not radically reconfigure Islam, Jews in the Muslim world adapted in ways that were far less anticlerical.²⁹ Jews who drifted from the traditional ways did not seek to establish formal denominations. The community remained on the surface religiously cohesive. Many Sephardic rabbinic thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw the Torah as sufficiently capacious to incorporate features of modern life.

The effect of Westernization, coupled with new avenues for professional advancement, changed the face of Jewish culture, generally beginning with the highest socioeconomic classes. Study of religious texts and the prestige of the rabbinate as a career declined. With some exceptions, such as the Baghdad yeshiva Bet Zilkha, founded in 1840 by a towering figure in nineteenth-century Iraqi Jewry, Abdullah Somekh, the cultural focus of the communities in the Islamic orbit shifted. Paradoxically, efforts to revive and sustain Torah study by the late nineteenth century often stemmed from European rabbis traveling east whose published works were circulating more broadly. During this period of flourishing religious productivity, the Karaite community in Crimea continued to produce significant work as well. Its thinkers authored some of the last great compilations of Karaite law, commentary, and theology as well as the last major metanarrative of Karaite history.³⁰

Haskalah and Pedagogy

Until the latter half of the eighteenth century, religious skepticism and calls for reform of various aspects of Jewish life remained individual expressions. They did not coalesce into movements that would overturn the structure of Jewish life and its hierarchy of values. When such movements began to take shape, they developed against an efflorescence of traditional rabbinic culture determined to hold the forces of innovation at bay.

One of the first programmatic statements came from the pen of Naphtali Herts Wessely. Reacting to the Toleranzpatent issued by the “enlightened despot” Joseph II of Austria, Wessely issued an epistle, Divre shalom v’emet (Words of Peace and Truth, 1782), calling upon Jews to abandon the deadened rabbinic culture with its talmudo-centrism and to reorient Jewish culture toward the full range of Hebraic knowledge as well as other languages, and the natural and exact sciences. He urged a complete change of attitude toward non-Jews. Wessely was a practicing Jew whose significance lay in his call to reimagine Ashkenazi Jewish society and culture from the top down. His epistle was a gauntlet thrown down to traditional rabbinic authority and was widely seen as the text that crystallized the aims of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) movement.

The Haskalah’s influential embodiment and philosophical icon was Moses Mendelssohn. An accomplished philosopher celebrated as the “Socrates of Berlin,” Mendelssohn addressed many conundrums of his time while adhering to and defending observant Judaism. Although he hoped to provide the intellectual infrastructure for Judaism in an enlightened society, and he clearly approved of the founding of the Jüdische Freischule (a free Jewish school in the maskilic spirit) in 1778, he did not establish schools or institutions to realize these goals.

The first official maskilic circle and the first printed journal for maskilim were founded by Isaac Euchel in Königsberg. Over the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Haskalah ideals and pedagogy slowly expanded and provided intellectual underpinnings for further movements of Jewish modernization.³¹ In formerly Polish (then Austrian) Galicia, in cities such as Brody, Tarnopol, and Lemberg (present-day Lviv), maskilic culture saw the traditionalist Hasidic movement as the foremost obstacle to Jewish modernization. In Russia, maskilic ideals, formulated in a programmatic essay by Isaac Ber Levinzon (1828), took root first in cities such as Odessa and Vilna. Yet the illiberalism of the society itself, from the tsar down, made it far more difficult for even for the most committed enlighteners to effect meaningful change. While the scholarly circles around the Gaon of Vilna and his disciples embraced a rabbinic rationalism and openness to the sciences as bold as those of any enlightened figures, Jews in Eastern Europe did not turn to the larger culture en masse until the late nineteenth century.³²

The first maskilim ransacked both Jewish and European tradition to find new and better platforms for creating and transmitting the Jewish cultural ideal they conceived. From translations of sacred Jewish texts to autobiographies and “dialogues of the dead,” Jews enlisted diverse literary genres to call for social, educational, and economic change. By the late nineteenth century, they had stimulated a profound recasting of Jewish literary culture in Hebrew and in Yiddish.

Questions of language were always political and deeply intertwined with those of Jewish education. A basic component of the traditional Jewish educational system (mainly for boys) had been the translation of the Bible into a stylized form of the vernacular—Yiddish-taytsh, Ladino, and Sharkh (Judeo-Arabic). In the Islamic world, Western Jewish, as well as non-Jewish, imperial and colonial cultural influences broadened educational choices. European Jewish schools, Christian missionary schools, and Russian and Ottoman state schools all competed with traditional Jewish schools in the nineteenth century. The modernization of curricula in Western-influenced schools was essential to the realization of maskilic goals.

Scholarship and Science

As more academic institutions opened their doors to Jews, scientific method and professions in the social and natural sciences and medicine became more accessible to Jews. The first efforts in the sciences in this period were often works of translation by individuals hoping to share their knowledge with Jews who could not directly learn about the latest advances in hygiene, medicine, and nutrition. With the advance of the nineteenth century, medicine (alongside the law) became one of the more popular professional choices for educated Jews, who soon began to contribute to myriad aspects of medical and scientific fields as well as to the social sciences. From Joseph Vita Castelli’s letter to a physician friend describing the symptoms of an acute illness to Ignác Goldziher’s foundational work on Islamic history and society, the scholarly and scientific ethos permeated Jewish intellectual life in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and resulted in contributions obscure and renowned. The foundations of the astonishing breakthroughs of Jews in the sciences in the twentieth century were laid in this period.

Perhaps as significant as Jewish scholars’ contributions to their respective fields was their application of scientific methods to their own culture and history. The advent of critical historical thinking about the Jewish past and Jewish texts constituted a monumental break from traditional modes. With rare exceptions, even modern Jews had accepted the narratives and materials of their past uncritically. Neither the German term Wissenschaft nor its incomplete English translation, “science,” do adequate justice to the breadth, rigor, dedication, and manifold materials that this term embraced. “More than footnotes, variant readings and bibliographies,” writes historian Ismar Schorsch, “At the core of modern Jewish scholarship there is a new way of thinking about Judaism. . . . A religious tradition indifferent to the category of time in comprehending itself . . . was suddenly confronted with a mode of cognition that rested on contextual interpretation.”³³ The establishment in Berlin, in 1819, of a society to study the materials of Jewish history set off a search for sources and revision of narratives whose repercussions remain with us until this day. On the occasion of the first anniversary of this society, Eduard Gans remarked, “No revolution is more difficult than the overturning and recasting of a state of mind.”³⁴

The university-trained Jewish men (and they were virtually all men), rejected for employment by the very institutions that nurtured them, brought their academic training to the study of Judaism. They hoped to wrest the “curatorship” of Jewish culture from the hands of its Christian antagonists and its traditional rabbinic Jewish guardians.³⁵ Attempting to fit the materials of the Jewish past into the European academic format was no easy task. It took decades to turn these studies into a new Jewish narrative that would appeal to a broad readership. Not until Heinrich Graetz produced his engrossing and dramatic multivolume history of the Jews, subsequently translated into many languages, did the products of the academic world become popular among Jews around the globe in the nineteenth century.³⁶

Over the course of the nineteenth century, these ideas and ideals radiated out toward other circles of Jewish intellectuals with differences specific to their context. “Études juives” circles in France, for example, saw themselves in a different light than the German Jewish scholars. A notable development was the adoption of scholarly approaches within more traditional circles. Because these practitioners saw themselves as continuing traditions of Jewish scholarship rather than as products of a rupture, they were less apt to distance themselves from more traditional Jewish values. Their contributions in Hebrew came to be known collectively as Ḥokhmat Yisrael.

Political Life and Thought

During the period 1750–1880, the political status of Jews changed dramatically from England and its colonies in the West to Jews of the Ottoman East and points beyond.³⁷ At the beginning of this period, most Jews were organized in self-governing units within the larger polity. While they never had full political autonomy and were always subject to local as well as distant political powers, they functioned as many smaller units tended to in the early modern period: running their own affairs, employing their own language, and educating their children while paying taxes and homage to the princes, dukes, bishops, kings, and emperors who granted them the right to dwell and pursue commerce in their domains. This internal political life should be seen within the framework of variable local political practices of the early modern period that only later came to be subsumed under nation-states.³⁸ Local Jewish political governance and its regulation abounded.

Jews expressed fealty to their political overlords. In 1780, Rabbi Ezekiel Landau of Prague delivered a eulogy for Empress Maria Theresa. Remembered for her cruel banishment of Bohemian Jews from her domains in 1745, she seems an unlikely candidate for such a demonstration of grief and loyalty. The text testifies to the status and meaning of the Jews as subjects in the Habsburg Empire. Over the course of the nineteenth century, this began to change. Local politics gave way to stronger centralizing nation-states that granted citizenship while insisting on the right to create a unified nationality, inclusive of cultural and educational dimensions. An intense debate ensued in the European sphere regarding the place of Christianity within the new national identities. If it remained central, then Jews would continue to remain unequal. In eloquent pleas to the governing bodies of nation-states, Jews argued that nation-states must extend equal rights under the law to all citizens regardless of religion in order to be faithful to their own stated ideals.

Jews debated all sides of the major political issues of their day. Some welcomed the idea of equality, whereas others feared the loss of their religious-institutional distinctiveness. Some defended and others repudiated the notion of private property and capital. Some defended and others repudiated the institution of slavery. Jewish women advocated for gender equality long before any nation was ready to entertain it. In the mid-nineteenth century, the first Jew elected to the U.S. Congress, Lewis Charles Levin, ran on a platform of temperance, nativism, and anti-Catholicism, and Benjamin Disraeli served in the British Parliament. Jews formed transnational societies, such as Alliance Israélite Universelle, to aid Jews in trouble and laid the first foundations for Zionist thinking when antisemitism grew to threaten the dream of political equality.

Much of the political discourse by and about Jews was disseminated via the press. While this volume has generally privileged the message over the medium, journalism is an exception. Its ubiquitous growth and presence, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe (later in the Ottoman Empire), profoundly shaped political debates and created a new sense of a Jewish public sphere.³⁹

Journalism

From the second half of the eighteenth century, journalism in all forms became the significant medium for the creation of an engaged public, the instrument for debating and shaping local politics and consolidating middle-class identity. This period marks the explosive rise of Jewish newspapers, dailies and weeklies, yearbooks and almanacs, feuilletons and other time-bound printed media throughout the Western world. Newspapers and journals of the nineteenth century disseminated far more than news and advertisements. They kept Jews aware of events affecting other Jews around the world, creating a new vehicle for their collective identity as Jews and as members of a far-flung community.

To cite one example, Shukr Kuhayl II, a messianic pretender, arose in Tan’im, Yemen, in 1868; he was arrested in 1871 by the Ottomans. Primary texts of the movement were published while it was at its apogee, including one set of letters in Kraków. What did the messiah of Yemen have to do with the Jews of Kraków? The letters were likely to have been published by a Galician maskil as a means of satirizing local Jews’ gullibility in following wonder workers.⁴⁰ They testify to the power of the press to link Jews from far-flung regions.

As party organs and cultural platforms, periodicals become the forum of choice for a new intelligentsia. Their choices of language, of register, and of audience were politically consequential. Journals served as springboards for writing by Jews not just of opinion and politics but also of belles lettres in Hebrew, in the Jewish vernaculars, and in many European languages. Although political borders in this period shifted frequently, journals employed a common language to unite politically dispersed Jews.

The first European Jewish periodicals appeared haltingly in the eighteenth century (earlier attempts were extremely short lived). With the emergence of the German Haskalah and its subscriber base, however, Jewish journals such as Ha-me’asef and Shulamith became more sustainable. The former was published in Hebrew, with the goal of fostering its use as a literary language among German Jews.

Through the first half of the nineteenth century, German-speaking Jewry remained at the forefront of periodical literature. The medium gradually expanded into the Austro-Hungarian Empire, at first with particular emphasis on the literature and criticism that were hallmarks of Haskalah.⁴¹ By the 1840s, Jews were printing journals and newspapers in Hebrew, Yiddish, and German, as well as in Hungarian, French, Ladino, Italian, Polish, Spanish, and, of course, English.

As soon as the number of Jews in the United States reached a critical mass of potential readers, the Jewish press emerged to educate, entertain, and exhort them. Isaac Leeser, ḥazan of Congregation Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia, founded the first successful Jewish paper, The Occident (1843), a monthly. Within a few years, its success spurred several other journals. In 1854, in Cincinnati, Reform rabbinic leader Isaac Mayer Wise established the long-lived and lively The Israelite. American Jewish papers tended to focus on local news and events, and came to be printed not only in English but also in German, Yiddish, Russian, and Ladino, following the needs of each wave of immigrants and increasing in circulation accordingly. Fearful that criticism would reflect poorly on the Jews who struggled to make their place in a new environment, many of the papers presented a relentlessly positive view of their communities.

In 1823, one of the first European Jewish newspapers, Dostrzegacz Nadwiślański (Observer over the Vistula), appeared in Polish, containing articles in German in Hebrew letters and in Polish in parallel columns. It was short lived, possibly because Jews who read and spoke Yiddish had difficulty relating to the Germanized Yiddish, and they may not have been able to follow the Polish-language news. Izraelita, founded in Warsaw in 1866, was the first Jewish newspaper printed in Poland to succeed over several decades. It originally championed the ideal of polonization of Jews; later it adopted a more Zionist posture.⁴² A Hebrew-language journal founded by Eliezer Silverman, Hamagid, appeared in Lyck in East Prussia in 1856. Its formula of moderate enlightenment and conservative religious stance granted it longevity through the end of the nineteenth century.

In Russia, the reign of Tsar Alexander II (1855–1881) ushered in an era of great reforms. The serfs were liberated, and the economy began a transformation from rural and agrarian to urban and industrial. Along with these momentous changes, such a stark contrast to the preceding reign of Nicholas I, hope sprung that Russia had finally started on a path of political and social liberalism. Against this background, the need to prepare Jews for the new era stimulated a proliferation of opinions and journals. Five newspapers were founded in the 1860s and 1870s in Odessa alone.

One of the great entrepreneurs of Jewish journalism in the later nineteenth century was Alexander Zederbaum (1816–1893), who championed Russian rather than German as the language of modernization. Adopting the railroad as a symbol of modernization, he urged Jews not to miss the train of modernity. During the 1863 Polish insurrection against Russia, Zederbaum’s newspapers supported the tsar against the Polish rebels, unlike the Polish Jewish papers that supported the Poles. Zederbaum founded Ha-melits (1860–1905), one of the most successful journals, attuned to all aspects of interest for its readers rather than advancing one didactic agenda. To succeed, Zederbaum had to navigate many obstacles. His statement of purpose declared that he hoped to carve a path between Jewish interests and those of the Russian government. He published imperial decrees relating to Jews and news of Jews advancing in the public sphere. By reverse token, his papers carried news affecting Jews around the world. He had to tread carefully between Russophiles who disdained the paper as too Jewish and traditionalists who rejected its advocacy of modernization. Zederbaum also founded and edited a Yiddish paper, Kol mevasser, in whose pages he introduced “Sholem Aleichem” to readers. Many other luminaries of Jewish life and letters appeared in its pages.

By eschewing the stilted German in Hebrew letters for a more colloquial Yiddish, the paper attracted broad readership from all classes and was particularly noted for attracting women as readers in large numbers. Its pages carried the debates that raged in Jewish society, from questions about migration, about science, and literature to the critical social issues of the day. Indeed, the paper encountered fierce resistance to its reports of social problems, for Jews feared oppressive reaction from the Russian government and people if problems such as poverty and internal discord were aired. The 1881 assassination of Alexander II, followed by pogroms and mass emigration to the United States, signaled the extinction of hope for liberalization of Russian society and a retreat from the elusive cultural and national acceptance that many Jews had worked so hard to achieve. Despite this dark turn, the extraordinary liveliness of the intellectual exchanges and cultural contributions of the journalistic press made it one of the signal arenas of nineteenth-century Jewish creativity.

Visual and Material Culture

Material Culture

Borrowed from the fields of anthropology and ethnography, the term material culture signifies objects and built physical environments that tell us how people navigated, related to, or shaped their material world. Many types of objects—furnishings and clothing, jewels and medals, wares crafted by Jews or specifically for use by Jews—are included in this section. “In portraying patterns of life in the modern period, changes in the ways Jews lived privately and publicly, their dress, manners, social customs and behavior, physical possessions and space and their attitudes to them, need to be integrated. For wherever Jews lived they possessed objects, and . . . those from the modern period are many, bearing the stamp of a Jew’s identity, relationship to the outside world, and sense of self.”⁴³

There are precious few material objects shaped by human hands that do not convey the character of the individual creator as well as that of the larger society and culture in which it was made. A humble spoon, a chair, an item of clothing—each can be made of many materials, in so many patterns and shapes. As universal as they might appear to be, each exemplar is unique in the age before mass production. In addition to many single objects, we have tried to convey a sense of the material surroundings of Jewish spaces. When objects or environments proved impossible to include in this volume, we have relied on the “next best thing.” An inventory of household goods from Jews in colonial America, although technically a text, gives a sense of the material possessions considered significant in their time and place. The delicate watercolor of Fanny Hensel’s music room likewise allows us to perceive the furnishings and sensibility of the physical space in which her music composition and private rehearsals took place.

Ritual objects constitute one of the enduring platforms for Jewish artistic creativity and patronage through the ages. Each piece manifests its creator’s responsibility to the purpose of the object and its prescribed forms, alongside the desire to transcend its physical limitations and create an artifact of surpassing meaning. Ritual objects have one of the longest trails in Jewish art history. Indeed, in the not-too-recent past the very term Jewish art would conjure silver Kiddush cups and Havdalah spice boxes, Seder plates and illuminated manuscript Haggadahs. Artisans worked from the most precious to the most base of materials, from refined gold and silver to wood and paper. They created ritually necessary items, such as menorahs, as well as decorative objects, such as mizraḥ and shiviti signs, each invested with individual beauty, yet reflecting the larger culture of the time. Mizraḥ (east) designated the wall in the house that faced east, whereas shiviti was the starting word of the verse “I place God before me always” (Psalm 16:8). Neither of these signs was ritually obligatory in any way. They migrated from synagogue walls, where they served to concentrate worshipers’ attention, to broadsheet pages, to home decorations, marking spaces as Jewish abodes.

It is worth pausing to note that depending on Jewish political status in a given time and place, the craftsmen and artisans may or may not have been Jews. In many Muslim lands in the nineteenth century, metalworkers were Jews because Muslims were forbidden to engage in the craft. In Poland, the Czech lands, and later Russia, Jews often organized themselves into craft guilds that played an important social and economic role. In Western Europe, through the first part of the nineteenth century, Jews were excluded from guilds and often commissioned Christians to create ritual pieces in silver to their specifications. In colonial America, by contrast, Jews were free to choose to work in silver, as Myer Myers’s works attest. Beyond political status, each work exemplifies the interplay between local artistic traditions, Jewish customs and requirements, the economic status of the parties, and of course individual artistic imaginations and abilities.⁴⁴ Many items in this section were used and beloved even by Jews whose attachment to religious tradition was marginal at best. The ritual objects can be divided into two types. The first category contains objects that were used to mark life-cycle events in a Jewish key.

For every stage of life from birth to death, for every life-cycle ritual, the embellished artifacts speak to the values their makers held dear. Jews all over the world sought every protection for children yet to be born and for newborns by invoking angelic names on amulets and ordering evil spirits, often embodied in the name Lilith, to stay away. Some amulets designated a specific child to be the beneficiary of special protection. Circumcision was practiced to represent the bond between God and male Jews since Abraham. Special seats, often beautifully decorated, were set aside at circumcision ceremonies for the invisible presence of Elijah. Special implements to care for the infant and adornments were created to commemorate the event. In Ashkenazic communities, mothers would embroider a cloth sash (wimple) with the new baby boy’s name and blessings for the future. When he was old enough to attend synagogue, he ceremonially brought the sash to serve as a Torah binder. The sermon for the bar mitzvah child coming of age cannot be captured by an object, but as photography grew in popularity, pictures of the bar mitzvah boy marked this rite of passage.

Marriages were celebrated with greater embellishment than any other life-cycle ritual. During his sojourn in Tangier, Morocco, the French painter Eugène Delacroix was moved by the way a Jewish mother lovingly prepared her daughter for marriage. His painting Saada, the Wife of Abraham Ben-Chimol and Préciada, One of Their Daughters (1832) immortalized the moment and captures a larger sense of the interior space as background for the rich life that unfolded within it. Delacroix’s visit to Tangier and his friendship with the Jews of the city gained him entry to a Jewish wedding that made a deep impression on him; he made a painting of it almost a decade later.⁴⁵ A huppah (wedding canopy) represented the home that the newlyweds would build, as did the wedding sofa. The ketubah (marriage contract) emerged as a locus for artistic embellishment all over the Jewish world. Some were written on parchment with exquisite decoration and illustrations that referred to the bride and groom’s families.

The end of life’s journey, too, was invested with dignified ritual. Jewish shrouds and coffins were to be plain, as the soul journeyed into a world where wealth and material matters fell away. But the “holy society,” members of the community who attended to the dead and prepared them for burial, marked their work with lasting images. Even the implements they used to prepare the dead were specially marked. Finally, while poor and rural Jews could not always afford lasting markers, many Jews were able to set carved and engraved headstones that served as durable memorials to the departed. These became and remained platforms for artistic creativity, with traditional signs indicating priestly or Levite birth or the person’s occupation.

The second category of ritual objects consists of those whose primary purpose was to carry out religious ritual related to the Jewish calendar, governed by a long tradition of hidur mitsvah, carrying out a religious ritual in the most beautiful manner. These objects spanned the gamut from humble to exquisite. They were used on Sabbath and holidays, some designed for private domestic use and others intended for the synagogue.

As has been practiced through the ages, every married woman blessed the Sabbath on special candlesticks or hanging lamps, the Sabbath day sanctified by a blessing over wine and special challah loaves presented on platters. The New Year included honey dishes to symbolize sweetness and the blowing of the shofar (ram’s horn) in the synagogue. Its plaintive notes would arouse the congregation to introspection and penitence. The sukkah (tabernacle) brought Jews outdoors into temporary shelters that reminded them of the transience of the material structures in their lives, of their desert sojourn when clouds and fire were their only protection. Jews built architecturally innovative sukkahs and decorated them to be as inviting as possible. Hanukkah brought lamps in many different materials and an astonishing profusion of decorative styles. The lamps were supposed to be seen by the public as reminders of the miracle of light against the forces of darkness. The daily prayer book, special prayer books for holidays, along with the Scroll of Esther and various accoutrements for Purim provided additional opportunities for lively illustration. Passover was the high point of the ceremonial year, and the Haggadah, its text the foundation story of the Jewish people, the story of the exodus from Egypt, was one of the most beloved, adapted, commented-on, and decorated Jewish books. Over the centuries its style and illustration reflected the Jewish historical experience.⁴⁶ The Seder plate, matzo covers, pitcher and basin for ceremonial washing of hands—indeed, every aspect of the Seder—was fair game for artistic embellishment.

The adornments inside synagogues, from the Torah vessels to charity boxes, the Ark and its hangings, the gates and the walls, all provided opportunities for Jews to affirm, “This is my God and I will beautify Him” (Exodus 15:2). Because they protect and adorn the most sacred object in Jewish religious life, the Torah scroll, Jews created a rich array of accoutrements in the finest materials and craftsmanship to adorn the Torah.⁴⁷ The Jewish calendar itself merited an embellished form of material representation.⁴⁸ Jews even had special subcalendars, such as the Omer calendar, to count the days from the exodus from slavery to the epiphany at Sinai. In the period covered by this volume, many of the objects transitioned from their original and intended use to become mementos of the past. Even then, they continued to exert their power as objects of inherent dignity. They were witnesses to, if not participants in, a living culture.

Special Spaces: Salons

The term salon originated in France and refers to an unofficial, often domestic space that is devoted to crossing social boundaries in order to foster great conversation, appreciation of the arts, and social mingling across classes. It is difficult to capture its ephemeral spirit in any material medium for its central legacy is the very fact of its existence and its spirit of a safe yet adventurous space.⁴⁹ By allowing people who were often doubly marginalized in this society, as women and as Jews, to shine by virtue of their social skills, these private spaces came to exert powerful influence on the imagination of their time. Salons fostered a new class of social leaders, a space for ideas and art appreciation to grow without fear of political reprisals. In a society still constrained by social and legal boundaries, salons and their hosts created a miniature world in which social taboos were temporarily cast off and members of different religious, artistic, and professional groups could mingle for the joy of their mutual company. The interiors and objects from these homes reflected a rarified setting of the luxury items and furnishings of the wealthiest Jews. Yet their purpose went far beyond a conspicuous display of consumption. These Jews used their homes to draw in a world that had excluded them for centuries, to host the political nobility in a style to which they were accustomed, and to announce that Jews had triumphed over centuries of discrimination in a society that still regarded them warily.

When in 1795 the wealthy Berlin merchant Isaac Daniel Itzig commissioned a porcelain teacup and saucer bearing his portrait and that of his palatial residence, he accomplished several goals with one object. He perpetuated his likeness, he showed off his princely residence as a Jew who had “arrived” in Berlin, and he projected a quasi-royal signal of power and wealth to those who frequented his household. Portraiture became a significant medium to signal social status, and Jewish subjects commissioned portraits from prominent artists. They presented themselves wearing special clothes and holding particular objects with coded significance in settings of their choosing, thus projecting themselves within a material environment that distilled their sense of their status in the social world. Portraits announced to the world that their subjects were comfortable with who they were, that they had arrived into the bourgeois life and were claiming their place in that world. Richard Brilliant noted the contrast between the ubiquitous lack of overtly Jewish identity in the paintings of American Jews and the strong ties to Jewishness that we know most of the subjects affirmed.⁵⁰ The seeming contradiction resolves when we consider that these portraits were almost always hung in the semiprivate quarters of a family home. Anyone who entered, coreligionist or not, knew the Jewish identity of the family. The painting did not need to proclaim the obvious. Instead, portraits served as affirmations of class and of belonging to the larger society even while their commitment to Jewish identity was strong.⁵¹

Not all portraits of Jews projected high status. Some “portraits” convey the opposite impression. The lithograph of Jewish washerwomen from Izmir (1830) portrays their poverty and drudgery as it conveys their inner dignity, and Delacroix’s painting of his Jewish translator’s wife, Saada, expresses the artist’s orientalist perspective while providing a sense of the circumstances of a North African Jewish woman in her home.

Synagogue Architecture

Through this period, the built environment inhabited by Jews—neighborhoods, individual dwellings, and buildings used for communal social and welfare purposes—was created in the style of the surrounding environment. “Jewish architecture” is a more difficult category to define, for as a professional trade architecture was not practiced by Jews until later in this period. Yet, all over the world, Jews commissioned, patronized, planned, and built structures for their use, sometimes with the specific intention of making them identifiable as Jewish structures. This is obviously true for buildings intended for religious use such as synagogues, mikva’ot (ritual baths), or mausoleums. Our section includes religious buildings, but it goes well beyond them.

Just as the changing interest in ritual objects that had been in continuous use among Jews was spurred in part by the European fascination with antiquities and the archeological discoveries in the Middle East, so, too, interest in a “Jewish” architectural history was sparked in the nineteenth century in the West in part by archeology fever. The discovery of remains of synagogues from the Byzantine period in Israel and the architectural models of the Jerusalem Temple piqued the interest of Jews and non-Jews alike in questioning the character of synagogue architecture. If Jews would be free to build the best structure they could afford, what would it, what should it, look like? Synagogues built in Europe in the age of Emancipation had somewhat contradictory goals. On the one hand, they were to articulate a proud Jewishness, which by definition meant a distinctive style. On the other hand, they wanted to announce that they were deeply embedded in the European cityscape.

One distinctive type of building associated with Jewish culture in the earlier part of the period covered in this volume is the wooden synagogue of Poland. Very few survived the Nazi period, but these buildings, dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, bespeak a confident relationship of Jews within their environment.⁵² The synagogues were intended to stand out from surrounding buildings both by their height and by their design. They were often located on the outskirts of the original settlement, close to the water. Their exuberant interior decoration testifies to an important and original form of folk art.

Why wood? Laws made it difficult for Jews in that period to obtain permission for masonry synagogue structures, and timber abounded in the rich forests of Poland and Lithuania. Polish synagogues were largely built and decorated by Jewish craftsmen. Prayer spaces for women in the synagogue evolved over time, from small slits in the wall to elaborate galleries with latticed woodwork and separate entrances, possibly indicating an increased presence of women in the synagogues in this period. The large wooden synagogues often functioned as study halls as well as places of worship.⁵³

As Jews settled in Western Europe and the Americas, they built synagogues that reflected the spirit of houses of worship of their time and place while also distinguishing the buildings with emblems denoting its Jewish character.⁵⁴ (Surprisingly, Stars of David came very late as synagogue adornments.) The second synagogue built in colonial America was the Touro Synagogue of Newport (1763). Its Christian architect designed other noted buildings in Newport, Cambridge, and Boston. Among its many features, the Touro Synagogue has a “secret” trapdoor in the floor of the reading platform, a feature of many colonial American buildings that may have resonated with a Sephardic congregation descended from Iberian refugees. Many of the most elegant synagogue buildings had their main entrances behind gates or facing away from the street.

Synagogues in the Western world went through several stylistic phases, with some elements overlapping or mingling in each. Greco-Roman classicism was replaced by references to Egyptian antiquity; from the mid-nineteenth century there was a pronounced turn to orientalism. The “Moorish” style for synagogues, influenced by the Alhambra and by fantasy, took hold particularly powerfully in Central European lands.⁵⁵ It also became popular in the United States and in England and France where Jews’ embrace of a “Moorish” style reinforced the argument that they did not truly belong in Europe. This perspective held many positive as well as negative connotations; however, Jews of the time used these tropes to convey their pride in their unique history.⁵⁶

By the early nineteenth century, Jews in large urban areas of Western Europe and the United States commissioned synagogues from the most prominent architects of their time. While the architects of Western synagogues were generally non-Jews in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Jewish architects were more common in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Some of the same principles governing Jewish buildings for daily life were echoed in cemeteries. Jews not only designed and decorated gravestones; wealthier individuals and families also constructed monuments and mausoleums that resembled small buildings and expressed their Jewish identity. Jewish grave sites were adorned with Stars of David, candelabra, tablets of the Law, and similar icons identifying the dead as Jews.⁵⁷

Any discussion of built environment must include the central role that Jewish entrepreneurs and industrialists had in building the modern cities of Europe. Often least invested in preserving memories of a difficult past from which they had been excluded, Jews hoped to leave an ordered and beautiful stamp on the shape of the cities themselves. They participated in and sometimes led the construction of railroads and stations, shopping arcades and department stores, new neighborhoods with grand boulevards and elegant apartment buildings, not to mention their own residential quarters. In Paris, the bankers James de Rothschild and Louis Fould, and the developers Émile and Isaac Pereire, left an indelible stamp on the city as they commissioned and built banks, hotels, and entire neighborhoods, buildings that today still signal “quintessential Paris.”⁵⁸ An age of fathomless aesthetic possibility dawned for a people whose horizons had been so greatly circumscribed until the nineteenth century.

Fine Art: Painting and Sculpture

For the longest time, scholars of the visual arts and built environment discounted the very notion of Jewish fine art, not to mention architecture. “Jewish art” conjured primarily objects intended for ritual purposes. The material included in this section embraces the ever-growing body of scholarship that demonstrates that contrary to earlier assumptions, Jews pursued artistic expression in many media wherever they lived. As new gateways to artistic education and freedom opened, Jews flocked to the arts and made them their own. All over the world, Jewish art reflected the hybrid nature of Jewishness, including the material circumstances and cultural milieu of the larger environment. Individual artisans and artists selected and created according to their personal and Jewish experiences.⁵⁹

The pursuit and nurturing of the fine arts (primarily painting and sculpture) required elaborate educational, social, economic, and institutional frameworks. This context scarcely existed for Jews until the later decades of the nineteenth century (although the myth that Jewish culture shunned visual expression has long been put to rest).⁶⁰ Unlike music, to which Jews had at least some basic approach in synagogue settings, no framework in premodern society existed within which Jews could pursue the fine arts. The emergence of Jews as painters and sculptors involved more of a creation de novo than any of the other fields of culture in which Jews participated. Visual artists included painters, sculptors, photographers, engravers of medals and coins, miniaturists, and muralists. It is difficult to name even one serious sculptor of Jewish origins who worked before the nineteenth century, and although Jews had been making craft items of exquisite beauty through the ages, other than synagogue decoration, manuscript illustration, and metal engraving, it is difficult to find them painting and drawing much earlier than the period that this volume addresses.

To speak of the opening of the world to art made by Jews and the opening of Jewish eyes to the world of art, a new framework as well as a new mind-set had to come into being on both sides. Fine arts required access into social circles that cultivated and appreciated secular art. Gradual exposure of more Jews to more Western art meant that more of them were able to contemplate and appreciate it. Academies and circles of painters where art could be studied and learned began to accept Jewish students. Salons at which art could be exhibited and analyzed, homes in which it could be commissioned and hung, and museums that could acquire, display, and validate it, each of these formed a necessary link for the cycle of artistic affirmation to be perpetuated. To earn a livelihood, artists needed to cultivate the commercial side of art, to befriend agents and dealers who would introduce them to the parts of society that could afford to cultivate their talent. Art could be criticized in journals, replicated in print for popular consumption, and collected for private and public appreciation. As the nineteenth century progressed, Jews moved from the margins to the center of the art world, both as creators of first-rank art and as entrepreneurs.

Yet a label such as “Jewish art” is neither helpful nor relevant. Certainly, there is nothing inherently Jewish about many of the images included in this volume, and readers may be surprised by some of the choices. The guiding principle for inclusion has been the identity of the artist (with the exception of certain portraits), based on the concept that art expresses the experience and personality of the artist, even if that connection is not immediately obvious. The artists exhibited the world they knew best, in all its particularity, as a subject just as worthy of artistic depiction as any other. To illustrate this, we can look at the trajectories of a few of the artists encountered in these pages.

Moritz Daniel Oppenheim is one of the best-recognized “Jewish” artists of nineteenth-century Europe.⁶¹ A prodigy who trained at the Munich Academy at a young age, his work embraces his own Jewish identity and that of his people. It fully engages the experiences of German Jews who entered comfortable middle-class life while maintaining their traditions. His work overturned stereotypes of Jewish life held by most non-Jews and many enlightened Jews of his age. Yet by virtue of his own distance from the subject and his great talent, his paintings transcend the particulars. Oppenheim’s success was unique: most Jewish artists found that despite the growth of an art-consuming middle class of Jews, if they were confined to a Jewish market by genre or subject, they could not earn a livelihood as artists.

Such was the case with Abraham Jacob Pizzaro. Born to Sephardic parents in the Caribbean colony of St. Thomas, he led a peripatetic life from a young age, with stints in France and Venezuela. Reaching Paris in the mid-nineteenth century, he styled himself Camille Pissarro. His work reflects his embrace of the rural countryside and its peasants as a space of warmth, natural beauty, and harmony (plein air was in vogue then), and he rejected as dark and malevolent the forces of industrialization and capitalism. Although not directly present in his paintings, Pissarro’s Jewish origins and family circles remained a presence throughout his life. The schools and salons judged his work on its merits and accepted him without any distinction from the others. Yet he was sometimes teased for his Jewishness, called Abraham or Moses because of his hair and beard (see his self-portrait).

Galician-born Maurycy Gottlieb went to study art in Kraków as a teen, and his immense talent was nurtured at the Academy there. A Polish patriot, Gottlieb presented his Jewish subjects in their full humanity and depth. His Jews Praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur is perhaps the most iconic of his paintings, while he depicted subjects that ranged from Jesus to Shylock to Ahasuerus as contemporary Jews (frequently including Gottlieb himself). His premature death at age twenty-three cut off a brilliant talent, but he had already earned a place in the history of representing Jews in art for his warm, direct, and unapologetic images.

While histories of Jews and the fine arts often survey the national or stylistic clusters of artists, this tends to obscure some of the remarkable commonalities that many of the Jewish artists shared. The number of family members who shared some roots or orientation in cognate fields is striking. Three brothers of the Dutch Verveer family became renowned artists. Salamon Leonardus Verveer and his brother Elchanon Leonardus Verveer were famed for iconic depictions of the Dutch landscape. A third brother, Maurits, was a skillful painter as well; by the mid-1850s he had turned to photography, one of the first in the Netherlands to do so. Henschel, Solomon, Meyerbeer (Beer), and Weiner represent just a few of the family clusters of Jewish artists productive in this period.

Every one of the selections in this volume represents a personal, and Jewish, odyssey. In some cases, this is addressed overtly in the works of art themselves, whereas in many others, the artist or his or her work did not represent conventional Jewishness or Jewish identity. The very ordinariness of some of these images and their lack of any particularly Jewish content reflects ways in which the artist embraced the world. In other cases, the work is deeply Jewish in theme and here the general message is the reverse. The artist is exhibiting the world he or she knows best, in all its particularity, as a subject just as worthy of artistic depiction as any other.

Photography

As a new technology, photography caught the imagination of young Jews. Louis Daguerre invented his eponymous process using chemicals to capture an image on a silver plate in 1839, and within a few years the technique had spread through Europe and the United States. Initially used for portraiture, one of the first to employ the technology to capture the great outdoors was Solomon Nunes Carvalho. Carvalho accompanied explorer John Fremont on an expedition across the United States in 1853. Despite the demanding challenges of the process itself, not to mention the need to adapt it to freezing conditions, they captured some three hundred daguerreotype images, a historic achievement. This traditional Jew of Sephardic descent penned a riveting and best-selling account of his adventures. Through his images and his account of their expedition, Incidents of Travel and Adventure in the Far West, Carvalho became the lens through which many Americans first encountered the western frontier, its magnificent and rugged landscapes, and its Native Americans.

Jews served the art world as prominent and influential critics, patrons, collectors, and exhibitors of the arts. They collected, displayed, and donated art to eminent institutions. Jews used their collections to announce their aesthetic discernment and financial success. Thus, Lesser Gieldzinski (1830–1910) collected furniture, paintings, and Judaica, objects that collectively affirmed his Jewish identity as well as his citizenship and rootedness in the city of Danzig. Isaac Straus of Strasbourg exhibited (perhaps for the first time in modern history) his collection of Jewish ceremonial objects at the Palais de Trocadéro in Paris in 1878. The exhibit marked a new turn toward the nostalgic appreciation of explicitly Jewish art, a turn that was not fully realized until the end of the nineteenth century. The Rothschild, Sassoon, and Goldsmid families began to amass collections that became synonymous with Jewish art collecting. Their donation of collections to central institutions to exhibit under their names in perpetuity expressed their desire to be remembered in association with the features of the art they collected.⁶²

Although most of these collections did not focus primarily on Jewish art, by the late nineteenth century many European Jews regarded artistically crafted Jewish ceremonial objects with a new gaze, as exotic reminders of a lost past. By then, European interest in the art and archeology of ancient Palestine demonstrated to the world that the modern emergence of Jews in the art world was no anomaly but rather the recovery of a lost patrimony.

The Performing Arts

Jews had always cherished lofty liturgical traditions, and popular occasions for musical and theatrical expression abounded. Torah cantillation and cantorial tunes that dated to medieval times continued in synagogue tradition. In the early modern period, many synagogues supported a musical team, with cantor, bass, and meshorer (voice accompanist) harmonizing the music. Weddings, purimshpils, and the dramatization of Bible stories provided entertainment over the centuries. One of the most striking changes in European Jewish culture toward the later eighteenth century was marked by the entry of Jews into art music, opera houses, and the stage.

The pathbreaking turn in this period lies in the Jewish entry into artistic spheres previously considered beyond Jews’ abilities, “belonging” instead to European social strata where Jews were not welcome.⁶³ Like many other elite arts, music, opera, and theater required special training, lifelong exposure and appreciation, cultivated patrons, and appropriate performance settings. The business of what we call today “classical music,” “classical opera,” and professional theater changed dramatically in the eighteenth century. In this period, it stepped away from its ecclesiastical roots and was reinvented as public entertainment. Such innovation created spaces that had hitherto been closed to Jews.

This entrepreneurial spirit was evident on all types of public stages. Theaters presented plays written by Jews, featuring Jewish characters, or acted by Jewish professionals. Rachel Félix maintained classical tragedy on the French stage as a singular presence against the prevailing trend of romantic comedy, and Sarah Bernhardt achieved her early international acclaim on the stage in this period. The first Arabic-language secular script for a play, written by Abraham Daninos, was published in the mid-nineteenth century.

Conservatories of music established neutral standards for judging talent, opening their doors to those without social connections. Technical innovations in instruments and acoustics enabled music and voices that had been played in small spaces to be projected powerfully to large audiences in grand halls. Instead of being sponsored by churches, royals, or small elite circles, patronage of artistic performance expanded to public “audiences,” and this required an entirely new economic model for the giant productions.⁶⁴

Once the doors began to open, music by Jews ceased to be “Jewish music.” It entered and belonged to the broader world. In some cases, the Jewish (or born Jewish) composers bridged both worlds, but this volume includes all manner of musical creation by Jews without distinguishing whether the form and content overtly indicate Jewishness. The role of Jews as critics, journalists, and printers of music and of librettos contributed immeasurably to its popularization as one of the accoutrements for accomplished educated citizens.

The first half of the nineteenth century saw the breakthrough of Jewish composers and performers to the greatest renown on the European stage. In the 1830s and 1940s, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Fromental-Halévy, and Giacomo Meyerbeer, each with strong ties to his Jewish origins, were the most celebrated composers in France and in German lands and were renowned throughout Europe. Jews brought aspects of Jewish synagogue music into the larger world of classical music, while progressive synagogues took contemporaneous Western music into their services.⁶⁵ Cantors began to collect and transcribe arrangements of synagogue music, and many introduced Western elements into their arrangements. In the late nineteenth century, professional Yiddish theater and opera matured in Eastern Europe and opened a new chapter in modern Yiddish culture.

Jews stood at the forefront of a movement to integrate “indigenous” music into the Western canon. Mordechai Rosenthal (Ròszavölgyi) advanced the cause of “gypsy” music in Hungary, and British composer Isaac Nathan championed Australian aboriginal music later in his life. Joseph Gusikov of Shklov enthralled Jewish and non-Jewish audiences with ingenious devices on which he played a form of klezmer folk music while dressed in Hasidic garb. The integration of traditional elements of Jewish folk music and theater into performances intended for modern audiences symbolizes the journey of Jewish performing arts that had come full circle.

This volume concludes, then, on a high note. The most distressing turns in nineteenth-century European history, Russian pogroms, and the Dreyfus affair in France had not yet occurred. Their effects, including mass migrations to the United States, Canada, and Latin America, and the founding of Zionism, were not yet imaginable. The Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the tsarist Russian Empire still governed their subjects. I often remind students that the key to entering the past sometimes resides not in remembering but in forgetting. If we are to enter the world of our subjects, we must forget what we know came “after.” What may seem to be fragile victory from a contemporary perspective appeared to the Jews of the nineteenth century as inexorable progress. They seized opportunities regardless of how hesitantly offered and turned them into achievements of enduring value, deep humanity, and surpassing beauty. What opens before you, dear reader, is a panorama of hope and of passion for the world. There are many entry points. Each selection stands in its own right. Taken as a whole, I hope you find these riches from the past as provocative, amusing, and moving as I did.

Notes

¹ Richard I. Cohen, Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 158.

² Ammiel Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 213.

³ Aron Rodrigue, Jews and Muslims: Images of Sephardi and Eastern Jewries in Modern Times (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003).

⁴ Jonathan D. Sarna and Jonathan Golden, “The American Jewish Experience through the Nineteenth Century: Immigration and Acculturation,” National Humanities Center, Brandeis University, http://www.bjpa.org/Publications/details.cfm?PublicationID=4067.

⁵ On the German migration and the role of women in it, see Hasia Diner, “German Immigrant Period in the United States,” Jewish Women’s Archive, https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/german-immigrant-period-in-united-s....

⁶ Todd M. Endelman, “German Jews in Victorian England: A Study in Drift and Defection,” in Assimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Jonathan Frankel and Steven J. Zipperstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 57–87.

⁷ For early modern examples, see Debra Kaplan, “The Self in Social Context: Asher ha-Levi of Reich-shofen’s Sefer Zikhronot,” Jewish Quarterly Review 97, no. 2 (2007): 210–36; Leon Modena, The Autobiography of a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Rabbi, ed. Mark Cohen (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988); Beth-Zion Abrahams, The Life of Glueckel of Hameln (1646–1724) Written by Herself (New York: T. Yoseloff, 1962; repr., Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 2010) or the full text in Yiddish with Hebrew translation, Glikl, Zikhroynes 1691–1719, ed. and trans. Chava Turniansky (Jerusalem: Mercaz Shazar and Mercaz Dinur, 2006). For an analysis of Western life writing that emphasizes rupture, see Alan L. Mintz, Banished from Their Father’s Table: Loss of Faith and Hebrew Autobiography (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).

⁸ For an acute analysis of the cultural and legal pluralism in nineteenth-century Morocco and the turn away from it under French influence, see Jessica M. Marglin, Across Legal Lines: Jews and Muslims in Modern Morocco (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2016).

⁹ Edith Gerson-Kiwi, “The Music of the Kurdistan Jews,” Yuval 2 (1971): 59–72.

¹⁰ For the most recent assessment of this term, see Zachary Leader, introduction to On Life-Writing, ed. Zachary Leader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1–6.

¹¹ Marcus Moseley, Being for Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005).

¹² Matthias B. Lehmann, Emissaries from the Holy Land: The Sephardic Diaspora and the Practice of Pan-Judaism in the Eighteenth Century (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2014).

¹³ Phillip E. Miller, Karaite Separatism in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Joseph Solomon Lutski’s Epistle of Israel’s Deliverance (Cincinnati, Ohio: Hebrew Union College Press, 1993), 4.

¹⁴ Ruth R. Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon: Journey through Language and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 31.

¹⁵ Robert Alter, The Invention of Hebrew Prose: Modern Fiction and the Language of Realism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), 5.

¹⁶ On Jews in the military of this period, see Derek J. Penslar, Jews and the Military: A History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013), chaps. 1–4; Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Jews in the Russian Army, 1827–1917: Drafted into Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

¹⁷ Lisa Moses Leff, “Eugénie Foa,” Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, Jewish Women’s Archive, http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/foa-eugenie.

¹⁸ For introductions, see T. Carmi, The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse (London: Penguin Books, 1981), 13–55; Irving Howe, Ruth R. Wisse, and Khone Shmeruk, The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), 1–50.

¹⁹ Richard I. Cohen, “Urban Visibility and Biblical Visions,” in Cultures of the Jews, ed. David Biale (New York: Schocken Books, 2002), 756.

²⁰ Eliyahu Stern, Jewish Materialism: The Intellectual Revolution of the 1870s (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2018).

²¹ Endelman, “German Jews.”

²² For an overview of the growth and development of Hasidism, see David Assaf, “Hasidism,” in YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 1:659–70.

²³ Moshe Rosman, Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba’al Shem Tov (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1996).

²⁴ For the best recent account of the rise of Hasidism, see Hasidism: A New History, ed. David Biale et al. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2017).

²⁵ On this argument, see Gershon David Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

²⁶ Marcin Wodziński, Haskalah and Hasidism in the Kingdom of Poland: A History of Conflict, trans. Sarah Cozens, with Agnieszka Mirowska (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2005), analyzes how the conflict between maskilim and Hasidim played out in the Kingdom of Poland.

²⁷ On the opponents of Hasidism (Mitnagdim), see Allan Nadler, The Faith of the Mithnagdim: Rabbinic Responses to Hasidic Rapture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Yehudah Mirsky, “Musar Movement,” in YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 2:1214–16.

²⁸ Zvi Zohar, “Religion: Rabbinic Tradition and the Response to Modernity,” in The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times, ed. Reeva Spector Simon, Michael Menachem Laskier, and Sara Reguer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 71.

²⁹ On the impact of scientific thought on late nineteenth-century Muslim society, see Marwa Elshakry, Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

³⁰ See further Fred Astren, Karaite Judaism and Historical Understanding (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004).

³¹ Michael Graetz, “The Jewish Enlightenment,” in German Jewish History in Modern Times, ed. Michael Meyer (London: Leo Baeck Institute, 1996), 1:261–375.

³² Eliyahu Stern, The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Jewry (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013), 63–82.

³³ Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis University Press, and University Press of New England, 2003), 152.

³⁴ The society was called Verein für Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden. Schorsch, Text to Context, 213.

³⁵ On the multiple tensions inherent in the Wissenschaft enterprise, see David Myers, Re-inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 15.

³⁶ Heinrich Graetz, Geschichte der Juden von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart, 11 vols. (Leipzig: Oskar Leiner, 1853–1870). For a recent review of the primary and secondary literature by and about Graetz, see Amos Bitzan, “Heinrich Graetz,” Oxford Bibliographies Online, http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199840731/obo-....

³⁷ For a comprehensive discussion of the changes in the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth-century Tanzimat reforms and their cultural and political impact on Jews, see Julia Phillips Cohen, Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

³⁸ Wim Blockmans, “Citizens and Their Rulers,” in Empowering Interactions: Political Cultures and the Emergence of the State in Europe, 1300–1900, ed. Wim Blockmans, Andre Holenstein, and Jon Mathieu (Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate, 2009), 281–92, provides a corrective to the teleological conception of nations states as the inevitable outcome of political consolidation. I thank David Sorkin for alerting me to this collection.

³⁹ On the Ottoman Jewish press in the last decades of the nineteenth and the early ones of the twentieth century, see Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Making Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003).

⁴⁰ Philip E. Miller, “Shukr Kuhayl in Galicia: An Anti-Hasidic Ruse?” in Judaeo-Yemenite Studies: Proceedings of the Second International Congress, ed. Ephraim Isaac and Yosef Tobi (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 65–69; Bat-Zion Eraqi-Klorman, The Jews of Yemen in the Nineteenth Century: A Portrait of a Messianic Community (Leiden: Brill, 1993).

⁴¹ Avraham Greenbaum, “Newspapers and Periodicals,” in in YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 2:1260–68.

⁴² Natan Cohen, “Itonut yomit yehudit be-Folin,” in Israel Bartal and Israel Gutman, eds., Kiyyum veshever: Yehudei Polin le-doroteihem (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar le-toledot Yisra’el, 1997), 2: 301–2.

⁴³ Isaiah Shachar, Jewish Tradition in Art: The Feuchtwanger Collection of Judaica, trans. Rafi Grafman (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1981), 12–14, cited in Cohen, Jewish Icons, 70.

⁴⁴ I thank Emily D. Bilski for this observation and her astute comments throughout this section.

⁴⁵ Vivian B. Mann, ed., Morocco: Jews and Art in a Muslim Land (New York: Merrell, 2000), fig. 77, p. 127.

⁴⁶ Yosef Yerushalmi, Haggadah and History: A Panorama in Facsimile of Five Centuries of the Printed Haggadahs from the Collections of Harvard University and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1997).

⁴⁷ Rafi Grafman and Vivian Mann, eds., Crowning Glory: Silver Torah Ornaments of the Jewish Museum (Boston: David R. Godine, 1996).

⁴⁸ Elisheva Carlebach, Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011).

⁴⁹ Emily D. Bilski and Emily Braun, Jewish Women and Their Salons: The Power of Conversation (New York: Jewish Museum, 2005).

⁵⁰ See similar patterns described in Laura Arnold Leibman, Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2012). I thank Prof. Julia Phillips Cohen for pointing this out.

⁵¹ Richard Brilliant, “Portraits as Silent Claimants: Jewish Class Aspirations and Representational Strategies in Colonial and Federal America,” in Facing the New World: Jewish Portraits in Colonial and Federal America (Munich: Jewish Museum, 1997), 2.

⁵² Maria Piechotka and Kazimierz Piechotka, Wooden Synagogues (Warsaw: Arkady, 1959), and the expanded edition, Heaven’s Gates: Wooden Synagogues in the Territories of the Former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (Warsaw: Wydawn. Krupski i S-ka, 2004); Rachel Wischnitzer, The Architecture of the European Synagogue (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1964), 125–47.

⁵³ Thomas C. Hubka, Resplendent Synagogue: Architecture and Worship in an Eighteenth-Century Polish Community (Lebanon, N.H.: Brandeis University Press and University Press of New England, 2003), 41.

⁵⁴ Barry Stiefel, Jewish Sanctuary in the Atlantic World: A Social and Architectural History (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014).

⁵⁵ Ivan D. Kalmar, “Moorish Style: Orientalism, the Jews, and Synagogue Architecture,” Jewish Social Studies 7, no. 3 (2001): 68–100.

⁵⁶ Kalmar, 76–84; and John Efron, German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015), 112–60.

⁵⁷ Fredric Bedoire, The Jewish Contribution to Modern Architecture: 1830–1930 (Jersey City, N.J.: Ktav, 2004), 157–63.

⁵⁸ Bedoire, 152–209.

⁵⁹ Cohen, Jewish Icons, 7, concludes that Jewish art is “an elusive entity that can be best encapsulated by a general definition as that which reflects the Jewish experience.” Bezalel Narkiss, “Introduction,” Journal of Jewish Art 1 (1974): 5, preferred to avoid any definition.

⁶⁰ Archaeological discoveries such as the Dura Europos synagogue and Byzantine-era synagogue floors paved the way for modern scholars’ realization that Jews created rich figurative art in antiquity. For a survey of visual imagination in medieval Jewish culture, see Kalman P. Bland, The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002).

⁶¹ For a fuller picture of Oppenheim’s oeuvre, see George Heuberger and Anton Merk, eds., Moritz Daniel Oppenheim: Jewish Identity in 19th Century Art (Cologne: Wienand Verlag, 1999) and his memoir, Erinnerungen eines deutsch-jüdischen Malers (Heidelberg: Manitius, 1999).

⁶² Richard I. Cohen, “The Visual Revolution in Jewish Life—An Overview,” in Visualizing and Exhibiting Jewish Space and History, ed. Richard I. Cohen, Studies in Contemporary Jewry 26 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 4–11.

⁶³ My discussion of Jews in Western music is indebted to David Conway, Jewry in Music: Entry to the Profession from the Enlightenment to Richard Wagner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), and to James Loeffler, Posen Library volume board member.

⁶⁴ Conway, Jewry in Music, 11.

⁶⁵ Conway, 133.

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