Description
Book SynopsisFollowing tremendous advances in recent years in the study of religious belief, this volume adopts a fresh understanding of Jewish religious life in Poland. Approaches deriving from the anthropology, history, phenomenology, psychology, and sociology of religion have replaced the methodologies of social or political history that were applied in the past, offering fascinating new perspectives.
The well-established interest in hasidism continues, albeit from new angles, but topics that have barely been considered before are well represented here too. Women’s religious practice gains new prominence, and a focus on elites has given way to a consideration of the beliefs and practices of ordinary people. Reappraisals of religious responses to secularization and modernity, both liberal and Orthodox, offer more nuanced insights into this key issue. Other research areas represented here include the material history of Jewish religious life in eastern Europe and the shift of emphasis from theology to praxis in the search for the defining quality of religious experience.
The contemporary reassessments in this volume, with their awareness of emerging techniques that have the potential to extract fresh insights from source materials both old and new, show how our understanding of what it means to be Jewish is continuing to expand.
Trade Review'The insights brought to the knowledge of the Orthodox and especially Hasidic tradition are considerable and always based on the use of unpublished documents. The contribution of No. 33 of the journal
Polin is therefore essential in its field.'Daniel Tollet,
Revue des études juives
Table of ContentsIntroduction - Ada Rapoport-Albert and Marcin Wodziński
PART I: THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Leah Horwitz’s Tkhine Imohos: A Proto-Feminist Demand to Increase Jewish Women’s Religious Capital - Moshe Rosman
‘A girl! He ought to be whipped’: The Hasid as Homo Ludens - David Assaf
Individualism, Truth, and the Repudiation of Magic as the Tsadik's Prerogative: Pshiskhe-Like Elements in the Theology of Rabbi Menahem Mendel of Kosov - Benjamin Brown
Table Talk and the Bond of Reading: A Jewish Broadsheet for Meals - Avriel Bar-Levav
PART II: THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
Shtrayml: An Ethnographic Tale of Law and Ritualization - Levi Cooper
The Narcissism of Small Differences? On Rituals and Customs as Hasidic Identity-Markers - Gadi Sagiv
The Vilna Talmud as a Reflection of Changing Patterns of Study - Edward Fram
Popular Religion and Modernity: Jewish Magical Books in Eastern Europe in the Nineteenth Century - Uriel Gellman
Hasidic Performance as a Reconstruction of Biblical Life - Daniel Reiser
Preserving a Synagogue: Cultural, Material, and Sacred Values - Sergey R. Kravtsov
The Laws of Moses and the Laws of the Emperor: Austrian Marriage Legislation and the Jews of Galicia - Rachel Manekin
A Forgotten Network? New Perspectives on Progressive Synagogues in Galicia and the Kingdom of Poland - Alicia Maślak-Maciejewska
PART III: 1914–1939
To Enlist the Enthusiasm of the Young: Orthodox Jewish Non-Political Responses to the Challenges of Interwar Poland - Gershon Bacon
The Scroll of 19 Kislev and the Construction of an Imagined Habad Lubavitch Community in Interwar Poland - Wojciech Tworek
At the Centre of Two Revolutions: Beit Ya’akov in Poland between Neo-Orthodoxy and Ultra-Orthodoxy - Iris Brown (Hoizman)
PART IV: HOLOCAUST AND POST-HOLOCAUST
Gerer Youths in the Holocaust: A Representative Blind Spot in Holocaust Research - Havi Dreifuss
The Afterlife of Religion: Orthodox Memoirs of the Holocaust and the Haredi Spiritualization of Modernity - Naftali Loewenthal
Being and Becoming: Polish Conversions to Judaism and the Dynamics of Affiliation - Jan Lorenz
PART V: NEW VIEWS
Foul-Weather Friends: Reinterpreting Jewish–Christian Urban Interaction in the Final Decades of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth - Curtis G. Murphy
The Vilna Pogrom of 19–21 April 1919 - Szymon Rudnicki
Jewish Medical Activity in the Ghettos under the Nazi Regime: Characteristics and Broad Historical Context - Miriam Offer
