Jewish Studies

England during the Middle Ages was at the forefront of European antisemitism. It was in medieval Norwich that the notorious "blood libel" was first introduced when a resident accused the city's Jewish leaders of abducting and ritually murdering a local boy. England also enforced legislation demanding that Jews wear a badge of infamy, and in 1290, it became the first European nation to expel forcibly all of its Jewish residents. In The Accommodated Jew , Kathy Lavezzo rethinks the complex and contradictory relation between England's rejection of "the Jew" and the centrality of Jews to classic English literature.

Bryan Cheyette combines cultural theory, discourse analysis, and new historicism with close readings of work by Arnold, Trollope and George Eliot, Buchan and Kipling, Shaw and Wells, Belloc and Chesterton, T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, to argue that 'the Jew' lies at the heart of modern English society: not as a stereotype, but as the embodiment of confusion and indeterminacy.

William (modern history, U. of Wales-Aberystwyth) and Australian historian Hilary look at support for Jews in Britain, America, Australia, and Canada from the Damascus blood libel to the Holocaust, with a further chapter on the situation after 1945. First they look at specific examples of help during antisemitic crises such as the Czarist pogroms of the 1880s and the rise of Nazism. Then they offer a typology of philosemitism, dividing it into liberal progressive, Christian, Zionist, and conservative elitist strand. They use primary sources entirely, since apparently no one has produced such an account before.

A vibrant Jewish community flourished in Poland from late in the tenth century until it was virtually annihilated in World War II. In this remarkable anthology, the first of its kind, Harold B. Segel offers translations of poems and prose works--mainly fiction--by non-Jewish Polish writers. Taken together, the selections represent the complex perceptions about Jews in the Polish community in the period 1530-1990.

(Available Online) The prevalence of anti-Semitism in Russia is well known, but the issue of race within the Jewish community has rarely been discussed explicitly. Combining ethnography with archival research, Jewish Russians: Upheavals in a Moscow Synagogue documents the changing face of the historically dominant Russian Jewish community in the mid-1990s. Sascha Goluboff focuses on a Moscow synagogue, now comprising individuals from radically different cultures and backgrounds, as a nexus from which to explore issues of identity creation and negotiation. Following the rapid rise of this transnational congregation--headed by a Western rabbi and consisting of Jews from Georgia and the mountains of Azerbaijan and Dagestan, along with Bukharan Jews from Central Asia--she evaluates the process that created this diverse gathering and offers an intimate sense of individual interactions in the context of the synagogue's congregation.

Anti-Jewish pogroms rocked the Russian Empire in 1881-2, plunging both the Jewish community and the imperial authorities into crisis. Focusing on a wide range of responses to the pogroms, this book offers the most comprehensive, balanced, and complex study of the crisis to date. It presents a nuanced account of the diversity of Jewish political reactions and introduces a wealth of new sources covering Russian and other non-Jewish reactions to these events. Seeking to answer the question of what caused the pogroms' outbreak and spread, the book provides a fuller picture of how officials at every level responded to the national emergency and irrevocably lays to rest the myth that the authorities instigated or tolerated the pogroms. This is essential reading not only for Russian and Jewish historians but also for those interested in the study of ethnic violence more generally.

A gripping revisionist history that shows how ordinary Italians played a central role in the genocide of Italian Jews during the Second World War.

Online. "Between the years 1550 and 1650, Italy's Jewish intellectuals created a unique and enduring synthesis of the great literary and philosophical heritage of the Andalusian Jews and the Renaissance_s renewal of perspective. While remaining faithful to the beliefs, behaviors, and language of their tradition, Italian Jews proved themselves open to a rapidly evolving world of great richness. The crisis of Aristotelianism (which progressively touched upon all fields of knowledge), religious fractures and unrest, the scientific revolution, and the new perception of reality expressed through a transformation of the visual arts: these are some of the changes experienced by Italian Jews which they were affected by in their own particular way. This book explores the complex relations between Jews and the world that surrounded them during a critical period of European civilization. The relations were rich, problematic, and in some cases strained, alternating between opposition and dialogue, osmosis and distinction."