Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Editors and Advisers
- Preface
- Polin
- Contents
- Towards a Polish–Jewish Dialogue: The Way Forward
- Note on Transliteration, Names, and Place-Names
- List of Figures
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART I JEWS IN EARLY MODERN POLAND
- PART II NEW VIEWS
- PART III REVIEWS
- REVIEW ESSAYS
- BOOK REVIEWS
- Israel Bartal, Rachel Elior, and Chone Shmeruk (eds.), Tsadikim ve'anshei ma'aseh: Meḥkarim beḥasidut Polin
- S. Bronsztejn, Z dziejów ludności żydowskiej na Dolnym Śląsku po II wojnie światowej
- Abraham David (ed.), A Hebrew Chronicle from Prague, c.1615
- Norman Davies and Antony Polonsky (eds.), Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1939–1946
- Artur Eisenbach, The Emancipation of the Jews in Poland, 1780–1870
- Barbara Engelking, Na łące popiolłów: Ocaleni z Holocaustu
- Barbara Engelking, Zagłada i pamięc
- Peter Faessler, Thomas Held, and Dirk Sawitzki (eds.), Lemberg–Lwow–Lviv: Eine Stadt im Schnittpunkt europäischer Kulturen
- Darrel J. Fasching, The Ethical Challenge of Auschwitz and Hiroshima: Apocalypse or Utopia?
- P. Fijałkowski (ed.), Dzieje Żydów w Polsce: Wybór tekstów źródłowych XI–XVIII wieku
- David E. Fishman, Russia's First Modern Jews: The Jews of Shklov
- Joseph Held (ed.), The Columbia History of Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century
- Edward H. Judge, Easter in Kishinev: Anatomy of a Pogrom
- Edward Kossoy and Abraham Ohry, The Feldshers: Medical, Sociological, and Historical Aspects of Practitioners of Medicine with below University Level Education
- Mark Levene, War, Jews, and the New Europe: The Diplomacy of Lucien Wolf, 1914–1919
- Steven M. Lowenstein, The Berlin Jewish Community: Enlightenment, Family and Crisis, 1770–1830
- Paul Robert Magocsi, Historical Atlas of East Central Europe
- Jerzy Michalski (ed.), Lud żydowski w narodzie polskim
- Clare Moore (ed.), The Visual Dimension: Aspects of Jewish Art
- Gedalyah Nigal, Magic, Mysticism, and Hasidism
- Magdalena Opalski and Israel Bartal, Poles and Jews: A Failed Brotherhood
- Eugenia Prokóp-Janiec, Międzywojenna literatura polsko-żydowska jako zjawisko kulturowe i artystyczne
- Joel Raba, Bein zikaron lehakheḥashah: Gezerot taḥvetat bereshimot benei hazeman ubere'i haketivah hahistorit
- Marek Rostworowski (ed.), Żydzi w Polsce: Obraz i słowo
- Jean W. Sedlar, East Central Europe in the Middle Ages, 1000–1500
- Jerzy Topolski, Polska w czasach nowożytnych: Od środkowoeuropejskiej potęgi do utraty niepodłegłości, 1501–1795
- Lawrence Weinbaum, A Marriage of Convenience: The New Zionist Organization and the Polish Government
- E. Thomas Wood and Stanisław M. Jankowski, Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust
- Steven J. Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha'am and the Origins of Zionism
- Bibliography of polish–jewish studies, 1994
- Notes on the Contributors
- Glossary
- Index
Steven M. Lowenstein, The Berlin Jewish Community: Enlightenment, Family and Crisis, 1770–1830
from BOOK REVIEWS
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Editors and Advisers
- Preface
- Polin
- Contents
- Towards a Polish–Jewish Dialogue: The Way Forward
- Note on Transliteration, Names, and Place-Names
- List of Figures
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART I JEWS IN EARLY MODERN POLAND
- PART II NEW VIEWS
- PART III REVIEWS
- REVIEW ESSAYS
- BOOK REVIEWS
- Israel Bartal, Rachel Elior, and Chone Shmeruk (eds.), Tsadikim ve'anshei ma'aseh: Meḥkarim beḥasidut Polin
- S. Bronsztejn, Z dziejów ludności żydowskiej na Dolnym Śląsku po II wojnie światowej
- Abraham David (ed.), A Hebrew Chronicle from Prague, c.1615
- Norman Davies and Antony Polonsky (eds.), Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1939–1946
- Artur Eisenbach, The Emancipation of the Jews in Poland, 1780–1870
- Barbara Engelking, Na łące popiolłów: Ocaleni z Holocaustu
- Barbara Engelking, Zagłada i pamięc
- Peter Faessler, Thomas Held, and Dirk Sawitzki (eds.), Lemberg–Lwow–Lviv: Eine Stadt im Schnittpunkt europäischer Kulturen
- Darrel J. Fasching, The Ethical Challenge of Auschwitz and Hiroshima: Apocalypse or Utopia?
- P. Fijałkowski (ed.), Dzieje Żydów w Polsce: Wybór tekstów źródłowych XI–XVIII wieku
- David E. Fishman, Russia's First Modern Jews: The Jews of Shklov
- Joseph Held (ed.), The Columbia History of Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century
- Edward H. Judge, Easter in Kishinev: Anatomy of a Pogrom
- Edward Kossoy and Abraham Ohry, The Feldshers: Medical, Sociological, and Historical Aspects of Practitioners of Medicine with below University Level Education
- Mark Levene, War, Jews, and the New Europe: The Diplomacy of Lucien Wolf, 1914–1919
- Steven M. Lowenstein, The Berlin Jewish Community: Enlightenment, Family and Crisis, 1770–1830
- Paul Robert Magocsi, Historical Atlas of East Central Europe
- Jerzy Michalski (ed.), Lud żydowski w narodzie polskim
- Clare Moore (ed.), The Visual Dimension: Aspects of Jewish Art
- Gedalyah Nigal, Magic, Mysticism, and Hasidism
- Magdalena Opalski and Israel Bartal, Poles and Jews: A Failed Brotherhood
- Eugenia Prokóp-Janiec, Międzywojenna literatura polsko-żydowska jako zjawisko kulturowe i artystyczne
- Joel Raba, Bein zikaron lehakheḥashah: Gezerot taḥvetat bereshimot benei hazeman ubere'i haketivah hahistorit
- Marek Rostworowski (ed.), Żydzi w Polsce: Obraz i słowo
- Jean W. Sedlar, East Central Europe in the Middle Ages, 1000–1500
- Jerzy Topolski, Polska w czasach nowożytnych: Od środkowoeuropejskiej potęgi do utraty niepodłegłości, 1501–1795
- Lawrence Weinbaum, A Marriage of Convenience: The New Zionist Organization and the Polish Government
- E. Thomas Wood and Stanisław M. Jankowski, Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust
- Steven J. Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha'am and the Origins of Zionism
- Bibliography of polish–jewish studies, 1994
- Notes on the Contributors
- Glossary
- Index
Summary
The political, economic, and cultural modernization of the Jews has been the major focus of modern Jewish historiography. For much of this century Jewish historians have explored the conditions that contributed to the rapid erosion of traditional Jewish patterns of life, particularly in western Europe and in some urban centres of east central Europe, and, more recently, the factors that promoted resistance to modernization. Nowhere is the puzzle of the rapid breakdown of traditional Jewry more striking than in Berlin at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. Yet Steven Lowenstein's major new book is the first scholarly investigation of the dimensions of that breakdown to address fully the interrelations between political, economic, and ideological changes. Moreover, as a creative social historian he weaves private and public lives together, demonstrating that the family was the primary venue for the manifestation of the abandonment of traditional Jewish values. Indeed, family networks promoted both tradition and conversion.
Mining a mix of sources—tax-lists, censuses, baptismal records, and lists of subscriptions to Enlightenment periodicals—Lowenstein offers his readers a splendid collective biography of the Jews of Berlin in this period. He traces the beginnings of ‘peaceful’, that is, moderate, modernization of the traditional Jewish community before turning to the period of crisis that began in the 1780s and extended into the early 1820s. In fact, he appropriately raises the question why early efforts at modernization in Berlin were relatively free of conflict in comparison with later efforts at change. Central to his story is the emergence in the wake of the Seven Years War of an economic élite that became community leaders. It was this elite that funded the maskilim, the men of the Jewish Enlightenment, and co-operated in the dissemination of their ideas and the building of their institutions. This combination of social elites and intellectual activists hastened the pace of change. Although there remained poor Jews and Orthodox Jews within Berlin, the wealthy set the tone of the community, and wealth tended to correlate with modernizing tendencies.
Lowenstein argues that a number of factors specific to Berlin undermined the process of gradual moderate change. The failure of the modernizing camp to achieve its goal of emancipation led to radicalization. The struggle for emancipation in fact stimulated growing calls by maskilim for Jewish self-improvement and for state intervention.
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- Jews in Early Modern Poland , pp. 377 - 379Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 1997