Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Contents
- List of Maps
- List of Tables
- Note on Transliteration
- Note on Place Names
- Maps
- Introduction
- 1 The Position of the Jews in the Tsarist Empire, 1881–1905
- 2 Revolution and Reaction, 1904–1914
- 3 The Kingdom of Poland, 1881–1914
- 4 Galicia in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century
- 5 Prussian Poland, 1848–1914
- 6 Jewish Spaces: Shtetls and Towns in the Nineteenth Century
- 7 Modern Jewish Literature in the Tsarist Empire and Galicia
- 8 Jewish Religious Life from the Mid-Eighteenth Century to 1914
- 9 Women in Jewish Eastern Europe
- 10 The Rise of Jewish Mass Culture: Press, Literature, Theatre
- Conclusion
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
Conclusion
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Contents
- List of Maps
- List of Tables
- Note on Transliteration
- Note on Place Names
- Maps
- Introduction
- 1 The Position of the Jews in the Tsarist Empire, 1881–1905
- 2 Revolution and Reaction, 1904–1914
- 3 The Kingdom of Poland, 1881–1914
- 4 Galicia in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century
- 5 Prussian Poland, 1848–1914
- 6 Jewish Spaces: Shtetls and Towns in the Nineteenth Century
- 7 Modern Jewish Literature in the Tsarist Empire and Galicia
- 8 Jewish Religious Life from the Mid-Eighteenth Century to 1914
- 9 Women in Jewish Eastern Europe
- 10 The Rise of Jewish Mass Culture: Press, Literature, Theatre
- Conclusion
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
THE ‘LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY’ saw a major transformation of Jewish life in the lands of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. At the same time it had an extremely disruptive impact on Jewish communal solidarity. In his book The Earth Is the Lord’s, published shortly after the Second World War, Abraham Joshua Heschel gives an idealized description of the civilization of Jewish eastern Europe before the impact of modernity:
There in Eastern Europe, the Jewish people came into its own. It did not live like a guest in somebody else's house, who must constantly keep in mind the ways and customs of the host. There Jews lived without reservation and without disguise, outside their homes no less than within them. When they used the phrase ‘the world asks’ in their commentaries on the Talmud, they did not refer to a problem raised by Aristotle or Averroes. Their fellow students of Torah were to them the ‘world’ …
Because the ideals of the Ashkenazi Jews were shared by all, the relations between the various parts of the community—between the scholarly and the ignorant, the Yeshiva student and the trader—had an intimate organic character. The earthiness of the villagers, the warmth of plain people, and the spiritual simplicity of the magidim or lay preachers penetrated into the beth ha-midrash, the house of prayer that was also a house of study and learning. Labourers, peasants, porters, artisans, storekeepers, all were partners in the Torah.
The nostalgic and romanticized depiction of traditional Jewish society was a common motif in the years before 1914, with many writers expressing pain at the loss of traditional Jewish culture. As early as 1872, having decided not to attend the Passover Seders in that year, Moses Leib Lilienblum inverted the text of the hagadah (the narration of the Exodus read at the Passover Seder) to illustrate his painful alienation from the traditional world he had abandoned:
This night, which was once a Night of Watching and full of the highest poetry, was now an utterly prosaic night, like all other nights. But I am alive and I love poetry, yet where is my poetry?
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- Information
- The Jews in Poland and RussiaVolume II: 1881 to 1914, pp. 404 - 408Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2010