In the nineteenth century, the largest Jewish community the modern world had known lived in hundreds of towns and shtetls in the territory between the Prussian border of Poland and the Ukrainian coast of the Black Sea. The period had started with the partition of Poland and the absorption of its territories into the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires; it would end with the first large-scale outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence and the imposition in Russia of strong anti-Semitic legislation. In the years between, a traditional society accustomed to an autonomous way of life would be transformed into one much more open to its surrounding cultures, yet much more confident of its own nationalist identity. In The Jews of Eastern Europe, Israel Bartal traces this transformation and finds in it the roots of Jewish modernity.
Price: $29.95
Pages: 216
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Imprint: University of Pennsylvania Press
Series: Jewish Culture and Contexts
Publication Date:
16 August 2006
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780812219074
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
HISTORY / Jewish, Social groups: religious groups and communities, HISTORY / Europe / Eastern
"The book represents a remarkable achievement. Bartal presents the broad contours of nineteenth-century East European Jewish history even as he reworks them into a nontraditional narrative. He offers readers basic information about the staple features of the East European Jewish story-including the Hasidic and haskalah movements, the struggle for emancipation in two empires, the shtetl, population growth, urbanization, emigration, the crystallization of orthodox Judaism, and the rise of Jewish nationalism-while at the same time challenging us to think about the significance of those features in unconventional ways."
Israel Bartal is Avraham Harman Chair in Jewish History at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Among his books are The Records of the Council of the Four Lands, Volume 1: 1580-1792, Exile in the Homeland, and Poles and Jews: A Failed Brotherhood (with Magdalena Opalski).
Introduction
1. The Jews of the Kingdom
2. The Partitions of Poland: The End of the Old Order, 1772-1795
3. Towns and Cities: Society and Economy, 1795-1863
4. Hasidim, Mitnagdim, and Maskilim
5. Russia and the Jews
6. Austria and the Jews of Galicia, 1772-1848
7. "Brotherhood" and Disillusionment: Jews and Poles in the Nineteenth Century
8. "My Heart Is in the West": The Haskalah Movement in Eastern Europe
9. "The Days of Springtime": Czar Alexander II and the Era of Reform
10. Between Two Extremes: Radicalism and Orthodoxy
11. The Conservative Alliance: Galicia under Emperor Franz Josef
12. The Jew Is Coming! Anti-Semitism from Right and from Left
13. "Storms in the South," 1881-1882
Conclusion: Jews as an Ethnic Minority in Eastern Europe
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
