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This book is a linguistic-cultural study of the emergence of the Jewish ghettos during the Holocaust. It traces the origins and uses of the term 'ghetto' in European discourse from the sixteenth century to the Nazi regime. It examines with a magnifying glass both the actual establishment of and the discourse of the Nazis and their allies on ghettos from 1939 to 1944. With conclusions that oppose all existing explanations and cursory examinations of the ghetto, the book impacts overall understanding of the anti-Jewish policies of Nazi Germany.
This book is a linguistic-cultural study of the emergence of the Jewish ghettos during the Holocaust. It traces the origins and uses of the term 'ghetto' in European discourse from the sixteenth century to the Nazi regime. It examines with a magnifying glass both the actual establishment of and the discourse of the Nazis and their allies on ghettos from 1939 to 1944. With conclusions that oppose all existing explanations and cursory examinations of the ghetto, the book impacts overall understanding of the anti-Jewish policies of Nazi Germany.
Nineteenth-century intellectuals often decried nostalgia as a widespread social and cultural malaise, issuing harsh indictments of contemporaries who expressed their discomforts over the rapid pace of modernization and urbanization by fixating on an idealized past. Yet as this article emphasizes in its discussion of the fiction of Leopold Kompert, nostalgic longings for the past were not always a symptom of dislocation in the present. Kompert, one of the earliest and most popular producers of ghetto literature in nineteenth-century Europe, geared his nostalgic tales of traditional Jewish life in his native Bohemia at an upwardly mobile Jewish community increasingly identified with German culture as well as at the general reading public. Through an analysis of his works and a study of their reception, this article explores the ways in which fiction helped promote a vision of the ghetto as a usable past. By memorializing traditional forms of Jewish life in respectable aesthetic forms, Kompert's tales claimed cultural respectability for the immediate Jewish past. Ghetto literature sought in this way to secure Jews a form of bourgeois cultural respectability that might serve as a marker of their newly-found—or yet-to-be achieved—middle-class status. An investigation of ghetto fiction and its reception illuminates thus both the dynamic role of German-Jewish literature in reinventing tradition and the ways in which this process of acculturation was inextricable from the quest to produce Jewish literature that might claim to be secular culture of the highest possible order.
This article examines the emergence of the Golem legend associated with the Maharal of Prague in the first half of the nineteenth century, with specific attention to the innovations found in two little-known versions by important Jewish literary figures of the era: the Bohemian-born Viennese poet and editor Ludwig Frankl and the Danish writer Meir Aaron Goldschmidt. These versions, it is argued, reveal several crucial mechanisms that help explain the shift from a Golem tale distributed among various individual places and rabbis, to one with little or no specificity at all, and finally to the Prague version that dominates the subsequent literary and artistic manifestations of the legend. The proliferation of non-Jewish renditions of the legend in the first quarter of the century, starting with the folklorist Jakob Grimm’s brief report in 1808, provides a context for several Jewish reconfigurations of the material around the centrality of Prague and its most famous rabbi, the Maharal. By 1847, the transition is complete with the near-canonical version published by Leopold Weisel in the popular and influential anthology of Bohemian Jewish tales, Sippurim. But in the decade leading up to Weisel’s publication, Frankl and Goldschmidt both produce intricate and sophisticated versions that offer a glimpse into the motifs and techniques engaged by the Jewish literary imagination of the period.
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