Short description:

Instead of treating Polish and German Jewish histories as playing out solely within national boundaries, this volume considers the interactions that have in practice shaped Jewish life---kinship ties and shared economic, cultural, and linguistic realities. By moving beyond traditional paradigms it opens up a nuanced understanding of modern European Jewish history.

Long description:

Historians have largely tended to regard Polish Jewish history and German Jewish history, from the Middle Ages to the present, as playing out solely within national boundaries, thereby ignoring the interactions that have in practice shaped Jewish cultural life. Geographical proximity has meant that Jews from both countries have been linked through kinship ties as well as shared economic, cultural, and linguistic realities. The complexity of this relationship and its consequences have been only partially reflected in scholarship. This volume takes a different approach, shifting the focus away from the nationally distinct to investigate instead mutual influences and interactions. Moving beyond the traditional paradigms that characterize Polish Jewry as ?authentic? and German Jewry as ?modernizing?, it challenges the sharp historiographic division between these two communities and opens up a nuanced understanding of modern European Jewish history.

Interested in subscribing to Polin? Institutional subscriptions are now available via LUP's Journals department. To find out more or to recommend Polin to your institutional librarian, please visit: https://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/journal/polin

Table of Contents:

Introduction

François Guesnet, Antony Polonsky, and Katrin Steffen

1. ENCOUNTERS BEFORE 1800

Solomon Dubno: an Eastern European Maskil and the German Haskalah

Zuzanna Krzemień

Feminine Discontent and Social Control in Maskilic Comedy and Sturm und Drang Melodrama

Marc Caplan

Mecklenburg-Poland. The Emotional History of A Jewish Hyphen, 1750--1800

Malgorzata Maksymiak

Encounters between Jews and Non-Jews in Prussian Warsaw, 1796--1806

Markus Nesselrodt

2. ENCOUNTERS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Yosl ben Todros: S. Y. Agnon on the Language of Ashkenaz

Israel Bartal

Samuel Adler: A German Reform Rabbi and the Lemberg Temple

Rachel Manekin

The Jews of Lemberg between the Viennese Kaffeehaus and the Polish Kawiarnia

Delphine Bechtel

A Master of Interference: The Daytsh in Yiddish Literature

Marie Schumacher-Brunhes

The Linguistic Politics of Jewish Emancipation: Leon Pinsker between German, Yiddish, and Hebrew

Marc Volovici

German Literature in Yiddish Translation, 1891--1939

Agnieszka Żółkiewska

Sir Toggenburg of the Shtetl: Friedrich Schiller in the East European Jewish Imagination

Sonia Gollance

3. THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND THE INTERWAR PERIOD

Narratives of the First World War: Multiple Jewish Perspectives

Alina Molisak

Jewish Laughter and Jewish Tears: The Rise of Fascism and Antisemitism in the Joke Pages of the Yiddish Press in 1930s Poland

Anne-Christin Klotz

An Inverted Hierarchy: Ostjuden and Yekkes in Mandatory Palestine, 1933?1948

Nathan Friedenberg

The Polenaktionen of October 1938 and September 1939. From Expulsion to Extermination

Aline Bothe

4. WARTIME, HOLOCAUST, POST-HOLOCAUST

?Between us and them there still stands a wall?: German Jews Deported to the Warsaw Ghetto, Spring 1942

Maria Ferenc and Katarzyna Person

Collaboration, Complexity, and ?Integrated History?: Jewish and German Historiographical Representations of Non-German Perpetrators during the Holocaust

Laura Jokusch and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe

5. 1945 TO THE PRESENT

Wrocław Jewish Transports, 1946: Persecuted as Jews, Expelled as Germans, Not Recognized as Victims

Maria Luft

Enduring Taboos: Jewish Life in Post-War Germany, 1945--1960

Joseph Cronin

Germans, Jews and Poles: On the Difficult New Beginning of Jewish Life in Frankfurt am Main after 1945

Tobias Freimüller

Responses to Silence: The Jewish Museums in Berlin and Warsaw

Michael Meng

Recovery versus Regression: Identity and Impact in the Post-Holocaust Narratives of Pawlikowski?s Ida and Petzold?s Phoenix

Mendel Weintraub

6. THE ENCOUNTER BETWEEN GERMAN AND EAST EUROPEAN JEWISH CULTURES

A German Jewish Head Teacher in Lithuania: Memories of Schwabe?s Hebrew Gymnasium in Kovno

Tessa Rajak