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since Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:17.
The review of Antony Polonsky's The Jews in Poland and Russia: Volume I below suggests that Allan Nadler, who is Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Jewish Studies Program at Drew University, shares my disdain for contemporary Jewish studies as practiced by incompetents and Zionist ideologues like Harvard Professor Ruth Wisse. (See Issues and Questions in the Historiography of Pre-State Zionism.)
Even though I have not yet read Polonsky's book, I have to comment on the following claim, which Nadler quotes in his article, for the negativity of ethnic Poles toward Jewish society seems to me to be overstated:
[Note that it is a common false assumption that Polish Jews constituted a single ethnic group when in fact a Polish Jew could belong to the Yiddish-speaking ethnic group or to the Tatar ethnic group, which also included Muslims and Armenian Christians.]
One must ask whether those Polish nationalists that considered Jewish society inferior to Polish society singled out Yiddish society (or Jewish Tatar society) as uniquely inferior or whether such Polish nationalists treated all non-Polish ethnicities the same.
In any case, it is probably incorrect to read late 19th and early 20th century Polish nationalist texts through the lens of American, French, or even German integrationist nationalism.
A Polish nationalist like Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz may have been looking not for individual integration but rather for ethnic integration within a non-extremist organic nationalist conceptualization of the Polish state even if Kelles-Krauz as a Polish nobleman of German ancestry and his Polish Catholic wife Maria Goldsteynówna of Yiddish ancestry may themselves have represented more a melting pot type of blending.
The integration of ethnic Polish and ethnic Ashkenazi culture surely persisted even after ethnic Ashkenazim began departing historic Poland.
The Zionist ideologist Ber Borokhov
almost certainly plagiarized practically all of his ideas from those of Kelles-Krauz while in the 1920s Henryk Sienkiewicz, the Nobel Prize winning Polish author of Tatar ancestry was the most popular novelist in the New Yishuv.
In fact, even though Harvard Jewish studies professor Ruth Wisse rather ignorantly and chauvinistically depicts the Jewish (Yiddish) Joke as specifically and uniquely Jewish, modern Yiddish/American Jewish humor has always struck me as owing a tremendous debt to the sardonic wit of the Polish Enlightenment as typified by Ignacy Krasicki.
There was [in Poland] far less chance than in Galicia of using the educational system to create a large group of Polish-speaking Jews, and no chance of realizing the Positivists’ dream of creating a secular and scientifically based society through universal education…. And those on the Polish side who favored integration had both a strong sense of the inferiority of Jewish to Polish society and unrealistic expectations of how rapidly the Jews could be transformed….
Nevertheless, the assumption that Jewish integration could not have succeeded in the Kingdom of Poland and that its supporters were hopelessly naïve should be rejected. It is another of the implicit assumptions of the now discredited nationalist grand narrative of Jewish history and an example of what E.P. Thompson has described as the “boundless contempt” exhibited in the present for those whose aspirations in the past were not fulfilled. The history of the Jews in the Kingdom of Poland is a story of lost opportunities for which subsequent generations were to pay a high price.
Historic Poland contained many ethnic groups besides ethnic Poles and ethnic Ashkenazim or Polish Lithuanian Tatars. [Note that it is a common false assumption that Polish Jews constituted a single ethnic group when in fact a Polish Jew could belong to the Yiddish-speaking ethnic group or to the Tatar ethnic group, which also included Muslims and Armenian Christians.]
One must ask whether those Polish nationalists that considered Jewish society inferior to Polish society singled out Yiddish society (or Jewish Tatar society) as uniquely inferior or whether such Polish nationalists treated all non-Polish ethnicities the same.
In any case, it is probably incorrect to read late 19th and early 20th century Polish nationalist texts through the lens of American, French, or even German integrationist nationalism.
A Polish nationalist like Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz may have been looking not for individual integration but rather for ethnic integration within a non-extremist organic nationalist conceptualization of the Polish state even if Kelles-Krauz as a Polish nobleman of German ancestry and his Polish Catholic wife Maria Goldsteynówna of Yiddish ancestry may themselves have represented more a melting pot type of blending.
The integration of ethnic Polish and ethnic Ashkenazi culture surely persisted even after ethnic Ashkenazim began departing historic Poland.
The Zionist ideologist Ber Borokhov
almost certainly plagiarized practically all of his ideas from those of Kelles-Krauz while in the 1920s Henryk Sienkiewicz, the Nobel Prize winning Polish author of Tatar ancestry was the most popular novelist in the New Yishuv.In fact, even though Harvard Jewish studies professor Ruth Wisse rather ignorantly and chauvinistically depicts the Jewish (Yiddish) Joke as specifically and uniquely Jewish, modern Yiddish/American Jewish humor has always struck me as owing a tremendous debt to the sardonic wit of the Polish Enlightenment as typified by Ignacy Krasicki.
A Rich Eastern European Dish
Polonsky Begins His Epic Historical Trek
By Allan Nadler
Published April 21, 2010, issue of April 30, 2010.
The Jews in Poland and Russia: Volume I, 1350-1881
By Antony Polonsky
The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 568 pages, $59.50
The academic world has become, as of late, almost grotesquely distended by piles of books and articles on the narrowest and most obscure of subjects, written in increasingly opaque scholarly jargon. A mere glance at the lengthy paper titles — employing dozens of terms not to be found in the Oxford English Dictionary — presented at just about any learned society conference, particularly in the humanities, is an experience almost as comical as it is exasperating.
My own particular field of Eastern European Jewish history — Hasidism, to be specific — is, alas, hardly immune. Involving the study of both social and communal history as well as rabbinics and Jewish mysticism, one often feels drowned by the mountain of ceaseless revisions of earlier scholarship, to say nothing of the petty contentiousness among academic colleagues on the most inconsequential of questions. A constant flow of narrow studies boldly claims to “revise,” “revisit,” “reimagine,” “reconstruct,” “deconstruct,” “transcend” and “transgress” the classic work of titan scholars, such as Heinrich Graetz, Israel Zinberg, Simon Dubnow, Ben-Zion Dinur, Salo Baron and Gershom Scholem.
Judaica journals today are filled with heated arguments about the most trivial arcana — the number of Hasidim versus Misnagdim living in Pinsk, Przemysl or Plock in March 1819; their respective median household incomes; annual taxes paid for kosher meat and Sabbath candles; what versions of the siddur every synagogue in each community was using, and so forth. More politically oriented scholars seem to revel in debating morbid matters such as the precise schedule of the Russian trains carrying Ukrainian mobs to commit this or that pogrom in some vanished shtetl, about whose correctly transliterated spelling bitter arguments ensue. This almost self-parodic state of affairs in the academy reminds us that in colloquial English, calling something “academic” is to dismiss it as irrelevant.
Faced with this linguistically impenetrable and mind-numbingly voluminous scholarly mess, reading Antony Polonsky’s masterful new tome, “The Jews in Poland and Russia,” is not merely an edifying pleasure: It is nothing short of a redemptive experience. In Polonsky’s erudite and eminently clear treatment, the rich forest of Eastern European Jewish civilization that has become obscured not only by trees, but also by debris of scholarly twigs, re-emerges in its full lushness.
By Antony Polonsky
The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 568 pages, $59.50
The academic world has become, as of late, almost grotesquely distended by piles of books and articles on the narrowest and most obscure of subjects, written in increasingly opaque scholarly jargon. A mere glance at the lengthy paper titles — employing dozens of terms not to be found in the Oxford English Dictionary — presented at just about any learned society conference, particularly in the humanities, is an experience almost as comical as it is exasperating.
My own particular field of Eastern European Jewish history — Hasidism, to be specific — is, alas, hardly immune. Involving the study of both social and communal history as well as rabbinics and Jewish mysticism, one often feels drowned by the mountain of ceaseless revisions of earlier scholarship, to say nothing of the petty contentiousness among academic colleagues on the most inconsequential of questions. A constant flow of narrow studies boldly claims to “revise,” “revisit,” “reimagine,” “reconstruct,” “deconstruct,” “transcend” and “transgress” the classic work of titan scholars, such as Heinrich Graetz, Israel Zinberg, Simon Dubnow, Ben-Zion Dinur, Salo Baron and Gershom Scholem.
Judaica journals today are filled with heated arguments about the most trivial arcana — the number of Hasidim versus Misnagdim living in Pinsk, Przemysl or Plock in March 1819; their respective median household incomes; annual taxes paid for kosher meat and Sabbath candles; what versions of the siddur every synagogue in each community was using, and so forth. More politically oriented scholars seem to revel in debating morbid matters such as the precise schedule of the Russian trains carrying Ukrainian mobs to commit this or that pogrom in some vanished shtetl, about whose correctly transliterated spelling bitter arguments ensue. This almost self-parodic state of affairs in the academy reminds us that in colloquial English, calling something “academic” is to dismiss it as irrelevant.
Faced with this linguistically impenetrable and mind-numbingly voluminous scholarly mess, reading Antony Polonsky’s masterful new tome, “The Jews in Poland and Russia,” is not merely an edifying pleasure: It is nothing short of a redemptive experience. In Polonsky’s erudite and eminently clear treatment, the rich forest of Eastern European Jewish civilization that has become obscured not only by trees, but also by debris of scholarly twigs, re-emerges in its full lushness.
[To read the entire book review, click here.]
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