This issue marks the beginning of the fifty-first year of publication of the journal, something to be registered with a degree of pride and not a little wonder. We have been served over this time with a remarkable series of editors, beginning with our founding editor Rabbi Dr Ignaz Maybaum z’l (1897-1976). In those early years the direction of the journal was led by Rabbi Michael Goulston z’l (1931-1972) as Managing Editor before his tragic early death. His vision for the journal is well expressed in his words:

Despite numerical depletion, the dangers of destructive assimilation, and the alienation of many in the wake of the European catastrophe, a Jewry with a will to independent existence has a future. We already possess enough intellectual and spiritual strength to achieve a great deal if we can focus it and give it a clear direction. For there can be no successor to the great European heritage except a reborn European Judaism itself.[i]

He was succeeded as Managing Editor by Anthony Rudolf (1972-1975) who shared Michael’s European vision and, as a poet, translator and critic, brought literary and political dimensions to the journal. We open this issue with his memoir of those early days. Rabbi Marcel Marcus (1976-1978) succeeded him and in an early ‘personal view’ noted the journal’s understandable preoccupation with the Holocaust, but that now ‘a new generation has arisen. A generation which does not know the Holocaust, but only knows of the Holocaust.’ He invited authors of the ‘new generation’ – ‘it is time for us, having established, to look into the future’.[ii] Continue reading “European Judaism at 50” →