European Judaism

The preparation for this issue coincided with a conference in London which also served to launch Anthony Polonsky’s important three-volume work The Jews in Poland and Russia. At the meeting he gave a paper which we reproduce here, originally delivered at Harvard, describing his own personal history and how he became engaged in the study of Polish-Jewish history. It serves also as an introduction to the themes of his book.

Antony Polonsky has just completed a three-volume history The Jews in Poland and Russia Volume 1, 1350–1881; Volume 2, 1881–1914 (Oxford, 2010); Volume 3, 1914–2008 (Oxford, 2012). In 2011, the book was awarded the Kulczycki Prize of the American Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies for the best book in any discipline on any aspect of Polish affairs, and in 2012, it won the Pro historia Polonorum prize by the Senate of the Republic of Poland for the best book on Polish history in a foreign language published in the last five years. This article describes how the book came to be written, describing the influence of the author's youth in apartheid South Africa, his decision to study the history of twentieth century Poland and his involvement with the Solidarity Movement. As one of the organisers of the conferences in the 1980s and as principal editor of Polin: Studies in Polish-Jewry, he has been at the centre of the developments which have transformed our understanding of the Polish-Jewish past and Polish-Jewish relations. The article describes how he came to write his three-volume history and what he hoped to achieve in this way.

Exploring some of the tensions in the recent international conference on 'Jews and Non-Jews in Lithuania: Coexistence, Cooperation, Violence', held at UCL in December 2012, I show how they relate to ways in which the Holocaust is to be understood and historical justice done not only to those who were murdered and suffered but also to the sufferings of Lithuanians under Soviet Occupation. Questioning the notion of a 'double holocaust' that would seek some equivalence I also interrogate assumptions informing the programme of the Prague Declaration. I explore ethical issues of what it means to do justice to the dead and how this calls for an ethical historiography that goes beyond its positivist frameworks.

Over the past decade, the question of where Holocaust survivors chose to rebuild their lives after the war has been the focus of much debate. This discussion is arguably a response to a post-Zionist discourse which claims that many survivors, when choosing where to immigrate after the war, were manipulated by the Zionist movement into making aliya. Through the examination of survivor testimony, this article will consider survivors' personal deliberations and considerations regarding their post-war immigration. It explores the factors that influenced their decision-making process, asking specifically whether survivors immigrated to the country that offered them the first chance of leaving Europe, by 'instinctive' or 'intuitive' Zionism, or if they were motivated by other concerns. This study is based on over eighty survivor testimonies, collected in Israel, Australia and the United States over the last twenty years.

Exile is a strong marker of identity for a writer, but to keep it forever as part of one's self-image surely involves a kind of mis-description, or at least over-simplification. Maintaining the position of being in exile also has its dangers: the posture of detachment can turn into a kind of wilful separation. Moreover migration, dislocation, various kinds of nomadism are becoming the norm, but this extreme mobility relativises even the most stable identities. What styles, or stories, or genres will be invented to describe a world which is no longer divided between peripheries and centres?

Almost 2,000 years after its destruction, the Jerusalem Temple remains present in the Jews' imagination and imagery. The Temple is remembered in Jewish tradition as a place of unity, utmost purity and holiness, an intersection between the divine and the human, between Jew and Jew, between the vertical and the horizontal. Generations of Jews have prayed to be able to behold the restoration of the Temple but have not been privileged to witness it. Nevertheless, it shaped their language and encapsulated their hopes for redemption. The Temple was the essence to which all other practices were compared; after its destruction, the Temple itself became the measure of many contemporary rabbinic practices. This article surveys the different ways the Jews kept the symbolism of the Temple and embedded it in their lives. It also examines the contemporary state of affairs – what was viewed in the past as an almost imaginary messianic hope, is now on the agenda of some right-wing groups who wish to hasten rebuilding of a Temple on the Temple Mount.

BT Baba Metziah 85b contains a little-understood aggadah which is here interpreted as part of an early commentary on the Amidah. The narrative is designed to explain that the coming of the Messiah is delayed by the near impossibility of attaining closeness to God by means of study, or of obeying the command cited in the Shema to adhere closely to Torah. It comments on the nature of study and prayer, showing how language is both a help and a hindrance in any discourse relating to spiritual matters.

'The Praise of Silence' is a reflection on silence in the face of the mystery of the divine, and on divine and human silence in the face of suffering and evil, as well as on the author's own ambivalence about silence. It begins by considering three traditional translations of Psalm 65:2: 'Praise is fitting for You, O God, In Zion', 'Praise waits for You, O God, in Zion' and the Targum's interpretation, 'To You silence is praise, O God, in Zion'. The last of these is the main focus of this article. Rashi explains the verse in two ways: firstly, the futility of multiplying words in praise of God, so that the best praise is silence. The roots of this doctrine lie in a Talmudic story, paralleled by a saying of Jesus and by teachings in other religious and philosophical systems, both Eastern and Western. The via negativa of Maimonides is the most powerful expression of this in Judaism. Rashi's second interpretation shifts the focus from human to divine silence, and suggests that God is to be praised for remaining silent in the face of the destruction of the Temple and the blasphemy of the wicked. This derives from a passage in Midrash Tehillim which culminates with the Psalmist's own commitment to stay silent in the face of suffering, a stance which is in tension with the moral imperative of speaking out in the face of evil. This imperative is expressed both by the mediaeval poet who rebukes God's silence in the face of Crusader atrocities, and by the motto of 1980s AIDS activism: Silence = Death. The third part of the article looks at another difficult Talmudic passage which contrasts the silence enforced by human tyranny with the voluntary silence of those who suffer at the hand of God. Two contrasting stories in the Talmud have God, on the one hand, commanding Moses to be silent in the face of the inscrutable divine will, and on the other hand, to speak out in aid of God's work. In conclusion, there is 'a time to be silent' in the face of mysteries beyond our grasp, but 'a time to speak' when we must protest against human evil and end avoidable suffering.

This article engages in a literary analysis of the 'Mole and the Well' narrative, a tale that in the far past apparently was part of the Talmudic text, but is absent from the extant Talmud, with only an allusion to the former existence of the story in the Talmud to be found in BT Taanit 8a. The discussion that opens the article uncovers the hidden links between the passage in Taanit, in a discursive unit that hints at this narrative, and the spiritual contents concealed within the narrative itself (as it is preserved in post-Talmudic sources). This is followed by a close reading of the narrative that will aid us in clarifying the concept of the Emunah (faith) of the sages of the Talmud. This reading places especial emphasis on gender. Our reading finds a striking expression of the central place occupied by the female side in the narrative, by virtue of the fact that those who represent the believer who adheres to God are its two female characters. These women seem to serve as spiritual guides for the third character, the man, who learns from them the profound meaning of the spiritual maturity demanded of the believer.

Catholic prayer traditions always were very close to the whole book of Psalms. But when Second Vatican Council generated a process of reform within the Church, some thought it not appropriate for modern Christians to say prayers that sometimes resemble curses; so finally it was decided that in the Liturgy of the Hours some verses had to be omitted, or put in parenthesis. This criticism is not new; through the ages there have been various intents to cope with the problem, none of them very satisfactory. So this paper proposes five new tracks to understand the language and imagery of violence in the Psalms: their language is not so much descriptive, but poetic and metaphorical. The violence mentioned in the Psalms simply is part of our reality – and so it has to be part of our prayer. The questions 'who is speaking?' and 'whom are they speaking to?' reveal the perspective of the victims of violence as well as the strict theocentricity of the Psalms. And finally, the intention of these prayers is to limit or end violence, not to multiply it. Three modern 'Psalms' from twentieth and twenty-first century authors show that our modern times, too, need a powerful language to cope spiritually with various experiences of violence.

A Jewish Bridge out of the Darkness of German History: The Remarkable Testimony of Max Mannheimer, Holocaust Survivor, Eloquent Educator and Expressive Action Painter

Polonsky, Antony, The Jews in Poland and Russia, vol. 1, 1350 to 1881, Oxford, Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010, xiv + 534 pp., ISBN 978-1-874774-64-8 (pb).

Polonsky, Antony, The Jews in Poland and Russia, vol. 2, 1881 to 1914, Oxford, Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010, 492 pp., ISBN 978-1-904113-83-6 (pb).

Polonsky, Antony, The Jews in Poland and Russia, vol. 3, 1914 to 2008, Oxford, Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2012, 1040 pp., ISBN 978-1-904113-48-5 (pb).

Shenhav, Yehouda, Beyond the Two State Solution: A Jewish Political Essay, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2012

Bayfield, Tony, Alan Race and Ataullag Siddiqui (eds), Beyond the Dysfunctional Family, London, The Manor House Abrahamic Dialogue Group, 2012, 297 pp., £12.95 (pb), ISBN 978-1468167474.

For My Father

Sentenced Declarations of Independence

Yahrtzeit I am looking for my father

Books received for review