A Jew in the Street: New Perspectives on European Jewish History

Reconsidering how early modern and modern Jews navigated schisms between Jewish community and European society.

This collection brings together original scholarship by seventeen historians drawing on the pioneering research of their teacher and colleague, Michael Stanislawski. These essays explore a mosaic of topics in the history of modern European Jewry from early modern times to the present, including the role of Jewish participants in the European revolutions of 1848, the dynamics of Zionist and non-Zionist views in the early twentieth century, the origins of a magical charm against the evil eye, and more. Collectively, these works reject ideological and doctrinal clichés, demythologize the European Jewish past, and demonstrate that early modern and modern Jews responded creatively to modern forms of culture, religion, and the state from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Contributors to this volume pose new questions about the relationship between the particular and universal, antisemitism and modernization, religious and secular life, and the bonds and competition between cultures and languages, especially Yiddish, Hebrew, and modern European languages. These investigations illuminate the entangled experiences of Jews who sought to balance the pull of communal, religious, and linguistic traditions with the demands and allure of full participation in European life.

Jonathan Karp is associate professor of Judaic studies and history at Binghamton University of the State University of New York (SUNY). He is the author of The Politics of Jewish Commerce: Economic Thought and Emancipation in Europe, 1638-1848 and has edited or coedited five volumes, including The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 7, The Early Modern World, 1500-1815 with Adam Sutcliffe and Classic Essays on Jews in Early Modern Europe with Francesca Trivellato. His forthcoming monograph is Chosen Surrogates: How Blacks and Jews Changed American Popular Music.

James Loeffler is professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century and The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire. He is also the coeditor of The Law of Strangers: Jewish Lawyers and International Law in the Twentieth Century and of the Association for Jewish Studies Review.

Howard Lupovitch is professor of history and director of the Cohn-Haddow Center for Judaic Studies at Wayne State University. He is the author of Transleithanian Paradise: A History of the Budapest Jewish Community, 1738-1938 and a coeditor, with François Guesnet and Antony Polonsky, of Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 31, Poland and Hungary: Jewish Realities Compared.

Nancy Sinkoff is professor of Jewish studies and history and the academic director of the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She is the author of Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlandsand the National Jewish Book Award-winningFrom Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History (Wayne State University Press). She is coeditor of Sara Levy’s World: Gender, Judaism, and the Bach Tradition in Enlightenment Berlin with Rebecca Cypess and of Polish Jewish Culture Beyond the Capital: Centering the Periphery with Halina Goldberg.