The Jews of Eastern Europe, 1772-1881

In the nineteenth century, the largest Jewish community the modern world had known lived in hundreds of towns and shtetls in the territory between the Prussian border of Poland and the Ukrainian coast of the Black Sea. The period had started with the partition of Poland and the absorption of its territories into the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires; it would end with the first large-scale outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence and the imposition in Russia of strong anti-Semitic legislation. In the years between, a traditional society accustomed to an autonomous way of life would be transformed into one much more open to its surrounding cultures, yet much more confident of its own nationalist identity. In The Jews of Eastern Europe, Israel Bartal traces this transformation and finds in it the roots of Jewish modernity.

Auteur
Israel Bartal is Avraham Harman Chair in Jewish History at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Among his books are The Records of the Council of the Four Lands, Volume 1: 1580-1792, Exile in the Homeland, and Poles and Jews: A Failed Brotherhood (with Magdalena Opalski).

Contenu

Introduction

1. The Jews of the Kingdom
2. The Partitions of Poland: The End of the Old Order, 1772-1795
3. Towns and Cities: Society and Economy, 1795-1863
4. Hasidim, Mitnagdim, and Maskilim
5. Russia and the Jews
6. Austria and the Jews of Galicia, 1772-1848
7. "Brotherhood" and Disillusionment: Jews and Poles in the Nineteenth Century
8. "My Heart Is in the West": The Haskalah Movement in Eastern Europe
9. "The Days of Springtime": Czar Alexander II and the Era of Reform
10. Between Two Extremes: Radicalism and Orthodoxy
11. The Conservative Alliance: Galicia under Emperor Franz Josef
12. The Jew Is Coming! Anti-Semitism from Right and from Left
13. "Storms in the South," 1881-1882

Conclusion: Jews as an Ethnic Minority in Eastern Europe
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments