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HEBR7040 / HEBRG006 History of the Jews in Poland

Course code:	HEBR7040 - UG and Full Year Junior Year Abroad (JYA) HEBR7040A - Term 1 JYA HEBR7040B - Term 2 JYA HEBRG006 - MA
Tutor:	Dr François Guesnet
Mode of assessment:	UG and Full Year JYA: Three 2,500 essays and one end of year exam One term JYA: One 6,000 word essay MA: One 5,000 essay and one final end of term exam
Taught:	In terms 1 and 2
Classes:	Thursdays, 1600-1800 in G10, 26 Gordon Square

This course offers a survey of Polish-Jewish history from its inception in the middle ages through the contemporary period. It will be understood as the trajectory of Jewish community that experienced an unprecedented extent of autonomy in a multi-ethnic setting. The course will offer comparative perspectives to the history of the Jews in Russia and other Eastern European commonwealths and regions. It focusses on communal and political structures, self-organization, migrations and economic networks, religious traditions and movements, legal status, (self-) images and narratives, aspects of cohabitation and anti-Semitism, political culture and movements, dimensions of gender as well as characteristics of everyday life.

Means of assessment

For the weekly meetings, participants will have to read those texts that are listed in the outline. Active participation in discussion is expected. Undergraduate and Full-year JYA: Three essays (30%), one exam (70%). One-term JYA see below. MA Students: one essay (20%), one exam (80%).

Undergraduate students are required to write three essays of 2,500 words in length, which will each count 10% of the total mark for the class.

Undergraduate Essay Topics

Essay One:

Discuss the phenomenon of Jewish self-government in Poland in the early modern period (until the partitions of Poland in the end of the 18th century). Include a discussion of Jewish autonomy, the structure of the Jewish community, and supra-local organization.

Essay Two:

Assess the reasons for the success of Hasidism in the Polish lands in the 19th century.

Essay Three:

Discuss how the character of Polish-Jewish relations affected the situation of the Jews during the German occupation of Poland (1939-1944).

One-Term JYA Students

One-term JYA students enrolled only for the First (or Second) Term, are assessed entirely on the basis of a 6,000 word essay. They may choose any of the three topics listed above. 

MA Students

MA students will sit a graduate-level three-hour examination, consisting of essay questions. This examination will count 80% of the total mark. In addition, MA students must submit an essay of at least 5,000 words which will count for 20% of the total grade. MA students are offered three extra classes (tutorials) each term. These will be scheduled on the basis of individual agreement.

All students must use the guidelines of the HJS Departmental Style Sheet for all questions of layout, organization, citations, etc. Essays must have a bibliography of works consulted and/or cited and footnotes or endnotes. Please pay special attention to the rules governing plagiarism since it carries serious penalties. Essays should be wordprocessed and must be submitted in duplicate with a cover sheet, which may be downloaded from the web address listed below. All essays should be handed in to the HJS office, not to the instructor. Deadlines must be adhered to, and late essays will be penalized. If there are problems meeting a deadline, please consult with the instructor in advance.

An electronic version of the Style Sheet and the cover sheet may be downloaded at: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/hebrew-jewish/students/studentresources/style-sheet-for-essays

It is departmental policy that all student work submitted on time should be returned to students within a fortnight. Late submissions do not fall within this rule. All students are entitled to receive an tutorial to discuss their returned essay with the instructor.

September-December JYA (HEBR7714A): one 5-6,000-word essay (100%)

January-June JYA (HEBR7714B): one 5-6,000-word essay (100%)

Graduate: 1 essay (20%), 1 exam (80%)

Course Outline

Term One:

Week 1: Induction Week

Week 2: The emergence and the structure of the Jewish community in Poland

Week 3: Golden Age and Chmielnicki-Uprising 1648

Week 4: The Jewish community in Poland and its hierarchies

Week 5: Eighteenth Century and Partitions of Poland

Week 6: -- Reading Week --

Week 7: Religious attitudes and cultures

Week 8: Changes in Legal Status and the Jewish Political Tradition

Week 9: Diversification of Religious Life in the 19th Century:

Week 10: Gender in Eastern European Jewish History

Week 11: Economic and social history

Term Two:

Week 1: Images and Narratives

Week 2: Entangled histories: Poland, Russia, and the Jews

Week 3: Acculturation in Partitioned Poland

Week 4: Jewish politics in the age of mass organization: Social Democracy and Zionism

Week 5: Every-day life, cohabitation, Jewish-non-Jewish relations, antisemitism, anti-Jewish violence

Week 6: -- Reading Week --

Week 7: World War One and the Emergence of the Second Republic

Week 8: Jews in Wartime Poland

Week 9: Postwar Poland, Jews and Communism/Stalinism, People's Republic of Poland

Week 10: New Perspectives and discussions: the 1980s

Week 11: The Jedwabne-Debate

Bibliography (for term 1 and 2)

Bibliographic and other reference works

• Corrsin, Stephen D.: Works on Polish Jewry, 1990-1994 : a bibliography. In: Gal-Ed, 14 (1995) 131-233.
• Ibid.: Recent works on Polish Jewry : a bibliography. In: Gal-Ed, 17 (2000) 105-203.
• Ibid.: Recent works on Polish Jewry : a bibliography. In: Gal-Ed, 19 (2004) 99- 302.
• Ibid.: Works on Polish-Jewish Relations Published since 1990: A Selective Bibliography. In: Robert Blobaum (ed.): Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland. Ithaca, NY 2005, 326-341.Edelheit, Abraham J. und Hershel Edelheit: The Jewish World in Modern Times. A Selected, Annotated Bibliography. Boulder, Col., London 1988.
• Goldberg, Jakub: Jewish Privileges in the Polish Commonwealth. Jerusalem 1985.
• Hundert, Gershon D. und Gersohn C. Bacon: The Jews in Poland and Russia: bibliographical essays. Bloomington 1984.Lerski, George J., Halina T. Lerski: Jewish-Polish Coexistence, 1772-1939: A Topical Bibliography. New York 1986.
• Magocsi, Paul Robert: Historical Atlas of East Central Europe. Seattle, London 1993.

Journals:

• Gal-Ed:  On the History of the Jews in Poland.  Jerusalem, 1973-present. 
• Polin:  A Journal of Polish-Jewish Studies.  Oxford, 1986-present.
• (From volume VIII, themed volumes, which are published in London.) 
• East European Jewish Affairs (formerly Soviet Jewish Affairs), London, 1968-present. 

Internet Ressources

• Index of Articles on Jewish Studies, Jerusalem („Rambi“): http://jnul.huji.ac.il/rambi/

Survey titles

• Baron, Salo Wittmayer.: The Jewish community, its history and structure to the American revolution, 3 Bde. Philadelphia 1942 (Reprint 1972).
• Ibid.: The Russian Jew under Tsars an Soviets. New York 21976.
• Bartal, Yisrael: The Jews of Eastern Europe, 1772-1881. Philadelphia 2005.
• Dubnow, Simon: History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Philadelphia 1916-20.
• The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe. Ed. Lucy Dawidowicz. Boston, Mass. 1967.
• The Jews in Warsaw: A History. Eds. Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, Antony Polonsky. Cambrigde, Mass. 1991.
• Mahler, Raphael: A history of modern Jewry, 1780-1815, London 1971.
• Mendelsohn, Ezra: On Modern Jewish Politics. Oxford 1993.
• Pogroms. Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Rus­sian History. Eds. John D. Klier, Shlomo Lambroza. Cambrigde 1992, S.164-190.
• Stanislawski, Michael: Eastern European Jewry in the modern period, 1750-1939. In: The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, (2002) 396-411.

First term, topics and readings

Week 1: Introduction

Week 2: The emergence and the structure of the Jewish community in Poland

• Hundert, Gershon: Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century. A Genealogy of Modernity. Berkeley CA 2003, chs. 1-2, 21-56.
• Levitats, Isaak: The Jewish Community in Russia, 1772-1844. New York 1943 (repring NY 1973), chs. 6-7, p 105-146.
• Ta-Shma, Israel M.: On the History of the Jews in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Poland. In: Polin 10 (1997), 287-317.

Week 3: Golden Age and Chmielnicki-Uprising 1648

• Fram, Edward: Creating a Tale of Martyrdom in Tulczyn, 1648. In: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. Ed. Elisheva Carlebach et al., Brandeis 1998, 89-112.
• Hanover, Nathan: Abyss of Despair (Yeven Metzulah), ed. & translation: Abraham J. Mesch. New York 1950, 1-12, 50-61, 110-121
• Stampfer, Shaul: What actually happened to the Jews of Ukraine in 1648? In: Jewish History 17 (2003) 2, 207-227.

Week 4: The Jewish community in Poland and its hierarchies

• Hundert, Gershon: Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century. A Genealogy of Modernity. Berkeley CA 2003, chs. 3-5, 57-118.
• Teller, Adam: The laicization of early modern Jewish society : the development of the Polish communal rabbinate in the 16th century. In: Schöpferische Momente des europäischen Judentums in der frühen Neuzeit, (2000) 333-349.
• Ury, Scott: The Shtadlan of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: Noble Advocate or Unbridled Opportunist. In: Polin 15 (2002), 267-299.

Week 5: Eighteenth Century and Partitions of Poland

• Klier, John D.: Russia gathers her Jews. the origins of the „Jewish Question“ in Russia, 1772-1825. DeKalb IL 1986, chs. 3-4, 53-115.
• Lederhendler, Eli: The Road to Modern Jewish Politics: Political Tradition and Political Reconstruction in the Jewish Community of Tsarist Russia. New York 1989, ch.2, 36-57.

Week 6: Reading week

Week 7: Hasidism and Enlightenment

• Nancy Sinkoff: Out of the Ghetto – Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands. Providence 2004, ch. 2.
• Rosman, Moshe: Hasidism as a Modern Phenomenon – The Paradox of Modernization Without Secularization. In: Simon-Dubnow-Institut Yearbook V (2007), p. 215-26.
• Hundert, Gershon: Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century. A Genealogy of Modernity. Berkeley CA 2003, chs. 8-9, 160-210.

Week 8: Changes in Legal Status and the Jewish Political Tradition

• Guesnet, François: The Turkish Cavalry in Swarzedz, or: Jewish Political Culture at the Borderlines of Modern History. In: Simon-Dubnow-Institute Yearbook 6 (2007), 227-248.
• Lederhendler, Eli: Modernity without emancipation or assimilation? The case of Russian Jewry. In: Assimilation and Community, (1992) 324-343.
• Stanislawski, Michael: Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews. The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia. 1825-1855. Philadelphia 5743/1983, chs.1, 2, 5; 13-48, 123-154.

Week 9: Diversification of Religious Life in the 19th Century:

• Dynner, Glenn: Men of silk: the Hasidic conquest of Polish Jewish society. Oxford, New York 2006, ch.1.
• Myers, Jody Elizabeth: Zevi Hirsch Kalischer and the Origins of Religious Zionism. From East and West. Jews in a Changing Europe. Eds. Frances Malino, David Sorkin. Oxford 1990, 267-294.
• Silber, Michael K.: The Emergence of ultra-Orthodoxy. The Invention of a Tradition, in: Wertheimer, Jack (ed.): The Uses of Tradition. Cambridge 1992, S: 23-84.

Week 10: Gender in Eastern European Jewish History

• Parush, Iris: Women readers as agents of social change among Eastern European Jews in the late nineteenth century. In: Gender & History, 9,1 (1997) 60-82.
• Rapoport-Albert, Ada: On Women in Hasidism: S.A. Horodecky and the Maid of Ludomir Tradition. In: Jewish History: Essays in Honor of Chimen Abramsky. Eds. Ada Rapoport-Albert, Steven J. Zipperstein. London 1988, 495-525.
• Rosman, Moshe: ‘The History of Jewish Women in Early Modern Poland: An Assessment‘. In: Polin 18 (2005), 25-56.
• Weissler, Chava: Voices of the Matriarchs. Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women. Boston, Mass. 1998 (Chapter One: The tkhines, religious literature in Yiddish, and the construction of Gender in Ashkenazic Judaism, 3-75)

Week 11: Economic and social history:

• Kahan, Arcadius: Notes on Jewish entrepreneurship in Tsarist Russia. In: Eds. Guroff, Gregory & Fred V. Carstensen: Entrepreneurship in imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. Princeon 1983, 104-124.
• Eli Lederhendler, “Classless: on the social status of Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in: Comparative Studies in Society and History, 50 (2008) 2, 509-534. 

Term Two

Week 1: Images and Narratives:

• Ury, Scott: Who, what, when, where, and why is Polish Jewry? Envisioning, constructing, and possessing Polish Jewry. In: Jewish Social Studies 6 (2000) 3, 205-228.
• Brenner, David: Marketing Identities: The invention of Jewish ethnicity in Ost und West. Detroit 1998, ch. 1-2, 21-76.

Week 2. Entangled histories: Poland, Russia, and the Jews

• Zimmerman, Joshua: Poles, Jews, and the Politics of Nationality. The Bund and the Polish Socialist Party in Late Tsarist Russia, 1892-1914. Madison, Wisc. 2004. (Chapter 2-5, 36-125).

Week 3: Acculturation in Partitioned Poland

• Cala, Alina: The Question of the Assimilation of Jews in the Polish Kingdom (1864-1897): An Interpretative Essay. In: Polin 1 (1986), 130-151.

Week 4: Jewish politics in the age of mass organiziations: Social Democracy and Zionism

• Frankel, Jonathan: “Crisis as a Factor in Modern Jewish Politics,” in: ibid.: Crisis, Revolution, and Russian Jews. Cambridge 2009, 15-31.

Week 5: Every-day life, cohabitation, Jewish-non-Jewish relations, antisemitism, anti-Jewish violence

• Brass, Paul R.: Introduction. In: Riots and pogroms. Basingstone 1996.
• Michlic, Joanna B.: Poland’s threatening other: the image of the Jew from 1880 to the present. Lincoln, Nebr. 2006 (Introduction and Chapter I: The Representation of the Jew as the Threatening Other. A Historical Introduction, 1-68).
• Celia Stopnicka Heller: On the Edge of Destruction: Jews of Poland between the World Wars. New York 1980 (reprint Detroit 1990), chs. 4 and 7.

Week 6: -- Reading week --

Week 7: World War One and the Emergence of the Second Republic

• Fink, Carole: Defending the Rights of Others. The Great Powers, and International Minority Protection, 1878-1938. Cambridge 2004, chs. 3-4, 67-132.
• Hagen, William: Before the ‚Final Solution’: Toward a Comparative Analysis of Political Antisemitism in Interwar Germany and Poland. In: Journal of Modern History 68 (1996) 2, 351-81.
• Jack Jacobs: Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland. Syracuse 2009, chs. 3-5, 48-97.

Week 8: Jews in Wartime Poland

• Redlich, Shimon: Together and Apart in Brzezany, Bloomington, Ind. 2002, ch. 5: The German Occupation, 93-135.
• Tec, Nechama: Resiliance and Courage, Newhaven 2003, ch. 6: Hiding and Passing in the Forbidden Christian World, 205-255.
• Trunk, Isaiah: Judenrat: the Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi occupation, Lincoln 1996, chs. 1-2, 1-35.

Week 9. Postwar Poland, Jews and Communism/Stalinism, People’s Republic of Poland

• Szaynok, Bozena: The Role of Antisemitism in Postwar Polish-Jewish Relations. In: Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland, ed. Blobaum, Robert. Ithaca, London 2005, 265-83.
• Stola, Dariusz: Fighting against the Shadows: The Anti-Zionist Campaign of 1968. In: Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland, ed. Blobaum, Robert. Ithaca, London 2005, 284-301.

Week 10: New Perspectives and discussions: the 1980s

• Jan Blonski: The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto. In: Polin 1987, 321-36.
• Steinlauf, Michael C.  Bondage to the Dead:  Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust.  Syracuse, NY, 1997, chs. 6-7, 89-146.

Week 11: The Jedwabne-Debate

• Kaczynski, Andrzej: Burnt Offering. In: Polonsky, Antony, Joanna B. Michlic (eds.): The Neighbours Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland. Princeton 2001, 50-60.
• Kurkowska-Budzan, Marta: My Jedwabne. In: Polonsky, Antony, Joanna B. Michlic (eds.): The Neighbours Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland. Princeton 2001, 200-209.
• Tokarska-Bakir, Joanna: Obsessed with Innocence. In: Polonsky, Antony, Joanna B. Michlic (eds.): The Neighbours Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland. Princeton 2001, 75-87.