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Newly-translated works from modern Yiddish historians that seeks to expand the scholarship about eastern European Jewry.
In the early twentieth century, when the dream of Jewish cultural nationalism in the Diaspora was growing among champions for Yiddish, its leading intellectuals included the “Yiddish historians” who helped to uncover the history of East-European Jews. Before the Holocaust, their mission was to discover and present the formative history of a living people for an audience of educated lay leaders, drawing where possible on Jewish sources of information, in order to help build and fortify a Yiddish-speaking nation. After the Holocaust, their mission became to console its surviving remnant with information about the struggle to survive under German occupation. This book makes Yiddish writings by these historians available in English for the first time, with translations by historian Mark L. Smith.
The book also includes a revealing Conversation with Series Editor Michael Berenbaum and an informative foreword by Samuel Kassow.
“Historian Mark L. Smith has done us a tremendous service by introducing English-language readers to a “lost continent” of scholarship about eastern European Jewry by eastern European Jews themselves and written in their mother tongue. Not only does the book definitively lay to rest myths about Yiddish as a language only for the uneducated. His expert translations of works by seminal historians, linguists, and literary scholars are accompanied by indispensable introductory essays. Together, they convey the fusion of high caliber scholarship and intimacy with its audience that is the hallmark of the best in Yiddish scholarship.”
—Kalman Weiser, Silber Family Professor of Modern Jewish Studies, York University, Toronto
"This volume's selections provide a roadmap for how to think through today’s political and cultural challenges by rooting them in past experience. Though its focus is on 'the Yiddish historians,' its voices ring prophetic, showing how intellectuals imagined Yiddish futurities. Smith's careful archeology of ideas demonstrates that without Yiddish we miss a great deal."
—Justin Cammy, Professor of Jewish Studies and Comparative Literature, Smith College
"Building and Consoling a Nation is a landmark anthology that highlights one of the most vibrant but neglected chapters of Jewish intellectual history: the modern Yiddish historians. Bringing together forty-nine newly translated works by thirty-six writers, ranging from prewar nation-builders to survivor-scholars of the Holocaust, this volume reveals an extraordinary scholarly tradition that sought to write the Jewish past in the everyday language of the Jewish people.
With clarity, elegance, and deep contextual knowledge, Mark L. Smith recovers a body of historical writing that shaped how Jews understood themselves in the twentieth century. These historians documented autonomous communal structures, the texture of Jewish daily life, interethnic relations, literary creativity, and educational ideals across centuries. Their authors include canonical figures such as Dubnow, Mahler, and Ringelblum alongside lesser-known historians whose work, untranslated until now, offers fresh insight into understudied aspects of Jewish history. Roughly half the selections concern the Holocaust and show Yiddish historians grappling with catastrophe through the same methods they brought to earlier periods, insisting on the continuity of Jewish social, cultural, and spiritual life even amid destruction. Collectively, these writings illuminate the distinctive priorities of Yiddish scholarship: an insistence on cultural vitality, communal agency, and the lived experience of ordinary Jews.
Building and Consoling a Nation will play a vital role in restoring an entire historiographical tradition to the writing of Jewish history and will serve as an indispensable resource for scholars of Jewish history, Yiddish literature, and Holocaust studies."
—Avinoam J. Patt, Professor of Holocaust Studies, New York University
Note on Languages and Usage
Foreword
Samuel H. Kassow
Introduction to the Yiddish Historians and Their Work
Mark L. Smith
Part One
Jewish Autonomy
1 Autonomy in Jewish History
by Simon Dubnow, 1934
2 The Jewish Parliament in Lithuania and Belorussia in Its Legislative Activity, 1623–1721
by Israel Sosis, 1928
3 A Budget of the Council of the Four Lands in 1726
by Raphael Mahler, 1940
4 The Financial Collapse of the Central and Provincial Autonomy of the Jews in Old-Time Poland, 1650–1764
by Ignacy Schiper, 1932
5 The Central Representative Bodies of the Jews in the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, 1807–1816
by Artur Eisenbach, 1938
6 The Warsaw Kehila under the Leadership of Dr. Ludwik Natanson, 1871–1896
by Jacob Shatzky, 1953
7 Jewish “Autonomy”: The Nazi-Imposed Jewish Councils
by Isaiah Trunk, 1949
Part Two
On the Jewish Street
8 Yiddish Theater in the German and Slavic Ghettos during the Sixteenth Century
by Ignacy Schiper, 1927
9 The Structure of the Jewish Guilds in Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
by Mark Wischnitzer, 1928
10 Two Communities in One City: The Jews of Lemberg from Medieval to Modern Times
by Meir Balaban, 1930
11 The Young Historians Circle in Warsaw, 1923–1939
by Raphael Mahler, 1967
12 Varied Were the Ways (of Jewish Resistance against the Nazis)
by Mark Dworzecki, 1946
13 The Wooden Synagogues in Poland before the Holocaust
by Rachel Wischnitzer, 1962
14 The Soup Kitchen and the Yiddish Theater in the Warsaw Ghetto
by Rachel Auerbach, 1977
Part Three
In the Non-Jewish World
15 Jewish-Christian Relations in Płock in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
by Isaiah Trunk, 1938
16 What Types of Taxes Did the Jews of Lublin Pay in the Former Independent Poland?
by Bela Mandelsberg, 1930
17 Jewish Home Industry in Old-Time Poland
by Emanuel Ringelblum, 1935
18 The “New Settlements” in 1808: How Belorussian Jews Responded to the First Order to Settle in Agricultural Colonies in Russian Ukraine
by Simon Dubnow, 1932
19 Jewish Cantonists—Young Boys Recruited for Military Service in Tsarist Russia, 1828–1956
by Saul Ginsburg, 1933
20 Antisemitism and Pogroms in Ukraine, 1917–1918: On the History of Ukrainian-Jewish Relations
by Elias Tcherikower, 1923
21 On the Causes of Jewish Defenselessness against the Nazis and the Strength of Jewish Resistance
by Isaiah Trunk, 1953
Part Four
Yiddish Literature
22 The Brantshpigl (Burning Mirror), 1596—The Encyclopedia of the Jewish Woman in the Seventeenth Century
by Maks Erik, 1926
23 On the Sources of the Mayse-bukh (Book of Stories), 1602
by Israel Zinberg, 1926
24 Three Hundred Years of the Tsene-rene (Bible Stories for Women), 1616
by Jacob Shatzky, 1928
25 The Tales of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav (1815): Hasidism and Yiddish Literary Creativity
by Shmuel Niger, 1932
26 On the History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century: Haskalah Period
by Meir Wiener, 1939
27 Four Unknown Yiddish Plays from the Mid-Nineteenth Century
by Max Weinreich, 1930
28 Yiddish Literature under Nazi Occupation
by Nachman Blumental, 1946
Part Five
Press, Post, Communications
29 Life and Language as Reflected by Yiddish Testimony in the Responsa Literature from the Beginning of the Fifteenth to the End of the Seventeenth Century
by Zalman Rubashov, 1929
30 The Jewish Postal Service in Tsarist Russia during the Early Nineteenth Century
by Saul Ginsburg, 1932
31 The First Yiddish Newspaper in the Russian Empire, Kol mevaser, and Its Time, 1862–72
by Israel Zinberg, 1913
32 The Attitude toward Yiddish of the Russian Authorities in Vilna during the 1860s: On the History of Yiddish Bookselling in Vilna
by Pinchas Kon, 1929
33. Ghettos and Concentration Camps Seeking Contacts: A Chapter of Jewish Resistance
by Mark Dworzecki, 1949
34 Unknown Letters by Zelig Kalmanovich in the Vilna Ghetto to Isaac Giterman in the Warsaw Ghetto
by Joseph Kermish, 1983
35 Inscriptions on Walls, Sacred Texts, and Other Books during the Holocaust
by Nachman Blumental, 1966
Part Six
Education
36 Joseph Perl as a Pedagogical Leader and His School in Tarnopol 125 Years after Its Founding
by Philip Friedman, 1940
37 Yehuda-Leib Gordon as a Fighter for the Haskalah in Jewish Schools in Lithuania in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
by Nadzieja Jaffe, 1938
38 The Rise of Yiddish Secular Schools in Poland during World War I
by Chaim-Solomon Kazdan, 1947
39 Jewish Schools in the Vilna Ghetto as Spiritual Resistance
by Mark Dworzecki, 1948
40 The Jewish Vocational and Higher School System in the Warsaw Ghetto, 1940–42
by Esther Goldhar-Mark, 1949
41 The School System and Education for Holocaust Survivors in the Displaced Persons Camps in Germany
by Philip Friedman, 1948
42 Four Years of the Chair for Holocaust Studies, Bar-Ilan University, Israel
by Mark Dworzecki, 1963
Part Seven
Book Reviews
43 The History of the Jews in Russia (1914)
Reviewed by Zelig Kalmanovich
44 Saul Ginsburg. Historical Works (1937)
Reviewed by Moyshe Shalit
45 Isaiah Trunk. The History of the Jews in Płock (1939)
Reviewed by A. Valdman
46 Jacob Shatzky. In the Shadow of the Past (1947)
Reviewed by Samuel Rollansky
47 Philip Friedman. Auschwitz (1950)
Reviewed by Julien Hirshaut
48 Mark Dworzecki. White Nights and Black Days: Jewish Camps in Estonia (1970)
Reviewed by Israel Kaplan
49 Nachman Blumental. Words and Sayings from the Holocaust Period (1981)
Reviewed by David Shtokfish