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History

Eric Goldstein
A Taste of Freedom: American Yiddish Publications in the Russian Empire

Abstract of a paper delivered at the 14th World Congress of Jewish Studies
Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel

Eric Goldstein, Associate Professor of History

Using sources ranging from Yiddish book catalogs to Russian censorship records, this paper documents the spread of American Yiddish publications in Imperial Russia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While most historians have assumed that the Jewish immigrant population in America simply imported Yiddish culture to these shores from their Eastern European homeland, this paper demonstrates that for almost two decades (c. 1892-1910), the influence largely went in the other direction. Yiddish publishing was stymied in Russia before 1905 by strict censorship laws and the conservative tone of Jewish society, which favored publications in the more elite Hebrew language. Because America offered a freer, more democratic setting for the growth of a mass culture in the "people's tongue," however, Yiddish publications emerged quickly on this side of the ocean, and subsequently had a major impact on developments back in the home country. The paper not only documents the popularity of American publications among Yiddish readers in Russia, but also suggests that Russian Yiddish newspapers and publishing houses followed American models in establishing themselves during the first decade of the twentieth century.

Jeffrey Lesser
National Unity and Racial Divide: Brazil and the Struggle over Racial Democracy

Jeffrey Lesser, Winship Distinguished Research Professor of History

One of the unique aspects of Brazilian national discourse is the claim that the country is a racial democracy. This notion is so strongly held that racism is prohibited constitutionally in the country. For many of the country's non-white citizens, this national discourse historically demanded that they whiten themselves or that they accept daily racism, even if officially it did not exist.

This paper explores a transnational challenge to racial democracy that occurred in the 1920's and 1930's. In those decades, groups of US African Americans attempted to settle in Brazil, believing the country was free of racism, unlike the segregated United States. Brazilian political elites were horrified by the idea and used race to prohibit the entry of Black colonists even as they insisted on Brazil's lack of racism. The case, which would embroil Brazil's Foreign Ministry, the NAACP and the FBI, provides an excellent lens for analyzing the ways in which formal laws and informal national histories that give the appearance of unified populations can in fact mask serious ethnic divides.

Marina Rustow
Yizhaq ibn Khalaf ibn 'Allun: A Karaite governor in Jerusalem, ca. 1060

Marina Rustow (History and IJS) and Benjamin Hary (MESAS and IJS)
Presented in Hebrew at the biennial conference of the Society for Judeo-Arabic Studies, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel, 25-28 July 2005

Our research for this paper began rather modestly when we began deciphering two unpublished documents in Judeo-Arabic: a court record from central North Africa, written in 1073, and an undated personal letter from Egypt from around the same time. Both of the documents mention a Karaite Jewish appointee unknown from Arabic sources of the period, Yishaq ibn Khalaf ibn 'Allun, who originated in Egypt and served in a government post under the Fatimid caliphs (a Shiite dynasty that ruled North Africa, Egypt, and Syria-Palestine from 909 until 1171). Ibn 'Allun may be identical with a figure from the 1060s who served as a tax collector in Jerusalem ca. 1060.

But the conclusions we drew on the basis of these modest documents aimed to answer a much larger question: why a large number of Jews and Christians served in high political posts under certain Islamic dynasties. The Fatimids appointed thirty-one Jews to high office between 909 and 1100 alone. Previous historians have proceeded from the problematic assumption that the Fatimids favored Jewish and Christian appointees for religious reasons, to offset the fact that they were a Shiite minority ruling over a Sunni majority. We argued that this presumption is based on an uncritical acceptance of medieval Arabic chronicles, most of them written by historians hostile to the Fatimid dynasty, who claimed that the Fatimids appointed Jews and Christians to curtail the power of the Sunni majority in Egypt. In fact, the Fatimids appointed more Sunnis than Jews and Christians combined. Moreover, a significant number of these Jewish and Christian appointees converted to Islam in order to assume their posts, a fact that militates against the idea that the Fatimids preferred non-Muslims in office. We argue that the disproportionate representation of Jews in office in particular was not because of their religion per se, but because of their disproportionate representation among the ranks of the literate cosmopolitan urban elite, which in turn had to do with their membership in a minority community. Religious affiliation was therefore not a direct cause of their rise to power but, at most, an indirect one.

The centerpiece of our paper was a four-page chart listing the thirty-one Fatimid Jewish appointees, including the figure mentioned in our two documents, along with the positions they held and the sources in which they appear. The question of sources proved to be particularly interesting. Some appointees are known only from Arabic chronicles and biographies; others, such as Ibn 'Allun, are known from Jewish documentary evidence preserved in the disposal chamber (Geniza) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo. Yet others appear in both types of sources, meaning that they were important enough to earn fame among Muslim chroniclers but also active in the organized Jewish community. This suggests that modes of authority within the autonomous Jewish social body were more varied than is sometimes suggested: power was not restricted to those who advanced through the traditional channels of religious learning, but rather was open to people who had made their mark on Islamic society as a whole, through mercantile activity, politics, or scientific learning.

We consider this research project to be mildly innovative in its synthesis of two distinct scholarly vantage points: Judeo-Arabic linguistics and philology on the one hand and the history of the political culture of the Jews and of the Islamic dynasties on the other. Because the historical contextualization of Geniza documents necessarily entails making interpretive decisions about texts that are fragmentary, difficult to decipher, composed by scribes who use varying proportions of dialect and literary discourse, and engaged in different regional linguistic cultures, some understanding of linguistics is important to the historical project of using these documents as evidence. Conversely, the deciphering of Geniza documents necessarily requires some focus on historical questions including political context, prosopographic detail, and the place of documents and writing within the larger societies that produced them. When we go on to publish the results of our research, we will present editions of our two texts (which are difficult to read both because the documents are torn and faded and because the handwriting resists easy decipherment) together with a translation, a commentary, and the historical and historiographic arguments above.

Sharon Strocchia
Dying to Live in the Community: Necrologies and the Discourse of Remembrance in Florentine Convents

Sharon T. Strocchia, Associate Professor of History

Necrologies created by and for female religious communities in Renaissance Italy were "living" documents in several senses. These ledgers kept a running record of nuns' deaths that allowed convents to register their losses, while compiling an ongoing, multilayered history of each institution. In contrast to convent chronicles written from an administrative standpoint, necrologies told their history from an intimate, personal point of view animated by life stories. Each obituary, often written by a close spiritual friend or companion, narrated key moments in a dead nun's life. In addition to noting standard biographical elements, nuns' obituaries frequently recounted specific examples or events that illustrated their personalities, social demeanors, religious attributes, and practical achievements. These female-authored texts possess a high degree of individuation that counteracts the flattening effect of prescriptive literature on women's monastic experiences. Moreover, necrologies were performative texts, read aloud during communal mealtimes as a way to instruct the living while keeping alive the memories of beloved dead for future generations. The compilation and retelling of nuns' life stories in these memory books formed a key practice by which convents constituted themselves as distinctive communities founded on personalized knowledge and unique chains of memory. Because of their richness, these sources can be put to various analytic uses. This paper reads Renaissance convent necrologies for what they can tell us about nuns' views of illness and their own bodies. I argue that, over the course of the sixteenth century, the body in pain became celebrated as the normative body for nuns. Illness was not only accepted as the natural order of things, but actively welcomed for the spiritual challenges it presented. The compressed narratives of necrologies posited a community of differently imagined physical abilities that encouraged nuns to seek out and joyously embrace suffering, but only within the newly imposed context of strict enclosure that aggressively partitioned nuns from the secular world. I argue that the spiritualization of illness exemplified in late Renaissance necrologies represented less a reversion to older ascetic models than a highly specific response to changing historical circumstances. My analysis takes as its main text the large, unpublished necrology of the Dominican convent of San Jacopo di Ripoli in Florence (conserved in the Florentine State Archives), which was begun in 1508 and continued with minor gaps to 1712.