Todd M. Endelman

Anglo-Jewish Scientists and the Science of Race

he belief in innate racial differences was well entrenched in Western science by the start of the twentieth century. It was widely believed that the world’s population was divided into distinct races and that the physical and cultural differences among them were rooted in biology. For Jewish physicians and academics, for whom science was supposed to be a neutral arena in which their Jewishness was irrelevant, the ubiquity of this belief was a challenge, both to their professional authority and their emotional equanimity. It was not the idea of race itself that was troublesome but rather the subsidiary idea that invariably accompanied it—the belief that races were ranked hierarchically and that Jews were an inferior race, marked by a distinctive mental and physical pathology. Jewish scientists who wanted to think of themselves as neutral observers found themselves in the uncomfortable position of being both the observer and the denigrated object of observation.1 Those who tried to escape this double bind pursued various strategies. Some disputed the stability and permanence of racial traits and the existence of pure races. Others internalized racial thinking and then unconsciously reworked and subverted its premises. Still others accepted the idea of racial differences but turned conventional stereotypes on their head. Jewish scientists in Central Europe experienced the double bind more acutely than their counterparts elsewhere in the West. The stigmatization of Jewishness was more pervasive and the barriers to career T

Writing English Jewish History

Cecil Roth (1899–1970), the dominant figure in the writing of English Jewish history in the mid-twentieth century, served as president of the Jewish Historical Society of England nine times. In his valedictory presidential address in September 1968, which he titled “Why Anglo-Jewish History?” Roth defended the enterprise—and the society and himself, by extension—against critics who considered it “petty and unimportant” and believed that “after all that has been written on the subject there is nothing more to be discovered.” In his apologia, Roth referred to discoveries made by members of the society that proved that “industrious cultivation of our own modest cabbage patch” contributed to knowledge of both British history and Jewish history in general. In Roths metaphor, “the inconspicuous inlet of Anglo-Jewish historical research” sometimes branched out into “majestic and…unexplored rivers.” But, in closing, he admitted frankly that what motivated his choice above all was “the pleasure of the thing” rather than high-minded ideals.

German immigrants in Britain during the nineteenth century, 1815-1914

The pre-19th century background German migration to Britain during the 19th century residential, age and gender and occupational distribution ethnic organizations - religion, philanthropy, culture and politics British attitudes towards Germany, Germans and German immigrants.

The frankaus of London: A study in radical assimilation, 1837–1967

The disappearance of entire families from Jewish communal life was not an uncommon occurrence in Western and Central Europe between the Enlightenment and World War II. Intermarriage and conversion removed the names of thousands of families from the rosters of religious, cultUral, and philanthropic organizations. In recent years there has been renewed interest in this kind of radical assimilation, sparked perhaps by contemporary anxiety about the future of diaspora communities in demographic decline) Historians who have written on the subject, myself included, have found that there are serious obstacles, largely inherent in the nature of the evidence that survives, to gaining a clear picture of both the scope and the character of defection from the Jewish community.

Rachel Cohen. Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade. Jewish Lives. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. 344 pp.

biting Ottoman patriotism, albeit formulated to adjust to the necessities of official nationalism, was on the whole a continuation of the efforts made by their premodern predecessors in maintaining good relations between Jewish communities and the Ottoman dynasty. By the same token, anxieties about the reputation of these communities in the eyes of the authorities had been evident before the nineteenth century, as demonstrated in Aryeh Shmuelevitz’s The Jews of the Ottoman Empire in the Late Fifteenth and the Sixteenth Centuries. There are many more examples of patterns of continuity that are left untreated in the study under review. With the caveat mentioned above, Julia Philips Cohen’s Becoming Ottomans is an important book, making an original contribution to scholarly writing on the history of Ottoman Jews, to the study of imperial citizenship, and to the literature on the passage of the Ottoman Empire to modernity.

The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth-Century Europe (review)

Vol. 30, No. 2 ♦ 2012 of Jewish historians on the Early Modern Period, and of “Early Modernity in European and World Historiography.” In the course of his concise and suggestive analysis, Ruderman supports his presentation with a wealth of examples and very complete endnote documentation that is recapitulated in the bibliography of secondary works. This book is a seminal work dealing with a very current topic. It should attract a very wide readership among both Jewish and general historians and engender much fruitful and stimulating discussion. Those involved in the field should find much of interest, and newcomers a most readable introduction to the period and the issues that it poses. Ruderman modestly considers this book an outline for charting an agenda for future study, and it is only natural to hope that he himself will continue his fruitful research and reflections along the lines that he here suggests. Benjamin Ravid Brandeis University

Anglo-Jewish Historiography and the Jewish Historiographical Mainstream

This article examines how the writing of Anglo-Jewish history became detached from the writing of modern Jewish history more generally. It suggests that the price of this isolation has been the loss of a pan—Jewish, transnational perspective with the potential, ironically, to shed light on events and trends in Anglo-Jewish history and to explain what is uniquely ‘English’ or ‘British’ about them. It also argues that this detachment has impoverished mainstream Jewish historiography by depriving it of the contributions and insights that are the hallmark of Anglo—Jewish history writing—a tradition of social history and a well-developed sense of the way local environments and social formations and customs shape historical outcomes.

Aestheticism and the flight from Jewishness

Like socialism and science, aestheticism served as a programmatic rationale for the transcendence of Judaism and Jewishness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It offered cultivated young Jewish men and, to a lesser extent, women a way of distancing themselves from the popular connection between Jews and the pursuit of commercial profit. This article examines the career of the Lithuanian-born art critic Bernard Berenson and his ultimately unsuccessful efforts to establish himself as a disinterested, high-minded connoisseur, free of the taint of trade and his East European Jewish origins.

Reviews: David Ellenson, After Emancipation: Jewish Religious Responses to Modernity, Hebrew Union College Press, Cincinnati, OH, 2004; 547 pp.; 0878202234,

atic, however, is Dinan’s conceptual confusion in explaining why the current EU was founded in the first place, and why it has developed in the way he describes it. He leans towards a rationalist explanation that governments as the main actors in the integration process have defined and negotiated ‘interests’. Dinan frequently refers to the works of the American IR scholar Andrew Moravcsik who has emphasized that these ‘national interests’ are derived from competition between domestic (economic) interest groups for influence on governmental policy-making. At the same time, Dinan also talks about the importance of individual actors and their ideas as defining integration outcomes (321–3). In short, he mixes at random rationalist, ideational, structuralist, actor-centred, political and economic interpretations without ever discussing these different approaches explicitly. On the whole, this new book can be recommended as a better descriptive text and an at times more entertaining story than the older synthesis offered by Urwin. Yet, it is not a sophisticated analysis of why, and why in this particular form, European integration has developed since 1945. Neither does it provide students with a better understanding of historiographical and social science controversies about European integration. The definitive textbook on European Union history remains to be written, and the task probably requires a scholar with a wider vision of what integration history should be than the one on offer here.

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In the early modern and modern periods, the occupational profile of Jews in the West diverged dramatically from that of their neighbors and fellow citizens. Commerce, rather than agriculture or artisanal or industrial manufacturing, provided the arena in which Jews labored to make a living. From an economic perspective, this was not a problem. It did not place Jews at a competitive disadvantage. Indeed, the opposite was true. In the context of industrialization, urbanization, and mass consumption, buying and selling was more profitable than tolling in a field, workshop, or factory. Having been forced into a narrow range of occupations earlier in their history, Jews in the West now found themselves in an advantageous position economically. However, for Gentiles, who rarely viewed Jews in a disinterested light, the Jewish distinctive occupational profile was problematic and often viewed as symptomatic of a more profound pathology. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with Jews becoming citizens of the states in which they lived and moving rapidly into the middle class, their economic distinctiveness became a central feature of the debate about their fate and future, what was known at the time as the “Jewish Question.”