Jews and Modernity: Beyond the Nation
May 02, 2006 - May 03, 2006
Conference at the Canadian University Conference Centre in Berlin (Germany) | Conveners: Derek Penslar (U. of Toronto), Tobias Brinkmann (U. of Southampton), Simone Lässig (GHI, Washington, DC)
The conference "Jews and Modernity: Beyond the Nation" approaches the history of the Jews beyond the nation-state from a micro and a macro perspective. The individual papers will highlight different aspects of the complex relationships between transnational and local Jewish identities. The focus will be on Europe and North America after 1750.
Is modern Jewish history simply the sum of different national histories? How do we assess and balance modern Jewish history’s European, transatlantic, and transnational dimensions? Most scholarship in the field of modern Jewish history treats Jewish life primarily within the sphere of the nation-state. No doubt, the nation-state did play a key role in the processes that transformed Jewish life since the late 18th century: it was a trailblazer of Jewish emancipation, defined expanding national cultures and provided the delimiting framework for education and careers. Jews, in turn, identified strongly with the nation-state, yet clearly Jewish history transcended the national paradigm. Thus this conference will focus on mutual relationships between local, regional and transnational Jewish identities in the modern world.
The importance of the transnationalJewish Diaspora has been widely acknowledged. Already in antiquity Jews built highly developed and far-reaching networks for the exchange of economic and cultural goods. And indeed, for the period up to the mid-18th century Jewish history has been treated largely within an international context. However, most historians for the period after 1750 keep within the confines of the nation-state, neglecting (with a few exceptions) transnational Jewish relationships. Nor have scholars of the Jews in late modernity thought through the relationship between the Jews’ position within early modern internationality and their new role in the nascent nation-state. How, this conference will explore, did Jewish networks and spheres of communication reposition themselves during the transformation from early to late modernity?
It is ironic that the historiography of a diverse and far-reaching Diaspora still moves primarily within the paradigm of the nation-state, although the latter’s salience has been increasingly questioned. Scholars in the fields of comparative literature and cultural studies increasingly deal with transnational issues. Research on supra-national and multiethnic empires has simultaneously widened and sharpened the focus of global history as a newly emerging field.
The mutual exchange between colonies and the metropole, intra-colonial relationships and the emergence of an international cultural sphere cannot be treated within the confines of the nation-state. The history of the Jews offers many case studies for this range of themes: Jews played an important role in opening up the Atlantic world, Jewish trading networks connected the Mediterranean with the Western hemisphere and the Muslim world. International Jewish organizations in the fields of education and philanthropy like the Alliance Israélite Universelle, were precursors of today’s global NGO's. The history of Jewish immigration to North America from Central and eastern Europe illustrate impressively the importance and the persistence of close transnational links between Jews in the New and Old worlds.
A second focus of the conference, which is closely related to the transnational theme, aims in the opposite direction, towards the exploration of Jewish local and regional identities. The construction and the longue duréeof such identities could support the project of the nation-state but also weaken it. It is no coincidence that historians of the fissiparous German lands have stressed the importance of local and regional difference. But even for France, the centralized modern nation-state par excellence, influential scholarly works have shifted the perspective to the regional level. Accordingly, this conference intends to follow the "regional turn" in recent historiography: By leaving the ghetto, Jews became not only Germans or Americans, French or English, but also Frankfurters, Chicagoans, Parisians and Mancunians. An indication of the importance of Jewish local identities in the 19th and 20th centuries are the many local histories of Jewish communities, especially in the German-speaking parts of Central Europe and in the United States. Strong local affiliations of Jews were not one-sided love affairs. Jews often acted as respected local insiders, even when they had to defend themselves against widespread anti-Semitic stereotypes as outsiders on the national level.
Program
May 02, 2006
09:00 am Welcome
I. Jewish Transnationalism
09:30 -10:30 am
Panel 1: Modern Jewish History as International History
Jonathan Skolnik - Narratives of Jewish History in 19th Century Europe: Between Nation, Minority, and Region
Derek Penslar - An Unlikely Internationalism: The Jewish Experience of Warfare in Modern Europe
10:30 - 10:45 am Coffee
10:45 am - 12:15 pm
Panel 2: Capital, Exchange and Jewish Internationality
Adam Sutcliffe - Culture and Commerce in the Early Modern Jewish Atlantic
Rainer Liedtke - A Jewish Transnational Business Network? N M Rothschild & Sons in 19th-century Europe
Abigail Green - Sir Moses Montefiore and the making of the 'Jewish International'
12:15 - 01:30 pm
Lunch followed by Coffee
01:30 - 03:00 pm
Panel 3: The Limits of Deutschtum Among Germany’s Jews
Tobias Brinkmann - A Diaspora on the Move? Jewish Migrants from Eastern Europe in Berlin after 1918
Joachim Schloer and Katharina Hoba - Lost and Found Heimat among German-Jewish Emigrés
Michal Bodemann - Jews in Germany since 1989: A Model of a Transnational Community?
06:00 pm Reception and Dinner
08:00 pm
Keynote Address
Dan Diner - Modern Jewish History beyond the Nation State
May 03, 2006
II. Sub-National Roots of Modern Jewish Life and Identity
09:00 - 10:30 am
Panel 4: Empire and Locality
Stephan Wendehorst - The Emperor's Jews: Imperial and Local Jewish Spaces in the Holy Roman Empire 1648–1806
Michael Miller - "Bless the land that nourishes your children": Habsburg Jewsbetween Empire and Nation-State
David Rechter - Geography is Destiny: Region, Nation and Empire in Habsburg Jewish Bukovina
10:30 - 10:45 am
Coffee
10:45 am - 12:15 pm
Panel 5: Urban Identities and Local Diasporas: Jews in Eastern Europe
Scott Ury - Bright Lights, Big City: Jewish Urban Anxiety in Fin-de-Siecle Warsaw
Rebecca Kobrin - Bialystok's Exile: Jewish Regional Identity in the Age of Mass Migration
Anna Lipphardt - Reconstructing Vilne throughout the World: Vilne and the Yiddish Diaspora after the Shoah
12:15 - 01:30 pm
Lunch followed by Coffee
01:30 - 03:00 pm
Panel 6: Locality and Heimatgefühl Among German Jews
Simone Lässig - Locality as the Centre of Bourgeois German-Jewish Life
Nils Roemer - Locating German Jewish Cultures Between the Province, the Nation, and the Diaspora
Nicolas Berg - Luftmenschen and Living Space: German-Jewish Concepts of Heimat at the Fin-de-Siecle
03:00 - 03:15 pm
Coffee
03:15 - 04:30 pm
Öffentliche Podiumsdiskussion (Public Roundtable Discussion)
Transcending the Nation? Implications of Sub- and Transnationality for the Jewish Future
Derek Penslar (Chair)
David Cesarani
Dan Diner
Reinhard Rürup