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Jewish Political Studies Review Abstracts
Volume 6, Numbers 3-4 (Fall 5755/1994)
"Zionism: Some Recurring Questions"
The disintegration of the central Ottoman government in the
eighteenth century had a significant impact on the situation in
Jerusalem. This paper investigates the relations in the second
half of that century between one minority group in the city (the
Jewish community) and the Ottoman authorities in Jerusalem and in
Damascus, the capital of the Sancak, as well as the Jewish
community's relations with the Arab population of Jerusalem. The
paper is based on a new historical source that has recently been
discovered: the original account books of the Jewish community in
Jerusalem of eleven years in the second half of the eighteenth
century (between 1760 and 1796).
The main conclusion of the present research is that the
Jewish community was forced to pay considerable sums of money
"under the table," which became fixed payments, in addition to
the formal taxes paid to the Ottoman authorities -- a phenomenon
which is not unique to the Jerusalem of that period. The paper
contains precise data and describes their distribution. It
includes tables of the amounts paid by the community both to the
government and to dozens of functionaries. The paper also
demonstrates the importance of the loans at interest taken by the
community from the Moslem population in Jerusalem. From time to
time these debts led to severe crises in the community. Another
point uncovered by this research is the identity of dozens of the
officials in the city who accepted presents, bribes and taxes
from the Jewish community -- including their names and their
positions in the civic hierarchy.
I believe that these lists of Ottoman rulers and officials,
as well as Arab notables and others mentioned in the account
books, can also teach us a great deal about the history of the
Arabs in Jerusalem.
Close connections with the United States were forged by many
yishuv leaders in the interwar period. Although on first
consideration, the poet, Chaim Nachman Bialik, might seem an
unlikely person to have extensive American ties, in fact, he was
instrumental in binding the cultural world of the yishuv to
America. Never conversant with American life or literature,
Bialik was able nonetheless to develop personal ties with many
American Jews, and he grew to appreciate the advances of
American-Jewish culture. Like leaders in other areas of yishuv
life, he recognized the financial and diplomatic necessity of
close American connections. He helped to pave the way for
Israel's later close relationship with American Jewry and the
United States.
German Orthodoxy in the Wilhelmine and Weimar periods
presents an interesting case study in Jewish attitudes toward
Israel and the diaspora. The German Orthodox minority, no more
than ten to twenty percent of German Jewry after World War I,
participated with the majority of German Jews in a whole-hearted
affirmation of German culture (in German Zionist parlance:
Galutbejahung). As with all German Jews, German culture had
become definitive of their very identity as Jews. Despite their
commitment to Jewish observance, the German Orthodox had more in
common with their less observant or non-observant brethren than
with the historic Jewish traditional culture of Eastern Europe.
Yet for all that, the Orthodox, as followers of traditional
Jewish behavior patterns and their corresponding value
commitments, affirmed their Jewish identities in a more
full-orbed way than their Reform-oriented co-religionists. They
validated German culture no less than other Jews, but did so with
their own inertia, accents and qualifications. Like the Zionists
they believed in and demonstrated a connectedness to a larger
Jewish people and to the Land of Israel. Such connections were
declared and spiritually reenacted every day in prayer and at
table. This tension between, as Jehuda Reinharz, put it
"fatherland and promised land" was thus heightened by and within
Orthodoxy. In the following pages, I will give an account of two
selective but representative Orthodox attitudes -- those of
Samson Raphael Hirsch and Jacob Rosenheim -- toward Jewish
nationality, the Land of Israel and, in Rosenheim's case, the
Zionist movement. I will explore these attitudes against the
background of German-Jewish identity and history as such.
The development of the Zionist movement in Libya was an
evolutionary process which brought changes in ways of thinking
and behavior without detaching completely from tradition. New
social and economic elements entered public life (lower middle
class and women) and changes took place in education (modern
Hebrew language and literature and modern Jewish history). This
is not to say, however, that those social elements did not have
any part in public life beforehand, but now their involvement
became a mainstream one. Similarly, traditional education did
not cease, and the old political guard continued to exist: the
official communal leadership was manned by it, and Zionist
leaders were observant Jews who were backed by many rabbis.
Despite the growing involvement of women, they hardly reached
leadership positions.
Australia's crucial role in the UN decision of 9 December
1949 to internationalize the whole city of Jerusalem and
Bethlehem emanated from the mistaken belief of its Minister of
External Affairs, H.V. Evatt, that many Catholic votes could be
won by that initiative. The campaign in Australia to that end by
some quarters in the Catholic Church clearly demonstrates very
obvious antisemitic |