Jewish acculturation in late nineteenth-century Russia: the case of Yonah Berkhin

Young Jewish students in the Pale of Settlement have not received comprehensive scholarly attention, despite their impact on Jewish politics and the public sphere in the late nineteenth century. Typically, representations of Jewish pupils and students are limited to the study of small and non-representative radical groups. This paper fills this gap through a contextualized examination of the practices and meanings of acculturation among educated Jewish youth. It focuses on a previously unknown diary by Yonah Berkhin, a Jewish teenager who strove to obtain a secondary education between 1879 and 1882. The discussion of this document adds a critical contextual perspective to the existing scholarship on acculturation among Jewish learning youth in late nineteenth-century Russia. I suggest that acculturation was a complex, multidirectional process. I show how, rather than merely creating alienation from Jewish society – which is often described as a “departure” leading either to a complete assimilation or to “repentance” and “return” – acculturation created new as well as modified existing modes of attachment to Jewish society.     

从民族宗教到帝国宗教——基督教的产生与发展历程

基督教产生于罗马帝国的全盛时代 ,初始是犹太人的民族宗教 ,是被压迫者的宗教。但基督教在成长过程中信徒的民族成分、阶级成分、教义以及与罗马帝国的关系都发生了很大变化 ,最终一步步发展为罗马帝国各阶层人士都信奉的帝国宗教。     

大汉帝国的正义观念及其现代启示——《白虎通义》之“义”的诠释

《白虎通义》所列举的制度规范的那些具体条款并不重要,最重要的是它所传达的大汉帝国所赖以制定那些制度规范的一般正义原则,那其实乃是"古今之通义",因而具有特别重要的现代启示意义。     

18 世纪苏格兰人参与不列颠帝国扩张的过程及影响

在18世纪不列颠帝国正式形成并在世界范围内展开扩张的时代,苏格兰人通过效劳国家对外战争、到殖民地定居、开展殖民贸易等方式全面参与了帝国扩张事业.该过程不仅使16-17世纪英格兰人发展起来的殖民帝国得以巩固和扩大,而且对解决18世纪不列颠本土的政治矛盾和社会问题、缩小苏格兰与英格兰的经济社会差距、提升不列颠国家的综合国力、培养苏格兰人的不列颠认同起到了积极功效.     

Inventing Culture and Nation: Intellectuals and Early Latvian Nationalism

The article argues that Latvian nationalism started out as a doctrine of cultural egalitarianism. This was due to the crucial role played by the emerging native intelligentsia, which came from peasant backgrounds and received education in Russian universities during the 1840s and 1850s. Using historical accounts and intellectuals’ publications, it is shown that Latvian intelligentsia was influenced by the bourgeoning Russian and German nationalist ideas at the time, which it re-interpreted within traditional cultural context. To a large extent, these intellectuals created a national identity for themselves in order to claim an equal position among intellectual elites of other nations. These conclusions imply that it is necessary to study nationalisms as a part of not only social and economic, but also cultural, modernity.     

UTOPIAS AND CITIES OF KALMAN ZINGMAN,AN UPROOTED YIDDISHIST DREAMER

The article analyses historical, political and ideological aspects of Sholem Aleichem's collection of political feuilletons, Menachem Mendel. Der tsveiter tom (Menachem Mendel. The second volume). The feuilletons were published in the newspaper Haynt (Today) in Warsaw in 1913. They were written as correspondence between the famous personages of Sholem Aleichem's prose, Menachem Mendel and his wife Sheyne Sheyndl. Menachem Mendel. Der tsveiter tom presents a wide panoramic view of the political and everyday life of Russian Jewry on the eve of the First World War. Sholem Aleichem described many aspects and events of world, and of Russian and Russian-Jewish politics, among them the Balkan Wars, the 11th Zionist Congress in Vienna, Jewish emigration, the Jewish question in the imperial Russian State Duma, expulsion of Jews from villages in the Russian Empire, the territorialist movement and the struggle between Yiddish and Hebrew. In 1913, Russian Jews were, on the one hand, an oppressed minority locked in the Pale of Settlement, but on the other a real subject of Russian and world politics, involved with political parties and civil movements, newspapers, leaders, congresses and the like. Within Sholem Aleichem's final half-fictional half-journalistic work a complicated collective portrait of Russian Jews emerges.     

Anti-Jewish disturbances in the North-Western provinces in the early 1880s

This article is devoted to a single wave of anti-Jewish violence in Lithuania which spread through northern Lithuania during the first half of the summer of 1900. It claims that specific incidents that took place during the first half of 1900 at Konstantinovo (news of an allegedly kidnapped girl, the so-called Jewish “procession” and a domestic dispute between Jews and the priest's workmen) were among the most important reasons for the pogroms. At the same time, it is clear that there were some more general (structural) changes in this society which facilitated the occurrence of violence (changes in the economy, growing Lithuanian nationalism, antisemitic tendencies, and pogroms in the south of the Romanov empire in the early 1880s, because they established the idea that violence against Jews was somehow legitimate). Peasants in the Panev??ys and ?iauliai districts took up violence against Jews because, as they understood it, an offence had been committed which no one else (especially the authorities) would put right and so Jews would go unpunished. Uncontrolled rumours ruled the mobs. Since Catholic peasant religious sentiments had been affected the most, it was common religious identity that drew people into a temporary community of action. When Jews were beaten in public spaces, the doors and windows of their houses smashed, the Jews were not only being punished for their alleged offences, but being shown the clearly delineated boundaries within the local social hierarchy. In public life, Jews were supposed to submit to the monopoly of power enjoyed by the Catholic community. Thus, this wave of anti-Jewish violence essentially differs from the deadly pogroms that took place in the early twentieth century in other gubernias of the Jewish Pale of Settlement.     

阿拉伯帝国为何没能产生重商主义?

从比较经济史的角度看,重商主义的兴起为近代欧洲崛起、资本主义制度的确立奠定了基础;而阿拉伯帝国也曾具有某些发展重商主义的历史条件.社会结构的剧变导致经济模式的改变和重农主义的崛起."哈里发"制度既不能有效动员体制内力量进行国际竞争,又无法与体制外力量建立联盟--像西欧一样发展产业城市、市民阶层.反对重利的伊斯兰经济伦理与由利己主义衍生出的重商主义格格不入.所有这些物质和精神上的动因相互作用,共同决定了阿拉伯帝国难以发展出西方意义上的重商主义.     

作为皇权思想的董仲舒历史哲学

董仲舒的《公羊》学产生了一套思辨历史哲学,本质上是一种皇权思想,与现实政治密不可分。为研究作为皇权思想的董仲舒历史哲学,运用文献分析法,从4个方面分析其历史哲学产生的时代背景。研究认为,董仲舒的《公羊》学具有3个特点:提出天命—神意史观,以天人合一的宇宙论解释历史发展的决定性力量,以君权神授说论证皇权合法性;提出王朝的三统循环的历史规律,将君王上升到历史主体的地位,认为皇权永恒;提出历史变易理论,呼应政治变革。从董仲舒以“三统”说和“大一统”说相配合、相交织的历史哲学是在西汉皇权巩固与扩张的政治背景下形成的,对比同时代罗马帝国未能产生高度系统化历史哲学的情形,这一点更明显。董仲舒历史哲学本质上是一种服务于现实政治的皇权思想,既论证了皇权统治合法性,又为当时皇权政治的发展与政治变革提供了理论依据。     

《百苗图》：近代中国早期民族志

通过对清帝国所绘制的多个版本的<百苗图>的绘制缘由、分类体系、构图方式、人物呈现、风俗描绘、宗教信仰的描述等多方面进行细致的分析解读,说明这一图绘所折射的乃是清帝国关于"他者"的认识与想像.在近代早期进程中,即大约于1500年至1800年之间,不同类型的扩张性国家与帝国,在或经由征讨、或直接殖民、或借助外交而扩张时,收集并记录了即将与之往来互动的人群的信息;并且,对他者的民族志兴趣并非是一个"西方独有的"现象,而是更广泛的近代早期时期的国家建构过程的一部分.