Jewish power and powerlessness: Prague Zionists and the Paris Peace Conference

This article explores how perceptions of Jewish power shaped the negotiations between Czechoslovak leaders and Jewish minority representatives at the time of the Paris Peace Conference. In the aftermath of the First World War, Prague-based Zionists embarked on a mission to convince Czechoslovak elites that attacks on Jews were detrimental to the internal stability of the new state and to Czechoslovak interests abroad. As Edvard Bene?, the head of the Czechoslovak delegation in Paris, worked to cultivate an image of the new state as more “Western” and “civilised” than other successor states – a strategy meant to garner international support for Czechoslovak territorial demands and its projected absorption of large minority populations – Jewish activists encouraged his uncertainty with regard to Jews' influence on Western audiences and statesmen. They did so in order to convince him to accept their demands for special protection clauses for the new country's Jews. The paper thus shows that the unprecedented victimisation of Jews and the upsurge in antisemitism during and after the war coexisted with a new bold and public Jewish activism. Yet, Jewish leaders did not in the end have the ability to convince Bene? and his colleagues to give in to international Jewish demands for special protection. Instead, they sought to cultivate a strategic alliance between the state's Czech elite and the Jewish minority which centred on the claim that Czechoslovakia was a particularly welcoming and tolerant place for Jews, an image that would evolve into a significant component of the myth of Czechoslovakia as an island of democracy in Eastern Europe.     

Oriental Othering and National Identity: A review of Early Israeli Anthropological Studies of Palestinians

Israeli culturalism, like Israeli identity at large, is premised on a two-pronged negation-that of the Jewish diaspora and that of the Arab East. Its emergence was assisted, directly or indirectly, by academic anthropology. The formative cohort of Israeli anthropology, mainly male researchers who came of academic age in the 1960s and 1970s, displayed stronger preoccupation with the Palestinian citizens of Israel than is normally recognized. This preoccupation, and the marginal status of Palestinians as a minority trapped within the ethno-territorial Jewish project, render the relationship between anthropological knowledge, Israeli statehood and constructions of Israeli identity particularly suggestive. The combination of these elements, so deeply integrated into Israeli public discourse, resurfaces in a grotesque, exaggerated form, as Israelis grapple to make sense of the Palestinian Intifada of 2000-2001 and of Wahabist inspired terrorism and America's 'War Against Terror' further a field.     

从锡安到锡安主义 --犹太人复国心路里程初探

"锡安"自古以来就是犹太人的情感和宗教寄托,而犹太人的复国愿望即"锡安情结"则是一种对国破家亡这一既定现实的自然反应,早在公元前的"巴比伦之囚"时期就已经形成.本文以<圣经>文字、考古事实和学术成果为依据,按古代迦南到现代巴勒斯坦和古代希伯来人到现代犹太人这两条主线,重点分析了犹太人锡安情结的萌发、不断强化直至最终得以实现的心路里程,从一个方面证明了犹太人"回归家园"的历史、地理和民族权利.从锡安到锡安主义,犹太人在流散状态下实现了从朴素思乡情感到系统政治理论的历史跨越.     

犹太教困境与犹太人困境下的文化犹太复国主义

从18世纪开始,犹太人为寻求平等和自由,纷纷背弃犹太教,犹太人的民族意识也随之淡漠;19世纪末,欧洲大规模的反犹浪潮再起,犹太人陷入了两难境地。为寻求犹太民族的生存之道,阿哈德·哈姆提出了文化犹太复国主义。     

清末中国对反犹主义的了解——兼与《犹太文明》一书的作者商榷

《犹太文明》一书的作者认为20世纪初之前中国对世界各地的反犹主义一无所知。作者这一论断不符合实际,事实是从19世纪末到20世纪初,中国对世界各地犹太人遭受迫害而处于十分悲惨境地的情况多有记述,对反犹主义持反对和谴责的态度,对犹太复国主义持赞赏态度。     

犹太复国主义与以阿关系

现代犹太复国主义同早期的犹太宗教文化存在各种内在联系。它不仅容纳了不同的犹太思想流派,而且赋予犹太教中的返乡复国以时代内涵,借此实现了古老弥赛亚观念的现代复活。以色列诞生后,犹太多数派中的强硬思潮长期影响着以色列的国家发展朝向和以阿关系,并且规范着犹太复国主义的走向。冷战结束催生的批判性的后犹太复国主义新思潮对犹太复国主义的基本特征和价值观构成了潜在的挑战。     

Thinking with restriction: immigration restriction and Polish Jewish accounts of the post-liberal state,empire, race,and political reason 1926–39

This paper investigates how educated Jewish observers struggled to understand the causes of the global immigration restriction that so impacted East European Jewry in the 1920s and 1930s, and uses their competing explanations, convictions, and uncertainties to reveal underlying structures of Jewish political understanding in the interwar period more broadly. Efforts to explain restriction, the ways in which it seemed both to target Jews and to be part of a general closure of the developed world, and questions of timing demanded reflection on the most fundamental questions of the interwar political order. Did state policies flow from economic reason, and did nationalisation, democratisation, and socialisation of domestic politics alter this causal pattern? In a world where closed borders were the default, what difference did statehood or statelessness make? What was the meaning and implication of the deployment of “race” in others' debates about restriction, and what role did global race-thinking play in determining population policies? What was the causal significance of specifically anti-Jewish animus, its nature, and the role of Jews' own choices in determining their situation? Analyzing a number of loci of Jewish social policy debate, the essay focuses particularly on the diasporist emigration activist Il'ya Dizhur, the Zionist sociologist Aryeh Tartakover, and the cooperative-movement activist Majer Pollner.     

Necronationalism: managing race,death and the nation's skeletons

This paper examines the construction of the Simon Wiesenthal Center ‘Museum of Tolerance (Jerusalem)’ over Mamilla Cemetery, one of the largest Muslim burial grounds in the region. Tracing the politics of death as exercised through the excavation of the cemetery, I consider how access to settler colonial memory is managed and renewed through the purging of Indigenous corporeality. Inspired by Achille Mbembe's sobering account of necropower, this paper conceptualizes power as a system of domination inscribed through the colonial management of deceased racial subjects and asks how we might understand systems of settler colonial power arranged through dehumanization of the already dead. I contend that the capacity to govern life after death is still firmly rooted in the reach of colonial power, and that by attending to the excavation and erasure of Mamilla Cemetery's deceased Palestinian subjects, we see a particular configuration of sovereignty defined through a calculus of absence. Identifying this practice of settler colonial nation building as ‘necronationalism’, I consider how power over life after death becomes the very terrain through which a nation is imagined.     

The power(lessness) of Czechoslovak Jews during the Second World War

The article evaluates the perceptions of Jewish power among the Czechoslovak exiles in Britain during the Second World War. The analysis documents the apparent persistence of prejudices against the Jewish minority among the Czechoslovak non-Jewish authorities that eventually formed the government-in-exile (1940–5), under the presidency of Edvard Bene? (1884–1948). The Czechoslovak exiles believed that the Jewish minority, in particular the Jewish nationalists (Zionists), had vehement supporters within Jewish circles in Western countries. Furthermore, they believed that the Jewish press played a significant role in the formation of public opinion in Britain and especially in the United States. In the early 1940s, the government-in-exile embarked on a policy of national homogenisation of post-war Czechoslovakia and was anxious to give concessions to the political representatives of the ethnic minority groups in exile, in particular the Germans, Hungarians and Jews. Yet the concerns about Jewish influence in liberal democracies granted several political concessions to the Jewish minority, in particular the appointment of a Zionist representative, Arno?t Frischer (1887–1954), to the exile parliament. This notwithstanding, by analysing the internal situation among the Czechoslovak Jewish groups in London, the article documents the internal weakness and disputes among the Jewish groups which gradually revealed the utter powerlessness of the Jewish exiles during their negotiations with the Czechoslovak authorities. The Jewish groups (the assimilationists, Orthodox and secular nationalists) were divided by mutual as well as internal disputes which were not concealed from outside observers and were utilised by the exile government. What emerges from the analysis is an impression of quarrelling groups that could not agree on any of the fundamental issues and whose only power was the ability to court the support of Western Jewish groups, which were perceived by the non-Jewish exiles as influential actors in US and British society.     

Christian Zionists in the Holy Land: Evangelical Churches,Labor Migrants,and the Jewish State

In this article we trace the creation of Evangelical churches created by and for Latin American undocumented migrants in Israel. First, we relate to the social significance of religious practices and beliefs for migrants' individual and collective identity in the host society and the ways through which non-Jewish labor migrants in Israel are creating alternative spaces that operate simultaneously as a new community of belonging. We consider the possibilities latent in the churches as “free spaces” for foreigners in the Jewish State, along with the limitations that participation in such a church entails for the migrant community. The second theme involves the universe of meanings through which believing migrants interpret their existence and place in the Jewish State. Here we probe how religion becomes a way of legitimizing the migrants' presence in a Jewish state and a means of channeling their claims for inclusion in the host country. We delve into the modes whereby the theological position of Christian Zionism is translated into a sociological position of Christian migrants in a Jewish state.