Jewish politics

• In Event: Transnational potentials in (American) Jewish studies and its various subfields

Abstract

Jewish politics in the modern era saw no national boundaries. The concerns of Jews in one place assumed important places on the communal agendas of those living elsewhere. The political activities of Jews in the United States and those in Europe operated along lines which crossed borders and which took cognizance of the needs and sensibilities of their co-religionists in a variety of national settings. Additionally various Jewish community leaders and notables linked advocacy for Jews in distress in other lands with their own prestige at home and the clout of their nation, be it the United States, Great Britain, Germany or France.
Whether thinking of Jewish political protests over the Damascus Affair in the 1840s or the Mortara controversy of the 1850s, organized lobbying to aid the of Roumania and the Czarist lands in the late nineteenth century, or of Germany and Poland in the 1930s, as well as the formation of international Jewish political movements, Zionism and the Bund most prominently, we can see how political concerns transcended national lines. These are just a few examples of moments in time when the transnational context of Jewish politics seems particularly prominent.
Historians have for decades noted the importance of these events and charted the histories of these movements and we have an ample scholarship about them. But these earlier studies pre-dated the emergence of transnationalism as an analytic tool to conceptualize the past. How can Jewish historians interested in modern Jewish politics benefit from this new intellectual framework? How would scholars interested in developing theories of transnationalism benefit from contemplating the details and the larger arc of modern Jewish history?

Author

• Hasia R. Diner, New York University