History Commons^™

The Immigrant Woman:Jewish Assimilation In The Lower East Side Ghetto Of New York City, 1880-1914, Rachael Siegel

History Theses

This paper looks at the factors that affected the extent to which Eastern European Jewish women were able to assimilate into American society between 1880 and 1914. By 1920, approximately 45% of Eastern European Jewish immigrants resided in New York City, primarily on the lower East Side. The population density of the Lower East Side made it the most crowded neighborhood in the city, if not the world. Eastern European Jews, especially Russian Jews, comprised the largest number of immigrants to the United States.

When these immigrants moved into the safety of the United States, they transplanted the traditions of …

Why Are There So Many Diverse Holocaust Museums?: A Journey Through The Holocaust Museums Of Five Nations, Marjorie E. Carignan

History Theses

Holocaust museums around the world are unique in their respective missions, funding, architecture and exhibitions. Some of these distinctions are extreme, leaving museums seemingly opposites of each other. To better understand these diversities, this thesis analyzes Holocaust museums in France, Germany, Poland, Israel and the United States. Through analysis, unique facets in many basic areas of the museums can be found, with many of these being affected by which country the museum is in. By seeing what museums choose to include and leave out, we are able to see what parts of the Holocaust could use more attention and how …

Ms-130: World War I Letters Of Henry W. Straus, Devin Mckinney

All Finding Aids

This collection comprises 48 letters from Henry W. Straus to his wife Anna. They were written between June 1918 and March 1919, when Henry, as a U.S. Army medical officer, was serving a British ambulance corps in France. Throughout the letters, Straus addresses his wife with great tenderness and yearning, anticipating their reunion and post-war life. He also displays a progressive attitude with respect to women’s independence, abilities, and right to do useful work.

Special Collections and College Archives Finding Aids are discovery tools used to describe and provide access to our holdings. Finding aids include historical and biographical information …

The San Nicandresi Jews: A Brief Bibliographic And Photographic Essay, Michael C. Vocino

michael c vocino

Brief bibliographic, photographic essay on the conversion story of the Southern Italian Jews known as the Jews of San Nicandro.

The Dilemma Of Genocide In The Old Testament, Daryl Neipp

Masters Theses

The Old Testament command to destroy every breathing thing within the cities of the Promised Land has long been a problem for those who seek to understand God. In some cases this has become welcome fodder for those who desire to question the credibility of Scripture, while for others it just creates an ethical gap that is simply too far to cross. This thesis will address the challenging issue by demonstrating how God's command to destroy the Canaanites was an essential component of his redemptive plan in that it brought to fruition the goals of the Abrahamic Covenant and established …

The San Nicandresi Jews: A Brief Bibliographic And Photographic Essay, Michael C. Vocino

Technical Services Department Faculty Publications

Brief bibliographic, photographic essay on the conversion story of the Southern Italian Jews known as the Jews of San Nicandro.

Cultural Transmission And Assimilation In A Quotidian Key: The Conversion Of Two Jews In Spain, 1790- 1792, David Graizbord

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

The Early Modern Period, an era of “confessionalization,” provides numerous examples of individuals of immediate, distant, feigned, or merely imputed Jewish origin whose religious and social allegiances shifted radically. The phenomenon of Iberian New Christians or conversos comes to mind. Early modern Jews who became Christians but who, unlike conversos, possessed no personal and familial background in Christianity constitute an allied field of research (See examples in the Bibliography, below). Scholarly assessments of the ways in which these Jewish non-conversos learned and influenced their adopted Christian culture(s) often concentrate on intellectual production. The focus is not surprising, as the converts …

The Early Modern Inn As A Space For Religious And Cultural Exchange, Magda Teter

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

While it is relatively easy to map out mutual cultural influences between Jews and non‐Jews, it is much more difficult to map out the mechanisms of this cultural exchange. Such instances of cultural exchange may have happened indirectly, for example, through books, as Joanna Weinberg termed it, through “virtual contact”; or, directly, through “real” human interaction. The texts presented here deal with the latter. One set of texts is a selection of several seventeenth‐century takkanot, rulings, by the Council of Four Lands, the supra‐communal organization responsible primarily for collection of taxes levied by the Polish state but also engaging in …

Jailhouse Encounter: A Sixteenth-Century Jewish-Christian Tale And Its Historiographical Ramifications, Daniel Jütte

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

This presentation examines two excerpts from the little known early seventeenth-century German memoirs of the non-Jewish Swabian merchant Hans Ulrich Krafft (1550–1621).1 Krafft was born into one of the most respected families in the city of Ulm, in southern Germany. In the 1570s, he served as a factor for the Augsburg-based Manlich trade company in the Levant. 2 In the summer of 1574, however, the Manlich Trade Company went bankrupt, and Krafft, who did not have the means to pay off the debts he had guaranteed on behalf of his employers, was arrested and imprisoned in Tripoli (now in Lebanon). …

Emw 2012: Cross-Cultural Connections In The Early Modern Jewish World, Emw 2012

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

Understanding the processes of cultural change in early modern history as a process of creating and negotiating social, cultural, and religious borders has become a commonplace in the last generation of research. This perspective has great validity for Jewish history, too: early modern Jews also found themselves in a range of new settings, which allowed a considerably greater range of interactions with their non-Jewish neighbors than had previously been the case. It was not only geographical dispersion that broadened their social, economic, cultural and religious contacts with their non-Jewish surroundings: new ideas and ideologies deriving from the thought of the …

A Jewish Merchant Family And A Moroccan Ruler, Daniel Schroeter

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

These three documents are from the Lévy-Corcos archives, a private collection of family documents in Paris, which I photographed in 1985. A few comments on what Jewish family archives reveal about Muslim-Jewish relations in Morocco: It was not uncommon for elite Jewish families to pass down from generation to generation various kinds of Muslim and Jewish legal documents, including Arabic decrees of rulers (dahirs) and letters from Muslim governmental officials. Such documents were kept as records of property, debts, or special privileges. Significantly, literate Jews did not read or write in the Arabic script, and thus could not read the …

A Jewish-Christian Commentary On Luke, Yaacov Deutsch

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

In 1735, Immanuel Frommann, a converted Jew who was working at the Institutum Judaicum in Halle translated the book of Luke and wrote a commentary on the text. This text is probably the first printed Hebrew commentary on the New Testament. In his commentary, Frommann uses a wide range of Hebrew sources. He quotes regularly from the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmud, biblical commentaries, midrashim, legal treatises, philosophical texts and historical works. He also makes use of mystical and kabbalistic works. The commentary has several layers of interpretation: relatively short lexical or grammatical explanations of words or phrases; literary explanations of …

Medicine As A Cultural Connection Between Jews And Christians In Early Modern Italy, Berns Andrew

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

This presentation explores cultural connections between Jews and Christians in sixteenth-century Italy through the lens of medicine. I present and analyze two texts. The first (from 1587) is a letter from Girolamo Mercuriale, a Catholic, to Moses Alatino, a Jew. The second (from 1592) is an excerpt from a consilium sent by the Jewish physician David de' Pomi to Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino.

It discusses the following texts:

1. Girolamo Mercuriale to Moses Alatino,"On a Uterine Tumor, Painful Urination, and Constipation, for a noble young Jewess, [sent] to the Jewish Physician Moses Alatino. Consultation #16" From: Hieronymi …

Finding Common Ground: The Metz Beit Din And The French Judicial System, Jay R. Berkovitz

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

In the two decades preceding the French Revolution, the rabbinic court of Metz functioned within a complex world of overlapping legal jurisdictions. The extant records of the beit din in the years 1771-1790 contain evidence of familiarity with French law and even an interest in taking that law into consideration in its own deliberations. From time to time, the beit din instructed litigants to consult French avocats in order to clarify a legal question, and in some cases the beit din itself initiated the consultation. There were also, certainly, instances when individuals sought the opinion of French lawyers on their …

Real Or Virtual Contact? Johannes Buxtorf's Reading Of Jewish Literature, Joanna Weinberg

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

This presentation attempts to analyse how Johannes Buxtorf the elder (1564-1629), long-time professor of Hebrew at Basel, ethnographer, lexicographer, and textual critic,read Jewish books by examining one passage from the Sefer ha-Hayyim written by Hayyim ben Bezalel (Cracow, 1593), which Buxtorf chose to integrate into his polemical critique of Jewish allegiance to the Talmud in this opening chapter of the Juden—Schul. Hayyim ben Bezalel, fated to remain second fiddle to his brother, the Maharal of Prague, had his own battles to fight against both Jews and Christians. In the selected passage, Hayyim ben Bezalel defends the Talmud as a unique …

Formation Of Public Sphere(S) In The Aftermath Of The 1908 Revolution Among Armenians, Arabs, And Jews, Bedross Der Matossian

Department of History: Faculty Publications

Revolutionary theories are most useful when they attempt to define and interpret the causes and mechanisms of revolutions. However, when they attempt to forecast the outcomes and the impact of revolutions on their indigenous societies, they are largely unsuccessful. This article deals with the impact of the Young Turk revolution on three non-dominant ethnic groups in the Ottoman Empire: Armenians, Arabs, and Jews. It will argue that the revolution resulted in the creation of a multiplicity of public spheres among the ethnic groupS.1 This multiplicity of public spheres became the main medium through which these ethnic groups internalized the Young …

“Under The Very Windows Of The Pope”: Confronting Anti-Semitism In Catholic Theology After The Holocaust, Carolyn Wesnousky

History Honors Papers

No abstract provided.

The Continuing Exodus: The Synagogue And Jewish Urban Migration, Samuel D. Gruber

Religion - All Scholarship

Catalog essay in Silent Witnesses: Migration Stories Through Synagogues Transformed, Rebuilt or Abandoned (Farmington Hills, MI, 2012) that deals with Jewish settlement and migration in American cities (especially New York, Boston and Cleveland) and the religious and community buildings erected and left behind in the process.