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Alain Nogues/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images
Alain Nogues/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images
The Liberation of the Arabs From the Global Left

The exploitation of the intellectual and political energies of Arab societies as ammunition in the ideological battles of the left has had disastrous effects on the region

byHussein Aboubakr Mansour

After the Great War, Arab societies, like many others, for the first time came to know politics as a modern mass phenomenon in which modern communication technologies are used for mass political mobilization. For the first time, intellectuals, journalists, poets, and men of letters of all sorts replaced the old classes of religious scholars by becoming the source of moral knowledge and ethical education for the public. The new trend of inspiring people with a total philosophical “vision,” the conversion of artistic sensibilities into populist political symbols, and the pooling of mass support into a demand, symbol, or figure that could be converted to power became the mainstays of Levantine and Egyptian politics....

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Over the centuries, Jews enjoyed various government-paid positions in the Ottoman Empire. Yes, among them there were advisors and tax farmers. But there was also a Jewish member of the feudal cavalry in the year 1431, and, in 1600, Jewish court physicians outnumbered their Muslim colleagues. By the turn of the 19th century, Jewish civil service had waned until 1856 when the sultan declared all subjects eligible for public employment with the Islahat Ferman. Relying on government registries that begin in 1879, the historian Abdulhamit Kirmizi provides a detailed statistical analysis of hundreds of Jewish civil servants in the Ottoman state. Kirmizi writes: “An official of Jewish origin was not merely ‘a Jewish official.’ [...] Religious, ethnic, and imperial identities and loyalties overlapped with one another; they were not necessarily in conflict or mutually exclusive.”

Auguste Hippolyte Collard/Public Domain
Auguste Hippolyte Collard/Public Domain
The Paris Commune at 150

France’s second revolutionary sequel was a failure. But it looks better than its successors.

byMitchell Abidor

On March 18, 1871, troops of the new Third French Republic were ordered to seize the 250 cannons stationed around Paris. France had just been defeated by the Prussians in a war that their now-former emperor, Napoleon III, had provoked. Paris had suffered a horrific siege lasting from September 1870 to January 1871, during which its residents had been reduced to eating, among other things, salami made from rats. When the siege was finally lifted, Parisians were forced to submit to the indignity of Prussian troops marching through the city and to pay an enormous indemnity to the victors. So when word spread of the plan to seize the cannons in the working-class quarter of Montmartre, cannons paid for by the workers themselves, the residents in the heights of the city rebelled. By the late afternoon, the crowd had killed two generals leading the troops to remove the artillery, and within hours the people had seized the Hotel de Ville and placed the city under the rule of the Central Committee of the National Guard. Only they, and not the regularly constituted government, which had fled to Versailles behind its leader, Adolphe Thiers, could properly defend the city and the republic. The spark that set off the revolution established it as something sui generis. As Antoine Brunel, a member of the National Guard and the Commune’s elected council, wrote years later, “The insurrection of 1871 is still misunderstood. It was first provoked by a patriotic sentiment and by the determination to prevent the monarchical form of government from taking possession of the country.” Only in France could a revolutionary seizure of power be set off by love for the patrie, the fatherland defended by the revolutionary army of 1793. It is commonly said that generals refight the last wars. The Paris Commune, for its part, refought the greatest of France’s revolutions, the one that began with the taking of the Bastille on July 14, 1789. ...

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The Nazi Roots of Islamist Hate

A review of recent scholarship on the shaping of the modern Middle East in the aftermath of the Holocaust

byJeffrey Herf

In early June 1946, Haj Amin el-Husseini, also known as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, escaped from a year of pleasant house arrest in France and flew to Cairo. Husseini, by then often referred to in Egypt simply as “the Mufti,” was internationally renowned as a collaborator with Nazi Germany as a result of his meeting with Adolf Hitler in Berlin in November 1941, and his Arabic language tirades to “kill the Jews” broadcast to the Middle East on the Third Reich’s short wave radio transmitters. Husseini was a key figure in an ideological and political fusion between Nazism and Islamism that achieved critical mass between 1941 and 1945 in Nazi Germany, and whose adherents sought to block the United Nations Partition Plan to establish an Arab and a Jewish state in former British Mandate Palestine, helping to define the boundaries of Arab politics for decades thereafter.

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template

Whence the unusual design features of the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, the oldest extant synagogue in the United States? The Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam and the Bevis Marks Synagogue in London offer clues. The scholar Laura Leib argues that the greatest design source is actually Rabbi Jacob Judah Leon de Templo’s messianic study, the Retrato del Templo de Se lomo (1642). Leib explains, “Early modern synagogue architects mimicked both the proportions prescribed by Leon de Templo and key symbolic design features of the Temple. By echoing the divinely-inspired structures, eighteenth-century Sephardic Jews in colonial America hoped to draw their worship closer to God and to help bring about the messianic era.”

Tourosynagogue.org
Eleanor Shakespeare
Eleanor Shakespeare
The American Zionist Dream

How William Blackstone, Henry Cabot Lodge, and their fellow Christians saw a Jewish state as deeply American

byWalter Russell Mead

On March 5, 1891, Secretary of State James G. Blaine presented William Blackstone of Chicago to President Benjamin Harrison. It was a miserable March, and the day was wet and dismal, with temperatures hovering around freezing. But as Blackstone entered the White House, he was bathed in light. The White House of the day was not the austere Federalist mansion that we know today: In 1882 Chester A. Arthur sold the old decorations at auction and asked Louis Tiffany to redecorate the interior in a more modern style. Tiffany’s pièce de résistance was a 50-foot-long screen inlaid with stained glass that stood across the entrance hall. In 1891, the rooms were already beginning to look dated. President Harrison had electricity installed that year, though both he and his wife, Caroline, refused to touch the light switches for fear they would be electrocuted. ...

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Whitman and the American Revelation

The epiphany that led to a national literature’s single greatest achievement: tucked in a prosaic, newly discovered early novel are the seeds of ‘Leaves of Grass’

byPaul Berman
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, born Ireland, 1840–1882), 'Shoshone,' 1867-72. Many of the men in the photograph are wearing U.S. Army hats and shirts, paraphernalia probably acquired through barter at the Army’s trading posts. When O’Sullivan made the picture, the delicate ecology of the Shoshone’s food sources (buffalo, small game, roots, berries, and grass seed) had been virtually destroyed over the preceding 30 years by the heedless practices of emigrant white settlers. The resulting degradation and the marauding, murderous retaliation of the Shoshone and associated tribes became known as the ‘Indian question,’ which the U.S. government attempted to resolve through legislation, the establishment of reservations, and, on occasion, slaughter. As an exploratory visitor rather than an exploitative settler, O’Sullivan met little hostility from Native Americans. If some of his subjects were reluctant to pose for the ‘shadow-catcher,’ the 13 Shoshone depicted here seem resolute and patient. Expressed as a pyramid, the group’s corporate solidarity appears as permanent as an ancient cairn, in contrast to the American and expeditionary flags, tents, and distant plain which, through the photographer’s choice, are rendered as flat and insubstantial as his own shadow.
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, born Ireland, 1840–1882), 'Shoshone,' 1867-72. Many of the men in the photograph are wearing U.S. Army hats and shirts, paraphernalia probably acquired through barter at the Army’s trading posts. When O’Sullivan made the picture, the delicate ecology of the Shoshone’s food sources (buffalo, small game, roots, berries, and grass seed) had been virtually destroyed over the preceding 30 years by the heedless practices of emigrant white settlers. The resulting degradation and the marauding, murderous retaliation of the Shoshone and associated tribes became known as the ‘Indian question,’ which the U.S. government attempted to resolve through legislation, the establishment of reservations, and, on occasion, slaughter. As an exploratory visitor rather than an exploitative settler, O’Sullivan met little hostility from Native Americans. If some of his subjects were reluctant to pose for the ‘shadow-catcher,’ the 13 Shoshone depicted here seem resolute and patient. Expressed as a pyramid, the group’s corporate solidarity appears as permanent as an ancient cairn, in contrast to the American and expeditionary flags, tents, and distant plain which, through the photographer’s choice, are rendered as flat and insubstantial as his own shadow.
In Praise of Native Americanism

Appropriation of identities we cannot claim has been a dangerous constant in American history. In an age of identity politics, it is still the best way of understanding our national character.

byJustin E.H. Smith
Whitman and the American Revelation

The epiphany that led to a national literature’s single greatest achievement: tucked in a prosaic, newly discovered early novel are the seeds of ‘Leaves of Grass’

byPaul Berman
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, born Ireland, 1840–1882), 'Shoshone,' 1867-72. Many of the men in the photograph are wearing U.S. Army hats and shirts, paraphernalia probably acquired through barter at the Army’s trading posts. When O’Sullivan made the picture, the delicate ecology of the Shoshone’s food sources (buffalo, small game, roots, berries, and grass seed) had been virtually destroyed over the preceding 30 years by the heedless practices of emigrant white settlers. The resulting degradation and the marauding, murderous retaliation of the Shoshone and associated tribes became known as the ‘Indian question,’ which the U.S. government attempted to resolve through legislation, the establishment of reservations, and, on occasion, slaughter. As an exploratory visitor rather than an exploitative settler, O’Sullivan met little hostility from Native Americans. If some of his subjects were reluctant to pose for the ‘shadow-catcher,’ the 13 Shoshone depicted here seem resolute and patient. Expressed as a pyramid, the group’s corporate solidarity appears as permanent as an ancient cairn, in contrast to the American and expeditionary flags, tents, and distant plain which, through the photographer’s choice, are rendered as flat and insubstantial as his own shadow.
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American, born Ireland, 1840–1882), 'Shoshone,' 1867-72. Many of the men in the photograph are wearing U.S. Army hats and shirts, paraphernalia probably acquired through barter at the Army’s trading posts. When O’Sullivan made the picture, the delicate ecology of the Shoshone’s food sources (buffalo, small game, roots, berries, and grass seed) had been virtually destroyed over the preceding 30 years by the heedless practices of emigrant white settlers. The resulting degradation and the marauding, murderous retaliation of the Shoshone and associated tribes became known as the ‘Indian question,’ which the U.S. government attempted to resolve through legislation, the establishment of reservations, and, on occasion, slaughter. As an exploratory visitor rather than an exploitative settler, O’Sullivan met little hostility from Native Americans. If some of his subjects were reluctant to pose for the ‘shadow-catcher,’ the 13 Shoshone depicted here seem resolute and patient. Expressed as a pyramid, the group’s corporate solidarity appears as permanent as an ancient cairn, in contrast to the American and expeditionary flags, tents, and distant plain which, through the photographer’s choice, are rendered as flat and insubstantial as his own shadow.
In Praise of Native Americanism

Appropriation of identities we cannot claim has been a dangerous constant in American history. In an age of identity politics, it is still the best way of understanding our national character.

byJustin E.H. Smith

before the fall

Tower of London: prison or sanctuary for the Jews of medieval England? Some 700 surviving manuscripts from this era suggest that it was a little of both. According to recent research, the Constable of the Tower had sole authority to arrest a Jew in London and Jews arrested outside of London were also promptly sent to do their time in the Tower of London. But the Constable also protected the city’s Jews during pogroms. “The Jewish community even helped defend the castle from a siege by rebel barons in 1267.” The Jews were expelled from England in 1290.

The Jew Who Spied for the Nazis

Renato Levi was recruited to spy for the Germans in World War II, but he was actually a double agent, secretly working for the British

byMarc Goldberg
Gay, Muslim, and Jewish in Berlin
byMardean Isaac
The Auto-da-fé of Mexico City
byRonnie Perelis
The Temple of Bel Palmyra, Syria
The Temple of Bel Palmyra, Syria
The Floating Space City of the Jews

In a tradition preserved in the Babylonian Talmud, Jews unhappy with the Temple of Jerusalem imagined a mythological paradise rooted in Zoroastrian mythology instead

byDan Shapira
Gay, Muslim, and Jewish in Berlin
byMardean Isaac
The Auto-da-fé of Mexico City
byRonnie Perelis
U.S. Ambassador at Large Philip Jessup, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, and U.S. Senator from New York John Foster Dulles in conference at the Assembly Hall of the United Nations in 1949
U.S. Ambassador at Large Philip Jessup, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, and U.S. Senator from New York John Foster Dulles in conference at the Assembly Hall of the United Nations in 1949
How British and American Elites Failed to Stop the Jewish State

Two new books bring to life the knife-edge moment when the British Empire was being liquidated and the U.S. national security establishment tried and failed to block the birth of Israel

byMike Watson
Belongings of newly arrived prisoners are seized by the Ustasha in Jasenovac. The Ustasha (Croatian Revolutionary Movement) was a fascist organization, active between 1929 and 1945.
Belongings of newly arrived prisoners are seized by the Ustasha in Jasenovac. The Ustasha (Croatian Revolutionary Movement) was a fascist organization, active between 1929 and 1945.
The Auschwitz of the Balkans

The Croatian concentration camp Jasenovać is the site of fierce ongoing controversy, muddled by extremists and cover-ups, about the extent of its horrors

byEfraim Zuroff
Recognizing Jewish Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust
byPatrick Henry
German Jewish Women Resist the Nazis
byRobert Rockaway
Recognizing Jewish Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust
byPatrick Henry
German Jewish Women Resist the Nazis
byRobert Rockaway

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sunny composition

The celebrated photographer André Kertész (1894-1985) bought his first camera (an ICA box camera) in 1912 and his first 35-millimeter camera, a Leica, in 1928. He was born in Budapest to a Jewish bookseller, Lipot Kertész, but was raised by his mother Ernesztin and her brother after his father died of tuberculosis when André was still young. “Kertész had two brothers: Imre, who was older, and Jenö, the youngest. Here, they pose for André’s camera, showing off their athleticism as they enjoy a moment of frolic and fun at a waterside resort.”

cleveland museum of art
Jack Mitchell/Getty Images
Jack Mitchell/Getty Images
Can Freudian Art Survive in an Age Without Freud?

A Louise Bourgeois show at the Jewish Museum and a new biography of Lucian Freud may provide the answer

byFrances Brent

In the triumphant haze of the mid-20th century, the British art historian and poet Herbert Read declared, “The universe of the painting—the universe seen by the painter—hasn’t been the same since Freud showed the importance of irrational sources of inspiration.” But if you are wondering how legible 20th-century masterworks may be to a 21st-century audience that no longer inhabits the cultural space permeated by psychoanalytic thought, the answer is that luckily, a great work of art is different from a tract. Go look at the mountain of flesh in Lucian Freud’s “Naked Man, Back View,” a painting that makes you rethink your understanding of what it means to inhabit the human body. Or take a look at Louise Bourgeois’ astonishing Janus Fleuri. Cast in bronze with gold patina, perhaps a womb buckling apart, with two phallic shapes blossoming from either side, it makes you question what is soft and what is hard, what is moving and what is still, what is male and what is female, what is inside and what is outside, what is grotesque and what is beautiful. ...

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The late writer Stuart Schoffman, who emigrated to Israel in the dark years after the Yom Kippur War
The late writer Stuart Schoffman, who emigrated to Israel in the dark years after the Yom Kippur War
Talking About My Generation

Reflecting upon the early years as an immigrant to Israel, and the legacy those ‘olim’ left behind

byMichael Oren

Throughout the centuries, Karaites maintained an alternate form of Judaism, one that denied the validity of the Rabbinic Oral Torah as embodied in the Talmud.

The late writer Stuart Schoffman, who emigrated to Israel in the dark years after the Yom Kippur War
The late writer Stuart Schoffman, who emigrated to Israel in the dark years after the Yom Kippur War
Talking About My Generation

Reflecting upon the early years as an immigrant to Israel, and the legacy those ‘olim’ left behind

byMichael Oren

Throughout the centuries, Karaites maintained an alternate form of Judaism, one that denied the validity of the Rabbinic Oral Torah as embodied in the Talmud.

emotionology

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Those who do not remember the past are ... probably not Jewish

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Library of Congress
Library of Congress
Jerusalem’s Plague of Locusts

A once-in-a-generation, yet largely forgotten, insect swarm reminds us that God’s plagues and wonders might be closer at hand than we think

byArmin Rosen

Subsequent events now make the once-a-generation locust plague that occurred in 1915 seem like a minor horror in the 20th-century history of the land that became the State of Israel. The next several decades of world wars, regular wars, riots, invasions, massacres, and terror attacks might even make the insect swarm of that distant year seem comfortingly separate from the grim agency of human beings, an event belonging only to nature, with nothing much to say about us....

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An Artist of the Yiddish Never-World

A newly reopened exhibit showcases the previously unknown photographer Shimmel Zohar, whose bizarre, arresting historical photos are nothing short of miraculous

byEddy Portnoy
Forging History
byDan Shapira
A diagram representing rabbinic interactions in the Babylonian Talmud
A diagram representing rabbinic interactions in the Babylonian Talmud
The Rabbinic Network

Using new digital techniques to unravel foundational questions about the Talmud

byMichael Satlow
Rabbenu Tam and the Silver Talons

Is falconry kosher?

byLeor Jacobi
An Artist of the Yiddish Never-World

A newly reopened exhibit showcases the previously unknown photographer Shimmel Zohar, whose bizarre, arresting historical photos are nothing short of miraculous

byEddy Portnoy
Forging History
byDan Shapira
Forging History
byDan Shapira
A diagram representing rabbinic interactions in the Babylonian Talmud
A diagram representing rabbinic interactions in the Babylonian Talmud
The Rabbinic Network

Using new digital techniques to unravel foundational questions about the Talmud

byMichael Satlow
An Artist of the Yiddish Never-World

A newly reopened exhibit showcases the previously unknown photographer Shimmel Zohar, whose bizarre, arresting historical photos are nothing short of miraculous

byEddy Portnoy
Rabbenu Tam and the Silver Talons

Is falconry kosher?

byLeor Jacobi
A diagram representing rabbinic interactions in the Babylonian Talmud
A diagram representing rabbinic interactions in the Babylonian Talmud
The Rabbinic Network

Using new digital techniques to unravel foundational questions about the Talmud

byMichael Satlow
Rabbenu Tam and the Silver Talons

Is falconry kosher?

byLeor Jacobi

Trees of emanation

According to the scholar of kabbalah J. H. Chajes, medieval kabbalists thought a lot about how to visualize the sefirot, and ultimately favored arboreal diagrams over the astronomical. Consider Pardes rimonim (Pomegranate Orchard). a survey of Kabbalah—or, as Chajes puts it, “an inventory with an attitude”—completed in 1548 by the brilliant young kabbalist R. Moses Cordevero. In Cordevero’s own words: And I have already explained that the constellation ofAṣilut (Emanation—the highest of the four “worlds”) is the ilan (tree) of Aṣilut, and no (demonic) shell will rule it whatsoever.

How Think Tanks Became Engines of Royal Propaganda

What their French origins, and their waning and rising relevance to the power structures over the centuries, say about the new Washington

byJacob Soll
Mississippi in Yiddish

The story of a hugely popular play about African Americans falsely accused of raping two white women in 1931 in Scottsboro, Alabama—that premiered in 1935 Warsaw

byAlyssa Quint
Soviets attacking the Czar's police in the early days of the March Revolution
Soviets attacking the Czar's police in the early days of the March Revolution
The Dark Centennial of the Russian Revolution
byPaul Berman
Mississippi in Yiddish

The story of a hugely popular play about African Americans falsely accused of raping two white women in 1931 in Scottsboro, Alabama—that premiered in 1935 Warsaw

byAlyssa Quint
Soviets attacking the Czar's police in the early days of the March Revolution
Soviets attacking the Czar's police in the early days of the March Revolution
The Dark Centennial of the Russian Revolution
byPaul Berman

jewish time

Smithsonian

A pocket watch with Hebrew letters that belonged to Sinai Kantor, a Russian immigrant who went down with the Titanic when it sunk on its maiden voyage in 1912. His wife Miriam survived the accident.

jewish museum of switzerland


A silver and brass pocket watch made by Jules Levy in La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1901.

yadvashem

A pocket watch on which Yeshayahu Markowitz (d. 1944) of Szilágysomlyó, Transylvania, pasted the photographs of his twelve children in order of birth.

jewish news

Sholem Aleichem’s 18k gold watch. The writer received the watch in 1911 in commemoration of the 10th Zionist Congress in Basel.

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