Jewish historiography

Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum was born in 1887 to his father Rabbi Hanania Yom-Tov Lipa Teitelbaum, chief rabbi of Sighet, the capital of Maramureş County, Hungary. The father was a Rebbe to his Hasidim, headed the local yeshiva, and was one of the top leaders of Hungarian Orthodoxy. During his childhood, Rabbi Yoel was known as a prodigy but was not destined to continue the family’s Hasidic or rabbinic dynasty, as this role was reserved for his older brother - Rabbi Haim Tzvi. At seventeen, soon after his father’s death and the ordination of his older brother as his successor, the newlywed Rabbi Yoel and his wife were forced to leave Sighet.

They settled in nearby Satmar (Satu Mare) where Rabbi Yoel began gathering a small group of disciples. Several years later he was elected as chief rabbi of the remote village Orshiva, but during World War I he returned to Satmar and established a small yeshiva, dividing his time between Satmar and Orshiva. In 1926 he was elected as chief rabbi of Kroly (Carei) in Transylvania, Romania and two years later he was elected chief rabbi of Satmar. This appointment faced substantial public opposition and it took Rabbi Yoel six years of fierce and scandalous struggle until he eventually took office in 1934. During that waiting period he also tried to run for a rabbinate office in other communities, including that of the Edah Haredit (the ultra-Orthodox community) of Jerusalem.

Rabbi Yoel was known to have a stubborn, controversial and argumentative personality. Wherever he wanted to serve, public debates arose and the newspapers accused him in using improper means during the election process. At the same time, he was also known as a religious zealot, and several extremist Orthodox groups acknowledged him as their spiritual leader. Following his ordination as chief rabbi of Satmar, Rabbi Yoel gained an important leadership role among the extreme-Orthodox, and became known for his unwavering opposition to modernity, Zionism and even to the ultra-Orthodox party Agudat Israel. In the late 1930s, after a long public campaign, he was elected to the leadership of the Central Bureau of the Orthodox Jewish communities of Transylvania. In that position he was able to influence the lives of over one hundred and fifty thousand religious Jews in that region.

In his personal life, Rabbi Yoel suffered a series of tragedies. After losing his father at an early age, he was expelled from his hometown, Sighet. He and his wife could not give birth to a son, and two of their three daughters died young and childless. His chronically ill wife died soon thereafter, as well as Rabbi Yoel’s mother and brother. He married again, but although his wife was young and healthy, she too did not bear him any children. Following this second marriage, Rabbi Yoel and his only daughter became estranged and they hardly spoke until she died, also at a young age. This surviving daughter was also barren meaning that Rabbi Yoel had no grandchildren to succeed him.

During World War II Rabbi Yoel was involved in various rescue operations for refugees who fled Poland. As danger grew, he sought to get a certificate that will allow him and his close family to immigrate to Palestine. Failing that, he abandoned his community and escaped along with a small group of friends from Satmar, but was caught and sent to the ghetto of Cluj. He was spared from being sent to Auschwitz as he was included in the small group saved by Zionist activist Israel Kasztner’s rescue train. He and the rest of the passengers were taken to Bergen-Belsen, where they were detained for a few months. Later the group was released to Switzerland where Rabbi Yoel stayed for a few months. He did not return to lead and to comfort the survivors that returned to Satmar after the Holocaust, nor did he join the relief operations conducted by other rabbis in the refugee camps in Germany.

After his stay in Switzerland, Rabbi Yoel decided to settle in Jerusalem. The leaders of the ultra-Orthodox community, who were aware of his aggressive and argumentative personality, shunned away from him. As a result, the institutions he established failed and he was on the verge of bankruptcy. His only hope to repay his tremendous debt was by raising funds in the United States. Humiliated and destitute Rabbi Yoel was forced to travel to the land he always considered the most hostile and spiritually dangerous environment for Orthodox Jews.

After arriving in the United States, it became clear to Rabbi Yoel that he will never be able to raise enough funds to save his institutions in Jerusalem. Having no place to return to, he decided to settle in New York. Oddly enough, it was in this notorious “New World” that Rabbi Yoel was able not only to establish his own congregation, but also to significantly expand and develop it. Within a few years he attracted a large circle of supporters and devotees and created a congregation which, he claimed, resembled that of an East-European “Shtetel.”

However, in order to succeed in his mission, Rabbi Yoel had to apply significant un-traditional innovations that were inconceivable in the East-European “Shtetel.” He established a Hasidic education system, including one for girls, which introduced secular teachings and summer camps. He also encouraged his followers to go to work or to establish their own small businesses. His delegates cooperated with government and municipal officials who helped the poor Hasidim to get public housing, professional training and social benefits. That innovative spirit was one of the main reasons his Hasidic court grew rapidly and prospered economically. Rabbi Yoel used funds gathered by his adherents to support the Eda Haredit in Jerusalem, and in 1952, just a few years after he was forced to leave Jerusalem, he returned triumphant to be declared president of the Edah Haredit.

One of the reasons for Rabbi Yoel’s unparalleled success, beyond his personal charisma and leadership qualities, was his anti-Zionist and Extreme Orthodox ideology. His views were published in two major books, Va-Yoel Moshe – published in the late 1950s, and Al Ha-Geula Ve-Al Ha-Temura – published after the Six Days War. These books were re-printed numerous times, and new editions are still being printed to this day. The radical ideas expressed in these books still affect and guide the Satmar Hasidic court and some of the other Hungarian courts, as well as some marginal groups of zealots, also known as Neturei Karta.

At the time of his death, in 1979 and still today, Rabbi Yoel was undoubtedly one of the most recognized and influential Jewish leaders in the post-Holocaust era. His community had tens of thousands of Hasidim and the education system he established was amongst the largest in the Jewish world outside Israel. Ideas expressed by Rabbi Yoel have influenced the rest of Orthodox society and thus the Jewish society in general. Today, about forty years after his death, the “Satmar” trademark is still strong and still synonymous with religious zealotry. The spiritual and practical foundations laid by Rabbi Yoel continue to fuel the ever-growing expansion of the Satmar Hasidic court that today has more than a hundred thousand followers worldwide.

The article examines the interwar period in the life and work of two architects, Usher Chiter (1899–1967) and Elyukim Maltz (1898–1973), both graduates of the Odessa School of Architecture.During that time the architects were doing work for the Mendele Moicher Sforim All-Ukrainian Museum of Jewish Proletarian Culture in Odessa. Based on documents and visual materials from a number of museums and archives located in Ukraine, Russia and Israel, as well as on private collections (including those of families of architects from Moscow, where Chiter and Maltz moved in the late 1920s),the author attempts to trace and reconstruct the two architects’ research expeditions across the former Pale of Jewish Settlement. A total of seven field trips were conducted in Podolia and the Soviet part of Volhynia – with the aim of collecting materials and exhibition items for the museum and of making nature drawings and watercolors showing Jewish sites, such as synagogues, cemeteries and residential buildings. This empirical approach exemplifies the method of preserving and representing disintegrating Jewish shtetls, commonly practised during the interwar period. The work of both architects is viewed through the prism of musealization of Jewish heritage in the early Soviet period which was closely connected to the formation of state ideology and its transition from «building of the national identity» to class paradigm and atheistic upbringing.

תיקון שבתי צבי / יונתן מאיר. ההרצאה מבקשת להציג תמונה מורכבת ביחס לשבתי צבי, מכתיבתו הקבלית של נתן העזתי על המשיח הנפוּל, דרך ניסיונות תיקון נשמתו בידי הבעש"ט, ועד לשילובו בנרטיב הלאומי בידי זלמן שז"ר וחוקרים שבאו אחריו. יהא זה ניסיון למשוך קו במחשבה ובהיסטוריוגרפיה היהודית העומד מנגד לתפיסת הצרה בדבר "משיח שקר"

The names of Saul’s descendants appear in a different form in the books of Chronicles (1 Chr 8:33-34; 9:39-40) as compared to those in the books of Samuel (2 Sam 2-4; 9; 19; 21). In Chronicles the name Eshbaal is used instead of Ishbosheth, and Meribaal instead of Mephibosheth. This article describes the differences between these names in the context of early Hebrew epigraphy. The recalling of the original names of the first Judaean royal dynasty in the books of Chronicles could be explained not only with reference to the original version of the books of Samuel, but also from the oral tradition of Judea or from some documents of the royal archives that survived the Babylonian conquest.

Yakov Leshchinsky’s 1928 essay, here translated from the Yiddish, provides the first cross-national analysis of the migration and class transformation of world Jewry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It draws on diverse and widely scattered official and historical sources in German, Polish, Russian, Yiddish and other languages. A careful, complex and empirically grounded work, it helped to boost Leschinsky’s scholarly reputation. Before long, its author was routinely referred to as “the father of Jewish demography” and “the dean of Jewish sociologists.”

This demonstrates the Mathematical Reasoning of the 9 Branches Candelabrum Menorah.

Extract from the Book " God's Language " by Professor Thierry BROUWERS ( Book in Progress as of 8/30/2019. Published on  20/20/2020 )



"If I were again beginning my studies, I would follow the advice of Plato and start with mathematics."
~ Galileo Galilei

"Numbers are the highest degree of knowledge. It is knowledge itself."
~ Plato

מדי פעם עוסקים אמצעי התקשורת בישראל בשאלה כיצד יכול הציבור החרדי בישראל לקיים את עצמו מבחינה כלכלית כאשר חלק ניכר מן הגברים ספון באולמות הישיבה ואילו למרבית הנשים החרדיות אין הכשרה מתאימה לשוק העבודה המודרני. השאלה מתחדדת עוד יותר כאשר מדובר בתושבי השכונות הקנאיות שבירושלים ובבית שמש, בהן מסרבות חלק מן המשפחות להיעזר בתשלומי הביטוח הלאומי או בסיוע ממשלתי ועירוני אחר ומוסדות החינוך שלהם אינם נתמכים  על ידי המדינה. אחת התשובות לשאלה זו היא פעילותו של כולל שומרי החומות אשר בשנת 2018 ציין 160 שנים להקמתו. אתר האינטרנט שהוא מפעיל (www.rebmeir.org) מדווח שתקציבו השנתי עומד על כששה עשר מיליון דולר. כמחצית התקציב מיועדת לתמיכה בתלמידי כוללי האברכים, בסיוע לכאלף משפחות, למתן שירותי רפואה, לסיוע לכאלפיים זוגות צעירים, לאספקת ציוד ליולדות צעירות ולאחזקת המבנים של הכולל. המחצית השנייה של התקציב מתווספת לקרן הגמ"ח המעניקה מאות הלוואות בגובה של 8,000 דולר ללא ריבית מדי חודש. בנוסף, מספק הכולל דיור במחירים מוזלים למעל אלף משפחות חרדיות בירושלים.

Profondément originale dans sa conception comme dans son écriture, cette enquête historique est une réflexion exemplaire sur les silences du passé. Lire la suite

Exception en Europe, un État allié du Reich a refusé de déporter sa communauté juive. Cette image de la Bulgarie pendant la seconde guerre mondiale a prévalu jusque récemment, quitte à omettre que, dans les territoires de la Yougoslavie et de la Grèce occupés par ce pays entre 1941 et 1944, la quasi-totalité des Juifs ont été raflés, convoyés vers la Pologne et exterminés.

Au terme d'une vaste enquête documentaire et archivistique, Nadège Ragaru reconstitue l’origine de ce qui a longtemps été tenu pour un socle de faits vrais parce que largement crus. Elle explique pourquoi une seule facette d’un passé complexe et contradictoire a fait l’objet d’une transmission prioritaire ; comment les déportations, sans être oblitérées, sont devenues secondaires dans les discours publics, les musées, les livres d’histoire et les arts ; comment la mise en écriture des persécutions contre les Juifs en Bulgarie s’est retrouvée l’otage de la guerre froide puis des luttes politiques et mémorielles de l’après-communisme dans les Balkans et le reste du monde.

Profondément originale dans sa conception comme dans son écriture, cette enquête historique est une réflexion exemplaire sur les silences du passé.

The Bulletin of the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts.  Journal of Eastern Studies  / ed. E. Kotlyar. – Kharkiv: The Center for Eastern Studies of KSADA, 2010. – # 8 (Vol. 3:  Jewish Art and the Ukrainian Context: Horizons of Traditional Artistic Culture). – 360 p.
Вісник Харківської державної академії дизайну і мистецтв. Сходознавчі студії / Упор. Є. Котляр. – Харків: Центр сходознавства ХДАДМ, 2010. – № 8 (Вип. 3: Єврейське мистецтво і український контекст. Обрії традиційної художньої культури). – 360 с.
The Center for Eastern Studies at the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts (KSADA) presents the Third Volume of Eastern Studies, a special issue of the Bulletin of the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts. This is the first time that an entire issue of a Ukrainian academic journal is devoted to Jewish art. The present volume deals with topics of traditional art and culture; the Fourth Volume will present current research findings in Art Judaica and work of Jewish artists beyond the scope of tradition. The two volumes’ special focus, “Jewish Art and the Ukrainian Context,” has attracted numerous submissions by scholars from Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Israel, the U.S., and Canada. The essays included in our collection are evidence of considerable international interest in Jewish art and cultural heritage that are in some way directly or indirectly bound up with Ukraine.
In setting ourselves the goal of bringing together in the Ukrainian academic field both native and overseas researchers of Art Judaica, we hardly expected to see such a thematically diverse spectrum of material submitted for publication. To introduce it to the general academic reader, we want to note that Jewish art on Ukrainian soil has been marked by extraordinary achievements, masterworks, and names which have become a part of not only Jewish, but also world art culture. Traces of antiquity and the Middle Ages, influences of the Rec’ Pospolita and of three world empires – Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman – as well as of other countries and states, made Jewish culture in this region inimitably variegated. This culture took on a shape all its own, manifesting itself in a variety of temporal and cultural milieus. The universe of the Eastern European Jewish shtetl produced a cultural environment that brought to life astounding works of Ashkenazi Jewish art, including wooden and stone “defense”-style synagogue architecture and ritual objects made of stone, clay, metal, wood, and textiles, which served in the Jews’ daily round and ritual. The architectural and object surroundings of the former Jewish shtetls along with the graves of the Chasidic masters (the Zaddiks), sites of mass pilgrimage by Chasidim from all over the world, by their power of mass attraction today constitute a historical landscape in their own right.
The traditional artistic universe of the Pale of Jewish Settlement, discovered by Shimon An-sky, became, in the art historian Abram Efros’ phrase, an “Aladdin’s lamp,” a source of living inspiration for the Jewish avant-garde tearing beyond the limits of the ghetto and leading forth into the world open artists such as Chagall, Lissitzky, Ryback, and dozens of others who set the fashion and the shape of world modernism. In addition, the artistic heritage of the Crimean Jews and Karaites reflected the coalescence of cultural Jewish elements with the Turkic-Tatar world. These phenomena are making a comeback today, after having sustained varying levels of loss due to the wars and totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. Contemporary Art Judaica in many ways is a turn to addressing this world, simultaneously combining evolved national forms and novel ideas with the universal objectives of art.
World academic forums and periodicals devoted to Judaica and Jewish art have long been working to introduce Eastern European Jewish Studies, as well as Jewish Ukrainian cultural discourse, into the scholarly context of today.
In bringing this discipline into the foreground, we are, in effect, conveying to the reader the collective art historical research of the very phenomenon of Ukraino-Judaica, as it was capaciously labeled by the well known ukrainist Marten Feller. This phenomenon has in many ways determined the cultural diversity of Ukraine, especially Ukraine’s Western regions, lending them a peculiar image of their own; it also conditioned the mutual integration of the Ukrainian context with the European and world cultural and hermeneutic space.
This volume includes articles on Jewish ritual objects and traditional art, historical-artistic heritage and collections of decorative and applied craft works.
We are grateful to colleagues at the Center for Eastern Studies, and to Ukrainian, Russian, and overseas researchers for their participation in preparing this volume. Special thanks to Elen Rochlin (Jerusalem) and Bogdana Pinchevskaya (Kyiv) for their translations of materials included in the present volume, as well as to Oleg Koval and Konstantin Bondar (Kharkіv) and Gregory Kotlyar (New York) for their academic and logistical support for the appearance of the present collection in print.
We hope that the publication of this collection will not only prove of interest for specialists and the public concerned with landmarks of traditional Jewish culture in Ukraine, but that it will also attract the attention of those responsible for the preservation of Ukraine’s multinational heritage. This is a priceless resource for future generations and the development of modern tourist and pilgrimage infrastructures, where the Jewish urban historical heritage, and, especially, the heritage of the shtetls, occupies a niche all its own.

"Secularism, the Christian Ambivalence Towards the Jews and the Notion of Exile," in: Ari Joskowicz and Ethan B. Katz (eds.), Secularism in Question: Jews and Judaism in Modern Times, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) 276-298.

A considerable number of first-generation Holocaust researchers were Polish Jews: Philip Friedman, Isaiah Trunk, Józef Kermisz, Nachman Blumental, Rachel Auerbach, Michał Borwicz, Joseph Wulf, Szymon Datner, Artur Eisenbach, Tatjana Berenstein and Bernard Mark, to name just a few. Most of them left Poland in the late 1940s and early 1950s and resettled in the United States, France, Israel or West Berlin. Others continued their work in Poland. They all made important contributions to the documentation and research of the German mass murder of European Jews and many to the legal processing of this too. What connects them is the institution at they began their work, known then as Churbn-forshung1: the Central Jewish Historical Commission (CJHC) in Poland, from which the Jewish Historical Institute (JHI) was formed in October 1947. The chapter describes the origin of and the scientific
work and documentation carried out by the Commission and Institute, as well as its contribution to the prosecution and punishment of Nazi perpetrators against the background of the political situation in communist post-war Poland, particularly the Jewish community there.

בעיני החסידים, ובמידה רבה גם בעיניו של כלל הציבור היהודי, הצדיק החסידי הוא איש מופת בעל סגולות על־טבעיות, ורבים, גם בקרב מי שאינם חסידים מובהקים, נעזרו בברכותיו בשעת צרה. בזמנים שהייתה הקהילה כולה שרויה במשבר, למשל בעת מלחמה, גזֵרות, מגֵפות או אסון טבע, השרתה נוכחותו של הצדיק תקווה כי בזכות תפילותיו תיוושע הקהילה כולה. בזכות קדושתו, מעשיו הטובים ותפילותיו הבוקעות שערי שמים, כך האמינו יהודים רבים, יענה האל לבקשתו ויפעל להגנתם של הסובבים אותו. 
דוגמה לכך אפשר לראות בתגובת הציבור היהודי לדרשה שנשא רבי מרדכי רוקח (1949-1901) מבילגוריי שבפולין בבודפשט לפני שעזב אותה עם אחיו לארץ ישראל. רבי מרדכי, ואחיו המוּכר יותר רבי אהרן רוקח (1957-1880) – הרבי מבלז שבגליציה – היו שני אדמו"רים חסידיים לא הונגרים שהצליחו להימלט מכיבוש הגרמנים ומצאו מקלט זמני בעיר בודפשט.  אף שהשניים לא חיו בהונגריה, היו שמותיהם מוּכרים היטב גם במדינה זו, ולכן הותירו דבריו של רבי מרדכי רושם רב ועוררו תקווה גדולה בלב השומעים.
התסכול שנוצר בשל הפער בין הביטחון בסגולותיו המטפיזיות של הצדיק ובין תוצאותיה הנוראות של השואה והעובדה כי אדמו"רים, כמו הרבי מבלז ואחיו, נמלטו ערב השואה והותירו את מרבית חסידיהם מאחור עוררו שאלה עקרונית בדבר תפקודו של הרבי החסידי בשעת צרה: למי הצדיק מחויב בראש ובראשונה – לבני קהילתו החוששים, המתייסרים והמצפים ממנו להושיעם, לנחם אותם או לטעת בהם תקווה ואמונה; או שמא חובתו העיקרית היא להציל את עצמו, וכך למעשה להציל את המסורת הייחודית לשושלת החסידית שהוא מייצג. במילים אחרות, האם הצדיק מחויב לחברי הקהילה הקיימת והשרויה בסכנה או שמא דווקא לחצר החסידית שתקום, אולי, לעתיד לבוא.

Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld discusses that although we can never fully quantify dominant group privilege, by discarding the bifurcated polar perspective and, instead, chart privilege along a continuum taking into account context and identity intersectionalities, we can attain a fuller and deeper awareness of issues of power and privilege, marginalization, and oppression as we work toward a more socially just society and world.

Women are conspicuously absent from the Jewish mystical tradition. Even if historically some Jewish women may have experienced mystical revelations and led richly productive spiritual lives, the tradition does not preserve any record of their experiences or insights. Only the chance survival of scant evidence suggests that, at various times and places, individual Jewish women did pursue the path of mystical piety or prophetic spirituality, but it appears that they were generally censured, and efforts were made to suppress their activities. This contrasts sharply with the fully acknowledged prominence of women in the mystical traditions of both Christianity and Islam. It is against this background that the mystical messianic movement centred on the personality of Sabbatai Zevi (1626-76) stands out as a unique and remarkable exception. Sabbatai Zevi addressed to women a highly original liberationist message, proclaiming that he had come to make them 'happy as men' by releasing them from the pangs of childbirth and the subjugation to their husbands that were ordained for women as a consequence of the primordial sin. This unprecedented redemptive vision became an integral part of Sabbatian eschatology, which the messianists believed to be unfolding and experienced in the present. Their New Law, superseding the Old with the dawning of the messianic era, overturned the traditional halakhic norms that distinguished and regulated relations between the sexes. This was expressed not only in the outlandish ritual transgression of sexual prohibitions, in which the Sabbatian women were notoriously implicated, but also in the apparent adoption of the idea-totally alien to rabbinic Judaism-that virginity, celibacy, or sexual abstinence were conducive to women's s spiritual empowerment. Ada Rapoport-Albert traces the diverse manifestations of this vision in every phase of Sabbatianism and its offshoots. These include the early promotion of women to centre-stage as messianic prophetesses; their independent affiliation with the movement in their own right; their initiation in the esoteric teachings of the kabbalah; and their full incorporation, on a par with men, into the ritual and devotional life of the messianic community. Their investment with authority was such as to elevate the messiah's s wife (a figure mostly absent from traditional messianic speculations) to the rank of full messianic consort, sharing in her husband's s redemptive mission as well as his divine dimension. By the late eighteenth century, a syncretistic cult had developed that recognized in Eva-the unmarried daughter of Jacob Frank, one of Sabbatai Zevi's s apostate messianic successors-an incarnate female aspect of the kabbalistic godhead, worshipped as 'Holy Virgin's and female messiah by her father's devotees. This was the culmination of the Sabbatian endeavour to transcend the traditional gender paradigm that had excluded women from the public arena of Jewish spiritual life. This work is a translation by Deborah Greniman.

Recent years have seen the flourishing of research on Lithuanian Kabbalists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the point that some scholars speak of a defined and delineated stream of Kabbalah, a school unto itself dubbed "Lithuanian Kabbalah." Such scholars include within this stream all those who saw the Vilna Gaon as their teacher in Kabbalah (parallel to the position of the Baal Shem Tov in Hasidism) and they ascribe to it such fixed categories as its "Articles of Faith." In their conception, this stream was part and parcel of the broader and well-known nationalist-messianic current that had its source, supposedly, in the Vilna Gaon himself; this current reached its full fruition in the twentieth century, and so too has the smaller stream within it, now a clearly defined "school," developed in various ways until the present. As if this were not enough, scholars have joined the later ideological trend which seeks to revise the history of Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a decidedly messianic way, presenting it in a continuous line from the Vilna Gaon to the emergence of Zionism and then to the founding of the State of Israel. Again, the Vilna Gaon is not merely presented as a "herald" of Zionism but as one who encoded within his Torah the secret of redemption, the beginning of which, apparently, we are witnessing today. The article conducts a critical analysis of the concept of "Lithuanian Kabbalah," and uses as its case study the life and teachings of Rabbi Shimon Tsvi Horowitz.


בשנים האחרונות צומח ועולה מחקר סביב למקובלים בני ליטא במאות התשע עשרה והעשרים, עד שיש כאלו המדברים על זרם מוגדר ומובחן, אסכולה בפני עצמה, המכונה 'קבלה ליטאית'. בתוך זרם זה כוללים את כל אלו שראו בגר"א את מורם בקבלה, כמעין בעש"ט לחסידות, ומונים קטגוריות מקובעות של 'עיקרי אמונה' של אותו זרם הרוכב על מהלך משיחי ולאומי ידוע שמקורו כביכול בגר"א עצמו והגיע לגמר בישולו במאה העשרים. עד שנוצר בעיני כמה חוקרים מעין 'חוג' ברור ומוגדר שמתגלגל באופנים שונים עד לימינו. אם לא די בכך, הרי שהמדברים על אותו זרם קבלי רוכבים למעשה על קו אידיאולוגי מאוחר שבא לפרש מחדש את ההיסטוריה של היישוב היהודי בארץ ישראל במאה התשע עשרה ברוח משיחית וליצור מעין המשכיות מימי הגר"א עד להופעתה של הציונות ולמאורעות שהתרחשו עם הקמת מדינת ישראל. שוב אין הגר"א מצטייר רק כ'מבשר' הציונות אלא כמי שצפן בתורתו את סוד הגאולה שאנו עומדים לכאורה בפתחה. המאמר עוסק בניתוח ביקורתי של המשוג "קבלת ליטאית" וכמקרה מבחן יש כאן דיון בדרכו של ר' שמעון צבי הורביץ

"Megaleh Temirin (Revealer of Secrets), ed. Jonatan Meir, Three volumes, Mosad Bialik, Jerusalem

Megaleh Temirin (Revealer of Secrets), first published in Vienna in 1819, is one of the sharpest and wittiest pieces of Jewish literature written in the first half of the nineteenth century, and is perhaps the most important piece of Hebrew prose composed before the stories of Mendele Mocher Seforim. A sly and complex story deriding Hasidism and Hasidim, it is told through the correspondence between the beadles of Hasidic courts and contemporary rabbis, and it presents a dark picture of  avaricious frauds and swindlers whose main concern was control over territory and the souls of believers, a goal achieved by beguiling the authorities and attacking all opponents. Perl lends his book a ‘Hasidic’ feel both in its physical design and in its language, presenting a Maskilic version of In Praise of the Ba’al Shem Tov that lays Hasidism bare so that no reader will ever be able to look at that, or any other Hasidic book, in the same way again. In addition to the book’s satiric sting, which would have been enough to bring its readers a dual pleasure, Perl’s hints at contemporary people and places, hidden within anagrams and numerological tricks. With the unraveling of these clues, which also include the use of actual Hasidic sources, the book is a valuable, contemporary view of historical reality. A meticulous reading of the book may therefore open a window on the hidden worlds of Hasidism and the Haskalah at the start of the nineteenth century.


The first volume (Imagined Hasidism) serves as an introduction to the complex satirical writings of Josef Perl of Tarnopol (1773-1839). At the center of the book stands an analysis of the satires, Megaleh Temirin (1819) and Bochen Tzadik (1838), including a systematic treatment of the ‘characters’ in the central works and a discussion of the dozens of manuscripts to be found in the Perl Archive in Jerusalem. Perl’s writings are analyzed here in the fuller context of Hebrew and Yiddish literature in general and Maskilic and Hasidic literature in particular, as well as other polemical writings and governmental records critical of Hasidism. The study thus presents a complex and nuanced picture of the relationship between literature and history, between the anti-Hasidic reports and the more complicated historical reality, and lays the groundwork for further research into the genre of nineteenth-century Maskilic satire.

The second and third volumes (Megaleh Temirin) present for the first time an annotated edition of Megaleh Temirin. It is based on the first edition and the scattered manuscripts and it includes a comparison to its Yiddish translation. The book is accompanied by appendices on its origins and contents, including fundamental treatments of several passages: an explication of the encoded names, the Hasidic sources used by the author, and the variants found in the manuscripts and in the only edition of the book in Yiddish.

The editor of the book, Professor Jonatan Meir, teaches in the Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University. He has published several articles on the Haskalah of Eastern Europe, Hasidism, and a number of varied topics in twentieth-century Kabbalah.


Contents

Volume 1  - Critical Edition

Concerning this edition
Key personalities
Sefer Megale Temirin – Critical Edition


Volume 2 - Appendixes:
1. Glossary, Abbreviations, Acronyms
2. Explanation of the Speaking Names
3. Perl’s Hasidic Sources
4. Manuscripts of Sefer Megale Temirin
5. Yiddish Introduction to Sefer Megale Temirin
Bibliographic Abbreviations

-------------------------------
Reviews:
(1) Dan Meron, 2013, ‘Megaleh Temirin’, Kivunim Hadashim 29, 55 pages (Hebrew)
(2) David Assaf, 2014, ‘Hasidim will not Read it but Tear it’, Haaretz, Tarbut ve-Sifrut, p .6 (Hebrew) http://onegshabbat.blogspot.co.il/2014/04/blog-post_18.html
(3) Eliezer Brodt, 2014, 'New book Announcement- Megale Temirin', The Seforim Blog http://seforim.blogspot.co.il/2014/01/new-book-announcement-megale-temirin.html
(4) Matan Hermoni, 2014,  הסבתא המופקרת של הספרות העבריתHaaretz, Sfarim (Hebrew) http://www.haaretz.co.il/.premium-1.2382365
(5) Shinichi Yamamoto, 2015, 山本　伸一, "ヨナタン・メイール編著『想像のハシディズム』", ユダヤ・イスラエル研究　第28号  http://www.waseda.jp/assoc-jsjs/jistudies.html
(6) David Biale and David Assaf,, 2015, 'Revealer Revealed', Jewish Review of Books, pp. 17-21  http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/1454/revealer-revealed/
(7) Hillel Halkin, 2015, "Sex, Magic, Bigotry, Corruption- and the First Hebrew Novel', Mosaic Magazine,  http://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2015/05/sex-magic-bigotry-corruption-and-the-first-hebrew-novel/
(8) Tomer Persico, 2015, "Interview", Lula'at haEl Blog, http://tomerpersico.com/2015/08/10/meir_perl/

In Living under the Evil Pope, Martina Mampieri presents the Hebrew Chronicle of Pope Paul IV, written in the second half of the sixteenth century by the Italian Jewish moneylender Benjamin Neḥemiah ben Elnathan (alias Guglielmo di Diodato) from Civitanova Marche. The text remained in manuscript for about four centuries until the Galician scholar Isaiah Sonne (1887-1960) published a Hebrew annotated edition of the chronicle in the 1930s. This remarkable source offers an account of the events of the Papal States during Paul IV’s pontificate (1555-59). Making use of broad archival materials, Martina Mampieri reflects on the nature of this work, its historical background, and contents, providing a revised edition of the Hebrew text as well as the first unabridged English translation and commentary.

"The article itself is available by subscription at : http://members.bib-arch.org/publication.asp?PubID=BSBA&Volume=40&Issue=2&ArticleID=4 . 
For the open-access endnotes that tell how archaeology confirms each of the 50 persons in the article, see http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/people-cultures-in-the-bible/people-in-the-bible/50-people-in-the-bible-confirmed-archaeologically/#note05r . 
This short, popular-level article identifies 50 persons mentioned in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) in Bible-era inscriptions of known authenticity.  Its intent is to set forth a conservativ.e list of strong identifications that can be trusted.  The linked web site contains much factual information.       

These identifications are based on the criteria established in pp. 9-89 of the author's published dissertation (Identifying Biblical Persons in Northwest Semitic Inscriptions of 1200-539 B.C.E. [Atlanta: Society of Biblical LIterature, 2004]).  The article extends the dissertation's coverage to include Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian inscriptions down to 400 B.C.E.  Inscriptions discovered as recently as 2005 and 2008 are included.  "

Full Article: https://www.academia.edu/39244534/Sefer_%E1%B8%A4alomei_Qets_Pela_ot_Meoraot_Tzvi_1814_and_the_Image_of_Sabbatianism_in_the_18th_and_19th_Centuries_Jewish_Thought_Journal_of_the_Goldstein-Goren_International_Center_for_Jewish_Thought_1_2019_pp._125-167_Hebrew_


ההרצאה היא פתח לפרוייקט רחב במסגרת האקדמיה הלאומית למדעים
ISF
שעניינו - מהדורה מוערת ומבוארת של ספר מאורעות צבי
וניצוח של עיצוב השבתאות במאה התשע עשרה


הקונגרס העולמי למדעי היהדות
מושב
250

Sabbatianism, Science and the Bounds of Religion
Tuesday, 08 August, 2017 09:00-11:00, Room: 2717

Maoz Kahana (he)
Rabbi Jonathan Eybeschutz’s Conception of the Sceintific Revolution and the Rediscovery of the Lost Manuscript of `Sefer Meirav’

Pawel Maciejko (en)
The Coat of Arms of Wolf Eibeschütz

Jonatan Meir (he)
Sefer Me’ora’ot Tzvi and the Image of Sabbatianism

A mariner, a knight, the governor of the Isle of Guernsey, and a nobleman with influence at the English and the Portuguese courts – Edward
Brampton, the son of a Jewish blacksmith, defied the so-called strict hierarchy of late medieval society and earned status, prestige,
and fortune

גרשם שלום -- תולדות התנועה השבתאית // 
History of the Sabbatian Movement was the first attempt by one of the giants of scholarship on Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem (1897-1982), to present a comprehensive picture of Sabbatianism as a single narrative. The book is based on the series of lectures given at the Hebrew University during 1939-1940, which are of special importance in that they laid the foundation for all of Scholem’s research in the years to come, including his extensive monograph Sabbatai Sevi: the mystical Messiah, 1626-1676, first published in 1957. What follows is a sketch of the massive History of the Sabbatian Movement, over which Gershom Scholem toiled his whole life but never completed. The lectures are presented here for the first time based on the original manuscripts, alongside the text of an additional series of lectures that Scholem gave as part of the “Month of Study” organized by Berl Katznelson in 1941. These long-hidden texts reveal new facets of the Sabbatian movement and its history, as well as of Gershom Scholem as a historian, and serve as prologue to any further study of this most stormy and complicated episode in Jewish history. The new edition includes a comprehensive introduction by the editors on all of Gershom Scholem’s studies on Sabbatianism. //---//

Table of Contents:
“The Open Book” - Jonatan Meir and Shinichi Yamamoto /
Introduction /
Chapter One: The Faces of the Generation /
Chapter Two: The Messianic Movement from its Beginnings to its Height /
Chapter Three: The Twists and Turns of the Sabbatian Movement /
Chapter Four: The Historical Development of Sabbatianism /
Appendix A: Messianism from the Spanish Expulsion to the Eve of Emancipation (Month of Study, 1941) /
Appendix B: The Sabbatian Movement: Its Roots, Its Development, and its Aftermath (Introduction, 1942-45 /
Appendix C: Bibliography of Works by Gershom Scholem on Sabbatianism /
Index /
Notes on the Cover Image (from the collection of Paweł Maciejko)

//--// Order The BOOK
http://www.schocken-jts.org.il/english/bookstore/prodView.asp?idproduct=408

Throughout the nineteenth century, Maskilic journals increased their publication of anti-Hasidic satires. From the eighteen-sixties onward, this literature came primarily as a response to the revival in the publishing of Hasidic hagiography and to the spread of Hasidism into new territory. To this point, no complete review or even general survey has been performed on this extensive polemical literature, despite the fact that it has much to teach us about Hasidism and the Haskalah in those years. We are not speaking of an insignificant bibliographical lacuna, but of a disregard for an entire field of research which would shed light not only on a forgotten chapter of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature but also on an important chapter in the relationships between Maskilim and Hasidim in that period and the genesis and development of the different streams of Hasidism. This Maskilic literature intended to do more than eradicate Hasidism; it aimed to strengthen the self-consciousness of the individual Maskilim who found themselves alone in Hasidic territory. Paradoxically, the literature documented the very movement it intended to eradicate from the world. The distorted reflection displayed in the anti-Hasidic literature does more than present a caricature of its subject -- it conceals hitherto unknown elements about the nature and development of the Hasidic movement. The present article deals with one such case, a satire on Bratslav Hasidism from 1863, which has at its core a Maskilic satirical text written by Yehiel Meller on pilgrimage to the grave of R. Nahman of Bratslav in Uman.





כתבי עת של משכילים לאורך המאה התשע עשרה הרבו לפרסם סאטירות בגנותה של החסידות. משנות הששים ואילך באה ספרות זו בעיקר כתגובה להתעוררות הדפסת ספרות השבחים החסידית ולהתפשטות החסידות במרחבים חדשים. לא קיימת עד עתה סקירה שלימה, ואף לא מיפוי כללי, של אותה ספרות פולמוסית ענפה, על אף שיש בה ללמד הרבה על דרכי החסידות וההשכלה באותן שנים.  לא מדובר רק בחסרון ביבליוגרפי שאין לו משמעות, אלא בהתעלמות משדה מחקר רב עניין שעשוי להאיר לא רק על פרק נשכח בספרות עברית ויידיש החדשה אלא גם על פרק חשוב ביחסים בין משכילים לחסידים באותה תקופה, ועל דרכי צמיחתם, פיצולם והתפתחותם של זרמים שונים בחסידות. הייתה זו ספרות שיותר מאשר נועדה לבער את החסידות נועדה לחזק את תודעתם העצמית של המשכילים הבודדים במרחבים החסידיים; ספרות שבאופן פרדוקסלי תיעדה תנועה אותה חפצו לבער מן העולם. הבבואה המעוותת בה התהדרה הסאטירה האנטי חסידית לא רק הציגה דימוי – אלא טומנת בחובה הצבעה על אלמנטים חדשים ועל התפתחויות בחסידות. במקרה אחד ממין זה הנוגע לחסידות ברסלב בשנות השישים של המאה התשע עשרה עוסק המאמר. שלפנינו - שעיקרו מהדורה של טקסט משכילי שכתב יחיאל מלר - בשנת 1863 - על העלייה לקבר ר' נחמן מברסלב באומן
"""

The strong connection between Arnaldo Momigliano’s historical work and his Jewish cultural upbringing is today widely accepted, and not simply as regards his intellectual biography. The fact that the editors of the present volume have included him in a collection of essays entitled Makers of Jewish Modernity – the volume was the winner of one of the 2016 National Jewish Book Awards - indicates the importance and general significance accorded his views on ancient and modern Judaism. In this essay, I try to show how life, doctrine, and métier d’historien, all converge in his very original approach to the problems of Judaism in the modern world today.  Central to his position is an insistent and mandatory defense of historical truth and truthfulness, with which his commitment to what may be termed the ethical experience of Judaism is very closely interconnected.

Holocaust research has expanded enormously in recent decades and consists by now of a series of subdomains. Nevertheless, the central domain was and remains the domain of “the core period”: the years of the Nazi regime, 1933–1945, and of the regimes of Nazi Germany’s close allies and satellite countries. In this treatise, Prof. Dan Michman, Head of the Yad Vashem International Institute for Holocaust Research, surveys and examines the major developments and changes in research on the core period of the Holocaust since 1990 until today, and analyzes the various factors that paved the way toward and prompted them—politics, memory policies and interests, social psychological needs, generational changes, value transformations, and new scholarly methodologies—citing hundreds of references in many languages. The broad picture presented in this treatise leads to conclusions that erode several assumptions, which became entrenched in earlier stages of research and are still widely taught and are commonplace in popular discourse. Consequently, according to the author, there is a need to redefine our understanding of the anti-Jewish campaign unleashed by Nazism for which we use the terms “the Holocaust” or ”the Shoah” and fine-tune it. The treatise, which concludes with such a redefinition, is a “must” for those who are interested in the most updated picture of the state of historical research on the Holocaust.

Hard copy available at
https://store.yadvashem.org/en/search-research-lectures-and-papers-34-holocaust-historiography-between-1990-to-2021-in-contexts-new-insights-perceptions-understandings-and-avenuesan-overview-and-analysis
The full text can be found at acdemia.edu under HOLOCAUST HISTORIOGRAPHY BETWEEN 1990 TO 2021