Jewish Life in Eastern Europe

The Jews of Eastern Europe, constituting more than two-thirds of the world’s Jewish population by the end of the 18th century, created a veritable Jewish renaissance. The extensive autonomy granted them during the Middle Ages enabled the development of a flourishing religious society, with the Torah as its constitution. And although secularization began to make inroads by the second half of the 19th century, it often resulted in a potent synthesis of traditional and secular culture. This course poses a challenge to the reduction of Eastern European Jewry to an insular, persecuted minority popularized by plays such as Fiddler on the Roof. After exploring different facets of the vital rabbinical culture, we follow the rise of movements that clashed with and, at times, displaced normative Jewish practice. Such challenges included the hedonistic messianic movement of Jacob Frank, the popular mystical movement known as Hasidism, the secular-oriented Jewish enlightenment (Haskalah), modern political ideologies such as Zionism and Jewish Socialism, and the emergence of a rich modern literature in Yiddish and Hebrew. Near the end of the course, we follow the emigration of more than two million Eastern European Jews to America following the pogroms of 1881-2 and attempt to confront the annihilation of more than four million Eastern European Jews during the Holocaust. Throughout, an effort will be made to appreciate the various ways that Jewish life was shaped by its non-Jewish Eastern European environment.