Jewish Identity Crisis

Another critical factor that would push the Galician Jews down the road to Nationalism was the Habsburg State’s legislative response to the Jewish presence in the crown land. This facet of the Jewish question is more convoluted, and will take a more in-depth examination in order to fully understand both the motives of the Habsburg State and its subsequent effect on the Jewish people.

Since the beginning of the Judaism, the Jewish people have been subject to hardships and discrimination. They have not been allowed to have a stabile place of worship and have also faced persecution and atrocities that most of us can not even imagine. Three events that have had a big impact on the Jewish faith were the building and destruction of the First Great Temple, the Second Great Temple and the events of the Holocaust. In this paper, I will discuss these three events and also explain and give examples as to why I feel that the Jewish people have always been discriminated against and not allowed the freedom of worship.

The Holocaust ravaged the Jewish nation when it took place. It was a catastrophic violation of the Jews’ rights, and the mass murderings that happened then have carried over to the present to affect the State of Israel. The studies of the State of Israel and the Holocaust directly tie together because the history of the Jewish people connects with their current conflicts, they are sorely misunderstood by the world, and because of the Holocaust, Israel has needed to heavily fortify their security against international threats.

The history of the Jewish people in Spain is certainly a pivotal time period that changed the future of the Jews and specifically, the Sephardic Jews. At the time of the issuing and signing of the Edict of Expulsion on March 31, 1492, Spanish Jews were experiencing the most persecution that had been felt in the many centuries of which the Jews had been in Spain. Spanish Jewry came to a dramatic end after almost a millennium of Jewish presence in the country. Spanish Jewry’s golden age, however, the Jews experienced almost no persecution, resulting in a new centre of Talmudic study, before suffering from a relapse of anti-Semitism that eventually led to the Inquisition and the Edict of Expulsion. (SOURCE 1) This essay will discuss and analyze

This essay is going to discuss the ways in which the Nazi’s persecuted the Jews between the years of 1933 to 1938. Through the rise of Nazism, Nazi beliefs and propaganda, Nuremberg laws and the Kristallnacht in which will be explained in detail, I will provide a knowledge based analysis of pre-war life and the initial lead up to the war.

While researching texts written about Jewish Diaspora, I came across many documentary publications on Holocaust. This tragic part of Jewish history is very well documented as opposite to the Jewish Migration. I found few authors who published articles and books on Impacts of the Holocaust on Jewish Migration. My goal in this research paper is to explore the topic of Jewish Migration by connecting it to the Holocaust. To achieve this goal, I have organized my paper in the chronological order. I have tried to analyse reasons and barriers of the Migration of Jewish during the ten year period. It starts with Hitler coming to power and ends with establishment of the State of Israel. In my conclusion I tried to understand how modern world responds to Holocaust.

In the Luis de Carvajal reading, the idea of what it means to be a Jew is explored. To provide some background, Luis de Carvajal (the Younger) was a crypto-Jew, or a secret Jew, who lived in New Spain during the time of the Inquisition. He was burned at the stake in December 1596, after being convicted of observing Jewish religious practices. The reading as a whole fundamentally delineates Luis’ desire to embrace his religion during a time in which people of the Jewish faith either had to either convert to Christianity or suffer persecution. Ultimately, Luis de Carvajal’s memoirs entail the concept that being a Jew involves the following: being loyal and devoted to the religion; carrying on Jewish traditions; feeling or developing a community with fellow Jews; and believing in one God and having a personal connection with Him.

When analyzing scholar’s interpretations of significant past events, it is crucial to take into consideration the preconceived notions that they may transport into their research. It is also important to consider the time period in which the area of focus took place, in this case, the Holocaust, and the time period in which the historian is conducting his research. After analyzing the many different ways specific academics went about analyzing the roles of the Judenräte, it become extremely transparent that scholars did not agree on many aspects of the Judenräte.

Altshuler’s purpose of writing this book is to display the Religion and change of identity the of Jewish people in USSR. The author wants to describe the social, political, and economic condition of Jews from 1941 to 1964. Mordechai Altshuler (2012) mentioned that one of the governments’ goal was to isolate the component members of Jews by atomizing the Jewish public (p 81). Decent Jews were persecuted and compelled to live under the threat of losing their identity. They were threatened and forced to leave their original identity and adopt new identity which altered their identity along with lives. According to the author, “In Babi Yar, on the outskirts of town, more than 30,000 Jews were murdered around Yom Kippur 1941 (September 29 – 30),

Anti-Semitism played a significant role in shaping the Jewish identity—specifically, the Anti-Semitism that snowballed into the infamous events that were the actions of the Christian community and the Holocaust. Primary components of the Jewish identity were unwelcomingly sculpted by the hands of those who participated in Anti-Semitism; the Anti-Semite way of thinking created effects on Jews from years ago that seem to have translated to the Jewish identity of the modern day.

The Change in Status and Position of Jews in Russia, France and Germany in the Years 1880-1920

Kamen notes the ambiguous pressure on Jews, as despite the anti-semitism of contemporary Europe, the ‘Aragonese crown protected the Jews and conversos firmly, rejecting all attacks on them‘ and how any existing anti-Semetic legislation went unenforced (Kamen 15). Even after Ferdinand and Isabella initiated their reign in 1474, the monarchs were ‘never personally anti-Semitic’ and their intervention in domestic politics demonstrated an ‘impressive picture of the monarchy protecting its jews’ (Kamen, 16). In actuality, the inception of the Inquisition and the subsequent expulsion of the Jewish population was prompted by the actions of ‘Judaizers’, who were made up of conversos who had attempted to persuade newly assimilated Christians to return to their original Jewish faith. The efforts of these Judaizers concerned the crown and as a result the Inquisition was officially founded on September 27, 1480 as a means of regulating the the disruptive and disobedient conversos.

The Jewish community is Kalisz, Poland, was heralded as both the oldest Jewish community and the most populous, numbering at 15,300 Jews in 1939, or 30% of the total Jewish population worldwide. As a result of the Second World War, this no community no longer exists (“Jewish Community”). The catastrophic affects of the Holocaust and this war on the Jewish community is virtually uncontested today, however the exact toll it had is difficult to ascertain; exact statistics of the camps and of the exoduses out of Europe that took place are varied and not agreed upon. What can be examined are the affects on the Jewish community itself, from accounts of both before and after the war. Through research and careful consideration of Isaac Singer’s The Son From America, the havoc that World War II wreaked upon the Jewish society, specifically in Poland, is palpable.

Furthermore, the World Jewish Congress(WJC), the political wing of the Jewish people, “led the way in establishing a functioning Jewish Diaspora” in the post-war period. With similar intentions as the Jewish humanitarian aid organizations, the WJC acted on the world stage as a facilitator of Jewish unity, undertaking massive efforts to rebuild Jewish communities in Europe. Unlike Jewish philanthropic

In this section, the reader can also meet with a discussion of to be or not to be a Jew. This is due to persecutions in other countries. As a result, the Jews began to deny their identity and to identify with the American society. There is outlined the problem of Antisemitism and of anti-Judaism referring to the Jewish society. The last aspect, described in this chapter, is the problem of the intermarriage. The author of the diploma project presents statistics which show the scale of the problem. Through marriage of the Jew with the non-Jew, the border between societies blurs out as well as the Jewish identity disappears. As a consequence, the Jewish community is exposed for the extinction, and for the destruction of the Jewish cultural and religious heritage.