The Shtetl: History and Myth of Eastern European Jewish Town - Einzelansicht

This seminar will examine shtetls or Eastern European Jewish market towns. Shtetls blossomed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as Jewish merchants and artisans helped to develop private urban settlements on the eastern edges of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. In the late nineteenth century, shtetls experienced pauperization and became a symbol of Eastern European Jewish poverty. Throughout their history, the shtetls were the locale of traditional Jewishness with its Hassidic and mitnagdic varieties. However, these towns were not immune to modern political and cultural ideas such as Haskalah, Zionism, or socialism. While migration to local big urban centers and abroad foreshadowed the demise of the shtetl, it was Nazi Germany that almost completely annihilated the shtetl as a Jewish form of communal life. In the post-World War II United States, shtetl became the anchor of nostalgic memories about poor, but close-knit and comfortably immersed in traditional, Eastern European Jewish past.

Testat