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Here is the poster pdf file for this Jacob Talmon event.
Jacob Talmon and Totalitarianism Today: Legacy and Revision
The Israeli Academy of Arts and Sciences
43 Jabotinsky Street, Jerusalem
26 - 28 December, 2006
Tuesday, December 26, 2006
18:00 Gathering, coffee and refreshments
Chair: Prof. Gabriel Herman (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Announcement of The Talmon Prize Winners for 2007
Keynote lecture: Prof. Hedva Ben-Israel (Hebrew University of Jerusalem):
"Talmon on Nationalism"
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
11:30-13:00 Session I: Enlightenment, Revolution, and Counter-Enlightenment
Chair: Prof. Joseph Mali (Tel-Aviv University)
Dr. Eran Shalev (Haifa University):
"The Missing Revolution: 1776 in the Light of Totalitarian Democracy"
Prof. Michael Heyd (Hebrew University of Jerusalem):
"Jacob versus Jean-Jacques: Talmon, Rousseau and the Origins of Totalitarian Democracy once again".
14:30-17:00Session II: From Romantic Nationalism to the Age of Violence
Chair: Prof. Steven E. Aschheim (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Prof. Zeev Sternhell (Hebrew University of Jerusalem):
"Nationalism and Zionism: From Herder to Talmon"
Prof. David Ohana (Ben-Gurion University):
"The Price of Messianism: Jacob Talmon and Gershom Scholem"
Thursday, December 28, 2006
09:30-13:00 Session III: Talmon and the Postwar Intellectual Milieu
Chair: Prof. Mario Sznajder (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Mr. Arie Dubnov (Hebrew University of Jerusalem):
"When the Crooked Timber meets the Forest Tree: Isaiah Berlin and Jacob Talmon between Zionism and Totalitarian Discourse"
Prof. Malachi Hacohen (Duke University):
"Jacob Talmon and the Worldview of Cold War Liberalism" [Presented in English]
Prof. David Weinstein (Wake Forest University)
"Historicism, Totalitarianism and the Autonomy of Texts" [Presented in English]
Prof. Joseph Agassi (Tel-Aviv University)
Comment
Prof. Steven E. Aschheim (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Concluding Remarks
All session will take place at the Israeli Academy of Arts and Sciences, 43 Jabotinsky Street, Jerusalem
Eurasian Nomads as Agents of Cultural Change
Institute of Advanced Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Givat Ram Campus,
5-8 June 2006
Preliminary Program
Monday, June 5, 2006
18:30
Greetings: Prof. Steven Aschheim,
George L. Mosse Program in History
Keynote Lecture:
Thomas T. Allsen. Oregon USA
Population Movements in the Mongolian Era
Tuesday, June 6, 2006
Session 1: Early Contacts: Archaeology, Identity and Empire
9:00-13:15
Gideon Shelach, Hebrew University
Weapons, Ornaments and Food: The Creation of Pastoralist Identity on the Borders of China during the First Millennium BCE
William Honeychurch. Gettysburgh College
Nomadic Cores, Sedentary Peripheries, and the Statecraft of Empire
11:00-11:15 - Coffee break
Steven Rosen, Ben Gurion University
Overgrazing and Depletion of the Natural Resources in the Negev [?]
Anatoly Khazanov, University of Wisconsin, Madison
The Scythians and Their Neighbours.
13:15-14:30 Lunch
Session 2: From Antiquity to Medieval: Archaeology and Language
14:30-18:30
Kazim Abdullaev, Institute of Archaeology, Samarkand
Yueh-chih-Kushan in Central Asia and the Problem of their Settlement
Qi Dongfang, Beijing University
The Disappearance of the Xianbei: An Archaeological Investigation of Northern Nomads in China
17:00-17:30 Coffee break
Isenbike Togan, Ankara University
The Use of Nomadic Socio-political Terminology in Chinese Sources
Wednesday, June 7th
9:00-12:00
Excursion to the Old City
Session 3: Into the Mongol Period: Kingship, Technology, Identity
13:30-16:45:
Peter Golden, Rutgers Universtiy and Institute for Advanced Study
Irano-Turkic Interaction: Aspects of the Sacral Kingship in Khazaria
Michal Biran, Hebrew University
The Mongols and Nomadic Identity: The Case of the Khitans in China
15:30-15:45 Coffee break
Reuven Amitai,Hebrew University
Gunpowder and Trebuchets: Mongol Siege Technology Re-examined
16:45-17:15 Coffee break
Session 4: The Role of Nomads in the Development of Material Culture
17:15- 19:15
Francois Louis, Bard Graduate Center
Chinese-Khitan Acculturation and the Material Culture of the Liao Elite
Morris Rossabi, Columbia University
The Role of the Mongols in the Transmission of Porcelain and the Other Decorative Arts.
Thursday, June 8th
Session 5: The Mongols and the Middle East
8:45-12:00
Beatrice Manz, Tufts University
The Impact of Nomad Conquest on Nomad Culture and Society in the Mongol Middle East
George Lane, Scool of Oriental and African Studies, London
Persian Notables and the Families which Underpinned Mongol Rule in Iran-zamin
10:45-11:00 coffee break
David Morgan, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Mongol Historiography since 1985: The Rise of Cultural History
12:00-13:15 Lunch
Session 6: Towards the Modern World: Law, Political Culture, Religion
13:15-18:30
Istevan Vasary, Budapest
The Tatar Factor in the Formation of Moscow's Political Culture
Veronica Weit , Bonn University
Shamanism and Buddhism in Mongolia: Religious and Political Aspects
Uli Schamiloglu , University of Wisconsin, Madison
The Black Death and Political and Cultural Transformations: Chinggisid and Islamic Legitimacy in Central Eurasia
16:15-16:30 Coffee Break
Ron Sela , Indiana University
Yasa and Shari`a in Central Asia: The anti-Yasa Polemics in Late 18th century Bukhara.
Andre Wink, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Post-nomadic Empires of Hind: from the Mongols to the Mughals
18:30-18:45: Coffee break
18:45-19:15: Concluding Session
Concluding Remarks: David Morgan, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Friday, June 9th
Excursion to the South
Friday, April 28 – Morning Session –10:00 - 1:00
Welcome and Introduction:
Stanley G. Payne, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Co-organizer
Jeffrey Herf, University of Maryland
“Confronting the Nazi Past after 1945 and the Communist Past after 1989: A Comparative Perspective on German Memory, History and Politics”
Franziska Seraphim, Boston College
“The Social Politics of the Past in Japan: Negotiating War Legacies and Postwar Democracies, 1945-2005”
1:00 – 2:30 Lunch
Friday, April 28 – Afternoon Session – 2:30 - 6:30
Luca La Rovere, University of Rome “La Sapienza”
“The Exam of Conscience of the Nation: The Lost Debate About Collective Guilt in Italy, 1943-1945”
Eva Kovacs, Center for Central European Studies, Teleki Foundation, Budapest
“Innocent Culprits - Silent Communities: The Austrian Case”
Refreshment Break
Laird Boswell, University of Wisconsin-Madison
“French Victims in German Uniform: Denying the Past in the French Borderlands”
Ivo Banac, Yale University
“Between Pavelic and Tito: Living with Twentieth-Century Croatian History”
Saturday, April 29 – Morning Session – 9:00 - 1:00
Ignacio Fernández de Mata, University of Burgos
“From Invisibility to Power: Spanish Victims and the Manipulation of Their Symbolic Capital”
António Costa Pinto, Institute of Social Science, University of Lisbon
“Dealing with Authoritarian Legacies: The “New State” and Portugal’s Democracy “
Refreshment Break
David Chandler, Monash University
“Cambodia Deals with the Past: Collective Memory and Induced Amnesia”
Christopher Kaplonski, William Paterson University
“Neither Truth Nor Reconciliation: Perpetrators, Victims and the Pragmatics of Political Violence in
Post-Socialist Mongolia”
Lunch 1:00-2:30
Saturday, April 29 – Afternoon Session – 2:30 - 6:30
Slawoj Szynkiewicz, Institute of Archaelogy and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Sciences
“How Perpetrators Have Overshadowed the Victims: Polish Debates on the Totalitarian Past”
Janos Kovacs, Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna
“Accomplices Without Perpetrators: Discourses of Decommunization in Hungary”
Refreshment Break
Irina Livezeanu, Pittsburgh University
“Romanians and the Holocaust: Revisiting the Past Under the Gaze of ‘Europe’ and NATO”
Milan Hauner, University of Wisconsin-Madison
“Crime and Punishment in Prague 1948-9: The Strange Case of Karel Vas and Gen. Heliodor Pika”
Sunday, April 30 – 10 a.m.-1:30 p.m. - Concluding Session
Anatoly Khazanov, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Co-organizer
“Whom to Mourn and Whom to Forget? (Re)Constructing Collective Memory in Contemporary Russia”
Edward Friedman, University of Wisconsin-Madison
“Sheep Raised on Wolf Milk: Victimization, Memory and Political Amnesia in China”
Refreshment Break
General discussion
Sponsored by: The Anonymous Fund and The George L. Mosse Program in History
Jewish History Conference Review
Friday, April 15, 2005
2:00-2:30 Opening Remarks: Gideon Reuveni
Jewish History Encounters Economy Once Again
2:30-4:30 Economy and Cultural Exchange
Chair: Uzi Rebhun (Hebrew University Jerusalem)
Adam Teller, University of Haifa
Economic Activity as a Form of Cultural Contact in Early Modern Poland-Lithuania
Susanne Bennewitz, Basel
Just Talking or Doing Business? Shmoozer, Middleman, or Agent: A Low-Profile Business that Served a High-Profile Cliché
Jonathan Karp, State University of New York at Binghamton
Jewish Ethnics and the Spirit of Feudalism
5:00 Keynote address
Introduction: David Sorkin,
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Derek J. Penslar, University of Toronto
Periphery or Center? Economics in Modern Jewish Historiography
6:30 Dinner
Saturday, April 16
9:00-11:00 Thinking in Economic Terms about Jews
Chair: Jeremi Suri (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Grit Schorch, University of Leipzig
Contract Theory and Economics in Moses Mendelssohn’s Political Writings
Sharon Gordon, Hebrew University Jerusalem
Exchange of Identity: The Economic Discourse of Jewish Conversion to Christianity in 19th century Germany
Jerry Z. Muller, The Catholic University of America, Washington
The Economics of Nationalism and the Fate of the Jews in the Twentieth Century: The Insights of Ber Borochov and Ernest Gellner
11:15-12:30 National and Trans-National Aspects of Jewish Economy
Chair: Steve Johnstone (University of Arizona)
Michael Miller, Central European University
Budapest Going Native: Moritz Jellinek and the Modernization of the Hungarian Economy
Sarah Stein, University of Washington-Seattle
Praying to a New God: Jews and the Trans-Atlantic Trade in Ostrich Feathers
12:35-1:30 Lunch
1:30-2:45 Jews as Consumers
Chair: John Tortorice (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Sarah E. Wobick, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Buying, Selling, Being, Drinking; Or, How the Coffeehouse Became a Site for the Consumption of New Jewish Identities
Paul Lerner, University of Southern California
Shopping and Its Discontent: The “Jewish Department Store” in German Politics and Culture
3:00-4:15 Imagining the Homo Economicus Judaicus
Chair: Benjamin Braude (Boston College)
Kirill Postoutenko, University of Southern California
Dostoevsky and Marx: Wandering as Circulation
Nicolas Berg, University of Leipzig
Economy and Metaphor: Perceptions of the Jewish ‘Luftmenschen’ in fin-de-siècle Europe
4:30-5:30 Jewish History Encounters Economy: Some Thoughts for the Future
Chair: Gideon Reuveni
Jonathan Zatlin, Boston University
Derek Penslar, University of Toronto
For information contact Gideon Reuveni
reuveni@wisc.edu, 608-263-1835
http://mosseprogram.wisc.edu
For information on the Friedrick Center:
1-608-263-4647 or 1-608-231 -1341
http://conferencing.uwex.edu/index_location.cfm
Conference Report
Jewish History Encounters Economy, April 15-16, 2005, University of Wisconsin-Madison
For several decades — from roughly the end of World War II until recently — scholars of Jewish history devoted scant attention to economic issues, despite the fact that Jews’ commercial activities had been a subject of great concern to many Europeans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The international workshop “Jewish History Encounters Economy,” which was organized by Gideon Reuveni and sponsored by the George L. Mosse Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, sought to place economic issues once again at the center of Jewish history and even called for an “economic turn” in Jewish studies.
In his introductory remarks, Reuveni (University of Madison-Wisconsin) showed that economic issues aroused a great deal of interest in the nineteenth century among Jews who were concerned with the emergence and meaning of capitalism. This was even more the case at the beginning of the twentieth century, when many Jews responded to the economic theories of Max Weber and Werner Sombart which ascribed Jews a special role in the emergence of capitalism and economic modernity. Yet, according to Reuveni, economic issues became marginal to postwar Jewish historiography — although a number of scholars, many of them relatively young, have recently begun to return to the economy and reexamine its crucial role in Jewish history. Reuveni then called for Jewish historians to engage not only with issues of production, distribution, and consumption but also with business networks and the development of trust, in order to demonstrate how Jewish identity has been embedded in broader social and economic realms.
In the workshop’s keynote address, Derek Penslar (University of Toronto) followed a similar line of argumentation and provided an overview and analysis of the historiography on economic issues in Jewish history. While the “Wissenschaft des Judentums” — the nineteenth-century German-Jewish movement that developed a systematic, scholarly approach to Judaism — mostly shied away from economic history, many Jewish historians in interwar Eastern Europe became interested in economic matters, in many cases from a Zionist perspective. However, after the Second World War, economic approaches waned, and the question of a Jewish homo economicus became taboo. Consequently, social and cultural historians often considered phenomena such as class in cultural rather than in economic terms. Penslar also noted that many important works that opened up economic perspectives on the Jewish past were written by scholars who were not trained specialists in Jewish history, but rather historians who worked on Jews within European social and cultural history and who thus brought fresh methodological insights into the field of Jewish history. Such a list includes: Natalie Zemon Davis, Jonathan Israel, and most recently, Yuri Slezkine. Nevertheless, economic issues remain on the fringes of Jewish history, which motivated Penslar to call for an “economic turn” in Jewish studies. In general, Penslar (and other participants) noted that economic history and matters of economic power are increasingly neglected in history departments today, even as many departments of economics remove economic history from their curricula.
Although Penslar noted that in recent years early modernists were more likely to focus on the economy than late modernists, only the first panel, entitled “Economy and Cultural Exchange,” dealt with the period before the early nineteenth century. In his paper, Adam Teller (University of Haifa) discussed and critiqued the middlemen theory, an influential model for the conceiving of the economic position of Jews in early modern Poland-Lithuania. Developed in the 1940s and fashionable from the 70s into the 90s, this theory describes the tendency of immigrants or immigrant groups to inhabit particular economic niches that are ethnically bound and which often include high risk business activities. (Chinese immigrants in Indonesia and other parts of South Asia and Indians in twentieth-century South Africa are other examples of such groups.) Teller claimed middlemen theory is too general to accurately describe the concrete historical situation of the Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, who, he argued, were integrated into the Polish political and economic systems, and who occupied a place as clearly defined as an estate in a hierarchical feudal system. Not only did economic contacts imply cultural transfer — such as the attempts of Jews to copy the nobles’ lifestyle — but ethnic solidarity was often limited, as illustrated by the great number of regulations that sought to limit competition among Jewish merchants. To depict Polish Jews solely as middlemen would mean, according to Teller, overlooking the deep influence that economic contacts had on cultural and religious matters.
While Teller questioned the value of the middlemen theory, Susanne Bennewitz (University of Basel) presented a case study of “real” middlemen in Basel. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the business of shmoozers [brokers] developed in the broad area between Switzerland and the French Alsace. This practice consisted of offering middleman services for wholesale and retail business, money and bills of exchange, and marriages. Though accusations against the shmoozers never disappeared, and some sources betray an ambivalent popular perception, the business was widely accepted around 1815 in public as well as in court.
In the panel’s third paper, Jonathan Karp (State University of New York at Binghamton) recalled that amid all the discussion of Jews’ role in the rise of modern capitalism, we often forget that Jews were also characterized as distinctively backward and bound to the feudal system, as in the case of the representation of Jews in eighteenth-century Alsace. Fichte, Marx and even Weber linked Jewish economic occupations to the nobility and thus regarded Jews’ economic role as reactionary. Yet, Karp did not propose substituting the image of the Jew as economically backward for the portrayal of Jews as economic modernizers. He urged, rather, that we appreciate the complexities and ambiguities in the economic position of Jews in early modern Europe.
On the second day, the presentations were equally divided between theoretical treatments of Jews and the economy and more empirical case studies of Jews’ commercial activities. In the panel “Thinking in Economic Terms about Jews,” Grit Schorch (University of Leipzig) dealt with the attitudes toward the economy in the writings of Moses Mendelssohn, a surprisingly unexamined topic among scholars of the Berlin Haskalah. In his thoughts on economics, Mendelssohn, in many respects, followed Menasseh ben Israel in conceiving of Jews as a useful part of society. Mendelssohn, himself a successful silk manufacturer, in contrast to many of his contemporary thinkers, regarded trade as a useful occupation.
Sharon Gordon (Hebrew University, Jerusalem) explored nineteenth-century connections between economy and conversion. She drew an opposition between conversions which were understood as “essential” and those viewed as “nominal,” meaning a formal change of identity without a meaningful religious transformation. Gordon showed how the latter form of conversion was seen by many nineteenth-century observers as a kind of economic act, akin to an exchange of currencies. While Theodor Mommsen argued that Jews had already fulfilled their destiny by transforming barter into a nominal system based on money, and thus no longer had any reason for remaining Jewish, Werner Sombart rejected Jewish conversion to Christianity as opportunistic; significantly, both associated Jewish religious change with economic transformations.
In the panel “Imagining the Homo Economicus Judaicus,” Kirill Postoutenko (University of Southern California) also looked at economic metaphors in representations of Jews and Jewishness. Specifically, he analyzed the use of wandering as a kind of circulation in the writings of Dostoevsky and Marx. Both, following different Hegelian traditions, described the Jewish God as abstract — as money represents an abstraction of actual wealth — and equated the historical teleology of Judaism (wandering) with the economic teleology of capitalism (circulation). Yet while Dostoevsky privileged a kind of antimodern nativism and extolled the virtues of rootedness in the soil, Marx emphasized universalism and the value of human labor.
Jerry Z. Muller (The Catholic University of America, Washington) presented a reexamination of the writings of Ber Borochov and Ernest Gellner for their insights on economics and nationalism. Borechov, an early twentieth-century socialist-Zionist, and a once important figure who has drifted into obscurity, portrayed nationalism as a product of capitalistic development. He claimed that the abnormal conditions of production would not lead to class conflict, but rather to conflict between national groups. Muller showed how Gellner’s theory of the development of nations and nationalism drew on Borochov in this respect, especially in regard to Eastern Europe. That is, Gellner also grounded the rise of ethnic nationalism in economic developments.
Nicolas Berg (University of Leipzig) then traced the evolution of the term “Luftmensch” [literally: air person or person not grounded] and its varying associations with Jews. He argued that while the term was originally used by people such as Max Nordau in the nineteenth century to describe Jews who were excluded from gainful employment, it became increasingly accepted as a description of assimilated Western European Jews. Berg claimed that “Luftmensch” referred less and less to socio-economic categories, and turned into a general critique of Judaism as lacking grounding and balance. It lost its ironic, self-critical implications and took on increasingly sharp anti-Semitic overtones.
Sarah Stein (University of Washington-Seattle) spoke about an international network of Jewish merchants who were active in the trans-Atlantic trade of ostrich feathers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This network was primarily established by Eastern European Jewish immigrants to South Africa after 1880, and Jews soon made up some ninety percent of local and international merchants in the ostrich feather trade. With the case of the ostrich feather trade, Stein demonstrated the interweaving of demographic and occupational patterns among this large immigrant group. On the one hand, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe came to South Africa, London, Paris and North America in large numbers after 1880 and thus could reactivate and use already existing networks. Second, many of these merchants already were involved in fur or textile trade before and so could rely on existing skills. Stein also discussed the fashion of ostrich feather wearing in pre-World War I metropolises and thus linked her analysis of Jewish trade networks to questions of taste and consumption.
Sarah E. Wobick (University of Wisconsin-Madison) turned to the problem of consumption and its meaning for Jewish identity by examining the case of coffeehouses. Here acts of buying and selling cannot only be seen as an economic exchange, since, as Wobick argued, coffeehouses were are a social space. Coffeehouse visits by Jews in the early nineteenth century represented an attempt to enter the new bourgeois society and to lay symbolic belonging within this group. Purchasing coffee in a coffeehouse, then, may be seen as the purchase of a social place.
Paul Lerner (University of Southern California) addressed the question of Jews and consumption from a different angle. In his presentation on the “Jewish department store” in German politics and culture, he examined representations and images of department stores in Germany around the turn of the century, a time when opposition to mass consumption coincided with a new rise of a new kind of antisemitism. The images included not only accusations of cheapness and shady business practices, but also allegations of sexual depravity, betraying a discomfort with female desire, especially in light of the fact that women comprised a large percentage of the sales staff and also of the visitors and consumers in the stores.
Michael Miller (Central European University) introduced the example of Moritz Jellinek who played a significant role in the modernization of the Hungarian economy in the nineteenth century. Coming to Pest from Moravia, he quickly became integrated into the new society and saw the economic function of Jews in the Hungarian economy as the fulfillment of patriotic duties. Though rejecting petty trade as most of his contemporaries, Jellinek depicted Jews active in commerce as useful and productive.
In the concluding session, Benjamin Braude (Boston College) sought to broaden the scope of analysis by emphasizing perceptions of Jews’ economic role in Ottoman history. He recalled the image of the Sephardic economic superman in the early modern period. In his final remarks, Derek Penslar addedthat the paradigm of Jews’ place in the emergence of capitalism still seems almost unavoidable in Jewish economic history. He also noted that most of the conference papers dealt with representations and perceptions and only several analyzed the actual economic activities of Jews. Penslar also urged consideration of Zionism and the construction of the State of Israel as an economic project and undertaking, a perspective seldom thematized in Jewish studies. Finally, Jonathan Zatlin (Boston University) stressed two other points in his concluding reflections. First, he called attention to a continuous discourse on Jewish unethical business behavior that spanned the premodern and the modern. Second, Zatlin called for breaking down the barriers that separate cultural and economic history, since culture and economy are intertwined, mutually constitutive forces.
Conferences from 2001-2004