Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture Online

The term  dhimmah (Arab.; “protection”) was used to denote the theological, legal, and social status granted by Islamic sovereigns to members of other revealed religions, like Jews and Christians, under their rule to guarantee them protection and autonomy. The concept of  dhimmah can be traced to Islamic theology (Kalām), which locates Islam within a continuum of prophetic revelation with the older monotheistic religions, thus allowing a place, albeit subordinate, for these religions. Politically and legally, the concept of  dhimmah took the form of a catalogue of righ…

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialektik der Aufklärung (1944/1947; “Dialectic of Enlightenment,” 2002) is one of the principal works of Critical Theory and of the Frankfurt School (Institute for Social Research​). The title also came to be known for its especial negativity in responding to the many political upheavals of the 20th century. In terms of theoretical development, the book announces a paradigm shift from the Marxist critique of the economy to the theory of antisemitism – a change tha…

The use of the term “dialogue” to refer to authentic, that is, non-instrumental relationships between individuals or between man and God is inextricably linked with the thought of Martin Buber (1878–1965). Buber transferred the term, which he introduced in Ich und Du (“I and Thou,” 1956) in 1923, from philosophy and theology into the realms of hermeneutics (especially the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible and Jewish religious texts), translation, and politics.1. IntroductionDialogic philosophers turned away from the Western tradition of  philosophia perennis, the quest f…

The diary kept by Anne Frank (1929-1945) from 1942 to 1944 in her Amsterdam hiding place is one the best-known literary sources of the Holocaust. First published in the Netherlands in 1947, the notes and observations received increasing international attention from the 1950s onwards. At first the diary was read less as a document of the Holocaust than as the touching literary explorations of a young girl. Adaptations of Anne Frank's account, especially in the theatre, led to recurring debates over the universal applicability of her life story. 1. The diaryOn June 12, 1942, Anne Frank…

The term “Diaspora” denotes the scattering of the people of Israel in antiquity, which began at the latest with the abduction by the Assyrians (8th century BCE) and had additional phases continually from then on. Beginning in the 3rd century BCE, the Jewish Diaspora was split up into a Hebrew-and-Aramaic-speaking East and a West in which Greek and Latin predominated. This language divide led to a break in late antiquity that divided Jewry into two disparate living environments and worlds of know…

The periodical  Die Fackel (The Torch), founded by Karl Kraus (1874–1936), was the most significant literary periodical of Viennese modernism. It was published between April 1899 and February 1936 and discussed all relevant political, social, and cultural topics of its time in a mostly polemic and satirical tone. Focal areas of criticism included capitalism (which was often equated with Judaism) and Zionism, the press (“ Journaille”), and judicial practice, as well as the decay of values, particularly of language and morals. Kraus’s conception of the critiqu…

In his polemic Die Germanomanie, published in 1815, the Jewish scholar and journalist Saul Ascher (1767–1822) criticized the departure of many of his Christian German contemporaries from universalist principles and the Enlightenment’s conception of man in favor of the nationalist conception of a völkisch (ethnic-nationalistic) differentiation of human beings. His work experienced strong rejection and was burned in 1817 as a Jewish invective during the fraternity ( Burschenschaft) meeting at Wartburg Castle in Eisenach.1. GenesisThe Berlin journalist Saul Ascher pub…

Literally translated, the Aramaic formulation  dina de-malkhuta dina means “the law of the kingdom is the [valid] law.” This rabbinic legal principle governs the recognition of other laws within Jewish religious law, the Halakhah. Foreign law thus takes the form of an external, more powerful system, whether this is a theoretically constructed Jewish kingdom or a non-Jewish state. The changing concepts of sovereignty and law necessitated an incessant redefinition of individual interpretations of this te…

Di shvue (Yidd.; “the oath”) is a Jewish workers’ song from Eastern Europe. Its starting point was a religious oath, which was carried over into a song. At the beginning of the 20th century, the General Jewish Labor Bund in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia ( Bund) adopted a version by the Russian-Jewish poet S. An-Ski (Dybbuk) as their hymn.The Yiddish song  Di shvue has its roots in the Jewish revolutionary labor movement that emerged in the Pale of Settlement around the end of the 19th century to campaign for improvement in the economic situation and for…

Naphtali Herz Wessely’s (1725–1805) Hebrew Enlightenment text  Divre Shalom ve-Emet (Words of Peace and Truth) was published in 1782 in response to Joseph II’s Habsburg tolerance legislation. As one of the most important authors of Haskalah, in this work he formulated his program for the reform of Jewish schools. On the basis of its wide-ranging cultural and social implications, it sparked serious intra-Jewish controversies regarding the relationship between religious and non-religious spheres of knowl…

The term  Di Yunge (Yidd.; "the young ones”) was adopted by a group of young American-Yiddish writers toward the end of the 1900s. The name may be derived from Yugent, the title of a literary anthology published in 1907, with which some of the more active members of the group distinguished themselves by a first important publication. It expressed the self-understanding of the authors, who wished to distinguish themselves clearly from their older, generally socialistically or anarchistically-minded predecessors. Very quickly…