Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture Online

The Alpine society Donauland Section (Sektion Donauland) was founded in Vienna in 1921 by mostly Jewish mountaineers. Created in reaction to the prevailing antisemitism in the German and Austrian Alpine Club (DuÖAV), the Section harked back to an earlier period of multifaceted Jewish involvement in European Alpine exploration. While these activities in the 19th century had been an expression of the struggle for integration and entry into the bourgeoisie for the Jewish circles of the population, …

The designation for the community of followers of the self-proclaimed Messiah Sabbatai Zevi (1626–1676; Smyrna), which formed in the 17th-century Ottoman Empire and can still be encountered to this day sporadically in Turkey. Like Sabbatai Zevi, many of his followers converted to Islam and created a synthesis of elements of Jewish and Islamic mysticism. The community’s religious syncretism led to their ejection from Judaism, but also separated them from the Muslims in the Ottoman Empire. From th…

Internment- and transit camp in France during the period of German occupation. The complex in northeastern Paris, referred to as the “Judenlager” (Jewish camp) by the Germans, was from summer 1942 on an obligatory interim stop for the transport of Jews (67 of the 79 total s0-called “Konvois” from France) destined for the extermination camps, primarily to Auschwitz. Consequently, the camp had a central function in implementing the “Final Solution” in France, with more than 76,000 Jews its victims…

In the post-Biblical period, Jewish dress regulations have functioned as an expression of internal as well as external requirements. They were defined by the interpretation of the Halakhah and its associated customs (Minhag) and had to conform to the specifications of local authorities. Of central importance for internal and external dress regulations were the questions of propriety and modesty, and the identification of the wearer as a Jew. With secularization beginning in the 19th century, dre…

Political affair in France in which the Jewish captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859–1935) was unjustly convicted of treason and condemned to lifelong exile and forced labor. The affair, which spanned from 1894 until Dreyfus’ acquittal in 1906, was accompanied by an unprecedented wave of antisemitic hatred. This was a shock to the French Jews, since it happened in the country that had been the first in Europe to grant the Jews full equality. Ultimately, the Third Republic emerged from the affair with its…

Drvar, a small town in western Bosnia (today Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina),  housed the headquarters of the Yugoslavian Partisans for a period during the Second World War and, in May 1944, became the location for a failed German military operation aimed at arresting the Partisan leader, Josip Broz Tito. One of Tito’s closest collaborators in Drvar was the Jewish painter, journalist, and communist functionary Moša Pijade (1890–1957). As the most prominent member of the Pa…

The lower house of the Russian parliament that met in four legislative periods between 1906 and 1917 in Saint Petersburg in the Tauride Palace. Representatives of Jewish interests placed great hope in the Duma, especially for legal equality for the Jews. Following the significantly more conservative composition of the parliament as a result of the change in electoral law in June 1907, the emancipation prospects for Russian Jews worsened, which is why Jewish deputies thenceforth limited themselve…