Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture Online

The trial of Adolf Eichmann took place from April 11 through December 15 in Jerusalem in 1961. Eichmann, an SS-Obersturmbannführer and former leader of the  “Judenreferat” in the Reich Security Head Office (RSHA), was responsible for the deportations of hundreds and thousands of Jews to concentration and annihilation camps during the Second World War. The trial is among the most historically significant legal proceedings of the 20th century. Both the spectacular abduction of Eichmann by the Isra…

Astrophysical institute for observing and computing spectroanalytic phenomena to prove Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. It was built in 1920–1921 on the Telegraphenberg in Potsdam to plans by the architect Erich Mendelsohn (1887–1953). The Einstein Tower is Mendelsohn’s metaphorical implementation of Einstein’s theory and is considered the most significant example of organic architecture in German Expressionism.1. Einstein’s Prague theoryIn 1911, Albert Einstein (Theory of Relativity), who was teaching at the German University in Prague at th…

The Egyptian town of El-Alamein in the Libyan desert was the scene of two large battles during the Second World War. In the first battle, at the beginning of July 1942 the British stopped the advance of Rommel’s German Afrika Korps in the direction of the Nile valley; at the end of the month, they repelled his last effort to break through their lines. In the second battle, which began on October 25, 1942, the British 8th Army defeated Rommel and began their westward march, during which they forc…

The title of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's novel Die Wahlverwandschaften (1809, "Elective Affinities," 1854) has time and again been cited with a view to evoking, in the imaginary presence of the poet and natural philosopher, an ideal relationship between Germans and Jews. The unparalleled affinity of German-speaking Jews for the representative of Weimar Classicism manifested itself, for instance, in a significant scholarly interest in Goethe that was already apparent to contemporaries. Jewish scholars of…

Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik’s first poem  El ha-tsippor (“To the Bird,” 1948), published in spring 1892, belongs to the conventional melancholy lyric typical for the epoch of sentimentality in modern Hebrew literature. In several respects, it expresses the mood, poetics, and worldview of an interim period – a poetic transition phase between neoclassicism and romanticism, politically the period between Haskalah and Herzl’s political Zionism. The poem directly announces the beginning of a new Jewish subjectivit…

In 1892, the small island in front of New York, from which the Manhattan skyline is visible, became the most important point of entry for immigrants to the United States. The vast majority of the more than two million Jews from Eastern Europe who emigrated to America from 1880 to 1924 entered the country through the bottleneck of Ellis Island. Sometimes called the “island of tears,” for the Jewish immigrants Ellis Island was a place of wistful reminiscences and hopeful expectations.1. Passage and arrivalWhen emigrants secured passage on a steamship in Central and Western …

The battle cry of “emancipation,” coined with the Enlightenment, refers in its narrower sense to the “liberation” of the European Jews from their premodern status as autonomous foreigners through political-legal equality with the rest of the citizens. In addition to this, the term came to be used for the concomitant processes of social and cultural adaption (Assimilation). Legal emancipation was carried out in France and the United States in 1791 as a revolutionary act; in Central Europe and Ita…

In 1751, there was a controversy between the rabbinic scholar Jakob Emden and the Hamburg Chief Rabbi Jonathan Eybeschütz, over the latter’s alleged Sabbatianism. As one of the most violent religious Jewish debates of the Early Modern period, it developed into a transnational confrontation about the legitimacy of traditional rabbinic authority. The Emden-Eybeschütz controversy, also known as the “amulet dispute,” was not only carried out in Jewish communities from Western to East Central Europe,…

The transformation of Jewish history and culture into modern scholarship, from the beginning of the 19th century, was reflected not least in modern Jewish encyclopedias. They served not only for providing knowledge that was perceived as certain, but also for the self-understanding of a collectivity in upheaval. The first programmatic writings and outlines emerged in the mid-19th century, and were modelled after the Wissenschaft des Judentums, before, toward the end of the century, they also reflected the formation of a national Jewish canon. The  Jewish Encyclopedia, publishe…

In the wake of immigration into the United States since the 1880s, English became one of the modern languages of the Jews. Unlike most other immigrant groups, whose respective mother tongues were usually linked to a specific country, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe brought with them at least three languages: the always transnational Yiddish, as the familiar language of the Old World; Hebrew as a sacred language; as well as one or more languages of their region of origin. Despite all the fe…

The values of the Enlightenment, particularly the emphasis on reason as the guide of thought, were fundamentally incompatible with anti-Jewish prejudices and defamations. These, however, were frequently taken up without question by the prominent thinkers of the Enlightenment and woven into a speculative image of history. Voltaire (1694–1778), the most prominent among them, abstracted his image of biblical Judaism and post-biblical Jewish society from this and treated both as an anomaly of history.1. The unenlightened side of the EnlightenmentThe focus of the Enlighten…

It was the “Taufzettel” (baptismal certificate) that Heinrich Heine called the “Entre Billet zur Europäischen Kultur” (entrance ticket into European Culture) [4. 10, 313]. This dismissive comment is enough to suggest that for him, Protestant baptism was exclusively a formal act, which he underwent in 1825, the year of his doctoral examination, in order to have better career opportunities as a lawyer in Christian-dominated mainstream society. It was self-evident to him that his literary works be…