PaRDeS : Zeitschrift der Vereinigung für Jüdische Studien e.V.

PaRDeS. Journal of the Association of Jewish Studies e. V. The journal aims at documenting the fruitful and multifarious culture of Judaism as well as its relations to its environment within diverse areas of research. In addition, the journal is meant to promote Jewish Studies within academic discourse and discuss its historic and social responsibility.

The Jewish family has been the subject of much admiration and analysis, criticism and myth-making, not just but especially in modern times. As a field of inquiry, its place is at the intersection – or in the shadow – of the great topics in Jewish Studies and its contributing disciplines. Among them are the modernization and privatization of Judaism and Jewish life; integration and distinctiveness of Jews as individuals and as a group; gender roles and education. These and related questions have been the focus of modern Jewish family research, which took shape as a discipline in the 1910s.

This issue of PaRDeS traces the origins of academic Jewish family research and takes stock of its development over a century, with its ruptures that have added to the importance of familial roots and continuities. A special section retrieves the founder of the field, Arthur Czellitzer (1871–1943), his biography and work from oblivion and places him in the context of early 20th-century science and Jewish life.

The articles on current questions of Jewish family history reflect the topic’s potential for shedding new light on key questions in Jewish Studies past and present. Their thematic range – from 13th-century Yiddish Arthurian romances via family-based business practices in 19th-century Hungary and Germany, to concepts of Jewish parenthood in Imperial Russia – illustrates the broad interest in Jewish family research as a paradigm for early modern and modern Jewish Studies.

The sea and maritime spaces have long been neglected in the field of Jewish studies despite their relevance in the context of Jewish religious texts and historical narratives. The images of Noah’s arche, king Salomon’s maritime activities or the miracle of the parting of the Red Sea immediately come into mind, however, only illustrate a few aspects of Jewish maritime activities. Consequently, the relations of Jews and the sea has to be seen in a much broader spatial and temporal framework in order to understand the overall importance of maritime spaces in Jewish history and culture.

Almost sixty years after Samuel Tolkowsky’s pivotal study on maritime Jewish history and culture and the publication of his book “They Took to the Sea” in 1964, this volume of PaRDeS seeks to follow these ideas, revisit Jewish history and culture from different maritime perspectives and shed new light on current research in the field, which brings together Jewish and maritime studies.

The articles in this volume therefore reflect a wide range of topics and illustrate how maritime perspectives can enrich our understanding of Jewish history and culture and its entanglement with the sea – especially in modern times. They study different spaces and examine their embedded narratives and functions. They follow in one way or another the discussions which evolved in the last decades, focused on the importance of spatial dimensions and opened up possibilities for studying the production and construction of spaces, their influences on cultural practices and ideas, as well as structures and changes of social processes. By taking these debates into account, the articles offer new insights into Jewish history and culture by taking us out to “sea” and inviting us to revisit Jewish history and culture from different maritime perspectives.

In the aftermath of the Shoah and the ostensible triumph of nationalism, it became common in historiography to relegate Jews to the position of the “eternal other” in a series of binaries: Christian/Jewish, Gentile/Jewish, European/Jewish, non-Jewish/Jewish, and so forth. For the longest time, these binaries remained characteristic of Jewish historiography, including in the Central European context. Assuming instead, as the more recent approaches in Habsburg studies do, that pluriculturalism was the basis of common experience in formerly Habsburg Central Europe, and accepting that no single “majority culture” existed, but rather hegemonies were imposed in certain contexts, then the often used binaries are misleading and conceal the complex and sometimes even paradoxical conditions that shaped Jewish life in the region before the Shoah.

The very complexity of Habsburg Central Europe both in synchronic and diachronic perspective precludes any singular historical narrative of “Habsburg Jewry,” and it is not the intention of this volume to offer an overview of “Habsburg Jewish history.” The selected articles in this volume illustrate instead how important it is to reevaluate categories, deconstruct historical narratives, and reconceptualize implemented approaches in specific geographic, temporal, and cultural contexts in order to gain a better understanding of the complex and pluricultural history of the Habsburg Empire and the region as a whole.