An intriguing collection of essays throws a new light into the dark world of the Jewish ghettos of Eastern Europe as seen by a cavalcade of Jewish writers including Heinrich Heine and Joseph Roth, and numerous others who have been all but forgotten. Ghetto Writing: Traditional and Eastern Jewry in German-Jewish Literature from Heine to…
Category: History
The Court Jew (Stern)
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The phrase “court Jew” is sometimes facetiously used today to describe the powerful underling of a major political or business leader, who acts obsequiously and with excessive discretion because he is Jewish. If the original Hofjuden or Court Jews of 17th- and 18th-century Europe were sometimes embarrassed by their Hebraic blood, it was because they…
Delisle exposes tradition of anti-semitism in Quebec
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Three years after her controversial book The Traitor and the Jew exposed anti-semitic and Nazi-sympathizing sentiments in Depression-era Quebec, Esther Delisle is working on a second book, this one about an underground “pipeline” that enabled French Nazi collaborators and war criminals to escape to French Canada after World War II. “I’m looking at the Canadian…
Canada’s Jews: A People’s Journey
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Gerald Tulchinsky, professor emeritus of history at Queen’s University in Kingston, has just produced his magnum opus in the form of a new 630-page book, Canada’s Jews: A People’s Journey, published by the University of Toronto Press in both hardcover and softcover. “I wanted to describe and analyze the significance of the transitions that Jews…
The Jews of Windsor
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The Jewish community of Windsor, Ontario, had a population of 3,000 at its zenith in the 1930s, and has been whittled down to about one-third that size in the modern era. It was never one of Canada’s major Jewish centers, but, as Jonathan V. Plaut writes in a new historical study, the border town’s Jewish…
Search Out the Land
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British authorities in the 1700s and 1800s encouraged Jews to come to the New World and help develop the colonies, according to a new ground-breaking academic work that is “the first extensively documented study of the early history of the Jews in Canada,” according to Sheldon Godfrey, who with his wife Judith wrote the fine…
The de Solas: A Distinguished Sephardic Lineage
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When Abraham de Sola arrived in Montreal in 1846 to serve as spiritual leader of the city’s Spanish and Portuguese Congregation, he carried a letter from his father, David de Sola, rabbi of London’s Bevis Marks synagogue, beseeching the community to look after him because he was only 19 years old. Abraham de Sola was…
Patai’s history of Hungarian Jews
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The Jews of Hungary: History, Culture, Psychology (Wayne State University Press) by Raphael Patai is a monumental 720-page treatise that traces the history of the Jews of the Carpathian basin from their origin in Roman times to their near-obliteration in 1944 and beyond, right up to the present moment. Patai, who died recently at 86, was…
Gluckel’s ‘Seven Little Books’
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If, as historian Jacob Shatzky once observed, catastrophe of one sort or another has been the usual impetus for the bulk of Jewish autobiographical writing, the celebrated chronicles left to us by Gluckel of Hamelyn (1646-1724) under the title The Memoirs of Gluckel of Hamelyn are no exception. The pious Gluckel took up her quill…
