Modern Judaism & Modern Anti-Semitism

Shabbatai Zvi

Les most successful messianic movement of the early modern period before being forced to convert to Islam

Donme

Followers of Zvi who converted to Islam

Enlightenment

Intellectual movement in the 17th and 18th centuries focused on reason, human, progress, and universalism

Haskalah

Jewish enlightenment

Maskilim

Followers of the Haskalah

Moses Mendelssohn

Central Jewish-German writer in the Haskalah; intervened in tensions around timely burial

Hasidism

Charismatic religious revival of mystical Judaism

Ba’al Shem Tov

Codified Hasidism and attracted following before death

Grand Sanhedrin

Large Jewish ruling council that evolved from an 1806 Assembly of Jewish Notables by Napolean

Wissenschaft des Judentums

Scientific Study of Judaism

Reform Judaism

sought to reconcile Judaism with modern sensibilities and Enlightenment universalism

Mechitza

partition that separated men and women; removed during synagogue reform

Progressive Revelation

God reveals will through reason, earlier Jewish law no longer binding

Orthodox Judaism

New Judaism

Derekh Ertez

Torah with the way of the land

Anti-Judaism

• medieval

• more theological

• focuses on claims about Jewish rituals and anti-Christian blasphemies

• Claims of deicide

• Occupational restrictions

Anti-Semitism

• modern

• more sociological

• sees Jews

• as a race that is physiological and psychological distinct

• imagines Jewish conspiracy to control the world

Pale of Settlement

Area in Russian Empire where Jews were permitted to live

Yiddish

Germanic language with Hebrew elements

Protocols of the Elders of Zion

Russian Antisemitic forgery that purports to the be the minutes of meeting of Jewish elders plotting world domination

Dreyfus Affair

When Alfred Dreyfus, a French-Jewish officer, was wrongly convicted of passing military secret to Germany

Zionism

Response to antisemitism; advocated for Jewish state and Jewish relocation

Hibbat Zion

Forerunner of Modern Zionism, founded in 1881 in response to pogroms in Russia

Nuremburg Laws (1935)

Defined who counted as Jewish, forbid intermarriage, revoked Jewish citizenship

Kristallnacht

“Night of Broken Glass”; anti-Jewish pogroms in Germany

Shoah

Holocaust

Balfour Declaration (1917)

When Britain announced support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine

Mizrahi

large migration of Jews from the Muslim world after First Arab-Israeli War