European Nationalisms and the Writing of Jewish History

Instructor: Magda Teter

6 sessions, Tuesdays and Thursdays

Tuition: $325
YIVO members: $250

Scholar David Lowethal has argued that “the past is integral to our sense of identity.”  Jewish history as a scholarly discipline emerged at a time when Jewish identity was being challenged. The narratives it produced to provide tools for shaping Jewish identity in the modern era.  But Jewish history as it was being written was also part of something larger—the rise of new national identities, and the rise of new nation states. This course will explore how the writing of Jewish history has been linked to the larger questions of national identity, and nationalism.  We will read the early Jewish historians from Germany, Poland, and Palestine/Israel and explore how their visions of Jewish history were shaped by larger questions that were also occupying other European historians and intellectuals.

Magda Teter received an M.A. from the School of Oriental Studies at the University of Warsaw, Poland, and her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Columbia University. She currently holds the Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies at Fordham University. She is the author of Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland (Cambridge, 2006), and Sinners on Trial (Harvard, 2011), and many articles in English, Polish, Italian, and Hebrew. She received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2012), the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation (in 2007 and 2012), Harvard (2002), Radcliffe (2007), the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, YIVO, and the Yad Ha-Nadiv Foundation (Israel).