Studia Rosenthaliana - Volume 47, Issue 2, 2021

During the high period of Yiddish scholarship from the 1920s to the 1980s, scholars who worked in Yiddish studied Jewish life wherever Yiddish-speaking Jews lived. Rarely, however, did they write about communities where assimilation had already led to the abandonment of Yiddish. A unique exception is the Netherlands, which had been a leading center of Yiddish culture in the 17th and 18th centuries but turned almost exclusively from Yiddish to Dutch by the end of the 19th century. The existence of Yiddish scholarship on the subject of Yiddish cultural life in the Netherlands is, therefore, noteworthy. Still more noteworthy is that this relatively small body of work offers two contrasting views of Dutch Ashkenazi Jewish history.

The Yiddishist scholars who were active before World War II – all outside the Netherlands – exhibited an enthusiasm for Dutch Jewish studies that arose primarily from their desire to add a further link to the ‘golden chain’ of Yiddish cultural continuity, and they sought evidence of the prolonged existence of Dutch Yiddish culture. By contrast, Leo Fuks – who lived in the post-Yiddish Netherlands – found in Dutch society a catalyzing and liberating force that reshaped the seemingly static forms of pan-Yiddish culture, leading to both its flowering and ultimate decline in the Netherlands.

Dutch Jews had a profound impact on the development of Belgium’s Jewish community in the nineteenth century. More than a third of the Jews living on Belgian territory during this period were of Dutch descent. The mass arrival of Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, however, transformed Belgian Jewish society. Dutch Jews now became a minority in Antwerp’s Jewish population. This essay explores how in the first four decades of the twentieth century Dutch Jews preserved and negotiated spaces within Antwerp’s Jewish society in which they could express their distinct Dutch Jewish identities. Their ties with Eastern European Jews will be explored and the place of Dutch Jews in Jewish society in general will be discussed. The intense contacts with the Eastern European Jewish world forced Dutch Jews in Antwerp to ask questions as to their own ‘Jewish’ identities.

The 1668-9 Cópia da vida de bemaventurado, claiming to be a copy of text written by Manoel Cardoso de Macedo who later adopted the name Abraham Pelengrino (d. 1652), is a unique testimony of an early modern conversion to Judaism, a phenomenon of which few descriptions have survived. The English translation of the Portuguese original presented in this article shows, among others, how such conversions were deeply personal experiences while at the same time served converts’ apologetic needs and, possibly, the Jewish community’s anti-Christian polemics. The essay that introduces the translation addresses questions of authorship, genre, and, focusing on discrepancies between facts described in the text and other sources, explores the Vida as a literary construct.

The Pri Ets Haim is a collection of approximately 950 Responsa produced by the Ets Haim Rabbinical Seminary over the period 1728-1808. The responsa have been indexed, summarized, and cross-referenced, and some articles have dealt with individual questions. This paper explores the infrastructure maintaining the production of the collection over its 80-year life span. It answers questions such as: At any given time how many PEH authors participated, what was their level of contribution, and, for each author, over what length of time? Were the responsa written in a sufficiently timely manner, to support a monthly edition over 80 years? Under some reasonable assumptions, when were the responsa issued? The paper also includes links to the extant responsa, clickable in the online edition.