2016 04/13 Nancy Sinkoff

NANCY SINKOFF

Gershom G. Scholem, Lucy S. Dawidowicz, and Nathan Birnbaum: A Transnational Postwar "Conversation" Contesting Jewish Secularism

Nancy Sinkoff is a cultural-intellectual historian of early modern and modern East European Jewry who is particularly fascinated with the question of how diasporic Jews understood politics. Her work focuses on both the European heartland (Poland) and on transnational settlements—in particular the United States—and examines how East European Jews and their descendants understood themselves as they encountered the political, economic, social, geographic, and religious transformations of modernity.

Graduate student inquirer Andrzej Brylak, UIC Slavic Langauges and Literatures

Summary

Secularization as both process and project constituted a central component in the Jewish encounter with modernity. Beginning in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, the all-encompassing world of traditional Ashkenazic Jewish culture was confronted with the intellectual demands of the European Enlightenment to distinguish between natural law based on reason and ceremonial law based on religious tradition and with the political goals of the centralizing European state to treat Jews as national subjects (and, exceptionally, in France, as citizens) who were to practice Judaism as a religion. My paper takes as a given that the Ashkenazi Jewish encounter with western modernity was both a typological (or phenomenological) encounter and a historically and regionally specific one. This paper explores a fertile exchange between one of the towering figures of twentieth-century Jewish life, Gershom G. Scholem (hailing from western Ashkenazi Jewish circles and living in Palestine/Israel), and a well-known popular historian of the Holocaust, Lucy S. Dawidowicz (hailing from eastern Ashkenazic Jewish circles and living in New York City). The exchange regarded the claims of secularism and mysticism on Nathan Birnbaum (hailing from fin-de-siècle Vienna and finishing his days in Holland after sojourning in the Second Polish Republic), a significant figure of late nineteenth- and early twentieth European Jewish nationalism. This exchange raises the question of the possibility or lack thereof of a completely secular Jewish modernity, a project suited—if at all—only to Jewish civilization in the European context.