Cultural transfer

• In Event: Transnational potentials in (American) Jewish studies and its various subfields

Abstract

The notion of culture as a category to understand Jewishness is a recent phenomenon in historiography. As it defines culture broadly as a set of symbols and meanings, it can reflect pre-modern understandings of Jewishness as much as modern ones. Jewishness understood on cultural terms can accommodate the internal diversity of Jewish identities that is characteristic of Jewish modernity. At the same time, a culturally conceived Jewishness can also complement and transcend traditional categorizations, such as “religion” or “nation,” that are reductive or otherwise problematic.
The diverse expressions of modern Jewishness are results of multidirectional transfer processes associated with the mobility of individuals, institutions, texts, and practices across time and space as well as among various Jewish communities in their highly varied cultural environments.
Even though cultural transfers are therefore crucial to the formation of modern Jewish expressions and identities, they have not been explored to their fullest depth in many contexts of the Jewish experience. The ethnicization of Jewish immigrants into a distinctly American group is an example of such processes, in which reciprocal cultural transfers with home places and other Jewries were an important element. The export of cultural products by (recently) Americanized Jews, such as Yiddish or German publications, to Jewish audiences elsewhere, has only recently attracted scholarly attention.
The transnationality of these processes raises crucial questions about the characteristics of modern Jewish identities. How does the idea of Jewish commonality mesh with the particularisms of specific Jewish cultures that were shaped by varied cultural surroundings? Can the Jewish tradition be transformed into a set of cultural expressions that serve as a common point of reference for post-traditional Jews?
The paper will point out the potential of a transnational approach for exploring such questions in specific studies. It will draw on research on the influential transnational publishing house Schocken Books, which in 1930s Germany, Palestine/Israel, and the post-1945 U.S. sought to help create modern Jewish identities in different places, based on a common cultural understanding of Jewishness and expressed in a putative canon of Jewish knowledge captured in book series.

Author

• Markus Krah, School of Jewish Theology University of Potsdam