Volume I, Number 1 / 2013

Judaica Olomucensia 2013 | 1 קולות חדשים Qolot Hadashim New Voices in Jewish Studies Odborný recenzovaný časopis / peer-reviewed journal Olomouc 2013 Motiv na obálce: lept podle výšivky na synagogální oponě, Morava, Dolní Kounice, 1814. Publikace vychází v rámci projektu Inovace studijního oboru Judaistika zvyšující možnosti mezioborových studií. Registrační číslo: CZ.1.07/2.2.00/15.0300 Ročník I. | Č íslo 1 | 2013 (Vycházejí dvě řádná čísla ročně) © Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci, 2013 Neoprávněné užití tohoto díla je porušením autorských práv a může zakládat občanskoprávní, správněprávní, popř. trestněprávní odpovědnost. Contents/obsah Preface/předmluva Louise Hecht Odborné recenzované články Kata Bohus…………………………………………………………………………………… 6-22 Institutionalized Confusion. The Hungarian Communist Leadership and the ‘Jewish Question’ at the Beginning of the 1960s Miroslav Dyrčík………………………………………………………………………………23-35 Was Leibele Prossnitz a Charlatan? Magdaléna Jánošíková..............................................................................................................36-44 Eliezer Eilburg and his Autographs: MS Oxford-Bodleian Neubauer 1969 Mariusz Kałczewiak………………………………………………………………………….45-57 Foreign Civil Marriage in the Israeli Legal System Tomáš Krákora……………………………………………………………………………….58-82 The Books of Testaments of Prague Jews from the End of the 17th to the Middle of the 18th Century Simona Malá………………………………………………………………………………….83-98 Charlotte de Rothschild (1819-1884), her Life 1819-1859: A Biographical Sketch Kerstin Mayerhofer………………………………………………………………………….99-113 The Concept of the Absurd in the Book of Qohelet and the Philosophy of Albert Camus Ivana Procházková…………………………………………………………………………114-141 Max Zweig’s Concept of ‘New Jewish Identity‘: An Attempt to Unravel his Dysfunctional Relationship to Palestine/Israel 1 Daniel Soukup …………………………………………………………………….………142-154 Forgotten old Czech Source for the Events in Pulkau in 1338 Dávid Szél…………………………………………………………………………...……..155-170 The Individual and Cultural Ways of Jewish Identity Strategies in Hungary after the Democratic Turn in 1989 Anna Załuska………………………………………………………………………………171-185 Female Proselytes in the Light of the Book of Ruth and its Targumic Interpretation Addendum/dodatky a přílohy List of Contributors 2 Preface Louise Hecht Upon the initiative of our junior lecturer Lenka Uličná, the Kurt-and-Ursula-Schubert Center for Jewish Studies at Palacký University, Olomouc organized its first international student’s workshop entitled Central European Jewish Studies: The Student’s Voice in September 2010. The workshop pursued a double objective. On the one hand, it sought providing a forum and meeting place for Central European students from various disciplines interested in different aspects of Jewish Studies; on the other hand, it aimed at enhancing the academic performance of advanced graduate students and Ph.D. candidates by the workshop’s format – presentations, followed by comments from senior scholars and discussions. The wide range of topics submitted and the diverse academic backgrounds of students that responded to our first call for papers considerably exceeded our expectations. The sixteen enthusiastic students from five different countries and eight universities that gathered at the first workshop urged us to institutionalize the event, since they appreciated the opportunity to meet peers working on Jewish topics and thus to enlarge their professional network. Furthermore, they suggested providing an opportunity to publish selected papers in English. The Kurt-and-Ursula-Schubert Center willingly complied with both requests. Since 2010, we hosted two additional workshops (October 2011, September 2012) with an ever-growing number of participants. The papers published in the present journal are revised and extended versions of presentations from the 2011-workshop, with the addition of Anna Załuska’s paper from 2012. Papers were selected according to scholarly qualities, without restrictions regarding topic and methodology. Despite the vast array of topics and methodological approaches expounded in these papers, there seems to be an overarching question that connects all of them, namely the tension between individual and community respectively group loyalty and individual freedom. This tension is most palpable in modern biographies, i.e. from the nineteenth century onward, when Judaism and Jewish identity have become a matter of voluntary choice. 3 As Ivana Procházková and Simona Malá aptly demonstrate – although through different methodological approach – in their biographies of the Czech-German-Jewish-Israeli playwright Max Zweig (1892-1992) respectively the German-English-Jewish aristocrat and philanthropist Charlotte de Rothschild (1819-1884), modern Jews had (and still have) to negotiate their individual and group identities time and again according to forced or voluntary changes in their personal circumstances. However, a similar tension can also be traced in pre-modern times, when the ‘hyphenated Jew’ was not yet common currency. In her paper on Eliezer Eilburg, a sixteenth century physician and philosopher, Magdaléna Jánošíková expounds, how Eilburg’s (forced) perigrination put him into contact with Italian culture which inspired religious critizism at a philosophical and practical level. Similarly, Miroslav Dyrčík’s depiction of the Sabbatian preacher and ‘false Messiah’ Leibele Prossnitz (c. 1670-1730), who was repeatedly excommunicated by Moravian rabbis, exemplifies the rift between individual and communal authorities. Examining two books of testaments that were kept by Prague Jews in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, Tomáš Krákora illustrates public control and monitoring of a seemingly personal and individual act, i.e. bequeathing one’s personal assets. Daniel Soukup’s analysis of the old-Czech poem Kterak Židé mučili Boží tělo (How Jews Tortured Corpus Christi) that describes the alleged host desecration in Pulkau (Austria) in 1338 stresses the preponderance of the general – expressed in the genre of exemplum – over the specific even in an apparently accurate historiographic description. The opposite claim is made by Kerstin Mayerhofer, who strips the biblical book Qohelet (Ecclesiastes) of its Jewish religious context and after a rigid philological analysis compares its main message with the individualistic, post-existentialist philosophy of Albert Camus. Anna Załuska likewise emphasizes the link between authoritative religious texts and contemporary life. Comparing the biblical book of Ruth with its Aramaic paraphrase (Targum), she points to the amazing fact that contemporary Israeli practice regarding conversion to Judaism privileges the religious interpretation of the Targum over the nationalistic in the Bible. Another particular trait of Israeli society is portrayed by Mariusz Kałczewiak, who explores the sensitive 4 balance of power between state and religion – as well as between community and individual – regarding marriage and divorce in Israel. Physical and moral integrity of the individual vis-à-vis National Socialism and Communisms in Hungary are the topics of Dávid Szél’s and Kata Bohus’ papers. While Szél delves into various strategies of Jewish identity three generation after the Holocaust, Bohus meticulously analyzes the policy of Hungary’s Communist Party regarding Jews and Israel in the years around the Eichmann trial (1961). For functional reasons, the papers are arranged in alphabetical order. February 2013 Louise Hecht (Olomouc/Philadelphia) 5 Institutionalized Confusion. The Hungarian Communist Leadership and the ‘Jewish Question’ at the Beginning of the 1960s Kata Bohus The relationship between Communism, both as an ideology and as a socio-political system, and the ‘Jewish Question’ has been a much debated issue in academia. This paper brings examples from Communist Hungary in the early 1960s to shed more light on the problem. It argues that Jews were indeed discriminated against repeatedly, for instance in the areas of Jewish self- identification or the right to emigrate, but this was not due to the ideological stand of the regime, but the result of the interplay of certain historic and systemic elements, some of which were country specific. Introduction In 1984, the oppositional (and thus illegal) SHALOM peace organization issued a public appeal in a samizdat to the National Board of Hungarian Jews (Magyar Izraeliták Országos Képviselete), the official mouthpiece of Jewish interests in socialist Hungary strictly supervised by the regime. The group’s message demanded a firm stance on Hungarian Jewry’s relationship with the totalitarian state and its Soviet patron; with Hungarian people and [the country’s] progress; with the last hundred-hundred and fifty years of Hungarian history; with Jewish traditions; with the problem of the survival of the Jewish people; with the strategy of fighting antisemitism; with Jews living outside Hungary and with the State of Israel.1 The message broke every important taboo the socialist systems had established in relation to the ‘Jewish Question’ not only in Hungary, but throughout the Soviet bloc. It also signified the systems’ overall failure to solve these fundamental issues that remained for the Jews of Central- 1 Beszélő Összes, Vol. 1,9, (Budapest: AB-Beszélő Kiadó, 1992), p. 571. 6 Eastern Europe after the Holocaust. My paper will explore a few aspects as to why and how socialism failed to provide adequate answers to the demands above. What were the policies toward the

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