The Feuilleton & Modern Jewish Cultures

Over the past year, we have been working with new contributors to expand our collection of feuilleton texts, translations, and commentaries.

Adding to the array of languages represented in the Feuilleton Project–Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, Ladino, Russian, Sranan Tongo, and Yiddish–two new feuilletons translated from Polish offer insight into the thriving Jewish press in Poland and, more broadly, the multilingual nature of modern Jewish cultures. The first newly-featured Polish feuilleton is Hygiene and Integrationism among Polish Jews, written by Leon Jozef Lichtenbaum, with translation and commentary by Zuzanna Kołodziejska-Smagała. In this feuilleton, which was published in Warsaw in 1902, the author uses well-known Polish novels as the foundation for a scathing critique of the hygiene practices of the “Jewish masses” and the ways in which strict religious observance, especially among the lower classes, stymies modernization and integration in Polish society. With its tacit embrace of the stereotype of “the dirty Jew,” it shows how Jewish intellectuals used anti-semitic tropes to modernize and reform their communities.

Concerns about modernization, especially of lower classes, are also at the heart of Proverbs - The Opium of the People, a feuilleton published by Polish author Antoni Słonimski in Warsaw in 1928. The feuilleton focuses on Polish proverbs, which the author claims are retrograde and parochial remnants of a bygone time and markers of a social hierarchy that must be done away with. As Ofer Dynes explains, by analyzing proverbs and arguing that they do not merit their perception as “the people’s wisdom,” Słonimski rejects Polish nationalism, which relies on such shared idioms. The text does not discuss Jews or Jewishness explicitly (and, in fact, the author descended from a Jewish family but was raised as a Christian), but it touches on the problematic coupling of Christianity and Polish nationalism, which affected the lives of Poland’s Jews throughout the twentieth century.

Jewish life in Poland is also featured in Demons on the Jewish Street (1914), a Yiddish feuilleton written by Hirsh Dovid Nomberg, with translation and commentary by Samuel Glauber. Nomberg, a prolific writer and tireless champion of Yiddish culture worldwide, criticizes public interest in demons and the occult. Nomberg uses recent “sightings” of dybbuks to discuss broader processes shaping Jewish life in Eastern Europe, namely, the end of the so-called “Haskalah period” and the failure of the Yiddish press to continue the maskilic struggle to educate and reform the Jewish masses. In this regard, there is a throughline that runs across the new texts by Lichtenbaum, Słonimski, and Nomberg: a critique of social and cultural practices that the authors believe to be outdated and incongruous with the modern world.

These feuilletons join an array of texts on the Feuilleton Project website that address different aspects of Jewish life in Eastern Europe and the impact of modernity on the Jewish experience. Nomberg’s feuilleton also participated in a broader conversation about the legacy of the Haskalah and the future of Jewish life in modern nation-states, topics that were also discussed in texts by Lev Levanda and Barukh Mitrani featured in the Project.

The impact of Haskalah on modern Jewish life lies at the heart of Light and Joy, a feuilleton in Judeo-Arabic published by Rabbi Shalom Bekache in Algeria in 1891. This feuilleton, which was translated by Avner Ofrath, focuses on the nexus of Jewish tradition and Western European culture. Backache, who was a printer and journalist of Baghdadi origin, urges Algerian Jews to celebrate their own history in a manner similar to European celebrations of important events and birthdays of prominent intellectuals such as Victor Hugo. The feuilleton calls for an amalgamation of the European Enlightenment, the Jewish Haskalah, and Jewish religious traditions and displays, as Avner Ofrath observes, “historical consciousness in the making.” It is the first text in the Feuilleton Project that was published in Algeria and discusses the culture of Maghrebi Jews, joining two other Judeo-Arabic feuilletons in the collection.

Two additional feuilletons newly added to the project foreground Jewish history and highlight the ways in which Jews narrated and interpreted the past in modern contexts. The Bondage of Jews in Spain was published in the Ladino newspaper El Tiempo in Istanbul in 1875. It is the first text in the Project that was published in Istanbul, which was a major center of Jewish publishing. Translated from Ladino by Marina Mayorski, this feuilleton is an installment from a serialized work of historiography adapted from a study on the Jews of Spain, originally published in 1847 by Spanish historian Adolfo de Castro. The sections published in the Ladino newspaper deal with the infamous reign of Fernando and Isabella and the Inquisition’s persecution of Jews and Jewish converts. The Ladino text highlights the craft of the feuilletonist, who abridged or omitted many historical details and sources, adding dramatic descriptions of the violence against the Jews, amplifying the pathos of their suffering, and creating suspense with cliffhangers between installments. It showcases the breadth and flexibility of the feuilleton, combining different genres and modes of writing to produce a didactic and tantalizing text for a distinctly Jewish readership.

Another new feuilleton focuses on the rewriting of Sephardi history. The Sun Sets on All Joy was published in the Hebrew newspaper Ha-zvi in Jerusalem in 1910. It is a distinctly Jewish roman feuilleton based on a German novel by Marcus Lehmann originally published in Mainz in 1878. It was translated into Hebrew, from an earlier Ladino translation, by Sephardi journalist Moshe Bar-Nissim. The novel deals with Sephardi refugees in the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century, underscoring the constant threats of expulsion and extermination that faced Jews. When it was translated and published in Ottoman Palestine, the roman-feuilleton found dramatic echoes with contemporary political, social, and cultural issues preoccupying the community.

Finally, a new addition to the project brings together questions of Jewish tradition, history, and the hybridity of the feuilleton. From the Handwritten Diary of a Woman from the 17th Century was published by historian Abraham Tendlau in Mainz in 1864 and translated from German by Matthew Johnson. Tendlau selected and translated sections from the diary of a German-Jewish woman who is now known as Glikl bas Judah Leib (ca. 1645-1724). Tendlau was the first to publish now Glikl’s well-known writings in old Yiddish which, until then, had only circulated among her descendants. The memoir allows us to gauge the experiences of women and the everyday lives of Jews in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, perspectives that were rarely recorded. Tendlau’s translation and commentary in the feuilleton illustrate the endeavor to preserve Jewish memory and tradition in a time of rapid modernization and acculturation. As Matthew Johnson notes, it exposes the importance of the feuilleton as a space for the recovery and circulation of forgotten texts and its inherent proclivity to meld different genres and modes of writing.

Thank you to all of our contributors! We hope you visit the website and explore these fascinating new additions. If you are interested in proposing new texts to be featured on the website, please fill out this form.