'Languishing from a distance': Louis Meyer and the demise of the German Jewish ideal

Louis Meyer (1796-1869), a Polish-Jewish merchant living in the middle-sized Polish provincial town of Wloclawek, authored a broad range of literary works in the German language. A representative of a moderate reform of Jewish religious traditions, he admired German, and more specifically, Prussian enlightened culture. His writings, a rare repository of thoughts and observations concerning Polish-Jewish culture in the 19th century, reveal a growing concern with the loss of humanist attitudes in Germany

Constitutio in actu? Eliezer Dileon's Letter to the Minsk Kahal, 1817

A letter by the army contractor Eliezer Dileon to the community board of Minsk relating his audience with Tsar Alexander I of Russia in January 1817 sheds light on the significance of the performative dimension of Jewish intercession. In the perception of the intercessor, due to the personal encounter between the sovereign ruler and himself, the Jews in Russia constitute part of the political and societal fabric of the Empire, it sees them as ‘a people.’ The letter is one of the very few documents describing and confirming the symbolic meaning of an encounter between a monarch and a Jewish intercessor. It reflects on the reciprocal nature of negotiations between the state and the Jewish minority, the limitations in concrete outcomes notwithstanding

Thinking Globally, Acting Locally: Joel Wegmeister and Modern Hasidic Politics in Warsaw

This contribution investigates how the emergence of the first modern Jewish metropolis in Warsaw in the second half of the 19th century challenged traditional visions of community cohesion. It argues that the acceleration of political and societal change within the Jewish community allowed observant elites to achieve political and cultural hegemony in Warsaw, and thus offers a sui generis pathway of Jewish metropolitan modernization. This claim is substantiated by following the communal and political involvement of a leading Hasidic civil leader, Joel Wegmeister (1837-1919), co-founder of the first outlets of the Agudat Israel in the Kingdom of Poland before World War One

Body, Place, and Knowledge: The Plica polonica in Travelogues and Experts' Reflections around 1800

The matting of hair, understood as a medical condition since around 1600 and named Plica polonica, appears prominently in the writings of eighteenth-century authors travelling to Polish lands or in experts’ opinions about these provinces. This paper argues that integrating observations about an allegedly endemic medical condition was intimately linked to the emerging discourse on eastern Europe as an essentially different part of the continent, and an object of colonizing efforts. It demonstrates that travelogues and experts’ opinions were drawing inspiration, observations, and assumptions from each other, a hitherto only partially understood instance of cross-fertilizing writing on eastern Europe, offering important insights into the development of experts’ culture in the Age of Enlightenment

How to enforce due diligence? Making EU-legislation on 'conflict minerals' effective

To reach the objectives stated in the draft legislation, the European Union has to make due diligence on “conflict minerals” mandatory for EU companies. This will increase the demand for “conflict-free” minerals, which will act as an incentive for speeding up local mapping and tracing efforts and the return of smelters to the DR Congo. Downstream companies are in a position to conduct due diligence with marginal to manageable costs, despite the complexity involved. The competitive disadvantage of European companies towards Asian companies is more imaginary than real. For due diligence legislation to be effective in conflict regions, EU actors ought to support multi-stakeholder initiatives on the ground that have greater credibility than government or industry schemes. Instead of rigid certification procedures that create high administrative burdens on state and economic actors, priority should be given to flexible and reliable instruments of mapping and tracing that smelters can use for their supply chain due diligence. In conflict regions, certificates risk being tainted by reports of fraud, as the challenges to governance can be expected to be similar to those in the Great Lakes region. A policy approach that enables rather than prohibits artisanal mining is better suited to providing market access to informal artisanal mining that does not have links to armed actors. Legality should not be made a precondition for recognising artisanal mines as conflict-free to avoid punishment of an entire sector for the links to conflict financing of a few

The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: sources, memory, politics

On 16 March 2021, the Institute for Polish–Jewish Studies, the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London (UCL), and The Wiener Holocaust Library convened an online symposium in honour of Professor Antony Polonsky on the occasion of his eightieth birthday. Entitled “The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: Sources, Memory, Politics”, the symposium brought together established and junior scholars researching the Holocaust in Eastern Europe and provided a timely overview of the state of knowledge. The presentations from the symposium can now be viewed online at The Wiener Holocaust Library’s YouTube channel at this link: http://bit.ly/Polonsky21