Reproduction of the original: The Jews of Barnow by Karl Emil Franzos

Franzos showed the attitudes of the 19th-century assimilated Jew in their best light. His conviction that Germanisation was the way forward was based on the idealistic strain in German culture and will have looked very different in his day to a post-Holocaust perspective. He believed, following the example of Friedrich Schiller, that literature should have an ethical purpose, but he managed to express that purpose through a range of vivid characters who still have the power to move the modern reader. Galicia and Bukovina were the most backward, the poorest provinces of the Austrian Empire, so that Franzos saw his promotion of Germanisation as part of an attempt to improve conditions there politically and economically as well as culturally and socially. Jews made up some 12% of the population, the largest proportion of any province; two-thirds of the Empire's Jews lived in Galicia. Besides being mostly poor, the shtetl Jews were strict, conservative Hasidim, shutting themselves off as far as possible from their Christian neighbours, who responded in kind. Poor orthodox Jews from the east were a not uncommon sight in Vienna and were probably regarded with even greater hostility by many of the westernised Jews of the city than by the Christian population. The rigidity with which the eastern Jewish communities shut themselves off from outside influences is the theme of Franzos's most ambitious work, Der Pojaz, completed in 1893, but not published until after his death in 1905. Why this novel, which Franzos regarded as his major work, remained unpublished during his lifetime, is a mystery. It is possible that he thought his critical portrayal of the ghetto might be exploited by antisemitic elements which were becoming increasingly active in Germany in the 1890s. The relations between the Christian and Jewish communities come into sharpest focus in sexual matters-as a young man Franzos fell in love with a Christian girl but renounced her because of the barrier between the two groups. This problem forms the subject of a number of his works, including two of his best novels, Judith Trachtenberg (1890) and Leib Weihnachtskuchen and his Child (1896). The main focus of his writing is the relationships between the different nationalities of the region-Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Germans and Jews-and his sympathies clearly lie with the oppressed groups, in particular the Ukrainian peasants and shtetl Jews. He insisted that he was free from racial prejudice and that his attacks on particular nationalities were because they oppressed others: "I spoke out against the oppression of the Ukrainians and Poles by the Russians, but where the Poles do the same, as is the case in Galicia, then I speak out against their oppression of the Ukrainians, Jews and Germans." He also "spoke out" against the rigid attitudes and practices of orthodox religion, and in this his attacks were directed above all at his fellow Jews: "I stand up for the Jews because they are enslaved, but I attack the slavery the orthodox Jews impose on the liberal members of their faith."

In this powerful and wide-ranging study, Sander Gilman explores the idea of 'the multicultural' in the contemporary world, a question he frames as the question of the relationship between Jews and Muslims. How do Jews define themselves, and how are they in turn defined, within the global struggles of the moment, struggles that turn in large part around a secularized Christian perspective? Gilman uses his subject to unpack a sequence of important issues: what does it mean to be multicultural? Can the experience of diaspora Judaism serve as a useful model for Islam in today's multicultural Europe? What is a multicultural ethnic? Other chapters look at specific figures in Jewish cultural history – Albert Einstein, Franz Kafka, Israel Zangwill, Philip Roth, the hermaphrodite N.O. Body (aka Karl Baer, raised as Martha Baer) – to explore issues within Jewish identity. Throughout, Gilman pays keen attention to the ways in which contemporary literature – Chabon, Ozick, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Safran Foer, Gary Shteyngart – taking the idea of Jewishness and multiculturalism into new arenas.

The last two centuries have witnessed a radical transformation of Jewish life. Marked by such profound events as the Holocaust and the establishment of the state of Israel, Judaism's long journey through the modern age has been a complex and tumultuous one, leading many Jews to ask themselves not only where they have been and where they are going, but what it means to be a Jew in today's world. Tracing the Jewish experience in the modern period and illustrating the transformation of Jewish religion, culture, and identity from the 17th century to 1948, the updated edition of this critically acclaimed volume of primary materials remains the most complete sourcebook on modern Jewish history. Now expanded to supplement the most vital documents of the first edition, The Jew in the Modern World features hitherto unpublished and inaccessible sources concerning the Jewish experience in Eastern Europe, women in Jewish history, American Jewish life, the Holocaust, and Zionism and the nascent Jewish community in Palestine on the eve of the establishment of the State of Israel. The documents are arranged chronologically in each of eleven chapters and are meticulously and extensively annotated and cross-referenced in order to provide the student with ready access to a wide variety of issues, key historical figures, and events. Complete with some twenty useful tables detailing Jewish demographic trends, this is a unique resource for any course in Jewish history, Zionism and Israel, the Holocaust, or European and American history.