Shtetl
Schumacher-Brunhes, Marie
Central Europe
Eastern Europe
Agents, Intermediaries
Social Matters, Society
Religion
Migration, Travel
296
307
Serving as a site of memory of eastern European Judaism since its systematic extermination by the Nazi regime, the shtetl existed for centuries as a socio-economic phenomenon and a socio-cultural construct, out of which a literary and cultural topos grew in the second half of the 19th century. The complexity of this term, which emerged in multi-ethnic Poland in the second half of the 17th century, lies in the difficulty in differentiating between mental perception and reality. These cities and town with populations predominantly consisting of Yiddish-speaking Jews were never Jewish municipalities. Autonomous self-administration by means of the so-called "kahal" and membership of a dense Jewish network which over time even extended overseas should not be confused with political autonomy. However, in their daily lives the shtetl Jews had this double experience of living in an essentially Jewish world on the one hand, and of the relative acceptance of this situation by the surrounding population on the other hand. In this way, these provisioning islands, which were characterized by a high degree of interethnic contact, were mythologized as a bastion of Judaism – of the so-called "yidishkeyt" – in the context of their increasing disintegration.
IEG(http://www.ieg-mainz.de)
Joe Kroll
Matthias Morgenstern
Niall Williams
2015-07-03
Text
text/html
/en/threads/crossroads/courts-and-cities/marie-schumacher-brunhes-shtetl
urn:nbn:de:0159-2015062304
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/913100272
EGO(http://www.ieg-ego.eu)
en
1791-1945
Central Europe
Eastern Europe
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