Pardes: Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies in Germany 29 (2024), Special Issue: Intersections between Jewish Studies and Habsburg Studies, 201 pp.

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In the aftermath of the Shoah and the ostensible triumph of nationalism, it became common in historiography to relegate Jews to the position of the “eternal other” in a series of binaries: Christian/Jewish, Gentile/Jewish, European/Jewish, non-Jewish/Jewish, and so forth. For the longest time, these binaries remained characteristic of Jewish historiography, including in the Central European context. Assuming instead, as the more recent approaches in Habsburg studies do, that pluriculturalism was the basis of common experience in formerly Habsburg Central Europe, and accepting that no single “majority culture” existed, but rather hegemonies were imposed in certain contexts, then the often used binaries are misleading and conceal the complex and sometimes even paradoxical conditions that shaped Jewish life in the region before the Shoah.

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The very complexity of Habsburg Central Europe both in synchronic and diachronic perspective precludes any singular historical narrative of “Habsburg Jewry,” and it is not the intention of this volume to offer an overview of “Habsburg Jewish history.” The selected articles in this volume illustrate instead how important it is to reevaluate categories, deconstruct historical narratives, and reconceptualize implemented approaches in specific geographic, temporal, and cultural contexts in order to gain a better understanding of the complex and pluricultural history of the Habsburg Empire and the region as a whole.

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Table of Contents:

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Tim Corbett, Björn Siegel and Mirjam Tulin 
“Towards Pluricultural and Connected Histories: Intersections between Jewish and Habsburg Studies”

Moritz Csáky 
“Habsburg Central Europe: A Culturally Heterogeneous and Polysemous Region”

Klaus Hödl 
“Blurring the Boundaries of Jewishness: Exploring Jewish-non-Jewish Neighborliness and Similarity”

Verena Kasper-Marienberg 
“Imperial Transition and Early Modern Jewish Continuities: The Case of Bohemian Jewry”

Ilya Berkovich 
“Jewish Mercenaries in Habsburg Service: Soldiers of the Freikorps Grün Loudon (1796–98)”

Johannes Czakai 
“Between Legibility, Emancipation, and Markers of ‘Otherness’: The Habsburg Empire and the Names of Jews”

 
Alicja Maślak-Maciejewska 
“Shared Spaces: Jews in Public Schools in Galicia”

Martin Stechauner 
“‘Domestic Foreigners’: The Trans-Imperial Loyalties of Sephardic Jews in Vienna”

Lida-Maria Dodou 
“‘Austrian,’ ‘Jewish,’ ‘Salonican’: The Multiple Aspects of Belonging of Salonican Jews  in the Fin-de-Siècle Habsburg Empire”

Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek 
“What was ‘Jewish’ about the Old Jewish Museum of Vienna?”

Omar T. Nasr and Tim Corbett 
“Diversifying Modern Austrian History: Exploring Parallels and Intersections between Jewish and Muslim Histories in Austria”

You can read the full volume here.