Jews as Germans: The Dilemmas of the Jews of Moravia, 1848-1938 Seminar
- Time:
- 18:00 - 19:30
- Date:
- 17 February 2022
- Venue:
- Online event.
For more information regarding this seminar, please email Clodagh Owens at parkes@soton.ac.uk .
Event details
Part of the Parkes Institute research seminars series.
Jews in Moravia, a province of the Habsburg Monarchy before World War I and of Czechoslovakia after the war, faced a complicated dilemma. They had adopted the German language in the first half of the nineteenth century, and they generally identified as Germans, but such identification was politically fraught in a province in which two-thirds of the population spoke Czech and at least in theory identified as Czechs. How Jews coped with this problem--insisting that their German identity was merely linguistic and cultural but not "ethnic," insisting that their Jewish identity was primary, and even regarding German as a Jewish language--tell us much about the nature of national belonging in Central Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth cenuries.
Speaker information
Professor Marsha Rozenblit, University of Maryland. is the Harvey M. Meyerhoff Professor of Modern Jewish History at the University of Maryland, where she has been on the faculty since 1978. She is the author of two books: The Jews of Vienna, 1867-1914: Assimilation and Identity (1983) and Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I (2001). She has also published two edited books: Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe (with Pieter Judson, 2005) and World War I and the Jews: Crisis and Transformation in Europe, the Middle East, and America (with Jonathan Karp, 2017), and over 35 scholarly articles on the Jews of the Habsburg Monarchy.