HIS 333 - The Jewish Century?

One of the defining aspects of the Jewish experience in Europe was the fact that Jews lived as a largely literate and urbanized minority amidst majority agrarian societies. This has led scholars and historians to call Jews in Europe a “middleman” or “rural service” minority, who were, as the scholar Yuri Slezkin has argued, “modern before modernity, and capitalist before capitalism.” As Europe industrialized and more and more people began to urbanize, they became in Slezkin’s formulation “Jewish,” leading him to describe the twentieth century as “The Jewish Century.”

Taking Slezkin’s provocative thesis as a starting point, this course considers the changing social and economic role of Jews in modern Europe, with a special focus on the Russian imperial and Soviet Jewish experience. How did experiences of migration, genocide, and state discrimination shape Jewish politics and everyday life in the lands that today make up Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, and Poland? Did changes to the global economy bridge the divide between Jews and their neighbors, or exacerbate it? Can the Jewish experience tell us something about the twentieth century as a whole, as Slezkin suggests? Students will have the chance to read translated primary and secondary sources on these questions, through which we will explore the history of social life in the Russian Empire, the formation of the Soviet Union and the Soviet experience, and histories of mass migration, secularization, war, and displacement.

Satisfies a History major and minor requirement.
Satisfies a Russian Studies major and minor requirement. 
Satisfies the Historical Thought Ways of Knowing requirement.
Satisfies the Cultural Diversity requirement.