Jews and Empires

Catalog description

This course is a comparative study of the Jewish communities of the Russian, Ottoman and Austrian Empires in the 1848-1918 period. In addition to a basic familiarity with the various structures of Jewish communities in these imperial settings, we will explore the ways in which Jewish communities responded to imperial policy politically and culturally. We will pay close attention to the intersection of these Jewish communities, the unique forms of Jewish cultural exchange in places where the Jews of different empires encountered each other (for instance, Russian Jews in Ottoman Palestine; Sephardic Jews of the Balkans in the Austro- Hungarian Empire, etc.).