PDF The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual by Kalman P. Bland in History

Description

How could a Jew kill a Jew for religious and political reasons? Many people asked this question after an Orthodox Jew assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Itshak Rabin in 1995. But historian Michael Stanislawski couldn't forget it; and he decided to find out everything he could about an obscure and much earlier event that was uncannily similar to Rabin's murder: the 1848 killing--by an Orthodox Jew--of the Reform rabbi of Lemberg (now L'viv; Ukraine). Eventually; Stanislawski concluded that this was the first murder of a Jewish leader by a Jew since antiquity; a prelude to twentieth-century assassinations of Jews by Jews; and a turning point in Jewish history. Based on records unavailable for decades; A Murder in Lemberg is the first book about this fascinating case. On September 6; 1848; Abraham Ber Pilpel entered the kitchen of Rabbi Abraham Kohn and his family and poured arsenic in the soup that was being prepared for their dinner. Within hours; the rabbi and his infant daughter were dead. Was Kohn's murder part of a conservative Jewish backlash to Jewish reform and liberalization in a year of European revolution? Or was he killed simply because he threatened taxes that enriched Lemberg's Orthodox leaders? Vividly recreating the dramatic story of the murder; the trial that followed; and the political and religious fallout of both; Stanislawski tries to answer these questions and others. In the process; he reveals the surprising diversity of Jewish life in mid-nineteenth-century eastern Europe. Far from being uniformly Orthodox; as is often assumed; there was a struggle between Orthodox and Reform Jews that was so intense that it might have led to murder.