Humanities Institute

In this paper, I argue that gossip is both an epistemic evil – it can restrict access to information – and an epistemic good – it can be a key resource for knowers.  These two faces of gossip can be illustrated when we consider the effects of participating in and being excluded from gossiping groups.  Social psychology has begun to study these effects and their results are useful here.  Because of these two aspects, I argue, gossip holds a peculiar place in our epistemic economy.  It is vicious, and employed to restrict agents in their capacities as knowers, and it is also a valuable epistemic commodity, employed to enable agents in their epistemic capacities.  To see these sides clearly, I employ some machinery from Miranda Fricker’s work on epistemic injustice.  The tools from Fricker will help demonstrate that gossip can be both the means of unjustly restricting an epistemic agent, and the epistemically valuable ends from which she is restricted.  Finally, I draw some conclusions for epistemology more generally.

When the Jews of Prague had passed unharmed through the volatile events of the early stages of the Thirty Years' War, from May 1618 to November 1620, they instituted a local annual commemoration of their safe deliverance observed, in part, by the recitation of selibot [liturgical poems] composed for the occasion by Rabbi Yom Tov Lipmann Heller The observance and its liturgy not only expressed gratitude to God, but also sought to crystallise the community's pro-Habsburg political stance. Moreover, in choosing locally-based models for the liturgy's form, its author both reflected and helped shape his community's historically-based local consciousness.

"To Tell Their Children weaves a fascinating tale of the interplay between individual and communal memory and the topographies of Jewish space. Prague was home to the largest and most culturally creative Ashkenazic community in early modern Central Europe. Beautifully written and richly detailed, Greenblatt's creative approach provides a wonderful entry to the world of Prague Jews and the means by which they perpetuated their historical memories."—Elisheva Carlebach, Columbia University"

Spread the word to current Harvard students: my new course in the Divinity School begins next Monday. We'll look at American Judaism through the lens of the spaces and places it inhabits, considering theoretical literature on "the spatial turn" in humanities and social sciences alongside case studies from American Jewish history

Shaul Shtampfer writes of *To Tell Their Children*:    "This thought-provoking book provides tools that help
readers understand the religious sensibilities of Prague
Jewry and the dynamic of religious change in Prague. The
clear style of the author makes the topic accessible not only
to experts in Ashkenazi Jewish culture but also to a wider
audience. It can therefore easily be used for comparative
purposes both with other Jewish cultures as well as with
non-Jewish societies that dealt with similar issues."

To Tell Their Children weaves a fascinating tale of the interplay between individual and communal memory and the topographies of Jewish space. Prague was home to the largest and most culturally creative Ashkenazic community in early modern Central Europe. Beautifully written and richly detailed, Greenblatt's creative approach provides a wonderful entry to the world of Prague Jews and the means by which they perpetuated their historical memories."

—Elisheva Carlebach, Columbia University

This Hebrew-language article explores Maharal's (Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the Maharal of Prague) complex relationship with the printed book as a means of preserving family memories, and an extended family's good name. While contemporaries, such as Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller, used autobiographical writing for a similar purpose, Maharal took a different approach.
English Table of Contents appears at the end of the file.

From: Frankfurter Judaistische Beiträge 40 (2015), special issue on "Frankfurt’s ‘Jewish Notabilia’ (‘Jüdische Merckwürdigkeiten’): Ethnographic Views of Urban Jewry in Central Europe around 1700."  A description of the issue can be found here  :https://judaica.hypotheses.org/37  The journal page is here: http://www.gesellschaft-foerderung-judaistischer-studien.de/english/frankfurt-jewish-studies-bulletin/

*Go to  http://rdcu.be/mHPY  for a view-only version of the whole article.*  In late seventeenth-century Prague, Simon Abeles, a Jewish boy of about eleven or twelve, left the Jewish quarter, studied for conversion to Christianity, returned home without converting, and then died. The boy’s father, Lazar Abeles, was charged with his murder and hanged himself in jail. Löbl Kurtzhandl, a young man who had lived with the family, was accused of being an accomplice and sentenced to death. The case became a cause célèbre as the boy came to be regarded as an unofficial local saint acclaimed in broadsides, pamphlets, and even music. A single Yiddish source, a historical song, tells the story from a Jewish point of view but, surprisingly, does not take up the question of the guilt or innocence of either Kurtzhandl or the elder Abeles, focusing instead on Kurtzhandl’s actions in his final days, hours, and moments. Burning polemics between local Christians and Jews centered on this very question, each population seeking saint-like heroes for its young members to emulate. On the Catholic side, such activity fit within a much broader context of Catholic renewal and triumphalism that capped a decades-long process of ridding Bohemia of Protestant influence. On the Jewish side, it represented active resistance against such trends.