Chapter 7: Outposts
Study Questions
1) In what ways and why did the status of the Sefardim vis a vis the Ashkenazim change in nineteenth century Europe?
2) What were some of the reasons for the deteriorations of the Jews’ status in the Ottoman Empire beginning in the eighteenth century?
3) Did the Ottoman reform movement Tanzimat markedly improve the living standards of the Jews by the mid-eighteenth century?
4) What was Jerusalem – the “holy city par excellence,” according to Gartner – like in the nineteenth century?
5) How did the experience of the first Jewish settlers in the 1650s in what would become New York differ from their experience in Brazil, their land of origin?
6) How does Gartner account for the fact that virtually all the German Jewish immigrants to the United States in the nineteenth century converted from Orthodoxy to Reform Judaism within “ten to twenty years” of their arrival?
7) Reform Judaism included among its basic tenets the view that, at least in the United States of America, the Jews’ exile (galut) had ended. Would you consider this position to be Reform’s most radical change with respect to traditional Jewish teaching? Why or why not?
8) Reviewing the impact of Max Lilienthal in Imperial Russia, the French sponsored Alliance Universelle in the Ottoman lands and North Africa, and the fully secularized American public school system of the late nineteenth century, what role, in your opinion, has standardized education played in recent modern Jewish history?