ABSTRACT
Since the twilight of the last century, scholarly consensus has upheld two formative, but potentially conflicting, accounts of the Jewish Fin De Siècle. Tracing Herzl’s life-long obsession with the Eastern European Jewish masses to his psychological and political alienation from the liberal values of his parents’ generation, Schorske points to a “deep kinship” between Herzl and his contemporaries, Schönerer and Lüger: “his rejection of rational politics, and his commitment to a noble, aristocratic leadership style with a strong taste for the grand gesture.” Loewengard’s longing for a private Jewish “City” of the soul stands out sharply against contemporary unease with the idea of the “public” city as promiscuous, dangerous and very scary. The division of Poland-Lithuania consigned Polish Jewry to the east of Europe. Partition effectively pushed an illustrious and once-proud center of Jewish learning to the cultural and geographic periphery of modern European civilization.
