Abstract
This essay investigates the appearance in the Dutch Purim productions of such contemporary political issues as the poverty and the unproductivity of the Ashkenazi Jews. At the end of the eighteenth century, pejorative images of the Jew and maskilic reform, as well as enlightened ideals, interacted within these writings. As a result, the focus of the Purim productions shifted from absurd humor to the hardships of Jewish life. This essay analyzes how maskilim employed the Ashkenazi Purim productions to cope with and address the “Jewish Question.” As such, it demonstrates that humor became an ideological motor for Jewish cultural change.
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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
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Rädecker, T. Addressing the Jewish Question with Humor: Poverty and Unproductivity in the Dutch Purim Productions (ca. 1800). Jew History 30, 233–256 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10835-017-9265-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10835-017-9265-1