Crossing the Jabbok: Illness and Death in Ashkenazi Judaism in Sixteenth- throughNineteenth-Century Prague by Sylvie-Anne Goldberg; Carol GosmanReview by: John D. KlierThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 77, No. 4 (Oct., 1999), pp. 759-760Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4212980 .

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REVIEWS 759

research is based mainly on the organization's publications. Consequently, as Owen acknowledges in his Foreword, the details of the Association's internal functioning and of certain policy disputes remain unclear. Also needful of further study is the Association's role during the war.

None the less, Roosa's book is a valuable contribution to the literature. It provides a mass of information about the Association's policies, giving a new perspective on the economy as well as the industrial-commercial bourgeoisie, and its judgements are careful and balanced. It may not be the last word on the Association of Industry and Trade, but it should prove a firm foundation for future work.

Department of European Studies A.J. HEYWOOD UTniversity of Bradford

Goldberg, Sylvie-Anne. Crossing the,Jabbok: Illness and Death in Ashkenazi Judaism in Sixteenth- through Nineteenth-Centuiy Prague. Translated by Carol Gosman. University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA and London, I996. xviii + 303 pp. Notes. Illustrations. Bibliography. Index. /37.50: $45.00.

AT the core of Sylvie-Anne Goldberg's book is a study of the hevrah kaddisha, or communal burial society, founded in Prague in I 564. Yet her work is the very opposite of a narrow, institutional study, for the narrative opens to explore fundamental issues in the history of EuropeanJewry.

As Goldberg reminds us, the hevrah kaddisha was not only the first, but also the most important organization in anyJewish community. When it did not actually incorporate other philanthropic activities, it provided a working model. The operation of the hevrah was dominated by the communal elite, and was a principal area of inter-communal rivalries. The society's ability to include or ostracize any member of the community, living or dead, made it an effective vehicle for social control in autonomousJewish communities across Europe. This explains why the hevrah kaddisha was a favoured target for criticism from the East European maskilim, the proponents of the Jewish Enlightenment movement, well into the nineteenth century. Likewise, since it was a central exemplar of Jewish autonomy, centralizing states in modern times never abandoned efforts to reduce or abolish its power. In its turn, the endurance of the hevrah represented a modest resistance by the traditional Jewish community to the inroads of modernity.

Goldberg points to the significance of the appearance of specific Jewish practices in the eleventh century as an important marker in the cultural differentiation ofJews from surrounding societies in Europe. The classic work of Philippe Aries has shown that in this period the death of Christians was integrated into 'the lap of the Church'. This process was marked by the creation and sacralization of a Christian funerary space. While Christians were moving corpses into the vaults of churches, Jews moved in the opposite direction. Jewish practice demanded removal, which was the opposite of sacralization. It stressed the importance of ritual in the treatment of death, through the preparation and interment of the corpse, and proper ritual

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760 SEER, 77, 4, 1999

conduct in places used for burial. It is not a facile comparison to see these contradictory conceptions as underlying the contemporary Christian-Jewish debate over the proper treatment of the site of the Auschwitz death camp.

The process of the 'invention of death' not only divided Christians and Jews, but also established an important indicator of cross-cultural influences. 'Crossing the jabbok' (Ma'avar Yabbok) is the title of aJewish funerary manual, published by Aaron Berachia in Mantua in I 626. The author offered a guide to assist the departed to cross theJabbok, a purifying river of fire, not totally dissimilar to the new Christian conception of Purgatory. Goldberg notes other apparent affinities, including the long-standing debate over the presumed influence on the Jewish hevrah of the practices of Christian guilds and confraternities. Yet she also warns against false analogies by demonstrating the essential influence onJewish thought and practice of kabbalistic thought, which produced such 'un-Christian' conceptions as gilgul, metempsychosis or the transmigration of souls.

Goldberg ranges widely over the international world of AshkenaziJewry. Her conjectures are always thought-provoking, even when not entirely convincing, as when she imputes the motif of the 'Dance of Death' to East EuropeanJewry. The book is attractively illustrated with paintings and prints which help carry the textual argument. The French text has been rendered into a flowing, readable English version by Carol Cosman. The book is a valuable contribution to European Jewish history and culture, to the phenomenon of cross-cultural contacts, and to the 'history of death'.

Department of Hebrew andJewish Studies JOHN D. KLIER

University College London

Rydlo,Jozef M. (ed.). Studi in onore di Milan S. Durica. Acta Academica Slovaca, 50. Slovak Institute, Bratislava, I 995. Notes. Tables. Plate. Bibliography. Index. Price unknown.

THIRTY-NINE essays here treat the two chief interests to which the Salesian priest and Professor of History at Padua, Milan Durica, has devoted his life: theology and moral philosophy and Slovak history, politics and language. Many essays in the Festschrift are serious. Only one Czech has an essay in this piece, Jan Rychlik, a historian particularly concerned with Czech-Slovak relations. Rychlik treats the central theme of the non-theological pieces in this volume, the nature of Slovakness. After a sensible theoretical introduction on nationalism and ethnicity, he traces the history of the Czech and Slovak national programmes, and the failure of the concept 'Czechoslovak'. The irony of that failure is that the Slovaks abandoned the idea somewhat less easily than the Czechs in 1993. On 'nationness', the former ideologist of Slovak Fascism, Stefan Polakovic, in an essay onJ. V. Gonzalez's conception of argentinidad, considers a definition of 'nation' as 'a new spiritual community' (p. 423), wherein 'tradition and poetry have been intimately linked in the inner history of the nation since its remotest origins' (p. 427); one thinks not only of Herder, but also of the codifier of literary Slovak, L'udovit Stuir. As far as nationalism is concerned, the most informative essay isJan Hnilica's 'I santi

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