2010: Mary Gluck, “The Invisible Jewish Budapest 01, Public Spaces, Private Selves: Jewish Flâneurs in Fin-de-Siècle Budapest”
Mary Gluck, “The Invisible Jewish Budapest 01, Public Spaces, Private Selves: Jewish Flâneurs in Fin-de-Siècle Budapest”
George L. Mosse Distinguished Lectures
https://mosselectures.wisc.edu/program/
Tuesday, 14 September 2010, 16:00 CST
This lecture series was published as The Invisible Jewish Budapest: Metropolitan Culture at the Fin de Siècle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Madison, 2016).
University of Wisconsin–Madison
Conrad A. Elvehjem Building
Room L160
800 University Avenue
Madison, WI 53706
Sponsored by:
George L. Mosse Program in History
Global Mosse Lecture Series
University of Wisconsin–Madison History Department
Lecture description: As urban citizens, Budapest Jews assumed the role of “flâneurs,” or anonymous strollers in the city, who could no longer be identifiable by the external makers of race, religion or ethnicity. Flânerie, however, was always a contested activity, challenged by the intrusion of politics and anti-Semitic violence. A revealing example of such intrusion was a farcical duel in 1882, fought between a Jewish member of parliament and the leader of the anti-Semitic party, which ended up reinstating the legitimacy of the flâneur.
Lecture series description: The projected book from which these lectures are taken attempts to recuperate the lost world of Jewish urban experience that flourished in Budapest between 1867 and 1914. Its hypothesis is that Jews became secularized by reconstituting themselves as actors and spectators within the cultural public sphere of the emerging metropolis. In opposition to the well-known motto of assimilation, according to which Jews were “men like others on the street, but Jews at home,” the book suggests that urban Jews were by definition public selves who found their true homes on the boulevards, in the coffee houses, the Orpheums, music halls and cabarets of the city. The term “the invisible Jewish Budapest,” refers to the erasure of this Jewish-identified “low” culture from both Jewish and Hungarian historical memory, which tended to focus on ideological and high cultural concerns.
Mary Gluck is Professor Emerita of History at Brown University. Her research and teaching have focused on the cultural and intellectual history of modern Europe, with particular attention to urban history, Jewish history, and modernist culture. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1976. She is the author of Georg Lukács and His Generation 1900-1918, Popular Bohemia: Modernism and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris, and The Invisible Jewish Budapest: Metropolitan Culture at the Fin de Siècle. For the latter work, she was awarded the 2017 Book Prize from the Hungarian Studies Association. Numbering among her many academic honors are fellowships at the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, Stanford Humanities Center, and National Humanities Center.
He first examined the formation of Jewish culture in the German states, which he came to understand as a “subculture.” The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840 (1987) won the Present Tense/Joel H. Cavior Literary Award for History. In a commissioned study of Moses Mendelssohn’s Jewish thought he emphasized the neglected Hebrew works. Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (1996) has been translated into French, German and Italian. In the Sherman Lectures delivered at Manchester University (UK) he used comparison to remove the “Haskalah” (Jewish Enlightenment) from its conventional parochial setting. Those lectures were published as The Berlin Haskalah and German Religious Thought (2000). He crossed confessional boundaries and national borders to reconceive the relationship of the Enlightenment to religion in The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews and Catholics from London to Vienna (2008), which was featured in a New York Times’ “Beliefs” column (October 11, 2008, A21). In Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries (2019), he argued that the attainment of civil and political rights or equality is the principal event of modern Jewish history. His new book, The Emancipationists: Nineteenth-Century Jews’ Campaign for Citizenship (2026), restores emancipation politics to a central place in the development of Jewish political history.
He is the co-editor of four volumes. Profiles in Diversity: Jews in a Changing Europe, 1750-1870 (1998) studies how individual Jews and families experienced major historical changes. New Perspectives on the Haskalah (2001) emerged from the first international conference devoted to the subject. “What History Tells”: George L. Mosse and the Culture of Modern Europe (2004) is a tribute to his undergraduate teacher and mentor. Moses Mendelssohn’s Hebrew Works (2018) (Edward Breuer translator) makes available a broad selection of the Hebrew writings in English for the first time. He also served as Associate Editor of The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies (2002), which won the National Jewish Book Award. In his capacity as Vice-President of the American Academy for Jewish research, he edited, A Commitment to Scholarship: The Centenary of the American Academy for Jewish Research (2021).
He has received grants from the British Academy, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has twice been a Visiting Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and at the Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa). He has also been a Visiting Fellow at the Max Planck Institut für Geschichte (Göttingen); All Souls College, Oxford; the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania; and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala.
He previously taught at Brown (1983-86), Oxford (1986-92), the University of Wisconsin–Madison (1992-2011) and the City University of New York-Graduate Center (2011-14).
