Discourses on Body in Jewish Culture in the Polish Lands between 1880 and 1939 - raw data

The main hypothesis of the proposed project is that between 1880 and 1939 the discourses on female and male body in Jewish culture were changing. The aim of the project is to answer the question of the nature of that transition that occurred within the Jewish culture in the Polish lands, that is the territory of former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Second Republic of Poland. Because body, and especially women’s body has been an important field of reflection and control (with the laws of niddah as the most visible ones) in various versions of Jewish culture and the concept and regulations differed from those in Christianity, research in the proposed project is limited only to inner Jewish perspective. In order to answer the aforementioned question a thorough analysis and juxtaposition of the changes that occurred between 1880 and 1939 in discourses on body (female and male) in Jewish literature, press, political
pamphlets, and private documents in five main languages spoken by Jews who lived in the Polish lands – Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, German and Russian – and in visual arts (press adverts, journal covers, press graphics, photography, leaflets, pamphlets, film), which in the timeframe of the project began to play a crucial role in shaping social perception of human body, will be done. The timeframe adopted begins when industrialisation, modernisation, secularisation, women’s emancipation movements, emergence of popular culture and new political ideologies started to shape
discourses on body. It ends with the outbreak of WWII which brought an entirely new paradigm on Jewish body and changed the social structure of the Polish lands. The non-obvious chronology of the project is aimed at examination the scope of changes in discourses on body provoked by WWI with a shift in gender roles, fashion, visible effects of violence on human body with mutilations, deformations and sexual abuse, and withdrawal of religious women from purifying rituals done in mikveh. As the inspiration for that project lies in my previous research projects on Polish-Jewish literature and on discourses on female body and sexuality in Polish-Jewish ego-documents, around 30% of primary sources are already collected. Thus, the proposed project develops further research on discourses on body in the Polish lands since
juxtaposition and analysis of discourses on Jewish body (both male and female) in five languages (Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, German and Russian), and four different areas of human creativity (literature, press, visual arts, and egodocuments) will expand our knowledge into new scientific fields and will show yet unknown cultural links and
relationships between speakers of those languages. The analyses will be followed by a creation of text corpus of sources translated into Polish, which (re)define the notion of body and show the tension between the question of corporality and identity. The text corpus will be made with the use of Supervised Machine Learning and will serve to design a virtual map showing the flow of ideas that created the discourses on body in Jewish press in Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, German and Russian between 1880 and 1939. The map is meant for academic and non-academic purposes. Thus, the proposed project is also transdisciplinary in its nature, as it requires research done by historians, philologists, IT specialists and art historians. The choice of hosting institution is not coincidental as the Taube Department of Jewish Studies is a home to renowned scholars of Jewish culture, while the Digital Humanities Lab at the University of Wroclaw will be able to supervise the digital component of the project. Because the proposed project attempts to answer such questions as: what were the corporal models and how they were changing within the timeframe of the project; how the ideas behind
discourses on body were spreading among different social actors in the Jewish culture; what was the role of visual arts in spreading the discourses; and what was the relation between new models of corporality with various Jewish identities, the results of the analyses may not be used only by literary historians of the Jewish past, but also by
historians of Jewish culture, sociologists, anthropologists, theologians, historians of Russian, German and Polish cultures; and women's history specialists.