The patriotism of gentlemen with red hair: European Jews and the liberal state, 1789–1939

European Jewish history from 1789–1939 supports the view that construction of national identities even in secular liberal states was determined not only by modern considerations alone but also by ancient patterns of thought, behaviour and prejudice. Emancipation stimulated unprecedented patriotism, especially in wartime, as Jews strove to prove loyalty to their countries of citizenship. During World War I, even Zionists split along national lines, as did families and friends. Jewish patriotism was interchangeable with nationalism inasmuch as Jews identified themselves with national cultures. Although emancipation implied acceptance and an end to anti-Jewish prejudice in the modern liberal state, the kaleidoscopic variety of Jewish patriotism throughout Europe inadvertently undermined the idea of national identity and often provoked anti-Semitism. Even as loyal citizens of separate states, the Jews, however scattered, disunited and diverse, were made to feel, often unwillingly, that they were one people in exile

‘Measure to yourself a prophet’s place’: Biblical Heroines, Jewish Difference, and Victorian Women’s Poetry

In Book II of Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning has her male protagonist, Romney Leigh, voice a number of Victorian stereotypes about women poets. Because it was assumed that women could not ‘understand’ philosophical, theoretical or abstract ideas, and because women were seen as creatures of their own emotional responses, women were rarely granted the cultural authority to speak prophetically, to voice their own experience as an authoritative mode ‘to teach the living’. Defined as essentially non-prophetic in their very existence, women were thus excluded from being the dominant figure for the poet in the period. For in order to be a poet/prophet, a speaker must be understood as moving between two realms, the earthly, individual realm and the universal, divine realm; likewise, he must be able to move between two rhetorical realms, private devotional utterance and public persuasive utterance. In Victorian England, those realms tended to be gender specific, coded female and male respectively. And while many male poets constructed their lyric identities by balancing those two rhetorical modes, Romney’s speech in Book II of Aurora Leigh re-creates the scorn and censure women poets faced when they dared to ‘measure [themselves] to a prophet’s place’ in Victorian England

Jewishness and Judaism

Jewish and Christian women writers expressed a dazzling variety of approaches to issues of Judaism, Jewishness, and Jewish identity in nineteenth-century England. Their work demonstrates the complexity of the issue itself, highlighting how Jewishness is always an intersectional identity in its religious, ethnic, and cultural manifestations

Molecular mapping of grapevine genes

In this chapter, we review the history of grapevine genetics and gene mapping. Genetic markers are introduced considering both sequence-based and sequence-independent approaches used for variant discovery. We provide a survey of genotyping tools, from low- to high-throughput platforms. We describe general principles of map building and implementation, highlighting specificities for outbred species such as the grapevine. Then, we review the different approaches applied for QTL identification according to the genetic material, from bi-parental progenies, pedigree-supported segregating populations, to germplasm collection. In particular, our emphasis is on the relevance of such studies for the dissection of a complex trait. We describe the difficult process of identifying genes responsible for QTLs and the few cases of QTL cloning. Many years have passed from the first grapevine marker isolation, the development of genetic and physical maps, until the deciphering of the genome sequence. With such a wealth of detailed information on wild and cultivated grapevines, we discuss how data sharing and multidisciplinary data integration are the current challenges that the scientific community faces to effectively translate knowledge into practic