https://at-ceu.studyguide.timeedit.net/modules/JEWS5020?type=COREThis class will approach Jewish history from the point of view of its fragmentation into conflicting groups (variously named as parties, sects, movements, parties, denominations, or sub-ethnicities) and study the dynamics of opposition and coexistence in different historical periods. Observers of the contemporary Jewish world, and of Israel in particular, often characterize its political and cultural situation by a deep schism. While the opposition to the Gaza War and on the judicial reform stands in the foreground of political controversies since 2023, it overlaps with other contentions in Israel's "multi-cleavage society": left and right, secular and religious, Ashkenazi and Mizrahi. The historical narrative in the present will compare contemporary situation with past moments of ideological and social division, and it will show the memorial traces in which the latter have served as models to interpret the present.By focusing on the central schism in each period of Jewish history, the class endeavors to propose a narrative that is both pluralistic and coherent. Research in Jewish cultural history in post-modernist or situational perspectives has voiced strong objections against essential definitions of Jewishness. In Judaism, with its characteristic absence of a central authority, religious and cultural norms indeed presented themselves often as matters of choice inside a grid of internal divisions. Students will learn to problematize generalizations about Jewish identity, but also observe that the different Judaisms" (a plural introduced by Jacob Neusner) hardly ever produced unbridgeable rifts: while strongly resenting and rejecting each other's convictions, the parties ultimately recognize each other as necessary partners in a common collective destiny that would be incomplete without opponents.