I am noting that in the Lit and Arts course, what seems to be easiest for me to understand (and was back then too?) is architecture. I'm not spatial, generally, and geometry was my weakest part of math. But the layout of churches seems to be intelligible to me. Charlemagne's church architecture has a logic to it, defining what a Christian ruler is and his relationship to his people, the clergy, and Christ. I noticed in the notes that Professor Nercessian compared Aachen to the Jerusalem Temple, as a representation of divinely created order within the chaos of life at that time. I find myself wondering what things like "order" and "standardization" were like related to before Charlemagne and in comparison to the hyper-organization of life today (not that we don't have our types of chaos).
In Government, Professor Hall noted about Britain in the 1800s two things -- the switch in the bourgeoisie's alliance from the commercial aristrocracy to some part of the working class; and how that alliance was mediated through or really because of the durable legacy of parliamentary stability, such that social conflict was in politics and not raw class conflict.
In France, the 1800s saw a succession of regimes, as monarchism and for a time a strong presidency kept coming back and then being undermined, and the question is why. Among the underlying factors Professor Hall pointed out were the fact that while Britain had a certain democratic ideology and corresponding institutional framework for more than a century, France's democratic ideology was only ten to twenty years old when industrialization began. The slow industrialization meant that the bourgeoisie was not large enough to be an independent force, and the peasantry remained large. Both groups, the peasantry more so, responded to monarchist offers -- strong top-down leaders coopted the language of democracy and the supposedly democratic plebiscite to woo the peasants. The working class leadership never coalesced because much of it was killed during rebellions, and the political system did not even in the late 1800s offer an avenue of influence for socialist parties. Consequently labor was not a parliamentary force and turned toward either more radical revolution or demands for working conditions outside politics. Thus the Third Republic, which endured for about 70 years finally, did so by performing relatively limited functions -- catalyzing a certain amount of industrialization but not anything like in Britain or even Germany, and nothing more major than that, and preserving for the most part the social class arrangement in France as it had been.
Two things that struck me in the notes -- One was the description of political parties in France as being based on locales and notables, such that they did not provide the durable mediating, aggregating, and compromise mechanisms that define British or American politics. (I think this is still a legacy somewhat in France today?). The other was Professor Hall's discussion of the Dreyfus Affair, and how little attention he paid to the function of antisemitism, which I still don't know enough about, other than to note that nationalism was a fissure point in French politics in a way that weakened the Third Republic.
In the Zionism course, Professor Bartal talked about how the all the religious reform movements within Eastern European, non-westernized Jewish society, all weakened the traditional authority structure of the community without disturbing the daily practice of religious tradition. He didn't really draw a line from this to Zionism, other than to suggest that at some margin this made the move into Chibbat Tziyon easier for traditional Jews. Some of the moves of the Eastern European Haskalah, such as the publication of newspapers and journals, were copied from the more Western maskilim and made it possible for traditional Jews to learn about new trends.
The liberalization movements in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and in Poland and Ukraine, multiethnic polities, often found Jews on the side of the state rather than the nationalists, because the state was the champion of reform based on multiethnic rule while the nationalists had no room for the Jews as a people regarded as not part of the "nation." In Russia up until the early 1880s, Jews had hopes that the czar and his reforms would be beneficial for Jews, but the violence following the assassination of the czar squeezed Jews from both directions. The people rejected or suspected the Jews, and the czarists also made up stories that the Jews were responsible. With the failure of emancipation already in Western Europe, there was no room for hope of acceptance in the Russian realm.
A large part of the Chibat Tziyon movement in this phase was small-scale and for self-help and education; there was no plan yet for migration to Eretz Yisrael. A schism arose between those focused on the practicalities of changing the Jewish situation, and Ahad Ha-am, who argued that a cultural and intellectual-spiritual transformation was the primary thing that needed to happen before the Jews could make any social change or migration succeed.
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