Marion Aptroot

Jozeph Michman

Yosef Mikhman

Written in Amsterdam Yiddish and full of colorful invective, these weekly dialogues in the satirical tradition of the English Spectator and similar periodicals allowed the breakaway community (the naye kille) to expose the inequalities and foibles of the establishment community (alte kille), which was heretofore supported by the government. In the wake of the reforms of the French Revolution, the newer community sought not only fuller civic rights for all Jews, but less community power and privileges for the corrupt rich men who dominated the affairs of the old community. Not content to ignore the upstarts, the old community fought back with its own weekly dialogues, using the same format and even the same characters. The resulting thirty-three eighteenth-century Diskursn, selections of which are translated and edited here for the first time, constitute a unique phenomenon in Jewish history and Jewish journalism.

Marion Aptroot

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