Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Jewish Space And Spiritual Supremacy In Eighteenth-Century Italy, David Sclar

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

This primary text, dated 11 October 1720, is taken from a pinkas belonging to the Jewish community of Padua. It concerns the establishment of an eruv hatserot, a boundary covering most of the city in which Jews would be permitted to carry possessions on the Sabbath. References to contemporary eruvin ordinarily appear in responsa literature. Perhaps uniquely, this document provides communal context for the construction of the Padua eruv. In so doing, it sheds light on the social and religious lives of Italian Jewry in the first half of the eighteenth century.

The document’s appearance as a copied …

Striking A Pietist Chord: Isaac Wetzlar’S Proposal For The Improvement Of Jewish Society, Rebekka Voß

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

In 1748/49, Isaac Wetzlar of Celle in Northern Germany completed Libes Briv (Love Letter), a Yiddish proposal for the improvement of Jewish society. In order to initiate exploration of the complex relationship between Central European Judaism and eighteenth-century Pietism selected sources are discussed that concentrate on the links between Libes briv and the contours of German Pietism. These sources demonstrate that Isaac Wetzlar’s Love Letter (edited and translated into English by M. Faierstein) substantially engages the concepts and initiatives encompassed by Pietist missionary efforts to Jews. The diaries of two travelling missionaries from the Institutum Judaicum in Halle who came …

Johan Kemper's (Moses Aaron's) Humble Account: A Rabbi Between Sabbateanism And Christianity, Níels Eggerz

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

Moses Aaron of Krakow, a Sabbatean rabbi, who would later call himself Johan Kemper, chose to convert to Christianity in the summer of 1696. When his mentor, the Lutheran cleric Johann Friedrich Heunisch, brought his mentee's wish before the council of the Free Imperial City of Schweinfurt, Kemper was asked to submit the reasons for his request together with a short autobiography in written form. The outcome was his Humble Account, which appeared in print shorty after Kemper was baptized. A close analysis of Kemper's Humble Account reveals a very subtle yet pronounced anti-Jewish narrative which makes use of …

The Religious Condition Of German Jewries In The First Half Of The 18th Century. Rural And Urban Communities In Comparison, Avi Siluk

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

This presentation focuses on Jewish attitudes towards non-Jews in the first half of the 18^th century as depicted in the travelling journals of Pietist missionaries. If up to that point, interreligious encounter had been a field of interaction between Jewish and Christian scholars, in the 18^th century the missionaries began to engage in conversations on faith with Jews of all social strata, genders, ages and educational backgrounds. Such interactions yielded many different forms of individual and communal Jewish reactions. Examining cases of missionary encounters with the large urban Jewry of Frankfurt (Main) and the smaller, rural kehilah of …

Illicit Sex And Law In Early-Modern Italian Ghettos, Federica Francesconi

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

This presentation explores the changes of attitudes toward illicit sexual relations within the ghetto societies that occurred in Italy between the late seventeenth century and the middle of the eighteenth century, with a specific focus on young Jewish maidservants. It analyzes how Italian Jewish leadership, both lay and rabbinical, acted in regard to the vicissitudes of Jewish women who faced seduction, sexual exploitation, and pregnancy under the Jewish roof. This analysis uses archival sources from both Jewish courts and civic magistracies in the cities of Venice, Mantua, and Modena during the years 1691-1751. Through a combination of paternalism, cohesiveness, innovation, …

Emw 2015: Continuity And Change In The Jewish Communities Of The Early Eighteenth Century, The Ohio State University

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

Volume 12: Continuity and Change in the Jewish Communities of the Early Eighteenth Century, Ohio State University, Columbus, August 17-19, 2015

The 2015 Early Modern Workshop on “Continuity and Change in the Jewish Communities in the Early Eighteenth Century” was held at Ohio State University.

Between the late seventeenth century and the middle of the eighteenth century, much of European Jewry (and elements within Ottoman Jewry as well) appear to have shifted from a generally traditional and religious way of life to a way of life that embraced non-traditional and/or non-halakhic practices and fashions. There were no great intellectual or …

The Sabbatean Who Devoured His Son: The Emden-Eibeschütz Controversy And Cannibalism, Shai Alleson-Gerberg

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

At a time when cannibalism captured European imagination and was used as effective propaganda against the ‘other’ within or elsewhere, as well as a test case for the concept of Natural Law, it is hardly surprising to discover similar rhetoric in internal Jewish discourse of the early modern era. R. Jacob Emden’s halachic writing on the subject of modern medicine and his tenacious battle against Sabbateanism, provide illuminating examples of the use of cannibalistic imagery, as this had crystalised in colonial literature from the new world and in religious polemics on the Eucharist. Emden’s halachic position on the question ‘is …

The End Of Jewish Democracy In 18th Century Prague, Joshua Teplitsky

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

One intriguing register for considering continuities and changes in Jewish life in the early eighteenth century is the constitution of the autonomous Jewish community, or kehillah. This institution of Jewish self-government was formed at the nexus of the imposition of governments, on the one hand, and Jewish collective investment in the legitimacy and utility of this form of association, on the other..

Although Jewish communal leadership appears to have been determined by elections in the earlier centuries of this period, by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries an increasing trend towards permanent ruling oligarchies can be discerned. A standing patriciate …

Emw 2014: Healing, Medicine, And Jews In The Early Modern World, Northwestern University, Evanston And Spertus Institute, Chicago

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

Early modern healing and medicine continued medieval traditions and were simultaneously transformed as a result of radical scientific, religious, and social changes. Early modern scholars, pharmacists, medical doctors, and popular healers advanced significant arguments that drew from and shaped new understandings of human nature and subsequently altered the interactions between healing, religion, and society. Such changes afford a unique opportunity to discuss forms of Jewish interaction with Christian and Muslim societies and developments within Jewish learned and popular culture. They also engage and test the limits of new topics and methodologies employed in early modern studies, enriching the evaluation of …

Violence At A Purim Ball, Francesca Bregoli

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

The texts presented here address an incident of violence at a Purim ball 1753, in Livorno.

Exorcism And Violence: Contexts Internal And External, Yohanan Petrovsky-Stern

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

This presentation discusses projections of violence and social values in a mystical text from eastern Europe.

The Murder Of A Travel Companion. Violence, Gender And Living Conditions Of Servants In 18th Century Prussia, Noa Sophie Kohler

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

Jews are often portrayed as non-violent and therefore as powerless victims. Highlighting and examining cases of Jews as violent perpetrators not only refutes this stigmatization of Jews, it also reveals much about day to day life, about personal and social conflicts both within Jewish society and in encounters with the Christian society.

Discussed here sections of a legal document from the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin Dahlem cover a court case against the Jewish servant, Samuel Saul, who was suspected of having murdered the Jewish maid Zierle in Prussia in 1791.

A Jewish Perspective On The Execution Of 'Jew Süss': 4 February 1738, Yair Mintzker

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

“The Story of the Passing of Joseph Süss, of Blessed Memory,” which appears here in full in English for the first time, is an extraordinary document. It concerns the arrest of Joseph Süsskind Oppenheimer in March 1737, his 11-month incarceration, his encounter with two Jews in prison and his execution the following day.

Oppenheimer, who already during his imprisonment began to be known derisively as “Jew Süss,” was born in Heidelberg to a middle-class Jewish family, probably in 1698. Starting in the third decade of the 18th century, Oppenheimer served as a court Jew to several German princes. In 1732 …

Big Blows On A Small Stage: Records Of Violence In Jewish Communal Registers, Altona 1765-1776, Elisheva Carlebach

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

The incidents of interpersonal violence discussed here were recorded in semi-private registers kept by communal scribes across a period of approximately a decade during the second half of the eighteenth century in the Ashkenazic community of Altona. The Ashkenazic “triple” community, AHW, whose center was Altona, then under the Danish crown, is richly represented by surviving internal and archival records for the early modern period.

The questions explored address the meaning of this level of physical violence and the means by which it was addressed. Was violence tolerated as a way of keeping disputes within the community? How did it …

Jewish Violence In Polish Laws And Courts, Jerzy Mazur

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

This presentation looks at violence in law and in courts in late medieval Poland.

La Mala Sangre: Daily Violence Within The Western Sephardic Diaspora, Daniel Strum

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

Recurrent private acts of violence within dense and homogenous communities, or diasporas, illustrate a tension between powerful gossip transmission and imperfect translation of such power into efficient social control.

This presentation explores the manifestation of private violence in the daily life of the Western Sephardic Diaspora in the early seventeenth century, examining inquisitorial sources from Portugal and notarial records from the Netherlands. These sources indicate that as much as group members expected mutual responsibility, trustworthiness and compliance with social norms from their fellow group members. Yet when they felt disappointed, they expressed their resentment aggressively. Aggression took shape of offenses …

Rome, 1571: A Body And A Murder Investigation In The Ghetto, Serena Di Nepi

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

The 1571 story of Sabato del Corsetto tells about violence in the Roman ghetto in the second half of Sixteenth Century. It concerns many issues related to violence: family violence; verbal violence; physical violence; violence among women; violence arisen both for economic and personal reasons and even attempt made by the Jewish community to manage violence and violent people.

Eschatological Avengers Or Messianic Saviors? Violence And Physical Strength In The Vernacular Legend Of The Red Jews, Rebekka Voss

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

The vernacular legend of the Red Jews allows us to explore the relationship of violence, physical strength and power during the early modern period, extending the traditional treatment of Jews and violence in that era. Violence is often linked to power and physical strength. Violence is typically associated with ruling authorities and the realm of the majority, rather than in the hands of an oppressed minority, as in case of Diaspora Jewry, which has been identified with victimhood. Moreover, in historiography, the perception of Jews as targets of aggression perpetrated by “the other,” whether Christian or Muslim, corresponds to the …

Plague And Violence Against Jews In Early Modern Europe, Samuel Cohn

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

Based on Italian chronicles and archival sources Samuel Cohn examined questions of violence against Jews during plague.

Killed Or Be Killed. Realities And Representations Of Violence In Seventeenth-Century Ukraine, Adam Teller

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

Based on sources related to the 1648 Chmielnicki Uprising, Adam Teller examined "The Realities and Representations of Violence in Seventeenth Century Ukraine"

2013 Emw: Jews And Violence In The Early Modern Period, Emw 2013

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

The 2013 Early Modern Workshop on “Jews and Violence in the Early Modern Period” sought to contextualize the violence involving Jews in the early modern period in order to understand this crucial aspect of their experience. Participating scholars tried to complicate not only the over-simplified notion of Jews as solely victims of violence in the premodern period, but also examined complexities of the question of Jews as victims of violence.

Keynote address by Robert Davis of Ohio State University, "Typologies of Violence in Early Modern Europe"

Cultural Transmission And Assimilation In A Quotidian Key: The Conversion Of Two Jews In Spain, 1790- 1792, David Graizbord

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

The Early Modern Period, an era of “confessionalization,” provides numerous examples of individuals of immediate, distant, feigned, or merely imputed Jewish origin whose religious and social allegiances shifted radically. The phenomenon of Iberian New Christians or conversos comes to mind. Early modern Jews who became Christians but who, unlike conversos, possessed no personal and familial background in Christianity constitute an allied field of research (See examples in the Bibliography, below). Scholarly assessments of the ways in which these Jewish non-conversos learned and influenced their adopted Christian culture(s) often concentrate on intellectual production. The focus is not surprising, as the converts …

The Early Modern Inn As A Space For Religious And Cultural Exchange, Magda Teter

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

While it is relatively easy to map out mutual cultural influences between Jews and non‐Jews, it is much more difficult to map out the mechanisms of this cultural exchange. Such instances of cultural exchange may have happened indirectly, for example, through books, as Joanna Weinberg termed it, through “virtual contact”; or, directly, through “real” human interaction. The texts presented here deal with the latter. One set of texts is a selection of several seventeenth‐century takkanot, rulings, by the Council of Four Lands, the supra‐communal organization responsible primarily for collection of taxes levied by the Polish state but also engaging in …

Jailhouse Encounter: A Sixteenth-Century Jewish-Christian Tale And Its Historiographical Ramifications, Daniel Jütte

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

This presentation examines two excerpts from the little known early seventeenth-century German memoirs of the non-Jewish Swabian merchant Hans Ulrich Krafft (1550–1621).1 Krafft was born into one of the most respected families in the city of Ulm, in southern Germany. In the 1570s, he served as a factor for the Augsburg-based Manlich trade company in the Levant. 2 In the summer of 1574, however, the Manlich Trade Company went bankrupt, and Krafft, who did not have the means to pay off the debts he had guaranteed on behalf of his employers, was arrested and imprisoned in Tripoli (now in Lebanon). …

Emw 2012: Cross-Cultural Connections In The Early Modern Jewish World, Emw 2012

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

Understanding the processes of cultural change in early modern history as a process of creating and negotiating social, cultural, and religious borders has become a commonplace in the last generation of research. This perspective has great validity for Jewish history, too: early modern Jews also found themselves in a range of new settings, which allowed a considerably greater range of interactions with their non-Jewish neighbors than had previously been the case. It was not only geographical dispersion that broadened their social, economic, cultural and religious contacts with their non-Jewish surroundings: new ideas and ideologies deriving from the thought of the …

A Jewish Merchant Family And A Moroccan Ruler, Daniel Schroeter

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

These three documents are from the Lévy-Corcos archives, a private collection of family documents in Paris, which I photographed in 1985. A few comments on what Jewish family archives reveal about Muslim-Jewish relations in Morocco: It was not uncommon for elite Jewish families to pass down from generation to generation various kinds of Muslim and Jewish legal documents, including Arabic decrees of rulers (dahirs) and letters from Muslim governmental officials. Such documents were kept as records of property, debts, or special privileges. Significantly, literate Jews did not read or write in the Arabic script, and thus could not read the …

A Jewish-Christian Commentary On Luke, Yaacov Deutsch

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

In 1735, Immanuel Frommann, a converted Jew who was working at the Institutum Judaicum in Halle translated the book of Luke and wrote a commentary on the text. This text is probably the first printed Hebrew commentary on the New Testament. In his commentary, Frommann uses a wide range of Hebrew sources. He quotes regularly from the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmud, biblical commentaries, midrashim, legal treatises, philosophical texts and historical works. He also makes use of mystical and kabbalistic works. The commentary has several layers of interpretation: relatively short lexical or grammatical explanations of words or phrases; literary explanations of …

Medicine As A Cultural Connection Between Jews And Christians In Early Modern Italy, Berns Andrew

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

This presentation explores cultural connections between Jews and Christians in sixteenth-century Italy through the lens of medicine. I present and analyze two texts. The first (from 1587) is a letter from Girolamo Mercuriale, a Catholic, to Moses Alatino, a Jew. The second (from 1592) is an excerpt from a consilium sent by the Jewish physician David de' Pomi to Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino.

It discusses the following texts:

1. Girolamo Mercuriale to Moses Alatino,"On a Uterine Tumor, Painful Urination, and Constipation, for a noble young Jewess, [sent] to the Jewish Physician Moses Alatino. Consultation #16" From: Hieronymi …

Finding Common Ground: The Metz Beit Din And The French Judicial System, Jay R. Berkovitz

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

In the two decades preceding the French Revolution, the rabbinic court of Metz functioned within a complex world of overlapping legal jurisdictions. The extant records of the beit din in the years 1771-1790 contain evidence of familiarity with French law and even an interest in taking that law into consideration in its own deliberations. From time to time, the beit din instructed litigants to consult French avocats in order to clarify a legal question, and in some cases the beit din itself initiated the consultation. There were also, certainly, instances when individuals sought the opinion of French lawyers on their …

Real Or Virtual Contact? Johannes Buxtorf's Reading Of Jewish Literature, Joanna Weinberg

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

This presentation attempts to analyse how Johannes Buxtorf the elder (1564-1629), long-time professor of Hebrew at Basel, ethnographer, lexicographer, and textual critic,read Jewish books by examining one passage from the Sefer ha-Hayyim written by Hayyim ben Bezalel (Cracow, 1593), which Buxtorf chose to integrate into his polemical critique of Jewish allegiance to the Talmud in this opening chapter of the Juden—Schul. Hayyim ben Bezalel, fated to remain second fiddle to his brother, the Maharal of Prague, had his own battles to fight against both Jews and Christians. In the selected passage, Hayyim ben Bezalel defends the Talmud as a unique …