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Shulamit and Margarete takes a microhistorical look at a small village on the border of Germany and France in the eighteenth century. Drawing on the rich source material of the village, it casts a searching light on the boundaries created by language, states, religions, cultures, sex, and gender. By writing the history of the village from multiple perspectives, the author is able to uncover fascinating artefacts of a cultural contact between Christians and Jews, and to gain insights into the agency and experiences of women in rural society. The book is enhanced by a variety of sources and illustrations relating to Jewish history, such as the last will of Abraham Levy and the previously unknown portraits of Fromette Levy and Bernard Lipmann.
The first comprehensive history of how Jews became citizens in the modern world For all their unquestionable importance, the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel now loom so large in modern Jewish history that we have mostly lost sight of the fact that they are only part of—and indeed reactions to—the central event of that history: emancipation. In this book, David Sorkin seeks to reorient Jewish history by offering the first comprehensive account in any language of the process by which Jews became citizens with civil and political rights in the modern world. Ranging from the mid-sixteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first, Jewish Emancipation tells the ongoing st...
The 2001 yearbook aims to fill a gap that has become more and more conspicuous among the wealth of scholarly periodicals in the field of Jewish Studies. It covers Jewish Culture in its broadest sense, i.e. encompassing various academic disciplines - literature, languages and linguistics, philosophy, art, sociology, politics and history - and reflects binary oppositions such as religious and secular, high and low, written and oral, male and female culture.
Religious conversion - a shift in membership from one community of faith to another - can take diverse forms in radically different circumstances. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, conversion can be protracted or sudden, voluntary or coerced, small-scale or large. It may be the result of active missionary efforts, instrumental decisions, or intellectual or spiritual attraction to a different doctrine and practices. In order to investigate these multiple meanings, and how they may differ across time and space, this collection ranges far and wide across medieval and early modern Europe and beyond. From early Christian pilgrims to fifteenth-century Ethiopia; from the Islamisation of the...
In the aftermath of the Shoah and the ostensible triumph of nationalism, it became common in historiography to relegate Jews to the position of the “eternal other” in a series of binaries: Christian/Jewish, Gentile/Jewish, European/Jewish, non-Jewish/Jewish, and so forth. For the longest time, these binaries remained characteristic of Jewish historiography, including in the Central European context. Assuming instead, as the more recent approaches in Habsburg studies do, that pluriculturalism was the basis of common experience in formerly Habsburg Central Europe, and accepting that no single “majority culture” existed, but rather hegemonies were imposed in certain contexts, then the o...
The major cultural, ideological, and social changes that have occurred in Europe in the past century have generated widespread reassessment of European history in terms of its presuppositions, its methodologies, its directions, its emphases, and its scope. This timely volume looks at the Jewish past in the spirit of this reassessment. It points to a new framework for the study of Jewish history and helps to contextualize it within the mainstream of historical scholarship.
Visualizing and Exhibiting Jewish Space and History includes a series of essays in its symposium section that treat the dramatic development of the visual arts in Jewish life from the beginning of the 20th century, focusing on the proliferation of Jewish museums after the Holocaust.
The story of one of the largest collections of Jewish books, and the man who used his collection to cultivate power, prestige, and political influence David Oppenheim (1664–1736), chief rabbi of Prague in the early eighteenth century, built an unparalleled collection of Jewish books, all of which have survived and are housed in the Bodleian Library of Oxford. His remarkable collection testifies to the myriad connections Jews maintained with each other across political borders. Oppenheim’s world reached the great courts of European nobility, and his family ties brought him into networks of power, prestige, and opportunity that extended from Amsterdam to the Ottoman Empire. His impressive library functioned as a unique source of personal authority that gained him fame throughout Jewish society and beyond. His story brings together culture, commerce, and politics, all filtered through this extraordinary collection. Based on the careful reconstruction of an archive that is still visited by scholars today, Joshua Teplitsky’s book offers a window into the social life of books in early modern Europe.
The fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries were truly an Age of Secrecy in Europe, when arcane knowledge was widely believed to be positive knowledge which extended into all areas of daily life. So asserts Daniel Jütte in this engrossing, vivid, and award-winning work. He maintains that the widespread acceptance and even reverence for this “economy of secrets” in premodern Europe created a highly complex and sometimes perilous space for mutual contact between Jews and Christians. Surveying the interactions between the two religious groups in a wide array of secret sciences and practices, the author relates true stories of colorful “professors of secrets” and clandestine encounters. In the process Jütte examines how our current notion of secrecy is radically different in this era of WikiLeaks, Snowden, etc., as opposed to centuries earlier when the truest, most important knowledge was generally considered to be secret by definition.
A comprehensive account of Jewish-Gentile relations in central Europe from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century.