Building the Past: Historical Writing on the Jews of the Bohemian Crown Lands in the Early Modern Period

Abstract

Abstract: Scholarship on the history of Jews in the early modern period, especially European Jewry, has flourished in recent years, clearly demonstrating that the period from c.1500 to c.1750 should be seen as distinct from both medieval and modern Jewish history. Mobility of people and information, changing relationships among rabbinic leaders and communal organizations, and the evolving nature of Jewish identity are among the characteristics that have been noted as unique to this period. This article surveys how historical scholarship related to Bohemian Jewry fits in that context, and suggests directions for moving that scholarship forward. Today’s historiography has grown from foundations laid in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Wissenschaft des Judentums framework, by way of the establishment of the Jewish Museum in Prague and scholarly activities undertaken there, through the difficult years of World War II and Communist rule. Building on that tradition, the strengths of current historical writing on early modern Bohemian Jewry include material and print culture. Room remains for the development of broader, more synthetic analyses that link this regional history more closely with its central European and Jewish early modern surroundings. More research on specific areas such as Bohemian Jewish history through the lens of gender analysis, wide-ranging social history, and more, together with improved integration with broader historiographical trends, would both shed light on historical processes in the Bohemian Lands and improve understanding of early modern Jewish history as a whole.