The Little Ice Age and the Jews: Environmental History and the Mercurial Nature of Jewish– Christian Relations in Early Modern Germany

Abstract

Scholars have frequently portrayed early modern German Jewish history as underresearched and fragmentary, with an underdeveloped pool of historical sources. Even the very productive historian Stefan Rohrbacher, for example, has rued that “[t]he early modern period numbers among the till now very little researched epochs in the history of the Jews in Germany. It has recently received increased attention from historians, however, this interest is distributed very unevenly in the various areas and aspects of Jewish life.”