The Patrons and Their Poor: Jewish Community and Public Charity in Early Modern Germany by Debra Kaplan

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Patrons and Their Poor: Jewish Community and Public Charity in Early Modern Germany by Debra Kaplan Adam Teller Debra Kaplan. The Patrons and Their Poor: Jewish Community and Public Charity in Early Modern Germany. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 239 pp. Debra Kaplan's new book, The Patrons and Their Poor: Jewish Community and Public Charity in Early Modern Germany, succeeds in shedding fascinating new light on the history of Jewish communal life in early modern Europe. Well written, well argued, and based on detailed research into a wide range of sources in four languages, this original and innovative study examines how the deeply established Jewish custom of charitable giving both reflected and shaped the social structures of Jewish life in the Holy Roman Empire from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. [End Page 420] Though much research has been done on what Jacob Katz termed "traditional Jewish society" in general, and its communal institutions in particular, this is the first full-length study to take an in-depth look at the practice of philanthropy in that setting. It does much more, however, than simply add further detail to the history of Jewish organizational life. Kaplan adopts a broad perspective that embraces not just the collection and disbursement of the funds themselves but also those who gave them and those who received them, as well as the socioeconomic networks, local, regional and transregional, in which this effort was undertaken. This opens a broad range of new and interesting perspectives on our understanding of early modern Ashkenazic Jewish society. In addition, by examining the developments in the Jewish communities against the background of those in the non-Jewish societies around them, Kaplan anchors the phenomena she discusses in a broad European context. In the first chapter, Kaplan introduces the reader to the three communities at the heart of the study, Frankfurt am Main, Worms, and Hamburg (or to be precise the triple community of Altona, Hamburg, and Wandsbeck), then turns her attention to the practice of charity itself. Though it had a long history in Jewish life, it took on new dimensions in the early modern period as a result not just of renewed demographic growth, but also—and perhaps more importantly—of the increased sophistication of communal administration that characterized the age. As the social margins of their communities grew wider, the philanthropic challenge facing Jewish leadership became ever more complex. No longer able to rely solely on the charitable impulses of the wealthy, it began to allocate funds from communal budgets to help cover the cost. This led to some overlap and confusion between the practice of charity—a religious imperative—and the payment of taxes—a hated burden. Kaplan explores this issue by expertly picking apart the different forms of charitable giving and charitable collecting adopted by the communities and then showing how they fitted together to create a single, though often unwieldy, philanthropic system. The next two chapters represent perhaps the book's most innovative discussion and most significant contribution to our understanding of early modern Ashkenazic society. The author focuses on the issue of those who received the charitable funds, the Jewish poor. Despite its size and significance in Jewish society, this group is hard to study due to the paucity of sources it has, by its very nature, left us. Though the Betteljuden (itinerant Jewish beggars) have been studied to some extent based on non-Jewish sources, Kaplan here provides the first systematic attempt to insert the poor into the history of Jewish communal life based on Jewish sources. She begins with the extremely important distinction between the residential and the itinerant poor. The former were the major recipients of communal charity and she provides a fascinating group portrait of them. She first distinguishes between those who held ḥezkat yishuv (formal membership in the community) and so enjoyed preferential status in the distribution of charity, and simple residents, whom she calls "the laboring poor," since their ability to live in the community, and so receive charity from it, was dependent on their being employed there. Then she surveys some of the main categories in each group, including widows, indigent pregnant women, young...