Tradition and transformation in eighteenth-century Europe: Jewish integration in comparative perspective

Abstract

This issue of Jewish History explores Jewish experiences of integration in eighteenth-century Europe, with a specific focus on Italy, France, Germany, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Through different approaches, which include social and legal history, along with cultural and intellectual analysis, our contributors investigate the various ways that Jewish societies negotiated the interplay between gradual modernization and the maintenance of traditional networks and communal institutions. The investigations include issues of acculturation and legal integration, Jewish economic utility (and its recognition on the part of both Jews and non-Jews), social proximity, religious and lay leadership, class, and gender. The goal is to frame the eighteenth century as a defining age for European Jewry, one that was, to paraphrase Nicholas Terpstra, simultaneously transformative and reactionary, egalitarian and elitist, [a period] of resistance and of acculturation.1 When analyzing Jewish cultural innovations and the intensity of Jewish contacts with the outside world, contemporary scholars disagree on whether to locate the beginning of modernity in the seventeenth or the eighteenth century.2 Recent historiographical works suggest that Jewish modernization was a process rooted in seventeenth-century cultural and social developments, best understood on the basis of prevailing trends during the Ancien Regime? According to this view, modern Jewry was shaped by a constellation of processes, to quote Moshe Rosman's apt definition, in which political, socio-cultural, and economic integration were only partial aspects. Additional factors included demographic growth and migrations, nationalism, legal emancipation, secularization, and the erosion of traditional forms of communal and religious authority, all of which led to structural reorganization in modern Jewish communities.4 It is undeniable that many of these developments began no later than the seventeenth century.5