Early Modern Jewish Community Research Articles

Privacy in Jewish Sources

The article introduces key concepts related to research into the historical notions of privacy, provides a brief historiographical overview, and discusses methodological tools that allow the researcher to examine privacy in primary sources. The second part discusses examples of the Jewish lived experience in the early modern period that were not only shaped by Jewish legal discourses but by the specific living conditions of an ethno-religious minority. The article offers some suggestions as to how privacy could have been understood in early modern Jewish communities and how individuals may have negotiated it in regards to the concepts of home, intimacy, gender, and notions of secrecy.

Sacred Sororities: Devotion and Death in Early Modern Jewish Communities

Sacred Sororities: Devotion and Death in Early Modern Jewish Communities

Lost in Translation, Found in Transliteration: Books, Censorship, and the Evolution of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews' Congregation of London as a Linguistic Community, 1663–1810 by Alex Kerner

Reviewed by: Lost in Translation, Found in Transliteration: Books, Censorship, and the Evolution of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews' Congregation of London as a Linguistic Community, 1663–1810 by Alex Kerner David Sclar Alex Kerner . Lost in Translation, Found in Transliteration: Books, Censorship, and the Evolution of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews' Congregation of London as a Linguistic Community, 1663–1810 . Leiden : Brill , 2018 . 283 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009420000562 Early modern Jewish communities formed and operated in complex ways. Over centuries of frequent and extensive migration, Jews lived in close proximity with other Jews, established rules of conduct, shared resources, and retained common heritages, memories, and commitments. Yet, spread through disparate cultural contexts, Jewish rituals, traditions, societies, experience, and thought varied greatly. In recent years, scholars have toiled to uncover communal self-fashioning, the function of subcommunities, and the nature of pan-Jewish identity. Alex Kerner's book on the Western Sephardic community of London is a welcome contribution to this broad objective of understanding Jewish communal life in the early modern period. Kerner's innovation is to bring theories of language and cultural translation, typified by Peter Burke's work on early modern Europe, to the Sephardic Jews of London (Shaʿar Hashamayim Congregation). Using archival documents and published pamphlets, Kerner shows how lay leadership (or, the Mahamad) oversaw "written communications (books, pamphlets, administration) and the languages used by the community institutions and members" in a bid to shape and control communal cohesion (13). To Kerner, the wardens of the community, fearing Christian perception and vilification of Jews, sought to anticipate and eliminate potential threats emanating from within. Tying this to earlier trends of confessionalization, Kerner argues that language policies were as strong a force on the community as religion or ethnicity. Kerner divides the book into three parts, each of which includes an introduction. Part 1 details the initial 1664 censorship article, which accompanied the birth of the community, and presents its evolution deep into the nineteenth century. Part 2 discusses various ways in which language played a factor in communal identity and control, particularly in ritual, administration, and publication. Part 3, taking up more than half the book, manifests these theoretical concerns in a chronological narrative of Sephardic publishing and publication attempts in London through the early nineteenth century. In parts 1 and 2, Kerner offers a deep analysis of the censorship bylaw, showing parallels with English Quakers and presenting it as a response to a slew of conversionary tracts published by apostate Ashkenazic Jews in the seventeenth century. He also articulates the two-century evolution of Shaʿar Hashamayim's publication policy: members of the community were banned from engaging in print activity (printing, editing, translating, publishing) without express permission of the Mahamad; initial threats of ḥerem (excommunication) were dropped by 1677 as communal involvement proved increasingly voluntary; frightening sacral punishments gave way to monetary fines by 1733; the 1781 protocols, the first to appear in print, incorporated a rationale for publishing prohibitions; and a copy of the 1784 version included a handwritten English translation alongside the printed Spanish, indicating linguistic shifts. In addition to [End Page 190] demonstrating the correlation between a shrinking community and a weakening Mahamad, Kerner shows how the bylaw controlling local Jewish publication amalgamated Dutch communal policies, Iberian inquisitional cultural heritage, and English censorship policies. In part 3, Kerner analyzes publishing permissions and rejections found in the archives of Shaʿar Hashamayim and offers a bibliographic history of publications issued by English Jews in the eighteenth century. He shows how Hebrew and Spanish, representing the community's dual heritage, were rarely deemed problematic, while English publication almost never received approval. For example, the Mahamad refused the request of Moseh Nieto, son and brother of successive chief rabbis, to publish his English translation of the Hebrew prayer book in 1734, but granted a license for his Spanish translation ( Livro de rezas ). According to Kerner, the Mahamad displayed a leniency toward Spanish, because of the unlikelihood that it "could be used against the interests of the community" (64). Though that assertion raises questions about the Sephardic Diaspora more broadly (Did fear of retribution prevent Portuguese Jews in Amsterdam or Hamburg from publishing...

Captives or crooks? Pirates, impostors, and Jewish communities in the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire

In the present article, based on Ottoman and Hebrew documents, we focus on people who made up fictitious stories of captivity in order to gain a living, as well as on authorities or local Jewish communities that detected and coped with those frauds in the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire. In detecting acts of fraud, a novel method adopted by Jewish communities during the period under study was printed letters that were not available to all segments of society. Considering the vigilance of Jewish communities to root out the ploys used by their co-religionists to acquire money through deceitful means, we suggest that those communities formulated some regulations in order to validate authenticity and differentiate between the true and the fake. We argue that an efficient web of networks among early modern Jewish communities in the Mediterranean and the use of the printing press played a crucial role in certifying the truthfulness of a document or a person.

Innerjüdische Streitigkeiten vor christlichen Gerichten

Norms and regulations of medieval and early modern Jewish communities forbade Jews from bringing other Jews to trial in front of Christian courts. In spite of this prohibition there were several cases, in which Jews sued other Jews in courts of Christian authorities. One example is a dispute between the Jewish intercessor, Jakob Süßmann , and the Jewish community of Frankfurt , which was processed before the Frankfurt council. The said case, which started as a local affair took a surprising course and affected, in the end, whole Jewish communities in the Holy Roman Empire. Through this case, the essay shows that not only the infraction of, but also compliance with the norms could lead to unexpected complications. In addition, the essay argues that the examination of such court cases would reveal valuable information about Jewish efforts of political organization.

Stefanie B. Siegmund, The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence. The Construction of an Early Modern Jewish Community, ser. Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), XXIV + 589 pp.

Stefanie B. Siegmund, The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence. The Construction of an Early Modern Jewish Community, ser. Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), XXIV + 589 pp.

The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence: The Construction of an Early Modern Jewish Community (review)

Reviewed by: The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence: The Construction of an Early Modern Jewish Community James Amelang The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence: The Construction of an Early Modern Jewish Community, by Stefanie B. Siegmund. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. 624 pp. $70.00. In September 1570 the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo I de’ Medici, gave the slightly more than 700 Jews living under his rule a choice: go into exile or take up residence in Florence in a quarter specifically designated as theirs. Such “ghettoization” did not lack for precedents. The city of Venice had famously subjected its Jews to a similar residential concentration in 1516, while recent papal policy had wavered back and forth between the creation of permanent ghettoes (such as Rome’s, in 1555) and expulsions (as in Bologna in 1569). But the Tuscan process differed from that of its neighbors in several significant ways. Pretext, purpose, and method turned out to have minds of their own. Pressure from the Church influenced all three aspects. After all, this measure followed hard on the heels of the conclusion in 1563 of the Council of Trent, one of whose objectives was closer supervision of the faithful through more effective territorial organization. Reform aimed at securing what John Bossy has referred to as “parochial conformity” rendered ever more visible the anomaly of the presence of Jews within a militantly confessional polity. Ghettoization may thus be read as a means of resolving this contradiction by transferring Jews from Christian space to a quasi-parochial place of their own. Nevertheless, Stefanie Siegmund takes pains to emphasize that the main impetus behind the creation of the Florentine ghetto did not derive from Rome. Rather, it was a by-product of Cosimo’s program for modernizing the Tuscan state. Ghettoization issued from and contributed to an unprecedented bureaucratic interest in religious, social, and political space. At the same time it represented merely one of the many mechanisms by which the Grand Duke consolidated his power over all his subjects, Jewish as well as Christian. Seen in the long run of relations between Catholics and Jews, it can be read as a sort of intermediate step, one that lingered between the expulsion that was the preferred [End Page 181] measure of the Counter-Reformation Church, and the pragmatic policy of mercantilist toleration by lay rulers that was beginning to loom larger as an option throughout sixteenth-century Europe. The consequences for Tuscany’s Jews were far-reaching. Perhaps the one that made deepest inroads—and the portion of the book’s argument that departs most from accepted historical opinion—involves the crucial question of collective identity and its articulation. Medieval and early modern Jewish historiography has long linked the settlement of Jews with the near-universal emergence and persistence of “traditional” institutions and practices of spiritual and communal self-government. The Tuscan case Siegmund analyzes, however, suggests an alternative trajectory. The (admittedly few) Jews living in the region prior to 1570 did not constitute a community, if one identifies the latter with the presence of regulatory institutions and practices, rabbinical leadership, voluntary associations, and the like. Rather, community in this more formal sense emerged as a result of the state’s forcing its Jewish population to take on these responsibilities as part and parcel of the residential concentration it decreed. In the end, a community originally created for administrative purposes did not take long to become one in fact. By the close of the sixteenth century a new, composite elite had replaced the older generation of notables whose members had negotiated their privileges with the ruler on an individual, ad hoc basis. At the same time, the ghetto’s inhabitants took steps to erect many of the institutions associated with “traditional” Jewish communities. Hence the appearance of a communal council, hired rabbis, a burial society and other confraternities, a school, and a slaughterhouse and ritual bath. All these would become central nodes in a quarter that, after being enlarged in the seventeenth century, was finally demolished in 1868, when concern for civic reputation led local leaders to replace its run-down buildings with the huge Piazza della Repubblica...

Stefanie B. Siegmund. The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence: The Construction of an Early Modern Jewish Community. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. xxiv, 624 pp.

Stefanie B. Siegmund. The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence: The Construction of an Early Modern Jewish Community. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. xxiv, 624 pp.

Thinking with Shedim: What Can We Learn From the »Mayse fun Vorms«?

An essential question to the study of early modern Yiddish literature is how our understanding of its particular genres an understanding not solely literary, but generally conceptualized in literary terms may help us to understand the early modern Jewish community. Such a genrebased approach can suggest how literary readings of a narrative text readings that attend to ambiguities, unresolved contradictions, extrusive symbols, and the like also yield what may be called epistemological evidence. That is, they provide the opportunity to reassess audiences' capacities as textual interpreters, which may in turn revise traditional conceptualizations of the audiences' literary sophistication, dissociating it from direct linkage to their linguistic and textual knowledge, the traditional markers of cognitive differentiation in historical approaches to the early modern Jewish community. Such an approach may also suggest how vernacular narrative texts written in and possessing the conventions of particular genres allow us a nuanced view of social norms and transgressions which complement and complicate our scholarly understanding of early modern Jewish society, a view whose nuance derives in part from the change in social positioning occasioned by the switch to the vernacular.

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The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence: The Construction of an Early Modern Jewish Community (review)

The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence: The Construction of an Early Modern Jewish Community. By Stephanie B. Siegmund. [Stanford Series in Jewish History and Culture.] (Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2005. Pp. xxvi, 624. $70.00.) Stephanie Siegmund's book is aU about how to think about the ghetto. TraditionaUy, the ghetto is the arch-symbol of the Jewish policy of militant Counter-Reformation Catholicism. A reinvigorated Church instituted a new and tougher policy on Jews in Italy, who were either expeUed or else stripped of many rights and privileges and confined to ghettoes. Indeed, the physical image of the ghetto, precisely because of its physical-spatial nature, served as the visible representation of the mix of restrictions and disabilities to which Jews were now subject, as weU as a symbol of the fear and loathing in which they were now formaUy and officiaUy held. This notion of the ghetto is a staple of Early-Modern Jewish historiography. It is a model with which Siegmund takes issue. She argues that one cannot speak of an undifferentiated Italian ghetto. WhUe ghettoes were in fact created in almost ali the communities where Jews were permitted to reside, they did not come into being in the same way, and their effects upon the local Jewish communities were not identical. Indeed, in the case of Florence, to which her study is devoted, the creation of the ghetto caused the creation of the Jewish community, both in the sense of bringing together disparate Jews living in Florence who had lived lives basicaliy separate from one another and often from Jewish practice, as weU as in the sense of a formal kehilah, which was formed by the state-ordered concentration of the seven hundred or so Jews living in Tuscany into a ghetto constructed by the state, and by the statesponsored formation of organs of seli-goverment. The Early-Modern kehilah being an organization dedicated, among other things, to promoting and even coercing religious praxis and halakhic conformity, it was a supreme irony that the Medici Christian state was responsible for pushing its Jews to live orthodox Jewish lifestyles. Or perhaps it was not ironic at ali, when one considers, as Siegmund does, the mix of factors that led to the decision of the Tuscan government to expel its relatively smali number of Jews from their places of residence throughout the (soon to be) Grand Duchy and to concentrate them in a ghetto in Florence in 1570-71. Traditional historiography has concerned itseE with the question of why it was that Cosimo I, the famous ruler of Florence who created both the Tuscan state and its feared and efficient administrative machinery, changed his longstanding pragmatic and even benevolent policy toward Jews in Tuscany in the late 1560's, when he began to conform to Papal policy and compelled the Jews to wear a segno (a yellow o on the hat) and move into a ghetto. …

The Medici state and the ghetto of Florence: the construction of an early modern Jewish community

The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence is a work about Italian Jews, Christians, and the institutions and policies that organized their relationship. It sets the 1570 decision of the Medici government to ghettoize the Jews of Tuscany in the context of early modern statecraft and in the climate of the Catholic (or Counter-) Reformation. While readers have had access to studies of the ghettos of Rome and Venice, this is the first study of the Jews of Tuscany available in English, and the first and only study of the Florentine ghetto based on sustained archival research. The story of the forced ghettoization of Tuscan Jews allows the author to explore the spatialization of power, the construction of Jewish community, and the reorganization of gender roles, leading to three broad arguments of great significance to readers interested in Italian history, Jewish history, urban history, and the history of women.