A Guide to Jewish Studies: Early Modern Period

"Early Modern Jewry boldly offers a new history of the early modern Jewish experience. From Krakow and Venice to Amsterdam and Smyrna, David Ruderman examines the historical and cultural factors unique to Jewish communities throughout Europe, and how these distinctions played out amidst the rest of society. Looking at how Jewish settlements in the early modern period were linked to one another in fascinating ways, he shows how Jews were communicating with each other and were more aware of their economic, social, and religious connections than ever before." - from the publisher

"Anna Foa's history of Jewish life in Europe from the fourteenth century through the nineteenth concentrates on the creative aspects of Jewish life and on continuities and correspondences among very different local Jewish communities."
"After describing the reaction of European Jews to the wave of anti-Semitism and the construction of the anti-Semitic stereotype that followed the Black Death, Foa discusses in the second chapter the historical relations between the Church and the Jews in terms of their peculiar symbiosis. In later chapters, she focuses on forms of Jewish identity that succeeded the various expulsions and exiles - expressed through internal society, family structures, collectives, and intercommunal relations - and on the life of specific communities, primarily in Spain and Italy and secondarily in northern Europe and England. In addition, she devotes an entire chapter to the structures of ghetto life." - from the publisher

"Seventeenth-century Amsterdam was a cosmopolitan 'carnival of nations': French Huguenots, North African merchants, Spanish Moriscos-and Iberian New Christians, formerly Jewish families forcibly converted to Catholicism, now fleeing the Inquisition and rediscovering their ancestral faith. This is the extraordinary tale of Amsterdam's prosperous Sephardi community during the Dutch Golden Age. Trading, writing, publishing, staging plays and being painted by Rembrandt, this Nação (Nation) of formerly wandering Jews not only settled but thrived, enjoying high status and unparalleled freedom. At a time when Dutch Catholics were repressed and Jews elsewhere were confined to the ghetto, this community dared to nurture the 'Hope of Israel', sowing the seeds of Zionism. Lipika Pelham charts the captivating history of Amsterdam's Jews, from their integral role in the Dutch economic miracle and the Enlightenment to a sombre coda in 1942, when the Nazis herded them into the 'Jewish Theatre' for deportation to the camps. But this was not the death of the resilient Nação -- Pelham also seeks out its descendants in present-day Amsterdam, offering poignant reflection on the meaning of nationhood, the Holocaust and what remains of Jerusalem on the Amstel." - from the publisher

"The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain is a detailed study of the events surrounding this infamous chapter in Spanish history. Based on hundreds of documents discovered, deciphered, and analyzed during decades of intensive archival research, this work focuses on the practical consequences of the expulsion both for those expelled and those remaining behind. It responds to basic questions such as: What became of property owned by Jewish individuals and communities? What became of outstanding debts between Jews and Christians? How was the edict of expulsion implemented? Who was in charge? How did they operate? What happened to those who converted to Christianity in order to remain in Spain or return to that country? The material summarized and analyzed in this study also sheds light on Jewish life in Spain preceding the expulsion. For example, Jews are shown to have been present in remote villages where they were not hitherto known to have lived, and documents detailing lawsuits between Christians related to debts left behind by Jews reveal much about business and financial relations between Jews and Christians. By focusing on the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in such detail - for example, by naming the magistrates who presided over the confiscation of Jewish communal property - Professor Beinart takes history out of the realm of abstraction and gives it concrete reality." - from the publisher

"Few events in the history of Spain have provoked as much controversy as the expulsion of the Jews in 1492. Conflicts within the Catholic Church, suspicions within the newly unified Spain, and the claims of Spanish merchants combined to make the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella intolerant and inquisitorial. Yet the roots of Spanish anti-Semitism went deeper. In this concise survey of the expulsion of the Sephardic Jews, Joseph Perez studies the evolution of the Jewish community in Spain from the time of the Visigoths to the reign of the Catholic kings. He explores the Jewish community's role in creating and sustaining the vibrant cultural, political, and economic world of medieval Spain, and how growing religious intolerance, a pervasive resentment of the "others," and a string of escalating encroachments culminated in expulsion." - from the publisher

"The dramatic one-thousand-year history of Jews in Spain comes to life in Exiles in Sepharad. Jeffrey Gorsky vividly relates this colorful period of Jewish history, from the era when Jewish culture was at its height in Muslim Spain to the horrors of the Inquisition and the Expulsion. Twenty percent of Jews today are descended from Sephardic Jews, who created significant works in religion, literature, science, and philosophy. They flourished under both Muslim and Christian rule, enjoying prosperity and power unsurpassed in Europe. Their cultural contributions include important poets; the great Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides; and Moses de Leon, author of the Zohar, the core text of the Kabbalah. But these Jews also endured considerable hardship. Fundamentalist Islamic tribes drove them from Muslim to Christian Spain. In 1391 thousands were killed and more than a third were forced to convert by anti-Jewish rioters. A century later the Spanish Inquisition began, accusing thousands of these converts of heresy. By the end of the fifteenth century Jews had been expelled from Spain and forcibly converted in Portugal and Navarre. After almost a millennium of harmonious existence, what had been the most populous and prosperous Jewish community in Europe ceased to exist on the Iberian Peninsula." - from the publisher

"Discusses the 1570 expulsion of Tuscan Jews by Cosimo de' Medici; however, rather than an expulsion from the country, it was a transfer to Firenze, where a ghetto was constructed. The expulsion did not reflect popular antisemitism, since the Jews lived in harmony with their Christian neighbors. The Medicis, including Cosimo's successor Francesco, had political as well as financial motives for ghettoizing the Jews, who became a politically controllable community within physical boundaries, parallel to a Christian parish. Without minimizing individual Jewish suffering at the transfer, stresses the establishment of a Jewish community, which had not existed in the region before. Urges that such a reinterpretation of the ghetto be considered in relation to other early modern state-building efforts. Notes the use of Catholic concepts and symbols by the Medicis in order to achieve political goals." - from the publisher

"An intimate portrait, based on newly discovered archival sources, of one of the most famous Jewish artists of the Italian Renaissance who, charged with a scandalous crime, rejected his faith and converted to Catholicism. In 1491 the renowned Jewish goldsmith Salomone da Sesso converted to Catholicism. Born in the mid-fifteenth century to a Jewish family in Florence, Salomone later settled in Ferrara, where he was regarded as a virtuoso artist whose exquisite jewelry and lavishly engraved swords were prized by Italy's ruling elite. But rumors circulated about Salomone's behavior, scandalizing the Jewish community, who turned him over to the civil authorities. Charged with sodomy, Salomone was sentenced to die but agreed to renounce Judaism to save his life. He was baptized, taking the name Ercole "de' Fedeli" ("One of the Faithful"). With the help of powerful patrons like Duchess Eleonora of Aragon and Duke Ercole d'Este, his namesake, Ercole lived as a practicing Catholic for three more decades. Drawing on newly discovered archival sources, Tamar Herzig traces the dramatic story of his life, half a century before ecclesiastical authorities made Jewish conversion a priority of the Catholic Church." - from the publisher

"This book focuses on central topics, such as the structure of the Jewish community, its organization and institutions and its relations with the state; the place Jews occupied in the Ottoman economy and their interactions with the general society; Jewish scholarship and its contribution to Ottoman and Turkish culture, science, and medicine. Written by leading scholars from Israel, Turkey, Europe, and the United States, these pieces present an unusually broad historical canvas that brings together different perspectives and viewpoints. The book is a major, original contribution to Jewish history as well as to Turkish, Balkan, and Middle East studies." - from the publisher

"Touted as the "Jerusalem of the Balkans," the Mediterranean port city of Salonica (Thessaloniki) was once home to the largest Sephardic Jewish community in the world. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the city's incorporation into Greece in 1912 provoked a major upheaval that compelled Salonica's Jews to reimagine their community and status as citizens of a nation-state. Jewish Salonica is the first book to tell the story of this tumultuous transition through the voices and perspectives of Salonican Jews as they forged a new place for themselves in Greek society." - from the publisher

"Morocco was once home to the largest Jewish community in the Arab world. Jews are also among Morocco's oldest inhabitants: the Jewish presence in Northwest Africa predates the rise of Islam in the seventh century and continues to the present day, combining elements of Berber (Amazigh), Arab, Sephardi, and European culture. In this setting, Muslim-Jewish relations have long been recognized as uncommonly intimate. For these reasons alone--and many more besides--the history of Morocco simply cannot be told without the history of its Jews. In Jewish Morocco, Emily Gottreich examines the history of Jews in Morocco from the pre-Islamic period to postcolonial times, drawing on newly acquired evidence from archival materials in Rabat. The book traces the development of five thematic "pillars" of Moroccan identity: Malikism (the dominant school of Islamic jurisprudence), Amazighity ("Berber" identity), Sharifism (ideology of genealogical privilege), Europeanization, and Arabness. But the book is unique in doing so from the original perspective of the Jewish historical experience. Fitting into a growing body of scholarship that consciously strives to integrate Jewish and Middle Eastern studies, this book is as much a history of Jews of Morocco as a history of Morocco from the point of view of its Jews. Emily Gottreich also places pressing issues in contemporary Moroccan society into their historical, and in their Jewish, contexts." - from the publisher