5
Matt Goldish
Jewish history has been an extremely active field in recent years. While a quick look at book catalogues might lead one to think most of this productivity is connected with the Holocaust, there have in fact been numerous excellent studies on the early modern period. These have expanded the range of disciplines and approaches familiar from traditional Jewish historiography, bringing Jewish history more closely into the larger context of its various environments. This survey will begin by mentioning some overall trends in the field, then move on to a group of the more active subfields, focusing primarily on materials in English and on books, unless journal articles or book chapters are particularly relevant.
One of the strongest new directions in the past few decades of Jewish historical research has been toward social history. Jacob Katz of Hebrew University and Salo Baron of Columbia University were pioneers who greatly expanded the interest and tool chest of historians working in this area.1 While a number of scholars (especially Robert Bonfil and Kenneth Stow, both working on Italy) have headed toward a consciously mentalité approach, many more have begun to examine the rhythms and assumptions of everyday life for early modern Jews.2 The Jews’ lack of a homeland with permanent archives makes the kind of social history done by historians of European Christian communities extremely difficult. Some of the slack created by a lack of baptismal and death records or regular court proceedings can be made up through judicious use of responsa collections (queries on Jewish law sent to rabbis, along with their responses), sermons, inquisitional files, and personal documents.
Closely related to the rise in social history is a corresponding interest in the social contexts of religious and intellectual history. Whereas older generations of Jewish historians were often content to note the development of, say, a conflict between rabbis over a questionable divorce or ritual bath, basing their work solely on legal documents, the new generation of historians will look for the contextual human elements involved. Often this type of study includes comparison and contrast with attitudes in the surrounding majority culture, based on a good knowledge of the literature in those fields.
This nuanced analysis of interactions between Jews and non-Jews is another of the truly revolutionary changes in recent historiography. Older literature often focused on oversimplified relationship models, particularly the “lachrymose” model made famous by Baron, according to which Jewish history is a litany of suffering at gentile hands, and what might be styled the “sanguine” model cultivated by Cecil Roth, according to which happy coexistence or convivencia was the norm in certain settings. While these outlooks have by no means disappeared, the prevalent scholarly approach today is to examine cases individually, study the lives and backgrounds of the specific people involved, and try to determine motivations that go beyond an artless dichotomy between “anti-Semitism” and “philo-Semitism.” Some of the most interesting work has been done on settings or fields in which Jews and non-Jews interacted. These include physical spaces, such as the printing house, the alchemical laboratory, sometimes the classroom, and occasionally even the bedroom. They also include areas of mutual interest in which relations were mainly literary: biblical exegesis, messianic expectations, science, and commercial enterprises.
In the same way that European history in general has become more interdisciplinary in the past generation, so has the historiography of the Jews. Some scholars, most notably Sergio della Pergola, have focused on demographic statistics and other numerical methods. Moshe Idel and others have introduced anthropological techniques such as models to historical situations involving Jews. Postmodernist analysis borrowed from literature and cultural studies has its adherents in this field. Some very interesting work has been done by historians studying Jews from an economic perspective. In a few cases, edited volumes or journals have undertaken the analysis of one episode or group by scholars of various disciplines.3
Some other trends in historiography of the Jews are notable as well. There is a distinct turn toward focus on primary documents at all levels of research. The increasing crossover between historic studies of the Jews and their majority neighbors has made the publishing and translating of primary document collections an especially useful development. Another trend has been toward focusing on formerly marginalized groups in Jewish society. This includes women, of course, but also poor people, communities in commonly overlooked regions, individuals straddling the boundaries between Judaism and Christianity or Islam, homosexuals, and slaves. Finally, like many other historians, scholars of early modern Jewish history have begun to think in terms of a Mediterranean world and an Atlantic world, rather than in continental or political divisions.4 Sometimes the breakdown is even more general: the Sephardi diaspora, the lands of Ashkenaz, or Jewish maritime networks, for example.
One study stands alone in its sweeping survey of early modern Jewish history in the West. That is Jonathan Israel’s European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550–1750, which has gone through three editions since its original appearance in 1985.5 Israel commands a huge range of material, composed in a number of languages and genres, which he brings together to present an overview of Jewish settlement, culture, economics, self-government, religion, and relations with the Christian majority. European Jewry is the most appropriate starting point for anyone first approaching the Jewish presence in western and central Europe during the early modern period. While the book focuses on the larger developments of Jewish fate and does not generally probe the lived experience of individual Jews, it is an indispensable work.
The study of Jewish mysticism and messianism has been tremendously active in recent decades. While Gershom Scholem, who essentially established this field as an academic discipline, apparently felt he had done most of what there was to do, it turns out that his work was only the beginning.6 His famous thesis concerning early modern Jewish kabbalah (mystical philosophy and practice) was that the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 caused a massive shift in Jewish thinking, placing the experience of exile and hopes for redemption at the center. Rationalism was largely cast aside as a wave of messianic pretenders appeared in the wake of the expulsion. When these failed, the impulse shifted to the speculative plane and reappeared in the kabbalah of Rabbi Isaac Luria and his school in Safed in the late sixteenth century, then jumped back to an active mode with the messianic movement of Shabbatai Zvi in the seventeenth century.
Scholem’s students, such as Joseph Dan and Isaiah Tishby, have continued this historical approach. Others have struck out in different directions. Zvi Werblowsky published an excellent English account of the mystical life of Rabbi Joseph Karo, the greatest Jewish legal scholar of the age, whose life spanned the exile from Spain through the Safed experience.7 Karo was one of several early modern rabbis to be visited by a maggid, or mentoring spirit, a topic explored by Jeffrey H. Chajes.8 Elliot Wolfson has introduced a very strong gender component into mystical studies, in several English volumes dealing partially with the early modern period.9 Lawrence Fine places a greater emphasis on the role of mystical practice and personality in the Safed circle.10 Moshe Idel and Yehuda Liebes question many of Scholem’s assumptions about the role of the Spanish expulsion and his emphasis on exile and redemption in early modern Jewish thought.11 Matt Goldish has argued against the centrality of mystical theology in the Sabbatean movement.12 Several good collections of essays and sources in English dealing with all this material are available.13 A very strong Christian interest in kabbalah arose in the late fifteenth century and lasted for hundreds of years, which will be discussed below in the context of Christian Hebraism.
Just as European historiography in recent decades has traced the development of occult and magical mentalities into early science, historians of the Jews have been similarly exploring Jewish engagement with scientific thought in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries in relationship to philosophy and mysticism. David Gans, a rabbi who spent time with Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler and wrote extensively about astronomy in the early sixteenth century, has been the subject of two major studies.14 David Ruderman’s research on Jews and early modern science has opened up the field as a major topic of discussion and laid the groundwork for future research. He has written both a synthetic study of the subject and monographs on individual Jews engaged in scientific study.15 Raphael Patai’s book on Jews and alchemy deals extensively with the early modern period.16 A new journal on Jews and the sciences, Aleph, often features papers on early modern topics as well. The general conclusion of all these studies is that early modern Jews were engaged with science to the degree that they were able, but being barred from most universities (Padua and, later, Leiden were limited exceptions), they did not have opportunities to participate in much pathbreaking work. Ruderman has emphasized that there was little or no religious objection to these studies in the Jewish world.
Regional studies have been quite active, with those concerning early modern Poland, Italy, and Germany especially noticeable. Jews first arrived in Poland in significant numbers at the beginning of the early modern period; during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Poland became the largest Jewish population center in the world. Poland was also the site of major Jewish religious upheavals in the eighteenth century, namely, Frankism (a radical messianic sect vaguely connected with earlier Sabbateanism), and Hasidism (a popular mystical and charismatic sect still very much alive today). Polish Jewry is the exclusive subject of the journals Polin and Gal-ed (the latter in Hebrew with English summaries). Recent studies have emphasized the experiences of ordinary Jews in Polish towns and villages, on the one hand, and of Polish rabbinic scholars, on the other. Some of the most innovative work has been done in an effort to understand the historical origins of the legendary early Hasidic leaders. This pursuit, in which Moshe Rosman excels, takes advantage of local Polish archives and other Polish sources little used by earlier historians of the Jews.17
Scholarship on Italian Jewry also has its own journals. Italia, published in Israel, usually contains articles in Hebrew, English, and Italian, many of them focusing on the early modern period. La Rassegna Mensile de Israel is a more popular journal containing a mixture of scholarly and popular material. A series of volumes called Italia Judaica contains a lot of early modern material. Kenneth Stow’s work on the Jews of sixteenth-century Rome, using notarial archive material, has shown previously little-known facets of daily life in the ghetto.18 Other important recent studies focus on the Jews in early modern Florence and Venice, among other places.19 Robert Bonfil has written about both the Renaissance rabbinate in Italy, and the overall experience of Italian Jewry in the Renaissance period. Bonfil attempts to correct perspectives from an earlier generation of scholarship that tended to oversimplify the attitudes of Jews toward their complex situation around the time walled ghettos began to appear in 1516.20 Many other specialized studies on early modern Italian Jewry and specific individuals within it have also been published in recent years.21 A handy place to begin is with Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, edited by Ruderman.22 The essays in this volume reflect the recent scholarly focus on Jewish intellectual life and popular culture in Italy.
Relations between Jews and Christians in early modern Germany and Italy, particularly those negative relationships that resulted in accusations of ritual murder and host desecration, have received extensive treatment. Ronnie Po-chia Hsia has examined the Trent ritual murder case in depth, as well as explaining the religious and political motivations of blood libels throughout the period. Miri Rubin presents a study of the formal tropes and contexts in which these accusations appeared and what they reveal about the accusers. These works share a common focus on the precise background of malfeasance accusations against Jews within Christian society.23 Several other recent works about relations between Jews and Christians in early modern Germany present both benign and sinister aspects of their interactions. Some of this writing reflects a sort of historical response to the thesis of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, who famously claimed that Germany had a long legacy of particularly violent anti-Semitism for centuries before the Holocaust.24 The volumes of the series Germania Judaica are now reaching the early modern period as well, and will be an invaluable resource.
Jewish life in Spain and the expulsion in 1492 continue to be an enormous topic of research. While the standard work on the centuries leading up to the expulsion remains Yitzhak Baer’s two-volume History of the Jews in Christian Spain (re-released in 1992), a great deal has been added since Baer first appeared.25 Benzion Netanyahu has studied the Jewish responses to expulsion and conversion, and the developments leading up to the establishment of the Inquisition and the expulsion from the Spanish perspective.26 Mark Meyerson’s Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain claims that, contrary to the views of Baer and others, Spanish Jewry actually experienced a cultural flowering in the fifteenth century.27 Norman Roth examines the phenomenon of conversos (converted Jews) in Spain from before the expulsion, their relationship with the Inquisition, and the decision to expel the Jews.28 Renée Levine Melammed treats the role of women in converso society.29 A spate of edited works, many connected to the five hundredth anniversary of the expulsion, deal with the expulsion decree, the fate of Jews in exile from Spain, and the problem of the conversos.30
The study of Sephardic (Spanish, or Iberian) Jewry after the expulsion has exploded in recent years. While much of this material deals with the Ottoman Empire and North Africa, studies of the western Sephardi Diaspora are relevant to the topic of early modern Europe. A very interesting biography of the fabulously wealthy Portuguese conversa, Dona Gracia Nasi, featuring her travels around Europe and the Mediterranean, was published recently by the journalist Andrée Aelion Brooks. Equally interesting, if somewhat more dry in style, is Mercedes Garcia-Arenal’s and Gerard Wiegers’ biography of Samuel Pallache, a Moroccan Jew who carried on many intrigues and adventures in Europe.31
About a century after the expulsion, communities of escaped conversos had formed in several western European cities that banned Jews. Many of these conversos were secret Judaizers, and several of them were wealthy merchants. Their secret Jewish lives inevitably became known to their Christian neighbors. Some cities’ leaders allowed economic motives (the utility of Sephardi merchants) to triumph over religious bias and permitted these people to remain as Jews. This was the genesis of the western Sephardi Diaspora, whose centers were in Amsterdam, London, Hamburg, Venice, Livorno, Bayonne, and Bordeaux. Satellite communities of former conversos also appeared in Barbados, Goa, Recife, and other locations. The real differentiation of Western Sephardic communities from those in the East, and the analysis of their differences, has largely been the work of Yosef Kaplan, whose biography of Isaac Orobio de Castro traces the complex career of this important converso intellectual. Kaplan’s subsequent work has laid the conceptual groundwork for specialized studies in the western Sephardi Diaspora.32 An equally absorbing biography by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi follows the life of Isaac Cardoso, another complicated converso personality, who ended up in Livorno.33 Several other important works on the western Sephardim, especially those of Amsterdam, have enriched this field considerably. Miriam Bodian’s survey of the Amsterdam Portuguese Jewish community, in particular, has been very popular in modern Jewish history courses.34 David Katz focuses on the English perspective concerning the converso group in London and the readmission of Jews to England.35 Several important works on Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel of Amsterdam, the learned Jew who begged Cromwell to accept Jewish settlement in England, have also been published in recent years. They deal with his mystical views and correspondence with Christians, as well as his mission to Cromwell.36
A sort of subgenre has developed in the study of Amsterdam Sephardim, focused on the most famous scion of that community, Barukh d’Espinosa, or Benedict Spinoza. Scholarship has slowly come around to the realization that Spinoza’s background in the Jewish world is critical to understanding his philosophy. Harry Austryn Wolfson and Leo Strauss touched on this issue, but the new Spinoza biography by Steven Nadler brings it to the fore. Richard H. Popkin, Yirmiyahu Yovel, Stephen Smith, and others also focus on the Jewish element in Spinoza’s thought.37
Spinoza is the key figure in Jonathan Israel’s massive Radical Enlightenment, which is just one of a number of recent works that stress the role of Jewish ideas in early Enlightenment thought. Popkin wrote a group of essays on topics such as the use of Jewish anti-Christian arguments by Enlightenment authors, the adoption of a position on the boundary between Judaism and Christianity by members of both faiths, and attempts by early Enlighteners to “reform” Judaism. Israel’s student, Adam Sutcliffe, crafted a detailed study of Enlightenment attitudes toward Jews and Judaism that suggests that Jews were an important subject for Enlightenment ideologues, but a trying one as well, because the “Jewish Question” forced them to struggle with their biases.38 This emphasis on intellectual influences running between Judaism and Christianity in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was seldom touched on by older historiography and raises many new questions about the changing role of the Jewish presence in Europe.
The Enlightenment entanglement of Judaism in European thought was a late phase of Renaissance Christian Hebraism, a trend that began in the Catholic Church during the fifteenth century and grew widely from there. Hebraists recognized the Hebrew language as the “third classical tongue,” but they were also interested in what Jewish texts could teach them about Christianity. This interest became much more pronounced in the Reformation, with a slowly growing recognition that one needed to learn about the Jewish life of Jesus and the apostles in order to return to apostolic Christian practice. Even before the Reformation, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and his circle had discovered the Jewish Kabbalah, which they construed to be a repository of ancient wisdom along with Hermetic and Platonic texts. Christian Kabbalah studies, as well as general Hebraic studies of ancient Judaism and biblical interpretation, remained strong well into the eighteenth century. While this field was not unexplored earlier, the present generation of scholarship has excelled in uncovering the contexts and intentions of Hebraism.39
These, then, are among the topics in early modern historiography of the Jews that have been most active and creative in recent decades. The study of early modern Jewish history and thought will undoubtedly continue to develop in the directions that have been described. The highly fruitful comparative focus on larger cultural, political, and religious contexts of Jewish life promises to enrich not only this field, but also fields in which the Jews have previously been marginal. Studies of anti-Semitism will continue to give way to the more specific and nuanced approaches made possible by local conditions. The expansion of the study of early modern Jews to include more emphasis on the Mediterranean, Adriatic, North African, and Asian regions will bring these communities toward the center of scholarly discussion. The availability of long-closed archives in Central and Eastern Europe promises to yield more information about the Jews of those communities as well. More generally, social history will continue to gain ground, but intellectual and religious history will remain vigorous fields.
Bibliography
ELECTRONIC RESOURCES
Jewish National and University Library, Digitized Book Repository (primary sources): http://aleph500.huji.ac.il./nnl/dig/list_all.html
Jewish National and University Library, Index of Articles on Jewish Studies (RAMBI): http://jnul.huji.ac.il/rambi/
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