Classic Essays on Jews in Early Modern Europe

Series Introduction: Classic Essays in Jewish History - Kenneth Stow

Volume Introduction: A Jewish 'Early Modern Period' Avant la Lettre? - Jonathan Karp and Francesca Trivellato

Chapter 1: "European and Jewish History: Do Their Epochs Coincide?" - Cecil Roth

Chapter 2: "Ghetto and Emancipation: Shall We Revise the Traditional View?" - Salo W. Baron

Chapter 3: "Marriage and Sexual Life at the Close of the Middle Ages" - Jacob Katz

Chapter 4: "The Woman of the Ghetto: Part I" - Selma Stern 

Chapter 5: "The Marranos" - I.S. Révah

Chapter 6: "The Shebet Yehudah and Sixteenth Century Historiography" - Abraham A. Neuman

Chapter 7: "The Amazing Abraham Colorni" - Cecil Roth

Chapter 8: "Baptisms of the Jews of Rome from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries" - Attilio Milano

Chapter 9: "Why Was Spinoza Banned?" - Jacob L. Teicher 

Chapter 10: "Poland’s Council of the Four Lands and its Relations with Local Jewish Community Governments" - Simon Dubnow

Chapter 11: "‘De Non Tolerandis Judaeis’: On the Introduction of the Anti-Jewish Laws into Polish Towns and the Struggle Against Them" - Jacob Goldberg

Chapter 12: "The Court Jews: Prelude to Emancipation" - Francis L. Carsten

Chapter 13: "The Emergence of General Education among German Jews before Mendelssohn" - Joseph Eschelbacher

Chapter 14: "German Pietism and the Jews" - Koppel S. Pinson

Chapter 15: "The Attitude of the Enlightenment Toward the Jew" - Paul H. Meyer 

Chapter 16: "The Economic Activities of the Jews" - Shmuel Ettinger

Chapter 17: "Modern Capitalism and Jewish Fate" - Salo W. Baron 

Index

Chapter Abstacts:

Chapter 1: First published in English in 1929, this article has yet to receive the attention it deserves. Roth reviews various periodization schemes of Jewish history proposed by his distinguished predecessors, including Heinrich Graetz, Simon Dubnow, and Ben-Zion Dinaburg (Dinur), and contests the extent to which they are predicated on events internal to the history of ancient Palestine and the Jewish diaspora. He argues that, beginning with the Middle Ages, "the main epochs of European history coincide[d] almost exactly with crucial movements in the existence of the Jewish people." This contention underpins Roth’s overall thesis, which challenged what was then the prevalent view according to which European Jewry did not partake in the Renaissance. In this respect, Roth is also responding to (without citing it) Salo W. Baron’s article of a year prior reprinted in this volume as Chapter 2. Although neither Baron nor Roth use the expression "early modern," their essays allow us to see how Jewish historians in the early twentieth century conceptualized this period.

Chapter 2: This is the earliest and one of the most famous pieces by the noted Jewish historian Salo W. Baron. It challenges the so-called "lachrymose theory of pre-Revolutionary woe," namely, the widespread depiction of Jewish history before emancipation as a time of unrelenting oppression and violence. The essay is republished here because of its influence on debates concerning periodization and because it acquires new valence once read alongside Cecil Roth’s article included as Chapter 1 in this volume. Baron makes two arguments. First, he maintains that for European Jews, the so-called Middle Ages lasted until emancipation. In other words, they did not experience a Renaissance. He calls this long period of European history the time of the Ghetto. Second, Baron reverses the negative attribution given to the Ghetto and posits that in spite of the legal disabilities, social exclusion, and violence to which Jews were subjected, because they were able to preserve their communal autonomy they enjoyed advantages during the long Middle Ages that would be lost through emancipation. For Baron, the advent of full citizenship in modern nation-states inaugurated a new epoch in Jewish history, albeit not a Golden Age.

Chapter 3: Appearing in Zion in 1945, this was the first historical essay published in Hebrew by the Hungarian-born scholar Jacob Katz and is here fully translated into English for the first time. The article pioneered the academic study of sexual, marital, and family life in premodern Ashkenaz. Its incorporation of contemporary sociological theory, particularly the approaches of Max Weber and Karl Mannheim, was as innovative in Jewish historiography as its subject matter. Katz focuses on the institution of marriage as the exclusive and obligatory vehicle for sexuality in rabbinic Judaism, as well as Jewish society’s concomitant rejection of celibacy, which had important institutional and social-psychological consequences. Katz equally attends to the economic impact of the dowry system as it related to Ashkenazi Jewry’s participation in business, finance, and trade. His focus is on normative sexuality with relatively little attention given to what was then regarded as deviant behavior. Later scholars would challenge his portrait as somewhat abstract and idealized. Nevertheless, Katz’s virtuosic mining of early modern rabbinic sources pointed the way toward new approaches to the social history of premodern Jewish life.

Chapter 4: Selma Stern (later Stern-Taubler) was already at work on what would become her magnum opus, Der preussische Staat und die Juden (The Prussian State and the Jews, 1962-1975) when she published this essay, part of a multi-part popular history of Jewish women in medieval and modern Europe. Although adopting a view of the early modern Ashkenazic ghetto as dilapidated and hermetically sealed, one that would be significantly modified by later scholars, Stern’s collective portrait of the collective situation of Jewish women remains valuable. Not only is it pioneering in terms of its subject matter, but it benefits from its author’s unmatched expertise in the fiscal and economic life of Central European Jews. Stern effectively captures the denigration of Jewish women who were typically denied educational opportunities and subjugated to the will of their husbands. At the same time, she suggests that, especially because of their characteristic roles as the wives of peddlers, traders, and merchants (though she makes little mention of servants), Jewish women often achieved standing and influence through their function as business partners and bread winners. Stern paints these women as pious and devoted to their families. She discusses some of the Yiddish literature that informed their mental lives and concludes with brief portraits of a number of outstanding women – beyond the well-known author Glückel of Hameln – some of whom have yet to be the subject of scholarly investigation.

Chapter 5: Published in French in 1958 and in Italian in 1959, this article exerted enormous influence on scholarly debates about the religious identity of Iberian Jewish converts to Catholicism but had never before been translated into English. It begins with the massacres of 1391 (which led to wide-scale semi-coerced conversions to Catholicism) and proceeds to cover the period after the decrees issued by the kings of Aragon and Castile (1492) and Portugal (1497) that ordered Jews to either emigrate or accept baptism. Révah argues that a large portion of those Jews who were baptized, as well as their descendants, remained faithful to the religion of their ancestors and that the legal and social discrimination that they suffered from at the hands of the Inquisition amounts to a form of racism. He distinguishes between the Jewish converts’ distinctive situations in Spain and in Portugal but stresses that in both countries statutes of purity of blood (limpieza de sangre) and Inquisition tribunals persecuted "New Christians" on the basis of racial conceptions. In so doing, he counters the interpretations of those historians for whom crypto-Judaism was a fantasy created by the Inquisition rather than a real-life phenomenon with its own spiritual and ritual specificities. Finally, Révah sketches the emigration routes of those converts who left Iberia for European regions where they were allowed to practice Judaism.

Chapter 6: The Shebet (or Shevet) Yuhudah is a remarkable Hebrew work that combines elements of historical chronicle, philosophical symposium, and storytelling to offer a meditation on the causes of Jewish suffering. The work was principally compiled by Solomon ibn Verga, a refugee from Spain and Portugal; it was later edited by his son Joseph and published for the first time in the Ottoman Empire around the middle of the sixteenth century. In his brief and incisive essay, Abraham A. Neuman situates this classic text in relation to a spate of Jewish historical works produced by Jews in the aftermath of the Iberian expulsions. As Neuman rightly observes, history writing was held in low esteem by medieval and early modern rabbinic Judaism, especially when compared with the stature it enjoyed in contemporaneous Christian and Islamic cultures. Neuman argues that the sudden outpouring of Jewish historical works in the sixteenth century can only be explained in light of the catastrophe of the expulsions themselves, whose magnitude and impact were without precedent in post-Second Temple Judaism. Authors like Joseph Ha-Kohen and Samuel Usque variously sought out messianic portents in the history they recounted in order to console a people shaken to its core. But ibn Verga’s approach was different. His principal aim was to use history and storytelling to comprehend objectively the underlying causes of Jew hatred. Neuman even calls the Shevet Yehuda "the earliest sociological study of the Jewish question." Through a searching analysis of ibn Verga’s skillful use of disparate source materials, Neuman shows how the author simultaneously flatters the Crown, indicts the Church, excoriates the Christian masses, and exonerates Jews from the libels directed against them while also suggesting how the faults of Jews themselves contributed to their estrangement.

Chapter 7: Published in English and in an expanded version in Italian in 1934, this short piece is representative of Roth’s anti-lachrymose approach and his determination to show that Italian Jews shared in the cultural efflorescence of the Renaissance. It offers a celebratory biographical sketch of Abraham Colorni (ca. 1530-1599), who gained an international reputation as an exceptionally skilled artisan and military engineer. Several Italian and European courts and cities competed for his services. His inventions and printed works met with an admiration rarely afforded to a Jew. Roth’s heroic portrait has since been shown to be inflated but stands as a reminder of an important historiographical approach that aims at normalizing the Jewish experience in pre-modern Italy.

Chapter 8: In 1968, Attilio Milano was finally granted admission to the archives of Rome’s Luoghi pii dei Catecumeni e dei Neofiti (Pious Institution of Catechumens and Neophytes), the Catholic body that oversaw the baptism and catechism of former Jews and Muslims from the mid-sixteenth century until the interwar period. Created as part of the Counter Reformation efforts to discipline Catholic subjects, and thus to instill religious orthodoxy in recent converts, this institution kept meticulous records. In this article, Milano forgoes an examination of the converts’ motives, or the attempts made by the Jewish community of Rome to resist the Church’s blatant and hidden evangelization of its members. Rather, he illustrates the procedures adopted to admit Jews to the institution, examines the ceremonies that accompanied the baptism of each "infidel," and compiles descriptive statistics of everyone who entered the institution from 1542 (the first year for which data are available) to 1870 (when Rome became the capital of the then recently created Kingdom of Italy). He finds that 788 Jews (426 of whom from Rome) were baptized between 1634 and 1700, 873 (493 of whom from Rome) between 1701 and 1790, and considerably fewer thereafter, except for a spike in conversions in the early 1830s. The article is devoted to a careful analysis of these and other trends (including the predominance of young converts, between the age of 19 and 30) and the possible motivations for conversion that one can discern from such trends. This pioneering study is translated here in English for the first time and serves as background to the rich literature on forced conversion that has since emerged.

Chapter 9: The reasons for Spinoza’s excommunication by the Amsterdam Jewish authorities in 1656 (at the tender age of 23) have intrigued scholars for years. The text of the ban indicates that its cause was Spinoza’s opinions, yet it does not specify precisely what these were. In this essay, Jacob L. Teicher offers a daring set of hypotheses to identify not only the nature of Spinoza’s offense but, more importantly, the specific political and religious circumstances underlying his removal. Teicher argues that the ban must be understood against the backdrop of recent disputes in the Amsterdam Jewish community regarding the question of the eternality of divine punishment. Teicher connects these debates to what he calls "the Christianization of Judaism," i.e., the progressive absorption of Christian doctrines by Jews in Western Europe over the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, particularly by those of Iberian and New Christian descent. On the one hand, Christianization made Jewish communities more attuned to safeguarding matters of belief rather than just behavior (heterodoxy rather than just heteronomy). On the other, the readmission of Jews to countries like Holland in the seventeenth century led Christian statesmen to define anew the precise terms under which Jews could be tolerated, including their adherence to what were defined as the fundamentals of religion: belief in God, revelation and eternal reward and punishment. Teicher reasons (or speculates) that the contemporaneous efforts of Dutch Jewry to secure Jewish readmission to England – and the need to assert that Judaism did not tolerate heterodoxy on matters such as eternal punishment, which Spinoza even then likely controverted – compelled the Jewish authorities to remove him at precisely this moment. Whatever the merits of Teicher’s intricate reconstruction, it is both intriguing in its own right and highly illuminating of the broader political and intellectual context.

Chapter 10: When the Russian-Jewish historian Simon Dubnow published this essay (in Hebrew) in 1904, very little scholarly attention had been paid to communal record books (pinkasim). Today they are one of the principal building blocks for historical reconstructions of Jewish community life in premodern Eastern and even Western Europe. However, even now, very few pinkasim have been translated into English and made available to general readers. What adds significance to Dubnow’s effort is that it aims to discern the policies not just of a single kehillah (community) but of the so-called super-kehillah, The Council of the Four Lands, that existed in Poland between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Early modern Poland-Lithuania was unique in that its Jewish population enjoyed a highly ramified and hierarchical form of self-government. The Council of the Four Lands and the Council of the Land of Lithuania adjudicated on a wide range of matters – legal, educational, commercial – and sought to impose their authority over regional and local communities. Unfortunately, as Dubnow laments, hardly any of the records of the Council of the Four Lands have survived. Yet, ingeniously, Dubnow makes up for this lacuna in part by ferreting out statements and passages in the local pinkas of the community of Tiktin (Tykocin, in northeastern modern Poland) that contain quotes from or paraphrases of the Council’s directives and rulings. Precisely because Tiktin was located in a border region between Poland and Lithuania, it had become the object of jurisdictional disputes between the two Councils. Hence, the Tiktin pinkas is replete with pleas and demands by the Council of the Four Lands that it adhere to the Council’s directives. For this reason, in both substance and rhetoric, it well captures the piecemeal, tentative, contested, and baroque character of Jewish institutional life in this period.

Chapter 11: Jacob Goldberg was the preeminent expert on the history of Jewish legal status in premodern Poland. In this essay he provides an overview of the privilege known as de non tolerandis Judaeis, which was sought by towns in western and central Poland to prohibit Jews from being able to reside and, for the most part, even trade in their precincts. Interestingly, in other parts of Europe, the opposite was occurring. Burghers had once petitioned for this privilege in order to eliminate Jewish commercial competition as well as to strengthen what they perceived as the religious integrity of their urban polity against the power of the nobility, which employed Jews as their agents. But by the seventeenth century, this privilege was disappearing in the western and central parts of the continent. Thus, in Poland, de non tolerandis Judaeis became part and parcel of the Jews’ so-called eastward expansion, a key push factor that led to their increasing exodus from the more urbanized, western parts of the Commonwealth and their growing settlements in the vast eastern territories of Lithuania, White Russia, and Ukraine mostly controlled by nobles rather than the Crown.

Chapter 12: As indicated by its title, Francis L. Carsten’s essay advances the claim that starting in the mid-seventeenth century, the figure of the Court Jew helped pave the way toward Jews’ eventual acquisition of civic rights in Germany and Central Europe. The emergence of a loose cohort of Jewish financiers, brokers, and army suppliers proved well suited to the haphazard nature of Central European state-building in the aftermath of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. In an age when governmental bureaucracies remained in their infancy, Court Jews helped fill the gap. At a time when feudal and estate privileges often made the raising of state revenue unfeasible, Court Jews could supply state loans on favorable terms. In wartime, Jews’ wide-ranging commercial networks enabled Court Jews to supply munitions, victuals, and uniforms, often in short order. Court Jews’ partnership with rulers, albeit asymmetrical, helped restore the principle of Jewish economic utility to the statecraft of post-Reformation Europe, which led some governments to permit the limited reintroduction and incorporation of small Jewish communities to Central European territories from which they had been excluded for decades or even centuries. Drawing on the voluminous works of Heinrich Schnee and Selma Stern-Taubler, without the ideological baggage of the former, Carsten provides a brief, well-argued summation of their central thesis – though one, it should be mentioned, which later scholars have at times challenged and modified.

Chapter 13: Published in German in 1916, this essay - here translated into English for the first time - was ahead of its time. It argues that Moses Mendelssohn represented a culmination, and a particularly high point - but was not the initiator - of a recent trend among elite Jewish men toward the acquisition of non-Jewish learning in the sciences, the humanities, and the legal and medical professions. Although focused on some notable male figures of eighteenth-century Germany, it is pioneering both because it throws light on a previously little studied phenomenon and because it lays the ground for examining what later historians have called the "early Haskalah."

Chapter 14: German Pietism was a movement of Lutheran reform that stretched from the late seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries. A reaction against confessionalization and its accompanying formalization, Pietism sought to return to original Reformation principles by emphasizing a simple, direct, and emotion-filled religiosity. Postwar historians of Europe tended to attribute the most wide-ranging significance to Pietism not only in the religious sphere but also in terms of its impact on secular modernity. Here Koppel Pinson extends these arguments to explain the more positive shift in European treatment of Jews starting in the seventeenth century. He argues that, in contrast to the virulent hostility to Jews displayed by Martin Luther and most of his fellow reformers, the seventeenth-century Pietist movement sought to restore the Reformation’s spiritual vitality and, in so doing, introduced a very different tone – more humane and to a degree even sympathetic to contemporary Jewish culture, sensibilities, and language, even if admittedly missionary in intent. Following his discussion of Luther and the Jews, Pinson homes in on Pietist figures such as Philipp Jacob Spener (1635-1705), August Hermann Francke (1663- 1727), and Nikolaus Zinzendorf (1700-1760). These individuals, he argues, went well beyond the polemical philosemitism of the early Luther to evince a genuine sympathy for Jews, even proposing concrete social and economic reforms to ameliorate their living condition. Pinson makes the case that the synthesis of Pietism and Aufklärung wrought a fundamental change in Çentral European attitudes to Jews and paved the way for the civic emancipation.

Chapter 15: Whether the Enlightenment was good or bad for the Jews and what (if any) is the relationship between the French Enlightenment and the first episode of Jewish emancipation in Europe during the French Revolution have long been hotly debated questions. This essay was one of the first to place these questions in a longer historical perspective. It offers a broad and learned panorama of the changing status of Jews in Western Europe after the mid-seventeenth century and the role that particularly forward-looking Christian thinkers played in forging not only more benevolent attitudes but also more tolerant policies toward Jews. Although it does not put forth a unified theory of the relationship between cultural and legal change, it provides a particularly sweeping yet prudent overview of the issue.

Chapter 16: Published in Hebrew in 1984 (and translated here into English for the first time), this essay outlines a synthetic account of Jewish economic activities from antiquity to the twentieth century that reflects decades of concerted study. Its author, Shmuel Ettinger, a former Communist and committed Zionist as well a distinguished historian and specialist on eastern Europe, was among the few to broach this subject in the aftermath of the Shoah. The essay tackles the thorny question of the Jews’ specialization in certain economic niches linked to trade, finance, and urban manufacturing. It argues forcefully that this specialization was the result of Christian discriminatory policies rather than any innate propensity by Jews and denounces the tendency to overestimate the financial roles played by Jews in the European economy. Werner Sombart is singled out for propagating this stereotype. Ettinger recognizes the involvement of a small Jewish elite in the development of capitalist industries but also stresses the proletarianization experienced by the Jewish masses as a result of the rise of urbanization and industrial complexes in the nineteenth century.

Chapter 17: In 1942, amidst the destruction of European Jewry, Salo Baron took on what had become a quasi-taboo subject among historians of Jews in the diaspora: the relationship between Jews and capitalism. This essay is interesting for how Baron comments on contentious scholarly debates, including Werner Sombart’s controversial 1911 work, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (Capitalism and the Jews). Baron essentially flipped Sombart’s argument on its head by asking not what Jews contributed to the development of capitalism but how capitalism affected Jews. It argues that, overall, Jews benefitted from the development of capitalism, particularly before industrialization, but bemoans the extent to which the individualist ethos that accompanies capitalism undermined organized Jewish self-government. Although a staunch opponent of communism, Baron laments that "it was capitalism, operating from its inception in the direction of political emancipation and cultural assimilation, that began to threaten the very survival of the Jewish people." This essay is thus an apt companion to Baron’s more idealized portrait of Jewish life before emancipation in his famous article reproduced as Chapter 2 in this volume.

Biography

Jonathan Karp is Associate Professor of Judaic Studies and History at Binghampton University SUNY, USA.

Francesca Trivellato is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Early Modern European History at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, NJ, USA.