1st Edition
Early Modern Jewish Civilization Unity and Diversity in a Diasporic Society. An Introduction
This collection is an introductory historical survey and selective cultural analysis of the development, coalescence, and eventual waning of a diasporic civilization—that of the Jews of the early modern period (ca. 1391–1789) in Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and key nodes of the Iberian Empires in the Americas.
Each chapter explores key factors that shaped both distinctive early modern Jewish communities and a remarkably coalescent and far broader community-of-communities. The contributors engage and answer the following questions: What do historians mean by “early modernity,” and to what extent does the concept illuminate the history and culture(s) of Jews from the end of the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment? What were the general demographic contours of the Jewish diaspora over this period and how did they change? How did culture, politics, technology, economics, and gender shape diasporic Jewish communities across eastern and western Europe and the New World over the course of some 400 years? Ultimately, the work renders a portrait of coherence and diversity, continuity and discontinuity, in early modern Jewish life within and across temporal and geographic boundaries.
Early Modern Jewish Civilization is essential reading for all students of Jewish history and civilization and early modern history more broadly.
1. Introduction: Continuities and Discontinuities in The Formation of a Transoceanic Diaspora, 1391-1789
David Graizbord
2. Who were the Jews of the Pre-Modern Diaspora?
Jonathan Ray
3. Ḥayei ha-Torah (The Life of Torah): Rabbinic Culture and The Pre-Modern Heritage Preserved and Adapted
David Graizbord
4. Eretz Yisrael (The Land of Israel): The Homeland, its Jews, and their Orienting Influence
David Graizbord
5. ‘Umot ha-‘Olam (The Nations of the Earth): Relations with The Other(s)
Iberian Watersheds: The Crisis of judeoconversos and the Evolution of Anti-Jewish Bigotry
David Graizbord
Jews in the Iberian Peninsula to 1498 and the Problem of judeoconversos 130
Axel Kaplan-Szyld
Jews and Their Non-Jewish Hosts in an Evolving Diaspora: Jews and Jewish-Muslim Relations in the Ottoman Sphere
David Graizbord
6. Kol Yisrael ‘Arevim Zeh la-Zeh (“All Israel are Mutually Responsible”): Self-Government, Economy, and the Rise of New Diasporic Centers
The Jews of the Italian Peninsula
Serena di Nepi
The Rise of New Diasporic Centers
Jessica Vance Roitman
7. Tsena u-Re’ena (Go Out and See): The World of Jewish Books
Noam Sienna
8. Ḳabalah (Tradition): Early Modern Jewish Mysticism as a Devotional Matrix of Jewish Life
Roni Weinstein
9. Minhagim: A Window on Popular Culture
Yaron Nisenholz
10. ‘Erev Rav (A Mixed Multitude): Class, Gender, and Ideological Cleavages
Stanley Mirvis
11: Ḥasidut and Haskalah (Pietism and Enlightenment): Toward the Watershed of Modernity
Stanley Mirvis
Biography
David Graizbord, a historian, is Curson Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Arizona. His publications include Souls in Dispute: Converso Identities in Iberia and the Jewish Diaspora, 1580-1700 (2004), and The New Zionists: Young American Jews, Jewish National Identity, and Israel (2020).
