Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

The second Early Modern Workshop was hosted by the Louis L. Kaplan Chair in Jewish History, the Department of History, and the Rebecca and Joseph Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Maryland; by the Hebraica Section of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., and was supported by Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT.

The setting for Jewish life in the early modern era was overwhelmingly urban. Yet traditional scholarship has tended to treat that fact as no more than a key to geographic categorization. Study after study has been devoted to the Jews of one city or another without much serious exploration of how their specifically urban environment shaped individual Jews, their communities, and their religious/cultural attitudes over the centuries.

The "ghetto" experience has loomed large in the historiography of early modern Jewish urban experience, even though it represented the experience of a small minority of Jews in this period. The vast majority of Jews inhabited smaller, unsegregated towns, in which Jews were an integral part of the social and economic fabric. The 2005 workshop sought to address and elucidate the complex interaction between Jews and their urban environment on various planes: physical and architectural, legal and jurisdictional, economic and social, as well as cultural.

Texts and maps cover a number of urban and geographic settings from London, to The Hague, Frankfurt, Livorno, Florence, Strasbourg, Prague, Poznań, and Minsk. They deal with physical personal space (minutes from the Poznań community record book; responsum of Rabbi Isaac the Great from Poznań; personal record book of Rabbi Hayyim Gundersheim of Frankfurt on Main), the halakhic understanding of space (Responsum of Rabbi Samuel Aboab concerning Genoa; the community minute book of The Hague); economic ideals and realities of Jewish urban existence (the 1595 Cracow community constitution; the ordinances of the community in Prague; appeals of judicial decisions from Livorno); transgressions (documents from Florence; the proceedings of the Old Bailey in London; the community minute book of The Hague); and complex legal boundaries and limitations (1711 decree of the Lithuanian Tribunal, letters of Josel of Rosheim).

Sponsors

• Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies, University of Maryland
• Library of Congress's Hebraic Section of the African and Middle Eastern Division
• Wesleyan University