Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

The 7th Early Modern Workshop will take place from August 15-17, 2010 at Wesleyan University. The topic this year is “Jewish Community and Identity in the Early Modern Period.”

The traditional approach to “Jewish community” has been focused on the formal communal structures of Jewish self-government. This approach often traced the presence of “autonomous” Jewish self-government in the diaspora from antiquity till the modern times, when, it was stressed, these “autonomous” structures were shattered by the interference of modern states in Jewish communal affairs. Recent scholarship has challenged this prevalent narrative, suggesting that the relatively sophisticated forms of local administration within Jewish communal organizations seem to have been an early modern development and a result of the interplay between the structures of power of the states and a local Jewish community. But the early modern period brought about developments that went beyond the political transformations of the states. In the early modern period, conceptions of community and identity were challenged.

The 2010 Early Modern Workshop proposed to re-examine the concept of the Jewish community in the early modern period more broadly, not only as formal structures of the Jewish self-government. The workshop aimed to understand different ways, formal and informal, in which Jews understood what a community meant, how they identified as a community, or communities, and fashioned their own identities in the early modern period. In addition to political transformations of states and institutions of the state, we would like to examine how, for example, gender, family relations, or ethnic identity shaped Jews’ understanding of community, both individually and as a collective.

Our keynote speaker was Barbara Diefendorf. The program included presentations based on primary texts (in alphabetical order):

Connie Aust, “Price of Power: Financing a Jewish Community”
Shuki Ecker, “Layered Networks: Functioningn Across Communities”
Eli Faber, “Struggle to Transcend Differences and Conflicts among Early American Jewry”
Debra Kaplan, “Regulating Communal Space: Mikvaot in Seventeenth-Century Altona”
Stefan Litt, “Rabbinic Authority and Community in 18th-century Germany: Moses Brandeis Levi and the Jewish Community of Mainz”
Jerzy Mazur, “Merchants and Rabbis: The Family of Josko of Lwow and the Beginnings of a Jewish Community in Poland”
Evelyne Oliel-Grausz, “Communication and community : multiplex networks in the 18th Century Sephardi Diaspora”
Lucia Raspe, “Minhag and Migration: A Yiddish Custom Book from Venice, 1553”
Stefanie Siegmund, “Communities Developing in Association with Place”
Adam Teller, “The Early Modern Jewish Parliament: The Council of Four Lands in Poland”

Sponsors

• Columbia University's Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies
• Wesleyan University’s Jewish and Israel Studies Certificate programs, the History Department, and Information Technology Services Department
• The Memorial Foudation for Jewish Culture