Search

Unlike the works of the “old masters” in the fine arts, often seen as the apotheosis of the creative spirit of their and all time, works of historiography have a much briefer shelf life. It is in the nature of scholarship to subject forebears to critical scrutiny; few works hold up beyond a generation or so. We are charged in this forum with reconsidering one of the “old masters” of Jewish historiography, Salo Wittmayer Baron, whose formidable mastery of languages and sources and his prolific output position him as one of the preeminent twentieth-century historians of the Jewish people. Has Baron's three-volumeThe Jewish Community, a masterpiece of historical synthesis first published in 1942, still retained its scholarly relevance? What is striking about this work is how much ahead of his time it was in certain respects, and how, in this work on a subject so central to understanding pre-modern Jewish life, Baron's construction was ahistorical in crucial dimensions. Baron'sJewish Communityhas fallen into disuse, so much so that in the Hebrew collection,Kehal Yisrael(2004), intended to portray specific Jewries and their communal lives, the latter two volumes, comprising dozens of essays and over 800 pages, written by leading Israeli scholars, contain only two references to Baron, in the notes. This blatant example of ignoring Baron's treasure trove is true not only of Israeli scholarship: most recent studies of Jewish communities make scarcely any use of it. Is the neglect deserved?

Records covering a brief period in eighteenth-century Altona reveal a pattern of behavior within the Jewish servant class that was widespread among non-Jewish neighbors. Jewish maidservants bore a significant number of children out of wedlock. These children came to the attention of communal authorities because of the dispute over who was responsible to bury them should they die. The unique arrangement that existed between the three communities Altona-Hamburg-Wandsbek caused these disputes to be recorded; ordinarily the matter would have remained shrouded in silence. Both the pattern of pregnancy and childbirth out of wedlock, as well as the tendency of community or magistracy to place the sole responsibility on the mother, were characteristic of non-Jewish European society in the eighteenth century. A notable departure from the non-Jewish norm was that none of the Jewish mothers in these records was charged with infanticide.

Jewish computus manuscripts in the early modern period were illustrated with a rich, original and unique iconographic program. These images have not previously been understood nor systematically interpreted. This article introduces the genre and provides a survey of its illustrations. It argues that the images complemented the messages in the text, particularly those concerning the antiquity and sanctity of the calendar and the valorization of the Jewish calendar above others.

The intensification of Jewish settlement in Eretz Israel in the wake of expulsions and messianic stirrings brought together outstanding figures whose individual and collective achievements left an enduring imprint on Jewish life. The renaissance in sixteenth-century Eretz Israel, particularly in Safed, produced one of the most remarkable and creative moments in Jewish intellectual, religious, and cultural history. Refugees from Spain and Portugal, as well as from Italian and German lands, wended their exile-weary way to the Holy Land. Fueled by a new, more favorable Ottoman administration and unprecedented economic opportunities, the conditions were set for the renewal of Jewish cultural life. Abraham David's book To Come to the Land is not primarily about the processes of immigration to the land, although a brief chapter is devoted to that subject at the beginning. It focusses on specific aspects of Jewish life in sixteenth-century Eretz Israel, primarily in Jerusalem and Safed.

This paper examines some of the ways in which early modern German literary culture portrayed Jewish visions of the endtime. Christians employed notions of Jewish deceit to undermine the meaning of Jewish messianism, reshaping the signs of the endtime to carry a far more sinister meaning. Christian writers transformed Jewish messianic claimants into predictable precursors of the Antichrist and mocked Jewish beliefs as the delusions of a nation of deceived deceivers. Notions of Jewish deceitfulness complicated Christian expectations concerning Jewish conversion at the end of time. The Christian perception of Jews as inherently deceitful encompassed all components of the early modern views of Jews and the Jewish religion. Early modern German literary works devoted to the theme of vain Jewish messianic expectations combined with the literature of the Antichrist, turning the demonic Antichrist who would appear at the endtime into the person the Jews expected as their messiah. Failed Jewish messianic movements played right into Christian literary and theological discourse on the Jewish endtime and provided historical confirmation for what would have otherwise seemed like an absurd polemical exaggeration.

German Jewish communities underwent momentous changes in status, composition, and character during the fifteenth century, yet apart from its intellectual legacy, this period has merited scant attention from historians. Even contemporaries viewed the post-plague German communities as a diminished and spent shadow of their vital medieval Ashkenazic predecessors, and historiography has maintained this perception. Scholars characterized the period as one of intellectual decline, population shrinkage and expulsion from the remaining cities that had not destroyed or expelled their Jewish communities during the bubonic plague depredations. Despite the real devastation caused by the fourteenth-century chaos, much vibrant life remained within German Jewish communities. Little has been written, particularly in English, concerning the reasons for subsequent Christian resistance to the presence of Jews and the effects of new Christian conceptions of their own communities on Jewish self-perception. Bell's book intends to fill this gap. Neither a social history, nor an intellectual history of fifteenth-century Germans and Jews, it is a pioneering attempt to track the changing definitions of Jewish and Christian identity in the fifteenth century. It is an ambitious enterprise.

This volume deals with conversions to Judaism from the 16th to the 18th century. It provides six case studies by leading international scholars on phenomena as crypto-Judaism, "judaizing", reversion of Jewish-Christian converts and secret conversions of non-Jewish Christians for intellectual reasons. With contributions by Arthur Williamson, Richard H. Popkin, Elisheva Carlebach, Allison P. Coudert, Martin Mulsow and Martha Keith Schuchard.

Jewish and Christian religious messianic traditions collided, intersected, and reverberated in an endless cycle which continually revised and reworked mutual perceptions and definitions. This paper will study the interplay between Christian expectations concerning Jewish conversion, Jewish messianism, and Jewish deceitfulness in early modern German literary culture. Jewish conversion to Christianity, collective or individual, and expressions of Jewish messianism constituted two extreme reactions to the Christian claims concerning the messiah. The former was interpreted by both Christians and Jews as a capitulation to the Christian interpretation of history, whereas the latter utterly rejected those claims. Christian notions of Jewish deceit undermined the meaning of both these Jewish responses and reinterpreted them, reshaping the signs of the endtime to carry a far more sinister meaning, in which conversions were transformed into new avenues of subversion and messianic claimants into predictable precursors of the Antichrist. They took on particular configurations in early modern German culture.

This research will focus on a specific segment of women in the Holocaust, on Jewish mothers with small children.