Connecting Histories: Jews and Their Others in Early Modern Europe

By David B. Ruderman and Francesca Bregoli

Whether forced by governmental decree, driven by persecution and economic distress, or seeking financial opportunity, the Jews of early modern Europe were extraordinarily mobile, experiencing both displacement and integration into new cultural, legal, and political settings. This, in turn, led to unprecedented modes of social mixing for Jews, especially for those living in urban areas, who frequently encountered Jews from different ethnic backgrounds and cultural orientations. Additionally, Jews formed social, economic, and intellectual bonds with mixed populations of Christians. While not necessarily effacing Jewish loyalties to local places, authorities, and customs, these connections and exposures to novel cultural settings created new allegiances as well as new challenges, resulting in constructive relations in some cases and provoking strife and controversy in others.

The essays collected by Francesca Bregoli and David B. Ruderman in Connecting Histories show that while it is not possible to speak of a single, cohesive transregional Jewish culture in the early modern period, Jews experienced pockets of supra-local connections between West and East—for example, between Italy and Poland, Poland and the Holy Land, and western and eastern Ashkenaz—as well as increased exchanges between high and low culture. Special attention is devoted to the impact of the printing press and the strategies of representation and self-representation through which Jews forged connections in a world where their status as a tolerated minority was ambiguous and in constant need of renegotiation.

Exploring the ways in which early modern Jews related to Jews from different backgrounds and to the non-Jews around them, Connecting Histories emphasizes not only the challenging nature and impact of these encounters but also the ambivalence experienced by Jews as they met their others.

Contributors: Michela Andreatta, Francesca Bregoli, Joseph Davis, Jesús de Prado Plumed, Andrea Gondos, Rachel L. Greenblatt, Gershon David Hundert, Fabrizio Lelli, Moshe Idel, Debra Kaplan, Lucia Raspe, David B. Ruderman, Pavel Sládek, Claude B. Stuczynski, Rebekka Voß.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Mar 7, 2019
• ISBN: 9780812296037

Book preview

Introduction

Connecting Histories

Jews and Their Others in Early Modern Europe

FRANCESCA BREGOLI

This volume focuses on the processes of connection and exchange in which Jews and former Jews participated in early modern Europe. It includes thirteen essays by American, European, and Israeli experts that exemplify new directions in the study of how Jews related to other Jews from different backgrounds and to the non-Jews around them in Italy and in central and eastern Europe. The last two essays further investigate the anomalous place of conversos and their connections with Jewish culture and the Christian establishment in the Iberian Peninsula. The protagonists of the chapters are individuals, but also Jewish texts and communal practices. These microhistories allow the authors the opportunity to explore new contact situations previously ignored or unnoticed by earlier scholarship.

The contributions all focus on the early modern period, a time of enormous demographic, sociopolitical, and intellectual changes for Jews everywhere, and display a number of common threads. Prominent among them is the impact of the printing press, whose role as an agent of connection is stressed but also comes under scrutiny. Several chapters highlight how Jews forged connections through strategies of representation and self-representation, both inner- and outer-directed, in a world in which their status as a tolerated minority was hardly stable, but rather ambiguous and in constant need of renegotiation. While many of the contributors focus on scholarly connections, a classic locus for the study of early modern Jewish-Christian exchanges, the volume also pays attention to secondary intelligentsias, as well as to social exchanges and class tensions.

The collection moves from the assumption that unprecedented mobility in early modern Europe—coerced or voluntary, emerging from governmental decree, persecution, economic distress, or financial opportunity—engendered Jewish displacement as well as reintegration into new cultural and legal-political settings, which in turn led to new and unprecedented modes of social mixing for Jews. Especially those Jews living in urban spaces encountered Jews from different ethnic backgrounds and cultural orientations. Additionally, they formed social, economic, and intellectual bonds with mixed populations of Christians.¹ As a result, early modern European Jews were regularly exposed to cultural and social others, a phenomenon that obliged them to rethink their traditional notions of identity, adapt to novel political interactions, and clarify their approaches to difference. These connections and exposures to unfamiliar cultural settings, while not necessarily effacing Jewish loyalties to local places, authorities, and customs, created new allegiances as well as new challenges, resulting in constructive relations in some cases, yet provoking strife and controversy in others.

This approach is inspired by the growing historiographical emphasis on Jewish connectedness that has recently culminated in David Ruderman’s reassessment of early modern Jewish culture, to which I will return below.² An examination of Jewish early modernity as a time of increased connections and exchanges requires us to collect and to weigh the quality and quantity of contact situations in which Jews became aware that beyond their local affiliations there existed a Jewish and non-Jewish world larger and more complex than they had ever imagined. In light of heightened interactions and communications, several questions should be raised: can we speak of a uniform and cohesive transregional Jewish culture in the early modern period? How should we understand the relations between local, regional, and supraregional Jewish identities, and what, if anything, connected local Jews and their regional communities to a larger unit spread across Europe? And finally, were the ways in which Jews encountered other Jews and non-Jews in the early modern period unprecedented and novel? While this volume does not aim to offer definitive answers to these challenging questions, the essays gathered here provide thoughtful suggestions and a roadmap for future research. Before turning to the individual essays that make up this collection, I will offer some reflections about the recent intensification of historiographical interest in Jewish connections and connectedness.

Connections and Connectedness in Early Modern Jewish History: Historiographies

Looking at trends beyond the field of Jewish studies helps contextualize the recent emphasis on connectedness for early modern Jews. In the past two decades, general historical research has increasingly attended to the social and cultural interactions and interdependencies between disparate geographical regions and between the local and the global that the increase of mobility and circulation of individuals and ideas engendered from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. While remaining wary of grand narratives, growing numbers of scholars think about and teach the early modern past not only in global but also in interconnected terms, embracing the admittedly challenging task of crossing national as well as disciplinary borders.³

Several elaborations in the 1990s and 2000s have been instrumental in this development, including the salutary influence of postcolonial thought and theoretical inputs from non-Western history. Seminal among them was Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s invitation to bypass the ethnocentric pitfalls of comparative history, the parochial constraints of area studies, and the Eurocentric focus on modernization processes by turning to the interactions between the local and regional and the supra-regional, at times even global.⁴ Drawing from episodes in early modern South Asian history, Subrahmanyam showed how material, intellectual, and cultural exchanges took place regularly across political boundaries and posited that the histories in question are not separate and comparable, but rather connected.⁵ The emergence of histoire croisée (crossed, or entangled, history) in France,⁶ the rise of intertwined global and imperial historiographies in the Anglo-American world,⁷ and the current emphasis by early modernists on issues of mixture and hybridization⁸ are all trends that point to an early modern global moment, even though one not without its critics.⁹

When it comes to early modern Jewry, approaches to connectedness are complicated by the traditional division of labor between historians focused on exchanges among Jews from different backgrounds and those working on relations between Jews and non-Jews. The development of a sustained hypothesis that integrates both approaches—the notion that the early modern Jewish experience implied simultaneous connections to other Jews as well as non-Jews—has come markedly to the fore of Jewish historiography only in the past fifteen years. A watershed publication has been David Ruderman’s attempt at providing a coherent framework for the early modern Jewish period in his synthesis Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History (2010), a work informed by the notions of cultural exchange and connected histories championed by Jerry Bentley and Subrahmanyam.¹⁰ There, Ruderman identifies five categories as unifying traits of the early modern Jewish experience, shared across regional boundaries and beyond local specificities, all of which emphasize increased exchanges between different parts of the Jewish world and between Jewish and non-Jewish societies. Of these, three (accelerated mobility, a knowledge explosion, and a blurring of religious identities) point explicitly to connections, and ensuing challenges, generated by heightened circulation of people and ideas and by boundary-crossing experiences, either forced or voluntary.¹¹ The remaining two categories (communal cohesiveness and a crisis of rabbinic authority), although ostensibly focused on boundary maintenance, in fact underscore supraregional bonds engineered by both lay and rabbinic establishments, enhanced ties between Jewish leaders and host governments, as well as new exchanges between Jews and gentiles brought about by heterodoxy.¹²

If the emphasis on connectedness in early modern Jewish studies is slightly belated vis-à-vis general history, this is also due to the discipline’s evolving understanding of the emphases, spaces, and periodization of Jewish history.¹³ First, attending to connections between the inside and the outside became a priority for Jewish historians only from the late 1970s, as earlier Jewish historiography was largely built on internal Jewish sources and concentrated on inner Jewish dynamics, in reaction to a tradition of external history of the Jews written by non-Jews before World War II and perceived as biased and often negative. Second, a comprehensive attempt to define Jewish early modernity did not emerge until the mid-1980s.¹⁴ And third, evolving scholarly ideologies and the development of new diasporic academic hubs in North America and in Europe, alongside the established Jerusalem school in Israel, have played a significant role in stimulating scholars to explore new directions, and have in time generated new spaces for cross-fertilization with Israeli scholarship. In the following paragraphs I will address briefly these developments.

Understandings of Jewish space, such as favoring the global over the local or vice versa, are tied to evaluations of the significance of life in the diaspora and may reveal a scholar’s ideological leaning. Despite their differences, two of the founding fathers of Jewish historiography, Heinrich Graetz¹⁵ and Salo W. Baron,¹⁶ both emphasized the Jews’ worldwide unity over regional specificities, privileging a transgeographical focus and downplaying variance as a meaningful factor in Jewish history.¹⁷ On the contrary, diaspora nationalist Simon Dubnow eschewed transregional connections and construed Jewish history around the historical waxing and waning of regional hubs of Jewish cultural influence (national hegemonic centers), such as medieval Spain or seventeenth-century Poland-Lithuania.¹⁸ After the Second World War, the founders of the Jerusalem school of historiography, influenced by Zionist nationalism, programmatically emphasized Jewish unity and cohesiveness over space (and, significantly, over time).¹⁹ For their part, American and Israeli scholars who came of age between the 1970s and the early 1990s rejected the spatial and chronological stances of the prewar generations, as well as a Zionist emphasis, by illuminating primarily local and regional cases, avoiding emphasis on transregional connections, and often concentrating on the themes of integration and acculturation of given communities in local milieus. Thus, unlike the founding fathers of Jewish historiography and the pioneers of Israeli historiography, not only did these diasporic and younger Israeli historians not attempt to offer a single, generalizable interpretation of the Jewish experience over the course of centuries, but they also proceeded from the idea that their inquiries should be attuned to the idiosyncrasies of specific diasporic experiences, identities, and traditions at a given time.²⁰

The other element relevant to our discussion is the relative belatedness with which the notion of a Jewish early modernity, viewed as a distinct period with unique characteristics, has appeared. A turning point in this development was the 1985 effort by Jonathan Israel, not a Jewish historian by training, to make sense of Jewish life across Europe between 1550 and 1750 in light of economic trends, considering the effects of mercantilist policies over Jewish settlements both in the West and the East.²¹ Prior to Israel’s book, only Israeli historian Jacob Katz had considered the time from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century as a distinct unit—one, however, which for him was still part of the Middle Ages.²² The approach to the periodization of those three centuries as either part of the Middle Ages or anticipating modernity can be again traced back to the founding fathers of Jewish historiography. While for Graetz the medieval period lasted until the emergence of Moses Mendelssohn, Dubnow and Baron had treated the years between the sixteenth and the mid-seventeenth century as a continuation of the Middle Ages (both had identified a watershed change only from 1650 on).²³ Israeli historians working in the 1950s and 1960s also envisioned the period between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century either as a continuation of the Middle Ages or as an anticipation of modernity.²⁴ Scholarly perceptions on periodization began shifting in the late 1970s. A concentration of scholars specializing on the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries—with a particular interest in Renaissance and baroque Italy and the Sephardic diaspora—were trained at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in the 1970s; in opposition to earlier trends, their emphasis on those two centuries as a crucial time of change in turn shaped a new generation of early modernists. Around the same time, Jewish early modernity came to the fore prominently in the United States as well, particularly at Harvard and at Columbia University, while in more recent years the University of Pennsylvania has served as an influential incubator of new ideas and conversations.²⁵

Today, while still not universally accepted, the notion that there are some distinctive traits that characterize the Jewish experience between the late fifteenth and the late eighteenth century, and that it is therefore possible to speak of a Jewish early modernity, has nonetheless become common—although the exact specificities of these traits are subject to debate.²⁶ Still, it is possible to detect one prominent common position among early modern Jewish historians. Unlike the earliest generations of scholars who tended to concentrate on inner Jewish developments and dynamics, the early modern field that has emerged over the past thirty years has primarily looked outward, relying on non-Jewish documents as frequently as on Jewish ones, and is searching for clearer understandings of Jewish connections with the outside world.

Recent and Current Directions

Perhaps as a reaction to the prevalence of geographically bound studies over the past thirty years, among North American, Israeli, and European scholars the pendulum is currently swinging back to a renewed attention to the Jewish global.²⁷ The study of early modern translocal networks and exchanges has emerged as an especially fruitful avenue for investigating links across political and geographical boundaries, while taking seriously context-specific developments and precise chronological limits.²⁸ Many of the most recent studies stress not only connectedness but also the ability of Jews to cross cultural boundaries and act as intermediaries and literal agents of connections, while remaining firmly immersed within the Jewish world.²⁹

Attention to heightened intellectual exchanges between Jews and Christians,³⁰ together with the flourishing subfield of the history of the Jewish book and its attendant focus on book circulation and distribution, and hence border crossing, have been quite influential in aiding this development.³¹ The books published by early modern Jewish printers were distributed across different subethnic communities and into the Christian sphere. Sephardic classics percolated into Ashkenazic areas, reaching new classes of readers and creating ways of studying that disrupted and innovated on medieval antecedents, and in time generated novel genres of publications. In turn, the diffusion of printed responsa created a sort of global rabbinic Republic of Letters.³² For its part, the early modern Christian interest in, and publication of, Hebrew books, with the associated rise of Christian Hebraism and kabbalah, generated unprecedented encounters between Jewish and Christian scholars, in turn enabling new Christian cultural appropriations (and equivocations) that differed from medieval and late antique models, and ultimately allowed Christians to become students of Hebrew without Jewish teachers.³³

Research on international Jewish merchants, charity networks and emissaries from Palestine, religious enthusiasm, as well as refugees and the poor, is yet another demonstration of the growing interest in transregional ties and diasporic webs.³⁴ Jews routinely traded cross-culturally by relying on commercial practices and languages shared by merchants of all ethnicities, at the same time as they strengthened Jewish familial connections and perfected communal processes to secure capital and foster bonds of obligation.³⁵ The heightened movement not only of traders but also of learned emissaries, rabbis, and teachers enabled new encounters between segments of the Jewish world that were previously not in touch, creating bonds of solidarity, but also misunderstandings and tensions between local concerns and supraregional ideals.³⁶ The circulation of unorthodox religious ideas and their opponents, with the outbreak of heated controversies around real and alleged Sabbatians, underlines connectedness as well as divisiveness within a beleaguered rabbinate, which organized across regional borders to bolster its authority.³⁷ Similarly, circulation engendered by persecution, such as the expulsion from Spain or the 1648 Khmelnytsky massacres, paradoxically created new communities and ties, straining existing relations but also generating new ones.³⁸ Studies on domestic workers and the poor, finally, demonstrate increased attention to cross-class interactions as well as class and gender stratifications—yet another way in which early modern Jews shaped intracommunal connections, but also crossed social boundaries.³⁹

This is evidently no return to the emphasis on the transgeographical cohesiveness and unity of the Jewish people present in early historiography. Rather, recent works consciously dwell on the limits of transgeographical trends and on the challenges inherent in forming and maintaining exchanges; they emphasize narrower areas of interaction (such as the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, Ashkenaz) and bring attention to the limitations, and sometime failures, of connectedness, not only its import. The first part of this volume exemplifies this research focus.

Another facet of this emphasis on connectedness is increasingly nuanced scholarly approaches to interactions between Jews and non-Jews, to capture the near-paradox of simultaneous connection and separation that Jews experienced as a minority in Christian-dominated European society.⁴⁰ The following reflections on such a vast and complex field of study cannot aspire to be comprehensive, but rather highlight a limited number of trends with the aim of better situating the second part of this volume.⁴¹ Careful reconsiderations of the encounters and interdependencies between Jews and their non-Jewish others within the same geographical locale—practical and intellectual entanglements that reflected the particular status of the Jews as a minority in constant dialogue and negotiation with the surrounding majority society—have emerged chronologically even earlier than the current reassessment of cultural and social interactions between early modern Jews and their Jewish others living in distant lands or belonging to different cultural subgroups.

Research on intellectual and cultural exchanges between early modern Jews and Christians, as alluded above, served as a crucial entryway into questions of connections and connectedness. A turning point took place in the 1980s, when older understandings of Jewish participation in the culture of Renaissance Italy, which had served as the classic locus for the study of intense Jewish-Christian relations before and immediately following World War II, were criticized as providing too schematic an appraisal of the relationship between Jewish and outside culture and of the complexities of Jewish culture itself, as a result of the dichotomy that earlier historians had construed between a purportedly obscurantist, traditionalist rabbinic society (reminiscent of a stereotypically narrow-minded Ashkenazic religious establishment) and the alleged free spirit of the Renaissance.⁴² At the same time as scholars grew increasingly skeptical of the notion that Jews were unilaterally affected by (or simply borrowed from) outside Christian culture,⁴³ new studies emerged that investigated the frequency and ambiguity of interactions between Jews and gentiles in the Italian states and examined the scope and limits of the freedoms that western Sephardic Jews enjoyed in Holland and England. This has led to an influential body of research on processes of Jewish cultural integration and expansion (as exemplified for instance by Jewish scholars’ engagement with scientific knowledge and the university) that also accounts for dynamics of cultural separation, such as polemical exchanges between Jews and Christians.⁴⁴ New methodologies, sensitive to issues of power and cultural creativity, have also emphasized unexpected spaces of interaction and the ability of the Jewish minority to selectively acculturate to its surroundings,⁴⁵ while Jewish prowess at cross-cultural exchanges and the complex balancing acts of Jewish scholars vis-à-vis the demands of the church and the attractions of gentile culture have been highlighted recently.⁴⁶

The sustained focus on Jewish-non-Jewish connections in western Europe has coexisted with reassessments of Jewish-gentile relations in other European areas. If some of the classic approaches to Ashkenazic Jewry, starting with Dubnow’s nationalist history and culminating with Katz’s sociological treatment, stressed its social and cultural isolation or its deep-seated conflict with the Christian majority, these positions, challenged from the 1970s on, are no longer tenable today. New work on Polish Jewry, for instance, proceeds from the assumption that Polish-Jewish relations informed all aspects of early modern Jewish life.⁴⁷ The experience of converts in the German lands has illuminated their liminal status and the spiritual borderlands between Judaism and Christianity.⁴⁸ The importance of physical borderlands and liminal spaces as sites of encounter and exchange between Jews and gentiles, in turn, is now solidly inscribed in the historiography of Polish Jewry.⁴⁹ Experts on greater Ashkenaz working on legal and social history have also taken up the question of the extent and limits of Jewish acculturation in central and eastern Europe, considering aspects such as layered judicial procedures in Alsace and social mingling in Poland,⁵⁰ or the ongoing interactions between Jews and Christians in Strasbourg, where Jews were in theory not supposed to reside.⁵¹ Additionally, research focusing on historical entanglements, namely the ways in which Jews and non-Jews experienced the same episodes or traditions from different perspectives, is offering new insights into cross-cultural exchanges and the extent and limitations of shared worldviews.⁵²

Turning to the final part of the volume on the ambivalent, at times evasive connections of Iberian conversos to Jewish culture, it is worth mentioning that approaches to the converso phenomenon highlighting the ambiguity of New Christian status in both Christian and Jewish societies have led to a significant methodological emphasis on boundary crossing. Conversos who left the Iberian Peninsula maintained profound personal and cultural connections with their motherland; many who reverted back to Judaism after leaving Spain and Portugal were perfectly at home in Latin and vernacular European cultures, had attended renowned Iberian universities, and, despite the threat of the Inquisition, had served the court or the nobility as physicians, administrators, financiers, or merchants.⁵³ Their role as cultural intermediaries between Jewish and non-Jewish spheres cannot be overstated.⁵⁴ Many of these individuals, also, demonstrated great religious flexibility, in particular an ability to take on religious identities depending on their surroundings, with individuals switching from Christianity to Judaism or Islam and, in some cases, back to Christianity.⁵⁵ Converso heterodoxy posed notable challenges to the structures of normative Judaism, generating vigorous, communal endeavors to stamp it out as well as apologetic writing to defend the authority of the rabbinic establishment.⁵⁶ The participation of conversos in the eminently early modern phenomenon of religious boundary crossing has led historians to look at those New Christians who chose to leave the Iberian Peninsula and revert to their ancestral faith as the first Jews to determine their own religious identity,⁵⁷ emphasizing the voluntary and often selective nature of their rejudaization.⁵⁸

But alongside conversos who reverted back to Judaism, there were thousands who decided to live their life as Catholics in the Iberian Peninsula and its colonies. In recent years, some Jewish historians have turned to the experience of these individuals of Jewish ancestry who remained part of, or returned to, the Catholic world, traditionally the purview of Iberianists and Latin Americanists. The older notion that all New Christians were potential Jews, associated with I. S. Révah, has begun to fall out of favor,⁵⁹ as studies have emphasized the expediency and fluidity—and, above all, the contingency—of religious identity in the early modern period.⁶⁰ Increasingly, scholars are exploring the Portuguese New Christian naçao as a separate yet integral part of Iberian Catholic society, one whose individual members did not always or necessarily wish to maintain connections with the Jewish world.⁶¹

Jews, Former Jews, and Their Others: New Perspectives

The thirteen contributions gathered here exemplify the trends described above. The first part reflects the importance of looking beyond the local in the effort to understand the diasporic, while remaining attentive to context-specific traits and attuned to connections between high and low within Jewish society. The second part highlights new modes of understanding cultural and social interactions between early modern Jews and non-Jews, including attention to murky areas of ambiguity in power dynamics and subtle acts of subversion; it has a distinct, though not exclusive, focus on Ashkenazic lands. The last two chapters extend the theme of connectedness beyond the Jewish community, addressing the position of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century conversos in Iberian society and their never linear relation to Judaism, emphasizing the extent to which New Christians were embedded within Catholic hierarchies and patronage ties.

Most of the contributions emphasize not only the altering impact and challenging nature of early modern encounters, but also their profound limitations and the great ambivalence experienced by Jews as they met their others. The five essays in Part I explore episodes reflecting both increasing differentiations within the early modern Jewish world, with the crystallization of regional identities and communal structures, and aspirations at increasing connectedness among far-flung communities thanks to the printing press—often realized but sometimes disappointed. Part I is opened by Rebekka Voß’s chapter, which challenges directly the notion of a cohesive transregional early modern culture. The heightened mobility that was typical of the early modern period impacted not only people, but also the texts (whether preserved in writing or passed on orally) that traveled with them across geographical borders. Voß traces the transmission of a vernacular folktale as an example of the successful creation of shared cultural traditions across space but also of the impermeability of some cultural borders, demonstrating the limits of early modern cultural transfer. With the advent of the printing press, the Western Yiddish story of the little Red Jew, based on a shared German-Yiddish understanding of color symbolism, achieved popularity across the Yiddish-speaking diaspora thanks to editorial strategies that made it appealing among different Ashkenazic reading communities. But once the story was translated into Hebrew, Voß shows, the absence of the very phrase Red Jews in Hebrew curtailed the story’s ability to inspire its audience’s visual imagination; the legend lost its colorful punch.

Debra Kaplan examines Jewish communal hierarchies and boundaries between different social classes in early modern western Ashkenaz. The chapter uncovers attitudes toward the Jewish poor by focusing on the ritual circumambulation of the cemetery grounds performed by all Jewish men of a certain means on the eves of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. This procession symbolically stratified the Jewish population in intersecting ways, by creating boundaries between men and women; wealthy and poor; and the foreign, itinerant poor and the local poor. While this procession made it possible for poor foreign Jews to receive annual donations, the event also served to underscore their liminality by relegating them to a marginal space, drawing attention to their fundamental difference from the official members of the community and preserving socioeconomic boundaries.

Pavel Sládek’s chapter, devoted to the publishing activity of the Bohemian rabbi Mordecai Jaffe, explores this author’s aspirations to establish himself as a translocal, universally recognized halakhic authority, inspired by the transgeographical circulation of sixteenth-century Hebrew printed works. Despite great obstacles, Jaffe managed to assert himself as a widely respected author not only in Ashkenaz, but also in Italy and the Land of Israel, two locales where his kabbalistically infused rulings, rather than other aspects of his teachings, became popular. Sládek’s investigation of the connections between Ashkenazic rabbis and Venice, which retained its fame as a prime center of Hebrew publishing even in the early seventeenth century, additionally illuminates the ties among rabbis from different backgrounds that growing mobility and print-related endeavors generated, while emphasizing the feelings of regional belonging these individuals maintained.

The importance of Hebrew printing as an agent of connectedness that facilitated exchanges between disparate Jewish communities and allowed diverse social classes and groups to cross cultural boundaries comes into focus again in Andrea Gondos’s chapter. Through an examination of kabbalistic popularizations produced by Yissachar Baer of Prague, Gondos looks at connections between elite and popular culture brought about by the exponential growth of printed Hebrew works. Baer’s study aids, primarily on the Zohar, simplified complex materials for Jewish readers with little or no kabbalistic background, effectively serving as bridges between medieval and early modern understandings of kabbalah and between elite and lay readers. But such works did not prove successful among Jewish readers alone. Christian Hebraists too turned to Baer’s popularizations, a testimony to his role as a cultural mediator of kabbalistic knowledge from one religious and geographical context to another.⁶²

Moshe Idel’s methodological meditation, probing how historians understand connections among agents from the past, concludes the first part. The study aims to recreate the self-understanding of a number of kabbalists from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century vis-à-vis their cultural surroundings, asking what made a meaningful other for them, whether positive or negative. Ultimately, Idel argues, these kabbalists had many more simultaneous others than a single historian is often able to reconstruct. Some of these cases exemplify the wish to maintain a strong identification with regions abandoned as a result of family migrations or persecutions, while others show that individuals made self-conscious cultural choices regarding which identity and attending rituals—Sephardic or Ashkenazic—they took on, bringing into focus the increased blurring and fragmentation of geographical and cultural identities for early modern Jews. The author adds a cautionary word to historians who attempt to reduce the complexities of the past to single causal explanations.

Part II comprises six studies that focus on the asymmetrical, entangled, and frequently ambivalent relations between Jews and Christians in early modern Europe, illuminating a minority’s coping strategies and showing that the perspectives expressed by early modern Jews often depended on whether they were addressing coreligionists or rather gentiles. Fabrizio Lelli’s chapter probes the different angles from which Jews and Christians came to discussions of Hebrew texts in Renaissance Venice. As Christians like Pietro Aretino appropriated zoharic imagery for their own purposes, kabbalists like Elijah Ḥalfan were adamant in urging their coreligionists not to disclose kabbalistic knowledge to gentiles. Still, Christian Hebraists continued pursuing their kabbalistic investigations, and Venice proved an ideal locale for such endeavors for two reasons: face-to-face conversations might have led learned Jews and Christians to cross the boundaries of what Jewish normative statements prescribed as appropriate disclosure of Jewish knowledge to gentiles, while the flourishing Hebrew press, to which men like Ḥalfan contributed, paradoxically made the secrets of kabbalah more accessible to non-Jews.

Michela Andreatta turns to encomiastic poetry and the patronage system that pervaded social interactions in Renaissance and baroque Italy to assess the complex encounter between the seventeenth-century Venetian rabbi Leon Modena and his Christian patrons, in this case the Fabbris, a Bolognese family for which he composed a Hebrew epithalamium. If social disparity was the precondition of any relationship of patronage, writing for Christians required an even more delicate balancing act on the part of a Jewish author because of the added burden of religious disparity. Andreatta suggests that Modena’s poem for the Fabbris, on the surface a conventional sonnet meant to reassert standard power dynamics between superior dedicatees and inferior author, in reality subverted the accepted poetics of patronage. Modena’s linguistic choices, hinting to an anti-Christian polemic, color his relationship with the Fabbris with ambivalence and cast doubts on his willingness to play deferential client.

Joseph Davis’s analysis of naming practices in Glikl bas Leib’s Yiddish memoirs is yet another demonstration of the ambivalence with which Jews approached social connections to gentiles, this time in seventeenth-century Ashkenaz. While Glikl made sure to name prominent Jewish figures with whom she wished to be associated, most Christians remained anonymous in her autobiographical work. Except for two princely guests at her daughter Zipporah’s wedding and Petersen the Postmaster, Glikl avoided naming the many Christians with whom she had frequent social and economic exchanges due to her profession, thus obscuring their presence. Instead, she consistently named public or historical non-Jewish figures, with whom she could not have any actual ties. The choice of naming or anonymity, Davis shows, was consistent with a wish to highlight connections with other Jews, while stressing boundaries with non-Jews. The question whether this is idiosyncratic or exemplifies a broader pattern remains for him an open question.

Alongside boundary-maintenance strategies, early modern exchanges between Jews and non-Jews also included boundary-crossing practices. By exploring competing narratives about the establishment of the town’s Jewish community as they circulated among sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Jews and Christians in Worms, Lucia Raspe reveals the entangled views that these communities, whose textual and oral traditions ricocheted off each other, held of their shared history. Christian renderings dated the beginnings of the town’s Jewry to its defeat and captivity at the hands of the Romans, thus demeaning the local Jews and implicitly implicating them in the story of the Crucifixion. Much nobler Jewish versions instead highlighted the great antiquity of the Worms community, exempting its members from the collective guilt of Jews in Christian Europe, and tied its fate with that of the local, aristocratic Dalberg family. Such intricately connected yet divergent narrative exchanges show that Jews and Christians knew well what the other side thought and that communication was bidirectional.

Rachel Greenblatt’s chapter, like Kaplan’s, focuses on Jewish ritual processions, these ones, however, meant for a mixed audience of Jews and non-Jews. Through an examination of the subtle differences with which three processions that took place in Prague’s Jewish Town in 1678, 1716, and 1741 were presented to Jewish and gentile audiences respectively, Greenblatt shows that Prague Jews sought to be recognized by their non-Jewish neighbors as fully partaking in a shared baroque culture of festival celebration and as proper German speakers. Yet Christian observers were often not as generous, deriding Jewish attempts at fitting in in Prague’s German-language culture. Even more ambiguous was the Jewish encounter with some of the Christian ideas that sustained Prague’s artistic culture, involving hints of Christian supersession and Jewish conversion.

Gershon Hundert’s chapter concludes the volume’s second part. His study of Dov Ber Birkenthal of Bolechów, who left the only extant memoir by an eighteenth-century Polish Jewish merchant, probes the shifting boundaries—sociocultural as well as ethical and legal—that characterized this man’s experience and that of Galician Jews. On the one hand, Birkenthal’s life points to a precarious reality in which duplicity, competition, and cheating were standard practices of intra-Jewish relations and of relations between individual Jews and the state—both of which were prone to mistrust. On the other