Modern Historian's Accounts of the Early Modern Period
1. Jonathan Israel, European Jewy in the Age of Mercantilism. See the author's Introduction, pp. 1-3.
2. Howard M. Sachar, "The Jew as Non-European" (chapter 1), The Course of Modern Jewish History (newly revised edition; New York: Vintage Books, 1990).
Jewish Self-Government in Western Europe
In the eighteenth century a majestic silhouette of spires and battlements greeted the traveler who made his way down the valley of the lower Main River in southwestern Germany. It was the silhouette of Frankfurt, one of the four remaining free cities of the Holy Roman Empire, and one of Germany's most important commercial entrepots. Frankfurt's cobblestoned streets teemed with activity -- shouting hucksters, bawling cattle driven in for slaughter, rattling vegetable barrows pushed along to market, paunchy burghers and weather-lined farmers arguing the cost and quality of merchandise and produce. No one could fail to be impressed by the well-being, the air of good-fellowship that seemed, for the most part, to characterize Frankfurt's citizenry. But as the traveler continued down the long business thoroughfare, turning from time to time to sample the wares in crooked little side streets, he found his way barred by what appeared to be yet another small city within the larger urban area, a dwarfed, walled-off collection of alleys and creaking ancient buildings, its ugliness and loneliness in marked contrast to the warmth and charm of greater Frankfurt. The solitary gate guarded by an armed warden gave our traveler the palpable impression that a prison community was locked within. He was not far wrong. This little encincture -- a hideous anomaly in one of Europe's most dynamic market communities -- was the Judengasse, the ghetto of the Jews.
The ghetto walls in Frankfurt, and in hundreds of other cities and towns in Germany and elsewhere, provided telling physical evidence of a basic fact of Jewish life in the era before the French Revolution. That fact was the isolation of the Jews from their European neighbors, their indeterminate status as non-Europeans. It is fair to ask, then, if the Jews were actually foreigners or interlopers. Were they, for example, voluntary immigrants, newly arrived from other lands or continents? Or had they perhaps been imported into Europe as captives, much as African Negroes had been imported to America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? In truth, these Jews were not "foreigners" in the usual sense of the word. Nor were they newcomers to Europe. Most of them were descended from Jews who had lived on European soil for many centuries, often antedating many of the settlements of the non-Jewish populations of Europe. Sizable Jewish communities had existed in Europe long before the rise of Christianity. Yet it was the very rise of Christiantiy, the emergence of Europe's Christian dynasties between the fourth and fifteenth centuries, that destroyed the equality of Jewish status and the economic and political basis of Jewish security. The Jews were isolated, in fact, not because they were suspect as newcomers, but rather because they were feared as Christ-killers and, perhaps (as we shall see in Chapter 11), resented as Christ-givers.
The Judengasse signified more than Jewish isolation, however. It also signified Jewish autonomy. Corporativism, the division of society into separate and frequently autonomous corporations, was one of the central characteristics of European life under the ancien regime: the free city of Frankfurt and the separate little Jewish city within Frankfurt were merely additional evidences of this fact. Society under the ancien regime was not composed primarily of individuals, but rather, of corporate groups of individuals, each group with its own carefully delimited rights and responsibilities. The result was a vast agglomeration of chartered freedoms, ranging from the aristocrat's right to receive tolls at a bridge to a peasant's right to pasture a cow in a common field. Corporativism was a relic of a feudal technique that developed in the eighth and ninth centuries, in the years of the Norman and Saracen invasions. It was a technique by which the ruler decentralized responsibilities and rights, in the hope that barons and townships would perform functions for him that he, the king, could not afford, or did not have the strength, to perform himself. The need for such corporate division of society had long since vanished. But, like so many other relics of the medieval feudal world, it persisted into the eighteenth century. The result was a welter of small autonomous local units: manors, parishes, towns, guilds, universities and academies, commercial and financial companies.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the four hundred thousand Jews of Western Europe in the eighteenth century should also have been organized on the basis of corporate autonomy. Yet, as we have seen, they could hardly be permitted entrance into feudal society, or even into the guilds of municipal corporations. As infidels, they were incapable of pronouncing the required Christian oaths of fealty and loyalty. Where, then, could they go? They could not be dealt with as individuals; individualism was unknown in the ancient regime. They had to "belong" somewhere; they had to be reached by duke, baron, or bishop for fiscal purposes. It was to solve this problem that Christian rulers permitted the Jews to enroll in their own autonomous corporations. In a decentralized society they had the right -- indeed, the responsiblity -- of governing themselves, of caring for social services that the duke or baron declined to perform. The Jews, therefore, were obliged to provide their own educational, religious, administrative, social, medical, and penal services. So long as the Jewish communities paid their collective taxes or assizes, the ruler had no objection to their ghetto sovereignty.
Like most of the other corporate groups, the Jews did not resent their autonomous status. It provided the leaders of the Jewish community with the opportunity of maintaining the Jewish religion and all that this religion embraced in the way of educational processes, judicial action, and social welfare. Thus, the synagogue remained a center of Jewish life, its activities unimpeded by the government. The Jews administered their own laws, based on their own Talmudical precepts. Virtually all legal disputes were resolved within the Jewish community, in Jewish courts before Jewish judges. Jewish police enforced Jewish judgments, clapped lawbreakers into Jewish-controlled jails; while the most dreaded punishment of all was the one reserved for incorrigible offenders -- the herem, the awesome rabbincial ban of excommunication. It was Jews, too, who built the ghetto's conduits, supervised Jewish hospitals and old folks' homes, guarded Jewish gates, cleaned Jewish streets, assessed and collected Jewish taxes.
Inevitably this complex schedule of activities required a Jewish government. Such a government existed in each major Jewish community. Technically, it was based on a full assembly of all male Jews who were the heads of families, but the Jews were children of their times. Even as Christian society was usually divided into three estates, so, too, the Jewish community was divided -- although by wealth -- into classes. In practice, only the more affluent voted on matters of communal policy, and elected the lay elders who administered Jewish public affairs. The elders, in turn, possessed far-reaching and rather autocratic appointive powers; for example, they appointed the tax assessors and auditors, the judges, and the rabbis of the leading syngagogues. Occasionally, to be sure, the rabbis would seek to modify the harsh realities of communal politics; but the prestige of the rabbinate had declined drastically as early as the seventeenth century -- just as the power of bishops and priests had declined in Christian society. For all practical purposes the Jewish community was a closed world dominated by wealthy Jewish laymen and politicians.
One of the factors that made the control of these lay elders so oppressive was the financial structure of the Judengasse. The Jews were obliged, in the first place, to pay heavy revenues to cover the costs of Jewish communal life; in addition, they were required to pay substantial assizes and yearly taxes to the royal, baronial, and ecclesiastical treasuries. As a rule, the responsibility for assessing and collecting all these taxes was left to Jewish communal officials. Few of these officials evidenced any strong feeligns of noblesse oblige; on the contrary, most of them were quite rapacious. For in Early Modern times the wealthy Jewish controlling oligarchy made every effort to shunt the burden of taxation onto the impoverished Jewish masses. Taxes were far-reaching and ingenious, and once they were assessed, there could be little evasion. This financial burden, not only doubly heavy but inequitably distributed, was becoming virtually insupportable by the late eighteenth century. On the eve of the Emancipation era, while most Jewish communities still managed to maintain the integrity of their religious, education, and judicial systems, they were, nevertheless, on the verge of bankruptcy and open class warfare.
pp. 3–6.
3. Anna Foa, The Jews of Europe after the Black Death (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000).
Creating a synthesis encapsulating a period as long and varied as the one discussed in this book poses significant methodological problems. In particular, one has to come to grips with the particularity of the material. To tell the story of the Jewish presence in Europe means to bring together into one whole both Christian and Jewish perspectives.... My basic principle has been constantly to interweave the internal history of the Jews with that of their relations and relationships with the non-Jewish world, a problem that defies easy solutions. The borders between the two worlds must constantly be crossed, and this also means dealing with historical opinion that sees these two worlds in permanent opposition, with sharp lines distingusihing opening from closure, identity from assimilation, and halcyon from lachrymose times. In reality, such clear lines have never existed, and it is only recently, thanks in large part to what has been learned from the social sciences--anthropology in particular--that scholars have begun to abandon their quest for clear-cut borders and, in their place, to search for points of cultural contact, as well as the existence of a Jewish sub- or microculture, and to do so, for that matter, without resort to apologetics.
These problems recur with respect to periodization. Jewish history has its own time brackets--which are not always congruent with those of general history. Neither the expulsion from Spain nor emancipation, for example, both of which created sharp breaks in Jewish history, has a parallel in the non-Jewish world.... At the same time, Jewish history and Jewish time have not existed in a vacuum....One cannot properly tell the story of one without being conscious of the existence and importance of the other....
The periods subsequent to the fourteenth century, those of the Italian Renaissance and after--on which my narrative dwells--were difficult ones for the Jews of western Europe. For these were the times of the expulsion from Spain and of an expanding Jewish Diaspora that penetrated every corner of the vast Mediterranean region. These were also the times of forced conversion on a massive scale, unprecedented in the brief and limtied episodes of forced conversion in the past, and which resulted in placing these unwilling converts under continuous surveillance to defend against the crypto-Judaizing and Marranism that these conversions in fact spawned. As for the remaining Jews, they were ghettoized; the institution of the ghetto spread throughout Italy, wherever Jews were allowed to live. This was, it goes without saying, an epoch of contraction in European Jewish settlement--in the West, that is, but not in the East, where a great explosion of Jewish population was about to begin. In the West, these trends did not begin to reverse themselves until near the end of the seventeenth century, most notably in the "communities of return," composed of Spanish and Portuguese Marranos who returned openly to Judaism, first and especially in Amsterdam, but also in Hamburg, Bordeaux, London, and Leghorn. This return was marked by a gradual acceptance of the legality of these Jews openly practicing Judaism, the flourishing of Dutch communities, and even a rebirth of Jewish life in Germany. Only in Italy, and especially in the papal states, did Jewish life grow ever more closed, and impoverished.
pp. ix-x, 3-4
4. John Edwards, The Jews in Christian Europe (1400–1700) (London: Routledge, 1988). Part of a series entitled: Christianity and Society in the Modern World.
Introduction: From medieval to modern times?
The use of the phrase 'social history of religion' in itself suggests . . . certain presuppositions about the meaning and explanation of the very term 'religion.' When the question at issue is the interrelationship between two distinct religious traditions or communities in a chronological period of two centuries, the matter becomes even more complicated, since the likelihood is that each will have its own view of the importance of that period and its place in that religion's perception of its own history. Both these difficulties will be major preoccupations throughout the pages which follow, but first it is necessary to define, as far as possible, the scope of the material which is to be discussed. The first possible conflict between Jewish and Christian perceptions arises at once with the question of dating. Even the numbering of the year in which a given event took place involves certain fundamental religious affirmations. . . . For practical purposes . . . this discussion will concern the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the era dated from the supposed date of Jesus's birth, though this may be thought of, as has become a matter of Jewish convenience too, in terms of a 'Common' rather than a 'Christian' era.
Such a solution in itself indicates the major historical realities of the period and helps to define the geographical as well as the chronological scope of the work. In deference to the dominance which, by 1500, had been achieved by a form of Christianity which owed its origins and allegiance to Rome, the subject of the book will be the religious and social life of Jews and Christians in Catholic Europe, that is, the parts of the continent which both had Jewish populations in this period and were predominantly Catholic at its beginning. Thus, the succeeding chapters will . . . be no more than marginally concerned with the eastern Mediterranean and Russia, or, in other words, the areas under Orthodox Christian or Muslim control. It will be noted that Jewish history in this period is here being defined in Christian terms. This seems to be a matter of simple historical reality, and does not presuppose any general view about the relative truth and strength of these two religions or the proper social relations between their adherents.
On the contrary, it is important to introduce at this stage a method of approach which will, it is hoped, allow both Christian and Jewish views of the period to be acknowledged. First of all, it is necessary to say that the general Christian, or post-Christian, perception of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries today has little or no place in it for Jews. . . . For those in the 'Christian' tradition, which for this purpose includes agnostic and atheist historians too, the important events in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the Renaissance and the more specifically religious Reformation, which between them broke up the old medieval institutional and cultural framework of Europe. There followed a period of violent and damaging conflict, at the end of which Europe was largely divided into two armed and religiously divergent camps. By 1600, medieval Europe had become early modern Europe, and the institutions of the historical profession, at all levels, still quite faithfully reflect this interpretation, which has survived the rejection by some practitioners of religion and culture as major historical factors, in favour of material social and economic phenomena. The latter part of the seventeenth century saw, according to this view, a further devleopment of intellectual and cultural history in which, in part as a reaction to the violence and disruption which was then perceived to have been caused by religion, new habits of thought were devised, first by a few brave and often persecuted individuals, and then by larger groups of increasingly influential people. This new mentality involved the rejection of irrational explanations of the phenomena of the world, including much of the intellectual edifice of organized Christianity, and, instead, a reliance on experiment and empirical observation as methods of understanding them. According to the conventional interpretation, the result of this intellectual change, which, by the eighteenth century is regarded as an Enlightenment, included the single-minded promotion of the perceived economic interests of states which is commonly known as mercantilism, a growth in official toleration of religious diversity, and, eventually, a type of enlightened absolute monarchy, known to eighteenth-century historians as enlightened despotism. If the Jews of Europe are fitted into this interpretation at all, then they are held to have benefited increasingly from all these phenomena, gaining greater religious, economic, and social freedom. Thus, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are seen essentially as a period of transition from the break-up of most of the Jewish communities of western and central Europe to a new enlightened patern of Jewish-Christian relations, in which Christian majorities abandon their old restrictions on Jewish life in return for an acceptance by Jews of the customs, and even the citizenship, of the Gentile majority. The Enlightenment thus destroys medieval Judaism as surely as it destroys medieval Catholicism.
Even when Christian dating is used, the Jewish perception of this period is different.. . . It is important for the non-Jewish reader to remember, at all times, that any consideration by Jews of the Jewish role in European history in earlier periods is likely today to be, to a greater or lesser extent, consciously or unconsciously, governed by the experience, either personal or vicarious, of the Shoah or Holocaust. Thus the hsitory of Jews in Catholic Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is liable to be seen by Jewish commentators in a more defenseive way than might have been the case before 1900, or even before 1939. The policies of Gentile governemtns will be judged by their willingness or otherwise to grant Jews life itself, and, as will become clearer in later chapters, those who adopted the option of assimilation will be liable to receive short shrift. The influence of recent events, including both the Holocaust and the establishment, in 1948, of an independent Jewish state for the first time since 70 AD CE, has not, of course, uniformly affected Jewish historians of Jewry, but the general interpretation of early modern Jewish history continues to see it as a period of readjustment following the late-medieval expulsion of communities from western Europe and preceding an 'assimilationist' episode which began in the late eighteenth century. According to this interpretation, the main activity of Jews in this period was to attempt to preserve their way of life in the midst of the upheavals which did so much to change or upset the Christian society in the midst of which they lived. An exception to this view is the writing of Jonathan Israel, who strongly urges that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries should be seen rather as a period of upheaval, and generally of improvement, in the life of Jews in Catholic Europe. . . .
The proper historical treatment of religious experience is an even more subtle and difficult problem, and before Jewish and Christian religious life may in this respect be compared, it is necessary to establish some criteria for describing and assessing what seems to have happened. . . . To begin with, it may be useful to consider religious phenomena, or those which were so described by participants, in three main categories, which inevitably and constantly overlap and interrelate. The first of these is what may be called 'official' religion. This includes not only the thought, writings, and teaching of religious leaderships but also the activities of their political supporters. Religious authority thus merges, in the context of the attempt to assure adherence by subject populations to a certain prescribed model of belief and practice, with what is generally called secular or state authority. The extent to which such authorities succeeded in controlling the activities of large numbers of people will be a constant theme among both Jews and Christians. The second important category to be borne in mind is . . . what may be called social, public, or corporate religion. The subject matter of this aspect of religious phenomena involves not only public worship in synagogues and churches, but also the whole 'sacred landscape,' to use William A. Christian's phrase, of shrines, images, and holy places, which was a particular feature of late medieval Christiantiy and which also to some extent affected Jews and Muslims who lived on the European mainland. In addition, the phenomena of social religion include, for this purpose, the pilgrimages, processions, and other public rituals which were so prominent a part of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century life, and which were by no means the sole property of the Catholic faith. Thirdly, it will be impossible to ignore the individual religious experience of Jews and Christians. This is, of course, the category for which it is most difficult to obtain evidence. However, it cannot be discounted because it seems clear, from materials emanating from various parts of Europe . . . that so many variations on the officially prescribed patterns of religious belief and practice were to be found in this period that a conservative and cautious refusal to consider the scattered and often intractable evidence would result in the conveying of a seriously misleading impression of what actually seems to have been going on. At this stage, it is necessary to do no more than give one example of the kind of phenomena which would remain inexplicable without a willingness to consider individual religious experience. This is the issue of conversion from Judaism to Christianity . . . It seems that no realistic, let alone comprehensive, understanding of the 'converso condition' is possible unless general concepts such as the 'converso' are broken down into the individuals which made them up. . . .
pp. 1-9
5. Berel Wein, Triumph of Survival. The Story of the Jews in the Moden Era 1650-1990 (Brooklyn, New York: Shaar Press, 1990)
Prologue:
There is a pattern to the story of the people of Israel. The Bible itself provides the early chapters and foretells the future. After slavery in Egypt and the miraculous exodus from the land of their bondage, the Jewish people at Sinai enter into the covenant of the Torah. This unique people, with beliefs and practices far different from the peer civilizations of their time, conquered and settled an inhospitable bit of land that is strategically important as the bridge connecting Asia, Europe, and Africa.
Their Torah and prophets taught them that the source of their strength and security was spirituality; that they would prevail by the spirit, not by the spear. But they strayed from the strictures of their Divine covenant and thus proved themselves unequal to their Divine mission. . . .
. . . Each new cut reopened all the old scars and wounds. The burden of the ages became increasingly heavy, and a sense of near panic besieged parts of the house of Israel as the centuries passed.
The Inquisition and expulsions of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492 and 1496 triggered a desperate reaction in the Jewish world. Spain and Portugal, which had provided home and haven to the intelligentsia and aristocracy of Israel for five centuries, became the graveyard of Jewish hopes and lives. Almost 250,000 Jews converted to Christianity -- most of them originally only pretending to do so -- in an attempt to save their homes, fortunes, families, and way of life. An equal number of Jews chose exile and dislocation rather than betray their faith, conscience, and tradition.
In an irony of history, Columbus' voyage to the New World was delayed by the density of ship traffic evacuating hapless Jews from Spanish harbors. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella decreed a deadline beyond which all Jews remaining in Spain must either convert or die at the stake -- a day that fell on the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av, the anniversary of the destruction of both Temples in Jerusalem. To the tens of thousands of Jews crossing the border to lives of suffering and uncertainty, the date was a Divine omen, signifying that though God was angry with them, He had not forgotten them.
Many Spanish and Portuguese Jews escaped to Holland, Italy, Turkey, and even to the Land of Israel. Many others crossed Europe and eventually found home and refuge with the Jews of Poland and Russia, assimilating into the Ashkenazic lifestyle and rite. The shock of Spanish Jewry's tragedy reverberated throughout the Jewish world. The disaster that befell the wealthiest, most sophisticated and stable section of world Jewry plunged the Jewish people everywhere into a state of depression.
Kabbalistic ideas and values gained public popularity in the Jewish world as the secrets of the ages, zealously guarded and reserved over untold generations exclusively for people of utmost scholarship and piety, now became part of the public domain. These teachings provided comfort because they imparted meaning and purpose into events that were otherwise incomprehensible. But there was a downside. Unscrupulous people would capitalize on the lack of sophistication of the Jewish masses in such metaphysical matters and wreak havoc with traditional Jewish life and mores. Great internal stresses developed within the Jewish people, and there was mounting pressure for change and alleviation of the Jewish condition in the exile of Europe.
The outside world, too, did not stand still. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries brought great and violent changes to Europe, now emerging from the enforced piety of the Middle Ages. The ideals of the Renaissance took hold and refashioned Europe. The foundation for the future reformation of Christianity, for the rebellion against absolute monarchy, and for the colonial expansion of Western civilization into all parts of the world was laid during those two centuries. The hope of Wstern civilization for a better tomorrow and the soaring -- almost arrogant -- optimism upon which Western man would build his new world eventually infected the people of Israel as well.
The story of the Jewish people from the 1640s onward is a history of drastic change and unswerving loyalty, of great achievements and monumental defeats. The most decisive events of current Jewish life were formed by the larger historic currents of the last 350 years. The emergence of a large and wealthy American Jewish community, assimilation, and religious ferment, the Holocaust, the resurgence of Torah life and scholarship, the State of Israel, the people and the Land, are the products of these years.
The impetus towards the light of the future stems from the knowledge of those forces and struggles that have so recently shaped our immediate, dark past. To know the past of the Jewish people is to believe in its future.
pp. 1-4
6. Moses A. Shulvass, The Jews in the World of the Renaissance, trans. by Elvin I. Kose (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1973)
Preface
The Renaissance is justifiably regarded as one of the most significant eras in human history. When people tired of the burdensome limitations imposed upon them during the Middle Ages, they discarded them and broke through to a broad avenue of new social and cultural creativity. The cultural treasures of the Antiquity were rediscovered. Men began to consciously perceive the world with all its vastness and beauty, and to extol the worth of the individual, his powers, his talents, and his aspirations for creativity and fulfillment.
The new approach that opened society to the individual offered hitherto unimaginable opportunities to the Jew. Renewed interest in the ancient world and its culture effected a changed relationship between enlightened Christian and Jew. Affection for the Jew displced hatred, for he was the keeper of an imporatnt part of ancient culture -- Hebrew language and literature. Simultaneously, new economic conditions gave rise to a new, more liberal attitude to "Jewish" professions. The social significance of the Jewish humanist and moneylender became enhanced and many sought their services. Some came to the Jewish humanist to study Hebrew language and Scripture; others visited synagogues to listen to his interesting sermons. On the basis of a special contract (condotta), that offered many privileges to the Jew, Jewish moneylenders were invited to many cities and states throughout the peninsula.
This astonishing change awakened a powerful response in Jewish hearts. The new attitudes and patterns of life penetrated the Jewish quarter. Almost feverish activity seized the Jews. They began to express interest in areas of knowledge which the Renaissance created. Political problems and events began to concern them, and even the visual arts engaged their interest.
In the area of visual arts, however, it becomes apparent that the Jews did not immerse themselves in the culture of the Renaissance unconditionally. The meagerness of Jewish creativity in the visual arts reveals that where new views clashed with a fundamental of the Jewish faith, Judaism emerged the winner. After perusing the description of the various areas of life, the reader will conclude that in virtually every respect the Jews accepted the Renaissance 'cautiously.' They honestly strove to create a harmonious blend of Judaism and Renaissance culture in life and thought patterns, and to a large degree they succeeded. . . .
pp. ix-xi