The Mediterranean And The Jews Society Culture And Economy In Early Modern Times

What does an understanding of Jewish history contribute to the study of the Mediterranean, and what can Mediterranean studies contribute to our knowledge of Jewish history? Jews and the Mediterranean considers the historical potency and uniqueness of what happens when Sephardi, Mizrahi, and Ashkenazi Jews meet in the Mediterranean region. By focusing on the specificity of the Jewish experience, the essays gathered in this volume emphasize human agency and culture over the length of Mediterranean history. This collection draws attention to what made Jewish people distinctive and warns against facile notions of Mediterranean connectivity, diversity, fluidity, and hybridity, presenting a new assessment of the Jewish experience in the Mediterranean.

The study of early modern history has exploded in the last several decades. Many new historical sources have been identified and examined and a host of exciting studies, employing a wide range of innovative methodologies, have been produced. Scholars of Jewish history have begun to ask to what extent the early modern period had a Jewish dimension; they have also begun to reconsider the nature of traditional periodization of Jewish history. Jews in the Early Modern World attempts to synthesize some of this exciting new research and present it in a broader comparative and global perspective. Jews in the Early Modern World argues that the years between 1400 and 1700 represented a discrete, cohesive and important period in Jewish history. Given the significant demographic shifts that began just before and ended just after this period, remarkable changes occurred in the history and experiences of Jews around the world. This volume begins with a broad context of Jewish experiences under medieval Christianity and Islam. It then turns to the early modern period, first providing an overview of Jewish demography and settlement. Next, the nature and structure of Jewish community and social structures in the early modern period are explored. In the final two chapters, this book presents a broad overview of Jewish religious and cultural life and Jewish relations with non-Jews throughout the early modern period. Jews in the Early Modern World will serve as a useful resource for a wide range of courses in medieval and early modern history, Jewish history and world history. It includes a bibliography of English-language works cited, a wealth of suggestions for further reading, a glossary of terms, a timeline of key events, and numerous maps and images.

David B. Ruderman's groundbreaking studies of Jewish intellectuals as they engaged with Renaissance humanism, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment have set the agenda for a distinctive historiographical approach to Jewish culture in early modern Europe, from 1500 to 1800. From his initial studies of Italy to his later work on eighteenth-century English, German, and Polish Jews, Ruderman has emphasized the individual as a representative or exemplary figure through whose life and career the problems of a period and cultural context are revealed. Thirty-one leading scholars celebrate Ruderman's stellar career in essays that bring new insight into Jewish culture as it is intertwined in Jewish, European, Ottoman, and American history. The volume presents probing historical snapshots that advance, refine, and challenge how we understand the early modern period and spark further inquiry. Key elements explored include those inspired by Ruderman's own work: the role of print, the significance of networks and mobility among Jewish intellectuals, the value of extraordinary individuals who absorbed and translated so-called external traditions into a Jewish idiom, and the interaction between cultures through texts and personal encounters of Jewish and Christian intellectuals. While these elements can be found in earlier periods of Jewish history, Ruderman and his colleagues point to an intensification of mobility, the dissemination of knowledge, and the blurring of boundaries in the early modern period. These studies present a rich and nuanced portrait of a Jewish culture that is both a contributing member and a product of early modern Europe and the Ottoman Empire. As director of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Ruderman has fostered a community of scholars from Europe, North America, and Israel who work in the widest range of areas that touch on Jewish culture. He has worked to make Jewish studies an essential element of mainstream humanities. The essays in this volume are a testament to the haven he has fostered for scholars, which has and continues to generate important works of scholarship across the entire spectrum of Jewish history.

This book explores how the Jewish ghetto engaged the sensory imagination of Venice in complex and contradictory ways to shape urban space and reshape Christian-Jewish relations.

Focusing on an epoch of spectacular demographic, political, economic, and cultural changes for European Jewry, Cultural Intermediaries chronicles the lives and thinking of ten Jewish intellectuals of the Renaissance, nine of them from Italy and one a Portuguese exile who settled in the Ottoman empire after a long sojourn in Italy. David B. Ruderman, Giuseppe Veltri, and the other contributors to this volume detail how, in the relative openness of cultural exchange encountered in such intellectual centers as Florence, Mantua, Pisa, Naples, Ferrara, and Salonika, these Jewish savants sought to enlarge their cultural horizons, to correlate the teachings of their own tradition with those outside it, and to rethink the meaning of their religious and ethnic identities within the intellectual and religious categories common to European civilization as a whole. The engaging intellectual profiles created especially for this volume by scholars from Israel, North America, and Europe represent an important rereading and reinterpretation of early modern Jewish culture and society and its broader European intellectual contexts.

Vol. 4 covers the late Roman period to the rise of Islam. Focuses especially on the growth and development of rabbinic Judaism and of the major classical rabbinic sources such as the Mishnah, Jerusalem Talmud, Babylonian Talmud and various Midrashic collections.

Sorkin seeks to reorient Jewish history by offering the first comprehensive account in any language of the process by which Jews became citizens with civil and political rights in the modern world.