JEWTACT Abstract (original) (raw)
In recent decades, research has pointed to an early modern period, in which great transformation took place. By focusing on local studies, scholars have recognized that Jews and Christians residing in Europe interacted with one another, sharing daily experiences as well as important cultural developments. The Jews living in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries experienced many changes, first and foremost among them demographic migrations. Developments such as the Renaissance, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, the Scientific Revolution, and the invention of moveable type altered life for Jews and Christians of Europe alike. Further research in this field should include social history, as well as the transregional connections between Jews living in different regions.
2024
Between the Bridge and the Barricade explores how translations of non-Jewish texts into Jewish languages impacted Jewish culture, literature, and history from the sixteenth century into modern times. Offering a comprehensive view of early modern Jewish translation, Iris Idelson-Shein charts major paths of textual migration from non-Jewish to Jewish literatures, analyzes translators’ motives, and identifies the translational norms distinctive to Jewish translation. Idelson-Shein reveals for the first time the liberal translational norms that allowed for early modern Jewish translators to make intensely creative and radical departures from the source texts—from “Judaizing” names, places, motifs, and language to mistranslating and omitting material both deliberately and accidently. Through this process of translation, Jewish translators created a new library of works that closely corresponded with the surrounding majority cultures yet was uniquely Jewish in character.
In and Out, Between and Beyond: Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Europe
In and Out, Between and Beyond, 2021
This book, produced for the exhibition In and Out, Between and Beyond, presents the scholarly work of a group of historians who study the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in dialogue with the work of contemporary Israeli artists. This is one of the culminating projects of the European Research Council-funded research group Beyond the Elite: Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Europe. Since the inception of the project (fall 2016), the team has worked to construct a history which includes those who were not part of the learned elite as well as those who were learned, about whom we know more. The research team trained its sights on everyday moments, investigating daily routines and the ways medieval Jews understood their lives amidst their host cultures. At the heart of this work is the complexity of the circumstances in which medieval Jews lived: the integration of Ashkenazic Jews within their Christian surroundings, alongside their maintenance of a distinct religious identity. To complement the medieval study underlying this endeavor, the exhibit’s curator, Dr. Ido Noy, orchestrated a fruitful exchange between the research team and seven Israeli artists, who then produced contemporary expressions of the historic ideas under discussion. This book, mirroring the structure of the exhibit, is comprised of sixteen articles. Each one is built around a primary source from a particular literary genre. The colorful catalogue at the end of the volume documents the objects created especially for the exhibition that was displayed physically at the gallery on the Mount Scopus campus of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and can still be viewed virtually.
Renaissance Quarterly, 2021
Chapter 4 explores how thirteenth-century German law was both protective and controlling of Saxon women. It demonstrates that Saxon women's rights were fluid and how that fluidity was captured in the images of the picture-books. Caviness here acknowledges that women and Jews are not represented in any given section of the Sachsenspiegel but, rather, are referred to in clauses peppered throughout Eike's text. The picture-books, notes Caviness, therefore add extra-textual pictorial representations of both women and Jews in places where they are not seen in the legal text. This theme is continued in chapter 5 and its closer examination of Jews. Caviness parallels the fluctuating nature of settlement in German lands with the picture-books' depiction of the Jewish male. Although stereotypical images of Jews do appear in the fourteenth-century picture-books, predominantly through clothing, Jews are also depicted as an object of compensatory projection. Caviness thus concludes that there is no fixed societal position of Jews in the picture-books between 1300 and 1600 and they are, instead, a reflection of the contradictory experiences of fourteenth-century Jewish communities in German lands. The final chapter returns to the question of reception, picking up where chapter 2 left off, and continues the story from the eighteenth century to the present. Here the discussion mostly centers on adopting the Sachsenspiegel as a cultural artifact, but one that, since the 1930s, became weighed down by nationalism and racism. Caviness has certainly contributed to the Sachsenspiegel 's rehabilitation. This is a beautiful homage to Caviness's long-term research partner Charles Nelson, and a well-presented examination of the legal standing of marginal groups in a society dominated by male Christians. It does well to draw on comparable examples to place the picture-books in a wider European context, and readers will be drawn in by the beautifully reproduced images. Some readers may feel misled by the title in that women and Jews are only fully treated in chapters four and five. The size and weight of the tome is also somewhat prohibitive in what might otherwise be a good introductory text for students. These critiques aside, this is an absorbing exploration of the Sachsenspiegel picture-books that will certainly be an asset to the bookshelves of scholars in diverse fields of study.
Descriptions of the history of Jews and Judaism in an early modern context are of relatively recent origin. 1 Despite a plethora of new studies in the last several decades, there have been few attempts to define the period of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries as a distinct epoch in Jewish history, distinguishable from both the medieval and modern periods. 2 Some historians have remained indifferent to demarcating the period, or have simply designated it as an extension of the Middle Ages, or have labelled it vaguely as a mere transitional stage between medievalism and modernity without properly describing its distinguishing characteristics. A few historians have used the term 'Renaissance' to apply to the cultural ambiance of Jews living in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries alone without delineating the larger period and the more comprehensive geographical area. I offer here my own preliminary sense of how one might speak about the primary transformations in Jewish civilization in this era considering primarily the distinct histories of five large sub-communities-those of Italy, the Sephardim (descendants of Jewish settlers from the Iberian peninsula, who settled in the West (for example, the Netherlands), and those who settled in the East (the Ottoman Empire)), Germany and central Europe, and Poland-Lithuania-in their broader connections with each other. I consider five primary markers in tracing the major political, social, and cultural transformations of early modern Jewry as a whole. Each element needs to be examined over the entire period and across regional boundaries to assess its significance as a vital dimension of a newly emerging Jewish cultural experience. These categories overlap but, to my mind, they offer a most promising beginning in speaking about a common early modern Jewish culture. I would be the first to acknowledge that these markers are tentative at best, that they might describe inadequately and incompletely certain aspects of the larger landscape I wish to describe, and that some of the factors affected more people than others. I am also aware that in attempting to define a distinct epoch in Jewish history, I focus more on transformations and discontinuities in this chapter than