Jews and Urban Spaces

EMW 2005: Jews and Urban Spaces

EMW 2005 — Sun, 21 Aug 2005 17:00:00 PDT

The second Early Modern Workshop (August, 2005) was hosted by the Louis L. Kaplan Chair in Jewish History, the Department of History, and the Rebecca and Joseph Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Maryland; by the Hebraica Section of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., and supported by Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT.

Texts and maps cover a number of urban and geographic settings from London, to The Hague, Frankfurt, Livorno, Florence, Strasbourg, Prague, Poznań, and Minsk. They deal with physical personal space (minutes from the Poznań community record book; responsum of Rabbi Isaac the Great from Poznań; personal record book of Rabbi Hayyim Gundersheim of Frankfurt on Main), the halakhic understanding of space (Responsum of Rabbi Samuel Aboab concerning Genoa; the community minute book of The Hague); economic ideals and realities of Jewish urban existence (the 1595 Cracow community constitution; the ordinances of the community in Prague; appeals of judicial decisions from Livorno); transgressions (documents from Florence; the proceedings of the Old Bailey in London; the community minute book of The Hague); and complex legal boundaries and limitations (1711 decree of the Lithuanian Tribunal, letters of Josel of Rosheim).

The Shtetl in Context

Thomas Hubka — Mon, 22 Aug 2005 09:00:00 PDT

The town plans that will be analyzed were part of a greater, pre-nineteenth century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, including most of today's Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and western Ukraine. The overall organization and character of the Polish, eighteenth century, small Jewish town was primarily developed during the fourteenth-through-eighteenth century Polish colonization of its eastern provinces in what is now Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine.

Question of the Eruv in Early Modern Europe

David Katz — Mon, 22 Aug 2005 10:00:00 PDT

Both the responsum of Rabbi Aboab and that of Hakham Zvi Ashkenazi reflect a feature of pre-modern kehillah life almost never dealt with in scholarly literature, namely, the urban eruv, a physical boundary delineating space in which one is permitted to carry items on Sabbath, erected by the kehillah.

This presentation is for the following text(s), available in the PDF file:

Samuel Aboab's Responsum 257
Hakham Zvi Ashkenazi's Responsum, She'elot u'Teshuvot Hakham Zvi no. 6 (1699)

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Proceedings of Old Bailey (18th century)

Todd Endelman — Mon, 22 Aug 2005 11:00:00 PDT

Todd Endelman discusses the following six texts were published in The Whole Proceedings upon the King's Commission of Oyer and Terminer and Gaol Delivery for the City of London and also the Gaol Delivery for the County of Middlesex, a series of printed volumes recording cases tried at the Old Bailey in the City of London in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (now accessible on line at www.oldbaileyonline.org.)

This presentation is for the following text(s):

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey

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Taverns and Public Drinking in Florence

Stefanie Siegmund — Mon, 22 Aug 2005 13:00:00 PDT

The texts presented here (from Florence, Italy, 1571-1622) draw our attention to a set of spaces neither specifically Jewish nor Christian, but decidedly urban and early modern: the eating and drinking establishments of the cities. Not included here but relevant are the rabbinic laws that forbid Jews to eat non-kosher food, regulate the wine Jews drink, and prohibit Jews from spending or handling money on the Sabbath and on festival days. As a set, the texts both hint at chronological developments in the city of Florence and in the ghetto and also serve to caution against facile readings of any one text in isolation. As an exercise, one might consider how any of the three texts that refer to Jews might have been interpreted on its own.

Rural Jews of Alsace

Debra Kaplan — Mon, 22 Aug 2005 14:00:00 PDT

From 1348/9-1477, the Jews of Alsace were expelled from the cities in which they had lived throughout the Middle Ages. While many opted to leave the Empire for centers in Eastern Europe and Italy, some Jews remained, moving to the towns and villages in the countryside. By the 1470's, the majority of Alsatian Jews lived in rural areas. Quotas often dictated residential policies in towns and villages, so it was not uncommon to find one or two Jewish families per village/town. The following documents detail the relationship of rural Alsatian Jews, as represented by their communal leaders, with two Alsatian cities, Strasbourg and Hagenau.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

Decree banning Jewish commerce in Strassburg (1530)
Letter from Josel of Rosheim to the magistrates of Strasbourg (1534)
Letter from Josel of Rosheim to the magistrates of the city of Strasbourg (1534)
Letter from Lazarus of Surbourg to the magistrates of Hagenau (1575)

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Close Quarters Privacy and Jewish House Space in Early Modern Polish Cities

Adam Teller — Mon, 22 Aug 2005 15:00:00 PDT

The following texts were chosen in order to illustrate the implications of the growth in Jewish population in Poland's larger towns during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when the number of Jews grew faster than the non-Jewish authorities would allow the Jewish quarters to expand. This led to an increasing degree of crowding in the Jewish quarter as a whole as well as in individual houses. To illustrate this, some demographic data on the situation in the Jewish quarter of Poznan may be seen in the presentation.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

Cracow Community Ordinance of 5355 (1595)
Ordinance from the Pinkas of the Jewish Community in Poznań (1686)
Responsa Be'er Yitzhak (1685)

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The Personal Record Book of Hayyim Gundersheim Dayyan (1774)

Edward Fram — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 09:00:00 PDT

Rabbinic courts were and remain an integral part of the Jewish community and the Jewish community in Frankfurt in the late eighteenth century had not one but two such courts. The courts handled a wide range of issues including divorces, contracts, real estate transactions, trusts, estates, and also gave opinions on the scope of Jewish communal authority. This particular case deals with a house on the so called "Judengasse" in Frankfurt. The Jewish ghetto was divided up into lots that had names rather than street numbers and houses on the lots were often owned by more than one family. The case before us deals with reaching an equitable division of the house among it owners. More introductory information about the Jewish ghetto and some of the families who lived there can be found at http://www.judengasse.de/index.htm.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

A Court Official's Personal Record Book

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Marching Soldiers, Opera Houses and Young Jewish Men in Eighteenth-Century Hague: Haag Jewish Community Minute Book

Stefan Litt — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 10:00:00 PDT

The presented sources have been selected from the oldest minute book, the pinkas, of the Ashkenazi community in The Hague, which was kept from 1723 until 1786. The Hague was then the Dutch capital and residence of the Orange Stadholders. The city was much smaller than Amsterdam, but it was still one of the most important urban centers of the Dutch Republic. As the capital, its urban population included many officials, diplomats and soldiers, and these people formed and influenced the urban life significantly. The second half of the eighteenth century witnessed the high point of the Rococo with its intensive pursuit of amusement, evidenced by numerous theatres, operas, and pubs, as well as by people’s colorful dresses and the soldiers’ extraordinary uniforms.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

The Haag Jewish Community Minute Book/Pinkas

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Law, Boundaries, and City Life in Early Modern Poland-Lithuania

Magda Teter — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 11:00:00 PDT

he dynamics of relations within cities thus are shaped not only by class or religious or ethnic membership but also by the legal framework. In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, divisions between the private and royal domains within cities disrupted not only their legal coherence but also that of Jewish communities themselves, sharpening economic competition and often also conflict. This is what the 1711 decree of the Lithuanian Tribunal against the kahal of Minsk highlights--legal distinctions sometimes exacerbated urban tensions.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

Decree of the Lithuanian Tribunal against the Kahal of Minsk (1711)

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