Jewish Community and Identity in the Early Modern Period

Merchants and Rabbis - The Family of Josko of Lviv

Jerzy Mazur — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 15:00:00 PDT

Josko of Lviv was one of the most important Jewish entrepreneurs in the late medieval Poland, specifically in the eastern provinces of Polish Kingdom, namely the voievodships of Russia and Lublin. Jossko engaged in the number of profitable commercial activities, but achieved real prominence as the leaseholder of royal customs in such important urban centers as Lviv, Lublin, Chelm and Belz. His successful service to Kazimierz Jagiellon, John Olbracht and Alexander Jagiellon became the point of contention during the session of Polish Diet in Lublin in 1505. In this year Polish parliament demanded that Josko would be removed from his official position in the royal service. Shortly after this dramatic intervention of the Polish noblemen Josko died in Lublin, and left behind his wife Golda and children. One of his sons, Shachna, a pupil of Jacob Pollack, became the foremost rabbinical authority in Poland, and his yeshiva graduated such influential scholars as Solomon Luria and moses Isserles. This presentation will examine the history of Josko and his family in the first three decades of 16th century. It will analyze the importance of Josko as the royal servant and how the fortune he left help his sons, especially Pyessak and Shachno to establish themselves as an important leader of the community in Lublin, and more broadly in eastern Poland. Number of important primary texts, issued mostly by the royal chancellery, will be utilized here, all pertaining to Josko and Shachno.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

Court record from Lublin Castle (1533)
The Letter (Privilege) with the Royal Seal Presented by Rabbi Schachno from the Lublin's Suburb (1533)

A Spiritual Community in the Social world: Lurianic Notions of Identity and Inter-subjectivity within the Community

Assaf Tamari — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 13:00:00 PDT

The importance of Lurianic Kabbalah to the context of early modern Jewish religiosity has been recognized almost unanimously. However, only in recent years scholars acknowledge its highly embodied nature, the specific historical community which lies at the heart of its religious interest, i.e. the Lurianic fellowship. The present presentation will discuss some of the radical notions of identity within the community developed in the writings of Lurianic Kabbalah. Based on its highly complex anthropological theory, and especially its theories of soul transmigration and soul interrelations, Lurianic Kabbalah sees individual action and identity as highly dependent upon the spiritual “soul community” with its own dynamics, hierarchies and power relations. I will focus on the tension between the hidden spiritual network and the visible social one, the former conceived as the hermeneutical key for the latter, and on its implications to the self understanding of the members of the fellowships. In the center of the analysis will be Hayyim Vital’s autobiographical account of the fellowships’ spiritual and actual dynamics.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

Sefer ha-Hezyonot (Book of Visions, 1570s)

Conjugal Disputes at the Jewish Court of 18th Century Altona

Noa Shashar — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 11:00:00 PDT

Disputes between married couples in 18th century were sometimes brought before the Jewish court ( the Beit-Din). Analysis of protocols of session which dealt with such disputes reveals facts about tensions caused by contemporary family structure and marriage customs as well as about the means which the court applied to enforce policy. The texts presented here are excerpts from one of the protocol books of the Jewish court of Altona. Altona, at the time subject to the Danish King, shared institutions with the neighboring Jewish communities in Hamburg and Wandsbeck, a union which produced several kinds of documents covering a period of almost three centuries (16th-19th), some of which have survived and are held at the Central Archives of the Jewish People in Jerusalem. This volume of the court’s protocol book contains 1458 listings from the period 1768-1771. The following excerpts record court decisions in cases of disputes between married couples. The first, which according to the date on the page (but not on this specific entry) is from 1768, records the court’s intervention in a conjugal dispute, sentencing both parties to refrain from visiting their own parents, revealing how gender mattered in such cases. The second, dated 1769, informs about the court’s involvement in family relations and reveals ways in which neighbors were engaged to enforce community policy and social control.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

Protocol of Altona Jewish Court

Layered Networks: Functioning Across Communities

Shuki Ecker — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 10:00:00 PDT

A considerable part of Rabbi Abraham Joseph Canette s book includes autobiographical material. It sheds light on the life of an orphaned son who became a travelling rabbi. He describes the circumstances of his life in Safed, Jerusalem, Aleppo, Candia, Venice, Livorno, Algiers and Constantinople, and praises his benefactors and patrons in each. While much of his writing is stylized praise for these individuals, he also portrays his own personal life in great detail. His life story and the networks it reveals offer a view of individuals in communities and between communities. I intend to focus on several overlapping networks that emerge from his descriptions, both locally in Constantinople, where the book was printed, and in particular across the various communities in which the author lived, along which some of his own travels can be traced.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

Mekits ben hai (The Awakening of a Living Man, 1757)

Communication and community : multiplex networks in the 18th Century Sephardi Diaspora

Evelyne Oliel Grausz — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 09:00:00 PDT

In many aspects, the Sephardi diaspora functioned as a combination of overlapping circulations and networks, its many levels of communication and interaction involving family ties, economic partnerships, and official intercommunal links. Whereas the question of intercommunal networks has recently attracted some topical studies, little attention has been paid to the articulation between these various levels of circulation and interaction. I propose to explore this idea of a multiplex diaspora through a selection of documents emanating from the Amsterdam and London Sephardic community, essentially letters, addressed to Bordeaux, Safed, Surinam and Ferrara : these documents describe several paradigmatic situations of interaction between communities and delineate networks of information, of halakhic authority, of diplomatic intercession. The articulation between merchant and community networks will be approached through the role played by two Sephardic community agents, Francisco Pereyra in London and Abraham da Costa in Amsterdam. The case of diplomatic interaction relates to the defence of Polish Jewry faced with ritual murder trials in 1753, and through the involvement of Polish communities, as well as various and Sephardic kehilot, it shows an instance of interconnection between Ashkenazic and Sephardic networks, thus allowing us to reflect on the broader issue of community and communication in the early modern Jewish world.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

Copiador de cartas/Letter copybook (1): Resolution by the Mahamad of the congregation Shaar Hashamayim of London, 8 July 1705- 16 tammuz 5465.
Copiador de cartas/Letter copybook (2): A letter to the parnassim of Kahal Kados Beraha Vesalom in Surinam by Abraham da Costa, 1723
Copiador de cartas/Letter copybook (3): Letters from the Amsterdam parnassim to Bordeaux and Safed, 1728
Copiador de cartas/Letter copybook (4): A letter from the Amsterdam parnassim to their financial agent in London, Francisco Pereyra, 1733.
Copiador de cartas/Letter copybook (5): A Letter from Amsterdam to Ferrara on behalf of Polish Jews, 1753

The Early Modern Jewish Parliament: The Council of Four Lands in Poland

Adam Teller — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 16:00:00 PDT

This presentation will examine the structure, functions, and internal tensions of the Council of Four Lands, based on a set of regulations drawn up in Polish by the Council at the request of the Treasury Commissioner, Dzialynski, in 1739. It will also attempt to examine the Council in its Polish and European contexts.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

Regulations of the Jewish Council in Jaroslaw

The Price of Power: Financing a Jewish Community

Cornelia Aust — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 15:00:00 PDT

The communal pinkas (logbook) of the Jewish community in Frankfurt on the Oder from the second half of the eighteenth century provides a glimpse into the ways of the communal leaders – usually the wealthiest merchants of the community – to raise the increasing taxes and dues demanded by the Prussian state. It, thus, allows us to examine, first, the interrelation between economic position and social power within the Jewish community and what this power meant taking into account the limited degree of communal autonomy of Prussian Jews. Secondly, it helps us to explore the trans-regional networks Jewish merchants used to secure the financial situation of their community and the extent to which these connections overlapped with their commercial undertakings.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

Pinkas/Minute book of the Jewish Community in Frankfurt on the Oder

Rabbinic Authority and Community in 18th Century Germany: Moses Brandeis Levi and the Jewish Community of Mainz

Stefan Litt — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 14:00:00 PDT

Moses Brandeis Levi (d. 1767) was one of the important rabbis of the early modern community in Mainz. Besides his local duties, he was also in charge for the rural communities in the territory of the archbishopric of Mainz. A number of sources indicate that his relations both to the local community and to the Gentile authorities were all but easy. In my presentation, I will introduce an unknown source from the records of the Jewish community in Mainz (Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem, D/Ma7/5, pp. 100-102). This Yiddish text is about a sharp dispute between Brandeis and the members of the community that came up on one of his decisions to ban all the bread, cakes, and pastries baked in town in 1754 due to his concerns on kashrut. A poll among twenty members of the community about their opinion on the rabbi’s ban showed that all of them were unwilling to accept his decision and eventually he was forced to withdraw the ban. The text is a detailed description of the issue, including the statements of the members. It shows a new understanding of the community in Mainz that was obviously more oriented on pragmatic aspects of everyday life than on strict observance of Halakha.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

Community Records of Mainz (1754)

The Struggle to Transcend Differences and Conflicts Among Early American Jewry

Eli Faber — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 13:00:00 PDT

Exploration of two contrary tendencies among colonial American Jews to achieve consensus within their religious fellowship. In one case, they relied upon European precedent by attempting to recreate the kehilla in America, while in the other they rejected European precedents that forbade commonality among Ashkenazim and Sepharadim. The outcome was a new kind of community: the voluntary one.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

Minute Book of the Congregation Shearith Israel in New York (1730-1760)

Regulating Communal Space: Mikvaot in Seventeenth-Century Altona

Debra Kaplan — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 11:00:00 PDT

Over the course of a few years in the latter half of the seventeenth century, the community of Altona made several changes in the administration of local ritual baths. A series of entries in the communal pinkas, or logbook, elucidates how the community raised funds from mikvaot, how lay and rabbinic leaders worked together, and how communal leaders regulated ritual space both in homes and in communal space.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

Pinkas/Communal Logbook of Altona (CAHJP AHW 14 [50])
Pinkas/Communal Logbook of Altona (CAHJP AHW 14 [90])
Pinkas/Communal Logbook of Altona (CAHJP AHW 14 [91])