Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

Keynote: "Entanglements" Tom Cohen, York University, Toronto

Tom Cohen — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 10:30:00 PST

Tom Cohen of York University speaks of Jewish-Christian "entanglements" in early modern Europe

Real or Virtual Contact? Johannes Buxtorf's Reading of Jewish Literature

Joanna Weinberg — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 13:00:00 PST

This presentation attempts to analyse how Johannes Buxtorf the elder (1564-1629), long-time professor of Hebrew at Basel, ethnographer, lexicographer, and textual critic,read Jewish books by examining one passage from the Sefer ha-Hayyim written by Hayyim ben Bezalel (Cracow, 1593), which Buxtorf chose to integrate into his polemical critique of Jewish allegiance to the Talmud in this opening chapter of the Juden—Schul. Hayyim ben Bezalel, fated to remain second fiddle to his brother, the Maharal of Prague, had his own battles to fight against both Jews and Christians. In the selected passage, Hayyim ben Bezalel defends the Talmud as a unique possession of the Jews and suggests a reason for the apparently ‘bewildering Aggadot’. By close scrutiny of both texts we consider how and why Hayyim ben Bezalel’s plea for the Talmud engaged Buxtorf’s attention and influenced the development of his argument?

Finding Common Ground: The Metz Beit Din and the French Judicial System

Jay R. Berkovitz — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 15:30:00 PST

In the two decades preceding the French Revolution, the rabbinic court of Metz functioned within a complex world of overlapping legal jurisdictions. The extant records of the beit din in the years 1771-1790 contain evidence of familiarity with French law and even an interest in taking that law into consideration in its own deliberations. From time to time, the beit din instructed litigants to consult French avocats in order to clarify a legal question, and in some cases the beit din itself initiated the consultation. There were also, certainly, instances when individuals sought the opinion of French lawyers on their own. Whatever the circumstances, it is clear that the Metz beit din wanted to avoid running afoul of French law and legal norms. But the occasional collaborative relationship with French legal officials and institutions also offers important evidence of the rabbinic court’s integration within the legal structure of the state and of the permeability of legal boundaries.

This presentation addresses the questions of legal boundaries.

It discusses the following texts included for download:

1. Pinkas Metz Beit Din (from the YIVO Archives), Vol. 1, pt. 1, 35a

2. Pinkas Metz Beit Din, Vol. 2, p. 85b

3. Copy of a Consultation of M. Roederer and Pakain Advocates here who were approached by the heirs of M. Reizele, 30 August 1773 (Archives départementales de la Moselle, Consistoire israélite 17J24)

4. Pinkas Metz Beit Din, Vol. 1, pt. 2, 16a. Record Group 128, Box 2, YIVO Archives

Medicine as a Cultural Connection Between Jews and Christians in Early Modern Italy

Berns Andrew — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 16:30:00 PST

This presentation explores cultural connections between Jews and Christians in sixteenth-century Italy through the lens of medicine. I present and analyze two texts. The first (from 1587) is a letter from Girolamo Mercuriale, a Catholic, to Moses Alatino, a Jew. The second (from 1592) is an excerpt from a consilium sent by the Jewish physician David de' Pomi to Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino.

It discusses the following texts:

1. Girolamo Mercuriale to Moses Alatino,"On a Uterine Tumor, Painful Urination, and Constipation, for a noble young Jewess, [sent] to the Jewish Physician Moses Alatino. Consultation #16" From: Hieronymi Mercurialis Foroliviensis Responsorum, et Consultationum Medicinalium Tomus Primus (Venice, 1587), fol. 43-44.

2. David de’ Pomi to Francesco Maria II, Duke of Urbino (Included in) Physicians' Consilia regarding the Illness of Francesco Maria II, Duke of Urbino. From Medicorum consilia in infirmitate francisci mariae II urbini ducis, an. 1592. [Physicians' Consilia regarding the Illness of Francesco Maria II, Duke of Urbino] Vatican, cor. Urb. 1468, 119r-134r.

A Jewish-Christian Commentary on Luke

Yaacov Deutsch — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 17:45:00 PST

In 1735, Immanuel Frommann, a converted Jew who was working at the Institutum Judaicum in Halle translated the book of Luke and wrote a commentary on the text. This text is probably the first printed Hebrew commentary on the New Testament. In his commentary, Frommann uses a wide range of Hebrew sources. He quotes regularly from the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmud, biblical commentaries, midrashim, legal treatises, philosophical texts and historical works. He also makes use of mystical and kabbalistic works. The commentary has several layers of interpretation: relatively short lexical or grammatical explanations of words or phrases; literary explanations of the text that are meant to make it more comprehensive to the readers; as well as “Christological interpretations”. This text is unique because it was written in Hebrew thus mainly for a Jewish (male) audience and not in Latin or vernacular languages as was the case in earlier compositions that made use of Jewish texts like Johannes Lightfoot, Horae Hebraicae et Talmudicae or to Surenhusius Sefer ha- Mashveh. In many ways, Frommann’s commentary is better described as a Jewish-Christian or perhaps a Christian-Jewish text. Instead of a total rejection of Jewish learning and writing, Frommann’s heavy use of the Jewish tradition in a Christian context is an attempt to reconnect Christianity and Judaism.

The presentation discusses the following text:

1. A Gospel according to Luke the Evangelist that is taken from books known as the New Testament, copied from the Greek, to the holy tongue, and explained with a commentary, Part I, in the year 495 (1735) -- Evangelium Lucae pars prior ab erudito proselyto Henr. Christ. Imman. Frommanno Doct. Med. in linguam ebraeam transferri ac explicari curauit ediditque Io. Henr. Callenberg, Halle, 1735

A Jewish Merchant Family and a Moroccan Ruler

Daniel Schroeter — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 09:00:00 PST

These three documents are from the Lévy-Corcos archives, a private collection of family documents in Paris, which I photographed in 1985. A few comments on what Jewish family archives reveal about Muslim-Jewish relations in Morocco: It was not uncommon for elite Jewish families to pass down from generation to generation various kinds of Muslim and Jewish legal documents, including Arabic decrees of rulers (dahirs) and letters from Muslim governmental officials. Such documents were kept as records of property, debts, or special privileges. Significantly, literate Jews did not read or write in the Arabic script, and thus could not read the documents in their possession. None of these three letters are addressed personally to the individual Jews in question, though they are intended as commands to be followed by both the Jews and Muslim officials. The first document is a letter sent from Sultan Sulayman’s brother to his son, ‘Abd al-Malik (the latter was governor of Agadir), pertaining to the Jewish merchant, Meir Macnin. The description in Judeo Arabic erroneously states that the document was from the sultan. Why, then, was the document in possession of descendants of the family? One can assume that it was customary (or required) for government officials to give such documents to the individuals concerned for safekeeping. The other two documents are royal decrees that would have been sent to the governing officials in the port of Essaouira (Mogador), one pertaining to Shlomo Macnin (the brother of Meir), and the second to the “children of Ibn Macnin.” Likewise, it must have been expected that once communicated to the governing authorities, the Macnins would keep these documents in their possession.

These documents raise a number of questions about Muslim-Jewish relations in Morocco and, more generally, the Islamic world in pre-modern times. While the letters pertain to the relationship of elite individuals (court Jews may not be the best concept here), they reflect the larger tensions embedded in the concept of dhimmi, which is both a contract between the individual Jew (in the Maghrib there were no dhimmi Christians), and the Muslim ruler, and between Jews as a collectivity and the Muslim community writ large. The patrimonial relationship between ruler and ruled revealed in these letters might in one context have little to do with religious difference, but in another context be shaped by the differences between Muslim and Jews as separate religious communities. These documents show commonalities between Muslims and Jews as well as the recognition of cultural and linguistic boundaries. They also reveal the interdependency of Muslims and Jews, and how each participant understood the benefits and liabilities of that relationship.

Jailhouse Encounter: A Sixteenth-Century Jewish-Christian Tale and its Historiographical Ramifications

Daniel Jütte — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 10:00:00 PST

This presentation examines two excerpts from the little known early seventeenth-century German memoirs of the non-Jewish Swabian merchant Hans Ulrich Krafft (1550–1621).1 Krafft was born into one of the most respected families in the city of Ulm, in southern Germany. In the 1570s, he served as a factor for the Augsburg-based Manlich trade company in the Levant. 2 In the summer of 1574, however, the Manlich Trade Company went bankrupt, and Krafft, who did not have the means to pay off the debts he had guaranteed on behalf of his employers, was arrested and imprisoned in Tripoli (now in Lebanon). This dismal situation was to last for three years, and Krafft faced moments of real crisis. For example, he was kept for forty days in a cell without a ray of sunlight, and the hygienic situation in the tiny cells was abominable. I would like to present two excerpts from Krafft’s nearly 500-page long memoirs. The first excerpt describes an episode from his imprisonment when he was visited by a German Jew named Mayer Winterbach, who came from the same region of Swabia. Despite Krafft’s initial reluctance, the two men eventually formed a friendship. More than a decade after Krafft’s release, they met again in Germany and continued their amicable relationship (excerpt 2). Krafft’s detailed and personal account provides us with insight into the nature of this uncommon, or perhaps not so uncommon, cross-cultural connection.

The Early Modern Inn as a Space for Religious and Cultural Exchange

Magda Teter — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 13:00:00 PST

While it is relatively easy to map out mutual cultural influences between Jews and non‐Jews, it is much more difficult to map out the mechanisms of this cultural exchange. Such instances of cultural exchange may have happened indirectly, for example, through books, as Joanna Weinberg termed it, through “virtual contact”; or, directly, through “real” human interaction. The texts presented here deal with the latter. One set of texts is a selection of several seventeenth‐century takkanot, rulings, by the Council of Four Lands, the supra‐communal organization responsible primarily for collection of taxes levied by the Polish state but also engaging in administration of affairs within Jewish communities. The second text comes from Polish court records and shows a criminal trial of a Jewish tavern keeper, Szmul Dubiński, accused of blasphemy in Rzeszow in 1726.

This presentation discusses the following texts:

1. Pinkas Va`ad Arba Aratsot [Minute Book of the Council of Four Lands] Year (5)367 – 1607

2. Trial of Szmul Dubiński (1726), Archiwum Państwowe w Rzeszowie, AmR, 27, pp. 348-351, published in Adam Kaźmierczyk, ed., Żydzi polscy 1648-1772 (Cracow: Uniwesytet Jagielloński, 2001), 147-150.

Cultural Transmission and Assimilation in a Quotidian Key: The Conversion of Two Jews in Spain, 1790- 1792

David Graizbord — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 14:00:00 PST

The Early Modern Period, an era of “confessionalization,” provides numerous examples of individuals of immediate, distant, feigned, or merely imputed Jewish origin whose religious and social allegiances shifted radically. The phenomenon of Iberian New Christians or conversos comes to mind. Early modern Jews who became Christians but who, unlike conversos, possessed no personal and familial background in Christianity constitute an allied field of research (See examples in the Bibliography, below). Scholarly assessments of the ways in which these Jewish non-conversos learned and influenced their adopted Christian culture(s) often concentrate on intellectual production. The focus is not surprising, as the converts under discussion were usually educated individuals to whom Christian patrons often assigned prominent roles as anti-Jewish polemicists and missionaries. By contrast to the apologetic works and other religious writings of and about such converts, the texts presented here offer glimpses of the experience of uneducated, relatively inarticulate people of very modest material means who found themselves at a crossroads between Jewish (or Jewish-identified) and Hispano-Catholic identities, and whose formal cultural realignment caused no historical ripple. The folios selected for this workshop comprise large excerpts of two inquisitorial cases dating from the early 1790s. Both dossiers are relatively brief and fragmentary. I offer them together in order to provide more analytical possibilities than each of the documents would offer by itself.

EMW 2012: Cross-Cultural Connections in the Early Modern Jewish World

EMW 2012 — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 10:00:00 PST

Understanding the processes of cultural change in early modern history as a process of creating and negotiating social, cultural, and religious borders has become a commonplace in the last generation of research. This perspective has great validity for Jewish history, too: early modern Jews also found themselves in a range of new settings, which allowed a considerably greater range of interactions with their non-Jewish neighbors than had previously been the case. It was not only geographical dispersion that broadened their social, economic, cultural and religious contacts with their non-Jewish surroundings: new ideas and ideologies deriving from the thought of the renaissance, the enlightenment, mercantilism, as well as the Protestant and Catholic reformations opened up new horizons for cross-cultural contacts, too.

The texts discussed during the EMW 2012 included inquisition trials, correspondence, criminal trials, rabbinic court records, takkanot, works by Christian Hebraists, and more.

'My Happiness Overturned': Mourning, Memory and a Woman's Writing

Rachel Greenblatt — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 13:00:00 PDT

In the late seventeenth century, Beila Perlhefter mourned her seven children in the introduction she wrote to a Yiddish ethical work written (at her urging, she tells her readers) by her husband, Ber. While the autobiographical information provided in the introduction is sparse indeed, it shares certain generic characteristics with other self-writing by early modern Jews from Prague, including Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller's "Megillat eivah." At the same time, each voice is a different voice, all the more so the rare instance of a woman's voice, and this short piece defies easy categorization.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

Sefer Be'er Sheva (Book of Seven Springs, 1690s)

Personal Life in the Context of Personal Death

Avri Bar-Levav — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 11:00:00 PDT

In his ethical will, R. Naphtali Ha-Kohen Katz (1650? - 1719), a central rabbinic figure in his time, gives specific instructions for death rituals that he wants, and also addresses his family in warm words, while mentioning meaningful events of his past. The presentation will analyze this personal voice of the beginning of the 18th century.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

The Ethical Will of R. Naphtali Ha-Kohen Katz

Introduction to Megillat Sefer by Rabbi Jacob Emden

Jacob J. Schecter — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 09:30:00 PDT

Among Jacob Emden’s many works is Megillat Sefer, one of the most unusual, open, revealing, and unself-conscious egodocuments in Jewish and even general history. Written between 1752 and 1766, this work existed only in manuscript form for one hundred and thirty years, first in Emden’s hand and then in the hand of someone who copied the original. Emden’s handwritten version is no longer extant and only the copy exists. The work was first published in Warsaw, 1896 by David Kahane. In 1979 it was printed again in Jerusalem by Abraham Bick-Shauli who claimed that he was correcting mistakes in the earlier Kahana edition although his version is much less reliable, to the point of being worthless. I am now completing a new edition of this work with an introduction and extensive annotations. This work is a multi-faceted one and deserves analysis on a number of different levels. My interest in my presentation is to focus on one aspect of this fascinating work, what motivated Emden to write it, thereby situating this work in the context of other early modern Jewish examples of such writing.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

Jacob Emden's Megilat Sefer (The Scroll of the Book)

Generational conflict in converso families, 1492-1550

Sara Nalle — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 15:30:00 PDT

The egodocuments presented to the seminar are Inquisitorial confessions of second-generation "nuevos convertidos" who in one way or another were caught between their parents' desire to maintain contact with Judaism and their own alleged desire to assimilate as Spanish Catholics.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

Trial of Francisco Martínez, apothocary, resident of Deza (1533)
Trial of Gaspar de San Clemente (1541)

Autobiographical accounts for a non-Jewish friend: Joseph Attias' Letters to L.A. Muratori

Francesca Bregoli — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 14:00:00 PDT

The Livornese Jewish scholar Joseph Attias (1672-1739) is known for his contributions to eighteenth-century Tuscan culture as a book collector and mediator. Attias sent two autobiographical letters to a beloved correspondent, renowned Modenese historian Ludovico Antonio Muratori, in 1724 and 1733. This presentation will analyze the documents as self-conscious life narratives and examples of early Enlightenment self-fashioning that shed light on the strategies employed by a Jewish member of the Republic of Letters to present his formative years, his training, and his achievements to one of the most esteemed representatives of eighteenth-century Italian culture.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

Joseph Attias' Letter to L.A. Muratori (December 22, 1724)
Joseph Attias' Letter to L.A. Muratori (November 20, 1733)

The Travel Diaries of Hayim Joseph David Azulai

Yaacob Dweck — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 13:00:00 PDT

This presentation examines the travel diaries of Hayim Joseph David Azualai, an emissary of the Jews of the Palestine in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. In particular it addresses the question of the place of reading and books in his diaries and compare Azulai's experience of books and reading to two of his contemporaries Hayim Isaac Karigal and Israel Landau.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

Hayim Joseph David Azulai's Ma'agal Tov (The Good Journey, 1770s)

Descend to the Abyss: Jacob Frank's going to Poland

Pawel Maciejko — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 11:00:00 PDT

This presentation examines several autobiographical fragments of the most important Frankist document, The Words of the Lord. It focuses on the motif of recurrent divine calls to 'go to Poland' and, ultimately, the justification of Frank's conversion to Christianity.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

The Collection of the Words of the Lord spoken in Bruenn

Mining an Unusual Ego Text (or Two)

Gershon D. Hundert — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 09:30:00 PDT

The texts presented here are excerpted from a 329-page-manuscript Divrei Binah in cursive Hebrew entitled Divre binah. The book was completed in 1800 but never published. It is devoted mostly to the Sabbatian and Frankist phenomena; the genre to which the text belongs is open to discussion. Its author is Dov Ber Brezer or Birkenthal of Bolechów (1723-1805) in western Galicia.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

Divrei Bina (Understanding Words) by Dov Ber Brezer (Birkenthal) of Bolechów

EMW 2011: Egodocuments: Revelation of the Self in the Early Modern Period

EMW 2011 — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 17:00:00 PDT

The Early Modern Workshop in 2011, “Egodocuments: Revelation of the Self in the Early Modern Period,” seeks to examine how individuals in the early modern period wrote and thought about themselves. The workshop participants explore texts ranging from the obvious autobiographical texts to less obvious, such as ethical wills, Inquisition-prompted accounts of self, family diaries of births and deaths, travelogues, and others. Questions raised deal with issues of self-representation, reading, relationship with the divine, gender differences in self-representation, and motivations to write autobiographical accounts.

Revealing, Concealing: Ways of Recounting the Self in Early Modern Times

Natalie Zemon Davis — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 18:00:00 PDT

Keynote address by Natalie Zemon Davis, University of Toronto, “Revealing, Concealing: Ways of Recounting the Self in Early Modern Times” is preceded by opening remarks by Robert Abzug and Miriam Bodian)