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This article seeks to clarify the methodology of Jewish legal history and illustrate how the historical examination of Jewish law serves as a valuable tool to discern the distinctive character of the early modern period. Principal elements of the analysis are the role of Jewish law in communal governance, its relationship to civil legislation, and its responsiveness to social and economic challenges. Communal autonomy, a hallmark of the early modern Jewish community and its self-governing institutions, had well-established roots in the medieval period, but it was only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the post-Westphalia (1648) era, that its distinctive legislative and judicial features were fully developed and widely adopted. The participation of rabbinic authorities in communal government and their consultative role alongside lay governing officials was of particular importance. As unofficial jurisconsultants, they provided guidance on matters of legislation, when a legal ambiguity required clarification, or when litigation involving the community was pending. Poskim (halakhic decisors) were asked to review and, in some instances, interpret communal bylaws. Important new trends in legal decision-making in areas of dispute resolution and judicial discretion and the devising of legal remedies to ease social or economic difficulties provides valuable illustrations of responsiveness to social and economic change. Legal activism is especially notable in areas of law relating to the rights of women regarding inheritance and marital property. Despite lay hegemony in community affairs, religion continued to be a potent force in civil government and legislation, and there was a far greater degree of cooperation between the lay and rabbinic authorities than has been previously assumed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores marginal notations in a manuscript of a resolutely rationalist commentary on the Torah written by the barely known fourteenth-century Maimonidean, Eleazar Ashkenazi. The notations belong to Ephraim ben Shabbetai, who completed his codex in Venetian Crete in 1399. Though Ephraim's comments are episodic and relatively few, study of them can serve as a vehicle for bringing the world of medieval Hebrew marginalia, and receptions of rationalist biblical scholarship, to life. After situating Eleazar's work and Ephraim's reproduction of it within a variety of late medieval eastern Mediterranean scribal and rationalist contexts, the article provides a taxonomy of Ephraim's marginalia, which range from commendation to a note that seeks to justify Ephraim's expurgation of a passage in Eleazar's work that he and his teacher deemed religiously intolerable. Findings in the field of marginalia studies inform the discussion as does the notion of a "manuscript matrix," a coinage of Stephen Nichols that aims to replace conceptions of manuscripts as inert places of inscription with one that sees them as an interactive space inviting ongoing interpretive activity. While Ephraim's marginalia yield no fully realized portrait of their author, they provide an entry into his mindset, not to mention his status as a reader with a mind of his own. In several cases, Ephraim's comments mark a point where a learned Jew's informed responses and his passionate religious attachments meet. Study of marginal notations like the ones explored here illustrates how manuscripts and their creators served as instruments for transmitting and shaping Jewish knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyses the twentieth century reception of the German-Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz. Specifically, it traces the ways in which three of Graetz's most significant intellectual and professional heirs—Simon Dubnow, Salo Baron, and Gershom Scholem—utilized, judged, conceived of, and measured themselves against Graetz's historiographical oeuvre. The figure of Graetz loomed large in the writings of all three historians, his scholarship and ideological positions constituting the point of departure from which they sought to diverge. This essay argues that Dubnow, Baron, and Scholem may aptly be described as "conflicted disciples" of Graetz. All three figures formulated their own identities as historians and thinkers upon their repudiation of Graetz and called for a comprehensive rearticulation of Jewish history based upon a historiographic framework they constructed over Graetz's methodological grave. Despite this, all three may be understood—and indeed often understood themselves—as expanding, bolstering, and perfecting Graetz's vision of producing a comprehensive national history that met both the scientific standards and the ideological needs of their own generation. Furthermore, each scholar's process of intellectual maturation was marked by an increasingly complex and conflicted attitude towards Graetz, as they sought to simultaneously overthrow and fulfill his mission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An exceptional correspondence took place between the Jews of Bukhara and those of Shklov in 1802–03. Neither community had known of the other's existence beforehand, and it was only due to geopolitical changes that they discovered each other. The Jews of Shklov were sure that those of Bukhara belonged to the ten lost tribes. This excited them immensely and prompted them to write a letter, extraordinary in the information it includes, which they printed and disseminated around Europe. The importance of the correspondence originates from the need the Jews of Shklov felt to share copious information with the Jews of Bukhara about the flow of Jewish history after the ten tribes were exiled, the locations of Jewish communities in Europe and, in particular, the situation of their own community, which at the time was enjoying its golden age. The correspondence yields important and diverse historical information about messianic tension among East European Jews, their eagerness to find the ten tribes as a stimulus to the Redemption, their historical and geographic consciousness, their loyal attitude towards Russian rule, their economic situation, their status vis-à-vis the authorities, and additional matters. The article discusses these topics among others, analyzes the sources, and presents an annotated version of the correspondence with an English translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on the enigmatic thirteenth-century figure of R. Isaac of Rus'. A case study in the reconstruction of early East European Jewish history, it tests an integrative approach that brings together different types of evidence and disciplinary methods, while involving some new or neglected sources. Also examined are connections between Rabbi Isaac's esoteric teachings and those of Ḥasidei Ashkenaz and related themes in contemporary and subsequent rabbinic literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the architecture of women's sections in eastern European synagogues and argues that two profound changes took place, one in the eighteenth century and the second in the second half of the nineteenth century. The first was moving of the women's section from an external (but not detached) annex into the main volume of the synagogue; the second was the introduction of women's galleries into the prayer halls. The first move coincided with the alteration of the woman's status in Jewish traditional society, while the second move resulted from the arrival of modernity and reflected the changing place of women in eastern European Jewish society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the life and work of an important but little-known Jewish-Russian-Ukrainian historian and political liberal, Ilya Galant, and examines his vision of Jewish history in Ukraine. Galant wanted to legitimize the rights of Jews in Russia and "normalize" their presence in Ukraine. To accomplish this goal he interpreted history creatively, demonstrating Jewish-Ukrainian friendship as well as Jewish contributions to Ukraine. He also appealed to the Russian intelligentsia to foster a liberal coalition of forces in favor of Jewish rights. This essay illuminates contexts that have not received proper scholarly attention: Jewish historiography on Ukraine, Jewish liberals in Russia, the development of Russian-Jewish historiography, the image of Jews in Polish-Ukrainian history, and Jewish scholarship in Soviet Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the Jews, the issue of slavery in the southern states, and the American Civil War has naturally focused on the Jews of the United States, who, as citizens, were reluctant to become involved in the debate that divided their country during those years. However, the attitude of the Jews in the Old World towards the events unfolding on a continent thousands of miles away has rarely been studied. This article examines the small group of Jews from Europe and the Land of Israel who became known as the "precursors of Zionism" and their attitude towards the American Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves. This group was very sensitive to historical changes, sometimes even imbuing them with metaphysical meaning that went far beyond their political significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyzes an unpublished manuscript of a giudiata, a poem mocking Jewish funerals that was written and performed in Rome in the mid-seventeenth century. Melchiorre Palontrotti, the author of the composition, was a Roman polemist and author of other published works against Italian Jews, including, among others, the Venetian rabbi Simone Luzzatto, between 1640 and 1649. After furnishing information on the author and the historical background in which the song was written, and following an analysis of the origins of giudiate and their diffusion in early modern Rome, this paper explores the content, language, and style of the giudiata text. The appendix includes a bibliography of Palontrotti's writings and a transcription of the manuscript. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits the question of the connection between the wars in Eastern Europe (beginning with gezeirot taḥ ve-tat in 1648) and the rise of Sabbateanism. It argues that the key issue is the ways in which the Ashkenazi Jews of Jerusalem dealt with the collapse of Polish-Lithuanian Jewish funding for the Land of Israel in the wake of the wars. Following 1648, an extended transregional philanthropic network began to support the relief efforts for Polish Jewry, diverting resources from the Land of Israel. Initially, this caused great suffering in Jerusalem, including a famine in which many, particularly women, died. In response, great pressure was put on the philanthropic network supporting Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel: the Ashkenazi women of Jerusalem tried to establish their own independent fundraising mechanism, while the men employed a Polish Jew, Nathan Shapira, to collect for them. A major kabbalist, Shapira found common ground with millenarian Protestants in north-western Europe, who saw in the suffering of the Jews in both Eastern Europe and the Holy Land a sign of the Messiah's imminent return. When they sent money to Jerusalem, the local community—including Nathan of Gaza, then a student—was forced to consider its attitude towards them and their ideology. Nathan had grown up in the post-1648 expanded world of philanthropy and, after the appearance of Shabbetai Zvi, used many transregional fundraising strategies with great success to help spread the new messianic movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes how Jews in medieval Crete were involved in, and knowledgeable about, agricultural practices. It pushes back against a persistent view in the scholarly literature that medieval Jews were alienated from the land, and that their disproportionate involvement in trade hastened the Commercial Revolution. The study attempts to show that Cretan Jews took halakhic strictures on agriculture seriously, and that, as a result, they farmed differently from their Greek Orthodox and Latin Christian peers. By examining Jewish texts from the Hellenic territories of the Venetian Republic, the article makes the case that stereotypes of Jews as merchants betrays abundant evidence that medieval Jews were deeply engaged in cultivating the land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay introduces a special triple issue of Jewish History that aims to offer both an introduction to and an in-depth guide for documentary Cairo Geniza studies. We outline the history of scholarship that led to the definition of the documentary or historical Geniza and in particular introduce the work of Shlomo Dov Goitein, the scholar whose work has essentially defined the field for the past half century. This historical sketch is followed by a brief review of the kinds of materials found in the documentary corpus and a look at the distribution of scholarship to date on different document genres, including some that have so far remained relatively overlooked. The nature of the materials, and the history of their scholarship, helps shape the rationale for the volume's form as we provide an overview of the essays in each of its four sections, which focus in turn on historiography, methodology, document types, and writing Geniza history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The letters from the Cairo Geniza are among the most important types of documentary source material available for those interested in the history of the Jewish communities in the Arabic-speaking world during the Middle Ages. At first utilized primarily for the factual information they provide about individuals, events, and communal institutions, these texts have of late begun to be reexamined in terms of their importance as material objects, their linguistic and literary dimensions, and the social contexts in which they were produced and read. Growing attention has also been given to those features that distinguish different genres of letter writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the medieval Islamic world, the petition served as the primary vehicle for appealing to governing authorities. Jews used the same device, particularly the poor seeking charity, although those petitions rarely followed the exact structure of the Islamic petition and usually were shorter. This essay offers an edition and a translation of a petition seeking charity that is unusually long and follows nearly completely the structure of the Islamic model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Cairo Geniza has proved to be a fascinating trove of information about all aspects of Jewish life in the medieval and early modern period, magic being one of them. Hundreds of manuscripts, in different states of conservation, testify to the interest of Jews in composing and copying magical manuals as well as producing amulets and curses and otherwise attempting to harness the supernatural in order to achieve earthly aims. This essay introduces the reader to Geniza magical texts and provides some guidelines for reading these documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

S. D. Goitein's nuanced description of the structure, functioning, and administrative reach of the Jewish community, most fully articulated in the second volume of A Mediterranean Society, was enlarged on, revised, and challenged in the work of two subsequent generations of scholars. Addressing the mixture of hierocratic and democratic elements that Goitein identified within the medieval Jewish community, this growing body of scholarship has examined anew and in greater detail such issues as the balance of power between the centralized leadership and the local community, the extent of the Jewish community's political autonomy, and the influential role in communal affairs played by wealthy and well-connected elites with access to the Muslim court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines similarities between the Hebrew chronicle of Shlomo bar Shimshon and the Latin chronicle of Albert of Aachen. Both sources describe the massacre of Rhineland Jews during the First Crusade and the subsequent defeat of the Crusaders by the Hungarians and the Bulgarians. On the basis of similarities in structure, content, and language between these two accounts, I argue that Shlomo chose to integrate at least one Christian source into his narrative. At the same time, I assert that it is unlikely that Shlomo’s Hebrew account was translated directly from Albert’s Latin chronicle. I present evidence indicating that the information conveyed in the Latin text reached the Jewish chronicler via vernacular channels, either oral or written. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emigration movement among Soviet Jews is usually dated to the 1960s-1990s. This essay focuses on the premovement emigration in the 1950s, which prepared the ground for the massive departure of Jews and non-Jewish members of their families, primarily to Israel and the United States. The parameters for leaving the Soviet Union in the 1950s were in many ways similar to the parameters for returning to Poland in the immediate post-World War II years. On paper, the basic pools of emigrants were the same: Jews who at the outbreak of World War II were Polish nationals. In reality, many repatriates of the 1950s were more Soviet than Polish, leaving the country where they had lived for up to twenty years, which often was a lion’s share of their lives. Those—that is, the majority—who ultimately reached Israel went through two repatriation processes: first, as returnees to their pre-World War II homeland and, second, as Jews going back to their historical homeland. As this essay shows, the contemporaneous political and social climates in the Soviet Union and Poland, the nature of those countries’ mutual relations and of their relations with Israel, not present on the map until 1948, framed a unique context for emigration in the early post-Stalinist period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though Jews arrived late in Bologna, they soon came to form a considerable community, numbering several hundred by the end of the fourteenth century. The existing historiography of this community is strongly characterized by ideas of inclusion and normalization of Jewish relations with Christian society. In contrast, the historiography of Jews in Renaissance Italy is heavily marked by references to their prosecution for alleged crimes. In exploring this contrast, this article examines fifty Bolognese trials involving Jews between 1370 and 1500, covering homicide, violence, theft, and sexual offenses. In order to reveal the particular character of criminal prosecutions of Jews, they are here placed in a comparative analysis with those of a similar group in the city: students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his will, Prospero Moisè Loria (1814-92) requested an autopsy and cremation and left his large inheritance to the municipality of Milan to establish a secular philanthropic institution, the Società umanitaria, “to enable all the disenfranchised poor, without distinction.” Loria and other Italian Jews were at the heart of secularist activity in Italy’s culture wars, as demonstrated by their engagement with secular philanthropy, battles for cremation, and Freemason activity. By exploring Loria as the most generous nineteenth-century Italian Jewish philanthropist, along with his affiliation with the Alliance israélite universelle as a secular Jewish institution in the Mediterranean, this essay shows how forms of secularism and Jewishness could coexist for Italian Jews and how secularism in Italy could include a commitment to a Jewish collective, and thus seeks to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the composite mixture of secular Italians and to a discussion of Jewish secularism in an international context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars regularly refer to independently operating Jewish courts as prime evidence of Jewish autonomy and self-rule in medieval Christian Europe. Yet few have focused on the largely anonymous individuals who populated these forums, despite the vital role that litigants played in fueling the judicial system. This article joins a growing body of research devoted to a bottom-up examination of the institutions of law and justice in premodern Europe, highlighting the activities of those who made use of the courts rather than the structures that authorized them. Specifically, it considers a divorce suit adjudicated in the mid-thirteenth century by the rabbinic court of Rabbi Hezkiah b. Jacob of Magdeburg as a lens onto the legal knowledge of lay litigants, their expectations of the judicial system, and the litigation strategies they developed. The reactions of R. Hezkiah and his colleagues to these tactics demonstrate that litigation in the Jewish courts not only reflected current legal trends but could also affect them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay concerns the place of books in shaping three decades (1728-60) during which Amsterdam's Portuguese community deepened and expanded its rabbinic study. It discusses two sets of sources primarily. The first consists of annual book acquisition lists discovered in the records of the community's Ets Haim yeshivah. These lists provide insight into contemporary reading habits and interests, the Ets Haim's education system and literary emphasis, and the economics of book production and commerce. The second set of sources comes from the hundreds of Hebrew books printed in Amsterdam during these decades. Members of the Ets Haim composed and published their own books, edited the work of their peers, and facilitated the publication of texts authored or brought to the city by rabbinic scholars from abroad. Paratextual material elucidates relations between authors, publishers, editors, printers, and rabbinic leadership. This research shows that the Ets Haim expended huge sums of money on book acquisition, thereby placing unprecedented resources at the disposal of its religious intellectual elite. In turn, the yeshivah's students enjoyed significant freedom to work and produce as they saw fit. As a direct outgrowth of this freedom, the production and dissemination of books facilitated interaction and collaboration between Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews still in many ways demarcated along communal lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elias Birkenstein (ca. 1778-1854), an early nineteenth-century German Jew who advocated for sweeping religious reforms, was largely ignored by his reform-minded contemporaries and forgotten by later historians. This essay will first survey the political and religious aftermath of the Congress of Vienna, especially the new expressions of anti-Jewish hostility and the Jewish responses they engendered. Against this backdrop, Birkenstein's writings, including some that were initially published anonymously, are examined in detail, underscoring their radical nature. The essay demonstrates that, despite their evident familiarity with these writings, other Jews refrained from addressing the most provocative aspects of Birkenstein's arguments. It endeavors to elucidate some of the substantive and contextual reasons for the reluctance to confront Birkenstein and for his subsequent disappearance from the pages of history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers how the reencounter between Christians and Jews over the course of the sixteenth century shaped the evolution of European attitudes toward Jews. It notes that, while 1492 marked an end to a long-standing era of Christian-Jewish relations in Europe, it also signaled an important shift toward new thinking about the once-familiar Jews. The combined effects of the absence of Jewish communities from most of Western Europe, the failure of Christian society effectively to integrate the Conversos of Spain and Portugal, and the expanded cultural horizons engendered by the Age of Discovery helped challenge and alter popular images of the Jews that had been inherited from the Middle Ages. The lands of the Muslim Mediterranean operated as an important stage on which the Christian reencounter with Jews played out, and travelers' accounts of the Jews in these lands came to exert a powerful influence on the way in which the image of the Jew was recast in the European imagination. The discussion here seeks to expand on recent work on sixteenth-century Christian ethnographies of the Jews and to complicate some of our notions of the nature and development of Christian attitudes toward the Jews during the transition from the medieval period to the early modern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study takes a fresh look at the tale of Rabbi Amram of Mainz, which appears in both Gedalyah ibn Yaḥya's Hebrew Shalshelet haqabbalah (Venice, 1587) and the Yiddish Mayse bukh (Basel, 1602). Based on the legend of Saint Emmeram of Regensburg, the tale has long been considered a classic case of Jewish narrative borrowing from Christian hagiography. Drawing on both literary and archival sources of both Christian and Jewish provenance to place the tale in its local context, the article shows that the legend's narrators in fact appropriated the Christian saint in a very sophisticated way. Rather than simply dressing a Jewish hero in a Christian plot, they implied that their own, clearly derivative version was the one containing ultimate religious truth and that the ostensibly more successful Christian cult was a fraud. They thus used their intimate knowledge of Christian legendry to beat the church with its own weapons. In this sense, the narrative does testify to the great attraction that the veneration of saints must have held for medieval Jews; at the same time, it is a monument to its narrators' sense of self-preservation in the face of the Christian master narrative so dominant in medieval Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue of Jewish History is devoted to shared heroes in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It explores diverse images of heroes that are shared by at least two of these religious traditions by comparing each figure's origin, inventions, and reinventions within varying cultural contexts in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the early modern period and by highlighting the cross-cultural significance of their counterstories and entangled histories. The construction and deconstruction, interpretation and reception of these heroic figures and their sociocultural roles over time and space bear witness to the encounters of Jews and Judaism with neighboring cultures. The approaches to our subject presented in this collection illuminate how the long-established rubric of 'the hero' benefits from a cross-cultural approach. In turn, empirical data culled from the cross-cultural study of heroes demonstrate the inner workings of cultural transfer and, we believe, contribute an original perspective to the field of transnational history, which focuses on cultural entanglement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amid the acrimonious debates over national identity, the proper political solution to the 'Jewish Question,' and linguistic primacy, the Jews of interwar Poland were also gripped by panic over rising rates of suicide. Observers claimed that there was an epidemic of self-destruction due to financial woes and the loosening of gender roles. Yet despite persistent poverty, rates of suicide among Jews in Poland still remained low compared to those seen among their Catholic neighbors and other European populations. The phenomenon of suicide loomed large in the Jewish psyche nonetheless, as it had previously been uncommon in this population, and the new trend was perceived as a physical manifestation of the social disintegration of all forms of Jewish civilization. The press fed Jews' fears by publishing morbid details in the hopes of boosting readership. Efforts to stem self-destruction, however, lacked focus and served primarily as a platform to express concern with the increasingly diffuse and heterogeneous nature of Jewish society in Poland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the spring of 1915, Italian Jews faced the first real test of their integration into the 'body of the nation' since they had obtained their definitive political-juridical emancipation about sixty years earlier. This essay analyzes the interpretation of the war offered by Italian rabbis, and in particular by the 'military rabbis'-those serving in a role first introduced into the Italian military at the beginning of this conflict. By analyzing sermons, prayers, discourses, and statements published by Italian rabbis in the Jewish press, both Zionist and non-Zionist, and by examining documentation generated by the military rabbis working on the war front, this article focuses on the content of rabbinical teachings during the war and examines the religious and cultural references with which Jewish religious leaders tried to combine and harmonize the values of the Jewish tradition with new patriotic and nationalistic expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Established in New York in 1955 by Zionist leader Emanuel Neumann, Midstream immediately proclaimed its identity as a Zionist publication and its intention to focus squarely upon the problems of Jewish existence in the diaspora. This article asks: How did the early Midstream, under the direction of its first editor, Shlomo Katz, attempt to position itself as a new and indispensable voice in Jewish and especially in Zionist letters? Did the magazine differ in significant ways from its ostensible competitors? How may we assess Katz's role and legacy at Midstream? To begin answering these questions, the article examines the extent to which founding editor Shlomo Katz, as an idiosyncratic Zionist and unadulterated pessimist, shaped the magazine. For Katz as an intellectual, Jewish needs always came first. Yet in seeking to maintain Midstream as a forum for free discussion, he sometimes provided room for novel or provocative perspectives on matters of importance to the Jewish community-including, prominently, Israel. Drawing on issues from the first eighteen years of Midstream as well as archival materials pertaining to its administration, this essay illuminates a significant intellectual and cultural venue in postwar American Jewish life, one that has largely been neglected by scholars of postwar American Jewish history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines French socialist Alphonse Toussenel's Les Juifs, rois de l'époque and places his hostility toward Jews on the spectrum of varieties of antisemitism. In this book, Toussenel denounced the supposed Jewish capitalist stranglehold over the workers of France and called for war against the Jews. As the article shows, Toussenel, who worked for the ultraconservative newspaper La Paix before founding the Fourierist La Démocratie pacifique, absorbed a toxic blend of Catholic and socialist antisemitism. In a sense, then, the origins of Toussenel's antisemitism and that of other anti-Jewish Christian socialists lay not in their adherence to traditional categories of Right or Left but in their reaction to bourgeois capitalism and the way it developed in France during the July Monarchy. While Toussenel did not express his hostility toward Jews in racial terms, his ideology appealed to a wide range of antisemites, including Édouard Drumont, the leader of French anti-Jewish forces in the late nineteenth century. Drumont co-opted many of Toussenel's ideas and blended them with racial antisemitism. Although Toussenel died in 1885, his work helped to legitimize the forces that led to the Dreyfus Affair. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores medieval and early modern Jewish-Christian polemic rooted in the specific properties of the Hebrew and Latin languages and argues that such discourse constitutes a neglected and significant aspect of the polemical literature of these time periods. The discussion focuses on two particular classes of 'linguistic' polemic. The first, introduced here as the 'directionality trope,' involves discourse concerning the contrasting directions of Hebrew and Latin writing-a feature of these languages that was much discussed between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries. The second concerns polemics rooted in the grammatical differences between Hebrew and Latin-specifically, the absence in Hebrew of a case system and the presence therein of final forms for certain letters. In showcasing the prominence of such discussions in Christian and Jewish texts spanning the medieval and early modern periods, this article introduces a new linguistic frontier to scholarship on the rich, albeit acrimonious, history of Jewish-Christian debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like other port cities of the early modern Mediterranean, Ottoman Salonica was repeatedly attacked by outbreaks of plague. When plague arrived, the Jewish residents of the town rushed to the countryside to protect themselves and their families. These departures sometimes brought the textile industry of Salonica to a halt and endangered the production of the woolen broadcloth that the Ottoman administration needed for distribution to the Janissaries. Hence, flight from plague frequently created tensions between the Ottoman central administration and the Jewish broadcloth weavers of Salonica. Documents in the Ottoman archives from the second half of the sixteenth century reveal a long process of negotiation that sought to address this problem. A close analysis of these documents, including a succession of orders issued by the Ottoman administration, offers unique insights into how the conflicting interests of the Ottoman central administration and a subject population were mediated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the treatment of Salonican Jewry in scholarly literature remained for a long time deeply embedded within the paradigms that were established by the academic study of Judaism ( Wissenschaft des Judentums) in the nineteenth century. Salonica was not noted for being distinctive except for its large Jewish population. Its study was part of the general interpretation of the history of Sephardic Jews in Muslim lands after the expulsions from the Iberian Peninsula. This history was seen as one of long decline into 'Oriental' obscurantism, paralleling the trajectory of the Muslim world as a whole. Furthermore, the city became deeply associated with the worst crisis faced by early modern Jewry-Sabbateanism. It is only recently that scholarly works on Sephardic Jewish communities in general, and Salonica in particular, have begun to emancipate themselves from this narrative. Nevertheless, they remain marginalized and have yet to become integrated fully into general accounts of Jewish history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Any attempt to map in Turkish historiography the presence of Salonica as a predominantly Jewish Ottoman city is bound to end in frustration due to a general lack of interest in the topic. This is strange if one considers that during the last decades of the empire, Salonica was by far its most active city after Istanbul, which was an unrivaled center of cultural, political, economic, and social modernity. The present situation stems from the reduction of Salonica to the status of a city lost to the Greeks, a vision that further occults the Jewish dimension of its identity and destiny. As such, there is little that connects the history of the city to mainstream Turkish history, other than the fact that it was the birthplace of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Turkish historiography has stripped Salonica of its historical identity and reality to turn it into yet another 'Turkish' city lost during the debacle of the end of the empire. The steamroller of national(ist) history has thus flattened the city's complex and multilayered past into the grand narrative of the Ottoman Empire as a Turco-Islamic state. Apart from translations of the few Western sources that tell a different story, Turkish historical studies have failed to produce any original work on the subject; even worse, some of the rare works that do exist tend to concentrate on a pseudohistorical and populist account of the Sabbatean community as (yet another) fifth column targeting the integrity of country and nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using sources in Judeo-Spanish, French, German, and Hebrew, this article explores the complex processes through which Ottoman Jewish intellectuals fashioned their own vision of Ottoman Jewish history, positioned Salonica at the center of that narrative, and in the process popularized an image of the city as the 'mother of Israel.' Ottoman Jewish history writers internalized Enlightenment discourses about 'regeneration,' 'civilization,' and 'modernity' that also shaped the nineteenth-century historiography of Greek Christian, Ottoman Muslim, French Jewish, and German Jewish intellectuals. This article focuses on how Ottoman Jewish intellectuals translated French Jewish and German Jewish historical narratives about Ottoman Jewry into Judeo-Spanish, adapted and rewrote them, and ultimately overturned them. Discovering that German Jewish historians portrayed Ottoman Jews as being in decline while French Jewish writers adopted a more sympathetic perspective, Ottoman Jewish intellectuals recast their own former narrative of tragedy as an exceptional story of Jewish redemption and romance in the Ottoman realm. In reclaiming Ottoman Jewish history they sought to strengthen their position within the Ottoman Empire and to elevate their status in the eyes of world Jewry. The Salonican Jewish intellectuals who participated in this effort presented an image of their city and its storied Jewish past as an idealized symbol of the broader Ottoman Jewish experience and founded a Salonican Jewish historiography that still shapes our understanding of the city's history today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This issue of Jewish History presents articles that are the result of a June 2012 meeting on the history of Salonica's Jews organized by the Group for the Study of the History of the Jews of Greece (created in 2005). In its seminars and workshops, the group tried to distance discussions of the history of Salonica's Jews from the often narrow national(ist) perspectives that Greek, Jewish, and Turkish historiographies traditionally applied to the study of Salonica and of its Jewish population. In the wake of the initiatives undertaken by a similar group founded in the early 1990s, and of the publication of Mark Mazower's Salonica, City of Ghosts, the group sought to bring to the fore the history of Salonica's Jews; compare it, when possible, to histories of the Jews of the Balkans, the Ottoman Empire, the Mediterranean, and other port cities; and consider it in contexts created by analytical terms such as 'tradition,' 'modernity,' 'migration,' 'diaspora,' 'identity,' 'hybridity,' and 'dissent.' The aim was manifold: to acknowledge the role of Salonica's large Jewish population in the city's history; to insert the Jewish 'element' in ongoing city affairs that also involved other groups; to transcend the identity politics with which Salonica's historiography had been colored; to challenge monolithic views of Salonica's Jewry; to insist on the variety and resulting tensions that characterized the city's Jewish population; and to historicize staple interpretations of Salonica's and Jewish Salonica's history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current historiography approaches the passage of Salonican Jewry from the Ottoman Empire to the Greek nation-state from a macroscopic perspective. Concentrating on state-minority relations, it focuses exclusively on external forces, treating Salonican Jews as a homogenized community and ignoring the role of the city's non-Jews. To reassess the importance of the local dynamic, this article examines processes within Salonica itself. Through a close reading of a debate over the city's commercial future, it considers the shifts in Greco-Jewish relations and the swift reversal of ethnic hierarchies within the city's entrepreneurial elite that took place at a time when Greek government circles still included the Jews in their vision of a commercially prosperous Greek Salonica. In 1913-14, the Salonican Chamber of Commerce's proposal to establish a free port generated a heated discussion that transcended the boundaries of professional deliberations and entered the local public sphere. The Greek New Club, an organization whose members were drawn from Salonica's still small and economically weak Greek entrepreneurial class, became heavily involved in the debate, broadening the field of entrepreneurial politics, marginalizing the existing multiethnic Ottoman commercial institutions, and ultimately elevating itself as the rightful representative of a class and a city's broader interests. At the same time, the Greek press identified the proposal's advocates as Jewish businessmen and discursively constructed them as un-Greek. Before the aggressive policies of a nationalizing state led to the complete marginalization of Salonica's Jews during the interwar period, this historically particular local interplay of class and ethnicity was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the de-Judaization of the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern Greek historiography has rendered Salonican Jews invisible in the national historical narrative, while those occasional works appearing in the past decades have treated them as a coherent and isolated community. In the 1970s and 1980s, a leftist historiography challenged the nationalist narrative but replaced it with a methodological ethnocentrism. The 'new Greek history' was almost exclusively preoccupied with state formation, failed modernization, class structure, and the impact of the West, neglecting various religious, gender, and ethnic internal 'others.' Only in the 1990s did the politics of identity and memory provide a space for the emergence of an interest in Greek-Jewish history. However, reliance on the homogenizing and static concept of community (borrowed from Greek historiography) and the absence of bottom-up, sociohistorical works still result in the exclusion of Salonican Jewry from the historiographical mainstream. The Greek-Jewish historiography of Salonica shares many of the negative features of Greek historiography, and both should turn to a systematic and multidimensional study of crossings and interrelations between axes of difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

French or Francophone historians have constructed two successive images of Salonica in the modern age. This article discusses these two images-products of two different perspectives, inquiries, and approaches to writing history-and their relationship to the landmark years of 1492 and 1943. The first image bears the mark of Fernand Braudel. It focuses on Salonica as a city of the Mediterranean. The Ottoman expansion between the middle of the fifteenth century and the first decades of the sixteenth century rendered the Mediterranean a site of both confrontation and exchanges. Salonica was connected to multiethnic commercial networks that extended westward to Venice and Livorno. This image of the city emphasizes its mostly Iberian Jewish population, one of the principal minorities-along with Greeks and Armenians-who operated as intermediaries in these networks. The second image was drawn by Salonica's Jewish intellectuals at the beginning of the twentieth century, but it did not gain wider scholarly currency until the 1970s and 1980s. It depicts Salonica from the middle of the nineteenth century to the empire's end as a Jewish city par excellence-'the Jerusalem of the Balkans.' This was also the image of Salonica as the empire's 'window onto the West' and mediator of its modernization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay provides a concluding summary of the volume as a whole, showing how it breaks down into historical and theoretical/methodological components and considering the ways in which the volume pushes forward our understanding of Salonican Jewish history by revealing it to be at once a Jewish history, an Ottoman history, and an urban history. In addition to providing a brief summary of each of the contributions to the volume, it aims to synthesize their collective impact by situating the volume as whole within the varied historiographies that to date have considered the history of Salonica's Jews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through an analysis of data compiled in the Ottoman income and property registers ( temettuat) of 1844-45, this article explores the socioeconomic and demographic structures of Salonica's Jews in order to understand the extent of Jewish poverty in Salonica in the mid-nineteenth century and its causal matrix. It examines the socioeconomic hierarchies within the Jewish community, as well as the position of Jews within broader urban social structures composed mainly of Jews, Muslims, and Christians. It also analyzes the mechanisms that Jews employed to deal with this poverty. Finally, it argues that community-based reasons alone cannot explain the existence of widespread severe poverty among Salonica's Jews in this period; broad fluctuations in the Ottoman economy had a significant impact on all the inhabitants of Salonica and must also be taken into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the establishment of a western European diplomatic presence in Salonica and the impact the local Ottoman administration perceived it to have on the local Jewish population. By studying the records of the şeriat court, the principal official documents produced in eighteenth-century Salonica, the article analyzes the evolving interactions between local Jews and Europeans during the eighteenth century and the rise of a new local Jewish elite whose privileges and prominence stemmed from its contacts with European consuls and merchants. It also examines the ambivalence of the Ottoman administrators toward the growing presence of foreigners in Salonica, which they saw as both a contribution to the local economy and a threat to public order. The growing Ottoman suspicion toward the connections between local non-Muslims and European representatives was evident especially during the second half of the eighteenth century, when the responsibility for enforcing the Ottoman order on non-Muslims who had obtained European protection was transferred from local officials to the imperial center. At this stage, the Ottoman bureaucracy in Istanbul mobilized its resources and began to take administrative steps to enforce the boundaries separating locals from foreigners, monitoring the nomination deeds granted to local non-Muslims ( zimmis) and enforcing the status of zimmi on all those whose claim to European protection was proved to be false or to have been misused. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The long-standing historiographical consensus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century German Jews suggests that they were largely 'beyond Judaism.' Most historians concur that German Jews abandoned a particularistic faith and the restricted social life of the autonomous community in exchange for cultural tropes of the dominant bourgeois culture as they strove to integrate into the surrounding society. While most German Jews no longer practiced the Judaism of their fathers or their fathers' fathers, this did not necessarily mean that religion or belief had become irrelevant. In this essay I explore, through a close reading of a set of diaries, the religiosity of one Jewish family-that of William and Clara Stern and their three children, Hilde, Günther, and Eva. In the process, I seek both to address a gap in the research and to contribute to an ongoing discussion in the historiography regarding modern Judaism. While religiosity among German Jews had increasingly become a matter of individual, and not collective, action and choice, I argue that Jews of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries still engaged in a quest for meaning for themselves and future generations specifically as Jews. The religious worldview and education that Clara Stern aimed to impart to her children reflect precisely this search for personal religious meaning and exemplify the individual nature of early twentieth-century German Jewish religiosity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]