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  • Jewish Geography
  • Pawel Maciejko
David B. Ruderman. Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010. Pp. ix + 326.

Until not so long ago, the early modern period had been seen in historical scholarship in a fashion similar to how the Middle Ages were portrayed by Renaissance scholars: as an era of transition from the Old to the New, an age lacking its own proper characteristics and defined only by its relationship to what preceded and what followed. While recent scholarship has largely dispensed with this perception, Jewish historiography lacked a systematic discussion of the period and its defining features: among dozens of books and hundreds of essays touching upon the affairs of the Jews between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, much of it excellent, there is little synthesis. David Ruderman’s Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History aims to fill this gap. Aside from Jonathan Israel’s European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550–1750 (1985), Ruderman’s book is the first attempt to paint a comprehensive portrait of Jewish society in all of Europe during roughly the same span. However, in contrast to Israel’s economic history, Ruderman’s understanding of the period is based primarily on the unique features of its culture. To my mind, this is probably the most striking aspect of this remarkable book: it is not only that Ruderman is an historian of early modern Jewry who focuses on its cultural production instead of, say, its social makeup or economic activities; it is that he sees the early modern as a culture par excellence, as a phenomenon whose specificity can be best grasped by the study of mentalities, doctrines, and ideas.

Ruderman’s narrative is structured in five sections revolving around five ‘‘primary components of the early modern Jewish experience’’ (p. 14). These are: (1) accelerated mobility; (2) a heightened sense of communal cohesiveness; (3) a knowledge explosion; (4) a crisis of rabbinic authority; and (5) mingled identities. The common backdrop of these components is a profound shift in the understanding of both internal and external [End Page 275] boundaries of Jewish community; in Ruderman’s own words: ‘‘I am not claiming a homogeneity of early modern Jewish culture where local differences can be swept away. I am seeing only general tendencies that vary distinctly from place to place but reveal nevertheless some commonality . . . [all components] are related in one respect: they reveal in their entirety the pressures this period exemplifies on the notion of religious and social boundaries between Jews and other Jews and between Jews and members of other faiths and ethnic groups’’ (p. 17). Within each section except the final one, the discussion aims mainly at summing-up the present state of research rather than discovering new primary sources or putting forward bold novel claims. This said, Ruderman’s masterful skill as a synthesizer opens up new perspectives for future research. Instead of summarizing Ruderman’s synthesis, in what follows I offer several thoughts triggered by reading his book.

Ruderman’s discussion of early modern Jewish mobility should be supplemented by the discussion of early modern Jewish geography. While scholarly attention has been devoted to the applicability of traditional schemes of periodization and chronology to the specific demands of Jewish history, the map of Europe used by Jewish historians is too often assumed to neatly overlap with the map used by scholars of other groups and communities, or—worse—it is simply a map reflecting political divisions between the contemporary nation-states. What the pattern of early modern Jewish mobility reveals clearly is that the borders between the then-existing states (not to mention the contemporary ones) were not necessarily the most important boundaries for living Jews—as one early modern observer stated, for the Jews, Poland began right at the gates of the city of Hamburg. Similarly, a Habsburg historian can, for the most part, treat the lands of the Bohemian Crown (Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia) as one unit. Jewish historians, in contrast, will draw a very sharp line between the Jewry of Bohemia—with its large urban center in Prague closely tied to the Habsburg emperors, the exceptional rural Jewish population in...

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