How Early Did We Become Modern?

‘‘In recent decades a most impressive and steadily mounting corpus of scholarly monographs and articles has vastly enriched our understanding of the history and culture of European Jewry in early modern times . . . There is undoubtedly a crying need for new general interpretations of the role of Jewry within Europe in this period.’’ This quotation is not taken from David Ruderman’s Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History, to which our forum is devoted, but from its predecessor, Jonathan Israel’s European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550–1750, first published in 1985 and reviewed by Ruderman in these pages.¹ Although Israel’s book has subsequently appeared in two revised editions (1989 and 1997), Ruderman, shortly before stepping down after two decades as director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, has boldly taken on the formidable task—as scholarly monographs (some reviewed in this issue) and articles have continued to mount even more steadily—of producing yet another synthetic history of early modern Jewry. Whereas Israel’s synthesis focused on a period of two hundred years which it described as ‘‘the age of mercantilism,’’ thus highlighting its economic significance, Ruderman’s volume, which covers a somewhat longer period of time, is no less forthrightly a ‘‘cultural history.’’ In such a work ‘‘the role of Jewry,’’ to quote Israel, is less relevant than the inner dynamics of the Jewish world, in constant dialogue, as its author stresses, with the surrounding cultures among which early modern Jews resided.

Indeed, early in his recent book Ruderman explicitly distances himself from Israel’s ‘‘characterization of Jewish social and cultural history . . . as primarily reflective and derivative of general trends located in non-Jewish society.’’ Ruderman’s critique parallels, and perhaps derives from, Robert Bonfil’s 1984 critique of earlier historical presentations— particularly by Israel’s fellow countryman Cecil Roth—of Italian Jewry during the Renaissance.² It is perhaps noteworthy that the scholars rebuked for their ‘‘derivative’’ notions of Jewish history were trained in England, and that their criticizers each earned their doctoral degrees at the Hebrew University, where both studied with Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, the centenary of whose birth occurs this year.

In his Short History of the Jewish People, first published in 1936, and in a revised edition seven years later, Roth gave expression to the notion widely then accepted that it was only in the late eighteenth century that ‘‘the Jewish Middle Ages were closed.’’³ Roth, who had earned both his undergraduate and doctoral degrees at Oxford (D.Phil. 1924), had good reason to be somewhat perplexed about periodization. When that venerable university’s Faculty of Modern History—which has produced such legendary early modernists as Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre), Lawrence Stone, (Sir) Keith Thomas, and Peter Burke—opened its doors in the mid-nineteenth century, the year 285 (C.E.) was designated as the beginning of ‘‘modern history,’’ and that still continues to be the case.

In the first of his two historiographical appendices Ruderman raises the ‘‘obvious’’ question as to why only in the mid-eighties was Jonathan Israel ‘‘the first to take up the challenge of producing . . . a synthesis that clearly laid out the parameters of an early modern period in Jewish history,’’ a question to which not even a tentative answer is provided. One possible explanation, however, may lie in the surprising longevity of the (now strange) historiographical notion that ‘‘the Jewish Middle Ages,’’ as Roth referred to them, did not follow the periodization of Europe as a whole. Similar to Roth’s assertion was that of Jacob Marcus, who wrote in the introduction to his influential source book The Jew in the Medieval World, first published in 1938, that ‘‘the medieval age comes to an end for Western Jewry with the proclamation of political and civil emancipation in France in September, 1791.’’⁴

That notion was already expressed a decade earlier by Louis Ginzberg, who also provided it with a distinguished pedigree: ‘‘The middle ages, aptly remarks Zunz,’’ he wrote, ‘‘did not terminate for the Jew until the end of the eighteenth century...