New Chapters in the History of Early Modern Ashkenaz

Among the cultural turns of the second half of the twentieth century, the translational turn has shaped Jewish studies most profoundly. Analyses of cross-cultural translation and the emerging concepts of cultural transfer and entangled histories have led to a new Jewish history, told in relationship to that of the surrounding majority.¹ While earlier studies that marked the emerging historiographic trend in the mid-1990s studied Jewish and Christian perceptions of each other and Jewish-Christian interaction expressis verbis,² in the postmodern age, a notion of cultural embeddedness has become a presumed factor in the telling of Jewish history; rather than being an end in itself, cultural entanglement between Jews and “the other” has become a key to opening yet broader questions. A similar shift now treats Jews as active participants of history, and not its passive objects: Jews were not merely influenced by events or cultural developments in the Christian or Muslim worlds but were major historical actors in the towns, villages, and lands where they lived, making active use of and forming the conditions of life they encountered (Kaplan, p. 6). They were agents of cultural change, partners in the cultural encounter (even if politically weak vis-à-vis a dominant other).³

This review essay discusses a number of recent works on the history of early modern Ashkenaz that exemplify this shift. This is not meant to be an exhaustive survey but rather a selection of five works from scholars from the United States, Israel, and Europe that I believe are exemplary for their holistic approach to Ashkenazi culture in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Each honors a fundamental principal of the new cultural history, namely, the inclusion of the voices of ordinary people and everyday culture. Based on the understanding that the history of Ashkenazic Jewry is not “limited to extraordinary moments” (Kaplan, p. 7) and texts “written by the elite for the elite” (Fram, p. 70), the works under review draw on sources that have hitherto been overlooked: Jewish calendars, Yiddish paratexts, and coffee.

The strategy of accessing the nonelite through an unexpected source is visible in Shlomo Berger’s Producing Redemption in Amsterdam: Early Modern Yiddish Books in Paratextual Perspective. Berger analyzes paratexts—texts subsidiary to a book’s main text—of Yiddish books produced in Amsterdam, the main center of Hebrew book production in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and distributed throughout the Ashkenazi diaspora. Extending the new field of paratextology, a subfield of book history, for the first time to Jewish books, Berger treats paratexts as a key to understanding Yiddish book production, the early modern Yiddish literary corpus, the cultural meaning of these books, and their roles in Ashkenazi culture and society. He demonstrates that how books in the Ashkenazi vernacular are presented for public consumption tells us something about the world of their authors, producers, and readers.

The discussion centers on title pages (chapter 2) and prefaces (chapter 4), but other paratexts are also dealt with: approbations (chapter 3), devices to order the text, epilogues, imprimaturs, tables of contents, and indices (chapter 5). With a careful eye for detail, Berger shows that “understanding the logic of paratexts . . . enables us to figure out the logic of Yiddish publishing” (p. 213). Yiddish paratexts...