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Reviewed by:
  • Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History
  • Joost Daalder
Ruderman, David B. , Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2010; cloth; pp. 336; 5 maps; R.R.P. US$35.00, £24.95; ISBN 9781400834693.

From the outset, I should like to explain that I am not writing this review of Professor Ruderman's book as someone at all expert on his subject area, but as someone eager to learn more about it. And this readable study has certainly not disappointed me.

In a way I find it easiest to start my discussion where Ruderman ends it, namely with what he has to say about the term 'Early Modern'. He discusses the problems associated with that very well, in my view, concluding: 'Put simply, early modernity [as a label] betrays its indebtedness to a flawed theory of modernization and thus the term, employed literally, is misleading. Only as a conventional and neutral label referring to a period between medieval and modern, and implying nothing more, might the historian cautiously employ the term' (p. 226). Where many writing about the 'Early Modern' period [End Page 252] have ideological axes to grind, Ruderman aims to offer a sober and factual account. His book differs, however, from that of his major predecessor, Jonathan Israel, whose European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism 1550-1750, which appeared in 1985, by Ruderman's own admission 'marked a significant moment in the emergence of this field' (p. 207). As Ruderman sees it, Israel's work would have us believe that Jewish intellectual history is 'essentially derivative'. In Israel's view, Ruderman states, it generally represents a Jewish version of a universal European trend, while in its own terms and in its engagement with its own tradition and intellectual past, it exhibits little intrinsic significance. Ruderman regards such a view as 'only partial', and he aims to offer a 'corrective' that, in effect, concentrates more on Jewish history (pp. 212-14).

It appears to me that he succeeds to a remarkable extent, although occasionally he might perhaps have related matters more to the overall European context than he does. However, it is valuable to have so much informative and probing material about Jewish history during the period assembled, and it will be possible for other scholars to establish such links as they see.

By specifically concentrating on a very thorough study of Jewish history rather than anything more broad, Ruderman in fact achieves a great deal of interest. As he suggests, one result of his study is to 'undermine once and for all a view long entrenched in modern Jewish historiography of an inevitable one-dimensional and one-directional path from servitude to emancipation, from communal solidarity to disintegration, from ghettoization to citizenship, and from a normative tradition to radical assimilation' (p. 204). Indeed, one thing that stands out for me after reading this book is the complexity of the history dealt with. From a contemporary point of view, and as someone writing in Australia, where many live who would see themselves as having something like a 'dual identity', I was particularly interested in Ruderman's descriptions of what this meant for Jews who in one way or another saw themselves, and/ or were seen by others, as being both Jewish and 'something else'.

Let me consider as an example what he says about 'The Ambiguity of Converso Lives'. Conversos (Spanish and Portuguese for 'converts') were those Jews who had become Christians, particularly, and usually as a result of pressure, during the two centuries preceding the Alhambra Decree of 1492 whereby all Jews who were not, or did not become, Christians, were expelled from Spain by that country's Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella. (Ruderman sees 1492 as in essence the starting point of his period.) Conversos were in a very unusual position, not least if they chose to leave Spain. Ruderman makes such interesting observations as the following: 'For New [End Page 253] Christians who fully returned to Judaism, their rite of passage was neither simple nor complete. They retained consciously or unconsciously deeply ingrained attitudes to and associations with their distant past, both religious notions and ethnic loyalties that...

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