Author: Lois Dubin Publisher: Stanford Studies in Jewish His ISBN: 9780804776035 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
This book offers an important new perspective on the process of Jewish integration in modern Europe. Heretofore, discussions of Jewish culture and politics in the eighteenth centry have emphasized enlightenment in Berlin and emphasized emancipation in Paris. In this study, the author addresses the Habsburg Mondarchy, which contained the largest Jewish Population in Europe outside Russia, by focusing on the free port of Trieste, at the crossroads of Central Europe, Italy, and the Levant. In this dynamic port city, mercantilist state-building, enlightenment absolutism, multicultural diversity, and Italian Jewish traditions produced a path toward integration that is generally ignored in modern Jewish history: that of acculturated merchants in commercial centers. The book provides an in-depth study of enlightened absolutism in action—of the way rulers, officials, and subjects negotiated and implemented policies. It shows both maria Theresa and Joseph II as pragmatic state-builders who developed new policies of toleration for Jews and other religious minorities. The book also emphasizes the commitment by Trieste Jews to the new norms of acculturation, enlightenment, and civil inclusion—in contrast to the wariness expressed by other European Jews to enlighteneed absolutist programs of societal transformation. The author seeks to counter the usual teleological readings of eighteenth-century Jewish history that sees civil-political improvement only in terms of the French Revolution's granting of legal emancipation. The example of Habsburg Trieste demonstrates the possibility and parameters of change within an Old Regime corporate-estates society and state, under which most Jews lived through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Author: Lois C. Dubin Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 519
Book Description
Winner of the 2000 Barbara Jelavich Prize in Habsburg, Russian or Ottoman history (American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies) and finalist in the 1999 National Jewish Book Awards, History category. “Dubin’s brilliant study of the cosmopolitan entrepôt of goods and peoples that was Trieste breaks new ground in our understanding of Jewish life in the Old Regime Europe. It demonstrates with exacting detail the extensive privileges such ‘port Jews’ enjoyed and the effect enlightened absolutism and emancipation politics exercised upon them, while skillfully portraying the Jews’ political and cultural responses. It is a classic study in modern Jewish history.” — David Sorkin, University of Wisconsin, Madison “Lois C. Dubin has produced a solid and original monograph that explores the economic, legal, political, and cultural changes experienced by Trieste’s Jewish community within the context of the reform policy of the Austrian enlightened absolutists and Enlightenment ideology... Dubin has written an outstanding work on Trieste’s Jews... a very valuable study that I recommend to any reader interested in Jewish and Habsburg history, as well as the Enlightenment.” — The American Historical Review “A valuable and carefully researched book... Dubin’s book is an important contribution not only to the study of Habsburg Jewry but also to our understanding of eighteenth-century absolutism.” — The Journal of Modern History “The book is replete with keen insights into the experiences of European Jews during the initial phases of the transition from the world of corporate orders to modern class society... Dubin's discussion of the dynamics of Haskalah in Trieste is a sophisticated and nuanced analysis of one of the crucial chapters in the modernization of European Jewry.” — Journal of Urban History “With this superb book, Lois C. Dubin has successfully and elegantly slain the two-headed dragon of modern Jewish historiography: nationalism and Germanocentrism. She has also provided Habsburg historians with a much-needed treatment of the complex interaction between state-building, reforming absolutism and the Jews, one of several significant ‘national minorities’ within the heterogeneous empire... The essential economic role played by Triestine Jewry once Charles VI declared Trieste a free port in 1719 made them indispensable to the Habsburg state. This indispensability itself is a critical marker in the shift between medieval and early modern Jewish history. What had been a liability, Jewish predominance in middle-class professions, particularly in trade, became an asset with the rise of mercantilism and a state-centralized economy. Coupled with the distinctive culture of Italian Jews, toleration shaped the ways in which Triestine Jews responded to Josephinian reforms, the Jewish Enlightenment in Berlin, challenges to Jewish marriage and divorce law, educational changes, and the dissolution of the ghetto, all of which Dubin explores with nuance and clarity... The Port Jews of Habsburg Trieste employs source material in all the essential languages, German, Hebrew and Italian, and Dubin is equally at home analyzing Viennese and Triestine archival material and rare Hebrew periodical literature published in Vienna and Berlin. Her assured use of such diverse materials is also welcome because it restores historical agency to the Jewish population which is at the center of her study... The Port Jews of Habsburg Trieste will undoubtedly remain the classic treatment of this fascinating city and of Habsburg state-building in one of its most important ports.” — Nancy Sinkoff, H-Net “Dubin has made here an important contribution that belongs in every library that addresses Judaism and the modern world.” — German Studies Review “Un travail magistral.” — Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales
Author: David Cesarani Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1135292531 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 222
Book Description
The history of Jews in cosmopolitan maritime trading centres is a field of research that is reshaping our understanding of how Jews entered the modern world. These studies show that the utility of Jewish merchants in an era of European expansion was vital to their acculturation and assimilation.
Author: Francesca Bregoli Publisher: Springer ISBN: 3319894056 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 223
Book Description
The volume investigates the interconnections between the Italian Jewish worlds and wider European and Mediterranean circles, situating the Italian Jewish experience within a transregional and transnational context mindful of the complex set of networks, relations, and loyalties that characterized Jewish diasporic life. Preceded by a methodological introduction by the editors, the chapters address rabbinic connections and ties of communal solidarity in the early modern period, and examine the circulation of Hebrew books and the overlap of national and transnational identities after emancipation. For the twentieth century, this volume additionally explores the Italian side of the Wissenschaft des Judentums; the role of international Jewish agencies in the years of Fascist racial persecution; the interactions between Italian Jewry, JDPs and Zionist envoys after Word War II; and the impact of Zionism in transforming modern Jewish identities.
Author: David Laven Publisher: OUP Oxford ISBN: 019154244X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 268
Book Description
The Austrian domination of Venice and Venetia after the Congress of Vienna has traditionally received a bad press. The Restoration regime was long villifed as oppressive and exploitative, and in direct opposition to the interests of almost all classes of the population. This volume questions this view, arguing from detailed archival research that Francis I's rule brought many real benefits to his Venetian subjects. The root of the remarkable passivity of Venetia in the years after the fall of Napoleon should not be explained in terms of pervasive policing, heavy handed censorship and the presence of Metternich's 'forest of bayonets', but rather by the existence of a fair and responsive, if sometimes cumbersome, administrative structure. Having outlined the origins of Austrian control of Venetia in terms of radical political and territorial changes experienced during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period, this work examines the mechanisms of Austrian rule. Early chapters focus on the uncomfortable tensions that existed between the temptation to retain a modernised machinery of state inherited from Napoleon's Kingdom of Italy, and the desire to look to models existing in the rest of the Habsburg Monarchy with the aim of creating greater uniformity with the rest of the multinational empire. Various aspects of the Habsburg system are examined to assess the burden of Austrian control in the form of taxation and conscription, and the way in which education, policing, the Church and censorship were used in sometimes surprising ways to attach the Venetian population to their Habsburg masters. Finally, the book addresses the question of what went wrong between the death of Francis I in 1835 and the Venetian insurrection of 1848-9 to alienate the population so radically.
Author: Martin Borýsek Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG ISBN: 3111050564 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 383
Book Description
The Jewish population of early modern Italy was characterised by its inner diversity, which found its expression in the coexistence of various linguistic, cultural and liturgical traditions, as well as social and economic patterns. The contributions in this volume aim to explore crucial questions concerning the self-perception and identity of early modern Italian Jews from new perspectives and angles.
Author: Renate Hansen-Kokoruš Publisher: Böhlau Wien ISBN: 3205212894 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 429
Book Description
The volume offers an overview of the diverse Jewish experiences in Southeastern Europe from the 19th to the 21st centuries, and the various forms and strategies of their representation in literature, the arts, historiography and philosophy. Southeastern Europe is characterized by a high degree of ethnical, religious and cultural diversity. Jews, whether Sephardim, Ashkenazim or Romaniots – settling there in different periods – experienced divergent life worlds which engendered rich cultural production. Though recent scholarly and popular interest in this heterogeneous region has grown impressively, Jewish cultural production is still an under-researched area. The volume offers an overview of the diverse Jewish experiences in Southeastern Europe from the 19th to the 21st centuries, and the various forms and strategies of their representation in literature, the arts, historiography and philosophy, thus creating a dialogue between Jewish studies, Balkan studies, and current literary and cultural theories.
Author: Antony Polonsky Publisher: Liverpool University Press ISBN: 1789627818 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 519
Book Description
A comprehensive survey-socio-political, economic, and religious-of Jewish life in Poland and Russia. Wherever possible, contemporary Jewish writings are used to illustrate how Jews felt and reacted to new situations and ideas.
Author: Francesca Bregoli Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 0804791597 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 356
Book Description
The Mediterranean port of Livorno was home to one of the most prominent and privileged Jewish enclaves of early modern Europe. Focusing on Livornese Jewry, this book offers an alternative perspective on Jewish acculturation during the eighteenth century, and reassesses common assumptions about the interactions of Jews with outside culture and the impact of state reforms on the corporate Jewish community. Working from a vast array of previously untapped archival and literary sources, Francesca Bregoli combines cultural analysis with a study of institutional developments to investigate Jewish responses to Enlightenment thought and politics, as well as non-Jewish perceptions of Jews, through an exploration of Jewish-Christian cultural exchange, sites of sociability, and reformist policies. Mediterranean Enlightenment shows that Livornese Jewish scholars engaged with Enlightenment ideals and aspired to contribute to society at large without weakening the boundaries of traditional Jewish life. By arguing that the privileged status of Livorno Jewry had conservative rather than liberalizing effects, it also challenges the notion that economic utility facilitates Jewish integration, nuancing received wisdom about processes of emancipation in Europe.
Author: Lippman Bodoff Publisher: Devora Publishing ISBN: 9781932687538 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 466
Book Description
In a series of evocative, groundbreaking articles, the author analyzes the Biblical and Rabbinic basis for what surely are now some of the most hotly debated topics in Jewish religious thought today. These include how the traditional interpretation of the Binding of Isaac has been misapplied in both Christian theology and Jewish martyrology, and how the centuries-long, and newly resurgent belief in mysticism and messianism, in kabbalah and Hasidism, has distorted classical Judaism and thwarted its national and cultural development. The author counters the arguments of those who see Judaism's – and the world's – newfound obsession with mysticism and kabbalah as a natural outgrowth of a progressive trend within rabbinic Judaism, and warns of the impending danger of rejecting the very core of Jewish thought and opinion as it was expounded in the Torah and classical Jewish tradition (the Oral Law). Each section of this magnificent work will give the reader new insights into how different aspects of Judaism have evolved and why they have often been in contention with each other. Nor is he afraid to deal with some of the supercharged issues within Judaism, such as, what are the underlying premises of Jewry's claim to the Divinely Promised Land? And has this claim been affected by its failure to pursue an active program of nationalism? These highly acclaimed articles have been gleaned from today's leading Jewish journals and have stood the test of time. They contain valuable source material and are a ready reference to the many historical and religious topics that are the focus of discussion across all main Jewish denominations.
Author: Lois Dubin
Author: Lois C. Dubin
Author: David Cesarani
Author: Francesca Bregoli
Author: David Laven
Author: Martin Borýsek
Author: Renate Hansen-Kokoruš
Author: Antony Polonsky
Author: Francesca Bregoli
Author: Lippman Bodoff