Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Editors and Advisers
- Contents
- Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry
- Polin
- Statement From the Editors
- SYMPOSIUM: JEWS AND THE EMERGENCE OF AN INDEPENDENT POLISH STATE
- ARTICLES
- DOCUMENTS
- COMMENTARY
- REVIEW ESSAYS
- BOOK REVIEWS
- Nahum Gross (ed.) Yehudim ba-Kalkalah
- Jonathan I. Israel European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism: 1550-1750
- Lucy S. Dawidowicz The Golden Tradition. Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe
- Joseph Weiss Studies in Eastern European Jewish Mysticism (edited by David Goldstein)
- Mathias Bersohn Kilka słów o dawniejszych bozjnicach drewnianych w Polsce
- Magdalena Opalski The Jewish Tavern-Keeper and his Tavern in Nineteenth Century Polish Literature
- Steven J. Zipperstein The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History
- Stephen M. Berk Year of CrisisYear of Hope. Russian Jewry and The Pogroms of 1881-1882
- Hans Rogger Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia
- Hans Rogger Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia
- Heide W. Whelan Alexander III and the State Council: Bureaucracy and Counter-Reform in Late Imperial Russia
- Mary Antin The Promised Land
- John Bodnar The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America
- Michael R. Weisser A Brotherhood of Memory: Jewish Landsmanshaftn in the New World
- Henryk Piasecki Secja Żydowsfca PPSD i Żydowska Partia Socjal-Demokratyczna 1892-1919/20
- Ber Borochov Class Struggle and the Jewish Nation. Selected Essays in Marxist Zionism
- Ehud Luz Makbilim Nifgashim
- Shmuel Nitzan (ed.) Tnu'at Dror be'Galicia
- Ritchie Robertson Kafka: Judaism, Politics and Literature
- Sander L. Gilman Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews
- Edward D. Wynot Warsaw Between the World Wars: Profile of the Capital City in a Developing Land
- Aleksander Biberstein Zagłada Żydów w Krakowie
- Shmuel Krakowski The War of the Doomed: Jewish Armed Resistance in Poland, 1942-1944
- Nechama Tec When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland
- W Czerdziestzą, Rocznicp Agonia, walka i śmierć warszawskiego getta; Janina Jaworska Henryka Becka
- Hanna Krall Sublokatorka
- Randolph L. Braham and Bélo Vágó (eds) The Holocaust in Hungary: Forty Years Later
- Les Limes du Souvenir: Mémoriaux juifs de Pologne (presente par Annette Wieviorka et Yitzhok Niborski)
- Leiter to the Editors
- Contributors
- Obituaries
Jonathan I. Israel European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism: 1550-1750
from BOOK REVIEWS
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Editors and Advisers
- Contents
- Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry
- Polin
- Statement From the Editors
- SYMPOSIUM: JEWS AND THE EMERGENCE OF AN INDEPENDENT POLISH STATE
- ARTICLES
- DOCUMENTS
- COMMENTARY
- REVIEW ESSAYS
- BOOK REVIEWS
- Nahum Gross (ed.) Yehudim ba-Kalkalah
- Jonathan I. Israel European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism: 1550-1750
- Lucy S. Dawidowicz The Golden Tradition. Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe
- Joseph Weiss Studies in Eastern European Jewish Mysticism (edited by David Goldstein)
- Mathias Bersohn Kilka słów o dawniejszych bozjnicach drewnianych w Polsce
- Magdalena Opalski The Jewish Tavern-Keeper and his Tavern in Nineteenth Century Polish Literature
- Steven J. Zipperstein The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History
- Stephen M. Berk Year of CrisisYear of Hope. Russian Jewry and The Pogroms of 1881-1882
- Hans Rogger Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia
- Hans Rogger Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia
- Heide W. Whelan Alexander III and the State Council: Bureaucracy and Counter-Reform in Late Imperial Russia
- Mary Antin The Promised Land
- John Bodnar The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America
- Michael R. Weisser A Brotherhood of Memory: Jewish Landsmanshaftn in the New World
- Henryk Piasecki Secja Żydowsfca PPSD i Żydowska Partia Socjal-Demokratyczna 1892-1919/20
- Ber Borochov Class Struggle and the Jewish Nation. Selected Essays in Marxist Zionism
- Ehud Luz Makbilim Nifgashim
- Shmuel Nitzan (ed.) Tnu'at Dror be'Galicia
- Ritchie Robertson Kafka: Judaism, Politics and Literature
- Sander L. Gilman Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews
- Edward D. Wynot Warsaw Between the World Wars: Profile of the Capital City in a Developing Land
- Aleksander Biberstein Zagłada Żydów w Krakowie
- Shmuel Krakowski The War of the Doomed: Jewish Armed Resistance in Poland, 1942-1944
- Nechama Tec When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland
- W Czerdziestzą, Rocznicp Agonia, walka i śmierć warszawskiego getta; Janina Jaworska Henryka Becka
- Hanna Krall Sublokatorka
- Randolph L. Braham and Bélo Vágó (eds) The Holocaust in Hungary: Forty Years Later
- Les Limes du Souvenir: Mémoriaux juifs de Pologne (presente par Annette Wieviorka et Yitzhok Niborski)
- Leiter to the Editors
- Contributors
- Obituaries
Summary
When did modem Jewish history begin? The early architects of Jewish historiography, and their successors, suggested the second half of the eighteenth century as the turning point which ended the ‘Jewish Middle Ages’. That period, marked by the French Revolution on the one hand, and by the work of Moses Mendelssohn on the other, is pictured as ushering in a new era involving fundamental changes in Jewish culture and political status. On this convention rests the common claim that, ‘the period known as “early modem” in Western Europe was, for most Jews, a continuation of the Middle Ages’. In the book under review, Professor Jonathan Israel of the University of London attempts to show that the early modem period was an essentially new phase in Jewish history, and to draw a firm dividing-line between the medieval and early modem epochs. The beginning of the early modem era is to be dated in 1570 and the period came to an end in the second quarter of the eighteenth century.
The author's central claim is based on a clearly expressed criterion for the evaluation of the Jewish historical experience, namely, the ‘significance’ or the ‘impact’ of the Jews on the economy and culture of Europe. On this basis he identifies a profound change beginning around 1570 and reaching a ‘high point’ in the period between 1650 and 1713. It was in the second half of the seventeenth century that Jews had the most profound and pervasive significance ever in European history. This heyday of jewish influence came to an end during the eighteenth century which the author depicts as a period of decline.
In the first chapter, entitled ‘Exodus from the West’, it is stressed that the Iberian expulsions of the late fifteenth century (Spain 1492, Portugal 1497, Navarre 1498) were part of a broader European trend which saw the banishment of numerous Central European Jewish communities during the same decade (Geneva 1490, Mecklenburg and Pomerania 1492, Halle and Magdeburg 1493, etc.; the 1495 expulsion from Lithuania is not mentioned). A further wave of expulsions, during the mid-sixteenth century, was more ‘ideological’ and systematic because of the tensions generated by the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. This second phase came to an end in 1570.
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- Jews and the Emerging Polish State (Polin Volume Two) , pp. 407 - 412Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2008