From "potential" and "fuzzy" Jews to "non-Jewish Jews"/"Jewish non-Jews" : conversos living in Iberia and early modern Jewry / Claude B. Stuczynski. "The poor of your city come first" : Jewish ritual and the itinerant poor in early modern Germany / Debra Kaplan -- A sixteenth-century rabbi as a published author : the early editions of Rabbi Mordecai Jaffe's Levushim / Pavel Sládek -- New Kabbalistic genres and their readers in early modern Europe / Andrea Gondos -- The "Significant other/s" and their/our histories / Moshe Idel -- On the mysteries of the law : a conversation between Pietro Aretino and Rabbi Elijah Menahem Ḥalfan / Fabrizio Lelli -- Praising the "idolater" : a poem for Christians by Rabbi Leon Modena / Michela Andreatta -- Crossing the name barrier : non-Jewish names in the memoirs of Glikl bas Leib and in early modern Ashkenazic Jewish culture / Joseph Davis -- Pride and punishment : Christians and Jews on the meaning of the Jewish presence in Worms / Lucia Raspe -- A Jewish Easter lamb : cultural connection and its limits in a 1716 Prague procession / Rachel L. Greenblatt -- Leibush the Lawless and his border tavern / Gershon David Hundert -- Alone among the sages of Sepharad? : Alfonso de Zamora and the symbolic capital of converso Christian Hebraism in Spain after 1492 / Jesús de Prado Plumed -- From "potential" and "fuzzy" Jews to "non-Jewish Jews"/"Jewish non-Jews" : conversos living in Iberia and early modern Jewry / Claude B. Stuczynski.
Summary:
Whether forced by governmental decree, driven by persecution and economic distress, or seeking financial opportunity, the Jews of early modern Europe were extraordinarily mobile, experiencing both displacement and integration into new cultural, legal, and political settings. This, in turn, led to unprecedented modes of social mixing for Jews, especially for those living in urban areas, who frequently encountered Jews from different ethnic backgrounds and cultural orientations. Additionally, Jews formed social, economic, and intellectual bonds with mixed populations of Christians. While not necessarily effacing Jewish loyalties to local places, authorities, and customs, these connections and exposures to novel cultural settings created new allegiances as well as new challenges, resulting in constructive relations in some cases and provoking strife and controversy in others.0The essays collected by Francesca Bregoli and David B. Ruderman in 'Connecting Histories' show that while it is not possible to speak of a single, cohesive transregional Jewish culture in the early modern period, Jews experienced pockets of supra-local connections between West and East-for example, between Italy and Poland, Poland and the Holy Land, and western and eastern Ashkenaz-as well as increased exchanges between high and low culture. Special attention is devoted to the impact of the printing press and the strategies of representation and self-representation through which Jews forged connections in a world where their status as a tolerated minority was ambiguous and in constant need of renegotiation.
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