Focusing on an epoch of spectacular demographic, political, economic, and cultural changes for European Jewry, Cultural Intermediaries chronicles the lives and thinking of ten Jewish intellectuals of the Renaissance, nine of them from Italy and one a Portuguese exile who settled in the Ottoman empire after a long sojourn in Italy. David B. Ruderman, Giuseppe Veltri, and the other contributors to this volume detail how, in the relative openness of cultural exchange encountered in such intellectual centers as Florence, Mantua, Pisa, Naples, Ferrara, and Salonika, these Jewish savants sought to enlarge their cultural horizons, to correlate the teachings of their own tradition with those outside it, and to rethink the meaning of their religious and ethnic identities within the intellectual and religious categories common to European civilization as a whole. The engaging intellectual profiles created especially for this volume by scholars from Israel, North America, and Europe represent an important rereading and reinterpretation of early modern Jewish culture and society and its broader European intellectual contexts.

"'The economic history of European jews' attempts to make sense of the economic foundations of Jewish life in the different parts of late antique and early medieval Europe. In the first part Michael Toch describes the demographic arc, decline, subsequent rise, and spatial distribution of Jewish populations. This data is then broadened to include the range of economic activities. The second part analyses the actual share of Jews in different branches of the economy. This includes the idea of their pioneer role and the notion of an intercontinental network of Jewish commerce, the phenomenon of Jews in agriculture and entrepreneurship, gender roles and the household mode of production, and the difficult subject of the significance of minority status for economic activity, among others"--provided by publisher.

"The Nazi Holocaust & the Exile of Yiddish is a history of the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye (General Encyclopedia, Berlin, Paris, & New York, 1932-1966), the only attempt to publish a comprehensive encyclopedia of universal knowledge in the Yiddish language. In the decade after World War I, the potential for Yiddish was seemingly limitless.The global number of speakers of Yiddish was estimated at between nine and ten million, with major communities in Poland, the Soviet Union, and the United States. But by the early 1930s, as Jews were becoming invested in their host states, a dramatic rise in antisemitism from the political right threatened their new status. Extreme nationalists sought to undo Jewish participation in civic life, limit Jewish migration and settlement, and contain - or even purge - Jews' political, economic, cultural, and racial influence. This combination of factors led many within the Yiddishist camp both to reassert their commitment to the language and to a distinct Jewish national identity, increasing the urgency for the Entsiklopedye's architects to embark upon their project. Uncertainty over the Jewish future began to be reflected in the Entsiklopedye itself. The volumes of 1936 and 1937 contain otherwise out-of-place monograph-length entries on the specifically Jewish topics of "Antisemitism" and "Land of Israel," presaging a shift away from general subjects and toward more specifically Jewish content. In September 1939, the German invasion of Poland cut the Entsiklopedye off from its major source of readers and trapped many of its contributors who were based there. Just as the second Yidn volume was being sent to subscribers in Spring 1940, Germany invaded France. Making matters even worse, the copies of the second Yidn volume were sent to the United States, and but most copies were lost at sea. A few volumes that had been sent via the regular mail arrived safely in New York, however. The encyclopedia's editors themselves fled and, after making a harrowing escape via Spain and Portugal, arrived in New York by late summer / early autumn 1940. With the end of World War II and as the enormity of the Nazi Holocaust was becoming understood, the editors decided that the Entsiklopedye should continue. The post-war Yidn volumes contain descriptive essays on Jewish life on the eve of the Holocaust, a study of Jewish life in the Americas, and the last two volumes (1964 and 1966) are historical overviews of the Holocaust. By the release of the final volume in 1966, few of the original editors of The Algemeyne Entsiklopedye were still alive. Many of the great Jewish scholars who contributed to the project had also passed. In the Foreword, the administrator of the Entsiklopedye Iser Goldberg outlined the task of future Jewish scholarship as one of creating a new corpus of work dedicated to the Holocaust. He declared that this project that once was to guide millions of Yiddish readers into the modern world was now dedicated to "the thousands of readers and subscribers in Jewish communities" with the much more modest goal of making "an important contribution to the growing khurbn [Holocaust] literature." By bringing this neglected and unique work of Jewish scholarship back into studies of modern Jewish history, Trachtenberg makes a significant contribution to current historiographical debates on the content and boundaries of Jewish knowledge in the tumultuous middle decades of the twentieth-century. In large measure because of the lack of researchers able to work in the Yiddish language, the significance and history of the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye has been overlooked, despite the fact that it was one of the great (and few) collaborative projects involving the twentieth century's most influential Jewish scholars. This monograph will inform recent scholarly discussions on the function of Yiddish before, during, and after World War II, on the extent to which Eastern European Jews turned away from Diaspora Nationalism on the eve of war, and to what degree Jews in the United States were "silent" in the decades following the Nazi Holocaust"--

In September 1791, two years after the Revolution, French Jews were granted full rights of citizenship. Scholarship has traditionally focused on this turning point of emancipation while often overlooking much of what came before. In Rites and Passages, Jay R. Berkovitz argues that no serious treatment of Jewish emancipation can ignore the cultural history of the Jews during the ancien régime. It was during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that several lasting paradigms emerged within the Jewish community—including the distinction between rural and urban communities, the formation of a strong lay leadership, heightened divisions between popular and elite religion, and the strain between local and regional identities. Each of these developments reflected the growing tension between tradition and modernity before the tumultuous events of the French Revolution.Rites and Passages emphasizes the resilience of religious tradition during periods of social and political turbulence. Viewing French Jewish history through the lens of ritual, Berkovitz describes the struggles of the French Jewish minority to maintain its cultural distinctiveness while also participating in the larger social and economic matrix. In the ancien régime, ritual systems were a formative element in the traditional worldview and served as a crucial repository of memories and values. After the Revolution, ritual signaled changes in the way Jews related to the state, French society, and French culture. In the cities especially, ritual assumed a performative function that dramatized the epoch-making changes of the day. The terms and concepts of the Jewish religious tradition thus remained central to the discourse of modernization and played a powerful role in helping French Jews interpret the diverse meanings and implications of emancipation. Introducing new and previously unused primary sources, Rites and Passages offers a fresh perspective on the dynamic relationship between tradition and modernity.

Warsaw. The Jewish Metropolis offers analyses of the cultural, religious, political and intellectual history of Warsaw Jewry, once the leading Jewish metropolis in Europe and the world.

A study of Jewish-Christian relations in Assisi in the late medieval period. Inter alia, discusses anti-Jewish sermons by Franciscan friars in the 15th century, particularly by Fortunato Coppoli da Perugia. At his instigation, the Monte di Pieta was instituted in Assisi in 1468 in order to facilitate the passage of banking and finance from Jewish to Christian hands; other anti-Jewish measures were adopted as well. The Jews requested the intervention of Pope Paul II, who stated that all contracts with Jews were valid, but the Jews continued to be hounded by Franciscan preachers. In 1485 the Monte di Pieta and other measures were reinstituted, and shortly afterwards most of the Jews left the city. Pp. 101-213 contain documents, some of which refer to anti-Jewish measures.

"These two pamphlets, 'Prelude to Pogroms? Facts for the Thoughtful' and 'German Judaism in Political, Economic and Cultural Terms' mark the first time that Alfred Wiener, the founder of the Wiener Holocaust Library, has been published in English. Together they offer a vital insight into the antisemitic onslaught Germany's Jews were subjected to as the Nazi Party rose to power, and introduce a sharp and sympathetic thinker and speaker to a contemporary audience. Tackling issues such as the planned rise of antisemitism and the scapegoating of minorities, these pamphlets speak as urgently to the contemporary moment as they provide a window on to the past."