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Jews in the Early Modern World, by Dean Phillip Bell. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008. 301 pp. $79.00 (c); $29.95 (p).
Dean Phillip Bell’s book is an overview of the history of the Jews in the early modern period, defined, somewhat arbitrarily, as 1400–1700. The book consists of five thematic chapters, plus an introduction and conclusions. The long bibliography and a section of “Suggested Readings” should be very helpful for students and teachers. Chapter One discusses the medieval period, attempting to paint background for what is to follow in Chapters 2 through 5, which cover “Settlement and Demography,” “Community and Social Life,” “Identity: Religion and Culture,” and “Relations with the Other.” The author took upon himself a very difficult task: to write a book that would provide a broad overview of the history of the Jews from the Middle Ages through the end of the seventeenth century; and, as with any such broad studies, the limited space has forced him to make hard choices of what to include or exclude.
One of the most valuable aspects of the book is its expansion of geographic perspective to include a discussion of Jewish communities in places beyond Europe and the Ottoman Empire, such as “the New World,” as well as India and China. The chapter on “Settlement and Demography” is useful in giving an overview of the demographic trends in the early modern period. But the extensive use of numbers, derived from Encyclopedia Judaica, a source used extensively in the book, is most problematic. Although the author acknowledges that “demographic information is notoriously difficult to secure for the premodern history” (p. 35), the book nonetheless provides authoritative-looking tables with population numbers for periods as remote as the 1300s. The chapter also unnecessarily simplifies the division of the Jewish population into Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews (pp. 35–36). While such division has been common, scholars are now more sensitive to communities that existed independently of the Germanic (Ashkenazic) or Iberian (Sephardic) lineage, including Italian Jews, Iraqi or Persian Jews.
The chapter on “Settlement and Demography” overlaps with the chapter on “Relations with the Other.” The latter outlines legal status of Jews. Demographic patterns are obviously related to the Jews’ legal status, and it would have been useful to have the two discussed together, rather than placing the two in separate chapters far removed from each other.
Although “complexity” is perhaps the most frequently used word in the book, the book actually shies away from it. The chapter on “Community and Social Life” tends to focus on internal community developments, without linking them with the non-Jewish world. There is no question that internal community needs were crucial for the maintenance of a communal structure (courts, synagogues, mikvaot etc), yet recent scholarship, especially on Italy and Poland (e.g. Teller, Cooperman, Siegmund), has raised questions about the extent of Jewish autonomy, signaling that even the creation of certain bodies of what appears to be autonomous communal governance was often a result of political and economic policies of the non-Jewish governments.
The chapter “Community and Social Life,” about communal structures, focuses on the male Jewish functions (rabbis, parnasim, courts, etc.); the same is true of the chapter on “Identity: Religion and Culture.” Although the author rightfully says that “women were integral members of the Jewish community and family” (p. 121), in the book itself women are not an integral part of the society. Indeed “Jews” are male in the book (see, e.g., p. 130 “Jews, even Jewish women”). Women receive rather scant attention, and only within the context of family and “women” (pp. 120–127), or “deviance” (p. 166); they remain segregated and marginal in the book. If a focus on formal community structures makes it perhaps difficult to integrate women, discussion of economic activities or education, or “observance,” could have easily been more inclusive. Women’s involvement in economic activities is discussed briefly in the subsection “Women” (p. 122) rather than in the following section, “Professions and Occupations” (pp. 127–131). In chapter four “Identity: Religion and Culture,” a discussion of education consciously excludes women (pp. 147–149), while devoting to women but one sentence (p. 182) about tutoring. Little is mentioned about manuals and books written and published for women and other forms of education they may have received outside of formal schooling. Neither are they mentioned in the discussion of print and its impact on Jewish culture. Still, for those interested in the developments within the halakhah or elite male Jewish culture, Chapter Four will be helpful. Granted its limitations, it is the strongest chapter of the book.
Throughout the book the author strives to balance “the internal” with the “external,” and to place Jewish experience within the broader “non-Jewish” context. The author acknowledges that “Jews and non-Jews might, and often did, have very positive relationships and that it is inappropriate to dismiss the period as one bracketed simply by expulsion and emancipation.” And yet, these “positive” relationships find little space in the book (e.g., pp. 195–200, parts of 232), in effect turning the book back into what Salo Baron dubbed “the lachrymose history of the Jews,” one that focuses on learning and suffering (especially, pp. 212–227). Even the discussion of conversions, which could serve as an opening for a discussion of some potentially positive interactions, focuses only on Jewish conversions to Christianity, judgmentally termed “apostasy” (pp. 224–227). Conversions to Judaism, much more limited, to be sure, but still existent, are not even mentioned. But conversions in both directions, however disapproved they may have been then or now, were often results of close interaction between the two communities.
To be sure, persecution and anti-Jewish sentiments were very much present during the early modern period, but so were close social relations between Jews and non-Jews. The implicit assumption that acculturation (assimilation?) and close interaction between Jews and non-Jews are markers of modernity is problematic. In fact recent scholarship suggests that they were very much markers of the premodern times as well. But they are lost in the book, in which focus on the “internal” (community structures, rabbinic learning etc) and “external” (predominantly persecution) dominate.
The book’s greatest accomplishment is bringing to our attention Jewish communities beyond Europe and the Ottoman Empire, and as such might open up new horizons for both students and teachers of the early modern period in general, or Jewish history in particular.
Magda Teter
Wesleyan University
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