Elisheva Carlebach
Elisheva Carlebach is Salo Baron Professor of Jewish History, Culture, and Society, at Columbia University. She is the author of The Pursuit of Heresy (1990), winner of the National Jewish Book Award; Divided Souls: Jewish Converts to Christianity in Early Modern German Lands (2001); and Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe (2011), which won the AJS Schnitzer Prize. She has held fellowships from the New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Tikvah Center of NYU Law School, and the Katz Center for Advanced Jewish Studies, University of Pennsylvania. She served as editor in chief of AJS Review and was past president of the American Academy for Jewish Research. She is the editor of The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, Volume 6: Confronting Modernity, 1750–1880.
Content by Elisheva Carlebach
Guide
European Rabbinic Scholarship
1750–1880Despite the challenges of the early modern period, rabbinic scholarship flourished in Central and Eastern Europe in the latter half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century.
Guide
Folk Tales and Fiction
1750–1880The “return to history” of Jews in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and engagement between Jews and their majority cultures offered new models for imaginative writing beyond those within their ancestral traditions.
Guide
Haskalah and Pedagogy
1750–1880The first maskilim ransacked both Jewish and European tradition to find new platforms for creating and transmitting the Jewish cultural ideals they conceived. Jews enlisted diverse literary genres to call for social, educational, and economic change.
Guide
Intellectual and Religious Thought
1750–1880The Jewish encounter with modernity from 1750 to 1880 engendered a deeply ideological age. Advocates of enlightenment, of liberalism, of revolution against old regimes fought bitter polemics with forces seeking stasis, stability, tradition, and the familiar strata of privilege.
Guide
Jewish Culture Confronts Modernity
1750–1880Between 1750 and 1880, Jews were at the forefront of literary, visual, material, musical, and intellectual culture, introducing new techniques, innovative approaches, and fresh ways of looking at the world.
Guide
Life Writing: Biography, Autobiography, and Ego Documents
1750–1880The famous and the obscure, women and men, in epitaphs and private letters, ethical wills, cookbooks, and religious reflections, all reflect aspects of Jewish life in a period of great transition.
Guide
Literature and Modernity
1750–1880Jewish writing in the period spanning 1750–1880 reflects the profound changes that confronted Jews in modernity. Some writers self-consciously broke with traditional and religious models; others definitely embraced it.
Guide
Material Culture and Modernity
1750–1880Discover the many types of objects—furnishings and clothing, jewels and medals, wares—crafted by Jews or specifically for use by Jews.
Guide
Music and Opera in Jewish Culture
1750–1880One of the most striking changes in European Jewish culture toward the later eighteenth century was marked by the entry of Jews into art music, opera houses, and the stage.
Guide
Painters, Sculptors, and Photographers
1750–1880All over the world, Jewish art reflected the hybrid nature of Jewishness, including the material circumstances and cultural milieu of the larger environment. Individual artisans and artists selected and created according to their personal and Jewish experiences.
Guide
Poetry and Modernity
1750–1880Jewish poets throughout Europe and the Americas created in the languages of their native tongues, allowing us access to voices and moments, particular and collective, that we would otherwise not hear.
Guide
Political Life and Thought
1750–1880Jews debated all sides of the major political issues of their day. Some welcomed the idea of equality, whereas others feared the loss of their religious-institutional distinctiveness.
Guide
Religious Movements in the West and in the Ottoman Empire
1750–1880Jewish rituals, synagogue spaces, and the prayer service itself came under increasing scrutiny in light of the call for modernization.
Guide
Scholarship and Science
1750–1880The scholarly and scientific ethos permeated Jewish intellectual life in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and resulted in contributions obscure and renowned. The foundations of the astonishing breakthroughs of Jews in the sciences in the twentieth century were laid in this period.
Guide
Synagogue Architecture
1750–1880Synagogues built in Europe in the age of Emancipation had somewhat contradictory goals. On the one hand, they were to articulate a proud Jewishness, which by definition meant a distinctive style. On the other hand, they wanted to announce that they were deeply embedded in the European cityscape.
Guide
The Emergence of Hasidism
1750–1880Hasidism, with its focus on pietism and spirituality, is one among the genuinely new forms of Jewish identity to develop in the period 1750–1880.
Guide
The Flourishing of Jewish Journalism
1750–1880This period marks the explosive rise of Jewish newspapers, dailies and weeklies, yearbooks and almanacs, feuilletons and other time-bound printed media throughout the Western world.
Guide
The Salon in Jewish History
1750–1880Salons fostered a new class of social leaders, a space for ideas and art appreciation to grow without fear of political reprisals. In a society still constrained by social and legal boundaries, salons and their hosts created a miniature world in which social taboos were temporarily cast off.
Guide
Theater in Jewish Culture
1750–1880The novelty in Jewish performing arts in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries involved the adaptation of traditional materials into new forms, as well as a turn to performing arts that were unconnected to religious life.
Guide
Travel Writing
1750–1880The proliferation of the press and travel by steamship (and toward the end of the period, railroad) brought descriptions of far-flung parts of the world and reports about Jews living in them from one corner of the globe to another.