Elisheva Carlebach

Despite 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. 

The “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.

The 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.

The 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.

Between 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.

The 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.

Jewish 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.

Discover the many types of objects—furnishings and clothing, jewels and medals, wares—crafted by Jews or specifically for use by Jews.

One 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.

All 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.

Jewish 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. 

Jews 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. 

Jewish rituals, synagogue spaces, and the prayer service itself came under increasing scrutiny in light of the call for modernization.

The 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.

Synagogues 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.

Hasidism, with its focus on pietism and spirituality, is one among the genuinely new forms of Jewish identity to develop in the period 1750–1880. 

This 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. 

Salons 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.

The 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. 

The 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.