Birth of an Idea: Defining the Early Modern Period

Early, partly, sometimes, maybe modern, early modern is a period for our period’s discomfort with periodization.—Randolph Starn¹

In 2018, the seventh volume in the multivolume series The Cambridge History of Judaism appeared: The Early Modern Period. Forty-one historians from many countries participated in it and contributed articles on a broad spectrum of topics, illustrating the full extent and content of the Jewish world between 1500 and 1815. Behind this publication lies a half century of important developments that produced the concept of an early modern period in Jewish history and culture, and thus the early modern selections included in the Posen Library.

The term early modern period is a new creature. In his intellectual autobiography, the English historian John Elliott wrote that, in the early 1960s, he and a colleague, Helmut G. Koenigsberger, submitted a proposal to Cambridge University Press suggesting that they publish a series of books on the early modern period. The idea was rejected out of hand. Even at that renowned press, no one understood what they meant by the term. The very concept was still unclear. However, Elliott and Koenigsberger did not give up, and in 1966 they submitted a second proposal. This time it was accepted. Within a short time, the series came into being, and by the end of the twentieth century, it contained nearly fifty volumes, on a variety of subjects.

At first, historians focused mainly on the countries of Europe, and the phrase “early modern period” replaced earlier terms, such as Renaissance, Reformation, and Counter-Reformation—and Age of Geographical Discovery and Colonial Expansion. Turning away from Protestant-oriented—and Eurocentric—ways of thinking about history and from the equation of secularism and liberalism with progress, more neutral terminologies were needed, ones that avoided associations with joint mythologies of religious and political “progress.” Over time, the concept of the early modern period gradually took root and eventually gained a prominent place for itself in historiography far beyond European history. Looking back, Elliott explained the essence of the period: it was a period of three to four centuries in which the medieval and the ‘modern’ interact in fascinating combination.”²

Jewish Historiography of the Early Modern Period

Until a generation ago, Jewish historians treated the years between 1500 and 1750 as part of the long Middle Ages. Jewish life during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and a good part of the eighteenth century seemed more to belong to the “medieval” than to the “modern” period. First, historians then assumed that most members of Jewish society lived their lives observing the commandments. As in previous centuries, their cultural world was anchored in halakhah, or Jewish law. Second, Jewish religious life continued to be the dominant factor unifying the Jewish people. Third, it was thought that wherever there was a Jewish public capable of existing independently, the Jewish community and its institutions administered Jewish society according to the same basic concepts of Jewish self-rule that had prevailed among Jews during the Middle Ages. Fourth, Christian and Muslim theology continued to define the place—in particular, the legal status—of Jews within the majority Christian or Muslim society. Fifth, Jewish families generally remained highly patriarchal, and romantic love was not a determining factor in the arrangement of marriages. Finally, the economic lives of many Jews depended on developments in urban centers, which, as communal spaces, also played an oversized role in shaping Jewish culture.

From the nineteenth century and the birth of secular historical study of Jews and Judaism until the end of twentieth century, these considerations—generalizations that would later be undercut and replaced by more complex pictures of society, economic functions, gender relations, rabbinic authority, and so on—determined the dominant paradigm among Jewish historians.

Yet change came, albeit slowly and incrementally. In the 1937 first edition of A Social and Religious History of the Jews, Salo Baron pointed out that, as early as the seventeenth century, Jews in Italy and Holland showed signs that their attitudes toward secular studies and historical criticism were shifting and hinting at the beginning of the revolt of the individual against the rule of the community. Crucially, as a historian, Baron rooted Jewish intellectual history within the broader demographic, economic, and social realities that were part of European history, broadly understood. Early signs of “enlightenment”—here defined as familiarity with non-Jewish literature and ideas—among Italian and Dutch Jews, Baron noted, could be attributed either to “early capitalism” or, equally, to the Renaissance in Italy and the Protestant Reformation in Holland. Baron, followed by his student Isaac Barzilay, thus regarded what he termed the Italian and Dutch Haskalah (Enlightenment) as a harbinger of some of the changes that were to take place in the modern period.

In the monumental second edition of A Social and Religious History of the Jews, Baron devoted nine volumes to what he called the “Late Middle Ages and the Era of European Expansion,” a period running from 1200 to 1650. By beginning the modern age in 1650, Baron meant to emphasize that everything after that date was already modern, especially because of the ongoing population shift westward. The effect, however, was to shorten slightly the span of years in Jewish historiography commonly referred to as the Middle Ages. Later historians who wrote comprehensive historical works or historical syntheses followed this structure.

Nonetheless, a significant shift occurred in the mid-twentieth century with the publication of Jacob Katz’s classic work, Tradition and Crisis. Analyzing Ashkenazic society at the end of the Middle Ages, Katz defined it as “traditional” according to the Weberian sociological typology that guided him. He placed the beginning of the turn to modernity in the mid-eighteenth century, with Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) and the Jewish Haskalah in Germany, and Israel Baal Shem Tov and the rise of Hasidism in Eastern Europe. In this influential and trailblazing work, which demonstrated that rabbinic texts could be used as a source for social history, Katz chose not to describe traditional Ashkenazic society during the medieval period. Instead, he narrowed his scope to only 250 years: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the first half of the eighteenth century. Importantly, Katz explicitly defined this span of time as a “historical period.”³ One senses throughout the book that Katz was considering seriously the changes taking place in traditional society before the transition to modernity. Despite the difficulties, which he fully recognized, in generalizing about the increasingly variegated Jewish world, Katz was aware that the numerous and substantial changes to the fabric of Jewish life justified viewing this period as standing on its own.

While the Israeli historian Ben-Zion Dinur had famously referred to the year 1700 as the beginning of “new times in the history of the Jewish people” as early as 1936, even more instructive is his later, detailed discussion of the changes that, in his opinion, took place in Jewish society during the three hundred years following the expulsion from Spain and Portugal. In his introduction to the 1958 edition of Israel in Exile, he proposed an unusual division of the 1,300-year diasporic period, which ran from the Muslim conquest of 636 to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Dinur suggested eight distinct periods, which he organized into pairs: a period of stability always followed by a period of crisis.

According to Dinur, the period between 1496 and 1648 was one of stability, which he called “the stability of protection.” He characterized it as “the concentration of masses of Jews in countries where they enjoyed protection provided by the kingdom (Turkey, Poland), the beginnings of recognition of the principle of religious tolerance toward the Jews (Holland), and the active participation of the Jews in the economies of their countries of residence.”⁴ Dinur attributed a unique role to the exiles from Spain and Portugal in this period. Dispersed throughout many countries, they created a single Jewish world. “The rise of the land of Israel and Safed, within it, as a center of vital energies in Judaism,” and “the tempest of the messianic Kabbalah movement,” he noted, managed to produce uniformity in the style and manner of Jewish life. Dinur also highlighted “the internal organization of Polish Jewry” and “the establishment of self-government.”⁵ The following period, which he saw as lasting until the French Revolution, was one of crisis: “the crisis of atrophy.” It was characterized by the undermining of security, economic impoverishment, and the social decline of the Jewish multitudes in the countries where they were concentrated (Poland and the Ottoman Empire), as well as increased security, the political and economic integration of a few Jews (in Western European states), and their social ascent.⁶

Jewish historiography on our period, then, was beginning to show signs of shifting. Another important Israeli historian, Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, had—in two books about the Jews in the Middle Ages—extended the medieval period from the conquest of Islam in the seventh century to the outbreak of the messianic movement of Shabbetai Tzvi in the 1660s. But in 1971, he changed his approach; in his entry “The Jewish People in History” for the Encyclopedia Judaica, he characterized the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as “a transition to modern times.”⁷

The 1985 publication of Jonathan Israel’s European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550–1750 marked an important new stage in the approach of Jewish historiography to the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Although the term early modern period appears only a few times in Israel’s book, his use of it exerted a great influence on later Jewish historians, who began seriously to treat the period as a distinct era, one with its own identity.

In European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, Israel integrated Jewish history into the overarching processes taking place mainly in Western European history, focusing on political and economic factors, but also including his reflections on European thought and its influence on attitudes toward Jews. A new development in this period was that, as Israel argued, overall structural and external factors came to affect both Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews, allowing the historian to discuss them together. And, again characteristic of this period, shifts in the legal status of the Jews allowed them to exert an impact on Western society while remaining a recognizable national group. Some critics objected to his emphasis on Western European Jewry, noting that in this period most Jews lived in Poland-Lithuania and the Ottoman Empire. Others criticized the weakness of his discussion of Jewish religious and cultural works and his lack of expertise in Hebrew sources. Nevertheless, most reviewers greeted the book with praise.

What was lacking in Israel’s book was amply supplied in 2010 by David Ruderman in his comprehensive survey, Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History. Picking up from a review of Israel’s book that he had written nearly twenty-five years earlier, Ruderman sought to balance the historical picture by including the inner life of Jewish communities and the wide-ranging creations of Jewish culture. Ruderman pointed to five areas testifying to the changes that took place at that time. First, increased physical mobility led to reinforced connections among various groups of Jews, despite distance from one another both geographically and culturally. Second, communal institutions in most of the diaspora were strengthened—such as the Council of Four Lands in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth—as was the wealthy oligarchy, both linked to a decline in rabbinic authority. Third, the revolution of printing contributed to an unprecedented explosion of accessible knowledge, both general and rabbinic. Fourth, the crisis in rabbinic authority was accelerated by the outbreak of radical messianism and mystical prophecy, sometimes accompanied by heresy. And fifth, traditional religious identity showed signs of blurring because of the phenomenon of New Christians in Iberia, as they retained elements of their former Jewish identities and the sweeping influence of radical messianism. Ruderman’s book is without a doubt the most important contribution in recent years to a panoramic view of early modern Jewish culture.

Among historians of the Jews, then, the early modern period has made a secure and stable place for itself in Jewish historiography.