Central European Jewry during the Thirty Years' War

1983 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan I. Israel
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
German Society ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Central European ◽  
European Jewish ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
German Jewry ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Systematic Explanation

Despite the wealth of published studies on individual German, Austrian, and Czech Jewish communities of the early modern era, it is remarkable how rare have been the attempts to synthesize the material and reach an overall assessment of the impact of the Thirty Years' War on Central European Jewish life. This gaping lacuna was noted some years ago by S. W. Baron, whose own general discussion of this subject is virtually unique. Immensely erudite, Baron's piece not only reveals the vast scope of the relevant material but tentatively suggests that the great European conflict was a key formative episode in the development of German Jewry, reversing earlier trends and preparing the way for the “Court Jews” of the later seventeenth century. This it undoubtedly was. Even so, Baron's evaluation is open to criticism on several counts. In particular, he fails to bring out, or make clear, just how crucial and how favorable a phase the Thirty Years' War was for the Jews of the Holy Roman Empire. Furthermore, while some effort is made in his essay to identify the key shifts of the period, such as an alleged drift of Jews from the countryside to the towns, it is arguable that this is not handled very convincingly or with sufficient precision. In any case, it is evident that a fuller, more systematic explanation is needed if we are to account for the singular fact that during this period of almost unparalleled disruption, turmoil, and suffering Christendom's perennial scapegoat fared considerably better than most of the rest of German society.

The Thirty Years War

1997 ◽  
pp. 72-100
Author(s):  
Jonathan Israel
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Central European ◽  
German Jewry ◽  
Czech Lands ◽  
New Phase

This chapter focuses on the Thirty Years War (1618–48), which marked a new phase in the interaction between Jews and European society in several respects. Especially in central Europe, the long and terrible conflict accelerated the reintegration of Jewry in progress since the 1570s, preparing the way for the ‘Court Jews’ of the later seventeenth century. While significant changes had already taken place in the period from 1570 down to the commencement of the Thirty Years War, care must be taken not to exaggerate the extent of central European Jewry's gains by 1618. The expansion of Jewish activity and communities was then still at a comparatively early stage. The first point to take into account in explaining the proliferation of Jewish communities in Germany, the Czech lands, and Alsace during the Thirty Years War is the special relationship between German Jewry and the Emperor. It had long been a fact that the chief protector of the Jews of the Holy Roman Empire was the Emperor. The chapter then looks at the role of Jacob Bassevi, the financier who was at the centre of the efforts to raise Jewish subsidies for the Emperor, during the Thirty Years War.

Introduction

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helmut Walser Smith
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
German Society ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
German History ◽  
Modern Germany ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
German Nation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact

This book departs in significant ways from previous histories of modern Germany. The book also represents a novel attempt to place German history in a deeper international and transnational setting than has hitherto been the case. This is the second important departure, and is, in this sense, that national histories and ‘area studies’ need to take fuller account of changes occurring in the wider world. There have also been a number of attempts to emphasize the history of the everyday, or to underscore the impact of war on German society. The book makes nation-state sovereignty into a decisive marker as well as a problem of modern German history. A concept of the German nation reaches at least to the early sixteenth century, when the Holy Roman Empire officially added the appellation ‘of the German Nation’. This article chronicles the history of Germany from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 199-205
Author(s):  
Adam Teller
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
Relevant Issue ◽  
Jewish Refugees ◽  
Short And Long Term ◽  
Cultural Formations ◽  
German Jewry

This chapter provides an overview of the Polish–Lithuanian Jews' flight westward after 1648. Three major issues underlie the discussion as a whole. First is the nature of Jewish solidarity in those years and the fate of the Jewish refugees outside Poland–Lithuania when the religious imperative to ransom captives was not a relevant issue. Second is the policies adopted by the states of the Holy Roman Empire toward the refugees and their impact on the refugees themselves as they tried to rebuild their lives on German lands. Third is the new social and cultural formations created by the encounter of “eastern” and “western” Ashkenazim in the wake of the refugee crisis and their consequences for the development of German Jewry in both the short and long term.

Listening between the Lines: Alexander’s Musical Legacy in Italy (13th–15th Centuries)

2019 ◽  
pp. 87-100
Author(s):  
Donatel Restani
Keyword(s):  
Music Education ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Medieval Literature ◽  
Musical Performance ◽  
Human Voice ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Alexander Romance ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Modern Era

This chapter consists of three examples of sound and music tales in Alexander’s life as transmitted in Italian medieval literature, and a coda pertaining to the early modern era. It deals with the Italian segment of Alexander’s musical legacy in medieval European literature, elaborated from vulgarisations and adaptations of the so-called Alexander Romance. Three main topics are focused on: human voice vs non-human voice, music education for a king and sonorous mirabilia. Two features are introduced: the significant role of music in shaping Alexander’s knowledge and his image as a chivalric king; the impact of the literature on Alexander upon 13th–14th century travellers by Europeans in Asia. The coda concerns the possibility that Alexander was imitated as idealised patron of the sciences and arts in the musical performance (intermedi) organised for the 1589 Florentine wedding of Ferdinand I de’ Medici and Christina of Lorraine.

Translating Sorrow

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-163
Author(s):  
Scott L. Edwards
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Musical Composition ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Central European ◽  
Cultural Challenges ◽  
The Social ◽  
Italian Music

In the multilingual environments of Central European cities and courts, Italian musicians found a receptive market for their music. There they confronted a range of linguistic abilities that encouraged innovative approaches to musical composition and publication. Recent rediscovery of the opening sheets of Giovanni Battista Pinello’s 1584 Primo libro dele neapolitane enables us to assess one Genoese composer’s experience of a multi-ethnic, Central European milieu during an unprecedented migrational wave. As chapelmaster at the electoral court in Dresden with ties to aristocratic circles in Prague, Pinello also issued a German version that can be sung, according to the composer, simultaneously with the napolitane. This study examines the Central European market for Italian music, the role of the Holy Roman Empire in facilitating Italian migration, and cultural challenges foreign musicians faced in their new homes. Nineteenth-century myths of nationhood depended on histories of folk-like immobility, but in fact migration was a basic condition of early modern European life. Music historians have long been aware of individual musicians’ travels from the Low Countries in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, along with a new trend, emerging around 1600, toward northward emigration by Italian musicians. Nonetheless, there is much more to say about the social underpinnings of such movements. Pinello’s fusion of languages, poetic forms, and registers invites us to reimagine the multi-ethnic complexion of Central European musical centers in the late sixteenth century.

scholarly journals Central European History and the Holy Roman Empire

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-45
Author(s):  
Joachim Whaley
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
British Journal ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
European History ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
German History ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Central European ◽  
East European ◽  
New Literature

Central European History (CEH) began to appear at a crucial juncture in the historiography of the Holy Roman Empire. Of course its remit was much broader. Founded sixteen years before the British journal German History, Central European History, together with the Austrian History Yearbook (founded in 1965) and the East European Quarterly (founded in 1967), took over the role occupied between 1941 and 1964 by the Journal of Central European Affairs. Each of these US journals shared an openness to new approaches and to work on all periods since the Middle Ages, as well as a desire—in the words of CEH's inaugural editor, Douglas Unfug—to keep “readers abreast of new literature in the field …,” with “reflective, critical reviews or review articles dealing with works of central importance … [and] bibliographical articles dealing with limited periods or themes…”

Law and Architecture: The Pollution Crisis in the Italian Ghetto

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-284
Author(s):  
David Malkiel
Keyword(s):  
Urban Development ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Jewish Law ◽  
Early Modern Italy ◽  
The Social ◽  
Physical Presence ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Modern Era

AbstractMuch has been written about the establishment of ghettos in Italy and some attention has been paid to social structures and cultural forms that emerged during the ghetto period, but there is a great deal more to be learned about how living in a ghetto affected the Jewish family, society and culture. The present study sheds light on the ghetto’s physical presence, specifically on the impact on religious life of the architecture and urban development of this uniquely Jewish space.Rabbinic responsa published in the Pahad Yitzhak, an encyclopedia of Jewish law published by Isaac Lampronti of Ferrara in the mid-eighteenth century, represent an eruption of anxiety, expressed in a flurry of intense literary activity, about the ostensible impossibility of escaping “tent pollution,” contracted by anyone present under the same roof as someone deceased. The pollution seemed inescapable because the architecture and urban layout seemed to allow for it to pass from building to building across the entire ghetto. The tent pollution material is thus an instance of the interplay of architecture, urban development and Jewish law.Tent pollution particularly exercised the Jews of early modern Italy. Jews living both before and after the age of the Italian ghetto evinced virtually no interest in the tent pollution problems posed by urban development. There is a smattering of writing on the subject from northern Europe and the Ottoman Empire, which only underscores that this was a particularly Italian problem.The present study spotlights this moment in early modern Jewish life, which stands out for the agitation it aroused among Italy’s Jews, and explores its implications for the social and cultural concerns of Jews in the early modern era. Lampronti’s encyclopedia affords us entrée, serving as a kind of seismograph to draw attention to areas which were the focus of heightened concern and activity in his historical setting.

scholarly journals Printing, Propaganda, and Public Opinion in the Age of Martin Luther

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Bagchi
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Communication Process ◽  
Low Literacy ◽  
God's Word ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Historical Literacy ◽  
The Impact

Luther had a notoriously ambivalent attitude towards what was still the new technology of the printing press. He could both praise it as God’s highest act of grace for the proclamation of God’s Word, and condemn it for its unprecedented ability to mangle the same beyond recognition. That ambivalence seems to be reflected in the judgment of modern scholarship. Some have characterized the Reformation as a paradigmatic event in the history of mass communications (a Medien- or Kommunikationsereignis), while others have poured scorn on any reductionist attempt to attribute a complex movement to a technological advance and to posit in effect a doctrine of “Justification by Print Alone.” The evidence in favor of some sort of correlation between the use of printing and the success of the Reformation in Germany and Switzerland is certainly formidable. Thousands of German Reformation pamphlets (Flugschriften) survive to this day in research libraries and other collections (with Luther’s own works predominant among them), suggesting that the Holy Roman Empire was once awash with millions of affordable little tracts in the vernacular. Contemporary opponents of the Reformation lamented the potency of cheap print for propaganda and even for agitation among “the people,” and did their best either to beat the evangelical writers through legislation or else to join them by launching their own literary campaigns. But, ubiquitous as the Reformation Flugschrift was for a comparatively short time, the long-term impact of printing on Luther’s Reformation was even more impressive, above all in the production and dissemination of Bibles and partial Bibles that used Luther’s German translation. The message of the Lutheran Reformation, with its emphasis on the proclamation of God’s Word to all, seemed to coincide perfectly with the emergence of a new medium that could, for the first time, transmit that Word to all. Against this correlation must be set the very low literacy rate in the Holy Roman Empire in the early 16th century, which on some estimates ranged between only 5 and 10 percent. of the entire population. Even taking into account the fact that historical literacy rates are notoriously difficult to estimate, the impact of printing on the majority must have been negligible. This fact has led historians to develop more nuanced ways of understanding the early-modern communication process than simply imagining a reader sitting in front of a text. One is to recognize the “hybridity” of many publications—a pamphlet might contain labeled illustrations, or be capable of being read out aloud as a sermon, or of being sung. Luther himself published many successful hybrid works of this kind. Another is the notion of the “two-stage communication process,” by which propagandists or advertisers direct their message principally to influential, literate, opinion-formers who cascade the new ideas down. Clearly much work remains to be done in understanding how Luther’s propaganda and public opinion interacted. The fact that our present generations are living through a series of equally transformative and disruptive communications revolutions will no doubt inspire new questions as well as new insights.

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