Benjamin E. Fisher. Amsterdam's People of the Book: Jewish Society and the Turn to Scripture in the Seventeenth Century. Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 2020. 330 pp.

This chapter addresses how the climax of the European debate over Jewish readmission came during the third quarter of the seventeenth century. For a quarter of a century, conferences, commissions, and petitions published and unpublished over whether or not to tolerate Jews, and if so on what terms, abounded from Poland to Portugal and from Hungary to Ireland. Why did the political and intellectual process of readmission culminate at this particular time? Several factors converged to intensify previous trends but what was the most crucial was the widespread backlash in Germany, following the evacuation of the Swedish, French, and other foreign garrisons at the end of the Thirty Years War. The substantial gains made by the Jews of central Europe during the conflict, of Austria and the Czech lands as well as Germany, had aroused intense opposition and controversy, so that the coming of peace was almost bound to be accompanied by a formidable reaction. The chapter then considers the Jewish population and Jewish economy during this period.

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Conclusion

Rescue the Surviving Souls ◽

10.23943/princeton/9780691161747.003.0027 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 293-306

Author(s):

Adam Teller

Keyword(s):

Seventeenth Century ◽

Early Modern ◽

Jewish History ◽

Refugee Crisis ◽

Common Cause ◽

Jewish Society ◽

Jewish Refugees ◽

Modern Jewish History ◽

To Come

This concluding chapter assesses whether the fate of the Polish Jewish refugees in each of the three major arenas in which they found themselves was really a single, interconnected refugee crisis or whether there were, in fact, three different crises sparked by a common cause: the mid-seventeenth-century wars of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Underlying all of the differences in the conditions in each of the three regions were numerous commonalities. Perhaps most important was the sense of solidarity that induced Jews to come to the aid of other Jews in distress. The term most commonly used at the time to describe this connection was “brotherhood.” The phenomena examined in this book are indeed, therefore, aspects of a single refugee crisis. The chapter then considers how large the problem was and how well Jewish society dealt with its challenges. It also highlights the effects of the refugee crisis on Jewish society, both while it was happening and in the longer term, and the importance of the crisis for the course of early modern and modern Jewish history in general.

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No Way Out: The Politics of Polish Jewry, 1935‒1939

Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 13 ◽

10.3828/liverpool/9781874774600.003.0039 ◽

2000 ◽

pp. 431-433

Author(s):

Emanuel Melzer

Keyword(s):

Political Parties ◽

Jewish History ◽

Doctoral Dissertation ◽

Ordinary People ◽

Future Studies ◽

Economic Problems ◽

Jewish Society ◽

Polish Society ◽

The Government ◽

Union College

Monographs of the Hebrew Union College, no. 19(Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1997); pp. xii + 236 The first edition of this book, written as a doctoral dissertation, was published in 1982 in Hebrew. The present edition was condensed but also updated, now that political changes have made it possible to study documents from Polish archives (notably Archiwum Akt Nowych in Warsaw). The author presents the basic political and economic problems of Jewish society in Poland; the attitudes of the government, political parties, and Polish society towards Jews; and the responses of the Jewish leaders, political parties, and ordinary people. Several of these topics have been treated in books and articles published by both Polish and Jewish historians and covering specific areas of Polish and Jewish history. This book’s merit is that it analyses a complex of issues and takes into consideration different elements of the changes going on not only in Poland, but in the whole of Europe as well. Such analysis can help readers to understand the situation of Jews in Poland and indicate the main directions for future studies....

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Amsterdam

Rescue the Surviving Souls ◽

10.23943/princeton/9780691161747.003.0024 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 259-271

Author(s):

Adam Teller

Keyword(s):

Seventeenth Century ◽

The Netherlands ◽

Port City ◽

Major City ◽

Jewish Society ◽

Jewish Settlement ◽

The Creation ◽

Economic Need ◽

The Way

This chapter addresses how, though the majority of the refugees from the Commonwealth who traveled westward ended up in the empire, a significant number made for a place outside it: Amsterdam. The major city in the Seven Provinces, the part of the Netherlands that had broken free of Habsburg control in 1581, Amsterdam had become one of Europe's major trading emporia and a bastion of mercantilism by the seventeenth century. The cosmopolitan atmosphere of the port city supported the development of more tolerant attitudes to strangers and non-Christians, while economic need and mercantilist ideology led the urban authorities to encourage the settlement of groups with wealth and economic skills, regardless of their background. This opened the way for Jews. Though it did not explicitly welcome Jewish settlement, Amsterdam's willingness to tolerate not only the presence of Jews but also the creation of Jewish communal bodies and communal buildings made it something of a magnet for Jews. The chapter then looks at the strength and centrality in Amsterdam Jewish society of the Portuguese Jews, as well as the significance of the Sephardi–Ashkenazi divide in the treatment of the refugees.

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Background

Rescue the Surviving Souls ◽

10.23943/princeton/9780691161747.003.0019 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 206-214

Author(s):

Adam Teller

Keyword(s):

Seventeenth Century ◽

Short Distance ◽

Refugee Crisis ◽

German Jews ◽

Jewish Society ◽

Large Numbers ◽

History Of ◽

Polish Jews ◽

The Relationship

This chapter presents a background of the relationship between German Jews and Polish Jews before 1648. Polish Jews were well aware that their ancestors had originated in the German lands and, long before the refugee crisis brought large numbers of them back there, knew a great deal about Jewish society in the empire. Much of what they knew came from meetings with German Jews, often in pursuit of trade, or from the stories of those who had traveled the relatively short distance to the German lands. Though there was much that separated them, both groups understood that they also had a great deal in common in cultural and religious terms. The meeting of Polish and German Jews in the mid-seventeenth century, for all its economic, social, and religious difficulties, was undoubtedly colored by this sense of kinship and belonging. To understand its significance, the chapter looks at the history of the connections between the two groups of Jews and the ways in which those connections were perceived by each side. In the years after 1648, this history of the connection between German and Polish Jews seems to have created a range of expectations on the part not only of the refugees but also of those in the empire who were to take them in.

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