The Ashkenazic Diaspora of Early Modern Central Europe

This chapter uses theories of diaspora—which transcend narrative of origins/dispersal and explore instead synchronic ties between multiple centers—to examine phenomena of Jewish cultural and social life in Central Europe during the early modern period (ca. 1500–1800), an geo-cultural association that was captured by the term “Ashkenaz.” Using examples from print culture, social history, and epistolary exchanges, it argues that Jews occupied a position of “variant-participants”—at once participating in wider social, intellectual, and cultural trends and translating those trends into a particular idiom with a distinctly Jewish inflection, shaped both by relationship to past texts and traditions and to other Jewish communities both within and outside of Central Europe. Considering the accommodations of diaspora existence, which creates a “home away from home,” provides a useful lens for conceptualizing the dimensions of Jewish distinctiveness, even while recognizing their local indigeneity, and allows for a consideration of the creation of local practices as well as extra-territorial forms of identification.