From Eulogy to Announcement: Death Notices in the Jewish Press since the Late Eighteenth Century

Qualitative and quantitative research into the Jewish press in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, French, German, and English is used to trace major steps in the transformation of styles of public notice of death in modern Jewish communities, and discuss its significance in both reflecting and shaping important aspects of contemporary Jewish life.

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Elisheva Carlebach. Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism in Germany, 1500–1750. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. xii, 324 pp.

AJS Review ◽

10.1017/s0364009405350173 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 29 (2) ◽

pp. 388-389

Author(s):

R. Po-chia Hsia

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Early Modern ◽

Central Europe ◽

New Haven ◽

Yale University ◽

Jewish Communities ◽

Jewish Historiography ◽

Modern Germany ◽

Late Eighteenth Century ◽

Late Eighteenth

Unlike the Sephardim, who accepted the concept of taqiyya and the practice of marranism to cope with forced conversions under Islam, the Ashkenazim, especially the Jewish communities of Germanophone Central Europe, developed an uncompromising rejection of Christian baptism. Instead of marranism and deception under Islam, the Ashkenazim, in the persecutions of the Crusades and after, developed a strong sense of martyrdom and detested baptism, whether forced or voluntary, as ritual and spiritual defilement and pollution. The small number of Jewish converts to Christianity were not so much sinners but apostates (meshummadim or the vertilgten). Given this Ashkenazi tradition, it is not surprising that converts were marginalized in Jewish historiography and scholarship. Nevertheless, as Carlebach argues persuasively in this book, they played a significant role in Jewish–Christian relations in early modern Germany; and given the fact that conversions rose rapidly in the late eighteenth century, it is all the more important to understand the prehistory of Jewish conversion and integration in Germany after Emancipation.

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A Dignitary in the Land? Literary Representations of the American Rabbi

AJS Review ◽

10.1017/s0364009406000122 ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 30 (2) ◽

pp. 255-275 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Wendy Zierler

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Jewish Life ◽

Scientific Study ◽

Jewish Law ◽

Hebrew Literature ◽

Literary Representations ◽

Arranged Marriages ◽

Late Eighteenth Century ◽

Late Eighteenth ◽

Status Of Women

The Haskalah of the late eighteenth century, it is often observed, dealt a major blow to many traditional Ashkenazic institutions, including the rabbinate. Formerly extolled by their communities in nearly God-like superlatives—such as “Chief shepherd, a dignitary in the land … Prince among princes in Torah and wisdom”—rabbis became the object of trenchant criticism during this period. The maskilim, formerly denizens of the yeshivot, cast special aspersion on rabbis and their assertion of the authority of Jewish law, charging that the rabbinic insistence on stringencies and legal minutiae was the source of all that was wrong with Diaspora Jewish life. Much of the critique of the rabbinate targeted the culture of yeshiva learning that supported it; the maskilim promoted the study of philosophy, science, Hebrew literature, and the scientific study of Judaism. Often, this literary and philosophical assault on the authority, role, and Talmud-centeredness of the rabbinate took the form of a critique of arranged marriages and the unequal status of women in Jewish law.

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The Diary

Anna and Tranquillo ◽

10.12987/yale/9780300219043.003.0002 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Kenneth Stow

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Eighteenth Century ◽

Western Europe ◽

Jewish Communities ◽

Late Eighteenth Century ◽

Late Eighteenth

This chapter examines how Anna del Monte lived closed within ghetto walls; and like all other Jews in that city, she was constantly pressed to renounce Judaism and accept Christianity. Conversionary activities in Anna's day were intense and sometimes violent. She left a record of her experiences, which her brother Tranquillo del Monte heavily edited and began to circulate in a handwritten copy in 1793, years after Anna's death. This record, properly titled Anna's Ratto—her kidnapping, but often called her diary—furnishes unique testimony to Roman Jewry's late eighteenth-century plight. Through his correspondence with other Jewish communities, Tranquillo had learned of the enormous gap separating the increasingly desperate straits of Roman Jewry from the vast improvements in rights and civic standing recently won by the Jews of Western Europe and the new United States.

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Introduction

Anna and Tranquillo ◽

10.12987/yale/9780300219043.003.0001 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Kenneth Stow

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

French Revolution ◽

Canon Law ◽

Jewish Life ◽

Civil Law ◽

Legal Rights ◽

Late Eighteenth Century ◽

Late Eighteenth ◽

The U.S

This introductory chapter explores the transformation in Jewish life that failed to occur in late eighteenth-century Rome. The French Revolution and the U.S. Constitution had established that Jews were citizens with full and equal legal rights. But in Rome, the capital of the then Papal State, no such proclamation occurred. Although Rome's Jews possessed rights in civil law, the discrimination determined by canon law was great. Roman Jews were forced to live in the ghetto decreed by Pope Paul IV in 1555, as part of a vigorous conversionary drive. People were taken to an institution known as the House of Converts, where they were held for periods of time, and most eventually converted. However, some did not, most notably Anna del Monte, who not only remained a Jew but also left a diary recounting her thirteen days in the Catecumeni, as Rome's Jews called the place.

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