Jewish Theatre in Poland

Author(s):  
Michael C. Steinlauf

This chapter investigates how theatre found a place in pre-modern Jewish societies. This was nearly exclusively a result of its association with the Jewish holiday of Purim. Closely linked to the celebration of Purim in Ashkenazi communities at least as early as the mid-sixteenth century was the performance of a Purim play, or purim-shpil. The actors were yeshiva students or artisans; dressed as non-Jews and where necessary as women, the purim-shpilers marched through town, performing their play in the wealthier Jewish homes, occasionally on an improvised stage. In eastern Europe, by the nineteenth century, the purim-shpil had become the property of the lower classes; it was often staged annually by the same group of players, with parts and even costumes passed down from father to son. Some of these groups travelled and performed in neighbouring towns. The earlier purim-shpils were apparently skits parodying local events; from the mid-seventeenth century, they began to be based on biblical stories.

Author(s):  
Jonathan Hehn

This chapter outlines the history of Presbyterian worship practice from the sixteenth century to the present, with a focus on North American Presbyterians. Tracing both their hymnody and their liturgy ultimately to John Calvin, Presbyterian communions have a distinct heritage of worship inherited from the Church of Scotland via seventeenth-century Puritans. Long marked by metrical psalmody and guided by the Westminster Directory, Presbyterian worship underwent substantial changes in the nineteenth century. Evangelical and liturgical movements led Presbyterians away from a Puritan visual aesthetic, into the use of nonscriptural hymnody, and toward a recovery of liturgical books. Mainline North American and Scottish Presbyterians solidified these trends in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; however, conservative North American denominations and some other denominations globally continue to rely heavily on the use of a worship directory and metrical psalmody.


2016 ◽  
Vol 61 (S24) ◽  
pp. 93-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rossana Barragán Romano

AbstractLabour relations in the silver mines of Potosí are almost synonymous with the mita, a system of unfree work that lasted from the end of the sixteenth century until the beginning of the nineteenth century. However, behind this continuity there were important changes, but also other forms of work, both free and self-employed. The analysis here is focused on how the “polity” contributed to shape labour relations, especially from the end of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century. This article scrutinizes the labour policies of the Spanish monarchy on the one hand, which favoured certain economic sectors and regions to ensure revenue, and on the other the initiatives both of mine entrepreneurs and workers – unfree, free, and self-employed – who all contributed to changing the system of labour.


Author(s):  
Kenneth Austin

This chapter summarizes how the Jews of Europe were in a very different position by the end of the seventeenth century compared to where they had been at the start of the sixteenth century. It points out how Spain had still not reversed its policy on Jews while most parts of Europe had become rather more welcoming to Jews in the interim. It also looks into the Jewish communities of Amsterdam, Frankfurt am Main, Prague, and Venice that exceeded 2,000 people for the first time in the seventeenth century, joining other cities, such as Rome that had already achieved that population in the sixteenth century. The chapter recounts how Jewish communities sprung up in places which had not traditionally been a home to Jews, especially in Eastern Europe. It talks about England and France, which had been the first territories to expel their Jewish populations back in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries but had begun to reverse that policy in the seventeenth century.


2000 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anton Minkov

AbstractAlthough the existence of tapus is well known, their typology, form, and structure have not been the object of a detailed analysis. Based on research undertaken in the Ottoman archive of the National Library of Bulgaria, I analyze eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ottoman tapu title deeds. I argue that their 'classical' eighteenth-and nineteenth-century form is the outcome of the amalgamation of (1) receipts for payment of the tapu fee (resm-i tapu) and (2) records of land transfer. I also argue that the process of amalgamation probably started in the middle of the sixteenth century and continued until the second half of the seventeenth century.


1961 ◽  
Vol 107 (449) ◽  
pp. 687-753 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Shepherd

Jealousy is more than a psychiatric symptom. Its language is universal: the conduct and feelings of the jealous man and woman have repeatedly drawn the attention of the great observers of human nature, the moralists and the philosophers as well as the poets and the novelists. They have, on the whole, described the reaction more successfully than they have defined it. Even the most celebrated definitions—Descartes' “kind of fear related to a desire to preserve a possession” or Spinoza's “mixture of hate and love”, for example— merely illustrate the complexity of a term whose many nuances of meaning can be detected in its roots. The English adjective “jealous” and the noun “jealousy” are derived respectively from the French “jaloux” and “jalousie”, both taken from the old Provençal “gilos”; “gilos” in turn may be traced back to the vulgar Latin adjective “zelosus” which comes from the late Latin “zelus” and so indirectly from the Greek ζηλoς. In its transmission the word has thus been debased. It has ceased to denote “zeal” or “ardour”; the “noble passion” which stood opposed to “envy” for the Greeks has acquired a pejorative quality. In modern German the distinction is preserved verbally, “Eifersucht” having been formed from the original “Eifer” (zeal) and the suffix “-sucht”, which is cognate with “siech”, meaning “sickly”. Amorous jealousy claims associations of its own. During the seventeenth century the French word “jalousie” acquired the meaning of “blind” or “shutter”; in this sense it entered the English language as a noun in the early nineteenth century; the transmutation is thought to have signified a jocular reference to the suspicious husband or lover who could watch unobserved behind the jalousie; the Italian word “gelosia” is used in this way as early as the middle of the sixteenth century. In the Scandinavian languages separate words designate amorous jealousy. (1) The Swedish “svartsjuk”, literally “black sick”, is taken from an old expression which identified jealousy with the wearing of black socks; the Danish “skinsyg”, “afraid of getting skin (a rebuff)”, harks back to an old link of jealousy with skin which may in turn have been connected with hose or socks. (2) The origin of the colours which are traditionally employed to depict jealousy, especially black, yellow and green, is obscure.


2002 ◽  
Vol 82 ◽  
pp. 197-245
Author(s):  
Ian Goodall

Sizergh– known as Sizergh Hall from the seventeenth century, and renamed Sizergh Castle in the mid-nineteenth century– has been the seat of the Strickland f amily for over seven hundred years. Although it has a medieval core, the house as it exists today is substantially the work of Walter Strickland (1516–69) who, in the mid- 1550s, initiated a comprehensive rebuilding programme, which more than trebled it in size. The enlarged house, built around three sides of a courtyard, reflected, in its rooms and their disposition, the concern for privacy and segregation that characterized the age. The fitting-out of the interior with high-quality panelling, ceilings and furnishings was incomplete on Walter's death, but was continued by his family over the next two or three generations. The house was altered and subdivided during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but much of the integrity of the mid-sixteenth-century building still survives.


1957 ◽  
Vol 10 (40) ◽  
pp. 363-391
Author(s):  
R.B. McDowell

At the beginning of the nineteenth century there were six superior courts in Ireland—chancery, the three common law courts (king’s bench, common pleas and exchequer), the admiralty court and the prerogative court (an ecclesiastical court with jurisdiction over testamentary matters).Four of these courts were of medieval origin. The exchequer was probably in existence before the close of the twelfth century, the Irish chancery was founded early in the thirteenth century, the first Irish chancellor being appointed in 1244, and the antecedents of the courts of king’s bench and common pleas are to be found in the thirteenth century. The other two courts were comparatively modern. The court of prerogative and faculties based its rights to exercise jurisdiction on two sixteenth century acts and two seventeenth century patents, one of James I and one of Charles I. And though admiralty jurisdiction had been exercised in Ireland from medieval times, the Irish court of admiralty had been created by statute in 1784. From the court of chancery and the three common law courts there was an appeal to the court of error (known as the court of exchequer chamber) composed of the judges of the three common law courts, and in 1857 it was enacted that the court of exchequer chamber when hearing an appeal should consist of the judges of the two courts from which the appeal did not arise. From the admiralty court and from the prerogative court there was an appeal to delegates in chancery.


Author(s):  
Mark Knights

This chapter takes the premodern divide, which is framed in English historiography as the end of “old corruption,” as the starting point for a long-term overview of anticorruption in Britain and its colonies. Focusing on anticorruption movements, it adds another dimension to the paradox of modernization by showing that although a transition took place in the period between the late-sixteenth century and the nineteenth century, it was by no means a linear one: anticorruption measures to ensure the scrutiny of public accounts could be introduced in the late-seventeenth century, abandoned and then reintroduced later in the eighteenth century. The chapter also argues that there is a relationship between late-sixteenth-century Reformation and eighteenth-century reforms, both of which involved an attack on corruption.


Author(s):  
Mehrdad Shokoohy

AbstractThe ex-Portuguese town of Diu on the island with the same name off the south coast of Saurashtra, Gujarat, is one of the best-preserved and yet least-studied Portuguese colonial towns. Diu was the last of the Portuguese strongholds in India, the control of which was finally achieved in 1539 after many years of futile struggle and frustrating negotiations with the sultanate of Gujarat. During the late sixteenth and seventeenth century Diu remained a main staging post for Portuguese trade in the Indian Ocean, but with the appearance of the Dutch, and later the French and British, on the scene the island gradually lost its strategic importance. The town was subjected to little renovation during the nineteenth century while in the twentieth century Diu was no more than an isolated Portuguese outpost with meagre trade until it was taken over by India in 1961. As a result, unlike the other former Portuguese colonies in India – Daman and Goa – Diu has preserved most of its original characteristics: a Portuguese colonial town plan, a sixteenth-century fort and a number of old churches, as well as many of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century houses.


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