Chapter 3. Daily Business or an Affair of Consequence? Credit, Reputation, and Bankruptcy Among Jewish Merchants in Eighteenth- Century Central Europe

2016 ◽  
pp. 71-90
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Central Europe

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

AJS Review ◽  
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.

not establish missions, even though they sometimes desired to do so. The first necessity was a body of people with the degree of commitment needed to live on someone else’s terms, together with the mental equipment for coping with the implications. Such commitment was in turn most likely to arise in the wake of powerful religious influences. Times of religious renewal were nec-essary for the recruitment of a sizeable company of such people, and the maintenance of a succession of them. A tradition of mental training, how-ever, was also needed; charismatic inspiration alone would not suffice, and indeed the plodder might succeed better with a new language and a new soci-ety than the inspired preacher. The second need was for a form of organization which could mobilize committed people, maintain and supply them, and forge a link between them and their work and the wider church. Since in the nature of things both their work and the conditions in which they carried it out were exceptional, the necessary structures could not readily emerge in very rigid regimes, whether political or ecclesiastical. They needed tolerance of the exceptional, and flex-ibility. The third factor necessary to overseas missions was sustained access to overseas locations, with the capacity to maintain communication over long periods. This implies what might be called maritime consciousness, with mar-itime capability and logistical support. All three factors were present in the first, Catholic, phase of the missionary movement. The Catholic Reformation released the spiritual forces to produce the committed worker, the religious orders offered possibilities of extension and adaptation which produced the structures for deploying them, and the Portuguese enclaves and trading depots provided the communication net-works and transoceanic bases. When in the course of the eighteenth century the Catholic phase of missions began to stutter, it was partly because the three factors were no longer fully in place. The Protestant movement developed as the Catholic movement weakened. It began, not at the end of the eighteenth century (that is a purely British per-spective) but at the end of the seventeenth; not in England, but in Germany and Central Europe. Its main motors were in Halle and Herrnhut, though, just as German Pietism drew on the English puritan tradition, it had a puri-tan prologue. William Carey’s Enquiry did not initiate it; the object of that

2003 ◽  
pp. 186-187
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Mental Training ◽  
Religious Orders ◽  
Catholic Reformation ◽  
The Third ◽  
Religious Influences ◽  
Missionary Movement ◽  
Do So

The Spa: Emotional Economy and Social Classes in Nineteenth-Century Pyrmont

2002 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heikki Lempa
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
Mineral Springs ◽  
Mineral Spring ◽  
German Speaking

In 1835, Ferdinand Gustav Kühne, a Saxon writer and teacher, estimated that the Germanic realm was inundated with spas and that nowhere else were there as many as in Central Europe. In France there were “only ten springs, in Italy eight, Hungary had twelve, Sweden three, Spain two, England two, in Denmark and in vast Russia there was only one mineral spring of note in each, whereas in German-speaking countries, that is, including Bohemia and Switzerland, 149 facilities claimed to possess healing springs.” Although Kühne's estimate of foreign spas was too low—according to recent studies, the number of spas in England and France was significantly higher—contemporary accounts and recent local studies support his finding that Germans had the most bathing facilities in Europe. Fred Kaspar has isolated ninety-nine spas and mineral springs in Westphalia alone. Beginning in the last third of the eighteenth century, the number of spas and spa goers in particular increased rapidly in the Germanic realm. Only 200 guests came to the Kissingen spa in the summer of 1800, whereas fifty years later there were close to 4,000 and by the turn of the century 15,000 guests proper and more than 20,000 day visitors. Pyrmont, one of the most popular spas in the eighteenth century, started with 1,424 guests proper (not including peasants who were not considered guests proper) reaching 2,800 guests by the middle of the century, and around 19,000 by 1900.

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