Re(de)fining Modernity in Jewish History

This chapter emphasizes how 80 per cent of world Jewry who lived in Poland and Lithuania during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had to de-Westernize and 'de-teleologize' the modern period in Jewish history. It defines the modern era that span the last several hundred years. It also cites the critiques of the anti-essentialists and the vitality of contemporary Jewishness that was embodied in the “magmatic” level of Jewish experience and was somehow beneath or beyond cultural, religious, and political change'. The chapter discusses the source of the inner core of Jewish identity as a continuing positive self-evaluation of Jews that derives from eastern European Jewry. It contends that the criteria for dividing Jewish history into periods should be drawn from majority of the Jewish experience itself.

Jewish Cultural History in Early Modern Europe

This chapter examines the innovative call of Jonathan Israel to recognize an 'early modern age' in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European Jewish history. It provides a useful survey of the recent flurry of historical research and identifies five markers of a newly emerging transnational European Jewish cultural experience. It also talks about the surge in the development of powerful Jewish communal structures coupled with the growing laicization of communal authority. The chapter investigates a crisis of religious authority that was accompanied by the related threats of heresy and enthusiasm and epitomized in the contemporaneous phenomena of Spinozism and Shabateanism. It describes social and religious identities, in which Conversos and their descendants, Jewish converts to Christianity, Christian Hebraists, and Shabatean syncretists helped to blur previously sharper boundary lines between Jews and their Christian neighbours.

Does Gender Matter?

This chapter probes the significant contributions to the understanding of the past, which postmodern criticism that has attributed vital importance to women as a historical subject and to gender as a category of critical analysis. It offers a valuable assessment both of inroads already made by women's history and gender analysis into Jewish historical research. It also invokes distinctions drawn by Gerda Lerner, 'the doyenne of women's history', to categorize both achievements and desiderata in the field of feminism. The chapter reviews compensatory history which focuses on women previously ignored, including gender-based adjustment and refinement of interpretation in areas ranging from the Conversos to the shtetl and from the Holocaust to the family. It tackles areas where women's and gender-sensitive history have the power to transform and reshape the fundamental assumptions of European Jewish history.