About the Early Modern Workshop

The Early Modern Workshop: Introduction Jews are an intrinsic part of the history of many parts in the world, where they lived among non-Jews, drew from, contributed to, influenced, and were influenced by developments in the larger "non-Jewish" context, and where their culture flourished. Until recently scholars of the Jews also made only some degree of effort to situate the Jewish experience in a larger context of the environment of where Jews lived, "Jewish history" has been largely excluded from broader historical narratives, and treated as a field separate from general history, European or non-European. This is true for the early modern period as well.

Scholars of early modern European history have seen this period as a period of rapid change. The increasing power of the centralized state, the invention and spread of printing, new economic forms and ideologies, changed demographic patterns, and significant improvements in communications and transportation have all been noted and linked to new patterns of cultural activity, the intensification of social discipline, and changing formulations of identity. Scholarship, in other words, has recognized the early modern as a distinct period well worthy of study on its own.

Historians of the Jews have widely studied phenomena connected with the early modern period. However, all too often, their immediate historical context and parallel changes in other Jewish centers and the non-Jewish world in the same period have been overlooked. Earlier, scholars of Jewish history have tended to view the period between the late fifteenth and the late eighteenth centuries as "the late middle ages" using the medieval world as a frame of reference, while others have preferred to ascribe the period of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the modern age. The concept of an "early modern period" in Jewish history has just recently been gaining recognition.

But history rarely has visible chronological breaks, and more frequently it represents continuities from period to period. This project, the Early Modern Workshop in early modern Jewish history, seeks to establish both the singularities of the early modern period and longer lines of development from the medieval period and into the modern age of the history of the Jews as an inseparable part of the general history. Through the Early Modern Workshop, we plan to examine developments in all aspects of early modern Jewish life in order to deepen our understanding of their significance. Our central aim remains, however, to establish a broad framework for the study of early modern Jewish history and to involve all those engaged in research on the field in a lively and ongoing academic discussion.

To this end, since 2004, we have held a series of workshops with the aim of defining the characteristics of Jewish development in the early modern period. This website presents the fruits of these meetings, a collection of primary sources and scholarly presentations dealing with different aspects of Jewish early modernity. Sources are available in both the original and English translation together with explanatory notes provided by the scholars who post them. In addition, selected lectures on, and discussions of the sources are available as video or audio. The Early Modern Workshop's lectures can be found on iTunes University.