Transnational Jewish Families and Mobility in the Early Modern Period: Challenges, Methodologies, Sources

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

This roundtable aims to begin a conversation on Jewish family and kinship ties in the early modern period, a time of heightened mobility and geographical dispersion. The past decade has seen a renewed interest in comparative and global approaches to Jewish history, in contrast to the focus on specific geographical regions and communities characteristic of the 1990s and 2000s. Within this framework, the themes of transnational networks and mobility have increasingly taken center-stage. While scholars have mostly concentrated on merchants, rabbis, or emissaries, we know less about the ways in which mobility, whether forced or voluntary, affected Jewish women and households. Some of the questions to be discussed will be: How were views of extended and immediate family affected by transnational ties? How was a sense of kinship maintained by family members scattered vast distances across geographical boundaries? To what extent did ideas of family inform individual and religious diasporic identities, and vice versa? What is the relation between family and professional networks? In order to make the roundtable more effective, panelists include scholars working with different methodologies and sources. Francesca Bregoli’s work concentrates on the culture of Italian and Mediterranean Jews in the eighteenth century. Her responses will be shaped by research on Jewish women’s wills and family letters. Joseph Davis, an expert of the cultural and intellectual history of Ashkenazi Jews in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, will draw from his exploration of family letters exchanged between Vienna and Prague Jews. Ronnie Perelis’s expertise in Sephardic studies combines literary and historical research. His observations will be shaped by his study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century converso autobiographical narratives and related inquisitorial material. Francesco Spagnolo's work focuses on the nexus between history and ethnomusicology. His remarks will be based on his research on the circulation of musical-liturgical traditions and of material culture within Italian and Mediterranean family and professional networks. Moderator Debra Kaplan will draw from her expertise on social history, autobiography, and gender to direct the conversation. The panelists’ perspectives will allow for a rich exploration of the complexities involved in the study of transnational Jewish households.

Sub Unit

• Medieval and Early Modern Jewish History, Literature, and Culture

Moderator

• Debra Kaplan, Bar-Ilan University

Discussants

• Francesca Bregoli, Queens College

• Joseph M. Davis, Gratz College

• Ronnie Perelis, Yeshiva University

• Francesco Spagnolo, University of California, Berkeley