The Emergence of the Early Modern Period as seen in the pages of the PAAJR

• In Event: Assessing the "Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research": Early Modern and Modern

Abstract

When PAAJR began publishing, the term and concept “early modern” had not yet been coined. Discrete histories of the period were limited to national entities: “Renaissance” generally meant Italian cultural and intellectual history as defined by Burckhardt and “Reformation” included the history of German lands from Luther through the Thirty Years War and beyond. In Jewish Studies the picture was both more complex and more limited. Virtually all sources were textual; unlike Renaissance historians, incorporating a visual and material dimensions into their work, Jewish studies remained stubbornly focused on the text alone, until the last quarter of the 20th century. As a result many studies focus on intellectual history: Spinoza, Yashar of Candia, Moses Hayim Luzzatto, and Moses Mendelssohn are some of the figures whose throught features in the pages of PAAJR. Legal studies most prominently feature Jewry Law, while several publications of pinkassim from various Ashkenazic communities present these regulations as building blocks for the history of these Jewish communities themselves. Many of the studies presented in PAAJR became books that had abroad influence on the field: Ben-Zion Netanyahu’s article on Marranos in halakhic literature became an influential book on that subject; Yerushalmi’s article “Clio and the Jews,” was the cornerstone of his later Zakhor, David Ruderman on Jewish thought in England heralded his major works on that Jewry. This talk will point out where PAAJR reflected prevailing norms and where it published work that became immensely influential in the subsequent decades as the early modern period emerged.

Author

• Elisheva Carlebach, Columbia University