Francesca Bregoli - Böcker

The Mediterranean port of Livorno was home to one of the most prominent and privileged Jewish enclaves of early modern Europe. Focusing on Livornese Jewry, this book offers an alternative perspective on Jewish acculturation during the eighteenth century, and reassesses common assumptions about the interactions of Jews with outside culture and the impact of state reforms on the corporate Jewish community. Working from a vast array of previously untapped archival and literary sources, Francesca Bregoli combines cultural analysis with a study of institutional developments to investigate Jewish responses to Enlightenment thought and politics, as well as non-Jewish perceptions of Jews, through an exploration of Jewish-Christian cultural exchange, sites of sociability, and reformist policies. Mediterranean Enlightenment shows that Livornese Jewish scholars engaged with Enlightenment ideals and aspired to contribute to society at large without weakening the boundaries of traditional Jewish life. By arguing that the privileged status of Livorno Jewry had conservative rather than liberalizing effects, it also challenges the notion that economic utility facilitates Jewish integration, nuancing received wisdom about processes of emancipation in Europe.

Whether forced by governmental decree, driven by persecution and economic distress, or seeking financial opportunity, the Jews of early modern Europe were extraordinarily mobile, experiencing both displacement and integration into new cultural, legal, and political settings. This, in turn, led to unprecedented modes of social mixing for Jews, especially for those living in urban areas, who frequently encountered Jews from different ethnic backgrounds and cultural orientations. Additionally, Jews formed social, economic, and intellectual bonds with mixed populations of Christians. While not necessarily effacing Jewish loyalties to local places, authorities, and customs, these connections and exposures to novel cultural settings created new allegiances as well as new challenges, resulting in constructive relations in some cases and provoking strife and controversy in others.The essays collected by Francesca Bregoli and David B. Ruderman in Connecting Histories show that while it is not possible to speak of a single, cohesive transregional Jewish culture in the early modern period, Jews experienced pockets of supra-local connections between West and East-for example, between Italy and Poland, Poland and the Holy Land, and western and eastern Ashkenaz-as well as increased exchanges between high and low culture. Special attention is devoted to the impact of the printing press and the strategies of representation and self-representation through which Jews forged connections in a world where their status as a tolerated minority was ambiguous and in constant need of renegotiation.Exploring the ways in which early modern Jews related to Jews from different backgrounds and to the non-Jews around them, Connecting Histories emphasizes not only the challenging nature and impact of these encounters but also the ambivalence experienced by Jews as they met their others.Contributors: Michela Andreatta, Francesca Bregoli, Joseph Davis, JesÚs de Prado Plumed, Andrea Gondos, Rachel L. Greenblatt, Gershon David Hundert, Fabrizio Lelli, Moshe Idel, Debra Kaplan, Lucia Raspe, David B. Ruderman, Pavel SlÁdek, Claude B. Stuczynski, Rebekka Voß.

The volume investigates the interconnections between the Italian Jewish worlds and wider European and Mediterranean circles, situating the Italian Jewish experience within a transregional and transnational context mindful of the complex set of networks, relations, and loyalties that characterized Jewish diasporic life.