The Jewish family has been the subject of much admiration and analysis, criticism and myth-making, not just but especially in modern times. As a field of inquiry, its place is at the intersection – or in the shadow – of the great topics in Jewish Studies and its contributing disciplines. Among them are the modernization and privatization of Judaism and Jewish life;integration and distinctiveness of Jews as individuals and as a group;gender roles and education. These and related questions have been the focus of modern Jewish family research, which took shape as a discipline in the 1910s. This issue of PaRDeS traces the origins of academic Jewish family research and takes stock of its development over a century, with its ruptures that have added to the importance of familial roots and continuities. A special section retrieves the founder of the field, Arthur Czellitzer (1871–1943), his biography and work from oblivion and places him in the context of early 20th-century science and Jewish life. The articles on current questions of Jewish family history reflect the topic’s potential for shedding new light on key questions in Jewish Studies past and present. Their thematic range – from 13th-century Yiddish Arthurian romances via family-based business practices in 19th-century Hungary and Germany, to concepts of Jewish parenthood in Imperial Russia – illustrates the broad interest in Jewish family research as a paradigm for early modern and modern Jewish Studies.

Knowledge is a result of never-ending processes of circulation. This accessible volume is the first comprehensive multidisciplinary work to explore these processes through the perspective of scholars working outside of Anglo-American paradigms. Through a variety of literature reviews, examples of recent research and in-depth case studies, the chapters demonstrate that the analysis of knowledge circulation requires a series of ontological and epistemic commitments that impact its conceptualisation and methodologies. Bringing diverse viewpoints from across the globe and from a range of disciplines, including anthropology, economics, history, political science, sociology and Science & Technology Studies (STS), this wide-ranging and thought-provoking collection offers a broad and cutting-edge overview of outstanding research on academic knowledge circulation. The book is structured in seven sections: (i) key concepts in studying the circulation of academic knowledge; (ii) spaces and actors of circulation; (iii) academic media and knowledge circulation; (iv) the political economy of academic knowledge circulation; (v) the geographies, geopolitics and historical legacies of the global circulation of academic knowledge; (vi) the relationships between academic and extra-academic knowledges; and (vii) methodological approaches to studying the circulation of academic knowledge. This handbook will be essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate researchers in the humanities and social sciences interested in the circulation of knowledge.

Accessible, engaging textbook offering an innovative account of people's lives in the early modern period.

As a field, German-Jewish Studies emphasizes the dangers of nationalism, monoculturalism, and ethnocentrism, while making room for multilingual and transnational perspectives with questions surrounding migration, refugees, exile, and precarity. Focussing on the relevance and utility of the field for the twenty-first century, German-Jewish Studies explores why studying and applying German-Jewish history and culture must evolve and be given further attention today. The volume brings together an interdisciplinary range of scholars to reconsider the history of antisemitism—as well as intersections of antisemitism with racism and colonialism—and how connections to German Jews shed light on the continuities, ruptures, anxieties, and possible futures of German-speaking Jews and their legacies.

This collection of essays examines an important and under-studied topic in early modern Jewish social history--the family life of Sephardic Jewish families in the Ottoman Empire. At the height of its power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Ottoman Empire spanned three continents, controlling much of southeastern Europe, western Asia, and North Africa, as well as territory in Western Europe, including the cities of Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Livorno, and part of southern France. Thousands of Jewish families who had been expelled from Spain and Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century created communities in these far-flung locations--communities that were very different from those of Ashkenazi Jews in the same period. The authors of these essays use the lens of domestic life to illuminate the diversity of the post-Inquisition Sephardic Jewish experience, enabling readers to enter into little-known and little-studied Jewish historical episodes.

From the seventeenth century until the Holocaust, Germany's Jews lurched between progress and setback, between fortune and terrible misfortune. German society shunned Jews in the eighteenth century and opened unevenly to them in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, only to turn murderous in the Nazi era. By examining the everyday lives of ordinary Jews, this book portrays the drama of German-Jewish history -- the gradual ascent of Jews from impoverished outcasts to comfortable bourgeois citizens and then their dramatic descent into genocidal torment during the Nazi years. Building on social, economic, religious, and political history, it focuses on the qualitative aspects of ordinary life -- emotions, subjective impressions, and quotidian perceptions. How did ordinary Jews and their families make sense of their world? How did they construe changes brought about by industrialization? How did they make decisions to enter new professions or stick with the old, juggle traditional mores with contemporary ways? The Jewish adoption of secular, modern European culture and the struggle for legal equality exacted profound costs, both material and psychological. Even in the heady years of progress, a basic insecurity informed German-Jewish life. Jewish successes existed alongside an antisemitism that persisted as a frightful leitmotif throughout German-Jewish history. And yet the history that emerges from these pages belies simplistic interpretations that German antisemitism followed a straight path from Luther to Hitler. Neither Germans nor Jews can be typecast in their roles vis à vis one another. Non-Jews were not uniformly antisemitic but exhibited a wide range of attitudes towards Jews. Jewish daily life thus provides another vantage point from which to study the social life of Germany. Focusing on both internal Jewish life -- family, religion, culture and Jewish community -- and the external world of German culture and society provides a uniquely well-rounded portrait of a world defined by the shifting sands of inclusion and exclusion.

Provides alphabetically arranged entries on the people, issues, and events of the European Renaissance and Reformation, as well as individual entries on each country.