In this rich transnational history, Cornelia Aust traces Jewish Ashkenazi families as they moved across Europe and established new commercial and entrepreneurial networks as they went. Aust balances ...economic history with elaborate discussions of Jewish marriage patterns, women's economic activity, and intimate family life. Following their travels from Amsterdam to Warsaw, Aust opens a multifaceted window into the lives, relationships, and changing conditions of economic activity of a new Jewish mercantile elite.
Dress constitutes one of the most obvious and indeed most visual and visible markers of difference. Being very close to the body it becomes part of the daily habitus and an unavoidable means of ...communication with others. In this volume, we want to follow transcultural perspectives and highlight the multiplicity of differences that are expressed via clothes.
Early modern copperplate engravers, painters, and printers produced an increasing number of images that depicted Jewish individuals or more often groups of Jewish men and women. Many of these images ...sought to present an ideal type, displaying (allegedly) typical Jewish dress and outward appearance. Some of these images saw adaptations already during the eighteenth-century, but all were photographed, reprinted, adapted, and altered from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. This article choses three images - an engraving of a Jewish man and woman from an early-eighteenth century costume book, the depiction of a Jewish couple from a late eighteenth-century painting, and the painting of Bertha Pappenheim posing as early modern Jewish merchant Glikl bas Judah from the early twentieth century - and follows their adaptations over time. I analyze how these adaptations were (re)used in different contexts and the problems they may create for historians as well as for (non-professional) observers interested in the history of early modern European Jewry. The afterlife of these early modern images is often framed in a discourse of Jewish belonging and identity. Especially popular adaptations are characterized by an uncritical and sometimes ahistorical approach to these images.
Paralleljustiz, Antidiskriminierungsgesetze, Rechtstransfer - das Thema »Recht und Diversität« verbindet unterschiedlichste aktuelle Diskussionen und erweist sich als zentral für den ...gesellschaftlichen Umgang mit Differenz und Gleichheit. Die Beiträger*innen des Bandes - aus der Geschichts- und Rechtswissenschaft sowie den Jüdischen Studien - rücken dieses Thema in eine historische Perspektive und nehmen Konstellationen und Umgangsweisen mit Rechtsvielfalt von der Frühen Neuzeit bis in die Gegenwart in den Blick. Beleuchtet werden Situationen des Kulturkontakts und des interreligiösen Zusammenlebens sowie global agierende Akteur*innen und Organisationen in Europa, Asien, den Amerikas und Afrika.
Attempts to regulate, monitor, and sanction dress and outward appearance was a typical feature of the early modern period. Religious and secular authorities aimed at controlling its subjects' ...spending as well as the upkeep of estate boundaries. This development did not leave untouched Jewish society in central and east-central Europe. Internal Jewish sumptuary laws from the late sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries as well as moral literature were an attempt of the communal lay and religious elites to exercise control over the communities. Increasingly, dress ordinances pertained to women and moral writings of rabbis scolded women for their haughtiness and too lavish and expensive dress, especially for adapting non-Jewish styles of dress. This article explores these developments; and how the regulation of dress aimed also at gaining control over the female Jewish body.
Between the mid-eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, commercial networks of Ashkenazim in central Europe experienced major shifts. I argue that this was a transitional period between the ...extensive trading and credit networks of central European Court Jews in the early modern period and the rise of new Jewish banking houses across Europe in the nineteenth century. Based on examples from Amsterdam, Frankfurt an der Oder (Prussia), and Warsaw I demonstrate how Amsterdam served as a center for the provision of credit to central and, indirectly, eastern Europe until the late eighteenth century, with Jewish merchants in central European cities like Frankfurt an der Oder serving as middlemen. Relying not on far-reaching networks but rather on more regional ones, a new mercantile Jewish elite rose in Warsaw beginning around the turn of the century, creating a new financial hub in east-central Europe. I suggest that the rise of Warsaw as a new center of Jewish banking and commerce can be described as a parallel development—though one on a much smaller scale—to the rise of London and that both new centers prospered at the expense of Amsterdam.
Warsaw Aust, Cornelia
The Jewish Economic Elite,
02/2018
Book Chapter
Szmul and Judyta Jakubowicz first grew wealthy thanks to their business eforts in Praga, when Jewish settlement remained illegal in Warsaw. Nevertheless, in terms of raw numbers, Warsaw had seen an ...ever-increasing number of Jewish residents. A 1792 census counted more than 6,800 Jews in Warsaw; that figure suggests that their presence was widely accepted. Within half a century, Warsaw had attracted the largest concentration of Jews within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.¹ By the first decade of the nineteenth century, we find Judyta Jakubowiczowa, her stepson Berek Szmul, and many other members of their extended family and business partners living in
