Project Details
Projekt
Continuity and Change in the Regional Organization of Jewish Life in the German Lands between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Lucia Raspe
Subject Area
Religious Studies and Jewish Studies
Early Modern History
Early Modern History
Term
since 2025
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 517713369
Among the manifold changes that mark the watershed between the Medieval and the Early Modern in German-Jewish history, the expulsions of the 'long' fifteenth century and the large-scale migration that followed loom large. For the Jews who remained in the Empire, the focus of settlement shifted to rural areas. This was associated with a fragmentation of Jewish life, which only gave way to a phase of gradual consolidation in the seventeenth century. Rural forms of settlement, however, had existed in Ashkenaz since the Middle Ages. Jews living in such locations, referred to as yishuvim or ḥavurot and sometimes made up of no more than one or two families, relied on the nearest full-fledged community (qehilla) for basic religious services: they joined prayers in ist synagogue on the festivals, they buried their dead in ist cemetery and were subject to the authority of ist rabbinical court. In some cases, the respective urban communities also assumed the political representation of all Jews living in the surrounding area (the medina). When the loss of almost all of the central communities from the end of the fourteenth century onward effectively put an end to these arrangements, the Jews that remained resident in their peripheries made an effort to uphold the traditions of their former centers. They held on to the time-hallowed cemeteries wherever that was possible; where it was not, attempts were made to transfer their identity-forming role to new cemeteries in the countryside. The local liturgies, characteristic of Ashkenazic Judaism, were similarly preserved, sometimes reaching print two or three centuries after the respective urban community had been expelled. The project investigates what possible connections may have existed between such orphaned peripheries and the supra-local federations of rural Jews that appeared as early as the sixteenth century and later merged into the so-called Landesjudenschaften, instruments of princely territorial rule which became widespread in the decades following the Thirty Years’ War. Looking at an exemplary number of 'lands' (medinot), the project examines the extent to which older spatial structures were able to survive and the reasons for their demise when they were not; it also explores how the map of Jewish self-organization was redrawn over time to fit current political borders. On the basis of a systematic analysis of the Jewish sources, which are then brought into dialogue with a select number of external sources, it aims to show how those Jews who had remained within Germany were able to shape their own surroundings by placing them in the greatest possible continuity with the organizational forms of the past. It thus contributes to furthering our understanding of these processes from a Jewish perspective, a central task the research group has set itself.
DFG Programme
Research Units
