Leadership and institutional autonomy in early modern Jewish communities - Single View

This seminar focuses on the character of Jewish communal autonomy during the early modern period and will examine its functioning, institutions and relations between Jewish communities and secular authorities. The early modern era has traditionally been considered a time of gradual corrosion of the essentially medieval model of Jewish-Christian relations and Jewish communal autonomy. According to this interpretation, Jewish religious elites struggled to preserve the old communal order and their own privileges, ultimately failing in their confrontation with the increasingly modernised society. However, recent scholarship has become sceptical to this “narrative of collapse” and suggests that Jewish leadership and autonomy in the early modern period are best understood not as a “decadent phase” of the medieval state of affairs but in their own terms, as a result of the changing circumstances of the time and periodically renewed negotiations between the Jewish communities and the majority society.