Jay R. Berkovitz's Books

Rites and Passages

The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Culture in France, 1650-1860

By: Jay R. Berkovitz

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Rites and Passages

The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Culture in France, 1650-1860

By: Jay R. Berkovitz

In September 1791, two years after the Revolution, French Jews were granted full rights of citizenship. Scholarship has traditionally focused on this turning point of emancipation while often overlooking much of what came before. In Rites and Passages, Jay R. Berkovitz argues that no serious treatment of Jewish emancipation can ignore the cultural history of the Jews during the ancien régime. It was during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that several lasting paradigms emerged within the Jewish community—including the distinction between rural and urban communities, the formation of a strong lay leadership, heightened divisions between popular and elite religion, and the strain between local and regional identities. Each of these developments reflected the growing tension between tradition and modernity before the tumultuous events of the French Revolution. Rites and Passages emphasizes the resilience of religious tradition during periods of social and political turbulence. Viewing French Jewish history through the lens of ritual, Berkovitz describes the struggles of the French Jewish minority to maintain its cultural distinctiveness while also participating in the larger social and economic matrix. In the ancien régime, ritual systems were a formative element in the traditional worldview and served as a crucial repository of memories and values. After the Revolution, ritual signaled changes in the way Jews related to the state, French society, and French culture. In the cities especially, ritual assumed a performative function that dramatized the epoch-making changes of the day. The terms and concepts of the Jewish religious tradition thus remained central to the discourse of modernization and played a powerful role in helping French Jews interpret the diverse meanings and implications of emancipation. Introducing new and previously unused primary sources, Rites and Passages offers a fresh perspective on the dynamic relationship between tradition and modernity.

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Page Count

342

Publisher

University of Pennsylvania Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0812200152

ISBN 13

9780812200157

Law’s Dominion

Jewish Community, Religion, and Family in Early Modern Metz

By: Jay R. Berkovitz

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Law’s Dominion

Jewish Community, Religion, and Family in Early Modern Metz

By: Jay R. Berkovitz

In Law’s Dominion, Jay Berkovitz offers a novel approach to the history of early modern Jewry. Set in the city of Metz, on the Moselle river, this study of a vibrant prerevolutionary community draws on a wide spectrum of legal sources that tell a story about community, religion, and family that has not been told before. Focusing on the community’s leadership, public institutions, and judiciary, this study challenges the assumption that Jewish life was in a steady state of decline before the French Revolution. To the contrary, the evidence reveals a robust community that integrated religious values and civic consciousness, interacted with French society, and showed remarkable signs of collaboration between Jewish law and the French judicial system. In Law’s Dominion, Jay Berkovitz has gathered and meticulously mined a dazzling array of rich and complex rabbinic texts and records from Western Europe during the early modern period, including the pinkas of the rabbinic court of Metz that he previously rescued from oblivion. What emerges is a remarkably fresh depiction and incisive comparative treatment of central aspects of Jewish law, religion and family, which will have far-reaching ramifications for all future studies in these disciplines. -Ephraim Kanarfogel, E. Billi Ivry University Professor of Jewish History, Literature, and Law at Yeshiva University

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Page Count

420

Publisher

BRILL

Published Date

ISBN 10

9004417400

ISBN 13

9789004417403

Protocols of Justice (2 vol. set)

The Pinkas of the Metz Rabbinic Court 1771-1789

By: Jay R. Berkovitz

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Protocols of Justice (2 vol. set)

The Pinkas of the Metz Rabbinic Court 1771-1789

By: Jay R. Berkovitz

Winner of the Jordan Schnitzer Award in the category of Modern Jewish History. This award, the highest honor the Association for Jewish Studies bestows on scholarship, was established in 2008 by the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation to honor scholars whose work embodies the best in the field: rigorous research, theoretical sophistication, innovative methodology, and excellent writing. Presented here to the public for the first time, the Pinkas of the Metz Beit Din is the official register of civil cases that came before the Metz rabbinic court in the two decades prior to the French Revolution. Brimming with details of commercial transactions, inheritance disputes, women’s roles in economic life, and the interplay between French law and Jewish law, the Metz Pinkas offers remarkable evidence of the engagement of Jews with the surrounding society and culture. The two volumes of Protocols of Justice comprise the complete text of the Metz Pinkas Beit Din, which is fully annotated by the author, and a thorough analysis of its significance for history and law at the threshold of modernity. Through his painstaking and path-breaking treatment of this incredibly nuanced and rich text, Jay Berkovitz has placed before academics and all other interested readers a heretofore untapped resource of vast importance. His insightful and extensive introductory monograph beautifully sets the stage for scholars in a wide array of fields to mine this material, which will undoubtedly yield significant new results in the history of Jewish and non-Jewish society in eighteenth-century Europe and beyond. Ephraim Kanarfogel, E. Billi Ivry University Professor of Jewish History, Literature and Law, Yeshiva University Protocols of Justice is a scholarly tour de force. Jay Berkovitz has not only brought to life a type of source that has been all but ignored in the study of Jewish life in Europe in the early modern period but offers a rich introduction that places the material in its historical context. This is a book that will stand the test of time and is a must for academic libraries. Edward Fram, Department of Jewish History, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev "Author Jay Berkovitz, Professor and Chair of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has painstakingly transcribed the pinkas, which provides fascinating and new insights in the lives of the Jews of Metz. Through his work, Berkovitz has opened a manuscript long gathering dust in the YIVO archives, brought it to light, and created an invaluable resource for scholars." Ben Rothke, The Times of Israel

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Page Count

1330

Publisher

BRILL

Published Date

ISBN 10

9004265163

ISBN 13

9789004265165

The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth–Century France

By: Jay R. Berkovitz

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The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth–Century France

By: Jay R. Berkovitz

Focusing on the ideology of regeneration, Jay Berkovitz traces the social, economic, and religious struggles of nineteenth-century French Jews. Nineteenth-century French Jewry was a community struggling to meet the challenges of emancipation and modernity. This struggle, with its origins in the founding of the French nation, constitutes the core of modern Jewish identity. With the Revolution of 1789 came the collapse of the social, political, and philosophical foundations of exclusiveness, forcing French society and the Jews to come to terms with the meaning of emancipation. Over time, the enormous challenge that emancipation posed for traditional Jewish beliefs became evident. In the 1830s, a more comprehensive ideology of regeneration emerged through the efforts of younger Jewish scholars and intellectuals. A response to the social and religious implications of emancipation, it was characterized by the demand for the elimination of rituals that violated the French conceptions of civilization and social integration; a drive for greater administrative centralization; and the quest for inter-communal and ethnic unity. In its various elements, regeneration formed a distinct ideology of emancipation that was designed to mediate Jewish interaction with French society and culture. Jay Berkovitz reveals the complexities inherent in the processes of emancipation and modernization, focusing on the efforts of French Jewish leaders to come to terms with the social and religious implications of modernity. All in all, his emphasis on the intellectual history of French Jewry provides a new perspective on a significant chapter of Jewish history.

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Page Count

311

Publisher

Wayne State University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0814344070

ISBN 13

9780814344071

The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth–Century France

By: Jay R. Berkovitz

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The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth–Century France

By: Jay R. Berkovitz

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311

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Wayne State University Press

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ISBN 10

0814344070

ISBN 13

9780814344071

Rites and Passages

The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Culture in France, 1650-1860

By: Jay R. Berkovitz

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Rites and Passages

The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Culture in France, 1650-1860

By: Jay R. Berkovitz

Delves into Jewish religion and culture at a time of profound social and political revolution in the wider European culture.

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Page Count

354

Publisher

University of Pennsylvania Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0812238168

ISBN 13

9780812238167

Book's by Jay R. Berkovitz

Rites and Passages

Rites and Passages

Law’s Dominion

Law’s Dominion

Protocols of Justice (2 vol. set)

Protocols of Justice (2 vol. set)

The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth–Century France

The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth–Century France

The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth–Century France

The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth–Century France

Rites and Passages

Rites and Passages

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