Jews and Catholic Identity.pdf

2003

Weakened by the religious challenges of the Protestant Reformation, the early modern Catholic Church sought "stability and reassurance." 1 One way it did so was through "tales of individual Jewish conversions," which went hand in hand with aggressive conversionary efforts. In Rome, these efforts began in the sixteenth century, through the burning of the Talmud and through the pressure exerted by ghetto life. In 1584, Gregory XIII ordered Roman Jews to submit to forced preaching. 2 This process repeated itself in the mid-eighteenth century, especially under Pope Benedict XIV. But the motives this time were different. Rather than battling disintegrating Catholic unity, as it did in the sixteenth century, the eighteenth century papacy was responding to religious and political challenges that accompanied the rise of anti-clericalism, secularism, and demands for religious tolerance. 3 Similar, albeit perhaps more subtle, attempts to convert Jews, complemented by tales and polemics decrying Jewish error and telling of conversionary miracles, were also known in late seventeenth and eighteenth century Poland. Yet contrastingly, the eighteenth century Polish Church and its clergy were reacting to stimuli similar to those the Church in Rome had reacted to over a century and a half before. As in so many other areas of "modernization," in the matter of policy, and attitudes, toward Jews, Poland once again lagged behind, its Church still embroiled in pre-modern religious and political conflicts and still responding to the aftershocks of early modern religious crises and wars, including those involving Protestants, Muslims and the Eastern Orthodox. 4 Seeking to buttress itself and to enhance its weakened authority, and perhaps even more its weakened prestige in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Polish clergy resorted to mission and to glorifying narrative of the kind that would show, as was so often said in sixteenth century Rome, that truly, there was only "one flock and one pastor." 5 Battling non-Catholics and unruly secular leadership created a sense of purpose. More importantly, it reassured. Admittedly, neither efforts to convert Jews in Poland, nor the results, were spectacular. Still, materials from numerous Church archives point to a steady, if limited, influx of converts to Catholicism not only from Judaism, but also

Jews often appear in Christian polemical literature as clichéd arch-heretics in the context of inter-confessional Christian polemics, rather than for their own sake, in a polemic directed against Judaism itself. In the multi-ethnic and multi-religious Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth political conflicts often took the form of religious polemics, and religion served as a central channel for expressing not only religious feelings but also national and political identity. The use of Jews in polemical literature was widespread and can be found in Orthodox polemics directed against the union with Rome, Uniates' defense of the union, Catholic-Protestant polemics in the context of the Counter-Reformation and in other contexts. This paper examines such use of Jews in inter-confessional Christian polemics in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

"In her article, “Jewish Shtetl or Christian Town? The Jews in Small Towns in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 17th and 18th Centuries,” Maria Cieśla analyses the social interaction between Jews and their non-Jewish Christian environment in the early modern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which was home to the largest Jewish community in Europe at the time. Cieśla’s analysis centers on the shtetls, or small towns where the majority of Jews lived. She argues that the image of the shtetl, as depicted in most literature on the subject, is often an oversimplified, idealised vision that ignores the complexity of social life. In order to elucidate that complexity, the author refers to Georg Simmel’s concept of space, considering the manifold interactions between Jews and their Christian neighbours, and thereby approaching Christian-Jewish relations from a new angle. Cieśla bases her research mainly on hitherto unanalysed private archives and legal acts. By examining the Jews’ economic activity in the market place, in the religious space of the synagogue and in their domestic spaces, she demonstrates the importance of all these areas for social integration between Jews and Christians. Cieśla concludes that the shtetl cannot be understood as a Jewish space alone; rather, it is necessary to consider its Christian elements as well." (Alina Gromova, Felix Heinert, Sebastian Voigt, Introduction in: Jewish and Non-Jewish Spaces in the Urban Context, p. 16.)

The American Historical Review, 2012

Polin, 2021

The religious life of east European Jews has naturally featured more than once on the pages of Polin. In particular, the main section of volume 11 (1998) consisted of eleven articles devoted to ‘aspects and experiences of religion’, while volume 15 (2002) contained fifteen articles dealing with ‘Jewish religious life, 1500-1900’. What these volumes presented, and even more so what they left out, reflected the state of scholarship on the subject more than two decades ago, while at the same time pointing at the direction in which it was heading. To demonstrate this, let us consider some basic facts and...

Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 27, 2014

Extant historiography has created a historiographie ghetto, seldom considering Jewish sources as relevant to the larger narrative of European history. This has created two parallel, often disconnected areas of study, "European history" and "Jewish history." Archival materials show that Jews and Christians resided side by side and interacted daily in early modern Europe. Reformation Strasbourg and post-Reformation Poland, geographically and demographically diverse, offer new insights about the past by including sources about Jews. In Reformation Strasbourg, leaders of different Christian confessions jointly issued policies aimed at regulating daily interactions between Jews and Christians, despite simultaneously battling one another in the realm of faith and politics. In post-Reformation Poland, the physical presence of Jews recorded underscores their neighborly relations with Christians and further demonstrates the limits to the seemingly successful Counter-Reformation in Poland.

Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations, 2011

This paper addresses the question of the “golden age” present in Polish and Jewish historiographies. It demonstrates that though the idea of the “golden age” was embraced by both Polish Christian and Jewish historians, they never applied it to Jewish-Christian relations. This paper looks at the myths of the golden age and the age of decline in both historiographies by juxtaposing them with archival documents that complicate both the idea of the “zenith” or “golden age” of the 16th century and that of the decline and crisis of the 17th century.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-history-of-judaism/poland/FBD4898B5B264B8E48F59CACFC146620 This essay provides a historical overview of the history of Jews in Polish lands between 1800-2000. Focusing on central social, religious and political developments among Jews from the final partition of Poland (1795) up to the post-Communist era, the chapter is designed to provide background to students and other readers interested in the topic and the period. Volume 8 of The Cambridge History of Judaism: The Modern World, was edited by Mitchell B. Hart and Tony Michels.