Acculturation and integration in eighteenth-century Metz

The records of the rabbinic court in late eighteenth-century Metz offer substantial evidence of acculturation and integration in the decades prior to the attainment of Jewish civic equality. In the modern state, the wide application of judicial procedures imposed on minority populations such as the Jews an unprecedented attachment to the larger society. This is reflected in the internalization of norms of legal culture, particularly in matters relating to business partnerships, purchase and sale, torts, inheritance, registration, and familial obligations. The administration of talmudic law in eighteenth century Metz therefore entailed familiarity with royal legislation and local ordinances, as is apparent in two discrete areas: the routinizing of civil procedures in the beit din and the navigation of plural jurisdictions exercised by the Jewish and French justice systems. The Jews of Metz met the challenges of legal pluralism by adapting to the prevailing system of law within French society and by acknowledging the interdependence of cases brought before the beit din and in the French civil court system. Decades before the Jewish population of France was admitted to citizenship, Metz Jews had little choice but to accommodate to general civil law and its structures. Within the realm of law, there emerged new rules of engagement between the Jewish minority and the surrounding society and culture.     

Fallen women and fatherless children: Jewish domestic servants in eighteenth-century Altona

Records covering a brief period in eighteenth-century Altona reveal a pattern of behavior within the Jewish servant class that was widespread among non-Jewish neighbors. Jewish maidservants bore a significant number of children out of wedlock. These children came to the attention of communal authorities because of the dispute over who was responsible to bury them should they die. The unique arrangement that existed between the three communities Altona-Hamburg-Wandsbek caused these disputes to be recorded; ordinarily the matter would have remained shrouded in silence. Both the pattern of pregnancy and childbirth out of wedlock, as well as the tendency of community or magistracy to place the sole responsibility on the mother, were characteristic of non-Jewish European society in the eighteenth century. A notable departure from the non-Jewish norm was that none of the Jewish mothers in these records was charged with infanticide.     

Sifting Through Tradition: The Creation of Jewish Feminist Identities

In recent decades, feminists have been questioning patriarchal religions. As a result, many find themselves ambivalent about their religious and spiritual identities. This paper presents a model of identity formation that addresses the processes by which potentially conflicted identities are integrated. This model is based on research about how women who identify themselves as both Jewish and feminist create unconflicted Jewish feminist identities. Through a process ofsifting through their available options, they have chosen to identify with only those aspects of Judaism and feminism that satisfy their feminist, religious, and perhaps most importantly, their spiritual, needs. Because these needs vary, what it means to be a Jewish feminist is not static. Three types of Jewish feminist identity—inclusionist, transformationist, and reinterpretationist—are identified.     

Medicine as Enlightenment cure: Benedetto Frizzi, physician to eighteenth-century Italian Jewish society

This article examines modern Jewish doctors and the Enlightenment in action through its analysis of Dr. Benedetto Frizzi (1756–1844) as an Enlightenment Jewish physician and public intellectual in Habsburg northern Italy. Frizzi sought to spread the new Enlightenment gospel of polizia medica—public health policy or social medicine—that he learned from its pioneering exponent, Dr. Johann Peter Frank, his teacher at the University of Pavia. Frizzi dispensed Enlightenment medicine for the benefit of the state and society in general, as well as Jewish society and culture in particular, for he saw himself as both public health crusader and doctor-priest ministering to his own people. His commitments to Enlightenment science and rationalism led him to criticize Jewish social practices harshly even as he creatively reinterpreted classic Jewish texts; accordingly, Frizzi was regarded in some quarters as subversive, while in others as an apologetic defender of Jews and Judaism. Situating Frizzi within the traditions of Jewish as well as European Enlightenment physicians, this article raises broader questions about religion and secularism in the modern discourse of medicalized Judaism.     

The epistemology of religiosity: an Orthodox Jewish perspective

This paper focusses on the Rabbinic suggestion that the attitude of awe, rather than any particular belief, lies at the heart of religiosity. On the basis of these Rabbinic sources, and others, the paper puts forward three theses: (1) that belief is not a sufficiently absorbing epistemic attitude to bear towards the truths of religion; (2) that much of our religious knowledge isn’t mediated via belief; and (3) that make-believe is sometimes more important, in the cultivation of religiosity than is mere belief.     

Attitudes and behavior: An information integration perspective

The relationship between attitudes, beliefs, and behavior was investigated in the context of a behavioral alternative model of attitudes and Anderson's information integration theory. Forty teenagers indicated their attitudes toward using each of seven methods of birth control. The attitudes were used to predict self-reports of contraceptive behavior. Functional measurement methodology was applied to understand the informational bases of the attitudes. In general, the data were supportive of the theoretical framework.