Volume 32, Issue 1

Social historical research assumes that Jewish living conditions of the imperial city Frankfurt had substantially deteriorated since their ghettoization in 1462. This deterioration announced itself normatively thirty years before against the backdrop of ecclesiastical demand for visible division regarding clothing and housing. It is a fact less known. This development had started with citizenship no longer being granted by the city council to Jews but they were mere inhabitants (»Beisassen«) protected by »Stättigkeit« which was then valid for all Jews. By which, in its first general version 1424, the old state of rights was still mirrored in order to limit successively from 1439 the rights of Frankfurt’s Jews. Finally, in the version of 1474, the council abandoned its autonomous municipal statuary law for ruling Jewish matters as far as it was not in accord with »Christian order« and »common law« which is canon law and Roman law, »Ius Commune«. So this meant in fact that the council submitted to the norms of Adversus-Judaeos of Papal church. The continuing imperial »Kammerknechtschaft« (Chamber serfdom) which was to secure the influence of emperor and empire could not keep back this process of detoriation of law.

The article investigates how early modern Christian authors perceived the names of Jews and their naming customs. Based on a variety of printed sources, like ethnographic reports, language manuals, criminal investigations, and academic texts, the article does not only depict early modern Jewish names and rituals but sheds light on the Christian authors, their sources, and their changing perceptions. While theologists and converts in the 16th and 17th century focused primarily on naming customs, authors after 1700 became increasingly interested in contemporary names – their creation, their meanings, and their variations. Closely connected to the negative perception of the Yiddish language, Jewish names were seen as a source of potential fraud and the acquisition of knowledge on the matter as a necessary means of control.

While Moses Mendelssohn’s reputation as a modern Socrates is well-known to scholars of eighteenth-century intellectual history, the opposite tendency to orientalise him has received less attention than it deserves. The paper discusses some examples, highlighting the interdependence of Greek and Oriental attributions. In their critical reactions to Mendelssohn’s Phädon (1767), a modern version of Socrates’ dialogues on the immortality of the soul, radical Pietist Johann Daniel Müller and Lutheran orthodox theologian Gottfried Joachim Wichmann sought to invalidate the Jewish Enlightener’s case for reason by orientalising him. At the end of the century, the religious tensions inherent in the uses of Greek and Oriental models for different Jewish and Christian denominational positions became visible in Johann Gottfried Schadow’s drawing Sokrates im Kerker (1800), a work commissioned by David Friedländer, whose Sendschreiben von einigen Hausvätern jüdischer Religion (1799) had just caused a stir with its bold statements in the spirit of Deism.

In diesem Aufsatz geht es um die Geschichte dreier populärer christlicher und jüdischer Heiler des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts mit sehr unterschiedlichem Hintergrund – der legendäre jüdische Rabbiner und Wundertäter Seckel Löw Wormser (1768–1847), bekannt als der Baʼal Shem von Michelstadt, der weithin bekannte katholische Geistliche und Fürst Alexander von Hohenlohe (1794–1849) und der populäre heilende Schäfer Heinrich Mohr (1798–1884). Untersucht wird die komplexe Beziehung zwischen Religion, Volksheilung (und sogar Magie) und Medizin. Der Vergleich dieser Heiler offenbart auch etwas über den vielschichtigen Prozess der Professionalisierung der Medizin. Nicht zuletzt kommt in diesem Aufsatz die zunehmende Rolle des Staates und der zivilen Behörden in der Sorge um die Gesundheit im Allgemeinen und in der Kontrolle der Körper der Untertanen zur Sprache.

Respondents construct their answers by implanting a style, using tropes and patterns of argumentations. Thereby, they intend to emphasize the correctness of their answer and to stage their authority. Due to this fact it is worthwhile to examine responsa as literature – one of two trends in the Law-and-Literature-Movement. In this paper I want to analyse the collection of responsa called Ele Divre ha-Brit . This collection of 22 responsa was edited in 1819 by the Bet Din (rabbinical court) of Hamburg in order to condemn the new reforms in Hamburg implemented by the reformers. My goal is to see if and how the febrile atmosphere is visible in rhetoric. It can be shown that a lot of tropes and stylistic devices are used to emotionalise the reader. But patterns of argumentations like »correctio« are used as well with the intention to stress the correctness of the answers.

In the chronicle of the Catholic parish of Eslohe in Westphalia there are two Hebrew manuscripts that have not yet been edited or researched. Both provide a glimpse on religious life in a small Ashkenazi Jewish community at the end of the 18 th century. One manuscript, dated March 9, 1800, contains the answer written by a certain Simon ben Eljakum on behalf of Joseph Friedländer from Padberg to a request from Jacob Zander from Eslohe regarding the creation of a mikveh, i. e. a ritual immersion bath. The second Hebrew manuscript, dated September 2, 1796, contains the text of a Hebrew eulogy that begins with a song that is sung in Jewish homes on Friday evening after dinner and begins with the Hebrew words zamah nafschi l'elohim (= my soul thirsts for God). Both manuscripts are examined and commented on here for the first time. In the appendix follows a complete transcription of both Hebrew (and partly also Yiddish) texts as well as a translation into German.