New Books in Early Modern History

Jonathan Daly is a professor of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His newest book Crime and Punishment in Russia: A Comparative History from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin (Bloomsbury, 2018), provides a comprehensive overview of the development of the criminal justice system in Russia from the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition (New York University Press, 2017), Ruth von Bernuth, Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures and Director of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, presents the first in-depth study of Chelm literature and its relationship to its literary precursors. The Chelm stories surrounding the ‘wise men’ (fools) of this town constitute the best-known folktale tradition of the Jews of Eastern Europe. Bernuth’s book joins together a historical analysis of early modern and modern German and Yiddish literature to give us a compelling and insightful account of the history of these stories.Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The cover of Amelia Glaser‘s new edited volume, Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising (Stanford University Press, 2015), bears a portrait of the formidable Cossack leader by that name. Inside the book, twelve contributing authors including Dr. Glaser, approach this legendary yet enigmatical figure from a number of perspectives—Jewish, Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, Western—across the centuries, with plenty of overlap, assembling together a single, fragmented, but nonetheless collective narrative (3). Khmelnytsky’s seventeenth-century Cossack uprising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is—depending on your point-of-view—an event of national liberation, treacherous factionalism, murderous pogrom, or personal vendetta, (again) with plenty of overlap. And the image of the Cossack warrior, the free horseman on the open steppe, serves as many narratives, right up to the present day with Mr. Putin’s twenty-first century Ukrainian land grab. On today’s podcast, Professor Glaser speaks about this remarkable figure and the issues at stake.Amelia M. Glaser is Associate Professor of Literature at the University of California at San Diego, and Director of the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Program, and also Director of the Jewish Studies Program at UCSD. Dr. Glaser is author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russias Literary Borderlands: From the Shtetl Fair to the Petersburg Bookshop (2012), and editor, with David Weintraub, of Protelpen: Americas Rebel Yiddish Poets (2012). She has also written a number of scholarly and popular articles including a recent piece for the New York times about Vladimir Putin and Ukraine.Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing on culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar; he also teaches at Los Medanos College and Berkeley City College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert Darnton, scholar of the trade of books on the eve of the French Revolution, discusses his new book which explores the history of book distribution in France. The podcast covers topics such as the challenges of travel in the eighteenth century, smuggling and piracy of books, and the demand for literature on the eve of the French Revolution.

Joseph Suss Oppenheimer became the “court Jew” of Carl Alexander, Duke of Wurttemberg in 1733. When Carl Alexander died, Oppenheimer was put on trial and condemned to death for his “misdeeds,” and on February 4, 1738, was hanged in front of a large crowd just outside Stuttgart. He was not allowed to give testimony at his own trial and left no written record of the case; we know little of his biography. Yet he remains an iconic figure to this day, not only as emblematic of the relationship between Jew and the early modern state, but together with Alfred Dreyfus and Shakespeare’s Shylock, in the long history of anti-semitism as well.While previous authors have chosen to limit themselves to barebones-facts or resorted to fictional accounts of Oppenheimer’s biography and trial, in The Many Deaths of Jew Suss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew (Princeton University Press, 2017), Yair Mintzker reinvestigates the case of the “Jew Suss” in light of new sources, as well as by incorporating the lives of four contemporary voices, eyewitness accounts that act as mirrors in which we can grow to see more of Oppenheimer himself. Fascinatingly, rather than presenting a unified narrative, these four voices often come into conflict with one another. The judge-inquisitor Philip Friedrich Jager; university professor and convert from Judaism, Christoph David Bernard; Mordechai Schloss, who wrote the only contemporary Jewish account of the case; and, finally, David Fassman, Oppenheimer’s first biographer. While Oppenheimer’s case stands as the narrative thread that brings these four voices together, the thick description of each life exposes overlapping worlds tied together by politics, culture, and theology. And here, the “Jew Suss” acts as a prism to better see the context of 18th-century Germany.Professor Yair Mintzker is professor of history at Princeton University and winner of the National Jewish Book Award in 2017 .Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, his life can be accurately described as a Rashamon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Benedito/Baruch/Benedict Spinoza (1623-1677) lived at the crossroads of Dutch, scholastic, and Jewish worlds. Excommunicated from the Jewish community of Amsterdam at 23, his works would later be put on the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books. He was a heretic. And yet, he was and continues to be seen by many as perhaps the hero of the early modern period. A figure alienated by the structures that defined his life, Spinoza has been understood, by Jews and non-Jews alike, to have expressed a powerful self-definition that echoes to the present day, where biographies, plays, “guides”, and academic works continue to abound.In place of a simplistic origin story or master narrative of a modernity that begins with Spinoza, The First Modern Jew: Spinoza and the History of an Image (Princeton University Press, 2012), tells the story of how Spinoza came to be understood as a cultural hero, a reception history of his image at many crucial junctures in Modern Jewish history. Rather than probing his philosophy or strictly philosophic influence, Schwartz studies a malleable “Spinoza” as a symbol that captures the ways in which Jews have sought to understand and define themselves. Beginning in 17th-century Amsterdam before moving to 18th-century Berlin, 19th-century Eastern Europe, and Israel and America in the 20th century, The First Modern Jew is a chronological narrative of modern Jewish history that moves seamlessly between a larger thematic thread and local histories of both the famous (Moses Mendelssohn, David Ben-Gurion, and Yitzhak Bashevis Singer) and the forgotten (Berthold Auerbach, Salomon Rubin, and Yosef Klausner). In so doing, it probes the porous boundary between history and memory: the history of Spinoza and the history of the memory of Spinoza. And thereby we can see Spinoza as the “first modern Jew,” both because he was often projected as such and because he was a means by which people have asked the quintessential modern question: what does it mean to be me?Professor Daniel B. Schwartz is an associate professor of history and the director of the Judaic Studies program at George Washington University.Moses Lapin is a graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he is a crypto-Spinozist and his hero is Blinky the Ghost. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Taisu Zhang ties together cultural history, legal history, and institutional economics in The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Pre-Industrial China and England (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and offers a novel argument as to why Chinese and English pre-industrial economic development went down different paths. Late Imperial and Republican China (1860-1949) was dominated of Neo-Confucian social hierarchies, under which advanced age and generational seniority were the primary determinants of sociopolitical status. This allowed many poor but senior individuals to possess status and political authority highly disproportionate to their wealth. In comparison, in the more individualistic early modern England (1500-1700) landed wealth was a fairly strict prerequisite for high status and authority. This essentially excluded low-income individuals from secular positions of prestige and leadership. Zhang argues that this social difference had major consequences for property institutions and agricultural production. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Singing Turk: Ottoman Power and Operatic Emotions on the European Stage from the Siege of Vienna to the Age of Napoleon (Stanford University Press, 2016), Larry Wolff takes us into that distinctly European art form, the opera, to show us the reflection of European ideas of Ottoman Turkey in the modern period. Beginning in 1683 when Ottoman guns shook the walls of Vienna, through a long eighteenth century, and up to Napoleon’s military supremacy in the nineteenth, when Turkish conquest of Europe was “no longer really imaginable” (402), the singing Turk in one form or another, dazzled, terrified, and enchanted European audiences from Vienna, to Venice, to Paris. Professor Wolff’s discussion of the music—its creation, its reception, and its context—is richly entertaining and accessible to the layman. It also reveals important currents in political and cultural thought during the Enlightenment in a Europe with ever-broader horizons. Professor Wolff moves between decades and opera houses, to argue that, rather than being some simplistic oriental foil, the operatic Turk ultimately allows the European audience to see its own humanity in a trans-Mediterranean alter ego, and composers and librettists to resolve the two in harmony with plenty of drama and humor along the way.The reader of the Singing Turk is advised to listen along on YouTube to the operas, other compositions, and Turkish military orchestra that appear in The Singing Turk. Professor Wolff has also collected quite a few of these on a website, http://www.singingturk.com/. In our podcast, Professor Wolff also discusses twenty-first century implications of this long cultural, political, and diplomatic relationship. Furthermore, he explains one of the opera’s more peculiar romantic roles of (now mercifully defunct), that of the castrato (adult performer castrated in boyhood) and why such an actor never played the Turkish eunuch.Professor Wolff is Silver Professor, Professor of History, and Director of Mediterranean Studies at New York University. He specializes in the history of Eastern Europe, the Habsburg Monarchy, the Enlightenment, and the history of childhood, writing from an intellectual, cultural, literary—and now musical—perspective. His work considers East and West and the dialectic relationship between the two, as he did with his Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization in the Mind of the Enlightenment (1994). The Singing Turk is his seventh book.Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing on culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar; he also teaches at Los Medanos College and Berkeley City College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this interview, we discuss Andrew Frank‘s most recent book, Before the Pioneers: Indians, Settlers, Slaves, and the Founding of Miami (University Press of Florida, 2017). The book is a concise and authoritative history of the region where modern-day Miami is located. Before the Pioneers, begins thousands of years in the past and places great emphasis on understanding the role that native people played in the history of south Florida. Borrowing extensively from archaeology, Before the Pioneers is a timely re-imaging of Miami’s history that places the native experience at the center of its narrative.Andrew Frank is the Allen Morris Professor of History at Florida State University. His primary research interest is the Native Southeast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alfred Ivry‘s book, Maimonides’ ‘Guide of the Perplexed’: A Philosophical Guide (University of Chicago, 2016) is the only modern commentary in English to explicate Maimonides’ summa The Guide of the Perplexed in its entirety. In so doing, it stands as a monument to both The Guide and to a career spent studying it. The book begins with an introduction that outlines its main arguments and method, and with chapters on Maimonides biography and intellectual context. It then divides the Guide into eight thematic sub-sections and provides a paraphrase and analysis of each in turn; it tackles the way Maimonides read the bible, synthesized physics and metaphysics, and espoused a new understanding of the Jewish tradition. The sections cover Maimonides’ philosophy of language and anti-anthropomorphic reading of the bible, his opposition to Kalām (Islamic theology) and theory of creation, and his theories of prophecy, metaphysics, providence and theodicy. The work ends with chapters on the Law, on politics, and True Knowledge.Moses Maimonides (1138-1204) was born in Cordoba, Spain and lived his mature life in Fustat, Egypt, he was a Jewish communal leader and legal scholar, physician and philosopher. The Guide is his philosophic masterwork, undoubtably one of the most influential and perplexing works of any faith written in the Middle Ages. Tucked away in Professor Ivry’s analysis is a rich reflection on Maimonides’ intellectual milieu and a genealogy sourced in both the Jewish tradition and Greek thought. Uniquely, he uses Maimonides’ biography and psychology as analytical tools and sees the book as a reflection of a Maimonides’ torn in his loyalties, seeking guidance as much as offering it, as a “mature spiritual and intellectual autobiography.” While others may read The Guide strictly as a work of exegesis or politics, Professor Ivry takes Maimonides’ metaphysical claims seriously, and sees him as neither a total skeptic nor a strictly orthodox thinker. Rather, this commentary understands The Guide in the mode of a confession, as a tool to tease out and come to terms with the eternal tensions between Reason and Revelation, and to see “Maimonides [as] indebted to a philosophical tradition that contradicted his inherent faith.” Rarely has a summa, the mature reflections of a career steeped in philosophic thought, been made so accessible.Alfred Ivry is emeritus professor in the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies as well as in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. He is renowned worldwide as both a scholar and a teacher, combining rich philological skills with a deep knowledge of Classical and Medieval philosophy; his career is now in its sixth decade.Moses Lapin is a perplexed graduate student in the departments of History and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices