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A great deal of what is considered essentially "Jewish" derives from the medieval and the early modern periods—from roughly the year 1000 to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In that time it became meaningful to think and speak about European Jewry as a distinct entity. Jewish communities within formative nations, such as Poland, Lithuania, Spain and Portugal, the German States, and the Ottoman Empire developed particular trends and counter-trends, under Christendom and Islam. Characteristics of gender and class conventions became institutionalized and changed over time. It also was a period in which we observe the emergence of ways of rejecting, resisting, and keeping Jews distant from the non-Jewish majority cultures and distinct interest groups. Our main concern will be the ways that Jews, as a people and communities of faith (combined with ethnic identity) attempted to adjust to changing times and conditions.

Jews repeatedly confronted the dilemma of how to respond to unprecedented situations, which prompted the intercession of figures such as Rashi, Maimonides, Spinoza, and Mendelssohn, and we shall investigate consequential events such as the Inquisition, the rise and demise of mystical messianism, and the Jewish variety of the Enlightenment. This is an introductory module that does not assume any previous experience with the subject.