| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Anna Foa. The Jews of Europe after the Black Death. Translated by Andrea Grover. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2000. Pp. xii, 276. $40.00.

Anna Foa is not the first European historian to construct a new synthetic history of the Jews in the late medieval/early modern period. The books of John Edwards and Jonathan Israel quickly come to mind, especially the latter's highly influential European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism 1550–1750 (3d ed., 1998). Like the others, Foa attempts to understand both the external and internal history of Jews and Jewish culture without access to primary and secondary sources in Hebrew, although to her credit, she has read much recent work in other European languages. Unlike Israel, she implicitly rejects the notion of a distinct "early modern" period and prefers to speak of a "long 'Middle Ages' of Jewish history, which ended only at the dawn of emancipation" (p. 219). 1

One might legitimately ask: why a new synthesis at this point? What does Foa offer either the specialist or the layreader in her "richly innovative history of Jewish life in Europe" (as the cover jacket claims)? She claims she is writing a new history, a history of creativity on the part of active protagonists, overcoming the previous conceptions of "lachrymose history"; she is offering a new vision of transformation and intrinsic change, challenging an alleged static image of premodern Jewry; and she is connecting Jewish history to a "surrounding milieu," drawing on tools of the social sciences and non-Jewish historiography (pp. 219–20). . . .

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