Until a few decades ago, a volume such as this one would likely not have included this chapter. During the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, Jews in Europe continued to live under the same constraints that they had lived under since the Christianization of the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE. The Islamic world continued to be governed by the dhimmi paradigm in which Jews were a recognized minority community with second-class legal status. Until the nineteenth century, when Jews in some places were granted political equality and those elsewhere were in a position to campaign for it, most historians considered the Jewish condition “medieval.” For some Zionist historians of the twentieth century, no real change occurred in the Diaspora until the beginnings of an ideologically driven Jewish settlement in Israel in the nineteenth century.

More recently, however, historians of the Jewish experience have followed their counterparts in general European history by delineating a period from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries as “early modern.” Since Jews who lived in Europe were affected by the same technological, economic, and political changes that historians view as distinct to this era, it is only natural that contemporary Jewish historiography has adopted this interpretive lens when considering Jews as part of their larger environment. At the same time, a distinctive Early Modern period in Jewish cultural and religious life can also be marked off in relation to internal Jewish developments that took place between 1400 and 1800.