David B. Ruderman, “Review of ‘The Jews of Europe After the Black Death’, by Anna Foa,” American Historical Review, vol. 106, no. 5 (December 2001): 1863-1864

Europe: Early Modern and Modern on the minutiae, although not all of his claims for inclusion or exclusion of particular individuals seem overwhelmingly convincing. The book makes several interpretive claims. Most broadly, it argues for a long, indigenous tradition of consultative rule, deriving from medieval models of godly kingship and household administration. It argues for change over time, with the increasing inclusion of skilled administrators in the charmed inner circle. In one of the most interesting discussions, it interweaves these two themes in order to explain the sixteenthcentury innovation of consultation with "all the land" as an organic outgrowth of the tradition of consultation, which merged with the tsar's growing need for information and broad consensus. The book tends to diminish the extremity of the Oprichnina and to normalize the reign of Ivan the Terrible. Bogatyrev finds a high degree of coordination between the Oprichnina and Zemshchina administrations during the entire period. He also finds continuity, particularly of the titled princely elite, within the inner council during the Oprichnina years, a conclusion very much in agreement with other studies of the period, such as Ann Kleimola's series of publications on the subject. He suggests, rather vaguely, that the Oprichnina itself was an outgrowth of strains within the Privy Council. This is a useful book to have available in English, as most of the recent works on the sovereign's court, such as those by A. P. Pavlov, A. I. Filiushkin, and M. M. Krom, have been in Russian only. The book offers an enormous amount of material, including passages from literary, administrative, and diplomatie texts, to an English-speaking audience. VALERIE KIVELSON University of Michigan 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 infiuential European Jewly in the A ge of Mercantilism 1550-1750 (3d ed., 1998). Eike 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). One might legitimately ask: why a new synthesis at this point? What does Foa offer either the specialist or AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 1863 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). To any student of Jewish history in this period, these assertions cannot be taken seriously. Given the explosion of new and sophisticated historical writing on every subject Foa touches, the claim that she is correcting a lachrymose history, one that sees premodern Jewry as statie, unconnected to its surroundings, and unaware of social science tools and non-Jewish historiography, is simply unwarranted. Given her heavy reliance on contemporary historians of the Jewish experience, it is even insulting. What is new about Foa's approach is her insistence that the Black Death was a watershed in Jewish history and should serve as a meaningful divide between an earlier period and a later one, which she traces until the nineteenth century. This emphatic claim is not based on any original research but on the standard accounts of the plague and its impact on Europe in general. There is no doubt that the Black Plague had a considerably disastrous effect on German Jewry, but as she herself acknowledges, its effect elsewhere was not as decisive. It is also unclear in her account how the plague is to be connected with the other critical experiences that followed: the Renaissance, the expulsions, the ghettos, and beyond. Nor is it apparent that the processes of deterioration in Jewish-Christian relations were triggered by the plague and not by developments discussed extensively by other historians in the thirteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. Additionally, Foa offers no rationale for seeing a distinct period from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century. Her afterword on twentieth-century events seems artificially tacked on, lacking any clear connection to the previous chapters. Foa's book, as she indicates, is exclusively about Western Europe, and her focus is primarily on Spain and especially Italy. She justifies her omission of the Jewries of the Ottoman Empire and Eastern Europe, the major centers of Jewish life from the sixteenth century on, as taking "us too far afield" (p. 5), but this is clearly unsound. A book treating the Jews of Europe in this era cannot fail to take into account the larger migratory patterns of Jews from the fifteenth century on and the subsequent new centers of Jewish settlement and creativity. Her account is not only limited; it distorts the wider picture. When she claims that Jewish population in the areas she is treating was contracting, she fails to see this in relation to the larger picture of population growth elsewhere (e.g. p. 8). Foa's chapters on the church and the Jews, on Spain and Italy, on the ghetto, and on more modern times DECEMBER 2001 1864 Reviews of Books are essentially competent summaries of other historians' work. Her most expansive and authoritative chapters deal with Italy, and given the genesis of this work in her Ebrei in Europa: Dalla peste nera all'emancipazione secolo (1992), this emphasis is understandable. Viewing a history of European Jewry over five centuries through the lens of Italy perhaps made more sense when addressing an Italian readership. In its English version, the Italianate focus distorts the larger picture. The book is handsomely produced and elegantly translated (by Andrea Grover) and contains a useful bibliography. But it claims too much in allegedly providing a meaningful picture of European Jewry as a whole, and in offering new insights based on original research. DAVID B. RUDERMAN University of Pennsylvania OLE PETER GRELL, ANDREW CUNNINGHAM, and JON ARRIZABALAGA, editors. Health Care and POOr Relief in Counter-Reformation Europe. New York: Routledge. 1999. Pp. ix, 309. The twelve essays and editors' introduction under review are the product of a tightly focused conference. Bach contributor undertook a survey of ways that church, state, and municipalities in Italy, Iberia, France, and Catholic Germany saw their obligations for health care and poor relief during the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Each contributor supplied substantial archival evidence and addressed, at varying lengths, how Tridentine reforms made a difference in welfare services for the indigent. Conceived as a project within the social history of medicine, the contributors—too many to list here—all have considerable expertise in medical history of this pexiod. Yet only about half of the essayists struggle to connect ideas and practices of poor relief to the medical ideas, innovations, and practitioners that one would find in standard medical history. A few note that church censorship of books and ideas, while having no direct target in the realm of medicine, distanced the intellectual elite of southern Europe from the Cartesian, mechanistic "conversation" transforming medical science in the north. Most of the contributors seem to assume that the arena of Catholic social services and health care for the poorest Christians instead offered few opportunities for elite medical practitioners to earn money or to conduct any medical research of interest to them. Medicine, traditionally understood, was simply not yet the objective of poor relief. A number of large cities had begun consolidation of medieval hospitals into one or two great institutions long before the Council of Trent opened in 1543. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, consolidation and centralization of hospital and welfare services was motivated by growing numbers of mendicants and refugees, by Catholic reform unfolding parallel to the Protestant Reformation, by intensified fear of the poor as disease carriers AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW and fuel for epidemics, and by the plans of strong monarchs and dukes to impose fiscal, managerial control over pious bequests and properties. With the possible exception of the new "French" disease, epidemie typhus fever, and recurrent plagues, most of the secular and religious reformers before Trent had no direct interest in medicine. Neither do the authors here make other connections between this pre-Vesalius period and Catholic welfare reform, other than to note that some great hospitals designed wards where medical services were important. After Trent, the objectives of Counter Reformationists are well known: public morality, "Christianization" of ill-taught masses, protection of female chastity, and the use of hospitals to distribute above all else food, doctrinal instruction, and spiritual care. This collection of essays efficiently summarizes the emergence and popularity of numerous service and healing orders over the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, some of which had explicit missions among the sick. Capuchin and Camillian monks were at their social zenith from the 1570s to the 1650s, if selfless dedication to the plague-stricken can be seen as a "zenith." Theatines maintained their thankless ministrations to the pox-stricken, Antonines to those suffering from ergotism or "fire." Followers of Saint John of God (Brothers of Charity) were especially aggressive in collecting alms and building hospices for the poor, and they took a broad enough definition of their medical mission to become renowned as lithotomists in some parts of France. The Portuguese Mercedarians exported such models of Christian healing throughout the world, while the Castilians may have used their larger world as a pious laboratory to experiment with models of Christian care that politically or economically could not be implemented easily at home. Finally, the singular efforts of Saint Vincent de Paul in seventeenth-century France opened the way for women in medicalized nursing, arguing that thorough "Christianization" of nonaristocratic women led a group used to hard work and care-giving to the spiritual benefits of sacrifice to the poor. Beneath the surface of such particulars—far more abundant in the volume than can be summarized here—lies the weight of suggestion that the Counter Reformation coincided with an almost two-century interval of relentless economie depression. The introduction, as is typical in such efforts, synthesizes the contributions for readers who will not pore over the contents. But it is impossible to estimate, even with the hints and references some contributors provide, the extent to which Catholic Europe faced greater burdens of abject urban and rural poverty. Certainly the authors all emphasize that there were few absolute differences between the ways Protestants and Catholies "gazed" upon, and crafted governmental or religious or theological responses to, beggars. Certainly the essays collectively show that all charity was local, despite generalizations one would like to make about themes, strategies, and perspectives. Only in a few DECEMBER 2001