Answer:
The 15th through the 18th centuries involved major changes in Jewish life in Europe. The conflicts, controversies, and crises of the period impacted Jews as much is it did other Europeans, albeit perhaps with different outcomes. In social, economic, and even intellectual life Jews faced challenges similar to those of their Christian neighbors, and often the solutions developed by both to tackle these problems closely resembled each other. Concurrently, Jewish communal autonomy and cultural tradition—distinct in law according to its own corporate administration, distinct in culture according to its own set of texts and traditions—unfolded according to its own intrinsic rhythms, which, in dialogue with external stimuli, produced results that differed from the society around it. The study of Jewish life in this period offers a dual opportunity: on the one hand, it presents a rich source base for comparison that serves as an alternate lens to illuminate the dominant events of the period while, on the other hand, the Jewish experience represents a robust culture in all of its own particular manifestations. Faced with these two perspectives, historians of the Jews are often concerned with examining the ways in which Jews existed in separate and distinct communities yet still maintained contact with their surroundings in daily life, commercial exchanges, and cultural interaction. Further, historians of different regions explore the ways that Jews, as a transnational people, shared ties across political frontiers, in some cases, whereas, in others cases, their circumstances resemble more closely their immediate neighbors than their coreligionists abroad. Given these two axes of experience—incorporation and otherness—the periodization of Jewish history resists a neat typology of Renaissance and Reformation. And yet, common themes—such as the new opportunities afforded by the printing press, new modes of thought including the sciences, philosophy, and mysticism, and the emergence of maritime economic networks— firmly anchor Jewish experiences within the major trends of the period and offer lenses for considering Jews of various regions within a single frame of reference. To build a coherent survey of this period as a whole, this article uses the major demographic upheavals of the 14th and 15th centuries and the subsequent patterns of settlement, as the starting point for mapping this period. These are followed by significant cultural developments, both of Jewish interaction with its non-Jewish contexts, the spaces occupying a more “internal” Jewish character, and of those boundary crossers and bridges of contact that traversed them before turning to the upheavals and innovations of messianic and millenarian movements in Judaism.
