In and out of the Ghetto

The basic contours of the social stratification of early modern Ashkenazic Jewry were outlined some twenty years ago. In 1971, Jacob Katz wrote:

Another researcher, Jonathan Israel, is in accord with Katz when he describes early modern European Jewry as a “uniquely mobile, shifting society.” The purpose of this essay is to complement this insight, centered as it is on the culturally and economically dominant Jewish classes, through observations on population history.

The first of these observations touches on the pace, phases, and direction of settlement history. We already know the outcome of this development: on the one hand, an urban Jewry comprising the great communities of Prague, Frankfurt, Hamburg-Altona, Vienna, and Berlin, to name only the most famous; on the other hand, by the early nineteenth century, German Jews made up varying percentages of the population of German villages and small towns, reaching 90 percent in some areas, according to one estimate. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, German Jewry was once again transformed, this time into a highly urbanized community, surely a precondition for the prominent cultural and economic role that it subsequently played.