As serfs of the Imperial Chamber (servi camerae), the Ashkenazim in Central Europe settled mostly in the many imperial cities of the medieval Holy Roman Empire, dependent on the emperors for protection. As imperial power declined in the late Middle Ages, Jewish communities were increasingly vulnerable to the violence of citizens. The turning point came in the years of the Black Death, as Frantisek Graus has demonstrated, when many Jewish communities were massacred or expelled, as was the fate of the Jews in Strasbourg, the largest city in Alsace. Although a few Jewish families were later re-admitted, they were again expelled in 1390. Between this expulsion and 1791, the city fathers of Strasbourg banned Jews from settling within the city walls. By the Reformation, a majority of Ashkenazim dwelled in small towns and villages; the famous communities in Frankfurt, Worms, and Prague were exceptions to the rule. In some regions, notably Franconia, Swabia, and Alsace, the dispersed rural Jewry formed strong networks, restructuring Jewish community life while maintaining a continuous economic link to the large urban centers. Beyond Expulsion, as it title indicates, studies precisely the many adaptations and continuities that characterized Jewish life in Alsace, focusing on the relationship of Jews to the imperial city of Strasbourg in the sixteenth century.

In reconstructing this history, Kaplan is fortunate to have access to both Hebrew and German language sources. In the first category, there are the Chronicle of Josel of Rosheim from the sixteenth century and the manuscript of the Alsatian Jew Asher ha-Levi of Reichshofen, the Sefer Zikhronot, from the early seventeenth century. Kaplan has also drawn extensively from the responsa and chronicles of Jewish writers of medieval and early modern Ashkenaz who lived elsewhere in the Holy Roman Empire, in order to offer a more comprehensive picture of Jewish life. In the second category of sources, Kaplan has examined the archives in Strasbourg for all references dealing with Jews in the period under consideration. In addition to routine correspondence—Jewish merchants asking for safe-conduct to visit the city, pleas to the city fathers about debt-disputes with citizens, etc.—there are also thicker dossiers concerning appeal cases filed by Jews to the Imperial Chamber Court (Reichskammergericht) that cast a sharp and focused light on Jewish-Christian relations. In addition, Kaplan has mastered the extensive scholarship on the Reformation history of Strasbourg and offers a larger picture of Christian-Jewish relations that goes beyond reconstructing the life of the Jewish communities.

Divided into seven chapters, Beyond Expulsion offers an overview of Reformation Strasbourg in Chapter 1. An exceptional city where many religious dissidents were tolerated, Strasbourg was the most vibrant intellectual center in the early Reformation years, counting Martin Bucer, Wolfgang Capito, and Jean Sturm among its reformers, and providing refuge at various times to John Calvin, Caspar von Schwenckfeld, and, for a time, even the Anabaptists. In Chapter 2, Kaplan describes Jewish life in the rural sphere. The dispered settlement of Jews in Alsace posed a challenge to the traditional notions of kehilla. Nonetheless, through family and business ties, as well as through extensive travel, the Alsatian Jews constituted two larger communities and combined resources to transact business, maintain liturgical life, and form a collective front in dealing with Christian authorities. Because these Jews lived in a region that lacked a large urban Jewish presence, Torah study inevitably declined. In Chapter 3, Kaplan documents the intimate dealings between Jews and Christians. The case of Meier of Hagenau was exceptional, as the physician was accused of multiple cases of sexual relations with Christian women. The stiff monetary fines imposed on Meier and the expulsion of his family from Hagenau have to be seen in the context of a normative law that stipulated the death penalty for Jewish-Christian sexual transgressions. Kaplan makes good use of this case study to discuss the attempts to define and police community boundaries, both on the part of Christian and Jewish leaders. However, the very nature of dispersed Jewish settlement in rural Alsace implied a continuous intimacy in social and economic dealings between Jews and Christians, as Kaplan is able to document from her archival sources. The author thus depicts a modus vivendi different from the one Jacob Katz described for East Central Europe, in which Jewish life was largely self-secluded. Chapter 4 draws on the considerable records documenting Jewish economic life; as doctors, moneylenders, wine-merchants, and horse-traders, Jewish men and women appeared often in Strasbourg and in the smaller market towns of Alsace. The traces in official documents, more often originating from disputes and lawsuits, may obscure the larger and hidden picture of a normative intercourse in social and economic life between Jews and Christians in the early modern period. The normality of life was nonetheless determined by the legislation of Christian authorities, as Kaplan argues in Chapter 5. In 1570, a new Strasbourg law forbade all commerce between Jews and Christians. It reflected a growing Lutheran confessional identity in Strasbourg, as the citizens closed ranks against outsiders, be they Jews, Catholics, or Calvinists. The consolidation of an orthodox Lutheran identity also drew on the anti-Semitic writings of Luther. Compared to the first half of the sixteenth century, the period between 1570 and 1700 reflected a more negative attitude toward Jews in Lutheran Germany, as represented by the writings examined by Kaplan. In Chapter 6, Kaplan breaks new ground in examining Christian Hebraism in sixteenth-century Strasbourg. She focuses on Wolfgang Capito, a friend of Josel of Rosheim and a leading Christian Hebraist of the Reformation years. Through a careful reading, she demonstrates the limits and extent of Capito's knowledge of Hebrew and Judaism. An interesting fact in this chapter is that the generations of Hebraists in Strasbourg after Capito learned the language solely in the service of Protestant theological pedagogy, eschewing any personal contact with rabbis and showing little or no interest in Jewish life or religion. Chapter 7 focuses on Jewish testimonies. Here Kaplan draws primarily on the writings of Josel of Rosheim and Asher ha-Levi of Reichshofen, while casting a glance at other Jewish histories produced in the early modern Empire. In using biblical typology, both writers classified events in their own days within the structure of Jewish piety and suffering, and the divine promise of delivery. A final reflection takes the history down to the eighteenth century, as Alsace came under French rule. Even then the Jewish communities, rural and deeply traditional, held onto their ways and language, finding their way to “becoming French” a long and thorny road indeed.