Despite its reputation as a dumping ground for orphaned articles and the sprawling, unfocused form it often adopts, the genre of the Festschrift possesses great potential. An academic's role as scholar is naturally preserved in publications; could not a Festschrift record as well a glimpse of time invested in teaching and “citizenship” in its best sense: developing professional networks, fostering collegiality and connection? This is, indeed, the stated intent of the editors of the volume at hand, a collection of thirty-one essays in honor of historian David Ruderman presented upon his retirement as director of the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. They write:

Moreover, Ruderman's recent publication of Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History,Footnote ¹ his own synthesis of the principal field of his scholarship, invites readers to consider the two works as in conversation with one another, a notion explicitly shared by many of the Festschrift's authors and welcomed by its editors in the very first sentence of their introduction (xi).

The Festschrift's five sections echo, without directly mimicking, categories around which the chapters of Ruderman's Early Modern Jewry are built: mobility, highly developed communal institutions, “knowledge explosion,” challenges to rabbinic authority, and “mingled identities.” There is also a rough chronological progression. Both works define the period as beginning, approximately, with the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492, and both devote significant attention to questioning how and where to mark its end. Many of the Festschrift’s authors relate to Ruderman's emphasis on “connected” history: links, encounters, entanglements of various sorts. Each of its sections consists of four to eight contributions of approximately four thousand to five thousand words, excellently edited, impressively compact and uniform in length and overall quality, resulting in a collection that breaks new ground while maintaining accessibility for the nonspecialist. The complete table of contents is available on the University of Pittsburgh Press web site, and the editors explain the reasoning behind its organization in their introduction. The following reading of the book's structure emphasizes selected thematic connections, inevitably leaving aside several fascinating contributions.

In part 1, “Realms of Authority: Conflict and Adaptation,” Joseph R. Hacker and Matt Goldish contribute essays that can be read as introductions to the two major migrations, Sephardic and Ashkenazic, that moved Jews, almost literally, into early modernity. Hacker brings the reader directly from pre-expulsion Iberia to early modern Ottoman Jewry by examining marriage strategies of two “prominent Jewish Portuguese clans” in their old and new worlds. Goldish traces the rise of the newly prominent Horowitzes in Prague as they sought to consolidate their authority within their new community, as well as that community's role of leadership in Ashkenazic Jewry, in part by cloaking themselves in the older authority of the recently destroyed Jewish community of Regensburg. Concluding the section, Benjamin Fisher and Anne Oravetz Albert—in the first of several instances throughout the volume in which two or even three adjacent essays directly complement one another—introduce Amsterdam thinkers Menasseh ben Israel and Saul Levi Morteira's desire for Jews to identify with the Dutch state alongside their contemporary Isaac Orobio de Castro's vision of Jews as forming their own republic.

At the center of part 2, “Knowledge Networks,” is another cluster beautifully illustrating the value of interlocking essays; pieces by Moshe Idel, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, and J. H. (Yossi) Chajes together form a detailed case study of the interworkings of print, newly reconceived areas of Jewish thought and mysticism, and migration. Part 3, “‘Jews and ‘Judaism’ in the Early Modern European Imagination,” includes several essays about ways in which Christian and Jewish Renaissance scholars on the one hand (by Joanna Weinberg, Andrew Berns, and Anthony Grafton) and Luther and like-minded reformers on the other (by Jonathan Karp and Debra Kaplan) interpreted Jewish sources and contended with contemporary Jews. In each of these clustered exchanges, a scholar trained under Ruderman engages in discussion of specific sources and themes with colleagues who spent time as fellows at the Katz Center under his direction. In this way, a portrait of a scholar in his variegated roles is subtly drawn, realizing the editors' vision of a tribute that would encompass them all. Roger Chartier, closing the section with a French-language exposition of Brazilian-born playwright and author Antônio José da Silva and his portrayal of Don Quixote, reminds readers of the cruelty and violence that sometimes accompanied early modern mobility, border-crossing, and mingled identities; his protagonist died at the stake as a Judaizer.

Part 4, “The Long Eighteenth Century in an Early Modern Key,” and part 5, “From the Early Modern to the Late Modern (and Back Again),” focus on the later part of the early modern period and the permeable boundary at its end. Several essays sketch personalities exhibiting hybrid “early modern” and “modern” characteristics, although the historical actors themselves, one presumes, would not have viewed themselves this way. Here again, clusters providing multiple lenses result in textured discourse of joint themes: Yaacob Dweck and Francesca Bregoli on eighteenth-century rabbi, author, and emissary from Palestine Ḥayim Yosef David Azulai (ḤIDA); Andrea Schatz, Shmuel Feiner, and Sharon Flatto on Naphtali Herz Wesseley, Moses Mendelssohn, and fellow maskilim. Offering an exciting new direction, Beth S. Wenger raises the question of “early modernity” in regard to American Jewry, effectively rejoining American and European Jewish history. In doing so, Wenger shows how badly needed such a trans-Atlantic Jewish history is, from the colonial period to the present. The penultimate essay, by Vivian Liska, particularly its beginning sections, could profitably be read first, as an expansion of and conversation with the introduction's discussion of the category “early modern” in Jewish history and its broader implications. In the essay's second half, Liska's saloniste Rahel Varnhagen becomes a counterpoint to Israel Bartal's Mendele Moykher Sforim of the previous contribution, each holding dearly to elements of the past while paving entirely new directions in their respective realms of activity.

The image of “Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe” that emerges from the Festschrift is, as one would expect, strongest in the areas in which Ruderman's own work and that of his students has focused. At the heart of this collection and many of its essays are “interconnections among intellectual creativity and the political, social, and technological conditions shaping Jewish life in this era.”Footnote ² Likewise, the volume is heavily weighted towards Italy and western Europe, differing little in this respect from the geographical focus of western-language historiography of early modern Europe in general. The essays by Joseph Hacker, Adam Teller, Sharon Flatto, Rebecca Kobrin, and Israel Bartal, however, suggest how much might be gained by more attention to the rest of the world in the Jewish case, especially given that Jewish population centered, at the time, in Polish lands, an imbalance to which Gershon Hundert, among others, has drawn attention.Footnote ³ Teller's and Kobrin's focus on women's lives and their representations in literature, along with Liska's on two influential women (Varnhagen and Hannah Arendt), also highlight an even more disturbing lacuna, that of gender analysis. Less critically, the transition out of early modernity is more explicitly considered than the one at its beginning. The book, however, is intended to celebrate Ruderman's career, his interests and those of his students, and that it does, felicitously adding meat to the relatively bare bones of Early Modern Jewry. It falls, I would argue, on historians of early modern Jewish history in other geographic expanses, preferring different analytical tools, to take up the challenge posed by these syntheses by constructing their own.

Not all early modernists will agree with that sentiment. Perhaps the most contentious issue following the appearance of Early Modern Jewry has been the question of whether it is at all possible, or desirable, to write an integrated Jewish history of this period. Some contend, instead, that local and regional conditions were so distinct as to render such a synthesis unfeasible, either thematically or methodologically. Yet Jews in the sixteenth, seventeenth, early and perhaps late eighteenth centuries did not themselves question the fundamental fact of their shared identity. They viewed themselves, I would argue, as bound together by a common commitment to what they perceived—despite local and regional variation—as a single legal code, and an understanding that their conduct according to that code, at the individual and communal level, fulfilled God's will for them, His people. This basic truth remains largely unarticulated in recent debates, perhaps because defining Jewish modernity on the basis of ideology has fallen out of fashion, likely owing to the Germano-centric, “top-down” approach of many of its proponents as a defining element in Jewish modernity. Nevertheless, the breakdown of this self-perception remains, in my view, central to our inner conceptions of the arc of Jewish history and the situation in which we find ourselves today. Michael Heyd's posthumously published contribution, “The Collapse of Jacob's Ladders?: A Suggested Perspective on the Problem of Secularization on the Eve of the Enlightenment” offers a possible direction towards writing early modern Jewish history with this in mind, by demonstrating a more nuanced analysis of the way specific “ladders” that had traditionally bound heaven and earth, such as ritual practice, institutional authority, and others—including Halakhah—were themselves undergoing change.

David Ruderman is well known as a facilitator of intellectual networks, a shadkhan (matchmaker) for scholars (as he has been known to say of himself), an individual rightly acclaimed for his exceptional skill and insurmountable enthusiasm in this role. How fitting that he has been honored in a work that portrays the workings of just such intellectual networks as they operated in the Jewish world of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, with forays into periods just before and after. The collected volume in question elegantly celebrates both that early modern world, a world to which Ruderman has drawn abundant attention and for the study of which he has built vital infrastructure, and the intellectual world whose creation he has so ably facilitated in our time.