EMJH

EMJH stands for Early Modern Jewish History. It is an academic field that analyzes Jewish life, thought, and communities from roughly the 16th through the 18th centuries, situating them between medieval and modern eras. Research covers Europe, North Africa, the Iberian and Ottoman spheres, and the broader Mediterranean world, with attention to both Ashkenazi and Sephardi/Mizrahi communities and to Jewish life within Muslim and Christian polities.

Key topics include religious practice and reform, education, social organization, economic networks, migration, conversion, and interactions with surrounding societies. Scholars explore how Jews navigated legal status, taxation, protection, and communal governance, as well as how Jewish culture—liturgical poetry, scholarship, and printing—developed in this period.

Sources and methods: rabbinic writings, responsa, communal records, letters, travel accounts, court documents, ledgers, printed books, and manuscript archives; languages include Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, Turkish, and others. Methodologies combine philology, archival research, prosopography, and digital humanities, including databases and manuscript digitization.

Scholarship in EMJH often employs comparative, transregional approaches, linking Iberian, Ottoman, Central and Eastern European contexts to reveal broader patterns of Jewish life. Debates address modernization and continuity, minority rights, religious authority, gender and family, and the experience of diaspora communities within evolving state structures.

EMJH is an interdisciplinary field within Jewish studies, European and Middle Eastern history, and the history of the book. It continues to grow through regional studies, gender history, and cross-cultural analyses, contributing to broader understandings of early modern global history.