Studia Rosenthaliana - Volume 49, Issue 2, 2023

Abstract As some historians have noted, already in the 1770s a significant group within the Ashkenazi community in Amsterdam had forsaken the benches of the study house and the synagogue and abandoned traditional Jewish clothing in favor of the temptations of the leisure culture of the big city: theaters, dance parties, taverns, reading modern novels, and wearing the finest of European fashion. At the same time, they ha Read More

Abstract This article examines the final seventy years of street trade in Jewish Amsterdam, from 1880 to the 1930s. It highlights the long-standing struggle of Amsterdam city officials to get a grip on an elusive phenomenon that was inextricably linked to public life for centuries, but increasingly clashed with the demands of modernity: ever since the Jewish street riots against the removal of peddlers in 1880, the social and admini Read More

Abstract This article studies the rise of Jewish urban history and argues for a diasporic reading of Jewish urban cultures that addresses three lenses: location, bilocation, and dislocation. The eighteenth-century history of Amsterdam Ashkenazim serves as a prime case study for analysing diasporic bilocation and the formation and growth of a local Amsterdam Jewish identity. Spatial practices demonstrate how Jews and non-Jews mix Read More