Fractality and the Dynamics of Jewish Existence in the Southern Parts of the Holy Roman Empire during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

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Although research on German-Jewish history during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been intensified during the past two decades, central characteristics of Jewish existence in the Holy Roman Empire have not yet been sufficiently explained. This pertains to (1) the remarkably high density of Jewish settlement in regions marked by small-scale, fluid, and “open” structures of territorial government; (2) the complex linkages between Jews’ status of protection on the local, territorial, and imperial level within this region; (3) the contradictions and ambivalences of Jewish-Christian local coexistence, which reveal social practices of segregation and interaction similar to those in confessionally mixed societies, but show marked differences as well. The project aims to offer the first comprehensive attempt at explaining the traditions of Jewish settlement in certain regions of the Holy Roman Empire and link these specific spatial patterns to the social practices of Jewish historical actors. The basic assumption is that complex political and administrative arrangements on the territorial level interacted with the resulting multi-layered patterns of Jewish protection and with the Jewish minority’s highly dynamic social practices, which are particularly evident in the emergence of highly effective networks among the Jewish elite. In conceptual terms, the project takes up the mathematical model of the Fractal, which Falk Bretschneider and Christophe Duhamelle have recently introduced into the field of imperial history and which focuses on the links between social logics of action and spatial logics within complex, multi-layered structures. The project focuses on the questions (1) how the obvious preference of Jews for these regions can be explained; (2) how Jewish actors positioned their networks within them; and (3) how their actions helped to shape the particular logics of these spaces. Moreover, the model of Fractality emphasizes the basic relevance of borders and boundaries within fractal structures and thus opens up perspectives for systematically explaining the practices of establishing and transgressing religious boundaries, which were characteristic for Jewish-Christian coexistence. To provide a solid empirical base for this project, three case studies will be used to systematically compare three different territorial spaces which offered protection to Jews: the condominium of Fürth, in which three territorial powers shared rights of jurisdiction; the dominion of Mitwitz, which was ruled by a family of imperial knights; and the Franconian territories of the Teutonic Order (Ballei Franken, Meistertum Mergentheim). The results of these three case studies will be published in monographic form as dissertations. Beyond that, the collected prosopographical data will be linked in an online database in order to reveal the networks of Jewish elites and make the data available to subsequent researchers.