Departmental Papers (History)

Welcome to the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Over thirty historians in the standing faculty with a broad range of research specialties advance our understanding of the past. Penn's graduate program trains the next generation of scholars and teachers. The Department's strong commitment to undergraduate education can be seen in the prominence of the history major, one of the largest on campus, in the numerous teaching awards earned by both standing faculty and graduate students, and history's strong presence in general education. History faculty direct and participate in many interdisciplinary centers on the Penn campus, and edit a number of scholarly journals.

 

 

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  • Publication
    El Viejo Monarca y Los Nuevos Favoritos: Los Discursos Sobre La Privanza en El Reinado de Felipe II / The old Monarch and the new Favorites: Discourses on the Privanza During Philip II's Reign
    (1997) Feros, Antonio
    RESUMEN: Durante el reinado de Felipe II, y especialmente desde comienzos de la década de 1580, se desarrollan una serie de iniciativas por parte del monarca que supondrían la aparición no sólo de nuevas prácticas políticas, sino también la introducción de cambios importantes en los discursos políticos dominantes. Estas iniciativas políticas promovidas durante los últimos años del reinado de Felipe II fueron en parte inspirados por el llamado "nuevo humanismo", el cual asociado a las teorías de la "razón de estado" tenía como punto central de su discurso la necesidad de promover la capacidad de acción independiente de la monarquía, frente a los obstáculos legales y administrativos impuestos por otros miembros del cuerpo político —consejos reales y Cortes—. Algunas de estas iniciativas políticas se basaban en experiencias anteriores (la creación de Juntas, por ejemplo) pero otras eran decididamente nuevas, como lo era el intento de evitar la presencia de facciones cortesanas enfrentadas. Elemento central en este proceso fue la creciente participación en la gobernación cotidiana de la monarquía de los llamados "favoritos del rey", quienes promovieron las teorías y prácticas políticas definidas con anterioridad. Del mismo modo, con la presencia de estos "nuevos favoritos" se inició el desarrollo de un discurso en el cual los favoritos reales aparecían representados como "ministros" del monarca, un discurso que sería plenamente desarrollado en las primeras décadas del siglo XVII bajo las privanzas del Duque de Lerma y el Conde Duque de Olivares. ABSTRACT: During the 1580s and 1590s, Philip II and his close counselors implemented political initiatives which resulted in important changes in the royalist political discourse and in the ways in which politics were conducted. These changes were in part inspired by the political philosophy of reason of state, promoted by the "new humanists", whose central political premise was the need to consolidate and expand the monarchy's right for independent action free of the legal and administrative constrains imposed by other members of the body politic, e.g. royal councils and Cortes. Although Philip II continued to advance initiatives began in the early years of his reign (such as the creation of committees ad hoc, or Juntas), towards the end of his rule he undertook others that were radically new (such as Philip's attempts to avoid the division of the court into conflicting factions). Throughout this period the king's favorites also played an increasing role in the everyday ruling of the monarchy. The merging of what contemporaries believed was a new type of royal favorite encouraged the surge of a political discourse portraying the favorite as the king's minister, and later as the king's principal minister. These developments led to a theoretical revolution which culminated during the first decades of the seventeenth century under the "privanzas" of Lerma and Olivares.
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  • Publication
    The 12 Covenants of Pinchas Hurwitz: How an 18th-Century Eastern European Kabbalist Jew Produced One of the First Hebrew Bestsellers
    (2016-10-13) Ruderman, David B
    The Book of the Covenant (Sefer ha-Brit) was one of the most popular Hebrew books read by modern Jews, as reflected in 40 editions spanning two centuries, including three Yiddish and six Latino translations. Part scientific encyclopedia, part manual of mystical ascent, and part plea to Jews to embrace a universal ethics, the work was widely influential in an era of radical change and internal debate for Jews as well as for others. The amazing popularity of the author, the Eastern European Jew Pinchas Hurwitz (1765-1821), stemmed from his kabbalistic pedigree. He offered his readers an exciting compendium of scientific knowledge they could read in their holy language under the pretext that its acquisition fulfilled their highest spiritual goals.
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    Tragedy and Transcendence: The Meaning of 1492 for Jewish History
    (1992) Ruderman, David B
    This year we commemorate the five hundredth anniversary of a tragic expulsion. Our history is replete with tragic moments, but this moment is of enormous significance for Jewish as well as for Christian and Moslem history. For Jews, 1492 constituted the abrupt end of an extraordinary cultural experience, a formative and repercussive period in the life of our people affecting every area of its civilization: Halakha, philosophy, kabbalah, poetry, ethical literature, messianism, political thought, and more.2 A world of enormous vitality and effervescence, a world, both in its high and low points, that can teach us a great deal about the nature of our faith and community, about our interaction with others, in short, about ourselves.
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    Review of Robert Bonfil, The Rabbinate in Renaissance Italy
    (1980) Ruderman, David B
    At least since the publication of Shlomo Simonsohn's comprehensive study of Mantuan Jewry, Italian Jewish history has emerged as a significant scholarly field for a growing number of researchers in Israel and abroad. Their numerous publications have considerably supplemented and refined the earlier attempts by Cecil Roth, Moses Avigdor Shulvass, Israel Zinberg and Attlilio Milano to chart the course of Italian Jewish history in the Renaissance period and before. They have also revealed all too glaringly the inadequacies of the edifice the earlier researchers had constructed. When Shulvass and Roth, in particular, wrote their popular surveys of Jewish life in the Renaissance, neither had sufficiently utilized the voluminous archival and manuscript resources now more readily available some twenty years later; nor did either of their works deeply penetrate the larger Christian cultural and social context of Jewish life on Italian soil.
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    Three Anglo-Jewish Portraits and Their Legacy for Today: Moses Marcus, the Convert; Abraham Tang, the Radical Maskil; David Levi, the Defender of Judaism
    (2007-01-01) Ruderman, David B
    My fascination with Anglo-Jewish history emerged by chance, but has been profound enough for me to write two books on the subject. My appreciation of the richness, diversity and significance of the history of Jewish cultural history on English soil continues to grow and deepen. There is a long tradition of Jewish historical writing, exemplified by the work of the Jewish Historical Society of England. But modern historians have barely begun to take pre-twentieth century Anglo-Jewish history seriously. The drama of modernity seems still to be regarded as a German story, beginning with Mendelssohn and continuing into Eastern Europe. Historians such as Todd Engelman and David Katz have made major contributions to our subject, but in so doing have sometimes revealed their own biases.
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    Review of Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, Apogee of Empire: Spain and New Spain in the Age of Charles III,1759–1789
    (2006-03-01) Feros, Antonio
    Although most eighteenth-century Europeans still considered Spain to be one of the most powerful polities on the continent, by the time Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations (1776), views about Spain and its empire, then headed by Charles III, seemed to have become unconditionally negative. Despite the size of its population, its terri-tories and the silver mines under Spanish jurisdiction, and its monopoly over the commercial trade with its American colonies, Smith and his contemporaries viewed Spain as one of the poorest nations in Europe. Spain’s economic backwardness was inevitably linked to its rather traditional political system. Smith, for example, believed that Spain remained a quasi-feudal state and that its colonies were ruled by an “absolute govern-ment . . . arbitrary and violent.” The predicament of the Spanish empire, according to eighteenth-century Europeans, stemmed from what many believed to be the mediocre character of Spain’s rulers and citizens. A nation that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seemed to represent the virtues of a learned, vigorous, and expanding Europe was now seen as culturally deprived and isolated, dominated by religious fanatics, and ruled by second-rate monarchs and self-interested elites. For many decades historians have debated the merits of these views—whether they in fact reflected the political and economic realities of eighteenth-century Spain or whether they were sim-ply a part of the ideological trashing that accompanies all international struggles for world power. The loss of its American colonies in the early nineteenth century, the political instability that characterized Spain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and its inability to industrialize until recent times have seemed to many historians sufficient proof that Smith and his contemporaries were essentially right. This view of Spain in time became the interpretative paradigm used to explain an empire that, despite its power, was never able to “modernize” economically and politically.
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    De Culturele Betekenis van het Getto in de Joodse Geschiedenis
    (2003-01-01) Ruderman, David B
    Bezien vanuit het perspectief van het joodse culturele geheugen wordt de term 'getto' vaak beschouwd als een vies woord.* De joden, die naar verondersteld wordt voor een groot deel van de joodse geschiendenis een gettobestaan leden, raakten pas 'geëmancipeerd' in de moderne tijd en ondanks de vaak negatieve consequenties van hun bevrijding en hun integratie in de westerse seculiere culturen — het virulente antisemitisme en de genocide die volgden — wordt hun geëmancipeerde staat meestal gezien als een zegen vergeleken met het hermetisch afgesloten en vervreemde bestaan van voor hun bevrijding. In het bijzonder voor hedendaagse joden heeft de term 'getto' allerlei negatieve bijklanken. Uitdrukkingen als 'het gettotijdperk', 'gettomentaliteit', 'gettojood' en 'weg van het getto' impliceren allemaal een erg negatief bestaan, een terugval naar een tijd waarin joden legaal en sociaal beteugeld werden en waarin hun cultuur zich karakteriseerde door beperkingen en bekrompenheid, die duideiijk het gevolg van hun afzondering waren. De term 'getto' heeft met de Holocaust een nog negatievere klank gekregen, zoals in de aanduiding 'het getto van Warschau'. Anderen hebben de term gebruikt om te refereren aan alle wijken die dicht bevolkt worden door leden van een minderheidsgroep, zoals de 'Afro-Americans' of 'native Americans', die gedwongen worden onder vreselijke en armzalige imstandigheden te leven als gevolg van sociaal-economische zowel als legale beperkingen.1
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  • Publication
    The Hague Dialogues
    (2012-01-01) Ruderman, David B
    Imagine the following scenario: A young scholar from Vilna, having wandered through several cities in Eastern Europe and Germany arrived in the city of the Hague at the close of the 1780s, enjoyed the material support of the richest family of Jewish merchants in the city, the Boaz family, and sought and gained the religious approval of the rabbi of the city, Judah Leib Mezerich. His name was Pinhas Elijah ben Meir Hurwitz (1765-1821) and he was about to complete the first draft of a manuscript of his soon-to-be published book, an encyclopedia of the sciences entitled Sefer ha-Brit (The Book of the Covenant).1 The young Hurwitz soon learned of the presence of an aging sage who lived in the city, a rigorous philosopher and émigré from Mainz, Naphtali Herz Ulman (1731-87). Ulman had completed a multi-volume philosophic opus of which only the first volume, Hokhmat ha-shorashim [The Science of Roots or First Principles], had been published in 1781.2 Hurwitz was hardly a philosopher in his own right; in fact he had been drawn to the study of the kabbalah. But he did share something in common with Ulman — an appreciation of the life of the mind and particularly a fascination for the natural world and the new sciences, and they were both Ashkenazic Jews with knowledge of the German language.3 It seemed natural that Hurwitz would seek out Ulman and converse with the major intellectual figure of Hague Jewry.