Armer Adel in Preussen 1770–1830 By Chelion Begass. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2020. Pp. 457. Cloth €99.90. ISBN: 978-3428156528.

Abstract

Mediterranean. It can be considered a major contribution of Teller’s book to uncover this testimony of generosity and solidarity between the two ethnic minority groups. Too many historians have considered them mostly oblivious if not antagonistic towards each other’s fates, overlooking these important interactions that helped create a transregional and transethnic sense of Jewish belonging. Teller follows several professional emissaries who were sent from Istanbul throughout the European mainland to raise funds for ransoms, elegantly providing the reader with a topography of charity networks through their travel itinerary. Almost always the emissaries’ way led through northern Italy, where Venice was the major clearing center. From there, they continued through the urban centers of the Holy Roman Empire, eastern France, up to Amsterdam. Throughout parts I and III of this book, Teller adds nuance and detail to the refugee migration to the West, for which we have better source transmission. He argues that Polish Jewish refugees received a rather harsh welcome and little support in traditional Ashkenazi communities like Frankfurt, in comparison to centers with mixed Jewish populations like Hamburg, Amsterdam, and Vienna. While Teller sees the causes for this in the “narcissism of small differences” à la Freud, there would be more to argue for the precarious and micromanaged Christian surroundings in which Ashkenazi urban communities lived. In combination with their ongoing welfare efforts for the masses of local vagrant poor, it left them little room to maneuver. What Teller convincingly argues, though, is that the Polish refugee crisis created a pattern of difficult reception of East European Jewish refugees in the West that would repeat itself in future centuries and set in motion a process of stigmatization and Othering of East European Jews in the Ashkenazi world. Teller’s book is recommended reading for Central European historians who might not have been aware of the profound Jewish refugee crisis that unfolded and was successfully overcome by concerted Jewish efforts throughout Europe and the Mediterranean in the seventeenth century. The parallels that can be drawn to other forced ethnic refugee migrations, to trauma-coping practices within refugee communities, and to the need for philanthropic collaboration through transregional communal infrastructures could not be timelier for our understanding of the continuities of the seventeenth century as well as our own time.