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1. Basis and definitionWithout a state of their own since antiquity, Jews in early modern Europe were the largest and most important religious and ethnic minority. Starting in Asia Minor, their areas of settlement stretched west and north through the North African and European Mediterranean region to Western, Central, and Eastern Europe, south as far as Yemen and Ethiopia, and east through Iraq and Persia as far as India, which they had already reached in the high Middle Ages. Jews also arrived on …

1. Primacy of Jewish jurisdictionEver since antiquity, the administration of justice according to the tenets of Judaic law has been considered an essential component of Jewish religio-cultural practice (Judaism). Jewish jurisdiction and Jewish law are crucial to an understanding of Jewish history, since Jewish law covered all areas of life, not just the categories of  issur ve-hetter (Hebr. “ritually prohibited and permitted”), but also the extensive area of  dine mammonot (Hebr. “financial matters”), which can only inadequately be translated as “ritual law” an…

1. European societies 1.1. General remarksThe term “marriage” denotes a lasting relationship between a man and a woman that derives its legitimacy from a religious or state ordinance. As a social institution, it is fundamental to the preservation of gender distinctions (see Gender; Gender roles) in society and of the social and symbolic order that goes along with these. The conventional, religious, and civil-rights ordinances connected with marriage (Matrimonial law) regulate and control the relation…

1. General 1.1. OverviewThe term emancipation, which exists in all European languages, comes from Roman private law (Latin emancipatio), and originally meant release from the patria potestas (Parental rights and obligations). The concept had an extraordinary career from the dawn of the early modern period, though the original family law sense survived in jurisdiction long into the 19th century in Europe. While outside legal usage it initially had an overtone of moral egoism, it increasingly became a subject of reflection…

1. Definition The earliest use of the term  ghetto dates from the 16th century, when the Jews of Venice were forced in 1516 to move into the Ghetto Nuovo, a foundry distict (Ital.  gettare, “cast”) [8. 23 f.]. Until the early 19th century, the Italian term was apparently limited to the Italian Peninsula, but outside Italy it also  de facto denoted a separate, compulsorily isolated neighborhood outside of which Jews were not allowed to live. Conversely, though, not every neighborhood inhabited primarily by Jews (Jewish society) can be called a ghetto,…