Evasion as a Legal Tactic: The 1616 Amsterdam Regulations Concerning the Jews
Early modern rulers (or ruling bodies) who chose to readmit Jews in places where they had long been banned were faced with theological dilemmas and practical problems. Although it is true that the principle of freedom of conscience was gaining increasing acceptance, its adherents were rarely clear about whether it could be applied to non-Christians. And while the economic interests of rulers favored the settlement of Jews in their lands, the opposition of guilds and clergy could not be ignored. In these circumstances, a rather striking policy of evasion was adopted in France, in the Netherlands, and in England. The legal status of the Jews remained formally unclear, while in practice Jews were allowed to establish themselves with unprecedented rights. To illustrate this legal tactic, I will present the Amsterdam Regulations of 1616 concerning the Jews a rather meager document which constituted the legal basis for Jewish settlement in that city for nearly two centuries. This presentation is for the following text(s): The Regulations for the Jews of Amsterdam (1616)
Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam.
Acknowledgements Preface 1. Introduction 2. The Forging of a Community: Early Years in Amsterdam 3. The Dutch Context: Working Out a Modus Vivendi 4. Iberian Memory and Its Perpetuation 5. The Rejudaisation of the Nation 6. Maintaining "the Nation" in Exile Conclusion Personalia Abbreviations Notes Bibliography Index
Work, Status, and Income: Men in the American Occupational Structure since the Late Nineteenth Century
The historical record rarely presents researchers with precisely the evidence they desire. This is particularly true for social historians and like-minded scholars, whose subjects left precious few signs of their passing. Consequently, certain data have borne a disproportionate evidentiary load in social-historical research. The occupation a person pursued is one key piece of information on which scholars have come to depend. Our understanding of the historical social structure and where people fit into it is bound up with the interpretation of occupations. But this reliance on occupation as the primary social locator in historical research depends on some largely unexamined premises. Whether scholars group occupations or convert them into numerical status measures, they make assumptions about the nature of the occupational structure. When researchers incorporate change over time into their analyses, they suggest that the meaning of occupations remained stable for the purpose of measuring social mobility, class position, or group status-attainment. This assumption has been the subject of little discussion and even less research. For all the use to which historians have put occupation, there has been little effort to assess systematically its stability as a social or economic indicator.