Jewish History in a New Key

Elliott Horowitz first entered Davis's life with his characteristic brilliance and brio at the 1980 meeting of the Association of Jewish Studies. Together with Mark Cohen, Theodore Rabb, they were presenting their Princeton course on the Jews in Early Modern Europe, into which they had introduced topics from the new social history within a comparative European perspective. A distinguished elder scholar from Jerusalem rose from the audience to state that the course disfigured Jewish history and, eyeing her, that the field did not need contributions from outsiders. Whereupon a student from the Yale doctoral program came forward and defended their course as the wave of the future. Horowitz saved the day for them, as many of the younger listeners took copies of their syllabus. Over the decades since then, Horowitz helped shape that future through his pioneering contributions to Jewish history and historiography and, thereby, to European history more generally. Often in correspondence with each other, they shared several thematic interests: youth as a stage of life; rituals that mark the end of life; the social dimension of liturgical piety; gender styles and the character of religious violence and its relation to the carnivalesque.