Jewish Communities in Central Europe in the Sixteenth Century

Jewish life in sixteenth-century central Europe (Germany, Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, and northern Italy) could be complex. Jewish settlements were often thin and widely dispersed and in many cases unstable because of various internal and external conditions. Jews lived within a web of nonJewish authorities that sometimes overlapped and other times conflicted. A remarkably rich range of Jewish ethnicities and religious customs, as well as intra-communal relations, further complicated notions of Jewish community.