IN PROGRESS
I have two book projects currently in progress. The first one is a book on Jewish-Christian relations and crime in Early Modern Poland tentatively titled "The Politics of Sacrilege: Jews, Christians, and Crime in Early Modern Poland." The book will reexamine the anti-Jewish accusations, especially that of host desecration, and situate them within a broader context of criminality and crime - most specifically that of sacrilege, a legal category of crime at the time. This book will examine the role religiously inspired charges had in the context of the power struggle between the Church and secular authorities. It will also consider the way early modern courts constructed and defined religious boundaries between diverse religious groups, in particular Jews and Christians, while manipulating the concepts of "sacred" and "profane".
The second book will be analysis of a number of early modern Italian editions of a manual for Jewish women, on how to perform "women's commandments." The book will explore the transmission and translation of cultural values from early modern eastern Europe to Italy. The Italian versions of the manual are based on a 1577 popular Yiddish manual Seder mitsvot nashim by Rabbi Benjamin Slonik (recently published in English by Edward Fram. One of the versions, most illustrative of the cultural adaptations and changes, will be translated into English.