What Clothes Make a Jew? Perception and Self-Perception through the Lens of Jewish Sumptuary Laws

While distinctive marks for Jews dictated by the authorities were to make Jews recognizable, Jewish authorities in early modern Europe were likewise concerned with Jews’ outward appearance and their distinguishability from Christian neighbors. In central Europe, traditional regulations regarding the religious permissibility of dress (like the law of shatnez) were joined by increasingly extensive sumptuary laws issued by Jewish communities from the seventeenth century onward. Part of these sumptuary laws dealt with dress and the permissibility of fabrics, embellishments, jewelry, and dress styles. These dress regulations have received some attention in historiography, mostly as normative sources of Jewish communal legislation. They are mostly perceived as means to prevent extensive spending and Christian envy. If viewed in the light of comparable general dress regulations of the period, they were much more: a means to create social order and to foster particular identities.

This paper discusses what these dress regulations meant in terms of social and gender divisions within Jewish communities and how they contributed to the negotiation and formation of Jewish identity and self-perception in early modern central Europe. The paper focuses on the sumptuary laws from the Jewish communities in Frankfurt am Main and Fürth, both of which were published with annotations by Christian contemporaries, Johann Jacob Schudt and Andreas Würfel. Their publications, thus, provide us some inside into the perception of Jewish dress and Jewish distinctiveness by Christians. Thus, the paper sheds new light on the intersections, differences and overlapping of the perception and self-perception of early modern Jews.