Abstract The evolving political status of the Jews of Moravia offers a fascinating case that helps see the changing role of law in the machinery of political change in the Habsburg Monarchy in the 17 th and 18 th centuries. This paper traces the peculiar history of Moraviaʼs Jewish communities from local communities, to supracommunal organization (vaʼad ha-medina), to the intent of absorption into the state. After tracing the legal foundations of communities in general and their function in early modern state-formation I will explore, how the Moravian Jewish communities contributed to this process. The underlying hypothesis being that corporate Jewish communities in Moravia competed with other societal groups (nobility and royal towns) in the complex process of state-formation in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Habsburg Monarchy. In the core of the paper, I will compare two corpora of law – the Shai Takkanot , the »autonomous« constitution of Moravian Jewry since 1650, and Maria Theresaʼs General-, Policey-, Process- und Commercialordnung for the Jewry in the Margravate of Moravia from 1754 – and try to place them on the continuum between communal self-government and state-imposed law making.
Louise Hecht (Thu,) studied this question.