Expressing Emotion within pre-Emancipation German Jewry: The Family Correspondence of Rabbi Mayer Bretzfeld, 1785–1820

Mayer Bretzfeld, who died in 1823 in Schnaittach near Nuremberg, was the last incumbent of the oldest provincial rabbinate in Bavaria. The recent edition of a trove of family letters from his estate, discovered in the local archives, makes it possible to recover the experiences and writing habits of non-elite Jews from a rural environment in which premodern patterns of education, economy, gender relations, and Western Yiddish language had largely remained intact. This article focuses on the registers of emotional self-expression that men and women mobilized to convince the rabbi of their respect, indignation, love, or distress.