[.ca] The Port Jews of Habsburg Trieste: Absolutist Politics ... (ISBN 0804733201)

Winner of the 2000 Barbara Jelavich Book Prize:
CITATION FOR BARBARA JELAVICH BOOK PRIZE for an outstanding monograph on Southeast European or Habsburg studies since 1600 or 19th- and 20th-century Ottoman or Russian diplomatic history funded by Charles Jelavich awarded by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) The Selection Committee unanimously award the 2000 Barbara Jelavich Prize to Lois C. Dubin for her outstanding The Port Jews of Habsburg Trieste: Absolutist Politics and Enlightenment Culture published by the Stanford University Press. Dr. Dubin has produced a fascinating and beautifully written study about the Jewish community in Trieste, a community especially invited thither by the Habsburg government to stimulate trade in that city. Dr. Dubin presents the development of Trieste from a minor town to a major emporium. In doing so, she shows herself to be equally at home with the Jewish community (drawn from Jewish families from different areas and different backgrounds), with Habsburg matters (whether the court and its policy or cultural issues \oincluding Central-European Jewish culture and state policy toward the Jews and trade\c) and Italian urban culture. Her study is based on an extraordinarily rich Bibliography with documents and scholarship not only in Italian and German, but also in Hebrew, not to speak of the other European languages. This work tells a fascinating story, many of whose facets are tied to the contacts between the Jewish world and the modernizing Habsburg state. She draws the reader into all the issues she treats. The work is a pleasure to read and will fascinate scholars and general readers of history, even those with no particular interest in the area with which she is dealing. (The award was presented on November 11, 2000 at the AAASS 32nd National Convention in Denver, Colorado).