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Abstract Daniel Ristau
My Ph.D. project looks at the members of three to four generations of a Jewish family and kinship network, the Bondi family, and investigates intra- and extra-familial processes and strategies of networking in the so called "age of emancipation". It focuses on the descendants of the later Saxon court factor Simon Isaac Bondi (1710-1733) who came to Dresden from Prague in the middle of the 18th century. At the beginning of the 19th century, most women and men of the descending familial generations under research spent their lives in Dresden, Mainz and Hamburg/Altona.
The history of the Bondi family sheds some light on the ambivalence and varieties of "Jewish life" in the period under study. I argue that a "success" of embourgeoisement can be assumed over the generations, notwithstanding the religious orientation of the different family branches: for the Bondis who became influenced by religious reform in Dresden just as well as for their kin in Mainz who tried to maintain their traditional (neo-orthodox) religious identity and way of life. This can be explained against the background of different networking strategies. On the one hand, I examine intra- and transgenerational negotiations and codes of interconnectedness, on the other hand I look at generational conflicts and divides.
For this purpose, the analytical concepts of "generation" and "networking"/ "interconnectedness" are combined to challenge the modernist and elitist approaches and "grand narratives" of emancipation still prevalent in research.