The Ottoman Origins of the Hasidic Kaftan

Elena Solomon

doi:10.31261/IR.2024.12.06

Published: 2024-06-25

No. 1(12) (2024)

The Ottoman Origins of the Hasidic Kaftan

Elena Solomon

Section: Articles

https://doi.org/10.31261/IR.2024.12.06

Abstract

Scholar Cornelia Aust analyzes the historical connection between the Jewish kaftan and the Polish aristocracy during the 17th and 18th centuries. This article expands on her work to illuminate the significant influence of the Ottoman Empire on Polish Sarmatian and, subsequently, Jewish fashion. The research will trace the slow provenance of the Hasidic kaftan, showing first the Polish Jewry’s adoption of aristocratic dress, then the Polish aristocracy’s imitation of Ottoman fashion a century earlier. This paper will subsequently examine Ottoman dress from the 15th and 16th centuries to show its original forms and stability over this period. Contemporary images and 19th century lithographs of Polish and Jewish kaftans will be compared with painted portraits from Istanbul in 1618. As Aust shrewdly describes eastern European Jewish fashion as “out of time;” this article shows Jewish dress as additionally “out of place.”

Keywords:

Hasidic , Jewish dress , Jewish history , kaftan , Ottoman Empire , Polish żupan

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Solomon, Elena. 2024. “The Ottoman Origins of the Hasidic Kaftan”. Iudaica Russica, no. 1(12) (June):1-21. https://doi.org/10.31261/IR.2024.12.06.

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No. 1(12) (2024)
Published: 2024-06-28

ISSN: 2657-4861

eISSN: 2657-8352

10.31261/IR

Publisher

Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego | University of Silesia Press

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