Christian Images and Their Jewish Desecrators

Christian Images and Their Jewish Desecrators PDF Author: Katherine Aron-Beller
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512824119
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 441

Get Book

Book Description
In Christian Images and Their Jewish Desecrators, historian Katherine Aron-Beller analyzes the common Christian charge that Jews habitually and compulsively violated Christian images, identifying this allegation as one that functioned alongside other anti-Jewish allegations such as ritual murder, blood libel, and host desecration to ultimately inform dangerous and long-lasting prejudices in medieval and early modern Europe. Through an analysis of folk tales, myths, legal proceedings, and religious art, Aron-Beller finds that narratives alleging that Jews committed violence against images of Christ, Mary, and the disciples flourished in Europe between the fifth and seventeenth centuries. She then explores how these narratives manifested differently across the continent and the centuries, finding that their potency reflected not Jewish actions per se, but Christians’ own concerns about slipping into idolatry when viewing depictions of religious figures. In addition, Aron-Beller considers Jews’ own attitudes toward Christian imagery and the ways in which they responded to and rejected—or embraced—such allegations. By examining how desecration allegations affected Jewish individuals and communities spanning Byzantium, medieval England, France, Germany, and early modern Spain and Italy, Aron-Beller demonstrates that this charge was a powerful expression of the Christian majority’s anxiety around committing idolatry and their eagerness to participate in practices of veneration that revolved around visual images—an anxiety that evolved through the centuries and persists to this day.

Christian Images and Their Jewish Desecrators

Christian Images and Their Jewish Desecrators PDF Author: Katherine Aron-Beller
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512824119
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 441

Get Book

Book Description
In Christian Images and Their Jewish Desecrators, historian Katherine Aron-Beller analyzes the common Christian charge that Jews habitually and compulsively violated Christian images, identifying this allegation as one that functioned alongside other anti-Jewish allegations such as ritual murder, blood libel, and host desecration to ultimately inform dangerous and long-lasting prejudices in medieval and early modern Europe. Through an analysis of folk tales, myths, legal proceedings, and religious art, Aron-Beller finds that narratives alleging that Jews committed violence against images of Christ, Mary, and the disciples flourished in Europe between the fifth and seventeenth centuries. She then explores how these narratives manifested differently across the continent and the centuries, finding that their potency reflected not Jewish actions per se, but Christians’ own concerns about slipping into idolatry when viewing depictions of religious figures. In addition, Aron-Beller considers Jews’ own attitudes toward Christian imagery and the ways in which they responded to and rejected—or embraced—such allegations. By examining how desecration allegations affected Jewish individuals and communities spanning Byzantium, medieval England, France, Germany, and early modern Spain and Italy, Aron-Beller demonstrates that this charge was a powerful expression of the Christian majority’s anxiety around committing idolatry and their eagerness to participate in practices of veneration that revolved around visual images—an anxiety that evolved through the centuries and persists to this day.

Incorruptible Bodies

Incorruptible Bodies PDF Author: Yonatan Moss
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520289994
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Get Book

Book Description
"Incorruptible Bodies examines a fateful theological controversy that raged in the eastern Roman empire in the early sixth-century. The controversy, whose main participants were the anti-Chalcedonian leaders Severus of Antioch and Julian of Halicarnassus, centered on whether or not Jesus' body was corruptible prior to its resurrection from the dead. Viewing the controversy in light of late antiquity's multiple images of the 'body of Christ,' Yonatan Moss reveals the underlying political, ritual, and cultural stakes of this debate and its long-lasting effects"--Provided by publishe

Images of Intolerance

Images of Intolerance PDF Author: Sara Lipton
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520921580
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Get Book

Book Description
Around the year 1225, an illuminated Bible was made for the king of France. That work and a companion volume, the two earliest surviving manuscripts of the Bible moralisée, are remarkable in a number of ways: they are massive in scope; they combine text and image to an unprecedented extent; and their illustrations, almost unique among medieval images in depicting contemporary figures and situations, comprise a vehement visual polemic against the Jews. In Images of Intolerance, Sara Lipton offers a nuanced and insightful reading of these extraordinary sources. Lipton investigates representations of Jews' economic activities, the depiction of Jews' scriptures in relation to Christian learning, the alleged association of Jews with heretics and other malefactors in Christian society, and their position in Christian eschatology. Jews are portrayed as threatening the purity of the Body of Christ, the integrity of the text of scripture, the faith, mores, and study habits of students, and the spiritual health of Christendom itself. Most interesting, however, is that the menacing themes in the Bible moralisée are represented in text and images as aspects of Jewish "perfidy" that are rampant among Christians as well. This innovative interdisciplinary study brings new understanding to the nature and development of social intolerance, and to the role art can play in that development.

Interfaith Relationships and Perceptions of the Other in the Medieval Mediterranean

Interfaith Relationships and Perceptions of the Other in the Medieval Mediterranean PDF Author: Sarah Davis-Secord
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030839974
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 387

Get Book

Book Description
This book is a collaborative contribution that expands our understanding of how interfaith relations, both real and imagined, developed across medieval Iberia and the Mediterranean. The volume pays homage to the late Olivia Remie Constable’s scholarship and presents innovative, thought-provoking, interdisciplinary investigations of cross-cultural exchange, ranging widely across time and geography. Divided into two parts, “Perceptions of the ‘Other’” and “Interfaith relations,” this volume features scholars engaging with church art, literature, historiography, scientific treatises, and polemics, in order to study how the religious “Other” was depicted to serve different purposes and audiences. There are also microhistories that examine the experiences of individual families, classes, and communities as they interacted with one another in their own specific contexts. Several of these studies draw their source material from church and state archives as well as jurisprudential texts, and span the centuries from the late medieval to early modern periods.

The Fathers Refounded

The Fathers Refounded PDF Author: Elizabeth A. Clark
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812295625
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 449

Get Book

Book Description
In the early twentieth century, a new generation of liberal professors sought to prove Christianity's compatibility with contemporary currents in the study of philosophy, science, history, and democracy. These modernizing professors—Arthur Cushman McGiffert at Union Theological Seminary, George LaPiana at Harvard Divinity School, and Shirley Jackson Case at the University of Chicago Divinity School—hoped to equip their students with a revisionary version of early Christianity that was embedded in its social, historical, and intellectual settings. In The Fathers Refounded, Elizabeth A. Clark provides the first critical analysis of these figures' lives, scholarship, and lasting contributions to the study of Christianity. The Fathers Refounded continues the exploration of Christian intellectual revision begun by Clark in Founding the Fathers: Early Church History and Protestant Professors in Nineteenth-Century America. Drawing on rigorous archival research, Clark takes the reader through the professors' published writings, their institutions, and even their classrooms—where McGiffert tailored nineteenth-century German Protestant theology to his modernist philosophies; where LaPiana, the first Catholic professor at Harvard Divinity School, devised his modernism against the tight constraints of contemporary Catholic theology; and where Case promoted reading Christianity through social-scientific aims and methods. Each, in his own way, extricated his subfield from denominationally and theologically oriented approaches and aligned it with secular historical methodologies. In so doing, this generation of scholars fundamentally altered the directions of Catholic Modernism and Protestant Liberalism and offered the promise of reconciling Christianity and modern intellectual and social culture.

Jewish Images in the Christian Church

Jewish Images in the Christian Church PDF Author: Henry N. Claman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book

Book Description
"Beginning in the Third Century with frescoes in the catacombs of Rome, public art began to illustrate the doctrine of supersessionism. This analysis of a millennium of Christian art outlines the path by which Christians reinterpreted the Hebrew Scriptures to prove they foretold the ascendancy of Christianity. Starting with a solid introduction to the origins of Christianity and the beginnings of Christian art in the catacombs of Rome, Henry Claman skillfully demonstrates the development of the anti-Jewish message of Christian art. The study culminates with analyses of the majestic cathedral at Chartres, the public burning of the Talmud in Paris in 1248, and the expulsion of the Jews from France and England."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

A Spirit of Revitalization

A Spirit of Revitalization PDF Author: Associate Researcher Kyama M Mugambi
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781481313551
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Get Book

Book Description
Perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, Africa has generated unique expressions of Christianity that have, in their rapid development, overtaken older forms of Christianity represented by historic missionary efforts. Similarly, African Christianity has largely displayed its rootedness in its social and cultural context. The story of Pentecostal movements in urban Kenya captures both remarkable trends. Individual accounts of churches and their leaders shed light on rich and diverse commonalities among generations of Kenya's Christian communities. Exploring the movements' religious visions in urban Africa, A Spirit of Revitalization: Urban Pentecostalism in Kenya highlights antecedent movements set against their historical, social, economic, and political contexts. Kyama Mugambi examines how, in their translation of the Gospel, innovative leaders synthesized new expressions of faith from elements of their historical and contemporary contexts. The sum of their experiences historically charts the remarkable journey of innovation, curation, and revision that attends to the process of translation and conversion in Christian history. While outlining a century of successive renewal movements in Kenya between 1920 and 2020, the study also delves into features of recent urban Pentecostal churches. Readers will find a thorough historical treatment of themes such as church structures, corporate vision, Christian formation, and theological education. The longitudinal and comparative analysis shows how these Pentecostal approaches to orality, kinship, and integrated spirituality inform Kenyans' reimagination of Christianity. --Emma Wild-Wood, Senior Lecturer in African Christianity and African Indigenous Religions and Director of Postgraduate Studies, University of Edinburgh

Luther and the Jews

Luther and the Jews PDF Author: Richard S. Harvey
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1498245005
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 130

Get Book

Book Description
Luther and the Jews: Putting Right the Lies is a timely and important contribution to the debate about the legacy of the Protestant Reformation. It brings together two topics that sit uncomfortably: the life, ministry, and impact of Martin Luther, and the history of Jewish-Christian relations to which he made a profoundly negative contribution. As a Messianic Jew, Richard Harvey considers Luther and his legacy today, and explains how Messianic Jews have a vital role to play in the much-needed reconciliation not only between Protestants and Catholics, but also between Christians and Jews, in order for Luther's vision of the renewal and restoration of the church to be realized.

Judaism and Christian Art

Judaism and Christian Art PDF Author: Herbert L. Kessler
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812208366
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 456

Get Book

Book Description
Christian cultures across the centuries have invoked Judaism in order to debate, represent, and contain the dangers presented by the sensual nature of art. By engaging Judaism, both real and imagined, they explored and expanded the perils and possibilities for Christian representation of the material world. The thirteen essays in Judaism and Christian Art reveal that Christian art has always defined itself through the figures of Judaism that it produces. From its beginnings, Christianity confronted a host of questions about visual representation. Should Christians make art, or does attention to the beautiful works of human hands constitute a misplaced emphasis on the things of this world or, worse, a form of idolatry ("Thou shalt make no graven image")? And if art is allowed, upon what styles, motifs, and symbols should it draw? Christian artists, theologians, and philosophers answered these questions and many others by thinking about and representing the relationship of Christianity to Judaism. This volume is the first dedicated to the long history, from the catacombs to colonialism but with special emphasis on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, of the ways in which Christian art deployed cohorts of "Jews"—more figurative than real—in order to conquer, defend, and explore its own territory.

Building on the Ruins of the Temple

Building on the Ruins of the Temple PDF Author: Adam Gregerman
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
ISBN: 9783161543227
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Get Book

Book Description
In the immediate centuries after the Romans' destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple in 70 CE, Jews and Christians offered contrasting religious explanations for the razing of the locus of God's presence on earth. Adam Gregerman analyzes the views found in three early Christian texts (Justin's Dialogue with Trypho, Origen's Contra Celsum, and Eusebius' Proof of the Gospel) and one rabbinic text (the Midrash on Lamentations), all of which emerged in the same place--the land of Israel--and around the same time--the first few centuries after 70. The author explores the ways they interpret the destruction in order to prove (in the case of Christians), or make it impossible to disprove (in the case of the Jews) that their community is the people of God. He demonstrates the apologetic and polemical functions of selected explanations, for claims to the covenant made by one community excluded those made by the other.