Fashioning Jewish Identity in Medieval Western Christendom

Fashioning Jewish Identity in Medieval Western Christendom PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780511121654
Category : Christianity
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
This book studies in detail five twelfth- and thirteenth-century polemicists from southern France and northern Spain. These are the first known Jewish polemicists from western Christendom, who identified their perceptions of major Christian challenges, and the lines of response proposed to fellow Jews who came increasingly under religious pressure.

Fashioning Jewish Identity in Medieval Western Christendom

Fashioning Jewish Identity in Medieval Western Christendom PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780511121654
Category : Christianity
Languages : en
Pages : 379

Get Book

Book Description
This book studies in detail five twelfth- and thirteenth-century polemicists from southern France and northern Spain. These are the first known Jewish polemicists from western Christendom, who identified their perceptions of major Christian challenges, and the lines of response proposed to fellow Jews who came increasingly under religious pressure.

Fashioning Jewish Identity in Medieval Western Christendom

Fashioning Jewish Identity in Medieval Western Christendom PDF Author: Robert Chazan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139441019
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
During the course of the twelfth century, increasing numbers of Jews migrated into dynamically developing western Christendom from Islamic lands. The vitality that attracted them also presented a challenge: Christianity - from early in its history - had proclaimed itself heir to a failed Jewish community and thus the vitality of western Christendom was both appealing and threatening to the Jewish immigrants. Indeed, western Christendom was entering a phase of intense missionising activity, some of which was directed at the long-term Jewish residents of Europe and the Jewish newcomers. This 2003 study examines the techniques of persuasion adopted by the Jewish polemicists in order to reassure their Jewish readers of the truth of Judaism and the error of Christianity. At the very deepest level, these Jewish authors sketched out for their fellow Jews a comparative portrait of Christian and Jewish societies - the former powerful but irrational and morally debased, the latter the weak but reasonable and morally elevated - urging that the obvious and sensible choice was Judaism.

Reassessing Jewish Life in Medieval Europe

Reassessing Jewish Life in Medieval Europe PDF Author: Robert Chazan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139493043
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
This book re-evaluates the prevailing notion that Jews in medieval Christian Europe lived under an appalling regime of ecclesiastical limitation, governmental exploitation and expropriation, and unceasing popular violence. Robert Chazan argues that, while Jewish life in medieval Western Christendom was indeed beset with grave difficulties, it was nevertheless an environment rich in opportunities; the Jews of medieval Europe overcame obstacles, grew in number, explored innovative economic options, and fashioned enduring new forms of Jewish living. His research also provides a reconsideration of the legacy of medieval Jewish life, which is often depicted as equally destructive and projected as the underpinning of the twentieth-century catastrophes of antisemitism and the Holocaust. Dr Chazan's research proves that, although Jewish life in the medieval West laid the foundation for much Jewish suffering in the post-medieval world, it also stimulated considerable Jewish ingenuity, which lies at the root of impressive Jewish successes in the modern West.

The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom

The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom PDF Author: Robert Chazan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521616645
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
A comprehensive synthesis of medieval Jewish history between AD 1000 and 1500.

The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom

The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom PDF Author: Robert Chazan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781139459877
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Between the years AD 1000 and 1500, western Christendom absorbed by conquest and attracted through immigration a growing number of Jews. This community was to make a valuable contribution to rapidly developing European civilisation but was also to suffer some terrible setbacks, culminating in a series of expulsions from the more advanced westerly areas of Europe. At the same time, vigorous new branches of world Jewry emerged and a rich new Jewish cultural legacy was created. In this important historical synthesis, Robert Chazan discusses the Jewish experience over a 500 year period across the entire continent of Europe. As well as being the story of medieval Jewry, the book simultaneously illuminates important aspects of majority life in Europe during this period. This book is essential reading for all students of medieval Jewish history and an important reference for any scholar of medieval Europe.

The Fabric of Religious Life in Medieval Ashkenaz (1000-1300)

The Fabric of Religious Life in Medieval Ashkenaz (1000-1300) PDF Author: Jeffrey R. Woolf
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004300252
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
The Fabric of Religious Life in Medieval Ashkenaz presents the first integrated presentation of the ideals out of which the fabric of Medieval Ashkenazic Judaism and communal world view were formed.

The Jew, the Cathedral and the Medieval City

The Jew, the Cathedral and the Medieval City PDF Author: Nina Rowe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107375851
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
In the thirteenth century, sculptures of Synagoga and Ecclesia - paired female personifications of the Synagogue defeated and the Church triumphant - became a favoured motif on cathedral façades in France and Germany. Throughout the preceding centuries, the Jews of northern Europe prospered financially and intellectually, a trend that ran counter to the long-standing Christian conception of Jews as relics of the prehistory of the Church. In this book, Nina Rowe examines the sculptures as defining elements in the urban Jewish-Christian encounter. She locates the roots of the Synagoga-Ecclesia motif in antiquity and explores the theme's public manifestations at the cathedrals of Reims, Bamberg, and Strasbourg, considering each example in relation to local politics and culture. Ultimately, she demonstrates that royal and ecclesiastical policies to restrain the religious, social, and economic lives of Jews in the early thirteenth century found a material analog in lovely renderings of a downtrodden Synagoga, placed in the public arena of the city square.

Catholic Spectacle and Rome's Jews

Catholic Spectacle and Rome's Jews PDF Author: Emily Michelson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691233411
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
A new investigation that shows how conversionary preaching to Jews was essential to the early modern Catholic Church and the Roman religious landscape Starting in the sixteenth century, Jews in Rome were forced, every Saturday, to attend a hostile sermon aimed at their conversion. Harshly policed, they were made to march en masse toward the sermon and sit through it, all the while scrutinized by local Christians, foreign visitors, and potential converts. In Catholic Spectacle and Rome’s Jews, Emily Michelson demonstrates how this display was vital to the development of early modern Catholicism. Drawing from a trove of overlooked manuscripts, Michelson reconstructs the dynamics of weekly forced preaching in Rome. As the Catholic Church began to embark on worldwide missions, sermons to Jews offered a unique opportunity to define and defend its new triumphalist, global outlook. They became a point of prestige in Rome. The city’s most important organizations invested in maintaining these spectacles, and foreign tourists eagerly attended them. The title of “Preacher to the Jews” could make a man’s career. The presence of Christian spectators, Roman and foreign, was integral to these sermons, and preachers played to the gallery. Conversionary sermons also provided an intellectual veneer to mask ongoing anti-Jewish aggressions. In response, Jews mounted a campaign of resistance, using any means available. Examining the history and content of sermons to Jews over two and a half centuries, Catholic Spectacle and Rome’s Jews argues that conversionary preaching to Jews played a fundamental role in forming early modern Catholic identity.

Modern Judaism and Historical Consciousness

Modern Judaism and Historical Consciousness PDF Author: Andreas Gotzmann
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900415289X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 681

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Book Description
Written by leading authors in their respective fields, this first comprehensive handbook on the relationship between modern Judaism and historical thinking contributes to a differentiated interpretation of Jewish historiography and its interaction with other academic disciplines since the Enlightenment.

Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe

Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe PDF Author: Paola Tartakoff
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812251873
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
A investigation into the thirteenth-century Norwich circumcision case and its meaning for Christians and Jews In 1230, Jews in the English city of Norwich were accused of having seized and circumcised a five-year-old Christian boy named Edward because they "wanted to make him a Jew." Contemporaneous accounts of the "Norwich circumcision case," as it came to be called, recast this episode as an attempted ritual murder. Contextualizing and analyzing accounts of this event and others, with special attention to the roles of children, Paola Tartakoff sheds new light on medieval Christian views of circumcision. She shows that Christian characterizations of Jews as sinister agents of Christian apostasy belonged to the same constellation of anti-Jewish libels as the notorious charge of ritual murder. Drawing on a wide variety of Jewish and Christian sources, Tartakoff investigates the elusive backstory of the Norwich circumcision case and exposes the thirteenth-century resurgence of Christian concerns about formal Christian conversion to Judaism. In the process, she elucidates little-known cases of movement out of Christianity and into Judaism, as well as Christian anxieties about the instability of religious identity. Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe recovers the complexity of medieval Jewish-Christian conversion and reveals the links between religious conversion and mounting Jewish-Christian tensions. At the same time, Tartakoff does not lose sight of the mystery surrounding the events that spurred the Norwich circumcision case, and she concludes the book by offering a solution of her own: Christians and Jews, she posits, understood these events in fundamentally irreconcilable ways, illustrating the chasm that separated Christians and Jews in a world in which some Christians and Jews knew each other intimately.