The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess

The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess PDF Author: Adrienne Williams Boyarin
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812252594
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
In the Plea Rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, Trinity Term 1277, Adrienne Williams Boyarin finds the case of one Sampson son of Samuel, a Jew of Northampton, arrested for impersonating a Franciscan friar and preaching false Christianity. He was sentenced to walk for three days through the centers of London, Canterbury, Oxford, Lincoln, and Northampton carrying the entrails and flayed skin of a calf and exposing his naked, circumcised body to onlookers. Sampson's crime and sentence, Williams Boyarin argues, suggest that he made a convincing friar—when clothed. Indeed, many English texts of this era struggle with the similarities of Jews and Christians, but especially of Jewish and Christian women. Unlike men, Jewish women did not typically wear specific identifying clothing, nor were they represented as physiognomically distinct. Williams Boyarin observes that both before and after the periods in which art historians note a consistent visual repertoire of villainy and difference around Jewish men, English authors highlight and exploit Jewish women's indistinguishability from Christians. Exploring what she calls a "polemics of sameness," she elucidates an essential part of the rhetoric employed by medieval anti-Jewish materials, which could assimilate the Jew into the Christian and, as a consequence, render the Jewess a dangerous but unseeable enemy or a sign of the always-convertible self. The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess considers realities and fantasies of indistinguishability. It focuses on how medieval Christians could identify with Jews and even think of themselves as Jewish—positively or negatively, historically or figurally. Williams Boyarin identifies and explores polemics of sameness through a broad range of theological, historical, and literary works from medieval England before turning more specifically to stereotypes of Jewish women and the ways in which rhetorical strategies that blur the line between "saming" and "othering" reveal gendered habits of representation.

The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess

The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess PDF Author: Adrienne Williams Boyarin
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812252594
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the Plea Rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, Trinity Term 1277, Adrienne Williams Boyarin finds the case of one Sampson son of Samuel, a Jew of Northampton, arrested for impersonating a Franciscan friar and preaching false Christianity. He was sentenced to walk for three days through the centers of London, Canterbury, Oxford, Lincoln, and Northampton carrying the entrails and flayed skin of a calf and exposing his naked, circumcised body to onlookers. Sampson's crime and sentence, Williams Boyarin argues, suggest that he made a convincing friar—when clothed. Indeed, many English texts of this era struggle with the similarities of Jews and Christians, but especially of Jewish and Christian women. Unlike men, Jewish women did not typically wear specific identifying clothing, nor were they represented as physiognomically distinct. Williams Boyarin observes that both before and after the periods in which art historians note a consistent visual repertoire of villainy and difference around Jewish men, English authors highlight and exploit Jewish women's indistinguishability from Christians. Exploring what she calls a "polemics of sameness," she elucidates an essential part of the rhetoric employed by medieval anti-Jewish materials, which could assimilate the Jew into the Christian and, as a consequence, render the Jewess a dangerous but unseeable enemy or a sign of the always-convertible self. The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess considers realities and fantasies of indistinguishability. It focuses on how medieval Christians could identify with Jews and even think of themselves as Jewish—positively or negatively, historically or figurally. Williams Boyarin identifies and explores polemics of sameness through a broad range of theological, historical, and literary works from medieval England before turning more specifically to stereotypes of Jewish women and the ways in which rhetorical strategies that blur the line between "saming" and "othering" reveal gendered habits of representation.

When Jews Face Christ

When Jews Face Christ PDF Author: Henry Einspruch
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Christian converts from Judaism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description


The Misunderstood Jew

The Misunderstood Jew PDF Author: Amy-Jill Levine
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061748110
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
In the The Misunderstood Jew, scholar Amy-Jill Levine helps Christians and Jews understand the "Jewishness" of Jesus so that their appreciation of him deepens and a greater interfaith dialogue can take place. Levine's humor and informed truth-telling provokes honest conversation and debate about how Christians and Jews should understand Jesus, the New Testament, and each other.

Jews in East Norse Literature

Jews in East Norse Literature PDF Author: Jonathan Adams
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110775743
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1222

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Book Description
What did Danes and Swedes in the Middle Ages imagine and write about Jews and Judaism? This book draws on over 100 medieval Danish and Swedish manuscripts and incunabula as well as runic inscriptions and religious art (c. 1200-1515) to answer this question. There were no resident Jews in Scandinavia before the modern period, yet as this book shows ideas and fantasies about them appear to have been widespread and an integral part of life and culture in the medieval North. Volume 1 investigates the possibility of encounters between Scandinavians and Jews, the terminology used to write about Jews, Judaism, and Hebrew, and how Christian writers imagined the Jewish body. The (mis)use of Jews in different texts, especially miracle tales, exempla, sermons, and Passion treaties, is examined to show how writers employed the figure of the Jew to address doubts concerning doctrine and heresy, fears of violence and mass death, and questions of emotions and sexuality. Volume 2 contains diplomatic editions of 54 texts in Old Danish and Swedish together with translations into English that make these sources available to an international audience for the first time and demonstrate how the image of the Jew was created in medieval Scandinavia.

The Christians Who Became Jews

The Christians Who Became Jews PDF Author: Christopher Stroup
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300247893
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
A fresh look at Acts of the Apostles and its depiction of Jewish identity within the larger Roman era When considering Jewish identity in Acts of the Apostles, scholars have often emphasized Jewish and Christian religious difference, an emphasis that masks the intersections of civic, ethnic, and religious identifications in antiquity. Christopher Stroup's innovative work explores the depiction of Jewish and Christian identity by analyzing ethnicity within a broader material and epigraphic context. Examining Acts through a new lens, he shows that the text presents Jews and Jewish identity in multiple, complex ways, rather than as a simple foil for Christianity. Stroup convincingly argues that when the modern distinctions among ethnic, religious, and civic identities are suspended, the innovative ethnic rhetoric of the author of Acts comes into focus. The author of Acts leverages the power of gods, ancestry, and physical space to legitimate Christian identity as a type of Jewish identity and to present Christian non-Jews as Jewish converts through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Traitor?

Traitor? PDF Author: Jacob Gartenhaus
Publisher: Thomas Nelson Publishers
ISBN: 9780840757401
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description


Redeeming Our Sacred Story

Redeeming Our Sacred Story PDF Author: Mary C. Boys
Publisher: Paulist Press
ISBN: 1587682818
Category : Christianity and antisemitism
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
Stories of Jesus' passion and death lie at the core of Christian identity. They offer an encounter with his experience of the human condition: betrayals by those closest to him, his own fear of death, uncertainty about God's will, and the endurance of terrible suffering and an ignominious death. From generation to generation, these stories have functioned in sacred and saving ways for Christians. Yet, misinterpretations of the passion narratives have rationalized hostility to and violence against Jews as "Christ killers". This sacrilegious telling cries out for redemption. Redeeming Christianity's sacred story requires respect, even awe, for its power; demands rigorous examination of the history between Jews and Christians and the ethical obligation to be altered by this history; and entails pursuing solid biblical scholarship, principles for reinterpreting troubling texts, and incorporation into Christian spirituality. Redeeming Our Sacred Story challenges us to forge more just relations between Jews and Christians. It witnesses to the world that reconciliation is possible. (Back cover).

How the West Became Antisemitic

How the West Became Antisemitic PDF Author: Ivan G. Marcus
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691258201
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
An examination of how the Jews—real and imagined—so challenged the Christian majority in medieval Europe that it became a society that was religiously and culturally antisemitic in new ways In medieval Europe, Jews were not passive victims of the Christian community, as is often assumed, but rather were startlingly assertive, forming a Jewish civilization within Latin Christian society. Both Jews and Christians considered themselves to be God’s chosen people. These dueling claims fueled the rise of both cultures as they became rivals for supremacy. In How the West Became Antisemitic, Ivan Marcus shows how Christian and Jewish competition in medieval Europe laid the foundation for modern antisemitism. Marcus explains that Jews accepted Christians as misguided practitioners of their ancestral customs, but regarded Christianity as idolatry. Christians, on the other hand, looked at Jews themselves—not Judaism—as despised. They directed their hatred at a real and imagined Jew: theoretically subordinate, but sometimes assertive, an implacable “enemy within.” In their view, Jews were permanently and physically Jewish—impossible to convert to Christianity. Thus Christians came to hate Jews first for religious reasons, and eventually for racial ones. Even when Jews no longer lived among them, medieval Christians could not forget their former neighbors. Modern antisemitism, based on the imagined Jew as powerful and world dominating, is a transformation of this medieval hatred. A sweeping and well-documented history of the rivalry between Jewish and Christian civilizations during the making of Europe, How the West Became Antisemitic is an ambitious new interpretation of the medieval world and its impact on modernity.

Forbidden

Forbidden PDF Author: Jordan D. Rosenblum
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479831506
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
A surprising history of how the pig has influenced Jewish identity Jews do not eat pig. This (not always true) observation has been made by both Jews and non-Jews for more than three thousand years and is rooted in biblical law. Though the Torah prohibits eating pig meat, it is not singled out more than other food prohibitions. Horses, rabbits, squirrels, and even vultures, while also not kosher, do not inspire the same level of revulsion for Jews as the pig. The pig has become an iconic symbol for people to signal their Jewishness, non-Jewishness, or rebellion from Judaism. There is nothing in the Bible that suggests Jews are meant to embrace this level of pig-phobia. Starting with the Hebrew Bible, Jordan D. Rosenblum historicizes the emergence of the pig as a key symbol of Jewish identity, from the Roman persecution of ancient rabbis, to the Spanish Inquisition, when so-called Marranos (“Pigs”) converted to Catholicism, to Shakespeare’s writings, to modern memoirs of those leaving Orthodox Judaism. The pig appears in debates about Jewish emancipation in eighteenth-century England and in vaccine conspiracies; in World War II rallying cries, when many American Jewish soldiers were “eating ham for Uncle Sam;” in conversations about pig sandwiches reportedly consumed by Karl Marx; and in recent deliberations about the kosher status of Impossible Pork. All told, there is a rich and varied story about the associations of Jews and pigs over time, both emerging from within Judaism and imposed on Jews by others. Expansive yet accessible, Forbidden offers a captivating look into Jewish history and identity through the lens of the pig.

The Language of Heresy in Late Medieval English Literature

The Language of Heresy in Late Medieval English Literature PDF Author: Erin K. Wagner
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501512099
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Vernacular writers of late medieval England were engaged in global conversations about orthodoxy and heresy. Entering these conversations with a developing vernacular required lexical innovation. The Language of Heresy in Late Medieval English Literature examines the way in which these writers complemented seemingly straightforward terms, like heretic, with a range of synonyms that complicated the definitions of both those words and orthodoxy itself. This text proposes four specific terms that become collated with heretic in the parlance of medieval English writers of the 14th and 15th centuries: jangler, Jew, Saracen, and witch. These four labels are especially important insofar as they represent the way in which medieval Christianity appropriated and subverted marginalized or vulnerable identities to promote a false image of unassailable authority.