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Author: Jean-Claude Schmitt
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812208757
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 318
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Book Description
Sometime toward the middle of the twelfth century, it is supposed, an otherwise obscure figure, born a Jew in Cologne and later ordained as a priest in Cappenberg in Westphalia, wrote a Latin account of his conversion to Christianity. Known as the Opusculum, this book purportedly by "Herman, the former Jew" may well be the first autobiography to be written in the West after the Confessions of Saint Augustine. It may also be something else entirely. In The Conversion of Herman the Jew the eminent French historian Jean-Claude Schmitt examines this singular text and the ways in which it has divided its readers. Where some have seen it as an authentic conversion narrative, others have asked whether it is not a complete fabrication forged by Christian clerics. For Schmitt the question is poorly posed. The work is at once true and fictional, and the search for its lone author—whether converted Jew or not—fruitless. Herman may well have existed and contributed to the writing of his life, but the Opusculum is a collective work, perhaps framed to meet a specific institutional agenda. With agility and erudition, Schmitt examines the text to explore its meaning within the society and culture of its period and its participation in both a Christian and Jewish imaginary. What can it tell us about autobiography and subjectivity, about the function of dreams and the legitimacy of religious images, about individual and collective conversion, and about names and identities? In The Conversion of Herman the Jew Schmitt masterfully seizes upon the debates surrounding the Opusculum (the text of which is newly translated for this volume) to ponder more fundamentally the ways in which historians think and write.
Author: Jean-Claude Schmitt
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812208757
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 318
Get Book Here
Book Description
Sometime toward the middle of the twelfth century, it is supposed, an otherwise obscure figure, born a Jew in Cologne and later ordained as a priest in Cappenberg in Westphalia, wrote a Latin account of his conversion to Christianity. Known as the Opusculum, this book purportedly by "Herman, the former Jew" may well be the first autobiography to be written in the West after the Confessions of Saint Augustine. It may also be something else entirely. In The Conversion of Herman the Jew the eminent French historian Jean-Claude Schmitt examines this singular text and the ways in which it has divided its readers. Where some have seen it as an authentic conversion narrative, others have asked whether it is not a complete fabrication forged by Christian clerics. For Schmitt the question is poorly posed. The work is at once true and fictional, and the search for its lone author—whether converted Jew or not—fruitless. Herman may well have existed and contributed to the writing of his life, but the Opusculum is a collective work, perhaps framed to meet a specific institutional agenda. With agility and erudition, Schmitt examines the text to explore its meaning within the society and culture of its period and its participation in both a Christian and Jewish imaginary. What can it tell us about autobiography and subjectivity, about the function of dreams and the legitimacy of religious images, about individual and collective conversion, and about names and identities? In The Conversion of Herman the Jew Schmitt masterfully seizes upon the debates surrounding the Opusculum (the text of which is newly translated for this volume) to ponder more fundamentally the ways in which historians think and write.
Author: Deborah Sadie Hertz
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300110944
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
When the Nazis came to power and created a racial state in the 1930s, an urgent priority was to identify Jews who had converted to Christianity over the preceding centuries. With the help of church officials, a vast system of conversion and intermarriage records was created in Berlin, the country’s premier Jewish city. Deborah Hertz’s discovery of these records, the Judenkartei, was the first step on a long research journey that has led to this compelling book. Hertz begins the book in 1645, when the records begin, and traces generations of German Jewish families for the next two centuries. The book analyzes the statistics and explores letters, diaries, and other materials to understand in a far more nuanced way than ever before why Jews did or did not convert to Protestantism. Focusing on the stories of individual Jews in Berlin, particularly the charismatic salon woman Rahel Levin Varnhagen and her husband, Karl, a writer and diplomat, Hertz humanizes the stories, sets them in the context of Berlin’s evolving society, and connects them to the broad sweep of European history.
Author: Herman Wouk
Publisher: Hachette+ORM
ISBN: 0316055522
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 253
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Book Description
"Valuable, wise, and quietly moving" (Chicago Tribune), This Is My God is Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Herman Wouk's famous introduction to Judaism. A miracle of brevity, This Is My God guides readers through the world's oldest practicing religion with all the power, clarity, and wit of Wouk's celebrated novels. "Anyone who wants to know what orthodox Judaism means to an informed and intelligent orthodox Jew, who is at the same time thoroughly American in outlook and culture, will do well to study this work." --New York Times Book Review
Author: Ryan Szpiech
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812207610
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329
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Book Description
In 1322, a Jewish doctor named Abner entered a synagogue in the Castilian city of Burgos and began to weep in prayer. Falling asleep, he dreamed of a "great man" who urged him to awaken from his slumber. Shortly thereafter, he converted to Christianity and wrote a number of works attacking his old faith. Abner tells the story in fantastic detail in the opening to his Hebrew-language but anti-Jewish polemical treatise, Teacher of Righteousness. In the religiously plural context of the medieval Western Mediterranean, religious conversion played an important role as a marker of social boundaries and individual identity. The writers of medieval religious polemics such as Teacher of Righteousness often began by giving a brief, first-person account of the rejection of their old faith and their embrace of the new. In such accounts, Ryan Szpiech argues, the narrative form plays an important role in dramatizing the transition from infidelity to faith. Szpiech draws on a wide body of sources from Christian, Jewish, and Muslim polemics to investigate the place of narrative in the representation of conversion. Making a firm distinction between stories told about conversion and the experience of religious change, his book is not a history of conversion itself but a comparative study of how and why it was presented in narrative form within the context of religious disputation. He argues that between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, conversion narratives were needed to represent communal notions of history and authority in allegorical, dramatic terms. After considering the late antique paradigms on which medieval Christian conversion narratives were based, Szpiech juxtaposes Christian stories with contemporary accounts of conversion to Islam and Judaism. He emphasizes that polemical conflict between Abrahamic religions in the medieval Mediterranean centered on competing visions of history and salvation. By seeing conversion not as an individual experience but as a public narrative, Conversion and Narrative provides a new, interdisciplinary perspective on medieval writing about religious disputes.
Author: Nina Caputo
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253037417
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
Fourteen essays examining the dynamics of trust and mistrust in Jewish history from biblical times to today. What, if anything, does religion have to do with how reliable we perceive one another to be? When and how did religious difference matter in the past when it came to trusting the word of another? In today’s world, we take for granted that being Jewish should not matter when it comes to acting or engaging in the public realm, but this was not always the case. The essays in this volume look at how and when Jews were recognized as reliable and trustworthy in the areas of jurisprudence, medicine, politics, academia, culture, business, and finance. As they explore issues of trust and mistrust, the authors reveal how caricatures of Jews move through religious, political, and legal systems. While the volume is framed as an exploration of Jewish and Christian relations, it grapples with perceptions of Jews and Jewishness from the biblical period to today, from the Middle East to North America, and in Ashkenazi and Sephardi traditions. Taken together these essays reflect on the mechanics of trust, and sometimes mistrust, in everyday interactions involving Jews. “Highly readable and compelling, this volume marks a broadly significant contribution to Jewish studies through the underexplored dynamic of trust.” —Rebekah Klein-Pejšová, author of Mapping Jewish Loyalties in Interwar Slovakia “An exemplary compendium on how to engage with a major concept—trust—while providing load of gripping new information, new theorization of otherwise well-covered material, and meticulous attention to textual and sociological sources.” —Gil Anidjar, author of Blood: A Critique of Christianity
Author: Miriamne Ara Krummel
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472132377
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285
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Book Description
Introduction: Calculating Time: Eosturmonath, Nisan, and the Paschal Table -- Just In Time: Sacrificial Gifts, Rotting Corpses, and Annus Domini -- An (Un)Common Era: Passionate Narratives, Temporal Clashes-Jewish and Christian -- Taking Jews out and Putting Them Back in: Christian Chronometry, the York Massacre, and a Cycle of Mystery Plays -- A Time of Many Layers: Feasting on the Temporalities of The Siege of Jerusalem -- Repressing a Perpetually Resurfacing Temporality: Four Authorial Orphans and The Fifteenth-Century 'Tale of the Litel Clergeon and the Jews' -- Epilogue: The Empire of Common Time.
Author: Adam Kirsch
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039360831X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 335
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Book Description
An accessible introduction to the classics of Jewish literature, from the Bible to modern times, by "one of America’s finest literary critics" (Wall Street Journal). Jews have long embraced their identity as “the people of the book.” But outside of the Bible, much of the Jewish literary tradition remains little known to nonspecialist readers. The People and the Books shows how central questions and themes of our history and culture are reflected in the Jewish literary canon: the nature of God, the right way to understand the Bible, the relationship of the Jews to their Promised Land, and the challenges of living as a minority in Diaspora. Adam Kirsch explores eighteen classic texts, including the biblical books of Deuteronomy and Esther, the philosophy of Maimonides, the autobiography of the medieval businesswoman Glückel of Hameln, and the Zionist manifestoes of Theodor Herzl. From the Jews of Roman Egypt to the mystical devotees of Hasidism in Eastern Europe, The People and the Books brings the treasures of Jewish literature to life and offers new ways to think about their enduring power and influence.
Author: Mark Gregory Pegg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192575562
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 521
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Book Description
Beatrice's Last Smile is a sweeping narrative history of the medieval west from the beginning of the third century to the beginning of the sixteenth. This book focuses on slow formation of Latin Christendom over a millennium in the aftermath of the disintegration of the western Roman Empire. Beatrice's Last Smile is a sweeping narrative history of the medieval west from the beginning of the third century to the beginning of the sixteenth. The reader travels from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, from the Nile to the Volga, from north Africa to the central Asia, until finally ending in the Americas. Through a focus on slow formation of Latin Christendom over a millennium in the aftermath of the disintegration of the western Roman Empire, Beatrice's Last Smile is a history of holiness which includes Judaism and the revelations of Muhammad. The narrative moves from the violence within fifth-century Britain and Gaul to the Hundred Years War between England and France, from the plague of the sixth century to the Black Death of the fourteenth, from the first crusaders sacking Jerusalem to the Spanish capturing Tenochtitlán, from Viking raids to Mongol invasions, from the inquisitons into heresy to the trials of witches, from a third-century Christian mother dying in a Roman arena to the immolation of Joan of Arc in the fifteenth, from an ancient universe without heaven and hell to a medieval cosmos with a fiery inferno and a shimmering paradise. Over these centuries there is an emphasis on individual men and women and their stories woven together with the story of the emergence of a distinctive western culture.
Author: Roy H. Schoeman
Publisher: Ignatius Press
ISBN: 1642290777
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 402
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Book Description
The book traces the role of Judaism and the Jewish people in God's plan for the salvation of mankind, from Abraham through the Second Coming, as revealed by the Catholic faith and by a thoughtful examination of history. It will give Christians a deeper understanding of Judaism, both as a religion in itself and as a central component of Christian salvation. To Jews it reveals the incomprehensible importance, nobility and glory that Judaism most truly has. It examines the unique and central role Judaism plays in the destiny of the world. It documents that throughout history attacks on Jews and Judaism have been rooted not in Christianity, but in the most anti-Christian of forces. Areas addressed include: the Messianic prophecies in Jewish scripture; the anti-Christian roots of Nazi anti-Semitism; the links between Nazism and Arab anti-Semitism; the theological insights of major Jewish converts; and the role of the Jews in the Second Coming. "Perplexed by controversies new and old about the destiny of the Jewish people? Read this book by a Jew who became a Catholic for a well-written, provocative, ground-breaking account. Some of the answers most have never heard before." Ronda Chervin, Ph.D., Hebrew-Catholic
Author: Kristine T. Utterback
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004250441
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356
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Book Description
In Jews in Medieval Christendom: Slay Them Not, an international group of scholars from numerous disciplines examines the manifold ways that medieval Christians coped with the presence of Jews in their midst. The collection’s touchstone comes from St. Augustine’s interpretation of Psalm 59:11: “Slay them not, lest my people forget: scatter them by thy power; and bring them down,” as it applied to Jews in Christendom, an interpretation that deeply affected medieval Christian strategies for dealing with Jews in Europe. This collection analyzes how medieval writers and artists, often explicitly invoking Augustine, employed his teachings on these strangers within Christian Europe. Contributors include: Nancy Bishop, Kate McGrath, Irven Resnick, Ephraim Shoham-Steiner, K.M. Kletter, Robert Stacey, Jennifer Hart Weed, Jay Ruud, Kristine T. Utterback, Merrall LLewelyn Price, Eveline Brugger, Birgit Wiedl, Carlee A. Bradbury, Judy Schaaf, Barbara Stevenson, Miriamne Ara Krummel, Albrecht Classen.
