A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain

A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain PDF Author: Mark D. Meyerson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400832586
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
This book significantly revises the conventional view that the Jewish experience in medieval Spain--over the century before the expulsion of 1492--was one of despair, persecution, and decline. Focusing on the town of Morvedre in the kingdom of Valencia, Mark Meyerson shows how and why Morvedre's Jewish community revived and flourished in the wake of the horrible violence of 1391. Drawing on a wide array of archival documentation, including Spanish Inquisition records, he argues that Morvedre saw a Jewish "renaissance." Meyerson shows how the favorable policies of kings and of town government yielded the Jewish community's demographic expansion and prosperity. Of crucial importance were new measures that ceased the oppressive taxation of the Jews and minimized their role as moneylenders. The results included a reversal of the credit relationship between Jews and Christians, a marked amelioration of Christian attitudes toward Jews, and greater economic diversification on the part of Jews. Representing a major contribution to debates over the Inquisition's origins and the expulsion of the Jews, the book also offers the first extended analysis of Jewish-converso relations at the local level, showing that Morvedre's Jews expressed their piety by assisting Valencia's conversos. Comparing Valencia with other regions of Spain and with the city-states of Renaissance Italy, it makes clear why this kingdom and the town of Morvedre were so ripe for a Jewish revival in the fifteenth century.

A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain

A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain PDF Author: Mark D. Meyerson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400832586
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
This book significantly revises the conventional view that the Jewish experience in medieval Spain--over the century before the expulsion of 1492--was one of despair, persecution, and decline. Focusing on the town of Morvedre in the kingdom of Valencia, Mark Meyerson shows how and why Morvedre's Jewish community revived and flourished in the wake of the horrible violence of 1391. Drawing on a wide array of archival documentation, including Spanish Inquisition records, he argues that Morvedre saw a Jewish "renaissance." Meyerson shows how the favorable policies of kings and of town government yielded the Jewish community's demographic expansion and prosperity. Of crucial importance were new measures that ceased the oppressive taxation of the Jews and minimized their role as moneylenders. The results included a reversal of the credit relationship between Jews and Christians, a marked amelioration of Christian attitudes toward Jews, and greater economic diversification on the part of Jews. Representing a major contribution to debates over the Inquisition's origins and the expulsion of the Jews, the book also offers the first extended analysis of Jewish-converso relations at the local level, showing that Morvedre's Jews expressed their piety by assisting Valencia's conversos. Comparing Valencia with other regions of Spain and with the city-states of Renaissance Italy, it makes clear why this kingdom and the town of Morvedre were so ripe for a Jewish revival in the fifteenth century.

Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Medieval and Early Modern Spain

Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Medieval and Early Modern Spain PDF Author: Mark D. Meyerson
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268087261
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
The essays in this interdisciplinary volume examine the social and cultural interaction of Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Spain during the medieval and early modern periods. Together, the essays provide a unique comparative perspective on compelling problems of ethnoreligious relations. Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Medieval and Early Modern Spain considers how certain social and political conditions fostered fruitful cultural interchange, while others promoted mutual hostility and aversion. The volume examines the factors that enabled one religious minority to maintain its cultural integrity and identity more effectively than another in the same sociopolitical setting. This volume provides an enriched understanding of how Christians, Muslims, and Jews encountered ideological antagonism and negotiated the theological and social boundaries that separated them.

The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance

The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance PDF Author: Dana E. Katz
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812240855
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Dana E. Katz reveals how Italian Renaissance painting became part of a policy of tolerance that deflected violence from the real world onto a symbolic world. While the rulers upheld toleration legislation governing Christian-Jewish relations, they simultaneously supported artistic commissions that perpetuated violence against Jews.

Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewry

Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewry PDF Author: Zion Zohar
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814797067
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
Sephardic Jews have contributed some of the most important Jewish philosophers, poets, biblical commentators, Talmudic and Halachic scholars, and scientists, and have had a significant impact on the development of Jewish mysticism. Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewry brings together original work from the world's leading scholars to present a deep introductory overview of their history and culture over the past 1500 years.

The Jews in the Renaissance

The Jews in the Renaissance PDF Author: Cecil Roth
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Jews
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Sephardism

Sephardism PDF Author: Yael Halevi-Wise
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804781710
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
In this book, Sephardism is defined not as an expression of Sephardic identity but as a politicized literary metaphor. Since the nineteenth century, this metaphor has occurred with extraordinary frequency in works by authors from a variety of ethnicities, religions, and nationalities in Europe, the Americas, North Africa, Israel, and even India. Sephardism asks why Gentile and Jewish writers and cultural figures have chosen to draw upon the medieval Sephardic experience to express their concerns about dissidents and minorities in modern nations? To what extent does their use of Sephardism overlap with other politicized discourses such as orientalism, hispanism, and medievalism, which also emerged from a clash between authoritarian, progressive, and romantic ideologies? This book brings a new approach to Sephardic Studies by situating it at a crossroads between Jewish Studies and Hispanic Studies in ways that enhance our appreciation of how historical fiction and political history have shaped, and were shaped by, historical attitudes toward Jews and their representation.

A Convert’s Tale

A Convert’s Tale PDF Author: Tamar Herzig
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674237536
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
An intimate portrait, based on newly discovered archival sources, of one of the most famous Jewish artists of the Italian Renaissance who, charged with a scandalous crime, renounced his faith and converted to Catholicism. In 1491 the renowned goldsmith Salomone da Sesso converted to Catholicism. Born in the mid-fifteenth century to a Jewish family in Florence, Salomone later settled in Ferrara, where he was regarded as a virtuoso artist whose exquisite jewelry and lavishly engraved swords were prized by Italy’s ruling elite. But rumors circulated about Salomone’s behavior, scandalizing the Jewish community, who turned him over to the civil authorities. Charged with sodomy, Salomone was sentenced to die but agreed to renounce Judaism to save his life. He was baptized, taking the name Ercole “de’ Fedeli” (“One of the Faithful”). With the help of powerful patrons like Duchess Eleonora of Aragon and Duke Ercole d’Este, his namesake, Ercole lived as a practicing Catholic for three more decades. Drawing on newly discovered archival sources, Tamar Herzig traces the dramatic story of his life, half a century before ecclesiastical authorities made Jewish conversion a priority of the Catholic Church. A Convert’s Tale explores the Jewish world in which Salomone was born and raised; the glittering objects he crafted, and their status as courtly hallmarks; and Ercole’s relations with his wealthy patrons. Herzig also examines homosexuality in Renaissance Italy, the response of Jewish communities and Christian authorities to allegations of sexual crimes, and attitudes toward homosexual acts among Christians and Jews. In Salomone/Ercole’s story we see how precarious life was for converts from Judaism, and how contested was the meaning of conversion for both the apostates’ former coreligionists and those tasked with welcoming them to their new faith.

The Conversos and Moriscos in Late Medieval Spain and Beyond

The Conversos and Moriscos in Late Medieval Spain and Beyond PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047428978
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Converso and Morisco are the terms applied to those Jews and Muslims who converted to Christianity in large numbers and usually under duress in late medieval Spain. The Converso and Morisco Studies publications will examine the implications of these mass conversions for the converts themselves, for their heirs (also referred to as Conversos and Moriscos) and for medieval and modern Spanish culture. As the essays in this first volume attest, the study of the Converso and Morisco phenomena is not only important for those scholars focused on Spanish society and culture, but for academics everywhere interested in the issues of identity, Otherness, nationalism, religious intolerance and the challenges of modernity. Contributors are Michel Boeglin, William Childers, Barbara Fuchs, Mercedes García-Arenal, Juan Gil, Luis M. Girón-Negrón, Kevin Ingram, Francisco Márquez Villanueva, Mark D. Meyerson, Vincent Parello, Francisco Peña Fernández, Fernando Rodríguez Mediano, Elaine Wertheimer, Nadia Zeldes, and Leonor Zozaya Montes.

Strangers Within

Strangers Within PDF Author: Francisco Bethencourt
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069120991X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 624

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Book Description
A comprehensive study of the New Christian elite of Jewish origin--prominent traders, merchants, bankers and men of letters--between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries The New Christian elite of Jewish origin were at the forefront of early modern globalisation from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Either forced to convert to Christianity or descended from those who were, these Iberian traders, merchants, and bankers with links to the academic world and liberal professions played a pivotal role in intercontinental trade for two centuries--only to decline, and virtually disappear as an ethnic elite, by the mid-1700s. In Strangers Within, Francisco Bethencourt offers a comprehensive study of the New Christian trading elite, describing their many achievements, innovations and migrations. Members of this new elite were instrumental in opening global trade, investing in plantations and industries and loaning money to kings, popes, cardinals, noblemen and religious orders. They lived under constant threat of the Inquisition for almost three hundred years, yet most of them stayed in the Iberian world. Others departed to create Sephardic communities in north Africa, the Ottoman Empire, northern Europe and the Americas. Drawing on new research in archives and research libraries in Lisbon, Madrid, Seville, Simancas, Rome, Florence, Antwerp, London and Lima, Bethencourt traces the international networks New Christian trading elite families built, the different religious allegiances they assumed and the wide range of places in which they carried on their business activities. He describes the prominent roles they played in Iberian and European culture: Saint Teresa de Avila had a New Christian background, as did the philosopher Spinoza. Despite their prominence, after three centuries, the New Christians disappeared as a recognizable ethnicity, finally bowing under the accumulated weight of racism and persecution.

Reading Jewish History in the Renaissance

Reading Jewish History in the Renaissance PDF Author: Nadia Zeldes
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498573428
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
Using the Hebrew Book of Josippon as a prism, this study analyzes the dialogue surrounding Jewish history among Renaissance humanists. Notwithstanding its focus on the Renaissance, the author’s analysis extends to the consumption of Josippon in the High Middle Ages and into interpretations by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century humanists. With a focus on both Christian and Jewish discourse, the author examines the mythical and historical narratives that developed from Josippon.