Medieval Jews Research Articles

Medieval Jews, Belonging and ‘Lived Citizenship’

Medieval Jews, Belonging and ‘Lived Citizenship’

When Rulers Came to Town: Jews, Christians and Urban Processions in Medieval France and the Holy Roman Empire

The festive entry of a monarch into medieval cities was an elaborate social drama involving the whole urban population. This article investigates how Jews were involved in these ceremonies in medieval France and the Holy Roman Empire, refuting previously held assumptions of their forced and marginalised roles. By demonstrating that Jews were actively included in these urban rituals, embracing local customs to welcome Christian rulers and using an array of distinctive objects to express their identity, much like other civic groups, this study argues that medieval Jews were part of an elaborate choreographed performance through which civic belonging was expressed. As Jewish participation spanned both the formal and logistical aspects of these events, medieval urban processions provide an effective case study on how religious minorities were woven into both the social and ceremonial fabric of medieval urban life.

A Wet Nurse Debate: Jews, Christians, and Later Medieval “Racism”

Abstract It is clear that medieval Jews employed Christian wet nurses, as well as other Christian domestic servants, and that ecclesiastical condemnations did not prevail against social and economic interests. In Etsi Judeos Pope Innocent III, who had earlier complained loudly that Jews across France are unscrupulous usurers, thieves, blasphemers, and secret murderers of Christians, added the unsubstantiated complaint that “on the day of the Lord’s Resurrection,” i.e., Easter, after they have received the Eucharist, “the Jews make these women,” that is, Christian wet nurses, “pour their milk into the latrine for three days before they again give suck to the children.” This paper surveys both the ecclesiastical and medical or natural-philosophical sources that contributed to a protracted medieval debate over maternal nursing versus the employment of wet nurses; examines Innocent III’s allegation that Jews force their Christian wet nurses to pour out their milk for three days after having received communion, and its novel implications; investigates complaints of cross-confessional nursing (whether of Christians nursing Jewish infants, or Jewish or Muslim wet nurses in Christian households); and explores a shift in later medieval and early modern Christian texts away from concerns over Christian wet nurses caring for Jewish infants toward racialized fears of Jewish women nursing Christian children.

Das Jüdisch-Mittelalterliche Erbe in Erfurt auf der Welterbeliste

Abstract On September 17, 2023, the Jewish Medieval Heritage in Erfurt was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List at the 45th session of the World Heritage Committee chaired by Saudi Arabia in Riyadh. This brought a decades-long process to its provisional conclusion, in which research into the history of the Jewish community in Erfurt in the Middle Ages and its material evidence had been intensified in preparation for the World Heritage application and also during the evaluation, thus leading to a great increase in knowledge. This process should and must continue, but an (interim) conclusion can be drawn in this paper.

The Strength of Ibn Rushd's Integration of Religion and Philosophy: An Islamic Historical Discourse

Ibn Rushd’s thoughts on the integration of religion and philosophy exerted a major influence on Medieval Jewish, Christian and Islamic philosophy. However, a study that writes the full concept of Ibn Rushd’s integration and its advantages has yet to be found. This study aims to thoroughly analyze Ibn Rushd’s concept of the integration of religion and philosophy, discover the strengths of the integration, and identify its logical consequences. This study uses the content analysis method with primary sources as the main data. The results of the study indicate that (1) Ibn Rushd integrates religion and philosophy by combining three things from religion and philosophy: sources, methods, and goals. (2) The strength of Ibn Rushd’s integration lies in the integrity of the aspects involved, the placement of ratios at a very high position, the principle that philosophical thinking is part of religious order, and the use of allegorical interpretation (ta’wil) of the holy verses. The implication shows that religion and philosophy become inseparable, and the movement for integration must be a movement towards each other, between religion and philosophy. Ibn Rushd’s thoughts on integration can be the basis of the efforts to integrate contemporary religion and science.

The Cairo Geniza as a Source for Turkish History

Abstract The information in the Cairo Geniza documents has contributed greatly to our understanding of medieval Jewish and, to a lesser degree, Islamic social and economic life. In addition, these documents have also furthered understanding of the development of Arabic, the language of the majority of the Geniza collection. However, for various reasons the Geniza’s possible contribution to the field of Turkish history has largely been ignored. This survey of documents from the Cairo Geniza which mention or allude to the Turks shows that the Geniza collection not only sheds light on aspects of Turkish history in the late 11th and early 12th centuries, but may also indicate new paths of inquiry into the presence and roles of the Turks in the Mediterranean in this period.

Halakha vs. Capitalism

Abstract: Medieval Jewish economic law was in many ways fundamentally inhospitable to early capitalism. Practice ultimately changed, and law with it, but not without bitter dissent from some towering rabbinic authorities, or poskim . To be clear, these protagonists are by no stretch of the imagination leftist; their views on society and gender often run against the grain of progressive sensibilities, to put it mildly. But they do express with passion and clarity the stakes of capitalism's growth, and hold out the hope of another way. The goal here is not to restore the premodern ghetto, but to salvage a usable past from it for the daunting political road ahead.

From Yu–suf al-Bas.r to Judah Halevi: The Sadduceean Myth of the Origins of Karaism in Medieval Rabbanite Sources Revisited

Two main historiographic motifs invented in the Middle Ages have dominated all later Jewish historical reconstructions of the origins of Karaism. One connects it with the activity of ‘Anan ben David, while the other associates the Karaites with the Sadducees. The aim of the article is to revisit the question of the origins of the Sadduceean motif and Halevi’s role in its creation. Accordingly, its purpose is not to explore the actual relationship between the Karaites and the Sadducees, but the way in which medieval Jews imagined this relationship, especially in terms of the Karaites’ past and the beginnings of their movement. It argues that against his explicit statements to the contrary, Halevi contributed to the establishment of a direct, historical link between the Karaites and the Sadducees. In addition, the article demonstrates that when creating his narrative on the emergence of Karaism, Halevi might have been inspired by Karaite sources such as Yūsuf al-Baṣīr’s Book of Precepts. It offers an analysis of a relevant passage of this legal Code through an attempt to reconstruct a complex process of cross-sectoral interchanges and transfers of ideas behind the creation of the Sadduceean myth of the origins of Karaism.

Contested identities: interpreting and representing medieval Jewish History in Bristol

ABSTRACT In the late 1980s, a potentially significant site with links to the city’s medieval Jews was discovered in Bristol. The site has ‘Scheduled Monument’ status, granted by Historic England, and has been described as a ritual bath, ranging from mikveh to bet tohorah. This paper takes an interdisciplinary approach, discussing the complexities of interpreting the monument, its authenticity, and significance to the memory of local medieval Jewish history. This paper highlights utilises the historical narrative of the site and the roles of multiple stakeholders to frame wider considerations of prominent issues concerning identity, authority and ownership.

Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe

In 1230 Matilda de Bernham claimed she had found Edward, son of Master Benedict, a Norwich physician, lamenting and saying that he was a Jew. Moreover, she accused the city's Jews of trying to retrieve the boy by force, calling him “their Jew.” Four years later, Master Benedict, who had not actively searched for Edward, accused the Jews of circumcising him. There followed both legal proceedings and attacks on Norwich Jews and their property. Some Jews fled elsewhere, and three moneylenders were condemned to be hanged. A church court awarded Master Benedict land and a house owned by Jews. Edward, who was five years old in 1230, then nine, was made to undergo physical examinations as part of the proceedings. The examinations were inconclusive. Paola Tartakoff notes that the official records, such as survive, may have omitted Edward's mother because she was a Jew. That would explain the claims of local Jews that Edward, named Jurnepin, a diminutive of Joseph, after his circumcision, was “their Jew.”Paola Tartakoff takes this case as a springboard for an inquiry into the borders between Christian and Jewish identities in the European Middle Ages. Her principal point is that these borders were permeable rather than fixed. There were conversions of Jews to Christianity in some numbers, but also (as she shows) some conversions of Christians to Judaism. Further, converts in either direction might return to their original communities. (Tartakoff's studies of Christians who embraced a Jewish identity are particularly interesting, whether or not they retained it.) Medieval Jews were particularly worried about their children being abducted for baptism. Reports remain that some killed their children rather than have them forcibly christened.Although the borders were permeable, attitudes on either side differed dramatically. Christians were often eager to convert Jews, and they supposed Jews were equally zealous. As the author shows, Jews were often reluctant to embrace converts. One reason for this reluctance was fear of Christian retribution. However, Jews did accept some of these converts, circumcising the men, men and women alike accepting a ritual bath. There was more zeal evident for winning back those Jews who embraced what was seen as Christian error. Christian authorities were harder on those they uncovered practicing as Jews. Those who would not repent this “apostasy” might be burned for embracing Jewish “unbelief.” (These condemnations and penalties are shown to fit into a larger pattern including heretics and Muslims as enemies of orthodoxy.)Tartakoff extends her inquiry into a more familiar realm, the belief that Jews practiced ritual murder of Christians, especially of their children. The English chroniclers William of Newburgh and Matthew Paris early on tied Edward's circumcision to that anti-Jewish libel. They and many others thought circumcising Edward was one step toward reenacting the crucifixion of Jesus by murdering a Christian made a Jew with a bris. That belief, and not just in the subsequent accounts of the Norwich case, passed over from Catholic to Protestant belief, including in the writings of the martyrologist John Foxe.This book presents compelling evidence that the borderline between Christians and Jews was not impermeable. Moreover, it shows how Christians often projected fears of apostasy onto their Jewish neighbors. Small wonder that the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 tried to reinforce that religious division by requiring Jews living in Latin Christian lands to wear distinctive badges. There is one weakness in the argument. Evidence of Christian attitudes toward circumcision tends to be drawn from inquisitors and Latin chroniclers. Theologians presented more nuanced views of that rite in commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. They treated the Jewish rite of initiation as once useful but since superseded. That omission, however, does not vitiate the value of Tartakoff's penetrating study.

The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess: The Polemics of Sameness in Medieval English Anti-Judaism by Adrienne Williams Boyarin

Reviewed by: The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess: The Polemics of Sameness in Medieval English Anti-Judaism by Adrienne Williams Boyarin Miriamne Ara Krummel Adrienne Williams Boyarin. The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess: The Polemics of Sameness in Medieval English Anti-Judaism. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Pp. iii, 325. $79.95 cloth. Built on nearly two centuries of Jewish studies scholarship, Adrienne Williams Boyarin's The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess: The Polemics of Sameness in Medieval English Anti-Judaism brings nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century scholars into conversation with each other to explore her observations about the distressing practice of "saming the Jew." Closing with a discussion of Grace Aguilar's 1847 essay "The Story of the Jews in England," Boyarin deploys the work of this "first author to attempt a history of medieval English Jewry" (222) to conclude her study of the misogynistic and antisemitic agenda that lingers in and fuels the veritable landmine that Boyarin terms the "politics of sameness" throughout her book. Boyarin's ideas are new, and her vision of sameness, especially in the production of the female Jewish characters, investigates how the viewer and reader are made to feel comfortable with Jewish proximity at the same time that "Judaism and living Jews" (224) are being erased. The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess follows a somewhat unique structure that complements Boyarin's claims about sameness. The book opens in the usual way with a comprehensive introduction, aptly entitled "Saming the Jew," which announces how the monograph's larger project departs from the scholarship that has preceded hers: "Many studies of medieval anti-Jewish texts and images in recent decades have discussed difference. This book is concerned, instead, with realities and fantasies of sameness" (1). The note to this point clarifies the departure from recent criticism: a number of the works that have preceded The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess, Boyarin explains, "have discussed issues of Jewish–Christian contact and sameness in sensitive ways, though none has presented sameness as a primary frame of analysis for understanding anti-Jewish polemics" (245 n. 1). After the introduction The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess unfolds in two parts: Part 1, "The Potential of Sameness," and Part 2, "The Unmarked Jewess." Both parts 1 and 2 open with "Historiae" that provide intimate glances into the temporal liminalities that inhere in the lives of select pre-1290 Expulsion Jews who changed their Jewish identities into Christian ones. The dangers that inhere in desires for sameness are then enlarged upon in all five chapters of Boyarin's book. Throughout, the book traces the idea that medieval Jews—and all Jewish [End Page 376] difference associated with these Jews—were eliminated from English Christian society through the process of "saming the Jew." Part I's "Historiae," entitled "The Friar and the Foundling," opens the study of the intersection between sameness and Jewishness by pondering the thirteenth-century Jewish man Sampson, son of Samuel, who disguises himself as a "fratris minoris" or "Friar Minor" (The National Archives, Kew, E 9/24, m. 5d; cited in Appendix 1, 228, 229). Sampson, son of Samuel—a Jew who pretends to be a Franciscan—embodies the fraught intersections, imperiled boundaries, and close proximities of real and invented Christian and Jewish bodies. Along with a brief look into the narrative of Sampson's identity, Part 1's "Historiae" also considers the strange tale of the Jewished—that is, "recently circumcised" (23)—body of the Christian foundling Jurnepin/Odard. After the opening "Historiae," Part 1 theorizes the category of "sameness" in Chapters 1 and 2. The title of Chapter 1, "The Same, but Not Quite," intentionally echoes a line in Homi Bhabha's Location of Culture (Routledge, 1994) when Bhabha refers to postcolonial identities as "almost the same, but not quite" (35; italics also Bhabha's). Boyarin also invokes Bhabha's notions of "partial presence" and the "incomplete" and "virtual" identities that are produced in her studies of the partly erased medieval English Jew. Chapter 2, "English 'Jews,'" presents typology as deploying "'Jewish' features" to design "the correct Christian self" (77), thereby...

Rivalrous Masculinities: New Directions in Medieval Gender Studies

Rivalrous Masculinities: New Directions in Medieval Gender Studies

Introduction: Margin Release

Introduction: Margin Release

The Call: Leo Strauss on Heidegger, Secularization, and Revelation

The Call: Leo Strauss on Heidegger, Secularization, and Revelation

Platonic Theocracy, Liberalism, and Authoritarianism in Leo Strauss’sPhilosophy and Law

Leo Strauss, inPhilosophy and Law(1935), offers Platonic theocracy as a more just and stable political alternative to both liberalism and authoritarianism. Rather than merely a scholastic investigation of medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy, I read the book as a programmatic endorsement of a morally perfectionist political order: a divinely legitimated and rationally justified “true” or “beautiful” state. Since human beings require political community to suppress their evil inclinations and promote their disposition toward the good, Strauss criticizes liberalism for contending that government should remain neutral regarding good and evil and modern authoritarianism for effectively committing idolatry by politically instrumentalizing theology. I demonstrate that Strauss’s long-neglected book is particularly relevant for our own “postsecular age,” an age when adherents of religious orthodoxy increasingly demand concessions from liberal democracies and resurgent state authoritarianism frequently cloaks itself in religious trappings.

“From Moses to Moses”: Late Medieval Jewish and Christian Interpretation of Moses’s Prophecy

The paper examines how the figure of the biblical Moses was philosophically interpreted in medieval Jewish and Christian writings. It highlights a turning point in a new concept of prophecy and scriptural authority and suggests that this transformation was made complicated for both Jewish and Christian intellectuals by the appearance of Moses Maimonides, who was most influential in promoting the Muslim model of philosophic interpretation of prophecy, and at the same time confusingly emerged as a living manifestation of semi-biblical authority. Against Jewish exclusivist interpretation of Mosaic law as the leading polemical argument to encounter competing revelations, the first part of my paper points out a mechanism of “Jewish successionism”, i.e., the re-interpretation of the biblical Moses as an instrument for rationalizing normative paradigmatic shift. The second, main part of the paper turns to the Latin translation of Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed, placing it in the midst of a crucial western Latin turn into a new phase of engagement with Old Testament concept of prophecy. A short comparison between some prominent twelfth century figures and later Scholastic thought demonstrates the central role of the new Arab Aristotelianism in general, and that of Maimonides in particular. Maimonides reception among the schoolman will culminate in the writings of Meister Eckhart, exposing the full potentiality of the double appearance of the Egyptian (Rabbi) Moses.

Javier Castaño, Talya Fishman, and Ephraim Kanarfogel, eds., Regional Identities and Cultures of Medieval Jews. London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization in association with Liverpool University Press, 2018. Pp. x, 352; 1 table. £39.50. ISBN: 978-1-9067-6467-8. Table of contents available online at https://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/products/87927

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsJavier Castaño, Talya Fishman, and Ephraim Kanarfogel, eds., Regional Identities and Cultures of Medieval Jews. London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization in association with Liverpool University Press, 2018. Pp. x, 352; 1 table. £39.50. ISBN: 978-1-9067-6467-8. Table of contents available online at https://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/products/87927Bernard D. CoopermanBernard D. CoopermanUniversity of Maryland Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 95, Number 4October 2020 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/710933 Views: 63Total views on this site Copyright 2020 by the Medieval Academy of America. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Limits of the City: Leo Strauss’s Hermeneutics and Plato’s Republic

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on Leo Strauss’s reading of the Republic. I argue that Strauss’s ironic interpretation of the dialogue must be understood in the context of a broader intellectual project which aims to criticize modern and contemporary political philosophy. Strauss’s understanding of Plato is strongly influenced by the hermeneutical principles he draws from his studies of medieval Jewish and Arab philosophy. Reading Plato through Alfarabi, Strauss pursues the idea of the conflict between philosophy and politics, which sheds light, also, on the problem of persecution. Accordingly, he stresses the importance of a peculiar art of reading between the lines. In Strauss’s view, this art is the starting point for recovering the esoteric meaning of the Republic. I will argue that Strauss’s interpretation contradicts several dialogical elements because it does not take into account the broader historical framework of the text. Nevertheless, even with these limitations, Plato scholars should consider Straussian insights, because these offer an untraditional and a non-doctrinal reading of the dialogue.

Syphilis in an Italian medieval jewish community: A bioarchaeological and cultural perspective

ObjectivesWe aim to discuss the presence of treponemal infections in three individuals belonging to a large (∼400 individuals) Late Medieval cemetery (14th -16th century) that archaeological and documentary sources place within a Jewish context, and to discuss the role of these diseases in a biocultural perspective. Materials and methodsAn anthropological and paleopathological study was conducted on skeletal remains of three individuals, though macroscopic and tomographic examination. ResultsCranial lesions in which simultaneous destructive and proliferative processes (caries sicca) are noted. Long bones also present osseous alterations with increased bone density and non-uniform thickening. ConclusionsSkeletal lesions are consistent with treponemal infections (possibly either endemic or acquired syphilis). Historical documentation could help the interpretation of our cases, recording a syphilis outbreak in Bologna in 1496, possibly coeval to the Late Medieval Jewish cemetery. SignificanceThese cases of treponematosis are unique, documenting the presence of the disease within the Jewish Medieval community in Italy, as they frame the effects and consequence of the infection in shaping social and cultural contexts of the medieval Italian and European communities. They offer material evidence to elaborate on the historical documents on the hostility Jewish community suffered. LimitationsRadiocarbon dating have not been performed directly on skeletal remains of the three pathological individuals. δ13C and δ15N isotope ratios should also be acquired to estimate the marine diet component, to account for possible marine reservoir effect on radiocarbon age calibration.

The Importance of Agriculture in Medieval Jewish Life: The Case of Crete

This article describes how Jews in medieval Crete were involved in, and knowledgeable about, agricultural practices. It pushes back against a persistent view in the scholarly literature that medieval Jews were alienated from the land, and that their disproportionate involvement in trade hastened the Commercial Revolution. The study attempts to show that Cretan Jews took halakhic strictures on agriculture seriously, and that, as a result, they farmed differently from their Greek Orthodox and Latin Christian peers. By examining Jewish texts from the Hellenic territories of the Venetian Republic, the article makes the case that stereotypes of Jews as merchants betrays abundant evidence that medieval Jews were deeply engaged in cultivating the land.