Jewish Culture And Society In Medieval France And Germany

Author : Ivan G. Marcus
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1000948862
Total Pages : 234 pages
Book Rating : 4.68/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Jewish Culture and Society in Medieval France and Germany written by Ivan G. Marcus and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-04-14 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These studies explore the history of the Jewish minority of Ashkenaz (northern France and the German Empire) during the High Middle Ages. Although the Jews in medieval Europe are usually thought to have been isolated from the Christian majority, they actually were part of a 'Jewish-Christian symbiosis.' A number of studies in the collection focus on Jewish-Christian cultural and social interactions, the foundations of the community ascribed to Charlemagne, and especially on the fashioning of a martyrological collective identity in 1096. Even when Jews resisted Christian pressures they often did so by internalizing Christian motifs and turning them on their heads to argue for the truth of Judaism alone. This may be seen especially in the formation of Jews as martyrs, a trope that places Jews as collective Christ figures whose suffering brings about vicarious atonement. The remainder of the studies delve into the lives and writings of a group of Jewish ascetic pietists, Hasidei Ashkenaz, which shaped the religious culture of most European Jews before modernity. In Sefer Hasidim (Book of the Pietists), attributed to Rabbi Judah the Pietist of Regensburg (d. 1217), one finds a mirror of everyday Jewish-Christian interactions even while the author advances a radical view of Jewish religious pietism.

Author : Elisheva Baumgarten
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400849268
Total Pages : 295 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Mothers and Children written by Elisheva Baumgarten and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-24 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a synthetic history of the family--the most basic building block of medieval Jewish communities--in Germany and northern France during the High Middle Ages. Concentrating on the special roles of mothers and children, it also advances recent efforts to write a comparative Jewish-Christian social history. Elisheva Baumgarten draws on a rich trove of primary sources to give a full portrait of medieval Jewish family life during the period of childhood from birth to the beginning of formal education at age seven. Illustrating the importance of understanding Jewish practice in the context of Christian society and recognizing the shared foundations in both societies, Baumgarten's examination of Jewish and Christian practices and attitudes is explicitly comparative. Her analysis is also wideranging, covering nearly every aspect of home life and childrearing, including pregnancy, midwifery, birth and initiation rituals, nursing, sterility, infanticide, remarriage, attitudes toward mothers and fathers, gender hierarchies, divorce, widowhood, early education, and the place of children in the home, synagogue, and community. A richly detailed and deeply researched contribution to our understanding of the relationship between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors, Mothers and Children provides a key analysis of the history of Jewish families in medieval Ashkenaz.

Author : Ephraim Kanarfogel
Publisher : Wayne State University Press
ISBN 13 : 0814336531
Total Pages : 215 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Jewish Education and Society in the High Middle Ages written by Ephraim Kanarfogel and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2007-06-11 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paperback edition of a favorite text on the literary creativity and communal involvement in the production of the Tosafist corpus.

Author : Kirsten A. Fudeman
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812205359
Total Pages : 274 pages
Book Rating : 4.50/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Vernacular Voices written by Kirsten A. Fudeman and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-06-06 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thirteenth-century text purporting to represent a debate between a Jew and a Christian begins with the latter's exposition of the virgin birth, something the Jew finds incomprehensible at the most basic level, for reasons other than theological: "Speak to me in French and explain your words!" he says. "Gloss for me in French what you are saying in Latin!" While the Christian and the Jew of the debate both inhabit the so-called Latin Middle Ages, the Jew is no more comfortable with Latin than the Christian would be with Hebrew. Communication between the two is possible only through the vernacular. In Vernacular Voices, Kirsten Fudeman looks at the roles played by language, and especially medieval French and Hebrew, in shaping identity and culture. How did language affect the way Jews thought, how they interacted with one another and with Christians, and who they perceived themselves to be? What circumstances and forces led to the rise of a medieval Jewish tradition in French? Who were the writers, and why did they sometimes choose to write in the vernacular rather than Hebrew? How and in what terms did Jews define their relationship to the larger French-speaking community? Drawing on a variety of texts written in medieval French and Hebrew, including biblical glosses, medical and culinary recipes, incantations, prayers for the dead, wedding songs, and letters, Fudeman challenges readers to open their ears to the everyday voices of medieval French-speaking Jews and to consider French elements in Hebrew manuscripts not as a marginal phenomenon but as reflections of a vibrant and full vernacular existence. Applying analytical strategies from linguistics, literature, and history, she demonstrates that language played a central role in the formation, expression, and maintenance of medieval Jewish identity and that it brought Christians and Jews together even as it set them apart.

Author : Jay R. Berkovitz
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812200152
Total Pages : 342 pages
Book Rating : 4.57/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Rites and Passages written by Jay R. Berkovitz and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2010-08-03 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In September 1791, two years after the Revolution, French Jews were granted full rights of citizenship. Scholarship has traditionally focused on this turning point of emancipation while often overlooking much of what came before. In Rites and Passages, Jay R. Berkovitz argues that no serious treatment of Jewish emancipation can ignore the cultural history of the Jews during the ancien régime. It was during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that several lasting paradigms emerged within the Jewish community—including the distinction between rural and urban communities, the formation of a strong lay leadership, heightened divisions between popular and elite religion, and the strain between local and regional identities. Each of these developments reflected the growing tension between tradition and modernity before the tumultuous events of the French Revolution. Rites and Passages emphasizes the resilience of religious tradition during periods of social and political turbulence. Viewing French Jewish history through the lens of ritual, Berkovitz describes the struggles of the French Jewish minority to maintain its cultural distinctiveness while also participating in the larger social and economic matrix. In the ancien régime, ritual systems were a formative element in the traditional worldview and served as a crucial repository of memories and values. After the Revolution, ritual signaled changes in the way Jews related to the state, French society, and French culture. In the cities especially, ritual assumed a performative function that dramatized the epoch-making changes of the day. The terms and concepts of the Jewish religious tradition thus remained central to the discourse of modernization and played a powerful role in helping French Jews interpret the diverse meanings and implications of emancipation. Introducing new and previously unused primary sources, Rites and Passages offers a fresh perspective on the dynamic relationship between tradition and modernity.

Author : Ivan G. Marcus
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812295005
Total Pages : 217 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

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Download or read book "Sefer Hasidim" and the Ashkenazic Book in Medieval Europe written by Ivan G. Marcus and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2018-05-24 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Composed in Germany in the early thirteenth century by Judah ben Samuel he-hasid, Sefer Hasidim, or "Book of the Pietists," is a compendium of religious instruction that portrays the everyday life of Jews as they lived together with and apart from Christians in towns such as Speyer, Worms, Mainz, and Regensburg. A charismatic religious teacher who recorded hundreds of original stories that mirrored situations in medieval social living, Judah's messages advocated praying slowly and avoiding honor, pleasure, wealth, and the lures of unmarried sex. Although he failed to enact his utopian vision of a pietist Jewish society, his collected writings would help shape the religious culture of Ashkenazic Judaism for centuries. In "Sefer Hasidim" and the Ashkenazic Book in Medieval Europe, Ivan G. Marcus proposes a new paradigm for understanding how this particular book was composed. The work, he contends, was an open text written by a single author in hundreds of disjunctive, yet self-contained, segments, which were then combined into multiple alternative versions, each equally authoritative. While Sefer Hasidim offers the clearest example of this model of composition, Marcus argues that it was not unique: the production of Ashkenazic books in small and easily rearranged paragraphs is a literary and cultural phenomenon quite distinct from anything practiced by the Christian authors of northern Europe or the Sephardic Jews of the south. According to Marcus, Judah, in authoring Sefer Hasidim in this manner, not only resisted Greco-Roman influences on Ashkenazic literary form but also extended an earlier Byzantine rabbinic tradition of authorship into medieval European Jewish culture.

Author : Israel Abrahams
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 494 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Jewish Life in the Middle Ages written by Israel Abrahams and published by . This book was released on 1896 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Albrecht Classen
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110776871
Total Pages : 642 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Communication, Translation, and Community in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period written by Albrecht Classen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-08-22 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Die neue englischsprachige Reihe zur Mediävistik strebt eine methodisch reflektierte, anspruchsvolle Verbindung von Text- und Kulturwissenschaft an. Sie widmet sich den kulturellen Grundthemen der mittelalterlichen Welt aus der Perspektive der Literatur- und Geschichtswissenschaft. ‚Grundthemen' sind die kulturprägenden Denkbilder, Weltanschauungen, Sozialstrukturen und Alltagsbedingungen des mittelalterlichen Lebens, also z. B. Kindheit und Alter, Sexualität, Religion, Medizin, Rituale, Arbeit, Armut und Reichtum, Aberglauben, Erde und Kosmos, Stadt und Land, Krieg, Emotionen, Kommunikation, Reisen usw. Die Reihe greift wichtige aktuelle Fachdiskussionen auf und stellt ein Forum der interdisziplinären Mittelalter-Forschung dar. Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture steht Sammelbänden ebenso offen wie Monographien. Intention ist immer, kompendienhafte Werke zu zentralen Fragen der mittelalterlichen Kulturgeschichte vorzulegen, die einen soliden Überblick über einen geschlossenen Themenkreis aus der Perspektive verschiedener Fachdisziplinen vermitteln. Im Ganzen bietet die Reihe so eine Enzyklopädie der mittelalterlichen Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte und ihrer Hauptthemen. Es werden ca. zwei Bände pro Jahr erscheinen.

Author : Cecil Reid
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000374637
Total Pages : 250 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Jews and Converts in Late Medieval Castile written by Cecil Reid and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jews and Converts in Late Medieval Castile examines the ways in which Jewish-Christian relations evolved in Castile, taking account of social, cultural, and religious factors that affected the two communities throughout the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The territorial expansion of the Christian kingdoms in Iberia that followed the reconquests of the mid-thirteenth century presented new military and economic challenges. At the same time the fragile balance between Muslims, Jews, and Christians in the Peninsula was also profoundly affected. Economic and financial pressures were of over-riding importance. Most significant were the large tax revenues that the Iberian Jewish community provided to royal coffers, new evidence for which is provided here. Some in the Jewish community also achieved prominence at court, achieving dizzying success that often ended in dismal failure or death. A particular feature of this study is its reliance upon both Castilian and Hebrew sources of the period to show how mutual perceptions evolved through the long fourteenth century. The study encompasses the remarkable and widespread phenomenon of Jewish conversion, elaborates on its causes, and describes the profound social changes that would culminate in the anti-converso riots of the mid-fifteenth century. This book is valuable reading for academics and students of medieval and of Jewish history. As a study of a unique crucible of social change it also has a wider relevance to multi-cultural societies of any age, including our own.

Author : Julie L. Mell
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3319341863
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Myth of the Medieval Jewish Moneylender written by Julie L. Mell and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-11-07 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book challenges a common historical narrative, which portrays medieval Jews as moneylenders who filled an essential economic role in Europe. Where Volume I traced the development of the narrative in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and refuted it with an in-depth study of English Jewry, Volume II explores the significance of dissolving the Jewish narrative for European history. It extends the study from England to northern France, the Mediterranean, and central Europe and deploys the methodologies of legal, cultural, and religious history alongside economic history. Each chapter offers a novel interpretation of key topics, such as the Christian usury campaign, the commercial revolution, and gift economy / profit economy, to demonstrate how the revision of Jewish history leads to new insights in European history.