Entangled Histories: Knowledge, Authority, and Jewish Culture in the Thirteenth Century (Jewish Culture and Contexts) - Hardcover

Buch 25 von 68: Jewish Culture and Contexts
 
9780812248685: Entangled Histories: Knowledge, Authority, and Jewish Culture in the Thirteenth Century (Jewish Culture and Contexts)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0812248686 ISBN 13: 9780812248685
Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

From Halakhic innovation to blood libels, from the establishment of new mendicant orders to the institutionalization of Islamicate bureaucracy, and from the development of the inquisitorial process to the rise of yeshivas, universities, and madrasas, the long thirteenth century saw a profusion of political, cultural, and intellectual changes in Europe and the Mediterranean basin. These were informed by, and in turn informed, the religious communities from which they arose. In city streets and government buildings, Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived, worked, and disputed with one another, sharing and shaping their respective cultures in the process. The interaction born of these relationships between minority and majority cultures, from love and friendship to hostility and violence, can be described as a complex and irreducible "entanglement." The contributors to Entangled Histories: Knowledge, Authority, and Jewish Culture in the Thirteenth Century argue that this admixture of persecution and cooperation was at the foundation of Jewish experience in the Middle Ages.

The thirteen essays are organized into three major sections, focusing in turn on the exchanges among intellectual communities, on the interactions between secular and religious authorities, and on the transmission of texts and ideas across geographical, linguistic, and cultural boundaries. Rather than trying to resolve the complexities of entanglement, contributors seek to outline their contours and explain how they endured. In the process, they examine relationships not only among Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities but also between communities within Judaism—those living under Christian rule and those living under Muslim rule, and between the Jews of southern and northern Europe. The resulting volume develops a multifaceted account of Jewish life in Europe and the Mediterranean basin at a time when economic, cultural, and intellectual exchange coincided with heightened interfaith animosity.

Contributors: Elisheva Baumgarten, Piero Capelli, Mordechai Z. Cohen, Judah Galinsky, Elisabeth Hollender, Kati Ihnat, Ephraim Kanarfogel, Katelyn Mesler, Ruth Mazo Karras, Sarah J. Pearce, Rami Reiner, Yossef Schwartz, Uri Shachar, Rebecca Winer, Luke Yarbrough.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Elisheva Baumgarten is Professor Yitzhak Becker Chair of Jewish Studies and Professor of Jewish History and History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author of Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz: Men, Women, and Everyday Religious Observance, available from the University of Pennsylvania Press. Ruth Mazo Karras is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. She is author of Unmarriages: Women, Men, and Sexual Unions in the Middle Ages and From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe, , and coeditor of Law and the Illicit in Medieval Europe, all available from the University of Pennsylvania Press. Katelyn Mesler is a postdoctoral fellow at the Westfalische Wilhelms-Universitat in Munster.

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Introduction
Elisheva Baumgarten, Ruth Mazo Karras, and Katelyn Mesler

"Go now into the Jews' streets and see how many do business with them [the Christians] even on the holiday itself."

This pronouncement was a central part of one of R. Ye?iel of Paris's responses to Christian accusations against Jewish conduct during the trial of the Talmud (Paris, 1240). Ye?iel, a prominent advocate for the Jewish community, was countering a common Christian accusation that "Jews are hostile toward and a danger to gentiles." He argued that, although he and his contemporaries observed the Torah with "all their souls," they still performed many activities that were forbidden by the Talmud. He was alluding to different prohibitions in tractate 'Avodah Zarah that pertained to what was considered idolatry or to aiding idol worshippers but were commonplace activities among medieval European Jews. In the context of the Talmud trial, a landmark event in the history of Jewish-Christian relations, his implication was that not every statement against gentiles in the Talmud need be read as evidence of contemporary anti-Christian activities. Thus he emphasized the close relations between Jews and Christians that he witnessed in his everyday surroundings.

His text states: "For we are taught: For three days preceding the holiday of the gentiles it is forbidden to engage in trade with them. Go now into the Jews' streets and see how many do business with them [the Christians] even on the holiday itself. And further we are taught 'Do not board cattle in the barns of gentiles,' and yet every day we sell cattle to gentiles and make partnerships with them and are alone with them and entrust our infants to their households to be nursed; and we teach Torah to gentiles, for there are Christian clerics who know how to read Jewish books." As Ye?iel indicates, many of the topics he mentions are noted in the Talmud as actions that are to be avoided. Despite this, he clarifies that Jews regularly engaged in business with their Christian neighbors, involved them in their domestic arrangements, and, most notably in light of the questions of the transmission of knowledge discussed in this volume, taught them the Jewish interpretation of Torah, or perhaps even how to read Hebrew. In another passage, Ye?iel noted that he was used to discussions with clergy and that this was the reason for his role in the trial.

From Ye?iel's "Jews' streets" to the secular courtroom, from the cult of saints to the Islamicate bureaucracy, and from shared reliance on Aristotle to shared polemics, this volume highlights a complex interdependence in thought and action among different groups of Jews, as well as between Jews and the Christian and Muslim majority cultures. The chapters, contributed by thirteen specialists in the history, society, and literature of the long thirteenth century, explore intricate interreligious and intercultural dynamics. The presence (though not always literal) of Jews was an integral part of life for medieval Christians and Muslims, who were affected by Jews just as Jews were affected by their situation as a minority culture, or set of cultures. The interaction born of these relationships, from love and friendship to hostility and violence, is best described as "entanglement."

Terms of Entanglement: Historiographies

The Paris Talmud trial represented a new sort of hostility in medieval Christian-Jewish relations: the Jews were accused of not only rejecting Christianity but of deliberately rejecting that which was valid in pre-Christian Jewish belief. It can be seen as a momentous event in a series of anti-Jewish intellectual developments running from the thirteenth century through the early modern period that built on earlier layers of Christian-Jewish hostility. Although the thirteenth century did mark a watershed in regard to interreligious polemics, the past decades of research have focused especially on the fact that Jews were not just on the receiving end of polemics, they also produced them, in some cases initiating polemical interchanges.

At the same time, many scholars studying the accounts of the Talmud trial and other medieval texts have found it difficult to reconcile the deep religious animosity behind disputations, accusations, and persecutions with the routinely cooperative contacts between Jews and Christians mentioned within the very same texts. The religious hostility and ongoing social ties are hard to discuss simultaneously, and in light of the further persecutions that led to the expulsion of Jews from the various regions of western Europe from the thirteenth to early sixteenth centuries, it is not surprising that scholarship has emphasized enmity rather than day-to-day coexistence and intellectual contact. Indeed, modern scholarship has tended to emphasize the distance between Jews and Christians, because the two communities have been studied by different groups of scholars, those familiar with Hebrew sources and those versed in Latin materials. Even shared events, like the Talmud trial, have been studied separately from the Christian and Jewish sides.

Yet over the past decades, scholars have gradually come to the understanding that separation and hostility were constantly in creative tension with economic, cultural, and intellectual exchange, and this seeming contradiction was at the foundation of Jewish existence in medieval Europe. While we encounter the designation "alienated minority" to describe the medieval European Jewish community, we also find other descriptions that affirm Jewish interactions with the Christian majority: "intimate and distant," "together and apart," "overlapping yet separate." The complexity of coexistence began on the most basic level of the streets of the cities of medieval Europe, where Jews tended to live in specific neighborhoods but were not their exclusive residents. They lived alongside Christians and interacted with their neighbors in a variety of ways. Medieval sources tell of neighborly relations and cooperation as well as hostilities. Much of this cooperation took place among women; as Ye?iel states, for example, Jewish families might hire Christian women to nurse their children, and Jewish women were involved in consumption loans to Christian women. Women's daily interactions to a large extent flew under the radar and must be teased out from a variety of sources; recent scholarship on medieval encounters has increasingly focused on the role of women, although none of the chapters in this volume places it at the center.

The interplay of cooperation and hostility, or separation and collaboration, between Jewish and Christian communities, as well as the complexity of the relations between Jewish communities living under Christian rule and those living under Muslim rule, and furthermore between the Jews of southern and northern Europe, is at the heart of this volume. The terminology used by scholars to describe these complexities—and the debates and dilemmas that arise from that terminology—are key to their understandings of interfaith and intrafaith relations. While use of the term "influence" to describe the way ideas and practices were transferred and shared between religious groups and geographies has fallen out of favor, as scholars have rejected the implied passivity of the group being influenced, there is no generally accepted replacement. Some studies use the geometric metaphors common in the field of comparative history: parallels, intersections, convergences, vectors. However, these geometric metaphors can be too binary, implying a rigid dichotomy: parallel lines never meet, converging lines intersect only in one place. They do not take account of ongoing contact, or of multiple vectors.

As a result, recent scholars have sought to indicate the complex relations between and among groups by employing terms like "embeddedness,"...

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Verlag
University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812248686
ISBN 13 
9780812248685
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
368
Herausgeber
Baumgarten Elisheva, Karras Ruth Mazo, Mesler Katelyn
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

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