Ageing In Medieval Jewish Culture

This is a seminal study of cultural attitudes to old age among Jews of the medieval Mediterranean and Near Eastern regions. Rigorously researched and accessibly written, it will appeal to scholars across a range of disciplines as well as to the broader public. While the focus is on Jewish society and culture, critical context regarding the social history of ageing is provided by comparative perspectives from the Muslim world as well as from Spain and Provence and other areas of Christian Europe that were in the Arabic Andalusian cultural orbit. The study draws on many literary genres and scholarly disciplines: philosophy and theology, ethics and law, biblical commentary, Hebrew poetry, medical literature, and a host of marriage contracts, personal letters, and family and communal records from the Cairo Genizah. The result is a nuanced portrait of ageing as both a lived reality and a cultural paradigm in medieval Jewish society.

Much of what we know about life in the medieval Islamic Middle East comes from texts written to impart religious ideals or to chronicle the movements of great men. How did women participate in the societies these texts describe? What about non-Muslims, whose own religious traditions descended partly from pre-Islamic late antiquity? Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt approaches these questions through Jewish women’s adolescence in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt and Syria (c. 969–1250). Using hundreds of everyday papers preserved in the Cairo Geniza, Eve Krakowski follows the lives of girls from different social classes—rich and poor, secluded and physically mobile—as they prepared to marry and become social adults. She argues that the families on whom these girls depended were more varied, fragmented, and fluid than has been thought. Krakowski also suggests a new approach to religious identity in premodern Islamic societies—and to the history of rabbinic Judaism. Through the lens of women’s coming-of-age, she demonstrates that even Jews who faithfully observed rabbinic law did not always understand the world in rabbinic terms. By tracing the fault lines between rabbinic legal practice and its practitioners’ lives, Krakowski explains how rabbinic Judaism adapted to the Islamic Middle Ages. Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt offers a new way to understand how women took part in premodern Middle Eastern societies, and how families and religious law worked in the medieval Islamic world.

Thirteen leading scholars offer a fresh look at four key topics in medieval Jewish studies: the history of Jewish communities in Western Christendom, Jewish-Christian interactions in medieval Europe, medieval Jewish Biblical exegesis and religious literature, and historical representations of medieval Jewry.

In medieval times, when a Jewish boy of five began religious schooling, he was carried from home to a teacher and placed on the teacher's lap. He was then asked to recite the Hebrew alphabet and lick honey from the slate on which it was written, to eat magically inscribed cooked peeled eggs and cakes, to recite an incantation against a demon of forgetfulness, and then to go down to the riverbank with the teacher, where he was told that his future study of the Torah, like the rushing river, would never end. This book--Ivan Marcus's erudite and novel interpretation of this rite of passage--presents a new anthropological historical approach to Jewish culture and acculturation in medieval Christian Europe. Marcus traces ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman elements in the rite and then analyzes it from different perspectives, making use of narrative, legal, poetic, ethnographic, and pictorial sources, as well as firsthand accounts. He then describes contemporary medieval Christian images and initiation rites--including the eucharist and the Madonna and child--as contexts within which to understand the ceremony. He is the first to investigate how medieval Jews were aware of, drew upon, and polemically transformed Christian religious symbols into Jewish counterimages in order to affirm the truth of Judaism and to make sense of living as Jews in an intensely Christian culture.

This is the first encyclopedic work to focus exclusively on medieval Jewish civilization, from the fall of the Roman Empire to about 1492. The more than 150 alphabetically organized entries, written by scholars from around the world, include biographies, countries, events, social history, and religious concepts. The coverage is international, presenting people, culture, and events from various countries in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. For a full list of entries and contributors, a generous selection of sample entries, and more, visit the Medieval Jewish Civilization: An Encyclopedia website.

The medieval Crown of Aragon reached the peak of its power and influence in the thirteenth century, and Jews took an active part in this expansion. In this detailed and meticulously researched study Yom Tov Assis deals with many important aspects of this period, which was truly a 'Golden Age' in the history of Aragonese and Catalan Jewry, both in terms of their relationship with the Crown and of their own cultural achievements. Professor Assis provides the most extensive treatment yet of Jewish self-government in the Hispanic kingdoms and the mutual interdependence of the Jewish and Christian communities. He describes institutions in very great detail, and examines the acute social problems that arose in the Jewish community and the dissent, polemics, and controversies that divided it. He shows how the proximity of the country to France and Provence on the one hand, and to Castile and Andalusia on the other, made Catalan Jewry a point of contact between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jewry, demonstrating the effect this had on religious and cultural life, and in particular the consequences of the growing influence in Spain of Franco-German Jewry. The book is based on a very wide variety of primary sources-Jewish and non-Jewish, archival and halakhic material, notarial and royal records-in Latin, Catalan, Aragonese, and Hebrew. By drawing on these extensive sources, the author has been able to create a comprehensive description of the social, religious, and administrative aspects of Jewish life that throws much light on the wider society and economy of that period under the Crown of Aragon. The abundant detailed source notes make this an indispensable work of reference for all scholars of medieval Spanish history.

Jewish Culture and Creativity honors the wide-ranging scholarship of Prof. Michael Fishbane with contributions of his students on subjects that cover the gamut of Jewish studies, from biblical and rabbinic literature to medieval and modern Jewish culture, and concluding with case studies of the creative application of Prof. Fishbane’s thought and theology in contemporary Jewish life. The innovative scholarship represented in this volume offers critical new perspectives from antiquity to contemporary Judaism and will serve as a stimulus for new directions in and beyond the field of Jewish studies.

These are the papers and discussions of the eighth annual conference of the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies at the State University of New York, Binghamton. The topics discussed were the relationship between Jewish and medieval studies, the patristic basis for Christian attitudes on the Jews, the Hispanic literary tradition, Jewish Spain, problems in Jewish art, and myth criticism and medieval studies.