Jews Christians And Muslims In Medieval And Early Modern Times

This volume brings together articles on various aspects of cultural, religious, social and commercial interactions between Jews, Christians and Muslims in the medieval and early modern periods.

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.

Demonstrating that similarities between Jewish and Christian art in the Middle Ages were more than coincidental, Cultural Exchange meticulously combines a wide range of sources to show how Jews and Christians exchanged artistic and material culture. Joseph Shatzmiller focuses on communities in northern Europe, Iberia, and other Mediterranean societies where Jews and Christians coexisted for centuries, and he synthesizes the most current research to describe the daily encounters that enabled both societies to appreciate common artistic values. Detailing the transmission of cultural sensibilities in the medieval money market and the world of Jewish money lenders, this book examines objects pawned by peasants and humble citizens, sacred relics exchanged by the clergy as security for loans, and aesthetic goods given up by the Christian well-to-do who required financial assistance. The work also explores frescoes and decorations likely painted by non-Jews in medieval and early modern Jewish homes located in Germanic lands, and the ways in which Jews hired Christian artists and craftsmen to decorate Hebrew prayer books and create liturgical objects. Conversely, Christians frequently hired Jewish craftsmen to produce liturgical objects used in Christian churches. With rich archival documentation, Cultural Exchange sheds light on the social and economic history of the creation of Jewish and Christian art, and expands the general understanding of cultural exchange in brand-new ways.

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.

The leading theme of this collection of essays and studies is the diversity of aspects of medieval communal identity. While the authors were selected for the very diversity of their interests, their final papers do tend to cohere around some recurrent themes. All of the studies in this volume touch upon one or more of the complex issues that lie at the heart of religious identity in the Middle Ages. They do so through concrete study of the very real practices by which medieval Jews, Christians and Muslims could police the perimeters of their spiritual communities. The authors were especially urged to note instances where religious identity was shaped without reference to dogmas, creeds, or sacred law. In no case are any of these papers satisfied with normative, legal definitions of Jew, Christian, or Muslim in medieval times. Sometimes small and subtle, sometimes explicit, dire, and violent, the techniques that emerge from these studies testify to the diversity of strategies of medieval communal identity over space and their changes over time.

In this volume, Jacob Lassner examines the triangular relationship that during the Middle Ages defined - and continues to define today - the political and cultural interaction among the three Abrahamic faiths.

In the book of Genesis, God bestows a new name upon Abram--Abraham, a father of many nations. With this name and his Covenant, Abraham would become the patriarch of three of the world's major religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Connected by their mutual--if differentiated--veneration of the One God proclaimed by Abraham, these traditions share much beyond their origins in the ancient Israel of the Old Testament. This Very Short Introduction explores the intertwined histories of these monotheistic religions, from the emergence of Christianity and Islam to the violence of the Crusades and the cultural exchanges of al-Andalus. Each religion continues to be shaped by this history but has also reacted to the forces of modernity and politics. Movements such as the Reformation and that led by seventh-century Kharijites have emerged, intentioned to reform or restore traditional religious practice but quite different in their goals and effects. Relationships with states, among them Israel and Saudi Arabia, have also figured importantly in their development. The Abrahamic Religions: A Very Short Introduction brings these traditions together into a common narrative, lending much needed context to the story of Abraham and his descendants. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

The name of Bernhard Blumenkranz is well known to all those who study the history of European Jews in the Middle Ages and in particular the history of Jewish-Christian relations. Blumenkranz was born in Vienna in 1913; he left for Switzerland during the war and obtained a doctorate at the University of Basel on the portrayal of Jews in the works of Augustine. He subsequently moved to France where his numerous publications revived and renovated the field of Jewish studies. The international group of scholars who wrote the fifteen essays in this volume, beyond paying homage to Blumenkranz's work, trace the trajectories of various lines of inquiry that he initiated: Christian theology of Judaism, problems of conversion and proselytism, geography and topography of Medieval Jewish communities, the representation of Jews in Christian art. These essays provide both an assessment of Blumenkranz's intellectual legacy and a snapshot of the evolution of the field over the last sixty years.