Jews In East Norse Literature

What did Danes and Swedes in the Middle Ages imagine and write about Jews and Judaism? This book draws on over 100 medieval Danish and Swedish manuscripts and incunabula as well as runic inscriptions and religious art (c. 1200-1515) to answer this question. There were no resident Jews in Scandinavia before the modern period, yet as this book shows ideas and fantasies about them appear to have been widespread and an integral part of life and culture in the medieval North. Volume 1 investigates the possibility of encounters between Scandinavians and Jews, the terminology used to write about Jews, Judaism, and Hebrew, and how Christian writers imagined the Jewish body. The (mis)use of Jews in different texts, especially miracle tales, exempla, sermons, and Passion treaties, is examined to show how writers employed the figure of the Jew to address doubts concerning doctrine and heresy, fears of violence and mass death, and questions of emotions and sexuality. Volume 2 contains diplomatic editions of 54 texts in Old Danish and Swedish together with translations into English that make these sources available to an international audience for the first time and demonstrate how the image of the Jew was created in medieval Scandinavia.

What did Danes and Swedes in the Middle Ages imagine and write about Jews and Judaism? This book draws on over 100 medieval Danish and Swedish manuscripts and incunabula as well as runic inscriptions and religious art (c. 1200–1515) to answer this question. There were no resident Jews in Scandinavia before the modern period, yet as this book shows ideas and fantasies about them appear to have been widespread and an integral part of life and culture in the medieval North. Volume 1 investigates the possibility of encounters between Scandinavians and Jews, the terminology used to write about Jews, Judaism, and Hebrew, and how Christian writers imagined the Jewish body. The (mis)use of Jews in different texts, especially miracle tales, exempla, sermons, and Passion treaties, is examined to show how writers employed the figure of the Jew to address doubts concerning doctrine and heresy, fears of violence and mass death, and questions of emotions and sexuality. Volume 2 contains diplomatic editions of 54 texts in Old Danish and Swedish together with translations into English that make these sources available to an international audience for the first time and demonstrate how the image of the Jew was created in medieval Scandinavia.

Due to the scarcity of sources regarding actual Jewish and Muslim communities and settlements, there has until now been little work on either the perception of or encounters with Muslims and Jews in medieval Scandinavia and the Baltic Region. The volume provides the reader with the possibility to appreciate and understand the complexity of Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations in the medieval North. The contributions cover topics such as cultural and economic exchange between Christians and members of other religions; evidence of actual Jews and Muslims in the Baltic Rim; images and stereotypes of the Other. The volume thus presents a previously neglected field of research that will help nuance the overall picture of interreligious relations in medieval Europe.

Traces the history of the Jews in Denmark, beginning with the settlement of the first Sephardic Jews invited from Holland in 1622. Denmark's Jews enjoyed privileges, and were never forced to live in a ghetto. An attempt by the Lutheran Church to convert them in 1728 was abandoned. A literary attack in 1813, when Thomas Thaarus translated German writer Friedrich Buchholz's antisemitic pamphlet "Moses og Jesus, " degenerated into an attack on Jewish civil and political rights. The Danish tolerant attitude remained unchanged, however, and full emancipation was granted by King Frederick IV in 1814, while the "More Judaico" oath was abrogated only in 1843. The German occupation of Denmark in 1940 did not affect the Jews until martial law was introduced in August 1943, which was followed by the deportation of 464 Jews to Theresienstadt. Most of the Danish Jews escaped to Sweden.

In 1732, Christian Petter Löwe, a Jewish convert to Lutheranism, published his Speculum Religionis Judaicæ (Mirror of the Jewish Religion), a description of the Jewish religion and ceremonies as practised at the time. Over 50 years before Jews were permitted to settle in Sweden in 1782, the genre of Christian ethnographical writing about Jews and Jewish rituals had arrived in Sweden from Germany. In this volume, Jonathan Adams (University of Gothenburg) introduces the background to Löwe's "mirror" by looking at both the earlier history of Jews in Sweden and the phenomenon of ethnographical writing about Jews. The text of Speculum is presented in its original Swedish with a translation into English facing on the opposite pages. This edition includes notes explaining technical terms, identifying people and places, and translating Hebrew words and phrases. The volume also includes two works published in Sweden prior to Speculum: Bezelius' Die Herrlichkeit des Christenthums (The Glory of Christianity [excerpts], 1684) and Seeligmann's Jüdischer Ceremonien (On Jewish Ceremonies, 1725). The volume should be of interest to students and researchers of Jewish and Scandinavian history as well as the history of Jewish-Christian relations.

The significance of religion for the development of modern racist antisemitism is a much debated topic in the study of Jewish-Christian relations. This book, the first study on antisemitism in nineteenth-century Sweden, provides new insights into the debate from the specific case of a country in which religious homogeneity was the considered ideal long into the modern era. Between 1800 and 1900, approximately 150 books and pamphlets were printed in Sweden on the subject of Judaism and Jews. About one third comprised of translations mostly from German, but to a lesser extent also from French and English. Two thirds were Swedish originals, covering all genres and topics, but with a majority on religious topics: conversion, supersessionism, and accusations of deicide and bloodlust. The latter stem from the vastly popular medieval legends of Ahasverus, Pilate, and Judas which were printed in only slightly adapted forms and accompanied by medieval texts connecting these apocryphal figures to contemporary Jews, ascribing them a physical, essential, and biological coherence and continuity – a specific Jewish temporality shaped in medieval passion piety, which remained functional and intelligible in the modern period. Relying on medieval models and their combination of religious and racist imagery, nineteenth-century debates were informed by a comprehensive and mostly negative "knowledge" about Jews.

This book presents the most recent scholarship on the sixteenth-century convert Johannes Pfefferkorn and his context. Pfefferkorn is the most (in)famous of the converts from Judaism who wrote descriptions of Jewish ceremonial life and shaped both Christian ideas about Judaism and the course of anti-Jewish polemics in the early modern period. Rather than just rehearsing the better-known aspects of Pfefferkorn’s life and the controversy with Johannes Reuchlin, this volume re-evaluates the motives behind his activities and writings as well as his role and success in the context of Dominican anti-Jewish polemics and Imperial German politics. Furthermore, it discusses other converts, who similarly "revealed the secrets of the Jews", and contains detailed studies of the campaigns against the Talmud and other Jewish books as well as the diffusion of Pfefferkorn's books and other anti-Jewish writings throughout early modern Europe. Revealing the Secrets of the Jews thus presents new perspectives on Jewish-Christian relations, the study of religion and Christian Hebraism, and the history of anthropology and ethnography.