The Jew The Cathedral And The Medieval City

This book examines the Synagoga-Ecclesia motif in the thirteenth century and argues that the figures conveyed a political message of Christian ascendancy and Jewish submission.

5. Tamquam domino proprio: The Bishop and His Jews in Medieval Palencia -- Part 3. Jews and Christians in Northern Castile (ca. 1250-ca. 1370) -- 6. The Jews of Castile at the End of the Reconquista (Post-1250): Cultural and Communal Life -- 7. Jews, Christians, and Royal Power in Northern Castile -- 8. "Insolent, Wicked People": The Cortes and Anti-Jewish Discourse in Castile -- Bibliography -- Index

The thirteenth-century Jewish mystical classic Sefer ha-Zohar (The Book of Splendor), commonly known as the Zohar, took shape against a backdrop of rising anti-Judaism in Spain. Mystical Resistance reveals that in addition to the Zohar's role as a theological masterpiece, its kabbalistic teachings offer passionate and knowledgeable critiques of Christian majority culture. During the Zohar's development, Christian friars implemented new missionizing strategies, forced Jewish attendance at religious disputations, and seized and censored Jewish books. In response, the kabbalists who composed the Zohar crafted strategically subversive narratives aimed at diminishing Christian authority. Hidden between the lines of its fascinating stories, the Zohar makes daring assertions that challenge themes important to medieval Christianity, including Christ's Passion and ascension, the mendicant friars' new missionizing strategies, and Gothic art's claims of Christian dominion. These assertions rely on an intimate and complex knowledge of Christianity gleaned from rabbinic sources, polemic literature, public Church art, and encounters between Christians and Jews. Much of the kabbalists' subversive discourse reflects language employed by writers under oppressive political regimes, treading a delicate line between public and private, power and powerlessness, subservience and defiance. By placing the Zohar in its thirteenth-century context, Haskell opens this text as a rich and fruitful source of Jewish cultural testimony produced at the epicenter of sweeping changes in the relationship between medieval Western Europe's Christian majority and its Jewish minority.

Scholastic disputation, the formalized procedure of debate in the medieval university, is one of the hallmarks of intellectual life in premodern Europe. Modeled on Socratic and Aristotelian methods of argumentation, this rhetorical style was refined in the monasteries of the early Middle Ages and rose to prominence during the twelfth-century Renaissance. Strict rules governed disputation, and it became the preferred method of teaching within the university curriculum and beyond. In The Medieval Culture of Disputation, Alex J. Novikoff has written the first sustained and comprehensive study of the practice of scholastic disputation and of its formative influence in multiple spheres of cultural life. Using hundreds of published and unpublished sources as his guide, Novikoff traces the evolution of disputation from its ancient origins to its broader impact on the scholastic culture and public sphere of the High Middle Ages. Many examples of medieval disputation are rooted in religious discourse and monastic pedagogy: Augustine's inner spiritual dialogues and Anselm of Bec's use of rational investigation in speculative theology laid the foundations for the medieval contemplative world. The polemical value of disputation was especially exploited in the context of competing Jewish and Christian interpretations of the Bible. Disputation became the hallmark of Christian intellectual attacks against Jews and Judaism, first as a literary genre and then in public debates such as the Talmud Trial of 1240 and the Barcelona Disputation of 1263. As disputation filtered into the public sphere, it also became a key element in iconography, liturgical drama, epistolary writing, debate poetry, musical counterpoint, and polemic. The Medieval Culture of Disputation places the practice and performance of disputation at the nexus of this broader literary and cultural context.

This volume examines the teaching of Jewishness within the context of medieval England. It covers a wide array of academic disciplines and addresses a multitude of primary sources, including medieval English manuscripts, law codes, philosophy, art, and literature, in explicating how the Jew-as-Other was formed. Chapters are devoted to the teaching of the complexities of medieval Jewish experiences in the modern classroom. Jews in Medieval England: Teaching Representations of the Other also grounds medieval conceptions of the Other within the contemporary world where we continue to confront the problematic attitudes directed toward alleged social outcasts.

By the late Middle Ages, manifestations of Marian devotion had become multifaceted and covered all aspects of religious, private and personal life. Mary becomes a universal presence that accompanies the faithful on pilgrimage, in dreams, as holy visions, and as pictorial representations in church space and domestic interiors. The first part of the volume traces the development of Marian iconography in sculpture, panel paintings, and objects, such as seals, with particular emphasis on Italy, Slovenia and the Hungarian Kingdom. The second section traces the use of Marian devotion in relation to space, be that a country or territory, a monastery or church or personal space, and explores the use of space in shaping new liturgical practices, new Marian feasts and performances, and the bodily performance of ritual objects.

A new approach to thinking about the representation of the Other in Western society, The Jew’s Daughter: A Cultural History of a Conversion Narrative offers an insight into the gendered difference of the Jew. Focusing on a popular narrative of “The Jew’s Daughter,” which has been overlooked in conventional studies of European anti-Semitism, this innovative study looks at canonical and neglected texts which have constructed racialized and sexualized images that persist today in the media and popular culture. The book goes back before Shylock and Jessica in TheMerchant of Venice and Isaac and Rebecca in Ivanhoe to seek the answers to why the Jewish father is always wicked and ugly, while his daughter is invariably desirable and open to conversion. The story unfolds in fascinating transformations, reflecting changing ideological and social discourses about gender, sexuality, religion, and nation that expose shifting perceptions of inclusion and exclusion of the Other. Unlike previous studies of the theme of the Jewess in separate literatures, Sicher provides a comparative perspective on the transnational circulation of texts in the historical context of the perception of both Jews and women as marginal or outcasts in society. The book draws on examples from the arts, history, literature, folklore, and theology to draw a complex picture of the dynamics of Jewish-Christian relations in England, France, Germany, and Eastern Europe from 1100 to 2017. In addition, the responses of Jewish authors illustrate a dialogue that has not always led to mutual understanding. This ground-breaking work will provoke questions about the history and present state of prejudiced attitudes in our society.

England during the Middle Ages was at the forefront of European antisemitism. It was in medieval Norwich that the notorious "blood libel" was first introduced when a resident accused the city's Jewish leaders of abducting and ritually murdering a local boy. England also enforced legislation demanding that Jews wear a badge of infamy, and in 1290, it became the first European nation to expel forcibly all of its Jewish residents. In The Accommodated Jew, Kathy Lavezzo rethinks the complex and contradictory relation between England’s rejection of "the Jew" and the centrality of Jews to classic English literature. Drawing on literary, historical, and cartographic texts, she charts an entangled Jewish imaginative presence in English culture. In a sweeping view that extends from the Anglo-Saxon period to the late seventeenth century, Lavezzo tracks how English writers from Bede to Milton imagine Jews via buildings—tombs, latrines and especially houses—that support fantasies of exile. Epitomizing this trope is the blood libel and its implication that Jews cannot be accommodated in England because of the anti-Christian violence they allegedly perform in their homes. In the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the Jewish house not only serves as a lethal trap but also as the site of an emerging bourgeoisie incompatible with Christian pieties. Lavezzo reveals the central place of "the Jew" in the slow process by which a Christian "nation of shopkeepers" negotiated their relationship to the urban capitalist sensibility they came to embrace and embody. In the book’s epilogue, she advances her inquiry into Victorian England and the relationship between Charles Dickens (whose Fagin is the second most infamous Jew in English literature after Shylock) and the Jewish couple that purchased his London home, Tavistock House, showing how far relations between gentiles and Jews in England had (and had not) evolved.