The Jews In Medieval Germany

The studies collected here centre on the social and economic life of medieval Germany, within a broader European context. The first three articles engage the day-to-day workings of rural society: literature, verbal attack and the language of mediated settlement of conflicts lead to a nuanced view of social hierarchy, in which the meek too have a say. The next group examines some major elements of rural life, dealing with technology, resources, ecology, transport, communication and credit. In the second part, the author focuses on the life of the Jews in Germany, first charting the process of settlement of Jews in Germany, the dynamics of social stratification and household composition, and the impact of economics and persecution on settlement patterns. A case study uncovers the motives and steps that led up to the expulsion of the Jews of Nuremberg in 1498. These themes are followed up into the early modern period, when German Jewry mostly came to live a village life. The last studies deal with the economic history of medieval European Jews, including professions other than moneylending, and with the function of women in economic life.

These studies explore the history of the Jewish minority of Ashkenaz (northern France and the German Empire) during the High Middle Ages. Although the Jews in medieval Europe are usually thought to have been isolated from the Christian majority, they actually were part of a 'Jewish-Christian symbiosis.' A number of studies in the collection focus on Jewish-Christian cultural and social interactions, the foundations of the community ascribed to Charlemagne, and especially on the fashioning of a martyrological collective identity in 1096. Even when Jews resisted Christian pressures they often did so by internalizing Christian motifs and turning them on their heads to argue for the truth of Judaism alone. This may be seen especially in the formation of Jews as martyrs, a trope that places Jews as collective Christ figures whose suffering brings about vicarious atonement. The remainder of the studies delve into the lives and writings of a group of Jewish ascetic pietists, Hasidei Ashkenaz, which shaped the religious culture of most European Jews before modernity. In Sefer Hasidim (Book of the Pietists), attributed to Rabbi Judah the Pietist of Regensburg (d. 1217), one finds a mirror of everyday Jewish-Christian interactions even while the author advances a radical view of Jewish religious pietism.

For nearly a century, it has been a commonplace of Central European history that there were no Jews in medieval Prussia—the result, supposedly, of the ruling Teutonic Order’s attempts to create a purely Christian crusader’s state. In this groundbreaking historical investigation, however, medievalist Cordelia Hess demonstrates the very weak foundations upon which that assumption rests. In exacting detail, she traces this narrative to the work of a single, minor Nazi-era historian, revealing it to be ideologically compromised work that badly mishandles its evidence. By combining new medieval scholarship with a biographical and historiographical exploration grounded in the 20th century, The Absent Jews spans remote eras while offering a fascinating account of the construction of historical knowledge.

Vol. 4 covers the late Roman period to the rise of Islam. Focuses especially on the growth and development of rabbinic Judaism and of the major classical rabbinic sources such as the Mishnah, Jerusalem Talmud, Babylonian Talmud and various Midrashic collections.

It is commonly held that medieval Christians viewed medieval Jews in exclusively negative terms. This is certainly the dominant opinion in much twentieth-century scholarship, and it is not wholly without justification. It is, however, an opinion that does not accurately reflect the breadth of medieval German Christian thinking about medieval German Jews. Drawing on Passion plays, hagiographical narratives and didactic literature, this monograph reveals a hitherto largely unacknowledged diversity in medieval German representations of Jews. In many of the best-attested texts from the late medieval and early modern periods, Jews appear in German literature as sympathetic, even morally exemplary figures.

A valuable compilation drawn from the Muehlhaeuser Reichsrechtsbuch, the Sachsenspiegel, the Dresden Collection of Jury-Court Decisions, the Remissorium Regulae Juris "Ad Decis" and other source records, all in their original languages. Originally published: New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1949. With an extensive introductory essay, a bibliography of manuscript and later editions, an index of subjects, an index of Jewish names and an index of places. Originally published as Volume III in the American Academy for Jewish Research series, Text and Studies. xiv, 274 pp.

This book examines the nature and extent of changes in communal structures and self-definition among Jews and Christians in Germany during the century before the Reformation. It argues that Christian community was restructured along civic and religious lines resulting in the development of a local sacred society that integrated material and spiritual well being into a moral and legal society, stressing the common good and internal peace, while Jewish community, given a variety of factors, came to be defined through regional communal structures and moral and legal discourse that allowed for broader geographical communal identity. Bell draws from a variety of German, Latin, and Hebrew sources and takes into consideration several methods and viewpoints of studying history.