The Accommodated Jew

Author : Kathy Lavezzo
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 393 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2016-10-21
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781501706707

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The Accommodated Jew by Kathy Lavezzo Pdf

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.

Author : Miriamne Ara Krummel
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
Page : 285 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2022-04-05
Category : History
ISBN : 9780472132379

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The Medieval Postcolonial Jew, In and Out of Time by Miriamne Ara Krummel Pdf

Introduction: Calculating Time: Eosturmonath, Nisan, and the Paschal Table -- Just In Time: Sacrificial Gifts, Rotting Corpses, and Annus Domini -- An (Un)Common Era: Passionate Narratives, Temporal Clashes-Jewish and Christian -- Taking Jews out and Putting Them Back in: Christian Chronometry, the York Massacre, and a Cycle of Mystery Plays -- A Time of Many Layers: Feasting on the Temporalities of The Siege of Jerusalem -- Repressing a Perpetually Resurfacing Temporality: Four Authorial Orphans and The Fifteenth-Century 'Tale of the Litel Clergeon and the Jews' -- Epilogue: The Empire of Common Time.

Author : Miriamne Ara Krummel,Tison Pugh
Publisher : Springer
Page : 373 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2018-01-08
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9783319637488

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Jews in Medieval England by Miriamne Ara Krummel,Tison Pugh Pdf

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.

Author : Magda Teter
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 561 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2020-01-07
Category : History
ISBN : 9780674243552

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Blood Libel by Magda Teter Pdf

A landmark history of the antisemitic blood libel myth—how it took root in Europe, spread with the invention of the printing press, and persists today. Accusations that Jews ritually killed Christian children emerged in the mid-twelfth century, following the death of twelve-year-old William of Norwich, England, in 1144. Later, continental Europeans added a destructive twist: Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood. While charges that Jews poisoned wells and desecrated the communion host waned over the years, the blood libel survived. Initially blood libel stories were confined to monastic chronicles and local lore. But the development of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century expanded the audience and crystallized the vocabulary, images, and “facts” of the blood libel, providing a lasting template for hate. Tales of Jews killing Christians—notably Simon of Trent, a toddler whose body was found under a Jewish house in 1475—were widely disseminated using the new technology. Following the paper trail across Europe, from England to Italy to Poland, Magda Teter shows how the blood libel was internalized and how Jews and Christians dealt with the repercussions. The pattern established in early modern Europe still plays out today. In 2014 the Anti-Defamation League appealed to Facebook to take down a page titled “Jewish Ritual Murder.” The following year white supremacists gathered in England to honor Little Hugh of Lincoln as a sacrificial victim of the Jews. Based on sources in eight countries and ten languages, Blood Libel captures the long shadow of a pernicious myth.

Author : David Hartman
Publisher : Turner Publishing Company
Page : 319 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2012-12-05
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781580237048

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A Heart of Many Rooms by David Hartman Pdf

“This work is not addressed only to scholars of Judaism or theologians, but also, and primarily, to all Jews and non-Jews who would like to share the thoughts and struggles of a person who loves Torah and Halakhah, who is committed to helping make room for and celebrate the religious and cultural diversity present in the modern world, and who believes that a commitment to Israel and to Jewish particularity must be organically connected to the rabbinic teaching, ‘Beloved are all human beings created in the image of God.’” —from the Introduction With clarity, passion, and outstanding scholarship, David Hartman addresses the spiritual and theological questions that face all Jews and all people today. From the perspective of traditional Judaism, he helps us understand the varieties of twentieth-century Jewish practice and shows that commitment to both Jewish tradition and to pluralism can create bridges of understanding between people of different religious convictions.

Author : Milton Plesur
Publisher : Burnham Incorporated Pub
Page : 235 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 1982
Category : History
ISBN : 0882298003

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Jewish Life in Twentieth-century America by Milton Plesur Pdf

A history of the culture of American Jews studies the reactions of immigrants to social conditions and the adaptation of the traditional Jewish lifestyle to reconcile conflicts with American society

Author : Adrienne Williams Boyarin
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 339 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2020-10-30
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780812297508

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The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess by Adrienne Williams Boyarin Pdf

In the Plea Rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, Trinity Term 1277, Adrienne Williams Boyarin finds the case of one Sampson son of Samuel, a Jew of Northampton, arrested for impersonating a Franciscan friar and preaching false Christianity. He was sentenced to walk for three days through the centers of London, Canterbury, Oxford, Lincoln, and Northampton carrying the entrails and flayed skin of a calf and exposing his naked, circumcised body to onlookers. Sampson's crime and sentence, Williams Boyarin argues, suggest that he made a convincing friar—when clothed. Indeed, many English texts of this era struggle with the similarities of Jews and Christians, but especially of Jewish and Christian women. Unlike men, Jewish women did not typically wear specific identifying clothing, nor were they represented as physiognomically distinct. Williams Boyarin observes that both before and after the periods in which art historians note a consistent visual repertoire of villainy and difference around Jewish men, English authors highlight and exploit Jewish women's indistinguishability from Christians. Exploring what she calls a "polemics of sameness," she elucidates an essential part of the rhetoric employed by medieval anti-Jewish materials, which could assimilate the Jew into the Christian and, as a consequence, render the Jewess a dangerous but unseeable enemy or a sign of the always-convertible self. The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess considers realities and fantasies of indistinguishability. It focuses on how medieval Christians could identify with Jews and even think of themselves as Jewish—positively or negatively, historically or figurally. Williams Boyarin identifies and explores polemics of sameness through a broad range of theological, historical, and literary works from medieval England before turning more specifically to stereotypes of Jewish women and the ways in which rhetorical strategies that blur the line between "saming" and "othering" reveal gendered habits of representation.

Author : Jonathan Elukin
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 204 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2009-01-10
Category : History
ISBN : 9781400827695

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Living Together, Living Apart by Jonathan Elukin Pdf

This book challenges the standard conception of the Middle Ages as a time of persecution for Jews. Jonathan Elukin traces the experience of Jews in Europe from late antiquity through the Renaissance and Reformation, revealing how the pluralism of medieval society allowed Jews to feel part of their local communities despite recurrent expressions of hatred against them. Elukin shows that Jews and Christians coexisted more or less peacefully for much of the Middle Ages, and that the violence directed at Jews was largely isolated and did not undermine their participation in the daily rhythms of European society. The extraordinary picture that emerges is one of Jews living comfortably among their Christian neighbors, working with Christians, and occasionally cultivating lasting friendships even as Christian culture often demonized Jews. As Elukin makes clear, the expulsions of Jews from England, France, Spain, and elsewhere were not the inevitable culmination of persecution, but arose from the religious and political expediencies of particular rulers. He demonstrates that the history of successful Jewish-Christian interaction in the Middle Ages in fact laid the social foundations that gave rise to the Jewish communities of modern Europe. Elukin compels us to rethink our assumptions about this fascinating period in history, offering us a new lens through which to appreciate the rich complexities of the Jewish experience in medieval Christendom.

Author : Ruth Nisse
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 363 pages
File Size : 40,6 Mb
Release : 2017-04-18
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781501708312

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Jacob's Shipwreck by Ruth Nisse Pdf

Jewish and Christian authors of the High Middle Ages not infrequently came into dialogue or conflict with each other over traditions drawn from ancient writings outside of the bible. Circulating in Latin and Hebrew adaptations and translations, these included the two independent versions of the Testament of Naphtali in which the patriarch has a vision of the Diaspora, a shipwreck that scatters the twelve tribes. The Christian narrative is linear and ends in salvation; the Jewish narrative is circular and pessimistic. For Ruth Nisse, this is an emblematic text that illuminates relationships between interpretation, translation, and survival. In Nisse’s account, extrabiblical literature encompasses not only the historical works of Flavius Josephus but also, in some of the more ingenious medieval Hebrew imaginative texts, Aesop’s fables and the Aeneid. While Christian-Jewish relations in medieval England and Northern France are most often associated with Christian polemics against Judaism and persecutions of Jews in the wake of the Crusades, the period also saw a growing interest in language study and translation in both communities. These noncanonical texts and their afterlives provided Jews and Christians alike with resources of fiction that they used to reconsider boundaries of doctrine and interpretation. Among the works that Nisse takes as exemplary of this intersection are the Book of Yosippon, a tenth-century Hebrew adaptation of Josephus with a wide circulation and influence in the later middle ages, and the second-century romance of Aseneth about the religious conversion of Joseph’s Egyptian wife. Yosippon gave Jews a new discourse of martyrdom in its narrative of the fall of Jerusalem, and at the same time it offered access to the classical historical models being used by their Christian contemporaries. Aseneth provided its new audience of medieval monks with a way to reimagine the troubling consequences of unwilling Jewish converts.

Author : Samantha Zacher
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
Page : 377 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2016-01-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9781442646674

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Imagining the Jew in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Culture by Samantha Zacher Pdf

The thirteen essays in Imagining the Jew in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Culture examine visual and textual representations of Jews before 1066.

Author : Katalin Franciska Rac,Lenny A. Ureña Valerio
Publisher : University Press of Florida
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2023-08-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781683403975

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Jewish Experiences across the Americas by Katalin Franciska Rac,Lenny A. Ureña Valerio Pdf

Latin American Jewish Studies Association Best Edited Volume This volume explores the local specificities and global forces that shaped Jewish experiences in the Americas across five centuries. Featuring a range of case studies by scholars from the United States, Brazil, Europe, and Israel, it explores the culturally, religiously, and politically diverse lives of Jewish minorities in the Western Hemisphere. The chapters are organized chronologically and trace four global forces: the western expansion of early modern European empires, Jewish networks across and beyond empires, migration, and Jewish activism and participation in international ideological movements. The volume weaves together into one narrative the histories of communities and individuals separated by time and space, such as the descendants of Portuguese converts, Moroccan immigrants to Brazil, and U.S.-based creators of Yiddish movies. Through its transnational focus and close attention paid to local circumstances, this volume offers new insights into the multicultural pasts of the Americas’ Jewish populations and of the different regions that make up North, Central, and South America. Contributors: Lenny A. Ureña Valerio | Elisa Kriza | Raanan Rein | Adriana M. Brodsky | Lucas de Mattos Moura Fernandes | Katalin Franciska Rac | Zachary M Baker | Neil Weijer | Hilit Surowitz-Israel | Isabel Rosa Gritti | Tamar Herzog | Jose C Moya | Sandra McGee Deutsch | Dana Rabin Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Author : Anthony J. Saldarini
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 325 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 1994-05-16
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780226734217

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Matthew's Christian-Jewish Community by Anthony J. Saldarini Pdf

The most Jewish of gospels in its contents and yet the most anti-Jewish in its polemics, the Gospel of Matthew has been said to mark the emergence of Christianity from Judaism. Anthony J. Saldarini overturns this interpretation by showing us how Matthew, far from proclaiming the replacement of Israel by the Christian church, wrote from within Jewish tradition to a distinctly Jewish audience. Recent research reveals that among both Jews and Christians of the first century many groups believed in Jesus while remaining close to Judaism. Saldarini argues that the author of the Gospel of Matthew belonged to such a group, supporting his claim with an informed reading of Matthew's text and historical context. Matthew emerges as a Jewish teacher competing for the commitment of his people after the catastrophic loss of the Temple in 70 C.E., his polemics aimed not at all Jews but at those who oppose him. Saldarini shows that Matthew's teaching about Jesus fits into first-century Jewish thought, with its tradition of God-sent leaders and heavenly mediators. In Saldarini's account, Matthew's Christian-Jewish community is a Jewish group, albeit one that deviated from the larger Jewish community. Contributing to both New Testament and Judaic studies, this book advances our understanding of how religious groups are formed.

Author : Aaron W. Hughes
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 191 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 2014-04
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780199356812

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Rethinking Jewish Philosophy by Aaron W. Hughes Pdf

Rather than assume that the terms "philosophy" and "Judaism" simply belong together, Aaron W. Hughes explores the juxtaposition and the creative tension that ensues from their cohabitation. He examines the historical, cultural, intellectual, and religious filiations between Judaism and philosophy.

Author : John Tolan
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2023-04-11
Category : History
ISBN : 9781512824001

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England's Jews by John Tolan Pdf

Author : Derek Rubin
Publisher : Schocken
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2010-02-10
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780307493118

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Who We Are by Derek Rubin Pdf

This unprecedented collection brings together the major Jewish American writers of the past fifty years as they examine issues of identity and how they’ve made their work respond. E.L. Doctorow questions the very notion of the Jewish American writer, insisting that all great writing is secular and universal. Allegra Goodman embraces the categorization, arguing that it immediately binds her to her readers. Dara Horn, among the youngest of these writers, describes the tendency of Jewish writers to focus on anti-Semitism and advocates a more creative and positive way of telling the Jewish story. Thane Rosenbaum explains that as a child of Holocaust survivors, he was driven to write in an attempt to reimagine the tragic endings in Jewish history. Here are the stories of how these writers became who they are: Saul Bellow on his adolescence in Chicago, Grace Paley on her early love of Romantic poetry, Chaim Potok on being transformed by the work of Evelyn Waugh. Here, too, are Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Erica Jong, Jonathon Rosen, Tova Mirvis, Pearl Abraham, Alan Lelchuk, Rebecca Goldstein, Nessa Rapoport, and many more. Spanning three generations of Jewish writing in America, these essays — by turns nostalgic, comic, moving, and deeply provocative- constitute an invaluable investigation into the thinking and the work of some of America’s most important writers.