Category Archives: Digital Humanities

Webinar on the Index of Jewish Art

The Center for Jewish Art “is offering a free introductory webinar on the Index of Jewish Art. This webinar is designed to help you effectively navigate the Index and utilize its diverse tools. It can also be integrated into course curricula and other group activities with students. For additional information, please reach out to Dr. Anna Berezin, Head of the Ritual and Ceremonial Section at the Center for Jewish Art, at anna.berezin@mail.huji.ac.il.”

Disruption and Resilience in Late Medieval Ashkenaz

New Book Volume for Dowload: Dialectics of Continuity and Discontinuity

Historians have long considered the later Middle Ages as a period of cultural decline in European Jewish history. As far as Ashkenaz is concerned, i.e., the area of the medieval German kingdom and its adjacent regions, pogroms and persecutions loom large in the memories of late medieval Jews and of modern historians – and rightfully so. At the same time, the first roots of later »rural Jewry« have been identified in htis very period. If we look closer, it appears that German towns and cities contined to play a role, too, even if Jews were often banned from in the major urban centers permanently and lived in nearby suburban spaces. Not least, the Ashkenazim who emigrated to northen Italy since the late-fourteenth century and to Poland during the fifteenth, laid the foundations for thriving early modern communities in these countries.

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Database: Elyonim veTachtonim. System of Analysis of Supernatural Entities

Have a look at this new database, which “a customizable system of the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the textual accounts featuring supernatural entities understood according to the cognitive science of religion with an emphasis on the cognitive metaphors used in the description of their appearance and behavior, especially vis-à-vis human actors. The central tool of this analysis is the database, which functions primarily as a convenient thematic concordance and a repository of systematically annotated data.”