Harvard University Press, Sept. 2024
For the first time, this collection makes available a selection of documents on the history of Jews in old Rus’ that provide unique insight into Slavic–Jewish relations, offering both the original texts in Latin, Hebrew, Church Slavonic, and Arabic, and their English translations.
Read now Avraham Grossman on the Cultural Dynamic of Medieval Jewish History and Thought, eds. Menachem Butler and Jonathan Grossman (Cambridge, MA: The Institute for Jewish Research and Publications, 2024).
Read tihs article via the Librarians blog of the nationla Library of Israel.
Read now Ram Ben-Shalom’s The Jews of Provence and Languedoc (Liverpool University Press, 2024). The publisher writes: “The Hebrew edition of The Jews of Provence and Languedoc, published in 2017, was awarded the Ben Zvi Institute Prize (2018) and the Am Olam Prize of the Historical Society of Israel (2019). This exhaustive history of Provençal Jewry examines the key aspects of Jewish life in Provence—cultural, religious, political, economic, and literary—over some 1,500 years. The Jewish response to the Albigensian Crusade, the annexation of Languedoc by the Kingdom of France, and other historical events was an unprecedented cultural florescence that was to have far-reaching and enduring consequences. Crucially, it was in Provence that philosophical and scientific works were first translated from Arabic to Hebrew, allowing the Jews of Christian Europe to absorb and assimilate the achievements of the Jews of Muslim Spain. The emergence in Provence of the Maimonidean-Aristotelian philosophical school sent spiritual shock waves throughout the Jewish world, and it was also in Provence that the first esoteric teachings of kabbalah emerged. But cultural innovations went beyond the religious and philosophical: secular Hebrew poetry written by Jewish troubadors offered a glimpse of Jewish merrymaking, romanticism, and eroticism that drew criticism from the rabbis, and even allowed women’s voices to be assertively raised in the public sphere. First published in Hebrew in 2017 to scholarly acclaim, this is a seminal examination of the crucial role of the Jews of Provence in shaping medieval Jewish culture in the Mediterranean basin.”
Edited by Katrín Lísa L. Mikaelsdóttir (University of Iceland, Faculty of Icelandic and Comparative Cultural Studies) and Lea D. Pokorny (University of Iceland, Faculty of History, Philosophy and Archaeology)
By Annegret Oehme
Jewish Seals by Andreas Lehnertz.
Take part in the online book launch of Book Launch of Anna Sapir Abulafia’s “Christian-Jewish Relations 1000-1300: Jews in the Service of Medieval Christendom” (2nd Edition) via the Oxford Interfaith Forum on 24 September 2024.
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.
Continue reading Disruption and Resilience in Late Medieval AshkenazRead this blog post by Lorris Chevalier about “Birds of Night: The Role of the Owl in Medieval European Anti-Judaism” via medievalist.net.
