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Beinart's detailed magnum opus focuses on the practicalities of the expulsion and its consequences, both for those expelled and those remaining behind. Analysis of hundreds of archival documents enables him to take history out of the realm of abstraction and give it concrete reality, and in so doing he also sheds much light on Jewish life in Spain before the expulsion.
The accounts, representing the experiences of girls and women from different classes and geographical regions, include the trials' vastly divergent outcomes ranging from burning at the stake to exoneration.
The Jewish community of medieval Spain was the largest and most important in the West for more than a thousand years, participating fully in cultural and political affairs with Muslim and Christian neighbors. This stable situation began to change in the 1390s, and through the next century hundreds of thousands of Jews converted to Christianity. Norman Roth argues here with detailed documentation that, contrary to popular myth, the conversos were sincere converts who hated (and were hated by) the remaining Jewish community. Roth examines in depth the reasons for the Inquisition against the conversos, and the eventual expulsion of all Jews from Spain. “With scrupulous scholarship based on a ...
After a nearly two-thousand-year interlude, and just as Christian Europe was in the throes of the great Witch Hunt and what historians have referred to as "The Age of the Demoniac," accounts of spirit possession began to proliferate in the Jewish world. Concentrated at first in the Near East but spreading rapidly westward, spirit possession, both benevolent and malevolent, emerged as perhaps the most characteristic form of religiosity in early modern Jewish society. Adopting a comparative historical approach, J. H. Chajes uncovers this strain of Jewish belief to which scant attention has been paid. Informed by recent research in historical anthropology, Between Worlds provides fascinating de...
Using cutting-edge theory regarding trade networks and diaspora, this book offers an innovative analysis of Sephardic merchants in 17th c. Amsterdam’s trade. Challenging views that Sephardic success stemmed from endogamous business relationships, it shows that Sephardic merchants traded with non-Sephardim.
Unique in its cultural and religious makeup, medieval Iberia represented a crossroads of cultures. This crossroads was reflected in large and small ways. On a grand scale, we see the convergence of intellectual ideas and great innovations in agriculture and science. On a more intimate level, we see an intersection of cultures as reflected in habits of consumption. The acts of producing food, cooking, and eating demonstrate the political realities of the land: at times interdependent, and, at times, at odds. Food, as an archeological and anthropological tool, can help us understand a particular moment in time. In considering the nature of consumption, we may arrive at the heart of a culture. In Medieval Fare, the author explores food references found in a number of medieval Iberian texts in order to expand our knowledge of daily life in the Middle Ages. By examining the depiction of food and consumption, this pioneering study provides insight into the cultural, religious, and social complexities of medieval Iberia.
Between 1391 and the end of the 15th century, numerous Spanish Jews converted to Christianity, most of them under duress. Before and after 1492, when the Jews were officially expelled from Spain, a significant number of these conversos maintained clandestine ties to Judaism, despite their outward conformity to Catholicism. Through the lens of the Inquisition's own records, this groundbreaking study focuses on the crypto-Jewish women of Castile, demonstrating their central role in the perpetuation of crypto-Jewish society in the absence of traditional Jewish institutions led by men. Renee Levine Melammed shows how many "conversas" acted with great courage and commitment to perpetuate their religious heritage, seeing themselves as true daughters of Israel. Her fascinating book sheds new light on the roles of women in the transmission of Jewish traditions and cultures.
All twenty-two original articles in the current volume are based on lectures given at the conference “The Jews in Italy: Their Contribution to the Development and Diffusion of Jewish Heritage”, which was convened in September 2011, at the University of Bologna, Department of Cultural Heritage. Geographically, the articles range from Italy to the Ottoman Empire (the Balkans and Aleppo), from France and Germany to the Middle East, including Israel, North and East Africa (Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, and Ethiopia). Chronologically, articles begin with the Roman period, through the Middle Ages and Renaissance until modern times. In this collection, the reader will find a wide range of subjects reflecting various scholarly perspectives such as history; Christian-Jewish relations; Kabbalah; commentary on the Bible and Talmud; language, grammar, and translation; literature; philosophy; gastronomy; art; culture; folklore; and education.
The Wiley-Blackwell History of Jews and Judaism presents a panoramic and comprehensive overview of the major aspects of Jewish life and culture, from the biblical period through to contemporary times. A collection of outstanding contributions from leading experts presents the latest scholarship on a range of questions relating to Jews, Jewish history, Judaism, folk practices, politics, economic structure, the relationship of Judaism to Christianity, and the manifold participation of Jews in general culture through various times and geographical locales. In addition, the book explores Jewish historiography and the lives of ordinary people, the achievements of Jewish women, and the sustained i...
Professor S.N. Eisenstadt has written numerous essays on Jewish Identity over the years. This volume brings together some of these. The major argument of the essays follows the Weberian view of Jewish historical experience as that of a distinct civilization, as a distinct Great Religion, the first monotheistic civilization - without, however, accepting many of Weber's concrete analyses.