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This narrative history surveying one thousand years of Jewish life integrates the Jewish experience into the context of the overall culture and society of medieval Europe. It presents a new picture of the interaction between Christians and Jews in this tumultuous era. Alienated Minority shows us what it meant to be a Jew in Europe in the Middle Ages. The story begins in the fifth century, when autonomous Jewish rule in Palestine came to a close, and when the papacy, led by Gregory the Great, established enduring principles regarding Christian policy toward Jews. Kenneth Stow examines the structures of self-government in the European Jewish community and the centrality of emerging concepts of...
The theme uniting the essays reprinted here is the attitude of the medieval Church, and in particular the papacy, toward the Jewish population of Western Europe. Papal consistency, sometimes sorely tried, in observing the canons and the principles announced by St Paul - that Jews were to be a permanent, if disturbing, part of Christian life - helped balance the anxiety felt by members of the Church. Clerics especially feared what they called Jewish pollution. These themes are the focus of the studies in the first part of this volume. Those in the second part explore aspects of Jewish society and family life, as both were shaped by medieval realities.
A historical interpretation of the diary of an eighteenth-century Jewish woman who resisted the efforts of the papal authorities to force her religious conversion After being seized by the papal police in Rome in May 1749, Anna del Monte, a Jew, kept a diary detailing her captors’ efforts over the next thirteen days to force her conversion to Catholicism. Anna’s powerful chronicle of her ordeal at the hands of authorities of the Roman Catholic Church, originally circulated by her brother Tranquillo in 1793, receives its first English-language translation along with an insightful interpretation by Kenneth Stow of the incident’s legal and historical significance. Stow’s analysis of Anna’s dramatic story of prejudice, injustice, resistance, and survival during her two-week imprisonment in the Roman House of Converts—and her brother’s later efforts to protest state-sanctioned, religion-based abuses—provides a detailed view of the separate forces on either side of the struggle between religious and civil law in the years just prior to the massive political and social upheavals in America and Europe.
The essays in this second volume by Kenneth Stow explore the fate of Jews living in Rome, directly under the eye of the Pope. Most Roman Jews were not immigrants; some had been there before the time of Christ. Nor were they cultural strangers. They spoke (Roman) Italian, ate and dressed as did other Romans, and their marital practices reflected Roman noble usage. Rome's Jews were called cives, but unequal ones, and to resolve this anomaly, Paul IV closed them within ghetto walls in 1555; the rest of Europe would resolve this crux in the late eighteenth century, through civil Emancipation. In its essence, the ghetto was a limbo, from which only conversion, promoted through "disciplining" par excellence, offered an exit. Nonetheless, though increasingly impoverished, Rome's Jews preserved culture and reinforced family life, even many women's rights. A system of consensual arbitration enabled a modicum of self-governance. Yet Rome's Jews also came to realize that they had been expelled into the ghetto: nostro ghet, a document of divorce, as they called it. There they would remain, segregated, so long as they remained Jews. Such are the themes that the author examines in these essays.
This book is a study of Catholic teachings on purity, and the anxiety these teachings have generated with respect to relations with the Jews since the time of St. Paul.
A rare book that combines searing passion with a subject that has affected all of our lives. "Chicago Tribune" Novelist, cultural critic, and former priest James Carroll marries history with memoir as he maps the two-thousand-year course of the Church s battle against Judaism and faces the crisis of faith it has sparked in his own life. Fascinating, brave, and sometimes infuriating ("Time"), this dark history is more than a chronicle of religion. It is the central tragedy of Western civilization, its fault lines reaching deep into our culture to create a deeply felt work ("San Francisco Chronicle") as Carroll wrangles with centuries of strife and tragedy to reach a courageous and affecting reckoning with difficult truths."
The theme uniting the essays reprinted here is the attitude of the medieval Church, and in particular the papacy, toward the Jewish population of Western Europe. Papal consistency, sometimes sorely tried, in observing the canons and the principles announced by St Paul - that Jews were to be a permanent, if disturbing, part of Christian life - helped balance the anxiety felt by members of the Church. Clerics especially feared what they called Jewish pollution. These themes are the focus of the studies in the first part of this volume. Those in the second part explore aspects of Jewish society and family life, as both were shaped by medieval realities.
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.