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In 1391 many of the Jews of Spain were forced to convert to Christianity, creating a new group whose members would be continually seeking a niche for themselves in society. This book considers the history of the Iberian conversos-both those who remained in Spain and Portugal and those who emigrated.
James William Nelson Novoa's new book Being the Nação in the Eternal City explores, in a set of case studies focusing on seven carefully chosen figures, the presence of Portuguese individuals of Jewish origin in Rome after the initial creation of a tribunal of the Portuguese Inquisition in 1531. The book delves into the varied ways in which the protagonists, representing a cross-section of Portuguese society, went about grappling with the complexities of a New Christian identity, and tracks them through their interactions with Roman society and its institutions. Some chose to flaunt Jewish origins. They espoused a sense of being part of a distinctive group, the Portuguese New Christian naÃ...
Examining women's property rights in different societies across the entire medieval and early modern Mediterranean, this volume introduces a unique comparative perspective to the complexities of gender relations in Muslim, Jewish, and Christian communities. Through individual case studies based on urban and rural, elite and non-elite, religious and secular communities, Across the Religious Divide presents the only nuanced history of the region that incorporates peripheral areas such as Portugal, the Aegean Islands, Dalmatia, and Albania into the central narrative. By bridging the present-day notional and cultural divide between Muslim and Judeo-Christian worlds with geographical and thematic coherence, this collection of essays by top international scholars focuses on women in courts of law and sources such as notarial records, testaments, legal commentaries, and administrative records to offer the most advanced research and illuminate real connections across boundaries of gender, religion, and culture.
Eschatology played a central role in both politics and society throughout the early modern period. It inspired people to strive for social and political change, including sometimes by violent means, and prompted in return strong reactions against their religious activism. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, numerous apocalyptical and messianic movements came to the fore across Eurasia and North Africa, raising questions about possible interconnections. Why were eschatological movements so pervasive in early modern times? This volume provides some answers to this question by exploring the interconnected histories of confessions and religions from Moscow to Cusco. It offers a broad p...
This book investigates Jan Van Eyck's patronage by the Crown of Portugal and his role as diplomat-painter for the Duchy of Burgundy following his first voyage to Lisbon in 1428-1429, when he painted two portraits of Infanta Isabella, who became the third wife of Philip the Good in 1430. New portrait identifications are provided for the Ghent Altarpiece (1432) and its iconographical prototype, the lost Fountain of Life. These altarpieces are analysed with regard to King Joao I's conquest of Ceuta, achieved by his sons, who were hailed as an "illustrious generation." Strong family ties between the dynastic houses of Avis and Lancaster explain Lusitania's sustained fascination with Arthurian lo...
Sephardic Jews have contributed some of the most important Jewish philosophers, poets, biblical commentators, Talmudic and Halachic scholars, and scientists, and have had a significant impact on the development of Jewish mysticism. Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewry brings together original work from the world's leading scholars to present a deep introductory overview of their history and culture over the past 1500 years.
Scholarship on the formation of the Atlantic world through contributions from Europe, Africa and the Americas has grown in recent decades. The results offer new understandings of the transformations in ethnic and religious identity faced by peoples from all the surrounding continents. Long used by scholars of Jewish studies, records from the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions have become an important source for historians of Africans and Amerindians in the Iberian colonial orbit. Using these and other materials, this book explores race, religion and politics among three newly and incompletely Christianized groups in the seventeenth century: Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and Amerindians. This fresh cross-cultural analysis brings these differing trajectories into dialogue.
From his first book, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto, to his well-known volume on Jewish memory, Zakhor, to his treatment of Sigmund Freud in Freud's Moses, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1932-2009) earned recognition as perhaps the greatest Jewish historian of his day, whose scholarship blended vast erudition, unfettered creativity, and lyrical beauty. This volume charts his intellectual trajectory by bringing together a mix of classic and lesser-known essays from the whole of his career. The essays in this collection, representative of the range of his writing, acquaint the reader with his research on early modern Spanish Jewry and the experience of crypto-Jews, varied reflections on Jewish history and memory, and Yerushalmi-s enduring interest in the political history of the Jews. Also included are a number of little-known autobiographical recollections, as well as his only published work of fiction.
Recent comparative, interdisciplinary scholarship has underscored the Inquisition s function in the imperial and colonial Iberian world, particularly in relation to the development of modernity. This book illustrates and enhances these debates on the Inquisition s relationship to imperialism, colonialism, and modernity through specific case studies of New Christians who became the target of the Inquisition. Drawing on research in the archives of the Spanish and the Portuguese Inquisition in different parts of the Iberian Atlantic World, it analyzes literary writings and inquisitorial testimonies produced by individuals of Jewish heritage who lived in the Iberian Atlantic world during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and brings to light the direct and mediated discourse produced by New Christians, revealing the still veiled contributions of an important but understudied ethnic and social group.
Gersonides’ Afterlife is the first full-scale treatment of the reception of one of the greatest scientific minds of medieval Judaism: Gersonides (1288–1344). An outstanding representative of the Hebrew Jewish culture that then flourished in southern France, Gersonides wrote on mathematics, logic, astronomy, astrology, physical science, metaphysics and theology, and commented on almost the entire bible. His strong-minded attempt to integrate these different areas of study into a unitary system of thought was deeply rooted in the Aristotelian tradition and yet innovative in many respects, and thus elicited diverse and often impassionate reactions. For the first time, the twenty-one papers collected here describe Gersonides’ impact in all fields of his activity and the reactions from his contemporaries up to present-day religious Zionism.