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James Campbell's work has established the impressive powers of the Anglo-Saxon state, with its ability to impose laws, raise revenue, undertake major works and consult the interests and wishes of its subjects. This collection of essays looks at the state and its successors from a number of angles.
The twelfth century in Europe, hailed by historians as a time of intellectual and spiritual vitality, had a dark side. As Robert Chazan points out, the marginalization of minorities emerged during the "twelfth-century renaissance" as part of a growing pattern of persecution, and among those stigmatized the Jews figured prominently. The migration of Jews to northern Europe in the late tenth century led to the development of a new set of Jewish communities. This northern Jewry prospered, only to decline sharply two centuries later. Chazan locates the cause of the decline primarily in the creation of new, negative images of Jews. He shows how these damaging twelfth-century stereotypes developed and goes on to chart the powerful, lasting role of the new anti-Jewish imagery in the historical development of antisemitism. This coupling of the twelfth century's notable intellectual bequests to the growth of Western civilization with its legacy of virulent anti-Jewish motifs offers an important new key to understanding modern antisemitism.
'God's War' tells the powerful and horrifying story of the Crusades - an explosive mixture of religious quest and greed for treasure that led enormous Christian armies to invade the Islamic world.
This book presents a linear history of Jewish martyrdom, from the Hellenistic period to the high Middle Ages. Following the chronology of sources, the study challenges the general consensus that martyrdom was an original Hellenistic Jewish idea. Instead, Jews like Philo and Josephus internalized the idealized Roman concept of voluntary death and presented it as an old Jewish practice. The centrality of self-sacrifice in Christianity further stimulated the development of rabbinic martyrology and the talmudic guidelines for passive martyrdom. However, when forced to choosed between death and conversion in medieval Christendom, Ashkenazic Jews went beyond these guidelines, sacrificing themselves and loved ones. Through death not only did they attempt to prove their religiosity, but also to disprove the religious legitimacy of their Christian persecutors. While martyrs and martyrologies intended to show how Judaisim differed from Christianity, they, in fact, reveal a common mindset.
This is the first book to examine the relationship between European antisemitism and Islamophobia from the Crusades until the twenty-first century in the principal flashpoints of the two racisms. With case studies ranging from the Balkans to the UK, the contributors take the debate away from politicised polemics about whether or not Muslims are the new Jews. Much previous scholarship and public discussion has focused on comparing European ideas about Jews and Judaism in the past with contemporary attitudes towards Muslims and Islam. This volume rejects this approach. Instead, it interrogates how the dynamic relationship between antisemitism and Islamophobia has evolved over time and space. T...
This book traces the hardening of Christian attitudes to Jews, Judiasm and their history during the second half of the Middle Ages.
In Popes and Jews, 1095-1291, Rebecca Rist explores the nature and scope of the relationship of the medieval papacy to the Jewish communities of western Europe. Rist analyses papal pronouncements in the context of the substantial and on-going social, political, and economic changes of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, as well the characters and preoccupations of individual pontiffs and the development of Christian theology. She breaks new ground in exploring the other side of the story - Jewish perceptions of both individual popes and the papacy as an institution - through analysis of a wide range of contemporary Hebrew and Latin documents. The author engages with the works of...
This is a study of the intellectual history of the Andalusī Christians (alias Mozarabs) of Spain based on their Arabic and Latin polemical writings against Islam, c. 1050-1200. The first part of the book examines how these authors drew on earlier Oriental Arab-Christian theology, twelfth-century Latin-Christian theology, and the foundational texts of Islam itself — the Qur’ān and ḥadīt — for polemical purposes. The second part is a critical edition and English translation of the most important source, the Liber denudationis siue ostensionis aut patefaciens (alias Contrarietas alfolica). Since it describes how the Andalusī Christians participated in the pluralistic intellectual milieu in which they lived, this study will be of interest to historians of medieval Spain's minority groups, Christian-Muslim relations, and the Arab-Christian tradition.
This is the first English translation of one of the most important treatises written during the late-Middle Ages in defense of converts from Judaism, favoring religious tolerance in the face of religious and racially motivated prejudice and violence. The book also includes a fresh Latin edition, drawing on all known manuscripts. The text was written in response to the actions of the "Old Christians" of Toledo against the "New Christians," also called conversos, in 1449. A letter of Pope Nicholas V favouring the converts is included.