Abstract
This collection of essays explores a variety of perspectives on Jewish and Christian life in northern France during the thirteenth century. The incentive for this volume was the changing paradigms within the field of medieval studies connected with Jewish-Christian relations and the growing understanding that has characterized the past decade and a half of scholarship, underlining not only the animosity but also the intimacy and similarities between the two faith communities.1 In light of the growing tendency to view both religious communities as more closely linked than in the past, this work aims to examine these relationships on multiple levels and in a variety of disciplines. It sets as its goal an examination of the thirteenth century specifically as it is somewhat overlooked, sandwiched between the “twelfth-century renaissance” and the late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century famine and disease that changed the face of Europe and, in the case of the Jews, the persecution and expulsions.2 This book seeks to examine the thirteenth century in particular—although a long thirteenth century, broadly defined—specifically through the prism of the changes that took place within the Jewish and Christian urban communities. Our objective has been to outline the continuity alongside the changes and the similarities as well as the differences in a coherent way.
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Notes
See these recent historiographical surveys: Ivan G. Marcus, “Israeli Medieval Jewish Historiography: From Nationalist Positivism to New Cultural and Social Histories,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 17 (2010): 244–285
and David Malkiel, Reconstructing Ashkenaz: The Human Face of Franco-German Jewry, 1000–1250 (Stanford, 2009), 1–61.
For a recent account of the twelfth century, see R. N. Swanson, The Twelfth-Century Renaissance (Manchester, 1999).
For a concise survey of the fourteenth-century developments see William Chester Jordan, Europe in the High Middle Ages (London, 2001), 289–325.
R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe 950–1250 2nd ed. (Oxford, 2007) and The War on Heresy: Faith and Power in Medieval Europe (London, 2012).
See Kirsten A. Fudeman, Vernacular Voices: Language and Identity in Medieval French Jewish Communities (Philadelphia, 2010).
For an accessible survey of the educational developments from the twelfth to the thirteenth century, see Lesley Smith, Masters of the Sacred Page: Theology in the Latin West to 1274 (Notre Dame, 2001), 3–34.
See, meanwhile, Ephraim Kanarfogel, Jewish Education and Society in the High Middle Ages (Detroit, 1992), 58.
Kenneth Stow, Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 245–251.
Regarding issues of belief, heresy, and sacrament, see R. N. Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe c. 1215–1515 (Cambridge, 1995), 10–38, with regard to the laity, see 25–30.
See the extensive treatment of this event by Robert Chazan in The Trial of the Talmud: Paris, 1240 (Toronto, 2012), 1–92.
On Gregory’s role in the trial, see Joel E. Rembaum, “The Talmud and the Popes: Reflections on the Talmud Trials of the 1240s,” Viator 13 (1982): 203–223.
Also see Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1999), 317–363.
On these thirteenth-century developments, see William Chester Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews: From Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians (Philadelphia, 1989),
Susan L. Einbinder, Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France (Princeton and Oxford, 2002),
and Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: the Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible Moralisée (Berkeley, 1999).
See Susan L. Einbinder, No Place of Rest: Jewish Literature, Expulsion, and the Memory of Medieval France (Philadelphia, 2008), 137–157.
See Elisheva Carlebach, “Early Modern Ashkenaz in the Writings of Jacob Katz”, in The Pride of Jacob. Essays on Jacob Katz and his Work, ed. Jay M. Harris (Cambridge MA and London, 2002), 65–83, where she discusses this poem in a different connection.
This original Hebrew poem was first published by Avraham Meir Haberman, “Shirat ha-ḥol shel yehudé ashkenaz ve-tsarfat”, Moznayim, 5 (1958), 403–408
and recently reprinted in Avraham Meir Haberman, Talmud Me’ir: Collected Articles, ed. Avigdor Shinan (Jerusalem, 2010), 132. The translation presented below is that of Susan Einbinder. The poem was originally translated by T. Carmi, The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse (New York, 1981), 453.
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© 2015 Elisheva Baumgarten and Judah D. Galinsky
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Baumgarten, E., Galinsky, J.D. (2015). Introduction: Jews and Christians in Thirteenth-Century France. In: Baumgarten, E., Galinsky, J.D. (eds) Jews and Christians in Thirteenth-Century France. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137317582_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137317582_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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