Liturgy against apostasy: Marian commemoration and the Jews in Visigothic Iberia

One of the most remarkable features of the earliest surviving liturgy for a feast of the Virgin Mary from seventh‐century Iberia is its incorporation of polemical material directed against Jews. This polemical dimension is explored here in the context of contemporary theological polemics and Visigothic law, particularly in relation to attempts to baptize Jews by force. Evidence that ecclesiastical leaders opposed the policy but had to come up with strategies to prevent those baptized from apostatizing raises the possibility that the Marian liturgy was intended to communicate Christian doctrine and warn against Jewish error among recent converts, as well as to assert episcopal control over Christian identity in the Visigothic kingdom.     

“Suffer Not the Evil One”: Unitarianism and the 1826 Maryland Jew Bill

The 1826 Maryland Jew Bill was the most protracted and heated fight over Jewish political rights in the United States. For eight years, in the legislature, in newspapers, and in elections, Marylanders debated whether Jews should be allowed to hold government office or positions of public trust, a struggle that garnered journalistic coverage from throughout the country. Historians have not explained why Maryland, a state with very few Jews in the early nineteenth century, was the site of the country's largest debate over their legal status. This study argues that Unitarianism, which did not claim many adherents in Maryland at the time of the Jew Bill but occupied an outsized role in the state's debates about religious rights and Christian orthodoxy, is a key part of the story of Jewish rights in Maryland; the state's unique experience with Unitarianism is one of the causes of the state's unique place in the story of Jewish rights in the United States.     

Marc Bloch: the identity of a historian

Several scholars have asserted that medieval Christians believed that Jewish men menstruated. Their arguments, made in support of a grander claim that Jews as a collectivity were gendered feminine in Christian thought, rest on numerous misreadings. Though such a belief did appear around 1500, prior references to a Jewish bloody flux derived from textual traditions that were not gendered. The rupturing of Judas's belly (Acts 1:18–19) inspired accounts of heretics and other betrayers of Christ dying with blood and/or guts coming out of their anuses. In the twelfth century this anal bleeding was exegetically linked to Jewish deicidal bloodguilt via the verse ‘may His blood be upon us and upon our children’ (Matt 27:25). In the thirteenth century this motif was rationalized using terms drawn from humoral medicine. Simultaneously, a new verse was adduced in support of the notion of supernatural anal bleeding: ‘He smote His enemies in their posteriors’ (Psalms 77:66). Monthly bleeding was first alleged in 1302, but only among the male descendants of the Jews who had accepted responsibility for the crucifixion. The earliest mention of gendered, monthly bleeding appeared in the 1503 account of the ritual murder trials held in Tymau in 1494.     

Papal Power and Protection in the Shebet Yehudah

The sixteenth‐century Shebet Yehudah is an account of the persecutions of Jews in various countries and epochs, including their expulsion from Spain in the fifteenth century. It is not a medieval text and was written long after many of the events it describes. Yet although it cannot give us a contemporary medieval standpoint, it provides important insights into how later Jewish writers perceived Jewish–papal relations in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. Although the extent to which Jewish communities came into contact either with the papacy as an institution or the actions of individual popes varied immensely, it is through analysis of Hebrew works such as the Shebet Yehudah that we are able to piece together a certain understanding of Jewish ideas about the medieval papacy as an institution and the policies of individual popes. This article argues that Jews knew only too well that papal protection was not unlimited, but always carefully circumscribed in accordance with Christian theology. It is hoped that it will be a scholarly contribution to our growing understanding of Jewish ideas about the papacy's spiritual and temporal power and authority in the Later Middle Ages and how this impacted on Jewish communities throughout medieval Europe.     

Why praise Jews: satire and history in the middle ages

Modern readers, including highly sophisticated, professional historians, have not always understood that medieval praise of jews, in its rare occurrences, never signifies categorical approval of Israelites. Instead, such praise functions as a condemnation, sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, of Christians whose behavior is not even equal to that of the lowest members of society. The elaborate story told by Richard of Devizes about the murder, towards the end of the twelfth century, of a young Christian by a Jew at Winchester provides a clear illustration of the problem.     

Maria Mirabilis: Beholding Mary in the Miracles†

In medieval miracles of the Virgin Mary that feature images, gazing at Mary and being seen by her can shape or change the identity of the miracle's protagonist. Such miracles often feature figures who have the potential to be adult male Christians but do not yet hold that status; they are transformed by their encounters with the malleable materiality of Marian images. Narratives of a Muslim devoted to a Marian statue and an English child who has to have an image of the Crucifixion explained to him show how questioning the nature of such images, and their material implications, could lead to belief. The widely popular story of “The Jewish Boy” extends the power of the image to suggest that merely looking upon it without understanding is sufficient to create a circuit of likeness and recognition that ultimately leads to conversion. In such miracles, an ostensibly surface-oriented or simplistic mode of religious devotion engages with gendered bodies in powerfully transformative ways that touch on complex theological issues.     

The Revolution's Forgotten Sons and Daughters: The Jewish Community in Tehran during the 1979 Revolution

The 1979 revolution in Iran was one of the most popular revolutions of the twentieth century. It was supported by all the classes of Iranian society, and crossed social strata, positions, and religious affiliations. A lot is known about the participation of different parts, such as students, urban professionals, religious leaders, bazaaris, and leftists, yet little is known about the participation of Jews in the revolutionary movements. This article sheds light on a little-known event in the life of the Jewish Iranian community and seeks to tell the story of different segments of the Jewish community during the tremulous years of the “Islamic Revolution.” This article examines two main arenas in which the Jews facilitated the revolution—the Society of Jewish Iranian Intellectuals, and the Sapir Charity Hospital in Tehran—and seeks to draw attention to the minorities' contribution to the most important national revolution in Iran.     

Into the Spiral of Problematic Perceptions: Modern Anti-Semitism and gebildetes Burgertum in Nineteenth-Century Germany

This article attempts to relate modern anti-Semitism to theincreasingly close interactions of Jews and non-Jews in an ageof political emancipation and social integration. It arguesthat the changing mutual perceptions of Jews and Protestantsin the German educated bourgeoisie are of central importancein this regard. In nineteenth-century Germany, literature movementssuch as realism, and various human sciences such as anthropology,Protestant theology or philology provided ample material fordiscussing the Jewish character. These fields suggest four waysof perceiving Jews: the Jew as parvenu, as Talmudist, as materialistand as nomad. Indeed, bourgeois Jews themselves contributedto these literary and scholarly debates. Their discussions werefrequently shaped by the attempt to confront anti-Jewish misconceptions.Moreover, they propagated their own interpretation of the Jewishcharacter: the figure of the humanistic Jew. This Jewish interpretation,which identifies a universal mission, proves to have a twofoldnature: it is not only a counter-attack against anti-Semiticpolemics, but also a particular result of the peculiar Jewishadaptation of bourgeois culture. As the article argues, however,this humanistic perception of Jewish identity caused concernon the Protestant side, which led to further polemics and thusfurther Jewish defence. The resulting spiral of problematicperceptions was the consequence of the growing social intimacyof bourgeois Jews and Protestants in nineteenth-century Germany.Modern anti-Semitism, it is thus argued, can be interpretedas a specific form of rejection of ambivalence and the establishmentof neat binary codes in the confusing closeness of Jews andnon-Jews.     

Recent Developments in the Academic Study of the Cult of the Virgin Mary

Marian veneration is a vital dimension in Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, growing in significance from its origins in the early Christian centuries. This development has been particularly important in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the era termed the "Age of Mary." The four books reviewed in this paper approach the subject of Marian veneration and pilgrimage to Marian shrines from a variety of perspectives. Significant themes covered include the evidence for Marian apparitions, traditional religious pilgrimage, and the changes the Internet has brought to pilgrimage and Marian devotion. Stafford Poole, CM's The Guadalupan Controversies in Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), Robert Maniura's Pilgrimage to Images in the Fifteenth Century: The Origins of the Cult of Our Lady of Czestochowa (Woodbridge: Boyell Press, 2004), and Paolo Apolito's The Internet and the Madonna: Religious Visionary Experience on the Web (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) all treat specific sites of Marian pilgrimage and are reviewed at length. In contrast, Swanson's edited volume, The Church and Mary: Papers Read at the 2001 Summer Meeting and the 2002 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004), contains a large number of papers on a range of issues relating to the cult of Mary including music, relics, visions, and the spread of Marian veneration. A selection of these papers is referred to throughout this essay, where relevant.     

Memory,Identity and Aspiration: Early Modern Jewish Maps of the Promised Land

In the sixteenth century Jews began to produce maps showing the Exodus to the Promised Land. My aim in this article is to show that, through unique compositions of written biblical references and pictured symbolism (both Jewish and Christian), maps such as the Mantua map (1560s) and, a century later, the Amsterdam Haggadah [Passover] map (1695) were a means of constructing Jewish cultural memory and identity in the Diaspora and fostering aspiration for a second salvation through a return to Zion. I also explore the Jewish approach towards the biblical land as this was reflected in the maps.     

‘You say that the Messiah has come …’: The Ceuta Disputation (1179) and its place in the Christian anti-Jewish polemics of the high middle ages

This article suggests that the ‘Disputation of Ceuta’ provides a link between the Christian anti-Jewish polemical discourse of the twelfth century, produced largely for internal consumption, and the active missionising of the thirteenth century. Having purportedly taken place in the North African port of Ceuta between a Christian merchant from Genoa and a Jew from Ceuta at the time of Almohad rule (1179), the disputation displays the signs of a major shift in the Christian contra Judaeos strategies. Unlike other twelfth-century works of this genre, which address a variety of points central to Jewish-Christian debate, the Ceuta Disputation is remarkably consistent in its emphasis on one particular issue – that of the coming of the Messiah. The messianic content of this disputation thus foreshadows the central thrust of the thirteenth-century Dominican mission to the Jews, which finds its fullest expression at the Barcelona Disputation of 1263. The article explains the prominence of this theme in the period by suggesting that the extraordinary emphasis on the Messiah in the Ceuta Disputation could be the result of the Christian protagonist's meeting with the North African Jew face-to-face and discovering that the Messianic promise was a subject of considerable interest for his opponent. More importantly, regardless of whether the discussion in Ceuta had or had not taken place, the new Christian attitude towards anti-Jewish polemics expressed in the Disputation's text was most likely inspired by real-life discussions between Jews and Christians.     

‘You say that the Messiah has come …’: The Ceuta Disputation (1179) and its place in the Christian anti-Jewish polemics of the high middle ages

This article suggests that the ‘Disputation of Ceuta’ provides a link between the Christian anti-Jewish polemical discourse of the twelfth century, produced largely for internal consumption, and the active missionising of the thirteenth century. Having purportedly taken place in the North African port of Ceuta between a Christian merchant from Genoa and a Jew from Ceuta at the time of Almohad rule (1179), the disputation displays the signs of a major shift in the Christian contra Judaeos strategies. Unlike other twelfth-century works of this genre, which address a variety of points central to Jewish-Christian debate, the Ceuta Disputation is remarkably consistent in its emphasis on one particular issue – that of the coming of the Messiah. The messianic content of this disputation thus foreshadows the central thrust of the thirteenth-century Dominican mission to the Jews, which finds its fullest expression at the Barcelona Disputation of 1263. The article explains the prominence of this theme in the period by suggesting that the extraordinary emphasis on the Messiah in the Ceuta Disputation could be the result of the Christian protagonist's meeting with the North African Jew face-to-face and discovering that the Messianic promise was a subject of considerable interest for his opponent. More importantly, regardless of whether the discussion in Ceuta had or had not taken place, the new Christian attitude towards anti-Jewish polemics expressed in the Disputation's text was most likely inspired by real-life discussions between Jews and Christians.     

Being Crypto‐Jewish in Colonial Brazil (1500–1822): Brushing History against the Grain

This paper consists of two parts. In the first, I am going to review and synthesise the history of Jews — or rather various versions of Fuzzy Jews ¹ 1 The term “Fuzzy Jews,” introduced by Charles Meyers and myself in the Preface to our jointly edited Troubled Souls: Conversos, Crypto‐Jews and Other Confused Jewish Intellectuals from the Fourteenth through the Eighteenth Centuries (Hamilton: Outrigger, 2001); it refers to non‐regular sets and categorical anomalies. The term is further developed in my Masks in the Mirror: Marranism in Jewish Experience (New York: Peter Lang Verlag, 2005).
— who settled in Brazil during the time it was a Portuguese colony, including a brief period when part of the nation passed under Dutch control. This overview probably adds nothing new to the history of this topic, except insofar as it stresses the details necessary to develop the argument in the next section. The second part turns to a more difficult and in many ways speculative kind of history, that of the emotional and psychological experience of being a Jew — again in several versions of nominal Catholicism. Here is where I bring to bear insights from psychohistory and the history of mentalities in order to interrogate the sources in Inquisitional archives and archaeological studies in Brazil and elsewhere in South America.     

Jewish experiences in the Italian Risorgimento: political practice and national emotions of Florentine and Leghorn Jewry (1849-1860)

Recent political and historical debates in Italy have led to a re-examination of the Risorgimento. This article asks what this revisionist reconsideration of the national past means for Italian Jews and whether Italian-Jewish history needs to be rewritten. Taking Tuscany as a case study, this article examines Jewish experiences in ­Florence and Leghorn during the Risorgimento, from the return to power of Grand Duke Leopold II after the revolution of 1848-9 to 1859, when Tuscany joined the new Italian national state. Tuscan Jews participated enthusiastically in the national movement, playing a decisive role in the development of the new political culture and in creating the emotional appeal of the nation. Jews were deeply integrated into the new national state and shared the same values and political attitudes as their Christian counterparts. Any reconsideration of the Risorgimento must take into account that - from a Jewish point of view - this period had remarkable innovative aspects and promising perspectives.     

魏玛共和国犹太人的德国认同

魏玛共和国犹太人在政治、文化和宗教生活方式上都表现出高度的德国认同。德国犹太人的这种国家认同既有重要的历史基础,也是现实的需要和客观环境压力的结果。魏玛共和国犹太人的德国认同突出表现在两个方面:一是将犹太教、犹太文化限定于宗教和文化的而非民族的层面,从而减少其与"德国国家认同"的冲突;二是强调犹太人与德国主流民族、语言、文化和历史的紧密关系。犹太人的德国认同对其族群产生了重要影响:犹太族群中发展出了对东方犹太人的歧视;排斥犹太复国主义;低估反犹主义的危害,以致对大规模地迫害、屠杀犹太人缺乏预见性等。     

“六日战争”对美国犹太人族群认同的影响

20世纪60年代,"大屠杀"话语的传播引发了美国犹太人对族群命运的担忧。在"六日战争"前,面对阿拉伯国家的反犹宣传及其对以色列的重重围困,美国犹太人担心"再次大屠杀"会发生,从而促使美国犹太人对以色列的生存产生深度忧虑。美国犹太社团逐渐把维护以色列的特殊利益和争取美国社会对以色列的同情与支持,作为游说活动的主要目标。美国犹太游说组织通过舆论引导、公开呼吁、经济动员等方式积极进行游说。"六日战争"后,美国与以色列之间的特殊关系迅速发展。美国犹太人的民族自信心和自豪感显著提升,并自觉地将以色列与自身的命运紧密相连。他们在归属意愿、宗教情感、对以色列的文化兴趣、青年群体族群意识等层面表达对以色列的认同,以色列在美国犹太人族群认同中发挥的作用凸显。     

Malagasy Judaism: The ‘who is a Jew?’ conundrum comes to Madagascar

With the virtual disappearance of the centuries‐old Jewish community in Ethiopia through wholescale emigration to Israel, African Jewry is in the process of reconstituting itself into new Jewish movements (NJMs). One of these NJMs is emerging in Madagascar. However, the number of Malagasy adherents to normative (i.e. rabbinic) Judaism is eclipsed by those within the larger society who affirm genealogical descent from ancient Israel – and therefore the mantle of ‘Jew’. They do so while practising Christianity. Thus, the longstanding, sensitive question ‘who is a Jew?’ has migrated from Israel, America and Europe to Africa and Madagascar. This article introduces an array of Malagasy ‘Judaizing’ communities – believers in an Israelite Lost Tribe origin, descendants of a Jewish convert to Islam, Leviticus‐like ‘Aaronites’ – before focusing on Malagasies practising normative Judaism. The new Jews of Madagascar extend the cultural and geographic scope of new religious movements literature to greater Africa and, by extension, to societies in the developing world.     

The Jew,the Blood and the Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

The reality of the blood libel legend and accusations of ritual murder against Jews in medieval and early modern times has been widely discredited by scholars. They demonstrate instead the processes by which the exclusion of a perceived ethnical and religious enemy strengthened the communal identity of European society at that time. The aim of this paper is to look at the alleged bodily evidence of the libel—the blood—and at the controversial way in which it has been perceived by different groups of people over time. This approach illuminates the fears and beliefs that fed hatred of Jews beyond its original manifestation as a religious motif in relation to the crucifixion of Christ.