The Ways of Jewish Martyrdom

The Ways of Jewish Martyrdom

Author: Simha Goldin

Publisher: Brepols Publishers

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9782503525235

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Jewish martyrdom in the Middle Ages is a most intriguing social, cultural, and religious phenomenon. It was stimulated by ancient Jewish myths, and at the same time it was influenced by the Christian environment in which the Jews lived and operated. The result was a unique and unprecedented event in which the Jews did not simply refuse to convert to Christianity; they were ready to kill themselves and their children so they would not be forced to convert. The Ways of Jewish Martyrdom discusses the phenomenon of Jewish Martyrdom in medieval Germany, northern France, and England from the time of the First Crusade (1096) until the mid-fourteenth century (that is, the time of the 'Black Death'), in light of modern research and with ample use of hitherto-neglected primary sources. In order to understand the unique phenomenon of Jewish martyrdom, the various Jewish and Christian antecedents that might have influenced the notion of Jewish martyrdom in the Middle Ages need analysis. The texts on which the analysis is based are various, ranging from chronicles through memorial books to liturgical materials and Piyyut. The last part of the book reviews the development of this phenomenon after the fourteenth century and delineates the essential changes and transformations therein at the dawn of the early modern period and beyond.


Book Synopsis The Ways of Jewish Martyrdom by : Simha Goldin

Download or read book The Ways of Jewish Martyrdom written by Simha Goldin and published by Brepols Publishers. This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jewish martyrdom in the Middle Ages is a most intriguing social, cultural, and religious phenomenon. It was stimulated by ancient Jewish myths, and at the same time it was influenced by the Christian environment in which the Jews lived and operated. The result was a unique and unprecedented event in which the Jews did not simply refuse to convert to Christianity; they were ready to kill themselves and their children so they would not be forced to convert. The Ways of Jewish Martyrdom discusses the phenomenon of Jewish Martyrdom in medieval Germany, northern France, and England from the time of the First Crusade (1096) until the mid-fourteenth century (that is, the time of the 'Black Death'), in light of modern research and with ample use of hitherto-neglected primary sources. In order to understand the unique phenomenon of Jewish martyrdom, the various Jewish and Christian antecedents that might have influenced the notion of Jewish martyrdom in the Middle Ages need analysis. The texts on which the analysis is based are various, ranging from chronicles through memorial books to liturgical materials and Piyyut. The last part of the book reviews the development of this phenomenon after the fourteenth century and delineates the essential changes and transformations therein at the dawn of the early modern period and beyond.

The Ways of Jewish Martyrdom

The Ways of Jewish Martyrdom

Author: Simha Goldin

Publisher:

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 9782503560571

DOWNLOAD EBOOK


Book Synopsis The Ways of Jewish Martyrdom by : Simha Goldin

Download or read book The Ways of Jewish Martyrdom written by Simha Goldin and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Jewish Martyrs in the Pagan and Christian Worlds

Jewish Martyrs in the Pagan and Christian Worlds

Author: Shmuel Shepkaru

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 9780521842815

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.


Book Synopsis Jewish Martyrs in the Pagan and Christian Worlds by : Shmuel Shepkaru

Download or read book Jewish Martyrs in the Pagan and Christian Worlds written by Shmuel Shepkaru and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Dying in the Law of Moses

Dying in the Law of Moses

Author: Miriam Bodian

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2007-05-22

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 0253116910

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Miriam Bodian's study of crypto-Jewish martyrdom in Iberian lands depicts a new type of martyr that emerged in the late 16th century -- a defiant, educated judaizing martyr who engaged in disputes with inquisitors. By examining closely the Inquisition dossiers of four men who were tried in the Iberian peninsula or Spanish America and who developed judaizing theologies that drew from currents of Reformation thinking that emphasized the authority of Scripture and the religious autonomy of individual interpreters of Scripture, Miriam Bodian reveals unexpected connections between Reformation thought and historic crypto-Judaism. The complex personalities of the martyrs, acting in response to psychic and situational pressures, emerge vividly from this absorbing book.


Book Synopsis Dying in the Law of Moses by : Miriam Bodian

Download or read book Dying in the Law of Moses written by Miriam Bodian and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2007-05-22 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Miriam Bodian's study of crypto-Jewish martyrdom in Iberian lands depicts a new type of martyr that emerged in the late 16th century -- a defiant, educated judaizing martyr who engaged in disputes with inquisitors. By examining closely the Inquisition dossiers of four men who were tried in the Iberian peninsula or Spanish America and who developed judaizing theologies that drew from currents of Reformation thinking that emphasized the authority of Scripture and the religious autonomy of individual interpreters of Scripture, Miriam Bodian reveals unexpected connections between Reformation thought and historic crypto-Judaism. The complex personalities of the martyrs, acting in response to psychic and situational pressures, emerge vividly from this absorbing book.

Dying for God

Dying for God

Author: Daniel Boyarin

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 0804737045

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Scholars have come to realize that we can and need to speak of a twin birth of Christianity and Judaism, not a genealogy in which one is parent to the other. In this book, the author develops a revised understanding of the interactions between nascent Christianity and nascent Judaism in late antiquity.


Book Synopsis Dying for God by : Daniel Boyarin

Download or read book Dying for God written by Daniel Boyarin and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars have come to realize that we can and need to speak of a twin birth of Christianity and Judaism, not a genealogy in which one is parent to the other. In this book, the author develops a revised understanding of the interactions between nascent Christianity and nascent Judaism in late antiquity.

Sanctifying the Name of God

Sanctifying the Name of God

Author: Jeremy Cohen

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2013-03-26

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0812201639

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

How are martyrs made, and how do the memories of martyrs express, nourish, and mold the ideals of the community? Sanctifying the Name of God wrestles with these questions against the background of the massacres of Jews in the Rhineland during the outbreak of the First Crusade. Marking the first extensive wave of anti-Jewish violence in medieval Christian Europe, these "Persecutions of 1096" exerted a profound influence on the course of European Jewish history. When the crusaders demanded that Jews choose between Christianity and death, many opted for baptism. Many others, however, chose to die as Jews rather than to live as Christians, and of these, many actually inflicted death upon themselves and their loved ones. Stories of their self-sacrifice ushered the Jewish ideal of martyrdom—kiddush ha-Shem, the sanctification of God's holy name—into a new phase, conditioning the collective memory and mindset of Ashkenazic Jewry for centuries to come, during the Holocaust, and even today. The Jewish survivors of 1096 memorialized the victims as martyrs as they rebuilt their communities during the decades following the Crusade. Three twelfth-century Hebrew chronicles of the persecutions preserve their memories of martyrdom and self-sacrifice, tales fraught with symbolic meaning that constitute one of the earliest Jewish attempts at local, contemporary historiography. Reading and analyzing these stories through the prism of Jewish and Christian religious and literary traditions, Jeremy Cohen shows how these persecution chronicles reveal much more about the storytellers, the martyrologists, than about the martyrs themselves. While they extol the glorious heroism of the martyrs, they also air the doubts, guilt, and conflicts of those who, by submitting temporarily to the Christian crusaders, survived.


Book Synopsis Sanctifying the Name of God by : Jeremy Cohen

Download or read book Sanctifying the Name of God written by Jeremy Cohen and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-03-26 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How are martyrs made, and how do the memories of martyrs express, nourish, and mold the ideals of the community? Sanctifying the Name of God wrestles with these questions against the background of the massacres of Jews in the Rhineland during the outbreak of the First Crusade. Marking the first extensive wave of anti-Jewish violence in medieval Christian Europe, these "Persecutions of 1096" exerted a profound influence on the course of European Jewish history. When the crusaders demanded that Jews choose between Christianity and death, many opted for baptism. Many others, however, chose to die as Jews rather than to live as Christians, and of these, many actually inflicted death upon themselves and their loved ones. Stories of their self-sacrifice ushered the Jewish ideal of martyrdom—kiddush ha-Shem, the sanctification of God's holy name—into a new phase, conditioning the collective memory and mindset of Ashkenazic Jewry for centuries to come, during the Holocaust, and even today. The Jewish survivors of 1096 memorialized the victims as martyrs as they rebuilt their communities during the decades following the Crusade. Three twelfth-century Hebrew chronicles of the persecutions preserve their memories of martyrdom and self-sacrifice, tales fraught with symbolic meaning that constitute one of the earliest Jewish attempts at local, contemporary historiography. Reading and analyzing these stories through the prism of Jewish and Christian religious and literary traditions, Jeremy Cohen shows how these persecution chronicles reveal much more about the storytellers, the martyrologists, than about the martyrs themselves. While they extol the glorious heroism of the martyrs, they also air the doubts, guilt, and conflicts of those who, by submitting temporarily to the Christian crusaders, survived.

Beautiful Death

Beautiful Death

Author: Susan L. Einbinder

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2002-07-01

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 1400825253

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

When Crusader armies on their way to the Holy Land attacked Jewish communities in the Rhine Valley, many Jews chose suicide over death at the hands of Christian mobs. With their defiant deaths, the medieval Jewish martyr was born. With the literary commemoration of the victims, Jewish martyrology followed. Beautiful Death examines the evolution of a long-neglected corpus of Hebrew poetry, the laments reflecting the specific conditions of Jewish life in northern France. The poems offer insight into everyday life and into the ways medieval French Jews responded to persecution. They also suggest that poetry was used to encourage resistance to intensifying pressures to convert. The educated Jewish elite in northern France was highly acculturated. Their poetry--particularly that emerging from the innovative Tosafist schools--reflects their engagement with the vernacular renaissance unfolding around them, as well as conscious and unconscious absorption of Christian popular beliefs and hagiographical conventions. At the same time, their extraordinary poems signal an increasingly harsh repudiation of Christianity's sacred symbols and beliefs. They reveal a complex relationship to Christian culture as Jews internalized elements of medieval culture even while expressing a powerful revulsion against the forms and beliefs of Christian life. This gracefully written study crosses traditional boundaries of history and literature and of Jewish and general medieval scholarship. Focusing on specific incidents of persecution and the literary commemorations they produced, it offers unique insights into the historical conditions in which these poems were written and performed.


Book Synopsis Beautiful Death by : Susan L. Einbinder

Download or read book Beautiful Death written by Susan L. Einbinder and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2002-07-01 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Crusader armies on their way to the Holy Land attacked Jewish communities in the Rhine Valley, many Jews chose suicide over death at the hands of Christian mobs. With their defiant deaths, the medieval Jewish martyr was born. With the literary commemoration of the victims, Jewish martyrology followed. Beautiful Death examines the evolution of a long-neglected corpus of Hebrew poetry, the laments reflecting the specific conditions of Jewish life in northern France. The poems offer insight into everyday life and into the ways medieval French Jews responded to persecution. They also suggest that poetry was used to encourage resistance to intensifying pressures to convert. The educated Jewish elite in northern France was highly acculturated. Their poetry--particularly that emerging from the innovative Tosafist schools--reflects their engagement with the vernacular renaissance unfolding around them, as well as conscious and unconscious absorption of Christian popular beliefs and hagiographical conventions. At the same time, their extraordinary poems signal an increasingly harsh repudiation of Christianity's sacred symbols and beliefs. They reveal a complex relationship to Christian culture as Jews internalized elements of medieval culture even while expressing a powerful revulsion against the forms and beliefs of Christian life. This gracefully written study crosses traditional boundaries of history and literature and of Jewish and general medieval scholarship. Focusing on specific incidents of persecution and the literary commemorations they produced, it offers unique insights into the historical conditions in which these poems were written and performed.

The Martyrdom of a Moroccan Jewish Saint

The Martyrdom of a Moroccan Jewish Saint

Author: Sharon Vance

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2011-05-10

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 9004207163

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The martyrdom of a young Jewish girl from Tangier in 1834 sparked a literary response that continues today. This book translates and analyzes printed and manuscript versions of her story in Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Spanish, Spanish and French written in the first century after her death.


Book Synopsis The Martyrdom of a Moroccan Jewish Saint by : Sharon Vance

Download or read book The Martyrdom of a Moroccan Jewish Saint written by Sharon Vance and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-05-10 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The martyrdom of a young Jewish girl from Tangier in 1834 sparked a literary response that continues today. This book translates and analyzes printed and manuscript versions of her story in Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Spanish, Spanish and French written in the first century after her death.

The Maccabean Martyrs as Saviours of the Jewish People

The Maccabean Martyrs as Saviours of the Jewish People

Author: Jan Willem van Henten

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-11-22

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 9004497544

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This volume deals with the presentation of the so-called Maccabean martyrs and the elder Razis in 2 and 4 Maccabees, discussing the religious, the political as well as the philosophical aspects of noble death in these writings. It argues that the theme of martyrdom is a very important part of the self-image of the Jews as presented by the authors of both works. Eleazar, the anonymous mother with her seven sons and Razis should, therefore, be considered heroes of the Jewish people. The first part of the book discusses the sources and the second part deals with the descriptions of noble death. This section of the book also offers extensive discussions of related non-Jewish traditions which highlight the political-patriotic dimension of noble death as described in 2 and 4 Maccabees.


Book Synopsis The Maccabean Martyrs as Saviours of the Jewish People by : Jan Willem van Henten

Download or read book The Maccabean Martyrs as Saviours of the Jewish People written by Jan Willem van Henten and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-11-22 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume deals with the presentation of the so-called Maccabean martyrs and the elder Razis in 2 and 4 Maccabees, discussing the religious, the political as well as the philosophical aspects of noble death in these writings. It argues that the theme of martyrdom is a very important part of the self-image of the Jews as presented by the authors of both works. Eleazar, the anonymous mother with her seven sons and Razis should, therefore, be considered heroes of the Jewish people. The first part of the book discusses the sources and the second part deals with the descriptions of noble death. This section of the book also offers extensive discussions of related non-Jewish traditions which highlight the political-patriotic dimension of noble death as described in 2 and 4 Maccabees.

'God Wants It!'

'God Wants It!'

Author: Lena Roos

Publisher: Brepols Publishers

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Examines three Jewish chronicles of the First Crusade: the Chronicle of Solomon ben Simson, the Chronicle of Eliezer ben R. Nathan, and the Anonymous Chronicle of Mainz, with the goal to analyze the ideology of martyrdom found in them and to trace its background. Notes the characteristic motifs in these chronicles: joy of martyrdom, heavenly reward to the martyrs, martyrdom as a decree of God, death of martyrs as a promise of the Messianic redemption, and the most unusual for the Jewish literature motif - active martyrdom. The communities suffered a disaster that surpassed all the previous outbursts of anti-Jewish violence in the region, and they wanted to come to terms with it and to infuse it with a meaning. Concludes that although some Biblical and midrashic motifs can be found in the chronicles, the ideology of martyrdom in them share many of its characteristics with the Christian contemporary counterparts. This fact may be attributed either to Christian influence or to a common contemporary European discourse of martyrdom. Notes that medieval Ashkenazic Jews were part of their non-Jewish surroundings in a greater degree than it has been supposed.


Book Synopsis 'God Wants It!' by : Lena Roos

Download or read book 'God Wants It!' written by Lena Roos and published by Brepols Publishers. This book was released on 2006 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines three Jewish chronicles of the First Crusade: the Chronicle of Solomon ben Simson, the Chronicle of Eliezer ben R. Nathan, and the Anonymous Chronicle of Mainz, with the goal to analyze the ideology of martyrdom found in them and to trace its background. Notes the characteristic motifs in these chronicles: joy of martyrdom, heavenly reward to the martyrs, martyrdom as a decree of God, death of martyrs as a promise of the Messianic redemption, and the most unusual for the Jewish literature motif - active martyrdom. The communities suffered a disaster that surpassed all the previous outbursts of anti-Jewish violence in the region, and they wanted to come to terms with it and to infuse it with a meaning. Concludes that although some Biblical and midrashic motifs can be found in the chronicles, the ideology of martyrdom in them share many of its characteristics with the Christian contemporary counterparts. This fact may be attributed either to Christian influence or to a common contemporary European discourse of martyrdom. Notes that medieval Ashkenazic Jews were part of their non-Jewish surroundings in a greater degree than it has been supposed.