Jonathan Ray | Georgetown University (original) (raw)
Papers by Jonathan Ray
The Routledge History of Antisemitism, 2023
University of Pennsylvania Press eBooks, Oct 21, 2022
The Jew in Medieval Iberia, 1100-1500
The rich history of Iberian Jewry has been a powerful muse for scholars of Jewish and medieval st... more The rich history of Iberian Jewry has been a powerful muse for scholars of Jewish and medieval studies for over a century. For many, the subject conjures up images of a Golden Age of Jewish civilization characterized by great material success and an outpouring of religious and intellectual works. For others, this alluring image of Jewish achievement is juxtaposed with, and often overshadowed by, a much darker legacy of marginalization and persecution that culminated in the eventual expulsion of Spanish Jewry in 1492. The Jew in Medieval Iberia attempts to embrace this complexity and present a portrait of Jewish life in Christian Iberia that emphasizes both the internal diversity of this community and the variety of ways it interacted with its host society. During the high and late Middle Ages, Iberian Jews fulfilled a number of distinct roles, acting as economic catalysts, diplomats, physicians and transmitters of culture. At the same time, the propagation of Jewish intellectual culture advanced along a variety of different pathways. In the hands of rabbis and Jewish courtiers, this intellectual culture also became linked to the general identity and the social and political fortunes of the average Jew. The essays collected in this volume introduce readers to some of the leading figures and social groups of Hispano-Jewish society, and explore the way in which they responded to the opportunities and challenges of their times.
Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2019
Much of the prevailing research on medieval Conversos has focused on Christian attitudes regardin... more Much of the prevailing research on medieval Conversos has focused on Christian attitudes regarding their religious status. To the extent that Jewish responses to the Conversos phenomenon have often been studied, the tendency has been to affirm the influence of the longstanding rabbinic position that the Conversos were forced converts, or ‘anusim, and thus still Jewish. Yet a closer analysis of late medieval sources reveals a great deal of popular Jewish suspicion with regard to Converso religious identity and resistance to the integration of former Conversos into the daily life of professing Jewish communities. Attitudes of average Jews on this issue offer insight into the ways in which theological and legal concepts of sin played out in the social spaces of Mediterranean Jewish communities.
The Oxford Handbook of the Jewish Diaspora
This chapter traces the evolution of the so-called “Eastern” Sephardic diaspora in its Mediterran... more This chapter traces the evolution of the so-called “Eastern” Sephardic diaspora in its Mediterranean context from 1492 to the late twentieth century. It looks at the way in which these exiles and their descendants forged a new diasporic identity characterized by sprawling mercantile networks that linked Jews and Conversos, new forms of Judeo-Spanish, and a nostalgia for medieval Spain. At first, the mutual sense of estrangement between the refugees and the native Jews among whom they came to settle reinforced communal solidarity among the Sephardim. From the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, the Mediterranean Sephardim adopted aspects of Ottoman, North African, and Italian culture, but succeeded in maintaining a distinct communal character amid a shifting set of political contexts and associations. During the twentieth century, the mass migration of Mediterranean Sephardim to the State of Israel helped recast them as “Eastern” Jews, or Mizrahim.
Journal of Early Modern History, 2015
From Catalonia to the Caribbean: The Sephardic Orbit from Medieval to Modern Times
Jewish History, 2017
This essay considers how the reencounter between Christians and Jews over the course of the sixte... more This essay considers how the reencounter between Christians and Jews over the course of the sixteenth century shaped the evolution of European attitudes toward Jews. It notes that, while 1492 marked an end to a long-standing era of Christian-Jewish relations in Europe, it also signaled an important shift toward new thinking about the once-familiar Jews. The combined effects of the absence of Jewish communities from most of Western Europe, the failure of Christian society effectively to integrate the Conversos of Spain and Portugal, and the expanded cultural horizons engendered by the Age of Discovery helped challenge and alter popular images of the Jews that had been inherited from the Middle Ages. The lands of the Muslim Mediterranean operated as an important stage on which the Christian reencounter with Jews played out, and travelers' accounts of the Jews in these lands came to exert a powerful influence on the way in which the image of the Jew was recast in the European imagination. The discussion here seeks to expand on recent work on sixteenthcentury Christian ethnographies of the Jews and to complicate some of our notions of the nature and development of Christian attitudes toward the Jews during the transition from the medieval period to the early modern.
Safed 16th-19th Centuries, in German.
Viator, 2007
... Milton, Christian and Jewish Lenders: Religious Identity and the Extension of Credit, Viato... more ... Milton, Christian and Jewish Lenders: Religious Identity and the Extension of Credit, Viator 37 (2006 ... noted, the successes of the reconquest absolved Iberian kings of the need to be ... 21 Peter Linehan, The Church, the Economy, and the Reconquista in early fourteenth-century ...
Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, 2009
... Ben Shalom, Myths of Troy. 10Lawee, Reception of Rashi's Commentary. 11O... more ... Ben Shalom, Myths of Troy. 10Lawee, Reception of Rashi's Commentary. 11On the continued use of older themes by Hispano-Jewish poets see Carrete Parrondo, Sefarad en las fuentes hebreas. On the influence of intellectual trends from northern Europe see Grossman ...
Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations, 2011
The medieval period in Spanish history has alternately been cast as a Golden Age of interfaith ha... more The medieval period in Spanish history has alternately been cast as a Golden Age of interfaith harmony and an example of the ultimate incompatibility of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities. In this essay, I suggest that a better way to understand interfaith relations in medieval Iberia is to think about these religious communities in less monolithic terms. With regard to Jewish-Christian relations in particular, factors such as wealth, social standing, and intellectual interests were as important as religious identity in shaping the complex bonds between Christians and Jews.
What Ifs of Jewish History
Journal of Transcultural Medieval Studies
No subject looms larger over the historical landscape of medieval Spain than that of the reconqui... more No subject looms larger over the historical landscape of medieval Spain than that of the reconquista, the rapid expansion of the power of the Christian kingdoms into the Muslim-populated lands of southern Iberia, which created a broad frontier zone that for two centuries remained a region of warfare and peril. Drawing on a large fund of unpublished material in royal, ecclesiastical, and municipal archives as well as rabbinic literature, Jonathan Ray reveals a fluid, often volatile society that transcended religious boundaries and attracted Jewish colonists from throughout the peninsula and beyond. The result was a wave of Jewish settlements marked by a high degree of openness, mobility, and interaction with both Christians and Muslims. Ray's view challenges the traditional historiography, which holds that Sephardic communities, already fully developed, were simply reestablished on the frontier. In the early years of settlement, Iberia's crusader kings actively supported Jewi...
Hispania judaica bulletin, 2015
The Routledge History of Antisemitism, 2023
University of Pennsylvania Press eBooks, Oct 21, 2022
The Jew in Medieval Iberia, 1100-1500
The rich history of Iberian Jewry has been a powerful muse for scholars of Jewish and medieval st... more The rich history of Iberian Jewry has been a powerful muse for scholars of Jewish and medieval studies for over a century. For many, the subject conjures up images of a Golden Age of Jewish civilization characterized by great material success and an outpouring of religious and intellectual works. For others, this alluring image of Jewish achievement is juxtaposed with, and often overshadowed by, a much darker legacy of marginalization and persecution that culminated in the eventual expulsion of Spanish Jewry in 1492. The Jew in Medieval Iberia attempts to embrace this complexity and present a portrait of Jewish life in Christian Iberia that emphasizes both the internal diversity of this community and the variety of ways it interacted with its host society. During the high and late Middle Ages, Iberian Jews fulfilled a number of distinct roles, acting as economic catalysts, diplomats, physicians and transmitters of culture. At the same time, the propagation of Jewish intellectual culture advanced along a variety of different pathways. In the hands of rabbis and Jewish courtiers, this intellectual culture also became linked to the general identity and the social and political fortunes of the average Jew. The essays collected in this volume introduce readers to some of the leading figures and social groups of Hispano-Jewish society, and explore the way in which they responded to the opportunities and challenges of their times.
Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2019
Much of the prevailing research on medieval Conversos has focused on Christian attitudes regardin... more Much of the prevailing research on medieval Conversos has focused on Christian attitudes regarding their religious status. To the extent that Jewish responses to the Conversos phenomenon have often been studied, the tendency has been to affirm the influence of the longstanding rabbinic position that the Conversos were forced converts, or ‘anusim, and thus still Jewish. Yet a closer analysis of late medieval sources reveals a great deal of popular Jewish suspicion with regard to Converso religious identity and resistance to the integration of former Conversos into the daily life of professing Jewish communities. Attitudes of average Jews on this issue offer insight into the ways in which theological and legal concepts of sin played out in the social spaces of Mediterranean Jewish communities.
The Oxford Handbook of the Jewish Diaspora
This chapter traces the evolution of the so-called “Eastern” Sephardic diaspora in its Mediterran... more This chapter traces the evolution of the so-called “Eastern” Sephardic diaspora in its Mediterranean context from 1492 to the late twentieth century. It looks at the way in which these exiles and their descendants forged a new diasporic identity characterized by sprawling mercantile networks that linked Jews and Conversos, new forms of Judeo-Spanish, and a nostalgia for medieval Spain. At first, the mutual sense of estrangement between the refugees and the native Jews among whom they came to settle reinforced communal solidarity among the Sephardim. From the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, the Mediterranean Sephardim adopted aspects of Ottoman, North African, and Italian culture, but succeeded in maintaining a distinct communal character amid a shifting set of political contexts and associations. During the twentieth century, the mass migration of Mediterranean Sephardim to the State of Israel helped recast them as “Eastern” Jews, or Mizrahim.
Journal of Early Modern History, 2015
From Catalonia to the Caribbean: The Sephardic Orbit from Medieval to Modern Times
Jewish History, 2017
This essay considers how the reencounter between Christians and Jews over the course of the sixte... more This essay considers how the reencounter between Christians and Jews over the course of the sixteenth century shaped the evolution of European attitudes toward Jews. It notes that, while 1492 marked an end to a long-standing era of Christian-Jewish relations in Europe, it also signaled an important shift toward new thinking about the once-familiar Jews. The combined effects of the absence of Jewish communities from most of Western Europe, the failure of Christian society effectively to integrate the Conversos of Spain and Portugal, and the expanded cultural horizons engendered by the Age of Discovery helped challenge and alter popular images of the Jews that had been inherited from the Middle Ages. The lands of the Muslim Mediterranean operated as an important stage on which the Christian reencounter with Jews played out, and travelers' accounts of the Jews in these lands came to exert a powerful influence on the way in which the image of the Jew was recast in the European imagination. The discussion here seeks to expand on recent work on sixteenthcentury Christian ethnographies of the Jews and to complicate some of our notions of the nature and development of Christian attitudes toward the Jews during the transition from the medieval period to the early modern.
Safed 16th-19th Centuries, in German.
Viator, 2007
... Milton, Christian and Jewish Lenders: Religious Identity and the Extension of Credit, Viato... more ... Milton, Christian and Jewish Lenders: Religious Identity and the Extension of Credit, Viator 37 (2006 ... noted, the successes of the reconquest absolved Iberian kings of the need to be ... 21 Peter Linehan, The Church, the Economy, and the Reconquista in early fourteenth-century ...
Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, 2009
... Ben Shalom, Myths of Troy. 10Lawee, Reception of Rashi's Commentary. 11O... more ... Ben Shalom, Myths of Troy. 10Lawee, Reception of Rashi's Commentary. 11On the continued use of older themes by Hispano-Jewish poets see Carrete Parrondo, Sefarad en las fuentes hebreas. On the influence of intellectual trends from northern Europe see Grossman ...
Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations, 2011
The medieval period in Spanish history has alternately been cast as a Golden Age of interfaith ha... more The medieval period in Spanish history has alternately been cast as a Golden Age of interfaith harmony and an example of the ultimate incompatibility of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities. In this essay, I suggest that a better way to understand interfaith relations in medieval Iberia is to think about these religious communities in less monolithic terms. With regard to Jewish-Christian relations in particular, factors such as wealth, social standing, and intellectual interests were as important as religious identity in shaping the complex bonds between Christians and Jews.
What Ifs of Jewish History
Journal of Transcultural Medieval Studies
No subject looms larger over the historical landscape of medieval Spain than that of the reconqui... more No subject looms larger over the historical landscape of medieval Spain than that of the reconquista, the rapid expansion of the power of the Christian kingdoms into the Muslim-populated lands of southern Iberia, which created a broad frontier zone that for two centuries remained a region of warfare and peril. Drawing on a large fund of unpublished material in royal, ecclesiastical, and municipal archives as well as rabbinic literature, Jonathan Ray reveals a fluid, often volatile society that transcended religious boundaries and attracted Jewish colonists from throughout the peninsula and beyond. The result was a wave of Jewish settlements marked by a high degree of openness, mobility, and interaction with both Christians and Muslims. Ray's view challenges the traditional historiography, which holds that Sephardic communities, already fully developed, were simply reestablished on the frontier. In the early years of settlement, Iberia's crusader kings actively supported Jewi...
Hispania judaica bulletin, 2015