Review: Jews in Medieval Christendom: Slay Them Not (original) (raw)
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In the years from 1366 to 1382, Elisha ben Abraham Cresques (1325-1387), a scribe and an illuminator living in Palma, Majorca, produced a lavish Hebrew manuscript commonly known as the "Farhi Bible,"1 or, as Katrin Kogman-Appel calls it, the "Farhi Codex." Around 1375, the Court of Aragon cartographer known as Cresques created the so-called "Catalan Atlas," now in Paris, a large mappamundi (64 × 300 cm)2 for the count of Barcelona and crown prince of Aragon, later King Joan I, which was gifted to the French Court. In the 1970s, the Catalan historian Jaume Riera i Sans suggested that the maker of the Farhi Codex was the same Abraham Cresques who had created the Catalan Atlas,3 but that contention was largely ignored in both cartographic research and medieval Jewish art studies. Kogman-Appel's Catalan Maps and Jewish Books offers, for the first time, a study that not only makes the connection between the Farhi Codex and Cresques' mappamundi, but also delves deeper into understanding them from the point of view of art history, text theory, Iberian Jewish intellectual history, and cross-religion relationships. The book is divided into eight chapters, an epilogue, and appendices with transcriptions from the manuscript's sources. It includes high-quality reproductions of the Catalan map, sometimes with details. There are also two separate folded maps so the reader can follow the images while reading without having to flip the pages to view the illustrations. Each chapter offers historical background and the state of current research on every subject under discussion. The rationale behind the arrangement of the chapters becomes clear as the reader gets a feeling of building his or her knowledge brick-by-brick and eventually understanding the complete, complex picture of this fantastic scholarly work. Chapter 1 deals with Elisha Cresques' life and artistic background. It briefly addresses the Farhi Codex and then goes on to a stylistic discussion of his previous cartographic works. The discussion goes into the history of map-making and also touches on matters of cartographic research, such as understanding of how some of these charts were used. Chapter 2 discusses Cresques' intellectual
A Jewish Atlas Marianus from the Eighteenth Century?
Pages 659–681 in Constanza Cordoni, Gerhard Langer (eds.) "Let the wise listen and add to their learning" (Prov 1:5): Festschrift for Günter Stemberger on the Occasion of his 75th Birthday. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2016, 2016
The paper deals with an exciting passage of Jonah Rapa's (at the turn of the 17th – 18th centuries) Anti-Christian polemical treatise, entitled Pilpul al zeman, zemanim, zemanahem (“Argument on Festival Times, their Festivals”). Our early modern, Italian Jewish author portrayed in his Hebrew language polemical text thirteen European sanctuaries housing a venerated statue or icon of the Virgin Mary. The main body of the article falls into two parts: first, the author, following in the footsteps of Samuel Krauss and Adolph Posnanski attempted to identify all the shrines situated in and outside of Italy. In most cases, he also tried to elucidate the specific reason why this or that sanctuary was very much in the public eye at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and for what reason it was included in Rapa's description. In the final part of the examination – basing his argumentation upon his previous findings, and particularly upon a hitherto neglected reference in the text – he will try to demonstrate that the most probable date of the publication of Rapa’s writing is the second decade of the eighteenth century. Also, preceding the main text of the article, the first English language translation of Rapa's description can be read.
Jews and Christians in Medieval Europe
Religion and law in Medieval Christian and Muslim Societies, 2016
This volume contains the fruits of a conference organized at the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften in Vienna on 23-25 October 2013. We brought together 15 specialists on the history of medieval Judaism to discuss the legacy of Bernhard Blumenkranz. Bernhard Blumenkranz was born in Vienna in 1913 to a family of Polish Jews. 1 He went to France at about the time of the Anschluss; he was arrested and placed in the Gurs prison camp in Pyrénées Atlantique, where the Vichy government interred foreign-born Jews. He escaped from Gurs and made his way to Switzerland, where he stayed out the war in Basel and prepared a doctorate at the University of Basel on the portrayal of Jews in the works of Augustine. 2 After the war, he moved to France and wrote a thèse d'État entitled 'Juifs et chrétiens dans le monde occidental, 430-1096' (Jews and Christians in the Western World, 430-1096). Through his numerous publications and through the foundation of two important research institutions (the Mission française des archives juives in 1961, and the « Nouvelle Gallia Judaica » in 1971), he revitalized the study of Jewish history in France and in Europe. His many publications and his teaching had a profound impact on the scholarship concerning medieval Jewish history and on the history of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. Most of his rich production falls into three areas. His earliest work deals with Christian perceptions of Jews and Jewish-Christian relations in the early Middle Ages: from Augustine to the first crusade. Much of this work involved the close study of Latin texts, for some of which he produced critical editions (notably Gilbert Crispin's Disputatio judei et christiani, published in Utrecht in 1956). 3 His second major field of research, beginning in the 1960s, was the place of Jews in Medieval Christian iconography. Finally, towards the end of his career, he wrote extensively about the history of the Jews in France, from the Middle Ages to the modern era. In all of these areas, Bernhard Blumenkranz's work was fundamental in reassessing and in reinvigorating research. A generation of scholars has been profoundly influenced by his work, and much of the work in these three fields over the past fifty years has been built on the foundations that he laid. In some cases his conclusions have been called into question or nuanced: for example on the First 1 This brief biography is based on 'Blumenkranz, Bernhard' , in Dictionnaire encyclopédique du Judaïsme,