Hillel J. Kieval, “Antisemitism and the City: A Beginner’s Guide,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 15 (1999): 3-18 (original) (raw)
The Clash over Synagogue Decorations in Medieval Cologne
Jewish History, 2016
A controversy erupted in eleventh-century Cologne with the appearance of lion and serpent decorations on the windows of the local synagogue. This imagery aroused the ire of Rabbi Elyakim ben Joseph of Mainz (d. 1152), who penned a letter in protest. This essay analyzes what the letter teaches about the Cologne synagogue decorations as well as about the dispute between R. Elyakim and the community lay leaders (parnasim) in Cologne who most probably commissioned the synagogue decorations and against whom the rabbi's letter seems to have been directed. Through comparison with other texts, and with the aid of recent archaeological discoveries in Cologne, the identity of the historical figure who may have been the very lay leader at whose behest the lion and serpent decorations were made is tentatively suggested. This incident offers a rare view of Jewish life and leadership during this early period in Cologne, probably prior to the First Crusade, and reveals the tension between the leadership of the Cologne community and the rabbinic leadership in Mainz. This study demonstrates how a multidisciplinary approach opens up new venues for research into the society and leadership of the early Ashkenazi Jewish community.
In 1931 the German Benedictine scholar Romuald Bauer reiss, who thirty years later would write the definitive church history for Bavaria in seven volumes, published a small book entitled Pie Jesu: Das Schmerzensmannbild und sein Einfluss auf die mittelalterliche Fr?mmigkeit (Pie Jesu: The Man of Sorrows Image and Its Influence on Medieval Piety).1 Building on an already sizable literature concerning the imago pietatis (the traditional Latin name for this image type),2 Bauerreiss jux taposed in provocative ways the sacramental, liturgical, devo tional, and mortuary contexts in which the image appeared north of the Alps after 1300.3 In particular, the author drew attention to a set of connections between the image of the wounded, suffering Christ and a family of pilgrimage shrines, most of them in German-speaking lands, whose foundation Gnadenbild) and beyond the church interior, notably to the cemetery, where the devotional formula and its narrative visionary counterpart, the image of the Mass of Saint Greg ory, found frequent use on epitaphs.5 Finally, and with some regret, Bauerreiss also linked the Man of Sorrows to the sites of anti-Jewish accusation and violence, destroyed synagogues and places associated with massacres, executions, and expul sions of Jews, places that carried names?ominous to us now?like Judenberg, Judenb?chel, Judenstein, and Juden grube.6 This trail of clues led back, via the stereotyped legend of Jewish host desecration in its many localized versions, to a core group of Eucharistie miracle shrines and their bleeding host cults. Despite the subsequent disappearance of key mon uments at several important sites in this group, Bauerreiss images" {Andachtsbilder) and cult images {Kultbilder), and the possibility, that they, too, served as symbolic vehicles for the Christian majority's struggle with the presence of Jews within medieval society and the world order. Without its familiar foothold on Christian art's stereotyped figurations of Judaism and "the Jew," art history, with only a handful of exceptions,14 has been unable to find purchase in the vast and shifting terrain of premodern Jewish-Christian relations. Another hindrance to expanding the discourse beyond this older set of concerns is the general aversion among Anglo phone art historians to the problems raised by premodern ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 2005 VOLUME LXXXVII NUMBER 4 1 Church of the Holy Blood, Pulkau, Austria, late 14th-mid 15th century, view eastward into choir (photograph by the author) popular religion, folklore, and "nonartistic" visual cultures? this despite the rapprochement between art history, psychol ogy, and religious ethnology announced in David Freed berg's oft-cited book of 1989, The Power of Images.15 Me dievalists, along with scholars in non-Western areas, may tend toward a greater affinity for anthropological approaches to meaning than their counterparts in other fields of art history, but old commitments remain. Interest in the myriad cultic and magical functions of premodern imagery (represented by anthropological terms like effigial, votive, amuletic, talis manic, apotropaic, and so on) has been slowly aroused in recent years, however, by another great work of synthesis? keyed, in contrast to Freedberg, to historical explanation16? Hans Belting's Bild und Kult (translated as Likeness and Pres ence). And Belting's more recent explorations and program statements toward an "anthropology of the image" will un doubtedly broaden the impact of his overall approach in the coming years.17 For the specialized problem of "art and anti Semitism," however, any approach to visual culture suffi ciently open to Belting's Bildanthropologie, as well as to the "historical anthropology" practiced in other disciplines,18 will have to learn new, integrative ways to interpret and contextu alize the great array of objects at our disposal: cultic and votive images, relics and reliquaries, altar panels and miracle cycles, pilgrimage paraphernalia and devotionalia, broad sheets, engravings, and printed books, as well as the manu script illuminations and monumental sculpture traditionally studied under this rubric.19 Against the backdrop of this double accumulation of arti facts?the "iconography of anti-Semitism" together with the art and architecture of pilgrimage20?the art historical pur suit of Bauerreiss's thesis encounters a surprising obstacle: surviving evidence for the veneration of a Man of Sorrows cult image at any known Holy Blood shrine from the later Middle Ages is not especially plentiful. By contrast, the Counter-Reformation counterparts of these images are dis tributed more widely. Was Bauerreiss, at this relatively early ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 2005 VOLUME LXXXVII NUMBER 4 Scottish Monastery (Schottenkloster) in Vienna, a powerful religious institition with patronage rights over the parish church of St. Michael's in Pulkau.31 Humanist scholar, poet, rhetorician, theologian, historian, and astronomer, Cheldo nius had been called to Vienna in 1511 from St. Egidius, a dependent monastery in Nuremberg, where he enjoyed the camaraderie and friendship of the humanist circle that gath ered at the home of Willibald Pirckheimer. That he was also a trusted adviser and friend to Maximilian, to whom he dedicated his most important work of theological commen tary, strengthens the case for identifying him as the altar's institutional patron, if not its iconographie planner. Scholarly opinion dates the work on the altar to about 1518-20, thus closely overlapping Cheldonius's brief abbacy (1518-21). Yet the situation with regard to patronage rights for the Holy Blood Church involves complexities that may render assump reached, however, is shown by a 1544 visitation protocol that names the Schotten abbot as fief holder {Lehensherr) over the church, while acknowledging the rights of Pulkau citizens to name key benefices within it.34 Whatever guiding role Chel donius took in the commissioning of the altar, then, it stands to reason that the rights and interests of the burgher com munity were taken carefully into account. Whether the altar represents a cooperative venture or one party's stake in a power struggle remains an open question. In the Year 1338 ... Built around a market settlement in the wine-producing northern reaches of Lower Austria, and incorporated in 1308 as a market commune {Marktgemeinde), the town of Pulkau lies about forty miles northwest of Vienna and only ten miles south of the (current) Czech border, placing it at the cross roads of culture, trade, and conflict.35 Apart from the Holy Blood Church with its great Passion Altarpiece, the town's picturesque Renaissance Rathaus, a thirteenth-century char nel house {Karner) in the churchyard of St. Michael's parish, and its excellent wines, Pulkau is renowned for two things that bear directly on our theme. The first is an event, a terrible but all-too-common type of fourteenth-century event: the massacre of Pulkau's Jewish community on April 23,1338.36 According to several Austrian and Bohemian chroniclers, on that day a crowd had gathered in the town center in response to rumors that a desecrated host had been found on the doorstep of a local Jew; passions, we are to infer, flared into violence; and most, possibly all, of the town's Jews (numbering about 150 persons) were seized, brutalized, and massacred and their possessions plundered.37 Contemporary sources offer selective details. A chronicler from the nearby Cistercian monastery at Zwettl, for example, informs us that the victims were burned alive and reduced to Lower Austria had been the scene of numerous host-sacrilege accusations against Jews. By correlating the lists published in several sources, I count nine such affairs for Lower Austria alone between 1290 and 1420
Jews: The Makers of Early Modern Berlin
Jews: The Makers of Early Modern Berlin, 2018
This paper discusses how Jews fit into the economic policies of Brandenburg-Prussia in the later 16th century. From Frederick William’s decree in 1671 to allow fifty Jewish families to settle in Brandenburg-Prussia to these families and their descendants becoming immersed in the economy of Berlin through their use in courts but more so through their trading, specifically, the ways in which they traded and how they used these to free themselves from some of the constraints of German Christian society. This will be shown by looking at Jews in Brandenburg-Prussia in the later 17th century, Jews in Berlin, and Jews and their relations to the economic sphere of Berlin. The conclusion of this paper is that Jews in Berlin from the time of their readmission in 1671 had become a necessity for Brandenburg-Prussia in order to rebound from its destruction in the Thirty Years’ War. This can be seen in their extensive use in the courts of Brandenburg-Prussia and the taxes that were extracted from them. However, this can also be seen in the ways that Jews traded with the German Christian majority and how they were able to circumvent some aspects of the society that were used to keep them down. This has expanded on the ways in which Jews used their roles in the economic sphere of Berlin to help improve their lives and possibly of Jews in positions similar to theirs.
Speculum 92/2 (April 2017) http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/690757 The massacre of the Jews of Metz by the First Crusaders, 1095 (1863), a painting by Auguste Migette, is a rare artistic depiction of the pogroms of the First Crusade. It presents an enigma: The attacks on the Jews of Metz became widely known for the first time only a few decades after the creation of the painting, with the publication of the Hebrew chronicles of the First Crusade at the end of the 19th century. Prior to the time of the painting, the events in Metz were commemorated in Hebrew manuscripts, that is, remembered within the Jewish culture. How did Migette, a Catholic Romantic artist, learn about the attacks in his native city? We focus on Migette's painting as a starting point, from which an enquiry of his possible sources unfolds. We track these sources in hitherto unnoticed writings by historians of Metz, and suggest that the essential source of information was Jewish memorial liturgy. We discuss the historiographical context of commemorating the Crusades in the 19th century as well as the reception of the painting, including the production of popular postcards depicting Migette's Massacre. The study brings out a unique moment in the historiography of the First Crusade, and nuances the current knowledge through an analysis of unnoticed sources. It also uncovers a process of transmission of historical narrative between Jewish and Christian culture through various commemorative means, from oral to written and ultimately to visual representation. Forthcoming, Speculum 92/2 (April 2017)