Anthony Grafton, “The Jewish Book in Christian Europe: Material Texts and Religious Encounters,” in Andrea Sterk and Nina Caputo, eds., Faithful Narratives: Historians, Religion, and the Challenge of Objectivity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 96–114, 243–247 (original) (raw)
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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,
Can polemics innovate, University of Vienna, 2017
The corpus of anti-Christian Jewish polemical literature-consisting of texts written in Hebrew or vernacular languages, during the Middle Ages and the early modern times-is as rich as it is poorly known. The studies devoted to these writings are invariably limited to one single text or to a choice of texts, which, in spite of being scientifically justified, is necessarily arbitrary. The study of the totality of this corpus is still to be done. Since many texts were lost and others are still in manuscript, such a study could not be exhaustive. However, since the function and specificity of this literature can only be apprehended by adopting a large perspective and by taking into account its multifarious relation to the historical, intellectual and religious contexts, this type of investigation is highly necessary. My intervention proposes therefore a first "total" approach of this polemical literature.
Christian (Re)Encounters with Jews in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean
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 sixteenth-century 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.
Contents Illustrations Acknowledgements Contributors A Note on Spelling and Referencing Introduction 1 Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß: Jewish Life and Books under Scrutiny: Ethnography, Polemics, and Converts I Life and campaigns 2 David H. Price: Johannes Pfefferkorn and Imperial Politics 3 Franz Posset: In Search of the Historical Pfefferkorn: The Missionary to the Jews, 1507–1508 4 Avner Shamir: Johannes Pfefferkorn and the Dual Form of the Confiscation Campaign II Books and dissemination 5 Jan-Hendryk de Boer: Pfefferkorn’s Books or the Most Rational Man in the World 6 Naomi Feuchtwanger-Sarig: Synagoga Veritas? Johannes Pfefferkorn and his Synagogue Descriptions in the buchlijn der iuden beicht 7 Cordelia Heß: Jew-Hatred Sells? Anti-Jewish Print Production in the German Dialects 8 Jonathan Adams: “Thus shall Christian people know to punish them”: Translating Pfefferkorn into Danish III Converts, ethnography, and polemics 9 Maria Diemling: Patronage, Representation, and Conversion: Victor von Carben (1423–1515) and his Social Networks 10 Stephen G. Burnett: Luther’s Chief Witness: Anthonius Margaritha’s Der gantz Jüdisch glaub (1530/1531) 11 Yaacov Deutsch: The Reception History of Ethnographic Literature about the Jews 12 Ryan W. Szpiech: From Convert to Convert: Two Opposed Trends in Late Medieval and Early Modern Anti-Jewish Polemic 13 Imanuel Clemens Schmidt: Revealing the Absurdity of Jewish Hopes: From Polemical Ethnography to Basnage’s L’Histoire des Juifs 14 Markéta Kabůrková: Tela Ignea Satanae: Christian Scholars and the Editing of Hebrew Polemical Literature 15 Avery Gosfield: Gratias post mensam in diebus festiuis cum cantico hebrayim: A New Look at an Early Sixteenth-Century Tzur Mishelo Works Attributed to Johannes Pfefferkorn Bibliography Indices
e external gate includes a list of many books that were translated from the Holy Tongue into the Latin language, that is 'leshon romi'. Some books were written in both the Holy Tongue and Latin-they are the work of non-Jews. is demonstrates the potency of the Holy Tongue-for all nations make every effort to learn and to write books in the Holy Tongue and to translate works from the Holy Tongue into other languages. e wise person will appreciate (ha-mevin yavin) the considerable utility of this section. I would have you know that I have listed the dates in which they were published according to their [i.e. Christian] era.¹ is remarkable approbation of Christian translations of Jewish literature concludes the final section of Shabbetai Bass's bibliography of Hebrew books.² Modelled on previous Christian bibliographies and published in Amsterdam in 1680, Bass's Si ei yeshenim ('Lips of ose Who Sleep') was one of the first attempts on the part of a Jew to produce a comprehensive list of Hebrew printed books with date and place of publication.³ e inclusion of non-Jewish Hebraica, admittedly at the very end of the work, suggests that Bass knew the taste of his potential readers. His use of the expression ha-mevin yavin adds to the sense that he was conveying something both unusual and worthwhile. Having displayed the ¹ Shabbetai Bass, Si ei yeshenim (Amsterdam, 1680), 107a. ² e list contains an interesting hotchpotch of works of both Protestants and Catholics. Bass included and used the bibliographies of Johann Buxtorf the elder and younger, Plantavit de la Pause,