Politics, Prophecy and Jews: the Destruction of Jerusalem in Anglo-Norman Historiography (original) (raw)
2013, Jews in Medieval Christendom: "Slay Them Not"
it has occasionally been the practice among historians and other scholars to comment ruefully on their subject in general when they start a discussion of some particular aspect of the history of Jewish-christian relations and representations of Jews in the middle ages. sometimes the commentary includes an invocation of or allusion to the great Jewish historian salo Baron's admonition against characterizing medieval Jewish history as uninterrupted tragedy, endless persecution, and unremitting catastrophe.1 more often than not it seems as if the ruefulness is a proactively defensive measure. it is designed to deflect accusations of indulgence in lachrymose exercises. it broadcasts a reasonable indifference to the broadly-drawn and gloomy schemes of causality put forward by earlier generations of scholars, who naïvely linked myths about, attitudes towards or acts against Jews on the part of some elements of the majority population in, say, the twelfth century to the horrors perpetrated against Jews, among others, in the twentieth century.2 i came across a reference to Baron's warning recently as i read through Jonathan elukin's Living Together, Living Apart: Rethinking Jewish-Christian Relations in the Middle Ages.3 in this valuable study, elukin focuses on the everyday tolerance of most medieval christian communities to a Jewish presence in their midst. he stresses the extent to which outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence in the middle ages were far from the norm, and, by and large, local in terms of both their causes and their manifestations. he focuses his readers' attention on the "resilience" of Jewish communities
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