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Jewish Martyrdom in Antiquity

Author: Yair Furstenberg

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2023-03-06

Total Pages: 565

ISBN-13: 9004538267

This volume offers a comprehensive discussion of all relevant sources concerning Jewish martyrdom in Antiquity. By viewing these narratives together, tracing their development and comparing them to other traditions, the authors seek to explore how Jewish is Jewish martyrdom? To this end, they analyse the impact of the changing social and religious-cultural circumstances and the interactions with Graeco-Roman and Christian traditions. This results in the identification of important continuities and discontinuities. Consequently, while political ideals that are prominent in 2 and 4 Maccabees are remarkably absent from rabbinic sources, the latter reveal a growing awareness of Christian motifs and discourse.

Martyrdom and Noble Death

Author: Friedrich Avemarie

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2005-08-18

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 1134772270

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This volume explores the fascinating phenomenon of noble death through pagan, Jewish and Christian sources. Today's society is uncomfortable with death, and willingly submitting to a violent and ostentatious death in public is seen as particularly shocking and unusual. Yet classical sources give a different view, with public self-sacrifice often being applauded. The Romans admired a heroic end in the battlefield or the arena, suicide in the tradition of Socrates was something laudable, and Christians and Jews alike faithfully commemorated their heroes who died during religious persecutions. The cross-cultural approach and wide chronological range of this study make it valuable for students and scholars of ancient history, religion and literature.

Dying for God

Author: Daniel Boyarin

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 0804737045

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Scholars have come to realize that we can and need to speak of a twin birth of Christianity and Judaism, not a genealogy in which one is parent to the other. In this book, the author develops a revised understanding of the interactions between nascent Christianity and nascent Judaism in late antiquity.

Christian Martyrdom in Late Antiquity (300-450 AD)

Author: Peter Gemeinhardt

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2012-07-04

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 3110263521

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The present volume’s focus lies on the formation of a multifaccetted discourse on Christian martyrdom in Late Antiquity. While martyrdom accounts remain a central means of defining Christian identity, new literary genres emerge, e.g., the Lives of Saints (Athanasius on Antony), sermons (the Cappadocians), hynms (Prudentius) and more. Authors like Eusebius of Caesarea and Augustine employ martyrological language and motifs in their apologetical and polemic writings, while the Gesta Martyrum Romanorum represent a new type of veneration of the martyrs of a single site. Beyond the borders of the Roman Empire, new martyrs’ narratives can be found. Additionally, two essays deal with methodological questions of research of such sources, thereby highlighting the hitherto understudied innovations of martyrology in Late Antiquity, that is, after the end of the persecutions of Christianity by Roman Emperors. Since then, martyrology gained new importance for the formation of Christian identity within the context of a Christianized imperium. The volume thus enlarges and specifies our knowledge of this fundamental Christian discourse.

A Noble Death

Author: Arthur J. Droge

Publisher: Harper San Francisco

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13:

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Pathbreaking study provides a stunning reappraisal of the early history of this controversial human freedom. A Noble Death challenges the often unquestioning attitudes we have toward suicide and traces the evolution of these attitudes from the time of Socrates to the present day. Droge and Tabor reveal the extraordinary fact that early Christians and Jews did not absolutely condemn suicide, but instead focused on whether or not it was committed for noble reasons. In.

Jewish Martyrs in the Pagan and Christian Worlds

Author: Shmuel Shepkaru

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 9780521842815

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This book presents a linear history of Jewish martyrdom, from the Hellenistic period to the high Middle Ages. Following the chronology of sources, the study challenges the general consensus that martyrdom was an original Hellenistic Jewish idea. Instead, Jews like Philo and Josephus internalized the idealized Roman concept of voluntary death and presented it as an old Jewish practice. The centrality of self-sacrifice in Christianity further stimulated the development of rabbinic martyrology and the talmudic guidelines for passive martyrdom. However, when forced to choosed between death and conversion in medieval Christendom, Ashkenazic Jews went beyond these guidelines, sacrificing themselves and loved ones. Through death not only did they attempt to prove their religiosity, but also to disprove the religious legitimacy of their Christian persecutors. While martyrs and martyrologies intended to show how Judaisim differed from Christianity, they, in fact, reveal a common mindset.

Struggling with Tradition

Author: Abraham Gross

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-11-22

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 9047413784

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This monograph discusses the disagreement within the Jewish community concerning the medieval practice of active martyrdom, including slaughter of children and suicide, from the 11th until the 16th centuries. It covers the mainly implicit reservations about and objections in Jewish society to this practice. It is suggested that such opinions existed throughout the period when this practice was accepted in halakhic (legal) terms and by the most outstanding Jurists. It is argued that this was the case during the persecutions of the First Crusade in Germany and in the following centuries in the Ashkenazic cultural sphere. This is complemented by a survey and analysis of the situation in the Iberian peninsula during the 14th-15th centuries, when such phenomenon is detected during the persecutions in 1391 and during the so-called "expulsion" from Portugal in 1497. A series of appendices discuss a variety of related topics and all main texts discussed in the book in the original Hebrew. While many scholars discussed the phenomenon of active martyrdom and described its status among medieval Jewry as positive and monolithic, this book proposes a different angle which reveals the ongoing objections of scholars and parts of Jewish society who opposed active martyrdom on legal as well as on emotional grounds until the eventual waning and disappearance of this practice. It is suggested that this actual change set the background for an explicit and total legal rejection of a tradition which lasted and was admired and hailed for more than 400 years.

The Ways of Jewish Martyrdom

Author: Simha Goldin

Publisher: Brepols Publishers

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9782503525235

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Jewish martyrdom in the Middle Ages is a most intriguing social, cultural, and religious phenomenon. It was stimulated by ancient Jewish myths, and at the same time it was influenced by the Christian environment in which the Jews lived and operated. The result was a unique and unprecedented event in which the Jews did not simply refuse to convert to Christianity; they were ready to kill themselves and their children so they would not be forced to convert. The Ways of Jewish Martyrdom discusses the phenomenon of Jewish Martyrdom in medieval Germany, northern France, and England from the time of the First Crusade (1096) until the mid-fourteenth century (that is, the time of the 'Black Death'), in light of modern research and with ample use of hitherto-neglected primary sources. In order to understand the unique phenomenon of Jewish martyrdom, the various Jewish and Christian antecedents that might have influenced the notion of Jewish martyrdom in the Middle Ages need analysis. The texts on which the analysis is based are various, ranging from chronicles through memorial books to liturgical materials and Piyyut. The last part of the book reviews the development of this phenomenon after the fourteenth century and delineates the essential changes and transformations therein at the dawn of the early modern period and beyond.

Ancient Christian Martyrdom

Author: Candida R. Moss

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2012-06-26

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0300154658

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Using perspectives on death from ancient Greek, Roman and Jewish traditions, a theology professor discusses the history of Christian martyrdom and challenges the traditional understanding of the spread of Christianity.

Desiring Martyrs

Author: Harry O. Maier

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2020-12-16

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 311068263X

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Martyrs create space and time through the actions they take, the fate they suffer, the stories they prompt, the cultural narratives against which they take place and the retelling of their tales in different places and contexts. The title "Desiring Martyrs" is meant in two senses. First, it refers to protagonists and antagonists of the martyrdom narratives who as literary characters seek martyrs and the way they inscribe certain kinds of cultural and social desire. Second, it describes the later celebration of martyrs via narrative, martyrdom acts, monuments, inscriptions, martyria, liturgical commemoration, pilgrimage, etc. Here there is a cultural desire to tell or remember a particular kind of story about the past that serves particular communal interests and goals. By applying the spatial turn to these ancient texts the volume seeks to advance a still nascent social geographical understanding of emergent Christian and Jewish martyrdom. It explores how martyr narratives engage pre-existing time-space configurations to result in new appropriations of earlier traditions.