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The Ways of Jewish Martyrdom

Author: Simha Goldin

Publisher: Brepols Publishers

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9782503525235

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.

The Ways of Jewish Martyrdom

Author: Simha Goldin

Publisher:

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 9782503560571

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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.

Sanctifying the Name of God

Author: Jeremy Cohen

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2013-03-26

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0812201639

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How are martyrs made, and how do the memories of martyrs express, nourish, and mold the ideals of the community? Sanctifying the Name of God wrestles with these questions against the background of the massacres of Jews in the Rhineland during the outbreak of the First Crusade. Marking the first extensive wave of anti-Jewish violence in medieval Christian Europe, these "Persecutions of 1096" exerted a profound influence on the course of European Jewish history. When the crusaders demanded that Jews choose between Christianity and death, many opted for baptism. Many others, however, chose to die as Jews rather than to live as Christians, and of these, many actually inflicted death upon themselves and their loved ones. Stories of their self-sacrifice ushered the Jewish ideal of martyrdom—kiddush ha-Shem, the sanctification of God's holy name—into a new phase, conditioning the collective memory and mindset of Ashkenazic Jewry for centuries to come, during the Holocaust, and even today. The Jewish survivors of 1096 memorialized the victims as martyrs as they rebuilt their communities during the decades following the Crusade. Three twelfth-century Hebrew chronicles of the persecutions preserve their memories of martyrdom and self-sacrifice, tales fraught with symbolic meaning that constitute one of the earliest Jewish attempts at local, contemporary historiography. Reading and analyzing these stories through the prism of Jewish and Christian religious and literary traditions, Jeremy Cohen shows how these persecution chronicles reveal much more about the storytellers, the martyrologists, than about the martyrs themselves. While they extol the glorious heroism of the martyrs, they also air the doubts, guilt, and conflicts of those who, by submitting temporarily to the Christian crusaders, survived.

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.

Dying in the Law of Moses

Author: Miriam Bodian

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2007-05-22

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 0253116910

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Miriam Bodian's study of crypto-Jewish martyrdom in Iberian lands depicts a new type of martyr that emerged in the late 16th century -- a defiant, educated judaizing martyr who engaged in disputes with inquisitors. By examining closely the Inquisition dossiers of four men who were tried in the Iberian peninsula or Spanish America and who developed judaizing theologies that drew from currents of Reformation thinking that emphasized the authority of Scripture and the religious autonomy of individual interpreters of Scripture, Miriam Bodian reveals unexpected connections between Reformation thought and historic crypto-Judaism. The complex personalities of the martyrs, acting in response to psychic and situational pressures, emerge vividly from this absorbing book.

Beautiful Death

Author: Susan L. Einbinder

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2002-07-01

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 1400825253

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When Crusader armies on their way to the Holy Land attacked Jewish communities in the Rhine Valley, many Jews chose suicide over death at the hands of Christian mobs. With their defiant deaths, the medieval Jewish martyr was born. With the literary commemoration of the victims, Jewish martyrology followed. Beautiful Death examines the evolution of a long-neglected corpus of Hebrew poetry, the laments reflecting the specific conditions of Jewish life in northern France. The poems offer insight into everyday life and into the ways medieval French Jews responded to persecution. They also suggest that poetry was used to encourage resistance to intensifying pressures to convert. The educated Jewish elite in northern France was highly acculturated. Their poetry--particularly that emerging from the innovative Tosafist schools--reflects their engagement with the vernacular renaissance unfolding around them, as well as conscious and unconscious absorption of Christian popular beliefs and hagiographical conventions. At the same time, their extraordinary poems signal an increasingly harsh repudiation of Christianity's sacred symbols and beliefs. They reveal a complex relationship to Christian culture as Jews internalized elements of medieval culture even while expressing a powerful revulsion against the forms and beliefs of Christian life. This gracefully written study crosses traditional boundaries of history and literature and of Jewish and general medieval scholarship. Focusing on specific incidents of persecution and the literary commemorations they produced, it offers unique insights into the historical conditions in which these poems were written and performed.

Jewish Martyrdom in Antiquity

Author: Yair Furstenberg

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2023-03-06

Total Pages: 565

ISBN-13: 9004538267

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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.

'God Wants It!'

Author: Lena Roos

Publisher: Brepols Publishers

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13:

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Examines three Jewish chronicles of the First Crusade: the Chronicle of Solomon ben Simson, the Chronicle of Eliezer ben R. Nathan, and the Anonymous Chronicle of Mainz, with the goal to analyze the ideology of martyrdom found in them and to trace its background. Notes the characteristic motifs in these chronicles: joy of martyrdom, heavenly reward to the martyrs, martyrdom as a decree of God, death of martyrs as a promise of the Messianic redemption, and the most unusual for the Jewish literature motif - active martyrdom. The communities suffered a disaster that surpassed all the previous outbursts of anti-Jewish violence in the region, and they wanted to come to terms with it and to infuse it with a meaning. Concludes that although some Biblical and midrashic motifs can be found in the chronicles, the ideology of martyrdom in them share many of its characteristics with the Christian contemporary counterparts. This fact may be attributed either to Christian influence or to a common contemporary European discourse of martyrdom. Notes that medieval Ashkenazic Jews were part of their non-Jewish surroundings in a greater degree than it has been supposed.

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.