Struggling with Tradition

Reservations about Active Martyrdom in the Middle Ages
Erscheinungsjahr 2004
ISBN: 978-90-04-13853-7
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 19, 138 Seiten, Gewicht: 423 g

Reihe: The Brill Reference Library of Judaism

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gross, Abraham

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Jüdische Studien Jüdische Studien

Inhaltsverzeichnis

PREFACE
Active Martyrdom During the First Crusade in Ashkenaz – Tradition or Innovation?
CHAPTER ONE
Active and Passive Martyrdom in Mainz 1096
CHAPTER TWO
Halakhic and Human Dilemma: Ashkenazic Struggle with its Own Tradition - Continuity of the Phenomenon and development of Traditions—Halakhic References and Discussions—Conclusions
CHAPTER THREE
The Iberian Peninsula
Introduction—Active Martyrdom in 1391—Ashkenazic Ideology of Martyrdom in Sefarad in the Fifteenth Century—Portugal 1493-1497—The Sources—The Abduction of the Children: Between 1493 and 1497—The "Simple People of Israel" and the "Heads of Israel"; Two Roads to Martyrdom in the Mass Forced-Conversion in Lisbon—Summary

Über Autor(innen)

Abraham Gross Ph.D. (1982) Harvard University, is Associate Professor of Medieval Jewish History, specializing in Medieval Jewish History and Literature. He is member of the staff of Ben-Gurion University since 1982. Major areas of research until the mid 1990s were the history of culture of Iberian Jewry, on which he published two books and scores of articles. In the last decade he focused on the history of Jewish martyrdom, spanning 2,200 years. He is former head of Jewish History Track and presently a member of the academic committee of the Ben-Gurion University Publishing House.