Classical civilization (and hence contemporary Western culture) had deep roots in Afro-Asiatic cultures, but these influences have been systematically overlooked. This series of monographs and collections of articles addresses the social, religious and cultural interactions between East and West, particularly the alienation between East and West as the two parts of the Roman Empire grew apart from the fourth century onwards. To treat the cultures of Western Europe, Byzantium, and the Muslim East separately, as if too fundamentally disparate for substantive borrowings or syncretism to take place, is a drastic simplification of the cultural and religious encounters between East and West throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.
The Mediterranean and its hinterlands were the scene of intensive and transformative contact between cultures in the Middle Ages. From the seventh to the seventeenth century, the three civilizations into which the region came to be divided geographically – the Islamic Khalifate, the Byzantine Empire, and the Latin West – were busily redefining themselves vis-à-vis one another. Interspersed throughout the region were communities of minorities, such as Christians in Muslim lands, Muslims in Christian lands, heterodoxical sects, pagans, and, of course, Jews. One of the most potent vectors of interaction and influence between these communities in the medieval world was inter-religious conversion: the process whereby groups or individuals formally embraced a new religion. The chapters of this book explore this dynamic: what did it mean to convert to Christianity in seventh-century Ireland? What did it mean to embrace Islam in tenth-century Egypt? Are the two phenomena comparable on a social, cultural, and legal level? The chapters of the book also ask what we are able to learn from our sources, which, at times, provide a very culturally-charged and specific conversion rhetoric. Taken as a whole, the compositions in this volume set out to argue that inter-religious conversion was a process that was recognizable and comparable throughout its geographical and chronological purview.
This book examines the premodern encounter between the three monotheistic religions through the unique prism of a premodern literary work—The Parable of the Three Rings—a poignant and charming tale of a father who had three sons and one precious ring. By tradition he was to bequeath the ring to his heir, but he loved his three sons equally — so he had two new rings made, crafted to be indistinguishable from the original, and on his deathbed gave a ring to each son. The narrator explains that the father is God, and his sons are the Jews, the Christians, and the Muslims, each believing themselves to be the sole upholders of the true religion. A historical and literary study, the book offers a comprehensive discussion of the various guises of the Parable, from the early Middle Ages onwards, and highlights its capacity to reflect openness and pluralism in the interfaith encounter.
Conflict, Conquest, and Conversion surveys two thousand years of the Christian missionary enterprise in the Middle East within the context of the region's political evolution. Its broad, rich narrative follows Christian missions as they interacted with imperial powers and as the momentum of religious change shifted from Christianity to Islam and back, adding new dimensions to the history of the region and the nature of the relationship between the Middle East and the West. Historians and political scientists increasingly recognize the importance of integrating religion into political analysis, and this volume, using long-neglected sources, uniquely advances this effort. It surveys Christian missions from the earliest days of Christianity to the present, paying particular attention to the role of Christian missions, both Protestant and Catholic, in shaping the political and economic imperialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Eleanor H. Tejirian and Reeva Spector Simon delineate the ongoing tensions between conversion and the focus on witness and "good works" within the missionary movement, which contributed to the development and spread of nongovernmental organizations. Through its conscientious, systematic study, this volume offers an unparalleled encounter with the social, political, and economic consequences of such trends.
This book discusses the “long fifteenth century” in Iberian history, between the 1391 pogroms and the forced conversions of Aragonese Muslims in 1526, a period characterized by persecutions, conversions and social violence, on the one hand, and cultural exchange, on the other. It was a historical moment of unstable religious ideas and identities, before the rigid turn taken by Spanish Catholicism by the middle of the sixteenth century; a period in which the physical and symbolic borders separating the three religions were transformed and redefined but still remained extraordinarily porous. The collection argues that the aggressive tone of many polemical texts has until now blinded historiography to the interconnected nature of social and cultural intimacy, above all in dialogue and cultural transfer in later medieval Iberia. Contributors are Ana Echevarría, Gad Freudenthal, Mercedes García-Arenal, Maria Laura Giordano, Yonatan Glazer-Eytan, Eleazar Gutwirth, Felipe Pereda, Rosa M. Rodríguez Porto, Katarzyna K. Starczewska, John Tolan, Gerard Wiegers, and Yosi Yisraeli.
A formidable collection of studies on religious conversion and converts in Jewish history Theodor Dunkelgrün and Pawel Maciejko observe that the term "conversion" is profoundly polysemous. It can refer to Jews who turn to religions other than Judaism and non-Jews who tie their fates to that of Jewish people. It can be used to talk about Christians becoming Muslim (or vice versa), Christians "born again," or premodern efforts to Christianize (or Islamize) indigenous populations of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. It can even describe how modern, secular people discover spiritual creeds and join religious communities. Viewing Jewish history from the perspective of conversion across a broad chronological and conceptual frame, Bastards and Believers highlights how the concepts of the convert and of conversion have histories of their own. The volume begins with Sara Japhet's study of conversion in the Hebrew Bible and ends with Netanel Fisher's essay on conversion to Judaism in contemporary Israel. In between, Andrew S. Jacobs writes about the allure of becoming an "other" in late Antiquity; Ephraim Kanarfogel considers Rabbinic attitudes and approaches toward conversion to Judaism in the Middles Ages; and Paola Tartakoff ponders the relationship between conversion and poverty in medieval Iberia. Three case studies, by Javier Castaño, Claude Stuczynski, and Anne Oravetz Albert, focus on different aspects of the experience of Spanish-Portuguese conversos. Michela Andreatta and Sarah Gracombe discuss conversion narratives; and Elliott Horowitz and Ellie Shainker analyze Eastern European converts' encounters with missionaries of different persuasions. Despite the differences between periods, contexts, and sources, two fundamental and mutually exclusive notions of human life thread the essays together: the conviction that one can choose one's destiny and the conviction that one cannot escapes one's past. The history of converts presented by Bastards and Believers speaks to the possibility, or impossibility, of changing one's life. Contributors: Michela Andreatta, Javier Castaño, Theodor Dunkelgrün, Netanel Fisher, Sarah Gracombe, Elliott Horowitz, Andrew S. Jacobs, Sara Japhet, Ephraim Kanarfogel, Pawel Maciejko, Anne Oravetz Albert, Ellie Shainker, Claude Stuczynski, Paola Tartakoff.
This collection is an introductory historical survey and selective cultural analysis of the development, coalescence, and eventual waning of a diasporic civilization—that of the Jews of the early modern period (ca. 1391–1789) in Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and key nodes of the Iberian Empires in the Americas. Each chapter explores key factors that shaped both distinctive early modern Jewish communities and a remarkably coalescent and far broader community-of-communities. The contributors engage and answer the following questions: What do historians mean by “early modernity,” and to what extent does the concept illuminate the history and culture(s) of Jews from the end of the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment? What were the general demographic contours of the Jewish diaspora over this period and how did they change? How did culture, politics, technology, economics, and gender shape diasporic Jewish communities across eastern and western Europe and the New World over the course of some 400 years? Ultimately, the work renders a portrait of coherence and diversity, continuity and discontinuity, in early modern Jewish life within and across temporal and geographic boundaries. Early Modern Jewish Civilization is essential reading for all students of Jewish history and civilization and early modern history more broadly.
In The Song of Songs in the Early Middle Ages, Hannah W. Matis examines how the Song of Songs, the collection of Hebrew love poetry, was understood in the Latin West as an allegory of Christ and the church. This reading of the biblical text was passed down via the patristic tradition, established by the Venerable Bede, and promoted by the chief architects of the Carolingian reform. Throughout the ninth century, the Song of Songs became a text that Carolingian churchmen used to think about the nature of Christ and to conceptualize their own roles and duties within the church. This study examines the many different ways that the Song of Songs was read within its early medieval historical context.
The three volumes present the current state of international research on Martin Luther’s life and work and the Reformation's manifold influences on history, churches, politics, culture, philosophy, arts and society up to the 21st century. The work is initiated by the Fondazione per le scienze religiose Giovanni XXIII (Bologna) in cooperation with the European network Refo500. This handbook is also available in German.
