The Jews of Provence and Languedoc

The Jews of Provence and Languedoc

Author: Ram Ben-Shalom

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2024-05-08

Total Pages: 544

ISBN-13: 1837641412

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This exhaustive history of Provençal Jewry examines the key aspects of Jewish life in Provence over some 1,500 years of cultural florescence with far-reaching consequences. A seminal examination of the crucial role of the Jews of Provence in shaping medieval Jewish culture in the Mediterranean basin.


True Citizens

True Citizens

Author: Philip Daileader

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-10-01

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 9004476598

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This first book-length, English-language study of medieval urban citizenship focuses on Perpignan, a town second in population only to Barcelona in fourteenth-century Catalonia, yet neglected by modern historians. True Citizens describes and analyzes the rules that governed membership in the community of citizens, the definition of citizenship, and how the development of divergent memories within the community resulted in a crisis of citizenship. This study uses urban citizenship to shed new light on many important historiographical issues, such as Jewish-Christian relations, the place of towns in feudal society, the place of Catalonia in the urban history of medieval Europe, and the transition from the High to the Late Middle Ages.


Women, Wealth, and Community in Perpignan, c. 1250–1300

Women, Wealth, and Community in Perpignan, c. 1250–1300

Author: Rebecca Lynn Winer

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-05-15

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 1351871366

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Women, Wealth, and Community in Perpignan, c. 1250-1300 investigates the gender system at work in medieval Perpignan. Using a series of notarial registers - unique as surviving records for the social history of the thirteenth-century realms of Aragon and Majorca, the political confederations to which this town belonged - Rebecca L. Winer opens a window onto the experiences of women and their families. Her interpretive framework reveals medieval assumptions about the distinct natures of Christian, Jewish, and enslaved Muslim women by analyzing which actions were curbed, controlled, or fostered in these different groups. Sensitive to questions of social rank and marital status, the book departs from traditional women's history by asking how a woman's religious identity factored in determining her economic and legal options in this society. As a frontier town, Perpignan lends itself well to an analysis of relations among Christians, Jews and Muslim slaves. The later thirteenth century also provides an ideal focus for this inquiry since the politics of Christian expansion and the economics of the western Mediterranean meant that Jewish communities flourished. In contrast, Christian/Muslim relations unfolded particularly tensely due to intermittent conflict and both groups' slave trade almost exclusively in each other's people. Winer reconstructs how the members of these three communities negotiated shared space, conducting all manner of exchanges, making (endogamous) marriages, wills, commercial contracts, and arranging for the care of children whose fathers were lost to war or disease. The first section of the book focuses on women's legal status, work and control of financial resources in the two dominant communities, Christian and Jewish, across the social spectrum. It goes on to compare the ways in which mothers' relationships to their children were understood in the Christian and Jewish communities. The book concludes by entering the homes of Christian


Entangled Histories

Entangled Histories

Author: Elisheva Baumgarten

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2017-01-13

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0812248686

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Entangled Histories: Knowledge, Authority, and Jewish Culture in the Thirteenth Century provides a multifaceted account of Jewish life in Europe and the Mediterranean basin at a time when economic, cultural, and intellectual encounters coincided with heightened interfaith animosity.


Popes, Church, and Jews in the Middle Ages

Popes, Church, and Jews in the Middle Ages

Author: Kenneth Stow

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-05-09

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 1000951111

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The theme uniting the essays reprinted here is the attitude of the medieval Church, and in particular the papacy, toward the Jewish population of Western Europe. Papal consistency, sometimes sorely tried, in observing the canons and the principles announced by St Paul - that Jews were to be a permanent, if disturbing, part of Christian life - helped balance the anxiety felt by members of the Church. Clerics especially feared what they called Jewish pollution. These themes are the focus of the studies in the first part of this volume. Those in the second part explore aspects of Jewish society and family life, as both were shaped by medieval realities.


The Myth of the Medieval Jewish Moneylender

The Myth of the Medieval Jewish Moneylender

Author: Julie L. Mell

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-10-14

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 1137397780

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This book challenges a common historical narrative, which portrays medieval Jews as moneylenders who filled an essential economic role in Europe. It traces how and why this narrative was constructed as a philosemitic narrative in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in response to the rise of political antisemitism. This book also documents why it is a myth for medieval Europe, and illuminates how changes in Jewish history change our understanding of European history. Each chapter offers a novel interpretation of central topics, such as the usury debate, commercial contracts, and moral literature on money and value to demonstrate how the revision of Jewish history leads to new insights in European history.


A Mediterranean Emporium

A Mediterranean Emporium

Author: David Abulafia

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2002-05-09

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 9780521894050

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Situated astride the trade routes of the western Mediterranean, the Catalan kingdom of Majorca has long deserved attention. It was established under the will of King James I of Aragon, who conquered Majorca in 1229, but was ruled from 1276 to 1343 by a cadet dynasty. In addition to the Balearic Islands the kingdom included the key business centres of Montpellier and Perpignan, and other lands in what is now southern France. It was also home to important Jewish and Muslim communities, and was the focus of immigration from Catalonia, Provence and Italy. This book emphasises the major transformations in the trade of the Balearic Islands from the eve of the Catalan conquest to the Black Death, and the effect of the kingdom's creation and demise on the economy of the region. Links between the island and mainland territories, and as far afield as England and the Canaries, are analysed in depth.


Jewish Life in Early Modern Rome

Jewish Life in Early Modern Rome

Author: Kenneth Stow

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-01-18

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1351154990

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The essays in this second volume by Kenneth Stow explore the fate of Jews living in Rome, directly under the eye of the Pope. Most Roman Jews were not immigrants; some had been there before the time of Christ. Nor were they cultural strangers. They spoke (Roman) Italian, ate and dressed as did other Romans, and their marital practices reflected Roman noble usage. Rome's Jews were called cives, but unequal ones, and to resolve this anomaly, Paul IV closed them within ghetto walls in 1555; the rest of Europe would resolve this crux in the late eighteenth century, through civil Emancipation. In its essence, the ghetto was a limbo, from which only conversion, promoted through "disciplining" par excellence, offered an exit. Nonetheless, though increasingly impoverished, Rome's Jews preserved culture and reinforced family life, even many women's rights. A system of consensual arbitration enabled a modicum of self-governance. Yet Rome's Jews also came to realize that they had been expelled into the ghetto: nostro ghet, a document of divorce, as they called it. There they would remain, segregated, so long as they remained Jews. Such are the themes that the author examines in these essays.