Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

114 results

Page 1 of 6

  • 9 - Medieval Western Christendom

  • from Part II - Medieval Times
  • Edited by Steven Katz, Boston University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Antisemitism
    Published online:
    05 May 2022
    Print publication:
    02 June 2022, pp 158-175

  • Summary

    During the second half of the Middle Ages, western Christendom became the most powerful sector of the West, in the process attracting a growing Jewish population. Over the course of these centuries, the Christian majority of western Christendom fashioned damaging new imagery of Jews and harmful new limitations on Jewish life, both of which severely impacted Jewish existence.

  • Chapter 1 - The Prior Church Legacy

  • from Part I - Jews in the Medieval Christian World
  • Edited by Robert Chazan, New York University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Judaism
    Published online:
    01 October 2018
    Print publication:
    11 October 2018, pp 9-31

  • Summary

    The emergence of Christianity within Palestinian Jewry and its eventual movement beyond its Jewish origins created complex Christian imagery of and policy towards Jews and Judaism. The Old Testament component in Christian Scripture portrays Jews as the original human partners to the divine-human covenant, but also presents them as unceasingly failing in their covenantal obligations. Within the New Testament, the Gospels portray both positives and negatives with respect to Jesus’ Jewish contemporaries. Most positively, Jesus himself and his immediate followers were all Palestinian Jews; on the other hand, the opposition to Jesus came from the leadership of Palestinian Jewry. The Gospel portrayal of the Jewish role in the Crucifixion highlights the destructive role of Jews in this cosmic event. Paul’s perspective on the evolution of the divine-human covenant created the new reality of gentile Christianity and a new view of Jews. Paul emphasized the past greatness of the Jews, acknowledged their present shortcomings, but insisted on their future return to a role in the divine-human covenant. Augustine, the great synthesizer of early Christianity’s views and policies, was deeply influenced by the Pauline perspective. He adopted Paul’s views of the Jewish past, present, and future and adumbrated a Church policy grounded in those views. Jews were to enjoy material and spiritual security in Christian societies; they were to be precluded from inflicting harm on host Christian societies; they were to be regularly and sympathetically addressed in hopes of winning them over to Christian truth. This Augustinian synthesis became the foundation for subsequent Church policies.

  • Chapter 8 - Northwestern Europe

  • from Part I - Jews in the Medieval Christian World
  • Edited by Robert Chazan, New York University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Judaism
    Published online:
    01 October 2018
    Print publication:
    11 October 2018, pp 213-238

  • Summary

    Until the end of the first millennium, there was little or no Jewish settlement in northern Europe, which was a backward hinterland to southern Europe. As northern Europe embarked on a process of remarkable vitalization, it became attractive to new Jewish settlers; these new Jewish settlers won the support of the ruling authorities anxious to expand the urban population of their realms and to augment their tax revenues. These new Jewish settlers encountered potent obstacles in the populace, which saw them as newcomers, as religious dissidents, and as the descendants of Jesus’ primary enemies and persecutors. As the principalities of northern Europe progressed during the twelfth century, Jews gravitated to moneylending as their most prominent economic activity, which further exacerbated popular antipathy. Church leaders began to exert pressures aimed at limiting Jewish usury, with considerable success, and the political authorities intensified their exploitation of Jewish resources. Despite these weighty problems, the Jewish population of northwestern Europe continued to expand, and these Jews created effective Jewish communal agencies and a vibrant new Jewish culture. By the late thirteenth century, the concatenation of negative forces—a hostile populace, the Church demands for limitations on Jewish life, and governmental exploitation of Jewish financial resources—led to a series of expulsions that removed Jews entirely from northwestern Europe and shifted the center of northern-European Jewish life eastward.

The Cambridge History of Judaism
  • Volume 6, The Middle Ages: The Christian World, The Christian World
  • Edited by Robert Chazan
  • Published online:
    01 October 2018
    Print publication:
    11 October 2018
  • Volume 6 examines the history of Judaism during the second half of the Middle Ages. Through the first half of the Middle Ages, the Jewish communities of western Christendom lagged well behind those of eastern Christendom and the even more impressive Jewries of the Islamic world. As Western Christendom began its remarkable surge forward in the eleventh century, this progress had an impact on the Jewish minority as well. The older Jewries of southern Europe grew and became more productive in every sense. Even more strikingly, a new set of Jewries were created across northern Europe, when this undeveloped area was strengthened demographically, economically, militarily, and culturally. From the smallest and weakest of the world's Jewish centers in the year 1000, the Jewish communities of western Christendom emerged - despite considerable obstacles - as the world's dominant Jewish center by the end of the Middle Ages. This demographic, economic, cultural, and spiritual dominance was maintained down into modernity.

Page 1 of 6