Regional Identities and Cultures of Medieval Jews

Though the existence of Jewish regional cultures is widely known, the origins of the most prominent groups, Ashkenaz and Sepharad, are poorly understood, and the rich variety of other regional Jewish identities is often overlooked. Yet all these subcultures emerged in the Middle Ages. Scholars contributing to the present study were invited to consider how such regional identities were fashioned, propagated, reinforced, contested, and reshaped — and to reflect on the developments, events, or encounters that made these identities manifest. They were asked to identify how subcultural identities proved to be useful, and the circumstances in which they were deployed. The resulting volume spans the ninth to sixteenth centuries, and explores Jewish cultural developments in western Europe, the Balkans, North Africa, and Asia Minor. In its own way, each chapter considers factors — demographic, geographical, historical, economic, political, institutional, legal, intellectual, theological, cultural, and even biological — that led medieval Jews to conceive of themselves, or to be perceived by others, as bearers of a discrete Jewish regional identity. Notwithstanding the singularity of each chapter, they collectively attest to the inherent dynamism of Jewish regional identities.

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 125-139
Author(s):  
Ангел Николов ◽  
Камен Станев

The paper discusses the differences between Eastern and Western Christians during the Middle Ages through the prism of the lists of ritual deviations and bad habits of the ‘Latin heretics’, which were circulated in Byzantium in the second half of the 12th century (following the Great Schism of 1054). The translations and revisions of these lists remained popular among the Orthodox Christians in the Balkans and Eastern Europe up until the end of the 17th century. Special attention has been given to the reception among the Slavs of two Byzantine accusations levelled on the westerners – (1) that their priests shave; (2) that they eat various ‘unclean’ animals and creatures. The examples of the peculiar mundanity of the religious dialogue and polemics analysed in the paper suggest that this was a trend resulting from the ambition of the Orthodox societies in the Balkans and Eastern Europe to strengthen through various means their ethnic and religious identity in the context of the fierce political and confessional confrontation with the Catholic world of Western Europe. Also highlighted is the need for the research of medieval polemical texts to embrace the archaeological, ethnological and folkloristic evidence, which would allow us to clarify the sources and trends in the development and transformation of the key features of the identity of Slavic Orthodox societies during the Middle Ages and Modernity.


Author(s):  
Robert G. Ousterhout

The rich and diverse architectural traditions of the Eastern Mediterranean and adjacent regions are the subject of this book. Representing the visual residues of a “forgotten” Middle Ages, the social and cultural developments of the Byzantine Empire, the Caucasus, the Balkans, Russia, and the Middle East parallel the more familiar architecture of Western Europe. The book offers an expansive overview of the architectural developments of the Byzantine Empire and areas under its cultural influence, as well as of the intellectual currents that lie behind their creation. The book alternates chapters that address chronological or regional developments with thematic studies that focus on the larger cultural concerns, as they are expressed in architectural form.


Author(s):  
R.M. Valeev ◽  
O.D. Vasilyuk ◽  
S.A. Kirillina ◽  
A.M. Abidulin

Abstract The study of the Turkic, including Asia Minor sociopolitical, cultural and ethnolinguistic space of Eurasia is a long and significant tradition of practical, academic and university centers in Russia and Europe, including Ukraine. The Turkic, including the Ottoman political and cultural heritage played a particularly important role in the history and culture of the peoples of Russia, Ukraine and modern Turkic states. Famous states and societies of the Turkic world (Turkic Khaganates, Volga Bulgaria, Ulus Juchi, the Ottoman Empire and other states of the Middle Ages and the New Age), geographical and historical-cultural regions of the traditional residence of the Turkic peoples of the Russian and Ottoman empires and Eurasia as a whole became the object and subject of scientific studies of Russian and European orientalists Turkologists and Ottomans of the nineteenth beginning of the twentieth century.Аннотация Исследование тюркского, в том числе малоазиатского социополитического, культурного и этнолингвистического пространства Евразии является давней и значимой традицией практических, академических и университетских центров России и Европы, в том числе Украины. Особо важную роль тюркское, в том числе османское политическое и культурное наследие играло в истории и культуре народов России, Украины и современных тюркских государств. Известные государства и общества тюркского мира (Тюркские каганаты, Волжская Булгария, Улус Джучи, Османская империя и другие государства Средневековья и Нового времени), географические и историко-культурные регионы традиционного проживания тюркских народов Российской и Османской империй и в целом Евразии стали объектом и предметом научных исследований российских и европейских востоковедов тюркологов и османистов ХIХ начала ХХ в.


2000 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Crowe

The Roma entered the Balkans from India during the Middle Ages. They reached Persia sometime in the ninth century and by the eleventh century had moved into the Byzantine Empire. According to the eleventh-century Georgian Life of Saint George the Athonite, the Emperor Constantine Monomachus asked the Adsincani to get rid of wild animals preying on the animals in his royal hunting preserve. Adsincani is the Georgian form of the Greek word Atsínganoi or Atzínganoi, from which the non-English terms for Roma (cigán, cigány, tsiganes, zigeuner) are derived. Adsincani means “ner-do-well fortune tellers” or “ventriloquists and wizards who are inspired satanically and pretend to predict the unknown.” “Gypsy” comes from “Egyptian,” a term often used by early modern chroniclers in the Balkans to refer to the Roma. Because of the stereotypes and prejudice that surround the word “Gypsy,” the Roma prefer a name of their own choosing from their language, Romani. Today, it is preferable to refer to the Gypsies as Rom or “Roma,” a Romani word meaning “man” or “husband.” Byzantine references to “Egyptians” crop up during this period as Byzantine political and territorial fortunes gave way to the region's new power, the Ottomans. There were areas with large Roma populations in Cyprus and Greece which local rulers dubbed “Little Egypt” in the late fourteenth century.


1998 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 193
Author(s):  
Kelly DeVries ◽  
J. F. Verbruggen ◽  
S. Willard ◽  
R. W. Southern

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-12
Author(s):  
Wei Zheng ◽  

For medieval Europe, spices have always been of great significance, so the spice trade has become the object of competition for various countries in Western Europe. With the improvement of navigation technology, countries obsessed with spices have opened up the way to explore the origin of spices and monopolize the spices trade. Among them, the most typical country is the Netherlands. From the perspective of the spice trade, this paper discusses how the beneficiary of the spice trade, the Netherlands, has become a generation of marine hegemons by transferring spice to monopolizing the spice trade.


Author(s):  
Maristella Botticini ◽  
Zvi Eckstein

This chapter assesses the argument that both their exclusion from craft and merchant guilds and usury bans on Christians segregated European Jews into moneylending during the Middle Ages. Already during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, moneylending was the occupation par excellence of the Jews in England, France, and Germany and one of the main professions of the Jews in the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, and other locations in western Europe. Based on the historical information and the economic theory presented in earlier chapters, the chapter advances an alternative explanation that is consistent with the salient features that mark the history of the Jews: the Jews in medieval Europe voluntarily entered and later specialized in moneylending because they had the key assets for being successful players in credit markets—capital, networking, literacy and numeracy, and contract-enforcement institutions.


Author(s):  
John Marenbon

This chapter investigates Augustine's role in addressing the Problem of Paganism. After the Sack of Rome in 410 CE, Augustine set out to produce his most ambitious work, a Christian rethinking, not just of the history of Rome, but of the relationship between God and the course of human history. Written in the safety of North Africa, the City of God (CG), begun probably in 412 but not finished until about fourteen years later, is both an intellectual masterpiece and a foundational book for the Problem of Paganism. Although the problem has somewhat different contours for him from those it would take on in the Middle Ages, in the City of God and other works Augustine looks closely at three of the main strands of the problem — wisdom, salvation, and virtue — and takes positions which set the agenda for almost all subsequent discussion.


PMLA ◽  
1901 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 375-387
Author(s):  
F. M. Warren

The French poems Troie, Thèbes, and Énéas, contemporaneous with one another in the sixth and seventh decades of the twelfth century, have many characteristics in common. They each repeat in a modernized form, and with incidents and details suited to their own age, the story of one of the great epics of classical antiquity, the Iliad, the Thebaid, and the Aeneid. They also combine with this traditional outline of adventure and conquest the narrative of romantic love and courtship, as conceived by Western Europe in the Middle Ages. And finally they each and all show an effort to attain some degree of excellence in style and composition. Thus they form a class by themselves, animated, as they are, by the same spirit and having the same purpose in view, and are the first exponents in the modern tongues of the ideals of chivalry. The sources of these poems, therefore, are an object of unusual interest to the student of mediaeval literature.


Worldview ◽  
1981 ◽  
Vol 24 (9) ◽  
pp. 14-16
Author(s):  
Sy Syna

Once upon a time all theatrical performances in Western Europe were religious in impetus and expression. Professional directors and stage managers of the Middle Ages traveled to such towns as Mons and Valenciennes to stage elaborate productions upon specially constructed platforms equipped with trapdoors and other devices to achieve the most spectacular effects. An English king journeyed to York and posted himself and his retinue on a street in order to witness a segment of that city's famous cycle of plays—from Creation to Christ s passion —performed upon a wagon.


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