Between Foreigners, Strangers and Jews: The Changing Perception of Parisian Jews on the Eve of the 1306 Expulsion

An unpublished document from late thirteenth-century Paris contains evidence of a Jewish-Christian public confrontation, on the one hand, and of Jewish-Christian economic criminal collaboration on the other. Using methods of micro-history, this article traces the story of Merot the Jew and his father-in-law, Benoait of St. Denis, who were caught attempting to smuggle merchandise by way of the River Seine. Their story is told in a verdict handed down by the parloir de Paris, the municipal judicial authority in charge of economic infractions. The parloir decreed the complete confiscation of Merot and Benoait’s merchandise on the grounds that “they were foreigners.” Taking this terminology as a point of departure, this paper tackles broader socio-economic aspects of belonging and foreignness among medieval Parisian Jews, and asks: in what ways were Jews considered “foreigners” in late thirteenth-century Paris? What were the implications of such a designation, and how did these perceptions change in the years leading up to the expulsion of 1306?

Mellem asoteriologiske aforismer og sort gnosis: Emil Cioran, Peter Sloterdijk og Peter Sloterdijks Cioran

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This article presents an introduction to the Romanian author Emil Cioran’s life and work. Cioran lived most of his life in self-imposed exile in Paris, where he kept himself out of the public gaze. From his small attic at the left-bank of the river Seine he published numerous books of collections of aphorisms and essays dealing with his own miserabilism and permanent existential despair. Further, in his books he is reflecting on the human condition in a world where humans have no possibility of receiving nor acquiring salvation or redemption. This presentation of Cioran leads to an investigation of his influence on the work and thought of the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. I show that Cioran in fact plays an important and long-lasting role throughout Sloterdijk’s authorship by analysing texts from three different periods of his oeuvre. Thus, I seek to construct a picture of Sloterdijk’s Cioran and understand why he is important to him. DANSK RESUMÉ: I denne artikel gives en generel præsentation af og introduktion til den rumænske forfatter Emil Ciorans liv og værk. Cioran levede størstedelen af sit liv i selvvalgt eksil i Paris uden for offentlighedens søgelys. Fra sit lille loftskammer på den venstre bred af Seinen publicerede han løbende samlinger af aforismer og essays omhandlende sin egen miserabilisme og permanente eksistentielle ulykke. Endvidere reflekterer han i bøgerne over den menneskelige eksistens vilkår i en verden, hvorfra mennesket ikke har nogen muligheder for at blive forløst. Præsentationen af Cioran fører til en undersøgelse af hans indflydelse på den tyske filosof Peter Sloterdijks værk og tænkning. Gennem en analyse af tekster fra tre forskellige perioder i Sloterdijks forfatterskab viser jeg, at Cioran spiller en vigtig og vedvarende rolle igennem hele Sloterdijks filosofiske arbejde. Således forsøger jeg at konstruere et billede af Sloterdijks Cioran og at forstå hvorfor han anser ham for vigtig.

The Seaports of the Seine Axis Facing the Contemporary Maritime Industry Mutations

The maritime industry is constantly evolving and striving for increased innovation. The past years have been exceptionally interesting. Major trends like globalisation and containerisation have reshaped the industry and continue to do it. These changes can be illustrated by the strategic alliances between ship-owners trying today to reshuffle the circulatory and port maps. Thus, in his constant search optimization, maritime transport requires continuous infrastructures’ adaptation. Due to an increasingly competitive environment, major seaports tend also to build up new strategies in order to become more attractive. It represents a system of spatial and temporal interactions and the territorial implications of supply chains and transportation are not negligible. In this respect, the paper proposes to analyse a singular location: the Seine Axis. This axis is concentrating on its territory the French first port complex and the fourth in Europe. This area combines a maritime interface structured around the ports of the River Seine estuary and a metropolitan interface which supplies a market of more than 11 million inhabitants in the Ile-de-France region. The communication aims to qualify the port system of the Valley of the Seine in order to analyze how it adapts to recent, rapid and numerous changes of the contemporary maritime world. The paper will address the attractiveness and efficiency of ports in a globalized economy, a highly competitive European context. The article is based on ports’ statistics utilizations and likewise on in-depth bibliographical research. The paper will also integrate some results from the CIRMAR platform which is using the Automatic Identification System (AIS) for the analysis of maritime traffic.

Pan no Kai (active 1908–1912)

Pan no Kai, or Pan Society, was a group of writers, poets, artists, and actors active in Tokyo from 1908 to around 1912. It was founded by Kinoshita Mokutarô (1885–1945), a medical doctor who, by avocation, was also active as a poet, playwright, and publisher of several periodicals, including Subaru. Kinoshita was an admirer of European culture, and named the Pan Society after the German cultural periodical Pan established in 1894 by Julius Meier-Graefe (1867–1935). Kinoshita held Pan Society gatherings at European-style restaurants situated near the Ryôkoku Bridge overlooking the Sumida River, which is considered Tokyo’s version of Paris’ river Seine. Meetings were informal affairs given over to discussing strategies for the reform and revitalization of Japanese art, literature, and theater, and to socializing over European food, wine, coffee, and music. In addition to Kinoshita, founding members included writers Nagata Hideo (1885–1949), Tanizaki Junichirô (1886–1965), and Nagai Kafû (1879–1959), oil painters Ishii Hakutei (1882–1958), Yamamoto Kanae (1882–1946), and sculptor and poet Takamura Kôtarô (1883–1956). At the group’s height of influence it included over forty members. Although the Pan Society sponsored no exhibitions and espoused no particular movement or style, it played an important role by fomenting wider interest in and knowledge of Western-style artistic modernism at a crucial time in Japan’s art and literary history.

Multiconfiguration electromagnetic induction survey for paleochannel internal structure imaging: a case study in the alluvial plain of the River Seine, France

The La Bassée floodplain area is a large groundwater reservoir controlling most of the water exchanged between local aquifers and hydrographic networks within the Seine River basin (France). Preferential flows depend essentially on the heterogeneity of alluvial plain infilling, whose characteristics are strongly influenced by the presence of mud plugs (paleomeander clayey infilling). These mud plugs strongly contrast with the coarse sand material that composes most of the alluvial plain, and can create permeability barriers to groundwater flows. A detailed knowledge of the global and internal geometry of such paleomeanders can thus lead to a comprehensive understanding of the long-term hydrogeological processes of the alluvial plain. A geophysical survey based on the use of electromagnetic induction was performed on a wide paleomeander, situated close to the city of Nogent-sur-Seine in France. In the present study we assess the advantages of combining several spatial offsets, together with both vertical and horizontal dipole orientations (six apparent conductivities), thereby mapping not only the spatial distribution of the paleomeander derived from lidar data but also its vertical extent and internal variability.

Just Another Day in Chancery Lane: Disorder and the Law in London's Legal Quarter in the Fifteenth Century

Scarcely any turbulence, quarrels or disturbance ever occur there, but delinquents are punished with no other punishment than expulsion from communion with their society, which is a penalty they fear more than criminals elsewhere fear imprisonment and fetters. For a man once expelled from one of these societies is never received into the fellowship of any other of those societies. Hence the peace is unbroken and the conversation of all of them is as the friendship of united folk. This was Sir John Fortescue's idealized account to the exiled prince of Wales, Edward of Lancaster, of the peace-loving nature of London's Inns of Court and Chancery in the mid-fifteenth century. Fortescue was not concerned with the reality, which, as he knew all too well, was different. He was concerned with impressing on his young pupil the perfection of the English law and the education of its practitioners, rather than the imperfections that existed in a society that the prince, as he explicitly told him, would never experience. Few who were familiar with the legal quarter that surrounded the Inns would have recognized the Arcadia that Fortescue described. Far from being the peaceful and well-ordered district that the former chief justice invoked, in the period when he wrote the area to the west of London's Temple Bar was a liminal space, populated by—among others—large numbers of young trainee lawyers, in whom the kind of unruly behaviour otherwise also associated with the early universities, not least the western suburb's Paris counterpart, the quartier latin to the south of the river Seine, was endemic. Among the most important factors that made it so was the very existence of the established, and to some extent tribal, all-male societies of the Inns of Court and of Chancery, at close quarters with the royal law courts and their heady mix of disputants and hired legal counsellors in permanent competition with each other.

Multiconfiguration electromagnetic induction survey for paleochannel internal structure imaging: a case study in the alluvial plain of the river Seine, France

The La Bassée floodplain area is a large groundwater reservoir controlling most of the water exchanged between local aquifers and hydrographic networks within the Seine River Basin (France). Preferential flows depend essentially on sediment fills, whose characteristics are strongly influenced by paleomeander heterogeneities. A detailed knowledge of the internal heterogeneities of such paleomeanders can thus lead to a comprehensive understanding of its long-term hydrogeological processes. A geophysical survey based on the use of electromagnetic induction was performed on a representative paleomeander, situated close to the city of Nogent-sur-Seine in France. In the present study we assess the advantages of combining several spatial offsets, together with both vertical and horizontal dipole orientations (6 apparent conductivities), thereby mapping not only the spatial distribution of the paleomeander derived from LIDAR data, but also its vertical extent and internal variability.