Divided Souls

Divided Souls
Author: Elisheva Carlebach
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2008-10-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0300133065

divThis pioneering book reevaluates the place of converts from Judaism in the narrative of Jewish history. Long considered beyond the pale of Jewish historiography, converts played a central role in shaping both noxious and positive images of Jews and Judaism for Christian readers. Focusing on German Jews who converted to Christianity in the sixteenth through mid-eighteenth centuries, Elisheva Carlebach explores an extensive and previously unexamined trove of their memoirs and other writings. These fascinating original sources illuminate the Jewish communities that the converts left, the Christian society they entered, and the unabating tensions between the two worlds in early modern German history. The book begins with the medieval images of converts from Judaism and traces the hurdles to social acceptance that they encountered in Germany through early modern times. Carlebach examines the converts’ complicated search for community, a quest that was to characterize much of Jewish modernity, and she concludes with a consideration of the converts’ painful legacies to the Jewish experience in German lands. “Carlebach’s reading of autobiographical texts by converts from Judaism is careful, intelligent, and skeptical--a model of how to treat spiritual memoirs.”--Todd M. Endelman, University of Michigan “This superb book highlights the ambiguous identities of these boundary crossers and their impact on both German and Jewish self-definitions.”--Paula E. Hyman, Yale University Elisheva Carlebach is professor of history at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of The Pursuit of Heresy: Rabbi Moses Hagiz and the Sabbatian Controversies, winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Jewish History, and coeditor of Jewish History and Jewish Memory. /DIV

Forced Baptisms

Forced Baptisms
Author: Marina Caffiero
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520254511

This book makes use of newly available archival sources to reexamine the Roman Catholic Church’s policy, from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, of coercing the Jews of Rome into converting to Christianity. Marina Caffiero, one of the first historians permitted access to important archives, sets individual stories of denunciation, betrayal, pleading, and conflict into historical context to highlight the Church’s actions and the Jewish response. Caffiero documents the regularity with which Jews were abducted from the Roman ghetto and pressured to accept baptism. She analyzes why some Jewish men, interested in gaining a business advantage, were more inclined to accept conversion than the women. The book exposes the complexity of relations between the papacy and the Jews, revealing the Church not as a monolithic entity, but as a network of competing institutions, and affirming the Roman Jews as active agents of resistance.

The History of the Jews in Early Modern Italy

The History of the Jews in Early Modern Italy
Author: Marina Caffiero
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2022-05-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000586685

Challenging traditional historiographical approaches, this book offers a new history of Italian Jews in the early modern age. The fortunes of the Jewish communities of Italy in their various aspects – demographic, social, economic, cultural, and religious – can only be understood if these communities are integrated into the picture of a broader European, or better still, global system of Jewish communities and populations; and, that this history should be analyzed from within the dense web of relationships with the non-Jewish surroundings that enveloped the Italian communities. The book presents new approaches on such essential issues as ghettoization, antisemitism, the Inquisition, the history of conversion, and Jewish-Christian relations. It sheds light on the autonomous culture of the Jews in Italy, focusing on case studies of intellectual and cultural life using a micro-historical perspective. This book was first published in Italy in 2014 by one of the leading scholars on Italian Jewish history. This book will appeal to students and scholars alike studying and researching Jewish history, early modern Italy, early modern Jewish and Italian culture, and early modern society.

Judeo-Romance Linguistics (RLE Linguistics E: Indo-European Linguistics)

Judeo-Romance Linguistics (RLE Linguistics E: Indo-European Linguistics)
Author: Paul Wexler
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2014-01-21
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1317918762

A separate bibliographic treatment of the Judeo-Romance languages should facilitate a deeper appreciation of the contributions that they may make to Romance linguistics in general. Up until now, Judeo-Romance topics have scarcely been canvassed in Romance linguistic bibliographies. It is hoped that this new book serves to popularize the field of Judeo-Romance languages both among students of general Romance and comparative Jewish linguistics.

Studies in Medieval Jewish Intellectual and Social History

Studies in Medieval Jewish Intellectual and Social History
Author: David Engel
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2012-01-20
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004222332

Thirteen leading scholars offer a fresh look at four key topics in medieval Jewish studies: the history of Jewish communities in Western Christendom, Jewish-Christian interactions in medieval Europe, medieval Jewish Biblical exegesis and religious literature, and historical representations of medieval Jewry.

Marking the Jews in Renaissance Italy

Marking the Jews in Renaissance Italy
Author: Flora Cassen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2017-08-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1316813029

It is a little known fact that as early as the thirteenth century, Europe's political and religious powers tried to physically mark and distinguish the Jews from the rest of society. During the Renaissance, Italian Jews first had to wear a yellow round badge on their chest, and then later, a yellow beret. The discriminatory marks were a widespread phenomenon with serious consequences for Jewish communities and their relations with Christians. Beginning with a sartorial study - how the Jews were marked on their clothing and what these marks meant - the book offers an in-depth analysis of anti-Jewish discrimination across three Italian city-states: Milan, Genoa, and Piedmont. Moving beyond Italy, it also examines the place of Jews and Jewry law in the increasingly interconnected world of Early Modern European politics.