Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"This is an incredibly rich book which takes the reader into the heart of the entangled cultural and religious world of the Near East in the thirteenth century...Shachar is able to accomplish what he sets out to do in his introduction, namely to understand not only why a sizeable group of Jews from France chose to emigrate to the Holy Land but even more crucially why they chose to enshrine their endeavours in the language of holy warfare....[T]he book exemplifies how exploring the Near East in its own right through its multilingual sources reveals a rich cultural world in which Muslim, Christian and Jewish writers moulded themes and traditions which they shared with each other to fashion visions of their own." * Jewish Studies *
"This book is a significant contribution to medieval studies, providing a refreshing consideration of complexity during the crusading years in the Near East. Shachar has been able to investigate the layers of this complexity by considering the very legitimate question as to in what way did the crusading communities of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries articulate the realities around them both in proximity to each other, and to justify their own involvement." * Journal of Religious History *
"The sheer variety of the source base for crusade studies makes the comparative close reading of texts from the Latin, Old French, Arabic, Hebrew, and Judeo- Arabic traditions difficult. It takes a special kind of scholar with training and expertise in all the relevant languages to pull it off. Uri Zvi Shachar is just such a scholar and his first monograph is just such a project..Shachar succeeds in placing three literary traditions in conversation with one another, demonstrating how their shared visions of militant piety helped them to make sense of the increasingly entangled world of the thirteenth-century Near East." * Comitatus *
"This fascinating study by Uri Zvi Shachar demonstrates the shortfalls of the general presentation of the crusader period and the interactions between Muslims, Christians, and Jews as dominated by warfare, religious animosity, and exclusion. He shows us that Muslims, Jews, and Christians not only shared the same geography, but they also spoke a similar 'language' saturated with common religious and cultural symbolisms, and that was only possible because of the avenues of interactions between them." * Suleiman A. Mourad, Smith College and IAS Nantes *
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Chapter 1. Holy Wars and Unholy Alliances: Historical Overview
Chapter 2. Warriors and Border Anxieties: Jacques de Vitry and His Legacy
Chapter 3. Warrior Mothers: The Coproduction of Pious Chivalry in Romance Literature
Chapter 4. A Jewish "Crusade" to the Near East: The Immigration Movement
Chapter 5. Translation and Migration in Messianic Figurations of Holy War
Chapter 6. Pollution and Purity in Crusading Rhetoric
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
