Search results for ""Author Robert Chazan""

Early Christianity understood the destruction of the Second Temple (70 C.E.) as the immediate outcome of the Jewish rejection of Jesus, a view later reinforced by the perception of permanent Jewish degradation evident in the continued exile and inferior status of Jews in the societies that hosted them. Aware of this view, Jews of Western Christendom interpreted their suffering in more triumphal ways. Hebrew narratives of the First Crusade (1096) depict the Christian understanding of Crusader attacks on Jewish communities as part of the ongoing degradation of Jews and evidence that they ought to convert to Christianity. Two important Hebrew sources, the Mainz Anonymous and the Solomon bar Simson Chronicle, counter this view with the perspective of a glorification of Jewish martyrdom found in the same events. By the mid-thirteenth century, the argument that Jewish suffering was a result of God's rejection of the Jews was paramount to Christian efforts to win over Jews in forced debates and forced sermons - instruments employed by such converts as Friar Paul and Alfonso of Valladolid. Jewish authors, such as Nahmanides (in his famous debate with Friar Paul) and Rabbi Mordechai ben Joseph of Avignon, asserted that Christian claims of divine favor were erroneous, and that God's promise of redemption for Jews was still valid. These methods to resist Christian assertions of superiority and affirm the grandeur of Jewish experience were essential for the continuity of Jewish life in the Middle Ages.

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One of the unanticipated results of the First Crusade in 1095 was a series of violent assaults on major Jewish communities in the Rhineland. Robert Chazan offers the first detailed analysis of these events, illuminating the attitudes that triggered the assaults as well as the beliefs that informed Jewish reactions to them.

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A leading historian argues that historically Jews were more often voluntary migrants than involuntary refugees​ For millennia, Jews and non-Jews alike have viewed forced population movement as a core aspect of the Jewish experience. This involuntary Jewish wandering has been explained by pre-modern Jews and Christians as divine punishment, by some modern non-Jews as the result of Jewish harmfulness, by some modern Jews as fostered by Christian anti-Jewish imagery, and by other modern Jews as caused by misguided Jewish acceptance of minority status. In this absorbing book, Robert Chazan explores these various perspectives and argues that pre-modern Jewish population movement was in most cases voluntary, the result of a sense among Jews that there were alternatives available for making a better life elsewhere.

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Originally published in 1974. Focusing on a set of Jewish communities, Robert Chazan tells how, by the eleventh century, French Jews had created for themselves a role as local merchants and moneylenders in adapting to the political, economic, and social limits imposed on them. French society, striving to become more powerful and civilized, was willing to extend aid and protection to the Jews in return for general stimulation of trade and urban life and for the immediate profit realized from taxation. While the authorities were relatively successful in protecting the Jews from others, there was no power to impose itself between the Jews and their protectors. The political and social well-being of the Jews was, therefore, dependent on the will of the governing authorities who taxed their holdings and regulated their activities. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the position of the Jews was constantly under attack by reform elements in the church concerned with Jewish moneylending and blasphemous materials in Jewish books; these reformers were eventually devoted to a serious missionizing effort within the Jewish community. The Jews' situation was further complicated by deep popular animosity, expressing itself in a damaging set of slanders and occasionally in physical violence. Despite the impressive achievements of the Jews in medieval northern France, by the thirteenth century their community was increasingly constricted; and in 1306, they were expelled from royal France by Philip IV. Overcoming the handicap of a lack of copious source material, Chazan analyzes the Jews' political status, their relations with key elements of Christian society, their demographic development, their economic outlets, their internal organization, and their attitudes toward the Christian environment. As it highlights aspects of French society from an unusual perspective, Medieval Jewry in Northern France should be of special interest to the historian of medieval France as well as to the student of Jewish history. This story is also significant for all who are fascinated by the capacity of human groups to respond and adapt creatively to a hostile and limiting environment.

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