Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Jewish History

Petrus Alfonsi was an important and unusual figure in the "twelfth-century renaissance" whose interests embraced polemical theology, astronomy, and literature, each an area in which he made important contributions to the development of medieval thought. Perhaps this diversity of interests is what has robbed Alfonsi of his due in modern scholarship, for he has fallen through the cracks, between various academic disciplines; he has received less acclaim among modern medievalists than he had among medieval writers.
In this first book-length treatment of Alfonsi, Tolan presents a thorough introduction to Alfonsi's thought and its importance to the Middle Ages.
A Spanish Jew who converted to Christianity, Alfonsi immigrated to England and later to France, wrote a polemic against Judaism and Islam, and translated moral fables and astronomical works from Arabic into Latin. The author shows that he was an important early transmitter of Arabic and Hebrew learning to the Latin north and greatly influenced later medieval thinkers.
Drawing from his analysis of nearly 170 manuscripts containing Alfonsi's works, along with the works of later authors who turned to Alfonsi as a source, Tolan uncovers much about who used Alfonsi's works and to what ends his works were put. He finds, for example, that Alfonsi's Disciplina clericalis provided a mine of materials not only for thirteenth-century preachers but also for Boccaccio and Chaucer, and that arguments from his Dialogis contra Iudaeos were taken up by Christian polemicists from Peter the Venerable to Alonso de Espina.

The Arch of Titus, constructed circa 81 CE under the emperor
Domitian, commemorates the victory of the general, then
emperor Titus in the Jewish War of 66–74 CE. Located on
Rome’s Via Sacra, the Arch has been a “place of memory”
for Romans, Christians and Jews since antiquity. This essay
explores the history of a Jewish counter-memory of a bas
relief within the arch that depicts the triumphal procession
of the Jerusalem Temple treasures into Rome in 71 CE. At
least since the early modern period, Jews—as well as British
Protestants—came to believe that the menorah bearers of this
relief represent Jews, and not Roman triumphadors. This essay
addresses the history of this widespread belief, particularly
during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and continuing
in contemporary Israel.

This is an extract from my new book, Messiah ben Joseph. It's the largest book ever written—and the first ever in English—on Messiah ben Joseph, the slain messiah of Rabbinic Judaism. It traces Messiah ben Joseph, from his origins in the Book of Genesis, through the Pentateuch, the Prophets, the Psalms, the Pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Targums, the New Testament and Church Fathers, the Talmud, the homiletic, exegetic, and apocalyptic midrashim, the Zohar, and the medieval rabbis, down to modern times.
This journey to the roots of messianism has profound implications for Jewish-Christian debate and fresh insights for all who love the Bible.
Foreword by Robert Gordon.

"An essay looking at the role that the cults of devotion to the saints played in Christian life in medieval europe. It looks at areas such as the development of saints in the early church, the grown of localised sacred space and in pilgrimages. It finishes with the importance of Mary and a brief look at how the medieval understanding of cosmology and divine kingship helped set teh foundations for beleif in the saints.

A relatively brief essay designed to lead into more study. "

In the first century of Islam, most of the former Christian Roman Empire, from Syria to Spain, was brought under Muslim control in a conquest of unprecedented proportions. Confronted by the world of Islam, countless medieval Christians experienced a profound ambivalence, awed by its opulence, they were also troubled by its rival claims to the spiritual inheritance of Abraham and Jesus and humiliated by its social subjugation of non-Muslim minorities. Some converted. Others took up arms. Still others, the subjects of John Tolan's study of anti-Muslim polemics in medieval Europe, undertook to attack Islam and its most vivid avatar, the saracen, with words.

In an effort to make sense of God's apparent abandonment of Christendom in favor of a dynamic and expanding Muslim civilization, European writers distorted the teachings of Islam and caricatured its believers in a variety of ways. What ideological purposes did these portrayals serve? And how, in turn, did Muslims view Christianity? Feelings of rivalry, contempt, and superiority existed on both sides, tinged or tempered at times with feelings of doubt, inferiority, curiosity, or admiration. Tolan shows how Christian responses to Islam changed from the seventh to thirteenth centuries, through fast-charging crusades and spirit-crushing defeats, crystallizing into polemical images later drawn upon by Western authors in the fourteenth to twentieth centuries. Saracens explores the social and ideological uses of contempt, explaining how the denigration of the other can be used to defend one's own intellectual construction of the world.

Everyone has a theory about the Voynich Manuscript… so here is mine.
The Voynich Manuscript was written in the 15th century, and so far to date, no other example, in this form of writing exists in the world. My theory is that it is written in the language of the Khazars, who were Turkic Jews, and whose written language disappeared around the 13th – 14th centuries. Since it is said that there were no mistakes in the manuscripts writing, I hypothesize that it was possibly hand copied from a previously older version.
Back to the Language itself, it is not written in code. By using a simple letter exchange method, you can convert to English letters and then phonetically utilize the Hebrew language to give key root words in an agglutinative language. I first discovered that the He and Cheth, Hebrew letters were very similar to two of the Voynich characters in the manuscript, and from there plugged them into page 14 and worked slowly discovering the alphabet in use.
An agglutinative language combines morphemes to create a new word that still contains the original root words, for example: Some words are quite plain Like ‘achur’ for West, but you have to break down others ‘spquzr’ is “spq” means  entrance + “zr” means to vex awake, hence the word East.
We have similar words in the English language, remember learning about compound words in school.  An example of this in English would be ‘firetruck’.  We all know what a fire truck is, but if you were to decipher from another language you would think it was a ‘truck on fire’. The process works in the Voynich the same way, and changes will be made when new information comes to light, but this is a start in actually being able to interpret and understand what someone wrote, in the “book that cannot be read”.
When deciphering, the language comes out garbled… so first we will use our English language skills to guess and create a more readable understanding of the words, then I’ll show the agglutinative version, and last show how it was phonetically translated.  Any _______ are areas where I could not make out the letters due to erosion, blurry, or just plain missing. Notes on translation pages are just part of my research and theory.
I do hope you enjoy the last paragraph of the Voynich manuscript. I feel this paragraph is the most important as it seems to speak of a Jewish Diaspora and is very revealing.
Monica Yokubinas

While we might and should concede that the Marxist analysis of the greed driven early capitalist systems, which, at least to some extent, is also true for today's free-market economies, is right about its conclusion that  the underlying greed causes  economic imbalances and social injustice with its dire effects on individuals and communities; and while we do acknowledge that the overt and covert ways of exploitation, as well as gender, race, and ethnic discrimination, have been a real problem of private capital and market  based societies (democratic or authoritarian) -
Communism should be considered a false political religion the prophecy of which has failed on all levels of social and economic interaction.

Except for a kind of "social empathy," there is nothing else that one can appreciate about communism. A largely inadequate analysis of the problem (of human societies) leads to employing very bad tools/methods with catastrophic results and to dreaming up a utopian society unattainable under the condition of corruption  and  limitedness  of  humans  as imperfect, fragile creatures
living in a love/hate relationship with "mother'' nature. It is not a poor implementation of an otherwise ''wonderful idea" that caused the  death  of  over  100 million people worldwide. Communists worldwide implemented the main doctrines of the ideology - permanent class struggle; violent revolution; dictatorship of the 'proletariat' - doctrines such as these have been the cause
of the millions of dead,  impoverished, displaced people, of the devastated  economies, cultures and minds.

Marxism made people uncommonly cruel and selfish and committed monstrous crimes because of moral illusions that stemmed from its consequent, systematic atheism. Marxism worked its unprecedented evils in the name of a promised post-theistic redemption. Interestingly enough, this fanatical, messianic self-understanding of Marxism, as the one ideology which holds the redemptive 'key to the riddle of history,' made communists largely imperceptive of their own sins. The goal of our contribution, therefore, is to understand and evaluate the failure of Marxism from the perspective of a Christian theological critique of modern, Marxist atheism as a distinct Christian heresy. In addition to that, an attempt will be made to analyze the effects of this 'political religion' on the church and society in Slovakia.

The principle of majority rule is considered to have deep roots in Jewish tradition. The present article reexamines its development as a principle of decision-making and as a political principle as well. The article takes the reader on a legal-historical journey from late antiquity, when the
foundations of the Jewish community were laid down, through the Middle Ages, when these foundations evolved and crystallized, until the late Middle Ages, when the principle of majority rule was widely accepted. The foundations of Jewish communal government are rooted in the encounter between Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions. The talmudic “people of the city” were organized under the influence of the Roman
polis, and its democratic nature is still visible in the city’s legal structure. But this democratic nature had become almost completely eradicated by the early Middle Ages. The halakhic authorities of that period confirmed the oligarchic structure of the communities and the “majority” was counted among a thin leadership layer of the community. Only during the thirteenth century was the principle of the majority extended such that a wider group of community members took part in its decision-making. This development was influenced by an external European process through which the leadership of the cities took shape and corporations were founded. Jewish legal authorities continued to argue about the nature
of majority rule and about the precise mechanism whereby to implement it, but by the late Middle Ages majority rule was widely accepted as the main political principle of Jewish public domain.

Abstract
The discovery of pawned objects in treasure troves attributed to Jews enables investigation of the use and understanding of these objects by Jews, especially regarding those of a more secular nature, i.e. objects that have little relationship to Jewish or Christian liturgy and that lack explicit Jewish or Christian religious iconography or inscriptions. One of these pawned objects is a girdle, which was found in a Jewish context in Erfurt. Through examining this girdle in the context of similar imagery in Jewish art, we see that Jews were not only exposed to such girdles but also were well aware of their symbolic meaning in noble love and romance.

""Dear reader, are you really hoping for a book of ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’? Do you want gentle ideas and a comfortable corner in which to rest your half-formed prejudices? Alas, you have come to the wrong place.

The truly employable in this world are harmless blobs of not-quite-anything, or heroic knights of flaming conviction (best employed by others after safe removal to a site of sacrifice), or good old fashioned hypocrites with opinions for hire. This particular writer is entirely unsafe to hire or to know, being addicted to a deadly combination of moderation and candour. Luckily few people ever understand what he is talking about. ""

"a) "David von Augsburg als Meister der traditionellen Stilkunst" - kurze Einführung in das literarische Werk und die Stilkunst des franziskanischen Novizenmeisters David von Augsburg (gest. 1272).
b) David von Augsburg: „Die sieben Staffeln des Gebetes“ - Übersetzung aus dem Lateinischen ins Russische (unter Einbeziehung der deutschen Fassung В) und Kommentar von Nikolai Bondarko. In: Simvol (Zeitschrift für christliche Kultur, gegründet 1979 von der Slawischen Bibliothek in Paris: Paris; Moskau, 2007), 15. S. 357-378."

Resumo: Este artigo discutirá a visão do trabalho no texto bíblico que tende a ser idealizada, mas mantém certa dose de coerência com os valores sociais aceitos e praticados pela sociedade. O trecho inicial do Pentateuco, inserido nos capítulos iniciais do Gênesis, pode ser interpretado, assim, por meio de uma diversidade de maneiras.
Palavras-chave: Judaísmo. Pentateuco. Trabalho

Resumo: A história pode servir para entender a permanência e a continuidade de determinadas crenças e comportamentos sociais. O propósito deste artigo é refletir sobre os primórdios do preconceito antijudaico e sobre como, a partir de sua concepção, se deu a longa duração. O assim denominado Povo Eleito ou Povo do Livro deixa de ser um grupo pretensamente escolhido por Deus e passa a ser concebido como um coletivo visto como “o assassino de Deus” e o aliado do Diabo.
Palavras-­‐‑chave: Diabo. Judeu. Patrística.

Drawing on rabbinic sources redacted in the early third and late fourth/early fifth centuries, this paper tracks the intertwined lives of divine image-things and rabbis living in late Roman and Byzantine period Palestine. The paper argues that the religious image-things of others (or avodah zarah, in rabbinic terms) pressed in different ways on rabbinic notions of animation, materiality, agency and representation, as well as on the boundaries between the thing, the human, and the divine. Additionally, the paper argues that while rabbis attempted to neutralize the claims of such image-things, in part by exposing their materiality, their excess nonetheless escaped such rabbinic efforts. Finally, the paper argues that in the fourth century, along with “material turn” in the Roman world inspired by Christian engagement, we find not only a greater sense of the excess in the things of avodah zarah, but also a concomitant thingification of the rabbinic sage.

הכתר של מרת צמח בת ר' אהרן: תפיסות של מלכוּת מעמד ובתולין בקרב כלות אשכנזיות בימה"ב

תקציר: עניינו של מאמר זה הוא כתר הפלורינים שחובשת דמותה המצוירת של מרת
צמח בת רבי אהרן, גיבורת הכתובה מקרמס. הממצאים החומריים וחזותיים ועדויות
כתובות מהספרות העברית בת התקופה מצביעים על כך שיהודים לא רק נחשפו למגוון
רחב של כתרי פלוירונים, אלא גם היו מודעים למשמעותם כסמלי מעמד של אצולה
ומלוכה וכן כסמלים של בתולין. הצבתו של כתר פלוירונים על דמותה המצוירת של
הכלה היהודייה נועד לציירה בדיוק כך – כמלכה וכבתולה.

The Crown of Mrs. Zemah, Daughter of Rabbi Aaron: Conceptions of Royalty, Status, and Chastity among Ashkenazi Brides during the Middle Ages

Abstract
This article addresses the fleuron crown of Mrs. Zemah, daughter of Rabbi Aaron, who is the heroine of the illuminated medieval ketubbah from Krems, Austria. Scrutiny of fleuron crowns in the context of similar imagery in Jewish art as well as in Hebrew literature of the same period, indicates that Jews were not only familiar with such crowns but were also aware of the crown's twofold significance, as an emblem of royalty and nobility, and as a symbol of virginity. Placing such a crown on Mrs. Zemah's head was designed to portray the Jewish bride precisely in those terms, as queen and as virgin.

Abstract: This article is part of the scholarly revival in Angela of Foligno (c.1248-c. 1308) studies in relation to images. With the exhibition entitled "Dal visibile all’indicibile. Crocifissi ed esperienza mistica in Angela da Foligno" (Foligno, October 6th, 2012 – January 6th, 2013) and the publication of the catalogue, relations between Angela’s visions and her artistic context have been examined in greater depth. However, despite the excellent essays included in the book, there is still lacking a theoretical basis to explain Angela's devotional relationship with some images and, in particular, her reception of them. The main aim of these pages is therefore to develop that theoretical background and to interpret from such a basis the events that occurred in Assisi in front of
the so-called “vetrata degli angeli” (the stained glass window of the angels).

This volume consists of an edition, translated into English and with an extensive introduction, of the Arabic translation and commentary on the book of Esther by one of the preeminent litterateurs of the Karaite “Golden Age” (10th–11th centuries), Yefet ben ‘Eli ha-Levi. Yefet’s text represents the first completely extant, devoted commentary on Esther and, consequently, provides fascinating insight into the history and development of exegetical thought on this book, both among the Karaites as well as the Rabbanites. Various facets of Yefet’s exegesis which we explore in our introduction … read moreinclude his rationalistic method, compilatory tendency, relationship to the doctrines of the Islamic Mu‘tazila, and his influence both by and upon other Jewish exegetes (Karaite and Rabbanite). We also assess Yefet’s Arabic translation technique and include a survey of all extant Karaite commentaries on Esther, both in Arabic as well as Hebrew.

The objective of this study is to analyze the conflict presented in a less known saga: the Saga of the Men of Svinafell (Svínfellinga saga). Until now none of the studies dealing with conflict in Iceland took this saga into consideration. Moreover facing the scarcity of studies concerning the Eastern Quarter, it seems interesting to look at this saga under this scope in order to offer another perspective on mechanisms of conflicts’ resolution in Medieval Iceland and more precisely around the middle of the 13th century

If you wish to get a PDF e-mail me directly.

This article deals with the various medieval versions of belief in the possibility of conception without sexual relations – either in a bath, from the semen of a man who had bathed there, or by sheets on which a man had lain. This notion is frequently cited in the name of the outstanding Muslim savant Ibn Rushd (Averroes, b. 1126), but our research shows that Ibn Rushd never wrote this, and this opinion was added only in the Latin translation of his book. The Latin translation of Ibn Rushd’s book influenced medieval Christian scholars, as well as Jewish Tosaphists, in France at the end of the 13th century. The halakhic discussions of the Tosaphists in this issue, which did not have a lot of importance in their days, became the cornerstone in the modern halakhic discussions about some aspects of artificial insemination – a procedure that indeed enables conception without sexual relations.