Resources for 2012
The Early Modern Inn as a Space for Religious and Cultural Exchange
One set of texts is a selection of several seventeenth-century takkanot, rulings, by the Council of Four Lands, the supra-communal organization responsible primarily for collection of taxes levied by the Polish state but also engaging in administration of affairs within Jewish communities. The second text comes from Polish court records and shows a criminal trial of a Jewish tavern keeper, Szmul Dubiński, accused of blasphemy in Rzeszow in 1726.
Finding Common Ground: The Metz Beit Din and the French Judicial System
No description available.
Cultural Transmission and Assimilation in a Quotidian Key: The Conversion of Two Jews in Spain, 1790- 1792
The Early Modern Period, an era of “confessionalization,” provides numerous examples of individuals of immediate, distant, feigned, or merely imputed Jewish origin whose religious and social allegiances shifted radically. The phenomenon of Iberian New Christians or conversos comes to mind. Early modern Jews who became Christians but who, unlike conversos, possessed no personal and familial background in Christianity constitute an allied field of research (See examples in the Bibliography, below). Scholarly assessments of the ways in which these Jewish non-conversos learned and influenced their adopted Christian culture(s) often concentrate on intellectual production. The focus is not surprising, as the converts under discussion were usually educated individuals to whom Christian patrons often assigned prominent roles as anti-Jewish polemicists and missionaries. By contrast to the apologetic works and other religious writings of and about such converts, the texts presented here offer glimpses of the experience of uneducated, relatively inarticulate people of very modest material means who found themselves at a crossroads between Jewish (or Jewish-identified) and Hispano-Catholic identities, and whose formal cultural realignment caused no historical ripple. The folios selected for this workshop comprise large excerpts of two inquisitorial cases dating from the early 1790s. Both dossiers are relatively brief and fragmentary. I offer them together in order to provide more analytical possibilities than each of the documents would offer by itself.
A Jewish-Christian Commentary on Luke
No description available.
Real or Virtual Contact? Johannes Buxtorf's Reading of Jewish Literature
No description available.
A Jewish Merchant Family and a Moroccan Ruler
No description available.
Jailhouse Encounter: A Sixteenth-Century Jewish-Christian Tale and its Historiographical Ramifications
This presentation examines two excerpts from the little known early seventeenth-century German memoirs of the non-Jewish Swabian merchant Hans Ulrich Krafft (1550–1621). I would like to present two excerpts from Krafft’s nearly 500-page long memoirs.
Medicine as a Cultural Connection Between Jews and Christians in Early Modern Italy
This presentation explores cultural connections between Jews and Christians in sixteenth-century Italy through the lens of medicine. I present and analyze two texts. The first (from 1587) is a letter from Girolamo Mercuriale, a Catholic, to Moses Alatino, a Jew. The second (from 1592) is an excerpt from a consilium sent by the Jewish physician David de' Pomi to Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino. It discusses the following texts: 1. Girolamo Mercuriale to Moses Alatino,"On a Uterine Tumor, Painful Urination, and Constipation, for a noble young Jewess, \[sent\] to the Jewish Physician Moses Alatino. Consultation #16" From: Hieronymi Mercurialis Foroliviensis Responsorum, et Consultationum Medicinalium Tomus Primus (Venice, 1587), fol. 43-44. 2. David de’ Pomi to Francesco Maria II, Duke of Urbino (Included in) Physicians' Consilia regarding the Illness of Francesco Maria II, Duke of Urbino. From Medicorum consilia in infirmitate francisci mariae II urbini ducis, an. 1592. \[Physicians' Consilia regarding the Illness of Francesco Maria II, Duke of Urbino\] Vatican, cor. Urb. 1468, 119r-134r.