Resources for 2013
Big Blows on a Small Stage: Records of Violence in Jewish Communal Registers, Altona 1765-1776
No description available.
Eschatological Avengers or Messianic Saviors? Violence and Physical Strength in the Vernacular Legend of the Red Jews
The vernacular legend of the Red Jews allows us to explore the relationship of violence, physical strength and power during the early modern period, extending the traditional treatment of Jews and violence in that era. Violence is often linked to power and physical strength. Violence is typically associated with ruling authorities and the realm of the majority, rather than in the hands of an oppressed minority, as in case of Diaspora Jewry, which has been identified with victimhood. Moreover, in historiography, the perception of Jews as targets of aggression perpetrated by “the other,” whether Christian or Muslim, corresponds to the widely held idea that Jewish men differ from their non-Jewish peers. The prototype of the “unmanly Jew,” even labeled as “effeminate” Jewish man – i.e., gentle, non-violent, valuing words over actions – runs deep in European and Jewish cultural history as a counter-image to the gentile ideal of muscular and forceful masculinity and takes on various shapes, with negative as well as positive connotations.
Exorcism and Violence: Contexts Internal and External
No description available.
A Jewish Perspective on the Execution of 'Jew Süss': 4 February 1738
No description available.
Jewish Violence in Polish Laws and Courts
No description available.
The Murder of a Travel Companion: Violence, Gender and Living Conditions of Servants in 18th Century Prussia
Jews are often portrayed as non-violent and therefore as powerless victims. Highlighting and examining cases of Jews as violent perpetrators not only refutes this stigmatization of Jews, it also reveals much about day to day life, about personal and social conflicts both within Jewish society and in encounters with the Christian society. Discussed here sections of a legal document from the _Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz_, Berlin Dahlem cover a court case against the Jewish servant, Samuel Saul, who was suspected of having murdered the Jewish maid Zierle in Prussia in 1791.
Plague and Violence Against Jews in Early Modern Europe
Based on Italian chronicles and archival sources Samuel Cohn examined questions of violence against Jews during plague.
Killed or Be Killed: Realities and Representations of Violence in Seventeenth-Century Ukraine
No description available.
Rome, 1571: A Body and a Murder Investigation in the Ghetto
The 1571 story of Sabato del Corsetto tells about violence in the Roman ghetto in the second half of Sixteenth Century. It concerns many issues related to violence: family violence; verbal violence; physical violence; violence among women; violence arisen both for economic and personal reasons and even attempt made by the Jewish community to manage violence and violent people.
Violence at a Purim Ball
The texts presented here address an incident of violence at a Purim ball 1753, in Livorno.
La Mala Sangre: Daily Violence within the Western Sephardic Diaspora
Recurrent private acts of violence within dense and homogenous communities, or diasporas, illustrate a tension between powerful gossip transmission and imperfect translation of such power into efficient social control. This presentation explores the manifestation of private violence in the daily life of the Western Sephardic Diaspora in the early seventeenth century, examining inquisitorial sources from Portugal and notarial records from the Netherlands. These sources indicate that as much as group members expected mutual responsibility, trustworthiness and compliance with social norms from their fellow group members. Yet when they felt disappointed, they expressed their resentment aggressively. Aggression took shape of offenses and beating with hands, sticks and various other objects, including cold steel. The body of sources suggests that the Western Sephardic Diaspora involved a significantly fervid environment.