Videos by Ephraim (Effie) Shoham-Steiner
The lecture focuses on a responsum by Rabbi Judah Mintz of Padua who attempted to curb Jewish Pro... more The lecture focuses on a responsum by Rabbi Judah Mintz of Padua who attempted to curb Jewish Prostitution in his city in the late fifteenth century 19 views
conversation about "Jews and Crime in Medieval Europe" (WSUP 2020)
Ephraim (Effie) Shoham-Steine... more conversation about "Jews and Crime in Medieval Europe" (WSUP 2020)
Ephraim (Effie) Shoham-Steiner - Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Be'ersheva ISRAEL
Magda Teter (Program for Jewish Studies -Fordham University NYC)
Nicholas Paul (Center for Medieval Studies - Fordham University NYC) 18 views
Books by Ephraim (Effie) Shoham-Steiner
A COMPANION TO CRIME AND DEVIANCE IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 2023
Hannah Skoda (ed.), A Companion to Crime and Deviance in the Middle Ages, (Arc Humanitas: Leeds 2... more Hannah Skoda (ed.), A Companion to Crime and Deviance in the Middle Ages, (Arc Humanitas: Leeds 2023), pp. 306-325.
English Historical Review , 2021
Ephraim Shoham-Steiner's book has been praised as the dramatic unveiling of a long-hidden shamefu... more Ephraim Shoham-Steiner's book has been praised as the dramatic unveiling of a long-hidden shameful secret: that Jews in the past were not only victims, but also sometimes criminals. 'For too long, apologists have ignored or denied a police blotter of cases-thievery, fencing, assault, and murder, perpetrated by and on Jewish men and women in pre-modern Europe' (Ivan Marcus, cover page endorsement). But, during the past sixty years, this apologetic history of European Jews has been systematically eroded. The studies of Jewish pirates, Jewish-gypsy gang collaboration, Jewish white slavery, and professional gang activity in twentieth-century New York have been quite explicit and convincing. All the same, the readers' endorsements of Shoham-Steiner's book-all of them specialists in Jewish history, not history of crime-consider it a major breakthrough in a hitherto uncharted field. In terms of purely medieval history, they are right. The author has done a heroic job in unearthing Jewish sources that deal with crime among Jews in Ashkenaz (Germany and France). Whether his findings are revolutionary depends on the readers' point of view. From the point of view of Jewish history, it is a revolutionary, innovative, erudite and very important study. From the point of view of the history of crime, the evaluation must consider wider criteria. It is hard to overstate the depth of erudition necessary for the writing of this book. Beginning with the Talmudic corpus and continuing through the unbroken tradition of Jewish legal opinions and law from ninth-century North Africa and Mesopotamia to the opinions of the rabbis of the nascent western communities, this is an enormous corpus, and Shoham-Steiner exhibits both mastery and depth in reading it. He is aware of his corpus's shortcomingresponsa, or legal opinions of rabbis (of no political authority) voicing the purely masculine point of view, and often copied, edited and re-edited by subsequent generations. It is completely unlike any other materials used for the history of crime in Europe. The book falls into four main parts. The first deals with historical criminology in general, while the following chapters deal with three main areas: theft, murder, and women in crime. The first part-presumably, written for the benefit of Jewish historians unfamiliar with the history of crime-is the weakest part. It is full of naïve assertions, such as 'the Jews … were subject to the judicial system of the state' (p. 11). Given that the historical context is the cities of the Rhineland and France, what sort of state judicial system was there in the eleventh and twelfth centuries? Similarly, relying upon the Carolingian law codifications, with their convoluted editorial histories, as proof of legal practice of 'German' (whatever that means) law centuries later is simply not good history. From the point of view of the historiography of medieval crime, the author also evinces some lacunae in his survey. The author asserts that 'The current fashion in studies about crimes and criminals in medieval Western Europe is
Journal of Jewish Studies
Jewish book council, 2021
on tem po rary Jews do not gen er al ly view their ances tors as crim i nals. Jew ish mem o ry, s... more on tem po rary Jews do not gen er al ly view their ances tors as crim i nals. Jew ish mem o ry, shaped by images of East ern Euro pean shtetls and the wounds of the Holo caust, con jures a past filled with meek Jews sur viv ing vile accu sa tions, cru saders, and expul sions. How ev er, real i ty is always messier than myth, and the most engag ing his tor i cal work demon strates that the past was as vibrant and com pli cat ed as the present, filled with much the same prag ma tism, vicious ness, and desperation. Ephraim Shoham-Steiner's Jews and Crime in Medieval Europe breaks ground in an area long over looked by most schol ars and cer tain ly the gen er al pop u lace.
Wayne State University Press, 2020
Jews and Crime in Medieval Europe is a topic laced by prejudice on one hand and apologetics on t... more Jews and Crime in Medieval Europe is a topic laced by prejudice on one hand and apologetics on the other. Beginning in the Middle Ages, Jews were often portrayed as criminals driven by greed. While these accusations were, for the most part, unfounded, in other cases criminal accusations against Jews were not altogether baseless. Drawing on a variety of legal, liturgical, literary, and archival sources, Ephraim Shoham-Steiner examines the reasons for the involvement in crime, the social profile of Jews who performed crimes, and the ways and mechanisms employed by the legal and communal body to deal with Jewish criminals and with crimes committed by Jews. A society's attitude toward individuals identified as criminals-by others or themselves-can serve as a window into that society's mores and provide insight into how transgressors understood themselves and society's attitudes toward them.
Wayne State University Press, 2020
jewish Studies | medieval history and literature | european history Jews and Crime in Medieval Eu... more jewish Studies | medieval history and literature | european history Jews and Crime in Medieval Europe is a topic laced by prejudice on one hand and apologetics on the other. Beginning in the Middle Ages, Jews were often portrayed as criminals driven by greed. While these accusations were, for the most part, unfounded, in other cases criminal accusations against Jews were not altogether baseless. Drawing on a variety of legal, liturgical, literary, and archival sources, Ephraim Shoham-Steiner examines the reasons for the involvement in crime, the social profile of Jews who performed crimes, and the ways and mechanisms employed by the legal and communal body to deal with Jewish criminals and with crimes committed by Jews. A society's attitude toward individuals identified as criminals-by others or themselves-can serve as a window into that society's mores and provide insight into how transgressors understood themselves and society's attitudes toward them. "In this meticulously argued book, Shoham-Steiner draws on a range of religious and legal sources to explore a fascinating and almost entirely neglected topic. In illuminating these darker corners of Jewish life, Jews and Crime in Medieval Europe restores medieval Jews to their full humanity, showing them to be subject to the same passions and drives as (and sometimes conspiring with) their Christian neighbors, even as they grappled with unique challenges and restrictions."-SARA LIPTON, professor of history, State University of New York at Stony Brook "This erudite study of criminal activity, undertaken within the broad context of history, culture, and mentalités, combines methodological sophistication, interdisciplinary scholarship, and highly accessible writing."
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Intricate Interfaith Networks:
Quotidian Jewish-Christian Contacts in the Middle Ages
***
Rec... more Intricate Interfaith Networks:
Quotidian Jewish-Christian Contacts in the Middle Ages
***
Recent scholarship has shown that the denominational divide between Jews and Christians, although ever present and at times even violently so, did not stop individuals and groups from forming ties and expanding them in more intricate ways than previously thought. These networks functioned with what seems to be a disregard to the denominational and religious difference. This is by no means a simple and self evident statement. The theological background regarding “other” faiths within each respective religion, strong social, religious and authoritative circles critiquing such contacts, if not discouraging them altogether, created a formidable opposition to these networks.
The articles presented in this book were presented as papers in an international workshop that took place at the Central European University in Budapest in February 2010. In it this premise was thoroughly explored across Europe in the high and later medieval period from the Iberian Peninsula to the eastern Hungarian frontier and from England to Italy. The contributors explored various angels of these phenomena through different disciplinary approaches. Ties of an economic and cultural nature are explored as well as social contacts and networks in the fields of art and the sciences, and matters of daily life. The picture that emerges is a more nuanced and diverse then the bipolar paradigm adopted in previous scholarship.
In medieval Europe, the much larger Christian population regarded Jews as their inferiors, but ho... more In medieval Europe, the much larger Christian population regarded Jews as their inferiors, but how did both Christians and Jews feel about those who were marginalized within the Ashkenazi Jewish community? In On the Margins of a Minority: Leprosy, Madness, and Disability among the Jews of Medieval Europe, author Ephraim Shoham-Steiner explores the life and plight of three of these groups. Shoham-Steiner draws on a wide variety of late-tenth- to fifteenth-century material from both internal (Jewish) as well as external (non-Jewish) sources to reconstruct social attitudes toward these "others," including lepers, madmen, and the physically impaired. Shoham-Steiner considers how the outsiders were treated by their respective communities, while also maintaining a delicate balance with the surrounding non-Jewish community.
On the Margins of a Minority is structured in three pairs of chapters addressing each of these three marginal groups. The first pair deals with the moral attitude toward leprosy and its sufferers; the second with the manifestations of madness and its causes as seen by medieval men and women, and the effect these signs had on the treatment of the insane; the third with impaired and disabled individuals, including those with limited mobility, manual dysfunction, deafness, and blindness. Shoham-Steiner also addresses questions of the religious meaning of impairment in light of religious conceptions of the ideal body. He concludes with a bibliography of sources and studies that informed the research, including useful midrashic, exegetical, homiletic, ethical, and guidance literature, and texts from responsa and halakhic rulings.
Understanding and exploring attitudes toward groups and individuals considered "other" by mainstream society provides us with information about marginalized groups, as well as the inner social mechanisms at work in a larger society. On the Margins of a Minority will appeal to scholars of Jewish medieval history as well as readers interested in the growing field of disability studies.
Papers by Ephraim (Effie) Shoham-Steiner
Avraham Grossman on the Cultural Dynamic of Medieval Jewish History and Thought HISTORYAND THOUGHT, 2024
Avraham Grossman on the Cultural Dynamic of Medieval Jewish History and Thought , Menachem Butler... more Avraham Grossman on the Cultural Dynamic of Medieval Jewish History and Thought , Menachem Butler & Jonathan Grossman (ed.), The Institute for Jewish Research and Publications, Cambridge MA 2024
The Medieval History Journal, Jan 10, 2024
The murder of Priscus the Jew seems to be one of the earliest documented episodes of murder invol... more The murder of Priscus the Jew seems to be one of the earliest documented episodes of murder involving Jews in the European Middle Ages. The incident, described by Gregory of Tours (Gregorius Turonensis) in his great work, Decem Libri Historiarum (Ten Books of Histories) involves the murder of the Jew Priscus at the hands of Phatir, his former coreligionist and new convert to Christianity, which occurred in the Frankish Kingdom of Neustria in 581 or 582, during the reign of King Chilperic I. In this study, based on a close reading of the relevant texts I attempt to illuminate what this incident may teach us about Jewish social and political life in the Merovingian kingdoms. I suggest, contrary to previous scholarship that saw the theological aspects of the conversion as paramount, that the murder was the result of a competition among the elite in the court of the king and highlight what we may learn from this case about the sources of Jewish religious law and what Jews and Christians living in this time knew about them. Thus, after a careful reading of the primary source, I propose an interpretation of the circumstances that precipitated the violent act, as well as the manner in which it was recorded in the writings of Gregory of Tours.
The Medieval History Journal, 2023
The murder of Priscus the Jew seems to be one of the earliest documented episodes of murder invol... more The murder of Priscus the Jew seems to be one of the earliest documented episodes of murder involving Jews in the European Middle Ages. The incident, described by Gregory of Tours (Gregorius Turonensis) in his great work, Decem Libri Historiarum (Ten Books of Histories) involves the murder of the Jew Priscus at the hands of Phatir, his former coreligionist and new convert to Christianity, which occurred in the Frankish Kingdom of Neustria in 581 or 582, during the reign of King Chilperic I. In this study, based on a close reading of the relevant texts I attempt to illuminate what this incident may teach us about Jewish social and political life in the Merovingian kingdoms. I suggest, contrary to previous scholarship that saw the theological aspects of the conversion as paramount, that the murder was the result of a competition among the elite in the court of the king and highlight what we may learn from this case about the sources of Jewish religious law and what Jews and Christians living in this time knew about them. Thus, after a careful reading of the primary source, I propose an interpretation of the circumstances that precipitated the violent act, as well as the manner in which it was recorded in the writings of Gregory of Tours.
Artefacts and Imageries in Medieval European Jewish Cultures , 2023
In this chapter I take the text of a halakhic responsum that Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg addressed t... more In this chapter I take the text of a halakhic responsum that Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg addressed to his disciple R. Asher b. Yehiel of Cologne as a point of departure in an attempt to link several events that took place in Cologne in the late 1260's and the 1270's.
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Videos by Ephraim (Effie) Shoham-Steiner
Ephraim (Effie) Shoham-Steiner - Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Be'ersheva ISRAEL
Magda Teter (Program for Jewish Studies -Fordham University NYC)
Nicholas Paul (Center for Medieval Studies - Fordham University NYC)
Books by Ephraim (Effie) Shoham-Steiner
Quotidian Jewish-Christian Contacts in the Middle Ages
***
Recent scholarship has shown that the denominational divide between Jews and Christians, although ever present and at times even violently so, did not stop individuals and groups from forming ties and expanding them in more intricate ways than previously thought. These networks functioned with what seems to be a disregard to the denominational and religious difference. This is by no means a simple and self evident statement. The theological background regarding “other” faiths within each respective religion, strong social, religious and authoritative circles critiquing such contacts, if not discouraging them altogether, created a formidable opposition to these networks.
The articles presented in this book were presented as papers in an international workshop that took place at the Central European University in Budapest in February 2010. In it this premise was thoroughly explored across Europe in the high and later medieval period from the Iberian Peninsula to the eastern Hungarian frontier and from England to Italy. The contributors explored various angels of these phenomena through different disciplinary approaches. Ties of an economic and cultural nature are explored as well as social contacts and networks in the fields of art and the sciences, and matters of daily life. The picture that emerges is a more nuanced and diverse then the bipolar paradigm adopted in previous scholarship.
On the Margins of a Minority is structured in three pairs of chapters addressing each of these three marginal groups. The first pair deals with the moral attitude toward leprosy and its sufferers; the second with the manifestations of madness and its causes as seen by medieval men and women, and the effect these signs had on the treatment of the insane; the third with impaired and disabled individuals, including those with limited mobility, manual dysfunction, deafness, and blindness. Shoham-Steiner also addresses questions of the religious meaning of impairment in light of religious conceptions of the ideal body. He concludes with a bibliography of sources and studies that informed the research, including useful midrashic, exegetical, homiletic, ethical, and guidance literature, and texts from responsa and halakhic rulings.
Understanding and exploring attitudes toward groups and individuals considered "other" by mainstream society provides us with information about marginalized groups, as well as the inner social mechanisms at work in a larger society. On the Margins of a Minority will appeal to scholars of Jewish medieval history as well as readers interested in the growing field of disability studies.
Papers by Ephraim (Effie) Shoham-Steiner
Ephraim (Effie) Shoham-Steiner - Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Be'ersheva ISRAEL
Magda Teter (Program for Jewish Studies -Fordham University NYC)
Nicholas Paul (Center for Medieval Studies - Fordham University NYC)
Quotidian Jewish-Christian Contacts in the Middle Ages
***
Recent scholarship has shown that the denominational divide between Jews and Christians, although ever present and at times even violently so, did not stop individuals and groups from forming ties and expanding them in more intricate ways than previously thought. These networks functioned with what seems to be a disregard to the denominational and religious difference. This is by no means a simple and self evident statement. The theological background regarding “other” faiths within each respective religion, strong social, religious and authoritative circles critiquing such contacts, if not discouraging them altogether, created a formidable opposition to these networks.
The articles presented in this book were presented as papers in an international workshop that took place at the Central European University in Budapest in February 2010. In it this premise was thoroughly explored across Europe in the high and later medieval period from the Iberian Peninsula to the eastern Hungarian frontier and from England to Italy. The contributors explored various angels of these phenomena through different disciplinary approaches. Ties of an economic and cultural nature are explored as well as social contacts and networks in the fields of art and the sciences, and matters of daily life. The picture that emerges is a more nuanced and diverse then the bipolar paradigm adopted in previous scholarship.
On the Margins of a Minority is structured in three pairs of chapters addressing each of these three marginal groups. The first pair deals with the moral attitude toward leprosy and its sufferers; the second with the manifestations of madness and its causes as seen by medieval men and women, and the effect these signs had on the treatment of the insane; the third with impaired and disabled individuals, including those with limited mobility, manual dysfunction, deafness, and blindness. Shoham-Steiner also addresses questions of the religious meaning of impairment in light of religious conceptions of the ideal body. He concludes with a bibliography of sources and studies that informed the research, including useful midrashic, exegetical, homiletic, ethical, and guidance literature, and texts from responsa and halakhic rulings.
Understanding and exploring attitudes toward groups and individuals considered "other" by mainstream society provides us with information about marginalized groups, as well as the inner social mechanisms at work in a larger society. On the Margins of a Minority will appeal to scholars of Jewish medieval history as well as readers interested in the growing field of disability studies.
CRIME AND DEVIANCE IN THE MIDDLE AGES, (Arc Humanitas: Leeds 2023), pp. 306-325
מבטאת את ניסיונם של יהודי רגנסבורג בשלהי המאה החמש־עשרה להתמודד עם תחושת הישמטותה של אחיזתם הפיזית בעיר על רקע עלילות דם ואימת גירוש, ומשקפת את ניסיונם להיאחז בקיומם בעיר.
across time; medieval Ashkenaz was no exception. By “leadership,”
we mean people—usually a group but sometimes individuals—who
were entitled to make decisions that influenced the lives of others
and who performed communal functions such as intercommunal arbitration, validation of legal transactions, representation of the community to outside authorities, division of taxes and financial burdens, and more. The term “lay,” in this context, refers to people who, although informed about religious norms, were not primarily known for their scholarly erudition and did not compose normative or legal
texts. In medieval times, leadership positions were mostly entrusted to the financially successful and the learned male elite. While the role of rabbinic scholars in the organization and leadership of medieval Ashkenazic communities has been thoroughly researched in the past, information regarding the lay leadership is limited and usually appears in passing in rabbinic writing. Unlike the rabbinic scholars who gradually moved from an oral to a written culture, explaining the norms of individual and communal life, lay leadership tended not to leave much of a paper trail, to the best of our knowledge. Even though written forms were accepted for many legal
procedures in the Jewish tradition, everyday leadership activities were
usually not recorded in writing and were not systematically archived until
a much later period. Yet even in communities with strong rabbinic academies and a strong rabbinic presence, a lay leadership existed, organized into a body of elect leaders, or parnasim, similar to the Christian city council. From the information available to us, this body comprised scholars and laymen alike. In this essay, we collected and analyzed evidence from Cologne, where there was no strong rabbinic academy
during the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, in order to show some features that we associate with lay leadership and the differences between lay leadership and rabbinic scholars who led communities. This will be achieved by contrasting the lay leadership with the more prominent form of decision making in medieval Ashkenaz—namely, the scholarly leadership documented in halakhic literature, which is our main, and often only, source of information. Texts composed by the rabbinic elite have been scrutinized for information on those “beyond the elite,” such as women, the poor, and the sick; thus we seek to extract from rabbinic texts traces of a lay leadership, a presence that, since it did not actively contribute texts, has remain silenced behind the literate culture associated with the rabbinic academies of Speyer, Worms, and Mainz (collectively referred to by the acronym ShUM).
The Department of Jewish History, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
The Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters
עם קישור לערוץ youtube
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Teusday November 14th 2017.
בהרצאה נדון היחס הקהילתי באשכנז של ימי הביניים למי שהרגו את הנפש. עולים לדיון מקורות מוסריים והלכתיים וכן פרשת פדיון גופתו של ר' מאיר בן ברוך מרוטנבורג שנפטר ב 1293 בכלא וגופתו נפדתה והובאה לקבורה בשנת 1307 . אני מעלה את אפשרות שפודה הגופה הוא לא אחר מיהודי שהואשם על ידי מהר"ם ברצח בשנות השבעים של המאה ה-13 ופדה את הגופה על מנת להביאה לקבר ישראל ולהקבר לידה כסוג של סימול לכפרה
מרכז גולדשטיין גורן לחקר התפוצות באוניבריסטת תל אביב
Between a Halakhic Responsum a legal ruling and the Epitaph : What May be the Untold story of the Ransoming of Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg's Body (1307)
הכנס השנתי השני של התכנית הבינתחומית לפרשנות ותרבות באוניברסיטת בר אילן
יום ג' ה 1 לדצמבר 2015
Beyond the Elite-From Texts to Societies in Medieval European Culture
Feb. 2015
בשיחה נעקוב אחרי דרכי ישומו של הצו המקראי מפרשת המשפטים: "ושם אלהים אחרים לא תזכירו , לא ישמע על פיך". מן המקרא דרך עולמם של חז"ל ואל עולמם של יהודי אירופה של ימי הביניים.
עם גידולה של הנוכחות היהודית באירופה של ימי הביניים (מן המאה ה-10) העמיקו והתרחבו קשרי המסחר והכספים בין יהודים ללא יהודים. במרחב עסקי זה היתה השבועה בקדושי הנצרות ובשרידי הקדושים נפוצה ביותר בין הנוצרים ועל כן גם יהודים נדרשו לה. בהרצאה היום נעקוב אחרי המאבקים בתוככי החברה היהודית באירופה של ימי הביניים בענין זה.
International Conference, March 19th to 22nd 2017, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem
Organized by:
Prof. Dr. Elisheva Baumgarten, Department of Jewish History and Department of History, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Hollender, Department of Jewish Studies, Goethe University, Frankfurt
Dr. Ephraim Shoham-Steiner, Department of Jewish History, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva
Conference Rationale
The year 2017 marks the 800th anniversary of the death of Judah b. Samuel (known as Judah heHasid), the primary author of Sefer Hasidim (the Book of the Pious). Sefer Hasidim is an outstandingly unique text consisting of an amalgam of genres including exegesis, legal material, folk narratives, literary narratives, homiletics, ethical directives, and liturgy. Judah heHasid himself, together with his disciple Eleazar b. Judah of Worms (author of Sefer Rokeah), are accredited with the establishment of a group known as Hasidei Ashkenaz (Rhineland Pietists) who stood out for their pious devotion and practice.
Series: History of Daily Life no. 5
(Brepols Publishing) Turnhout 2016.
editor: Ephraim (Effie) Shoham-Steiner
חברי ועדת הכנס:
אפרים שהם-שטיינר (יו"ר)
סקוט אורי ( אונ' ת"א)
מירי אליאב פלדון (אונ' ת"א)
הלי זמורה (אב"ג)
איריס סולימני (אונ' פתוחה)
42nd Annual conference of the Israeli Historical Society
Law Crime and Enforcement
program committee:
Ephraim Shoham-Steiner (Chair, BGU)
Miri Eliav-Feldon ( TAU)
Iris Sulimani (Open Univerisity)
Scott Uri (TAU)
Hillay Zmora (BGU)
Religious Conversion : Then and Now
תרבות וספרות "הארץ" 22.10.2012