TMR Review of Practicing Piety by Rebecca Winer Sept. 2015

The name of Bernhard Blumenkranz is well known to all those who study the history of European Jews in the Middle Ages and in particular the history of Jewish-Christian relations. Blumenkranz was born in Vienna in 1913; he left for Switzerland during the war and obtained a doctorate at the University of Basel on the portrayal of Jews in the works of Augustine. He subsequently moved to France where his numerous publications revived and renovated the field of Jewish studies. The international group of scholars who wrote the fifteen essays in this volume, beyond paying homage to Blumenkranz’s work, trace the trajectories of various lines of inquiry that he initiated: Christian theology of Judaism, problems of conversion and proselytism, geography and topography of Medieval Jewish communities, the representation of Jews in Christian art. These essays provide both an assessment of Blumenkranz’s intellectual legacy and a snapshot of the evolution of the field over the last sixty years.

Prognostication in the Medieval World, 2020

Those who would like the full article are encouraged to contact the author. Judaism is a religion of revelation. Attempts at prognostication constitute a ubiquitous aspect of Jewish culture from its primordial beginnings until our present age. The most fruitful era for Jewish manticism was the late Medieval era, in which a confluence of circumstances provided a fertile, practical, ideological and cultural background for the proliferation of numerous techniques related to mantic practice. As Jewish culture is far from monolithic in nature, this article will trace a plethora of mantic techniques and attitudes that characterized Jewish activity during the Middle Ages and also analyze the major trends and processes of that period.

This essay argues that Avraham Grossman's analysis in Pious and Rebellious is a model of Modern Orthodox thinking, mood, and method. It explains how Grossman examines Jewish law regarding its attitudes toward women and how the values of that canon were applied. Grossman provides a modern sensibility bound to the canon yet appropriate to postcanon precedents and the modern temper.

Renaissance Quarterly, 2021

Chapter 4 explores how thirteenth-century German law was both protective and controlling of Saxon women. It demonstrates that Saxon women's rights were fluid and how that fluidity was captured in the images of the picture-books. Caviness here acknowledges that women and Jews are not represented in any given section of the Sachsenspiegel but, rather, are referred to in clauses peppered throughout Eike's text. The picture-books, notes Caviness, therefore add extra-textual pictorial representations of both women and Jews in places where they are not seen in the legal text. This theme is continued in chapter 5 and its closer examination of Jews. Caviness parallels the fluctuating nature of settlement in German lands with the picture-books' depiction of the Jewish male. Although stereotypical images of Jews do appear in the fourteenth-century picture-books, predominantly through clothing, Jews are also depicted as an object of compensatory projection. Caviness thus concludes that there is no fixed societal position of Jews in the picture-books between 1300 and 1600 and they are, instead, a reflection of the contradictory experiences of fourteenth-century Jewish communities in German lands. The final chapter returns to the question of reception, picking up where chapter 2 left off, and continues the story from the eighteenth century to the present. Here the discussion mostly centers on adopting the Sachsenspiegel as a cultural artifact, but one that, since the 1930s, became weighed down by nationalism and racism. Caviness has certainly contributed to the Sachsenspiegel 's rehabilitation. This is a beautiful homage to Caviness's long-term research partner Charles Nelson, and a well-presented examination of the legal standing of marginal groups in a society dominated by male Christians. It does well to draw on comparable examples to place the picture-books in a wider European context, and readers will be drawn in by the beautifully reproduced images. Some readers may feel misled by the title in that women and Jews are only fully treated in chapters four and five. The size and weight of the tome is also somewhat prohibitive in what might otherwise be a good introductory text for students. These critiques aside, this is an absorbing exploration of the Sachsenspiegel picture-books that will certainly be an asset to the bookshelves of scholars in diverse fields of study.

De Gruyter eBooks, 2023

In recent decades, the study of medieval Jewry has been enriched by a variety of new research questions and innovative approaches. These include the use of gender as a category of analysis, an increased interest in the social, economic, and religious lives of ordinary Jews, and investigations of Jews on the social margins. In addition, nuanced and contextualized readings of literary texts have revised older understandings of historical events and their representations. In many cases, these late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries explorations of the past have been facilitated by online resources of various kinds. 1 Consideration of evidence from material culture and architecture have also enhanced scholarly understandings of the richness and diversity of medieval Jewish life. 2