by Simon Schama
32 This time, Halkin’s truly lovely version, Yehuda Halevi (New York, 2010), 29.
33 Cole, 58–9, 66.
34 Ibid., 39.
35 Brann, 36.
36 Halkin, Yehuda Halevi, 33.
37 Weinberger’s translation (slightly amended), 55.
38 Halkin (with minor changes), Grand Things to Write a Poem On, 92.
39 Ibid., 97.
40 Moshe Pearlmann, ‘Eleventh Century Authors on the Jews of Granada’, in Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, 18 (Ann Arbor, 1948), 283.
41 Ibid., 286.
42 Halkin translation, Yehuda Halevi, 85.
43 Cole, 147.
44 Halkin, Yehuda Halevi, 60.
45 Ibid., 79.
46 Cole, 159.
47 Yehudah Halevi, The Kuzari: An Argument for the Faith of Israel (ed. and intro. H. Slominski), (New York, 1964), 98–9.
48 Cole, 164.
49 Ibid., 166, 167, somewhat modified by me. There are also excellent side-by-side translations of Halevi’s sea poems – itself an entirely new genre in Hebrew poetry, unless one claims the Book of Jonah – available in Joseph Yahalom’s fine book, Yehudah Halevi, Poetry and Pilgrimage ( Jerusalem, 2009), 107ff. Hebrew readers will be able to grasp the cleverness of the poet’s onomatopoeia, the relentless slamming of the waves, rhymed by the terrified pounding of the poet’s heart: khamu galim, barutz galgalim, ve’avim vekalim, al penei ha yam (‘whirling waves, whipped spume, hurtling clouds, on the face of the sea’).
50 Yahalom, Halevi, 108.
51 Cole, 169.
52 Halkin, Yehuda Halevi, 211–12.
53 Judah Alharizi’s wonderful Book of Tahkemoni, written in the late twelfth century and thus not many generations after Halevi’s death, mentions all those who were eager to find the place of his end but were thwarted. Judah Alharizi, The Book of Tahkemoni: Jewish Tales from Medieval Spain (trans., explicated and annotated David Simha Segal), (Oxford and Portland, OR, 2001), 43, 240–1, 533.
54 In contrast to earlier pre-Geniza historians who wrote off the possibility of Halevi reaching Palestine as wishful thinking, Goitein believed letters in the Cairo Geniza close to the period of his demise prove that he had in fact ended his days there.
Chapter 7
1 A letter from the widow asking for help is in the Cairo Geniza. See Judith R. Baskin, ‘Medieval Jewish Women’, in Linda E. Mitchell (ed.), Women in Medieval Western European Culture (New York, 1999), 79; see also Avraham Grossman, Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe (Waltham, MA, 2004); Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton, 2004).
2 Robert Chazan, Medieval Jewry in Northern France: A Political and Social History (Baltimore, 1973), 37–8.
3 For a penetrating and often moving discussion of the problems of factuality in the Hebrew narratives see Jeremy Cohen, Sanctifying the Name of God: Jewish Martyrs and Jewish Memories of the First Crusade (Philadelphia, 2004).
4 Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: The Idea of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1999), 155.
5 Albert of Aachen in Kenneth R. Stow, Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 109.
6 On the way in which each of the Hebrew narratives treats these crises, Robert Chazan, God, Humanity and History: The Hebrew First Crusade Narratives (Berkeley, 2000), 32–3 and passim.
7 Nils Roehmer, German City, Jewish Memory: The Story of Worms (Waltham, MA, 2010), 13.
8 The complete texts are given in Shlomo Eidelberg (trans. and ed.), The Jews and the Crusaders: The Hebrew Chronicles of the First Crusades (Hoboken, NJ, 1996); see also David G. Roskies (ed.), The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe (Philadelphia and Jerusalem, 1989), 75–82.
9 Jacob Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World: A Source Book, 315–1791, ( Jerusalem, 1938), 129; for the Masada trope, and its self-conscious adoption in the narratives if not as a matter of historical fact, Susan Einbinder, Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France (Princeton, 2002).
10 Jacob Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World, 167.
11 Cohen, Sanctifying the Name of God, 142ff.
12 See, for example: Robert Chazan, Reassessing Jewish Life in Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 2010), a work that back-pedals gratuitously from the power and depth of Chazan’s work on the Crusade narratives; Jacob Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World; and, in my view least persuasively, Jonathan Elukin, Living Together, Living Apart, Rethinking Jewish-Christian Relations in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 2007).
13 Richard of Devizes, Cronicon (ed. J. T. Appleby), (Oxford, 1963), 3–4; see also Anthony Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Anti-Semitisms, 1350–1500 (Oxford, 2006), 27.
14 Richard of Devizes, Cronicon, 4.
15 On these attacks see Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora, A History of Anti-Semitism in England (Oxford, 2010), 118ff.
16 For the subsequent cult see Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book, 105–43.
17 Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews of England (Oxford, 1941), 9.
18 On the ‘Jewish boys in the oven’, Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (Philadelphia, 1999), 10ff.
19 Ibid., 11.
20 Joe Hillaby, ‘The ritual child-murder accusation: its dissemination and Harold of Gloucester’, Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, 34 (1996), 69–109; also Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (Philadelphia, 1983), 124ff.
21 Sheila Delaney (ed.), Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings (London, 2002).
22 Emily Taitz, ‘Women’s Voices, Women’s Prayers: The European Synagogues of the Middle Ages’, in Susan Grossman and Rivka Haut, Daughters of the King: Women and the Synagogue ( Jerusalem and Philadelphia, 1992), 65.
23 Ivan Marcus, ‘Mothers, Martyrs and Moneymakers: Some Jewish Women in Medieval Europe’, Conservative Judaism, 38 (Spring 1986), 42.
24 Judith R. Baskin, ‘Women and Ritual Immersion in Medieval Ashkenaz:
The Politics of Sexual Piety’, in Lawrence Fine (ed.), Judaism in Practice from the Middle Ages to the Modern Period (Princeton, 2001), 138.
25 Lawrence Hoffmann, ‘Women at rituals of their children’, in Fine, Judaism in Practice, 99–114.
26 Ibid., 113.
27 Ibid., 142.
28 Roth, A History of the Jews of England, 15–16.
29 Ibid.
30 Cecil Roth, The Jews of Medieval Oxford (Oxford, 1950), 41ff.
31 ‘The Deacon and the Jewess or an Apostasy at Common Law’, Collected Papers of Frederick W. Maitland (online), Vol. 1, 1911.
32 Ibid., 52; Suzanne Bartlet, Licoricia of Winchester (Edgware, 2009), 56–7.
33 Zefira Entin Rokeah, ‘Money and the hangman in late 13th century England: Jews, Christians and coinage offences, alleged and real’, Jewish Historical Studies, 31 (1988–1990) 83–109; 32, 159–218.
34 Zefira Entin Rokeah (ed.), Medieval English Jews and Royal Officials: Entries of Jewish Interest in the English Memoranda Rolls, 1266–1293 (Jerusalem, 2000), 380.
35 Ibid., 393–4. See Zefira Entin Rokeah, ‘Crime and Jews in late Thirteenth Century England’, Hebrew Union College Annual, 55 (1984), 131–2.
Chapter 8
1 Isadore Twersky (ed.), A Maimonides Reader (Springfield, NJ, 1972), 47.
2 Deuteronomy 30:15.
3 Twersky, 50.
4 Joel L. Kraemer, Moses Maimonides (New York and London, 2008), 103.
5 Ibid., 104–11.
6 Ibid., 116ff.
7 Ibid., 207.
8 Twersky, 438.
9 Ibid., 457.
10 Twersky, 290.
11 Kraemer, Maimonides, 440–1.
12 Susan Einbinder, ‘Trial by Fire. Burning Jewish Books’, in Lectures on Medieval Religion at Trinity University (Kalamazoo, 200
0), 1ff.
13 ‘The Dirge of Rabbi Meir von Rothenburg’ (trans. John Friedman), in John Friedman, Jean Connell Hoff and Robert Chazan, The Trial of the Talmud, Paris 1240 (Toronto, 2012), 169–70.
14 Pope Gregory IX to the king of France, 20 June 1239, in Robert Chazan (ed.) Church, State and Jew in the Middle Ages (New York, 1980).
15 Hillel of Verona also claimed, wrongly, that both Maimonides’ books and the Talmud had been burned on the same site in Paris. If there were burnings of the former at all, they would only have been in Montpellier.
16 Javier Rois and Selma L. Margaretten (trans.), A Vigilant Society: Jewish Thought and the State in Medieval Spain (Albany, 2013), 271. It was Peter the Venerable who, in ‘Against the Inveterate Obtuseness of the Jews’ first insisted on the beastly quality of the Jews: ‘I dare not designate you a man . . . for what is extinguished, buried in you, is precisely what separates men from animals and beasts and raises man above them, namely reason.’ Robert Chazan et al., The Trial of the Talmud, Paris, 1240 (Toronto, 2012), 13; Dominique Ionga-Prat (trans. Graham Robert Edwards), Order and Exclusion: Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism and Islam, 1000–1150 (Ithaca, 2002), 275ff.
17 Hyam Maccoby, Judaism on Trial: Jewish-Christian Disputations in the Middle Ages (Portland, Oregon, 1982), offers rich documentation, including Nahmanides’ Vikuah, and a Hebrew account of a third disputation at Tortosa in Spain in 1413–14.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., 119.
20 Ibid., 146.
21 Willis Johnson, ‘The myth of Jewish male menses’, Journal of Medieval History, 24, 3 (1988), 273–95.
22 ‘Play of the Saucemakers’, Publications of the Surtees Society (1911), 155ff.
23 Anthony Bale, Feeling Persecuted: Christians, Jews and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages (London, 2012), 46.
24 Ibid., 90–2.
25 Rubin, Gentile Tales, op. cit., 45.
26 The most comprehensive inventory of the creatures of Hebrew illumination is in Therese and Mendel Metzger, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages: Illuminated Hebrew Manuscripts of the Thirteenth to the Sixteenth Centuries (New York and Fribourg, 1982), esp. 19–37.
27 Marc Michael Epstein, Dreams of Subversion in Medieval Jewish Art and Literature (University Park, PA, 1997), 16–38, 70–95.
28 Marc Michael Epstein, The Medieval Haggadah: Art, Narrative and Religious Imagination (New Haven and London, 2013), 19–28.
29 On the work of Christian illuminators for Jewish patrons see Eva Froimovic, ‘Early Ashkenazic Prayer Books and their Christian Illuminators’, in Piet van Boxell and Sabine Arndt (eds), Crossing Borders: Hebrew Manuscripts as a Meeting Place of Cultures (Oxford, 2009), 45–56.
30 Stanley Ferber, ‘Micrography: A Jewish Art Form’, Journal of Jewish Art, 1977, 12–24.
Chapter 9
1 Fine facsimiles were published to mark the 600th anniversary: Hans-Christian Freiesleben, Der Katalanische Weltatlas vom Jahre 1375 (Stuttgart, 1977); Georges Grosjean (ed.), Mapamundi: der Katalanische Weltatlas vom Jahre 1375 (Zurich, 1977). See also Jean-Michel Massing, ‘Observations and Beliefs: The World of the Catalan Atlas’, in 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration (Washington DC, 1992), 27–33; J. Brian Harley, ‘The Map and the Development of Cartography’, in Harley et al., The History of Cartography, Vol. 1 (Chicago, 1987); Evelyn Edson, The World Map, 1300– 1492: The Persistence of Tradition and Transformation (Baltimore, 2007).
2 On portolans, see Tony Campbell, ‘Portolan Charts from the late 13th Century to 1500’, in J. B. Harley and David Woodward (eds), The History of Cartography: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, Vol. 1, Chicago, 1987; for the Majorcan connection, see Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonization from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229–1492 (Philadelphia, 1987), 13–17.
3 On Cresques Abraham and Jafuda see the excellent, archivally based website www.cresquesproject.net, with articles by Jaume Riera i Sans, ‘Cresques Abraham, Master of Mappaemundi and Compasses’, and Gabriel Llompart i Moragues, ‘Majorcan Jews and Medieval Cartography’ (trans. Juan Ceva). See also David Abulafia, A Mediterranean Emporium: The Catalan Kingdom of Majorca (Cambridge, 1994), 204–8.
4 Gabriel Llompart i Moragues, ‘The identity of Jaume Ferrer the Seafarer’, at www.cresquesproject.net (trans. Juan Ceva).
5 Abulafia, 75–99; A. Lionel Isaacs, The Jews of Majorca (London, 1936).
6 David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1996), 231ff, argues that well-poisoning accusations rarely occur as a reason for the attacks on the Jews (as well as Muslims), but rather that the plague had been brought about by the accumulation of sins, including their very presence in the midst of Christendom. In 1351, the Bishop of Valencia wrote to the town council that ‘by their [Jewish and Muslim] sins, the Lord might wish to send pestilences’. Nonetheless, there were certainly assaults and murders in Barcelona, Cervera and Tarrega, where according to the chronicler Joseph Ha-Cohen three hundred were killed.
7 On Martinez, see Benzion Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain (NY, 1995), Vol. 2, 128–48; Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain (Philadelphia, 1961).
8 Leon Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism: From Mohammed to the Marranos, Vol. 2 (trans. Natalie Gerardi), (Philadelphia, 2003) 158–9.
9 ‘Rabbi Hasdai Crescas gives an account of the Spanish massacres of 1391’, in Franz Kobler (ed.), Letters of Jews Through the Ages: From Biblical Times to the Middle of the Eighteenth Century, Vol. 1 (New York 1952), 272–5; Baer, History, 2, 104–5.
10 Isaacs, The Jews of Majorca, 79–90.
11 For Jafuda and others post-1391 see J. N. Hillgarth, ‘Majorcan Jews and Conversos as Owners and Artisans of Books’, in Aharon Mirky, Avraham Grossman and Yosef Kaplan, Exile and Diaspora: Studies in the History of the Jewish People Presented to Professor Haim Beinart (Jerusalem, 1991), 125–30.
12 On Llull and the Jews see Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca, 1982), 199–225.
13 Both Jewish (Solomon ibn Verga’s Shebet Yehuda) and Christian accounts of the Tortosa disputation, with Benedict XIII becoming impatient with Halorki/Geronimo’s apparent inability to persuade the rabbis, Maccoby, Judaism on Trial, 168–216.
14 Isaacs, The Jews of Majorca, 110–17.
15 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, ‘Exile and expulsion in Jewish history’, in Benjamin R. Gampel (ed.), Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World 1391–1648 (New York, 1997), 14. Yerushalmi writes that sometimes ‘Toledo’ was also thought to be called ‘Toletula’ from the Hebrew tiltul – wandering.
16 Jerrilynn D. Dodds, ‘Mudejar Tradition and the Synagogues of Medieval Spain: Cultural Identity and Cultural Hegemony’, in Vivian B. Mann, Thomas F. Glick and Jerrilynn D. Dodds, Convivencia: Jews, Muslims and Christians in Medieval Spain (New York, 1992), 113–31; Francisco Cantera Burgos, Sinagogas espanolas (Madrid, 1985); C. H. Krinsky, Synagogues of Europe: Architecture, History, Meaning (New York and Cambridge, 1985); Ana Maria Lopez Alvarez, Catalogo del Museo Sephardi (Madrid, 1987); Ana Maria Lopez Alvarez and Santiago Plaza Palomero (eds), Juderias y sinagogas de la Sefarad medieval (Ciudad Real, 2003).
17 For example, the four-volume ‘Toledo Bible’ (its parts now divided) copied by Israel ben Israel, a member of a family that handed down scribal skills generation to generation. Gabrielle Sed Rajna, ‘Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts from the Iberian Peninsula’, in Mann et al., Convivencia, 134–6. For the family tree of the ben Israel dynasty of scribes see Katrin KogmanAppel, Jewish Book Art between Islam and Christianity: The Decoration of Hebrew Bibles in Medieval Spain (Leiden and Boston, 2004), 61–4.
18 Dodds, ‘Mudejar Tradition’, 128.
19 Yirmiyahu Yovel, The Other Within: The Marranos: Split Identity and Emerging Modernity (Princeton and Oxford, 2009), 111, 130. Yovel’s tour de force of a book has transformed much o
f the debate about the relationship between the conversos and those who remained Jews during the fifteenth century, although the field remains, to put it mildly, contentious. I rely on him for the detailed accounts of countless practical ways in which conversos remained in contact with Jews and vice versa, but it may be that he goes a little too gently on the abhorrence with which many religious Jews would undoubtedly have viewed apostates, even if they were known as ‘anusim’, the ‘forced ones’.
