Download or read book The Jews of Europe After the Black Death written by Anna Foa and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2000-11-19 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Thoughtful, provocative, and lucidly written, this is a remarkably successful attempt to reconstruct the history of the Jews of Europe in a comparative perspective."—Carlo Ginzburg, author of The Cheese and the Worms

Download or read book After the Black Death written by Susan L. Einbinder and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2018-05-18 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Black Death of 1348-50 devastated Europe. With mortality estimates ranging from thirty to sixty percent of the population, it was arguably the most significant event of the fourteenth century. Nonetheless, its force varied across the continent, and so did the ways people responded to it. Surprisingly, there is little Jewish writing extant that directly addresses the impact of the plague, or even of the violence that sometimes accompanied it. This absence is particularly notable for Provence and the Iberian Peninsula, despite rich sources on Jewish life throughout the century. In After the Black Death, Susan L. Einbinder uncovers Jewish responses to plague and violence in fourteenth-century Iberia and Provence. Einbinder's original research reveals a wide, heterogeneous series of Jewish literary responses to the plague, including Sephardic liturgical poetry; a medical tractate written by the Jewish physician Abraham Caslari; epitaphs inscribed on the tombstones of twenty-eight Jewish plague victims once buried in Toledo; and a heretofore unstudied liturgical lament written by Moses Nathan, a survivor of an anti-Jewish massacre that occurred in Tàrrega, Catalonia, in 1348. Through elegant translations and masterful readings, After the Black Death exposes the great diversity in Jewish experiences of the plague, shaped as they were by convention, geography, epidemiology, and politics. Most critically, Einbinder traces the continuity of faith, language, and meaning through the years of the plague and its aftermath. Both before and after the Black Death, Jewish texts that deal with tragedy privilege the communal over the personal and affirm resilience over victimhood. Combined with archival and archaeological testimony, these texts ask us to think deeply about the men and women, sometimes perpetrators as well as victims, who confronted the Black Death. As devastating as the Black Death was, it did not shatter the modes of expression and explanation of those who survived it—a discovery that challenges the applicability of modern trauma theory to the medieval context.

Download or read book The Black Death and the Transformation of the West written by David Herlihy and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1997-09-28 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this small book David Herlihy makes subtle and subversive inquiries that challenge historical thinking about the Black Death. Looking beyond the view of the plague as unmitigated catastrophe, Herlihy finds evidence for its role in the advent of new population controls, the establishment of universities, the spread of Christianity, the dissemination of vernacular cultures, and even the rise of nationalism. This book, which displays a distinguished scholar's masterly synthesis of diverse materials, reveals that the Black Death can be considered the cornerstone of the transformation of Europe.

Download or read book In the Wake of the Plague written by Norman F. Cantor and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-03-17 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Black Death was the fourteenth century's equivalent of a nuclear war. It wiped out one-third of Europe's population, taking millions of lives. The author draws together the most recent scientific discoveries and historical research to pierce the mist and tell the story of the Black Death as a gripping, intimate narrative.

Download or read book Mothers and Children written by Elisheva Baumgarten and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-24 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a synthetic history of the family--the most basic building block of medieval Jewish communities--in Germany and northern France during the High Middle Ages. Concentrating on the special roles of mothers and children, it also advances recent efforts to write a comparative Jewish-Christian social history. Elisheva Baumgarten draws on a rich trove of primary sources to give a full portrait of medieval Jewish family life during the period of childhood from birth to the beginning of formal education at age seven. Illustrating the importance of understanding Jewish practice in the context of Christian society and recognizing the shared foundations in both societies, Baumgarten's examination of Jewish and Christian practices and attitudes is explicitly comparative. Her analysis is also wideranging, covering nearly every aspect of home life and childrearing, including pregnancy, midwifery, birth and initiation rituals, nursing, sterility, infanticide, remarriage, attitudes toward mothers and fathers, gender hierarchies, divorce, widowhood, early education, and the place of children in the home, synagogue, and community. A richly detailed and deeply researched contribution to our understanding of the relationship between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors, Mothers and Children provides a key analysis of the history of Jewish families in medieval Ashkenaz.

Download or read book The Black Death written by Philip Ziegler and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-04-07 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A series of natural disasters in the Orient during the fourteenth century brought about the most devastating period of death and destruction in European history. The epidemic killed one-third of Europe's people over a period of three years, and the resulting social and economic upheaval was on a scale unparalleled in all of recorded history. Synthesizing the records of contemporary chroniclers and the work of later historians, Philip Ziegler offers a critically acclaimed overview of this crucial epoch in a single masterly volume. The Black Death vividly and comprehensively brings to light the full horror of this uniquely catastrophic event that hastened the disintegration of an age.

Download or read book The Black Death written by and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This series provides texts central to medieval studies courses and focuses upon the diverse cultural, social and political conditions that affected the functioning of all levels of medieval society. Translations are accompanied by introductory and explanatory material and each volume includes a comprehensive guide to the sources' interpretation, including discussion of critical linguistic problems and an assessment of recent research on the topics covered. From 1348 to 1350 Europe was devastated by an epidemic that left between a third and one half of the population dead. This source book traces, through contemporary writings, the calamitous impact of the Black Death in Europe, with a particular emphasis on its spread across England from 1348 to 1349. Rosemary Horrox surveys contemporary attempts to explain the plague, which was universally regarded as an expression of divine vengeance for the sins of humankind. Moralists all had their particular targets for criticism. However, this emphasis on divine chastisement did not preclude attempts to explain the plague in medical or scientific terms. Also, there was a widespread belief that human agencies had been involved, and such scapegoats as foreigners, the poor and Jews were all accused of poisoning wells. The final section of the book charts the social and psychological impact of the plague, and its effect on the late-medieval economy.

Download or read book The Encyclopaedia Britannica written by Hugh Chisholm and published by . This book was released on 1911 with total page 1016 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Black Death written by Hourly History and published by Hourly History. This book was released on 2016-02-16 with total page 45 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sweeping across the known world with unchecked devastation, the Black Death claimed between 75 million and 200 million lives in four short years. In this engaging and well-researched book, the trajectory of the plague’s march west across Eurasia and the cause of the great pandemic is thoroughly explored. Inside you will read about... ✓ What was the Black Death? ✓ A Short History of Pandemics ✓ Chronology & Trajectory ✓ Causes & Pathology ✓ Medieval Theories & Disease Control ✓ Black Death in Medieval Culture ✓ Consequences Fascinating insights into the medieval mind’s perception of the disease and examinations of contemporary accounts give a complete picture of what the world’s most effective killer meant to medieval society in particular and humanity in general.

Download or read book Plague written by William G. Naphy and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive history of the greatest catastrophe in human history which wiped out fifty per cent of Europe's population. The Black Death first hit Europe in 1347. This horrific disease ripped through towns, villages and families

Download or read book Poisoned Wells written by Tzafrir Barzilay and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2022-03-22 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1348 and 1350, Jews throughout Europe were accused of having caused the spread of the Black Death by poisoning the wells from which the entire population drank. Hundreds if not thousands were executed from Aragon and southern France into the eastern regions of the German-speaking lands. But if the well-poisoning accusations against the Jews during these plague years are the most frequently cited of such cases, they were not unique. The first major wave of accusations came in France and Aragon in 1321, and it was lepers, not Jews, who were the initial targets. Local authorities, and especially municipal councils, promoted these charges so as to be able to seize the property of the leprosaria, Tzafrir Barzilay contends. The allegations eventually expanded to describe an international conspiracy organized by Muslims, and only then, after months of persecution of the lepers, did some nobles of central France implicate the Jews, convincing the king to expel them from the realm. In Poisoned Wells Barzilay explores the origins of these charges of well poisoning, asks how the fear took root and moved across Europe, which groups it targeted, why it held in certain areas and not others, and why it waned in the fifteenth century. He argues that many of the social, political, and environmental factors that fed the rise of the mass poisoning accusations had already appeared during the thirteenth century, a period of increased urbanization, of criminal poisoning charges, and of the proliferation of medical texts on toxins. In studying the narratives that were presented to convince officials that certain groups committed well poisoning and the legal and bureaucratic mechanisms that moved rumors into officially accepted and prosecutable crimes, Barzilay has written a crucial chapter in the long history of the persecution of European minorities.

Download or read book Persecution Toleration written by Noel D. Johnson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-14 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Noel D. Johnson and Mark Koyama tackle the question: how does religious liberty develop?

Download or read book Natural Disasters in the Ottoman Empire written by Yaron Ayalon and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yaron Ayalon explores the Ottoman Empire's history of natural disasters and its responses on a state, communal, and individual level.

Download or read book The Jewish Dark Continent written by Nathaniel Deutsch and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-29 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the turn of the twentieth century, over forty percent of the world’s Jews lived within the Russian Empire, almost all in the Pale of Settlement. From the Baltic to the Black Sea, the Jews of the Pale created a distinctive way of life little known beyond its borders. This led the historian Simon Dubnow to label the territory a Jewish “Dark Continent.” Just before World War I, a socialist revolutionary and aspiring ethnographer named An-sky pledged to explore the Pale. He dreamed of leading an ethnographic expedition that would produce an archive—what he called an Oral Torah of the common people rather than the rabbinic elite—which would preserve Jewish traditions and transform them into the seeds of a modern Jewish culture. Between 1912 and 1914, An-sky and his team collected jokes, recorded songs, took thousands of photographs, and created a massive ethnographic questionnaire. Consisting of 2,087 questions in Yiddish—exploring the gamut of Jewish folk beliefs and traditions, from everyday activities to spiritual exercises to marital intimacies—the Jewish Ethnographic Program constitutes an invaluable portrait of Eastern European Jewish life on the brink of destruction. Nathaniel Deutsch offers the first complete translation of the questionnaire, as well as the riveting story of An-sky’s almost messianic efforts to create a Jewish ethnography in an era of revolutionary change. An-sky’s project was halted by World War I, and within a few years the Pale of Settlement would no longer exist. These survey questions revive and reveal shtetl life in all its wonder and complexity.

Download or read book In the Wake of the Plague written by Norman F. Cantor and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-10-14 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much of what we know about the greatest medical disaster ever, the Black Plague of the fourteenth century, is wrong. The details of the Plague etched in the minds of terrified schoolchildren -- the hideous black welts, the high fever, and the final, awful end by respiratory failure -- are more or less accurate. But what the Plague really was, and how it made history, remain shrouded in a haze of myths. Norman Cantor, the premier historian of the Middle Ages, draws together the most recent scientific discoveries and groundbreaking historical research to pierce the mist and tell the story of the Black Death afresh, as a gripping, intimate narrative. In the Wake of the Plague presents a microcosmic view of the Plague in England (and on the continent), telling the stories of the men and women of the fourteenth century, from peasant to priest, and from merchant to king. Cantor introduces a fascinating cast of characters. We meet, among others, fifteen-year-old Princess Joan of England, on her way to Spain to marry a Castilian prince; Thomas of Birmingham, abbot of Halesowen, responsible for his abbey as a CEO is for his business in a desperate time; and the once-prominent landowner John le Strange, who sees the Black Death tear away his family's lands and then its very name as it washes, unchecked, over Europe in wave after wave. Cantor argues that despite the devastation that made the Plague so terrifying, the disease that killed more than 40 percent of Europe's population had some beneficial results. The often literal demise of the old order meant that new, more scientific thinking increasingly prevailed where church dogma had once reigned supreme. In effect, the Black Death heralded an intellectual revolution. There was also an explosion of art: tapestries became popular as window protection against the supposedly airborne virus, and a great number of painters responded to the Plague. Finally, the Black Death marked an economic sea change: the onset of what Cantor refers to as turbocapitalism; the peasants who survived the Plague thrived, creating Europe's first class of independent farmers. Here are those stories and others, in a tale of triumph coming out of the darkest horror, wrapped up in a scientific mystery that persists, in part, to this day. Cantor's portrait of the Black Death's world is pro-vocative and captivating. Not since Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror have medieval men and women been brought so vividly to life. The greatest popularizer of the Middle Ages has written the period's most fascinating narrative.

Download or read book Those Who Forget written by Geraldine Schwarz and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[Makes] the very convincing case that, until and unless there is a full accounting for what happened with Donald Trump, 2020 is not over and never will be.” —The New Yorker “Riveting…we can never be reminded too often to never forget.” —The Wall Street Journal Journalist Géraldine Schwarz’s astonishing memoir of her German and French grandparents’ lives during World War II “also serves as a perceptive look at the current rise of far-right nationalism throughout Europe and the US” (Publishers Weekly). During World War II, Géraldine Schwarz’s German grandparents were neither heroes nor villains; they were merely Mitlaüfer—those who followed the current. Once the war ended, they wanted to bury the past under the wreckage of the Third Reich. Decades later, while delving through filing cabinets in the basement of their apartment building in Mannheim, Schwarz discovers that in 1938, her paternal grandfather Karl took advantage of Nazi policies to buy a business from a Jewish family for a low price. She finds letters from the only survivor of this family (all the others perished in Auschwitz), demanding reparations. But Karl Schwarz refused to acknowledge his responsibility. Géraldine starts to question the past: How guilty were her grandparents? What makes us complicit? On her mother’s side, she investigates the role of her French grandfather, a policeman in Vichy. Weaving together the threads of three generations of her family story with Europe’s process of post-war reckoning, Schwarz explores how millions were seduced by ideology, overcome by a fog of denial after the war, and, in Germany at least, eventually managed to transform collective guilt into democratic responsibility. She asks: How can nations learn from history? And she observes that countries that avoid confronting the past are especially vulnerable to extremism. Searing and unforgettable, Those Who Forget “deserves to be read and discussed widely...this is Schwarz’s invaluable warning” (The Washington Post Book Review).

Download or read book Alienated Minority written by Kenneth Stow and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-01 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This narrative history surveying one thousand years of Jewish life integrates the Jewish experience into the context of the overall culture and society of medieval Europe. It presents a new picture of the interaction between Christians and Jews in this tumultuous era. Alienated Minority shows us what it meant to be a Jew in Europe in the Middle Ages. The story begins in the fifth century, when autonomous Jewish rule in Palestine came to a close, and when the papacy, led by Gregory the Great, established enduring principles regarding Christian policy toward Jews. Kenneth Stow examines the structures of self-government in the European Jewish community and the centrality of emerging concepts of representation. He studies economic enterprise, especially banking; constructs a clear image of the medieval Jewish family; and portrays in detail the very rich Jewish intellectual life. Analyzing policies of Church and State in the Middle Ages, Stow argues that a firmly defined legal and constitutional position of the Jewish minority in the earlier period gave way to a legal status created expressly for Jews, who in the later period were seen as inimical to the common good. It was this special status that paved the way for the royal expulsions of Jews that began at the end of the thirteenth century.