Regional Identities and Cultures of Medieval Jews

by Javier Castaño (Editor), Talya Fishman (Editor), Ephraim Kanarfogel (Editor)

Though the existence of Jewish regional cultures is widely known, the origins of the most prominent groups, Ashkenaz and Sepharad, are poorly understood, and the rich variety of other regional Jewish identities is often overlooked. Yet all these subcultures emerged in the Middle Ages. Scholars contributing to the present study were invited to consider how such regional identities were fashioned, propagated, reinforced, contested, and reshaped - and to reflect on the developments, events, or encounters that made these identities manifest. They were asked to identify how subcultural identities proved to be useful, and the circumstances in which they were deployed.

The resulting volume spans the ninth to the sixteenth centuries, and explores Jewish cultural developments in western Europe, the Balkans, North Africa, and Asia Minor. In its own way, each contribution considers factors - demographic, geographical, historical, economic, political, institutional, legal, intellectual, theological, cultural, and even biological - that led medieval Jews to conceive of themselves, or to be perceived by others, as bearers of a discrete Jewish regional identity. Notwithstanding the singularity of each essay, they collectively attest to the inherent dynamism of Jewish regional identities.

Genres: History, Judaism

362 pages, Hardcover

Published August 4, 2018

Reviews

[Jeffrey Green · Rating 4 out of 5]

I might be the only person in the world, who is not a professional academic in the field of Jewish Studies, who actually read this whole collection of scholarly articles about aspects of medieval Judaism by some of the leading experts in the field. I bought and read it because, in a discussion with guests around the dinner table, we started wondering where Ashkenazi Jews came from, and the initial article, by Michael Toch, addressed that question cogently. The rest of the articles were scholarly to the extreme, on topics I knew little or nothing about, and, honestly, I don't know how much I remember or understood. The things that scholars can write about are the documents left by the rabbis, and very few traces of the daily life of the Jews in medieval Europe are present there (unlike the material about the Jews of the Mediterranean from the Cairo Geniza). Moreover, it appears that little is known about what I hoped to learn: the early formation of the communities that, in the twelfth century or so, began to produce the brilliant scholars whose writings provide the substance of these articles. The erudition of the contributors to this book is astounding, but their readership is people like themselves, not me or, probably, you.