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5 The Jew’s balcony: a tale of a Jewess’s flirtation 1 with Christianity Alack, what heinous sin is it in me To be ashamed to be my father’s child! But though I am a daughter to his blood, I am not to his manners, O Lorenzo, If thou keep promise I shall end this strife, Become a Christian and thy loving wife. (Jessica in The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare, Act II, Scene iii) In The Merchant of Venice, Jessica, the daughter of Shylock the Jew, fell in love with a Christian. With his assistance, she fled her father, her house and her faith. She
This book explores two areas of interest: the Papal Inquisition in Modena and the status of Jews in an early modern Italian duchy. Its purpose is to deepen existing insights into the role of the former and thus lead to a better understanding of how an Inquisitorial court assumed jurisdiction over a practising Jewish community in the seventeenth century. The book highlights one specific aspect of the history of the Jews in Italy: the trials of professing Jews before the Papal Inquisition at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Inquisitorial processi against professing Jews provide the earliest known evidence of a branch of the Papal Inquisition taking judicial actions against Jews on an unprecedented scale and attempting systematically to discipline a Jewish community, pursuing this aim for several centuries. The book focuses on Inquisitorial activity during the first 40 years of the history of the tribunal in Modena, from 1598 to 1638, the year of the Jews' enclosure in the ghetto, the period which historians have argued was the most active in the Inquisition's history. It argues that trials of the two groups are different because the ecclesiastical tribunals viewed conversos as heretics but Jews as infidels. The book emphasizes the fundamental disparity in Inquisitorial procedure regarding Jews, as well as the evidence examined, especially in Modena. This was where the Duke uses the detailed testimony to be found in Inquisitorial trial transcripts to analyse Jewish interaction with Christian society in an early modern community.
In various respects, the division of material between this chapter and the previous one is somewhat arbitrary, as it is hardly possible to make an effective separation between social and economic matters. Nonetheless, whereas chapter III is primarily concerned with Jewish economic activities for their own sake, and Jews’ financial relations with Christian rulers
case of a Jewish alchemist in Germany, the rest of the documents in this chapter originated in Italy. They show everyday interaction between Jews and Christians (and, in the case of document 48, Spanish converts from Judaism as well), in such disparate areas as the disposal of Christian art-works in a house newly owned by Jews, and Jewish contributions to the famous Roman
[ Dracula ] anticipates the mass destruction of both European Jews and sexual deviants at the hands of Nazi racial hygienists. The teutonic Dr. van Helsing’s surgical assault on the supine, immobile, and vulnerable form of Dracula, in a ritual murder outside conventional morality, without the
In June 1888, The Lancet medical journal published a report by its Special Sanitary Commission which gave an eye-witness account of life in Leeds’ predominantly Jewish quarter, the Leylands. For several years The Lancet had reported on the risks to the health of the general population posed by unsanitary conditions in the tailoring industry, particularly in the many hundreds of small, reeking, unventilated workshops, where ‘Jew sweaters’ toiled for 16 hours or more and, in the breaks between, snacked on bread and weak tea or
. The story begins with the reaction of the king of Castile, Henry III, to the attacks on all the major Jewish communities in the kingdom. After the event, the king ordered the punishment of the ringleaders, but, in the succeeding decades, many Spanish Jews converted to Christianity. Although the letter translated here was addressed specifically to the city council in Burgos, it
This may well appear to many to be the most conventional and least unexpected section of the present work, in that there is generally an unconscious or else admitted assumption that, as the Reformation changed so many things for Europe’s Christians, it must therefore have had a similar effect on Jews. As a prelude to the all too familiar works of Martin
There are two main aspects of the involvement of Jews in the European economy of the late medieval and early modern periods which have to be considered here. In all western European countries with Jewish populations in this period, there were restrictions on the economic roles which Jews might fulfil. These were justified on theological as much as economic
As European politics, society, economy and religion underwent epoch-making changes between 1400 and 1600, the treatment of Europe's Jews by the non-Jewish majority was, then as in later periods, a symptom of social problems and tensions in the Continent as a whole. Through a broad-ranging collection of original documents, the book sets out to present a vivid picture of the Jewish presence in European life during this vital and turbulent period. This book discusses the history and background of the Jewish presence in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe. As far as the late medieval Church was concerned, the basis for the treatment of Jews, by ecclesiastical and secular authorities, was to be found in the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council of the Roman Church, which were issued in 1215. The book is concerned with Jewish economic activities for their own sake, and Jews' financial relations with Christian rulers. It then concentrates on other aspects of the dealings which went on between European Jews and their Christian neighbours. The book includes the Jews' own economic presence and culture, social relations between Jews and Christians, the policies and actions of Christian authorities in Church and State. It draws upon original source material to convey ordinary people's prejudices about Jews, including myths about Jewish 'devilishness', money-grabbing, and 'ritual murder' of Christian children. Finally, the book demonstrates from the outset that much of the treatment of European Jews, in the period up to the Reformation and thereafter, was to be a practical result of the controversies within 'Christendom' on the subject of authority, whether ecclesiastical or secular.