Late Medieval Jewish Identities Iberia and Beyond

by Alfonso, Maria Esperanza; Caballero-Navas, Carmen

• ISBN13: 9780230608337
• ISBN10: 0230608337
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-11-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Taking the Jewish community as a focal point, this book thoroughly explores the various "borders"geographical divides, religious affiliations, gender boundaries, genre divisionsthat ruled the lives and intellectual production of late medieval Jews.

Author Biography

Maria Esperenza Alfonso is Ramon y Cajal Research Fellow in the Department of Hebrew and Aramaic Studies at Universidad Complutense.  Carmen Caballero-Navas is Research Fellow and Lecturer in the Departamento de Estudios Semíticos, Área de Hebreo Facultad de Filosofía y Letras at Universidad de Granada.

Table of Contents

Introduction—Carmen Caballero-Navas and Esperanza Alfonso * PART I: On Borders and Boundaries * Bloodshed and Borders: Violence and Acculturation in Late Medieval Jewish Society—Mark Meyerson * The Identity of Zequiel: Conversos, Historiography, and Familiar Spirits—Eleazar Gutwirth * PART II: Converso Identity * Identities in Flux: Iberian Conversos at Home and Abroad—Renée Levine Melammed * Polemical Strategy and the Rhetoric of Authority in Abner of Burgos/Alfonso of Valladolid—Ryan Szpiech * PART III: Female Identity * Jewish Women in Ashkenaz: Renegotiating Jewish Gender Roles in Northern Europe—Judith R. Baskin * Queen for a Day: The Exclusion of Jewish Women from Public Life in the Middle Ages—Asunción Blasco Martínez * “Only That Which I Have Lost Is Now Mine Forever”: The Memory of Names and the History of Jewish and Converso Women in Medieval Girona—Silvia Planas Marcé * PART IV:  Is There a Sense of Otherness in the Sciences? * Arav and Edom as Cultural Resources of Medieval Judaism: Contrasting Attitudes toward Arabic and Latin Learning in the Midi and in Italy—Gad Freudenthal * Science and Jewish Identity in the Works of Abraham Zacut (1452–1515)—Mariano Gómez Aranda * The Incorporation of Foreign Medical Literature into the Medieval Jewish Corpus—Lola Ferre * PART V: Representation of Otherness and Construction of Identity in Literature * The Seri ha-yagon [Balm for Assuaging Grief] by Ibn Falaquera: A Case of Literary Crossbreeding—Aurora Salvatierra Ossorio * Defining Borders: Early Fifteenth-Century Jews from the Crown of Aragon in Search of their Identity—Ángel Sáenz-Badillos * The Representation of Conversos in Bonafed’s Diwan—Arturo Prats * PART VI: Representation of Otherness and Construction of Identity in the Visual Arts * Jewish Mudejarismo and the Invention of Tradition—Eva Frojmovic * The Jew’s Face: Vision, Knowledge, and Identity in Medieval Anti-Jewish Caricature—Sara Lipton