Medieval Jewish History

The twelfth and thirteenth centuries witnessed an explosion of Christian interest in the meaning and workings of the natural world—a "discovery of nature" that profoundly reshaped the intellectual currents and spiritual contours of European society—yet to all appearances, the Jews of medieval northern Europe (Ashkenaz) were oblivious to the shifts reshaping their surrounding culture. Scholars have long assumed that rather than exploring or contemplating the natural world, the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz were preoccupied solely with the supernatural and otherworldly: magic and mysticism, demonology and divination, as well as the zombies, werewolves, dragons, flying camels, and other monstrous and wondrous creatures that destabilized any pretense of a consistent and encompassing natural order.

In _A Remembrance of His Wonders_, David I. Shyovitz disputes this long-standing and far-reaching consensus. Analyzing a wide array of neglected Ashkenazic writings on the natural world in general, and the human body in particular, Shyovitz shows how Jews in Ashkenaz integrated regnant scientific, magical, and mystical currents into a sophisticated exploration of the boundaries between nature and the supernatural. Ashkenazic beliefs and practices that have often been seen as signs of credulity and superstition in fact mirrored—and drew upon—contemporaneous Christian debates over the relationship between God and the natural world. In charting these parallels between Jewish and Christian thought, Shyovitz focuses especially upon the mediating role of polemical texts and encounters, which served as mechanisms for the transmission of religious doctrines, scientific facts, and cultural mores. Medieval Jews' preoccupation with the apparently "supernatural" reflected neither ignorance nor intellectual isolation, but rather a determined effort to understand nature's inner workings and outer limits, and to integrate and interrogate the theologies and ideologies of the broader European Christian society.

Monica H. Green, “Bodies, Gender, Health, Disease: Recent Work on Medieval Women’s Medicine,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, 3rd series, vol. 2 (2005), 1-46.

Abstract: This long essay review summarizes work in the field of History of Medicine as it relates to topics on women and gender in the medieval world—mostly focusing on western Europe but bringing in some comparative work. It supplements and expands upon two earlier reviews of the field that I did in 1989 and 1993. Topics include:
(1) a review of edited texts (where I argue that “we have perhaps reached the point of critical mass, where enough work has been done to identify both the major continuities and the major novelties in the textual traditions of women’s medicine”);
(2) “technologies of the body,” a term I have coined to refer to “a group of techniques, beliefs, and practices focused on intervening in the functioning of the body (including, but not limited to, the alleviation of pain)” and which I propose as a definition wider than “medicine” to capture the focus on cosmetics, promotion of fertility (rather than contraceptives), and even andrology in many medieval texts on women’s medicine;
(3) sex differences as they were understood in medieval medical literature, which challenge Laqueur’s idea of a “one-sex body,” including beliefs in male menstruation, the emphasis on “provoking the menses” in texts on women’s medicine, and the impact of the “new Aristotle” starting in the 13th century, especially new interest in the nature of generation;
(4) women as medical agents, a concept I develop here to circumvent the limiting vocabulary of medical professionalization and encompass women’s various engagements with healthcare, including as readers of medical texts and recipes, the lack of evidence for professionalized midwives before the 14th cent.;
(5) childbirth as a female space, where I contest the assumption that childbirth was exclusively a female concern and show instead that there are a variety of ways pregnancy, childbirth, and wetnursing can be analyzed as gendered phenomena; and
(6) future directions, where I explore topics and methodologies that might yet prove valuable.
The essay draws on medical anthropology both for conceptual analyses of the workings of gender, but also (via ethnographies) as a source of comparative material.

This review is 3rd in a series of 4 essays I have done reviewing literature on women, gender, and medicine in the medieval period. The others are:

Monica H. Green, “Women’s Medical Practice and Health Care in Medieval Europe,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14 (1988-1989), 434-73; reprinted in Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages, ed. J. Bennett, E. Clark, J. O’Barr, B. Vilen, and S. Westphal-Wihl (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 39-78; reprinted again in Monica H. Green, with corrigenda in Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts, Variorum Collected Studies Series CS680 (Aldershot, 2000).

Monica H. Green, “Recent Work on Women’s Medicine in Medieval Europe,” Society for Ancient Medicine Newsletter 21 (1993), 132–41.

Monica H. Green, “Gendering the History of Women’s Healthcare,” Gender and History, Twentieth Anniversary Special Issue, 20, no. 3 (November 2008), 487-518; reprinted in Gender and Change: Agency, Chronology and Periodisation, ed. Alexandra Shepard and Garthine Walker (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 43-82.

See also, for comprehensive bibliography up through 2009: Monica H. Green, “Bibliography on Medieval Women, Gender and Medicine, 1980-2009,” an 82-page cumulative annotated bibliography of over 375 items of European and North American scholarship published in the past 30 years, posted for free access on Sciencia.cat, http://www.sciencia.cat/english/libraryenglish/publicationssc.htm, posted 02 March 2010.

Jews and Christians in Medieval Castile examines the changes in Jewish-Christian relations in the Iberian kingdom of Castile during the pivotal period of the reconquest and the hundred years that followed the end of its most active phase (eleventh to mid-fourteenth century). The study's focus on the Christian heartland north of the Duero River, known as Old Castile, allows for a detailed investigation of the Jews' changing relations with the area's main power players―the monarchy, the church, and the towns. In a departure from previous assessments, Soifer Irish shows that the institutional and legal norms of toleration for the Jewish minority were forged not along the military frontier with Islam, but in the north of Castile. She argues that the Jews' relationship with the Castilian monarchy was by far the most significant factor that influenced their situation in the kingdom, but also demonstrates that this relationship was inherently problematic. Although during the early centuries of Christian expansion the Jewish communities benefited from a strong royal power, after about 1250 helping maintain it proved to be costly to the Jewish communities in economic and human terms. Soifer Irish demonstrates that while some Castilian clergymen were vehemently anti-Jewish, the Castilian Church as a whole never developed a coordinated strategy on the Jews, or even showed much interest in the issue. The opposite is true about the townsmen, whose relations with their Jewish neighbors vacillated between cooperation and conflict. In the late thirteenth century, the Crown's heavy-handed tactics in enforcing the collection of outstanding debts to Jewish moneylenders led to the breakdown in the negotiations between the Jewish and Christian communities, creating a fertile ground for the formation of an anti-Jewish discourse in Castilian towns. Soifer Irish also examines the Jews' attitudes toward the various powers in the Christian society and shows that they were active players in the kingdom's politics. Jews and Christians in Medieval Castile breaks new ground in helping us understand more fully the tensions, and commonalities, between groups of different faiths in the late medieval period.

Listen to a discussion of the volume on the Tel Aviv Review:  https://tlv1.fm/the-tel-aviv-review/2020/10/19/antisemitism-past-and-present/

Co-edited by Guy Miron of Israel’s Open University and Scott Ury of Tel Aviv University, this volume was published as a special, year-long issue of the journal Zion: A Quarterly for Research in Jewish History in cooperation with the Zalman Shazar Center.

Beginning with a Hebrew translation of David Engel’s 2009 essay “Away from a Definition of Antisemitism,” the volume includes over twenty contributions in Hebrew by a range of scholars based in Europe, Israel and North America regarding the history, implementation and usefulness of the term “antisemitism.”

Individuals and libraries interested in receiving more information about the volume or purchasing a copy can visit the website of the Zalman Shazar Center at:

https://shazar.org.il/Book/%D7%90%D7%A0%D7%98%D7%99%D7%A9%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%95%D7%AA+%D7%91%D7%99%D7%9F+%D7%9E%D7%95%D7%A9%D7%92+%D7%94%D7%99%D7%A1%D7%98%D7%95%D7%A8%D7%99+%D7%9C%D7%A9%D7%99%D7%97+%D7%A6%D7%99%D7%91%D7%95%D7%A8%D7%99.aspx?name=%D7%90%D7%A0%D7%98%D7%99%D7%A9%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%95%D7%AA%3A+%D7%91%D7%99%D7%9F+%D7%9E%D7%95%D7%A9%D7%92+%D7%94%D7%99%D7%A1%D7%98%D7%95%D7%A8%D7%99+%D7%9C%D7%A9%D7%99%D7%97+%D7%A6%D7%99%D7%91%D7%95%D7%A8%D7%99&code=185-1103