A01=Susan L. Einbinder
Abraham ibn Ezra
Allusion
Apostasy
Ashkenaz
Author_Susan L. Einbinder
Blood libel
Book of Ezekiel
Books of Kings
Category=DCQ
Category=DSBB
Category=DSC
Category=QRJ
Christian literature
Christianity
Conversion to Judaism
Crusades
Defection
Desecration
Elohim
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
Exegesis
First Crusade
Gershom
God
Hagiography
Hazzan
Hebrew Bible
Hebrew language
Heresy
High Middle Ages
Host desecration
Humiliation
Illustration
Incorruptibility
Jewish identity
Jews
Judaism
Kohen
Lament
Literature
Maimonides
Martyr
Martyrology
Medieval Hebrew
Meir of Rothenburg
Mishnah
Nahmanides
Narrative
Old French
Penitential
Persecution
Poetry
Polemic
Princeton University
Prose
Psalms
Quatrain
Rabbi
Rabbinic literature
Rashi
Religious text
Responsa
Sefer (Hebrew)
Sefer Hasidim
Simhah
Soloveitchik
Stanza
Suffering
Talmud
Tefillin
Ten Martyrs
The Other Hand
Troyes
V.
Writing
Yom Tov of Joigny
Product details
- ISBN 9780691090535
- Weight: 482g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 21 Jul 2002
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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When Crusader armies on their way to the Holy Land attacked Jewish communities in the Rhine Valley, many Jews chose suicide over death at the hands of Christian mobs. With their defiant deaths, the medieval Jewish martyr was born. With the literary commemoration of the victims, Jewish martyrology followed. Beautiful Death examines the evolution of a long-neglected corpus of Hebrew poetry, the laments reflecting the specific conditions of Jewish life in northern France. The poems offer insight into everyday life and into the ways medieval French Jews responded to persecution. They also suggest that poetry was used to encourage resistance to intensifying pressures to convert. The educated Jewish elite in northern France was highly acculturated. Their poetry--particularly that emerging from the innovative Tosafist schools--reflects their engagement with the vernacular renaissance unfolding around them, as well as conscious and unconscious absorption of Christian popular beliefs and hagiographical conventions. At the same time, their extraordinary poems signal an increasingly harsh repudiation of Christianity's sacred symbols and beliefs.
They reveal a complex relationship to Christian culture as Jews internalized elements of medieval culture even while expressing a powerful revulsion against the forms and beliefs of Christian life. This gracefully written study crosses traditional boundaries of history and literature and of Jewish and general medieval scholarship. Focusing on specific incidents of persecution and the literary commemorations they produced, it offers unique insights into the historical conditions in which these poems were written and performed.
Susan L. Einbinder is Professor of Hebrew Literature at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati.
