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Reading medieval religious disputation: The 1240 "debate" between Rabbi Yeh&dotbelow;iel of Paris and Friar Nicholas Donin.
No full textThis dissertation takes as its subject the Latin and Hebrew accounts of a much-studied event: the Jewish-Christian Disputation of 1240. In medieval Europe's first formal religious debate, Friar Nicholas Donin challenged Rabbi Yeh&dotbelow;iel of Paris over the legitimacy of the Talmud. After the disputation, Donin and Yeh&dotbelow;iel wrote individual accounts of their experiences.This dissertation concentrates on the texts of the two disputants and suggests a new approach to reading these texts. Based on the records of the 1240 Debate, this dissertation demonstrates that the authors' goals in writing polemic were not necessarily or exclusively to offer a response to their antagonists.Read as a historical narrative, Yeh&dotbelow;iel's document reveals that it is less an account of the debate than a manual for future Jewish disputants. Moreover, because Yeh&dotbelow;iel's intended audience consisted of learned Jews, he was able to write in melitza, a pastiche of biblical verses in rhymed prose which is impenetrable to the uninitiated. Both explicitly and subtextually, Yeh&dotbelow;iel provided words of encouragement to his readers, as well as subtle anti-Christian invective.Donin's Latin record addressed a Christian, clerical audience, as this was the population with both the ability and the interest in reading such literature. As such, Donin's account must be understood as addressing ecclesiastical concerns, notably the development of unmonitored texts. In an increasingly text-oriented environment, unmonitored texts such as the Talmud were feared as potential catalysts for heretical or offensive ideas. This dissertation places the debate in a Christian context of increasingly tight systems of religious control over books.This dissertation concludes with a comparison of cultural developments in the Jewish and Christian world such as the rise of textual communities, questions of anthropomorphism, heresy, and the structure of academic institutions.Through cognizance of the milieu and audiences of the authors, both Jewish and Christian, we can come to a more nuanced understanding of religious, cultural, and intellectual currents of thirteenth-century northern France.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Michigan, 2008.School code: 0127
AHC interview with Adele Monteser Wardle.
No full text03/16/2008Adele Wardle née Monteser was born on Dec. 10, 1916, in Vienna, Austria. She left Austria in 1939, traveling to Italy and France, where she was arrested in Angoulème as an Enemy Alien. She arrived in the United States in January 1940.Austrian Heritage Collectio
AHC interview with Gertrude Stevens.
No full textGertrude Stevens née Hoffmann was born 1928 in Vienna, Austria, where she lived in Hietzing, Vienna’s 13th District. Gertrude and her brother grew up in a protective family environment, where religion did not play a major role, as her parents were celebrating both Chanukah and Christmas. She was still a child during Kristallnacht, but she remembered the local synagogue burning. Her father was arrested and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. In March 1939, the family escaped via Czechoslovakia and France to the USA. Shortly after their arrival, the family – fearing further persecution - converted to a Protestant denomination. They first settled in Chicago where Gertrud became a teacher, teaching grades 1-7 in Chicago’s metropolitan area for 40 years until her retirement in 1988. In 1948 she married Gustav Schwarz, and they had two sons. Eventually, Gertrude Stevens settled in Atlantis, Florida.Austrian Heritage Collectio
AHC interview with Otto Altschuler.
No full textJuly 25, 2008Otto Altschuler was born 1920 in the Fischern district of Karlsbad (today Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic). He grew up in a household comprising of his parents, one brother and a maid. In about 1934, he joined a Zionist youth group. His parents were imprisoned by Nazi forces, and after their release they immigrated to New York. The Straus family (owners of Macy’s department store) was their sponsors. Otto Altschuler joined the army and later worked for the Goldscheider ceramics company.Austrian Heritage Collectio
Anticlerical alliances: Jews and the Church question in Germany and France, 1783--1905.
No full textBeginning with the Enlightenment, European Jews expressed their visions of progress and pluralism through polemics against Catholicism and the Catholic Church. This dissertation explores the development of this Jewish criticism in Germany and France, starting with the statements of Jewish authors in the late eighteenth century and concluding with the debates surrounding the separation of Church and State in France in 1905. These polemics ranged from moderate criticism of Catholicism as anti-modern to elaborate theories of Jesuit conspiracies for world domination. Showing the pervasiveness of anticlerical and anti-Catholic tropes in the writings of German and French Jews, this study contends that anticlericalism stood at the foundation of modern Jewish politics in Western Europe. Throughout the nineteenth century, Jews' ability to criticize the Catholic Church remained a gauge of their integration into liberal and republican circles and of the opportunities they had to articulate themselves politically. Complicating the scholarship on European Jews' efforts to join the middle-classes through the appropriation of positive bourgeois values, this work focuses on the role of 2 polemics against anti-modern groups in the development of Jewish ideas of progress and citizenship.Focusing on this common element of Jewish secularism and political articulation, the dissertation adds a unifying perspective to the disaggregated narrative of differing German and French models of integration. In both countries, Jews perceived the campaign against the Catholic Church as a battle fought simultaneously for the emancipation of Jewry and the victory of genuinely German or French concepts of freedom against religious despotism. Anticlericalism thus became an expression of Jews' national belonging to their respective states. At the same time, it was part of transnational European discourses on liberal---and Jewish---solidarity in the face of perceived encroachments of the Catholic Church. Only towards the end of the nineteenth century did the trajectories of Jews in Germany and France diverge in this respect. Whereas German Jews found anticlericalism less persuasive after the rise of antisemitism in the 1880s, French Jews were reinforced during the Dreyfus affair in their sense that anticlerical alliances would guarantee their liberty and equality.Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Chicago, 2008.School code: 0330
Ambivalence toward Christianity in the Kabbalah of Abraham Abulafia.
No full textThis dissertation is devoted to an investigation of the conflicted attitude toward Christianity demonstrable in the writings of the kabbalist Abraham Abulafia (1240--ca. 1291). Abulafia's hostility toward Christianity is explicit and emphatic. He partakes of most of the polemical arguments raised against Christians by the fellow Jews of his day. On the other hand, Abulafia's absorption of Christian doctrines is equally clear and central. In fact, Abulafia goes beyond this absorption of doctrine to accord a place of key importance in his own messianic self-conception to the figure of Jesus. The latter Abulafia viewed as the transgressive element within his own inner psyche. Abulafia, in kind with many of the kabbalists of his day, viewed Jesus as the epitome of idolatry, and he discusses the extent to which this inner idolatrous element tempted him. For Abulafia, the threat of such temptations manifested itself in the form of demons. These, by his own testimony, dogged him as he sought to commune with the Active Intellect. We will explore the fashion in which these demons embodied Abulafia's powerful attraction to Christianity. The latter Abulafia characterizes as the forbidden feminine element, while the demons poised against him threatened Abulafia with emasculation. The implications of Abulafia's attitudes toward Christianity lend themselves to psychoanalytic investigation. Abulafia's ambivalent feelings toward Christianity ran to the core of his psyche, providing the subtext for his mystical doctrine and sense of his own messianic mission and demonstrating the role of the forbidden other in the construction of self. Abulafia, in his mystical thought and practice, seeks to subsume Christian influences within a synthetic whole. By such means he intended to overcome the self-other dichotomy, with redemptive consequences.Thesis (Ph.D.)--New York University, 2008.School code: 0146
Reading medieval religious disputation: The 1240 "debate" between Rabbi Yeh&dotbelow;iel of Paris and Friar Nicholas Donin.
No full textThis dissertation takes as its subject the Latin and Hebrew accounts of a much-studied event: the Jewish-Christian Disputation of 1240. In medieval Europe's first formal religious debate, Friar Nicholas Donin challenged Rabbi Yeh&dotbelow;iel of Paris over the legitimacy of the Talmud. After the disputation, Donin and Yeh&dotbelow;iel wrote individual accounts of their experiences.This dissertation concentrates on the texts of the two disputants and suggests a new approach to reading these texts. Based on the records of the 1240 Debate, this dissertation demonstrates that the authors' goals in writing polemic were not necessarily or exclusively to offer a response to their antagonists.Read as a historical narrative, Yeh&dotbelow;iel's document reveals that it is less an account of the debate than a manual for future Jewish disputants. Moreover, because Yeh&dotbelow;iel's intended audience consisted of learned Jews, he was able to write in melitza, a pastiche of biblical verses in rhymed prose which is impenetrable to the uninitiated. Both explicitly and subtextually, Yeh&dotbelow;iel provided words of encouragement to his readers, as well as subtle anti-Christian invective.Donin's Latin record addressed a Christian, clerical audience, as this was the population with both the ability and the interest in reading such literature. As such, Donin's account must be understood as addressing ecclesiastical concerns, notably the development of unmonitored texts. In an increasingly text-oriented environment, unmonitored texts such as the Talmud were feared as potential catalysts for heretical or offensive ideas. This dissertation places the debate in a Christian context of increasingly tight systems of religious control over books.This dissertation concludes with a comparison of cultural developments in the Jewish and Christian world such as the rise of textual communities, questions of anthropomorphism, heresy, and the structure of academic institutions.Through cognizance of the milieu and audiences of the authors, both Jewish and Christian, we can come to a more nuanced understanding of religious, cultural, and intellectual currents of thirteenth-century northern France.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Michigan, 2008.School code: 0127
Overlapping jurisdictions: Confessional boundaries and judicial choice among Christians and Jews under early Muslim rule.
No full textThis study examines the legislative responses of Christian and Jewish religious elites to the problems posed by the appeal of their coreligionists to judicial systems outside their communities. Focusing on the late seventh--early eleventh centuries in the region between Iraq in the east and present-day Tunisia in the west, the project explores the multiplicity of judicial systems that coexisted under early Muslim rule in order to reveal the complex array of social obligations that bound individuals across confessional boundaries. By examining the incentives for appeal to external judicial systems on the one hand and the response of minority confessional elites on the other, the thesis fundamentally alters our conception of the social history of the Near East in the early Islamic period. Contrary to the prevalent scholarly notion of a rigid social setting, strictly demarcated along confessional lines, a comparative study of Christian and Jewish legal behavior under Muslim rule exposes a considerable degree of fluidity across communal boundaries. The transcendence of religious affiliations threatened to undermine the position of traditional religious elites. In response, these elites acted vigorously to reinforce communal boundaries, censuring recourse to external judicial systems and even threatening transgressors with excommunication.I begin this study with an analysis of pre-Islamic precedent by surveying late antique judicial systems. I then consider the Muslim judicial setting during the first centuries following the Arab takeover. In both cases, I seek to illustrate the wide choice of judicial systems, both formal and informal, available to contemporary individuals. Following these two introductory chapters, I turn to examine the Christian and Jewish judicial organizations after the Muslim conquest, the challenges that faced these organizations, and the legislative response of Christian and Jewish religious elites to these challenges. I conclude my study with a comparative discussion of the social changes undergone by Christian and Jewish communities under Muslim rule, reconsidering questions of authority, boundaries, and allegiance.The study relies heavily on two main bodies of literary materials: (1) Christian legal codices (including ad hoc rulings), issued primarily between the late seventh and tenth centuries. This material largely derives from the East-Syrian Church in Mesopotamia and the West-Syrian Church in the Fertile Crescent. (2) Geonic responsa: the widespread exchange of questions and answers between local Jewish communal leaders throughout the Near East and their spiritual superiors, the geonim, in Baghdad. Most of these questions originated from North Africa between the ninth and eleventh centuries.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Princeton University, 2008.School code: 0181
AHC interview with Maximilian Lerner.
No full textAugust 26, 2008Maximilian Lerner was born 1924 in Vienna, Austria. He grew up in Vienna’s 3rd District and went to high school at the 'Akademisches Gymnasium Wien'. He and his family left Vienna in May 1938. They emigrated to Paris (France), where they lived until 1940. From there they went on to Portugal and then to the United States, where they arrived in April 1941. Lerner joined the army and worked for the OSS. He was stationed in Europe until 1946 (France and later Germany). After he returned to the US he studied at Columbia University. He then worked as a businessman until his retirement in New York City.Austrian Heritage Collectio
AHC interview with Frank P. Grad.
No full textDecember 8, 2008Frank Grad was born 1924 as Franz Paul Grad in Vienna, Austria. He lived with his parents and his sister in the second district, Leopoldstadt. Following “Anschluss” in 1938 his father was deported to Dachau. In December 1938, he and his sister, Eva, fled on a Kindertransport to England, where they lived with foster parents until their father joined them in England. Relatives of the Grads arranged the necessary papers for the family, and they were reunited with the children’s mother in New York. After serving 3 months in the American army, Frank Grad went to Columbia University on the G.I. Bill. Afterwards he worked as a lawyer, focusing on environmental law. He and his wife Lisa, née Szilagyi retired in New York, NY.Austrian Heritage Collectio