Böcker av Robert (New York University) Chazan

Chazan analyses how during the second half of the Middle Ages, damning imagery of Jews and Judaism proliferated, with a subsequent impact on broader Christian thinking about the trajectory of Jewish history. Portrayals of the Jewish past and future offered by major intellectual leaders, once ambiguous, became increasingly negative.

This 2003 study examines the techniques of persuasion adopted by the Jewish polemicists in order to reassure their Jewish readers of the truth of Judaism and the error of Christianity. At the very deepest level, these Jewish authors sketched out for their fellow Jews a comparative portrait of Christian and Jewish societies.

In this important synthesis of medieval Jewish history, Robert Chazan discusses the Jewish experience in Europe between AD 1000 and 1500. As well as being the story of medieval Jewry, the book also illuminates important aspects of majority life in Europe.

This book re-evaluates the prevailing notion that Jews in medieval Christian Europe lived under an appalling regime of ecclesiastical limitation, governmental exploitation and expropriation, and unceasing popular violence. Robert Chazan argues that, while Jewish life in medieval Western Christendom was indeed beset with grave difficulties, it was nevertheless an environment rich in opportunities; the Jews of medieval Europe overcame obstacles, grew in number, explored innovative economic options, and fashioned enduring new forms of Jewish living. His research also provides a reconsideration of the legacy of medieval Jewish life, which is often depicted as equally destructive and projected as the underpinning of the twentieth-century catastrophes of antisemitism and the Holocaust. Dr Chazan's research proves that, although Jewish life in the medieval West laid the foundation for much Jewish suffering in the post-medieval world, it also stimulated considerable Jewish ingenuity, which lies at the root of impressive Jewish successes in the modern West.