In 1322, a Jewish doctor named Abner entered a synagogue in the Castilian city of Burgos and began to weep in prayer. Falling asleep, he dreamed of a "great man" who urged him to awaken from his ...slumber. Shortly thereafter, he converted to Christianity and wrote a number of works attacking his old faith. Abner tells the story in fantastic detail in the opening to his Hebrew-language but anti-Jewish polemical treatise,Teacher of Righteousness. In the religiously plural context of the medieval Western Mediterranean, religious conversion played an important role as a marker of social boundaries and individual identity. The writers of medieval religious polemics such asTeacher of Righteousnessoften began by giving a brief, first-person account of the rejection of their old faith and their embrace of the new. In such accounts, Ryan Szpiech argues, the narrative form plays an important role in dramatizing the transition from infidelity to faith. Szpiech draws on a wide body of sources from Christian, Jewish, and Muslim polemics to investigate the place of narrative in the representation of conversion. Making a firm distinction between stories told about conversion and the experience of religious change, his book is not a history of conversion itself but a comparative study of how and why it was presented in narrative form within the context of religious disputation. He argues that between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, conversion narratives were needed to represent communal notions of history and authority in allegorical, dramatic terms. After considering the late antique paradigms on which medieval Christian conversion narratives were based, Szpiech juxtaposes Christian stories with contemporary accounts of conversion to Islam and Judaism. He emphasizes that polemical conflict between Abrahamic religions in the medieval Mediterranean centered on competing visions of history and salvation. By seeing conversion not as an individual experience but as a public narrative,Conversion and Narrativeprovides a new, interdisciplinary perspective on medieval writing about religious disputes.
Jews, Christians, and Muslims all have a common belief in the sanctity of a core holy scripture, and commentary on scripture (exegesis) was at the heart of all three traditions in the Middle Ages. At ...the same time, because it dealt with issues such as the nature of the canon, the limits of acceptable interpretation, and the meaning of salvation history from the perspective of faith, exegesis was elaborated in the Middle Ages along the faultlines of interconfessional disputation and polemical conflict. This collection of thirteen essays by world-renowned scholars of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam explores the nature of exegesis during the High and especially the Late Middle Ages as a discourse of cross-cultural and interreligious conflict, paying particular attention to the commentaries of scholars in the western and southern Mediterranean from Iberia and Italy to Morocco and Egypt. Unlike other comparative studies of religion, this collection is not a chronological history or an encyclopedic guide. Instead, it presents essays in four conceptual clusters ("Writing on the Borders of Islam," "Jewish-Christian Conflict," "The Intellectual Activity of the Dominican Order," and "Gender") that explore medieval exegesis as a vehicle for the expression of communal or religious identity, one that reflects shared or competing notions of sacred history and sacred text. This timely book will appeal to scholars and lay readers alike and will be essential reading for students of comparative religion, historians charting the history of religious conflict in the medieval Mediterranean, and all those interested in the intersection of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim beliefs and practices.
Aunque los escritores del s. XII como Pedro Alfonso y Pedro el Venerable de Cluny atacaron las ideas musulmanas sobre Jesús y María, los autores polémicos de los ss. XIII y XIV a veces presentaron ...las mismas ideas de manera positiva y describieron al musulmán como un 《testigo》 de las ideas cristianas ante los judíos. En los textos del dominico Ramon Martí, el Corán mismo sirve como una 《prueba》 de las doctrinas cristianas sobre Jesús y María y en textos como el Mostrador de justicia de Abner de Burgos/Alfonso de Valladolid, a los musulmanes se los describe como 《nazarenos》. El estudio de estas imágenes permite distinguir entre la representación de los musulmanes en los textos anti-judíos y su representación en los textos anti-islámicos. Este artículo sugiere que, en los textos anti-judíos de los ss. XIII y XIV, son más determinantes las normas de la polémica anti-judía que el juicio sobre el islam que se observa en la polémica anti-musulmana.
Chubut Province, in Patagonia, Argentina, is home to a group of Afrikaans-speaking Boers, descendants of those who–starting in 1902–came to Argentina from the region of present-day South Africa. ...Although little Afrikaans is spoken among fourth- and fifth-generation community members, many in the third generation (60 years and older) still maintain the language. According to Joshua Fishman’s model of generational language shift, the Boers’ Afrikaans should have been largely diluted by the third generation; older community members today should have little functional knowledge of the language, and their children and grandchildren none. The goal of this paper is to explore the persistence of bilingualism in the Argentine Boer community and explain why the changes normally associated with the third generation of immigrants are only now being seen in the fourth and fifth generations. On the basis of bilingual interviews with living community members, we argue that the community’s attitude toward Afrikaans as a language of group identity, as well as the relative isolation of the community in rural Patagonia in the first half of the 20th century, were both decisive factors in delaying the process of linguistic assimilation. Only in the middle of the 20th century, when the community came into greater contact with Argentine society as a result of modernization and schooling in the region, did the process of linguistic integration begin in a measurable way.
En este artículo se presentan y analizan las citas árabes del Qurʼān y el ḥadīṯ escritas en caracteres hebreos y traducidas al latín, que se hallan en el Pugio Fidei (Puñal de la fe) del polemista ...dominico Ramón Martí (m. después de 1284). Éstas son de gran interés, pues constituyen el único ejemplo de citas en lengua árabe en su obra y nos proporcionan, además, información sobre las fuentes de Martí y sobre la conexión directa entre el uso de lenguas originales y la estrategia retórica de su obra polémica.
Astrolabes in Medieval Cultures brings together fifteen studies on the astrolabe in the Middle Ages. By considering sources and instruments from Muslim, Christian, and Jewish contexts, this volume ...provides state-of-the-art research on the history and use of the astrolabe.
L'hérésie absente Szpiech, Ryan
Archives de sciences sociales des religions,
04/2018, Letnik:
63, Številka:
182
Journal Article
Dans le Moreh Ẓedeq (Le Maître de justice) – une polémique anti-juive écrite en hébreu et traduite en castillan –, l'auteur Alfonso de Valladolid (m. V. 1347), connu aussi comme Abner de Burgos, ...raconte l'histoire des communautés juives karaïtes au xiie siècle dans la péninsule Ibérique et ce qu'il appelle leur « conversion forcée » au judaïsme rabbinique. Alfonso raconte cette histoire afin d'inspirer le doute religieux parmi ses lecteurs juifs. Il représente la puissance coercitive comme un aspect inhérent à la société juive ibérique, fournissant ainsi un contexte logique qui lui permet de développer sa polémique contre « l'hérésie » juive. Alfonso suggère que sa propre lecture christologique du Talmud peut être imposée à ses lecteurs pour inspirer leur conversion au christianisme.
In his Moreh Ẓedeq (Teacher of Righteousness) – an anti-Jewish polemic written in Hebrew and translated into Castilian – Alfonso de Valladolid (d. ca. 1347), known also as Abner of Burgos, tells the story of the Karaite Jews of the Iberian Peninsula in the twelfth century, speaking specifically of their "forced conversion" to Rabbinical Judaism. Alfonso tells this story in order to inspire religious doubt in his Jewish readers. He depicts coercive force as an inherent aspect of Iberian Jewish society, providing a logical context in which to develop his anti-Jewish polemic against Jewish « heresy ». Alfonso suggests that his particular reading of the Talmud can justifiably be imposed on his readers in order to inspire their conversion to Christianity.
En el Moreh Ẓedeq (Mostrador de justicia) – una polémica anti-judía escrita en hebreo y traducida al castellano – Alfonso de Valladolid (m. ca. 1347), también conocido como Abner de Burgos, relata la historia de los judíos caraítas en la península ibérica del s. xii, hablando en particular de su "conversión forzosa" al judaísmo rabínico. El motivo de Alfonso al contar esta historia es fomentar la duda religiosa entre sus lectores judíos. Presenta la coerción como un aspecto inherente de la sociedad sefardí, y de esta manera crea un contexto lógico que le permite desarrollar su polémica contra las « herejías » judías. Alfonso sugiere que está justificado imponer en sus lectores su propia lectura cristológica del Talmud para así inspirar su conversión al cristianismo.
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