What is it like to practice your faith in an environment dominated by another? To evolve as a people when all of the world around you moves to religious and cultural rhythms very different from your own? To maintain your unity as a living community—and always to be aware of that sense of community—even when your numbers have been scattered across many lands, without a common government, a common country, or even a common language? Moreover, how might these circumstances affect not only your own history, but also the history of those other cultures through which you move? What might you take from them? What might you give them? For 10 formative centuries, the answers to questions like these helped define a developing Judaism, whose history was forever affected by its encounters with the surrounding social, economic, political, and intellectual environments of both medieval Islam and Christendom. Investigate the fascinating history of Jewish culture and society from the rise of Islam to the dawn of modernity in the 17th century, and learn how this faith maintained unity in the shadow of two other powerful faiths.
Between Cross and Crescent: Jewish Civilization from Mohammed to Spinoza
Investigate the fascinating history of Jewish culture and society from the rise of Islam to the dawn of modernity in the 17th century, and learn how this faith maintained unity in the shadow of two other powerful faiths.
01: On Studying Jewish History
This opening episode presents some preliminary observations about Jewish history and the approach taken with material often laden with ideological presuppositions.
32 min
02: The Rabbinic Legacy prior to Islam
After the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by the Babylonians, the increasing complexity of life in the remaining community gives rise to new sectarian groups.
30 min
03: The Beginnings of Jewish Life under Islam
With the rise of Mohammed's new religion in the 7th century, the cultural environment under which Jews lived in the Middle East, in North Africa, and in the Iberian Peninsula was transformed. But it is clear that early Islam was in dialogue with the Jewish tradition from its very inception.
30 min
04: Baghdad and the Gaonic Age
This episode examines the institutions that governed Jewish life in Baghdad, including the structure of (and threats to) rabbinic power and Jewish communal autonomy.
30 min
05: Saadia Gaon and His World
This episode begins your examination of the life and career of an intellectual giant whose meteoric rise to power offers a rich portrait of the community as a whole.
30 min
06: The Philosophy of Saadia Gaon
In writing a Jewish philosophy, Saadia Gaon sought to defend the integrity of the Jewish faith not only against his Muslim colleagues but against those rationalists who questioned its veracity and against the Karaites who undermined the rabbinic underpinnings of the Jewish tradition.
30 min
07: The Rise of the Spanish Jewish Community
The Spanish Jewish community begins to assert its independence of the hegemony of Baghdadian Jewry. Writing in Hebrew verse to distinguish themselves from their Arab counterparts writing in Arabic, they initiate a remarkable efflorescence of literary creativity for several centuries.
30 min
08: Judah ha—Levi’s Cultural Critique
Look at the work of Judah ha-Levi, whose writings denounce the excessive integration of Spanish cultural values into Judaism and the fusion of philosophy and Judaism.
30 min
09: Moses Maimonides’s Philosophy of Judaism
The lecture examines the work of Moses Maimonides, the dominant cultural figure within the Jewish world of his day and for centuries following his death, and whose masterpiece, The Guide to the Perplexed, originally composed in Arabic, achieved a revered status within the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian intellectual worlds.
30 min
10: Jewish Beginnings in Christian Europe
This lecture examines the emergence of Jews in Christian Europe, from their first appearances along trade routes to the beginnings of a system of communal authority and interconnectedness that transcended the local level, reflecting the emergence of what came to be called Ashkenazic Jewry.
30 min
11: The Church and the Jews prior to 1096
Beginning with the foundations of Church policy towards Jews in the Gospels themselves, this lecture looks at how Augustine's arguments shape the standard policy of the Church of antiquity and of the early Middle Ages.
30 min
12: The Crusades and the Jews
The fears of European Jews as to what the Crusades against Muslim "infidels" might mean to them prove accurate. Five thousand Jews die during the first crusade, some massacred by Christians; many take their own lives as martyrs.
30 min
13: Patterns of Jewish Culture—Rabbinic Learning
As Talmudic scholarship shifts geographically to northern France, the commentaries of a rabbi known to us as Rashi are an instant success and become indispensable guides to the study of biblical and rabbinic literature.
30 min
14: Patterns of Jewish Culture—Kabbalah
This lecture introduces us to Kabbalah, the collective traditions of Jewish mystical contemplation of the divine, and explores how its proliferation in the 13th century was, to a great extent, a negative reaction to the influence of rationalism and philosophy on the Jewish community.
30 min
15: Patterns of Jewish Culture—German Pietism
In Germany, a small community of Jews introduces a unique social philosophy and set of religious practices that come to be known as German pietism, whose colorful folklore and moral literature leave a lasting imprint on Jewish culture in later ages.
30 min
16: The Medieval Jewish-Christian Debate
The 12th and 13th centuries mark a re-evaluation of and departure from previous official Church policy regarding the Jews, with the prevalent Augustinian tolerance displaced by a more aggressive policy of vilifying Judaism and missionizing among Jews.
30 min
17: Understanding Medieval Anti-Semitism
Historians have offered a variety of explanations for the decline in medieval Jewish life from the 12th century on. We see that the reasons go well beyond Church doctrines alone, encompassing wider and deeper social, economic, and political issues.
30 min
18: Notes on the Medieval Jewish Family
This lecture places a sharper focus on a once-neglected area of medieval Jewish history: the study of Jewish women and their families, in relation to both male Jews and non-Jewish women.
31 min
19: The Decline and Expulsion of Spanish Jewry
Until the end of the 14th century, the Jewish community remained secure despite Christian hostility toward Jews elsewhere in Europe. All this changed in 1391, with a never-seen-before reaction by Jewish victims.
30 min
20: Italian Jewry in the Early Modern Period
By the end of the 15th century, new Jewish communities have emerged in Italy. Created in the context of significant social, political, and intellectual changes, they have a profound cultural impact - including the paradoxical results of ghettoization.
30 min
21: Kabbalah and Society in 16th-Century Safed
The Spanish emigration of 1492 infused new vitality into Jewish cultural and religious life in Ottoman lands, including an enormously influential interpretation of Kabbalah.
31 min
22: Shabbetai Zevi—The Mystical Messiah
This lecture examines the explosion of millenarian fervor within the Jewish community that is focused on the frenzied behavior of a self-proclaimed messiah named Shabbetai Zevi, whose nihilistic ideology proves to have wide appeal.
30 min
23: The Rise of Eastern European Jewry
Jews begin migrating to Poland in the 14th and 15th centuries. With few economic restrictions, they assume diversified economic roles for the Polish nobility and king, and Ashkenazic rabbinical scholarship reaches unsurpassed heights in the receptive political and social climate of Eastern Europe.
31 min
24: The Sephardim of Amsterdam
As Amsterdam invites former Jewish victims of Spanish persecution (forced by circumstance to convert) to settle within its borders, a vibrant new Jewish community is formed and becomes a significant incubator of modern Jewish consciousness.
31 min
About
Dr. David B. Ruderman is Joseph Meyerhoff Professor of Modern Jewish History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the Ella Darivoff Director of the university's Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. He was educated at the City College of New York, the Teacher's Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and Columbia University. He earned his rabbinical degree from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York and his Ph.D. in Jewish History from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Prior to taking his position at Pennsylvania, he held teaching positions at Yale University and the University of Maryland. At Maryland, he won the Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award. Professor Ruderman is the author of numerous books, articles, and reviews. His works include Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe and Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry's Construction of Modern Jewish Thought, for which he received the Koret Book Award. His book, The World of a Renaissance Jew: The Life and Thought of Abraham B. Mordecai Farissol, was honored with the JWB National Book Award in Jewish History. Professor Ruderman is president of the American Academy for Jewish Research and is the recipient of a lifetime achievement award for his work in Jewish history from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture.
