Survey
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
Self-hating Jew wikipedia , lookup
Origins of Rabbinic Judaism wikipedia , lookup
The Invention of the Jewish People wikipedia , lookup
History of the Jews in Gdańsk wikipedia , lookup
Jewish views on evolution wikipedia , lookup
Interfaith marriage in Judaism wikipedia , lookup
Jewish military history wikipedia , lookup
Index of Jewish history-related articles wikipedia , lookup
Jewish religious movements wikipedia , lookup
Europe: Ancient and Medieval only in his fortitude over personal losses in the fire (details of which are fascinating) (p. 259). Mattern has little interest in my interests, the quality of Galen’s pharmacology or the continuing value of his medicine (I believe his preventive medicine would improve modern health care), but why should she? She places him beautifully and convincingly in his own world, concluding that he was arrogant and possibly misogynistic, but also passionate and a good doctor (p. 289). JOHN WILKINS University of Exeter MARISTELLA BOTTICINI and ZVI ECKSTEIN. The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70–1492. (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World.) Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. 2012. Pp. xvii, 323. $39.50. The exhaustive research of S. D. Goitein, which eventuated in his remarkable five-volume A Mediterranean Society (1967–1993), has proven conclusively that during the first half of the Middle Ages Jews in the sphere of Islam, who constituted the overwhelming majority of worldwide Jewry, were thoroughly diversified in their economic pursuits, with the sole exception of involvement in agriculture. As the vitalization of northern Europe began during the late tenth and eleventh centuries, Jews made their way into this rapidly developing region. There they encountered considerable resistance, which resulted in constriction of their economic outlets. As a result, northern European Jews became heavily concentrated in business and banking, and this early concentration continued to a significant extent in European Jewish life down into modernity, thus creating the misleading imagery of Jews as exclusively business people over the ages. For the Jews of the medieval and modern Christian West, the concentration in business has raised an intriguing question. Was it the result—at least in part—of the emphasis on literacy in Jewish religious tradition? Since the centerpiece of Jewish liturgy involves the regular public reading of the Bible, which listeners were expected to follow closely, and since Jewish oral law is supposed to be studied as well, literacy was an important value in medieval and modern Jewish religious life. Researchers have recently suggested that this religious valorization of literacy may have played a role in Jewish business success during the medieval and modern centuries in addition to fitting Jews for achievement in modern higher education. At first blush, Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein seem to contribute to this burgeoning sense of the importance of literacy in Judaism and Jewish life. Unfortunately, their book pushes the insight much too far, and in the process fashions a series of significant distortions. At the outset, the authors indicate that they intend to answer several pertinent questions about Jewish history. These questions begin with the lack of Jewish farming, proceed to why the Jews became “an urban population of traders, entrepreneurs, bankers, finan- AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 229 ciers, lawyers, physicians, and scholars,” and then move on to population issues (p. 1). The authors hypothesize answers that might—they believe—be given by an Israeli Jew, a European, and an economist. Interestingly and problematically, they do not adduce conclusions advanced by historians who have investigated these issues. More importantly, they present the questions as directly linked to one another and proceed to propose a single development in the Jewish past that explains all these facets of Jewish experience. This is the first major flaw in the book, since there is no reason to assume one unified explanation for what was in fact a protracted and complex set of historical developments. The evolution that eventuated in Jewish retreat from agriculture and heavy Jewish involvement in business and banking took place over the course of many centuries and in multiple venues. It cannot be clarified by one simple explanation. After noting the answers to their questions as provided by the hypothetical observers, the authors add their own response. In their view, “these distinctive characteristics of the Jewish people were the outcome of a profound transformation of the Jewish religion after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE.” (p. 2). This transformation purportedly “shifted the religious leadership within the Jewish community and transformed Judaism from a cult based on ritual sacrifices in the temple to a religion whose main norm required every Jewish man to read and to study the Torah in Hebrew and to send his sons from the age of six or seven to primary school or to synagogue to learn to do so” (p. 2). According to Botticini and Eckstein, the transition took place from the third to the sixth centuries and profoundly affected Jewish life thereafter. This constitutes the book’s second major flaw. To my knowledge, there is no authority on late antique Judaism who would subscribe to the authors’ portrayal of the evolution of Judaism during that period. Contemporary students of Jewish life in late antiquity do not read rabbinic sources as accurate reflections of reality. There is deep suspicion of the sources that Botticini and Eckstein treat with utmost confidence. This scholarly restraint in the reading of rabbinic sources from late antiquity has led to uncertainty as to the protracted process whereby the rabbis came to exercise leadership within the Jewish world. That rabbis had the authority to erect the kind of perfected schooling system described in this book is—given the current state of research—unthinkable. It is in fact by no means clear when such a system might have first been operative among Jews. Alongside their incorrect assessment of rabbinic sources, Botticini and Eckstein once again erroneously reduce a lengthy and complicated process to a single development. Judaism’s evolving emphasis on literacy surely did play a role in Jewish business and educational successes over the ages. A study that charts the evolution of this religiously valorized literacy and its impact is a desid- FEBRUARY 2014 230 Reviews of Books eratum. I hope that the insufficiencies of The Chosen Few stimulate such an undertaking. ROBERT CHAZAN New York University JANNEKE RAAIJMAKERS. The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda, c. 744 –c. 900. (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, Fourth Series.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2012. Pp. xix, 357. $99.00. In The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda, Janneke Raaijmakers offers her readers a multidimensional portrait of an influential monastery in the early medieval era: the Abbey of Fulda, situated in the eastern zone of Carolingian power in what is today Hesse in Germany. Raaijmakers zooms in on this impressive abbey using archaeology, architecture, wall paintings, book inventories, charters, vitae of abbots, epistles, monastic commentaries, miracle tales, Easter tables, relics, poetry, inscriptions, monk lists, annales necrologici, and historical chronicles. The book is structured around the tenure of various abbots, from the “founder” Sturmi (d. 779) through the rulers of the late ninth-century community, Hatto, Thioto, and Sigihard. The abbacy of Carolingian luminary Hrabanus Maurus (d. 856) receives two full chapters, marking his rule as essential both in the Carolingian era and in this book. The ordering of each chapter, however, goes beyond a simple chronological listing of abbot after abbot: certain chapters highlight the sources under investigation, including architectural diagrams, necrologies, or inventories of relics, while others focus on historiographical issues, such as the alleged primacy of the Rule of St. Benedict, the relationship between court and cloister, and the supposed deterioration of Fulda at the end of the Carolingian age. Raaijmakers centers her investigation of Fulda on the collective memory of its monks, a historical consciousness evolving over the course of two centuries and inscribing itself onto textual, liturgical, and material media. Specifically, Raaijmakers argues that the monks of Fulda created a number of strategies for representing themselves to the world outside of the cloister and to the sometimes contentious community within. In fact, this theme of “inside/outside” is a controlling one in the book, inviting audiences to peer into the ritual core of the abbey from a number of perspectives: from the monastery’s far-flung estates to the royal court, from its satellite houses to the dwellings of lay donors, from its strategic positioning of the relics of martyrs amid the sacred terrain in and around Fulda to the paths traversed by Roman relic dealers who moved back and forth across the Alps on a seasonal basis distributing their wares. The eight chapters provide an institutional history of a vigorous early medieval monastery, offering insight into the actual practices of abbey management. Fulda boasts one of the largest collections of charters from the early medieval era, some 2,000 documents in total covering fifteen regions of the AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW empire. These charters (along with other sources) open a window into the economic realities facing a Carolingian monastery like Fulda. Raaijmakers reminds her readers that even a powerful and wealthy abbey could experience periods of economic depression: gifts to the abbey could decline during political upheavals both inside and outside of the cloister, and abbots, even the illustrious Hrabanus Maurus, could find themselves in situations where they could not afford to light lamps with oil, having to resort instead to pig fat. The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda is more than an institutional or economic history of one abbey, however. Raaijmakers pursues her theme of Fulda’s self-representation down different paths of inquiry. Particularly fascinating is the way in which the “motherhouse” interacted with its numerous satellite cells (cellae) scattered across the region and beyond, creating a system in which the cellae could be more open to the laity, providing pastoral care and proximity to relics for women and men alike without compromising the ritual purity of the main cloister. Raaijmakers synthesizes classic and more recent work on the abbey’s famous and controversial building projects, especially the monumental program of Abbot Ratger (r. 802– 817), which sparked the best-documented monastic strike in Carolingian history. Yet the abbey’s collective memory could recall—and then forget—points of controversy such as the tumultuous tenure of Ratger. Far from being disgraced, the former abbot died in the cella on the Frauenberg, a short walk from the motherhouse, and his body was buried in abbatial style only to be discovered incorruptus in 1525 by the prior of another Fulda cell, the Petersberg. In addition to showing how community identity works both inside and outside the cloister, the book’s eight chapters stress the fluidity of ritual practices at major monasteries like Fulda, and how textbook narratives about the hegemony of the Benedictine Rule or the primacy of Roman liturgical styles in the Carolingian Empire simply break down upon a careful consideration of the evidence. Raaijmakers demonstrates how the program of royal reform (correctio) played out on the ground level in the eastern half of the empire. She also uses Fulda as an example of how Christianization of the countryside worked less through the baptism of pagans and more through the “pastoralisation of landed property” (p. 225). Her work builds on existing scholarship on history and memory in the Carolingian era, but adds something new: the role of material culture, especially reliquaries and sacred spaces, in the production of monastic memory. The theory of collective memory at Fulda, however, could have been pressed more throughout the eight chapters and particularly in the conclusion. The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda represents a significant contribution both to Carolingian history and to the broader history of Christian monasticism, a field which typically overlooks this complex yet crucial period. Moreover, this monograph brings together for the first time the massive amount of Euro- FEBRUARY 2014