“The” Red Jews

“The” Red Jews
Author: Andrew Colin Gow
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 444
Release: 1995
Genre: History
ISBN: 9789004102552

The German legend of the Red Jews, a medieval conflation of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel with the biblical destroyers Gog and Magog, articulated throughout the Middle Ages and well into the sixteenth century a fundamentally antisemitic strain of popular apocalypticism. This undigested piece of medievalia disappeared as more strictly biblical narratives of the End replaced medieval myth. As a result, the Red Jews have not been noticed by modern historians though they were a universally-known feature of German apocalyptic belief for over three centuries.

The Red Jews: Antisemitism in an Apocalyptic Age, 1200-1600

The Red Jews: Antisemitism in an Apocalyptic Age, 1200-1600
Author: Andrew Colin Gow
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2021-10-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 900447806X

This book is the history of an imaginary people — the Red Jews — in vernacular sources from medieval and early modern Germany. From the twelfth to the seventeenth century, German-language texts repeated and embroidered on an antisemitic tale concerning an epochal threat to Christianity, the Red Jews. This term, which expresses a medieval conflation of three separate traditions (the biblical destroyers Gog and Magog, the 'unclean peoples' enclosed by Alexander, and the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel), is a hostile designation of wickedness. The Red Jews played a major role in late medieval popular exegesis and literature, and appeared in a hitherto-unnoticed series of sixteenth-century pamphlets, in which they functioned as the medieval 'spectacles' through which contemporaries viewed such events as Turkish advances in the Near and Middle East. The Red Jews disappear from the sources after 1600, and consequently never found their way into historical scholarship.

The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination

The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination
Author: Leonid Livak
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 513
Release: 2010-09-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0804775621

This book proposes that the idea of the Jews in European cultures has little to do with actual Jews, but rather is derived from the conception of Jews as Christianity's paradigmatic Other, eternally reenacting their morally ambiguous New Testament role as the Christ-bearing and -killing chosen people of God. Through new readings of canonical Russian literary texts by Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, Babel, and others, the author argues that these European writers—Christian, secular, and Jewish—based their representation of Jews on the Christian exegetical tradition of anti-Judaism. Indeed, Livak disputes the classification of some Jewish writers as belonging to "Jewish literature," arguing that such an approach obscures these writers' debt to European literary traditions and their ambivalence about their Jewishness. This work seeks to move the study of Russian literature, and Russian-Jewish literature in particular, down a new path. It will stir up controversy around Christian-Jewish cultural interaction; the representation of otherness in European arts and folklore; modern Jewish experience; and Russian literature and culture.

Saracens, Demons, & Jews

Saracens, Demons, & Jews
Author: Debra Higgs Strickland
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2003
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780691057194

These images, which reached a broad and socially varied audience across Western Europe, appeared in virtually all artistic media, including illuminated manuscripts, stained glass, sculpture, metalwork, and tapestry.".

Peoples of the Apocalypse

Peoples of the Apocalypse
Author: Wolfram Brandes
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2016-05-24
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 3110472635

This volume addresses Jewish, Christian and Muslim future visions on the end of the world, focusing on the respective allies and antagonists for each religious society. Spanning late Antiquity to the early modern period, the collected papers examine distinctive aspects represented by each religion’s approach as well as shared concepts.

The friars and Jews in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

The friars and Jews in the Middle Ages and Renaissance
Author: Susan E. Myers
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2004
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004113983

Historians--some specializing in the Middle Ages, some in religion, and some in a particular European country--describe the major areas scholars are working in with regard to the friars' preaching to and writing about the Jews from the early days of the mendicant order about the turn of the 13th century to the 16th century. Their topics include the.

Sons of Saviors

Sons of Saviors
Author: Rebekka Voß
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2023-09-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 151282433X

Envisioned as a tribe of ruddy-faced, redheaded, red-bearded Jewish warriors, bedecked in red attire who purportedly resided in isolation at the fringes of the known world, the Red Jews are a legendary people who populated a shared Jewish-Christian imagination. But in fact the red variant of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel is a singular invention of late medieval vernacular culture in Germany. This idiosyncratic figure, together with the peculiar term "Red Jews," existed solely in German and Yiddish, the German-Jewish vernacular. These two language communities assessed the Red Jews differently and contested their significance, which is to say, they viewed them in different shades of red. The voyage of the Red Jews through the Jewish and Christian imagination, from their medieval Christian nascence, through early modern Old Yiddish literature, to modern Yiddish culture in Eastern Europe, Palestine, and America, is the story of this book. By studying this vernacular icon, Rebekka Voß contributes to our understanding of the formation of minority awareness and the construction of Ashkenazic Jewish identity through visual cultural encounters. She also spotlights the vitality of vernacular culture by demonstrating how the premodern motif of the Red Jews informed modern Yiddish literature, and how the stereotype of Jewish red hair found its way into Jewish social critiques, political thought, and arts through the present day. Sons of Saviors is a story about power: the Yiddish reappropriation of the Red Jews subverted the Christian color symbolism by adjusting the focus on redness from a negative stereotype into a proud badge of self-assertion. The book also includes in an appendix the full text of a significant Yiddish tale featuring the Red Jew, translated by the author.

The Monstrous Middle Ages

The Monstrous Middle Ages
Author: Bettina Bildhauer
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2003-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780802086679

The figure of the monster in medieval culture functions as a vehicle for a range of intellectual and spiritual inquiries, from questions of language and representation to issues of moral, theological, and cultural value. Monstrosity is bound up with questions of body image and deformity, nature and knowledge, hybridity and horror. To explore a culture's attitudes to the monstrous is to comprehend one of its most important symbolic tools. The Monstrous Middle Ages looks at both the representation of literal monsters and the consumption and exploitation of monstrous metaphors in a wide variety of high and late-medieval cultural productions, from travel writings and mystical texts to sermons, manuscript illuminations and maps. Individual essays explore the ways in which monstrosity shaped the construction of gender and sexual identity, religious symbolism, and social prejudice in the Middle Ages. Reading the Middle Ages through its monsters provides an opportunity to view medieval culture from fresh perspectives. The Monstrous Middle Ages will be essential reading for anyone interested in the concept of monstrosity and its significance for both medieval cultural production and contemporary critical practice.

The Antichrist and the Lollards: Apocalypticism in Late Medieval and Reformation England

The Antichrist and the Lollards: Apocalypticism in Late Medieval and Reformation England
Author: Curtis V. Bostick
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2021-10-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004474536

This study examines expectations of imminent judgment that energized reform movements in Late Medieval and Reformation Europe. It probes the apocalyptic vision of the Lollards, followers of the Oxford professor John Wycliff (1384). The Lollards repudiated the medieval church and established conventicles despite officially sanctioned prosecution. While exploring the full spectrum of late medieval apocalypticism, this work focuses on the diverse range of Wycliffite literature, political and religious treatises, sermons, biblical commentaries, including trial records, to reveal a dynamic strain of apocalyptic discourse. It shows that sixteenth-century English apocalypticism was fed by vibrant, indigenous Wycliffite well springs. The rhetoric of Lollard apocalypticism is analyzed and its effect on carriers and audiences is investigated, illuminating the rise of evil in church and society as perceived by the Lollards and their radical reform program.