European University Institute Library

A historian in exile, Solomon ibn Verga, Shevet Yehudah, and the Jewish-Christian encounter, Jeremy Cohen

eng

Includes bibliography (pages 205-234) and index

index present

non fiction

A historian in exile

bibliography

945949926

Jeremy Cohen

Jewish culture and contexts

Solomon ibn Verga, Shevet Yehudah, and the Jewish-Christian encounter

Solomon ibn Verga was one of the victims of the decrees expelling the Jews from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s, and his Shevet Yehudah (The Scepter of Judah, ca. 1520) numbered among the most popular Hebrew books of the sixteenth century. Its title page lured readers and buyers with a promise to relate "the terrible events and calamities that afflicted the Jews while in the lands of non-Jewish peoples": blood libels, disputations, conspiracies, evil decrees, expulsions, and more. The book itself preserves collective memories, illuminates a critical and transitional phase in Jewish history, and advances a new vision of European society and government. It reflects a world of renaissance, reformation, and global exploration but also one fraught with crisis for Christian majority and Jewish minority alike. Among the multitudes of Iberian Jewish conversos who had received Christian baptism by the end of the fifteenth century, ibn Verga experienced the destruction of Spanish-Portuguese Jewry just as the Catholic Church began to lose exclusive control over the structures of Western religious life; and he joined other Europeans in reevaluating boundaries and affiliations that shaped their identities. --, Provided by publisher

Religious debate and disputation -- Tortosa -- Talmud and Talmudists -- Anti-Jewish libels -- Martyrs and martyrdom -- Conversos and conversion -- The author and his work: purpose and structure