Popular ideas about what it means to be a minority may change, but incidents of state-sanctioned violence remain eerily similar across millennia, explains Hazel D. Cole Fellow Brendan Goldman, a historian of the medieval Islamic world.
Annegret Oehme shares the stories of the nearly forgotten Yiddish knights' tales that inspired centuries of storytellers, both Jews and non-Jews alike.
Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela's travel writing shows that Jews in medieval Iraq and Kurdistan lived in (relative) peace and freedom, countering narratives of universal misery and oppression, grad fellow Jeffrey Haines writes.
Has anti-Semitism always been the same, or have ideas about Jewishness, and suspicion towards Jews, changed over time? In this episode, guest Ana Gómez-Bravo helps to answer these questions by looking at the lives of Jews and “conversos” (Jewish converts to Christianity) in medieval Spain, exploring how Catholic authorities tried to define and restrict their Jewish and converso residents.
Contrary to the stereotypes, the biggest bankers, traders, and financiers in medieval Europe were Christians, not Jews, writes graduate fellow Kerice Doten-Snitker.
Anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish expulsions in medieval Germany were engineered for political gain, writes Grad Fellow Kerice Doten-Snitker, much like anti-Semitism today.
Shem Tov de Carrión's "moral proverbs" about human nature and right rulership are surprisingly relevant today, Graduate Fellow Vivian Mills writes.
Graduate Fellow Vivian Mills shows how all-too-familiar patterns of discrimination and exclusion affected Sephardic Jews in the Middle Ages.
