Explore the vast range of titles available.

The persistence of anti-Jewish and antisemitic stereotypes throughout history, from medieval times to the present, reveals the enduring power of visual and cultural narratives in shaping public perceptions of Jews. This paper examines how Yvan Attal’s film Ils sont partout effectively satirizes these stereotypes, exposing their absurdity and the dangers of such ingrained prejudices. By connecting modern satire to historical instances of antisemitism, this study emphasizes the necessity of challenging and critically analyzing these harmful depictions. While the forms of anti-Jewish and antisemitism evolve over time, the underlying biases remain disturbingly consistent across cultures and eras.

Since historians assume that the Rhodes blood libel of 1840 was a small-scale version of the contemporaneous Damascus Affair, Rhodian Jews, too, are believed to have been rescued by Moses Montefiore and other European Jews. Yet, unlike the Damascus crisis that turned into an international political emergency, the one on Rhodes was treated by the Ottomans as a domestic legal case and handled in accordance with the Tanzimat laws (a series of modernizing reforms), the 1840 penal code in particular. This article, based on newly discovered evidence, examines the legal means and mechanisms used to manage the Rhodes crisis, arguing that its resolution, advocated by the Jewish leadership in Istanbul, can be adequately understood only in the context of the Tanzimat judicial reform. This was the first instance when the Sublime Porte complied with its European allies' demand that it guarantee its non-Muslim subjects equal treatment and legal protection.

This article discusses the relations between Jews and Christians in Edirne during the late Ottoman period. At the time, approximately half the city’s inhabitants were Greeks, and at least ten percent were Jews. The Jewish quarter of the city was surrounded by areas with a Greek majority, while a few Armenians also lived alongside the Greeks and Jews. Drawing on diverse sources from the Ladino, Hebrew, French, English, and Greek press, I argue that an ambivalent coexistence prevailed between Jews and Christians in Edirne, where hostility and enmity acted as catalysts for, rather than obstacles to, transculturation. Analysis of two case studies illustrate this ambivalent coexistence. The first concerns the reflection of the blood libel waged by Greeks in Istanbul in 1874 in Jewish and Armenian discourse in Edirne. The second is the discourse on the historical symbiosis between Jews and Greeks embodied in lectures by the maskil Abraham Danon in 1892 to a Greek audience in the city. Both issues sparked considerable interest among Jews and Christians, not only within the Ottoman Empire but also throughout the global Jewish and Greek diasporas.

This article discusses a series of investigations from 1729 to 1730 into an alleged ritual murder in the town of present-day Niasvizh. In the eighteenth century, Niasvizh, then called Nieśwież, belonged to the Radziwiłłs, one of the wealthiest and most powerful families of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Unlike similar cases during this period, this ritual murder investigation did not follow the standard script of interrogation by torture and public execution, in part because the private town lord fostered a culture of legality and predictability that allowed the Jewish community the opportunity to organize an effective defense. The multiple investigations carried out by the town magistracy and the lord’s hand-picked officials also revealed a dense network of socioeconomic and neighborly relations between Catholic elites and Jews of both genders, a relationship that excluded non-Catholics and noncitizen residents of the town. In such an environment, blood libel served as a weapon of resentment and revenge for the disenfranchised and the excluded in order to destabilize the class oligarchy. The failure of the accusation to fundamentally alter relations between Catholics and Jews underscores the extraordinary significance of the supposedly “feudal” private town lord in enforcing cooperation and upholding legality, creating a framework in which the Jewish community had greater room to maneuver to combat a blood libel accusation than in royal towns or in even more “modern” states.

Moses and Gitla Ritter were accused of murdering the charwoman Franciszka Mnichówna. The accusation and trials which followed revoked the blood libel. In three circumstantial trials (1882–1886), despite the lack of evidence, the Ritters were found guilty and sentenced to death. Owing to the “ritual” nature attributed to the presumed murder, the trials became media events, followed by an international audience. The author discusses the course of the trials, considering whether and how the municipalities in which they took place exploited their unexpected popularity for promotional purposes. What importance did the urban elites attach to the trials? How can we interpret the three guilty verdicts, and what symbolic significance can be assigned to them?

This book analyzes the ways in which literaryworks and cultural discourses employ the construct of the Jew's body inrelation to the material world,  either to establish or to subvert dominantcultural norms and stereotypes. It argues that materiality also embodiesfictional constructions that should be approached as a material-semioticinterface.

This book challenges the standard conception of the Middle Ages as a time of persecution for Jews. Jonathan Elukin traces the experience of Jews in Europe from late antiquity through the Renaissance and Reformation, revealing how the pluralism of medieval society allowed Jews to feel part of their local communities despite recurrent expressions of hatred against them. Elukin shows that Jews and Christians coexisted more or less peacefully for much of the Middle Ages, and that the violence directed at Jews was largely isolated and did not undermine their participation in the daily rhythms of European society. The extraordinary picture that emerges is one of Jews living comfortably among their Christian neighbors, working with Christians, and occasionally cultivating lasting friendships even as Christian culture often demonized Jews. As Elukin makes clear, the expulsions of Jews from England, France, Spain, and elsewhere were not the inevitable culmination of persecution, but arose from the religious and political expediencies of particular rulers. He demonstrates that the history of successful Jewish-Christian interaction in the Middle Ages in fact laid the social foundations that gave rise to the Jewish communities of modern Europe. Elukin compels us to rethink our assumptions about this fascinating period in history, offering us a new lens through which to appreciate the rich complexities of the Jewish experience in medieval Christendom.

Hannah Johnson's article for this symposium, and her masterful book, provide a historical and psychological template for understanding the perennial obsession among certain Christian writers with the \"blood libel.\" My brief response to Johnson emphasizes Friedrich Nietzsche's expansive aphorisms in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) that analogously frame some Christian responses to Judaism around the phenomenon of \"ressentiment.\"

The blood libel is sometimes described as a paradigmatic example of the irrational qualities of antisemitic thinking. Certainly it is difficult to understand the history of this legend without recourse to some theory concerning the psychological operations of antisemitism. This paper reviews a common narrative that has emerged in recent scholarship to account for medieval antisemitism. This explanatory narrative privileges structures of repression, projection, and identity formation as critical to the operation of legends such as the blood libel. This common story of explanation is considered in order to ask what other paths remain to be explored in the discussion of the psychological aspects of antisemitism. .Two scholars, Anthony Bale and Gavin Langmuir, offer possible models for formulating new questions at this difficult confluence of psychology and history.

While Mendel Beilis stood trial for murder in Ukraine, the small Jewish population of Quebec City in Canada pursued legal action against perpetrators of the blood libel. This article traces the attempts by Jewish populations in Quebec City, Montreal, Winnipeg, Manitoba, and in the small upstate New York town of Massena (USA), to use legal means to combat manifestations of the pernicious blood libel in North American locales. While each instance took place in unique social, political, and cultural contexts, what they share is a common belief by Jewish populations that they enjoyed full and emancipated citizenship rights, and that law was a tool available to them as citizens of North American democracies to combat these manifestations of Jew hatred.