عنوان

Legal Inheritance, Indifference, Innovation, and Initiative:

TLpq2461614132

انگلیسی

Legal Inheritance, Indifference, Innovation, and Initiative:

[Thesis]

Ben-Ezra, Ilana

Raymond of Penyafort and the Jews (c. 1175-1275)

Chazan, Robert

New York University

2020

393

Ph.D.

New York University

2020

While historians examining thirteenth-century Jewish-Christian relations in Iberia and greater Europe have shown that Christian anti-Jewish violence and rhetoric increased, they have not explored whether this pattern also exists in coeval canon law, which was then flourishing. This raises questions about the degree to which normative law reflected concurrent intellectual and lay Christian anxieties about Jews and conceptions of Judaism. My dissertation begins filling that gap by exploring how Raymond of Penyafort (d. 1275), a leading legal scholar from Barcelona, approached Jews in his legal works and broader socioreligious activities. I argue that Raymond's normative legal texts echo coeval problematization of Judaism as a looming spiritual danger and actionable issues involving Jews - especially conversion - but not contemporaneous popular discourses dehumanizing Jews as monstrous threats to Christian welfare. However, I also show, contrary to the current historiography on Raymond, that he did not materially act on his theoretical concern for converting Jews. Raymond did not spearhead missionizing efforts targeting Jews, though his legal texts indicate that he indeed valued those endeavors. By studying Raymond of Penyafort's legal writings, I show that fear of Judaism's influence and framing of it as a pollutant occurred in Iberia beyond polemical or theological texts, evidencing its pervasiveness in thirteenth-century Iberian discourse concerning Jews. My project thus critically adds another dimension to our understanding of the landscape of thirteenth-century Christian discourses in Iberia about Jews preceding the Spanish Inquisition while also reframing the historiographical narrative surrounding Raymond. The Spanish Inquisition of the late fifteenth-century specifically targeted and persecuted converts to Christianity suspected of retaining ties to Judaism or Islam. This differs from the Church inquisition initiated in the 1230s that focused on identifying and correcting heretics within the Christian community. Further, this project similarly evidences the likelihood that canonists at the University of Bologna engaged with theological and polemical discourses that framed Jewishness and Judaism as a spiritual pollutant. Thus, the dissertation demonstrates how canon law transmitted and contributed to Christian thought's tacit acceptance of rhetoric painting Judaism as antithetical to Christianity. The dissertation bases its argument off Raymond's legal works, the Summa de Paenitentia (c. 1223 and 1236) and Summa de Matrimonio (c. 1236). The book accesses Raymond's views by comparing manuscripts of his works to those of earlier authors from which he copied when he wrote his own. Close textual comparison between Raymond's regulations concerning Jews to those of his sources allows us to pinpoint places where Raymond deviated and offered his own view. These variants enable insights about Raymond's articulated and implicitly expressed perspectives on Jews and Judaism. Reading Raymond's legal texts against later documents written about him by others describing his life's work sheds light on the degree to which Raymond implemented theoretical concerns about Jews that he expressed in his writings.

European history

Judaic studies

Medieval history

Religious history

Rhetoric

Theology

Ben-Ezra, Ilana

Chazan, Robert

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y