HI Laboratory ①
Exploring Religious Identity
in the Early Middle Ages
Jewish and Christian Perspectives on the Holy Land
The laboratory is concerned with Jewish and Christian perceptions and conceptualizations of a bounded space of “elastic borders”. Currently two projects are conducted in the lab: The Land of Israel in Geonic times explores questions concerning how Jews related to their ancestral homeland, questions of Jewish diaspora and identity formation in the early Middle Ages; a second project, Medieval Reception of the Roman Conquest of Jerusalem, investigates the medieval reception and interpretation of the Roman conquest of Jerusalem in 70 AD by the emperors Titus and Vespasian.
Project A
The Land of Israel in Geonic Times
The period between the Arab/Muslim conquests in the seventh century CE and the first crusade in the eleventh century, often referred to as the Geonic period, is a formative period in which important changes took place in Jewish biblical exegesis, law and prayer that would set the stage for later medieval and early modern, and even the rest of Jewish cultural and intellectual history. It was during this period that a new religious stream (the oldest) emerged, offering a scripturalist alternative to rabbinic Judaism, known as Karaism. In the Jewish communities under Islamic rule, processes of Arabisation were underway during these centuries, partly shifting intellectual power from the traditional centres of rabbinic learning in Iraq (Babylonia) back to Palestine and further west (North Africa, Spain, but also southern Italy). The Geonic period witnessed a transformation in the internal hierarchy of the Jewish rabbinic system of literary genres, with Jewish literature now being composed in Judeo-Arabic and Arabic, but also in the traditional languages Hebrew and Aramaic. The study of this literature provides insights into Jewish identity formation in the period, as well as Jewish-Christian and Jewish-Muslim interactions in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Islamic world.
Project B
The Medieval Reception of the Roman Conquest of Jerusalem (c.600-c.1200)
This project investigates the medieval reception and interpretation of the Roman conquest of Jerusalem in 70 AD by the emperors Titus and Vespasian, an event that brought the destruction of the Jewish Temple, just as it marked the end to a Jewish revolt. This momentous episode was reported in numerous medieval texts of diverse nature, purpose, and genre, straddling chronicles, anti-Jewish treatises, biblical commentaries, and sermon collections. Focussing on Latin texts and applying a discourse analysis, the project examines the episode’s use from the post-Roman world and early monastic exegetes (c.600) to the crusade movement and the university of Paris (c.1200). This aims at exploring why it was used in largely different intellectual and historical contexts, and how the authors incorporated meaningful interplay with contemporary phenomena such as the crusades or anti-Jewish politics. This scope becomes possible thanks to the exploitation of digitized source materials; and the objective is of wide-ranging pertinence, since medieval authors entangled the conquest with pivotal concerns: The concept of typology created meaningful causalities between distant events such as those of 70 AD and Jerusalem’s various medieval conquests, for example, those of 1099 and 1187. Or the relentless medieval anti-Judaism understood 70 AD’s conquest as the prototype for divinely sanctioned Jewish punishment, while constructing Christian identity in opposition to this group. And the metanarrative of Salvation History granted the conquest an important role in the trajectory leading up to the Apocalypse, which was supposed to happen in Jerusalem. Studying its use in the medieval period is, therefore, much more than the investigation of a particular event’s commemoration. This project will thus deliver a vital contribution to scholarship on the Middle Ages, including the dimension of how the past used the past, that is, how history was commemorated, put to use, and distorted in diverse genres of text.
