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
Medieval Reception of the Roman Conquest of Jerusalem
The project examines the medieval reception and interpretation of the Roman conquest of Jerusalem in 70 AD by the emperors Titus and Vespasian. This event marked the end of a Jewish revolt and the destruction of the Jewish Temple. 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. Focusing on Latin texts, the aim here is to explore why the conquest was used in different contexts and genres, and how authors incorporated meaningful interactions with historical phenomena such as the Crusades or anti-Jewish politics. The project covers the period from c.400 to c.1200, from the late Roman Empire through the Church Fathers to the Crusades and the University of Paris. It exploits the possibilities of harvesting digitized source material, in order to examine why the same event was put to use in largely different intellectual and historical contexts.
Medieval authors related the Roman conquest to pivotal concerns of Christian existence, including the lore of typology that created causalities between events such as those of 70 AD and Jerusalem’s several conquests in the Middle Ages (such as 1099 or 1187); or the relentless medieval anti-Judaism that saw the conquest of 70 AD as the prototype of divinely sanctioned Jewish punishment, while constructing Christian identity in opposition to that group; and it formed part of the metanarrative of Salvation History which accords to such events a significant place in the trajectory leading up to the Apocalypse and the final battle between good and evil at the venue of Jerusalem. Studying the use of the conquest in the medieval period is, therefore, not only the investigation of a particular event’s commemoration, but relates to many pertinent dimensions that occupied and troubled the minds of contemporaries; in consequence, this project provides an important contribution to the understanding of the Middle Ages as such, and of how history is commemorated, put to use, and distorted in diverse genres of text.
