Essays on Jewish Culture

This paper includes two essays:

-A jewish-Christian Symbiosis: The culture of Early Ashkenaz, Ivan G. Marcus :

Ashkenazic Jews living in Northern and Eastern Europe differ from Sephardic Jews from Southern Europe in their respective relationships with surrounding religions. Whereas Sephardic Jews were very integrated in the society they were living in, which was composed of both Muslims and Christians, Ashkenazic culture was a much more isolated one. Ashkenazic Jews developed a very ambiguous relationship with Christians as they both rejected and integrated aspects of Christian religion at the same time. The author's thesis is that although the persecution of Ashkenazic Jews by Christians is the most commonly accepted view, members of both religions were more often in contact than is believed. Moreover, they were both attracted by the other religion to the point of taking over certain aspects of it, even if each denigrated the other. This very ambiguity is essential in the way Ashkenazic Jews built their own identity in relationship with Christians.

- Urban Visibility and Biblical Visions: jewish culture in Western and Central Europe in the Modern Age, Richard I. Cohen

The Emancipation brought a whole new paradigm for European Jews in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The willing from the countries they were living in to better integrate them led the Western and Central European Jews to reposition themselves in relation to their surrounding environment. The essay analyzes the acculturation of the European jewish population through the reorganization of their public and private spaces as well as the consequences that this new reality had on a major jewish element: the Bible.