The ideology of reform and changing ideas concerning Jews in the works of rupert of deutz and hermannus quondam iudeus
In 1965 Lea Dasberg postulated that one result of the Investiture Struggle was that the political and economic status of the Jews began to erode. Jews, as the perceived allies of the emperor, were cast in the role of the enemies of an increasingly assertive Church intent on establishing its freedom from all non-ecclesiastical interference.' This theory has not received widespread acclaim; nonetheless, there is an obvious appeal in the suggestion that one should investigate possible connections between the Gregorian Reform and changing twelfth-century attitudes of Christians to Jews. The religious revival toward the end of the eleventh century, which spilled over into the twelfth century, was marked by the attempt of the reforming popes to disengage the Church from lay authority. In the eyes of popes such as Gregory VII, only a Church unimpeded by temporal encroachment could play its allotted function to create in society iustitia, or justice. And that meant total compliance of all who lived in that society with the life ordained by Jesus Christ.2 Only a universal Church that was properly steered by Rome, through papal legates and bishops who looked to Rome for instruction, could effectively play this role. One side of the Reform movement thus concentrated on the structure which the Church needed in order to Christianize society.
Ashkenazic Talmudic Interpretation and The Jewish–Christian Encounter
This study looks anew at the interactions and possible influences between the monastic and cathedral school masters in Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the leading contemporary scholars of the Talmud in northern France and Germany known as the Tosafists. By focusing on significant commonalities in interpretational methods and institutional structures, as well as on the formulations of various critics, the contours of these interactions can be more precisely charted and assessed.
Scholarship and Intolerance in the Medieval Academy: The Study and Evaluation of Judaism in European Christendom
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN THE FIELD of literary criticism have emphasized the influence of texts and textual traditions in shaping the world views of individuals and the cultures of societies. Perceptions of meaning, structure, and authority in literature, as well as the extent of its accessibility, reflect and contribute to manifold components of a community's ethos, ranging from the political and socioeconomic to the religious and intellectual. It follows that new methods for studying particular texts, or any alteration in the prevailing level of familiarity with them, may ultimately affect existing patterns of interpersonal relations and hitherto regnant ideologies in a given culture. Viewed within the context of the rise of urban schools and universities in.lhigh medieval Europe, the orientation of Christian scholars to the biblical and rabbinic literature of the Jews offers a fascinating case in point. Christianity had always acknowledged its debt to the Old Testament,' but the medieval church could not forget that a community of unbelievers-a people unique in its ability to withstand Christianity's conquest of the Roman world and to secure legal standing in Western Christendom nonetheless-served as the guardian of the original Hebrew text of the Old Testament and maintained the most literal observance of its precepts. Modern scholars have long recognized that, as the focus of medieval intellectual creativity shifted from monastery to urban school, Christian concern for the Hebraica veritas and rabbinic exegesis of the Bible increased markedly. This process had several implications for scholarly method and religious ideology. As their interest in Hebraic texts rose, Christian scholars of the period came to espouse the view that these texts, to serve as a valid source of religious and historical knowledge, had to be measured against the beliefs and instruction of contemporary Jews. Yet when influential churchmen, true to the Scholastic spirit of their age, turned to these beliefs as a subject for academic scrutiny in their own right, they perceived that such a comparison threatened to