Lloyd P. Gartner, History of the Jews in Modern Times (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001)


Chapter 1: The Heritage of Medieval Judaism

Study Questions

1) Gartner remarks: “It is only a later conception that every religion is subjectively true for its believers and that emotional satisfaction and psychic benefits from religion count the most.” (page 2) What point is he making?

2) Gartner describes Judaism as an “activist religion” (page 2). Look up the word “activist.” Might he rather mean “activity-oriented” or ritualistic? Would you agree?

3) How might the way in which a “minority” group practices its religion shape its identity as well as its relations with the numerically dominant practitioners of another religion?

4) Society in “Old Regime” Europe was made up of corporations or classes. In what ways did the Jews make up such a corporate body?

5) What did education in the Jewish communities of Early Modern Europe consist of? In what ways was it, according to Gartner, “inadequate”? In what ways beneficial?

6) What region did Gartner refer to as the “flourishing center of world Jewry”? Why?

7) What does Gartner mean when he states that Marranos were “not Jewish” and “yet were not quite Christians either” (page 12)? Does Gartner contradict himself when he subsequently observes that a host of Marrano “prelates, scholars, poets, and statesmen who were wholly or partially of Jewish descent” were responsible for “much of Spain’s imperial greatness” (page 13)? In other words, can one be “not Jewish” but of “Jewish descent”?

8) What does Gartner mean by “Spanish racism” and when did it purportedly end?

9) What made Holland, and Amsterdam in particular, such an attractive place of settlement for Jews in the early seventeenth century?

10) Gartner observes that the papacy had “protected Jews for a millenium” but that this policy suddenly changed in the mid-sixteenth century. What are some of the reasons for the papacy’s change in attitude toward the Jews?

11) In a world in which everyone was beholden to someone in terms of both rights and obligations, to whom were the Jews beholden? How secure was this relationship?

 

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