Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France

by Susan L. Einbinder

When Crusader armies on their way to the Holy Land attacked Jewish communities in the Rhine Valley, many Jews chose suicide over death at the hands of Christian mobs. With their defiant deaths, the medieval Jewish martyr was born. With the literary commemoration of the victims, Jewish martyrology followed. Beautiful Death examines the evolution of a long-neglected corpus of Hebrew poetry, the laments reflecting the specific conditions of Jewish life in northern France. The poems offer insight into everyday life and into the ways medieval French Jews responded to persecution. They also suggest that poetry was used to encourage resistance to intensifying pressures to convert.


The educated Jewish elite in northern France was highly acculturated. Their poetry--particularly that emerging from the innovative Tosafist schools--reflects their engagement with the vernacular renaissance unfolding around them, as well as conscious and unconscious absorption of Christian popular beliefs and hagiographical conventions. At the same time, their extraordinary poems signal an increasingly harsh repudiation of Christianity's sacred symbols and beliefs. They reveal a complex relationship to Christian culture as Jews internalized elements of medieval culture even while expressing a powerful revulsion against the forms and beliefs of Christian life.


This gracefully written study crosses traditional boundaries of history and literature and of Jewish and general medieval scholarship. Focusing on specific incidents of persecution and the literary commemorations they produced, it offers unique insights into the historical conditions in which these poems were written and performed.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Judaism, France, Jewish, Religion

232 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 2002

Reviews

[Anatolikon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Einbinder examines Jewish martyrological poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to argue that it is useful for understanding Jewish aspirations towards life and death and some quotidian concerns. The poems also serve as polemic pieces, which Einbinder posits increased the gulf between Christians and Jews. The texts reflect some contemporary interaction with Latin hagiography and were primarily written by and for and elite, educated group of males. Books can also be martyrs.

[AskHistorians]

"Everyone knows" the story of Jews in the Middle Ages: moneylending, pogroms, blood libel, exile. Einbinder's study of Jewish martyr chronicles and songs challenges the conception you didn't know you had that medieval Jews were defined solely by persecution. She draws out an amazing amount of details about everyday life, how Jews coped practically and theologically with Christian oppression--and, not incidentally, allows Jewish literature itself to stand as proof of just how vibrant these communities really were.