While They Sing, Dance, and Make Merry: Song and Dance in the Medieval Jewish-Christian Encounter, 1100-1450
| Autor: | Kohn, Albert Evan, Schachter, Hannah Teddy |
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| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2022 |
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| DOI: | 10.5281/zenodo.7430684 |
| Popis: | This article seeks to explore the place of song and dance in the Jewish-Christian encounter within the geo-cultural region of Ashkenaz, that is northern France, England, and German lands, during the high and late Middle Ages. This was a period and region that saw such drastic changes in Jewish-Christian relations—oscillating between peaceful interaction, crisis, and violent persecution—that the complexities of their coexistence are hard to capture. It is the contention of this paper, however, that as two simple everyday activities that span not only the religious and mundane, but also the merry and morbid aspects of medieval life, singing and dancing serve as an excellent case study to address one central question currently permeating the historiography on medieval Jewish-Christian relations: While it has become clearer in recent years that Jewish and Christian communities were living neither completely isolated from, nor completely acculturated within one another in medieval urban spaces of northern Europe, in what ways did they both share with each other and distinguish themselves? By illuminating how the deep and pervasive diffusion of song and dance were shared and fluid across the various arenas of Jewish and Christian life together, the following will argue that a focus on such activities of European medieval culture allows us to see through it the range of relations that existed between Jews and Christians. It will enrich the field of medieval musical culture by placing a strong emphasis on Hebrew sources, especially rabbinic material, in this discussion, as it is a corpus which has not yet been brought into the discussion of medieval song and dance. Synthesizing these with Latin and vernacular texts, this socio-historical analysis will demonstrate how urban musical life led to substantive interreligious interactions in both thought and practice. Pre-Publication Version |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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