Mark D. Meyerson. A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain. Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. xv, 272 pp.
In this elegantly produced volume, Mark Meyerson traces the life of a single Jewish community in Spain, Morvedre (he uses the Catalan name for the Valencian town generally known to medievalists as Murviedro and to modern Spaniards as Sagunto), from the anti-Jewish riots of 1391 through the Spanish J...
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| Format: | Electronic Review |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
2006
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| In: |
AJS review
Year: 2006, Volume: 30, Issue: 1, Pages: 201-203 |
| Further subjects: | B
Book review
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| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | In this elegantly produced volume, Mark Meyerson traces the life of a single Jewish community in Spain, Morvedre (he uses the Catalan name for the Valencian town generally known to medievalists as Murviedro and to modern Spaniards as Sagunto), from the anti-Jewish riots of 1391 through the Spanish Jewry's expulsion in 1492. Behind this exercise in local history, however, lies a broader intention: to revise the master narrative of Hispano-Jewish historiography according to which Jewish life in Spain after 1391 was a tale of almost unmitigated woe. By demonstrating that the century between 1391 and 1492 was not simply “a gloom-filled parenthesis” for Morvedre's Jews but instead “an era of remarkable resurgence” (3)—nay, “a Jewish Renaissance,” as the book's title provocatively proclaims—Meyerson challenges the regnant vision of Spain's Jewish communities as sliding almost inexorably toward expulsion after 1391. In making his case, he weds an awareness of the historical aerial view with a fluency in older and more recent historiographic trends and an extraordinary mastery of events on the ground. The result is a copiously documented, lucidly written exploration of a treasure trove of hitherto mostly unknown archival sources that dazzles with its wealth of detail and enlivens through regular recourse to vivid vignettes. |
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| ISSN: | 1475-4541 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Association for Jewish Studies, AJS review
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S0364009406270090 |