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In the first three centuries after the crucifixion of Christ, the relationship of the early church with Jews was dominated by anxieties about the identity of Christianity as a separate religious movement whose faithful included Gentiles as well as Jews. The debate between the Apostles Paul and Peter over circumcision and the decision to abandon compulsory circumcision “in the flesh” (the Old Covenant) did not abate worries that Jews would influence early Christians to “judaize.” This chapter, however, focuses on the perception of the Jew in Christian thought after Christianity became the dominant religious movement in the Mediterranean Basin and Western Europe. Its focus is on thinkers in Western (Roman Catholic) Christendom from the fifth century to the close of the fifteenth century.
What status should Jews, who refuse to accept Christ's Messiahship, have in a majority Christian society? This question exercised the minds and drained the inkwells of numerous Christian theologians throughout the medieval period. As it will become clear in this chapter, the work of St. Augustine in the early fifth century helped to establish a theological framework for a form of grudging religious pluralism in which Jews had a place in Christian society. The Augustinian concept of the Jews as a “witness people” to be tolerated proved to be enduring and became the guiding policy of the papacy. From the twelfth and thirteenth centuries onward, however, many theologians were influenced by the works of Jewish converts to Christianity and their “revelations” about the Talmud and rabbinical Judaism. The result was a distinct hardening of attitudes towards Jews and, in some cases, a renewed questioning of their status in Christian society. Just as significantly, the rise of a polemical Christian tradition that focused on the Talmud was to have very serious consequences for Christian–Jewish relations in the modern era.
St. Augustine's “Witness People”
The first Christian theologian to formulate a clear status for Jews in a majority Christian society was the prolific theolo-gian St. Augustine, bishop of Hippo in North Africa (354–430). To understand Augustine's doctrine regarding the Jews, it is important to remember the historical context in which the bishop was writing.
In October 2012, I was invited to give a research seminar paper on anti-Jewish propaganda produced in the late medieval and early modern Iberian world at an Australian university. The title of the paper included the term “antisemitic propaganda” and the terms “antisemitic” and “antisemitism” were used a few times during the paper. In the question and answer session that followed the paper, several academics in the audience—historians of twentieth-century Europe—vigorously questioned the appropriateness of using the concept of “antisemitism” in a pre-modern context. I was forcefully reminded that antisemitism is a “racial hatred of Jews,” linked to the rise of “scientific racism” in the nineteenth century. Therefore, whilst “modern” hatred of Jews is racial, pre-modern hatred of Jews was distinguished and defined by its purely religious character. It was the height of absurdity, a terrible anachronism even, for a historian to use the concept of “antisemitism” in a medieval or early modern context.
Such a reaction will not come as a surprise to historians who have worked on the subject of anti-Jewish sentiment and propaganda in medieval Christian Europe. “Antisemitism” is certainly a nineteenth-century term that defies any facile attempt to define it. Kenneth L. Marcus has articulated the crux of the problem:
To open up the question of the definition of anti-Semitism is to encounter one puzzle after another, each opening into the next like a set of Russian nesting dolls. To begin with, are we defining an attitude, a form of conduct, or an ideology or pathology?
In a twenty-first-century context, “antisemitism” has been used to define, alternatively, a refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the existence of a Jewish homeland (the State of Israel), criticism of Zionism as an ideology and movement, or indeed sometimes even criticism of Israeli government policies in Gaza and the West Bank. Some writers have even argued that these now constitute a “new” form of “antisemitism,” adding another layer of complexity to the problem of defining “antisemitism.” Even if it is reduced to its vaguest (and most imperfect) definition as “a hatred of Jews,” the use of “antisemitism” is problematic. Does it merely mean a hatred of Jews defined as a specific racial/ethnic group?
Eighteenth-century Britain is often understood as a time of commercial success, economic growth, and improving living standards. Yet during this period, tens of thousands of men and women were imprisoned for failing to pay their debts. The Poverty of Disaster tells their stories, focusing on the experiences of the middle classes who enjoyed opportunities for success on one hand, but who also faced the prospect of downward social mobility. Tawny Paul examines the role that debt insecurity played within society and the fragility of the credit relations that underpinned commercial activity, livelihood, and social status. She demonstrates how, for the middle classes, insecurity took economic, social, and embodied forms. It shaped the work that people did, their social status, their sense of self, their bodily autonomy, and their relationships with others. In an era of growing debt and the squeeze of the middle class, The Poverty of Disaster offers a new history of capitalism and takes a long view of the financial insecurities that plague our own uncertain times.
In the spring of 1797, when French invasion appeared likely, the Spithead and Nore mutinies successively immobilized the two Royal Navy fleets responsible for home defence. The Spithead mutineers gained more pay and greater food rations for all Royal Navy sailors, and a general pardon for themselves. The Nore mutiny ended in collapse, courts martial, and the execution of approximately twenty-eight prominent mutineers. In their scale and potential danger, these fleet mutinies rank among the most serious manifestations of collective resistance in eighteenth-century Britain. In complexity, they far exceeded single-ship mutinies like the Bounty or Hermione. The mutineers deliberately subverted symbols of the legitimate rule of officers and deployed them in support of their own rival regime. “Counter-theatre” allowed the mutineer leaders to perpetuate their rule with minimal recourse to coercion by combining familiar symbols of naval order, new mutineer power structures, and sailors’ traditions of resistance. As such, the mutinies speak to wider literatures: to histories of the age of revolutions, to the revolutionary Atlantic, and to histories of popular protest and resistance.
The article analyses the development of agricultural penal colonies in Italy, focusing on their margins and borders. The first section focuses on Italy's frontier with overseas territories that was assumed in discussion of the location of penal colonies following Italian unification. The article also highlights some of the factors behind the effective lack of deportation and transportation of Italians overseas. The second section explores Italy's largest agricultural penal colony, Castiadas, in Sardinia and, more generally, the borders between convicts and free citizens and between penal territory and free territory. My thesis is that penal colonies were partly designed to discipline populations in adjacent territories and that their economic and social organization served as a development model for rural Italy more widely.
The study considers the economics of the oil palm (Elaeis guinensis) to rural farmers in a rural community in south-eastern Nigeria. It compares the economic benefits of all products of the oil palm industry – palm oil, palm kernel, timber, palm wine and brooms. It posits that the most important product of the oil palm to the Enugu Ezike farmer is oil palm wine. This contrasts with the view that holds palm oil and palm kernel as the chief products of the oil palm. In a study conducted in Enugu Ezike, findings reveal that annual revenue from palm wine surpasses the six-yearly income from palm oil, palm kernel and brooms together. The study employs an eclectic framework of data collection, involving oral interviews, focus group discussions, participant observation, and the use of secondary sources. The oil palm is by every standard the most economically important tree crop and proceeds from it have positively influenced the socio-economic life of the rural communities, and as a result it has improved their living conditions.
This article examines coastal defence in East Norfolk between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. From 1802 until 1932 sea defence between Happisburgh and Winterton was the responsibility of the Commissioners of Sewers for the Eastern Hundreds of Norfolk, more commonly known as the Sea Breach Commission (SBC). This article explores the geographies of authority shaping sea defence, with the SBC a body whose relationship to the local and national state could be uneasy. The article outlines the SBC’s nineteenth-century roles and routines, and examines its relationship to outside expertise, including its early hiring of geologist William Smith. The article reviews challenges to the SBC’s authority following late nineteenth-century flood events, details its early twentieth-century routines, and examines disputes over development on the sandhills. The article details the SBC’s dealings with an emerging national ‘nature state’, around issues such as coastal erosion and land drainage, matters which led to the SBC’s demise following the 1930 Land Drainage Act. The article concludes by considering the SBC’s contemporary resonance in a time of challenges to the role of the nature state, and anxieties over coastal defence.
This article focuses on the way that staff and guardians in the rural Nottinghamshire workhouse of Southwell sought to exert control and containment over pauper inmates. Fusing together local and central records for the period 1834–71, including locally held punishment books and correspondence at The National Archives, Kew (TNA), we argue that the notional power of the workhouse authorities was heavily shaded. Most paupers most of the time did not find their behaviour heavily and clumsily controlled. Rather, staff focused their attention in terms of detecting and punishing disorderly behaviour on a small group of long-term and often mentally ill paupers whose actions might create enmities or spiral into larger conflicts and dissent in the workhouse setting. Both inmates and those under threat of workhouse admission would have seen or heard about punishment of ‘the usual characters’. This has important implications for how we understand the intent and experience of the New Poor Law up to the formation of the Local Government Board (LGB) in 1871.
Using about 1,730 probate inventories, this article studies the wealth of peasant farmers in Sweden for the years 1750, 1800, 1850 and 1900. Average wealth grew rapidly, tripling over the nineteenth century, but it did not grow equally: the Gini coefficient for the farmers’ wealth grew from 0.46 in 1750 to 0.73 in 1900. Farmers who lived close to the major grain markets in Stockholm and the mining district of Bergslagen were wealthier than others, as were farmers on fertile plains and, in 1900, those living in coastal areas. Increased market access – in terms of cities and foreign demand – meant that farmers well placed in terms of geography and infrastructure benefited much more than farmers on what became the periphery. The diversity of farmers’ wealth grew, as did their financial sophistication.
The civilian food shortages and accompanying malnutrition that characterised the latter stages of the First World War were instrumental in fundamentally changing the course of European history. In Russia, food shortages were a key underlying factor in precipitating the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, while in Germany, food shortages led to the so-called ‘turnip winter’ of 1917, which effectively helped to undermine commitment to the war effort and contribute to the country’s defeat. In spite of Britain’s precarious dependence on imported food, and the shipping losses inflicted by German U-boats, the population was less badly affected. This achievement has been attributed to the work undertaken by Lord Rhondda, the second food controller, whose actions were characterised as the ‘heroic age of food control’. This article uses evidence from official government reports, newspapers and diaries, memoirs and biographies to challenge the prevailing historiography about the success of food control measures in Britain during the First World War. It shows that the Ministry of Food under Lord Rhondda’s period of tenureship was not only indecisive, but that efforts to save the nation from malnutrition, if not actual starvation, were in large part the result of initiatives implemented at the local level.
The collective management of irrigation is an essential factor in agrarian development, both present and past. However, the relationship of irrigation associations with the state remains underexplored, despite the increasingly important role played by water policies in the modern world. The present article examines this relationship in Spain over the last two centuries. Our results suggest that, first, the state played a decisive part in the emergence and evolution of irrigation associations, and this belies the assumption of the traditional origin of these institutions; second, that farmers, despite being subject to the regulatory framework, enjoyed substantial autonomy in the management of water resources; and, third, that the relationship between local associations and the state changed over time, in response to political regime changes and the transformation of irrigation agriculture. When the state tried to impose authoritarian policies upon irrigation users, these reacted by developing unprecedented forms of organisation.