A Pious Belligerence: Dialogical Warfare and the Rhetoric of Righteousness in the Crusading Near East (Middle Ages Series) - Hardcover

Shachar, Uri Zvi

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812253337 ISBN 13: 9780812253337

Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

In A Pious Belligerence Uri Zvi Shachar examines one of the most contested and ideologically loaded issues in medieval history, the clash between Christians, Muslims, and Jews that we call the Crusades. He does so not to write about the ways these three groups waged war to hold onto their distinct identities, but rather to think about how these identities were framed in relation to one another. Notions of militant piety in particular provided Muslims, Christians, and Jews paths for thinking about both cultural boundaries and codependencies. Ideas about holy warfare, Shachar contends, were not shaped along sectarian lines, but were dynamically coproduced among the three religions.
The final decades of the twelfth century saw a rapid collapse of the Frankish and Ayyubid hegemonies in the Levant, followed by struggles for political dominion that lasted for most of the thirteenth century. The fragmented political landscape gave rise to the formation of multiple coalitions across political, religious, and linguistic divides. Alongside a growing anxiety about the instability of cultural boundaries, there emerged a discourse that sought to realign and reevaluate questions of similarity and difference. Where Christians and Muslims regularly joined forces against their own coreligionists, Shachar writes, warriors were no longer assumed to mark or protect lines of physical or political separation. Contemporary authors recounting these events describe a landscape of questionable loyalties, shifting identities, and unstable appearances.
Shachar demonstrates how in chronicles, apocalyptic treatises, and a variety of literary texts in Latin, French, Arabic, Hebrew, and Judeo-Arabic holy warriors are increasingly presented as having been rhetorically and anthropologically shaped through their contacts with their neighbors and adversaries. Writers articulated their thoughts about pious warfare through rhetorical devices that crossed confessional lines, and the meaning and force of these articulations lay in their invocation of tropes and registers that had purchase in the various literary communities of the Near East. By the late twelfth century, he argues, there had emerged a notion that threads through Christian, Muslim, and Jewish texts alike: that the Holy Land itself generates a particular breed of pious warriors by virtue of the hybridity that it encompasses.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Uri Zvi Shachar is Associate Professor in the Department of General History at Ben-Gurion University.

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Introduction

In the spring of 1211, a large group of French-speaking Jews reached the port of Acre with the intention of settling in the Land of Israel. A fifteenth-century chronicle states that this group numbered more than three hundred rabbis, and their families presumably, but even if this figure is somewhat exaggerated, a movement of this size is massive in medieval terms. Nor was it the first—a few years earlier, a smaller contingent from the south of France led by Jonathan ha-Cohen of Lunel took to the sea and reached the Holy Land via Egypt. Both groups, and subsequent ones, included eminent scholars who had made a name for themselves in the intellectual elite of the French-speaking rabbinical world. Sources tell us that the rabbis and their families first settled in Jerusalem, which a few decades earlier had been taken by Saladin. Between the First Crusade and 1187, the Holy City was closed to non-Christians, but under Ayyubid rule, the immigrants were welcome inside. Yet, plagued with inter- and intrareligious strife, as Judah al-Harizi famously observed, the city was not a particularly pleasant place during the first years of the thirteenth century. What is more, in 1219, the Ayyubid ruler al-Mu'azzam dismantled its walls in anticipation of the Fifth Crusade, making it less hospitable still. The Frenchmen subsequently moved to Acre, the acting capital of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, where their descendants and followers stayed until 1291. In the port city of Acre, they found a more cosmopolitan environment, home to groups and individuals professing every creed and speaking every language known around the Mediterranean.

What led to the formation of this unusually large and prominent group is a question that has long puzzled historians. Surely a combination of factors, political and theological, must have played a role in their decision to leave their homes and head east. But what is clear beyond doubt is that these rabbis never embarked on this journey in order to conquer the Holy Land; they were no crusaders. It is doubtful whether any of them were trained in the art of swordsmanship, much less in mounting a destrier. And yet, some of those who participated in this fateful crossing of the Mediterranean chose to depict it as the first phase of an eschatological war against the heathen. One author even declared that the true purpose of the journey was to liberate the Holy Land from the impurity that it suffered due to the presence of Christians and Muslims upon it. When the vanguard finishes to cleanse the land from the "Ishmaelites" and the "uncircumcised," he continues, then the messiah will be revealed in their midst and will champion several more cycles of war in which the Jews will finally emerge triumphant. While this portrayal is thoroughly fantastic—in the sense that none of the participants actually sought to instigate war against the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and its surroundings—and must have been appreciated as such by its contemporary readers, it had a tremendous impact on subsequent generations of Jewish authors living in Acre. Over the course of the thirteenth century, they penned multiple messianic treatises that, using a highly elusive language, staged the local Jewish community and the messiah in an imagined armed conflict against the enemies of their faith. Readers of these texts would hardly have missed the echoes of contemporaneous ideas that orbited in crusade and jihad literatures.

Those Jewish authors who resettled in Acre and their successors, in other words, found this language of holy war useful. Surprising as it may seem, they chose to engage with their neighbors in mobilizing traditions that thematized images of pious warfare in order to convey ideas about their presence in the Holy Land. What cultural and intellectual circumstances would have made these literary gestures possible? This book sets out to investigate this very question. That Acre would have facilitated these kinds of discursive strategies should come as no surprise. Throughout this period, Syria and Egypt saw a steady stream of immigrants from East and West as well as transient visitors, such as pilgrims, merchants, warriors, statesmen, and temporary ecclesiastic officials. Indeed, the Near East emerged as a major multicultural crossroads in which members of the various religious communities shared a common space that generated multiple opportunities for mutually defining interactions. Both in the Kingdom of Jerusalem and around it, European Jews and Christians lived among or maintained frequent contacts with their Muslim, oriental Jewish, and Orthodox Christian neighbors. If at first the political landscape in the Near East was polarized, this too started to change already before the end of the twelfth century. The era of political uncertainty that followed the fall of Frankish Jerusalem in 1187 and the death of Saladin in 1193 engendered frequent alliances across political, religious, and linguistic divides, as members of all three communities regularly collaborated with each other against rivals among their own coreligionists. This political fragmentation also brought about multiple opportunities for economic, social, and intellectual contacts between inhabitants in the region.

And yet for almost a century, the reigning paradigm in the study of the crusading era held the view that contacts between religious communities in the Near East were insignificant, if not in quantity, then in importance. Indeed, in both lay and academic circles, this period is characterized as one plagued with religious fanaticism and polarizing intercommunal discord. Postwar historians of the crusades, says Christopher Tyerman in his revealing survey of crusade historiography, were disillusioned by the prospects of a "benevolent colonialism" and saw the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem as an oppressive regime that had exploited the indigenous populations. Working against the backdrop of French and German scholars who were sympathetic toward the colonial ambitions of their own countries, historians trained in Britain and America (and later in Israel) asserted that the Franks did not adapt to the Near Eastern intellectual climate, nor were they tolerant toward the choices of their subordinates and neighbors. What is more, we are told that even as the Frankish elites came into the habit of consuming regional goods and adopting local architectural practices, they continued to cultivate European legal and institutional traditions and maintained a rigid separation from local communities. It is true that scholars, especially of art and intellectual history, have recognized that the crusading Near East constituted an important site of encounter. The assumption for a long time, however, has been that the Frankish territories served primarily as an impartial conduit through which goods of eastern provenance filtered to the West.

This picture was inscribed by generations of historians who, in search of ways to reaffirm their respective national myths, turned to the Middle Ages and identified the crusades as the site in which Europe was shaped through its rivalry with Islam. This attempt to invoke the authority of the past on behalf of various national impulses meant that histories of the crusades were necessarily conceived through notions of opposition and exclusion that, despite having been critiqued since the 1990s, are proving remarkably persistent. Both continental advocates of the crusading project as a benign colonial enterprise (Emmanuel Rey, René Grousset, etc.) and their less enthusiastic Anglophone critics (R. C. Smail, Dana Munro, and later Joshua Prawer, etc.) engaged in an intellectual project whose roots lay firmly in nineteenth-century sentiments. While the opinions of these scholars on the nature of intercommunal relations in the East varied depending on the political traditions that informed their...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0812253337
• ISBN 13: 9780812253337
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande