On the Word of a Jew

Description

What, if anything, does religion have to do with how reliable we perceive one another to be? When and how did religious difference matter in the past when it came to trusting the word of another? In today's world, we take for granted that being Jewish should not matter when it comes to acting or engaging in the public realm, but this was not always the case. The essays in this volume look at how and when Jews were recognized as reliable and trustworthy in the areas of jurisprudence, medicine, politics, academia, culture, business, and finance. As they explore issues of trust and mistrust, the authors reveal how caricatures of Jews move through religious, political, and legal systems. While the volume is framed as an exploration of Jewish and Christian relations, it grapples with perceptions of Jews and Jewishness from the biblical period to today, from the Middle East to North America, and in Ashkenazi and Sephardi traditions. Taken together these essays reflect on the mechanics of trust, and sometimes mistrust, in everyday interactions involving Jews.

Introduction: On the Word of a Jew, or Trusting Jewish History / Nina Caputo and Mitchell B. Hart

Section One: To Swear an Oath

1. Oaths, Vows, and Trust in the Bible / Robert S. Kawashima

2. "And in most of their business transactions they rely on this": Some Reflections on Jews and Oaths in the Commercial Arena in Medieval Europe / Ephraim Shoham-Steiner

3. The Oath of a Jew in the Thirteenth Century English Legal Context / Joshua Curk

4. What is an Infidel?: Jewish Oaths and Jewish History in the Making of English Trust and Tolerance / Mitchell B. Hart

5. Trusting Adolphe Crémieux: Jews and Republicans in Nineteenth-Century France / Lisa Leff

Section Two: The Business of Trust

6. "A kind of republic and neutral nation:" Commerce, Credit, and Conspiracy in Early Modern Europe / Joshua Teplitsky

7. Jewish Peddlers and Non-Jewish Customers in the New World: Between Profit and Trust / Hasia Diner

8. Belonging and Trustworthiness: Jewish Businessmen in the Public Rhetoric around the "Trustworthy Businessman" in Post-World War I Germany / Stefanie Fischer

Section Three: Intimacy of Trust

9. The Voice of a Jew? Petrus Alfonsi's Dialogi contra judaeos and the Question of True Conversion / Nina Caputo

10. A Return to Credibility? The Rehabilitation of Repentant Apostates in Medieval Ashkenaz / Rachel Furst

11. The Jewish Physician as Respondent, Confidant, and Proxy: The Case of Marcus Herz and Immanuel Kant / Robert Leventhal

Section Four: The Politics of Trust

12. Perspectives from the Periphery: The East India Company's Jewish Sepoys, Anglo-Jewry, and the Image of "the Jew" / Mitch Numark

13. Between Honor and Authenticity: Zionism as Theodor Herzl's Life-Project / Derek Jonathan Penslar

14. The Most Trusted Jew in America: Jon Stewart's Earnestness / Shaina Hammerman

Sujets

• Religión
• Jews
• Jewish studies
• Religious studies
• Oath
• List of country legal systems
• Vow
• Politics
• Judaism
• Business
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 14 janvier 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253037435
• Langue: English

Extrait

ON THE WORD OF A JEW
ON THE WORD OF A JEW
Religion, Reliability, and the Dynamics of Trust

Edited by Nina Caputo and Mitchell B. Hart
Indiana University Press
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
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1320 East 10th Street
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iupress.indiana.edu
2019 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Caputo, Nina, [date] editor. | Hart, Mitchell Bryan, [date] editor.
Title: On the word of a Jew : religion, reliability, and the dynamics of trust / edited by Nina Caputo and Mitchell B. Hart.
Description: Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018019382 (print) | LCCN 2018021056 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253037411 (e-book) | ISBN 9780253037398 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253037404 (pb : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Judaism-Relations-Christianity. | Christianity and other religions-Judaism. | Jews-Public opinion. | Gentiles-Attitudes. | Reliability.
Classification: LCC BM535 (ebook) | LCC BM535 .O48 2018 (print) | DDC 305.892/4-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018019382
1 2 3 4 5 24 23 22 21 20 19
In memory of Yarnton Manor
Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: On the Word of a Jew, or Trusting Jewish History / Nina Caputo and Mitchell B. Hart

Section One: To Swear an Oath

1 Oaths, Vows, and Trust in the Bible / Robert S. Kawashima

2 And in Most of Their Business Transactions They Rely on This : Some Reflections on Jews and Oaths in the Commercial Arena in Medieval Europe / Ephraim Shoham-Steiner

3 The Oath of a Jew in the Thirteenth-Century English Legal Context / Joshua Curk

4 What Is an Infidel?: Jewish Oaths and Jewish History in the Making of English Trust and Tolerance / Mitchell B. Hart

5 Trusting Adolphe Cr mieux: Jews and Republicans in Nineteenth-Century France / Lisa Leff

Section Two: The Business of Trust

6 A Kind of Republic and Neutral Nation : Commerce, Credit, and Conspiracy in Early Modern Europe / Joshua Teplitsky

7 Jewish Peddlers and Non-Jewish Customers in the New World: Between Profit and Trust / Hasia Diner

8 Belonging and Trustworthiness: Jewish Businessmen in the Public Rhetoric around the Trustworthy Businessman in Post-World War I Germany / Stefanie Fischer

Section Three: Intimacy of Trust

9 The Voice of a Jew? Petrus Alfonsi s Dialogi contra Iudaeos and the Question of True Conversion / Nina Caputo

10 A Return to Credibility? The Rehabilitation of Repentant Apostates in Medieval Ashkenaz / Rachel Furst

11 The Jewish Physician as Respondent, Confidant, and Proxy: The Case of Marcus Herz and Immanuel Kant / Robert Leventhal

Section Four: The Politics of Trust

12 Perspectives from the Periphery: The East India Company s Jewish Sepoys, Anglo-Jewry, and the Image of the Jew / Mitch Numark

13 Between Honor and Authenticity: Zionism as Theodor Herzl s Life Project / Derek Jonathan Penslar

14 The Most Trusted Jew in America: Jon Stewart s Earnestness / Shaina Hammerman

Index
Acknowledgments
T HIS VOLUME BEGAN as an eight-month-long Oxford Seminar in Advanced Jewish Studies at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies in 2013-14. We d like to thank the core seminar members who made those eight months such an intellectual and social pleasure. Our thanks to Marco Di Giulio, Todd Endelman, Stefanie Fischer, Rachel Furst, Sara Lipton, and Ron Schechter. Thank you as well to the weekly seminar and conference participants: Nicholas Cole, David Feldman, Adriana Jacobs, George Rousseau, Miri Rubin, Adam Sutcliffe, Daniel Strum, and Frank Wolf, as well as to all those who have contributed their essays to this volume.
Special thanks to Josh Teplitsky, whose participation in the seminar and the social gatherings added so much to the enjoyment of the year.
We d also like to acknowledge and thank Martin Goodman for his support and encouragement of the seminar and Martine Smith-Huvers and Sue Forteath for their professional logistic support and their constant good cheer in the center s office.
Thanks to the staffs of the Bodleian Library and the British Library and to the Alexander Grass Chair for financial assistance.
Our thanks to the two readers for Indiana, Gil Anidjar and Rebekah Klein-Pej ov , for their careful readings and comments, and to Dee Mortensen, Paige Rasmussen, and Julia Turner for all their help in the publication process. Also, Anna Lankina was incredibly thorough and attentive to detail in her preparation of the index.
Finally, we owe our deepest gratitude to David Rechter, who facilitated the seminar and who, with his family-Lynne Hirsch, Ella, Noah, and Laura-graciously hosted and entertained us throughout the year.
ON THE WORD OF A JEW
Introduction

On the Word of Jew, or Trusting Jewish History

Nina Caputo and Mitchell B. Hart
Trust in Jewish History
What, if anything, does religion, race, or gender have to do with reliability? When and how do such differences matter when it comes to trusting the word of another? 1 Most of us living in the Western world today might take it for granted that one s Jewishness does not and should not matter when it comes to acting or engaging in the public realm. That is, the word of a Jew qua Jew is no longer, for most people, a matter of suspicion. This was, however, not always the case. Contemporary politics, in the age of Muslim travel bans and the war on terror, bring the historical contingency of trust into sharp relief. The trustworthy Jew and the untrustworthy Jew have a history, one that reaches from the Middle Ages into the twenty-first century but that has remained largely unexplored by historians.
This collection of essays looks at when and how Jews became reliable or trustworthy in the realms of jurisprudence, medicine, politics, culture, and business and finance. As an exploration of issues of trust, it is also an exploration of mistrust and the gradations between these two positions. Neither trust nor mistrust should be viewed as unconditional or noncontingent states. Rather, the challenge is to understand the mechanics of trust, how the Jew and Jews move, either as subjects or objects, between trust and mistrust discursively and materially.
Thus, the question of Jews and trust as this book frames it is more generally a question of a transformation of Western or Christian society over time. While it is difficult to pinpoint just how or when it is that tolerance or acceptance occur, this book explores this process through case studies that examine how the Jew serves as a spur or impulse to large-scale changes in Western mentalities and practices, and explains how this occurred within specific contexts. Social, economic, and political forces shape common understandings of the character of the Jews-that is, whether they can fulfill the expectations of being gentlemen or respectable citizens.
This book begins with the acknowledgment of the well-known image of the perfidious and untrustworthy Jew that has been part of the Christian imagination for eighteen hundred years. In the words of Salo Baron, That one could not trust any Jew, who, by both nature and the dictates of his law, was a cheat and a swindler, had become a commonplace in the medieval literary presentations of Jewish types. 2 Or, as Francesca Trivellato has more recently put it, It is all too evident that Jewish communities in Christian Europe had to manage their self-image of credibility not only against reality (were individual Jews reliable or not?) but also against deep-rooted anti-Semitic preconceptions of Jews as usurers and cheaters. 3 That emancipation and the process of inclusion in the body politic slowly shifted Jews status in western European Christian society, eventually naturalizing them vis- -vis the laws, customs, and mannerisms of the broader society, has garnered much scholarly attention. 4 But as this scholarship has shown, the redefinition of political status rarely coincided with an immediate reassessment of previously held perceptions or prejudices. Indeed, Jews, both as communities and as individuals, successfully navigated economic and social relationships with Christians long before emancipation provided them the legal framework within which to do so, despite legal and frequently deeply ingrained cultural limitations placed on them.
Given the persistently ambivalent nature of Jewish-Christian relations, amply documented by the negative and hostile images generated about Jews by Christians in both elite and popular discourse, one might reasonably assume that a study of trust and mistrust would simply reaffirm assumptions that Christian antisemitism and reciprocal Jewish insularity are generally intractable and unyielding. Surprisingly, however, the studies in this volume tend to challenge such assumptions in complicated ways. The focus on the mechanics of trust destabilizes the sense that antisemitism, whether as an individual gut response or a more organized ideology, is generally all-encompassing and unchang