John Tolan
John Tolan works on the history of religious and cultural relations between the Arab and Latin worlds in the Middle Ages and on the history of religious interaction and conflict between Jews, Christians and Muslims. He studied at Yale (BA classics), University of Chicago (MA & PhD history) and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (HDR). He has taught in various universities in North America, Europe, Africa and the Middle East; he is currently professor of History at the University of Nantes and member of the Academia Europæa and the Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona. He has received several prizes and distinctions, including two major grants from the European Research Council and the Prix Diane Potier-Boès from the Académie Française (2008). He is author of numerous articles and books, including Petrus Alfonsi and his Medieval Readers (1993) Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (2002), Sons of Ishmael (2008), Saint Francis and the Sultan (2009), Faces of Muhammad: Western Perceptions of the Prophet of Islam from the Middle Ages to Today (2019), and Nouvelle histoire de l’islam, VIIe-XXIe siècles (2022). He is one of the four coordinators of the European Research Council program “The European Qur’an” (2019-2025; euqu.eu).
Address: ERC programme RELMIN: The Legal Status of Religious Minorities in the Euro-Mediterranean World (5th-15th centuries)
Maison des Sciences de l'Homme Ange Guépin
5 Allée Jacques Berque
BP 12105
44021 Nantes cedex 1
France
Address: ERC programme RELMIN: The Legal Status of Religious Minorities in the Euro-Mediterranean World (5th-15th centuries)
Maison des Sciences de l'Homme Ange Guépin
5 Allée Jacques Berque
BP 12105
44021 Nantes cedex 1
France
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Books by John Tolan
Historian John Tolan tells the story of the thousands of Jews who lived in medieval England. Protected by the Crown and granted the exclusive right to loan money with interest, Jews financed building projects, provided loans to students, and bought and rented out housing. Historical texts show that they shared meals and beer, celebrated at weddings, and sometimes even ended up in bed with Christians.
Yet Church authorities feared the consequences of Jewish contact with Christians and tried to limit it, though to little avail. Royal protection also proved to be a double-edged sword: when revolts broke out against the unpopular king Henry III, some of the rebels, in debt to Jewish creditors, killed Jews and destroyed loan records. Vicious rumors circulated that Jews secretly plotted against Christians and crucified Christian children. All of these factors led Edward I to expel the Jews from England in 1290. Paradoxically, Tolan shows, thirteenth-century England was both the theatre of fruitful interreligious exchange and a crucible of European antisemitism.
The essays in this volume examine the range of medieval Latin transmission of the Qur’an and reaction to the Qur’an by concentrating on the manuscript traditions of medieval Qur’an translations and anti-Islamic polemics in Latin. We see how the Arabic text was transmitted and studied in Medieval Europe. We examine the strategies of translators who struggled to find a proper vocabulary and syntax to render Quranic terms into Latin, at times showing miscomprehensions of the text or willful distortions for polemical purposes. These translations and interpretations by Latin authors working primarily in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Spain were the main sources of information about Islam for European scholars until well into the sixteenth century, when they were printed, reused and commented. This volume presents a key assessment of a crucial chapter in European understandings of Islam.
In European culture, Muhammad has been vilified as a heretic, an impostor, and a pagan idol. But these aren’t the only images of the Prophet of Islam that emerge from Western history. Commentators have also portrayed Muhammad as a visionary reformer and an inspirational leader, statesman, and lawgiver. In Faces of Muhammad, John Tolan provides a comprehensive history of these changing, complex, and contradictory visions. Starting from the earliest calls to the faithful to join the Crusades against the “Saracens,” he traces the evolution of Western conceptions of Muhammad through the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and up to the present day.
Faces of Muhammad reveals a lengthy tradition of positive portrayals of Muhammad that many will find surprising. To Reformation polemicists, the spread of Islam attested to the corruption of the established Church, and prompted them to depict Muhammad as a champion of reform. In revolutionary England, writers on both sides of the conflict drew parallels between Muhammad and Oliver Cromwell, asking whether the prophet was a rebel against legitimate authority or the bringer of a new and just order. Voltaire first saw Muhammad as an archetypal religious fanatic but later claimed him as an enemy of superstition. To Napoleon, he was simply a role model: a brilliant general, orator, and leader.
The book shows that Muhammad wears so many faces in the West because he has always acted as a mirror for its writers, their portrayals revealing more about their own concerns than the historical realities of the founder of Islam.
The 11 chapters in this book, Geneses: A Comparative Study of the Historiographies of the Rise of Christianity, Rabbinic Judaism and Islam, written by an international group of specialists the languages, religions, laws and cultures of early Judaism, Christianity and Islam, tackle these questions through a comparative study of these narratives: their formation over time, and their use today. They explore three key aspects of the field: (1) the construction (and scholarly deconstruction) of the narratives of triumph (and defeat) of religions, (2) how legal imperatives are constructed from religious narratives and sacred texts, and (3) contemporary ramifications of these issues. In doing so, they tap into the significant body of research over the last 30 years, which has shown the fluidity and malleability of these religious traditions in relation to each other and to more traditional "pagan" and Zoroastrian religions and philosophical traditions.
This book represents an important contribution to, and a valuable resource for, the burgeoning field of comparative history of the Abrahamic religions.
Table of Contents
Introduction (John Tolan)
I. Narratives of Triumph and defeat
The Contours of Abrahamic Identity: A Zoroastrian Perspective (Yishai Kiel)
The Twilight of the Ancient Gods (Danuta Shanzer)
Simon the God: Imagining the Other in Second-Century Christianity (Duncan MacRae)
Contested Ground in Gaza: Hagiography and the Narrative of Triumphalist Christianity (Claudia Rapp)
Between Jerome and Augustine of Hippo: Some Intellectual Preoccupations of Late Antiquity (Mohamed-Arbi Nsiri)
II. Forging legal paradigms
What is ‘Islamic’ about Geonic Depictions of the Oral Torah? (Marc Herman)
Reevaluating the Role of the Epigones (tabiʿun) in the Formation of Islamic Ritual and Jurisprudence (Mohammed Hocine Benkheira)
Recording Debts in Sufyanid Fusṭāṭ: A Re-examination of the Procedures and Calendar in Use in the 1st/7th century (Naïm Vanthieghem)
Marriage and Sexual Ethics: Divergence and Change in Classical Islamic Legal Texts (Karen Moukheiber)
III. Contemporary Echoes
Teaching Early Islam: The Gap Between School and the Internet in British Schooling (Philip Wood)
The Shahada and the Creation of an Islamic Identity (Suleiman A. Mourad)
L’historien John Tolan en retrace ici le destin dans un récit passionnant.
Alors que ce sont, tout d’abord, les peurs de la Chrétienté qui se cristallisent dans les portraits de Mahomet, celui-ci deviendra pourtant au fil des siècles un objet de fascination, comme chez Goethe ou Lamartine. De même certains théologiens le tiendront pour un grand réformateur, et il sera admiré par Napoléon. Tantôt vilipendé, tantôt glorifié, Mahomet est un adversaire ou un allié toujours profitable, instrumentalisé par les Européens depuis des siècles dans leurs polémiques internes. Ainsi éclairé par une formidable érudition, il devient une figure incontournable pour comprendre comment l’Europe s’est construite. Un livre qui fera date.
À la hauteur des défis éducatifs actuels, l’intention de cet ouvrage est de mettre en perspective les institutions scolaires, les contenus enseignés et les pratiques pédagogiques afin que le religieux soit apprécié de la manière la plus juste et qu’il participe à la compréhension d’un monde complexe.
Muslim law developed a clear legal cadre for dhimmīs, inferior but protected non-Muslim communities (in particular Jews and Christians) and Roman Canon law decreed a similar status for Jewish and Muslim communities in Europe. Yet the theoretical hierarchies between faithful and infidel were constantly brought into question in the daily interactions between men and women of different faiths in streets, markets, bath-houses, law courts, etc. The twelve essays in this volume explore these tensions and attempts to resolve them. These contributions show that law was used to try to erect boundaries between communities in order to regulate or restrict interaction between the faithful and the non-faithful—and at the same time how these boundaries were repeatedly transgressed and negotiated. These essays explore also the possibilities and the limits of the use of legal sources for the social historian.
Table of Contents
Introduction - Ana Echevarria and Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala
I. From Sacred Texts to Social Regulation / Del texto sagrado a la regulación social
Defending Jewish Judicial Autonomy in the Islamic Middle Ages - Mark R. Cohen
The Melkites and Their Law: Between Autonomy and Assimilation - Johannes Pahlitzsch
Cadíes, alfaquíes y la transmisión de la sharī‘a en época mudéjar - Ana Echevarria
Straddling the Bounds: Jews in the Legal World of Islam - David J. Wasserstein
II. Negotiating Daily Contacts and Frictions / Negociando contactos y fricciones diarias
El criterio de los juristas malikíes sobre los alimentos y las bebidas de los dimmíes: entre la teoría y la práctica - María Arcas Campoy
‘Twenty-five hundred knidia of wine… and two boats to transport the wine to Fustāt’. An Insight into Wine Consumption and Use Amongst the dhimmīs and wider Communities in Umayyad Egypt - Myriam Wissa
In the Eyes of Others: Nāmūs and sharī‘ah in Christian Arab Authors. Some Preliminary Details for a Typological Study - Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala
Los vapores de la sospecha. El baño público entre el mundo andalusí y la Castilla medieval (siglos X–XIII) - Marisa Bueno
III. Application of the Law / La aplicación de la ley
Swearing by the Mujaljala: A fatwā on dhimmī Oaths in the Islamic West - Camilla Adang
Forum Shopping in al-Andalus (II): Discussing Coran V, 42 and 49 (Ibn Ḥazm, Ibn Rushd al-Jadd, Abū Bakr Ibn al-ʽArabī and al-Qurṭubī) - Delfina Serrano
Religious Minorities’ Identity and Application of the Law: A First Approximation to the Lands of Military Orders in Castile - Clara Almagro Vidal
La interacción en el espacio de dos sociedades diferentes: concordia establecida entre el bachiller Hernando Alonso y la aljama de moros de Talavera - Yolanda Moreno Moreno
What do Legal Sources Tell Us about Social Practice? Possibilities and Limits - John Tolan
The 13 studies gathered in this volume explore the ways in which states have treated their religious minorities. We study various policies — repression, supervision, integration, tolerance, secularization, indifference — as well as the many ways in which minorities have accommodated the majority’s demands. The relation is by no means one-sided: on the contrary, state policies have created resistance, negotiation (on the legal, political, and cultural fronts) or compromise. Through these precise and original examples, we can see how the protagonists (states, religious institutions, the elite, the faithful) interact, try to convince or influence each other in order to transform practices, invent and implement common norms and grounds, all the while knowing the confessional dimension of "religious" majority and minority does not fully embrace the identity of each citizen in full.
Judaïsme, christianisme, islam ont en Europe une histoire millénaire. Ces monothéismes se différencient par leur poids respectif, par les moments de leur inscription sur le continent et par leurs inégaux rapports avec le pouvoir : le christianisme a été adopté par un très grand nombre d’habitants et est devenu – avec d’importantes variations selon les lieux et les époques – une religion officielle, faisant face, dès lors, à des religions minoritaires. La structuration du continent en États et la division du christianisme lui-même, entre le Moyen Age et le XVIe siècle, ont placé les minorités dans une situation souvent instable et douloureuse. Ainsi s’expliquent, pour partie, la lutte contre les « hérésies », les guerres de religion, l’expulsion des juifs de plusieurs royaumes européens (et aussi l’expulsion de Musulmans de la Sicile et de la péninsule ibérique), la « question juive » au XIXe siècle et jusqu’à la Shoah. C’est ce passé que réveille, depuis la fin du XXe siècle, le débat sur la place de l’islam et les manières de manifester sa foi dans l’espace public.
Les 13 études réunies dans ce volume étudient les manières dont les États ont traité leurs minorités religieuses. On y voit des politiques diverses envers des minorités religieuses– répression, encadrement, intégration, tolérance, laïcité, indifférence – ainsi que de diverses manières dont les minorités ont accueilli les exigences de la majorité. La relation n’est pas unilatérale : au contraire, les politiques étatiques donnent lieu à des résistances, des négociations (sur le plan légal, politique, culturel, etc.) ou compromis. À l’aide d’exemples précis et originaux, on voit comment les acteurs – États, institutions religieuses, élites, fidèles – interagissent, tentent de se convaincre, s’influencent pour transformer des pratiques, mettre au point des normes communes et inventer un terrain d’entente, sachant que la dimension confessionnelle des majorités et des minorités « religieuses » n’embrasse pas la totalité de l’identité de chaque citoyen.
The scholars whose work has been brought together in this volume shed light on this key period of the history of Jews and of Jewish-Christian relations, focusing on key sources of the period: Byzantine imperial law, the canons of church councils, papal bulls, royal legislation from the Visigoths or Carolingians, inscriptions, and narrative sources in Hebrew, Greek and Latin. The picture that emerges from these studies is variegated. Some scholars, following Bernhard Blumenkranz, have depicted this period as one of relative tolerance towards Jews and Judaism; others have stressed the intolerance shown at key intervals by ecclesiastical authors, church councils and monarchs.
Yet perhaps more than revealing general tendencies towards "tolerance" or "intolerance", these studies bring to light the ways in which law in medieval societies serves a variety of purposes: from providing a theologically-based rationale for social tolerance, to attempting to regulate and restrict inter-religious contact, to using anti-Jewish rhetoric to assert the authority or legitimacy of one party of the Christian elite over and against another. This volume makes an important contribution not only to the history of medieval Jewish-Christian relations, but also to research on the uses and functions of law in medieval societies.
Table of Contents
Capucine Nemo-Pekelman & Laurence Foschia, Introduction
I Rank and status of Jews in civil and canonical law
1. Ralph W. Mathisen, The Citizenship and Legal Status of Jews in Roman Law during Late Antiquity (ca. 300-540 CE)
2. Céline Martin, Statut des juifs, statut de libre dans l’Occident du haut Moyen Âge : l’exemple ibérique
3. David Freidenreich, Jews, Pagans, and Heretics in Early Medieval Canon Law
II - Lawyers at work : from the adaptation of Roman Law to the creation of canonical collections and false canons
4. Bruno Judic, Grégoire le Grand et les juifs. Pratique juridique et enjeux théologiques
5. Jessie Sherwood, Interpretation, negotiation, and adaptation: Converting the Jews in Gerhard of Mainz’s Collectio
6. Philippe Depreux , Les juifs dans le droit carolingien
7. Capucine Nemo-Pekelman, Signum mortis : une nouvelle explication du signe de la rouelle ?
III - Juridical sources as indications of Jewish life and institutions?
8. Alexander Panayotov, Jewish Communal Offices in Byzantine Law and Jewish Inscriptions from the Balkans
9. Bat-Sheva Albert, Les communautés juives vues à travers la législation royale et ecclésiastique visigothique et franque
10. Raul González-Salinero, The Legal Eradication of the Jewish Literary Legacy in Visigothic Spain
11. Johannes Heil, Getting them in or Keeping them out? Theology, Law, and the Beginnings of Jewish Life at Mainz in the 10th and 11th centuries
IV - From the Law to Violence, from Violence to Law
12. Paul Magdalino, ‘All Israel will be saved’? The forced baptism of the Jews and imperial eschatology
13. Rachel Stocking, Forced Converts, “Crypto-Judaism,” and Children: Religious Identification in Visigothic Spain
14. María Jesús Fuente, Jewish Women and Visigoth Law
15. Oscar Prieto Dominguez, The mass conversion of Jews decreed by Emperor Basil I in 873: its reflection in contemporary legal codes and its underlying reasons
16. Amnon Linder, The Jewish Oath
Nicholas de Lange and John Tolan, Conclusion
Ange Guépin à Nantes en juin 2011.
Le concept d’une « identité » nationale ou ethnique (et l’assimilation de l’une à l’autre) est bâti, en particulier au XIXe siècle en Europe, sur la base des histoires de « nations » dont on cherchait les origines dans l’antiquité. Certains des travaux réunis
ici mettent en lumière les processus de constructions d’identités nationales au XIXe siècle, que ce soit l’idée les visions nationalistes de l’histoire française, ou la tension, dans la Tunisie du protectorat, entre identité « nationale » tunisienne, identités arabes ou musulmanes, et la réalité du protectorat français. Ce sont les moments d’implosion ou de démantèlement de grandes unités transnationales qui exige un travail sur des identités nationales soit nouvelles, soit anciennes mais remises au goût du jour et revêtues d’une importance accrue : la décolonisation, puis l’implosion de l’URSS ont donné lieu à de nouvelles constructions identitaires plus ou moins solides. Si en France comme en Tunisie des questions d’« identité » politique, nationale, religieuse, font l’objet d’interrogations et de polémiques, les essais réunis ici nous permettent de prendre du recul et de mettre ces phénomènes en perspective.
Since the seventh century, when the armies of Constantinople and Medina fought for control of Syria and Palestine, there has been ongoing contact between the Muslim world and the West. This sweeping history vividly recounts the wars and the crusades, the alliances and diplomacy, commerce and the slave trade, technology transfers, and the intellectual and artistic exchanges. Here readers are given an unparalleled introduction to key periods and events, including the Muslim conquests, the collapse of the Byzantine Empire, the commercial revolution of the medieval Mediterranean, the intellectual and cultural achievements of Muslim Spain, the crusades and Spanish reconquest, the rise of the Ottomans and their conquest of a third of Europe, European colonization and decolonization, and the challenges and promise of this entwined legacy today.
As provocative as it is groundbreaking, this book describes this shared history in all its richness and diversity, revealing how ongoing encounters between Europe and Islam have profoundly shaped both.
Historian John Tolan tells the story of the thousands of Jews who lived in medieval England. Protected by the Crown and granted the exclusive right to loan money with interest, Jews financed building projects, provided loans to students, and bought and rented out housing. Historical texts show that they shared meals and beer, celebrated at weddings, and sometimes even ended up in bed with Christians.
Yet Church authorities feared the consequences of Jewish contact with Christians and tried to limit it, though to little avail. Royal protection also proved to be a double-edged sword: when revolts broke out against the unpopular king Henry III, some of the rebels, in debt to Jewish creditors, killed Jews and destroyed loan records. Vicious rumors circulated that Jews secretly plotted against Christians and crucified Christian children. All of these factors led Edward I to expel the Jews from England in 1290. Paradoxically, Tolan shows, thirteenth-century England was both the theatre of fruitful interreligious exchange and a crucible of European antisemitism.
The essays in this volume examine the range of medieval Latin transmission of the Qur’an and reaction to the Qur’an by concentrating on the manuscript traditions of medieval Qur’an translations and anti-Islamic polemics in Latin. We see how the Arabic text was transmitted and studied in Medieval Europe. We examine the strategies of translators who struggled to find a proper vocabulary and syntax to render Quranic terms into Latin, at times showing miscomprehensions of the text or willful distortions for polemical purposes. These translations and interpretations by Latin authors working primarily in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Spain were the main sources of information about Islam for European scholars until well into the sixteenth century, when they were printed, reused and commented. This volume presents a key assessment of a crucial chapter in European understandings of Islam.
In European culture, Muhammad has been vilified as a heretic, an impostor, and a pagan idol. But these aren’t the only images of the Prophet of Islam that emerge from Western history. Commentators have also portrayed Muhammad as a visionary reformer and an inspirational leader, statesman, and lawgiver. In Faces of Muhammad, John Tolan provides a comprehensive history of these changing, complex, and contradictory visions. Starting from the earliest calls to the faithful to join the Crusades against the “Saracens,” he traces the evolution of Western conceptions of Muhammad through the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and up to the present day.
Faces of Muhammad reveals a lengthy tradition of positive portrayals of Muhammad that many will find surprising. To Reformation polemicists, the spread of Islam attested to the corruption of the established Church, and prompted them to depict Muhammad as a champion of reform. In revolutionary England, writers on both sides of the conflict drew parallels between Muhammad and Oliver Cromwell, asking whether the prophet was a rebel against legitimate authority or the bringer of a new and just order. Voltaire first saw Muhammad as an archetypal religious fanatic but later claimed him as an enemy of superstition. To Napoleon, he was simply a role model: a brilliant general, orator, and leader.
The book shows that Muhammad wears so many faces in the West because he has always acted as a mirror for its writers, their portrayals revealing more about their own concerns than the historical realities of the founder of Islam.
The 11 chapters in this book, Geneses: A Comparative Study of the Historiographies of the Rise of Christianity, Rabbinic Judaism and Islam, written by an international group of specialists the languages, religions, laws and cultures of early Judaism, Christianity and Islam, tackle these questions through a comparative study of these narratives: their formation over time, and their use today. They explore three key aspects of the field: (1) the construction (and scholarly deconstruction) of the narratives of triumph (and defeat) of religions, (2) how legal imperatives are constructed from religious narratives and sacred texts, and (3) contemporary ramifications of these issues. In doing so, they tap into the significant body of research over the last 30 years, which has shown the fluidity and malleability of these religious traditions in relation to each other and to more traditional "pagan" and Zoroastrian religions and philosophical traditions.
This book represents an important contribution to, and a valuable resource for, the burgeoning field of comparative history of the Abrahamic religions.
Table of Contents
Introduction (John Tolan)
I. Narratives of Triumph and defeat
The Contours of Abrahamic Identity: A Zoroastrian Perspective (Yishai Kiel)
The Twilight of the Ancient Gods (Danuta Shanzer)
Simon the God: Imagining the Other in Second-Century Christianity (Duncan MacRae)
Contested Ground in Gaza: Hagiography and the Narrative of Triumphalist Christianity (Claudia Rapp)
Between Jerome and Augustine of Hippo: Some Intellectual Preoccupations of Late Antiquity (Mohamed-Arbi Nsiri)
II. Forging legal paradigms
What is ‘Islamic’ about Geonic Depictions of the Oral Torah? (Marc Herman)
Reevaluating the Role of the Epigones (tabiʿun) in the Formation of Islamic Ritual and Jurisprudence (Mohammed Hocine Benkheira)
Recording Debts in Sufyanid Fusṭāṭ: A Re-examination of the Procedures and Calendar in Use in the 1st/7th century (Naïm Vanthieghem)
Marriage and Sexual Ethics: Divergence and Change in Classical Islamic Legal Texts (Karen Moukheiber)
III. Contemporary Echoes
Teaching Early Islam: The Gap Between School and the Internet in British Schooling (Philip Wood)
The Shahada and the Creation of an Islamic Identity (Suleiman A. Mourad)
L’historien John Tolan en retrace ici le destin dans un récit passionnant.
Alors que ce sont, tout d’abord, les peurs de la Chrétienté qui se cristallisent dans les portraits de Mahomet, celui-ci deviendra pourtant au fil des siècles un objet de fascination, comme chez Goethe ou Lamartine. De même certains théologiens le tiendront pour un grand réformateur, et il sera admiré par Napoléon. Tantôt vilipendé, tantôt glorifié, Mahomet est un adversaire ou un allié toujours profitable, instrumentalisé par les Européens depuis des siècles dans leurs polémiques internes. Ainsi éclairé par une formidable érudition, il devient une figure incontournable pour comprendre comment l’Europe s’est construite. Un livre qui fera date.
À la hauteur des défis éducatifs actuels, l’intention de cet ouvrage est de mettre en perspective les institutions scolaires, les contenus enseignés et les pratiques pédagogiques afin que le religieux soit apprécié de la manière la plus juste et qu’il participe à la compréhension d’un monde complexe.
Muslim law developed a clear legal cadre for dhimmīs, inferior but protected non-Muslim communities (in particular Jews and Christians) and Roman Canon law decreed a similar status for Jewish and Muslim communities in Europe. Yet the theoretical hierarchies between faithful and infidel were constantly brought into question in the daily interactions between men and women of different faiths in streets, markets, bath-houses, law courts, etc. The twelve essays in this volume explore these tensions and attempts to resolve them. These contributions show that law was used to try to erect boundaries between communities in order to regulate or restrict interaction between the faithful and the non-faithful—and at the same time how these boundaries were repeatedly transgressed and negotiated. These essays explore also the possibilities and the limits of the use of legal sources for the social historian.
Table of Contents
Introduction - Ana Echevarria and Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala
I. From Sacred Texts to Social Regulation / Del texto sagrado a la regulación social
Defending Jewish Judicial Autonomy in the Islamic Middle Ages - Mark R. Cohen
The Melkites and Their Law: Between Autonomy and Assimilation - Johannes Pahlitzsch
Cadíes, alfaquíes y la transmisión de la sharī‘a en época mudéjar - Ana Echevarria
Straddling the Bounds: Jews in the Legal World of Islam - David J. Wasserstein
II. Negotiating Daily Contacts and Frictions / Negociando contactos y fricciones diarias
El criterio de los juristas malikíes sobre los alimentos y las bebidas de los dimmíes: entre la teoría y la práctica - María Arcas Campoy
‘Twenty-five hundred knidia of wine… and two boats to transport the wine to Fustāt’. An Insight into Wine Consumption and Use Amongst the dhimmīs and wider Communities in Umayyad Egypt - Myriam Wissa
In the Eyes of Others: Nāmūs and sharī‘ah in Christian Arab Authors. Some Preliminary Details for a Typological Study - Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala
Los vapores de la sospecha. El baño público entre el mundo andalusí y la Castilla medieval (siglos X–XIII) - Marisa Bueno
III. Application of the Law / La aplicación de la ley
Swearing by the Mujaljala: A fatwā on dhimmī Oaths in the Islamic West - Camilla Adang
Forum Shopping in al-Andalus (II): Discussing Coran V, 42 and 49 (Ibn Ḥazm, Ibn Rushd al-Jadd, Abū Bakr Ibn al-ʽArabī and al-Qurṭubī) - Delfina Serrano
Religious Minorities’ Identity and Application of the Law: A First Approximation to the Lands of Military Orders in Castile - Clara Almagro Vidal
La interacción en el espacio de dos sociedades diferentes: concordia establecida entre el bachiller Hernando Alonso y la aljama de moros de Talavera - Yolanda Moreno Moreno
What do Legal Sources Tell Us about Social Practice? Possibilities and Limits - John Tolan
The 13 studies gathered in this volume explore the ways in which states have treated their religious minorities. We study various policies — repression, supervision, integration, tolerance, secularization, indifference — as well as the many ways in which minorities have accommodated the majority’s demands. The relation is by no means one-sided: on the contrary, state policies have created resistance, negotiation (on the legal, political, and cultural fronts) or compromise. Through these precise and original examples, we can see how the protagonists (states, religious institutions, the elite, the faithful) interact, try to convince or influence each other in order to transform practices, invent and implement common norms and grounds, all the while knowing the confessional dimension of "religious" majority and minority does not fully embrace the identity of each citizen in full.
Judaïsme, christianisme, islam ont en Europe une histoire millénaire. Ces monothéismes se différencient par leur poids respectif, par les moments de leur inscription sur le continent et par leurs inégaux rapports avec le pouvoir : le christianisme a été adopté par un très grand nombre d’habitants et est devenu – avec d’importantes variations selon les lieux et les époques – une religion officielle, faisant face, dès lors, à des religions minoritaires. La structuration du continent en États et la division du christianisme lui-même, entre le Moyen Age et le XVIe siècle, ont placé les minorités dans une situation souvent instable et douloureuse. Ainsi s’expliquent, pour partie, la lutte contre les « hérésies », les guerres de religion, l’expulsion des juifs de plusieurs royaumes européens (et aussi l’expulsion de Musulmans de la Sicile et de la péninsule ibérique), la « question juive » au XIXe siècle et jusqu’à la Shoah. C’est ce passé que réveille, depuis la fin du XXe siècle, le débat sur la place de l’islam et les manières de manifester sa foi dans l’espace public.
Les 13 études réunies dans ce volume étudient les manières dont les États ont traité leurs minorités religieuses. On y voit des politiques diverses envers des minorités religieuses– répression, encadrement, intégration, tolérance, laïcité, indifférence – ainsi que de diverses manières dont les minorités ont accueilli les exigences de la majorité. La relation n’est pas unilatérale : au contraire, les politiques étatiques donnent lieu à des résistances, des négociations (sur le plan légal, politique, culturel, etc.) ou compromis. À l’aide d’exemples précis et originaux, on voit comment les acteurs – États, institutions religieuses, élites, fidèles – interagissent, tentent de se convaincre, s’influencent pour transformer des pratiques, mettre au point des normes communes et inventer un terrain d’entente, sachant que la dimension confessionnelle des majorités et des minorités « religieuses » n’embrasse pas la totalité de l’identité de chaque citoyen.
The scholars whose work has been brought together in this volume shed light on this key period of the history of Jews and of Jewish-Christian relations, focusing on key sources of the period: Byzantine imperial law, the canons of church councils, papal bulls, royal legislation from the Visigoths or Carolingians, inscriptions, and narrative sources in Hebrew, Greek and Latin. The picture that emerges from these studies is variegated. Some scholars, following Bernhard Blumenkranz, have depicted this period as one of relative tolerance towards Jews and Judaism; others have stressed the intolerance shown at key intervals by ecclesiastical authors, church councils and monarchs.
Yet perhaps more than revealing general tendencies towards "tolerance" or "intolerance", these studies bring to light the ways in which law in medieval societies serves a variety of purposes: from providing a theologically-based rationale for social tolerance, to attempting to regulate and restrict inter-religious contact, to using anti-Jewish rhetoric to assert the authority or legitimacy of one party of the Christian elite over and against another. This volume makes an important contribution not only to the history of medieval Jewish-Christian relations, but also to research on the uses and functions of law in medieval societies.
Table of Contents
Capucine Nemo-Pekelman & Laurence Foschia, Introduction
I Rank and status of Jews in civil and canonical law
1. Ralph W. Mathisen, The Citizenship and Legal Status of Jews in Roman Law during Late Antiquity (ca. 300-540 CE)
2. Céline Martin, Statut des juifs, statut de libre dans l’Occident du haut Moyen Âge : l’exemple ibérique
3. David Freidenreich, Jews, Pagans, and Heretics in Early Medieval Canon Law
II - Lawyers at work : from the adaptation of Roman Law to the creation of canonical collections and false canons
4. Bruno Judic, Grégoire le Grand et les juifs. Pratique juridique et enjeux théologiques
5. Jessie Sherwood, Interpretation, negotiation, and adaptation: Converting the Jews in Gerhard of Mainz’s Collectio
6. Philippe Depreux , Les juifs dans le droit carolingien
7. Capucine Nemo-Pekelman, Signum mortis : une nouvelle explication du signe de la rouelle ?
III - Juridical sources as indications of Jewish life and institutions?
8. Alexander Panayotov, Jewish Communal Offices in Byzantine Law and Jewish Inscriptions from the Balkans
9. Bat-Sheva Albert, Les communautés juives vues à travers la législation royale et ecclésiastique visigothique et franque
10. Raul González-Salinero, The Legal Eradication of the Jewish Literary Legacy in Visigothic Spain
11. Johannes Heil, Getting them in or Keeping them out? Theology, Law, and the Beginnings of Jewish Life at Mainz in the 10th and 11th centuries
IV - From the Law to Violence, from Violence to Law
12. Paul Magdalino, ‘All Israel will be saved’? The forced baptism of the Jews and imperial eschatology
13. Rachel Stocking, Forced Converts, “Crypto-Judaism,” and Children: Religious Identification in Visigothic Spain
14. María Jesús Fuente, Jewish Women and Visigoth Law
15. Oscar Prieto Dominguez, The mass conversion of Jews decreed by Emperor Basil I in 873: its reflection in contemporary legal codes and its underlying reasons
16. Amnon Linder, The Jewish Oath
Nicholas de Lange and John Tolan, Conclusion
Ange Guépin à Nantes en juin 2011.
Le concept d’une « identité » nationale ou ethnique (et l’assimilation de l’une à l’autre) est bâti, en particulier au XIXe siècle en Europe, sur la base des histoires de « nations » dont on cherchait les origines dans l’antiquité. Certains des travaux réunis
ici mettent en lumière les processus de constructions d’identités nationales au XIXe siècle, que ce soit l’idée les visions nationalistes de l’histoire française, ou la tension, dans la Tunisie du protectorat, entre identité « nationale » tunisienne, identités arabes ou musulmanes, et la réalité du protectorat français. Ce sont les moments d’implosion ou de démantèlement de grandes unités transnationales qui exige un travail sur des identités nationales soit nouvelles, soit anciennes mais remises au goût du jour et revêtues d’une importance accrue : la décolonisation, puis l’implosion de l’URSS ont donné lieu à de nouvelles constructions identitaires plus ou moins solides. Si en France comme en Tunisie des questions d’« identité » politique, nationale, religieuse, font l’objet d’interrogations et de polémiques, les essais réunis ici nous permettent de prendre du recul et de mettre ces phénomènes en perspective.
Since the seventh century, when the armies of Constantinople and Medina fought for control of Syria and Palestine, there has been ongoing contact between the Muslim world and the West. This sweeping history vividly recounts the wars and the crusades, the alliances and diplomacy, commerce and the slave trade, technology transfers, and the intellectual and artistic exchanges. Here readers are given an unparalleled introduction to key periods and events, including the Muslim conquests, the collapse of the Byzantine Empire, the commercial revolution of the medieval Mediterranean, the intellectual and cultural achievements of Muslim Spain, the crusades and Spanish reconquest, the rise of the Ottomans and their conquest of a third of Europe, European colonization and decolonization, and the challenges and promise of this entwined legacy today.
As provocative as it is groundbreaking, this book describes this shared history in all its richness and diversity, revealing how ongoing encounters between Europe and Islam have profoundly shaped both.
King Edward I, begging his aid in punishing fourteen Christians
excommunicated for working as servants and nursemaids in
Jewish households. Eight years later, Richard Swinfield, bishop of
Hereford, wrote to the chancellor of Hereford commanding that
he publicly condemn Christian participants in a local Jewish
wedding celebration. These letters attest to the hostile legal and
political climate for English Jews in the thirteenth century. But
they also hint at communal interactions between Jews and
Christians that proved more intimate and amicable than statutory
records tend to indicate. In this essay, the authors-a historian and
literary scholar, respectively-bring their distinct disciplinary
perspectives to bear on these letters and their implications for
thirteenth-century English communities. Tolan analyses them
within the larger context of anti-Jewish legislation in England,
while Jahner looks to contemporary literary and cultural
productions sponsored by Gravesend and Swinfield and their
households. Together, the authors consider the legacy of anti-
Jewish violence in England by focusing on the kind of domestic
affiliations and arrangements that often escape historiographic
notice, even as they prove foundational to the regulation of
communal affairs.
in the Age of Enlightenment – indeed, Napoleon was described by Goethe as a ‘new Mahomet’.
Arabic translation of my article appearing in Aeon:
https://aeon.co/ideas/muhammad-an-anticlerical-hero-of-the-european-enlightenment
Depuis 2010, une équipe d’historiens se penche sur ce sujet à Nantes dans le cadre d’un programme de recherche financé par le Conseil européen de la recherche et hébergé à l’université de Nantes. Ce programme, RELMIN, étudie le statut légal des minorités religieuses dans l’Europe médiévale, en particulier les lois qui réglèrent (ou tentèrent de le faire) les relations entre membres de différentes confessions. (voir www.relmin.eu ). Ces textes de lois, en latin, grec, arabe, hébreu, ou dans des langues vernaculaires médiévales (français, espagnol, etc.) ont été éditées et mis en ligne par notre équipe, avec des traductions, commentaires et bibliographies (voir http://www.cn-telma.fr/relmin). Cette base de données est à la fois un outil de recherche mis à la disposition d’historiens, juristes, sociologues et d’autres travaillant sur ces questions et une ressource pédagogique à la disposition d’enseignants du secondaire et de l’université, en France et à l’étranger (le site peut être consulté en français et en anglais). Il contient désormais plus de 600 textes légaux et à terme en comportera plus de 1000.
Il s’agira dans cette conférence de présenter, dans les grandes lignes, l’apport de cette base de données et d’explorer quelques pistes de sa possible utilisation dans l’enseignement secondaire.
Les journalistes de RTSreligion ont choisi d’aller au-delà de cette rhétorique pour mieux comprendre comment les relations Orient-Occident ont évolué depuis les croisades, cette période de deux cents ans qui court de la fin du XIe à la fin du XIIIe siècle. Quelles traces reste-t-il des expéditions militaires venues de l’Ouest? Quelle influence les croisades ont-elles eues sur le christianisme et l’islam?
Une enquête au fil des siècles qui montre comment le développement des empires coloniaux au XIXe siècle a ravivé de vieux souvenirs, comment la fin de l’Empire ottoman a rouvert des questions ethnico-religieuses, comment les conflits des XXe et du XXIe siècles se sont aussi nourris de cet imaginaire de la croisade, comment les religions ont pu être source de tensions mais aussi de pacification.
Une série signée Gabrielle Desarzens, Jean-Christophe Emery, Catherine Erard, Evelyne Oberson et Fabien Hünenberger.
Avec la participation notamment de Martin Aurell, Georges Corm, Michel Grandjean, Vincent Gelot, Rinaldo Tomaselli, John Tolan, Jean-Claude Cheynet, André Vauchez et bien d'autres.
Saladin
S’il est un personnage des croisades qui deviendra légendaire en Orient, mais aussi en Occident, c’est bien Saladin. Il va parvenir à unifier la Syrie avec l’Egypte et à reconquérir Jérusalem en 1187. La bataille d’Hattîn sera décisive. Les troupes de Saladin écraseront l’armée chrétienne conduite par le roi de Jérusalem, Guy de Lusignan.
Chef de guerre redoutable, il sera également décrit comme un pieux musulman, capable de faire preuve d'indulgence y compris envers ses ennemis.
La prise de la ville Sainte par Saladin provoquera le départ de la troisième croisade mené par Richard Cœur de Lion, roi d’Angleterre, Philippe Auguste roi de France et l’empereur d’Allemagne, Frédéric Ier Barberousse.
Avec Martin Aurell, Julien Loiseau, John Tolan, Abbès Zouache.
"A vue d'esprit" propose 25 émissions sur les croisades, ses conséquences et ses interprétations au fil des siècles.
"Attaquer les croisés où qu'ils soient" et maintenir les "bastions chrétiens" en "état d’alerte". Ces expressions figuraient noir sur blanc, en janvier 2015, dans un communiqué du groupe Etat islamique. Croisés? Bastions chrétiens? Ces mots sonnent de manière étrange en Occident. Les croisades: c’était il y a une éternité! Comment expliquer que ce registre sémantique apparaisse dans la propagande d'un groupe armé qui met à feu et à sang le Proche et le Moyen-Orient et réprime les minorités religieuses?
Les journalistes de RTSreligion ont choisi d’aller au-delà de cette rhétorique pour mieux comprendre comment les relations Orient-Occident ont évolué depuis les croisades, cette période de deux cents ans qui court de la fin du XIe à la fin du XIIIe siècle. Quelles traces reste-t-il des expéditions militaires venues de l’Ouest? Quelle influence les croisades ont-elles eues sur le christianisme et l’islam?
Une enquête au fil des siècles qui montre comment le développement des empires coloniaux au XIXe siècle a ravivé de vieux souvenirs, comment la fin de l’Empire ottoman a rouvert des questions ethnico-religieuses, comment les conflits des XXe et du XXIe siècles se sont aussi nourris de cet imaginaire de la croisade, comment les religions ont pu être source de tensions mais aussi de pacification.
Une série signée Gabrielle Desarzens, Jean-Christophe Emery, Catherine Erard, Evelyne Oberson et Fabien Hünenberger.
Avec la participation notamment de Martin Aurell, Georges Corm, Michel Grandjean, Vincent Gelot, Rinaldo Tomaselli, John Tolan, Jean-Claude Cheynet, André Vauchez et bien d'autres.
Ce que les chrétiens latins savaient des musulmans
Lorsque les croisades débutent, la connaissance de l’islam par les chrétiens d’Occident est très lacunaire. Ils pensent alors que les Sarrazins, comme ils les nomment, sont des polythéistes. Ils s’appuient sur des écrits de St Jérôme qui a vécu deux siècles avant le prophète Mahomet. Les croisades vont permettre aux occidentaux de découvrir l’islam. La première version latine du Coran sera éditée en 1143.
Avec Martin Aurell et John Tolan.
L’historien John Tolan en retrace ici le destin dans un récit passionnant.
Alors que ce sont, tout d’abord, les peurs de la Chrétienté qui se cristallisent dans les portraits de Mahomet, celui-ci deviendra pourtant au fil des siècles un objet de fascination, comme chez Goethe ou Lamartine. De même certains théologiens le tiendront pour un grand réformateur, et il sera admiré par Napoléon. Tantôt vilipendé, tantôt glorifié, Mahomet est un adversaire ou un allié toujours profitable, instrumentalisé par les Européens depuis des siècles dans leurs polémiques internes. Ainsi éclairé par une formidable érudition, il devient une figure incontournable pour comprendre comment l’Europe s’est construite. Un livre qui fera date.