Bøger af Norman Roth

The Jewish community in Spain was the largest and most important in the West for almost a thousand years, participating fully in cultural and political affairs with Christian and Muslim neighbors. Norman Roth traces the chain of events that led to mass conversions of Spanish Jews to Christianity in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the rise of animosity against them, the establishment of the Inquisition, and finally, the 1492 Expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Citing evidence from his extensive research of medieval documents, he firmly refutes the traditionally accepted story of "crypto-Judaism", which contends that the conversos were forced publicly to abandon their faith, while continuing secretly to maintain their Jewish traditions. Roth argues persuasively that the conversos were, in fact, sincere Christians.

Though certainly not untouched by tragedy, the historical period of the Middle Ages was a dynamic and prosperous time for Jewish civilization; for despite the mass expulsions and periodic attacks that the Jews of the time suffered, they also managed prolonged periods of at least civil relations with the Christian and Muslim cultures that surrounded them, periods in which the Jewish culture at large produced great poetry and important philosophical and theological works, and made inspired contributions to mathematics and the sciences. Accessible to the general reader but enlightening also to the scholar, Norman Roth's account of the diverse and diffuse culture of Jewish daily life in the medieval world offers a direct look on this profoundly historical people, who through their unique relationship with the cultures that surrounded them touched obliquely on so much else in the world of the Middle Ages--as well as on that of the present day.