FREDERICK THE SECOND is the story of the remarkable man whose power and sphere of influence straddled the worlds of Christendom and of Islam. The last of the Hohenstaufens, HolyRoman Emperor and King of Sicily and Jerusalem, Frederick II was an energetic and versatile ruler, a man of great ambition in whose lifetime the conflict between Emperor and Pope reached a newintensity. Excommunicated three times by the Church, he was an absolute monarch whose power, defended in almost continuous struggle, extended over much of Germany and Italy as well as the Holy Land. Frederick was a complex man of cultured tastes and licentious manners who had unusually wide intellectual interests. At his Sicilian court scholars of all religions were welcomed--Christian, Jewish, Mohammedan. He founded the University of Naples in 1224 and was a patron of the arts and sciences. The life of this dynamic man is fully explored in Ernst Kantorowicz's notable biography, filled with dramatic incident and absorbing detail, and written with style and scholarship.

Stephen Haliczer has mined rich documentary sources to produce the most comprehensive and enlightening picture yet of the Inquisition in Spain. The kingdom of Valencia occupies a uniquely important place in the history of the Spanish Inquisition because of its large Muslim and Jewish populations and because it was a Catalan kingdom, more or less "occupied" by the despised Castilians who introduced the Inquisition. Haliczer underscores the intensely regional nature of the Valencian tribunal. He shows how the prosecution of religious deviants, the recruitment and professional activity of Inquisitors and officials, and the relations between the Inquisition and the majority Old Christian population all clearly reflect the place and the society. A great series of pogroms swept over Spain during the summer of 1391. Jewish communities were attacked and the Jews either massacred or forced to convert. More than ninety percent of the victims of the Valencian Inquisition a century later were descendants of those who chose conversion, the conversos. Haliczer argues convincingly against those who see all the conversos as "secret Jews." He finds, on the contrary, that a wide range of religious beliefs and practices existed among them and that some were even able to assimilate into Old Christian society by becoming familiares of the Inquisition itself. Nevertheless, it was controversy over the sincerity of the converted which spawned the first proposals for the establishment of a Spanish national Inquisition. That very same controversy, persisting in the writings of history, may be resolved by Haliczer's stimulating discoveries. Inquisition and Society in the Kingdom of Valencia is a major contribution to the lively field of Inquisition studies, combining institutional history of the tribunal with socioreligious history of the kingdom. The many case histories included in the narrative give both Valencian society and the Inquisition very human faces. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.

incl. illust. - Eginhard of Franconia ibn Khordadhbeh Judah Haleli Rabbi Petachia Rabbi Jacob Ven Rabbi R.N. Ha Cohen David Azulai and other travellers

Theology is, by definition, rational discourse about God and, by extension, the rational discourse about religious matters in general. Humans are rational--though not only rational--creatures and, as such, they are ever striving to verbalize, to rationalize, and to systematize. But, if theology is rational discourse about a primary experience rather than experience itself, we are faced with the problem of whether theology can really do full justice to the primary experience. Theologians have often list sight of the fact that theology is an interpretive discipline, that the primary source of religious knowledge is human experience, and that we have in our experience only hints and intimations of God. The images and nuances of poetry may be better suited than logical discourse for capturing these hints and intimations. Alongside its technical theological tractates, Judaism has always had its prayerbook, and the language of prayer is the language of poetry. Theological systems may come and go, but the theology that is translatable into liturgy remains. Liturgical poems expressing the unconventional and the idiosyncratic share the same prayerbook pages with conventional theology, just as conflicting ideas had always shared the same pages of Talmud and Midrash, where no uniformity of theological positions was ever enforced. Ibn Ezra's advice to "pray only in a literalist manner" was hardly the advice by which Jews let themselves be guided. The poetry of the synagogue proves it. The traditional Jewish liturgy contains not only the standard prayers ordained in the Talmud and the ritual codes, but also poetic embellishments of all kinds. Such poetic embellishments, or piyyutim, take the form of hymns to be sung in conjunction with the standard prayers, and of poetic inserts in the standard prayers themselves. Jakob Petuchowski presents ten such poems in pointed Hebrew, with translation, commentary, and introduction to the theological theme of each poem. The poems-ranging from the sixth to the fourteenth centuries and hailing Palestine, Spain, France, Germany, and Italy-introduce the reader to innovative poetic expressions of unconventional and daring theological ideas that have been incorporated into the standard liturgy. This reprint edition is an indispensible introduction to piyyut (medieval liturgical poetry) for all students of Jewish thought and culture.