Why was martyrdom important for medieval jews

Many consider the millions of Jewish women, men, and children murdered by the Nazis during the Shoah to be martyrs.

In Jewish memorial worship, their lives and deaths are ritually recalled with those of martyrs of previous eras. As with earlier martyrdom accounts, however, some Holocaust narratives may be more emblematic than historical. Information about the letter appeared in an article in the New York Times on January 8, It is impossible to know the reality behind the Krakow letter; although most historians believe that the events it described are unlikely, there is no conclusive evidence that they did not happen.

The scholarly intent is not to diminish the unbearable reality of degradation and tragic death, female and male, during the Shoah. Sara R. With female martyrs, as with so much else in Jewish tradition, it is not only what happened that matters; it is also essential to recognize how events or even imagined events are reconstructed and given evocative meanings that speak across time to the community of believers.

In their efforts to console survivors and exhort future generations, such heroic reshapings of martyred Jews move beyond the domain of history to the realm of the mythological.

However, recognizing the literary and didactic elements in these accounts in no way diminishes the tragic realities of the self-sacrifices and murders of Jewish women and men on which they are based. Baumel, Judith Tydor and Jacob J. Leo Jung , ed. Jacob J. Northvale, NJ: J.

Aronson,, Boyarin, Daniel S. Chazan, Robert. European Jewry and the First Crusade. Berkeley: University of California Press, Cohen, Jeremy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, Einbinder, Susan.

Grossman, Avraham. Horowitz, Sara R. Glenda Jackson and Hilary Kilpatrick. New York: Routledge, , Malkiel, David. Boyarin criticizes Frend and others, opining that Judaism and Christianity only separated in the 5th century CE and that the martyrdom traditions of Jews and Christians were interconnected in multiple ways.

Boyarin contends that in late Antiquity a new martyrdom discourse developed with three basic constituents: 1 a ritualized and performative speech act, 2 the fulfillment of a religious mandate, and 3 powerful erotic elements. Castelli focuses not on the debate over when martyrdom originated nor on what actually happened with those who became martyrs. Its leading question is how early Christians were remembered as martyrs by others. Castelli shows close interconnections between the commemoration of martyrs through documents and artifacts and identity constructions by those who admired and commemorated the martyrs.

Middleton points out important distinctions between early Jewish and early Christian martyrdom and explores the interconnections of martyrdom and cosmic conflict. Baumeister, Theofried. Survey of the ideas about martyrdom as presented in early Jewish and Christian documents, taking a rather broad view of martyrdom that includes the punishment of persecutors and the posthumous reward for killed righteous persons in apocalyptic texts, the persecution of prophets, the sufferings of Jesus, and the imitation of Christ by martyrs.

Bowersock, Glen W. Martyrdom and Rome. DOI: Brief and programmatic study arguing that the concept of martyrdom was constructed by Christians roughly in the period between 50 and CE. Christians devised it in response to social, political, and religious pressures of the Roman imperial period. Boyarin, Daniel. Proposes a new approach to the study of the relationship between Jewish Hellenistic Jewish as well as rabbinic and Christian martyrdom traditions.

The two were intertwined in multiple ways until the 5th century. Castelli, Elizabeth A. New York: Columbia University Press, Innovative monograph that focuses on the interconnections between the commemoration of martyrs with Ignatius, Perpetua, Pionius, and Thecla as prime examples and the process of Christian identity construction related to martyrdom. Cobb, L. Gender Theory and Religion. Browse by series. Browse by subject. Company profile. Brepols Websites. Jobs Publishers.

Like their earlier Rabbinic and Christian ancestors, the issue of contestation was not merely an historical fact. The contest, like the fires of hell they were meant to imply, continued in the way each side represented the story long after the flames had abated.

Martyrological poems can be understood as a response to Christian representations of Jewish martyrdom in triumphalist terms: as proof that God had forsaken the Jews and turned toward Christians with favor.

Although Jews created their own visual images of burning martyrs, these were only accessible in a private context, in illuminated manuscripts. Church frescoes, reliefs, and stained glass windows were public.

Christian woman selling a consecrated Host to a Jewish money-lender to pay off a debt on a dress. The host is ceremoniously re-consecrated and restored to its rightful place. The Christian woman is punished and an angel descends from heaven.

The Jewish money-lender and his family are burnt at the stake. Two angels and two devils fight over the Christian woman's body. We also need to bear in mind that the unfortunate Christian children for whose deaths Jews were scapegoated themselves became Christian martyrs.

See, for example, Anderl of Rinn:. He speaks in the voice of an aged adulterer:. Each historical verdict of ritual murder produced two distinct, competing, sets of martyrs, one Jewish, the other Christian. Each side had its own exclusive truth claim. Thus, that each side saw its co-religionists as martyrs was per se vindication of its own religious claims. If we move ahead to the mid 17 th c. Despite these familiar tropes, the account develops several nova : First, some of the Jews choose capture and escape over death, anticipating their redemption by the Jewish communities of Salonica and Constantinople and their asylum in Turkey, north Africa, and Egypt.

Although Hanover makes clear that the preferable course of action is to follow the rabbinic view and to choose martyrdom, he chooses to narrate an alternative. In fact, following his descriptions of Jewish calamities, Hanover often adds a sad reflection on the destruction of churches and murder of Catholic priests, sometimes refracted through the citation of a Biblical verse.

May his Kingdom grow and my he cause his enemies to fall under him. For he is a just King, a god-fearing man, and a friend of Israel. Yeven Metzulah marks a ground-shift in the martyrological portrait of Christians, admittedly as much a result of socio-political alliances as any theological conviction. Yet a related theological shift may also be detected. The violate dietary laws to stay alive.

Post-Shoah Notions of Martyrdom. In the post-Shoah era, it has become customary to refer to the six million Jews who perished in the Shoah as martyrs. Although most Jews killed by the Nazis were given no choice other than death, the appellation has become quite common. This distinction is not evident in the classical sources.

In fact, the three young men of Daniel 3 who survived the furnace ordeal were continually referred to as martyrs in both Jewish and Christian tradition. People who demonstrated willingness to die for their faithfulness to God and the Law through their radical actions were considered martyrs, whether they actually died or not. By so doing, martyrs were heroes: they exemplified courage. They were willing to battle death, whether they prevailed or not. I suspect that in making this distinction, the voluntary aspect of the classical definition has also been set aside.

In the post-Enlightenment age of individualist consciousness, it is almost inconceivable to envision choosing death as a real choice rather than one coerced by a system of violent oppression or false consciousness. Thus, Jewish martyrdom was made irrelevant. A martyr chooses to die. Martyrdom is never to be sought; he who embraces it by failing to seek safety in flight is a sinner.

Another classical aspect of martyrdom, tzidduk ha-Din, is also discarded. With the exception of some early post-Shoah orthodox rabbinic responses to the Holocaust maintained today by ultra-orthodox groups, most Jews find that the concept of martyrdom as divine judgment is blasphemous when applied to the Shoah. Then I painted and drew him in pictures about ghettos, surrounded by Jewish troubles, by Jewish mothers, running terrified with little children in their arms.

Many would find this view offensive, as typified in the Auschwitz convent controversy. In the book, Memory Offended , Stanislaw Krajewski wrote,. The word [martyrdom] is not neutral. Auschwitz, or the Shoah in general, does not have this redemptive quality. It is an ultimate horror: Jews were condemned independently of their willingness to defend their faith, indeed independently of their behavior.

For most believing Jews, Auschwitz must have meaning, but that meaning seems totally hidden. In contrast, from the Christian point of view, the redemptive interpretation is natural. They were led out in groups to the cemetery, and gunned down into open ditches. Zvi Michalowski, then a young man, jumped into the grave just before the bullets hit, and then climbed out hours later. Naked and dripping with blood, he headed toward the Christian section of town and knocked on the first door he came to.

Finally, he confronted a widow whom he knew, saying:. I came down from the cross. Let me in. The door was opened. Whether or not the actual interaction happened as Eliach tells it is beside the point. What is remarkable is that the story stands as a perpetual memory of Jewish escape from death during the Shoah.

The self-portrait of a persecuted Eastern European Jew in as Christ is both ironic and irenic. The irony has a polemical edge to it: the widow only treats Michalowski kindly when he poses as Christ and hides his Jewish identity. The irony, of course, is that Jesus was himself Jewish. Yet there is a tone of reconciliation in the identification as well: Michalowski recognizes that from a Christian perspective, suffering is typified by the crucifixion.

Thus, if he wants the widow to empathize with his suffering, he must express it in Christian terms. The fact that he can overcome his parochialism while the widow cannot suggests that the polemic has the last word with an inverted sort of triumphalism: Jews, the minority, must constantly translate their world into the terms of the majority, while the Christian majority remains complacent in its insularity. Thus, despite this brief moment of rapprochement, Jews can narratively avenge our trauma and overcome our post-Holocaust terror by representing subversion and deception as the secrets to our survival.

In this theology, martyrdom only works if there is bodily resurrection. And bodily resurrection is construed here as a new kind of triumph over death that entails clinging to bodily life. I would like to conclude with a few personal reflections. The topic of martyrdom has captivated my attention for a long time.

To be honest, I am uneasy with a tradition that valorizes death without demanding critical scrutiny of the social structures that allowed it to happen in the first place. I am uncomfortable with theological assertions about death as redemptive or atoning. And here is where my intellectual study of Christianity and my personal faith divide.

The God to whom I pray does not demand human sacrifice. I know that Jews have believed such ideas for millennia, but I find myself rejecting this aspect of my own tradition in deference to its ethical demands. And that is a challenge with which I continue to struggle. Emmeram of Regensburg see Amram of Mayence , who, having been accused by Uta, daughter of Thedo, Duke of Bavaria, of being her seducer, was tied to a ladder, where his limbs were cut off, one by one. He was then brought to the castle of Aschheim, where he expired praying and blessing his murderers "Acta Sanctorum," September series, vi.

Perhaps Ezekiel