| Title |
Jews as pagans? : Polemical definitions of identity in Visigothic Spain. |
|---|---|
| Host Item |
Early Medieval Europe 11,3 (2002) 189-207 |
| Description |
In the early years of his reign (ca. 613-615), King Sisebut ordered the Jews to be baptized. A conciliar canon, most probably from the third Council of Sevilla held in 624, relates that Jewish parents who had been baptized by force tried to prevent their children's baptism, relying on the help of Christian neighbors who lent them their own children (to undergo a second baptism). According to the wording of the canon, Jewish parents thereby retained their children who were viewed as "pagans". The peculiar terminology served as a rhetorical tool to denigrate Judaism, putting it on a par with idolatry, superstition, and backward rural culture. The rhetoric constructed a negative Jewish identity, which in turn served to strengthen a new concept of Gothic identity propagated since the conversion of the Visigoths to Catholicism. Surmises that Isidore of Seville was the author of the canonical text, which means that he changed his views on conversion at this Council. It seems, therefore, that political pressure was exerted on the assembled clerics which induced them to endorse the king's policy of forced conversion. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) |
| Language |
English |
| National Library system number |
990004148270705171 |
| Links |
Locate this publication in Israeli libraries |
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