Jewish martyrs in the pagan and Christian worlds

Rejects the view that the idea of martyrdom was a contribution of Hellenic Judaism to Western civilization, arguing rather that Jews took the idea from Roman and early Christian heroic views of death. In the Middle Ages Jews were also influenced by heretics' resistance to Catholic persecution. Martyrdom then became an element in a "polemic" between Jews and Christians, the latter viewing the killing of Jews as a fulfillment of Divine will, while the former viewed dying in faithfulness to Divine chosenness as defeating Christianity. Highlights the role of French Jewry, particularly the Tosafists, in developing the Jewish tradition of martyrdom in the wake of persecution during the Crusades. Notes that Christian women served both as models of martyrs and as violent persecutors of Jews. A key element of Jewish martyrology was an emphasis on the choice between conversion and death. This model appeared in later Ashkenazi martyrological literature even when the historical reality was apparently different, where such a choice was not given. Jewish exiles, e.g. from Spain, also employed the martyrological rhetoric but transformed it so that living in exile was portrayed as equivalent to, or higher than, dying for one's faith. In the Nazi period living for one's faith, as opposed to martyrdom, was hailed by some rabbis, philosophers, and simple Jews as the demand of the hour. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)