Premium
Gender, memory and Jewish identity: reading a family history from medieval southern Italy
Author(s) -
Skinner Patricia
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
early medieval europe
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 24
eISSN - 1468-0254
pISSN - 0963-9462
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-0254.2005.00159.x
Subject(s) - judaism , reading (process) , middle ages , identity (music) , jewish identity , eleventh , history , jewish history , genealogy , jewish studies , ancient history , art , archaeology , linguistics , philosophy , aesthetics , physics , acoustics
This article combines recent work on memory in the early and central Middle Ages to read the Scroll of Ahimaaz, a well‐known eleventh‐century Jewish text from southern Italy. It suggests that previous readings of the text have been shaped by the dominant tradition of intellectual history within Jewish studies, and that Ahimaaz's work has been overlooked for the information it contains about gender and family history. It concludes that whilst the primarily Jewish identity of Ahimaaz and his family is reinforced by the text, they were at the same time as much a product of the southern Italian environment in which they lived.