Rabbinic Culture and Its Critics: Jewish Authority, Dissent and Heresy in Medieval and Early Modern Times ed. by Daniel Frank, Matt Goldish (review)

REVIEWS 320 iter per Hispaniam, a route to Jerusalem through North Africa. “In this way, the efforts and goals of crusaders fighting in Iberia were presented as being synonymous with those of crusaders who set out for the Holy Land via Hungary and Asia Minor” (131). Here again Purkis emphasizes the persistence of Jerusalem in the spiritual motivations of crusaders. He notes that while campaigns before 1120, like the conquest of Zaragoza, were penitential in nature, “there is nothing to suggest that these undertakings were regarded as crusades” (128), thus distinguishing crusading as a certain type of penitential warfare. Crusading warfare only slowly took root in Iberia, thanks in part to the emergence of St James as a patron of warfare against Islam. Purkis carries out a detailed analysis of the Liber Sancti Iacobi and other parts of the Codex Calixtinus to trace this process. Crusading Spirituality delivers a powerful argument in surprisingly few pages. The first four chapters, which primarily address the situation in the Latin East, combine a real command of the primary sources with tightly reasoned analysis. Purkis also navigates well the more general field of medieval spirituality , allowing him to place crusading within the religious context of the period. Purkis’s effort to provide some nuance to the established crusading positions is nevertheless quite successful, and ought to open up further research opportunities for the field. The two chapters on Iberia make an interesting and plausible case, but the sources employed are far more limited, and there is little evidence of familiarity with Spanish or Portuguese scholarly literature.4 Iberian church councils held during the middle decades of the twelfth century, which do not figure prominently in Crusading Spirituality, were also important to the development of crusading ideology in the peninsula. Purkis’s analysis of the sources he does use is sound, but ultimately he needs more evidence to make his Iberian case convincingly. Still, the attempt to incorporate both Iberia and the Holy Land into a single small volume is laudable. Purkis promises further work on Iberia in subsequent publications (7); if they are as good as the first four chapters of Crusading Spirituality, Iberian medievalists will be grateful indeed. SAM CONEDERA, SJ, History, UCLA Rabbinic Culture and Its Critics: Jewish Authority, Dissent and Heresy in Medieval and Early Modern Times, ed. Daniel Frank and Matt Goldish (Detroit: Wayne State University Press 2008) 480 pp. This edited volume presents interdisciplinary perspectives on dissent in rabbinic Judaism in medieval and early modern times. The dominance of rabbinic texts, institutions, and leaders allowed for disparate Jewish communities to maintain “a cultural identity remarkable for its coherence, and a pattern of life 4 See, for example, Carlos de Ayala Martínez, “Iglesia y violencia en torno a la idea de cruzada (siglo XII), Hispania Sacra 49 (1997) 349–361; Eloy Benito Ruano, “La orden de Santiago y la idea de cruzada,” I Jornadas de historia de las órdenes militares (Madrid, febrero-marzo de 1996) (Madrid 1997) 11–26; Ermelindo Portela and María del Carmen Pallarés, “Compostela y Jerusalén. Reconquista y cruzada en el tiempo de Diego Gelmirez,” in José María Minguez and Gregorio del Ser, eds., La Península en la Edad Media treinta años después. Estudios dedicados a José Luis Martín (Salamanca 2006) 282–285. REVIEWS 321 striking for its consistency” (1). Yet rabbinic culture weathered criticism throughout the long period of its centrality in Jewish life. These challenges ranged from subtle critiques of rabbinic foibles to severe assaults that shook very foundations of rabbinic authority. The book consists of fourteen well-crafted studies, divided into three sections . The essays in the first part examine the boundaries of rabbinic culture in the Middle Ages as they were tested in literature, politics and theology. The second and third sections move into the early modern period, respectively addressing the relationship of Jews, conversos and heretics to the rabbinic establishment , and the repercussions of the Sabbatean movement for rabbinic culture . Editors Daniel Frank and Matt Goldish frame these diverse studies with a substantial introduction in which they present the narrative of Jewish history with an emphasis on how rabbinic culture responded to the...