Full Description
What, if anything, does religion have to do with how reliable we perceive one another to be? When and how did religious difference matter in the past when it came to trusting the word of another? In today's world, we take for granted that being Jewish should not matter when it comes to acting or engaging in the public realm, but this was not always the case. The essays in this volume look at how and when Jews were recognized as reliable and trustworthy in the areas of jurisprudence, medicine, politics, academia, culture, business, and finance. As they explore issues of trust and mistrust, the authors reveal how caricatures of Jews move through religious, political, and legal systems. While the volume is framed as an exploration of Jewish and Christian relations, it grapples with perceptions of Jews and Jewishness from the biblical period to today, from the Middle East to North America, and in Ashkenazi and Sephardi traditions. Taken together these essays reflect on the mechanics of trust, and sometimes mistrust, in everyday interactions involving Jews.
Contents
Introduction: On the Word of a Jew, or Trusting Jewish History / Nina Caputo and Mitchell B. Hart
Section One: To Swear an Oath
1. Oaths, Vows, and Trust in the Bible / Robert S. Kawashima
2. "And in most of their business transactions they rely on this": Some Reflections on Jews and Oaths in the Commercial Arena in Medieval Europe / Ephraim Shoham-Steiner
3. The Oath of a Jew in the Thirteenth Century English Legal Context / Joshua Curk
4. What is an Infidel?: Jewish Oaths and Jewish History in the Making of English Trust and Tolerance / Mitchell B. Hart
5. Trusting Adolphe Crémieux: Jews and Republicans in Nineteenth-Century France / Lisa Leff
Section Two: The Business of Trust
6. "A kind of republic and neutral nation:" Commerce, Credit, and Conspiracy in Early Modern Europe / Joshua Teplitsky
7. Jewish Peddlers and Non-Jewish Customers in the New World: Between Profit and Trust / Hasia Diner
8. Belonging and Trustworthiness: Jewish Businessmen in the Public Rhetoric around the "Trustworthy Businessman" in Post-World War I Germany / Stefanie Fischer
Section Three: Intimacy of Trust
9. The Voice of a Jew? Petrus Alfonsi's Dialogi contra judaeos and the Question of True Conversion / Nina Caputo
10. A Return to Credibility? The Rehabilitation of Repentant Apostates in Medieval Ashkenaz / Rachel Furst
11. The Jewish Physician as Respondent, Confidant, and Proxy: The Case of Marcus Herz and Immanuel Kant / Robert Leventhal
Section Four: The Politics of Trust
12. Perspectives from the Periphery: The East India Company's Jewish Sepoys, Anglo-Jewry, and the Image of "the Jew" / Mitch Numark
13. Between Honor and Authenticity: Zionism as Theodor Herzl's Life-Project / Derek Jonathan Penslar
14. The Most Trusted Jew in America: Jon Stewart's Earnestness / Shaina Hammerman
