Israel Jacob Yuval

Yuval's publications include two Hebrew-language studies listed in the Jewish Women’s Archive bibliography. “An Appeal against the Proliferation of Divorce in Fifteenth-Century Germany” appeared in Zion 48 (1983), pages 177–216. “Monetary Arrangements and Marriage in Medieval Ashkenaz” appeared in a 1995 collection edited by Menahem Ben-Sasson, pages 191–208.[2]

His Hebrew-language book Shenei goyim be-vitnekh: Yehudim ve-Notsrim, dimuyim hadadiyim was published by Am Oved in Tel Aviv in 2000.[5] The University of California Press issued the English translation, Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, in 2006.[5] A French translation appeared as Deux peuples en ton sein: juifs et chrétiens au Moyen âge, translated by Nicolas Weill.[3]

Yuval contributed “Jews and Christians in Middle Ages: Shared Myths, Common Language” to Demonizing the Other: Antisemitism, Racism & Xenophobia, volume 4 of the Studies in Antisemitism series. The volume was published in Amsterdam and Abingdon in 1999 for the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.[6] He also co-edited Conflict and Religious Conversation in Latin Christendom: Studies in Honour of Ora Limor with Ram Ben-Shalom.[3]

A later discussion of Jewish historical writing presented Yuval’s work as an example of comparative Jewish-Christian historiography. It quoted his assertion that “mutual relations exist” even between persecutor and persecuted and summarized his call for historians to consider both sides when writing about Jewish life in Christian Europe.[1]

This comparative approach also informed his treatment of medieval liturgical poetry. Yuval discussed a motif in which God’s garment is stained with martyrs’ blood, characterizing it as having become “one of the strongest symbols of Jewish martyrdom in Germany” and relating it to Crusade-era martyrdom and vengeance liturgy.[5] He cited nine piyyutim in connection with the motif, including a selihah and a kinah associated with R. Eliezer b. Natan, a Yom Kippur selihah by R. David b. Meshulam, and poems associated with R. Ephraim b. Yitzhak of Regensburg and other medieval Ashkenazic authors.[5]

A 1999 article in Aschkenas (volume 9, issue 1, pages 189–232) examined responses to the 1096 massacres in contemporary chronicles and piyyutim, including calls for divine revenge, and discussed Kiddush Hashem and attitudes toward martyrdom and suicide. It also reviewed objections to Yuval’s thesis published in Zion and other journals. An abridged English version appeared in the 2007 volume Human Sacrifice in Jewish and Christian Tradition, pages 213–236.[3]

Yuval's 1993 Zion article attracted scholarly dispute. Its central argument was that Jewish parents’ killing of their children during the 1096 persecutions to prevent forced conversion contributed causally to the Christian blood-libel accusation.[3][4] A later analysis summarized in the National Library of Israel record concluded that the connection was indirect at most: the 1096 deaths were one element among several perceptions and accusations that fed the idea of Jewish hatred for Christians, rather than a straightforward causal origin.[3]

Historian David Berger, in a 1997 lecture titled From Crusades to Blood Libels to Expulsions: Some New Approaches to Medieval Antisemitism, characterized Yuval’s approach as explaining medieval anti-Jewish accusations through distorted interpretations of contemporary Jewish practices. Berger rejected that explanation, arguing instead that High Medieval antisemitism developed from a broad range of beliefs emerging in the eleventh century.[7]

The Jewish Virtual Library independently describes an early-2000s scholarly controversy around an argument connecting the deaths of Jewish children during Crusader attacks with the medieval origins of the blood libel, but it does not identify Yuval by name as the argument’s proponent.[4] The attribution of that thesis to Yuval, and the detailed account of its later criticism, therefore rests principally on the National Library of Israel records.[3]