Anti-Semitism: Medieval to Modern

Catalog description

This course surveys the history of Jewish-Christian interaction in Europe from late antiquity until the Dreyfus Affair, with emphasis on the 10 centuries between the ninth and the 19th. Using primary and secondary sources, literature, and film, students explore the complex relationships between Jews and Christians in these years, including often overlapping instances of persecution, segregation, disputation, coexistence, assimilation, and cooperation. The major political events, social shifts, and intellectual trends that profoundly altered European society in this extended period provide the backdrop against which the changing lives of Jewish and Christian Europeans are studied.