Judaism

J.J.N. McGurk describes how Jewish settlements in England followed the Norman Conquest, and pogroms began only a century later.

S. G. F. Brandon describes how the Roman legate faced the problems of a Jewish Revolt.

In dealing with her often refractory Jewish subjects, writes E. Mary Smallwood, Rome followed a policy of toleration and protection but insisted that the Jews must “repay toleration with toleration.”

E. Mary Smallwood asserts that when trouble broke out between rulers and subjects, the fault did not always lie with the Roman administration.

According to the ancient religions of the Near East, every man possessed a double nature, compounded of physical and psychical elements, each an essential adjunct of his life.

S.G.F. Brandon explains how, from the religious conceptions of the ancient Hebrew people, sprang the traditional idea of how mankind originated.

The majestic narrative of the fortunes of the Jewish people, as unfolded in the Pentateuch, incorporates four different strains of literary tradition. Once fused together, writes S.G.F. Brandon, they produced a philosophy of history that has influenced not only Israel itself but the whole of Christian Europe.

In this article, a British military commentator attempts to sum up the force of events that led to the establishment of the state of Israel.

S.G.F. Brandon poses the question: was Josephus, the famous Jewish historian of the first century A.D., an arch Quisling of the ancient world? He “could scarcely have given a worse impression of himself than that to be derived from the Jewish War,” whence he emerges as an unscrupulous opportunist whose conduct is rendered even more distasteful by a hypocritical profession of the highest motives.

The persecution and execution of Jews in 15th-century Italy highlights the ambiguous attitudes of Renaissance intellectuals towards Jewish people, their beliefs and their historical relationship with Christian theology, as Stephen Bowd explains.