Just read the absolutely fantastic Memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln. Truly stupendous. This is the personal recollections of a middel-aged Jewish woman who begins writing after being recently widowed-- to have something to do on the nights she can’t sleep. It was written in the late 1600’s.
Absolute must for anyone interested in Judaism OR women’s autobiography OR the Middle Ages.
I loved it, and would have read it in one sitting, had I not been on call this weekend (ready to take a sledge hammer to the damned pager).
“[He] beat his fist down upon the table and hurt his hand and became so
further enraged… that he beat his fist down upon the table even harder and
hurt his hand some more.” – Joseph Heller’s Catch-22
>>Hi Rowan! I’ll look for it next weekend when I go shopping. Does it mention the “red-headed evil person” thingie?<< --Melin
No. I’m pretty sure that was goyisher kop, and not many Jews even knew about it. (I’ll bet we were pretty surprised to find out that we’d been drinking Christian children’s blood at Passover, too.)
BTW: Did you see my reply to your request for a cite on the “Red-headed step-child” thread?
>>>Dammit! This thread should have been in MPSIMS.<<< --krish
You haven’t read this book…
–Rowan
Shopping is still cheaper than therapy. --my Aunt Franny
Does it mention the “red-headed evil person” thingie?<< --Melin
No. I’m pretty sure that was goyisher kop, and not many Jews even knew about it.<<–Rowan
–Ahem, here’s a very censored beginning: A traveller arriving in eighteenth-century Frankfurt, as he passed across the main Sachsenhauser Bridge leading to the Fahrtor Gate, could hardly miss the Judensau–The Jew’s Sow :::snip:::
Such a graphic expression of anti-Jewish sentiment was by no means unique: the image of :::snip::: can be found in numerous woodcut and printed versions dating as far back as the fourteenth century, while the myth of ritual murder gained currency in Germany in the fifteenth. What made the Frankfurt pictures remackabel–at least in the eyes of the city’s most celebrated son, Johann Wolfgang Goethe–were “not the product of private hostility, but erected as a public monument.”
This is from the opening paragraphs of “The House of Rothschild” by Niall Ferguson, Viking Press. It’s an authorized biography, by the way. The opening is to give you an idea of what a Rothschild had to go through.
Perhaps Gluckel had the taste to write about more positive subjects.
I will order the book.