Education, identity and cultural resistance in medieval judaism: Maimonides epistles

Abstract

The twelfth century brings us a critical moment of medieval Judaism. There are threats to Jewish existence, whether in the medieval Christian West or in the Muslim world. In the Christian majority space crusades occur, in which many Jewish communities are urged to conversion or death, occurring numerous cases of self-immolation (called Kidush Hashem). In North Africa and Al Andaluz (Muslim Hispania) the rise of the Almoad dynasty brings the winds of intolerance and waves of forced conversions or death of Jews occur. And in the sequence the Islamic intolerance to the Jews arrives in distant Yemen (south of the Arabian Peninsula) in which forced conversions occur. The wise rabbi Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides) writes on two occasions epistles of consolation and encouragement of the identity resistance of the Jews to forced conversions in spaces dominated by Islam. These epistles originally written in Arabic and translated into Hebrew in the same period are our sources. One is called the Epistle of conversion and the other Epistle of Yemen. We use Hebrew versions and translations in English and Portuguese. Our aim is to analyze the Jewish identity discourse in the sense of the resistance of the minority against its cultural and religious extermination.