Refugees or Migrants: Pre-Modern Jewish Population Movement
Robert Chazan
Abstract
For millennia, Jews and non-Jews alike have viewed forced population movement as a core aspect of the Jewish experience. This involuntary Jewish wandering has been explained by pre-modern Jews and Christians as divine punishment, by some modern non-Jews as the result of Jewish harmfulness, by some modern Jews as fostered by Christian anti-Jewish imagery, and by other modern Jews as caused by misguided Jewish acceptance of minority status. This book explores these various perspectives and argues that pre-modern Jewish population movement was in most cases voluntary, the result of a sense among ... More
For millennia, Jews and non-Jews alike have viewed forced population movement as a core aspect of the Jewish experience. This involuntary Jewish wandering has been explained by pre-modern Jews and Christians as divine punishment, by some modern non-Jews as the result of Jewish harmfulness, by some modern Jews as fostered by Christian anti-Jewish imagery, and by other modern Jews as caused by misguided Jewish acceptance of minority status. This book explores these various perspectives and argues that pre-modern Jewish population movement was in most cases voluntary, the result of a sense among Jews that there were alternatives available for making a better life elsewhere.
Keywords:
Jews,
population movement,
forced movement,
Jewish experience,
minority,
Jewish population
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2019 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780300218572 |
| Published to Yale Scholarship Online: September 2019 |
DOI:10.12987/yale/9780300218572.001.0001 |
