FULFIL · Fulfilling the Law: Medieval Intellectuals and the Christian Making of Jewish Identity

Fulfilling the Law: Medieval Intellectuals and the Christian Making of Jewish Identity

Considering the cultural construction of minority identities in medieval Europe, and designed to include the history of Jews and Judaism into history of Europe as a whole, FULFIL has interrogated the impact that the Christian perceptions, conceptions and uses of the Hebrew Bible had on the religious identification of Jews as a distinctive group, mainly in the thirteenth century. Given that Christianity was understood as fulfilling, not abolishing, the Old Law, the Jews’ purported misreading of their own sacred text affected ideas about their intellectual abilities, and moral and social qualities. FULFIL has investigated the intellectual forms, cultural processes and social effects of Christian ideas, as these emerged in a world with living Jews and Jewish practice. The close study of scholastic, narrative and iconographic sources has shown that theological thinking was not disconnected from common beliefs and representations. By putting the religious diversity into a historical perspective, FULFIL has contributed to current debats on the place and role of religious minorities in Europe, at a time when understanding European identity is more pressing than ever before. It has allowed for a better understanding of how history has shaped our ways of perceiving and conceiving religious differences. Above all it contributed to demonstrate the constructedness of minority identities, and the role of ideas and scholars in making it happen. As it highlighted the cultural making of Jewish identity in later medieval Europe, by showing how Christian theologians built up Jewish otherness, FULFIL has contributed to a broader understanding of the European history, identity, and relationships to religious minorities. In order to show how Christian understandings of the "Old Law" have contributed to building up Jewish otherness, the main objective was to build an extensive network of sources, including the edition and translation of the unpublished Latin texts on the Old Law written in the 1290s by the Franciscan theologian Peter of John Olivi; to broaden the corpus of sources and set their intellectual, religious and social contexts; to assess the impacts of theological ideas.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз