The Jewish War, God’s Wrath and ‘the Most Unfortunate People’:
The Jewish War, God’s Wrath and ‘the Most Unfortunate People’:

Representations of the Jews and Judaism in Late Sixteenth-Century Protestant Literature in the Bohemian Lands

Summary/Abstract: This study shows how Protestant scholars wrote about the First Jewish-Roman War and the destruction of Jerusalem, and demonstrates how this story was updated in relation to Jews and anti-Jewish politics in the Bohemian lands after 1550. Drawing on a large corpus of Latin and vernacular texts, the author shows that the Jewish revolt was linked primarily to eschatological expectations and to a critique of the Jews’ disruption of natural law, religious unity and the social order as based on sovereign-subject relations. With regard to individual works, the author traces the collective imagination of the day that helped to shape the alterity of Jews (including imaginary notions of cannibalism, unsettled lifestyles, and non-normative sexuality) and elaborates on the strategies of legitimisation for violence against contemporary Jewish communities through references to the past.

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