ChapterPDF Available

Encounters and Fantasies: Muslims, Jews and Christians in the North

Authors:
Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß
1 Encounters and Fantasies: Muslims, Jews
and Christians in the North
. Northern borderlands
We know a lot about Jewish life in the Middle Ages, and we also know a great
deal about anti-Jewish hostility during the same period. The complex relations
between Christians and Muslims from the First Crusade on have also been thor-
oughly investigated. Indeed, the past twenty years or so have seen a wealth of
studies published on interreligious contacts; dialogue and violence; Otherness
and hybridity; antisemitism and Islamophobia; the Self and the Other in Medi-
eval Europe; integration and disintegration of cultures, and medieval concep-
tions of race and ethnicity.
1
In most of these studies, Scandinavia and the Baltic
Rim (that is, the Baltic countries, northern Poland, and the German lands bor-
dering the Baltic Sea) have been missing. There are several reasons for this
lack of research. First of all, the traditional definition of this area as a periph-
ery – culturally, geographically, and historically – results in a lack of interest
in it from the “centre”. Secondly, the historiography of the Scandinavian coun-
tries tends to describe the medieval, the early modern, and often even the mod-
ern societies of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway as culturally and religiously
homogenous. And finally, probably the most obvious reason: There are essen-
tially no sources that confirm the actual presence of real Muslims and Jews in
medieval Scandinavia and the Baltic Region.
Nevertheless, we have managed to collect an entire book about Muslims
and Jews in the medieval North, and more besides. Rather than being studies
that apply the theoretical frameworks and concepts developed in other, richer
areas to the scarce sources from the North, most of the articles collected here
are first-time presentations of source materials, new readings of well-known
sources, and other attempts to make visible phenomena that until now have
remained unseen. And suddenly, the Muslims and Jews of the North emerge as
an absent presence – something that is there, but not visible, either construct-
ed or silenced, and always shifting between being entirely neglected and being
blown up to imagined and fantastical proportions
2
– inspired by Christian
1Reuter 2006; Borgolte et al. 2011; Conklin Akbari 2012; Becker and Mohr 2012; all with further
references.
2On the concept of absent presence, see Law 2004.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 4/26/15 2:32 PM
4Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß
teaching and tradition, by occasional encounters with travellers and traders,
and by fear and loathing.
Anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish hatred in the North functions differently from
areas where there were actual day-to-day contacts, be they peaceful or violent.
It also functions differently than in places like England, where Jews had once
been present but were expelled only then to live on in the Christian imagina-
tion. At the same time, the homogeneity of Northern populations in terms of
ethnic and religious identity is a modern supposition: There were cultural and
economic contacts with the pagan Sámi in the North, there were contending
attempts for Christianization from the East and the West, and there were strong
competing local identities based on custom, practice, and dialects even after
the formal unification of the Nordic and Baltic peoples under the Christian
faith – not to speak of persisting political differences between the Swedish,
Danish, and Norwegian Empires, and between Prussia and Livonia.
3
However,
examples of contact with non-Christians, real or imaginary, have to be carefully
extracted, partly from written sources and partly from archaeological ones.
They have not left persistent traces in the collective memory of the modern
nation states in Scandinavia, whereas in the Baltic Rim countries the situation
is quite the reverse. Here, the struggle between the Slavic and German popula-
tions and states, which was still ongoing until quite recently, has led both to
the destruction of many archives and to the obscuring of other religious and
ethnic groups and their potential influence.
The absent presence of Muslims and Jews in the sources has two principal
causes. First of all, there were no stable communities that could write and
trade their own memory. And secondly, the few non-Christians actually present
in the North and Baltic left for the most part very few traces in the sources that
might help to identify their actual presence. Nevertheless, these traces do exist,
and once discovered, they can be critically examined for their representation
of actual people. What happened to the Muslim prisoners of war who are docu-
mented as inhabitants of Prussia for a short period in the first half of the fif-
teenth century? Did they convert, die, or secretly maintain their belief and cul-
ture for several generations? We do not know. If Jews were held responsible for
spreading the Plague in medieval Prussia, or pejoratively depicted in Icelandic
manuscripts, does this mean that Jews were actually present in these areas?
Almost certainly not. The Muslims and Jews from the Scandinavian and Baltic
sources are products of the imagination, an imagination created from igno-
rance, maybe curiosity, fragments of knowledge from homecoming travellers,
3Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (2006) has similarly shown the complexity of identities in twelfth-
century Britain.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 4/26/15 2:32 PM
Encounters and Fantasies: Muslims, Jews and Christians in the North 5
pilgrims, and warriors, and most important of all, the massive Christian textual
tradition, which was adapted to Northern needs. Most of the texts speaking of
Muslims and Jews – except for the ones documenting actual settlement and
residency, as in Prussia – are translations of well-known material from the
continent: courtly romances, lives of saints, sermons, biblical references in his-
toriographical texts, even material culture such as altarpieces, sculptures, and
wall-paintings. The differentiations necessary when examining continental
phenomena apply even more so here – what did a continental Judenbild tradi-
tion mean for Northern people’s willingness to exclude, mock, or kill those
depicted? Mitchell M. Merback’s call not to read medieval images of Others
“inside the prison of Otherness furnished with the propaganda imagery it sets
out to study” is valid even in an area where the social realities did not contain
any or very few actual encounters.
4
According to postcolonial theory, this adaptation of a textual and cultural
tradition in a peripheral area always leads to a hybridization of knowledge, of
cultural forms and signs, and other phenomena of cultural adaptation, alien-
ation, and appropriation.
5
The medieval Baltic is an area where cultural forma-
tions were mixed and adopted, not only as far as the representation of Muslims
and Jews is concerned, but also regarding different elements of the Christian
tradition. This makes it extremely difficult – even more than in other, more
central, European regions – to deduce a common local mentality behind the
representation of Muslims and Jews in the sources, and to decide whether cer-
tain images of Muslims and Jews were the result of campaigns by the learned
elite or rather of long-term changes in the relations between majority society
and minorities.
6
Was the lavish continental courtly culture depicted in Floris
and Blancheflour not just as foreign to the Scandinavian reader as the religion
and lifestyle of the “Babylonians” in the romance? When the concept of Cru-
sading was transferred to the Baltic, the term for the enemy in Outremer, the
“Saracen”, was also transferred to the pagans, the “Saracens of the North” –
but what did this term mean to people who had never been to Outremer?
Considering all these questions, we are not exactly in a position to explain
phenomena. We are rather detecting, gathering, and discussing evidence. The
conference Fear and Loathing in the North aimed to draw together scholars
from a range of disciplines – such as theology (both popular and authorita-
tive), social history, literary studies, art history, Islamic and Jewish studies, and
4Merback 2006, 11.
5See an overview of the concepts of hybridity relevant for medieval studies in Burkhardt et
al. 2011.
6See Chazan 1997, 94.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 4/26/15 2:32 PM
6Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß
the history of Islamophobia and antisemitism – to present their research inter-
ests and findings concerning the perception of or encounters with Muslims and
Jews in medieval Scandinavia and the Baltic Region. The geographical areas
for discussion were defined as those where the predominant language was
Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and the German dialects characteristic
for the Teutonic Order’s lands along the Baltic coast. The period for discussion,
the Middle Ages, was set – rather loosely – as the centuries between the col-
lapse of the Western Roman Empire and the beginning of the sixteenth century.
There was a degree of elasticity here as the Jewish and Islamic Middle Ages do
not of course map directly onto the datings for Western Christian Europe.
Scandinavia and the lands to the south of the Baltic Sea are usually dealt
with separately in historiography despite the obvious mutual influence
through religious culture, trade, and military activity. For example, the effects
of Western Christianity, the Hanseatic League, and the Northern Crusades
could be felt in the lands to both the north and the south of the Baltic Sea. Yet
the areas remain distinct with regard to Muslims and Jews, not least as far as
actual settlement is concerned. Although there are no recorded communities
of Muslims or Jews in medieval Scandinavia, both groups of non-Christians
inhabited some of the areas along the southern coast of the Baltic Sea at vari-
ous times. This difference in actual presence could possibly have affected the
groups’ representation in literature and art, their treatment in legal regula-
tions, and the creation of myths and stereotypes.
All of these aspects specific for the area in focus – periodization, geogra-
phy, and populations – have received increased attention by scholars within
the field of postcolonial medieval studies. The complex relation between the
Self and the Other becomes particularly visible if considered from the perspec-
tive of borderlands. Text production about Muslims and Jews in the North
points to the interconnection between spatial and temporal distance, while it
also contains all the aspects of merging, mirroring, and delimitating the Other
that we know from other areas and periods.
7
The hierarchization between cen-
tre and periphery, which has been identified as the basis for Eurocentric
models of interpretation, is disturbed in the Christian periphery, and opens
for differentiations of the phenomena of alterity, between seeing the Other as
monstrous and potentially disturbing the boundaries of the social order and a
simple curiosity for the strange.
8
7Saurma-Jeltsch 2012, 9.
8An attempt to see alterity as a central positive and differentiated concept of analysis is found
in Rehberg 2012.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 4/26/15 2:32 PM
Encounters and Fantasies: Muslims, Jews and Christians in the North 7
While vital in the medieval Baltic, the Crusades as the most privileged
model for cultural encounters between Christians and Muslims play only a mi-
nor role in Scandinavia, and thus evidence from this area can add to the at-
tempts by Sharon Kinoshita and others to describe the encounters between
these two groups in other terms than proto-colonialism.
9
For Prussia and Livo-
nia, on the other hand, the notion of alterity shaped by both medieval and
modern forms of colonialism can be questioned by adding knowledge to the
hybrid and heterogeneous practices of religion and identity. In Scandinavia
and the Baltic Region, modern national borders have for a long time obscured
the perspective on medieval borders and borderlands. The examination of the
representations of Muslims and Jews here can serve, as Lisa Lampert has pro-
posed for medieval literature in general, as a tool for decentring Christianity
as the single normative frame of medieval Europe.
10
. Medieval Scandinavia and the Islamic World
There were no resident Muslims in Scandinavia until towards the end of the
nineteenth century when a few hundred Tatars arrived in Finland.
11
Thus, with
the exception of occasional envoys or travellers from the Islamic world to the
North, the Muslims whom Scandinavians met were abroad. Vikings encoun-
tered the Islamic world in Iberia to the west, the Maghreb to the south, and
the Abbasid Caliphate to the east. Later, pilgrims to the Holy Land and crusad-
ers would have had first-hand experience of Muslims, Islam, and Arab and
Ottoman culture and society. Studies on the portrayal of Islam and Muslims in
medieval Scandinavian art and texts are few and far between.
The main sources at hand for studying contacts between the Viking and
Islamic worlds are written records (runestones and Arabic texts), Arabic coins,
and archaeological objects. As far as runic evidence is concerned, it is particu-
larly the interpretation of placenames that has caused the most debate. Al-
though some placenames are straightforward to interpret, such as iursala, Je-
9Kinoshita 2006. Similarly we avoid using phrases like “orientalism” and “proto-orientalism”
(Said 1978) as they better suit the heyday of European dominance and colonialism in the nine-
teenth and late twentieth centuries rather than the more fluid situation in the Middle Ages
(characterized by cultural exchange) and at the time of the Ottoman Empire (characterized by
European weakness).
10 Lampert 2010, 10–13.
11 On the Tatars of Finland, see Leitzinger 1999; Leitzinger 2006; Martikainen 2009.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 4/26/15 2:32 PM
8Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß
rusalem, which appears on three runestones, others are more problematic.
12
There are seven extant runestones that, while alluding to travels to the east,
make explicit mention of sirklant, that is Særkland.
13
In spite of its obvious
similarity to “Saracen land”, there is no scholarly consensus where this place
is.
14
Although first used to refer to the south-easternmost destination of the
Vikings, the (Muslim) area south of the Caspian Sea,
15
later in the Viking Age
Særkland came to refer to all Muslim lands beyond Russia. In Old Norse sagas
and poems it even included North Africa and southern Spain, although it was
generally used as the name of a fictional romanticized place rather than a fac-
tual location.
16
The name may derive from the city of Sarkel in the land of the
Khazars,
17
or from the Norse word særker, “shirt, sark”, and thus ultimately
from Latin sericum, “silk”, referring either to the silk-producing lands or the
clothes worn by the inhabitants.
18
Another problematic placename is karusm
found on the Vs 1 runestone. Some argue that it is an error for karþum,
Garðaríki, the regions ruled by the Kievan Rus’,
19
while others interpret it as
Khwarezm, the river delta of the Amu River at the Aral Sea in western Central
Asia and a region that had been Muslim since about the eighth century.
20
The
very existence of these runestones thus provides clear evidence for an aware-
ness of and economic interest in the East, while placenames such as iursala
and karusm demonstrate just how far into Muslim lands some Scandinavians
travelled before 1200. But runic inscriptions can be tricky evidence to interpret,
and it is difficult to see whether it will ever be possible to know for sure how
to read these names.
More information about contacts between Scandinavians and the Islamic
world is found in Arabic written sources whose authors, such as Yayā ibn al-
akam al-Bakrī (al-Ġazāl), Ibrāhīm Yaqūb a-arūši, Amad ibn Falān, and
al-Masūdī, provide a snap-shot of Scandinavian society, although as with
12 Unlike many of the other voyages mentioned in runic inscriptions, the three runic inscrip-
tions that refer to Jerusalem (G 216, U 136, and U 605†) seem not refer to trading or military
expeditions but rather to pilgrimage. See Samnordisk rundatabas for transcriptions and trans-
lations of these runic inscriptions.
13 Samnordisk rundatabas: G 216, Sö 131, Sö 179, Sö 279, Sö 281, U 439, and U 785.
14 Whaley 2005, 494 n. 2; Jesch 2005, 124–136.
15 Brate and Wessén 1924–1936, 155.
16 Ruprecht 1958, 55; Cleasby and Vigfússon 1874, s.v. “Serkland”.
17 Jarring 1983.
18 Shephard 1982–1985, 235.
19 Jesch 2001, 96 n. 26.
20 Pritsak 1981, 443–445; Gustavson 2002; Meijer 2007, 86. It is noteworthy that karusm is
the same as *qarus-m, the reconstructed Middle Turkic form of Khwarezm.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 4/26/15 2:32 PM
Encounters and Fantasies: Muslims, Jews and Christians in the North 9
many travel descriptions it can be difficult to discern between the real and the
fantastical, and the everyday and the extraordinary. In spite of the pioneering
work on sources by Georg Jacob and Harris Birkeland, as well as studies by the
likes of Elisabeth Piltz, James E. Montgomery, and Stig Wikander, there still
remains a great deal of work to be undertaken on Arabic sources on the Vi-
kings, and not least work on later Persian versions.
21
An obvious way forward
would be greater collaboration between scholars of Arabic, Persian, and Scan-
dinavian literature and language.
A substantial number of archaeological finds also testify to contacts with
the Islamic world. For example, around 85,000 Arabic or Kufic coins have been
found in Sweden, about 5,000 in Denmark, and just fewer than 2,000 in Fin-
land.
22
Interestingly, some of these coins have pagan images of Þórr’s hammer
(Mjǫlnir) or Christian crosses scratched onto them, which suggest that Scandi-
navians wanted to disassociate themselves from the other faith, Islam.
23
Other
objects from the Islamic world reaching Scandinavia include balances and
weights, textiles, and beads. All these objects testify to a lively trade – either
directly or indirectly – with the East, while the defacing or “rendering harm-
less” of objects by inscribing pagan or Christian symbols onto them hints at a
perceived need to draw and affirm the boundaries between their own religion
and Islam. Intriguing though this may be, we can but speculate to what extent
Vikings felt threatened by the religion of Muslims while at the same time covet-
ing their wares and precious metals. In his account of the Volga Bulgars, Ibn
Falān writes that he saw 5,000 people called al-baringār who had converted
to Islam and built a wooden mosque.
24
Al-baringār has been interpreted as
væringjar, Varangians, the name given by Greeks and East Slavs to Vikings.
25
Might some of these same Vikings have subsequently brought their new faith
back to Scandinavia with them?
Given the late arrival of the Latin alphabet to Scandinavia (the very earliest
written documents date from c. 1200) and its geographical distance from the
Islamic world, the paucity of written sources from Scandinavia is hardly sur-
prising. As written culture developed over the next few centuries, not least
21 Jacob 1927; Birkeland 1954; Piltz 1998; Montgomery 2000; Montgomery 2008; Wikander
1978.
22 Mikkelsen 1998; Jensen and Kromann 1998; Talvio 1998.
23 Mikkelsen 1998, 48–50; Mikkelsen 2008, 546. However, scratching such symbols onto
these coins may also have just been a way of transforming them into talismans with no deliber-
ate intention to elide the Islamic religion as such.
24 Wikander 1978, 21, 57–58; Piltz 1998, 36.
25 Lewicki 1972, 12 (quoting Károly Czegléd [pers. comm.]); Wikander 1978, 21. See also
Duczko 1998.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 4/26/15 2:32 PM
10 Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß
through the cultivation of a vernacular literature, texts portraying Muslims be-
gin to appear. These include sermons;
26
romances, such as the Old Danish
Floris and Blancheflour and The Chronicle of King Magnus; miracle stories, such
as the Old Swedish legendary; Old Icelandic sagas, such as Nítíða saga and
Yngvars saga víðførla; travel descriptions and pilgrim guides, such as that in
Copenhagen, AM 792, 4°, and reports of Ottoman military expansion, such as
the Old Danish Siege of Rhodes from 1508. However, in these texts – unlike
the albeit somewhat unforthcoming runestones of the Viking Age – Særkland,
Khwarezm, and other sites of adventure, gold and pilgrimage are replaced by
a constructed, largely pejorative image of Islam, Muslims and Muammad im-
ported from the European mainland. Despite including many details about
Muslim beliefs and customs, these documents do not reflect actual contact be-
tween the North and the Islamic world but rather the absorption of European
anti-Muslim polemics into Scandinavian literary culture.
There has been little research on Christian ideas about Muslims in medie-
val vernacular Scandinavian literature. In fact, such accounts usually form lit-
tle more than brief prolegomena to more detailed examinations of later litera-
ture; for example in Bent Holm’s study of the Turk in early modern Danish
drama or Martin Schwarz Lausten’s study of Muslims in post-Reformation texts
from Denmark.
27
Studies on Scandinavian Latin literature and the image of
Muslims and Islam tend to fall within the context of crusading and therefore
to concentrate on violent encounters.
28
There is thus much work to be done,
beginning not least with the identifying and cataloguing of relevant sources
and the images contained therein. It is generally assumed that ideas about
non-Christians in medieval Scandinavian literature, which at least as far as
mainland Scandinavia is concerned was largely translated from other Euro-
pean languages, were unoriginal, yet there has in fact never been a study to
see how the image of the Islamic world might have been developed during the
transmission of texts to Scandinavia. One need only think of the conclusion of
Floris and Blancheflour to see that this could be a promising area of study. In
the French versions of the tale, the emir consults his advisors and forgives the
two young lovers when they are discovered in bed together. In the Danish ver-
sion, the couple are put on trial and the matter resolved through a violent duel
between Floris and a Saracen knight. What do these sorts of examples tell us
about how Scandinavian literary culture used an “Oriental” background to de-
fine itself and its values?
26 On the whole, Muslims only appear in crusading sermons. See Jensen 2007, 104–132.
27 Holm 2010, and Lausten 2010.
28 See, for example, Skovgaard-Petersen 2001; Simonsen 2004, and Jensen 2007.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 4/26/15 2:32 PM
Encounters and Fantasies: Muslims, Jews and Christians in the North 11
Similarly, medieval art depicting Muslims, such as the Norwegian painted
altar frontals featuring Saracen soldiers (Nedstryn Church, Norway, c. 1300–
1325)
29
and a Saracen’s head (unknown provenance, Norway, c. 1300),
30
have
largely escaped scholars’ attention. Post-Reformation art, such as the recently
discovered wall-paintings in Skibinge Church, Denmark, depicting St. James
the Greater being (anachronistically) martyred by Moors, has received more
attention.
31
The sixteenth- or seventeenth-century painting in Gothem Church,
Visby, has also become well known, not least as its renovation coincided with
the Jyllands-Posten Muammad cartoon controversy. Alongside the figures of
the pope (“Papa”) and St. Christopher (“Christophoros”), a moustachioed fig-
ure in a turban is identified by the accompanying name “Mahomet”, but there
is some disagreement whether it depicts the Prophet Muammad or the sultan
Mehmed IV (1642–1693).
32
Furthermore on the subject of art, there is a need for
research on the extent to which Islamic art – in architecture, textiles, weapons,
and harness decorations and ornaments – influenced Scandinavian styles.
. Medieval Scandinavia and the Jews
Although Jews were not resident in the medieval lands north of the Baltic Sea,
Scandinavians would have had the opportunity to meet Jews elsewhere in Eu-
rope.
33
For example, there were Jews living in Normandy at the time the Danish
Vikings settled there; Vikings who travelled eastwards to Russia and Byzanti-
um would have traded with Jews in Khazaria; participants in the pilgrimages
or Crusades south to mainland Europe or to the Holy Land would also have
encountered Jews, and students studying at European universities would pos-
sibly have seen or interacted with Jews in those cities. Individual Jews may
have come to Scandinavia before the seventeenth century as merchants or trad-
ers, but if they did, they have not left behind any archaeological remains or
written evidence whatsoever.
34
The absence of a Jewish community does not
29 Hohler, Morgan, and Wichstrøm 2003, , 112–113; , 121, and , 43.
30 Hohler, Morgan, and Wichstrøm 2003, , 96, and , 7.
31 Schnohr 2012.
32 Sjögren 2005–2006.
33 Jews were first permitted to settle in Denmark from 1622 and in Sweden from 1718.
34 The first registered Jew in Denmark whom we know of is Jochim Jøde in 1592 in Helsingør
(see Christensen 1987). There may, however, have been Jews living in Denmark some years
before this date who arrived under false Christian names (see Katz 1988, 96; cf. Adams 2014,
92–93). The earliest recorded Jew in Sweden is King Gustav Vasa’s doctor: A letter dated 9
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 4/26/15 2:32 PM
12 Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß
mean that Jews are absent from medieval artistic and literary works; indeed,
they appear in many artistic, literary, and theological works, albeit as fantasti-
cal, fabricated beings, and were as such very much alive and present in the
Scandinavian collective mentality. Descriptions of and stories about Jews
abound in the extant literature, especially from within the religious sphere,
and they give the impression that ideas about Jews, and what they were be-
lieved to represent, had saturated the public’s consciousness.
The rather modest amount of research on Jews and medieval Scandinavia
has tended to be characterized by subject specialists working in isolation.
35
As
far as Sweden is concerned, Hugo Valentin’s pioneering work Judarnas historia
i Sverige (1924) gives short shrift to the Middle Ages,
36
and with the exception
of a highly readable student dissertation on Jews in Swedish medieval wall-
paintings and a couple of articles that mention Jews in St. Birgitta’s Revela-
tions,
37
nothing of note has appeared since. This is quite remarkable as there
are a great many sources in Sweden, both in art and in literature. The country
has the dubious honour of possessing Scandinavia’s only examples of the Ju-
densau, three in all,
38
as well as many other images of Jews in church art.
39
With the exception of some venerable figures from the Old Testament, the Jews
in these paintings are all presented pejoratively: typically in profile, with gro-
tesque facial features, beards, dark or red skin, and wearing “Jew hats”. Many
Swedish vernacular texts, such as the Old Swedish Legendary, the Revelations
of St. Birgitta, sermons, and devotional texts, include descriptions of Jews.
These still need to be investigated from the viewpoint of Jewish-Christian rela-
tions, and as some of them are translations from foreign works – for example,
the legendary is a reworking of Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda aurea – there
is the possibility of comparative studies that will demonstrate whether or how
the image of the Jew transforms during its transmission from continental Eu-
rope to the North.
Relations between Christians and (imagined) Jews in Denmark have been
most thoroughly investigated by Martin Schwarz Lausten and Jonathan Adams.
October 1557 (Västerås) describes a conflict between “desse våre medicos, doktor Kop och den
juden [these doctors of ours, doctor Kop and that Jew]”, Valentin 1924, 8.
35 This has resulted in some unfortunate errors in the interpretation of the sources. See, for
example, criticisms in Adams 2013a, 23 n. 41, and 283.
36 Valentin 1924, 1–9.
37 Muck af Rosenschöld 2007; Raudvere 2000; Raudvere 2003.
38 The Judensäue are located in Härkeberga (wall-painting, 1480s); Husby-Sjutolft (wall-paint-
ing, 1480s), and Uppsala cathedral (carved stone cornice, fourteenth century).
39 An online database of medieval Swedish church art is available at < http://medeltidbild.
historiska.se >.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 4/26/15 2:32 PM
Encounters and Fantasies: Muslims, Jews and Christians in the North 13
Lausten’s work is rooted in church history and is largely theological in its ap-
proach looking at how patristic and authoritative writing shaped the works of
writers in Latin and Danish.
40
Adams provides an investigation of (anti-)Jewish
motifs and stereotypes in Danish vernacular literature up to and including the
publication in 1516 of Poul Ræff’s Danish translation of Johannes Pfefferkorn’s
De Judaica Confessione, as well as a study of Jews in Passion tales and in ser-
mons.
41
His findings show that the images of biblical Jews from late medieval
mainland European texts were deeply embedded in the prevailing culture of
Denmark, whereas popular myths concerning well poisoning, host desecration,
ritual murder, and the like, are entirely lacking. However, this may just be a
consequence of the small size of the Old Danish text corpus. The portrayal of
Jews in Danish wall-paintings has been investigated extensively by Ulla Haas-
trup,
42
although her conclusions – not least that Jews must have been resident
in Denmark – have been disputed.
43
The area would benefit from an interdisci-
plinary approach integrating art history, medieval literature, and theology to
investigate the interplay between church art and popular religious texts, partic-
ularly sermons, in order to understand what images were propagated by the
Church and how they came to be embedded in medieval Scandinavian culture.
There remains much work to be done on Norway and Iceland. Despite the
publication of fine editions of key texts, such as Jóns saga Hólabyskups ens
helga and Gyðinga saga, little has been written on the portrayal of Jews in West
Norse art and literature.
44
Painted figures appear dressed in typical Jewish at-
tire in several Norwegian churches, for example in Bø, Hamre, and Nes, and
Jews can be seen crucifying Jesus in Hauge Church, while the miracle of the
Jewish boy in the oven appears on two altarpieces, viz. in Årdal and Vanyl-
ven.
45
An article by Bjarne Berulfsen argued that antisemitism was a “litterær
importvare [literary imported item]” from mainland Europe.
46
This claim,
which seems to be based on the view that anti-Jewish ideas and the cultures
that produced them were static and unchanging, rests on the supposition that
40 Lausten 1992. This is the first volume in his monumental series documenting the relation-
ship between the Jews and the Church in Denmark.
41 Adams 2010; Adams 2012a; Adams 2012b; Adams 2013a; Adams 2013b; Adams 2014.
42 Haastrup 1999; Haastrup 2003.
43 Thing 2000, 34; Adams 2014, 92.
44 Jóns saga contains a miracle concerning the Jews’ torturing a statue of Christ (see Foote
2003, 26–27, 93–94, and 129–130). Gyðinga saga is a retelling of the Book of Maccabees (see
Wolf 1995). In contrast to the Middle Ages, the post-Reformation period has been studied more
thoroughly (see, for example, Vilhjálmsson 2004).
45 For references, see the indexes in Hohler, Morgan, and Wichstrøm 2003.
46 Berulfsen 1958.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 4/26/15 2:32 PM
14 Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß
the representation of the Jews in Old Norwegian and Icelandic literature is en-
tirely religious in character and the same as in other European texts.
47
How-
ever, there has never been a survey of Jewish stereotypes and antisemitic imag-
es in West Norse literature that might uncover significant differences in the
frequency or use of certain motifs between Norway, Iceland, and the rest of
Europe. Nor do we know anything about pre-conversion ideas concerning Jews
whom Norwegians or Icelanders might have encountered on their travels. If
pagan Swedish Vikings felt the need to deface Islamic writing and symbols on
coins by scratching on Þórr’s hammers, why would Norwegians not have felt
a similar distaste towards the religion of the Jews whom they met around the
Mediterranean?
. Imagined Muslims and Jews in the Baltic
Scholarship on non-Christians in the medieval Baltic Rim is inevitably shaped
by research on the Teutonic Order and its colonization of the region. And in
this research, the relations between Christian knights, Christian settlers, and
indigenous pagan Prussians entirely dominate the picture, while relations be-
tween the Teutonic knights and members of the other monotheistic religions
are mainly dealt with in the context of the Order’s earlier presence in the Holy
Land. None of the three large military orders originally seemed to have a partic-
ularly negative relation to the Jewish communities in the Holy Land or the
other areas where the orders built up dominions, such as Rhodes and Cyprus.
48
Since the Teutonic Order was the youngest among the knight orders, its role
in the production of anti-Muslim crusading propaganda and literature is some-
what neglected compared to that of the Templars and the Hospitallers.
Regarding the process of the settlement of eastern Prussia, dominated by
German-speaking colonizers, questions of ethnicity have been much discussed,
but questions of religion have been limited to the contrast between Christian
colonizers and indigenous pagans.
49
The topics of inter-religious contact or
47 Berulfsen 1958, 126. Berulfsen somewhat marginalizes the issue of Jews in West Norse lit-
erature in his 1963 encyclopaedic article. For a different view, see Cole 2014.
48 Sarnowsky 2001 briefly describes the expulsion of the Jews from Rhodes in the early six-
teenth century, while the Order of St. John had the Judenregal (a ruler’s right to tax Jews in
return for protecting them) on the island.
49 On pagan religion in Prussia as reported in the sources of the fifteenth and sixteenth centu-
ries, see Brauer 2011.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 4/26/15 2:32 PM
Encounters and Fantasies: Muslims, Jews and Christians in the North 15
religious diversity in the Baltic seem entirely overshadowed by the Teutonic
Order’s fight against the indigenous pagan peoples: Prussians, Samogitians,
and Lithuanians.
50
Muslims do play a certain role in the imagination of the
Christian knights and consequently in scholarly research, but in this context,
it is not potential encounters with real Muslims and Jews in the Northeast that
are the focus of historical and literary scholarship, but rather the transference
of the concept of the enemy from the Muslims in the Holy Land to the pagan
Prussians and Lithuanians in the Baltic lands.
51
It is assumed that the Order
somehow developed a collective memory of the encounters with Muslims in the
Mediterranean and that these encounters from the twelfth and early thirteenth
century became a matrix for meeting the enemies of the fourteenth century –
at least in the world of chronicles and epics.
Since the literary production of the Order itself – that is, texts that can
clearly be assigned either to Prussia and/or to a member of the Teutonic Order
as author and/or sponsor – is very limited, the Baltic crusades as described in
European chivalric epics and travel literature have provided insights into the
perception of pagan Lithuanians as the religious Other.
52
Regarding the Teu-
tonic Order’s own production, the translation of Old Testament texts domi-
nates, and here, much work remains to be done regarding the particularities
of translation. The fact that the Teutonic Order adopted the “new Maccabees”
as their label and used and disseminated a German translation of the Books of
Maccabees
53
has been mentioned frequently in the context of the military and
corporative ideal that this ideology transports.
54
In the chronicles of Peter of
Dusburg (died c. 1326) and its translation by Nicolaus of Jeroschin (died c.
1341), the Maccabees as well as the three young men in the fiery furnace from
the Book of Daniel are, as has been pointed out by scholars of literary history,
presented as virtuous models of fighting and suffering.
55
But the significance
of choosing explicitly Jewish role models and emphasizing the translation of
50 On pagan beliefs and the process of Christianization in the Baltic, see the contributions by
Vladas Žulkus on Lithuania, Guntis Zemītis and Andris Caune on Latvia, and Enn Tarvel on
Estonia and Livonia in Müller-Wille 1998. See also Valk 2003; Valk 2008; Šne 2008; Kala 2009;
Wüst 2012. Ivar Leimus is one of the few scholars whose research on inter-religious contact
deals with the pre-Teutonic period. He has studied Islamic coins in pagan Estonia and the
effects of trade with the East; see Leimus 2007a; Leimus 2007b.
51 Urban 1998; Fischer 2007.
52 Murray 2010.
53 Helm 1904.
54 Feistner, Vollman-Profe, and Neecke 2007. However, it should be noted that Maccabees
was also used before the Teutonic Order; see Undusk 2011.
55 Fischer 1991; Fischer 2005; Lähnemann 2012.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 4/26/15 2:32 PM
16 Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß
Old Testament books – in addition to Maccabees, both Judith
56
and Esther
57
were also translated at the behest of the Order – has not been investigated
yet.
58
The representation of Muslims and Jews in church paintings, architec-
ture, and manuscript illustrations has likewise been neglected.
59
. Real Muslims and Jews in Prussia
As far as medieval Prussia is concerned, the assumption that the Teutonic Or-
der maintained an active anti-Jewish policy has become a commonplace and
has ultimately led to a lack of research on Jews in this area before the seven-
teenth century. The sources for this anti-Jewish policy are, however, more than
doubtful. In one thread of the tradition of Prussian chronicles, it is claimed
that High Master Siegfried of Feuchtwangen gave the Prussian lands a codex
of laws (Landordnung) in 1309, as soon as he had moved the main seat of the
Order to Marienburg (Malbork). The first willkor, or article, of this Landordnung
is said to forbid the residence of “Jews, magicians, sorcerers, and waideler
in the Prussian lands, the waideler being Prussian pagan priests. The earliest
chronicle containing this information is Simon Grunau’s Preussische Chronik
from 1525, which is otherwise generally viewed as highly unreliable by scholars
of history.
60
The earliest Landordnungen by High Masters for the Prussian lands
stem from the beginning of the fifteenth century and do not contain any anti-
Jewish regulations. Despite the obvious reasons to doubt the existence of this
anti-Jewish policy on the part of the Teutonic Order, the fact remains that there
are but few traces of real Jews in Prussia; this probably explains why German
Jewish scholars of the emerging Wissenschaft des Judentums,
61
Christian and
National Socialist German scholars
62
as well as Polish scholars
63
all started
56 Palgen 1969.
57 Caliebe 1985.
58 An exception is Auffarth 1994, but without special emphasis on the Teutonic Order and
Prussia.
59 A notable exception in this context is the volume by Hanna Zaremska on Jews in medieval
Poland that contains several examples of depictions of Jews in altar paintings from fifteenth-
century Toruń. See Zaremska 2011.
60 Zonenberg 2009, with references to the older studies arguing in this direction.
61 Jolowicz 1867, 2–3; Hollack 1910; Stern 1925, 6. Also Echt 1972, 12–13. Echt was a teacher in
Gdańsk until he was forced to flee to the UK in 1939.
62 Baczko 1789, 315; Forstreuter 1937; Aschkewitz 1967, 1.
63 Zaremska 2011; Nowak 1991; Broda 2011; Wołosz 2002.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 4/26/15 2:32 PM
Encounters and Fantasies: Muslims, Jews and Christians in the North 17
their published investigations of Jewish communities in early modern Prussia
by repeating the statement that the Teutonic Order had proposed and imple-
mented a ban on Jewish settlement.
Nevertheless, there are traces of Jewish life in the area from the beginning
of the fourteenth century on. No stable Jewish communities seem to have exist-
ed in the Prussian heartlands; however, letters of safe conduct for Jews, formu-
lae for Jewish converts, records of bishops’ financial support for these converts
as well as recurring calls in Prussian towns during the fifteenth century for
restrictions on Jewish trading exemplify that Jews were by no means only imag-
ined figures in medieval Prussia.
64
Numerous medieval placenames containing
the element Juden- have until now only been investigated by völkische scholars
who judged them not to be evidence of actual Jews living there.
65
The quite
uncertain field of personal names has enjoyed great attention by scholars inter-
ested in the “German character” of the region but they have never mentioned
and discussed the frequent evidence of iode, “Jew”, as a surname.
66
The expansion and decline of the Order’s territory would also justify a
more thorough investigation of its presumed anti-Jewish policy: In Neumark
(Nova Marchia), acquired by the Order in 1402, Jews had had the right of resi-
dency since the thirteenth century and were not expelled by the Order;
67
in
the territories under the control of the Prussian bishops, the Order’s rules for
settlement and residency did not apply at all,
68
and as far as Livonia is con-
cerned the legal situation for Jews is ignored in scholarship just as much as
for the Prussian heartlands.
69
In nearby Poland, the Jews’ legal situation was
exceptionally good due to the Privilegium Casimirianum of 1334, and most of
the studies assuming a ban issued by the Teutonic Order mention that the legal
situation of Jews in Prussia might have changed for the better after 1466, when
larger parts of Prussia came under the control of the Polish crown. The shifting
authorities in the town of Danzig (Gdańsk) also provided shifting policies on
64 The index of the archives of the Teutonic Order’s incoming correspondence (Ordensbrief-
archiv, OBA) already contains twenty-four entries under the lemma “Juden”. See Hubatsch and
Joachim 1948.
65 Strunk 1931.
66 See for example Clemens Iode in Ordensfoliant 2a. Kubon and Sarnowsky 2012. On inter-
preting “Jew” in medieval Scandinavian personal names, see Adams 2014, 92–93.
67 Heise 1932.
68 Radzimiński 1997.
69 Most recently in Jähnig 2011, where Jews are not mentioned at all. For Tallinn, see Kreem
2002, who also does not mention Jews. Buchholtz (1899, 1) finds the first evidence of Jews in
Riga in 1560.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 4/26/15 2:32 PM
18 Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß
Jewish settlement and residency.
70
However, a systematic review of this still
remains a desideratum.
As far as the areas to the east and south of the Teutonic Order’s Prussian
heartlands are concerned, sources and research on religious diversity are gen-
erally better, but the main focus here is on contact between Catholic and Ortho-
dox Christians in places such as Novgorod, Pskov, and Reval (Tallinn), mainly
because of the cultural contacts brought about by the Hanseatic League.
71
West
of Prussia, the territories of Brandenburg and Mecklenburg were the sites of
shifting relations between Christians and Jews, resulting in numerous Jewish
communities but also violent pogroms and expulsions.
72
Medieval Lithuania
as a place of interreligious and intercultural exchange and coexistence has
attracted scholarly interest in the past decades, finally overcoming research
structured according to the boundaries of modern national states.
73
At the end
of the Middle Ages, Tatars settled mostly in the eastern part of the Grand Duchy
of Lithuania and, like the Jews who lived there, enjoyed considerable privileg-
es.
74
Fifteenth-century sources from Prussia mention Tatar prisoners of war,
and in the sixteenth century, during the Livonian War, Tatars who served in
the Russian army even settled Livonia.
75
Evidence of Jews in the Hanseatic
towns on the Baltic coast, such as Lübeck, Stettin (Szczecin), and Rostock,
during the Middle Ages is just as sparse as for Prussia and has been equally
neglected in systematic studies of Jewish life.
. This volume
The articles in this volume are grouped into four sections. In “Contact”, the
first section, cultural and economic exchange between Christians and members
of other religions in Scandinavia and the Baltic are investigated. Bjørn Band-
lien (Buskerud and Vestfold University College) discusses whether images of
the heathens in northern Scandinavia changed during the Middle Ages, and if
such developments were influenced by perceptions of Saracens from elsewhere
70 For the sixteenth century, see Bogucka 1992.
71 See the contributions in Keene, Nagy, and Szende 2009, especially Anti Selart on Livonia,
and Olga Kozubska-Andrusiv on Lviv.
72 Backhaus 1988; Heß 2013, 304–309.
73 See the introduction in Rohdewald, Frick, and Wiederkehr 2007, with further references.
74 Racius 2002; Konopacki 2010.
75 See the contribution by Kwiatkowski in this volume; on Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, see
the contributions in Larsson 2009; Martin 2002.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 4/26/15 2:32 PM
Encounters and Fantasies: Muslims, Jews and Christians in the North 19
in Europe. Trading relations between medieval Christian Scandinavians and
Sámi are compared to see if they were legitimized in the same way as they
were between Muslims and Christians in the Mediterranean. Christian Ethe-
ridge (University of Southern Denmark) considers the influence of Islamic sci-
entific works on medieval Iceland. Latin translations of such works had arrived
in Iceland possibly as early as the late eleventh century and were being used
at least until the fourteenth century. These scientific works both supplemented
and augmented earlier Icelandic treatises. The transmission of these ideas
shows that Scandinavian and Islamic interaction, albeit indirect, in the medie-
val period is an example of non-hostile relations. Kay Jankrift (Technische Uni-
versität München) writes about the reports of Ibrāhim ibn Yaqūb (mid-tenth
century), a Jewish convert, who was fascinated by the whale hunting practised
by the Norsemen, and the Arab ambassador al-Ġazāl who visited a Viking court
in Denmark c. 845. Stefan Schröder (University of Helsinki) accounts for the
unusual travel route of the Dutchman Jost van Giselen to the Holy Land and
Northern Africa. Van Giselen’s encounters with the Other are described and
compared with those in other travel writings, for example Sir John Mandeville’s
Book of Marvels and Travels.
The second section “Settlement” deals with evidence of actual Muslims
and Jews along the Baltic Rim. Cordelia Heß (University of Gothenburg)
presents an interpretation of the chronicles and letters dealing with Jews as
scapegoats for spreading the Black Death in Prussia around 1350. Despite the
existing connection between Jews and contagion in these local sources, there
is no evidence of pogroms or trials against Jews or Jewish converts in Prussia.
Michalina Duda (Nicolaus Copernicus University) discusses the surprising
presence of three doctors of potentially Jewish origin (Meyen, Jacob, and Tham
von Hochberg) in Prussia for short periods during the fifteenth century. They
are known from the archives of the incoming and outgoing correspondence of
the High Master, including letters of request for Jewish experts in medicine
and letters of safe conduct for their travels in Prussia. Krzysztof Kwiatkowski
(Nicolaus Copernicus University) presents evidence of Muslim prisoners of war
who lived in Prussia in the fifteenth century and were kept by the Teutonic
Order especially for their skills as horse keepers and breeders. Initially they
seem to have formed small communities, but after only two to three genera-
tions the sources turn quiet, which Kwiatkowski interprets as a result of proc-
esses of assimilation and acculturation, maybe also conversion. Veronika Klim-
ova (Adam Mickiewicz University) discusses the Karaite settlement in the Lith-
uanian town Troki from the thirteenth century on, pointing out the relatively
large amount of religious freedom and social integration this Jewish group en-
joyed. This status granted them an important position in Lithuanian society as
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 4/26/15 2:32 PM
20 Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß
well as acting as a positive model for later Jewish communities in their strug-
gles for privileges.
The third and fourth sections deal with images and stereotypes of the
Other. Beginning the section “Scandinavia”, Yvonne Friedman (Bar-Ilan Uni-
versity) identifies Peter the Venerable as the paradigm of medieval Christian
anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim theological thought and the anti-Jewish and anti-
Muslim rhetoric employed in Scandinavia and the Baltic region in the twelfth
to fourteenth centuries. Peter’s greater tolerance for Islam as compared to his
inveterate hatred of Judaism diverged from crusader anti-Muslim political
propaganda. Although in Scandinavia and the Baltic region we find the same
demonization of the Jews in Christian sermons as in Peter’s work, Muslims
suffered a harsher rhetoric that was adopted from crusader propaganda and
used as a metaphor in the fight against the local heathens, who were referred
to as Saracens. This stands in stark contrast to the pragmatic approach that
encountered and engaged the Other in the Latin Kingdom. Jonathan Adams
(Uppsala University) investigates descriptions of Muslims, Islam, and Muam-
mad in Old Danish and Old Swedish literature. He shows how Muslims are
used in these texts both as foils to prove the truth of Christianity and as mirrors
to reflect the Christian readers’ moral failings. Muammad is depicted as both
an idol and a pseudo-prophet, a treatment that fits clearly within the Western
European traditions of describing and denigrating Islam. Descriptions of events
in the life of Muammad are shown to be part of an attempt to render Islam
harmless and insignificant to Scandinavian readers and audiences. Richard
Cole (Harvard University) investigates the depiction of Jews in Old Norse litera-
ture to sketch out some Norse positions on what we would now think of as
notions of “race” or “ethnicity”. Presenting the most typical ethnic and racial
identifiers, for example skin colour, hooked noses, and grotesque features, he
found that they resemble modern antisemitic stereotypes very closely.
In the final section on images and stereotypes, “Baltic Region”, Sarit Cof-
man-Simhon (Kibbutzim College of Education and Art) writes about anti-Jew-
ish sentiment in the Ludus Prophetarum (Prophets’ Play) that was staged for
pagans in Riga in 1204 as a means of persuading them to convert to Christiani-
ty. She argues that its anti-Jewish images and staged violence, while being
used as a missionary tool, blurred the medieval dichotomy between ‘good’
(some Old Testament figures) and ‘bad’ (New Testament) Jews. Elina Räsänen
(University of Helsinki) discusses the visual representations of Muslims and
Jews in the Kalanti altarpiece (c. 1420), which contains paintings from the
Meister Francke tradition and sculptures of Hamburg or Lübeck origin. She
found familiar strategies of depicting the Jews in the Marian picture cycle as
ugly and inferior, while the pagans present at the torture of St. Barbara were
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 4/26/15 2:32 PM
Encounters and Fantasies: Muslims, Jews and Christians in the North 21
depicted dressed in imagined Oriental outfits. Shlomo Lotan (Bar-Ilan Universi-
ty) describes the evidence of non-Christians in the early historiographical
works of the Teutonic Order, namely, the chronicle by Peter of Dusburg, and
connects this evidence to the Teutonic Knights’ experiences of the Holy Land
and its loss. A striking aspect was the adaptation of the term “Saracens” for
the pagan inhabitants of the land conquered in the Baltic, as well as the ascrip-
tion of deeds and characteristics to them known from Crusading propaganda
in the Holy Land. Jurgita Šiaučiūnaitė-Verbickienė (Vilnius University) writes
about the development of anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim hatred in Early Modern
Lithuania. Despite the fact that Lithuania was itself Christianized relatively late
and that Jewish settlements are not known before the seventeenth century,
anti-Jewish stereotypes were widely spread among the upper echelons of socie-
ty as early as the mid-sixteenth century. While these reflected the adaptation
of a universal stereotype in form and content, the resentment against the Ta-
tars was more complicated, since it included both Tatars as a hostile out-group
attacking the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and those Tatars living legally, even
if in separation, within the country. Madis Maasing (University of Tartu) also
describes the adaptation of a well-proven stereotype, that of the Turks, to an
entirely different group, viz. the Russians, who had become a major threat to
Livonia. The Teutonic Order went to war with the Grand Duchy of Muscovy at
the beginning of the sixteenth century, an event that was followed in Livonia
by the intense writing of polemical works that identified the “schismatic Rus-
sians” with the infidel Turks.
This collection thus gives readers a unique perspective on relations be-
tween Christians, Muslims, and Jews in medieval Scandinavia and along the
Baltic Region during the Middle Ages. The inclusion of the articles by Maasing
and Šiaučiūnaitė-Verbickienė recognizes the extended boundaries of what con-
stitutes “medieval” in Islamic and Jewish history and demonstrates how con-
structed terms such as “the Middle Ages” can be limiting particularly when
dealing with groups outside of Western Christianitas. The articles also cover a
vast geographical area from Iceland in the west (Cole, Etheridge) to Muscovy
in the east (Maasing), from Sápmi in the north (Bandlien) to the Arabian Penin-
sula in the south (Schröder). What is remarkable perhaps is how in some ways
the view of the Muslims and Jews was broadly the same among Christians in
these areas, due no doubt to the unifying influence of the Church as, for exam-
ple, mediated through papal bulls, sermons, and art. Nevertheless, it is impor-
tant to recognize that this view of Muslims and Jews was malleable and provid-
ed an array of images that could be put to a variety of different uses and that
could elicit a variety of responses, from coexistence to conflict.
The reader will notice that the volume does not include contributions on
places such as the Hanseatic towns, Novgorod, and Mecklenburg. However, we
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 4/26/15 2:32 PM
22 Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß
hope that this book will act as an impetus for new research and that scholars
will soon begin investigating attitudes towards Muslims and Jews in these
areas. The study of Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations in medieval northern-
most Europe is a relatively new area of research. It draws upon many disci-
plines and builds upon and nuances the findings from more thoroughly inves-
tigated areas such as England, Spain, and Germany. The results, we hope, pro-
vide a fresh and original description of the pre-modern religious and non-
religious background to society in today’s Scandinavia and Baltic lands with
respect to tolerance, persecution, and intercultural encounters. Furthermore,
we hope that they highlight the mutual influences between centre and periph-
ery in the Middle Ages.
Bibliography
Primary sources
Brate, Erik, and Elias Wessén. Sveriges runinskrifter. Vol. 3. Södermanlands runinskrifter del
1. Stockholm: Kungl. Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien, 1924–1936.
Caliebe, Manfred (Ed.). Hester: Eine poetische Paraphrase des Buches Esther aus dem
Ordensland Preussen. Marburg: N. G. Elwert, 1985.
Foote, Peter (Ed.). Jóns saga Hólabyskups ens helga. Copenhagen: Reitzel, 2003.
Helm, Karl. Das Buch der Maccabäer im mitteldeutscher Bearbeitung. Tübingen: Literarischer
Verein in Stuttgart, 1904.
Hubatsch, Walther, and Erich Joachim (Eds.). Regesta historico-diplomatica ordinis S. Mariae
Theutonicorum, 11981525. Vol. 1.1. Index tabularii ordinis S. Mariae Theutonicorum:
Regesten zum Ordensbriefarchiv; 11981454. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1948.
Kubon, Sebastian, and Jürgen Sarnowsky (Eds.). Regesten zu den Briefregistern des
Deutschen Ordens: Die Ordensfolianten 2a, 2aa und Zusatzmaterial. Göttingen: V&R
Unipress, 2012.
Medeltidens bildvärld. Ed. Historiska museet. < medeltidbild.historiska.se/ >
Palgen, Rudolf, and Hans-Georg Richert. Judith [dt./mhd.] Aus der Stuttgarter Handschrift HB
XIII ll. 2. Aufl. besorgt von Hans-Georg Richert nach der Ausgabe von Rudolf Palgen.
Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1969.
Samnordisk rundatabas < http://www.nordiska.uu.se/forskn/samnord.htm >.
Wolf, Kirsten (Ed.). Gyðinga saga. Reykjavík: Stofnun Árna Magnússonar á Íslandi, 1995.
Zonenberg, Sławomir (Ed.). Kronika Szymona Grunaua. Bydgoszcz: Wydawnictwo
Uniwersytetu Kazimierza Wielkiego, 2009.
Literature
Adams, Jonathan. “Hebraiske ord i Jødernes hemmeligheder (1516).” Danske Studier 105
(2010): 31–50.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 4/26/15 2:32 PM
Encounters and Fantasies: Muslims, Jews and Christians in the North 23
Adams, Jonathan. “Imagined Others: A Critical Examination of the Representation of Jews in
Medieval Scandinavia.” Unpublished Master’s dissertation. University of Cambridge,
2012a.
Adams, Jonathan. “Grumme løver og menstruerende mænd.” Rambam: Tidsskrift for jødisk
kultur og forskning 21 (2012b): 78–93.
Adams, Jonathan. Lessons in Contempt: Poul Ræff’s Publication in 1516 of Johannes
Pfefferkorn’s The Confession of the Jews. Odense: University Press of Southern
Denmark, 2013a.
Adams, Jonathan. “Kristi mordere: Jøder i danske passionsberetninger fra middelalderen.”
Danske Studier 108 (2013b): 25–47.
Adams, Jonathan. “Preaching about an Absent Minority: Medieval Danish Sermons and
Jews.” The Jewish-Christian Encounter in Medieval Preaching. Eds. Jonathan Adams and
Jussi Hanska. New York: Routledge, 2014. 92–116.
Aschkewitz, Max. Zur Geschichte der Juden in Westpreussen. Marburg (Lahn): [s.n.], 1967.
Auffarth, Christoph. “Die Makkabäer als Modell für die Kreuzfahrer. Usurpationen und
Brüche in der Tradition eines jüdischen Heiligenideals. Ein religionswissenschaftlicher
Versuch zur ‘Kreuzzugseschatologie’.” Tradition und Translation: Zum Problem der
interkulturellen Übersetzbarkeit religiöser Phänomene; Festschrift für Carsten Colpe zum
65. Geburtstag. Eds. Christoph Elsas and Renate Haffke. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1994. 362–
390.
Backhaus, Fritz. “Die Hostienschändung von Sternberg (1492) und Berlin (1510) und die
Ausweisung der Juden aus Mecklenburg und der Mark Brandenburg.” Jahrbuch für
brandenburgische Landesgeschichte 39 (1988): 7–26.
Baczko, Ludwig von. Versuch einer Geschichte und Beschreibung der Stadt Königsberg:
Viertes Heft. [Königsberg]: Hartung, 1789.
Becker, Anja, and Jan Mohr (Eds.). Alterität als Leitkonzept für historisches Interpretieren.
Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2012.
Berulfsen, Bjarne. “Antisemittisme som litterær importvare.” Edda 58 (1958): 123–144.
Birkeland, Harris. Nordens historie i middelalderen etter arabiske kilder. Oslo: Dybwad,
1954.
Bjarne Berfulfsen. “Jøder: Norge og Island.” Kulturhistorisk Leksikon for Nordisk Middelalder.
Vol. 8. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde og Bagger, 1963. Col. 77.
Bogucka, Maria. “Jewish Merchants in Gdańsk in the 16
th
–17
th
Centuries–APolicy of
Toleration or Discrimination?” Acta Polonia Historica 65 (1992): 47–57.
Borgolte, Michael et al. (Eds.). Integration und Desintegration der Kulturen im europäischen
Mittelalter. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011.
Brauer, Michael. Die Entdeckung des “Heidentums” in Preußen: Die Prußen in den
Reformdiskursen des Spätmittelalters und der Reformation. Berlin: Akademie Verlag,
2011.
Broda, Michalina. “Żydowscy lekarze w państwie zakonu krzyżackiego w Prusach w późnym
średniowieczu.” Kwartalnik Historii Żydów 240 (2011): 435–443.
Buchholtz, Anton. Geschichte der Juden in Riga bis zur Begründung der Rigischen
Hebräergemeinde im Jahr 1842. Riga: Kymmel, 1899.
Burkhardt, Stefan, et al. “Hybridisierung von Zeichen und Formen durch mediterrane Eliten.”
Integration und Desintegration der Kulturen im europäischen Mittelalter. Eds. Michael
Borgolte et al. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011. 467–557.
Chazan, Robert. Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Antisemitism. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 4/26/15 2:32 PM
24 Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß
Christensen, Karsten. “Jochim Jøde i Helsingør i 1592.” Dansk Jødisk Historie 24 (1987): 11–
16.
Cleasby, Richard, and Gudbrand Vigfússon. An Icelandic-English Dictionary. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1874.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult
Middles. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Cole, Richard. “One or Several Jews? The Jewish Massed Body in Old Norse Literature.”
Postmedieval 5.3 (2014): 346–358.
Conklin Akbari, Suzanne. “The Other’s Images: Christian Iconoclasms and the Charge of
Muslim Idolatry in Medieval Europe.” Images of Otherness in Medieval and Early
Modern Times: Exclusion, Inclusion and Assimilation. Eds. Anja Eisenbeiss and
Lieselotte E. Saurma-Jeltsch. Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2012. 121–132.
Duczko, Władysław. “Viking Age Scandinavia and Islam: An Archaeologist’s View.” Byzantium
and Islam in Scandinavia: Acts of a Symposium at Uppsala University, June 15–16 1996.
Ed. Elisabeth Piltz. Gothenburg: Åström, 1998. 107–115.
Echt, Samuel. Die Geschichte der Juden in Danzig. Leer: Rautenberg, 1972.
Feistner, Edith, Gisela Vollmann-Profe, and Michael Neecke. Krieg im Visier: Bibelepik und
Chronistik im Deutschen Orden als Modell korporativer Identitätsbildung. Tübingen: Max
Niemeyer, 2007.
Fischer, Mary. “Di himels rote”: The Idea of Christian Chivalry in the Chronicles of the
Teutonic Order. Göppingen: Kümmerle-Verlag, 1991.
Fischer, Mary. “The Books of the Maccabees and the Teutonic Order.” Crusades. Eds.
Benjamin Z. Kedar, Jonathan S. C. Riley-Smith, and Helen J. Nicholson. Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2005. 59–71.
Fischer, Mary. “Des tuvils kint? The German Order’s Perception of its Enemies as Revealed in
the Kronike von Pruzinlant.” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und
Literaturen 244 (2007): 260–275.
Forstreuter, Kurt. “Die ersten Juden in Ostpreußen.” Altpreußische Forschungen 14 (1937):
42–48.
Gustavson, Helmer. “Runmonumentet i Rytterne.” Nya anteckningar om Rytterns socken:
Medeltidsstudier tillägnade Göran Dahlbäck. Eds. Olle Ferm, Agneta Paulsson, and
Krister Ström. Västerås: Västmanlands läns museum, 2002.
Haastrup, Ulla. “Jødefremstillinger i dansk middelalderkunst.” Danish Jewish Art: Jews in
Danish Art. Ed. Mirjam Gelfer-Jørgensen. Copenhagen: The Society for the Publication of
Danish Cultural Monuments, 1999. 111–167.
Haastrup, Ulla. “Representations of Jews in Medieval Danish Art – Can Images Be Used as
Source Material on their Own?” History and Images: Towards a New Iconology. Eds. Axel
Bolvig and Phillip Lindley. Turnhout: Brepols, 2003. 341–356.
Heise, Werner. Die Juden in der Mark Brandenburg bis zum Jahre 1510. Berlin: Ebering, 1932.
Heß, Cordelia. Social Imagery in Middle Low German: Didactical Literature and Metaphorical
Representation (14701517). Leiden: Brill, 2013.
Hohler, Erla B., Nigel J. Morgan, and Anne Wichstrøm. Painted Altar Frontals of Norway 1250–
1350. 3 vols. London: Archetype Publications, 2003.
Hollack, Emil. “Zur Vorgeschichte der Juden in Ost- und Westpreußen.” Zeitschrift für
Demographie und Statistik der Juden 6.1–2 (1910): 9–13, 17–24.
Holm, Bent. Tyrk kan tæmmes: Osmannere på den danske scene 1596–1896. Copenhagen:
Multivers Academic, 2010.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 4/26/15 2:32 PM
Encounters and Fantasies: Muslims, Jews and Christians in the North 25
Jacob, Georg. Arabische Berichte von Gesandten an germanische Fürstenhöfe aus dem 9. und
10. Jahrhundert. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1927.
Jähnig, Bernhart. Verfassung und Verwaltung des Deutschen Ordens und seiner Herrschaft in
Livland. Berlin: Lit, 2011.
Jarring, Gunnar. “Serkland.” Namn och bygd 71 (1983): 125–132.
Jensen, Janus Møller. Denmark and the Crusades 1400–1650. Leiden: Brill, 2007.
Jensen, Jørgen Steen, and Anne Kromann. “Cufic Coins in Denmark.” Byzantium and Islam in
Scandinavia: Acts of a Symposium at Uppsala University, June 15–16 1996. Ed. Elisabeth
Piltz. Gothenburg: Åström, 1998. 71–77.
Jesch, Judith. Ships and Men in the Late Viking Age: The Vocabulary of Runic Inscriptions and
Skaldic Verses. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2001.
Jesch, Judith. “Geography and Travel.” A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and
Culture. Ed. Rory McTurk. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. 119–135.
Jolowicz, Heimann. Geschichte der Juden in Königsberg in Preussen. Ein Beitrag zur
Sittengeschichte des preussischen Staates. Posen: Jolowicz, 1867.
Kala, Tiina. “Rural Society and Religious Innovation: Acceptance and Rejection of Catholicism
among the Native Inhabitants of Medieval Livonia.” The Clash of Cultures on the
Medieval Baltic Frontier. Ed. Alan V. Murray. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. 169–190.
Katz, Per. “De første jøder i Danmark.” Judiskt liv i Norden. Eds. Gunnar Broberg, Harald
Ringblom, and Mattias Tydén. Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet, 1988. 71–97.
Keene, Derek, Balázs Nagy, and Katalin Szende (Eds.). Segregation, Integration, Assimilation:
Religious and Ethnic Groups in the Medieval Towns of Central and Eastern Europe.
Farnham: Ashgate, 2009.
Kinoshita, Sharon. Medieval Boundaries. Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
Konopacki, Artur. Życie religijne Tatarów na ziemiach Wielkiego Księstwa Litewskiego w XVI
XIX wieku.1
st
edn. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2010.
Kreem, Juhan. The Town and its Lord. Reval and the Teutonic Order (in the Fifteenth Century).
Tallinn: Ilo, 2002.
Lähnemann, Henrike. “The Maccabees as Role Models in the German Order.” Dying for the
Faith, Killing for the Faith: Old-Testament Faith-Warriors (1 and 2 Maccabees) in
Historical Perspective. Ed. Gabriela Signori. Leiden: Brill, 2012. 177–193.
Lampert, Lisa. Medieval Literature and Postcolonial Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2010.
Larsson, Göran (Ed.). Islam in the Nordic and Baltic Countries. London: Routledge, 2009.
Lausten, Martin Schwarz. Kirke og synagoge: Holdninger i den danske kirke til jødedom og
jøder i middelalderen, reformationstiden og den lutherske ortodoksi (ca. 1100 – ca.
1700). Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1992.
Lausten, Martin Schwarz. Tyrkerfrygt og tyrkerskat. Copenhagen: Anis, 2010.
Law, John. After Methodology: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge, 2004.
Leimus, Ivar. Sylloge of Islamic Coins 710/1–1013/4 AD: Estonian Public Collections. Tallinn:
Estonian History Museum, 2007a.
Leimus, Ivar. “Die letzte Welle des orientalischen Münzsilbers im Norden.” Magister
Monetae. Studies in Honour of Jørgen Steen Jensen. Eds. Michael Andersen, Helle W.
Horsnæs, and Jens Christian Moesgaard. Copenhagen: National Museum of Denmark,
2007b. 111–126.
Leitzinger, Antero. “Tataarit Suomessa.” Muslimit Suomessa. Eds. Tuula Sakaranaho and
Heikki Pesonen. Helsinki: Yliopistopaino, 1999. 25–58.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 4/26/15 2:32 PM
26 Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß
Leitzinger, Antero. Suomen tataarit: Vuosina 1868–1944 muodostuneen muslimiyhteisön
menestystarina. Helsinki: East-West Books, 2006.
Lewicki, Tadeusz. “Handel Samanidów ze wschodnią i środkową Europą.” Slavia Antiqua 19
(1972): 1–18.
Martikainen, Tuomas. “Finland.” Islam in the Nordic and Baltic Countries. Ed. Göran Larsson.
New York: Routledge, 2009. 76–89.
Martin, Janet. “Tatars in the Muscovite Army during the Livonian War.” The Military and
Society in Russia 1450–1917. Eds. Eric Lohr and Marshall Poe. Leiden: Brill, 2002. 365–
387.
Meijer, Jan. “Punctuation Marks on Viking Age Rune Stones.” Amsterdamer Beiträge zur
älteren Germanistik 63 (2007): 65–97.
Merback, Mitchell B. “Introduction.” Beyond the Yellow Badge. New Approaches to Anti-
Judaism and Antisemitism in Medieval and Early Modern Visual Culture. Ed. Mitchell B.
Merback. Leiden: Brill, 2006. 1–29.
Mikkelsen, Egil. “Islam and Scandinavia during the Viking Age.” Byzantium and Islam in
Scandinavia: Acts of a Symposium at Uppsala University, June 15–16 1996. Ed. Elisabeth
Piltz. Gothenburg: Åström, 1998. 39–51.
Mikkelsen, Egil. “The Vikings and Islam.” The Viking World. Eds. Stefan Brink and Neil Price.
Abingdon: Routledge, 2008. 543–549.
Montgomery, James E. “Ibn Faḍlān among the Rūssiyah.” Journal of Arabic and Islamic
Studies 3 (2000): 1–25. < http://www.uib.no/jais >
Montgomery, James E. “Arabic Sources on the Vikings.” The Viking World. Eds. Stefan Brink
and Neil Price. Abingdon: Routledge, 2008. 550–561.
Muck af Rosenschöld, Viktoria. “Främlingsbilder: Om juden och judendom i medeltida danskt
och svenskt kalkmåleri.” Unpublished Master’s dissertation. University of Lund, 2007.
Müller-Wille, Michael (Ed.). Rom und Byzanz im Norden: Mission und Glaubenswechsel im
Ostseeraum während des 8.−14. Jahrhunderts. Internationale Fachkonferenz der
Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft in Verbindung mit der Akademie der Wissenschaften
und der Literatur [in] Mainz, Kiel, 18. 25. September 1994. Mainz: Akademie der
Wissenschaften und der Literatur, 1998.
Murray, Alan V. “The Saracens of the Baltic: Pagan and Christian Lithuanians in the
Perception of English and French Crusaders to Late Medieval Prussia.” Journal of Baltic
Studies 41.4 (2010): 413–429.
Nowak, Zenon H. “Dzieje Żydów w Prusach Królewskich do roku 1772. Charakterystyka.”
Żydzi w dawnej Rzeczypospolitej: Materiały z Konferencji “Autonomia Żydów w
Rzeczypospolitej Szlacheckiej”: Międzywydziałowy Zakład Historii i Kultury Żydów w
Polsce, Uniwersytet Jagielloński, 2226 IX 1986. Eds. Andrzej Link-Lenczowski and
Tomasz Polański. Wrocław: Zaklad Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1991. 136–143.
Piltz, Elisabeth. “Byzantium and Islam in Scandinavia.” Byzantium and Islam in Scandinavia:
Acts of a Symposium at Uppsala University, June 15–16 1996. Ed. Elisabeth Piltz.
Gothenburg: Åström, 1998. 27–37.
Pritsak, Ormeljan. The Origin of Rus’: Old Scandinavian Sources Other than the Sagas.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
Racius, Egdunas. “Islam in Lithuania: Changing Patterns of Religious and Social Life of
Lithuanian Muslims.” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 22.1 (2002): 176–183.
Radzimiński, Andrzej. Der Deutsche Orden und die Bischöfe und Domkapitel in Preussen.
Toruń: UMK, 1997.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 4/26/15 2:32 PM
Encounters and Fantasies: Muslims, Jews and Christians in the North 27
Raudvere, Catharina. “Jak är gudh ok ey stengudh. Hedningar och vantro i Birgittas
uppenbarelser.” Språkets speglingar. Festskrift till Birger Bergh. Eds. Anders Piltz and
Arne Jönsson. Lund: Skåneförlaget, 2000. 604–611.
Raudvere, Catharina. “Verklighetsåtergivningen i Birgittas uppenbarelser.” Birgitta av
Vadstena. Eds. Per Beskow and Annette Landen. Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand,
2003. 73–87.
Rehberg, Karl-Siegbert. “Alterität zwischen Pluralisierungsversprechen und Exklusion.”
Alterität als Leitkonzept für historisches Interpretieren. Eds. Anja Becker and Jan Mohr.
Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2012. 417–434.
Reuter, Timothy. “Whose Race, whose Ethnicity? Recent Medievalists’ Discussions of
Ethnicity.” Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities. Ed. Janet L. Nelson. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006. 100–110.
Rohdewald, Stefan, David A. Frick, and Stefan Wiederkehr (Eds.). Litauen und Ruthenien:
Studien zu einer transkulturellen Kommunikationsregion (15. 18. Jahrhundert) =
Lithuania and Ruthenia: Studies of a Transcultural Communication Zone: (15th18
th
Centuries). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2007.
Ruprecht, Arndt. Die ausgehende Wikingerzeit im Lichte der Runeninschriften. Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1958.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
Sarnowsky, Jürgen. Macht und Herrschaft im Johanniterorden des 15. Jahrhunderts:
Verfassung und Verwaltung der Johanniter auf Rhodos (14211522). Münster: Lit, 2001.
Saurma-Jeltsch, Lieselotte. “Facets of Otherness and Affirmation of the Self.” Images of
Otherness in Medieval and Early Modern Times. Exclusion, Inclusion and Assimilation.
Eds. Anja Eisenbeiß and Lieselotte Saurma-Jeltsch. Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2012.
9–14.
Schnohr, Josephine. “Enestående kalkmalerier afdækket i Skibinge Kirke.” Kristeligt Dagblad
(16 April 2012): 6.
Shephard, Jonathan. “Yngvarr’s Expedition to the East and a Russian Inscribed Stone Cross.”
Saga-Book 21 (1982–1985): 222–292.
Simonsen, Jørgen Bæk. Islam med danske øjne: Danskernes syn på islam gennem 1000 år.
Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 2004.
Sjögren, Åke G. “Mahomet i Gothem och den turkiske månen i Linde.” Byggnadshyttan på
Gotland (2005–2006): 85–98.
Skovgaard-Petersen, Karen (Ed). A Journey to the Promised Land, Crusading Theology in the
Historia de profectione Danorum in Hierosolymam c. 1200. Copenhagen: Museum
Tusculanum, 2001.
Šne, Andris. “Stammesfürstentum und Egalität: Die sozialen Beziehungen auf dem
Territorium Lettlands am Ende der prähistorischen Zeit (10.–12. Jahrhundert).”
Forschungen zur baltischen Geschichte 3 (2008): 33–56.
Stern, Selma. Der preußische Staat und die Juden. Berlin: Schwetschke, 1925.
Strunk, Hermann. “Flurnamen und Vorgeschichte. 2. Teil.” Altpreußische Forschungen 8
(1931): 1–45.
Talvio, Tuukka. “Islamic Coins Found in Finland.” Byzantium and Islam in Scandinavia: Acts
of a Symposium at Uppsala University June 15–16 1996. Ed. Elisabeth Piltz. Gothenburg:
Åström, 1998. 77–84.
Thing, Morten. “Jøden og orientaleren: Et essay.” Kvinder, køn og forskning 3 (2000): 21–38.
Undusk, Jaan. “Sacred History, Profane History. Uses of the Bible in the Chronicle of Henry of
Livonia.” Crusading and Chronicle Writing on the Medieval Baltic Frontier. Eds. Marek
Tamm, Linda Kaljundi, and Karsten Selch Jensen. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. 45–75.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 4/26/15 2:32 PM
28 Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß
Urban, William L. “Victims of the Baltic Crusade.” Journal of Baltic Studies 29.3 (1998): 195–
212.
Valentin, Hugo. Judarnas historia i Sverige. Stockholm: Bonniers, 1924.
Valk, Heiki. “Christianisation in Estonia: a Process of Dual-Faith and Syncretism.” The Cross
Goes North. Processes of Conversion in Northern Europe, AD 300–1300. Ed. Martin
Carver. York: University of York, 2003. 571–579.
Valk, Heiki. “Estland im 11.–13. Jahrhundert. Neuere Aspekte aus Sicht der Archäologie.”
Forschungen zur baltischen Geschichte 3 (2008): 57–86.
Vilhjálmur Örn Vilhjálmsson. “Iceland, the Jews, and Anti-Semitism, 1625–2004.” Jewish
Political Studies Review 16.3–4 (2004): 131–156.
Whaley, Diana. “Skaldic Poetry.” A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture.
Ed. Rory McTurk. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. 479–502.
Wikander, Stig. Araber – Vikingar – Väringar. Lund: Hansson, 1978.
Wołosz, Arthur. “Żydzi w miastach Prus Wschodnich. Obecność zapomniana czy zatarta?”
Obcy wśród obcych swojacy wśród swoich: Materiały z konferencji Węgorzewo, 16
listopada 2002 r. Eds. Jerzy Okulicz-Kozaryn, Marian Pokropek, and Stanisław
Achremczyk. Węgorzewo: MKL, 2002. 99–121.
Wüst, Marcus. “Westliche Einflüsse auf den Verlauf der Christianisierung in Livland.”
Christianisierung Europas. Entstehung, Entwicklung und Konsolidierung, Eds. Orsolya
Heinrich-Tamáska, Niklot Krohn, and Sebastian Ristow. Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner,
2012. 483–496
Zaremska, Hanna. Żydzi w średniowiecznej Polsce. Gmina Krakowska. Warszawa: Instytut
Historii PAN, 2011.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 4/26/15 2:32 PM
... Limited contact with peoples from the east and an absence of Jewish or Muslim communities in Iceland played into what Cordelia Heß and Jonathan Adams have described as their 'absent presenceʼ, since '[t]he Muslims and Jews from the Scandinavian and Baltic sources are products of the imagination, an imagination created from ignorance, maybe curiosityʼ. 50 It has been well-documented how Snorri Sturluson explained the Nordic pantheon as euhemerised Trojan refugees, ensuring an enduring conceptual connection between Scandinavians and the area of modern-day Turkey. Sverrir Jakobsson has shown how the schism between the Western and Eastern church remained amorphous in the minds of Icelanders, and Constantinople and its emperor retained a superlative position in the minds and hearts of Icelandic writers even after they had been associated with heresy and thus rejected by other parts of the Roman Catholic world. ...
Article
Full-text available
Timur was a renowned Central Asian conqueror who fascinated Early Modern writers, and this article takes up the question of the source of the description of him found in Oddverjaannáll. Robert Cook, in an article from 1985, suggested several possible candidates. These are analysed and a new candidate is proposed, that being Sebastian Franck’s Chronica, Zeitbuch und Geschichtsbibell (1531). Following this, an example is given of how such historiographical material came to be used in saga- and rímur-literature of the seventeenth century, namely in Ambáles saga and Ambáles rímur. These works adapt the well-known story of Hamlet, but have him sent to Timur (Tamerláus) instead of to the King of Britain. An analysis is made of how the representation of Timur in these works (in particular in the witness AM 521 c 4to) functions as a kind of vindication of the earlier gruesome accounts of Timur the tyrant. Moreover, an attempt is made to explain how such a vindication would have been welcome in an Iceland reeling from the recent Tyrkjarán.
... It has been suggested that Serkland derives from the Latin sericum for 'silk' (Shepard 1984: 235) and thus means 'land where people wear long gowns or särkär, as many Arabs did' (Lönnroth 2014: 103). However, more popular definitions suggest that Serkland refers to the land of the Saracens or Muslims (Jesch 2001;Zilmer 2003;Adams and Heß 2015;Sverrir 2016) and thus Islamic countries in the Middle East and North Africa (Källström 2016: 169) or around the Caspian Sea, with the name possibly deriving from the city of Sarkel in Khazar territory (Jesch 2005: 125). 20 Despite the fact that the Caspian Sea seems to be many scholars' preferred destination, Melkinova doubts whether many Scandinavians knew where Serkland was other than a 'vague notion that it lay somewhere at the southern edge of the habitable world' (Melkinova 1995: 655). ...
Article
Full-text available
Yngvars saga víðförla is a fantastic story of adventure in exotic, faraway lands. The saga recounts the exploits of an eleventh-century Swedish Viking, Ingvar, who led a voyage east that ended in disaster, somewhere southeast of Russia, around 1041. Despite the saga’s improbable storyline, it may have a basis in historical fact. In Sweden, a number of runestones bear the name Ingvar and reference a journey to the east. Many scholars believe the runestones provide corroborative evidence of the journey immortalised in the saga and treat them as a factual given. However, this is problematic as there are many more runestones bearing the name Ingvar than those designated as Ingvar stones, which raises questions about the comprehensiveness of previous analyses of the runestones. Although the saga may be rooted in a real historical event, fact and fiction are so tightly intertwined that it is difficult at times to separate one from the other. One upshot is that the sparse data on the runestones, e.g. reference to Serkland, have been used to flesh out lacunae in the saga, and it is not uncommon to see Ingvar’s journey recast as an expedition to Serkland or Persia, neither of which is mentioned in the saga. To what extent do the runestones bear witness to Ingvar’s expedition and is the Ingvar named on the runestones the same person as his namesake in the saga? This paper seeks to answer these questions by critically re-examining the runestones alongside evidence from both historical and geographical sources.
Article
Full-text available
In recent years, the influence of Muslims and Islam on developments in medieval Europe has captured the attention of scholars and the general public alike. Nevertheless, ‘conversion’ to Islam remains a challenging subject for historical research and demands more transdisciplinary collaborations. This article examines early medieval interactions between Muslim Arabs and Northern and Eastern Europeans as a case study for whether some individuals in Northern Eurasia ‘converted’ to Islam. More importantly, we address some key examples and lines of evidence that demonstrate why the process of ‘conversion’ to Islam is not more visible in the historical and archaeological records of Northern Eurasia. We find that, despite the well-established evidence for economic exchanges between the Islamic World and Northern Eurasia, the historical and material records are much more complex, but not entirely silent, on the issue of religious change. We also conclude that religious connectivity and exchanges, including with Islam, were common in early medieval Northern Eurasia, even if it is difficult in most cases to identify conclusive instances of ‘conversion’ to Islam.
Article
JEM-EUSO is a space mission designed to investigate Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays and Neutrinos (E>5⋅10¹⁹eV) from the International Space Station (ISS). Looking down from above its wide angle telescope is able to observe their air showers and collect such data from a very wide area. Highly specific trigger algorithms are needed to drastically reduce the data load in the presence of both atmospheric and human activity related background light, yet retain the rare cosmic ray events recorded in the telescope. We report the performance in offline testing of the first level trigger algorithm on data from JEM-EUSO prototypes and laboratory measurements observing different light sources: data taken during a high altitude balloon flight over Canada, laser pulses observed from the ground traversing the real atmosphere, and model landscapes reproducing realistic aspect ratios and light conditions as would be seen from the ISS itself. The first level trigger logic successfully kept the trigger rate within the permissible bounds when challenged with artificially produced as well as naturally encountered night sky background fluctuations and while retaining events with general air-shower characteristics.
Book
Das mittelalterliche Europa war keine christliche Einheitskultur, sondern geprägt von vielfältigen Prozessen des Kontakts und der Abgrenzung zwischen Kulturen, bei denen die drei monotheistischen Religionen Christentum, Judentum und Islam eine herausragende Rolle spielten. Seit 2005 erforscht das DFG-Schwerpunktprogramm "Integration und Desintegration der Kulturen im europäischen Mittelalter" die Geschichte Europas als Geschichte kultureller Differenzen. Der Band dokumentiert die Dynamiken und Erträge eines wissenschaftsorganisatorischen Experiments: Gegliedert in fächerübergreifende Arbeitsgruppen, erforschten 24 Einzelprojekte aus 14 Disziplinen Integrations- und Desintegrationsprozesse von Skandinavien bis Ägypten, von der Iberischen Halbinsel bis zu den Steppen Zentralasiens in komparativem Zugriff; sie präsentieren ihre Ergebnisse nun in Beiträgen, die von mehreren Autorinnen und Autoren gemeinsam verfasst worden sind. Dabei werden Begriffe wie "Kultur" problematisiert und schon eingeführte Konzepte wie "Integration/Desintegration", "Inklusion/Exklusion", "Hybridisierung" und "Transfer" als Instrumente transkultureller Mediävistik auf den Prüfstand gestellt. Das Ende der Laufzeit des Schwerpunktprogramms gibt zugleich Anlass, methodisch-theoretische Einsichten der gemeinsamen Forschung wie auch praktische Erfahrungen bei der transdisziplinären Zusammenarbeit zu bilanzieren.