The Red Jews: Antisemitism in an Apocalyptic Age, 1200-1600 / / Andrew Colin Gow.

• Superior document: Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions ; 55
• VerfasserIn: Gow, Andrew Colin,
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden; , Boston : : BRILL,, 1994.
• Year of Publication: 1994
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions ; 55.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource.

This book is the history of an imaginary people - the Red Jews - in vernacular sources from medieval and early modern Germany. From the twelfth to the seventeenth century, German-language texts repeated and embroidered on an antisemitic tale concerning an epochal threat to Christianity, the Red Jews. This term, which expresses a medieval conflation of three separate traditions (the biblical destroyers Gog and Magog, the 'unclean peoples' enclosed by Alexander, and the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel), is a hostile designation of wickedness. The Red Jews played a major role in late medieval popular exegesis and literature, and appeared in a hitherto-unnoticed series of sixteenth-century pamphlets, in which they functioned as the medieval 'spectacles' through which contemporaries viewed such events as Turkish advances in the Near and Middle East. The Red Jews disappear from the sources after 1600, and consequently never found their way into historical scholarship.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material / Andrew Colin Gow -- Acknowledgements / Andrew Colin Gow -- Chapter One Inventio rerum et locorum: Finding a Forgotten History / Andrew Colin Gow -- Chapter Two Apocalypticism and Messianismi: Christian and Jewish Perspectives on the End in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages / Andrew Colin Gow -- Chapter Three Antisemitism and Apocalypticism in the Middle Ages / Andrew Colin Gow -- Chapter Four The Red Jews in their 'Native Habitat' / Andrew Colin Gow -- Chapter Five The Medieval Antichrist and his Jewish Henchmen / Andrew Colin Gow -- Chapter Six A Medieval Legend in the Sixteenth Century: Pious and Political Permutations / Andrew Colin Gow -- Chapter Seven Approaches to the End / Andrew Colin Gow -- Appendix A The Red Jews in Medieval and Early Modern Sources / Andrew Colin Gow -- Appendix B The 'Unclean Nations', Gog and Magog, and the Ten Tribes / Andrew Colin Gow -- Appendix C Antichrist and the Jews at the End of Time / Andrew Colin Gow -- Appendix D Illustrations / Andrew Colin Gow -- Bibliography / Andrew Colin Gow -- Index of Places / Andrew Colin Gow -- Index of Names / Andrew Colin Gow -- Subject Index / Andrew Colin Gow -- Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought / Editor: Heiko A. Oberman.