Tea at Trianon: Medieval Jewish Homes in Oxford

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, May 19, 2021

Medieval Jewish Homes in Oxford

From Haaretz:

Kashrut, the body of Jewish dietary laws, wasn’t born like Venus, neither fully formed and perfect nor from a clamshell. The rules evolved gradually over more than two thousand years and only took the shape familiar to today’s Jewry in early modern Europe. By the time of the medieval period in Europe, the practices were firm, leaving aside discrepancies in precise observances among the Jewish communities around the world such as whether chicken could be cooked in milk since they don’t lactate anyway.
Now, archaeologists from Bristol University report identifying two Jewish households in early medieval Oxford, based in large part on the missing oink.
Absent dedicatory plaques or Jewish symbols, identifying Jewish communities in archaeology starts with what isn’t there: a sign of the swine. In Israeli archaeological circles, ancient settlements are often categorized as “Jewish” or “other”: Canaanite, Philistine, etc. by the presence or absence of pig. It’s hardly categorical but there it is.
In the case of the study published Wednesday in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, there was quite a wealth of evidence that two of the medieval homes discovered in a salvage excavation, done ahead of development works in central Oxford, were Jewish. Julie Dunne, the lead author on the study, confirms that no Jewish symbology was found in the site of the two house, but in fact, they were part of a Jewish neighborhood, as records indicate. (Read more.)