Robert Jütte

Robert Jütte's The Jewish Body is a survey of ideas about the "Jewish body" held by both Jews and Gentiles over the centuries: from Biblical Israel up to modern Jewish communities in Israel, Europe, and the U.S. It also covers a broad array of topics, from stereotypes to ideas about gender, to the intersections of the biological and the social body, to how the sick and the dying should be tended to. This means there's an awful lot to cram into about 250 pages of text (even though Jütte mostly focuses just on Ashkenazi and to a lesser extent Sephardi Jews and their descendants; I don't remember much coverage of Mizrahi communities at all), and there's more description than there is argument. I felt the lack of a conclusion chapter strongly—why does all of this matter? As a jumping off point for future research, though, this book undoubtedly has its uses.… (meer)

I have to admit that I haven't really read this, just quickly skimmed. If I do research on people in the middle ages and attitudes to poverty this would be a useful tool, even for fiction writers this would be a good look at poor people, the attitude to them and what was done by people to try to deal with it. It has potential and has some potted biographies of some of the reformers in the back, a trail of crumbs to lead you elsewhere.

Not what I'm currently researching but could be useful another time (I'm trying to reduce the TBR from the Library pile and this one has been on the pile too long unread.)… (meer)