Books by Jeremy Cohen

"The slaughter of the Jews in the Rhineland in 1096 is one of the better-known events of the First Crusade. Cohen analyzes the texts of the Jewish accounts of these massacres in light of the martyrdom tradition of Masada, well-known at that time, and the contemporary Christian cult of self-sacrifice... Recommended."-Choice

In A Historian in Exile, Jeremy Cohen shows how Solomon ibn Verga's Shevet Yehudah bridges the divide between the medieval and early modern periods, reflecting a contemporary consciousness that a new order had begun to replace the old.

In Living Letters of the Law, Jeremy Cohen investigates the images of Jews and Judaism in the works of medieval Christian theologians from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas. He reveals how-and why-medieval Christianity fashioned a Jew on the basis of its reading of the Bible, and how this hermeneutically crafted Jew assumed distinctive character and power in Christian thought and culture.Augustine's doctrine of Jewish witness, which constructed the Jews so as to mandate their survival in a properly ordered Christian world, is the starting point for this illuminating study. Cohen demonstrates how adaptations of this doctrine reflected change in the self-consciousness of early medieval civilization. After exploring the effect of twelfth-century Europe's encounter with Islam on the value of Augustine's Jewish witnesses, he concludes with a new assessment of the reception of Augustine's ideas among thirteenth-century popes and friars.Consistently linking the medieval idea of the Jew with broader issues of textual criticism, anthropology, and the philosophy of history, this book demonstrates the complex significance of Christianity's "e;hermeneutical Jew"e; not only in the history of antisemitism but also in the broad scope of Western intellectual history.

"Cohen argues that it was in the thirteenth century that a fundamental shift occurred in the Christian perception of both Judaism and Jews in Western Europe, and he attributes this change to the activities of the newly-formed mendicant orders-the Dominicans and Franciscans. In order to make this case as effectively as he does, the author has to...

Providing a discussion of the Jewish experience in Mediterranean and Western societies over the last 2000 years, these papers concentrate on the doctrinal substance of the Jewish-Christian dispute in the order that it developed.

This volume of New Directions for Teaching and Learning offers insights into how and why public scholarship has grown and is beginning to sustain itself at Penn State University and beyond. The research and writing contained here was generated by faculty and graduate students active in Penn State's Laboratory for Public Scholarship and Democracy.

A guide for conducting research involving both legal and communication questions. It shows communication law scholars how to make use of the methodologies employed in communication science. It addresses topics such as reconciling communication and law, social research approaches to libel and theories pertaining to freedom of expression.