Cette série propose la publication des travaux effectués au sein du programme ERC RELMIN: The Legal Status of Religious Minorities in the Euro-Mediterranean World (5th-15th centuries). La collection comprend la typologie suivante : actes de colloques (2 par an, donc une dizaine sur les 5 ans), anthologies de textes, monographies, et éventuellement des manuels universitaires. Certains titres seront publiés en français, d’autres en anglais ; d’autres (les actes du colloque) seront mixtes (anglais, français, parfois d’autres langues).

The name of Bernhard Blumenkranz is well known to all those who study the history of European Jews in the Middle Ages and in particular the history of Jewish-Christian relations. Blumenkranz was born in Vienna in 1913; he left for Switzerland during the war and obtained a doctorate at the University of Basel on the portrayal of Jews in the works of Augustine. He subsequently moved to France where his numerous publications revived and renovated the field of Jewish studies. The international group of scholars who wrote the fifteen essays in this volume, beyond paying homage to Blumenkranz’s work, trace the trajectories of various lines of inquiry that he initiated: Christian theology of Judaism, problems of conversion and proselytism, geography and topography of Medieval Jewish communities, the representation of Jews in Christian art. These essays provide both an assessment of Blumenkranz’s intellectual legacy and a snapshot of the evolution of the field over the last sixty years.

The eleven essays brought together in this volume explore the relations between expulsion, diaspora, and exile between Late Antiquity and the seventeenth century. The essays range from Hellenistic Egypt to seventeenth-century Hungary and involve expulsion and migration of Jews, Muslims and Protestants. The common goal of these essays is to shed light on a certain number of issues: first, to try to understand the dynamics of expulsion, in particular its social and political causes; second, to examine how expelled communities integrate (or not) into their new host societies; and finally, to understand how the experiences of expulsion and exile are made into founding myths that establish (or attempt to establish) group identities.

This volume shows through the use of legal sources that law was used to try to erect boundaries between communities in order to regulate or restrict interaction between the faithful and the non-faithful; and at the same time shows how these boundaries were repeatedly transgressed and negotiated.
Muslim law developed a clear legal cadre for dhimmīs, inferior but protected non-Muslim communities (in particular Jews and Christians) and Roman Canon law decreed a similar status for Jewish and Muslim communities in Europe. Yet the theoretical hierarchies between faithful and infidel were constantly brought into question in the daily interactions between men and women of different faiths in streets, markets, bath-houses, law courts, etc. The twelve essays in this volume explore these tensions and attempts to resolve them. These contributions show that law was used to try to erect boundaries between communities in order to regulate or restrict interaction between the faithful and the non-faithful—and at the same time how these boundaries were repeatedly transgressed and negotiated. These essays explore also the possibilities and the limits of the use of legal sources for the social historian.

The sixth to eleventh centuries are a crucial formative period for Jewish communities in Byzantium and Latin Europe: this is also a period for which sources are scarce and about which historians have often had to speculate on the basis of scant evidence. The legal sources studied in this volume provide a relative wealth of textual material concerning Jews, and for certain areas and periods are the principal sources. While this makes them particularly valuable, it also makes their interpretation difficult, given the lack of corroborative sources.
The scholars whose work has been brought together in this volume shed light on this key period of the history of Jews and of Jewish-Christian relations, focusing on key sources of the period: Byzantine imperial law, the canons of church councils, papal bulls, royal legislation from the Visigoths or Carolingians, inscriptions, and narrative sources in Hebrew, Greek and Latin. The picture that emerges from these studies is variegated. Some scholars, following Bernhard Blumenkranz, have depicted this period as one of relative tolerance towards Jews and Judaism; others have stressed the intolerance shown at key intervals by ecclesiastical authors, church councils and monarchs.
Yet perhaps more than revealing general tendencies towards "tolerance" or "intolerance", these studies bring to light the ways in which law in medieval societies serves a variety of purposes: from providing a theologically-based rationale for social tolerance, to attempting to regulate and restrict inter-religious contact, to using anti-Jewish rhetoric to assert the authority or legitimacy of one party of the Christian elite over and against another. This volume makes an important contribution not only to the history of medieval Jewish-Christian relations, but also to research on the uses and functions of law in medieval societies.

Peut-on et doit-on enseigner les faits religieux à l’école ? À quelles conditions un savoir rigoureux et scientifique sur cette question peut-il être dispensé ? Au moment où, plus que jamais, le religieux est l’objet de multiples projections, qu’il est invoqué, voire instrumentalisé, par des acteurs du champ politique et souvent réduit à la violence qu’il génère, il est important que tous ceux qui ont pour mission de produire et de transmettre la connaissance afin de former les futurs citoyens puissent accéder à des outils de réflexion adaptés. Face à des phénomènes religieux, souvent considérés comme excessivement porteurs de charge émotionnelle, il est tentant, pour les autorités politiques comme pour les enseignants, d’éviter de les prendre en considération. Le parti pris de ce livre, fruit du travail de nombreux spécialistes, est d’aller à l’encontre de ce point trop souvent aveugle de l’enseignement. Instruments par excellence de médiation entre les élèves et les professeurs, les manuels scolaires qui traitent des faits religieux sont ici analysés avec le souci de les objectiver au moyen de la méthode historique et de la comparaison non seulement entre des pays de cultures très différentes, mais aussi entre des conceptions idéologiques hétérogènes, voire concurrentes, au sein d’un même pays.
À la hauteur des défis éducatifs actuels, l’intention de cet ouvrage est de mettre en perspective les institutions scolaires, les contenus enseignés et les pratiques pédagogiques afin que le religieux soit apprécié de la manière la plus juste et qu’il participe à la compréhension d’un monde complexe.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam have coexisted in Europe for over 1300 years. The three monotheistic faiths differ in demography, in the moment of their arrival on the continent and in the unequal relations they maintain with power: Christianity was chosen by a large number of inhabitants and became — in spite of important differences according to place and time —a religion of state. The organization of the continent into states and the divisions within Christianity often placed minorities in an unstable and at times painful situation. This partially explains the fight against "heresies", the wars of religions, the expulsion of Jews from several European kingdoms (as well as the expulsion of Muslims from Sicily and the Iberian peninsula), the "Jewish question" in the 19th century up until the Holocaust. Since the 20th century, the debates concerning Islam and concerning public expression of religion are shaped in part by this past.

The 13 studies gathered in this volume explore the ways in which states have treated their religious minorities. We study various policies — repression, supervision, integration, tolerance, secularization, indifference — as well as the many ways in which minorities have accommodated the majority’s demands. The relation is by no means one-sided: on the contrary, state policies have created resistance, negotiation (on the legal, political, and cultural fronts) or compromise. Through these precise and original examples, we can see how the protagonists (states, religious institutions, the elite, the faithful) interact, try to convince or influence each other in order to transform practices, invent and implement common norms and grounds, all the while knowing the confessional dimension of "religious" majority and minority does not fully embrace the identity of each citizen in full.

The fruit of a sustained and close collaboration between historians, linguists and jurists working on the Christian, Muslim and Jewish societies of the Middle Ages, this book explores the theme of religious coexistence (and the problems it poses) from a resolutely comparative perspective. The authors concentrate on a key aspect of this coexistence: the legal status attributed to Jews and Muslims in Christendom and to dhimmīs in Islamic lands. What are the similarities and differences, from the point of view of the law, between the indigenous religious minority and the foreigner? What specific treatments and procedures in the courtroom were reserved for plaintiffs, defendants or witnesses belonging to religious minorities? What role did the law play in the segregation of religious groups? In limiting, combating, or on the contrary justifying violence against them? Through these questions, and through the innovative comparative method applied to them, this book offers a fresh new synthesis to these questions and a spur to new research.