ABSTRACT
The study of medieval Jewry lay at the heart of the nineteenth-century Wissenschaft des Judentums, the first academically driven study of the Jewish experience. By contrast, the Jewish experience in medieval Western Europe has often been viewed as one beset with persecutions and violence. Indeed, memories of these events still pepper the liturgical writings of modern Ashkenazi Jews. The popular perception of Jewish suffering amid medieval Christian persecution was reinforced by earlier readings of the small corpus of explicitly historical writings left behind by medieval Jews. The rise of transnational history over the past two decades has shed light on the relationship between cultures and societies, and brought with it a turn to comparative analysis and cultural transfer. Transnationalism rejects the idea of static "influence" and analyzes instead the dynamic connections between cultures and societies. Sarah Stroumsa evokes the image of a "whirlpool" to describe the dynamic ways in which ideas circulated in the Middle Ages.
