Download or read book Reconstructing Ashkenaz written by David Malkiel and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-10 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reconstructing Ashkenaz shows that, contrary to traditional accounts, the Jews of Western Europe in the High Middle Ages were not a society of saints and martyrs. David Malkiel offers provocative revisions of commonly held interpretations of Jewish martyrdom in the First Crusade massacres, the level of obedience to rabbinic authority, and relations with apostates and with Christians. In the process, he also reexamines and radically revises the view that Ashkenazic Jewry was more pious than its Sephardic counterpart.