Abstract
Prior to Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, David Nirenberg was best known for his impressive study Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages, a work that is at once an exemplary piece of archival research and a theoretically sophisticated meditation on the historian’s craft. Nirenberg took issue with some of the commonplace tropes of the field — such as the image of medieval Iberia as an inter-religious convivencia of nearly utopian proportions — and championed localized studies rather than teleologically-driven treatments of minority persecution over the longue durée. He was wary of historians acting as “geologists” and set out to refute the belief that “we can best understand intolerance by stressing the fundamental continuity between collective systems of thought across historical time […].” Nirenberg was able to show, for example, that a critique of monarchy, more than an unwavering and “irrational” animus toward Jews, drove anti-Jewish violence during the Shepherds’ Crusade of the 1320s.