Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry
Subject: Blanche of Castile, Queen of France (r.1223-1252), and the Jews
Supervisor: Prof. Elisheva Baumgarten
Abstract: My current project is a study on the relationships between queens and Jews in medieval Northern Europe. One basic reality of Jewish life in medieval European lands was living in Christian kingdoms. Jews had to interact with Christian rulers, who were so often involved in Jewish settlement, levying taxes, Jewish communal infrastructure, and more. To explore these dynamics of how Jewish people engaged with their monarchies, scholars have looked most commonly to kings and princes. But queens also served as the chief royal advisors, regents, and even sole rulers in this period, leaving the ways in which royal women factored into Jewish-royal relations seldom accounted for in the historiography. My PhD dissertation aims to enrich what we know by providing a case study on Jewish relations to Blanche of Castile (r.1223-1252), Queen of France, during the first half of the 13th century. Combining royal administrative and artistic sources with Jewish legal and literary works that survive the reign of Blanche of Castile, this project will consider the role of royal women in medieval Jewish policy, as well as how gender shaped interreligious contacts between Jews and Christian monarchies in the European Middle Ages.
Bio: Teddy is a PhD candidate in the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Doctoral Fellow of the Israel Science Foundation-funded research group "Contending with Crises: Jews in 14th Century Europe" led by Prof. Elisheva Baumgarten. Originally from Texas, USA, she studied at Clark University, Universität Freiburg, the European Institute of Jewish Studies in Sweden, and the Hochschule für jüdische Studien Heidelberg Germany, before coming to Jerusalem.
Publications:
(In press, 2023) with Albert Kohn, “While They Sing, Dance, and Make Merry: Song and Dance in the Medieval Jewish-Christian Encounter, 1100-1450” Viator, vol. 54, no. 1 (Fall issue).
(2022) Review. Paola Tartakoff, Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2020), in Francia (forthcoming).
(2022) “A Record of Credit Transaction between Queen Elisabeth of Germany and the Jews of Würzburg, 1308” in T. Barzilay, E. Baumgarten, and E. Levinson, eds. Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Northern Europe, 1080-1350: A Sourcebook (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications: forthcoming).
(2021) “The Queen and the Jews: Dynamics between Jews and Their Rulers” in E. Baumgarten and I. Noy, eds. In, Out, Between and Beyond: Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Europe (Jerusalem: The Max and Iris Stern Gallery, Hebrew University of Jerusalem), 71-76.