Win Refugees Or Migrants: Pre-Modern Jewish Population Movement Articulated By Robert Chazan Represented In Digital Copy

A leading historian argues that historically Jews were more often voluntary migrants than involuntary refugees

For millennia, Jews and nonJews alike have viewed forced population movement as a core aspect of the Jewish experience.
This involuntary Jewish wandering has been explained by premodern Jews and Christians as divine punishment, by some modern nonJews as the result of Jewish harmfulness, by some modern Jews as fostered by Christian antiJewish imagery, and by other modern Jews as caused by misguided Jewish acceptance of minority status.

 
In this absorbing book, Robert Chazan explores these various perspectives and argues that premodern Jewish population movement was in most cases voluntary, the result of a sense among Jews that there were alternatives available for making a better life elsewhere.
Robert Chazan is Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University, .