Benjamin Z. Kedar

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Benjamin Z. Kedar

Benjamin Zeev Kedar (born September 2, 1938 in Nitra ) is an Israeli historian . He is considered a leading international expert on the Crusades .

Live and act

Kedar (standing 3rd from left) with Israeli President Reuven Rivlin and the current and former Presidents of the Israel Academy of Sciences.

Benjamin Z. Kedar was born in Czechoslovakia in 1938 . He and his parents survived the Holocaust in hiding among Slovak farmers . He fled to Israel in 1949 at the age of eleven, where he did military service from 1956 to 1958. From 1958 to 1961 he studied history and sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem . His academic teachers were Jacob Katz and Joshua Prawer . Prawer's seminar on the history of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and, above all, the four-day excursion under his direction to crusader castles and churches aroused Kedar's interest in the history of the Crusades and the Latin East. He completed his studies in 1961 with a bachelor's degree and in 1965 with Joshua Prawer with a master's degree. From 1963 to 1965 he was a history assistant at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. At Yale University from 1965 to 1969 he worked on his Ph.D. in medieval history. There he received his doctorate in 1969 under Roberto Sabatino Lopez . Stephan Kuttner's influence was significant at Yale . He showed Kedar the importance of canon law for social and cultural history. Kedar returned to Israel in 1969 and was a lecturer in history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem until 1976 . In 1976 he became a senior lecturer there. He was drafted as a reserve soldier in 1973 and served as a communications sergeant in the Yom Kippur War . Kedar was an Alexander von Humboldt fellow in 1976/77 in Munich at the Monumenta Germaniae Historica . A study emerged from his stay in Munich that deals with the Munich manuscript Clm 28195. In the letter of September 1187, the Patriarch of Jerusalem Eraklius reported on the desperate situation in Jerusalem and asked Pope Urban III. for help. In 1976 he became Senior Lecturer in History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Kedar did a research stay at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1981/82 . He became an Associate Professor in 1981 and Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1986. There he founded a research institute for history (The School of History) in 1999 and became its first director. From 2001 to 2005 he was director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem. In 2007 he retired.

His main research interests are the Kingdom of Jerusalem , aerial photographs as historical sources, displacement as a theme of world history and cultural survival under conditions of total political collapse. Kedar presented fundamental research on the time of the Crusades and the Mediterranean world in the Middle Ages.

His dissertation dealt with the behavior of Genoese and Venetian merchants and the depression of the 14th century. In it he combined history, economics and psychology. He tried to approach the crisis of the 14th century in terms of the history of mentality . In it he represented the thesis of a noticeable change in the mentality of the merchants of the two sea-trading cities due to the economic crisis that began in the thirties of the 14th century. What has been achieved should be secured rather than expanded. The merchants made various arrangements such as a marine insurance or sought the assistance of the saints. Our own ships and children were increasingly given names of saints. The study appeared in 1981 in the Italian translation provided by Giulia Barone.

In his work published in 1984 ( Crusade and Mission: European Approaches toward the Muslims ) he dealt with the intercultural encounters between Europeans and Muslims. He also researched the Jewish communities in the Mediterranean. Based on a concept developed by Kedar, the Monumenta Germaniae Historica signed a formal agreement with the Israel Academy of Sciences to jointly publish the series Hebrew Texts from Medieval Germany . The first volume was published in 2005.

Together with Peter Herde , he became known to a broader German-speaking audience with his study on the Bavarian state historian Karl Bosl and the exposure of his National Socialist entanglements, which was published in German translation in 2011 and 2015 . In it they stated that during the denazification process as a teacher in Ansbach in 1945 , Bosl took advantage of the execution of his student Robert Limpert for himself. The study had immediate local political consequences. The town of Cham renamed a square named after Bosl and deprived it of other awards.

For his research, Kedar was awarded numerous scientific honors and memberships. He is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences (1998) and was its vice-president from 2010 to 2015. He is a corresponding member of the Medieval Academy of America (since 2005) and the Central Management of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (since 2006). He was President of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East from 1995 to 2002 . He was from the University of Haifa , the honorary doctorate awarded (2007). He was honored with the prestigious EMET Prize for science, art and culture in 2019 . A year later he received the Israel Prize . In 2008 he became co-editor of the 5th volume of the manual The Cambridge World History , which covers the period between 500 and 1500.

Kedar has two sons from his first marriage. In his second marriage, he was married to the art historian Nurith Kenaan-Kedar , who died in 2015 .

Fonts (selection)

Monographs

  • with Peter Herde : A Bavarian historian reinvents himself. Karl Bosl and the Third Reich. Hebrew University Magnes Press, Jerusalem 2011, ISBN 978-965-493-564-7 .
    • with Peter Herde: Karl Bosl in the “Third Reich”. De Gruyter Oldenbourg et al., Berlin et al. 2016, ISBN 978-3-11-041256-7 (German translation and significantly expanded version)
  • Franks, Muslims and oriental Christians in the Latin Levant. Studies in frontier acculturation (= Variorum collected studies series. Vol. 868). Ashgate Variorum, Aldershot et al. 2006, ISBN 978-0-7546-5912-9 (collection of 20 articles published between 1994 and 2003).
  • Crusade and mission. European approaches toward the Muslims. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ et al. 1984, ISBN 0-691-10246-5 .
  • Merchants in crisis. Genoese and Venetian men of affairs and the 14th century depression. Yale University Press, New Haven 1976, ISBN 0-300-01941-6 .

Editorships

  • with Sophie Menache, Michel Balard: Crusading and Trading between West and East. Studies in Honor of David Jacoby (= Crusades. Subsidia. Vol. 12). Routledge, London / New York 2019, ISBN 978-1-138-30804-6 .
  • with Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks: Expanding webs of exchange and conflict, 500 CE - 1500 CE (= The Cambridge world history. Vol. 5). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2015, ISBN 978-0-521-19074-9 .
  • Jonathan Riley-Smith , Rudolf Hiestand : Montjoie. Studies in Crusade History in Honor of Hans Eberhard Mayer. Variorum, Aldershot et al. 1997, ISBN 0-86078-646-3 .
  • with Hans Eberhard Mayer , RC Smail: Outremer. Studies in the history of the crusading kingdom of Jerusalem presented to Joshua Prawer. Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi Institute, Jerusalem 1982, ISBN 965-217-010-0 .

literature

  • Iris Shagrir, Ronnie Ellenblum, Jonathan Riley-Smith (eds.): In laudem hierosolymitani. Studies in crusades and medieval culture in honor of Benjamin Z. Kedar (= Crusades. Subsidia. Vol. 1). Routledge, London 2007, ISBN 0-7546-6140-7 .

Web links

Remarks

  1. ^ Benjamin Z. Kedar: A call for help from Jerusalem from September 1187. In: German archive for research into the Middle Ages . 38, 1982, pp. 112-122 ( online ).
  2. ↑ See the review by Karl-Ernst Lupprian in: Historische Zeitschrift . 227, 1978, pp. 431-434; Hans Eberhard Mayer in: German Archive for Research into the Middle Ages. 35: 667 (1970) ( online ); Michele Cassandro in: Quarterly journal for social and economic history . 66, 1979, pp. 244-245.
  3. ^ Benjamin Z. Kedar: Mercanti in crisi a Genova e Venezia nel '300. Rome 1981. Cf. the discussion of Ernst Voltmer in: Sources and research from Italian archives and libraries . 63, 1983, pp. 373-374 ( online ).
  4. ↑ See the reviews of Allan Harris Cutler, Helen Elmquist Cutler in: The Catholic Historical Review . 73, 1987, pp. 292-294; James Waltz in: Speculum . 61, 1986, pp. 431-433; Marie-Luise Favreau-Lilie in: Historical magazine . 242, 1986, pp. 672-673.
  5. ↑ Eva Haverkamp (ed.): Hebrew reports on the persecution of the Jews during the First Crusade. Hanover 2005.
  6. ↑ For the English presentation, see the reviews by Frank-Rutger Hausmann in: H-Soz-Kult , November 21, 2012, ( online ); Jürgen Finger in: German History. 31, 2013, No. 3, pp. 436-437 ( online ); Frank Rexroth in: Historical magazine. 295, 2012, pp. 244-246. For the German-language presentation, see the reviews of Bernhard Unckel in: Hessisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte. 68, 2018, pp. 253-254 ( online ); Clemens Vollnhals in: Bohemia . 57, 2017, pp. 483-485 ( online ); Stefan Jordan in: Historical magazine. 305, 2017, pp. 258-260.
  7. ^ Hans Kratzer: Because of the dubious Nazi past: Cham overturns the Bosl monument. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , November 29, 2011, p. R 16.
  8. ^ Awarded an honorary doctorate to Benjamin Z. Kedar
  9. ↑ Information on the award winner
personal data
SURNAME Kedar, Benjamin Z.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kedar, Benjamin Zeev (full name); Kraus, Willi (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Israeli historian
DATE OF BIRTH September 2, 1938
PLACE OF BIRTH Nitra