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1 results

  • 16 - Hebrew Sources

  • from Volume II Part 1 - Literary Sources
  • Edited by Michal Biran, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Hodong Kim, Seoul National University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Mongol Empire
    Published online:
    01 January 2024
    Print publication:
    17 August 2023, pp 1261-1272

  • Summary

    The Mongol advance is described from an unusual viewpoint in the Hebrew sources. The writers either witnessed Mongol activity, as in the Jewish communities of Iraq and Armenia, or heard of it from afar, as in Sicily, Provence, Spain, and Morocco. The texts, scant in number yet diverse in nature, are traced according to genre – letters, poems, tomb inscriptions, eschatology and Kabbalah, exegesis, and sermons. They touch the early Mongol raids in Iraq and the vast invasion of Eastern Europe, the conquest of Baghdad and the advance into Syria, and the activity of the Ilkhanate and its conflict with the Mamluk Sultanate. Since the Jews had neither state nor army, they were not considered a target or a threat, and their texts therefore provide a sort of neutral, and often positive, description of the Mongols as a raiding force, a conquering army, and a state.