On Monday, 7th of May, SICSA  held a research seminar titled: Anti-Jewish Rhetoric of Canon Law: Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction and Jews in Medieval Bohemia and Moravia.

The event was chaird by SICSA's Posen Post-Doctoral Fellow Dr. Anat Vaturi, and featured a lecture by Dr. Daniel Soukup of Palacky University in Olomouc.

The lecture investigated anti-Jewish ecclesiastical rhetoric as one of the aspects of violence against Jews in late-medieval Bohemia (14th-15th centuries). Through a contextual analysis of the case study -  the Statuta provinicialia Arnesti (1349) named after their collector, the first Archbishop of Prague, Ernest of Pardubice –  Dr. Soukup analyzed how the canon law and ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the (Arch)bishopric of Prague shaped the perception of medieval Jewish community in the Czech lands (e. g. clothing regulation, Jewish-Christian public and private relations, prohibitions and rights etc.).

In the lecture, the anti-Jewish rhetoric of the collection of Statuta provinicialia Arnesti is both compared with the papal canon law and state legislation, and analyzed from the Jewish perspective of Halacha and prevailing custom. Besides text criticism, Dr. Soukup applied comparative methodology and discusses diverse literary and iconographic sources.