Joshua Prawer

Prawer was born on November 10, 1917 to a prosperous Jewish merchant family in Będzin, a small city in the Polish part of Silesia.[1][2] He grew up speaking Polish and German, learned Hebrew, French, and Latin at school, and after joining a Zionist group, learned Yiddish as well. He immigrated to Palestine in 1936, where he learned English, and became a student of mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.[3] An invitation to study at the university was one of the few legal ways for Jews to enter the British Mandate of Palestine at the time.[4] His mother died at the outbreak of World War II, and most of his family was murdered in the Holocaust.[2][3]

Prawer found that he was unhappy with mathematics, and his father suggested he study history instead since he had always enjoyed history in high school.[4] His professor, Richard Koebner, an Anglophile historian of imperialism, set him on the course of studying the crusader colonies in the Holy Land.[3] The close ties to Koebner were likely to have instilled in Prawer his interest in the history of settlements and colonialization.[1][5] Prawer began his teaching career at the Hebrew University in 1947 and (after fighting in the 1948 siege of Jerusalem) soon rose through the faculty ranks.[3][6] He became deputy dean of the Faculty of Humanities from 1953 to 1955, was made professor and chair of medieval history in 1958, was dean of the Faculty of Humanities from 1962 to 1966, and served as prorector at the university in the years 1975–78.[6] In the process, he succeeded in making the university into a "global center" for Crusade Studies, and trained many future Israeli historians in that specialty.[7] Prawer has been described as an outstanding teacher and lecturer who combined thorough preparation with a charismatic style.[6] He was often invited to lecture abroad.[2]

Prawer was part of a cadre of historians, including Claude Cahen and Jean Richard, who freed crusader studies from the old conception of crusader society as an exemplar of pure, unchanging feudalism that spontaneously emerged from the conquest. This view, which originated with feudal jurists in the thirteenth century, was held to by modern historians since the early thirties. Through the work of Prawer, particularly his two papers from the fifties, and his colleagues, crusader society began to be seen as dynamic, with the nobility gradually putting checks on the monarchy. The combined efforts of these historians led to a surge of new research into crusader society. Prawer's research extended to a wide variety of other aspects of the crusader states. Among the topics he addressed were land development projects and urban settlement, agriculture, the Italian quarters of port cities, the types of landed property, and legal issues in the Assises des Bourgeois.[1]

One of Prawer's best known works is the Histoire du Royaume Latin de Jérusalem, which won him the Prix Gustave Schlumberger of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. The two-volume work presents the crusader states as a working immigrant society, and shows the importance of immigration and labor shortages. Another book by Prawer, The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem: European Colonialism in the Middle Ages, which was intended for a larger audience, was more controversial. In it, he portrays the crusaders as a society of Frankish immigrants living in complete political and social segregation from the local Muslim and Syro-Christian population, and terms this phenomenon "Apartheid".[1] To Prawer, it is the settlers' refusal to assimilate and their reconstruction of a European-type society on foreign soil, as well as the persistence of indigenous institutions without any interference, that mark the Crusader settlement as colonialist. His thesis is that the economy, society, and institutions of the Latin states are best understood in the light of their colonial status.[13] The 1980 book Crusader Institutions collected a number of his earlier publications and expanded upon them with revisions and new chapters. The book continues his treatment of the Kingdom of Jerusalem as a European colonial product but focuses attention on five topical areas, while throughout employing the tools of textual criticism and commentary on sources. Especially prominent is his coverage of the status and administrative role of burgesses, which had not received such attention before.[14] In his last years, he published a book on a topic of especial interest to him, The History of the Jews in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, which examined the tightly knit isolated Jewish communities of the Levant, the Jewish philosophical feuds they engaged in, and their dreams of restoring Israel.[1][12]

An analogy has frequently been drawn between the European Crusades of the Middle Ages and the modern day Zionist movement. This view, which has been espoused by Arab media and political leaders, has also been discussed in Israeli academia.[15] Prawer was often asked to comment on this analogy, and claimed that a major difference was that the Jews settled the land and worked it, whereas the Crusaders lorded over a conquered land worked by the natives.[2] Ronnie Ellenblum, a lecturer at Hebrew University, identifies a subliminal objective in Prawer's work to draw a distinction between the two: "He's always writing about the Crusaders' manpower shortage and about their not settling the land...He claims that their presence here was principally urban, consisting of nobility and merchants. This is why they lost in the end. The implications are obvious: If we bring enough immigrants, and if we settle the land, we are bound to succeed." (Ellenblum himself has shown that Crusader settlement in the Holy Land was much more widespread than previously thought and has found evidence of hundreds of Crusader farms.)[16] But he also notes that "if Joshua Prawer were alive today he would no doubt deny any linkage between his Zionist political beliefs and the model of segregation that he developed."[17]

Ziad J. Asali, who considers Zionism "the heir—albeit illegitimate—of the Crusader movement," goes further and writes that Prawer "recognized the extent of the similarity in the individual and social experience of Crusaders and Zionists. Rather than studying the comparison and denying its validity, he chose to study the Crusader's experience as if it were a historical model which could be completely analyzed and dissected in order to benefit from its experience and avoid its mistakes."[7] To Zionist author Yoram Hazony, however, it is exactly because of Prawer's readiness to draw the analogy that he considers him a subverter of Zionism and a progenitor of post-Zionist thought.[18][19] David Ohana, a professor of history at Ben Gurion University who rejects the Zionist-Crusader analogy, writes that the subject has now become a litmus test for clarifying one's views on Zionism, with post-Zionists freely making the analogy and sympathizers with the Zionist viewpoint rejecting it.[15]

• (1969–70). Histoire du royaume Latin de Jérusalem. Le Monde byzantin. Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.
• (1972). The Latin kingdom of Jerusalem: European Colonialism in the Middle Ages. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson (later editions The Crusader's Kingdom: European Colonialism in the Middle Ages).
• (1972). The world of the Crusaders. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
• (1980). Crusader institutions. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• (1988). The History of the Jews in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

• First Crusade
• History of Jerusalem
• History of the Jews and the Crusades
• History of the Jews and Judaism in the Land of Israel
• List of Israel Prize recipients

• Joshua Prawer (1917–1990) - Resources for studying the Crusades
• Crusader Shadows, by James Pinkerton
• Mediterraneans or Crusaders? Israel Geopolitical Images between East and West, by David Ohana. Contains excerpts from Prawer's statements about the Zionist-Crusader analogy.