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A Rebuilder Works On After His Own Son Is Killed

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A Rebuilder Works On After His Own Son Is Killed

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Hasdai Crescas survived the wave of anti-Jewish violence that swept the Iberian Peninsula in 1391, a documented catastrophe distinct from ordinary communal hardship, in which his only son was killed in Barcelona. That personal loss is documented as occurring within the same violence that devastated the wider communities Crescas would go on to spend much of his later career rebuilding, rather than as a separate misfortune apart from his public work.

He spent much of that later career working, with the backing of the Aragonese crown, to rebuild Jewish communities the massacres had shattered, a documented public role distinct from, and continuing alongside, his private loss. That Crescas took on crown-backed communal rebuilding after the same violence that killed his own son is recorded as the specific shape his later career took, institutional restoration rather than withdrawal, in the years following 1391.

That a philosopher who survived the massacre that killed his only son went on to rebuild, with royal backing, the very communities that catastrophe had shattered marks Hasdai Crescas' later career as a documented case where personal loss and public restoration ran through the same span of years rather than one following at a distance from the other.

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Source Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd editionMichael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.)
Sources
Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd edition
Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.), Macmillan Reference USA, 2007View the Source
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