Joshua Prawer

Joshua Prawer (; November 22, 1917 – April 30, 1990) was a notable Israeli historian and a scholar of the Crusades and Kingdom of Jerusalem.

His work often attempted to portray Crusader society as a forerunner to later European colonialist expansion. He was also an important figure in Israeli higher education, was one of the founders of the University of Haifa and Ben-Gurion University, and was a major reformer of the Israeli education system.

Life Prawer was born on November 10, 1917, to a prosperous Jewish merchant family in Będzin, a small city in the Polish part of Silesia. 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. His mother died at the outbreak of World War II, and most of his family was murdered in the Holocaust. 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. Prawer has been described as an outstanding teacher and lecturer who combined thorough preparation with a charismatic style.

Together with Professor H. Hanani, Prawer initiated the mechina university preparatory programs in 1963, which were originally intended to provide an additional year of study for Sephardic students after discharge from the defense forces, but were later expanded to include foreign educated students and immigrants.

Prawer served as chief editor of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica from 1967 onwards, In 1969, he also received an honorary doctorate from the University of Montpellier. In 1974, he was also awarded the Rothschild Prize and the Order of the Chevalier de L'Ordre Nationale du Mérite.

In an interview a year before his death, Joshua Prawer said his message for the Jerusalem of today is "that it is a universal city, belonging to all cultures and conquering time."

Research

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. 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. 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. 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. 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."

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." 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.

Selected publications (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.