History, it seems, must always suffer the impositions of second guessing. If this is true of historical events, the traditional content of historical accounts, it is no less true of historiography, that higher order analysis which is itself a venerable form of retrospective re-examination. We continuously revise our understanding of historical explanations as well as events. In a volume dedicated to revisiting the massacre at York in 1190 and its legacy, I take it as given that part of our task is to consider what kinds of tools we have in our scholarly arsenal in the early twenty-first century for evaluating that moment and its context, in terms that encompass contemporary historiographical trends as well as medieval documents. My own small part in this project is to reflect on the intellectual moment in which we find ourselves, and to consider briefly how this context might offer some new resources as well as new challenges for engaging with the events at York.

A critical aspect of our current intellectual climate is what I will call an emergent paradigm shift in medieval Jewish studies that is at once methodological and ethical. Recently we have seen the development of competing historiographical views of the phenomenon of Jewish self-martyrdom in medieval Europe that I will try to summarize clearly, if rather schematically. On the one hand are those interpretations that fall within a tradition that might be described as memorializing, and tend to frame acts of medieval Jewish self-sacrifice primarily as heroic demonstrations of communal self-assertion. This perspective is prominently represented by Robert Chazan, though his work is part of a longstanding post-Holocaust historiographical tradition.