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Titele in WoS: The metropolises of the Middle East

Slutreplik till Malin Thor Tureby om svensk-judisk historieforskning (se Vol. 31 nr 1 och 2).

This article addresses the issue of teaching Judaism for students in the teacher-trainingprogramme and those training to become clergy in a Swedish milieu. A major challenge in thesecular post-Protestant setting is to pinpoint and challenge the negative presuppositions of Judaismas a religion of legalism, whereas the student’s own assumption is that she or he is neutral. Even ifthe older paradigms of anti-Jewish stereotypes are somewhat distant, there are further patterns ofthought which depict Judaism as a ‘strange’ and ‘legalistic’ religion. Students in the teacher-trainingprogramme for teaching religion in schools can in class react negatively to concepts like kosherslaughter, circumcision and the Shabbat lift. Even if the explanatory motives vary, there is nonethelessa tendency common to ordination students, relating to a Protestant notion of the Jewish Torah,commonly rendered as ‘Law’ or ‘legalism’. This notion of ‘the Law’ as a means of self-redemptioncan, it is argued in the article, be discerned specially among clergy students reading Pauline textsand theology. This analysis shows that both teacher-training and textbooks need to be updated inaccordance with modern research in order to refute older anti-Jewish patterns of thought. As forthe challenge posed by the simplistic labelling of both Judaism and Islam as religions of law, theimplementation of the teaching guidelines concerning everyday ‘lived religion’ enables and allowsthe teacher to better disclose Judaism, Christianity and Islam as piously organised living faiths ratherthan as being ruled by legalistic principles. Title in WoS: Didactic reflections on Judaism, stereotypes and thought figures

This article examines the design of the mathematics curriculum applied in Sweden between 1980 and 1995 and how this design affected student results between two international tests, SIMS1980 and TIMSS1995. During this period, the results in mathematics improved on a general level, but in some topics it did not. The results increased significantly in arithmetic, but very little in algebra. I investigate in what respect the arithmetic and algebra curricula were designed differently. The analysed materials are syllabus, commentary material, tests, and textbooks. The analysis is based on Bernstein’s theory on classification and framing. The main conclusion is that strong framing in the curriculum can be associated with better student results in TIMSS and evidence for a causal relation between these entities is presented. On the basis of my finding, I raise a critical question about the change in governing policy that took place in Sweden between 1975 and 2000.

In a Swedish context, Jewish women’s experiences and actions have gone unrecorded and unrecognised; most narratives of Swedish Jewish history offer only a partial account of their past. Marginalised or ignored, or absorbed into universalised categories of ‘Jews’, ‘women’ or ‘survivors’, the experiences and histories of Jewish women are in general not represented in previous Swedish research on the history of the Jewish minority, the Swedish Jewish response to the Nazi terror and the Holocaust or the history of the women’s movement in general. Previous research on the Swedish Jewish response and assistance for the Jewish refugees and survivors of Nazi persecution has mainly dealt with the Jewish community in Stockholm and its relief committee, where the women were absent from leadership positions. The purpose of this study is to explore if and how the Jewish women’s club in Stockholm initiated or was involved in relief activities for and with the persecuted Jews of Europe. Specifically, this is investigated in the context of how the club was established and manifested in public by examining what questions the club raised and what activities it organised in the 1930s and 1940s.

This article presents the new find of a manuscript with runes from Byland in Yorkshire. It provides a full description of the manuscript and examines its Scandi­navian runic alphabet in detail. The runes are further assessed within the context of the English tradition of runica manuscripta and Scandinavian epi­graphical tradition in Britain. Due to the exceptional origins of the manuscript and a number of uncommon features, the background of the material and the runic scribe are also examined. https://doi.org/10.33063/diva-384655

https://doi.org/10.33063/diva-384658

How can the Danish lawn be read and interpreted through the last century? The cases vary a lot, therefore the cases reach out towards a general discussion.The investigation aims at exploring the Danish lawn in an international perspective, and lawns in landscape architecture or lawns as symbols signify critical points of view to societal matters.The present contribution explores the lawn as a central component in selected cases from 1915 till today. The modern breakthrough in the 1920s in Danish landscape architecture revitalized the lawn. Further artistic contributions in the 1950s launched the lawn in a delicate poetic edition. Only a few years later in the 1960s, the lawn signified the inhuman, industrialized suburb. The color TV in the 1980s made the lawn synonymous with commercial football and technology. In 2019, the lawn is an everyday thing, and parallelly it exists as the antonym to the ecological flower meadow – the “true” urban nature.

In September 1704 a man named Sæmundur Þórarinsson was murdered by the river Elliðaá (fig. 1). Steinunn Guðmundsdóttir, his 43-year old wife, and Sigur­ður Arason, a 26-year-old man who lived with his mother, had had an affair and when Sæmundur was found dead in the river, rumours arose that he had been murdered. Sigurður was arrested for the murder. He first denied all allegations, but eventually he confessed and said that Steinunn had urged him to kill her hus­band. On November 14tth they were both sentenced to death at Kópavogur’s assembly and executed the following day. He was beheaded and his head put on a stake. She was drowned. Both were buried in unconsecrated ground on the opposite side of the road (fig. 2). In the spring of 1988, the archaeologists Guðmundur Ólafsson, Lise Gjedssø Bertelsen and Sigurður Bergsteinsson excavated their remains. The excavation uncovered a pair of barrows (fig. 3). A lot of small stones had been thrown on top of the original layer by passers-by, a custom which prevented revenance according to Icelandic folklore. Grave 1. Under the pile of stones, in a shallow grave, with no traces of a coffin, lay the skeleton of a woman (figs. 4–6). Her legs were crossed, and most of the bones from the toes were not found. The left arm was slanted down towards the stomach, the right arm inclined up towards the chest. The fists were clenched. The skull was in a strange distorted position. Two cervical vertebrae lay outside normal position, and the two front upper teeth were missing, but one was found in the grave behind the skull. She had been drowned with a sack covering her upper body. Although the missing toes and teeth raised the suspicion of torture, there is, no written evidence of torture in Kópavogur and by civil law, torture of the accused, but yet not convicted was banned and recent analysis showed no signs of torture. A confession given under torture could not be used as evidence in a lawsuit, however, when a person had been sentenced to death, he or she could be tortured, as an addition to the punishment in Denmark as well as in Iceland. Grave 2. On top of the second pile of stones a lower jaw of a man’s skull was found and some loose teeth, the grim remains of the skull that had been placed on a stake, and eventually fallen down (fig. 7). In a shallow grave under the stones lay the skeleton of the beheaded man (figs. 6 & 8), with the skull and the upper 2½ cervical vertebrae missing. The legs were crossed (figs. 6 & 8). By his feet was a 9 cm wide round hole for the stake, supported by several stones. The decapitated head had been placed at the top of the stake to intimidate passers-by on the road (figs. 6 & 8). There were no traces of a coffin. From literary sources we know that at least 12 death sentences were carried out at Kópavogur’s assembly. The last one was carried out in 1704 over Steinunn and Sigurður in accordance to Icelandic law. The Kópavogur gravesite is the only excavated execution site in Iceland, but comparable cases have been found in Denmark, such as one from 1822. Thomas Thoma­sen Bisp was executed in Vendsyssel for the murder of his wife Maren Just­datter. He had an affair with his maid Ane Margrethe Christensdatter and poisoned his wife. Thomas was sentenced to death by beheading and penalty on wheels and steep. Thomas’s body, including the head pierced by an iron nail, was soon removed and buried in a nearby hill, where it lay undisturbed for 78 years until road workers discovered it (fig. 9). Then the bones came at Vendsyssel Historical Museum. Ane Margrethe was sentenced to lifelong work detention in Viborg Prison, but after many years she was pardoned. https://doi.org/10.33063/diva-400603