By Natalie Fingerhut, History Editor
Jill N. Claster was my first true “author.” I met her in November of 2005 in a lovely café near Washington Square Park for my first ever author meeting. She was elegant and straightforward. During coffee, I asked her why at this stage of her illustrious career, she had decided to author a book for me on the history of the crusades. “Natalie,” she said in her wonderful New York accent, “my NYU students think that 9/11 happened yesterday. They don’t know the history. I feel responsible to tell them that all of that destruction did not happen in a vacuum. It had a past. This is my job to tell them that.” I heard her message clearly that day and it has stuck with me. Jill made me understand my personal responsibility as a history editor to help communicate the past to students.
Ross Brann, friend and colleague of Jill, had this to say about her book, Sacred Violence: The European Crusades to the Middle East, 1095-1396:
“The reading public’s interest in the crusades has been renewed by its curiosity about their meaning for the world in which we live. Jill N. Claster’s Sacred Violence offers the reader a cogent narrative history of the crusades based on the latest research. In her recounting of events from the perspective of the Latin West, the Muslim East, the Christian East, as well as the Jewish communities caught in the crossfire, Claster interrogates the ideological basis of the concepts of holy war and jihad in Christianity and Islam. In so doing, she deftly integrates the social and political history of the crusades, its battles and institutions, with the history of religion. Sacred Violence represents a new and important resource for students of the crusades.”
Jill previously served as the first female dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at NYU from 1978 to 1986 and director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center of Near Eastern Studies from 1991 to 1997. A dedicated professor, she taught her course, “Renewal and Expansion in Europe in the Twelfth Century,” up until a few weeks before her death. One of her many beloved students, Alex Novikoff, currently at Fordham University and also a UTP author, was asked to finish her course which, as Alex recounted to me, was a very moving experience.
She will be deeply missed by all of us at UTP.
