Download PDF | The Jews Of Medieval Christendom 1000 - 1500 Robert Chazan Cambridge 2006.
362 Pages
PREFACE
This book began with an invitation extended by Cambridge University Press to write a one-volume history of the Jews of medieval western Christendom for its Cambridge Medieval Textbooks series, a series I have long used and admired. The desire of Cambridge University Press to include a volume on the Jews in its distinguished series seemed to me to reflect a sea change in perceptions of the place of the Jews on the medieval scene.
Fifty years ago, such an invitation would have been unthinkable, for the broad academic community exhibited little interest in Jewish life in medieval Latin Christendom.1 Over the past half century, however, scholarly – and even popular – perceptions of the Middle Ages have changed considerably, with the prior sense of a homogeneous and static period giving way to accelerating interest in the diversity and evolution of medieval society, the fracture lines that afflicted it, and its variegated minority communities.
These changes in the study of medieval history have in fact been characteristic of the recent study of Western history in all its periods. Augmented interest in the history of minority communities in a variety of settings and epochs has resulted in the opening of academic portals inter alia to historians of the Jews. Jewish history has become an accepted specialty in universities, and academic presses regularly publish scholarship on the Jews of the ancient, medieval, and modern periods. As a result of this new openness, research into the Jewish experience in general and the medieval Jewish experience in particular has proliferated.
Scholars in North America, Israel, and Europe have investigated increasingly diverse aspects of medieval Jewish life, resulting in an impressive corpus of new books and articles on the Jews of medieval western Christendom. Innovative questions and perspectives have surfaced regularly, and knowledge of medieval Jewish life has increased exponentially.2 The importance of the Cambridge Medieval Textbooks series and the challenge of presenting the new scholarship on medieval Jewry in western Christendom warranted a positive reply on my part to the Press’s generous invitation. I very much agreed with the sense that a one-volume history of the Jews in medieval Latin Christendom would be most useful at this point in time.
While the Jewish experience in medieval Europe has been treated in the context of overall histories of the Jews and while two one-volume histories of medieval Jewry have recently appeared, the time seems ripe for a new introduction to the Jews of medieval western Christendom.3 More personal factors as well influenced my decision to proceed with this project. The first has to do with my prior books. They have all involved carefully delimited topics and manageable bodies of source material. At the same time, I believe – or at least hope – that they have addressed issues of critical significance to the medieval Jewish experience, for example Christian and Jewish imageries of one another, Christian pressures physical and spiritual and Jewish reactions, neglected aspects of medieval Jewish intellectual and spiritual creativity.
The challenge of absorbing these earlier studies into a comprehensive treatment of the medieval Jewish experience was appealing. Readers familiar with my prior work will see these earlier investigations reflected throughout this book. Over and above my writing, my teaching played a critical role in moving me to undertake this book. I have been teaching medieval Jewish history at university level for over forty years now and have taken this teaching responsibility very seriously. I have experimented with a range of organizational schemes for presenting medieval Jewish history and have tinkered with a variety of topical approaches.
These teaching efforts have left me with a full appreciation of the difficulties associated with conveying the medieval Jewish experience and with a number of ideas as to how to do so effectively. More than imparting satisfaction with conveying medieval Jewish history, my teaching experience has inspired me to attempt a more focused effort at “getting it right” at last. A voice deep inside assures me that the effort is worthwhile; to be sure, the same voice also suggests that, when this project is finished, I shall still remain somewhat dissatisfied.
I undertook this project fully aware that it would constitute a new experience, in fact a very challenging new experience. I committed myself, for the first time, to writing an extended synthetic history. All my prior books have addressed carefully defined aspects of medieval Jewish history. I have regularly set manageable parameters for these studies and have felt capable of examining all relevant sources in investigating these focused issues. Essentially, I have gathered extensive data, have analyzed them, and have then followed them where they led me.
While I have aspired to present important developments on the medieval Jewish scene, my studies have all been limited to specific times and spaces. The present project differs markedly in its spatial and temporal scope. I propose to discuss Jewish experience stretching across almost the entirety of Europe and spanning five centuries. There is more even than simply vast territory and a lengthy time period. Neither the territory nor the time period is homogeneous.
There were, as we shall see rather fully, enormous differences among the various Jewish communities of medieval western Christendom and wide-ranging changes through the centuries. Encompassing these differences and changes constitutes a profound challenge to the historian attempting to make sense of the diversified Jewish experiences in medieval western Christendom. Indeed, to complicate matters yet further, I intend to discuss major developments on both the material and spiritual planes.
This study will begin with demographic, economic, and political realities and changes, but will include issues of Jewish identity and Jewish intellectual and spiritual creativity as well. The vastness of the topic and the richness of the literature have necessitated painful decisions as to coverage or – more precisely – as to inclusion and omission. This book was not intended by the Press or by me to be excessive in length and exhaustive in coverage; it was intended, rather, to provide an overview of the diverse Jewish communities of medieval western Christendom and their material and spiritual experience and to offer analysis of the broad evolutionary patterns of Jewish life in medieval Europe and the key factors influencing those evolutionary patterns.
None of the Jewish communities depicted and none of the developments tracked could be treated fully.4 Decisions as to inclusion and exclusion and the fullness in depiction of those topics covered have been extremely difficult.5
Ultimately, these difficult decisions have been made on the basis of an over-arching view of the medieval Jewish experience in medieval western Christendom, a view that will be articulated and will surely give rise to criticism on the part of respected colleagues. It is out of such articulation and criticism that historical knowledge progresses.
The conceptual framework underlying this work proposes that medieval western Christendom was highly ambivalent in its attitude to the growing Jewish minority in its midst, with some elements in Christian society accepting this minority, some rejecting it, and yet others accepting it with reservations and limitations. In response, the Jews themselves viewed the Christian environment with parallel ambivalence, acknowledging Christendom’s dynamism and achievements while at the same time fearing it and denigrating it.
On the spiritual plane, the same ambivalences are manifest. The Christian majority – heir to a rich set of views of Judaism and the Jews – despised Judaism and the Jews, respected both, and feared both. In turn, the Jews – heirs to a far less developed tradition with respect to Christianity and Christians – forged a new sense of the two, again made up of repulsion, attraction, and fear.
The divergences of the medieval Jewish experience in space and the changes in this experience over time flowed from the working out of the inherent ambivalences on the part of Christian majority and Jewish minority, conditioned by differing circumstances of place and time. Beyond these divergences, however, there is an overriding commonality: both the Christian majority and the Jewish minority were deeply affected by the mutual engagement that took place between 1000 and 1500 ce. Both sides emerged with altered perceptions of one another, for good and ill. Inevitably, minorities are more deeply affected by such interactions than majorities, and our case is no exception.
Between 1000 and 1500, the Jewish world was radically transformed in both material and spiritual terms by its encounter with medieval western Christendom. A new constellation of Jewish life was created, and new forms of Judaism emerged. At times, writing this book has felt like flying over the panorama of medieval Jewish history at 35,000 feet, perceiving and sketching the broadest of outlines, knowing that the fields and towns were filled with living human beings, but failing inevitably to discern and portray them in their full reality. Such of course is the nature of a survey.
I have attempted to compensate a bit by introducing into this account of the Jews of medieval western Christendom an occasional reconstruction of specific events and personalities and – perhaps more important – by citing recurrently the sources from our period. All this is done in order to recover somewhat the elusive sense of particularity that a survey risks losing. In general, readers would be well served by keeping at their side one or another collection of translated medieval sources, into which they might periodically dip.6 Like all volumes in the Cambridge Medieval Textbooks series, this one also is intended for an audience of literate and interested readers. Some of these readers will be university undergraduate and graduate students; some will be scholars of a variety of periods of the Jewish past or of medieval history; some will be interested lay readers.
I hope that all these disparate groups of readers will find an account that is comprehensible, stimulating, and satisfying, albeit by no means exhaustive. The experience of medieval Jewry in western Christendom has taken on great symbolic significance in subsequent Christian and Jewish thinking. This symbolic significance has often led to gross over-simplification and distortion. I hope the present overview will contribute in some measure to a more balanced sense of the Jews as a vital element on the medieval scene and of western Christendom during the Middle Ages as a formative period in the evolution of subsequent Jewish life.
INTRODUCTION
An observer viewing world Jewry in the year 1000 would have readily discerned an obvious Jewish demographic distribution and an equally obvious configuration of Jewish creativity. The oldest, largest, and most creative Jewish communities were located in the Muslim sphere, stretching from Mesopotamia westward through the eastern littoral of the Mediterranean Sea, across North Africa, and over onto the Iberian peninsula. Somewhat smaller, but still sizeable and venerable were the Jewish communities of the Byzantine Empire.
Our putative observer might have noted, as an afterthought, the small Jewish settlements in western Christendom, huddled along the northern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, in Italy, southern France, and northern Spain; he might have – reasonably enough – not even bothered to mention them, for they would hardly have seemed worthy of serious attention. Our observer would almost certainly have known that this pattern of Jewish demography and creativity had been established more than a thousand years earlier, long before the rise of Islam to its position of power during the seventh century.
He would have been aware that, subsequent to the exile of the Jews from their homeland in the sixth pre-Christian century, two major centers of Jewish life had emerged, one as the result of Jewish resettlement in Palestine and the other as a result of the decision of Jews to secure for themselves a permanent place in Mesopotamia. He would have known that the great religious–political leaders of world Jewry had been the patriarchs of Palestinian Jewry and the exilarchs of Mesopotamian Jewry; that the classical texts of post-biblical Judaism were the (Palestinian) Mishnah, the Jerusalem (Palestinian) Talmud, and the Babylonian (Mesopotamian) Talmud; that the distinguished rabbis whose teachings were enshrined in the Mishnah and the two Talmuds were all residents of either the Holy Land or the Mesopotamian territory that Jews anachronistically called Babylonia.
Our hypothetical observer would also have recalled that Palestinian Jews had, from a fairly early date, made their way westward, creating new centers of Jewish life all along the Mediterranean shorelines. He would have been aware that the centers in what are today Syria and Egypt were the oldest and largest of these western communities. Newer and smaller settlements stretched out all along the southern and northern coastlines of the Mediterranean Sea – across North Africa, through Asia Minor, and into what is today Italy, southern France, and Spain. With the rise of Islam during the seventh century and its remarkable conquests, the overwhelming majority of world Jewry fell under the rule of the new religion and the empire built upon it.
The only Jewries left outside the realm of Islam were the Jewish communities of the shrunken Byzantine Empire, along the northeastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, and those of the relatively backward western Christian states in Italy, southern France, and northern Spain, along the northwestern shores of that same sea. While we do not have the kind of observations just now suggested from the year 1000, we do possess the writings of a European Jew who traveled from west to east during the middle decades of the twelfth century.
This Jew, Benjamin of Tudela, did not attempt the kind of assessments just now suggested. However, his travelogue – generally rather dry and boring – does provide a first-hand sense of the various areas of Jewish settlement he encountered.1 Benjamin made his way down the Ebro River from his home town, reached the Mediterranean, visited some major Spanish port cities, traversed much of southern France, and crossed over into Italy and down the peninsula. Throughout this portion of his journey, he encountered a variety of Jewish communities.
The largest of these numbered a few hundred souls or males or households.2 When Benjamin reached the Byzantine Empire, he encountered much greater urban enclaves and much larger Jewish communities. In Constantinople, he found a city far exceeding in size, wealth, and culture anything he had seen further west. The Jewish community numbered some three thousand. Again, it is not clear whether this means souls, males, or households. In any case, the Jewish community of Constantinople was many times larger than any Benjamin had encountered in the Roman Catholic sphere of southern Europe. When Benjamin entered the realm of Islam, he was overwhelmed by what he found.
The city of Baghdad, then arguably the greatest city in the Western world, captivated him. His description of the size and splendor of the city reveals an utterly enthralled visitor. The Jewish communities of the Islamic realm in general far surpassed in size and strength those of the Roman Catholic world from which he came. In Damascus, Benjamin found three thousand Jews; in Alexandria, seven thousand Jews; in Baghdad, the staggering number of forty thousand Jews.3 In Baghdad, according to Benjamin, there were twenty-eight synagogues and a Jewish officialdom that enjoyed remarkable prestige and respect in the caliph’s court.
While Benjamin limits himself to fairly specific and often pedestrian observations, his travelogue indicates clearly an Islamic realm far superior to Byzantium and Roman Catholic Europe, and Jewish communities that reflect the same ordering of size, strength, and creativity. Even though Benjamin traveled at a time when the balance of power had already begun to shift, he still found that the Jewries under Muslim domination were larger and more fully developed than those under Christian control. Pressed to predict what the future might hold, our hypothetical observer in the year 1000 would have assumed that the known configuration of Jewish life would surely last into the indeterminate future. In general, of course, most of us have great difficulty in imagining radically altered circumstances.
Such a lack of imagination would have hardly been the only factor influencing our observer, however. For there was nothing in the year 1000 to suggest that radical change was in the offing. The constellation of world power appeared remarkably stable. Islam’s domination seemed to be challenged seriously by no one, neither the Greek Christians of the eastern sectors of the Mediterranean nor the Latin Christians of the western sectors of Europe.
Our observer of the year 1000 would surely have concluded that the contemporary power structure was unlikely to shift and that Jewish life would thus continue along the lines currently discernible. Benjamin, traveling and writing in the middle of the twelfth century, had the benefit of a century and a half of change. By time he made his journey, western Christian forces had driven the Muslims out of their Italian strongholds and had begun to push the Muslims southward on the Iberian peninsula. Western Christian armies had even managed to journey eastward and conquer portions of the Holy Land, including the symbolically important city of Jerusalem. Yet it is unlikely that even Benjamin could have envisioned the further changes in the offing. Were our hypothetical observer of the year 1000 in a position to view world Jewry in the year 1250, halfway through our period, and again in the year 1500, he would have been stunned by the changes.
While the Jewries of the Muslim world remained in place in the years 1250 and 1500, they were well on their way to losing their position of demographic and creative eminence. They were in the process of being supplanted in their physical and cultural primacy by the diverse Jewish communities of western Christendom. The rise of Latin Christendom to its central role in the Western world, achieved from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, brought in its wake – not surprisingly – a parallel ascendancy of the Jewish communities it harbored and attracted. Periodically – but not all that often – new powers have erupted from fringe areas and radically altered the power structure of the Western world.
Such an unanticipated eruption and restructuring took place during the seventh century, when the forces of Islam exploded unexpectedly out of the Arabian peninsula and overwhelmed both the Neo-Persian and Byzantine empires. A more recent example of this restructuring has involved the rise of the United States to its central position in the West, in the process usurping the hegemony long associated with such European powers as England, France, Germany, and Spain. It was between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries that these European powers – especially England, France, and (Christian) Spain – emerged from their relatively backward state and began to dominate the Western world.
The rapid and unexpected emergence of Roman Catholic western Christendom transformed the West and, in the process, realigned the pattern of world Jewish population, authority, and creativity that had remained relatively static for almost a millennium and a half. As a result of this seismic shift in the world power structure, the Jews became and have remained a European and eventually North Atlantic people.4 Herein lies the enormous significance of the period we shall study for Jewish history. This era of roughly five hundred years – approximately 1000 to 1500 – established an entirely new pattern of Jewish settlement and civilization. The geographic lexicon of the Jewish people had heretofore been almost entirely Near Eastern; Jerusalem, Tiberias, Antioch, Damascus, Sura, Baghdad, Alexandria, Cairo were dominant and resonant names.
Now, new names came to the fore – Mainz, Cologne, Paris, London, Toledo, Madrid, Cracow, Warsaw, Vilna, and eventually New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles as well. The earlier Semitic languages of the Jewish people – Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic – declined, to be replaced by the languages of the West – German, French, Spanish, and English. Political ideas and ideals underwent radical alteration, as did cultural and religious norms and aspirations. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of these changes. The relocation of the center of Jewish gravity from the Middle East and North Africa to Europe involved, above all else, a new religious and cultural ambiance. During the period under consideration, the Jews established themselves firmly within the Christian orbit.
To be sure, the history of Christian–Jewish relations did not begin in the year 1000. Christianity was, after all, born in the Jewish community of Palestine. Fairly quickly, however, the religious vision centered around the figure of Jesus of Nazareth won adherents beyond Palestinian Jewry. The original leadership of the Jesus movement had been entirely Jewish; as that movement evolved into Christianity, new and gentile leadership came to the fore. The rapid spread of Christianity took place outside of Palestine, across the length and breadth of the Roman Empire, and involved a largely gentile population. Despite its Jewish roots, Christianity established itself as a separate religious faith, the patrimony of a set of non-Jewish peoples. So long as the vast majority of Jews lived outside the orbit of Christian power, the Jewish issue was muted for the Christian authorities.
Church leaders, it is true, produced an extensive anti-Jewish literature during the first Christian millennium. Much of that literature, however, was theoretical, focused on buttressing convictions as to the rejection of Old Israel (the Jews) and the election of a New Israel (the Christians). Genuine engagement with real Jews was, however, limited. From the Jewish side, the lack of engagement with Christianity is yet more marked. Up until the year 1000 and well beyond, we possess not one single anti-Christian work composed by Jews living within western Christendom.5 Down through the end of the first millennium, the Jews of the world, concentrated in the realm of Islam, were hardly obsessed with Christianity and Christians.6 With the displacement of the center of Jewish population to western Christendom, serious engagement from both sides had to begin. Jews and Judaism penetrated the Christian consciousness in a far more immediate way than heretofore.
This meant the augmentation of antiJewish argumentation, the adumbration of more extensive policies for the Jewish minority living within western Christendom, the evolution (perhaps deterioration would be more accurate) of Christian imagery of Jews, and the eruption of new forms of anti-Jewish animus and violence. For the Jewish minority, the changes were equally momentous. Jewish life was now constrained by new policies and new dangers; Jews were now regularly exposed to the blandishments of the majority Christian religious faith; Jewish leaders had to learn more about that majority faith and to fashion anti-Christian argumentation that would enable their Jewish followers to resist missionizing pressures and remain loyal to Judaism. The story of medieval Jewry in western Christendom constitutes a critical element in the saga of the Jewish people; at the same time, this story illuminates significant aspects of majority life in medieval western Christendom.
As scholarly attention has shifted away from the leadership groups on the medieval scene – popes, bishops, emperors, kings, and dukes – toward a broader swath of humanity, awareness has developed of the variegated nature of what once seemed a monolithic society. The Jews have come to occupy a significant place in recent study of medieval western Christendom. They provide an intriguing litmus test for treatment of out-groups in an overwhelmingly Christian society; they are especially valuable in that – unlike most other out-groups – they have left a literature of their own, to supplement the data available from the majority perspective.
Indeed, for most of the time period we shall be studying, and most of the geographic areas under consideration, there was a very special quality to the Jews as a minority presence in western Christendom. Generally, the Jews constituted the only legitimate dissenting religious group in all of society.7 Minority status is never easy; to be the only legitimate religious minority is even more precarious. Often, as we shall see, the negative aspects of this minority status have been highlighted, and there surely was much that was limiting and harmful. At the same time, the successes of the venture should by no means be overlooked.
In many ways, the Christian majority – or at least elements of it – and the Jewish minority cooperated effectively in fostering Jewish presence and activity that proved of immediate and long-term benefit to majority and minority alike. The spatial boundaries of this study are easy to delineate and are hardly controversial. The designation “western Christendom” points to the distinction between the eastern and western areas of the Christian world, with the eastern centered in the imperial court at Constantinople and the western centered in the papal court at Rome. On another level, eastern Christendom was constructed around Greek language and culture, while western Christendom was constructed around Latin, its linguistic derivatives, and its culture. With the passage of time, these two segments of the Christian world pulled further away from one another.
This process of disengagement and differentiation culminated in the bloody Fourth Crusade of 1204 and the sacking by western Christian troops of the eastern Christian imperial city of Constantinople.8 While there was considerable unity within western Christendom – religious, cultural, and political – that unity should by no means be overstated. This vast area harbored considerable differences as well. The fault lines were both horizontal and vertical. Perhaps the most significant fault line lay in the distinction between the Mediterranean lands of southern Europe and the more remote lands of the north.
The Mediterranean lands of the south had been fully absorbed into the Roman Empire and had been richly infused with Roman civilization and culture. Remnants of Roman civilization and culture were (and are) everywhere palpable across the southern tier of Europe. In contrast, the lands of northern Europe had been only brushed by the contact with Rome and had preserved much of their Germanic heritage.9 In a general way, the southern sector of medieval western Christendom was far more advanced in the year 1000 than were the areas of the north. That situation, however, was to change rapidly and dramatically.
The remarkable vitalization of western Christendom subsequent to the year 1000 took place most markedly in the heretofore backward north. By the year 1500, England and France had emerged as large and powerful monarchies on the Western scene, contesting Spain for preeminence. Indeed, part of the French kingdom’s success lay in its absorption of previously independent southern territories into the expanded royal domain, centered in the north. Paris and London were the greatest cities of medieval western Christendom by the year 1500; strikingly, they had both been backward provincial towns five hundred years earlier. There is perhaps no more eloquent testimony to the centrality of northern Europe in the great awakening of medieval western Christendom that took place between 1000 and 1500. 10
There is a second major fault line as well, one that proceeds on a vertical axis, and that is the distinction – particularly noteworthy in the north – between western Europe, on the one hand, and central and eastern Europe on the other. In the year 1000, the most potent political authority in western Christendom seemed to be the German emperor. Rooted in imperial lore and tradition, the German throne seemed likely to remain the strongest political power among the emerging states of western Christendom. Such was not, however, to be the case. The far less imposing kings of France, England, and Spain learned how to manipulate the feudal system to their advantage, slowly converting local rule and royal prerogative into large, stable, and increasingly puissant monarchies. Germany slipped far behind its more westerly neighbors in economic development, political maturity, and cultural creativity.
Further east, at the fringe of medieval western Christendom, such kingdoms as Hungary and Poland slowly began to develop by the end of our period. Finally, there is yet one more important geographic distinction, involving interior areas of western Christendom and those exposed to outside forces. On many levels, differences emerged between those lands generally insulated from outside aggression and with a relatively homogeneous population (in which Jews were prominent as the only legitimate dissenters), on the one hand, and territories that bordered on other realms and in which populations were heterogeneous, on the other.11 The lands of the east – Italy in the south and Hungary and Poland in the north – were very much exposed to external intrusion, as was the Iberian peninsula in the southwest.
There were salient differences between exposed and interior areas in terms of majority self-image and in terms of the populations with which the Christian majority (even in a few instances the Christian ruling minority) had to deal. We shall have to be constantly aware of these important geographic distinctions. They will play a key role in understanding the roots of Jewish life in the south, the establishment of important Jewish communities in the rapidly developing north, the banishment of these new Jewish centers to the eastern peripheries of northern Europe toward the end of our period, and the eventual disappearance of almost all Jewish life from the western sectors of Europe by the year 1500.
It is impossible to make the kind of generalizations necessary in an overview such as this without occasionally slighting one or another geographic sector of large and complex medieval western Christendom. Ideally, there should be available more focused studies of medieval Jewish life for each of the geographic regions included in medieval western Christendom.12 While the geographic parameters of this study are fairly easy to specify, the temporal boundaries are somewhat more difficult. The designation “medieval” is fraught with problems. Medievals would never of course have identified themselves as medievals; they very much saw themselves as moderni, that is to say moderns, the latest link in the chain of human history.
The terms “Middle Ages” and “medieval” came into being as the medieval synthesis began to unravel; they were terms of opprobrium, used to highlight the alleged backwardness and benightedness of the period that stretched from late antiquity to the onset of the Renaissance. Generally, this negative sense of the Middle Ages focused on the purportedly suffocating centrality of religion in every sphere of human endeavor. This centrality of religion – monotheistic religion at that – contrasted with the more open society of ancient Rome and with the more open society that the men and women of the Renaissance hoped to create.
Out of this backlash the pejorative term “medieval” was fashioned. In practical terms, how does this view of the Middle Ages translate into tangible dating for the beginning and end of the medieval period? This is an extremely difficult question to answer. Scholars have differed regularly as to the onset and conclusion of the Middle Ages. Happily, for our purposes, the debate over the beginnings of the Middle Ages is irrelevant. As already noted, significant Jewish presence in medieval western Christendom did not emerge until the end of the first Christian millennium, the point in time when the region began its long ascent toward dominance in the Western world. Thus, whatever “medieval” might mean in the abstract, for this specific study of the Jews of medieval western Christendom it identifies a period that begins around the year 1000. 13 The end point for this study is more problematic.
Once again, there is considerable scholarly dispute as to marking the close of the Middle Ages. Clearly, the Middle Ages ended at different points in time in diverse sectors of western Christendom – generally earlier in the western areas and later in the eastern areas. Since by the fourteenth century the process of removal of the Jewish population to the eastern edges of western Christendom was well under way, for the bulk of European Jewry medieval conditions ended quite late. For the purposes of this study, however, the adjective “medieval” will be attached to western Christendom, not to the Jews. This will be a history of the Jews in medieval western Christendom, rather than a history of medieval Jewish circumstances in western Christendom. As the medieval synthesis began to disintegrate, toward the close of the fifteenth century, our story will conclude, even though Jews continued to live under medieval conditions for centuries to come in the northeastern areas of Europe.
The divergences within the Jewish communities of medieval western Christendom make the terminal date of 1500 sometimes irrelevant, sometimes inappropriate, and in one major case highly appropriate. The year 1500 is obviously irrelevant to English Jewry, whose history came to a close in 1290, and to French Jewry, whose creative history ended in 1306. It means little for the history of German and eastern European Jewish history. The year 1500 is actually problematic for the history of Italian Jewry, for which most historians see the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as a unified epoch.14 1500 is of course highly appropriate for Iberian Jewry, given the expulsion from Aragon and Castile in 1492 and from Portugal in 1497. Again, the date has been chosen out of consideration of the Christian majority, rather than any special sector of the diversified Jewish minority. Thus, the temporal boundaries of this study will be the years 1000 and 1500.
During this five-hundred-year period, the old Jewish communities of the south expanded markedly and a new set of Jewish communities was created in the north; both sets of Jewish communities developed through the thirteenth century with measures of success and failure; they disintegrated subsequently in the more advanced areas of western Europe and were reconstituted on the eastern peripheries of western Christendom, especially in the north.
Despite all the shortcomings and failures, the bulk of world Jewry made its transition into the rapidly developing Christian orbit, a change that would not be undone down to the present. In some ways, the shortest word in my title – “of” – has presented the most difficulties. I vacillated regularly between The Jews in Medieval Western Christendom and The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom. The first title suggests the relative isolation of the Jews whom we shall be studying; the second integrates them somewhat into their European ambience. I ultimately opted for the latter title, out of the strong conviction that medieval Europe was far more than simply a terrain on which Jewish life unfolded. Problems aside – and they were manifold – the Jews upon whom we shall focus were very much a part of the medieval European scene.
They spoke the language of their land; they were integrated into the economic and political structures of their societies; their cultural and religious lives were deeply affected by their environment; they influenced – for good and ill – the majority ambience within which they found themselves.15 Reconstructions of the past are ultimately determined by the source materials bequeathed to posterity. Where the data are rich, the reconstructions can be dense and nuanced; where the data are thin, so too must be the historical account. To what extent are sources available for reconstructing the story of the Jews of western Christendom from 1000 to 1500? How fortunate or unfortunate are we with regard to the evidence?
The simple answer is that we are moderately fortunate. The data are far richer than those available for the first half of the Middle Ages; they are, at the same time, far poorer than those available for reconstructing the experience of modern Jewish communities. Not surprisingly, availability of source materials for reconstructing the history of the Jews in medieval western Christendom is much influenced by the temporal and geographical distinctions just now drawn. During the period between 1000 and 1500, as the various sectors of medieval western Christendom and their Jewries matured, increasing quantities of source material were compiled and maintained. As we approach the close of this period, the sources – at least in certain parts of western Christendom – become truly copious and diversified. As the same time, the geographic distinctions just noted played a significant role.
The southern and northwestern sectors of Europe, for example Italy, Spain, southern France, England, and northern France, provide extremely rich documentation; the north-central and northeasterly areas, for example Germany, Hungary, and Poland, provide far less. The removal of Jews from the more advanced areas of western Christendom has deprived us of considerable data; the Jews, as noted, relocated in those areas where documentation remains sparse. Thus, we are differentially provided with data. For some periods and places, the data are rich; for others, they are poor. Since the focus of this study is the interrelated activities of majority and minority in fostering Jewish presence and creativity in medieval western Christendom, we shall necessarily depend on the evidence provided by both the Christian majority and the Jewish minority.
With regard to the former, one of the most important developments of our period was the maturation of authority, both religious and temporal. A critical element in this maturation was the creation of stable institutions and reliable record keeping. The first truly potent institution to emerge in medieval western Christendom was the papacy. The papal court quickly developed all the appurtenances of power, including scrupulous record keeping. Papal documentation grew exponentially from the twelfth century on. While Jews constituted a fairly minor element within the complex of Church priorities, they were important enough to generate thousands of papal documents and conciliar decrees.
This rich documentation was among the first bodies of non-Jewish source material to be exploited for reconstructing the history of medieval Jewry.16 The pioneering secular authority in record keeping was Angevin England, beginning in the latter decades of the twelfth century. The records of the Angevin monarchy are extremely rich, and data concerning the Jews are copious. Indeed, no one has been yet able to control this vast documentation. At the same time that the royal records were multiplying at an astonishing rate, so too were the archives of the various ecclesiastical institutions of England. An increasingly large number of literary sources – histories, poetry, early theater pieces – were produced and preserved as well. Thus the relatively small English Jewish community is documented with a richness nowhere else available for medieval western Christendom at this early point in time.17
The French monarchy matured slightly more slowly than its English rival, and the same is true for its archives as well. Since the Jews were expelled from France at the beginning of the fourteenth century, the explosion of royal documentation that began during the thirteenth century does not fully illuminate the medieval experience of French Jews. At the same time, the rich local court and notarial records of southern France have preserved valuable evidence of Jewish life and activity. An increasing volume of Christian literary evidence also began to accumulate prior to the expulsion. The kingdoms of medieval Spain were yet slower to develop the institutional and archival maturity of England, but eventually they did. Since medieval Spanish Jewry far outlasted its English counterpart, by time we reach the latter decades of the thirteenth century and on into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Spanish records become increasingly voluminous.18 Much interesting research is currently being done on the Jews of Spain, based on the available documentary evidence.19 Once more, literary evidence grew at a rapid pace as well. Both historical accounts and belle-lettristic compositions serve to round out the evidentiary base for reconstructing the history of the Jews of medieval Spain. For Italy, the proliferation of principalities and the longevity of the Jewish communities have resulted in extensive archival deposits. A voluminous set of documents has been published over the past few decades, providing a rich evidentiary base for the reconstruction of Jewish life all across the peninsula, at least for the latter centuries of our period.20
The process of working through these materials and integrating them into a synthetic view of the Jewish experience in medieval Italy has proven most difficult. In the north-central and northeastern areas of Europe – Germany, Hungary, and Poland – the volume of non-Jewish source materials diminishes. There are, unfortunately, almost no Jewish documentary materials available from our period. Record keeping within the Jewish communities of medieval western Christendom may well have begun during our period; however, the upheavals occasioned by expulsion resulted in the destruction of most of the documentary evidence created by the Jews of medieval western Christendom. Thus, our major Jewish sources are literary compositions of one or another kind. Most valuable for our purposes are historical narratives. Medieval Jews – in western Christendom and elsewhere – were not deeply drawn to the writing of broad histories, as were their Christian neighbors. Recurrently, however, unusual events moved Jewish observers to record what they had seen or heard, sometimes in order to warn contemporaries against danger, sometimes in order to memorialize fallen heroes, sometimes in order to lodge a plea before the divine audience, and sometimes in order to engage difficult questions associated with Jewish suffering. The resultant narrative records, sparse though they are, provide invaluable evidence of the minority perspective on important developments on the medieval scene.
The related literary genre of poetry, especially liturgical poetry, provides similar evidence of important developments, although generally providing less in the way of specific detail.21 A genre that became increasingly popular with the passage of time was polemical literature, which constituted a Jewish response to enhanced Christian proselytizing. While there is an element of the timeless – and often an element of the tedious – in polemical literature, in many instances these compositions provide valuable evidence of accelerating religious pressure exerted by the majority on the minority and of creative minority response.22 The literary genres most favored by the Jews of medieval western Christendom revolved around what the Jews viewed as their two revelations, which they designated their Written Torah, i.e. the Hebrew Bible, and their Oral Torah, i.e. the classics of rabbinic teachings. Biblical and talmudic commentaries and codes of Jewish law, which are central to an understanding of Jewish cultural and intellectual activity, generally shed minimal light on the quotidian lives of the Jews of medieval western Christendom.
The one popular genre of rabbinic law that does provide considerable insight into everyday Jewish life is the rabbinic responsum. Beginning with a query, normally generated by a real-life situation, the medieval responsa literature reveals much about the interactions between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors, as well as much about internal interactions within the Jewish community. As was true for the non-Jewish materials, so too the Jewish evidence is spotty, occasionally extremely rich and sometimes quite poor. Specific data – sometimes rich and sometimes sparse – provide the underpinning for modern historical reconstructions. In approaching this particular historical reconstruction, the first important decision I had to make involved the alternative paths of narrative versus topical organization, each with advantages and disadvantages. Given the remarkable changes in Jewish fate from the year 1000 to 1500, my decision has been – probably not surprisingly – for narrative reconstruction. This option enables fullest focus on the evolution of the Jewish communities of medieval Latin Christendom. The major disadvantage of this choice is the loss of social history. Topics such as religious practice and the role of family and women do not lend themselves well to the basic narrative format I have utilized. Having opted for a basically narrative approach, I quickly concluded that the complex nature of medieval western Christendom and its Jewish communities precluded a single narrative treatment. The Jewries of medieval Latin Christendom were simply too divergent one from another to allow for one encompassing narrative.
Thus, the narrative account of Jewish fate in medieval western Christendom has been divided into four chapters – the first treating the one major pan-European institution, that is the Roman Catholic Church; the second describing the older Jewish communities of southern Europe; the third focused on the new Jewish communities of the northwest, i.e. northern France and England; and the fourth portraying the Jewish communities of north-central and northeastern Europe, i.e. the German lands, Hungary, and Poland.23 These four narrative chapters will then be followed by a chapter that attempts to draw together the material aspects – positive and negative – of medieval European Jewish experience and a second chapter that attempts to make sense of the Jewish spiritual and intellectual experience.24 The efflorescence of studies in medieval Jewish history has been noted, and it has raised a number of important issues, two of which deserve to be addressed. In the first place, as the parameters of interest in medieval western Christendom have expanded, and as the Jews, along with other marginal groups, have become increasingly a focus of interest, the circle of those reconstructing the medieval Jewish experience has – happily – expanded.
In addition to the more traditional group of historians whose training and central interest has been in the Jewish past, a growing number of general medievalists have devoted themselves to projects involving the Jews of medieval western Christendom.25 This development has contributed richly to our expanding knowledge of the Jews of medieval Europe. On occasion, there has seemed to be a tension between treatment of the Jews within the context of overall Jewish history and acknowledgement of the embeddedness of these Jews in their medieval milieu.26 The stance of this study will be that neither context can be dismissed; in fact, the combination is what shaped the fate of the Jews of medieval western Christendom. For this reason, the book will insist on acknowledgement of both the diachronic and the synchronic aspects of the Jewish experience, that is to say the Jewish experience as shaped to an extent by the overall trajectory of the Jewish past and the Jewish experience as shaped by the specific contours of one or another area of Europe. The book thus begins with discussion of the legacies imposed upon and introduced by the Jews of medieval Latin Christendom prior to indicating how these legacies were preserved and altered in the new European contexts.
The dual focus on the diachronic and synchronic will be maintained throughout. The expanded perspectives brought to the study of medieval history in general and medieval Jewish history in particular raise yet another important issue. As noted, attention has moved from the leadership groups on the medieval scene – both lay and ecclesiastical – to the more nuanced sense of medieval society as composed of numerous elements and classes, each of which must be understood in its own terms to the extent possible. The lively new interest in the Jews of medieval western Christendom in fact flows from this new and more open stance on the part of scholars. However, in writing a composite history of the Jews of medieval western Christendom, I have found myself forced to make some assessments I would have preferred not to make, to highlight certain issues and to submerge others. In effect, I have had to move in the direction of identifying “major” facets of medieval Jewish experience. I have found this necessity distasteful, but unavoidable. Opting for a basically narrative structure necessitates some central image or set of images, often called a meta-narrative or a master narrative. While regularly lamented, this imagery is in fact indispensable. Data must be organized in some coherent fashion, and the master narrative affords this coherence.
To be sure, the data and the imagery must ultimately reinforce one another. Radical disjuncture between the data and the master narrative suggests that the latter is inappropriate. Quite often, master narratives turn out to be quite judgmental, in effect to reflect one or another ideological predisposition. The history of the Jews in medieval western Christendom has conjured up much negative imagery among the descendants of these Jews. For subsequent Jewish memory, the Jewish experience in medieval Latin Christendom has been synonymous with persecution and violence; it has meant bloody crusading assaults, anti-Jewish slanders and the popular attacks they spawned, the dreaded inquisition and the pain it inflicted. These memories have been deeply embedded in the ritual and liturgy of medieval and modern Jews.27 While persecution and suffering have been projected as leitmotifs of the two-thousand-year experience of Jewry in exile, an overwhelming majority of the catastrophes memorialized in post-exilic Jewish ritual and liturgy derive from experience under medieval Christian rule. As noted and analyzed by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, history writing was undertaken only fitfully by medieval and early modern Jews.
That limited body of historical writing very much reinforced the popular perception of medieval Christian persecution and Jewish suffering.28 When fuller integration into historically conscious nineteenth-century European society stimulated the onset of modern history writing within the Jewish world, the prior memory patterns created the framework through which historical data were interpreted. For the first great historian of the Jews, Heinrich Graetz, the dominant patterns of pre-modern Jewish history were suffering inflicted by the outside – preeminently Christian – world and heroic Jewish commitment to life of the intellect through which the suffering was transcended. When Graetz’s romantic and intellectually oriented framework was challenged by a newer nationalist and more specifically Zionist historiography, the emphasis on persecution and suffering was yet more pronounced, with the Jewish experience in medieval Latin Christendom once again highlighted, without the redeeming creativity suggested by Graetz. Majority Christian perceptions of the Jewish experience in medieval western Christendom have been similarly simplistic and one-sided. While this experience looms very large in Jewish memory, its impact is considerably reduced in Christian memory.
The little recollection that remains is, once again, highly negative, although with an opposing valence. For Christians, the folk recollections involved Jewish hostility, which took a number of forms, including political treachery, for example bringing the Muslims onto the Iberian peninsula during the eighth century; vicious anti-Christian rage, which led Jews to murder; and the harm inflicted by Jewish moneylenders and moneylending. For Christian memory, there was no counterpart to Graetz’s insistence on Jewish creativity; there was no awareness of the Jews as involved in anything other than relating negatively to the Christian majority. General medieval historiography has likewise been affected by much ideological prejudgment, both negative and positive. As noted, the very terms “Middle Ages” and “medieval” reflect damning indictments made by Renaissance thinkers, determined to forge a new European civilization. For the men and women of the Enlightenment, the Middle Ages constituted a deplorable interlude in European history. Not surprisingly, rejection of these negative perspectives resulted in the creation of a highly romanticized view of medieval Latin Christendom, a world viewed in this camp as rich in ideals and meaningful achievements, enlivened by a great Church and chivalric commitments, achieving heights of human creativity. Again, the relation of these views of the Middle Ages to important assessments of nineteenth- and twentieth-century realities and issues is patent.
Recent historiography – both Jewish and general – has moved in new and different directions. Historians of the Jews have come to see their Jewish subjects in all periods as living within majority environments that challenged them in multifarious ways – not only through persecution and violence – and that stimulated the Jewish minority to wide-ranging creativity.
For the study of Jewish life in medieval western Christendom, this has meant a decided movement away from the folk and earlier historiographic emphasis on suffering and toward a fuller appreciation of the many dimensions – both positive and negative – of the Jewish experience in medieval Europe. At the same time, as the study of medieval western Christendom in general has abandoned its earlier focus on the ecclesiastical and secular authorities, the tendency toward the judgmental has diminished markedly, replaced by a desire to understand the complexities of medieval European society and life.
The present account of the Jews in medieval western Christendom is very much anchored in the new tendencies discernible among historians of the Jews and historians of medieval Europe. It begins by rejecting the sense of the medieval Jewish experience as consisting essentially of suffering. To the contrary, one of the most striking aspects of the Jewish experience in medieval western Christendom involves the growing number of Jews who became part of the Christian ambience. To be sure, some of these Jews came into Christendom involuntarily via conquest; others, however, made a conscious decision to leave the Muslim world and to immigrate into Christendom, which suggests positive imagery of Christian society on the part of such Jews. Even those Jews who passed into Christian territory via conquest still had the option of leaving and generally chose not to exercise that option.
Perhaps more strikingly yet, as the situation of the Jews in medieval western Christendom deteriorated, the overwhelming majority of these Jews opted to stay within their Christian ambience, rather than abandon it. The changing material fortunes of the Jews in medieval western Christendom will be tracked carefully, with no sense that Jewish fate was preordained from the outset. There were positive factors working on Jewish fate and negative factors as well. Both sides of the story will be presented. There was certainly enough of the positive to encourage considerable voluntary Jewish migration into medieval Latin Christendom and to maintain the desire of most Jews to remain with its confines.
The decline of Jewish life is palpable as we move into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and that decline will necessitate considerable description and analysis. There is, however, no intention to project a teleological vision of Jewish history in medieval western Christendom, a sense that Jewish life was doomed in this environment from the outset. Put differently, the Jews who made their way into medieval western Christendom and elected to stay there will not be treated in this book as myopic, unaware that there was no hope for a Jewish future in Christian Europe.
They will, rather, be projected as vigorous and adventuresome pioneers, willing to tie their fate to the most rapidly developing sector of the Western world. In the process, these pioneering Jews achieved much and lost much, but such is the way of the world. The interactions of Christian majority and Jewish minority will by no means be limited to the material realms of demography, economics, and politics. Medieval western Christendom was alive with intellectual and spiritual vigor.
The Jews of medieval western Christendom were challenged by this dynamic environment, both directly and indirectly. Directly, the Christian majority became increasingly committed to a program of conversion. Occasionally, these efforts were carried out violently, in contravention of ecclesiastical teachings. More often, the modalities of convincing the Jews were peaceful and ecclesiastically legitimate, ranging from informal suasion to formal preaching and disputation. Whatever the modality of persuasion, Jewish leadership was called upon to identify salient differences between the two faiths, emphasizing of course Jewish strengths and Christian shortcomings. Less directly, the sheer vigor and dynamism of the Christian majority stimulated enhanced creativity among the Jewish minority.
Living in a dynamic majority, even an often hostile dynamic majority, moved the Jews of medieval western Christendom to a rich creativity of their own. The Jewish creativity celebrated by Heinrich Graetz was not unrelated to the Christian environment that he decried. Finally, it must be acknowledged that focusing on the Jews and the effort – in part Jewish and in part non-Jewish – to establish viable Jewish life in medieval western Christendom has meant projecting developments, to a significant extent, from an essentially Jewish perspective. History generally involves conflict of one sort or another, and historical accounts are always written from a particular point of view. The War of American Independence reads differently from an American perspective than it does from a British perspective.
The conquest of the American West is perceived differently by the victorious settler population than by the native American victims of that conquest. Telling the story of the medieval Jews from an essentially Jewish perspective means, for example, seeing Jewish resistance to Christian missionizing as a success, although the same development was perceived by ecclesiastical leadership as a failure on its part and on the part of the Jews as well. Likewise, the expulsions from the westerly sectors of Latin Christendom will be portrayed from a Jewish perspective, that is to say as a negative outcome. To be sure, there were many in western Christendom for whom expulsion of the Jews was a signal victory.
The present account will not be framed from their perspective. The story that will unfold herein is a complex amalgam of successes and failures, on the part of both the Christian majority and the Jewish minority of medieval western Christendom. It involves the best and worst of human characteristics; it is filled with contingencies at every point; it has no plot resolution, either happy or sad; it concludes open-ended, with benefits and liabilities extending far beyond the year 1500, indeed down into our own times. Those seeking a clearcut and obvious moral to this tale will be disappointed. Hopefully, the complex saga of the Jews in medieval western Christendom – not at all reducible into simple conclusions and lessons – will provide useful insights into the Jewish, Christian, and human conditions.
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