Download PDF | Joshua Prawer, The History of the Jews in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, Oxford University Press, 1988.
334 Pages
This is the story of the Jewish community in Palestine from the Crusader conquest in 1099 until the fall of the Latin Kingdom in 1291. Drawing on a wealth of documentation, much of it largely unknown to western scholars, Professor Prawer examines the working of the community’s internal organization within the framework of the Crusader Kingdom's institutions; their attitude to the Crusader conquerors, as well as to the neighbouring Muslim rulers; contacts between rulers and members of the community; and, in rare instances, cases of interfaith relationships. He describes how the massacres and destruction caused by the Crusader conquest, and the subsequent process of reconstruction, affected the Jewish communities, and provides vivid descriptions of conditions in both rural and urban areas. Time and again new settlements rose from the ruins as the remaining population, seeking to rebuild its life, was joined by pilgrims and immigrants from abroad.
The study of the ideological premises of Jewish pilgrimage to Palestine, as well as an analysis of the Hebrew written itineraries, illuminate the attitude of medieval Jewry towards the Holy Land. The Crusader trading town of Acre housed a particularly flourishing community, and became an intellectual centre and a meeting place for the many strands of Jewish thought from throughout the Diaspora—a community destroyed when Acre fell in 1291. Important as a chapter in Jewish history, this book also offers a better documented and clearer insight into the fate of the minorities in a conquered land, Muslim and Oriental Christian as well as Jew.
Joshua Prawer was Professor of Medieval History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a member of Israel’s Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
PREFACE
THE history of the Jewish community in the Holy Land under Crusader rule has been sporadically treated, but has never merited a monographic study. It has been dealt with in the framework of Jewish history in the Near East, but overshadowed by the great centres of Babylon and Egypt. Such were the chapters devoted to the subject in the pioneering studies of S. Poznanski and the monumental works of Jacob Mann,' as well as in the numerous articles published in final form as seven studies in the collected papers of S. D. Goitein.?
These pioneering and important studies opened new vistas and rewrote almost entirely unknown chapters in the history of Near Eastern Jewry. They were substantiated in masterly fashion by a massive publication of texts from the inexhaustible treasures of the Fustat Genizah and their penetrating analysis. More recently a large quantity of references to partially published or still manuscript material was made in one of the most important works of our generation relating to the Near East, namely in Goitein’s Mediterranean Society.’ This was followed by M. Gil’s publication of a monumental corpus of all available documents of the Cairo Genizah regarding Palestine in the early Muslim Period.* On our specific subject, a single attempt at a monograph was published in Hebrew over forty years ago.” And yet the story of the Jewish community is a fascinating one, a part of the story of the conquered Syro-Palestinian population. As such it was viewed in the framework of research on the Crusader establishments in the East.°
Some years ago, writing a chapter on the ‘minorities’ (that is, the conquered population) in the Crusader states,’ I became aware that a monographic study of Palestinian Jewry under Crusader rule would not only be an addition to Jewish history but also a very meaningful contribution to the study of the Crusader kingdom and society. The Jews, despite being a small minority amidst the conquered population, left far richer sources regarding their life and fate than the Oriental Christians, let alone the Muslims, who made up the bulk of the Palestinian population. This offers the possibility of a deeper insight and better understanding of what happened to at least some of the anonymous conquered population under Crusader rule.
The documentation at our disposal makes it possible to follow in detail the period of Crusader conquest with its massacres and ruin, and the subsequent process of reconstruction, temporarily interrupted by the Third Crusade, until we reach the period of the Second Kingdom, when the Jewish community, though no longer in Jerusalem, reached the peak of its development in the great Crusader trading centre at Acre. Better than for any other community we can follow the working of the community’s internal organization in the framework of the Crusader kingdom’s institutions. Here and there we also get glimpses of the attitude of the Jews to the Crusader conquerors as well as to neighbouring Muslim rulers. We also come across contacts between the rulers and the members of the community and, in rarer instances, cases of interfaith relations.
The salient characteristic is that of a closely knit community leading its own life with very little interference or contacts, but for the most practical purposes, with the outside. ‘This seems to have been the general tenor of interfaith relations. The same is also true in the realm of attitudes to the Holy Land. The pilgrims to the Holy Land—Christian, Muslim, Jew—often trod the same road but took not the slightest interest in the holy places of other religions unless they happened to be part of their own tradition. For the Jewish pilgrim, Nazareth and Bethlehem had nothing to do with the Annunciation and Nativity. He would have known nothing about a marriage in Cana of Galilee; the Jewish tradition knew the place as the burial-place of the prophet Jonah son of Amittai. The Jew had his own Jewish Palestine which was as much a religious as a national concept. Whoever was ruling it, his rule was ephemeral: part of the tenets of Jewish belief was that such rule was a transient event, a prologue that would end with the ushering in of the restoration of Israel.
In small communities in cities but also in villages, Palestinian Jewry as it was reconstructed in the twelfth and especially in the thirteenth century had some of the characteristics of the Frankish society. Created like the latter by a stream of immigration but added to an existing local nucleus, these communities presented a cross-section of the Jewish Diaspora. Oriental Jews from the Maghreb, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq met and mingled with the Westerners who came from Spain, France, Italy, and Germany. Under the impact of these Westerners, the language of our sources changes from Arabic (albeit written in Hebrew characters) to Hebrew, the only common language of the Diasporas.
The newcomers brought with them their own attitudes to religion and philosophy, their preoccupations, and their academic traditions. But whereas the demographic picture reflects in some measure the general pattern of the Crusader kingdom, the similarity ceases at the level of intellectual life. Jewish Acre, though not as far as we can see a very creative centre, was clearly a centre of intellectual ferment and the meeting place of the various trends of Jewish thought, from Aristotelian rationalism harnessed to theology, through fundamentalism and pietism, to the borderlines of the mysteries of the different branches of the Kabbalah. An attack on the philosophical works of Maimonides spread from here and _ reverberated throughout the great centres of Judaism in the East and in the West, coming to an end only with the disappearance of the Jewish community in the wake of the fall of Acre in 1291.
The story of the Jewish community in the Holy Land in any period cannot be treated without reference to the Jewish Diaspora. This is not only due to the physical fact that the Jewish Diaspora in every corner and in every age was the main reservoir supplying a fluctuating stream of pilgrims or eventual settlers in the Holy Land, but above all because the Land of Israel was the focal point of Jewish existence and its expectations of the future. This transcended the daily prayers for a return to Zion or the more solemn prayers of the Great Feasts. It influenced the Jews’ way of thinking of themselves, the meaning of the Diaspora in the framework of history, and its picture of the blissful End. This stimulated writers, theologians, and philosophers and kept the awareness of the faraway Homeland alive throughout centuries. Pilgrimages and itineraries, philosophical treatises and exegesis, religious and secular poetry—their inspiration came in different degrees from the Holy Land. In our context the relation of the Diaspora to the Holy Land takes different turns whether in the poetry and in the treatises of Judah Halevy and in the reflections of Nahmanides on the one hand or the earthly and religious pilgrimages to the Holy Land.
It is to be hoped that the following study will contribute to our knowledge of Jewish history but will also be a contribution to the history of the Crusader kingdom. Based on sources in Hebrew and studies written in the same language, and thus almost inaccessible except to a limited number of scholars, it should allow better insights into the story of a minority that linked its destiny in one way or another with that of the Holy Land under Crusader rule.
A few words should be added on the system of transcription of Oriental names. A large number, usually biblical and historical names, have been written according to common English usage. In others I have followed the transcriptions used in the studies of J. Mann and S. D. Goitein. Finally, names and quotations have been transcribed following the accepted diacritic signs. A particular problem was posed by the titles of books written in Hebrew which also have a title-page in one of the European languages. As a rule I have reproduced the latter in the way in which they are usually catalogued in libraries. As the books were printed in different countries at different periods the transcriptions vary and do not follow any systematic rules. Wherever possible I have indicated existing translations of sources and studies into European languages. Titles of books and articles written in Hebrew are usually given in English translation.
I should like to express here my thanks to friends and colleagues who read and commented on parts of the study. Among many let me single out Professors H. Beinart, B. Z. Kedar, J. Hacker, H. Soloveitchik of the Hebrew University and Dr Sylvia Schein of Haifa University. I owe a great debt to my assistant, Mr M. Sluchovsky, whose reliability and unceasing help were indispensable in writing the following study. And I should like to thank my assistant Mrs Sharon Roubach for her help in rechecking the text and in preparing the index.
Additionally I should like to express my thanks to Dumbarton Oaks and its former president Giles Constable, and to the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Hebrew University and its staff whose hospitality facilitated the writing of the following study.
J. PRAWER The Hebrew University Jerusalem, 1986
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