The Cambridge History of Judaism, Volume 6: The Middle Ages: The Christian World [6] 0521517249, 9780521517249

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Figures
Introduction
Part I. Jews in the Medieval Christian World
1 The Prior Church Legacy
2 Medieval Church Doctrines and Policies
3 Mutual Perceptions and Attitudes
4 Byzantium
5 Italy
6 The Iberian Peninsula
7 Southern France
8 Northwestern Europe
9 Germany
10 Northeastern Europe
Part II. Social and Institutional History
11 The Sources
12 Demography and Migrations
13 Economic Activities
14 Communal and Religious Organization
15 Schools and Education
16 Annual Cycle and Life Cycle
17 The Family
Part III. Spiritual and Intellectual History
18 The Sources
19 Languages and Translations
20 Book Production
21 Bible Studies
22 Talmudic Studies
23 Jewish Law
24 Liturgy and Piyut
25 Philosophy
26 Science and Medicine
27 Mysticism
28 Belles-Lettres
29 Polemics
30 Historiography
31 Material Culture and Art
Suggested Readings
Index

Citation preview

THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF JUDAISM VOLUME VI

THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF JUDAISM FOUNDING EDITORS

W. D. Davies† L. Finkelstein† ALREADY PUBLISHED

Volume 1 Introduction: The Persian Period Edited by W. D. Davies and Louis Finkelstein 1984, 978 0 521 21880 1 Volume 2 The Hellenistic Age Edited by W. D. Davies and Louis Finkelstein 1989, 978 0 521 21929 7 Volume 3 The Early Roman Period Edited by William Horbury, W. D. Davies and John Sturdy 1999, 978 0 521 24377 3 Volume 4 The Late Roman-Rabbinic Period Edited by Steven T. Katz 2006, 978 0 521 77248 8 Volume 7 The Early Modern World, 1500–1815 Edited by Jonathan Karp and Adam Sutcliffe 2018, 978 0 521 88904 9 Volume 8 The Modern World, 1815–2000 Edited by Mitchell B. Hart and Tony Michels 2017, 978 0 521 76953 2

THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF JUDAISM VOLUME VI

THE MIDDLE AGES: THE CHRISTIAN WORLD VOLUME EDITOR

ROBERT CHAZAN

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314 321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06 04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521517249 doi: 10.1017/9781139048880 © Cambridge University Press 2018 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2018 Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Control Number: 77085704 Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data (Revised for Volume 6) Main entry under title: The Cambridge History of Judaism / Edited by W.D. Davies and Louis Finkelstein isbn 978-0-521-21880-1 (hardback) I. Judaism - History I. Davies, W.D. II. Finkelstein, Louis 296'.09'01 BM165 isbn 978-0-521-51724-9 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

CONTENTS

List of Figures

page viii

Introduction

1

R O BE R T C H AZ AN , New York University

part i jews in the medieval christian world

7

1 The Prior Church Legacy

9

R O BE R T C H A Z A N , New York University

2 Medieval Church Doctrines and Policies

32

A N NA S API R A B UL A F IA , Oxford University

3 Mutual Perceptions and Attitudes

54

D AVID B E R G E R , Yeshiva University, New York

4 Byzantium N ICHO LA S

76 DE

L A NG E , University of Cambridge

5 Italy The South

98 98

D AVID A BU LA F IA , University of Cambridge

The North

117

R O B E R T B O N F IL , The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

6 The Iberian Peninsula The Transition to Christian Rule

129 129

Y O M T OV A S S IS †

Under Christian Rule

146

M A R K M E Y E R S O N , University of Toronto

7 Southern France

185

R AM B EN S H A L O M , The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

8 Northwestern Europe

213

R O BE R T C H A Z A N , New York University

v

vi 9 Germany

contents 239

A L F R E D H A V E R K A M P , Trier University

10 Northeastern Europe

282

N O R A B E R E N D , University of Cambridge

part ii social and institutional history 11 The Sources

305 307

E P H R AIM S H O H A M S TE INE R , Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel

12 Demography and Migrations

335

M I CH AEL T O C H , The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

13 Economic Activities

357

M I CH AEL T O C H , The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

14 Communal and Religious Organization

380

J E F F R E Y W O O L F , Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel

15 Schools and Education

393

E P H R AIM K A N A R F O G EL , Yeshiva University, New York

16 Annual Cycle and Life Cycle

416

E L IS H EV A B AU MG ARTEN , The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

17 The Family

440

E L IS H EV A B AU MG ARTEN , The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

part iii spiritual and intellectual history

463

18 The Sources

465

D A NI EL J. L A SK ER , Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel

19 Languages and Translations Languages

485 485

D A VI D M. B UN IS , The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Translations

506

J A M ES T. R O B IN S ON , The University of Chicago

20 Book Production

535

M AL ACHI B E IT A RI E´ , The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

21 Bible Studies M A R T I N L O C K SH I N , York University, Toronto

555

vii 582

contents 22 Talmudic Studies E P H R A I M K A N A R F O G EL , Yeshiva University, New York

23 Jewish Law A L Y S SA M. G R A Y , Hebrew Union College of Religion, New York

620 Jewish Institute

24 Liturgy and Piyut Liturgy

648 648

S T E F A N C. R E IF , University of Cambridge

Piyut

664

E LIS ABETH H O L L E N DE R , Goethe University, Frankfurt

25 Philosophy

678

M A UR O Z O NT A †

26 Science and Medicine

702

G AD F R E U D E NT H A L , Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris

27 Mysticism

742

E LLI OT R. W OL F SO N , University of California, Santa Barbara

28 Belles-Lettres

787

J O N A T H A N P. D ECTER , Brandeis University, Waltham, MA

29 Polemics

813

D A NI EL J. L A SK ER , Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel

30 Historiography

836

E VA H A V E R K A M P , Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich

31 Material Culture and Art

860

K AT RI N K O GM A N A PPE L , Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster

Suggested Readings Index

882 905

FIGURES

9.1 Jewish settlements in the Regnum teutonicum around 1200 page 240 20.1 Map of the geo cultural division of the main types of Hebrew 546 book craft and script 31.1 Synagogue of Ibn Shoshan, Toledo, late thirteenth century, interior 862 31.2 Synagogue of Samuel Halevi Abulafia, Toledo, 1356, architectural 863 decoration 31.3 Synagogue of Worms, begun 1174, with later additions, capital 865 31.4 Altneushul, Prague, late thirteenth century, architectural decoration 866 at the entrance 31.5 Leipzig Mahzor, Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek, MS Voller 1002 3, 867 ˙ vol. II, fol. 129r, Worms, c.1310, “The Lily of the Valley” 31.6 Leipzig Mahzor, Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek, MS Voller 1002 3, 868 ˙ vol. I, fol. 31r, Worms, c.1310, Shabbat Shekalim ˙ 871 31.7 Bird Heads Haggadah, Jerusalem, Israel Museum, MS 180/57, fol. 22v, southern Germany, c.1300, the collection of Manna 31.8 Damascus Keter, Jerusalem, National Library of Israel, cod. 4º790, 873 fol. 310v, Toledo (?), c.1260 with additions from Burgos from the late thirteenth century, carpet page 31.9 Perpignan Bible, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, cod hébr. 874 7, fol. 12v, Perpignan, 1299, the Temple implements 31.10 Ambrosiana Bible, Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, MS 30 32 inf., 876 vol. III, fol. 135v, southern Germany, 1236, “The messianic banquet”

viii

INTRODUCTION robert chazan

Historians writing from the perspective of the modern West have usually defined the “Middle Ages” as the period between 500 and 1500 and as the epoch during which the Church controlled the major directions taken by the societies of Christendom. The Renaissance thinkers who initially coined the locution and those moderns who subsequently made its usage common were very much focused on Europe and were profoundly hostile to the medieval epoch. The notion of a “middle” period in European history was meant to conjure up the greatness of the earlier Greco-Roman era, the decline fostered by the victory of Christianity and the Church, and the anticipated revitalization of Europe in the spirit of Greece and Rome. The “Middle” of the Middle Ages was a term of opprobrium. That opprobrium was heightened during the Enlightenment, when “medieval” came to symbolize all the ills against which Enlightenment thinkers railed – dictatorial ecclesiastical powers, obscurantist religious views, and suppression of innovative and creative thinking. Intense Enlightenment castigation of medieval civilization and its achievements eventually stimulated a Romantic reaction that projected onto the Middle Ages the enduring virtues seemingly absent in the new, more secular, and more democratic era. With the passage of time, ideologically grounded opprobrium and its opposite – adulation of the medieval Church and medieval society – have both given way to more scholarly distance and to the recognition that the “Middle Ages” produced highly creative and constructive achievements, along with much that was harmful and destructive. The broadening of recent scholarly interests beyond the borders of Europe has enlarged perspectives on the “Middle Ages,” especially through the growing awareness that European Christendom was by no means the sole or even the dominant force on the Western scene during much of the period bounded by 500 and 1500. Scholars have become increasingly aware of the extent to which the “Middle Ages” reflect a Eurocentric perspective, and of the difficulties in applying the notion outside Europe. Recognition of the 1

2 the middle ages: the christian world range and power of the medieval Islamic world has been one of the most significant elements in this newer and broader sense of the Middle Ages. During the seventh century, an unanticipated new religious vision and force emerged from the Arabian peninsula. Muslim armies conquered vast territories, stretching from central Asia westward to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, across North Africa, and onto the European continent. Within this enormous area, Muslim rulers built effectively on the foundations of prior civilizations, absorbed much of the learning and wisdom of the Greco-Roman world, and fashioned multi-ethnic and multi-religious societies of great terrestrial power and equally great intellectual and spiritual vitality. This vast Islamicate realm included the overwhelming majority of the world’s Jewish population from the seventh century through the early centuries of the second Christian millennium. The concentration of the world’s Jewish population and creativity in the orbit of Islam during this period is reflected in the decision to devote the bulk of volume 5 of The Cambridge History of Judaism to Jewish communities and Jewish life under Islamic rule during the Middle Ages. During the first half of the Middle Ages, the Christian sphere of political power was divided into two sectors. In Asia Minor, the venerable Eastern Roman Empire maintained its authority and creativity, grounded in the teachings of the Greek Orthodox Church. The Byzantine Empire set limits to the Islamic conquest along the northeastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Further westward, the Roman Church provided essential coherence to the diverse principalities of Latin Christendom. While western Christian armies were eventually successful in halting the Muslim advance across Europe, Latin Christendom suffered grievous losses and emerged as the weakest of the three major religio-political blocs of the first half of the Middle Ages. Buffeted from every direction – by Muslim forces, by Byzantium, and by raiding parties from the north – the rulers of Western Christendom during the first half of the Middle Ages were constantly on the defensive, seeking as best they could to protect their clients and followers from the multitude of dangers threatening from all quarters. Just as the rise of Islam and the Islamic conquests could not have been foretold during the sixth century, so too the vitalization of Western Christendom could not have been predicted during the tenth century. Modem scholars are not at all certain as to the explanations for the reversal of position that enabled Latin Christendom to evolve from the weakest of the Western blocs to the strongest. The vitalization was more than simply military. Beginning in the tenth century, the population of Western Christendom grew rapidly, its economic productivity expanded, urban life developed impressively, effective governments emerged, the Church became ever better organized, and wide-ranging cultural and spiritual

introduction 3 creativity crystallized. There was an underside to all this as well. Recent scholars have highlighted major shortcomings in medieval Latin Christendom, including the tendencies toward militarism and especially toward societal uniformity, with dissident groups of all kinds marginalized and often severely persecuted. The vitalization of Latin Christendom – negative aspects notwithstanding – bore enormous implications for Western history in general and for world Jewry in particular. During the second half of the Middle Ages, increasingly large Jewish populations emerged in Western Christendom, transforming its Jewish communities from a minuscule element on the world Jewish scene to the eventual majority of world Jewry. In part, the growth of Europe’s Jewish population was a by-product of Christian military successes. As Christian armies began to eliminate Islamic principalities from European soil, especially on the Iberian and Italian peninsulas, Jews faced the difficult decision as to whether to remain in place and accept Christian rule or to retreat southward with their former Muslim overlords. Most of these southern European Jews seem to have chosen the former course, much encouraged by the enticements proffered by the new Christian rulers in order to convince them to remain and contribute to rebuilding the economy of the conquered areas. More striking was the decision of other Jews to leave the realm of Islam and settle in the expanding and maturing principalities of southern Europe. Thus, the Jewish communities of southern Europe were further reinforced by a wave of co-religionists drawn by the economic opportunities in rapidly developing Western Christendom. More important yet was the decision of some southern European Jews to abandon older areas of Jewish settlement and to settle in northern France and Germany, where serious Jewish life had never before taken root. Northern Europe was, in many ways, at the forefront of the process of vitalization, and some Jews accurately sensed the dynamism of the area. Once again, there was more involved than Jewish initiative. Here, too, farsighted rulers recognized the benefits that Jewish settlers might bring with them, especially the economic expertise drawn from experience in the more advanced sectors of the early medieval West. These northern rulers – like their Christian counterparts in the south in the wake of the Christian conquests – attracted Jewish settlers by conferring upon them promises of physical safety and economic support. The overtures of northern European rulers and the positive response of their Jewish clients resulted in the emergence of entirely new Jewish settlements, indeed of an entirely new branch of the Jewish people, destined for remarkable growth during the closing centuries of the Middle Ages and into modernity. The circumstances these new Jewish settlers encountered were complex. Many of the rulers of northern France and Germany, concerned for the

4 the middle ages: the christian world economic development of their realms, welcomed and supported them, while at the same time often exploiting them harshly. The Church maintained its traditional ambivalence. On the one hand, the Church remained committed to the Augustinian tradition of allowing Jews to live in safety and security within Christian society. Indeed, the Augustinian tradition saw positive value in the Jews’ presence within Christian society. On the other hand, the medieval Church – like earlier ecclesiastical leadership – was deeply concerned over the damage that Jews might inflict on Christian host societies. This concern triggered extensive ecclesiastical legislation designed to protect Christianity and Christians from harmful Jewish influences. The third element in society – the populace at large – tended to be strongly negative, exhibiting little of the ambivalence of the secular and ecclesiastical authorities. For the populace at large, the immigrating Jews were newcomers and elicited the hostility that is the normal lot of newcomers in all societies and all ages. The immigrants were not just newcomers but Jews as well, and this evoked powerful Gospel imagery of unrelenting Jewish opposition to Jesus, and the central Jewish role in bringing about his crucifixion. For many of the townfolk of northern Europe, Jews were also competitors equipped with the numerous and vexing advantages that the political authorities conferred. Finally, many in northern Europe perceived the immigrating Jews as agents of change – which they in fact were. Since societal change is normally feared and hated, these Jewish agents of change became the targets of much anxiety and loathing. The multi-faceted popular resistance to the newly settling Jews created potent obstacles to normal social and economic integration. Despite this complicated and problematic situation, the new Jewish settlers ultimately put down effective roots in both northern France and Germany. They soon struck out in further directions as well, moving westward during the eleventh century from northern France into England, where a small but important Jewry was founded and grew. Somewhat later, German Jews headed eastward into the late-blooming sectors of eastern Europe, where an increasingly large set of Jewish communities was established. By the end of the Middle Ages, the Jews of Latin Christendom were approaching numerical equality with the older Jewish communities of the Islamic world. During the modem period, the Jewry of Europe and its offshoots would become the dominant demographic element in the Jewish people worldwide. Organizing a volume devoted to this emergent and rapidly developing European Jewry is no easy matter. On the one hand, the overall objective of such a volume is to convey a coherent sense of the Jews, Jewish communities, and Judaisms of Western Christendom during the second

introduction 5 half of the Middle Ages. There was in fact a measure of coherence in Latin Christendom, provided by the authority of the Roman Church. Nonetheless, despite the unity the Roman Church provided, Latin Christendom was a vast and sprawling area that encompassed diverse climates, varied ethnic communities with divergent histories and traditions, and multiple languages and cultures. Genuine homogeneity all across Western Christendom was impossible under these circumstances. Moreover, the time period covered – 1000 through 1500 – includes a series of phases that proceeded from early development through rapid maturation to periodic decline and revival. Putting the disparities of space and time together, there were striking differences between the Jewish communities of twelfth-century Spain and those of twelfth-century northern France, and equally striking differences between these two sets of Jews and those of fourteenth-century Poland and Hungary. The volume has been organized in such a way as to combine the desire for coherence with acknowledgment of diversity. The first section, entitled “Jews in the Medieval Christian World,” begins with a focus on the homogeneous aspects of Latin Christendom – Church doctrines and policies, and broad perceptions of one another held by Christians and Jews. The rest of this section is devoted to the separate geographic areas of Latin Christendom, beginning in the Mediterranean south where Jewish settlement was oldest, proceeding to the northwest sectors of Europe where Jewish life thrived for a period of time and then declined precipitously, and then on to central and eastern Europe where the curve of Jewish life was flatter, lacking rapid growth but lacking also sudden and decisive decline and termination. The second and third sections of the volume are organized topically, with an initial focus on social and institutional history followed by spiritual and intellectual developments. The authors of the chapters in these latter two sections of the volume have remained fully attuned to the tension between broad and overarching themes on the one hand, and geographical and chronological diversity on the other. It is our hope that readers will emerge with a sense of both aspects of Jewish existence: the common characteristics of Jewish life throughout medieval Western Christendom, and the unique features of Jewish experience in the diverse sectors of Latin Christendom and during the alternative phases in the evolving history of this rapidly developing civilization.

part i JEWS IN THE MEDIEVAL CHRISTIAN WORLD

chapter 1

THE PRIOR CHURCH LEGACY robert chazan

Monotheisms are mono-covenantal as well; they assume that the one true God established only one genuine covenant with one chosen human community. All other religious faiths – whether polytheistic or monotheistic – are necessarily deficient in their grasp of the divine and its demands on humanity. There may well be gradations of error, with those who acknowledge one God superior to those who worship many deities. Nonetheless, all other human communities are inherently inferior to the one true-covenant people and its grasp of the divine. Monotheistic communities that are earlier than their rivals project these rivals as deviations from the original true faith; monotheistic communities that come later dismiss their predecessors as having only a part of religious truth. These generalizations apply nicely to the Jewish view of Christianity and Islam (projected as later deviations), to the Christian view of Islam (projected as a later deviation), and to the Muslim view of Judaism and Christianity (projected as early and deficient). One set of relations, however – the Christian perspective on Judaism – cannot be understood simply in terms of the above generalizations. The relationship of Christianity to Judaism is more entangled and more complex. The errors of Judaism are in fact central to the truth claims of Christianity. In the Christian view, it was precisely the errors of Judaism and the Jews that paved the way for the emergence of Christianity. Jewish error and Christian truth are thus intrinsically linked to one another. The Jews necessarily loom large in the Christian scheme of things, whether or not Jews are actually present. Jesus of Nazareth – it is by now widely agreed – was a member of the firstcentury Jewish community in Palestine, and his message was addressed to fellow-Jews in that crisis-ridden area of the Roman Empire.1 The crisis 1

The recent literature devoted to reconstructing the historical Jesus is vast. Due to the lack of reliable sources, Jesus is portrayed in the most diverse ways imaginable. Thus, for example, he is depicted by some as scrupulously uninvolved in the first century political rebelliousness that agitated and divided Palestinian Jewry, while others portray him as

9

10 the middle ages: the christian world involved both political and spiritual dimensions. Politically, many Jews supported rebellion against the rule of Rome, although major constituencies within Palestinian Jewry opposed the incipient uprising. To an extent, the political crisis entailed religious and spiritual issues as well, for example the proper reading of the relationship between God and his people and therefore the appropriate stance toward foreign domination. At the same time, purely religious issues also divided Palestinian Jews from one another. The Jewish synthesis of traditional Near Eastern thinking with Greco-Roman ideas and ideals was still very much in process, and such efforts at synthesis always entail discord and controversy. Josephus points clearly toward internal fissures within first-century Palestinian Jewry, although his effort to make these fissures comprehensible to his Roman readers strips his description of requisite Jewish detail and color. The discoveries along the shore of the Dead Sea at Qumran, which unearthed the literature of a dissident community of first-century Jews, have contributed greatly to current understanding of the fragmented Jewry of first-century Palestine.2 This richer grasp of dissidence in firstcentury Palestinian Jewry has resulted in the sense that Jesus was not preaching a new faith. Rather, he – like others in the fractious Jewish community of that period – was arguing for a particular grasp of the historical covenant between God and the Jewish people.3 The facts that no source materials from the lifetime of Jesus himself have yet come to light and that those sources that depict the activities of Jesus stem from a much later period and a very different ambience leave us devoid of reliable insight into the precise version of the covenant actually preached by Jesus to his followers, as well as into his relationship with other segments of divided Palestinian Jewry. Jesus and his followers made little headway within the Palestinian Jewish community in both the Galilee and Jerusalem, encountering – like other such dissident groups – considerable opposition and rejection. Exactly how intense this opposition was and whether it led to Jewish initiation of the charges brought against Jesus before the Roman authorities is not clear. To be sure, the later Gospel accounts place the responsibility for Jesus’ crucifixion squarely upon the leadership of Palestinian Jewry, and this claim played a significant role in

2

3

militantly committed to armed rebellion. The disagreements cover all aspects of Jesus’ career and thinking. For overall surveys of the Dead Sea community and its literature, see James C. VanderKam, The Dead Sea Scrolls Today (Grand Rapids, 1994), and Lawrence H. Schiffman, Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls (Philadelphia, 1994). A growing segment of the recent Jesus literature has come to emphasize the rootedness of Jesus and his disciples in first century Palestinian Jewry its trials, its tribulations, and its spirituality.

the prior church legacy 11 subsequent Christian views of Judaism and Jews, whatever its historical accuracy.4 The earliest sources that have survived from the Jesus movement are the letters of Paul.5 Paul was a diaspora Jew who seemingly came to study in the Jewish academies of Jerusalem, where he became concerned with the small community of Jesus followers and intense in his opposition to them. He claims that, in the course of his efforts to oppose the young sect, he was miraculously transformed from a persecutor to an adherent. As an adherent of the movement, Paul was much removed from the circle of Jesus’ immediate followers, who had remained in Jerusalem to preach his message after his crucifixion. Paul was not a native Palestinian Jew, was not a native Hebrew or Aramaic speaker and writer, and had in fact never encountered Jesus during his lifetime of activity. The evidence in Paul’s own writings and the Acts of the Apostles indicates considerable discord between Paul and the original circle of Jesus’ disciples. Despite his own lack of first-hand acquaintance with Jesus and the original circle’s direct engagement with Jesus and his views, Paul took a strong stand against the original disciples, claiming that he had been directly deputized by Jesus for a special mission. That special mission involved preaching outside the Jewish community to gentiles. Against the views of the original disciples, Paul argued that reaching out beyond the Jewish world was part and parcel of the essential vision of Jesus. He further insisted on a particular view of the religious obligations of the new gentile adherents to the movement. In Paul’s view, these new followers were bound to observe the broad ethical obligations spelled out by Jewish tradition for non-Jews and to believe in the salvific power of Jesus. They were not to be burdened by observance of Jewish law.6 In extending the message of Jesus beyond the Jewish community and distinguishing between the obligations of Jewish and of gentile followers of Jesus, Paul profoundly influenced the further directions of the Jesus movement and – in the process – raised significant questions about the post-Jesus place and role of his Jewish brethren. According to Paul, God envisioned a sequence of stages in the deliverance of his message to humanity. The initial phase involved Moses and the details of the law communicated by Moses to the Israelite community. 4

5

6

The accuracy of the Gospel accounts has been questioned severely in the recent Jesus literature. For reliable background information on the New Testament sources, see Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament, The Anchor Bible Reference Library (New York, 1997). On the Pauline letters, see 407 680. The major sources for Paul’s views and the disagreement with Jesus’ original disciples are Paul’s Letter to the Galatians and the Acts of the Apostles.

12 the middle ages: the christian world This revelation was genuinely divine; however, God intended from the outset that it would be superseded by a further dispensation, which would be broader and richer. The new dispensation was to extend beyond the limits of the Jewish world, and its richness resided in its heightened spirituality, as the physicality of the Mosaic legislation would give way to the spirituality of belief – specifically in Jesus. Jews – for a long period the people singled out by God as bearers of the covenant – refused to recognize the divinely mandated evolution and in Paul’s view remained mired in the physicality of the Sinaitic revelation.7 Recent scholars have argued that Paul’s critique of the physicality of Jewish law may well have been influenced by his insistence that gentile Christians not be burdened by observance of that law. While this may be true to an extent, Paul expressed himself negatively in other ways toward Jews and Judaism. For Paul, the biblical stories of sibling rivalry laid bare the relationship of the young Christian community to the older Jewish community. This relationship was foreshadowed – in Paul’s eyes – by the biblical tales of Isaac and Ishmael, and Jacob and Esau. In both these biblical episodes, primacy passed to the younger brother, with the elder brother consigned to insignificance, thus prefiguring what was to become the relationship of the younger Christian faith community to the more venerable Jewish community.8 Paul’s sense of the supersession of the physical law in favor of spiritual faith, and his projection of the Jews as the elder brother passed over for primacy, created a negative view of Judaism and Jews in the gentile Christian community and constituted a powerful legacy for all subsequent Christian thinking about Judaism and Jews. Jewish failure and attendant divine rejection served as the grounding for Christian succession to the blessings and obligations of the divine–human covenant. To be sure, there was a second and more positive aspect to Paul’s view of Judaism and Jews. While regularly castigating Jews for their failure to recognize that the epoch of the law had come to a conclusion, Paul also sympathized deeply with his prior brethren. In his Epistle to the Romans, in which he continues to berate the Jews for their spiritual insensitivity and their attraction to the physical, he introduces countervailing positive observations, focused on the Jewish past and the Jewish future. Early in his Epistle to the Romans, Paul harshly criticizes Jewish commitment to circumcision, again arguing the priority of the spiritual over the physical: “It is not externals that make a Jew, nor an external mark in the flesh that makes circumcision. The real Jew is one who is inwardly 7 8

This view is articulated by Paul most fully in his Letter to the Romans. This biblical imagery is central to Romans 9.

the prior church legacy 13 a Jew, and his circumcision is of the heart, spiritual not literal; he receives his commendation not from men but from God.”9 Yet at precisely this point of intense criticism, Paul introduces mitigation: “Then what advantage has the Jew? What is the value of circumcision? Great, in every way. In the first place, the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God. What if some of them were unfaithful? Will their faithlessness cancel the faithfulness of God? Certainly not.”10 While highlighting the present shortcomings of the Jews, Paul unexpectedly shifts attention to the past greatness of the Jews, to their role in receiving, preserving, and disseminating divine revelation. Paul insists that God will surely reward this past Jewish achievement and contribution. Further on in the Epistle to the Romans, Paul vacillates yet more strikingly in his stance toward his former Jewish brethren – from positive to negative and back to positive again. He opens chapter 9 with high praise for his Jewish brethren, speaking of great grief and unceasing sorrow in my heart. I would even pray to be an outcast myself, cut off from Christ, if it would help my brothers, my kinsfolk by natural descent. They are descendants of Israel, chosen to be God’s sons; theirs is the glory of God’s presence, theirs the covenants, the law, the temple worship, and the promises. The patriarchs are theirs, and from them by natural descent came the Messiah. May God, supreme above all, be blessed forever. Amen.11

These positive observations give way immediately to Paul’s standard emphasis on recent divine rejection of the Jews. He initially projects this divine rejection as mysterious, but quickly returns to the notion of Jewish attraction to the physical and incapacity to grasp the spiritual and truly meaningful: “Then what are we to say? That gentiles, who made no effort after righteousness, nevertheless achieved it, righteousness based on faith; whereas Israel made great efforts after a law of righteousness, but never attained to it. Why was this? Because their efforts were not based on faith but, mistakenly, on deeds.”12 This oscillation between the positive and the negative takes yet one more striking turn, in an important final observation. I ask then: When they stumbled, was their fall final? Far from it! Through a false step on their part, salvation has come to the gentiles, and this in turn will stir them to envy. If their false step means the enrichment of the world, if their falling means enrichment of the gentiles, how much more will their coming to full strength mean. It is to you gentiles that I am speaking. As an apostle to the gentiles, I make much of that ministry, yet always in the hope of stirring those of my own race to 9

Ibid. 2:28 9.

10

Ibid. 3:1 3.

11

Ibid. 9:2 5.

12

Ibid. 9:30 2.

14

the middle ages: the christian world

envy and to saving some of them. For if their rejection has meant the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance mean? Nothing less than life from the dead.13

Here Paul adds a new perspective on the Jews. They are loved by God because of their past commitment to him, but there is a future element as well. Jewish failure opened the way for illumination of the gentiles, which in turn will eventuate in Jewish recognition of the evolving truth and reconciliation with God. Paul makes vivid this notion of eventual Jewish return to the true path with striking imagery of an olive tree, destined to play a major role in subsequent Christian thinking about Judaism and Jews. If the root is holy, so are the branches. But if some of the branches have been lopped off, and you a wild olive have been grafted in among them, do not make yourselves superior to the branches. If you do, remember that you do not sustain the root; the root sustains you . . . Observe the kindness and the severity of God severity to those who fell away, divine kindness to you provided that you remain within its scope; otherwise you too will be cut off, whereas they if they do not remain faithless will be grafted in, since it is in God’s power to graft them in again. For if you were cut from your native wild olive and against nature grafted into the native olive, how much more readily will they, the natural olive branches, be grafted into their native stock!14

This potent image maintains the earlier emphasis on the past greatness of the Jews. They are the root of the olive tree; they are the cultivated olive tree. To be sure, the Jews have erred and have been punished by God. Branches have been lopped off, and branches from the wild olive have been grafted onto the root, which continues to sustain the tree, despite the loss of some of its native branches. Looking forward, the possibility remains that current error and punishment will be reversed and that Jews who acknowledge the true religious vision grounded in faith will be grafted onto the tree. This grafting process is well within God’s power. Indeed, it is simpler for God to graft the cultivated olive branches than it was to graft the wild olive branches. Future Jewish return to religious truth and reacceptance of Jews by God are distinct and desirable possibilities. The distinguished Jewish past affords considerable hope for a shining Jewish future. Both the image and the thinking behind the image have embedded themselves deeply in subsequent Christian rumination on Judaism and Jews. Paul’s castigation of his Jewish contemporaries is intense. However, the scope of his vision, which extends from the distant past through the distant 13

Ibid. 11:11 15.

14

Ibid. 11:16 24.

the prior church legacy 15 future mitigates considerably the negativity focused on the present. While this vacillation between the negative and the positive reflects considerable ambivalence on the part of Paul toward his former brethren, the ambivalence expresses itself through the scope of the Pauline vision, which extends from far-off past to far-off future. For subsequent Christian thinking, the Pauline oscillation between castigation and mitigation came to play a decisive role, especially for major Christian thinkers who sought to ascertain the normative Christian stance on Judaism and Jews. These thinkers regularly reinforced the complex Pauline message. The epistles of Paul and the Gospels, along with the Acts of the Apostles, constitute the core of the New Testament and hence the foundation of subsequent Christian thinking on all issues, including Judaism and Jews. The Gospels lack the sweeping temporal scope of the Pauline epistles; they are focused on the lifetime of Jesus, his activities, and the reactions of others to him. Lacking the Pauline sense of past Jewish greatness and hope for a future religious reorientation of the Jews and centered instead on Jesus’ ministry and the immediate aftermath of his mission, these narrative sources project more consistent and more intense negativity toward Judaism and Jews than do the Pauline epistles. The Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles have tended to exercise more impact on common Christian thinking than the Pauline epistles. As opposed to the letters of Paul – as colorful as they are – the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles are gripping narratives that excite the imagination of readers. The high points of these narratives have anchored the Christian calendar, with a special – though not exclusive – focus on the beginning of Jesus’ earthly experiences at Christmastime and their end at Eastertime. They have served as the source of vivid representations of all kinds – statuary, frescoes, paintings, theatre, and music. While the intellectual leaders of the subsequent Christian world have absorbed and wrestled with the complex and ambivalent views of Paul, the popular Christian sense of Judaism and Jews has been more deeply influenced by the powerful, present-centered, and unambiguously negative imagery of the New Testament narratives, with their emphasis on unremitting Jewish opposition to Jesus and the special role of the Jews in his crucifixion. The story line in the Gospels and their central themes are relatively consistent. Despite the turbulent political and spiritual circumstances in first-century Palestine, the portrait sketched in the Gospels is straightforward. Romans and the issue of Roman authority make no significant appearance; the diversity of political and religious perspectives in the Palestinian Jewish community is muted. Rather, the narrative portrays Jesus as opposed by only one identifiable and implacable force – the unified

16 the middle ages: the christian world leadership of a seemingly homogeneous Palestinian Jewry. This leadership does not absorb at all the significance of the miracles and healings performed by Jesus, projecting them as the work of nefarious spirits. The diverse Jewish leaders – high priests, Pharisees, Sadducees, elders, and scribes – disagree with Jesus on issues of Jewish law, with no sense conveyed of the extent to which these groups differed from one another. Perhaps reflecting the influence of Paul, the disagreements with Jesus revolve around his profounder grasp of the meaning of the Jewish legal norms, as opposed to the limited and mechanistic understanding of his Jewish opponents. Tellingly, these leaders very early on perceive Jesus as a threat to their authority and plot his removal. This transforms their opposition from the realm of genuine religious difference to the less exalted sphere of selfinterest. The end point of all the Gospels is Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. From very early in the narratives, Jesus points to this eventuality, without spelling out the details. In the Mark version of the crucifixion, which is the earliest and simplest rendition, the Jewish leaders have Jesus arrested by their own forces and bring him to trial.15 For this trial, “the chief priests and the whole council tried to find evidence against Jesus that would warrant a death sentence, but failed to find any.” In the absence of genuine evidence, “many gave false evidence, but their statements did not tally.”16 Eventually, the high priest questioned Jesus directly, and his answer was adjudged blasphemous. On the morrow, “the whole council, chief priests, elders, and scribes” – again the unified leadership of Palestinian Jewry – brought Jesus to the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate and presented their charges against him. Pilate questioned Jesus, but received no reply, seemingly obligating him to pronounce the death sentence.17 The Gospel of Mark then introduces a further episode, grounded in the purported custom of releasing one condemned prisoner each festival period. The Roman procurator is depicted as uncomfortable with the execution of Jesus, “for he knew it was out of malice that Jesus had been handed over to him.” Pilate asked: “Would you like me to release the king of the Jews?” The gambit proved unsuccessful, again due to the machinations of the Jewish leadership: “But the chief priests incited the crowd to ask instead for the release of Barabbas. Pilate spoke to them again: ‘Then what shall I do with the man you call king of the Jews?’ They shouted back: ‘Crucify him!’ ‘Why what wrong has he done?’ Pilate asked. But they shouted all the louder: ‘Crucify him!’”18 This is a sustained indictment of the Jewish leadership of first-century Palestine. It is dramatic, suspenseful, 15 16

On the sequence of the Gospels, see Brown, Introduction to the New Testament, 126 382. Mark 14:55 6. 17 Ibid. 15:1 5. 18 Ibid. 15:9 14.

the prior church legacy 17 and utterly unambiguous in fastening total responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus on the Palestinian Jewish leadership. The impact of even this brief and relatively spare narrative over the ages has been incalculable. The subsequent Gospel accounts, however, complicate the story in ways that magnify Jewish culpability for Jesus’ crucifixion. The Gospel of Matthew, for example, adds further details that intensify the sense of Jewish malevolence. Mark had already indicated Pilate’s negativity toward execution of Jesus, thus laying full responsibility on the Jewish leaders. Matthew proceeds further, making the Roman governor a yet more sympathetic figure and the Jews yet more reprehensible. According to Matthew, Pilate asked the assembled crowd whether it wished the release of Barabbas or Jesus. At that suspenseful moment, Matthew introduces the wife of Pilate: “While Pilate was sitting in court, a message came to him from his wife: ‘Have nothing to do with that innocent man; I was much troubled on his account in my dreams last night.’”19 Then, when the crowd asks for the release of Barabbas, Pilate takes the public step of distancing himself from what was about to happen. “When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere and that there was danger of a riot, he took water and washed his hands in full view of the crowd. ‘My hands are clean of this man’s blood,’ he declared. ‘See to that yourselves.’”20 The Pilate gesture and his insistence that the assembled Jews accept responsibility for the death of Jesus elicited, according to Matthew, full acknowledgment by the Jews of their role – and more: “With one voice the people cried: ‘His blood be on us and on our children.’”21 This purported acceptance of responsibility for all time has echoed down through the ages. The dramatic tale, with its clear message of Jewish culpability, requires none of the thinking demanded by the complex Pauline stance on Judaism and Jews; it offers a simple and damning message. The crucifixion of Jesus was the first half of the culminating drama of the Gospels; the second half of the drama involved his resurrection. Again, the Mark narrative is spare in details, with no intrusion of the Jews into the story. In contrast, Matthew tells a far fuller tale, with the Jews making an appearance again designed to portray them in a most negative light. Building on Mark, Matthew indicates that “a wealthy man from Arimathaea, Joseph by name,” sought and received permission from Pilate to take the body of Jesus. Permission was granted, and “Joseph took the body, wrapped it in a clean linen sheet, and laid it in his own unused tomb, which he had cut out of rock. He then rolled a large stone against the entrance and went away.”22 19

Matthew 27:19.

20

Ibid. 27:24.

21

Ibid. 27:25.

22

Ibid. 27:57 60.

18

the middle ages: the christian world With Jesus thus buried, the leaders of the Jews came before Pilate and requested that they be allowed to secure the gravesite, out of the following concern:

We recall how that impostor said, while he was still alive, “I am to be raised again after three days.” We request you to give orders for the grave to be made secure until the third day. Otherwise, his disciples may come and steal the body and then tell the people that he has been raised from the dead. The final deception will be worse than the first.23

According to Matthew, on the third day “there was a violent earthquake; an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled away the stone and sat down on it,” frightening the guards deeply.24 The angel announced to the two Marys seated nearby that Jesus had been raised from the dead and ordered them to share the news with the disciples. Meanwhile, the guards reported these events back to the Jewish authorities. After meeting and conferring with the elders, the chief priests offered the soldiers a substantial bribe and told them to say: “His disciples came during the night and stole the body while we were asleep.” They added, “If this should reach the governor’s ears, we will put matters right with him and see that you do not suffer.” So they took the money and did as they were told. Their story became widely known and is current in Jewish circles to this day.25

Matthew thus projects Jewish enmity to Jesus even subsequent to his death, deepening the message of Jewish opposition and malevolence. The Acts of the Apostles, which is the history of the early Church subsequent to the crucifixion of Jesus, is not as dramatic or influential as the Gospels. Its story is important nonetheless, and its impact considerable. Composed by the author of the Gospel of Luke, it depicts the development of the Church in two stages: the first led by the original circle of disciples headed by Peter, and the second addressed beyond Palestine and its Jews and directed by Paul. Jews continue to appear in both sections of the Acts of the Apostles, with a focus on their ongoing opposition to Jesus, his message, and his followers. Especially notable is the wrestling with Pauline themes. While Paul ultimately dominates the Acts of the Apostles, it has long been noted that there are significant differences between the Paul reflected in his own letters and the Paul depicted by the author of Luke in the Acts of the Apostles. In the wake of Jesus’ crucifixion, his original followers, under the leadership of Peter, regrouped in Jerusalem and began to spread his message. They were infused with the Holy Spirit, taught, and healed. 23

Ibid. 27:62 4.

24

Ibid. 28:1.

25

Ibid. 28:11 15.

the prior church legacy 19 The Jewish opposition that had been manifest against Jesus was now directed against them. This opposition included legal moves, somewhat like the case made against Jesus himself. At one point, the Jewish authorities arrested and imprisoned the disciples. Miraculously released and having resumed their preaching, they were brought before the council and challenged with contravening orders given to them. Peter, replying for the group, declared that they were following the orders given by God himself. Angered, the council “wanted to put them to death,” but were restrained by one of its members, “a Pharisee called Gamaliel, a teacher of the law held in high regard by all the people.” Gamaliel distinguished between the human realm and the divine realm, suggesting that the message of Jesus and his followers would eventually be exposed by God if, in fact, it were fraudulent.26 Another member of the early Church was not so fortunate. Stephen was a new member of the Church, one of a group of diaspora Jews attracted to the message of Jesus. He is depicted as teaching brilliantly, eventually engaging and besting a specific group of other diaspora Jews in a “synagogue called the Synagogue of Freedmen, comprising Cyrenians and Alexandrians and people from Cilicia and Asia Minor.” Angered, these Jews accused Stephen of making blasphemous statements and brought him – like Jesus and the original disciples previously – before the council. When confronted directly by the high priest as to the truth of the charges, Stephen launched into a lengthy statement on the Jewish past. Beginning with Abraham, Stephen depicted the subsequent patriarchs, the descent into Egypt, Egyptian oppression, Moses, and the exodus from Egypt.27 With Moses, the account turned negative, highlighting the resistance of the Israelites to Moses’ leadership. After describing the conquest of the Holy Land, ending again on a negative note, Stephen turned to outright condemnation. How stubborn you are, heathen still at heart and deaf to the truth! You always resist the Holy Spirit. You are just like your fathers! Was there ever a prophet your fathers did not persecute? They killed those who foretold the coming of the righteous one, and now you have betrayed him and murdered him. You received the law given by God’s angels and yet you have not kept it.28

Striking here is the reversal of the Pauline emphasis on the greatness of the Jewish past. While there are positive elements in Stephen’s speech, the dominant tone is condemnation. For Stephen, what the Jews did to Jesus was a continuation of the sinfulness that had marked the history of the Jews from olden times. 26

Acts 5:34 9.

27

Ibid. 6:9 14.

28

Ibid. 6:51 3.

20

the middle ages: the christian world This speech aroused the ire of the council, which was further inflamed by Stephen’s claim to see “the Son of Man standing at God’s right hand.”29 With this declaration, Stephen sealed his fate. In this instance, the Roman authorities were not consulted, and punishment was immediate and grounded in Jewish mores. Ostensibly, the members of the council brought Stephen immediately outside the city and stoned him. In a seemingly irrelevant footnote to the stoning of Stephen, the author mentions that “the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul,” who “was among those who approved of the execution.”30 This seemingly haphazard observation serves to introduce Saul, who, subsequent to his miraculous conversion, dominates the second half of the Acts of the Apostles as Paul. In this last half of Acts, a second source of conflict appears. No longer are the Jews the only oppositional group and source of contention. Now, alongside the strife between Paul and the Jews, there is also tension between Paul and the original band of Jesus’ followers, who regularly opposed the new directions introduced by Paul. The original disciples obviously rested their views on first-hand experience of the living Jesus; Paul rested his case on a special commission entrusted by the risen Christ to him: the responsibility to take Jesus’ message beyond the borders of Palestine and beyond the Jewish community. The most intense and significant struggle in the second half of Acts involves Paul and the disciples led by Peter, with the sympathies of the author clearly lying with Paul. Nonetheless, contention with the Jews does not dissipate entirely in this segment of the narrative. Despite his special commission, Paul continues to reach out to the Jews in the cities he visits, at least according to the Acts of the Apostles.31 Once again, these efforts prove fruitless, as the Jews remain obdurate in their opposition to the message of Jesus. Indeed, a confrontation between Paul and the Jews of Rome is the note on which the Acts of the Apostles closes. The backdrop to this closing episode involves ongoing Jewish opposition in Palestine to the new message – in this instance, as preached by Paul. Paul is allegedly brought to Rome to stand trial for events that had taken place in Palestine. In this situation, Paul called together the Jewish leaders of Rome and addressed them: My brothers, I never did anything against our people or against the customs of our forefathers. Yet I was arrested in Jerusalem and handed over to the Romans. They examined me and would have liked to release me, because there was no capital charge against me. But the Jews objected, and I had no option but to appeal to 29

Ibid. 6:55 6.

30

Ibid. 6:58.

31

This is not reflected in Paul’s own letters.

the prior church legacy

21

Caesar. This is why I have asked to see and talk to you. It is for loyalty to the hope of Israel that I am in these chains.32

Once again, the Jews of Palestine opposed the new teaching and expressed their opposition before the Roman authorities. Determined Jewish opposition in Palestine continues to surface down through the very last episode of the Acts of the Apostles. The closing episode pits Paul against a new group of Jewish opponents, the Jews of Rome. Responding to Paul’s request, the Jews of Rome came to his quarters and listened to the case he made: “Some were won over by his arguments; others remained unconvinced.”33 The author of the Acts of the Apostles accords Paul the final word: How well the Holy Spirit spoke to your fathers through the prophet Isaiah, when he said: “Go to this people and say: ‘You may listen and listen, but you will never understand; you may look and look, but you will never see. For this people’s mind has become dull; they have stopped their ears and closed their eyes. Otherwise, their eyes might see, their ears might hear, and their mind understand, and then they might turn again and I would heal them.’” Therefore take note that this salvation of God has been sent to the gentiles. The gentiles will listen.34

Here the author of Acts of the Apostles depicts Paul as utilizing the powerful prophecy of Isaiah 6 to castigate the Jews of Rome and to inform them that the Jewish role in the covenant has been stripped away from them and transferred to the gentiles. In the process, Paul is portrayed as subverting the message of Isaiah and his own message in the Epistle to the Romans. The Isaiah passage has the prophet in the divine throne room, responding to God’s request for a messenger. Volunteering to serve as God’s messenger, Isaiah was told to preach a message that the people will not understand. Alarmed by the notion of preaching a message that will not be grasped, the prophet asks how long this dolorous state of affairs will last. The divine response is hardly encouraging. Till towns lie waste without inhabitants And houses without people, And the ground lies waste and desolate. For the Lord will banish the population, And deserted sites are many In the midst of the land.35

According to the author of Acts of the Apostles, Paul interprets this divine harshness as removal of the Jews from their role in the divine–human relationship and the transfer of that role to the gentiles. 32

Acts 28:7 20.

33

Ibid. 28:24.

34

Ibid. 28:25 8.

35

Isaiah 6:11 12.

22 the middle ages: the christian world This is a very free interpretation of the closing verses in Isaiah 6, or perhaps even a dismissal of them: “But while a tenth part yet remains in it, it shall repent. It shall be ravaged like the terebinth and the oak, of which stumps are left even when they are felled. Its stump shall be a holy seed.”36 The prophetic message seems to envision horrific destruction, with only a small fraction of God’s original people surviving, but with that small fraction serving as the holy seed out of which the tree would eventually be reconstructed. The Pauline interpretation, as projected in the Acts of the Apostles, is divine rejection of the original people and their replacement with a new set of bearers of the covenant, which seems a radical reformulation of the Isaiah message. Indeed, this interpretation subverts Paul’s own teachings, as expressed in his Epistle to the Romans. There, Paul does invoke a notion of replacement of the Jews by the gentiles for a period of time, but insists that the prior Jewish role in the divine–human covenant will result in their eventual reconciliation with God and their return to a distinguished place in the divine–human relationship. The author of the Acts of the Apostles imposes a harshness in Paul’s view of the Jews that goes beyond that which he himself expressed. The legacy bequeathed by the New Testament writings to subsequent Christian thinking involved a set of potent images. These images did not yet cohere into a formal doctrine of the place of Judaism and Jews in a Christian society or into a set of policies to govern Jewish life in a Christian society. To be sure, such doctrine and policies would eventually develop, long prior to year 1000 and the growth of an actual Jewish community in Latin Christendom. The imagery in the books of the New Testament played, of course, a major role in the adumbration of the later doctrine and policies. The New Testament imagery is hardly consistent and coherent. The broad tone is potently negative, especially in the narrative sections of the New Testament. The Jews of Palestine – Jesus’ contemporaries – are his unique and determined enemies. They oppose him at every turn and enthusiastically accept responsibility for his crucifixion. In the less dramatic letters of Paul, the Jews are still portrayed negatively. They are mired in the physicality of Mosaic law, whose time had passed with the advent of Jesus and the dawning of a new era in the divine outreach to humanity. Paul, however, introduced mitigation into this portrayal of Judaism and the Jews. For Paul, as disappointing as the Jewish recalcitrance might be, it did not efface the greatness of the Jewish past and the Jewish contribution to spreading awareness of God into the human world. This past greatness 36

Ibid. 6:13.

the prior church legacy 23 assured the Jews of God’s ongoing concern and commitment, which would result in eventual reconciliation. As the early centuries of the first Christian millennium unfolded, changes took place in both the older Jewish community and the younger Christian Church. The two unsuccessful rebellions against Rome were costly to Palestinian Jewry, but it nonetheless remained the largest and spiritually dominant Jewish community down into the third century.37 As a result of the third-century chaos in the Roman Empire, the center of gravity in the Jewish world moved eastward. Confronted with the difficulties of everyday life in the easternmost province of the turbulent Roman Empire, an increasing number of Palestinian Jews sought refuge in the more tranquil Sassanian Empire, which was not all that far away and already harbored a considerable Jewish population. As the Jewish community of Mesopotamia grew, it challenged the hegemony of the Palestinian Jewish leadership. Slowly, what Jews called the “Babylonian” academies assumed spiritual and intellectual pre-eminence on the worldwide Jewish scene. While the Sassanian Empire was also home to Christian communities, Christianity did not exercise dominance in this part of the world, as it began to do in the fourth century further westward. By virtue of the movement of many Jews eastward, much of the Jewish world escaped engagement with an increasingly large and powerful Christianity. Paul’s preaching beyond the boundaries of Palestine and his outreach to gentiles moved the center of Christian gravity westward, in the opposite direction. During the first and second Christian centuries, the Church continued to make only limited headway in Palestine, where the Jewish community – military defeats notwithstanding – remained strong. However, throughout the rest of the Roman Empire, effective Christian preaching won large numbers of converts to the new faith community, increasingly differentiated from its initial Jewish roots. How many of these converts came from the synagogues of the Roman diaspora is not known. What is clear is that the overwhelming majority of Christians were gentile converts. Christianity became a gentile phenomenon, and the Jewish wing of the movement that was so central in the first half of the Acts of the Apostles became a dwindling minority. 37

Both traditional Jewish and Christian thinking posited an expulsion enacted by the Romans along the same lines as the prior Assyrian and Babylonian expulsions. While the Romans did bring many Jewish captives back to Rome with them, this was by no means parallel to the thorough exile of the Israelite and Judean population carried out by the Assyrians in the pre Christian eighth century or by the Babylonians in the pre Christian sixth century. The Jewish population remained strong enough to mount a second major rebellion only six decades after the first uprising.

24

the middle ages: the christian world Just as Paul’s sense of a mission to the gentiles created for him the need to wrestle with the issues of Judaism and Jews, so too did subsequent gentile Christianity have to continue the Pauline effort to differentiate Christianity from Judaism. This effort necessitated careful consideration and evaluation of the Hebrew Bible, the Israelite experience detailed therein, and subsequent Jewish interpretations of both. Paul’s distinction between the physicality of the Sinai revelation and the spirituality of the Jesus message lent itself readily to denigration of Sinai, the Israelites, and their Jewish successors. At the same time, the Gospel sense of Jesus as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy influenced Christian thinking in a more positive direction. In part, this tension expressed itself in controversy over the precise dimensions of Christian Scripture. For those intensely negative to Sinai, Israelites, and Jews, the Hebrew Bible had no place in the corpus of Christian sacred writings. For those viewing these issues more positively, the Hebrew Bible had to be an element in that corpus. The latter group eventually won out, with the Hebrew Bible taking its place within Christian Scripture as the Old Testament. This resolution had important ramifications for subsequent Christian views of Judaism and Jews, creating respect, disagreement, and anxiety. Both Christian groups – those opposed to the Hebrew Bible and those arguing for its inclusion in Christian Scripture – saw themselves as interpreting Paul accurately. Those arguing the more benign view of the Hebrew Bible and Israelite experience emphasized the Pauline sense that God himself had envisioned an evolution of divine revelation, beginning at a more physical level and proceeding eventually to a higher spiritual plane. This meant that the Hebrew Bible – the record of the initial phase of divine revelation – must by no means be repudiated. Rather, it must be understood as the precursor and the predictor of the succeeding phase of divine outreach to humanity. The key to this proper grasp of the meaning of the Old Testament was to interpret it appropriately, i.e. to fathom the allegorical meanings embedded within it. Thus, Christian interpretation of the Old Testament had to extract the spiritual meanings of its rituals and narratives. The shortcomings of the Jews, seen in general as residing in their inability to rise beyond the physical and comprehend the spiritual, meant more specifically their failure to read the biblical record properly, i.e. with a focus on its spiritual allusions. Jews – Israel of the flesh rather than the spirit – suffered from an incapacity to read their own sacred writings from the proper perspective. Christian wrestling with the Hebrew Bible, the Israelite experience, and Judaism was central to the process of Christian self-definition. At the same time, this wrestling was further necessitated by the potential judaizing influence of the Hebrew Bible – now a part of Christian Scripture – and

the prior church legacy 25 of contemporary Jews, who by their very presence served to make the Jewish alternative a challenge. The process of absorbing the Hebrew Bible and the Israelites into the core of Christianity had to include pejorative contrasts between Christianity and Judaism, and it did. The Church Fathers of the early Christian centuries fashioned an extensive contra Judaeos literature, intended to portray Judaism and Jews in a way that would diminish any potential appeal they might have for unsuspecting Christians, who might be attracted to a more literal reading of the Hebrew Bible or might be swayed by Jewish views of it. This contra Judaeos literature was grounded in the Pauline distinction between physicality and spirituality. Eschewing the radical conclusions of the detractors of biblical Israel, these Church Fathers focused on the Pauline sense of the Jews as failing to acknowledge the dawn of a new and spiritual era with the advent of Jesus as Messiah and Savior. Ongoing Jewish observance of the ritual laws subsequent to the advent of Jesus was stridently criticized, condemned as an embrace of the physical; these practices were contrasted with Christian capacity to extract the spiritual – i.e., true – meaning of religious ritual originating with the Hebrew Bible. Jewish literal reading of the biblical record was a further aspect of Jewish failure and indeed the key to the quarrel between the two faith communities. Both communities saw their foundations in the Hebrew Bible, which Jews read incorrectly and Christians understood properly. These Church Fathers had one further line of argumentation, not yet available to Paul. Paul, writing in the 50s, preceded the great Jewish rebellion against Rome. Writing subsequent to that rebellion and the Roman victory over the Jewish insurgents, and in most cases after the unsuccessful second Jewish revolt against Rome in the 130s, the Church Fathers could and did interpret Jewish defeats as divine interventions intended to prove the errors of the Jews. These errors resided in a general way in the Pauline projection of Jewish failure to make the leap from the physical to the spiritual. More specifically, Jewish error expressed itself in the Gospel focus on Jewish unwillingness to recognize Jesus, Jewish opposition to him, and the Jewish role in his crucifixion. In this Christian view, God deprived Jews of their political power, the land promised to them, and the central site of their cult. This was, to be sure, an exaggeration. The Jerusalem Temple was indeed destroyed by the Romans in the year 70; however, Jewish political power had disappeared long prior to the rebellion against Rome, and transformation of the Jews into a predominantly diaspora people did not eventuate until a number of centuries subsequent to 70. Despite these historical inaccuracies, the imagery of radical divine punishment was potent and became part of the standard Christian view of Judaism and Jews in late Antiquity and thereafter.

26

the middle ages: the christian world These perspectives on Judaism and Jews represent the beginnings of the elaboration of Christian doctrine on the older faith and faith community. At the same time, Christian leaders began to wrestle with policy issues aroused by the presence and activities of actual Jews living side by side with Christian neighbors throughout the Roman Empire. Not surprisingly, the initial thrust of Church concern involved minimizing the impact of Judaism and Jews on Christians, perhaps especially recent converts to Christianity. There was considerable effort to limit Christian–Jewish interaction, which it was feared would heighten attraction to Judaism and absorption of its teachings. Given the decision to make the Hebrew Bible part of Christian Scripture and the richness of references to Jewish life in the New Testament, the potential for disruptive Jewish influence was real. The very first references to Jews in the ecclesiastical legislation of the evolving Church comes from the early-fourth-century Council of Elvira in Spain.38 Two of the canons of the council address the highly charged issue of sexual relations with non-Christians. Married Christian men who have relations with either pagan or Jewish women are to be cut off from the community. Marriage between a Christian and either a heretic or a Jew is prohibited, and the parents of the Christian so married are to be excommunicated for five years. In addition, landholders must not invite Jews to bless their fields, and those who do so are to be ejected from the Church. Finally, Christians are enjoined not to eat with Jews. The overall stance of these edicts is defensive and represents an effort to protect Christians against baneful Jewish influence. This potential influence might be exercised by pagans and heretics, but Jews are projected as the most dangerous element in the non-Christian population. This segregative legislation became a staple of subsequent Church policy toward Jews. The chaos throughout the third-century Roman Empire, which resulted in the shift of the center of Jewish population eastward into the Sassanian Empire, had a yet more striking impact on the Christian community. This chaos and the remarkable growth of the Christian population throughout the Roman world combined to effect a monumental shift in governance of the empire. Constantine, in the early fourth century, seems to have concluded that he could best reconstruct the foundations of imperial authority by ending the failed effort to suppress the ever-expanding Church and by using the increasingly potent Christian community as the basis for a new Roman polity. This sea-change was critical to the history of Christianity, to the history of the Roman Empire and its successor states, and – of lesser significance, to be sure – to the evolving Christian stance toward Judaism 38

Amnon Linder, ed. and trans., The Jews in the Legal Sources of the Early Middle Ages (Detroit, 1997), 482 4.

the prior church legacy 27 and Jews. For the first time, a monotheistic church was allied with the rulers of a huge and powerful empire. This alliance raised issues of all kinds with respect to the religious diversity of the empire. The traditionally comfortable acceptance of religious diversity had to be reassessed, at the very least. With respect to Judaism and Jews, the complex history of Christian–Jewish relations meant the need for adumbration of a doctrine and specific policies to govern Jewish presence in the now-Christian Roman state. Constantine himself does not seem to have been concerned with such a doctrine and innovated little in the realm of policy. A number of Constantine’s edicts have survived, and they reflect broadly the defensive stance already noted. The central aims of these edicts were to outlaw conversion to Judaism, to prohibit circumcision of slaves owned by Jews, and to forbid Jews from harassing former Jews who decided to desert their community and join the ascendant Church. Establishment of a fully articulated doctrine that would govern Jewish life in a Christian society fell to the great fourth-century bishop St. Augustine.39 The range of Augustine’s expertise and the power of his mind made him the dominant authority for the later Church on many doctrinal issues. The Augustinian synthesis of prior Church teachings with respect to the place of Judaism and Jews in Christian society set the framework for all subsequent Christian thinking on that issue through the Middle Ages and down into modernity. For Jews in medieval Latin Christendom, the Augustinian views established the parameters within which Jewish life could develop. Augustine himself might well have demurred, insisting that he was only repeating the teachings of his ultimate mentor, Paul, and there is a measure of truth to this modesty. However, from Paul’s day down to the time of Augustine, much had happened, and Augustine absorbed disparate intervening views into a consistent and coherent doctrine, which was no mean achievement. The world into which Augustine was born was very much in flux. Various polytheisms were still potent and influential. Within the Christian community, turbulence and division of opinion were rampant, as diverse perspectives on the essential message of Jesus vied against one another. Many of these currents were palpable in the household and educational institutions in which the young Augustine matured.40 39

40

The importance of Augustine to Church doctrine and policy on Judaism and Jews has long been noted. The two fullest recent treatments of this important issue are Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law (Berkeley, 1999), ch. 1, and Paula Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (New York, 2008). The two most authoritative recent biographies of Augustine are Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley, 1967), and James J. O’Donnell, Augustine: A New Biography (New York, 2005).

28 the middle ages: the christian world Augustine wrestled intensely with these multiple influences. For a time, he was especially attracted to the clarity and consistency of Manichean teachings; however, he felt uncomfortable with many of the implications of this doctrine. Eventually, Augustine fought and thought his way clear of Manicheism and became a major opponent. In the process, the moderate position he espoused on the material world positioned him to view Pauline teachings on Jewish physicality from a relatively benign perspective. The physicality in which Jews were purportedly steeped had its place in the human sphere. While Christian spirituality was superior, Augustine was able to appreciate the Jews for their positive place in the divine relationship to humanity, which is essentially the position advocated by Paul. Augustine’s moderate perspective on the physicality that Paul had attributed to Judaism and the Jews linked up with yet another major theme in Augustine’s overall thinking. One of the many polemical quarrels in which Augustine took a leading role involved the relationship of Christian ascendancy to the alleged decline of Roman power and authority. Many spokesmen for displaced Roman polytheism argued that the sack of Rome in 410 reflected negatively on Christian accession to political power. Stung by these claims, Augustine embarked on his historical masterpiece, The City of God. This overview of human history contrasted Christian and pagan perspectives and aspirations, with consistent denigration of the latter. Augustine did, however, project a middle position between these two poles, placing Israel, Israelites, and Jews in this middle position. While lacking the spirituality of Christianity, the Israelites/Jews are projected as a foil to the Romans, superior in every way to polytheists. Augustine argues that “earthly blessings – the sole objects of breathless desire for those who can imagine nothing better – are dependent on the power of the one God, not on that of the many false gods, whom the Romans formerly believed they ought to worship.” He then adduces a sequence of biblical miracles as proof of the power of the one God and his favor to Israel.41 Augustine concludes this argument with broad praise for the Israelites/ Jews, tempered by acknowledgment of their failures. In fact, the Israelites received from the one true God all the blessings for which the Romans thought it necessary to pray to all the host of false gods, and they received them in a far happier manner. If they had not sinned against God by turning aside to the worship of strange gods and of idols, seduced by impious superstition as if by magic arts, and if they had not finally sinned by putting Christ to death, they 41

St. Augustine, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson, Penguin Classics (Harmondsworth, 1972), 177 8.

the prior church legacy

29

would have continued in possession of the same realm, a realm exceeding others in happiness.42

Jews were, in Augustine’s view, superior to the other alternative available in human society, the alternative of polytheism. Thus, the Augustinian view of Judaism and Jews was rather close to that of Paul in its combination of condemnation of Jewish error along with respect for prior Jewish achievement and conviction of eventual Jewish return to the truth. This meant, for Augustine, maintaining Jews within Christian society, under limited and demeaning circumstances. Augustine spelled out this position through use of a powerful biblical image and striking exegesis of an important biblical passage. The image that Augustine invoked was that of the fratricide Cain. In the biblical tale, God condemns Cain to a life of wandering. When the latter expresses the fear that “anyone who meets me may kill me,” God reassures Cain that he will be protected: “The Lord said to him, ‘I promise, if anyone kills Cain, sevenfold vengeance shall be taken on him.’ And the Lord put a mark on Cain, lest anyone who met him should kill him.”43 For Augustine, Jews – fratricides like Cain – were to be similarly protected by divine fiat. Thus, despite the horrific sin of which they were guilty, Jews were not be put to death, but were to suffer in safety the ignominy of constant wandering. The biblical passage that Augustine utilized for his position on Judaism and Jews was Psalm 59. This psalm is a supplication to God uttered by the author who perceives himself threatened by an array of enemies. After expressing his fears, the author proclaims his confidence in the allpowerful God who will protect him from these enemies. In verse 12, he says the following: “Do not kill them lest my people be unmindful; with your power make wanderers of them.”44 For Augustine, this request evoked the imagery of Cain/Jews. Thus, the verse is projected as a commitment to maintaining the enemies/Jews, while turning them into Cain-like wanderers. The purpose of this particular form of punishment is – in Augustine’s view – spelled out clearly. Jewish wandering serves as a constant reminder to Christians who observe it that God punishes sinfulness in general, and that God specifically punished the Jews for their sin of occasioning the death of the messianic figure sent to redeem them. Toward the end of the psalm, the author contrasts the happy believer – “I will sing of your strength, extol each morning your faithfulness” – with the degraded circumstances of his enemies – “They come each evening growling like dogs.”45 Augustine interprets this rather freely as a reference to the Pauline notion of eventual Jewish repentance, grounded in the 42

Ibid., 178.

43

Genesis 4:15.

44

Psalms 59:12.

45

Ibid. 59:16 17.

30 the middle ages: the christian world Hebrew verb’s meaning of either “return” or “repentance.” Thus, Psalm 59 conveys the important message that Jews are not to be killed, but are condemned to wander the world endlessly in expiation of their historic sin and as an object lesson to Christian believers. Eventually, these Jews will acknowledge the error of their ways and return to the correct path, at which time God will joyfully accept them. This eventual repentance constitutes yet another compelling reason for Jews not to be killed or destroyed. In Augustine’s view, the Jews were superior to every human community, with the obvious exception of the Christian one. With respect to the place of Jews within Christian society, Augustine concluded that the Jews must be treated scrupulously, in accordance with divine mandate. This divine stipulation had numerous useful implications for Christianity and Christians. The first of the two dominant roles that Jews could play in Christian society involved attesting to the truth of the Old Testament, in which the advent and activities of Jesus were – in the Christian view – clearly foretold. Jewish insistence that the books of the Old Testament were divinely revealed constituted independent authentication of these books and their contents. To be sure, the Jews did not understand properly the message of these books, because of the limitation of their thinking. That limitation, however, was irrelevant to their essential support of the divine truth in the Old Testament. Non-Christians interested in Christianity would learn from the disinterested testimony of the Jews the truth of the pronouncements of Isaiah and Jeremiah; Christian preachers could then build on the foundations thus established to prove that Jesus constituted obvious fulfillment of the Old Testament predictions. The second major way in which Jews served a useful role was through providing evidence for divine reward and punishment in general, and more specifically through the punishment they incurred, which served as evidence for the truth of Jesus’ role as Messiah and Savior. In general, anyone with doubts as to the workings of divine reward and punishment need only attend to the situation of the Jews. Jews had been vouchsafed accurate predictions of the advent of a messianic redeemer. Jesus had fulfilled those predictions in obvious ways, but the Jews refused to acknowledge him and, in fact, caused his death. God, who had sent Jesus, immediately punished the Jews by stripping them of their temple, their political independence, and their homeland, turning them forever into a people in exile. For anyone doubting the paradigm of sin and divine punishment, there could be no clearer proof of it than this sequence. Since the sin of the Jews specifically involved rejection of Jesus, the punishment served also as direct confirmation of Jesus’ messianic role. Augustinian doctrine implied a policy of maintenance of Jewish life – though, to be sure, under limiting and demeaning circumstances. This

the prior church legacy 31 maintenance of Jewish life reflected the Pauline and Augustinian sense of the glories of early Israelite/Jewish existence and the conviction of eventual Jewish return to the truth; the limiting and demeaning circumstances reflected horrific Jewish sinfulness and were intended to serve major pedagogic objectives for the Christian community that had acceded to the place formerly occupied by Jews in the divine–human relationship. Long before a significant Jewish population emerged in medieval Western Christendom, the Church had formulated a complex doctrine concerning Judaism and Jews; had developed policies to protect, limit, and demean them; and had created rich imagery to convey a sense of the Jews of Antiquity and of the Middle Ages to the Christian populace at large. The doctrine involved a complicated combination of denigration and respect, which was understood and promulgated by ecclesiastical leadership over the ages. This doctrine proved difficult for laymen to assimilate, and was thus regularly contravened. The raw emotional impact of Church imagery, especially imagery of the Jewish role in the crucifixion of Jesus, often obliterated the sophistication of the complex ecclesiastical doctrine. This problematic combination of doctrine, policy, and imagery was susceptible to considerable evolution as Judaism and Jews progressed from a largely theoretical issue to the reality of a rapidly growing minority in medieval Latin Christendom.

chapter 2

MEDIEVAL CHURCH DOCTRINES AND POLICIES a n n a s a p i r a b u l a fi a

In 1215, Pope Innocent III convened the Fourth Lateran Council. A host of churchmen from every corner of Christendom deliberated on a wideranging agenda. In set-up and content, the council reflected Innocent’s ambition to give strong papal direction to an extensive program of Christian reform. The council produced seventy-one canons which spanned doctrinal issues, ecclesiastical administration and discipline, pastoral concerns, religious orders, taxation of the clergy, simony, marriage, heretics and their supporters, crusade, and the Jews.1 The four canons concerning Jewish matters drew heavily on earlier ecclesiastical material.2 As such, they constitute an excellent platform from which to embark on an in-depth examination of medieval Christian policies and doctrines concerning Jews and Judaism. Taking the canons in reverse order, canon 70 reflected the Church’s position on Jewish conversion, complaining that some converts brought “disorder to the propriety of the Christian religion by keeping remnants of their former religion.” The canon insisted that converts “should be restrained by prelates from observing their old rites in all circumstances.” It ended by asserting that “there is less evil in not knowing the way of the Lord than turning one’s back to it once the way is known.”3 Christian views on Jewish conversion were governed by a number of contradictory principles. On the one hand, St. Paul had prophesied that, at the end of time, all Jews would convert, and by doing so regain the divine 1

2

3

J. A. Watt, “The Papacy,” in David Abulafia, ed., The New Cambridge Medieval History [henceforth NCMH], vol. V: C. 1198 c. 1300 (Cambridge, 1999), 119 24. Kenneth R. Stow, “The Church and the Jews,” in NCMH, V, 207 10; Stow, Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 246 51. Solomon Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century: A Study of their Relations during the Years 1198 1254, Based on the Papal Letters and the Conciliar Decrees of the Period, revised edn. (New York, 1966), 310 11; Norman P. Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. I: Nicaea I to Lateran V (London, 1990), 267. I have based the quotations from the canons of Lateran IV in this chapter on existing translations but I have modified them when appropriate.

32

medieval church doctrines and policies 33 4 approval they had lost when they repudiated Jesus Christ. Jewish conversion would thus encapsulate the validity of Christianity and the supersession of Judaism; in Christian eyes, it was a vital step toward the fruition of God’s plan for mankind. On the other hand, churchmen were terrified of insincere conversion. False converts, or crypto-Jews, were considered far more dangerous than Jews because they were suspected of spreading judaizing tendencies within the Christian community. And converts who reverted to Judaism were seen both as a threat and as an affront to the integrity of Christendom. As early as 506, the Council of Agde in what is now southern France stipulated that prospective Jewish converts should be put on probation for eight months to see whether they were sincere. Otherwise, it was feared they would “return to their vomit,” i.e. Judaism.5 Things came to a head in Visigothic Spain when ecclesiastics at the Fourth Council of Toledo in 633 confronted the problems King Sisebut had caused by forcing the Jews of his kingdom to convert in 615/ 616. Canon 57 of that council stated in no uncertain terms that Jews should not be forced to convert. If, however, conversion had taken place by force or other means, Jews were not allowed to return to Judaism. That would constitute an unthinkable insult to the sacrament of baptism. Other canons of this Toledan council, and subsequent ones, reiterated rulings on the need to keep baptized Jews and their children on the straight and narrow. Children of (recalcitrant?) Jewish converts were to be removed from the malign influence of their parents. The canons, as well as relevant sections of the Law of the Visigoths (codified in the reigns of Reccesvinth [r. 653–72] and Erviga [r. 680–7]), belabored the danger Judaism was thought to pose to the fabric of Christian society.6 Whether or not there really were many Jews in Visigothic Iberia who were affected by all of these rulings, the crucial legacy of the Toledan canons cannot be disputed. From the work of John Gilchrist, we know that canon 57 of the Fourth Council of Toledo featured prominently among the most-cited canons concerning Jews in canonical collections between 906 and 1141. Canon 60 on removing children from Jewish parents, canon 62 which forbade contact between Jewish converts and Jews, and canon 59 forbidding Jewish converts from retaining their Jewish rites were also among the most popular canons in this period. All four canons featured in Gratian’s Decretum of the mid twelfth century, as well as in early Decreta 4 5

6

Romans 11. Amnon Linder, ed. and trans., The Jews in the Legal Sources of the Early Middle Ages [henceforth JLSEMA] (Detroit, 1997), 466 7; 2 Peter 2:22 (cf. Proverbs 26:11). JLSEMA, 485 9, 257 332. On the Visigoths and the Jews, see Alexander P. Bronisch, Die Judengesetzgebung im katholischen West gotenreich von Toledo (Hanover, 2005).

34 the middle ages: the christian world of Burchard of Worms (start of the eleventh century) and Ivo of Chartres (end of the eleventh century). The Agde canon on conversion was included in all of these collections as well.7 The violence of the so-called popular crusades in 1096 reopened the problem of forced Jewish converts. Many Jews in the Rhineland who had not been slaughtered or taken their own lives were peremptorily baptized, as was the Jewish population of Regensburg. The violence contravened ecclesiastical law as formulated by Alexander II in 1063. In a letter to the bishops of Spain, Alexander had insisted that Jews should not be attacked because, unlike Muslims, they were willing to serve in the dispersion which they suffered as punishment for their spilling of Christ’s blood. Gratian would include this protective measure, known as Dispar nimirum, in his Decretum.8 As far as temporal law was concerned, Henry IV of Germany had awarded the Jews of Speyer and Worms generous charters of protection in 1090, in which the safety of their children from forced baptism had been specifically guaranteed. It is not for nothing that, in the one city, Speyer, where the bishop was strong enough to protect the Jews, their attackers were severely punished. Notwithstanding the disapproval of Clement III, the man he himself had made pope, Henry allowed Jews to return to Judaism in 1097.9 In 1146, Bernard of Clairvaux forestalled a bloody repetition of the events of the First Crusade by reiterating the principle that Jews should not be attacked; they would convert in due course as Paul had prophesied.10 The facts that Jews had resisted the attempts by crusaders to baptize them, and that forced Jewish converts 7

8

9

10

John Gilchrist, “The Canonistic Treatment of Jews in the Latin West in the Eleventh and Early Twelfth Centuries,” Zeitschrift der Savigny Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte Kanonistische Abteilung 106 (1989), 70 106, and “The Perception of Jews in the Canon Law in the Period of the First Two Crusades,” Jewish History 3 (1988), 9 24. JLSEMA, 452 3; Shlomo Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews: Documents, 492 1404 [henceforth Simonsohn], Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies: Studies and Texts, 94 (Toronto, 1988), no. 37, pp. 35 6; Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews: History, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies: Studies and Texts, 109 (Toronto, 1991), 12 13; Robert Chazan, Church, State and Jew in the Middle Ages [henceforth CSJMA] (New York, 1980), 99 100; Decretum, C. 23 q. 8 c. 11, ed. Emil Friedberg, in Corpus iuris canonici, vol. I: Decretum magistri Gratiani (Leipzig, 1879), col. 955: http:// geschichte.digitale sammlungen.de/decretum gratiani/online/angebot; Stow, Alienated Minority, 243. JLSEMA, 391 400; Eva Haverkamp, ed., Hebräische Berichte über die Judenverfolgungen während des Ersten Kreuzzugs, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Hebräische Texte aus dem Mittelalterlichen Deutschland, 1 (Hanover, 2005), 266 7, 13; Simonsohn, no. 42, p. 42. Letters 363 and 365 in Sancti Bernardi opera, ed. Jean Leclercq and Henri Rochais, vol. VIII (Rome, 1977), 311 17 and 320 2; CSJMA, 100 6; see also Jeremy Cohen, “‘Witnesses of our Redemption’: The Jews in the Crusading Theology of Bernard of

medieval church doctrines and policies 35 had done whatever they could to return to their own faith, were hardly conducive to good Christian–Jewish relations at a time of Christian spiritual revival. The stark contrast between Christian glorification of the salvific properties of baptism and a life devoted to Christ through inner conversion, and Jewish glorification of the martyrs who had chosen death for themselves and their children over baptism, could only serve to sharpen Christian views on Jewish conversion.11 Indeed, by the end of the twelfth century, some Christian theologians began to wonder whether Toledan canon 60 might not suggest that Jewish children in general should be removed from their families so that they could benefit from the grace of baptism. This is apparent from the discussion of the matter by Huguccio (d. 1210) in his Summa on Gratian’s Decretum. Huguccio, as well as Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), argued against this practice; Duns Scotus (d. 1308), on the other hand, encouraged it.12 Canon 70 of the Fourth Lateran Council harped back to the idea that insincere converts would have a damaging effect on the Christian body politic. In the spirit of the Toledan principle, it stipulated that baptism was irreversible, but specified that this was only in respect of baptism which had been undergone voluntarily. What Innocent in fact regarded as voluntary can be gauged from his letter to the archbishop of Arles in 1201. There, Innocent argued that someone who had given in to baptism as a result of being “forced violently through fear and punishment” was deemed to have given “his consent as if conditionally, though not absolutely.” Such a person was compelled to remain a Christian, unlike the person who had not given in in this way: “because it is more to dissent strongly than to give minimal consent, just as he who shouts out his dissent incurs no guilt when forced violently to offer incense to idols.” In practice, this would have meant that, save for on the rarest of occasions, forced converts were technically considered to have agreed to be baptized.13 The final words of the canon acknowledged that a false Jewish convert was much worse than an unconverted Jew.

11

12

13

Clairvaux,” in Bat Sheva Albert, Yvonne Friedman, and Simon Schwarzfuchs, eds., Medieval Studies in Honour of Avrom Saltman (Ramat Gan, 1995), 67 81. On this, see, for example, Kenneth Stow, “Conversion, Apostasy, and Apprehensiveness: Emicho of Flonheim and the Fear of Jews in the Twelfth Century,” Speculum 76 (2001), 911 33. Walter Pakter, Medieval Canon Law and the Jews (Ebelsbach am Main, 1988), 321 7; C. Magin, “Wie es umb der iuden recht stet”: Der Status der Juden in spätmittelalterlichen deutschen Rechtsbüchern (Göttingen, 1999), 185 90. Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, no. 12, 100 3, 15; Simonsohn, no. 77, 80 1; quotations from John A. Watt, “Jews and Christians in the Gregorian Decretals,” in Diana Wood, ed., Christianity and Judaism, Studies in Church History, 29 (Oxford, 1992), 99 100; Stow, Alienated Minority, 262 3; Pakter, Medieval Canon Law, 317.

36

the middle ages: the christian world Canon 69 referred to the vexed problem of Jews having any kind of authority over Christians, stating that it was “exceedingly absurd that a blasphemer of Christ should exercise power over Christians.” Referring to canon 14 of the Third Council of Toledo of 589,14 canon 69 averred that Jews would use this kind of authority to harm Christians. Christians who gave Jews positions of power should be restrained from doing so; the Jewish officials should be boycotted by Christians until they gave up their offices “which they had irreverently taken up.” Their ill-gotten gains from holding office should be “converted to the use of the Christian poor according to the discretion of the diocesan bishop.”15 Attempts to restrict Jewish authority over Christians went back to Christian Roman Law. In 438, for example, Theodosius II and Valentinian III had stipulated that Jews should not “accede to honours and dignities” because they judged it “impious, that the enemies of the Supreme Majesty and of the Roman laws [should] be considered as avengers also of our laws . . . and armed with the authority of an illgotten dignity [should] have the power to judge and pronounce sentence against Christians, very often even against priests of the sacred religion, to the insult of our faith.”16 The assumption that Jewish officials would use any power they had to the detriment of Christians is echoed in a myriad of canons over the centuries, including the canon under consideration as well as the Toledan canon it cited. The Law of the Visigoths sought to prevent Jews from being put in charge of Christian households by imposing penalties on the Christians who would thus employ them; this ruling was incorporated in the canons of the Twelfth Council of Toledo (681) and later by Burchard of Worms and Ivo of Chartres and others, in their canonical collections.17 Notwithstanding these rules and regulations, Christian princes, including clerics, continued to put Jews in positions of authority if it suited them. This was especially the case in Iberia where Christian lords needed Jews with their mastery of Arabic to help them govern over the lands which they had newly conquered from the Muslims. As early as 1081, Gregory VII had chided Alfonso VI of Leon-Castile about slighting Christ by putting Jews in charge of Christians.18 Gregory IX 14 15 16

17 18

JLSEMA, 484 5. Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, 310 11; Tanner, Decrees, 266 7. Amnon Linder, The Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation [henceforth JRIL] (Detroit, 1987), 323 37, esp. 329. JLSEMA, 320 1, 520, 637, 674; Gilchrist, “The Canonistic Treatment,” 103. H. E. J. Cowdrey, The Register of Pope Gregory VII, 1073 1085: An English Translation (Oxford, 2002), 400.

medieval church doctrines and policies 37 complained bitterly about Ferdinand III of Leon-Castile in this respect in 1233.19 From a theological point of view, there were fundamental issues at stake when it came to Jews being invested with any authority over Christians, which went back to a palimpsest of Roman, Pauline, Augustinian, and Gregorian legal and theological ideas. Under Roman law, Jews practiced a licit religion. Roman suppression of Judea did not change that. As such, Jews had a place in society. Augustine (d. 430) formulated a Christian version of societal accommodation for Jews by arguing that Christianity needed Jewish service to confirm its credentials and to disseminate its appeal throughout the empire. Jews did this in spite of themselves by carrying their Jewish texts which, unbeknown to them, provided proofs for Christian teachings. Their own dispersion after the destruction of the Second Temple provided useful evidence for the fate of those who turned their backs on Christ. This meant that the raison d’être of Jews in Christian society was to serve Christians, not to govern them.20 As a legislator, Gregory the Great (d. 604) used Roman law to enshrine the right of Jews to remain unmolested as long as they kept to the role Christianity had devised for them. The best-known Gregorian text to express this was the letter he wrote in 598 at the behest of the Jews of Rome to the bishop of Palermo, instructing him not to destroy a synagogue. The text is known as Sicut Iudeis. It, too, was one of the most popular canons concerning Jews in the canonical collections between 906 and 1141. Alexander II seems to have alluded to it in his letter of 1063 protecting Jews from overzealous knights fighting the Muslims in Spain.21 Popes, from Calixtus II in the 1120s, began to issue universal bulls of protection for Jews, which incorporated the opening words of Gregory’s original letter and expanded on its stipulations that Jews should not be molested as long as they honored what could loosely be called their service contract within Christendom – i.e., did not exceed the privileges they had enjoyed as of old. Innocent III’s particular version of Sicut Iudeis opened with a direct reference to Augustine’s concept of Jewish service as witnessing to the truth of Christianity, and closed with the proviso that the bull applied to only those Jews “who will not have dared to plot anything to 19 20

21

Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, no. 71, 204 7; Simonsohn, no. 137, 145 7. On Augustine, see Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley, 1999), 23 71; Paula Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (New York, 2008); and also Anna Sapir Abulafia, Christian Jewish Relations, 1000 1300: Jews in the Service of Medieval Christendom (Harlow, 2011), 3 18. JLSEMA, 433 4, 452 3; Gilchrist, “The Canonistic Treatment,” 74 5, 106, and “The Perception of Jews,” 12 13.

38 the middle ages: the christian world overturn the Christian faith.” Innocent’s successors dispensed with his opening clarification, but they retained the ominous ending when they reissued the bull.22 Ideas about Jewish service impacted on another area concerning Jewish authority – namely, the emotive issue of Jews having Christian slaves, servants, or employees. The Toledan ruling to which canon 69 referred did not just deal with Jews occupying public office. It also forbade Jews from having Christian wives or concubines and from buying Christian slaves for themselves.23 The Theodosian code contained laws forbidding Jews from buying Christian slaves and freeing non-Jewish slaves who had been circumcised by their Jewish masters.24 Two of Gregory the Great’s most popular canons concerning Jews related to Jewish slaveholding. Gregory seemed particularly anxious about Christian slaves being drawn to Judaism because they were in the power of Jews. He seemed less concerned about people who worked on Jewish lands who were not slaves, although they were bound to the soil. Slaves of Jews who became Christians were to be freed; Jewish masters were not allowed to sell them. Gregory thought it was detestable for Christians to be enslaved to Jews. In a letter to Queen Brunhild of the Franks, Gregory expressed his dismay that in her kingdom Jews were allowed to own Christian slaves. For Gregory, this was an inversion of the correct relationship between Christians and Jews. How could she honor Christ while allowing “his enemies to tread down his members?”25 The frequent repetition of these canons must mean that Jews continued to own Christian house slaves and employ Christian servants from a broad spectrum of legal statuses. In Rouen in 1074, a Norman council ruled against Jews having Christian slaves or wet-nurses.26 Alexander III ruled in a similar way, by letter and in the Third Lateran Council. He declared that Christian servants who stayed in Jewish houses should be excommunicated. He feared that Christian servants living in close proximity to their Jewish masters would be corrupted by Jewish customs, which to his mind were fundamentally different from Christian ones.27 Innocent III was even more vociferous on the subject. In his Etsi Iudeos bull of July 1205, addressed to the archbishop of Sens and the bishop of Paris, he forbade Jews from employing any Christian servants. Christian servants who were employed by Jews should be excommunicated; Jews 22

23 25 27

Solomon Grayzel, “Popes, Jews, and Inquisition: From ‘Sicut’ to ‘Turbato,’” reprinted in Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century, vol. II: 1254 1314, ed. Kenneth R. Stow (Detroit, 1989), 4 6; Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, no. 5, 92 5; Simonsohn, no. 71, 74 5; Stow, “The Church and the Jews,” 216. JLSEMA, 484 5. 24 JRIL, nos. 10 and 11, 138 51. JLSEMA, 426 7, 429 31, 431, 440 1, esp. 440. 26 Ibid., 558. Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, no. I, 296 7; Simonsohn, no. 56, 59 60.

medieval church doctrines and policies 39 who would not cease from these practices should be commercially boycotted by Christians until they toed the line. Innocent’s particular complaint was the report he had received that Jews had forced their Christian wet-nurses to express their milk for three days after receiving the host at Easter. This prompted Innocent to spell out that Jews suffered perpetual servitude on account of Christ’s crucifixion. Following Paul (Galatians 4: 22–3), he emphasized that the sons of the free Sarah (Christians) should not serve the sons of the slave woman Hagar (Jews). On no account must Christians be in the service of the people whose very place in Christendom hinged on their duty to serve.28 All of these notions lay at the back of canon 69, including the idea of boycotting recalcitrant Jews. But, as with so much ecclesiastical material, the practical impact of any such ruling depended entirely on whether temporal princes were minded to allow them to be put into practice.29 The English kings were not about to allow boycotts of Jews on whom so much of their royal income depended.30 As for the German kings/emperors, Henry IV’s 1090 charter for Worms had specifically allowed Jews to engage ancillae and even wet-nurses, as long as they did not work on Sundays or Christian festivals. Henry made a point of adding the rider that he would brook no episcopal opposition to this or objections from any other cleric. Although this statement had much to do with Henry’s position in Worms at this stage of the investiture contest, it nonetheless also showed that the king followed his own views when it came to “his” Jews. As far as pagan slaves of Jews were concerned, Henry stipulated that no one was to baptize them as a ruse to free them. If this did occur, the guilty party had to pay a hefty fine and restore the baptized slave to his Jewish master to serve him in everything except the observance of his Christian faith. This charter was confirmed by Frederick Barbarossa in 1157, and by Frederick II for all the Jews of Germany in 1236. But when Frederick II gave a charter to the Jews of Vienna in 1238, he did not allow them to have Christian servants or wet-nurses. Indeed, in 1237, Frederick had ruled for the city of Vienna that Jews were not to hold office over Christians.31 We shall return to this shortly. 28 29 30

31

Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, no. 18, 114 17; Simonsohn, no. 82, 86 8. See also Watt, “Jews and Christians,” 101 2. John A. Watt, “The English Episcopate, the State and the Jews: The Evidence of the Thirteenth Century Conciliar Decrees,” in P. R. Coss and S. D. Lloyd eds., Thirteenth Century England: Proceedings of the Newcastle upon Tyne Conference 1987 (Woodbridge, c.1988), 142. JLSEMA, 396 400, 353 8; Friedrich Lotter, “The Scope and Effectiveness of Imperial Jewry Law in the High Middle Ages,” Jewish History 4 (1989), 34 6, 48 9; L. Weiland, ed., Constitutiones et acta publica imperatorum et regum, vol. II, Monumenta Germaniae

40

the middle ages: the christian world Canon 68 of the Fourth Lateran Council underscored another longstanding Christian concern about Jews and Judaism – that of contamination. Much of this had its roots in the acerbic language that Paul had used against judaizing gentiles in his letters to the Galatians and Corinthians. In these texts, judaizing tendencies were deemed to pose a threat to the development of Christianity, and Christians were encouraged to distance themselves from those who espoused them.32 The canon stated that in some parts of Latin Christendom Jews and Muslims could be distinguished from Christians by what they wore. But elsewhere clothing did not set Jews and Muslims apart from Christians, and “thus it sometimes happens that by mistake Christians have sex with Jewish or Muslim women and Jews or Muslims with Christian women.” To avoid this, the canon ruled that Jews and Muslims “should at all times publicly be distinguished by the character of their clothes, seeing that they are even commanded to do the very same by Moses.” It went on to insist that Jews should not appear in public “on the Days of Lamentation and on Easter,” complaining that Jews would dress up especially on those days and make fun of Christians mourning Christ’s passion. It closed by categorically forbidding anyone from insulting Christ and commanded the cooperation of temporal princes to prevent this.33 The image of Jews mocking Christ echoed the image Paul used in Galatians 4:28–31 of Ishmael, the son of Hagar (Jews) mocking Isaac the son of Sarah (Christian) to show just how threatening Jews could seem to be to Christians. The demand that Jews stayed indoors during the latter part of Holy Week had a venerable tradition. The Third Council of Orleans of 538 ruled that Jews should not mingle with Christians over the four-day period commencing with Maundy Thursday; the Council of Mâcon (581–3) forbade Jews from promenading in the streets and walking around the forum during this period; these restrictions were repeated in the council of Meaux-Paris of 845–6; Ivo of Chartres included the Orleans prohibition in his Decretum.34 Alexander III recommended in his letter to the bishop of Marseille of 1159–79 that Jews be required to keep their doors and windows shut on Good Friday.35 The idea that Jews regularly insulted Christianity seems to have been on Innocent’s mind for some time. We have already seen that, in July 1205, he was outraged by

32

33 34

Historica (Hanover, 1896), no. 204, 274 6; P. Csendes, ed., Die Rechtsquellen der Stadt Wien (Vienna, 1986), 39 43, 47 9. E.g. Galatians 4:22 31; Galatians 3:13; 1 Corinthians 5:6 8; see Kenneth Stow on this topic in his Jewish Dogs: An Image and its Interpreters: Continuity in the Catholic Jewish Encounter (Stanford, CA, 2006), esp. 3 5. Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, 308 9; Tanner, Decrees, 266. JLSEMA, 471, 474, 540 2, 544 6, 662 3. 35 Simonsohn, no. 48, 50.

medieval church doctrines and policies 41 the report that Jews made their wet-nurses express their milk into the latrine after taking communion at Easter. In January of that year, he admonished Philip Augustus that Jews in his realm were blaspheming Christ by insulting Christians in public, claiming that they believed in a peasant whom they themselves had strung up. He also complained that, contrary to established custom, Jews were on the streets on Good Friday, making fun of Christians for adoring the crucified Christ. To Innocent’s mind, this made a travesty of the kind of service Jews were supposed to render to Christian princes until they finally converted.36 Lateran IV’s ruling concerning dress is one of the few instances where Innocent was doing something which actually seems to be new. Some scholars have argued that a Parisian synod obliged Jews to wear a badge in the form of a wheel, but it remains very doubtful that this is what the obscure passage in the synodic decisions really meant.37 Others have drawn attention to Muslim rulings about Jews and Christians wearing clothes of different color and design from Muslim garments. Whatever the case may be, the fact that the canon specifically referred to Jews as well as to Muslims reflected the reality that for some time the Church had needed to regulate relations between Christians and both groups throughout the Latin Mediterranean. Intriguing is Innocent’s confidence that in some regions Jews (and Muslims) were already easily distinguishable from Christians. As far as Jews are concerned, Grayzel suggested that this might well have been the case in Tzarfat (northern France) and Germany. For, despite what might have been some localized rulings, the French rouelle was only properly introduced throughout Capetian France in 1269, notwithstanding Louis IX’s consistently hard-line approach to Jews. In Germany, Jews were eventually required to put on the tapered hat they seem to have already been wearing. In England, notwithstanding the strenuous efforts of ecclesiastics like Archbishop Stephen Langton (d. 1228), the tabula, a badge in the shape of the tablets of the law, was only seriously introduced by Henry III in 1253, and, even then, probably not consistently enforced. The Iberian kings were often reminded of their duty to impose distinguishing dress on “their” Jews. Interesting is the way in which Christian princes interpreted the canon as demanding that Jews wear a distinctive sign to mark them out as Jews, whereas the canon only spoke of distinguishing dress. But, once again, the bottom line remained that the introduction of any kind of 36 37

Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, no. 14, 104 9; Simonsohn, no. 79, 82 4. James M. Powell (“The Papacy and the Muslim Frontier,” in Powell, Muslims under Latin Rule, 1100 1300 [Princeton, 1990], 190 1) argues in favor of this reading of the ruling (Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, no. IV, 300 1), but Grayzel (61 n. 98, and 301 n. 4) had argued against it.

42 the middle ages: the christian world distinguishing dress or badge depended entirely on the wishes of individual Christian princes and their ability to enforce their will in matters such as these.38 Canon 67 concerned the fraught issue of Jewish usury. It started by expressing concern about Christians suffering financial strain on account of Jewish usury, and went on to state that, henceforth, Christians would be required, under pain of excommunication, to boycott Jews if they charged “oppressive and immoderate interest,” until they had “given suitable compensation for immoderate exactions.” It also commanded Jews “to compensate churches for the tithes and offerings owed to them which they had been used to receive from Christians on houses and other possessions before they had passed to Jews under some title so that in this way churches would not suffer any losses.”39 The first thing that needs to be emphasized is that the term “usury” covered any form of interest, and that taking any interest on loans was banned by the institutional Church. Ecclesiastical hostility to profiting from moneylending went back to Deuteronomy 23:19–20: “Thou shalt not lend to thy brother money to usury, nor corn, nor any other thing: But to the stranger. To thy brother thou shalt lend that which he wanteth, without usury: that the Lord thy God may bless thee in all thy works in the land, which thou shalt go in to possess.” Jerome (d. 420) reasoned that, since the coming of Christ, all men were brothers and that, therefore, charging interest was wrong. Ambrose, on the other hand, thought the Bible did permit one to charge interest to one’s enemies. Jerome’s views prevailed and, by the eleventh century, ecclesiastics were discussing usury in terms of theft, and financial gains made from usury were not allowed to be used for offerings. Moneylenders were deemed to have made their profits by, in effect, selling time, which was God’s and, therefore, not theirs to sell. In the heady atmosphere of reform of the long twelfth century, usury was seen by Christian moralists as a direct attack on the fabric of Christian society. Such negative ideas about the raising of necessary capital and investing spare capital rested uneasily with the burgeoning money economy of the period. Needless to say, ecclesiastical rules concerning usury were circumvented in the most ingenious ways, if not broken outright, by clergy and laity alike. In southern Europe, where the traditions of commerce were more embedded than in the north, the rules were 38

39

Powell, “The Papacy,” 191; Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, 61 70; Stow, Alienated Minority, 247 51; Stow, “The Church and the Jews,” 208 10; Robert Chazan, Medieval Jewry in Northern France: A Political and Social History (Baltimore, 1973), 149 50; Watt, “The English Episcopate,” 140, 142 3. Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, 306 9; Tanner, Decrees, 265 6.

medieval church doctrines and policies 43 systematically ignored. In terms of Christian–Jewish relations, it is important to recognize how much Christian moneylending went on, and not just by the so-called Lombards of Italy and Cahorsins of France. At the Third Lateran Council, open Christian usurers were excommunicated and denied Christian burial.40 Medieval exempla are full of moral tales spelling out the horrific and unending tortures usurers could look forward to in Hell.41 A particular worry for the institutional Church was the interest charged to crusaders. Pope Eugenius III’s bull Quantum praedecessores of 1145 demanded that crusaders were not charged interest on their outstanding loans. Bernard of Clairvaux, the most prominent preacher of the Second Crusade, felt that this rule should also be applied to Jewish lenders, and it appears that Louis VII of France acquiesced to this request. Bernard was a fierce opponent of usury, a vice which he identified with Jews by using the term “judaisare” to denote charging interest. Indeed, one of the reasons he opposed violence to Jews at the time of the Second Crusade was that he feared there would be more Christian moneylenders – whom he called baptized Jews – if there were no Jews.42 In 1198, Innocent himself insisted, in a letter to the archbishop of Narbonne, that Christian and Jewish lenders should not charge crusaders interest. Canon 71 of Lateran IV, which promulgated a crusade, picked this up by insisting on a moratorium on all interest payments on crusader debts to Christians or Jews. So, when it came to Jewish usury, Innocent seemed to have been concerned about two matters in particular: safeguarding crusaders from the burden of debt while on crusade, and safeguarding all Christians from Jewish lenders charging them immoderate rates of interest. Interestingly enough, he does not seem to have been worried about Jews charging moderate rates of interest. In this, he was at odds with the moralist theologians of late twelfth-century Paris and later scholars of the thirteenth century, such as Robert Grosseteste, Thomas Aquinas, and John Peckham, not to mention the canonists who absorbed his rulings and commented on them in future canonical collections as forbidding interest altogether. Robert Grosseteste wrote to the Countess of Winchester in the early 40

41

42

See Anna Sapir Abulafia, Christians and Jews in the Twelfth century Renaissance (London, 1995), 60 2 and 152 nn. 32 42, for references to literature on usury; biblical translation from the Douay Rheims version. E.g. Caesarius of Heisterbach, The Dialogue on Miracles, trans. H. von E. Scott and C. C. S. Bland (London, 1929), vol. I, 76 80, 116 21; vol. II, 270 3, 305, 313 14. Anna Sapir Abulafia, “The Intellectual and Spiritual Quest for Christ and Central Medieval Persecution of Jews,” in Sapir Abulafia, Religious Violence Between Christians and Jews: Medieval Roots, Modern Perspectives (Basingstoke, 2002), 72 5; Stow, Alienated Minority, 113 14.

44 the middle ages: the christian world 1230s that Jews should be punished for the crucifixion by laboring on the land for the benefit of their lords, rather than engaging in moneylending; Peckham wanted Jews to be kept at a minimal level of income, scraping a living from working the land or from trade, in the hope they would convert. He relayed this to the duchess of Brabant in 1270. Writing to the same duchess, Aquinas responded more mildly but stressed, nevertheless, that rulers could not freely avail themselves of the taxes they collected on the usurious gains of “their” Jews. Every effort had to be made to make restitution to those who had been charged interest; what remained had to be channeled into devout projects. As Stow has pointed out, it remains curious how the kings of France and England who had benefited from Jewish usury and had regulated it eventually aligned themselves to the hard-line position of the theologians and canonists, rather than abiding by the altogether more pragmatic view of the papacy.43 As far as tithes were concerned, and Jewish liability for them, this was a continuing issue. In Iberia, where all kinds of properties passed through Jewish hands, the Church feared loss of income on lands that had once been held by Christians. The Christian kings of Iberia were constantly reminded by the pope to make sure Jews paid up. Innocent III had angrily written to Alfonso VIII of Castile on the matter, chiding him that “the Synagogue thrived while the Church weakened, and the handmaid was shamelessly preferred.” In England, where so much land was used as security against Jewish loans, Jews too were commanded to pay what was owing to relevant churches, for example by the Council of Oxford in 1222 and, far more importantly, by Henry III’s Statute of Jewry of 1253.44 For, as in the case of Christians boycotting Jews, popes could admonish and bishops could rant, but princes were the ones who decided whether or not the Jews of their lands would comply with any ecclesiastical demands. Innocent’s bulls concerning Jewish conversion, Jewish servants, and Jewish usury, together with the Jewish canons of Lateran IV, were included in Gregory IX’s definitive collection of canonical material, the so-called Decretals, which was compiled by the Dominican scholar Ramon of Penyafort in 1234. Only roughly 30 out of the more than 1,900 decretals 43

44

Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, no. 1, 86 7; Simonsohn, no. 67, 71; Kenneth R. Stow, “Papal and Royal Attitudes toward Jewish Lending in the Thirteenth Century,” AJS Review 6 (1981), 161 84; John A. Watt, “Grosseteste and the Jews: A Commentary on Letter V,” in M. O’Carroll, ed., Robert Grosseteste and the Beginnings of a British Theological Tradition: Papers Delivered at the Grosseteste Colloquium Held at Greyfriars, Oxford on 3rd July 2002 (Rome, 2003), 201 16; Christoph Cluse, Studien zur Geschichte der Juden in den mittelalterlichen Niederlanden (Hanover, 2000), 174 85. Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, 36 7; no. XVI, 314 15; no. 17, 112 13; Simonsohn, no. 81, 85 6; Watt, “The English Episcopate,” 143 4.

medieval church doctrines and policies 45 in this collection referred specifically to Jewish matters, but these decretals and the interpretative material added to them by successive canonists would henceforth comprise the Church’s official legal position vis-à-vis the Jews. For it was on the relationship between Christians and Jews that the Church legislated. Internal Jewish matters did not, of course, fall under ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Ramon placed a good chunk of decretals pertaining to Jews in the sixth title of the fifth book of the Gregorian Decretals. This title comprised material concerning Jews, Muslims, and those in their service (de Iudaeis, Sarracenis, et eorum servis).45 The contents of the title demonstrate how concerned ecclesiastics such as Ramon were to work out the correct pecking order between Christians and Jews. It is in this title that we find the very popular ruling of Gregory the Great on Jewish slaveholding (Hortamur) and the canon of the Council of Mâcon of 581–3 that “no Christian should be bound to serve a Jew.”46 We find canon 26 of the Third Lateran Council and bulls by Alexander III concerning restrictions on Jews on Good Friday, Christians’ service in Jewish households, the prohibition on Jews constructing new synagogues, and the demand that Jewish converts not be deprived of their inheritance. Lateran III’s demand that Christians should be allowed to testify against Jews in the same way Jews could be involved as witnesses in court cases against Christians was put in the second book of the Decretals under a title concerned with witnesses and testimonies. As Alexander had put it, “Jews should be subordinate to Christians; they should be supported by Christians out of kindness alone.”47 Innocent III’s Etsi Iudeos bull focusing on the perpetual servitude of Jews, as well as Lateran 68 on distinguishing dress and the need to prevent Jews from mocking Christ, and Lateran 69 forbidding Jews from holding official posts are included as well.48 It is here too that we find a text of Sicut Iudeis as promulgated in 1188 by Clement III stipulating that Jews were not to be baptized against their will or unlawfully punished or robbed of their goods or molested in their festivals; nor were their cemeteries to be violated or their bodies exhumed.49 Innocent’s letter of 1198 on 45

46

47

48 49

Watt, “Jews and Christians,” 93 105; Heinz Schreckenberg, Die christlichen Adversus Judaeos Texte und ihr literarisches und historisches Umfeld (13. 20. Jr) (Frankfurt am Main, 1994), 119 23. Nullus Christianus Iudaeo and Hortamur [We admonish], in JLSEMA, 475 6, 426 7; X 5.6.1 2, ed. E. Friedberg, Corpus iuris canonici, vol. II (Leipzig, 1879), cols. 771 2. The Gregorian Decretals are available online at www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/digital/co llections/cul/texts/ldpd 6029936 002/pages/ldpd 6029936 002 00000043.html. X 5.6.4 5, 5.6.7 8, 2.20.21, ed. Friedberg, cols. 772 3, 773 4, 322; Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, 55 7. X 5.6.13, 15 16, ed. Friedberg, cols. 775 6, 776 7. X 5.6.9, ed. Friedberg, col. 774; Simonsohn, no. 63, 66 7.

46 the middle ages: the christian world Jewish usury, which had been doctored to pertain to all Christians and not just crusaders, and canon 67 of the Fourth Lateran Council on Jewish usury and tithes were slotted into title 19 of book 5 which concerned usury in general. Canon 70 concerning conversion found its way into title 9 of that book, which concerned apostates; Innocent’s elaborate letter on what constituted forced conversion went into book 3, title 42, concerning baptism and its effect.50 Taken as a whole, these decretals hammered home the message that Jews were to be protected as long as they served Christians. We have seen how fraught the question of Jewish conversion was for the Church and how ecclesiastics feared backsliding of Jewish converts. In 1267, Clement IV issued Turbato corde in which he authorized Dominican and Franciscan inquisitors combating heresy to investigate the role any Jews might have played in a convert’s return to Judaism. Anyone attempting to hamper inquisitors in such investigations would be subject to ecclesiastical penalties. Clement concluded by saying that lay authorities might need to be called upon for help.51 The crucial and novel aspect of this ruling was the idea that agents of the pope might deal directly with Jews who did not fall under ecclesiastical jurisdiction because “they were without” (qui foris sunt [I Corinthians 5:12]). This is a clear example of how popes, with the help of canon lawyers, did their best to extend the boundaries of their authority as far as possible. Sinibaldus Fieschi, who went on to become Pope Innocent IV in 1243, had argued that as the Vicar of Christ the pope had authority over all of God’s creatures. This had to mean that the pope was bound to have at least some say over Jews, who fell under the rule of temporal princes, who as Christians fell under papal remit. In particular, Innocent felt that the pope had the right to insist that Jews should be compelled to attend conversionary sermons. Also, the pope had the right to intervene if Jews disobeyed natural law, which was binding on all men – by, for example, having immoral relations with Christians – and in cases where they transgressed divine law by blaspheming Christ or by going against their own religious laws without being checked by their own leaders. This is the concept of papal plenitude of power to which Innocent III had, of course, already contributed a great deal. But it is important to emphasize that Innocent IV, as well as Hostiensis (d. 1271), the most eminent thirteenth-century canonist, would have expected for popes to be able to rely on temporal rulers to help them in these and other endeavors which, in the pope’s eyes, were supposed to secure the general welfare of Christendom. It was only if temporal princes did not abide by 50 51

X 5.19.12, 5.19.18, 5.9.4, 3.42.3, ed. Friedberg, cols. 814 15, 816, 791, 644 6. Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, no. 26, 102 4.

medieval church doctrines and policies 47 their part of the bargain in keeping lay affairs in the order popes expected that popes felt that it was not just their right, but their duty, to intervene. Acerbic clashes between popes and temporal rulers on the premises of papal plenitude of power are the stuff of the history of medieval political thought. What is so interesting is how often Jewish matters were linked to wider considerations concerning relations between Regnum (“kingship”) and Sacerdotium (“priesthood”). Opposition to inquisitional interference with “their” Jews from James I of Aragon and Philip the Fair of France revolved around royal disquiet about legal precedent, and fears for loss of income for the royal coffers. Popes, for their part, reissued Turbato corde at the behest of inquisitors another four times in the thirteenth century.52 Another example of papal interference in Jewish internal affairs was Gregory IX’s decision to write to the bishop of Paris to request him to forward letters to the kings of France, England, and Iberia, asking them to take the Talmud from the Jews and hand it over to the mendicants for investigation and, if necessary, destruction. Gregory had been informed by a Jewish convert, Nicholas Donin, of problematic passages in the text which appeared to abrogate biblical laws, dishonor God, and blaspheme against Christ and the Virgin Mary. In the event only King Louis IX responded to these summons to put the Talmud on trial in Paris in 1240; perhaps we should wonder with Lesley Smith whether he was the only one to receive the papal missive. Yehiel of Paris was one of the Jewish scholars ˙ called upon to answer for the material which was at the center of Tosafist scholarly activities. The condemnation of the Talmud by the king’s court was a foregone conclusion; in 1242, cartloads of talmudic and other Jewish manuscripts were publicly burnt, to the horror of the Jewish communities of Christendom. Not only were Jews deeply distressed on account of the loss of their holy books, not only were they deeply perturbed by this show of royal judicial violence – they were horrified at the flagrant breach in their “service contract” with the papacy. Did not Sicut Iudeis offer them protection as long as they did not deign to act beyond what they had been allowed to do in the past? And was the Talmud not one of their ancient texts? Jeremy Cohen argued many years ago that Christian awareness of the Talmud in the thirteenth century dramatically changed Christian policies toward the Jews. Once Christians realized that Jews were not Augustinian clones of biblical Jews bearing witness to Christianity by only carrying the 52

Grayzel, “Popes, Jews, and Inquisition,” 12 21; John A. Kemp, “A New Concept of the Christian Commonwealth in Innocent IV,” and J. A. Watt, “The Use of the Term ‘Plenitudo Potestatis’ by Hostiensis,” in Stephan Kuttner and J. Joseph Ryan, eds., Proceedings of the Second International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, 12 16 August 1963 (Vatican City, 1965), 155 9 and 161 87.

48 the middle ages: the christian world books of the Hebrew Bible, they felt Jews no longer needed to be preserved in Christian society. However, if one moves away from solely focusing on Augustine’s witness theory to recognize that the core of Augustine’s ideas about preserving Jews consisted of the concept of Jewish service, one can better understand how it was possible for the Talmud to be put to Christian purposes so quickly after its initial full-scale condemnation for usurping the Hebrew Bible and maligning Christ. In 1263, Paul Christian, another convert from Judaism, was already selecting talmudic passages to convince Nachmanides that the messiah had come in the disputation on the Talmud held in Barcelona in the presence of King James I. Ramon Marti’s massive Pugio fidei of c.1278 tabulated the talmudic material which was considered to be particularly promising for Dominicans in their concerted efforts to convert Jews. But using the Talmud to find proofs for the validity of Christianity did not remove the onus of dealing with its alleged blasphemies. The Talmud was subjected to sporadic investigations at papal, ecclesiastical or royal behest after 1242, and at times it was burnt (e.g., 1244 in Paris, 1553 in Italy). But it seems that, on the whole, popes favored censorship of offensive materials over the wholesale destruction of Jewish texts. Letters from Innocent IV and Clement IV reveal their understanding that Jews should be allowed the books they needed to practice their religion as long as they were inoffensive. The sting in the tail, of course, was that it was up to Christian authorities to determine what was and what was not offensive.53 Our examination of medieval Christian policies and doctrines concerning Jews and Judaism so far has demonstrated manifold ambiguities in ecclesiastical positions on Jews. As John Watt has noted, these ambiguities come to the fore in commentaries on the version of Sicut Iudeis which was included in the Gregorian Decretals (X 5.6.9).54 In its comments on the section of Sicut Iudeis concerning Jewish cemeteries, the Ordinary Gloss balanced Alexander II’s protective stance toward Jews, which was centered on their “willingness to serve” (parati sunt servire) and had been incorporated in Gratian’s Decretum (Dispar nimirum [C. 23 q. 8 c. 11]), with Innocent III’s Etsi Iudeos, which had entered the Decretals (X 5.6.13), by

53

54

Lesley Smith, “William of Auvergne and the Jews,” in Wood, ed., Christianity and Judaism, 113 17; Stow, Alienated Minority, 251 9, and “The Church and the Jews,” 210 12; Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti Judaism (Ithaca, NY, 1982); Robert Chazan, Daggers of Faith: Thirteenth century Christian Missionizing and Jewish Response (Berkeley, 1989), and Barcelona and Beyond: The Disputation of 1263 and its Aftermath (Berkeley, 1992); Hyam Maccoby, ed. and trans., Judaism on Trial: Jewish Christian Disputations in the Middle Ages (London, 1982). Watt, “Jews and Christians,” 105.

medieval church doctrines and policies 49 stating: “Jews are, however, not counted as enemies (Dispar), even though they are enemies of our faith (Etsi Iudeos).” Hostiensis formulated it thus: “although Jews are enemies of our faith (Etsi Iudeos), still they do serve us and are tolerated and defended by us as is plain in Dispar.” What we seem to have here is an articulation of the principle underpinning Jewish protection in Sicut Iudeis: Jews were wrong-minded in refusing to acknowledge prophecies concerning Christ in the Old Testament, yet Christian charity responded mercifully to Jewish pleading and granted Jews protection from forced conversion, crimes against their bodies and property, and desecration of their cemeteries, provided that Jews did not exceed what they had been allowed to do. To put it differently, Jews could count on protection as long as they kept to their part of the bargain, or, to state it in the language of Alexander II’s Dispar, “were willing to serve.” Etsi Iudeos expressed Jewish service in the harshest of terms to counteract what was seen by Innocent III as Jewish enmity toward Christianity, which did not comply with the behavior that was expected of them in Sicut Iudeis. The nature of Jewish service took on a sinister character through the stridency with which Etsi Iudeos introduced the concept of perpetual Jewish servitude on account of collective Jewish guilt for the crucifixion, and the manner in which the bull accused Jews of repaying Christian mercy with grossly insulting behavior regarding Christianity. According to Etsi Iudeos, Jews needed to be controlled by their temporal lords so that they would remain bowed under the yoke of perpetual slavery, continuously displaying the shame of their guilt in servile fear, and showing respect to the honor of the Christian faith.55 Indeed, moralist theologians such as Peter the Chanter (d. 1197) and his pupil, Thomas Chobham, stated emphatically that Jewish service should be menial. Peter had Jews cleaning the streets of Christendom, while Thomas had them doing base work so that they could not lord it over Christians. And we have already seen how Grosseteste would have liked Jews to labor on the land for the benefit of their lords rather than make a profit out of moneylending.56 55

56

Gloss on X 5.6.9, “cimiterium,” in Nova Decretalium compilatio Gregoris IX (Lyon, 1481): “Iudei vero non reputantur hostes, xxiii.q.viii. dispar, licet sint hostes fidei nostre, infra eo, etsi Iudeos”; Hostiensis, Apparatus, on X 5.6.9 “cimiterium” (Paris, 1512), fol. 30v: “Iudei vero etsi sint fidei nostre hostes infra eo. Etsi iudeos, servi tamen nostri sunt, et a nobis tolerantur et defenduntur, ut hic patet, et xxiii.q.viii.dispar”; Watt, “Jews and Christians,” 103 5; Stow, “The Church and the Jews,” 216, 206 7; Stow, Alienated Minority, 243 6. Commentary of Peter the Chanter on Psalm 58(9):12, ed. Gilbert Dahan, in Dahan, “L’Article Iudei de la Summa Abel de Pierre le Chantre,” Revue des Études Augustiniennes 27 (1981), 125 6; John Watt, “Parisian Theologians and the Jews: Peter Lombard and Peter Cantor,” in P. Biller and B. Dobson, eds., The Medieval Church: Universities,

50

the middle ages: the christian world It was hard enough for theologians and canon lawyers, not to mention popes and bishops, to make sense of how in practice to tolerate Jews while at the same time condemning them, but it was even harder for temporal rulers to work out how to apply these ambiguous, theoretical notions to real Jewish men, women, and children living in their lands. By and large this was done by granting Jews privileges in which it was clear, either implicitly or explicitly, that Jews were in the service of those who granted them protection. Jews understood the situation only too well. Rabbi Asher ben Yehiel who left Germany for Toledo in the early fourteenth century ˙ put it thus:

It seems to me that all types of taxes must be considered defence expenditures. For it is they that preserve us among the Gentiles. For what purpose do some of the Gentile nations find in preserving us and allowing us to live among them if not the benefit that they derive from Israel in their collection of taxes and extortions from them.57

The difficulty for rulers was in benefiting from “their” Jews without being seen to stray from current ecclesiastical norms governing relations between Christians and Jews. Jews, for their part, had to broker arrangements with the different overlapping and contesting powers in the places of their abode; their welfare depended on whether or not their socio-economic endeavors continued to be deemed useful as well as acceptable. The concept that Jews were expected to render service to those who protected them was sometimes expressed by the ambiguous Latin term servus, which can mean anything from “slave” to “servant.” In the Christian kingdoms of Iberia, for example, Jews were denoted as servi regis et fisco deputati (“servi of the king entrusted to his treasury”) in the fueros (“municipal charters”) of towns such as Teruel and Cuenca to express the fact that the Jews in the newly Christianized territories went about their business ultimately for their royal lords’ benefit. In Germany, Frederick II granted all the Jews of Germany the privileges Henry IV had given to the Jews of Worms in 1090, and which Frederick Barbarossa had confirmed in 1157. In the introduction to his charter, Frederick II described the Jews as the servi camere nostre (“servi of our chamber”). This became the stock phrase used by German emperors for “their” Jews. The Worms privilege of Henry

57

Heresy, and the Religious Life. Essays in Honour of Gorden Leff (Woodbridge, 1999), 72 4; Thomas of Chobham, Summa Confessorum, ed. Frederick Broomfield, Analecta Mediaevalia Namurcensia, 25 (Louvain, 1968), Art. 7.4.6.11, 434; Sapir Abulafia, Christian Jewish Relations 1000 1300, 194 228. Asher ben Yehiel, commentary on Baba Bathra 1.29 in the Babylonian Talmud, transla tion from B. Septimus, Hispano Jewish Culture in Transition (Cambridge, MA, 1982), 13.

medieval church doctrines and policies 51 IV and Frederick Barbarossa had more simply spoken of the Jews as “pertaining to our chamber.” In 1179 Barbarossa had promulgated a Land Peace in which he asserted that the Jews of his kingdom “belonged to his fisc.” In his charter for Vienna of 1237, Frederick II ruled that Jews should not preside over offices, positing that imperial authority had made Jews suffer perpetual servitude on account of their crimes against Christ.58 In England, Henry III spelt out, in his Jewry Statute of 1253, “That no Jew remain in England unless he do the King service (servicium), and that from the hour of birth every Jew, whether male or female, serve (serviat) Us in some way.” But the vernacular term serfs appeared for the first time in Edward I’s statute prohibiting Jewish moneylending; by 1290, he had expelled all Jews from his realm.59 The French kings used their Jewry policies as one of the many ways in which they tried to gain the upper hand over the French magnates. The term servus appeared in the ordinance of Melun of 1230 in which Louis IX mandated that lords would not retain another lord’s Jews. Lords had the right to seize back their Jews “tanquam proprium servum” (“like their own serf’”).60 Great efforts have been made to probe the legal implications of the use of the term “servus” to denote the relationship between Jews and their lords; theories have been formulated about so-called Jewish chamber serfdom in Germany, by which Jews would have lost their freedom.61 It seems to me, however, that the best way to understand Jewish socio-economic and political service is to regard it as the twin sister of Jewish theological service. That Jews were meant to serve Christians was a given in medieval Christendom. What was crucial in all these arrangements was the nature of the service that was required of Jews at any particular time and place. 58 59

60

61

See note 31 and JLSEMA, 358 65. J. M. Rigg, Select Pleas, Starrs and Other Records from the Exchequer of the Jews, 1220 1284, Selden Society, 15 (London, 1902), xl xlii, xlviii xlix, trans. on p. xlix; Statutes of the Realm, 1101 1713, vol. I, Record Commission (London, 1810), 221; R. R. Mundill, England’s Jewish Solution, Experiment and Expulsion, 1262 1290 (Cambridge, 1998), 291 3;CSJMA, 317 19; J. A. Watt, “The Jews, the Law, and the Church: The Concept of Jewish Serfdom in Thirteenth Century England,” in D. Wood, ed., The Church and Sovereignty, Studies in Church History, Subsidia Series, 9 (Oxford, 1991), 153 72. A. Teulet, Layettes du Trésor des chartes, vol. II (Paris, 1866), no. 2083, 192 3; CSJMA, 213 15; William Chester Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews: From Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians (Philadelphia, 1989), esp. 133. For example, Guido Kisch, The Jews of Medieval Germany: A Study of Their Legal and Social Status, 2nd edn. (New York, 1970), 145 68, 331 64; and, more recently, Alexander Patschovsky, “The Relationship between the Jews of Germany and the King (11th 14th Centuries): A European Comparison,” in Alfred Haverkamp and Hanna Vollrath, eds., England and Germany in the High Middle Ages (London, 1996), 193 218.

52 the middle ages: the christian world The Jewish servi regis of Cuenca and Teruel might have served their kings, but their socio-economic and legal position in these towns and others was very favorable. Indeed, for much of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Iberian Christian monarchs’ relations with Jews were marked by a pragmatism which owed much to their need for Jewish expertise in their concerted efforts to assimilate ever more territories under their authority. There was no question of Jewish serfdom or slavery here.62 Frederick II’s 1236 charter was issued to protect the Jews of Germany against blood libel accusations. The charter explicitly used the term to spell out that a lord was honored by the way his servi were treated: “those who deal favorably and kindly with our servi, the Jews, without doubt honor us.” Frederick’s use of the term servi was not intrinsically negative. Even his adoption of the concept of perpetual servitude in his charter to Vienna might have reflected his attempt to underline the longstanding link between emperors and the Jews more than anything else. Legendary material told of how, after the destruction of the Temple, Jews were rewarded with imperial protection because Josephus cured Vespasian’s son Titus, when he was ill.63 But Jewish dependency on their lords for protection, combined with the ambiguity of the term describing their service, did make them vulnerable to the whims of those who protected them. Jewish service needed to be profitable for lords, to make it worth their while to negotiate ambiguous ecclesiastical theories concerning Jews. And increased ecclesiastical emphasis on the need for Jewish service to be demeaning gradually undermined the position of Jews throughout Latin Christendom from the thirteenth century. Ecclesiastical rhetoric was particularly damaging for Jews whose economic activities were predominantly geared toward moneylending activities, as was the case in England and in France to the north of the Loire. A king like Louis IX seemed to prefer financial loss to allowing “his” Jews to continue to engage in usury; Edward I decided in 1290 that his interests were best served by expelling the Jews from England. Philip IV made the same decision for France in 1306; it 62

63

James F. Powers, trans., The Code of Cuenca: Municipal Law on the Twelfth century Castilian Frontier (Philadelphia, 2000); Maz Gorosch, ed., El Fuero de Teruel (Stockholm, 1950); [Yitschak] Fritz Baer, Die Juden im Christlichen Spanien. Erster Teil: Urkunden und Regesten, vol. I: Aragonien und Navarra (Farnborough, 1970 [1929], 1037 43; David Abulafia, “Nam Iudei servi regis sunt, et semper fisco regio deputati”: The Jews in the Municipal Fuero of Teruel (1176 7),” in H. J. Hames, ed., Jews, Muslims and Christians in and around the Crown of Aragon: Essays in Honour of Professor Elena Lourie (Leiden, 2004), 97 123; Jonathan Ray, The Sephardic Frontier: The Reconquista and the Jewish Community in Medieval Iberia (Ithaca, NY, 2006). See also Watt, “The Jews, the Law, and the Church,” for his emphasis on the importance of service. Kisch, The Jews, 152 5.

medieval church doctrines and policies 53 would take almost two more centuries before Iberia followed suit. No general expulsion took place in Germany because Jewish fortunes did not, in fact, solely hinge on imperial rhetoric. In an empire with multiple authorities vying with each other for power, the realities of Jewish life were played out in the towns where they lived. At the same time that Jews were deemed to be servi of the imperial chamber, they were granted a form of citizenship in many towns in the fourteenth century. A complicated mix of imperial, territorial, and local factors would eventually determine which of these cities expelled their Jews from c.1400. Some Jews found refuge in neighboring villages; others migrated eastward, or southward to Italy.64 Jews were granted a place in Christian society in order to carry the books of the Hebrew Bible, in which the Church found the prophecies concerning Christ. At the same time, Jews were also deemed to serve Christians by proving from their own circumstances that those who denied Christ would lose their lands and exist in a subservient position dispersed in the lands of others. Ecclesiastics expressed these views through policies and doctrines which combined words of condemnation with demands for service and promises of protection. In a practical sense, Jews served their lords through their linguistic, medical, and administrative expertise and by paying taxes on their economic activities. In short, Jewish preservation in medieval Christendom was entirely dependent on the services they were able to render. Needless to say, this meant that Jewish existence, even at the best of times, remained precarious. Indeed, one of the most puzzling paradoxes of the medieval period is how the Jews of Latin Christendom managed to produce such a wealth of new religious, intellectual, and cultural material in the face of increasing strictures on their persons and livelihoods. 64

Alfred Haverkamp, “‘Concivilitas’ von Christen und Juden in Aschkenaz im Mittelalter,” in Robert Jütte and Abraham P. Kustermann, eds., Jüdische Gemeinden und Organisationsformen von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Vienna, 1996), 103 36; Michael Toch, Die Juden im Mittelalterlichen Reich, 3rd edn. (Munich, 2013), 52 5, 106 7; Gilbert Dahan, “Le Pouvoir royal, l’église et les Juifs ou de la condition politique du Juif en occident médiéval,” in D. Tollet, ed., Politique et religion dans le judaïsme ancien et médiéval (Paris, 1989), 100 1; Michael Toch, “The Formation of a Diaspora: The Settlement of Jews in the Medieval German Reich,” Aschkenas 7 (1997), 76 8.

chapter 3

MUTUAL PERCEPTIONS AND ATTITUDES david berger

Medieval Jews and Christians lived in an environment where the Other mattered profoundly. That Christians were a source of concern for Jews hardly needs to be noted, let alone demonstrated. The legal and political dimensions of the Jewish condition were virtually determined by the dominant society, the social life of the minority was profoundly affected by the majority, and cultural influences were deeper and more pervasive than historians imagined less than a half-century ago. That Jews were a source of concern for Christians is more striking and, for an observer who comes to the subject with expectations formed by an abstract analysis based on the “objective” importance of Jews in medieval Christian Europe, nothing less than startling. The manifest structural significance of Judaism for Christianity goes a long way toward explaining this concern. The Jewish Scriptures are a key element standing at the core of Christianity, and the people of that Book served simultaneously as buttress and challenge for the bearers of the younger faith. R. Isaac Arama, a fifteenth-century Spanish Jewish thinker, expressed keen awareness of Judaism’s significance for Christians and saw it as a crucial component of the divine economy. God, he wrote, exiled Jews to two societies – Christian and Muslim – where Judaism matters. Had Jews found themselves in lands where the ruling society had no interest in their religion, the knowledge of the Torah would have been lost. When those who define the environment in which a minority lives care about the culture of that minority – even if the concern manifests itself through distortion and hostility – the objects of such attention remain confident of their importance and retain their commitment to a beleaguered tradition.1 Let us begin, then, with Christian perceptions of Jews. That Jews were responsible for the execution of Jesus was, of course, axiomatic. Medieval Christians did not entertain questions about the historicity of New Testament accounts of the crucifixion, and however they reconciled 1

Isaac Arama, Sefer Akedat Yitzhak (Pressburg, 1849), ch. 88, 16a 16b.

54

mutual perceptions and attitudes 55 some of the tensions among the Gospel narratives, the central role of the Jews was not in question. Nonetheless, those tensions played a role in problematizing the dimensions of Jewish culpability. Matthew’s Jews famously endorse the declaration that the blood of Jesus is destined to remain on their heads and those of their children, but, as some medieval Jews noted, a presumably greater authority than Pilate or the crowd prayed, on the cross, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.” This last formulation raised the related question of whether the Jews acted in knowledge or in ignorance. On this point as well, conflicting evidence could be cited from Christian Scripture, and medieval Christians did not reach uniform conclusions as they examined that evidence. Augustine affirmed that the Jews were ignorant of both the messiahship and the divinity of Jesus. In the eleventh century, Anselm reinforced this position with the assertion that no one would knowingly desire to kill God. In the twelfth, Abelard went so far as to say that, given their lack of awareness of Jesus’ true nature, the Jews would have “sinned more gravely” had they refrained from killing him and persecuting his Apostles. The trope of Jewish blindness, rooted in II Corinthians 3:13–18 and Romans 11:7–10, was nearly ubiquitous. In medieval art, the veil of Corinthians regularly identified the synagogue, most famously in a classic sculpture at a church in Strasbourg, while Christian authors not only emphasized this characteristic and demonstrated its validity through additional proof-texts but occasionally cited it in exasperation to explain Jewish imperviousness to reasoned argument. While the position that Jews acted in ignorance had manifest advantages over the view that they knowingly killed the divine Messiah, it often provided scant consolation. Since a developed intellect is the hallmark of the distinction between human beings and animals, profound, systemic, ingrained stupidity can raise questions about the proper classification of human-like creatures who exemplify it. Bernard of Clairvaux spoke of the Jews’ “bovine intellect,” and some of his contemporaries and successors laid special emphasis on this characteristic. Moreover, there was a substantial history of rhetoric describing Jews in bestial terms that went beyond mere stupidity and crossed the line into malevolence: wild beasts, serpents, wild asses, dogs, wolves, and more.2 As we shall see, even this imagery did not capture the full measure of willful Jewish evil, so that Jews came to be depicted – with profound practical consequences – in literally diabolical terms. 2

See the discussion and references in David Berger, Persecution, Polemic and Dialogue: Essays in Jewish Christian Relations (Boston, 2010), 257, 268 9. See also Kenneth R. Stow, Jewish Dogs: An Image and its Interpreters: Continuity in the Catholic Jewish Encounter (Stanford, CA, 2006).

56

the middle ages: the christian world It is not surprising, then, that the perception that they acted out of ignorance did not necessarily carry the day. Peter Lombard maintained that they knew that Jesus was the messiah, though they did not know that he was God. Aquinas agreed with respect to the Jewish elite, but went on to say that ignorance of Jesus’ divinity provides no exculpation since the evidence of that divinity is so blatant that it could have been resisted only out of hatred and jealousy.3 Perhaps the deepest tension in the discourse about Jewish culpability was the necessity that Christian theology assigned to the act in question. Jesus had, after all, come to the earth for the purpose of undergoing an atoning death. The Jewish sin, then, was a felix culpa – so felicitous, in fact, that its very designation as a sin became problematic. A few Christian thinkers were so impressed by this question that they ascribed Jewish exile and suffering not to the crucifixion but to the persecution of the Apostles. More commonly, the happy consequences were severed from the moral evaluation of what the Jews had done. Like the ancient Assyrian hordes, who acted as the rod of God’s anger but were motivated only by the urge to destroy (Isaiah 10), the Jews had no inkling of the divine mission that they were bringing to fruition; rather, they were driven by the unalloyed desire to kill. It is a matter of no small interest that Jews employed precisely this reasoning as they looked forward to God’s eschatological vengeance against Christians. Since exile was widely understood as divine punishment for sin, why should Christians suffer for carrying out a mission orchestrated by God? The answer, said some Jews, is expressed in a verse excoriating the enemies of Israel: “I am very angry with the nations that are at ease; for I was only angry a little, but they overdid the punishment” (Zechariah 1:15).4 Important as this discussion can be in determining the appropriate treatment of the Jewish collective, which is necessarily played out in this world, the fundamental fate of individual Jews in the hereafter was sealed, whatever position one took regarding the degree of their responsibility for the crucifixion. Perhaps the extent and intensity of the torments awaiting them could be affected, but, like other non-believers, they were included in the circle of the damned. How much the awareness of your neighbor’s ultimate damnation colors your everyday relations is an intriguing question and, of course, differs from individual to individual. Today, Christians who believe this about Jews can nonetheless feel genuine

3

4

For an analysis of this theme, see Jeremy Cohen, Christ Killers: The Jews and the Passion from the Bible to the Big Screen (New York, 2007), 73 92. See David Berger, The Jewish Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 1979), 293 4.

mutual perceptions and attitudes 57 affection toward them; some sincerely want to save their Jewish friends not only because of a general religious imperative but because they are genuinely distressed about the terrible fate awaiting them. Even in a medieval environment, it is not to be ruled out that a nontrivial number of Christians harbored similar sentiments. However that may be, ordinary Christians, who were, of course, unfamiliar with the niceties of sophisticated discourse, formed their impressions of Jews based on sermons, stories, prevailing superstitions, and, in some instances, personal contacts. Such contacts could take the form of economic interaction as well as the common experiences of people living in close proximity in small towns and nascent cities. We have only indirect access to the attitudes of the non-literate masses, which can be assessed primarily through reports of malevolent or benevolent actions, although plausible deductions about cordial or hostile images can be drawn from the depiction of Jews in art, in legends, and in historical narratives. On the whole, Jews in early medieval Europe were permitted to live in relative security, and there is little evidence that the masses resented this state of affairs. At some point in the eleventh or twelfth century, a shift toward increased hostility gathered momentum. The contrast between the early and High Middle Ages with respect to this issue should not be overstated, as it sometimes is, to the point where we see the earlier period – with the exception of seventh-century Visigothic Spain – as one marked by almost unalloyed toleration. One needs to resist the temptation to see the centuries before the First Crusade through the prism of the enhanced hostility of a later age, thereby understating the sense of alienation, disdain, and – from the Jewish perspective – persecution that already obtained. Thus, some scholars assume that a particular commentary by Rashi, who lived from 1040 to 1105, must have been written after 1096 because it presents the condition of Jews in exile as one of degradation and misery. But Ashkenazic liturgical poems written before the crusade clearly and wrenchingly reflect precisely such an assessment. While such literature should of course not be taken as a definitive portrait of the Jewish condition, it certainly provides meaningful evidence of attitudes, images, and perceptions. Just as we should not idealize the status of Jews in the early Middle Ages, we should not see the later period as one of unrelieved suffering. Setting religious convictions aside, the typical late medieval Jew, at least in ordinary times, would probably not have chosen to trade places with the typical Christian peasant. Nonetheless, there is little question that both elite and popular attitudes toward Jews did become more hostile as the Middle Ages wore on. R. I. Moore’s influential study entitled The Formation of

58 the middle ages: the christian world a Persecuting Society5 has argued that persecution of Jews was spawned by a sense of threat posed not by Jewish ignorance or stupidity but precisely by the existence of a literate group with a developed intellectual/religious tradition that posed a challenge to the Christian faith. Whether or not this concern really explains the larger transformation, it is probably fair to say that the image of the intellectually deficient Jew was at least in part a means of neutralizing such a challenge. This is all the more likely to be the case in light of persuasive indications that some Jews in northern Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries aggressively confronted Christians with questions and arguments designed to demonstrate the superiority of Judaism to the dominant faith.6 A similar approach has been proposed to explain the rise of grotesque libels against Jews beginning in the twelfth century. Gavin Langmuir regards what he labels “chimerical” accusations – i.e., assertions that Jews do things that no one has ever seen a Jew do – as responses to inner doubts by Christians regarding the rationality of their own religion.7 The accusations in question – ritual murder and consumption of the victim’s blood, desecration of the host, and well poisoning – have also been connected to the conception of the Jew as an ally or instrument of the Devil.8 The association between the Devil and the Jew has roots in early Christian texts, but it reached maturity (or the fullness of immaturity) in the latter part of the Middle Ages. John (8:44) already spoke of the Jews’ “father the Devil.” Revelations (2:9 and 3:9) introduced the phrase “synagogue of Satan.” John Chrysostom understood the verse “Their own sons and daughters they sacrificed to demons” (Psalms 106:37) as a reference to the Jews. Artistic depictions reinforced these literary texts. To take one thirteenth-century French example that has been subjected to careful analysis, the illuminations in the Bible Moralisée are suffused with images of the Jew in routine alliance with the Devil and the Antichrist.9 This association led to dehumanization of the Jew in forms far more serious than intellectual inadequacy. Jews, like the Devil, had horns – 5 6 7

8

9

R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society (Oxford, 1987). See Berger, Persecution, Polemic and Dialogue, 177 98. This thesis is a central element of Langmuir’s overarching analysis presented in his twin volumes, History, Religion and Anti Semitism and Toward a Definition of Anti Semitism (Berkeley, 1990). The key themes and texts bearing on this conception were surveyed more than a half century ago in a work of continuing relevance. See Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and its Relation to Modern Anti Semitism (New Haven, 1943). Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralisée (Berkeley, 1999).

mutual perceptions and attitudes 59 which, it needs to be noted, have little or nothing to do with the Moses of medieval art, whose horns resulted from the Vulgate’s mistranslation of the Hebrew term for the rays of light emanating from the lawgiver’s face. The foetor judaicus was a stench that could be removed only through baptism. Jewish men menstruated. We find isolated assertions in the late Middle Ages that Jews are descended from a union between Adam and either animals or a demon,10 and that they emerged not from Abraham’s seed but from his excrement.11 The depiction of the Judensau, which showed a Jew suckling a female pig, originated in the thirteenth century and became widespread by the late fifteenth.12 This perception of a less than human figure with telltale physical characteristics could not help but be associated with diabolical behavior. Thus, Jewish physicians poisoned their patients, sometimes with poisons that took effect only months later. It is virtually impossible to determine whether this assertion was simply a result of the perception of a hate-filled Jew in league with the Devil or if it was also born out of the desire to stop Christians from patronizing, and hence supporting, Jewish doctors. Medicine was a field in which Jews were disproportionately represented even in northern Europe, perhaps because it was difficult to dissuade Christians from seeking the help of people whom they regarded as best qualified to treat their maladies. This, then, is an instance in which antiJewish ideology was trumped by self-interest. The most effective means of achieving the daunting goal of detaching Christian patients from their Jewish physicians would presumably have been to persuade them that patronizing those Jews would not improve their health but endanger it. The poisoning physician could destroy his victims only individual by individual. The Jew as mass poisoner emerged primarily, though not exclusively, in the context of the well poisoning said to have engendered the Black Death of the mid fourteenth century. We have some recipes providing ingredients of the alleged poisons, and, while they are not very palatable, many of them, such as Christian hearts and sacred hosts, do not have the capacity to kill in naturalistic fashion. These are, rather, concoctions that bear the mark of the black arts, where Jews, who were often depicted as deeply involved in witchcraft, could exercise their special expertise. That Jews were not actually brought to trial for witchcraft is 10

11

12

So Alonso de Espina, Fortalitium fidei, consideratio, vol. II (Nuremberg, 1494), fol. 79, col. d. See David Nirenberg, “Mass Conversion and Genealogical Mentalities: Jews and Christians in Fifteenth Century Spain,” Past and Present 174 (Feb. 2002), 26. So Jakoubek of Stribro. See Peter Demetz, Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City (New York, 1997), 168. Isaiah Shachar, The Judensau: A Medieval Anti Jewish Motif and its History (London, 1974).

60 the middle ages: the christian world probably a result of the very pervasiveness of their presumed involvement in this activity, to the point where it could not be separated from their essential nature. To try Jews for witchcraft would be to revoke even the minimal toleration that was a deep-seated component of Church law governing the Jews.13 As to the Black Death itself, the “plausibility” of the well poisoning accusation is sometimes connected with a purportedly lower death rate from the plague among Jews, a phenomenon explained by a wide array of conjectures ranging from sanitary practices to laws of kosher food consumption. None of these conjectures is especially compelling, and the reality that they attempt to explain is far from established. The Jewish mortality rate may well have been indistinguishable from that of Christians. And so we turn to the remaining “chimerical” accusations, which could be generated without reference to wholesale death and illness. The longestlasting of these was the accusation of ritual murder.14 The first instance of this libel occurred in mid-twelfth-century England, though reference to the case appeared almost instantaneously on the Continent, where additional accusations arose within a few decades with far more serious consequences. By the 1230s – and perhaps even earlier – the initial accusation that Jews, after an annual meeting to determine the appropriate location, ritually murder a Christian child in imitation of the crucifixion was transformed into the assertion that Jewish law requires the ingestion of the blood (or, much more rarely, the heart) of a murdered Christian. The precise ritual use of the blood could vary. Most often it was to be baked into Passover matzah; sometimes it was to be used in the Passover food known as haroset (a paste made from wine, nuts, and apples or other ˙ it was to be mixed into wine used at the seder, and fruit) sometimes sometimes it was intended for medicinal rather than ritual purposes. In some sources, the medicinal use was for the treatment of the Jewish disease of male menstruation, where one type of blood could counteract the other. Modern readers roll their eyes when they see this accusation, and they wonder how large numbers of people could have believed it. It is 13

14

This point was made by Anna Foa, “The Witch and the Jew: Two Alikes that Were Not the Same,” in Jeremy Cohen, ed., From Witness to Witchcraft: Jews and Judaism in Medieval Christian Thought (Wiesbaden, 1996), 373 4. For a recent discussion of the persistence of this accusation, see Stow, Jewish Dogs. On its origins, see John M. McCulloh, “Jewish Ritual Murder: William of Norwich, Thomas of Monmouth, and the Early Dissemination of the Myth,” Speculum 72 (1997), 698 740. For my view of Israel Yuval’s stimulating but highly controversial article on this issue (“Ha Nakam ve ha kelalah, ha Dam ve ha Alilah,” Zion 58 (1992/3), 33 90) and the literature that it spawned, see Berger, Persecution, Polemic and Dialogue, 31 7.

mutual perceptions and attitudes 61 consequently important that we force ourselves to recognize that, for medieval, especially late medieval, Christians, two elements crucial for the nurturing and dissemination of this belief carried weight that they do not for most 21st-century observers. First, the Devil was a real, even constant, presence. Second, there appeared to be considerable evidence that Jews indeed practiced such rituals. It is true that thirteenth-century investigations by the papacy and by the Holy Roman Emperor had concluded that there was in fact no such Jewish practice, but alongside these conclusions there was a growing body of evidence from judicial investigations and proceedings that ruled in case after case that Jews were guilty of such behavior. The use of torture or the threat of torture to elicit confessions did not offend medieval sensibilities or render the results suspect in medieval minds, so that the perception by many Christians that their Jewish neighbors were a threat to their children became widespread and deeply entrenched. If we succeed in internalizing an appreciation of this psychological reality, we will attain a much better understanding of the degree to which this libel could have poisoned Jewish–Christian relations at the core. The task of historical imagination has regrettably been made easier by the resurgence of the blood libel in the contemporary Middle East, where it is affirmed on government-sponsored television networks, and, to a lesser degree, even elsewhere. Beyond this, we live in a world where untold millions of people believe that the thousands of Jews working in the World Trade Center absented themselves on that fateful September 11, so that there were no Jewish casualties. If this can happen in an age where irrefutable counter-evidence is available with the press of a computer key (though, of course, the fantasy itself is similarly available), we should not be surprised by the spread of chimerical imaginings in pre-modern times, and we should not underestimate their impact. The final chimerical accusation was that of host desecration, which was facilitated by the formalization in the thirteenth century of the doctrine of transubstantiation. In this instance, Langmuir’s suggestion that these accusations were a function of inner Christian doubts achieves its highest level of plausibility, and it is consequently no surprise that, with specific reference to this libel, the point was made before him. Jews purportedly succeeded in obtaining consecrated hosts that they proceeded to mistreat in various ways – stabbing, stomping, boiling, and the like. Some of these stories presumably assume Jewish recognition that this is indeed the body of Jesus, but even when this is not the case, the miraculous transformation of the host into the visible baby Jesus, as well as the other wondrous events that characterize many of these accounts, could well have served to

62 the middle ages: the christian world strengthen the faith of Christians in this particularly problematic doctrine.15 Even when Christians did not attribute diabolical or subhuman characteristics to Jews, they appear to have seen them as physically inferior. The evidence here comes primarily from northern European Jewish sources, which speak of Christian perceptions of Jewish ugliness. Strikingly, these Jewish texts accept the aesthetic judgment and struggle to explain the phenomenon in ways that will neutralize its sting. Notwithstanding the cleverness of some of these explanations, there is no avoiding the fact that they reflect a psyche deeply wounded by the disdain of a dominant culture.16 The essentializing of the difference between Christians and Jews could also have legal ramifications. In fifteenth-century Spain, as substantial numbers of Jews converted to Christianity under the impact of attacks as well as persuasion, the welcome (such as it was) normally extended to converts came under ever greater stress. It was one thing to embrace individuals who had come to see the light; it was quite a different matter to welcome as equals masses of Jews whom you viewed until now with undifferentiated distaste and whose sincerity was in many cases suspect. In this environment, the sense of essential difference, even if it did not reach the level of full demonization, engendered legal distinctions between new Christians and those of “pure blood.” Such distinctions were highly problematic in the light of standard law, theology, and practice, but learned scholars, invoking innovative racial categories as well as transient precedents going back to the Visigoths, succeeded to some degree in establishing discriminatory norms that disadvantaged conversos for generations.17 At roughly the same time that the ritual murder and host desecration accusations were born, perceptions of Jewish hostility to Christians were further nourished by a very different development. The classic Christian argument for tolerating Jews had been formulated by Augustine. Jews, said the greatest of the Church Fathers, testify to the truth of Christianity both 15

16 17

See Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven, 1999). See Berger, Persecution, Polemic and Dialogue, 111 14. See Nirenberg, “Mass Conversion.” For a detailed analysis of the debate regarding this question, see B. Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain (New York, 1995), 381 627. Irven M. Resnick has now presented a detailed survey and analysis of the evidence for a medieval perception of Jews as physically distinct from Christians. See his Marks of Distinction: Christian Perceptions of Jews in the High Middle Ages (Washington, DC, 2012). For an assessment, see my review in AJS Review 37 (2013), 392 5.

mutual perceptions and attitudes 63 through their suffering and through their preservation and observance of the Hebrew Bible. Beginning in the twelfth century and rising to prominence in the thirteenth, Christian awareness of a different Jewish work generated both a selective examination of the content of that work and a reassessment of the centrality of the Bible for Judaism. The Talmud came to the attention of Christians largely as a result of the work of Jewish converts. In the early twelfth century, Petrus Alphonsi’s apologia for his conversion cited talmudic passages that he considered theologically problematic, and in the middle of the century Peter the Venerable subjected several selections from the Talmud to scathing mockery and denunciation. But the assertion that the Talmud exemplifies Jewish hatred of gentiles in general and Christians in particular came to the fore in a campaign pursued by the French convert Nicholas Donin in the 1230s and 1240s, whose dramatic apogee was a 1240 disputation with Rabbi Yehiel of Paris that was essentially a trial of the Talmud. Donin pointed to˙ the Talmud’s hostile depictions of Jesus as well as laws that discriminate against non-Jews, many of which he interpreted reasonably. At the same time, his intense hatred of his former co-religionists led him to present a talmudic assertion that “the best of the Gentiles should be killed” as a normative, universal ruling, though he had to have known that no medieval Jew understood this as a legal injunction to be applied outside a wartime situation. Beyond Donin’s ascription to the Talmud of blasphemy, discrimination, and even incitement to murder, his portrayal of the work as “another law” inconsistent with the Bible, and his assertion that it was the former and not the latter that Jews observed, called into question the very core of the Augustinian argument for tolerating Jews. While the Church never embraced Donin’s argument in its fullness, its force was not entirely neutralized, and the image of the Jew as the devotee of a sacred text that was not only different from the Bible but replete with evil contributed in no small measure to growing hostility, initially among intellectuals but eventually among the masses as well.18 The mixed success of these accusations is also evident in the fate of the Talmud itself in medieval and early modern Europe. On several occasions, including the aftermath of the Paris disputation, it was burned. For the 18

See Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti Judaism (Ithaca, NY, 1982). For an example of the preservation of the unalloyed Augustinian teaching of toleration in a pastoral guidebook written in Germany two decades after the widespread killing of Jews during the initial outbreak of the Black Death, see Deeana Copeland Klepper, “Pastoral Literature in Local Context: Albert of Diessen’s Mirror of Priests on Christian Jewish Coexistence,” Speculum 92 (2017), 692 723.

64 the middle ages: the christian world most part, however, Jews were allowed to preserve and study it, although a process of censorship and self-censorship led to the elimination or modification of some passages about Jesus, as well as the terminology for gentiles. In two notable instances, the liturgy itself was changed, so that a curse against heretics came to be aimed at informers, and a declaration that non-Jews “prostrate themselves before vanity and emptiness and pray to a god who does not save” was eliminated entirely from many texts.19 The image of the Jews in Christian eyes was also adversely affected by their disproportionate concentration in moneylending. Shakespeare has succeeded in illustrating the dangers of this profession for interfaith amity far better than any historian could, and the fundamental reality of these dangers is unassailable. At the same time, Joseph Shatzmiller has provided us with a study entitled Shylock Reconsidered,20 which reminds us of a different reality with wider ramifications for the entire discourse of this chapter. As I have already noted in passing, personal relationships across religious and ethnic lines can often be amicable, even when the other group as an abstraction is seen through the darkest lens. Moreover, even the darkness of the lens can sometimes be moderated under the influence of such relationships. We are accustomed to dismissing the response of people accused of anti-Semitism that “some of my best friends are Jews” (or, in Karl Lueger’s well-known formulation, “I decide who is a Jew”), and for the most part this dismissive attitude is more than justified. At the same time, even in cases where personal relationships do not undermine generic hostility, it remains important to remember that the rhythms of everyday life in routine times can be marked by cordiality and, yes, even friendship. Shatzmiller’s study introduces us to a Jewish moneylender brought before a court, who produced apparently sincere character witnesses from his Christian clientele. In less fraught business contexts, cordial relationships were all the more likely to develop, and the thirteenth-century Sefer Hasidim [The Book of the Pious] urges a Jew to defend an innocent Christian even against a Jewish attacker.21 How then did Jews perceive their Christian neighbors and the faith to which they adhered? The two components of this question are inextricably – or at least deeply – intertwined, and we must consequently address the second before turning to the first. Rabbinic Judaism referred to the practices associated with polytheistic religions as ‘avodah zarah, literally “foreign worship.” Almost all 19

20 21

See Ruth Langer, Cursing the Christians? A History of the Birkat HaMinim (New York, 2011). Joseph Shatzmiller, Shylock Reconsidered (Berkeley, 1990). Sefer Hasidim, ed. J. Wistinetsky, 2nd edn. (Frankfurt am Main, 1924), no. 1849, 445.

mutual perceptions and attitudes 65 manifestations of ‘avodah zarah can be subsumed under a rough definition – to wit, the formal recognition or worship as God of an entity that is in fact not God. Since Christians worshipped Jesus of Nazareth as God, and Jews believed that he was in fact not God, it followed ineluctably that Christianity should be classified as ‘avodah zarah. This was no small matter. The legal category evoked the idolatries of old; various biblical verses have exceedingly pejorative things to say about the practitioners of those idolatries; and once a religion was classified under this rubric, embracing it was to be resisted even under threat of death. There is no question that the dominant medieval Jewish attitude toward Christianity was driven by these considerations. When crusading armies forced Jews to choose between conversion to Christianity and death, some died and some converted, but none argued that apostasy is permissible under duress because Christianity is not ‘avodah zarah. The liturgical poems commemorating these martyrdoms explicitly designate Christianity as such; Jews, they affirm, gave their lives “so as not to bow before ‘avodah zarah.”22 In a famous story associated with a central prayer of the High Holiday season, a Jew is wracked by guilt for asking a Christian nobleman for time to consider the latter’s proposal that he “deny the living God” by accepting Christianity.23 The very fact that Jews died to avoid Christian ‘avodah zarah reinforced this perception of Christianity and strengthened the hostility that it evoked. In Ashkenaz, one finds invective and insulting terminology describing Christian sancta explicitly justified by an appeal to a rabbinic principle that one should assign pejorative names to ‘avodah zarah; one text extends this practice beyond inanimate objects to encompass Christian personalities, on the basis of the verse, “Those who make them [i.e., idols] should be like them” (Psalms 115:8). Thus, Jesus is the hanged one, Christian graves are pits, saints (kedoshim) are sacred prostitutes (kedeshim), baptismal water is ˙ impurity, and so on. The formal ˙ the water of justification for such terminology was clearly not the primary explanation for this practice, which served as an outlet for a subordinated and suffering people yearning for defiance. Finally, though the classification of the Other as less than human played a much smaller role in the discourse of medieval Jews than in that of Christians, we find occasional affirmations to this effect as well.24 22

23

24

R. Avrohom Chaim Feuer and R. Avie Gold, Zakhor le Avraham: The Complete Tishah B’Av Service (New York, 1991) #22, 296/297. R. Isaac b. Moses of Vienna, Sefer Or Zarua, vol. II (Jerusalem, 2010), Hilkhot Rosh ha Shanah #276, 342. Mordechai Breuer provided a list of pejorative terms in his Sefer Nitsahon Yashan (Ramat Gan, 1978), 195. See too Anna Sapir Abulafia, “Invectives against Christianity in the Hebrew Chronicles of the First Crusade,” in Peter W. Edbury, ed., Crusade and

66

the middle ages: the christian world Did such manifestations of hostility restrict themselves to verbal expression? Since there is no reason to believe that any Jew ever desecrated a host, I did not hesitate to utilize Langmuir’s classification of this accusation under the rubric “chimerical.” Nevertheless, some medieval Jews were perfectly capable of treating Christian symbols with extreme disrespect. We cannot, of course, take all Christian stories about such actions at face value, but when a Jewish text tells us with considerable satisfaction that a Jew urinated on a cross and produced a clever justification when caught in the act, our resistance to the historicity of such accounts must surely be affected.25 The status of the Christian religion and that of its practitioners bore implications that were not restricted to the extraordinary circumstances surrounding martyrdom. Jewish law forbids deriving benefit from objects dedicated to ‘avodah zarah, which raised serious questions about the sale of objects consecrated in the context of Christian worship. Rabbinic law prohibited gentile wine as “wine of libation,” which appeared to place it in the same category as such religious objects. Moreover, the Talmud forbade doing business with idolaters on their holidays. Given the large number of Christian holy days in medieval Europe, not to speak of the fact that the Talmud specifically identified what appears to be the Christian Sunday as one of those prohibited days, the economic impact of this regulation was potentially devastating. On the one hand, these prohibitions strengthened the sense of alienation, even revulsion, evoked by Christianity and its symbols. On the other, the economic difficulties engendered by this constellation of debilitating restrictions impelled Jews to take a second look at their scope and applicability. Sometimes, that reexamination produced a partial reassessment of the religious status of Christianity itself. The talmudic prohibition of commerce on pagan holidays was rooted in the concern that the idolater was more likely to thank his god for the consummation of a transaction if it took place on a religious festival. Medieval Jewish decisors confronting the consequences of this ruling suggested various strategies to render it inapplicable to medieval

25

Settlement (Cardiff, 1985), 66 72. The argument from the verse in Psalms appears in Sefer Hasidim, no. 193, 74. For the analogy between non Jews and animals, see R. Abraham b. David of Posquières ’s comment on Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Avot ha Tumah 2:10. See Joseph Official, Sefer Yosef ha Mekane’, ed. Judah Rosenthal (Jerusalem, 1970), 14. See, too, Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (Princeton, 2006), which provides valuable discussion relevant to our question; none theless, despite the implication of the title, it points to vanishingly few incidents of genuine violence on the part of medieval Jews.

mutual perceptions and attitudes 67 Christian Europe. Some of these have no relevance to the evaluation of Christianity, or even of the religious status of medieval Christians. Thus, the prohibition does not apply if observing it would create hostility toward Jews. Alternatively, it was never intended to apply where Jewish livelihoods would be entirely undermined. Other strategies, however, carried at least the potential for transformed perceptions of broader significance. Thus, the major eleventh-century authority R. Gershom of Mainz cited an unelaborated talmudic assertion that gentiles outside the Land of Israel are not worshippers of ‘avodah zarah; rather, they follow the customs of their ancestors. Divining the meaning of this talmudic statement is a daunting task, but while it cannot reasonably be taken as an assertion that the intrinsic character of a religion changes because of a geographical change, it can serve to mitigate the most pejorative evaluation of the status of its worshippers. In the twelfth century, the northern European talmudic commentators known as the Tosafists went on to suggest that the transactions prohibited in talmudic times were now permissible because “we know that the gentiles among us do not worship ‘avodah zarah.” At first glance, this can be understood as a characterization of Christianity as a religion. It is, however, highly unlikely that this was the intention of the Tosafists; rather, they almost surely meant, as other medieval authorities explicitly assert, that their Christian neighbors are not so devout. Thus, the fact that a transaction took place on a holiday did not substantially increase the likelihood that they would to go their house of worship to recite a prayer of thanksgiving. Still, even this understanding goes some moderate distance toward mitigating the image of medieval Christians as idolaters.26 Far more important is another Tosafot that really does say something deeply meaningful about Christianity itself, though the most significant sentence there for an understanding of medieval Jewish assessments of Christianity is not the one that is usually cited. The Talmud forbade business partnerships with idolaters lest a dispute between the partners lead to a court proceeding in which the non-Jew would take an oath in the name of his god. In such a case, the Jew would violate what the rabbis understood as a biblical injunction against causing someone to invoke the name of another deity. Thus, it appeared that a Jew in medieval Europe would be precluded from entering into a partnership with a Christian. A major Tosafist ruled that this is not the case; rather, a Jew may in fact “accept” such an oath from a Christian. First of all, Christians swear in the name of the saints, whom they do not see as deities. Second, even though 26

Many of these issues are addressed in Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance (Oxford, 1961).

68 the middle ages: the christian world the oath invokes God as well as the saints, and when Christians say “God” they have in mind Jesus of Nazareth, they are not actually pronouncing the name of Jesus; moreover, “their intention is to the Creator of heaven [and earth].” Finally, the concern that the Christian is nonetheless “associating the name of God with something else” is neutralized by the fact that “association” is not forbidden to gentiles. The affirmation that gentiles are not obligated to refrain from “association” produced an entire literature beginning in the sixteenth century, when highly influential authorities began to understand it as an assertion that even Christian worship is permitted to non-Jews. Once again, it is exceedingly improbable that the “liberal” reading, whose impact endures to this day, accords with the intention of the Tosafists. They almost certainly meant either that an oath in the name of God taken by one who is thinking – or also thinking – of Jesus of Nazareth is permitted to non-Jews, or that an oath in which both God and the saints are mentioned is permitted to them. Actual worship remains forbidden. At the same time, the preceding affirmation that Christians have in mind the (true) Creator of heaven and earth when they say “God” is unambiguous, and it demonstrates that some medieval Jews of great stature, while continuing to classify Christianity as ‘avodah zarah even for gentiles, recognized that it differs in a critical sense from the paganism of Antiquity. Among the Jews of northern Europe, this remained an isolated observation with little impact on visceral Jewish instincts, but its significance is real and revealing.27 One major medieval talmudist pushed the envelope considerably further, and his views have attracted much attention among modern scholars, as well as among traditional Jews seeking a model for interfaith relations more favorable to Christianity than the medieval standard. R. Menahem ha-Meiri of Perpignan (1249–1316) made two distinct but ˙ related affirmations: (1)‘avodah zarah is not to be found in our environs; (2) talmudic legislation that discriminates against non-Jews does not apply to “nations restricted by the ways of religions.” While the precise understanding of his position remains the subject of lively debate, his approach appears to have been driven by the conviction that believers in a cosmic deity, whatever the conception of his exact nature may be, are likely to live in accordance with ethical rules that produce a civilized society. Not only is civil discrimination inapplicable to the members of such a society, even some prohibitions connected with ‘avodah zarah do not apply.28 27 28

See Tosafot Sanhedrin 63b, under asur. See Moshe Halbertal, Between Torah and Wisdom: Rabbi Menachem ha Meiri and the Maimonidean Halakhists in Provence [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 2000), 80 108.

mutual perceptions and attitudes 69 As we have already seen, Nicholas Donin had confronted R. Yehiel of ˙ Paris with citations illustrating discriminatory talmudic legislation. R. Yehiel did not construct an all-embracing theory along the lines of ha˙ but he did argue without equivocation that the laws in question Meiri’s, applied only to ancient pagans. After all, he said, you see that we do not observe the prohibition that banned commerce with idolaters on their festivals, and you also see that we are so devoted to our religion that we martyr ourselves rather than abandon it. Thus, you cannot legitimately question my sincerity when I declare that these laws do not apply to you. R. Yehiel went on to argue that the handful of pejorative statements in the ˙ about Jesus refer to a somewhat earlier figure of the same name Talmud and not to the founder of Christianity. Despite the argument from martyrdom, R. Yehiel’s sincerity cannot be accepted uncritically. Nonetheless, we may˙ be – and probably are – witness to an ironic and important development. In response to attacks leveled against their texts by increasingly hostile persecutors, Jews formulated a more tolerant understanding of those texts, and some of those Jews ultimately internalized that understanding. Thus, at least in this case, a more favorable attitude toward Christians was born not out of an atmosphere of enhanced openness and cordiality but precisely out of a new and potentially deadly offensive. Donin is a particularly striking and dangerous example of the phenomenon of Jewish conversion to Christianity, which is the most extreme illustration of the fact that, along with revulsion toward Christian symbols and faith, medieval Jews could feel attraction that spilled over into seductive temptation. Scholars have begun to recognize that, even in Ashkenaz, whose image – and self-image – was molded by the martyrdoms engendered by the crusades, Jews could be sorely tempted by the regnant religion – and not only for pragmatic reasons. Rabbi Jacob Tam – the greatest rabbi in twelfth-century northern Europe – reported that he was familiar with more than twenty divorce documents issued to their wives by Jewish converts to Christianity. Even though an authority of R. Tam’s stature would know of documents prepared across a relatively broad geographic area, this is an impressive number. The communities of the North were quite small, many conversions no doubt involved both spouses and would consequently not generate a divorce, some (many? – most?) converts would refuse to provide a divorce to wives who would not join them, and routine documents would not have to be brought to a major rabbi at all. Jews often persuaded themselves that the motivations of converts were in fact rooted in self-interest rather than sincere faith, and one Ashkenazic text – the polemical Nitsahon vetus – speaks of the apostate’s desire to experience various pleasures˙ of the flesh denied to him or to her by Judaism

70 the middle ages: the christian world but permitted – or effectively permitted – in Christian society. But even in northern Europe we find the story of a Jew who committed suicide in order to frustrate the efforts of a demon enticing him to embrace Christianity, and the polemical literature produced in that community, while largely intended to boost morale, was also designed to provide protection against the temptations of apostasy.29 In late medieval Iberia, the effectiveness of Christian missionizing is even clearer. In that community, we begin with a very different cultural profile. Ashkenazic tradition tended, at least at the level of intellectual discourse, to treat Christianity and Christian society with hostility and contempt. Sephardic Jews, on the other hand, were heirs to a cultural orientation going back to Muslim Spain that saw much of the surrounding culture in a far more positive, even admiring, light. Indeed, philosophically oriented Jews in late medieval Spain expressed concern that the resistance of some of their co-religionists to the study of philosophy led learned Christians to denigrate the intellectual standing of the Jewish people. It may well be that this openness weakened the instinctive resistance that would have prevented a Christian missionary from progressing beyond the initial defenses of a medieval Jew. Then there was the increasing sophistication of the Christian mission, which elaborated upon an approach to the Talmud considerably deeper and more nuanced than that of Nicholas Donin. Here, too, the initiator and chief protagonist was a Jewish convert to Christianity. In a public disputation in Barcelona in 1263, Pablo Christiani and Nahmanides debated Pablo’s contention that the core doctrines of ˙ can be found in the Talmud itself. Nahmanides argued that Christianity ˙ the very fact that the talmudic rabbis did not embrace Christianity was sufficient to refute Pablo’s contention, but the new approach was not to be deflected so easily. Even though Nahmanides acquitted himself impress˙ was reinforced in the short run, the ively, to the point where Jewish morale long-term impact was damaging. Raymund Martini, a friar who had been present at the disputation, wrote what became a classic polemical work entitled Pugio fidei, in which he honed Pablo’s argument with a plethora of rabbinic references, and, during the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth 29

On converts, see Chaviva Levin’s dissertation, “Jewish Conversion to Christianity in Medieval Northern Europe Encountered and Imagined, 1100 1300” (New York University, 2006). See, too, Avraham Grossman, Hakhmei Tsarfat ha Rishonim (Jerusalem, 1995), 502 4, who makes the key points about R. Tam; Joseph Shatzmiller, “Jewish Converts to Christianity in Medieval Europe, 1200 1500,” in Michael Goodich, Sophia Menache, and Sylvia Schein, eds., Cross Cultural Convergences in the Crusader Period (New York, 1995), 297 318. For the passage in the Nitsahon vetus, see Berger, The Jewish Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages, 206 7.

mutual perceptions and attitudes 71 centuries, several distinguished Jewish converts to Christianity not only developed these arguments but also served as role models for Jews attracted to the dominant faith.30 Once a trickle of converts turned into a stream, what was once a remote, almost unthinkable prospect became a realistic psychological option, even in ordinary times. When pressures mounted – as they did during the 1391 and 1412 violence, as well as in the wake of the Tortosa disputation of 1413–14 – conversion became all the more difficult to resist, and significant numbers of Jews relented, driven in many cases by entirely pragmatic considerations, but sometimes by genuine doubts and, ultimately, by sincere conviction. Most Jews, of course, did not succumb to the attractions of the environment to this extent. Nonetheless – as I have already noted – overarching rationales for hostility – whether theological, typological, economic, or even demonological – cannot always serve as an impenetrable barrier to social intercourse containing at least a component of cordiality and friendship. Such relationships, with their complex intermingling of contradictory impulses, can produce influences that sometimes mirror those complexities. Scholars in the last generation have provided a series of suggestions regarding Christian influences on Jewish thought, ritual, and behavior. Some of these suggestions posit simple borrowing; others speak of polemical inversion. Theories of this sort usually remain in the realm of speculation, and they range from far-fetched to plausible to probable to persuasive to compelling. In the aggregate, however, they provide a strong case for interaction across a wide spectrum of cultural and social life. Here, then, are some salient examples of purported influences, which I provide without elaboration and without assignment to one or another of the classifications of plausibility: • Jewish biblical interpretation was deeply influenced, even permeated, by the spirit of the twelfth century Renaissance as well as the imperative of responding to Christian exegesis, and the dialectical approach of the Tosafists to talmudic study was influenced by the similar techniques utilized by students of canon law.31 • Rituals ranging from elements of the Passover hagadah to the initiation cere mony when a child begins to study Torah, to the celebration associated with 30

31

See Robert Chazan, Barcelona and Beyond: The Disputation of 1263 and its Aftermath (Berkeley, 1992), and my review essay reprinted in Berger, Persecution, Polemic and Dialogue, 199 208; Chazan, Daggers of Faith: Thirteenth Century Christian Missionizing and Jewish Response (Berkeley, 1989). Elazar Touitou, “Shitato ha Parshanit shel ha Rashbam al Reka’ ha Metzi’ut ha Historit shel Zemano,” in Y. Gilat, ed., ‘Iyunim be Sifrut Hazal, ba Mikra u be Toledot Yisrael: Mukdash le Prof. E. Z. Melammed (Ramat Gan, 1982), 48 74; Jose Faur, “The Legal Thinking of the Tosafot,” Dinei Israel 6 (1975), 43 72.

72

the middle ages: the christian world

reaching the age of bar mitzvah, to an array of activities associated with birth and its aftermath were a conscious or unconscious reaction to Christian ceremonies, folk beliefs, or doctrines.32 • The role of women in marriage, in society, and in ritual varied in accordance with conditions in the surrounding Christian culture.33 • Expressions of religiosity, including the penances of German Pietists and even the actions and exhortations of Jewish martyrs, owe much to Christian models.34 • The use of mystical images, including nothing less than the prominence accorded to the feminine manifestation (the Shekhinah) of God himself, is a polemical response to Christian imagery in this case, the increasing role of Mary in Christian piety.35

Many more examples can be cited, and those that appear persuasive reinforce the clear-cut evidence provided by the overt polemical, liturgical, and legal works that engage the challenge of the Christian world directly. None of these manifestations of complexity – and even attraction – should obscure the fact that the norm remained one in which Christians were seen as persecutors, and Christianity as ‘avodah zarah. This norm was reinforced as anti-Jewish measures increased, chimerical accusations multiplied, and eruptions of violence intensified. A bedrock symbol of Christendom was the biblical Esau, who lived by the sword, pursued only physical pleasures, and sought to kill his brother Jacob. This perception grew out of the rabbinic characterization of Rome as Edom/Esau, followed by the Christianization of the Empire. On an even deeper theological level, Rome–Christendom was seen as the fourth kingdom of Daniel’s eschatological vision, a kingdom destined to be destroyed as the end of history is ushered in. It is a matter of no small interest that 32

33

34

35

Israel Jacob Yuval, Two Nations in your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. B. Harshav and J. Chipman (Berkeley, 2006); Ivan Marcus, Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe (New Haven, 1996); Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton, 2004). Baumgarten, Mothers and Children; Avraham Grossman, Hasidot u Moredot: Nashim Yehudiyot be Eropah hi Yemei ha Beinayim (Jerusalem, 2001) (abridged English transla tion: Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe [Waltham, 2004]). Talya Fishman, “The Penitential System of Hasidei Ashkenaz and the Problem of Cultural Boundaries,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 8 (1999), 201 29; Robert Chazan, European Jewry and the First Crusade (Berkeley, 1987), as well as his later works on this subject. Arthur Green, “Shekhinah, the Virgin Mary, and the Song of Songs: Reflections on a Kabbalistic Symbol in Its Historical Context,” AJS Review 26 (2002), 1 52; Peter Schafer, Mirror of His Beauty: Feminine Images of God from the Bible to the Early Kabbalah (Princeton, 2002), 118 72, esp. 169 72.

mutual perceptions and attitudes 73 Christians reciprocated this typology, so that Esau, as the older brother, represented the Synagogue, and the younger Jacob embodied the Church.36 Since God told Rebecca that the elder would serve the younger, this identification led to the conclusion that Jews must not exercise any authority over Christians. While this rule was often honored more in the breach than in the observance, observance was by no means unknown. Jews could be excluded from positions of even marginal power, to the point where the employment of Christian domestics, let alone the exercise of authority on a broader scale, could occasionally be met with opposition. The destruction of the fourth kingdom poses the question of the ultimate destiny of Christians. We have already noted that, in medieval Christian theology, individual Jews, like all non-believers, were condemned to damnation. In accordance with Romans 11:25–6, the remnant of the Jewish collective that will survive at the culmination of the eschatological scenario will recognize the truth of Christianity and be saved. The corresponding Jewish perceptions of the fate of Christians were considerably more complex. On the individual level, Judaism left open a path for what Christians called salvation and Jews described as a portion in the world to come, even for those who did not embrace Judaism in its fullness. This path was the observance of the seven laws that, according to rabbinic tradition, were revealed by God to Noah and bind all his descendants. Maimonides restricted this opportunity by insisting that gentiles must accept these laws as revelation (in his formulation, to Moses) in order to benefit from their salvific value. Much of the Noahide covenant consists of ethical norms that would be imposed at least in their broad outlines by any civilized society, but the exception most relevant to Christianity is the prohibition against ‘avodah zarah. We have already seen that, with the notable exception of ha-Meiri, medieval Jews took for granted that Christians transgressed this norm. It follows that Christians would not have a portion in the world to come. This question was raised explicitly in the fraught context of the Paris disputation. Can we, asked the Christian participants, achieve a portion in the world to come through our faith? In an awkward exchange, R. Yehiel made reference to the Noahide covenant and more or less allowed ˙the Christian participants to conclude that Judaism affirms their entry into the world to come.37 While a careful reading of the tenor of the passage strongly suggests that R. Yehiel did not share this position, the question ˙ 36

37

Gerson D. Cohen, “Esau as Symbol in Early Medieval Thought,” in A. Altmann, ed., Jewish Medieval and Renaissance Studies (Cambridge, MA, 1967), 19 48. Vikuah Rabenu Yehiel mi Paris, ed. Reuven Margaliyot (Lvov, [1868]), 22 3; John Friedman, Jean Connell Huff, and Robert Chazan, The Trial of the Talmud:

74 the middle ages: the christian world itself reflects the degree to which the dynamics of intergroup relations can be affected by what the Other believes about one’s chances of salvation. And so we turn to the destiny of the Christian collective at the end of days. Here the issue of ‘avodah zarah mingled with another, no less critical, concern – to wit, Christendom’s unrelenting persecution of the Jewish people. (This consideration is, of course, not entirely irrelevant to discussions of the posthumous punishment awaiting individual Christians as well.) Let us begin with the obvious. Despite the impression that might be created by Micah 4:5 (“All peoples may walk each in the name of his god, but we will walk in the name of the Lord our God forever and ever”), medieval Jews, like medieval Christians, could not imagine a messianic era with significant religious diversity. At the end of days, the truth will be known, and the bearers of false religions will recognize their error. The question is which, and how many, adherents of such religions will survive to acknowledge the true faith. Notwithstanding several isolated passages in Ashkenazic works, Jews did not envision the utter destruction of the nations of the world. Some, however, in both Ashkenaz and Sepharad, did expect Christendom to be wiped out. The reason usually provided was not the persecution of the Jewish people but the sin of ‘avodah zarah. Nonetheless, when R. Isaac Abravanel insisted on this point, while simultaneously affirming that pagan nations will survive to recognize the God of Israel, the purely theological explanation that he formulated to account for this distinction is less than compelling. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that his affirmation of the ultimate destruction of the collective that expelled him from Spain and inflicted untold anguish upon his people was not rooted in theology alone. At the same time, although most Jews – once again in both Ashkenaz and Sepharad – expected widespread eschatological destruction of the enemies of Israel, as God would avenge the blood of his people, they did not anticipate total destruction even within the ranks of Christendom. The vision of universal recognition of the true God appears in standard prayers inherited from late Antiquity, and medieval Jews provided further elaboration. Thus, an Ashkenazic hymn recited on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and arranged according to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, provided twenty-two expressions of this vision with repeated reference to all the nations of the world. With some exceptions, even Jews who spoke most positively about the embrace of the God of Israel by all of humanity did not envision the complete eradication of national distinctions. The nations of the world would serve the people of Paris, 1240, Hebrew texts translated by John Friedman, Latin texts translated by Jean Connell Hoff, historical essay by Robert Chazan (Toronto, 2012), 156.

mutual perceptions and attitudes 75 Israel, whose religious superiority would now be translated into political as well as spiritual dominance.38 Eschatological expectations and perceptions rooted in faith could not be tested before the end of history; nonetheless, they mattered profoundly even in the real world. For the dominant culture, images of the Other could be and often were translated into policy and practice; it is not by choice but by necessity that this chapter has frequently moved, however fleetingly, from the world of ideas to that of actions and events. But even for a group bereft of power, perceptions of the Other could and did affect real life, not only by determining legal and cultural norms but by providing the psychological framework in which the identity of a downtrodden people could be preserved and nurtured in the face of the most severe adversity. 38

See Berger, Persecution, Polemic and Dialogue, 117 38.

chapter 4

BYZANTIUM nicholas de lange

The Byzantine Empire, over the nine centuries that are the object of our attention, is something of a moving target: its frontiers changed continually and radically. We shall therefore focus on a more coherent subject, namely Greek-speaking Jewry. The criterion of language conveniently defines a geographically widespread population that could be deeply divided religiously or politically, but that nevertheless displays considerable cultural uniformity, and whose personal and communal links transcended political borders. Certain regions require particular comment. The eastern provinces of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt were lost to the Arabs in the 630s and disappear from our canvas thereafter, since there is little that can be said for certain about Greek-speaking Jewish communities here, although we should note that Genizah documents testify to the presence of such Jews in Egypt, particularly during the Middle Ages. In Italy, the Greek-speaking Jewish presence in our period is essentially confined to the south of the peninsula and to Sicily. The latter was effectively lost to the Arabs by the beginning of the tenth century, while the former passed under Norman rule in the following century. The Fourth Crusade culminated in 1204 with the capture of Constantinople by the Latin Christians and the long-term establishment of Latin rule in various territories. The Greek-speaking Jewish communities under Latin rule continue to be part of our story. Byzantine Jewry has been studied less than other medieval Jewries for two main reasons: general prejudices that have affected the study of Byzantine and Jewish history in general, and the lack of geographical and political coherence that has already been mentioned.1 The formation of a national identity in the various countries concerned has impeded the study of minorities; among Jewish historians, a tendency to concentrate on the later Spanish-speaking Jewish population has also deflected attention 1

See N. de Lange, “Qui a tué les Juifs de Byzance?” in D. Tollet, ed., Politique et religion dans le Judaïsme antique et médiéval (Paris, 1989), 327 33. An exception to the general remarks that follow is Byzantine Italy.

76

byzantium 77 away from the Byzantine period. The few works of Byzantine Jewish history have mostly been written by Jewish historians from elsewhere. The outlines can be rapidly traced. The first book-length work on Byzantine Jewry was Samuel Krauss’s Studien zur byzantinisch-jüdischen Geschichte.2 It remains the starting-point for research in this area, even though much new evidence has come to light since Krauss wrote. Joshua Starr’s Jews in the Byzantine Empire consists of two parts, a synthetic account and a source book comprising English translations, notes, and bibliographical references.3 The same format was adopted more recently by Steven Bowman for his Jews of Byzantium, which sets out to extend Starr’s pioneering work to the period after the Latin conquest of Constantinople.4 Two books on the subject appeared in the intervening years. Zvi Ankori’s Karaites in Byzantium, while ostensibly devoted to the Karaites, deals compendiously with the whole of Byzantine Jewry in the eleventh century, and makes use of a far wider range of source materials than Starr did.5 Andrew Sharf’s Byzantine Jewry is a serviceable narrative with a substantial bibliography.6 David Jacoby, in a long series of magisterial studies, has placed the study of Byzantine Jewry on a new footing: most of these have been collected together in the volumes of his collected articles.7 Joshua Holo’s Byzantine Jewry in the Mediterranean Economy embraces many aspects of Jewish life in the empire beyond the narrowly economical, from the seventh to the twelfth centuries.8 Finally, a 1,000-page collective volume entitled Jews in Byzantium brings together thirty-five essays on different aspects of the subject.9 SOURCES FOR BYZANTINE JEWISH HISTORY

Several types of materials that are essential for the writing of Byzantine history in general offer little or nothing for the history of the Jews. We have no Jewish coins or seals; leaving aside the earliest period, there are no excavated synagogues or other Jewish buildings, no Jewish iconography, and very few inscriptions (the great majority being from Italy); and there is 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9

Samuel Krauss, Studien zur byzantinisch jüdischen Geschichte (Vienna, 1914). Joshua Starr, The Jews in the Byzantine Empire 641 1204 (Athens, 1939). Steven B. Bowman, The Jews of Byzantium, 1204 1453 (Tuscaloosa, 1985). Zvi Ankori, Karaites in Byzantium, the Formative Years, 970 1100 (New York, 1959). Andrew Sharf, Byzantine Jewry from Justinian to the Fourth Crusade (London, 1971). Especially D. Jacoby, Byzantium, Latin Romania and the Mediterranean (Aldershot, 2001). Joshua Holo, Byzantine Jewry in the Mediterranean Economy (Cambridge, 2009). Robert Bonfil, Oded Irshai, Guy G. Stroumsa, and Rina Talgam, eds., Jews in Byzantium: Dialectics of Minority and Majority Cultures (Leiden, 2012).

78 the middle ages: the christian world almost nothing in the way of ritual objects, charms and amulets, jewellery, or domestic items with a demonstrable Jewish origin. The reasons for this lacuna have not been sufficiently explored. Given the dearth of other types of Jewish realia, heightened importance attaches to the one type of artefact that does survive in reasonable quantities, namely manuscripts. The precise number of Byzantine Hebrew manuscripts that survive in whole or part is not known, because specialists have only recently begun to develop objective criteria for identifying a manuscript as Byzantine. It has been estimated that about 10 percent of all medieval Hebrew manuscripts are Byzantine,10 and if this estimate is correct there could be as many as 10,000 Byzantine manuscripts and fragments in all. Dated and localized manuscripts from Byzantium begin in the twelfth century; they are rare before the beginning of the fourteenth century, but become increasingly common thereafter. These manuscripts are potentially an extremely rich source of knowledge about Byzantine Jewish life, both as physical objects and for the written texts and annotations they carry. No Byzantine Jewish archives have been preserved, and only in the materials recovered from the Cairo Genizah do we have much in the way of personal or family documents, such as deeds of marriage or divorce, wills or genealogies. It is impossible to be certain whether or not the Byzantine written texts (documents, prayer-books, and scholarly texts) recovered from the Cairo Genizah represent the remains of one or more personal archives (we seem at least to have copies of part of the personal correspondence of one of the foremost Byzantine Karaite scholars, Tobias ben Moses11). Genizah documents began to be published in the 1890s, and some were included in Jacob Mann’s Texts and Studies in Jewish History and Literature.12 A number of documents specifically referring to Byzantium were listed in Starr’s Jews in the Byzantine Empire; others have been identified and published more recently.13 Genizah documents, including 10

11

12

13

Malachi Beit Arié, “The Codicological Data base of the Hebrew Palaeography Project: A Tool for Localising and Dating Hebrew Medieval Manuscripts,” in D. Rowland Smith and P. S. Salinger, eds., Hebrew Studies (London, 1991), 165 97, esp. 169. See Nicholas de Lange, “Byzantium in the Cairo Genizah,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 16 (1992), 34 47, and further references there. Jacob Mann, Texts and Studies in Jewish History and Literature, 2 vols. (Cincinnati, 1931, and Philadelphia, 1935). See S. Shaked, A Tentative Bibliography of Geniza Documents (Paris, 1964), 155; N. R. M. de Lange, “Greek and Byzantine Fragments in the Cairo Genizah,” Bulletin of Judaeo Greek Studies 5 (1989), 13 17; Nicholas de Lange, Greek Jewish Texts from the Cairo Genizah (Tübingen, 1996); J. Niehoff Panagiotidis, “Byzantinische Lebenswelt und rabbinische Hermeneutik: Die griechischen Juden in der Kairoer Genizah,”

byzantium 79 some relating to Byzantium, form the basis for S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society.14 However, as David Jacoby has written, “a comprehensive list of Genizah material bearing on Byzantium is highly desirable.”15 The chance survival of a family chronicle compiled in the mid eleventh century by Ahimaas of Oria (in southern Italy), and extending back some 200 years, has shed considerable light on Jewish life in Byzantine south Italy,16 but such documents are very rare. A good deal of information about individuals and about social and economic history can be gleaned from legal documents, such as responsa17 and local bylaws (takkanot).18 The one Hebrew source that has been systematically exploited is the twelfth-century travelogue of Benjamin of Tudela, which lists the names of the leaders of each Jewish community visited and gives its size, sometimes adding further information. Translations of the section on Byzantium are given by Starr, Sharf, and Bowman, but a new edition is long overdue.19 A good deal of historical information comes to us from the abundant Hebrew prose and verse works written in Byzantium, some of which are discussed further below. Many such works remain unpublished. In some cases, because of the prevailing negative attitude to Byzantine Jewish culture, authors writing in Byzantium have been

14 15

16

17

18

19

Byzantion 74 (2004), 51 109; B. M. Outhwaite, “Byzantium and Byzantines in the Cairo Genizah: New and Old Sources,” in N. de Lange, J. G. Krivoruchko, and C. Boyd Taylor, eds., Jewish Reception of Greek Bible Versions: Studies in Their Use in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Tübingen, 2009), 182 220. S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 6 vols. (Berkeley, 1973 93). David Jacoby, “What Do We Learn about Byzantine Asia Minor from the Documents of the Cairo Genizah?” in N. Oikonomides and S. Vryonis, eds., I Vizantini Mikra Asia (Athens, 1998), 83 95, esp. 95. Italian translation, with introduction, notes, and bibliography, by Cesare Colafemmina, Sefer Yuhasin: libro delle discendenze. Vicende di una famiglia ebraica di Oria nei secoli IX XI (Cassano delle Murge, 2001). See also R. Bonfil, History and Folklore in a Medieval Jewish Chronicle (Leiden, 2009). Some of these are cited in Starr, Jews in the Byzantine Empire, and Bowman, The Jews of Byzantium; others remain to be collected. See, particularly, the collection of Cretan takkanot, collected originally by Elia Kapsali in the early sixteenth century and edited by E. S. Artom and M. D. Cassuto, in their Statuta Judaeorum Candidae eorumque memorabilia (Jerusalem, 1943). See David Jacoby, “Benjamin of Tudela in Byzantium,” Palaeoslavica 10 (2002), 180 5; and Jacoby, “Benjamin of Tudela and his ‘Book of Travels,’” in K. Herbers and F. Schmieder, eds., Venezia incrocio di culture. Percezioni di viaggiatori europei e non europei a confronto (Rome, 2008), 135 64.

80 the middle ages: the christian world wrongly located elsewhere; no doubt further examples of this kind await discovery.20 Finally, there are non-Jewish written sources in Greek and other languages that shed light on the Jewish minority. Again, many of these are cited by Starr and Bowman, but a good deal of further work could be done. The same applies to Christian art as a source for Jewish history. DEMOGRAPHY AND SETTLEMENT

No scientific study exists of the actual presence of the Jews in the empire, and occasional estimates of population figures (mainly based on Benjamin of Tudela) are largely subjective and vary considerably.21 It is questionable, given the nature of the evidence, whether any reliable statistics will ever be achieved. By no stretch of the imagination can the total proportion of the Jews in the empire’s population at any time be placed at more than a tiny number. By putting together information from Benjamin of Tudela and other Jewish writings, as well as epigraphical data and references in Christian documentary and literary sources, we may form quite a detailed picture of the distribution of Jewish communities throughout the empire. To summarize, these communities were very widely distributed in different types of locations. They were typically located in towns, although rural settlements are not unknown.22 The towns in question tend to have some economic importance, and are linked together by overland or maritime trade routes. The Jewish presence was generally not stable, but fluctuated with the waxing and waning importance of the town owing to political and other factors. Our survey, region by region, begins in the metropolis and proceeds in a clockwise direction.23

20

21

22

23

For an exposition of this problem with some examples, see Nicholas de Lange, “Hebrew Scholarship in Byzantium,” in N. de Lange, ed., Hebrew Scholarship and the Medieval World (Cambridge, 2001), 23 37. See the summary in Holo, Byzantine Jewry, 28 30. Holo’s overall estimate is about 1 per 1,000 of the total population. See the remarks of David Jacoby, “The Jewish Communities of the Byzantine World from the Tenth to the Mid Fifteenth Century: Some Aspects of their Evolution,” in de Lange et al., eds., Jewish Reception of Greek Bible Versions, 157 81, esp. 160. On the basis of toponyms, Jacoby suggests that some villages in the Aegean islands may have been mainly or entirely inhabited by Jews. Fully documented maps of the Jewish presence in Byzantium can be found on line at byzantinejewry.net.

byzantium 81 Constantinople can be assumed to have had a substantial Jewish presence throughout most, if not all, of its history as the capital of the Byzantine Empire, but it has to be said that this presence is poorly documented. We learn, from Christian sources, of occasional violence and repression, including expulsions and decrees of imposed baptism, but the shortage of general information makes it hard for us to put such negative reports into perspective. Anna Comnena, in her Alexiad (mid twelfth century), rarely mentions Jews, yet her contemporary Benjamin of Tudela states that there were about 2,500 Jews in the capital, of whom 500 were Karaites. This is among the largest figures he gives for the Jewish presence in any city. They lived in their own quarter, in the suburb of Pera, across the Golden Horn from the city; he adds the detail that the Rabbanites and Karaites were divided by a wall. The existence of this Jewish quarter is attested from the eleventh century; others had preceded it.24 This was a time of rapid commercial expansion for the city, which attracted Jewish immigrants from the east, but we know little about the trading activities of the Jews. The quarter was burnt down by the Latins during fighting in 1203, and we hear little or nothing about Jews in the city under Latin rule, from 1204 to 1261. Subsequently, a Jewish presence was restored: in fact, there were three separate Jewish communities – one situated in the walled-off Jewish quarter at Vlanga, near the southern shore of the city, under the rule of the Byzantine emperor; and two more located across the Golden Horn in the Venetian and Genoese quarters, respectively. The latter communities enjoyed the benefits of what has been termed “virtual extraterritorial status”;25 all three had close personal and commercial relations with each other. Jews continued to arrive in the capital, from Greek-speaking areas such as Crete and also from beyond the Greek-speaking world. Anatolia or Asia Minor, a vast peninsula separated from the capital by a narrow waterway (the Bosporos) had a substantial and widespread Greekspeaking Jewish population in earlier times, as evinced primarily by the epigraphic record.26 What became of this presence during our period is a mystery. Surveys conducted by Abraham Galanté in 1904 and again in 1937 produced very few medieval inscriptions.27 A few more have been discovered since. Documentary and literary sources add a little more 24

25 26 27

David Jacoby, “Les Quartiers juifs de Constantinople à l’époque byzantine,” Byzantion 37 (1967), 167 227, reprinted in his Société et démographie à Byzance et en Romanie latine (London, 1975). Jacoby, “Jewish Communities of the Byzantine World,” 167. W. Ameling, ed., Inscriptiones judaicae orientis, vol. II: Kleinasien (Tübingen, 2004). A. Galanté, Histoire des juifs d’Anatolie, 2 vols. (Istanbul, 1939).

82 the middle ages: the christian world information. The once prosperous and stable region was much fought over, and experienced various movements of population. Raids by Arabs and, from the mid eleventh century, Turks menaced Byzantine rule in the east, and after the decisive battle of Manzikert (1071), it was limited to the coastal regions and constantly under pressure. In the course of the fourteenth century, the Byzantines were gradually eliminated from their last possessions. Nevertheless, there are traces of a Greek-speaking Jewish presence well into the Middle Ages. Ancient Greek Jewish tombstones sometimes have graffiti added to them in Hebrew, perhaps suggesting visits from descendants after the dominance of Hebrew in Jewish education.28 A marriage deed written in 1022 at Mastaura, in the Meander Valley in Lydia, is drawn up in Hebrew and Aramaic but names various items of the bride’s trousseau in Greek; the bride has a Greek name (Evdokia) and both her father and bridegroom have typically Byzantine Hebrew names (Caleb and Namer, respectively).29 On the other hand, it is thought that a Karaite community in Attaleia (Antalya) on the southern coast, documented in 1028, is of immigrant origin, and we know of an Egyptian Jew who settled in eastern Asia Minor some forty years later. After Manzikert, he fled westward, settling ultimately in Salonika. This westward migration can be seen as not untypical at this time.30 In the twelfth century, Benjamin of Tudela sailed down the Aegean coast and did not venture inland; we have references elsewhere to Jewish communities in a few localities, such as Attaleia, Seleukeia (Silifke) (a prosperous community including some immigrants from Egypt), and Chonai (whose community was expelled by 1150). There are indications that Jewish life continued thereafter in various parts of Asia Minor, but they are vague and insubstantial. A Jewish presence is attested in the larger islands off the Aegean coast of Asia Minor. Benjamin mentions several communities on Mytilene, and several hundred Jews in each of Chios, Samos, and Rhodes. These figures may reflect immigration from Asia Minor, particularly after Manzikert.31 28

29 30 31

For examples of graffiti, see Ameling, ed., Inscriptiones, nos. 56, 160, 184. A Greek inscription now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, has a Hebrew graffito that seems to read “N prayed here. Shalom!” (W. Ameling, SCI 22 [2003], 241 55). On Hebrew education, see N. de Lange, “A Thousand Years of Hebrew in Byzantium,” in W. Horbury, ed., Hebrew Study from Ezra to Ben Yehuda (Edinburgh, 1999), 147 61; de Lange, “Jewish Education in the Byzantine Empire in the Twelfth Century,” in G. Abramson and T. Parfitt, eds., Jewish Education and Learning (Chur, Switzerland, 1994), 115 28. De Lange, Greek Jewish Texts, no 1. Jacoby, “Jewish Communities of the Byzantine World,” 165 6. Demetres Letsios, “Jewish Communities in the Aegean during the Middle Ages,” in Julian Chrysostomides, Charalambos Dendrinos, and Jonathan Harris, eds., The Greek Islands and the Sea (Camberley, 2004), 109 30; Philip D. Argenti, The Religious

byzantium 83 The island of Cyprus, after being fought over by Byzantines and Arabs, was under Byzantine rule from 965 until 1191, when it passed under Latin control. In this period of relative prosperity, we have some evidence of a Jewish presence. Benjamin of Tudela mentions that there were Rabbanites and Karaites there, and also another sect whom he calls “Epicureans.”32 There was a Jewish presence on Crete before the Venetian takeover following the Fourth Crusade, but not much is known about it. Thereafter, it gradually became by far the best-documented Jewry of the area, thanks to the preservation of abundant Venetian archives as well as internal Jewish regulations and a number of inscriptions.33 Jewish life was mainly concentrated in the capital city of Candia (modern Heraklion), with its four synagogues, but there were communities also in Rethymno and Canea (Hania) and in various scattered settlements around the island. Although no longer ruled from Constantinople, the Cretan Jews continued to use the Greek language, and they maintained contacts with local Greek as well as Latin Christians, and with Jews in the Byzantine empire as well as in the other Latin-ruled territories, and indeed they were part of a trading network that extended from Venice to Egypt.34 Their culture came to be progressively influenced by that of other parts of the world, notably Renaissance Italy, as prosperous Candiote Jews sent their sons there to be educated.35 The names of the Cretan Jews indicate the diversity of their origins, which ranged as far afield as Spain and Ashkenaz, Syria and Palestine. Very little is known about Jewish life in the Morea (Peloponnesos) before the Latin conquest at the beginning of the thirteenth century.

32 33

34

35

Minorities of Chios: Jews and Roman Catholics (Cambridge, 1970), 398 418; N. Oikonomides, “The Jews of Chios (1049): A Group of Excusati,” in B. Arbel, ed., Intercultural Contacts in the Medieval Mediterranean: Studies in Honour of David Jacoby (London, 1996) (= Mediterranean Historical Review, 10, 1 2 [1995]), 218 25. Starr, Jews in the Byzantine Empire, 41 2; Ankori, Karaites in Byzantium, 372ff. Zvi Ankori, “Jews and the Jewish Community in the History of Medieval Crete,” in Proceedings of the Second International Congress of Cretan Studies, vol. III (Athens, 1968), 312 67; Zvi Ankori, “The Living and the Dead: The Story of Hebrew Inscriptions in Crete,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Reseaarch (PAAJR) 39 40 (1970 1), 1 100; Judith Humphrey, “Six Hebrew Epitaphs from Venetian Candia,” BJGS 14 (Summer 1994), 38 44; Nicholas de Lange, “Hebrew Inscriptions in the Etz Hayyim Synagogue, Chania,” BJGS 25 (Winter 1999/2000), 27 39. D. Jacoby, “The Jews in Byzantium and the Eastern Mediterranean: Economic Activities from the Thirteenth to the Mid Fifteenth Century,” in M. Toch and E. Müller Luckner, eds., Wirtschaftsgeschichte der mittelalterlichen Juden (Munich, 2008), 25 48. Aleida Paudice, Between Several Worlds: The Life and Writings of Elia Capsali (Leiden, 2010).

84 the middle ages: the christian world Benjamin, who sailed down the Gulf of Patras and did not venture inland, mentions only 50 Jews in Patras and 300 in Corinth, ‘the capital’ (of the theme of Peloponnesos). Corinth remained an important port, and had a flourishing silk industry. An undated Hebrew tombstone of a dyer may indicate a Jewish connection with that activity.36 It was found, as were other Hebrew inscriptions, in the center of the town. Under Latin rule, the importance of Corinth declined. The Jewish presence in Patras is documented through the period of Latin rule,37 although no physical remains of it have been found there. The capital of the Frankish principality of Achaea was Andravida, a previously insignificant town in the plain of Elis. The presence of a Jewish community here is attested by a Genizah document datable to 1257.38 The main port of the principality, from its foundation in the mid thirteenth century, was Clarence (or Glarentza); hardly anything is known of its Jewish population, which is said to have been carried off by a Catalan pirate in 1430.39 The Byzantines slowly recovered the Morea, and from 1349 to 1460 maintained an autonomous despotate, whose fortress capital, Mistra, was the home of a flourishing cultural life. Its Jewish community is very poorly documented.40 Studies of Byzantine Jewish culture tended to ascribe an exaggerated importance to Italy, largely on the strength of the accidental preservation of literary and epigraphic sources.41 The family history known as the Chronicle of Ahimaas or Sefer Yuhasin is a particularly valuable source.42 Byzantium lost ˙ to the Lombards in the mid eighth century, and Sicily Ravenna in the northeast was lost to the Arabs in the course of the following two centuries. When we think of Byzantine Italy, we generally have in mind the south of the peninsula (Apulia, Basilicata, Calabria), and towns such as Bari, Oria, Taranto, or Rossano. This area was brought under Norman control in the early eleventh century, and after that time it disappears from the map of Byzantine Judaism.43 The region of Epiros had fluid borders, a checkered history, and a very mixed population. After the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204, an 36 37 40 41

42 43

David Jacoby, “Silk in Western Byzantium,” BZ 84/5 (1991/2), 455 and n. 14. Bowman, The Jews of Byzantium, 86 7. 38 Ibid., 80, 224. 39 Ibid., 85 6, 308. Ibid., 81 4. Nicholas de Lange, “Hebrew Scholarship in Byzantium,” in De Lange, ed., Hebrew Scholarship and the Medieval World (Cambridge, 2001), 23 37; Cesare Colafemmina, “Hebrew Inscriptions of the Early Medieval Period in Southern Italy,” in B. D. Cooperman and B. Garvin, eds., The Jews of Italy: Memory and Identity (Bethesda, MD, 2000), 65 81. Colafemmina, Sefer Yuhasin. R. Bonfil, “Tra due mondi. Prospettive di ricerca sulla storia culturale degli Ebrei dell’Italia meridionale nell’alto Medioevo,” in Italia Judaica Atti del I Convegno Internazionale, Bari, 18 22 maggio 1981 (Rome, 1983), 135 58; Ewald Kislinger, “Juden im byzantinischen Sicilien,” in Nicolò Bucaria, Michele Luzzati, and Angela Tarantino, eds., Ebrei e Sicilia (Palermo, 2002), 59 68; Vera von Falkenhausen, “The Jews in

byzantium 85 independent Greek state (later called the Despotate of Epiros) was set up; later it underwent periods of Italian and Serbian rule. The Adriatic port of Dyrrachion was the starting point of an important overland road (the former Via Egnatia), running to Salonika and eventually to Constantinople. A Jewish presence is documented from the thirteenth century on. In Ioannina, documents from the early fourteenth century refer to recent immigrants as well as a longer-established presence. A Jewish community in Arta, a commercial and administrative center, has been posited.44 Ioannina was taken by the Ottomans in 1430, and Arta in 1449. Benjamin found a substantial community at Naupaktos on the north coast of the Gulf of Corinth. The eastern part of central Greece, generally referred to as Hellas, included, notably, Boeotia, whose capital, Thebes, was an important center of silk production in the twelfth century, when Benjamin of Tudela visited it. He calls it a large city, with about 2,000 Jews (an extraordinarily high figure, four times the number he gives for Salonika): “They are the most skilled craftsmen in silk and purple cloth throughout Greece.” After the Latin conquest of 1204, it was held by a succession of western rulers, notably the Catalans and Florentines: a continuing Jewish presence is documented by some inscriptions, but has left too few traces for us to assess its size or importance. Euripos (called Negroponte by westerners) on the island of Euboea was of commercial and strategic importance as it controlled the narrow straits dividing the island from the mainland, on the main sea route between Venice and Constantinople. It came under Venetian rule in 1204, and fell to the Turks in 1470. According to Benjamin, in the 1160s there were 200 Jews living there. Under the Venetians, a few wealthy Jews gained Venetian citizenship, but the majority were subject to discriminatory laws, as in the other Venetian possessions. The Jews lived at first outside the walled town, but fear of Genoese or Turkish attacks led them to move inside the walls in the mid fourteenth century, where they were later segregated in their own quarter, in the southern part of the town.45 Some Hebrew inscriptions from that period survive. In Thessaly, Benjamin mentions four places, of which one, Gardiki, was a ruin with only a few inhabitants. Halmyros, on the Pagasitic Gulf south

44 45

Byzantine South Italy,” in Bonfil et al., eds., Jews in Byzantium, 271 96; Linda Safran, The Medieval Salento: Art and Identity in Southern Italy (Philadelphia, 2014). Bowman, The Jews of Byzantium, 75. David Jacoby, “La Consolidation de la domination de Venise dans la ville de Négrepont (1205 1390). Un aspect de sa politique coloniale,” in C. A. Maltezou and P. Schreiner, eds., Bisanzio e il mondo franco greco (XIII XV secolo) (Venice, 2002), 152 87, esp. 178 80.

86 the middle ages: the christian world of the modern town of Volos, was an important port that became in the twelfth century a busy entrepôt for Italian traders from Venice, Genoa, and Pisa. Benjamin found a substantial presence of 400 Jews there, and there are traces of a Jewish community in the following century. The other, smaller communities he mentions were at Lamia and Besaina. A Jewish presence in Trikkala is likely, though not documented. Macedonia and Thrace include the Jewish communities along the trade route linking Dyrrachion to Constantinople (Ohrid, Pelagonia [Bitola], Salonika, Serres, Selymbria), as well as other locally important centers such as Kastoria, Drama, Didymoteichon, and Adrianople. Salonika, the second city of the empire and an important trading station, had a Jewish community that probably dated back to preByzantine times. It is mentioned in sources from the early eleventh century on, and was clearly numerous and locally significant at times.46 As in Constantinople, the Jews seem to have inhabited a separate quarter. Benjamin says there were 500 Jews living there, and that they were engaged in silk manufacture. After a period of Latin rule following the Fourth Crusade, the city was repeatedly fought over in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, by rival Greeks, Catalans, Serbs, and Turks. Worsening economic conditions led to emigration, particularly after the Venetian takeover of the city in 1423. It fell definitively to the Ottoman Turks in 1430. There are particular aspects of this survey of the Jewish population that would repay closer study, such as the existence of separate Jewish quarters,47 or the origins of immigrants and visitors.48 Situated as it was in the center of the medieval Jewish world and at the crossroads of major trade routes, Byzantium received Jewish travelers and settlers from every direction, while, conversely, Byzantine Jews appear in other parts of the world as traders, students, or captives. This openness has a bearing on the character of Byzantine Jewish economic and cultural life.49 We can see the latter particularly in the movement of scribes and manuscripts: works

46

47

48

49

David Jacoby, “Foreigners and the Urban Economy in Thessalonike, ca. 1150 ca. 1450,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 57 (2003), 85 132, esp. 124 9. David Jacoby, “Les Juifs de Byzance: une communauté marginalisée,” in Praktika Imeridhas ‘I perithoriaki sto vizantio’ (Athens 1993), 103 54, esp. 129 33; Jacoby, “Les Quartiers juifs de Constantinople”; Jacoby, “The Jewish Community of Constantinople from the Komnenan to the Palaiologan Period,” Vizantijskij Vremennik 55, 2 (1998), 31 40, reprinted in Jacoby’s Byzantium, Latin Romania and the Mediterranean. David Jacoby, “The Jews of Constantinople and their Demographic Hinterland,” in Cyril Mango and Gilbert Dagron, eds., Constantinople and its Hinterland (Aldershot, 1995), 221 32. Holo, Byzantine Jewry, 24 77.

byzantium 87 written elsewhere are soon copied or read in Byzantium, and Byzantine Jewish writings make an impact in other places. Despite the presence of many immigrants, and hence of a variety of languages, the spoken language of the Jews everywhere was Greek; this situation was not to change until the arrival of large numbers of Spanishspeakers from the end of the fifteenth century. As for the written culture, it was firmly rooted in Hebrew from at least the tenth century. We do not have enough information from the preceding centuries to trace the history of the introduction of Hebrew.50 JEWS AND BYZANTINES

The Byzantine Jews were distinguished within the Jewish world of their day particularly by this spoken Greek language. Even after they abandoned Greek as their language of prayer and Bible study, they continued to use Greek Bible translations, and they wrote a Hebrew that was influenced by Greek and peppered with Greek words.51 Even Judah Hadassi, a Karaite who criticized the Byzantine Rabbanites for using Greek words in their legal documents, uses many Greek expressions in his Eshkol ha-Kofer. Greek-speaking Jews proudly bore the sobriquet “Yevani” (“Greek”), even if they were not living under Byzantine rule. Thus, Modecai Khomatiano (1402–82), who lived for much of his active life under Ottoman rule, describes himself as ha-Qostandini ha-Yevani (“the Constantinopolitan, the Greek”).52 Yet they referred to their spoken language in Hebrew as “Roman speech” (leshon Romi). The Jews of the empire designated themselves collectively as “the communities of Romania,” and their prayer-book is known as Mahzor Romania.53 ˙ 50

51

52

53

Nicholas de Lange, “The Hebrew Language in the European Diaspora,” in B. Isaac and A. Oppenheimer, eds., Studies on the Jewish Diaspora in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods (Tel Aviv, 1996), 111 37; de Lange, “A Thousand Years of Hebrew”; de Lange, “Jewish Use of Greek in the Middle Ages: Evidence from Passover Haggadoth from the Cairo Genizah,” Jewish Quarterly Review (JQR) 96 (2006), 490 7; Natalie Tchernetska, Judith Olszowy Schlanger, and Nicholas de Lange, “An Early Hebrew Greek Biblical Glossary from the Cairo Genizah,” Revue des Études Juives (REJ) 166 (2007), 91 128. Nicholas de Lange, “Hebraism and Hellenism: The Case of Byzantine Jewry,” Poetics Today 19 (1998), 129 45; de Lange, “Hebrew/Greek Manuscripts: Some Notes,” Journal of Jewish Studies 46 (1995), 262 70. J. C. Attias, Le Commentaire biblique: Mordekhai Komtino ou l’hermeneutique du dialogue (Paris, 1991), 21. Starr, Jews in the Byzantine Empire, 214, 227, 228, 241; Bowman, Jews of Byzantium, 211 16; J. Starr, Romania: The Jewries of the Levant after the Fourth Crusade (Paris, 1949); Leon J. Weinberger, Jewish Hymnography: A Literary History (London, 1998).

88

the middle ages: the christian world The Jews formed a distinct element, too, in the ethnically mixed Byzantine population.54 Their status was defined by their religion, and if they converted to Christianity they acquired that of their new community. While subject to the laws of the state, some of which applied to them specifically, they also lived according to their own laws and customs, and had their own judges and courts. They maintained their own educational institutions, and did not have access to those of the state. They were also excluded from the civil service and the army, and generally from occupations that might put them in a position of authority over Christians (although they could and did serve rulers and officials as interpreters and physicians). The legal rights of the Jews were enshrined in law and custom, although on occasion they were victims of arbitrary exactions and abuses of power. On a few occasions, the wholesale conversion of Jews to Christianity was decreed by emperors Heraklios (632), Leo III (721/2), Basil I (873/4), Leo VI (c.894), Romanos I (shortly before 932), and John Vatatzes (1254). The details, motives, and effects of these decrees are far from clear; they certainly did not result in the eradication of Judaism from the empire.55 The official Byzantine attitude to the Jews has its roots in the early days of the Byzantine state in late Antiquity, and it continued to be shaped by the theological hatred of Judaism that was characteristic of the Byzantine church. The language of Christian worship and preaching, in Christian literature, and even of the law court represented them as strangers, aliens, benighted adherents of superstitious and primitive beliefs, and enemies of Christ and his Church. Particularly striking is the wording of the oath to be taken by Jews involved in legal proceedings.56 Yet individual Jews might be spoken of and treated with respect, and the Jewish communities were generally well integrated into wider Byzantine society. Canon law sometimes asserts the rights of the Jews, particularly perhaps in the face of abuses by the state. Some Christian scholars were content to learn from Jews: we 54

55

56

Nicholas de Lange, “Hebrews, Greeks or Romans? Jewish Identity in Byzantium,” in Dion C. Smythe, ed., Strangers to Themselves: The Byzantine Outsider. Papers from the Thirty Second Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, March 1998 (Aldershot, 2000), 105 18. Paul Magdalino, “‘All Israel Will Be Saved?’ The Forced Baptism of the Jews and Imperial Eschatology,” in J. Tolan, N. de Lange, L. Foschia, and C. Nemo Pekelman, eds., Jews in Early Christian Law: Byzantium and the Latin West, 6th 11th Centuries (Turnhout, 2014), 231 42; Oscar Prieto Domínguez, “The Mass Conversion of Jews Decreed by Emperor Basil I in 873: Its Reflection in Contemporary Legal Codes and Its Underlying Reasons,” in Tolan et al., eds., Jews in Early Christian Law, 283 310. Amnon Linder, “The Jewry Oath in Christian Europe,” in Tolan et al., eds., Jews in Early Christian Law, 311 58.

byzantium 89 have Christian biblical manuscripts annotated with “Jewish” glosses, and the philosopher George Gemistos Plethon (1360–1452) learned from a Jewish teacher.57 There was thus a profound ambiguity in the treatment of the Jews in Byzantium: they were variously loathed, distrusted, execrated, despised, defended, and admired. Their life was generally stable but occasionally disrupted by political events or in local conflicts or manipulations. For their part, the Jews themselves mirrored this ambiguity in their attitude to the Byzantine state and church. In their prayers and hymns, they cursed the Christian state and prayed for its overthrow.58 Yet they acted as law-abiding subjects, and cheerfully put up with insults and humiliations. A Hebrew lament on the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453 uses biblical language to express profound grief and anguish.59 The economic life of Byzantine Jewry over a period of nine centuries cannot be dealt with in any detail here.60 Documentation is sparse, with the exception of Venetian Crete. Here a considerable production of and trade in kosher wine and cheese highlights the close links with the countryside that could be enjoyed even by a primarily urban population, and the way in which specifically Jewish concerns could dominate both local and long-distance trade, since Cretan produce was exported not only to Constantinople but extensively in the eastern Mediterranean.61 This, in turn, reminds us that Jews were involved in trade by sea as well as by land. The areas of production were situated on major maritime trading routes, linking Constantinople via the Black Sea to Crimea and Russia, and to the Caucasus and overland routes to the Far East, and via the Mediterranean to the Middle East, North Africa, Italy, and western Europe. Locally, surplus kosher produce, or produce unfit for use by Jews, was sold to gentiles, pointing to an interrelationship between internal Jewish trade and 57

58

59 60

61

Mariachiara Fincati, “Some Remarks on the Codex Ambrosianus,” in XIV Congress of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies, Helsinki, 2010 (Atlanta, 2013), 425 34; Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge, 2012), 33 4. Nicholas de Lange, “Jews and Christians in the Byzantine Empire: Problems and Prospects,” in Diana Wood, ed., Christianity and Judaism (Oxford, 1992), 15 32, esp. 27 9. Bowman, The Jews of Byzantium, 341 4. See Holo, Byzantine Jewry; Jacoby, “The Jews in Byzantium and the Eastern Mediterranean”; David Jacoby, “The Jews in the Byzantine Economy (Seventh to Mid Fifteenth Century),” in Bonfil et al., eds., Jews in Byzantium, 219 55. Benjamin Arbel, “The ‘Jewish wine’ of Crete,” in I. Anagnostakis, ed., Monemvasian Wine Monovas(i)a Malvasia (Athens, 2008), 81 8; Jacoby, “The Jews in Byzantium and the Eastern Mediterranean.”

90 the middle ages: the christian world involvement in the wider economy. The main Jewish contribution to the Byzantine economy was in the production of hides and leather and of silk and other textiles, and in the trade in these commodities.62 Jews were also involved in the spice trade and other forms of commerce. They made a contribution to the economy through taxation; there is disagreement about whether or not there were specific taxes levied on the Jews as a group.63 Generally speaking, the Jewish community was organized and united, even where there were local divisions, as in Constantinople, where imperial, Venetian, and Genoese Jews remained in close contact. In Candia – where, exceptionally, there were four congregations, each with its own synagogue – the leaders came together for certain purposes, including notably to promulgate local ordinances (takkanot) that were binding on the entire community.64 The glaring exception was the division between Rabbanites and Karaites.65 As we have seen, Benjamin of Tudela reports figures for the two communities separately, and even states that in Constantinople they were divided by a wall. Leading figures on both sides refused to recognize the authority of the religious leaders on the other side, and penned outspoken polemics against their beliefs and practices. On one occasion, the Karaites in Salonika persuaded the civil powers to impose a fine on the Rabbanites.66 No analogous case is recorded, however, and any communal taxes or fines levied on the Jewish community must have been paid by both groups acting in concert, which implies a degree of practical co-operation. At the end of our period, there are several examples of teachers accepting pupils from the other community.67 CULTURAL ACTIVITIES

Like their Christian counterparts, Byzantine Jews tended to value tradition over innovation; their strength was in faithful transmission and close study of classical texts, rather than original creativity. They play an important part in the textual transmission of classical rabbinic works, and have given us an impressive apparatus of glossaries, scholia, and commentaries. 62 64 65

66 67

Holo, Byzantine Jewry, 163 71. 63 Ibid., 131 46. Artom and Cassuto, eds., Statuta Judaeorum Candidae. Ankori, Karaites in Byzantium; Nicholas de Lange, “Can We Speak of Jewish Orthodoxy in Byzantium?” in A. Louth and A. Casiday, eds., Byzantine Orthodoxies. Papers from the Thirty Sixth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Durham, 23 25 March 2002 (Aldershot, 2006), 167 78. Holo, Byzantine Jewry, 146. Attias, Le Commentaire biblique, 41 89; Bowman, The Jews of Byzantium, 149.

byzantium 91 Learning was highly prized, and the Byzantine schools enjoyed a high reputation abroad.68 Byzantine students also studied in the rabbinic academies of the east and the west. The quality of the Hebrew education is evident in the widespread proficiency in the language evinced in texts ranging from merchants’ letters to complex poetic compositions.69 Scholars and professional scribes traveled widely in search of manuscripts to consult and copy, and there were clearly some large private libraries.70 Much of the literary production of Byzantine Jewry is lost. The extensive extant literature (only a little of which has been edited so far) covers a wide range of genres, which can only be briefly surveyed here.71 The interests of individual scholars could also be wide-ranging. Shemariah ben Elijah of Negroponte (b. c. 1260) claims authorship of translations of unspecified philosophical books, commentaries on most of the books of the Bible, and an annotated digest of the Talmud, written for his son. He is also known as the author of philosophical treatises and liturgical poems.72 His pupil Judah ibn Moskoni of Ohrid (b. 1328) traveled widely in search of manuscripts of the biblical commentaries and philosophical writings of Abraham ibn Ezra, and he also collected manuscripts of the historical work Sefer Yosippon, from which he prepared a critical edition.73 Bible study constituted the nucleus of Jewish education – particularly, but not exclusively, at the lower levels. Serious biblical scholarship was encouraged by continuing debates between Karaites and Rabbanites and between Jews and Christians. Surviving glossaries, grammar books, annotated Bibles, and Greek translations testify to the strength and range of this interest. The tradition of Greek translation and Greek glosses goes back to Antiquity: the distinctive style of Aquila’s translation is still evident in the twelfth century and later.74 To a Byzantine tradition of grammar with old Palestinian roots, presumably going back to the introduction of Hebrew 68

69 70

71

72

73 74

In a letter from the Cairo Genizah, an Iraqi Jew living in Egypt states that he is planning to emigrate to Byzantium because they have permanent academies there, presumably by contrast with the schools centered on individual teachers that he knew in Egypt: Nicholas de Lange, “Jewish Education in the Byzantine Empire,” 115 17; Jacoby, “The Jewish Communities,” 159. De Lange, “A Thousand Years of Hebrew”; de Lange, “Hebrew Scholarship.” Holo, Byzantine Jewry, 112 19; Bowman, The Jews of Byzantium, 129 70; Jacoby, “The Jewish Communities,” 158 9. Starr, Jews in the Byzantine Empire, 50 64; Bowman, The Jews of Byzantium, 129 70; de Lange, “Hebrew Scholarship.” Bowman, The Jews of Byzantium, 131 3, 255 62; Aaron Ahrend, ed., Rabbi Shemariah ben Eliahu ha Ikriti, Liber Elef ha Magen. Commentarius in partem aggadicam tractati Megilla [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 2003); Weinberger, Jewish Hymnography, 351 2. Bowman, The Jews of Byzantium, 133 7, 282 5. De Lange et al., eds., Jewish Reception of Greek Bible Versions.

92 the middle ages: the christian world teaching in the second half of the first millennium, Karaites added Hebrew translations or adaptations of the Arabic works of Abu al-Faraj Harun, and later absorbed grammatical theories developed in Spain.75 All this apparatus of biblical study fed into the production of commentaries on individual biblical books, groups of books, or the entire Bible.76 Rabbanite commentaries tend to cite traditions from the rabbinic literature. Karaite commentaries, on the other hand, are more concerned with the peshat, and tend to repeat comments found in the classical Karaite ˙ commentary literature in Arabic; in fact, the Hebrew language of the Karaite commentaries is marked by distinctive Arabisms.77 A leading figure of eleventh-century Byzantine Karaism, Tobias ben Moses, was a pupil of the Jerusalem Karaite scholars Yusuf al-Basir and (probably) Abu al-Faraj Harun, and drew freely on their work in his own commentaries. He is credited with responsibility for an ambitious project of translating Arabic works by Karaites into Hebrew.78 His massive exegetical compilation on Leviticus, entitled Otsar Nehmad, is, by his own account, largely translated ˙ commentaries of David ben Boaz and Yefet from Arabic and based on the ben ‘Eli. A little later, Jacob ben Reuben produced a commentary on the entire Bible, entitled Sefer ha-‘Osher, which is similarly based on the work of earlier commentators writing in Arabic. Aaron ben Joseph (c. 1250–1320) also draws heavily and avowedly on the earlier Karaite commentators, but he incorporates insights from Abraham ibn Ezra and other Rabbanite authors (even on occasion citing with approval the foundation stone of Rabbanism, the Mishnah). His work is followed and refined by Aaron ben Elijah of Nicomedia in the mid fourteenth century.79 The best-known of the early Rabbanite commentators is Tobias ben Elijah of Kastoria and Salonika, whose Lekah Tov, compiled at the end of the eleventh and ˙ ˙ ˙centuries, represents the transition from midrash beginning of the twelfth 75

76

77

78 79

De Lange, “Hebrew Scholarship,” 31; R. C. Steiner, “A Jewish Theory of Biblical Redaction from Byzantium: Its Rabbinic Roots, Its Diffusion and Its Encounter with the Muslim Doctrine of Falsification,” Jewish Studies, an Internet Journal 2 (2003), 123 67. I. M. Ta Shma, “Byzantine Bible Commentary from the Turn of the Eleventh Century” [Hebrew], in Ta Shma, Studies in Medieval Rabbinic Literature 3 (Jerusalem, 2005), 241 58; G. Brin, Reuel and His Friends: Jewish Byzantine Exegetes from around the Tenth Century C.E. [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv, 2012). R. C. Steiner, “The Byzantine Biblical Commentaries from the Genizah: Rabbanite vs. Karaite,” in M. Bar Asher et al., eds., Shai le Sara Japhet: Studies in the Bible, its Exegesis and its Language (Jerusalem, 2007), 243 62. Ankori, Karaites in Byzantium, 415 52. Daniel Frank, “Karaite Exegetical and Halakhic Literature in Byzantium and Turkey,” in M. Polliack, ed., Karaite Judaism: A Guide to its History and Literary Sources (Leiden, 2003), 529 58.

byzantium 93 to commentary proper. As time went on, both Rabbanites and Karaites paid increasing attention to theology and philosophy, as we can see in the commentaries of the two Aarons, mentioned above, or the Rabbanite Shemariah ben Elijah of Negroponte. In the area of rabbinic Halakhah, Byzantium served as an important conduit between the rabbinic schools of Palestine and Iraq on the one hand and Ashkenaz on the other.81 Halakhic comments are found embedded within biblical commentaries, and we also have halakhic treatises and commentaries on talmudic tractates and other rabbinic writings. The bestknown Byzantine author of such works is Hillel ben Eliaqim of Selymbria (mid twelfth century), who wrote pioneering commentaries on the halakhic midrashim as well as the early aggadic midrashim.82 Karaite scholars, while some of them certainly studied rabbinic texts, did not write commentaries on them, but they did write on halakhic topics, and contributed some notable compendious books on Karaite Halakhah, beginning with a Hebrew translation of Levi ben Yefet’s Sefer Mitsvot, and continuing through Judah Hadassi’s highly original Eshkol ha-Kofer (1148) and Aaron ben Elijah’s Gan ‘Eden (1354).83 The interest of Shemariah ben Elijah in philosophy has already been mentioned. In a letter addressed to some Roman Jewish scholars in the 1330s or early 1340s, he explains his understanding of the connection between biblical exegesis and philosophy: all philosophical knowledge can be found in the Bible, if it is rigorously interpreted. He complains of the errors of the Karaites and the Rabbanites: the former either devote themselves to the plain reading of Scripture and do not look beyond it, or they turn to non-Jewish philosophy, or else they import extraneous mysteries and parables into their reading of the text. The latter are so obsessed with the Talmud that they learn nothing from the Bible: “Behold all Israel has become factionalised and developed two philosophies and both groups’ hearts are enjoined to evil and speak falsehood about each other.”84 Even if based on experience, this bitter judgment seems rather harsh. It is true that the early Karaites, down to and including Judah Hadassi in the mid twelfth 80

80

81

82 83 84

I. M. Ta Shma, “Midrash Leqah Tov its Background and its Character” [Hebrew], in Ta Shma, Studies 3, 259 94. H. J. Zimmels, “Scholars and Scholarship in Byzantium and Italy,” in C. Roth, ed., World History of the Jewish People, vol. XI (New Brunswick, NJ, 1966), 175 88; I. M. Ta Shma, “The Cultural Ties Between the Jews of Byzantium and Ashkenaz” [Hebrew], and “On Torah Study in Byzantium: Many Scholars but Little Literature” [Hebrew], in Ta Shma, Studies 3, 177 87 and 231 7, respectively. I. M. Ta Shma, “Rabbi Hillel ben Eliaqim” [Hebrew], in Ta Shma, Studies 3, 326 35. Frank, “Karaite Exegetical and Halakhic Literature.” Translation from Bowman, The Jews of Byzantium, 261.

94 the middle ages: the christian world century, were firmly committed to the Mu‘tazilite kalam. By Hadassi’s day, Greek philosophy in Arabic dress was already well established among Rabbanites. With Aaron ben Joseph, who was an older contemporary of Shemariah ben Elijah, Byzantine Karaism takes a bold step toward Rabbanite thought, and specifically toward the dominant Aristotelianism represented by Maimonides. The younger Aaron was unable to turn the clock back, but endeavored to rescue what he could of the earlier Karaite kalam, while accepting much in Maimonidean thought.85 As for Rabbanites, we may note the somewhat eclectic Neoplatonism of Shabbetai Donnolo in the tenth century, which owes something to patristic writings.86 The study of manuscripts enables us to chart the later interest in philosophical study. From around the time that Maimonides’s Guide arrived in Byzantium, in the latter half of the thirteenth century, we have a stream of copies and commentaries testifying to the interest it aroused. For example, a commentary on the Guide was copied in Salonika in 1329, in Shemariah’s lifetime; it was written by Adonijah Kalomiti, who was related to Shemariah by marriage.87 We also have many manuscripts relating to the study of Aristotle, including commentaries by Averroes and supercommentaries thereupon. For instance, an abridgment of Aristotle’s Logic was made by Joseph ben Moses Kilti (“Joseph the Greek”) in the late fourteenth century, for a Sephardic scholar who was presumably unable to gain direct access to Aristotle’s logical writings.88 Prominent among the works of the Aristotelian corpus represented in the Byzantine Hebrew manuscripts are those on natural philosophy, particularly in the period of the Palaeologan Renaissance, in which a strong interest in the subject is manifest. Particularly well represented are copies of Averroes’s commentaries, for example the Middle Commentaries on the Physics, the de Caelo, and the de Anima. We also find Hebrew translations of Ptolemy’s Treatise on the Astrolabe and the Persian astronomical tables, and other astronomical, astrological, and mathematical works, and copies of Hebrew writings on these subjects. Shabbetai Donnolo is the first Byzantine Jewish author we know of who studied astronomy. He describes in his Hakhmoni how he copied ancient Jewish works on the subject, but could find no Byzantine Jewish scholar 85 86

87

Daniel J. Lasker, “Byzantine Karaite Thought,” in Polliack, ed., Karaite Judaism, 505 28. G. Sermoneta, “Il neoplatonismo nel pensiero dei nuclei ebraici stanziati nell’Occidente medievale (riflessioni sul ‘Commento al Libro della Creazione’ di Rabbi Shabbatai Donnolo),” Settimani di studio del Centro italiano di studi sull’Alto Medioevo (Spoleto, 1980), 867 925. Bowman, The Jews of Byzantium, 252. 88 Ibid., 286 7.

byzantium 95 who could understand them, and since some of these scholars added that the only good books on the subject were by non-Jews: I took it on myself to search out the science of the Greeks, the Moslems, the Babylonians, and the Indians, and I gave myself no rest until I had copied the works of the ancient Greeks and the “Macedonian” [Byzantine] scholars, as well as those of the Babylonians and the Indians, in the original languages with their commentaries . . . After having copied those works I toured various lands for the purpose of finding Gentile astronomers under whom I might study, and I did find one or two.89

This is a good illustration of the wide-ranging scholarly interests of Byzantine Jews, their openness to foreign learning, and the facilities for study that were available to them. Shabbetai Donnolo argues that, while all human beings are naturally drawn to the praise of God through the contemplation of the heavenly bodies, Jews are particularly commanded to study astronomy.90 Shabbetai Donnolo is also one of the earliest Byzantine Hebrew medical writers, and he has been associated with the origins of the medical school of Salerno. We know of many medical practitioners at different periods, including a chief physician to the Emperor, and numbers of medical manuscripts have been preserved – notably, collections of materia medica. There is a third facet of Shabbetai Donnolo’s Hakhmoni, which, on the face of it, might seem to stand in contradiction to his scientific interests, and that is the mystical: the work is one of the earliest commentaries on the Sefer Yetsirah. Mystical interests are a salient feature of Byzantine Hebrew writing of all periods, and in the Palaeologan period Kabbalah took firm root.91 A tendency to apocalypticism and messianic speculation that can be traced back to the last phase of Byzantine rule in Palestine recurs at various times. Jews also enjoyed a reputation as magicians and soothsayers. One of the richest seams of Byzantine Hebrew literature is that of hymnography (piyut). This genre originated in Byzantine Palestine in late Antiquity, and spread slowly into Europe with the Hebrew synagogue liturgy that it was designed to embellish. The earliest European author whose liturgical poems survive is Silano of Venosa, who lived in the ninth century and is mentioned in the Scroll of Ahimaas. From his time on, we have a great wealth of Byzantine piyutim, which adorn the distinctive 89 90

91

Translation in Starr, Jews in the Byzantine Empire, 156 7. Piergabriele Mancuso, Shabbetai Donnolo’s Sefer Hakhmoni (Leiden, 2010), Book 1, line 98. He bases himself on rabbinic interpretation of Deuteronomy 4:6, cf. Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 75a. See also Andrew Sharf, The Universe of Shabbetai Donnolo (Warminster, 1976). Bowman, The Jews of Byzantium, 156 64.

96 the middle ages: the christian world Romaniote prayer rite, as well as the closely related rites of Corfu, Crete, Kaffa (Crimea), and Kastoria (Macedonia and Bulgaria).92 The hymns are, at their best, marked by technical sophistication and a deep knowledge of the Bible and the distinctive Byzantine tradition of exegesis. They also display a preoccupation with polemic against Christian rule, which is also a feature of other Byzantine Hebrew writing, such as Hadassi’s Eshkol haKofer.93 A particularly interesting feature of Byzantine Hebrew scholarship is the writing of commentaries on piyutim. CONCLUDING REMARKS

We have seen that the Jews were a persistent (if numerically tiny) presence in the Byzantine Empire throughout the period under review. They had to adapt to changing political and economic conditions, and to absorb several waves of immigration, yet overall their lives were relatively stable. While their political status was a subordinate one, and they were progressively marginalized socially, they enjoyed the protection of the law, and, unlike some Jewish communities in western Europe, they did not generally have to face exactions, persecutions, expulsions, or massacres at the hands of their Christian neighbors and rulers. Although deeply divided by the Karaite schism, they maintained their own distinctive culture and sense of identity down the centuries, despite various pressures. Surveying nine centuries of Byzantine Judaism, we cannot help being struck by some of the paradoxes. The Jews of the empire were profoundly rooted within the empire and, despite their small numbers, were very much part of its urban (and, to a much lesser extent, rural) landscape, yet they could appear to others as an alien presence, and could themselves articulate a deep sense of alienation. While praying daily for the overthrow of the “‘evil empire,” the Jews were curiously loyal to it in practice. Their economic activities were largely directed inward – for instance, to the production of wine, cheese, and textiles ritually fit for Jewish use – yet these activities also had the effect of involving them in the wider local economy and in long-distance trade. Judaism had a longer history in Greek-speaking lands than Christianity, and Christians acknowledged the ancient Jewish roots of their own civilization and sometimes cited Jewish traditions with respect, yet they also often treated Jewish beliefs 92 93

Weinberger, Jewish Hymnography, 193 367. De Lange, “Jews and Christians in the Byzantine Empire”; Samuel Krauss and William Horbury, The Jewish Christian Controversy from the Earliest Times to 1789 (Tübingen, 1996), esp. 67, 218 19, 236 8; Nicholas de Lange, “A Fragment of Byzantine Anti Christian Polemic,” Journal of Jewish Studies (JJS) 41 (1990), 92 100.

byzantium 97 with hostility or contempt, and sometimes used the Jews as political scapegoats. Finally, the Byzantine Jews maintained a remarkably high level of cultural activity over several centuries, and yet one would be hard put to it to name more than a handful of outstanding cultural personalities or creations. The Jews of Byzantium were located at the center of the Jewish world of their time and had close links to other parts of it, through trading and other relations. Yet they maintained their distinctive traditions over a very long period of time. For example, they used Greek Bible translations going back to Roman Antiquity, they kept up practices derived from Roman private law, and in their biblical studies they evince an interest in textual criticism whose roots are in ancient Alexandria. In part, they were encouraged in all this by the influence of the Greek Christian environment. It is possible that there was a continuing two-way influence with this environment, in such areas as biblical study, and apocalyptic and mystical theology and practices. While, to a Byzantine Christian, the local Jewish culture could appear alien and strange, we know that it also struck foreign Jews as peculiar. The ancient roots of this culture were in Byzantine Palestine, but it showed an aptitude for absorbing other influences, from Babylon and the Arab world, Spain and elsewhere. It is not unfair to describe Byzantium as a conduit leading from the Middle East to Ashkenaz. The Romaniote prayer rite, for example, is of Palestinian origin, and it seems to have begotten the various Ashkenazic rites. At the same time, writings created in Byzantium (such as the Yosippon or the Lekah Tov) became part of the common heritage ˙ ˙ of Judaism, as did the work of˙ Byzantine scribes and textual scholars. For centuries, Byzantine Jewish life and culture continued on its steady path of conservation and adaptation. Foreign influences were absorbed without distorting or subverting the essential character of the tradition. Even the dramatic upheavals caused by the Karaite schism and the Latin and Ottoman conquests did not succeed in radically transforming this inherently and confidently traditional society. On the contrary, immigrant Jews were quickly won over by the distinctive local culture, which in the generation following the watershed of 1453 was beginning to display a remarkable resilience. The mass immigration of Spanish and Italian Jews from 1492 on, however, brought change on a scale that Romaniote Jewish culture could not withstand. It was not only a matter of overwhelming numbers: the immigrants also introduced technological, commercial, and cultural changes that, coming on top of political upheavals, proved too much for the native Jewish traditions. In the Ottoman Empire, the Romaniotes became a minority of a minority, their culture surviving – if at all – in marginalized communities, such as those of the Karaites in Constantinople, or in out-of-the-way towns in Greece.

chapter 5

ITALY d a v i d a b u l a fi a a n d r o b e r t b o n fi l

THE SOUTH d a v i d a b u l a fi a

Until the late fourteenth century, by far the greatest concentration of Jews in Italy was to be found in the south, within the two kingdoms of Sicily – the mainland kingdom (often called the Kingdom of Naples) and the island kingdom, which both originated in the elevation of the Norman Roger II to the crown of Sicily in 1130. Whereas the Jewish communities of northern Italy grew in the late Middle Ages following immigration from France into Piedmont and from Germany into the Po Valley, the Jews of Rome, southern Italy, and Sicily had been there for centuries, appearing already in Cicero’s biting orations against Verres. The sense that Jews were not outsiders but part of the fabric of society remained alive throughout the Middle Ages, even if popular hostility grew in the fifteenth century. For the Jews were protected not merely by rulers who valued their presence (often enough for financial reasons), but also by the character of a region in which Greek Orthodox, Armenians, Slav and Albanian settlers, Waldensian heretics, and, for a while, Muslims all intermingled, the Jews being one minority among many. The Jews were, if anything, one of the more stable elements in this shifting population. Ethnic and religious diversity provided what was generally a safe environment. The Jews of southern Italy and Sicily were not isolated. Until the twelfth century, the Jews of Apulia enjoyed close links with the Byzantine world, for the region had been under Byzantine rule until 1070. Those of Sicily, on the other hand, lived under Muslim rule until the Norman conquest, which began in the 1060s, and maintained intimate ties with North Africa, Spain, and Egypt; these links are amply represented in the letters of the Cairo Genizah.1 In some southern Italian towns, 5 percent of the

1

Relevant documents are collected in M. Ben Sasson, Yehude Sitsilyah, 825 1068: Te’udot u Mekorot (Jerusalem, 1991).

98

italy 99 urban population was probably Jewish. At the same time, it would be wrong to treat their existence as idyllic. The heavy involvement of Jews in the dyeing of cloth and in slaughterhouses may be a survival of Byzantine practices whereby physically unpleasant jobs such as tanning and dyeing were passed to the Jews. Moreover, the profits that the monarchy could make from taxes on the Jews encouraged the region’s rulers to take them directly under their own protection. It is impossible to say when significant numbers of Jews first settled in southern Italy. Venosa, in the interior of southern Italy, still preserves its Jewish catacombs, and there are many Hebrew inscriptions from the city, suggesting that there was a lively community of Jews in the sixth to ninth centuries. Jewish settlements flourished in the Byzantine southeast of Italy. Here one of the major centers of Jewish scholarship was Oria. The reputation for learning of the Apulian Jews was summarized in the saying: “From Bari shall go forth the Law, and the word of the Lord from Otranto.” A sense of the glories of these communities can also be gained from the mid-eleventh-century chronicle of Ahima’az, rich in legends about successful dealings between the Jews and the Byzantine emperors.2 At the end of the tenth century, the physician, astronomer, and Hebrew scholar Shabbetai Donnolo appears to have had good personal relations with the charismatic monk Nilus of Rossano.3 As for Sicily, the Cairo Genizah documents shed a powerful light on groups of prosperous and highly mobile merchants who traded through Palermo and Mazara, supplying cotton to the looms of North Africa, trading in silk from Spain and flax from Egypt, and conveying spices brought out of the Indian Ocean across the southern Mediterranean. Sicily was one of the hubs of the Genizah network. Mazara became the grand terminal for shipping bound from Egypt, bringing flax to Sicily and sending silk eastward.4 Sicily had large areas given over to pasture, and it is no surprise that good-quality leather, sometimes gilded, and kosher sheep’s cheese were among the prized exports of the island.5 These mercantile links peaked in the early eleventh century; by 1200, the direction of Sicilian trade was shifting northward to Genoa, Pisa, and Venice, and the era of the 2

3 4

5

M. Salzmann, The Chronicle of Ahimaaz (New York, 1924); A. Sharf, The Universe of Shabbetai Donnolo (Warminster, 1976), 9. Sharf, Universe, esp. 14 17. S. D. Goitein, “Sicily and Southern Italy in the Cairo Geniza Documents,” Archivio storico per la Sicilia orientale 67 (1971), 10, 14, 16. S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, vol. I: Economic Foundations (Berkeley, 1967), 111; Goitein, “Sicily and Southern Italy,” 31; A. Feniello, Sotto il segno del Leone: storia dell’ltalia musulmana (Bari, 2011), 165 6.

100 the middle ages: the christian world Genizah merchants was at an end.6 These economic changes formed part of a wider set of political changes in the Mediterranean around 1100. The major political change in the region was the coming of Norman knights who conquered southern Italy and all of Sicily. The fundamental feature of Norman rule was respect for existing institutions, and the arrival of the Normans made little difference to the economic activities of the Jews, though gradual changes occurred in their legal status, and (from a cultural perspective) the late eleventh century and early twelfth century seem to mark the end of the golden age of Apulian Jewry. One of its more colorful figures was the son of a Norman knight, Obadiah the Proselyte, who adapted to Jewish use the church music with which he was familiar.7 Whether there was a rash of such conversions is hard to say: in one extraordinary incident, the archbishop of Bari, Andreas, supposedly became a Jew, but fled to Constantinople and Egypt out of harm’s way, a story that may just be hostile gossip disseminated by enemies who forced him out of his see. A further indication of the relatively untroubled state of the Jewish community comes from the reign of the first Norman king of Sicily and southern Italy, Roger II. In 1153 a Jew exchanged some land with an abbess in order to acquire a plot between the main synagogue of Naples and a nearby church. The aim was to establish a small school and house of prayer on the new site.8 A dozen or so years later, the Spanish Jew Benjamin of Tudela visited southern Italy, and recorded the existence of flourishing communities in Salerno, Capua, and Benevento, in all of which their numbers supposedly ran into the hundreds, and in the case of Naples, thousands.9 Jews were active in wine production, and the tanning and silk industries, and the impression is of a largely artisan population. Moneylending, as Thomas Aquinas would later testify in his letter to the duchess of Brabant, was not their trade. In the thirteenth century, the age of relative toleration (if that is not too optimistic a term) ended, and a new period of forced conversions and 6

7

8

9

David Abulafia, The Two ltalies: Economic Relations between the Norman Kingdom of Sicily and the Northern Communes (Cambridge, 1977); David Abulafia, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (London, 2011), 295 6. J. Prawer, “The Autobiography of Obadyah the Norman,” in I. Twersky, ed., Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature (Cambridge, MA, 1979), 110 34. N. Ferorelli, Gli Ebrei nell’Italia meridionale dall’età romana al secolo XVIII, ed. F. Patroni Griffi (Naples, 1990), 59. M. N. Adler, ed., The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela (London, 1907), 7 9; C. Colafemmina, “L’itinerario pugliese di Beniamino da Tudela,” Archivio storico pugliese 37 (1975), 81 100; C. Roth, The History of the Jews of Italy (Philadelphia, 1946), 74 81.

italy 101 migrations began, in which the monarchy and the Church were heavily implicated. The south Italian Jews entered the history of western Europe, detached from their historic ties to Byzantium and the Maghreb. Frederick II’s reign marks the beginning of the process of transition. He was heavily influenced by papal thinking on the way of treating the Jews within a specifically Christian society. The multi-religious, multi-lingual, multiethnic Sicily of the twelfth century, containing Greeks, Muslims, and Latins alongside Jews, gave way under the later Normans to an increasingly monocultural society, comprising primarily Latin Christians.10 The removal of the Muslim population from Sicily left the Jews as the sole non-Christian element in the island’s population. Papal influence on Frederick’s legislation can already be seen in his decrees issued at Messina in the spring of 1221. Jews were classed alongside prostitutes as outcasts who threatened contamination; each group must be made visible by its costume, and where appropriate physically segregated from the mass of Christians. This was idealized legislation, for there is no evidence that Jews were made to wear the costume that was prescribed. In further legislation of 1231, Frederick warned against persecuting Jews and Muslims, who must have the same right to initiate legal proceedings as anyone else, and who are at the moment too severely persecuted. Although, in the same code of laws, he tried to limit the rate of interest Jews could charge, there is no evidence that the Jews of the Sicilian kingdom were heavily involved in moneylending; these provisions simply demonstrate his indebtedness to current papal thinking. In fact, Frederick encouraged North African Jews to settle in Palermo, to replace the skills of the expelled Muslim population by cultivating specialized commercial crops such as henna and indigo.11 An important feature of Frederick’s treatment of the Jews was his classification of his Jewish subjects as servi camere regie (“servants of the royal chamber”), a term which indicated that they were the ruler’s direct dependants, but that he would protect them and expected them to be honored by non-Jews for the service they did to the king. The idea of the ruler possessing the Jews, in a certain sense, is already visible in the Norman period. Confirming Sichelgaita’s grant of the Jews to the archbishop of Palermo in the late eleventh century, Frederick stated that the Jews “are yours and of the Church of Palermo and are subject to you and to the Church in all things.”12 Although the concept of Jews belonging in some 10

11 12

David Abulafia, “The End of Muslim Sicily,” in James M. Powell, ed., Muslims under Latin Rule, 1100 1300 (Princeton, 1990), 103 33. David Abulafia, Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor (London, 1988), 335 6. “Vestri sint et ecclesie panormitane et vobis et ecclesie subditi in omnibus”: B. and G. Lagumina, Codice diplomatico dei Giudei di Sicilia, Documenti per servire alla storia

102 the middle ages: the christian world sense to the royal or imperial fisc can be traced back to twelfth-century Germany, Castile, and Aragon, the precise phrase servi camere nostre was first used by Frederick II in his Jewry privilege issued for Germany in 1236. Out of this phrase has developed a whole literature on the meaning of the term “chamber serfdom,” which is itself a misconceived translation of a much more subtle concept: the Jews were as much the ruler’s ministers or agents as they were his direct dependants (with servi not to be understood as “serfs”).13 Soon after the German privilege, we see the concept cross the Alps as Frederick himself moves down from Germany through northern Italy to Sicily: a privilege issued at Brescia in November 1237 exempted the magister Busach (Abu lshaq), described as iudeus medicus, servus camere nostre, from taxes customarily paid by the Jews of Palermo, in reward for his servicia.14 At this point, the term servus camere nostre seems to have been used on an individual basis in Sicily, though it was applied more generally in Germany. Meanwhile, the papacy complained, in August 1236, that Frederick had stamped on the rights of the Church in Sicily, and one issue was “the Jewries seized from certain Churches.”15 Frederick replied that all Jews, both in the Empire and in his kingdom, were immediately subject to his authority.16 Political strife in Italy in the thirteenth century had a severe impact on the Jews. The arrival in southern Italy of the Angevin dynasty in 1266 signalled the coming of a new, anti-talmudic approach to Judaism, which had developed particularly in the circle of King Louis IX of France, whose brother Charles now became king of Sicily and southern Italy, though he lost the island to the king of Aragon following the revolt of the Vespers at Palermo in March 1282.17 There is no evidence that Charles shared his brother’s visceral hatred of Judaism, but he did permit the convert Manuforte to organize anti-Jewish preaching, with the result that he

13

14

15 16

17

di Sicilia, ser. 1, vol. 6 (Palermo, 1884), I, no. xii, 9 10; no. xvi, 12 14; also (evidence from 1195) R. Straus, Gli ebrei di Sicilia dai Normanni a Federico II, trans. S. Siragusa (Palermo, 1992), 97. Anna Sapir Abulafia, Christian Jewish Relations 1000 1300: Jews in the Service of Christendom (Harlow, 2011). S. Simonsohn, The Jews in Sicily, vol. I: 383 1300 (Leiden, 1997), no. 214; also Lagumina, I, 27 8. Simonsohn, The Jews in Sicily, no. 212. Ibid., no. 213; J. Aronius, Regesten zur Geschichte der juden im fränkischen und deutschen Reiche bis zum jahre 1273 (Berlin, 1902), no. 498. Joshua Starr, “The Mass Conversion of Jews in Southern Italy (1290 93),” Speculum 21 (1946), 203; David Abulafia, “Monarchs and Minorities in the Late Medieval Western Mediterranean: Lucera and its Analogues,” in Scott L. Waugh and Peter D. Diehl, eds., Christendom and its Discontents: Exclusion, Persecution and Rebellion, 1000 1500 (Cambridge, 1996), 234 63.

italy 103 made a number of converts. Spasmodic acts were transformed into a veritable campaign against the Jews under his son Charles II, whose antiJewish campaign began in northern France, in the county of Anjou, over which he also exercised authority, in 1289. In a thoroughly lurid decree, he expelled the Jews of Anjou after denouncing them for their usury and their supposed sexual excesses. A blood libel in southern Italy came next. We know of the events of circa 1290 from a sermon preached several years later in Florence by a famous and voluble friar, Giordano da Rivalto, who claimed that one of the king’s ministers had discovered the Jews committing human sacrifice, and had declared that it was thus legitimate to kill or expel the Jews.19 Offered the choice between conversion or extermination, we are told, 8,000 Jews decided to accept baptism, while the others fled, with the result that no Jews supposedly remained in southern Italy.20 Communities of converts (neofiti) emerged, and Trani seems to have been the focus of the conversions.21 Two synagogues converted into churches still survive: Santa Anna (now a museum) and the Scolanova, recently handed back to Jewish use. And yet Jews were paying taxes as Jews in Naples in 1294–5, and, very significantly, orders were issued permitting refugee Jews to return to the kingdom.22 Thus, the Jewish communities experienced gradual recovery: the next king, Robert the Wise, even encouraged Jewish merchants from Majorca to come and settle in 1329.23 18

18

19

20

21

22

23

Starr, “Mass Conversion,” 203; R. Caggese, Roberto d’Angio e i suoi tempi (Florence, 1922 30), vol. I, 299. Giordano da Rivalto, Prediche (Florence, 1831), vol. II, 231; Carlo Delcorno, Giordano da Pisa e l’antica predicazione volgare (Florence, 1975), no. 62, 283 4 (partial transcription). Giordano da Rivalto, II, 220 32; J. Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti judaism (Ithaca, NY, 1982), 238 41. U. Cassuto, “Un ignoto capitolo di storia giudaica,” in Judaica: Festschrift zu Hermann Cohens 70. Geburtstage (Berlin, 1912), 389 404; U. Cassuto, “Iscrizioni ebraiche a Trani,” in Rivista di studi orientali (1931/2), 172 80; Moshe David Cassuto [the same author’s Hebrew name], “Od Ketubot Ivrit me’ir Trani,” in Alexander Marx Jubilee Volume (New York, 1950); M. D. Cassuto, “Hurban ha Yeshivot be Italyah ha Deromit ba Me ’ah ha 13,” in Studies in Memory of Asher Gulak and Samuel Klein (Jerusalem, 1942), 139 52; Ferorelli, Ebrei nell’Italia meridionale, 66 72; Roth, The History of the Jews of Italy, 100 1; E. Munkacsi, Der Jude von Neapel (Zurich, 1940); Starr, “Mass Conversion,” 203 11. Starr, “Mass Conversion,” 208, 210; Roth, The History of the Jews of Italy, 269; Ferorelli, Ebrei nell’Italia meridionale, 67. Ferorelli, Ebrei nell’Italia meridionale, 73, based on the lost Naples registro angioino 13298, fol. 180v; for the trade of the Balearics, the role of the Jews, and the relations between Majorca and Naples, see David Abulafia, “I rapporti fra la Sardegna e le Isole Baleariche,” in the acts of a congress held in Cagliari in 2008: C. Tasca, ed., Italia judaica: gli ebrei di Sardegna (forthcoming).

104 the middle ages: the christian world The motivation behind the more negative policy of Robert’s father must be sought in the attempt of the Angevin kings to articulate a view of themselves as Christian monarchs ruling Christian subjects. The persecution also extended to the Muslims of Sicily, who had been deported en masse to Lucera in Apulia by Frederick II; most were rounded up under orders from Charles II and sold as slaves in 1300.24 The Christian identity of the kingdom offered a platform for a policy of centralization and the assertion of royal authority after twenty years of chaos and civil war. These wars had seen the island of Sicily break away from the mainland and reconstitute itself as a separate kingdom; but there too the Jews found themselves in the firing line. The reformist ruler of Sicily Frederick III, a Catalan, was inspired by Church legislation, as well as by Spanish examples, to decree the concentration of the Jews of Palermo in a new walled Jewish quarter or giudecca; Jews were also not to eat and drink with Christians, or to possess Christian slaves or servants. This type of physical separation needs to be seen as a form of “internal expulsion,” and similar measures were taken a little earlier in such places as Majorca. Such policies gave the Crown the opportunity to continue to draw income from its Jews, rather than simply seizing their goods once and for all, as often happened with expulsions. Frederick’s policy toward the Jews formed part of a wider attempt to regenerate the Christian religious life on the island of Sicily after long years of interdict and excommunication during the War of the Sicilian Vespers.25 Among the main texts that speak of Sicily in the Angevin period are the voluminous writings of the charismatic Spanish kabbalist Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia (1240 – c.1291). His belief that mankind was about to enter an era of redemption was stimulated by the sight of the great wars that were tearing apart not just the western Mediterranean, but also the Near East and the lands under Mongol sway farther to the east, and his ideas may have been influenced by those concerning the Last Days of Joachim of Fiore, the Calabrian abbot active around 1200.26 In southern Italy and Sicily, Abulafia’s teaching of ecstatic Kabbalah and his sense of his unique vocation aroused both admiration and hostility, not least in 1280 when it became plain that he proposed to reveal himself as the Messiah to Pope Nicholas III, who fortunately died a day before Abulafia attempted to gain 24

25

26

David Abulafia, “From Privilege to Persecution: Crown, Church and Synagogue in the City of Majorca, 1229 1343,” in D. Abulafia, M. Rubin, and M. Franklin, eds., Church and City, 1000 1500: Essays in Honour of Christopher Brooke (Cambridge, 1992), 111 26. See, on this, C. Backman, Decline and Fall of Medieval Sicily: Politics, Religion and Economy in the Reign of Frederick III, 1296 1337 (Cambridge, 1995). A large literature exists, but see, in particular, H. Hames, Like Angels on Jacob’s Ladder: Abraham Abulafia, the Franciscans and Joachimism (Albany, NY, 2007).

italy 105 an audience with him. He was obsessed by the variety of languages and scripts in the world, and his observations on Sicily include a description of the linguistic abilities of the Jews: Note that the Jews who live among the Ishmaelites speak Arabic like them; those who live among the Greeks speak Greek; those who inhabit Italy speak Italian, the Germans [Ashkenazim] speak German, the inhabitants of Turkish lands speak Turkish, and so on. But the great wonder is what happens among the Jews in all Sicily, who not only speak the local language or Greek, as do all those who dwell there with them, but have preserved the Arabic tongue which they had learned in former times, when the Ishmaelites were dwelling there.27

This linguistic archaism created demand at court for Sicilian Jews as interpreters in dealings with the Muslims of North Africa. A sense of the rather “provincial,” almost archaic, character of Sicilian Jewry in the later Middle Ages emerges from the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century documentation in other ways too. With the decline of the international world of the Genizah merchants, the Jews of Sicily lost their intense links to Spain, Egypt, and as far beyond as Yemen and the Indies, though Jewish commerce out of Syracuse and Palermo was not negligible in the fifteenth century. The situation of late medieval Sicilian Jewry is best appreciated through a series of case studies, for there survives exceptionally rich material concerning their legal status, their tax arrangements, their demography, and their internal organization. Fortunately, the publication by Shlomo Simonsohn of eighteen volumes of documents mainly concerned with the Jews of late medieval Sicily, and drawn in significant measure from the rich notarial archives of the island, has provided plenty of raw material for such explorations.28 However, it is precisely the fragmented, localized character of the Jewish communities of Sicily that needs to be stressed, for certain changes, such as seclusion in reserved areas of the towns, occurred more rapidly in some cities than in others. The major common themes are the largely artisan identity of the Jewish communities (with a good sprinkling, however, of physicians), and the problem of their relations with the central government at a time of constant internal upheaval in Sicily. The first case to examine is the Jewish community of Erice or Monte San Giuliano, on the steep hill overlooking Trapani in western Sicily, the economic activities of which are amply recorded in a notarial register of the years around 1300.29 Several key themes emerge: the existence of 27 28 29

Abraham Abulafia, Otzar Eden Ganuz, ed. A. Gross (Jerusalem, 2000), 313. S. Simonsohn, The Jews in Sicily, 18 vols. (Leiden, 1997 onwards). David Abulafia, “Una comunità ebraica della Sicilia occidentale: Erice 1298 1304,” Archivio storico per Ia Sicilia orientale 80 (1984), 157 90; also published in Hebrew as:

106 the middle ages: the christian world a good day-to-day relationship between Jews and Christians; the lack of a quarter specifically reserved for Jews, even though one eventually emerged in the course of the fourteenth century; the reliance on the governing board or universita of the Jews for taxation of the community. The Jews of Erice were active in the collection of funds to sustain the Aragonese army during the War of the Vespers. They may have numbered as many as 400, up to 5 percent of the total population of the territory, including many artisans, shopkeepers, and agricultural laborers. When Jews advanced money to Christians, it was in the form of improvement grants for land, often vineyards; these Jewish investments were no different in character from investments made by Christian inhabitants of the town. A survey of the professions mentioned in the cartulary of the notary Giovanni Maiorana of 1297–1300 indicates that eight were described as metalworkers (fabri), including one goldsmith. There were also a couple of butchers, a carpenter, and some clothworkers. Many of the prime features observable in Erice are found in Palermo too.30 Some activities were more characteristic of a big city, such as the sale of slaves, and joint enterprises with Christians in silk production. The Jews of both the small hill-town and the capital remained well integrated in the wider economy of the island, and were not pushed into the marginal occupations characteristic of northern Europe. At Palermo, as at Erice, wine production was a special concern of the Jews, not simply in order to provide wine that was ritually fit, but also as a reliable form of investment. Moneylending by Jews is not mentioned in the notarial documents of this period, even though it remained the subject of so much restrictive legislation, much of which clearly was theoretical rather than practical. It was to a Christian of Palermo that the kosher butchers of the city in 1299 consigned the fleeces and skins of the sheep they expected to slaughter over the next three or four years. On the other hand, the Sicilian Jews probably dominated the dyeing of cloth. Other areas of the textile industry in which they worked included the production of silken cloths, for instance in eastern Sicily. They were distinguished from the Christian majority not by economic function, but by the Jewish religion and the Arabic language.31

30

31

“Yehudei Erice (Monte San Giuliano) shebeSitsiliah, 1298 1304,” Zion: A Quarterly for Research in Jewish History 51 (1986), 295 317. David Abulafia, “Le attività economiche degli Ebrei siciliani attorno al 1300,” in Italia judaica 5: Gli Ebrei in Sicilia sino all’espulsione del 1492. Atti del V Convegno internazio nale, Palermo, 15 19 giugno 1992 (Rome, 32, 1995), 89 95; see also the mass of documents produced by Simonsohn, The Jews in Sicily, esp. vols. IX XIV. H. Brese, Arabes de langue, juifs de religion: l’évolution du judaïsme sicilien dans l’envir onnement latin, XIIe XVe siècles (Saint Denis, 2001).

italy 107 However, the fourteenth century saw increasing marginalization of the Sicilian Jews. The most serious factor in the deterioration of the condition of the Jews was the influence of new attitudes imported from Spain. The terrible pogroms that convulsed Castile and Aragon in 1391 spread throughout the lands of the Crown of Aragon, so that Sicily too, by 1392, had been fully infected with the bacillus. Despite a number of conversions, the Sicilian communities were not so severely affected that they suffered the precipitous decline visible in the Spanish lands of the Crown of Aragon, and the fifteenth century saw their fortunes recover. A sense of the continuing, but endangered, well-being of the Sicilian Jews can be gained from a closer look at several of the fifteenth-century communities: Palermo, Sciacca, and Malta. The 1390s saw the extinction of the old, island-based, dynasty of Aragonese descent, and the re-integration of Sicily into the network of lands ruled from Spain by the king of Aragon. A divided, weakened kingdom became a province of a Mediterranean empire, but gained in stability as a result. Thus, King Martin of Aragon sought to bring the Jewish communities of Sicily under centralized control: he pushed back the age-old authority of the archbishops of Palermo over the Jewish lawcourts in the city; in 1396, he appointed a Dienchelele to watch over the Jews – a Supreme Judge (Dayan Kelali in Hebrew) – the Catalan Jewish courtier and physician Joseph Abinafia. The Sicilians protested so vigorously at his appointment that the office of Dienchelele disappeared in 1421, though it was briefly restored.32 Joseph Abinafia appointed a number of local judges for cases between Jew and Jew, though those cases which had to be judged by the law of the land were referred by the king to a Christian “Protector of the Jews.” Abinafia also sought to suppress Sicilian practices which were seen by a Spanish Jewish aristocrat as archaic, notably child marriage. Polygamy was also practiced by the Jews of Sicily even after it had disappeared elsewhere in Europe. This archaic-looking community clearly puzzled its Dienchelele. Palermo still acted as a magnet for Jewish settlers from all over the Mediterranean, especially Tunisia and Tripolitania. The fact that their Sicilian co-religionists were also in large measure Arabic speakers made it much easier for the Maghrebi immigrants to acclimatize themselves. Palermo was certainly the most substantial Jewish community in Sicily at the start of the fifteenth century, with about 850 families in 1487, according to the traveler Obadiah of Bertinoro; Ashtor, using rather a high multiplier of six, translates this into “not much less than 5,000 souls.” A census of 32

Roth, The History of the ]ews of ltaly, 236 8, 240.

108 the middle ages: the christian world 1479 only reports 523 Jewish hearths, however – maybe half Ashtor’s total.33 The Jews had shops and houses all over the city, and remained well integrated into Palermitan society. A wide range of professions attracted them: there were sugar planters, much in demand in a period when the island’s sugar industry was undergoing a renaissance, and some were involved in oil production and, of course, viticulture; Palermo was something of a “garden city” and a sizeable proportion of the population was engaged in specialist agriculture. Artisan crafts included not just dyeing and tanning, but metalworking, carpentry, cloth production, and shoemaking.34 There were also Jewish tunny fishermen. The presence of such a wide range of skills was cited as an argument against expulsion in 1492. Palermo’s Jews also included successful merchants, handling Catalan cloths for re-export to the east. They could hardly compete with the largescale import–export businesses of the Genoese, Catalans, and Tuscans, but the Jews played an important role in the internal market as purveyors of goods. There were also North African Jewish businessmen who traded across the straits toward Tunis and Tripoli. The Sala family of Trapani was involved in the wheat trade toward North Africa at the start of the fifteenth century. The Jews had not by any means disappeared from the overseas trade routes running out of Sicilian ports, and were interested in such goods as English and French cloth, which they passed on to the royal court. There existed a broad similarity between the economic function of the Jews and that of the Christian merchants. On the other hand, Jewish involvement in loans seems to have increased in this period. The provision of small-scale credit became more common, as it did in mainland Italy; but it did not dominate the economic life of these communities, as happened in the north of Italy. Abinafia was a capable physician, and from Malta to Messina the Jewish elite practiced this skill; well over 150 Jewish physicians are recorded in late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Sicily.35 Joseph Abinafia himself assumed the power to examine Jews who wished to practice medicine. Access to universities remained extremely difficult for Jewish students of medicine, though Padua in the north became willing to admit a few Jews. The answer in Sicily appeared to be the foundation of a Jewish university, which the king of Aragon permitted in 1466, although there is no evidence that this 33

34

35

E. Ashtor, “Palermitan Jewry in the XV Century,” Hebrew Union College Annual 50 (1979), 219 51. There is rich material in H. Brese, Un monde méditerranéen: économie et société en Sicile, 1300 1450, 2 vols. (Rome, 1986), esp. vol. II. J. Shatzmiller, “Jewish Physicians in Sicily,” Italia Judaica 5 (1995), 347 54.

italy 109 institution, modelled on Christian studia generalia, ever functioned. Nor was Sicily a great center of rabbinic academies. In religious life, as in much else, the Sicilian community was very traditional and very provincial. Occasionally, at the time of Abraham Abulafia or in the mid fifteenth century, there was a surge of Messianic expectation; in 1455, a group of Jews from several cities chartered a ship to take them to the Holy Land, under the leadership of a Palermitan physician, but then found themselves in deep trouble with the authorities, which treated them as illegal fugitives. The king’s property could not simply be allowed to get up and go. The account of the Palermo community offered by Rabbi Obadiah of Bertinoro in a letter of 1488 states that Jews were obliged to take on debasing tasks such as the execution of criminals: “the labour imposed upon them by the government weighs heavily upon them, for they are compelled to go into the service of the king whenever any new labour project arises; they have to drag ships to the shore, to construct dykes and so on.” Obadiah looked down on Palermitan Jews, seeing them as “poverty-stricken artisans”: coppersmiths, ironsmiths, porters, and peasants, wearing tattered and dirty clothes (disfigured by the red Jewish badge) that are a source of contempt to the Christians. Obadiah expressed shock at the number of weddings conducted when the bride was already pregnant, another survival of early medieval practices which distinguished betrothal and marriage. A man of great religious rigour, he found their moral standards in most areas rather deplorable; the leaders of the community were collaborators with the viceroy’s officials who “crush the people under a heavy burden.” Yet Obadiah also offered positive comments about the magnificence of the synagogue, with its succession of open courtyards leading to the central prayer hall: the description is reminiscent of a mosque; indeed, Sicilian Christians called a synagogue a muschita. Reality lay in a welter of paradoxes: there did exist legislation that labeled the Jews as outcasts – quite literally at times, for the Jewish badge was something they understandably hated to wear. On the other hand, the rules could be avoided, by payments in the right direction. Jewish life in Palermo around 1400 was comparable in its degree of liberty – but also in the underlying tensions – with that in Segovia or Toledo in the same period. A community such as that of Sciacca in the south of the island displays many features in common with the giudecca of Palermo. First heard of in 1295, when Sant’Alberto da Trapani was at work converting its Jews, the community was concentrated in the area of the town known as La Cadda, but there were Jewish properties in other parts of town, and Christian house-owners in La Cadda. In 1435, 187 male Jews voted in an election of the proti, or syndics, of the community, which would produce a total figure

110 the middle ages: the christian world of anything from 500 to 1,000 Jews in the town, perhaps 10 percent of the total Sciaccan population of somewhere around 10,000. A distinctive feature of the community was that it was granted to a secular lord, Antonio de Luna Peralta, in 1457. The giudecca of Sciacca was careful to make handsome contributions to Alfonso’s war funds, such as 50 onze in 1436. But there were outbreaks of violence against the Jews, who were subjected to the usual vigorous attempts at conversion.36 A final example of a Jewish community in the Sicilian kingdom is provided by Malta.37 It enjoyed especially close links to Syracuse, whose Jewish community was active in trade toward not just Malta but North Africa, sending such objects as coral, spun cotton, raw silk, and cheese to the Maghreb, and olive oil to Malta. Malta, despite its cultural peculiarities, notably the survival of Arabic as the general language, was an integral part of the kingdom, and its Christian universita and its giudecca both show fundamental similarities to those found in Sicilian towns; there was the same problem of disentangling the taxation of Jews from that of Christians, and the same tendency for the Crown to set Christian officials over the Jews, as much to protect the monarchy’s rights as those of the Jews. The Jews were landowners, petty merchants, and retailers, rarely big businessmen, and not especially involved in moneylending. Bahyuni Mehyr and his wife Zambite possessed fourteen fields and thirteen smaller portions of arable land in Malta and Gozo, and even some property near Syracuse in Sicily. The easiest way for propertied Jews to participate in the exploitation of such scattered estates was through share-cropping agreements with farmers, Jewish or Christian. Godfrey Wettinger believed that most of the Jewish land was acquired from Christian owners who effectively mortgaged it in return for loans. The image preserved in English literature by Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta cannot be substantiated. Malta was pre-eminently famous as a source of raw cotton, and Jews were involved in the exploitation of this resource; they were active alongside native and Sicilian Christians and foreign merchants such as the Catalans. The sale of foreign cloths was, however, an area where the Jews were particularly active, and Jewish petty traders were sometimes the target of hostility in the villages. It has to be remembered, though, that the Jews were generally transmitting goods acquired on the international trade routes by big-time foreign merchants with whom they could in no way compete. Their function lay in the distribution of these goods out of the capital of Malta, Mdina. In the late fifteenth century, a group of Jews, probably from Syracuse, functioned as the main blacksmiths on the island, and they were so 36 37

A. Scandaliato and M. Gerardi, La giudecca di Sciacca (Castelvetrano, 1992). G. Wettinger, The Jews of Malta in the Late Middle Ages (Malta, 1985).

italy 111 valued that Hauad Cussu the Jew received exemption from the corvée normally imposed on Jews, and from certain taxes. His work included the repair of the cathedral bells in Mdina. Within the island, however, the role of the Jews was less appreciated. In 1458, there occurred an attempt to restrict the Jews of Mdina to a ghetto in the north of the town; but in reality the Jews continued to live alongside Christians, and no real Jewish quarter emerged. Symptomatic, however, of fifteenth-century attitudes to the Jews was the argument for creating a ghetto: that the Jews were a contamination and that they must be separated from Christian society. The years around 1400 saw the beginning of an important transformation in southern Italy, where new Jewish settlers arrived, under the protection of privileges conferring the right to operate pawnbrokers’ shops, particularly in the northernmost parts of the region such as the city of L’Aquila. Royal beneficence to the Jewish moneylenders was, however, counter-balanced by the attacks on the Jewish religion and on their economic activities which spread southward from central Italy. Periods of royal weakness coincided with a much increased likelihood of assaults on the Jews, as in 1411 when a tumult broke out at Taranto and the queen’s officials proved incapable of protecting the giudecca from the sack. The Franciscan Giovanni di Capestrano gained considerable influence at the court of the weak-willed Queen Joanna II, prompting her to revoke earlier privileges to the Jews, including the right to lend at interest. Royal finances, already chaotic, suffered from lack of income from the Jews, and the Christian population protested at the lack of ready credit. Joanna revoked her anti-Jewish decrees; with papal support, she restored the right of the Jews to lend at up to 45 percent interest per annum.38 The situation of the Jews was all the more precarious, however, since the monarchy was enfeebled and southern Italy was the object of bitter contest between Alfonso, king of Aragon, and René, duke of Anjou and count of Provence, between 1435 and 1442. Both Alfonso and René acted favorably toward the Jews in their dominions; indeed, what is noticeable in the fifteenth century is the gulf between royal and princely support for a Jewish presence and increasing popular hostility to the Jews. Although these rulers greatly valued their income from the Jews, there is no reason to doubt that they had a genuine regard for Jews. Their attitude was not simply utilitarian.39

38

39

Ferorelli, Ebrei nell’Italia meridionale, 74 6. See also J. Starr, “Johanna II and the Jews,” Jewish Quarterly Review (n.s.), 31 (1940), 67 78; A. Milano, Storia degli Ebrei in Italia (Turin, 1963), 187; Roth, The History of the Jews of Italy, 274 5. D. Iancu, Être juif en Provence au temps du Roi René (Paris, 1998).

112 the middle ages: the christian world The contest for the Crown of Naples was settled in 1442 when the king of Aragon invaded Naples by way of secret tunnels and sent René packing.40 Alfonso’s son and successor Ferrante retained the awareness of the financial utility of protecting the Jews that had long been practiced by most kings of Aragon in their native Spain. What did change, however, was the level of involvement by the Crown in the control and taxation of Jewish moneylending. In June 1452, Alfonso confirmed the right of the Jews to lend at interest, following the payment of a large fee of 1,000 ducats by the south Italian Jews.41 The art lay in taxing the Jews sufficiently to keep the monarch’s finances safely afloat, without destroying the wealth of the Jewish communities. In 1464 the Jews of Naples, Aversa, and Capua complained that the taxes demanded of them were so oppressive that many would simply have to pack up and leave southern Italy. The king decided that this was against everyone’s interest: the Jews must be treated humanamente.42 In 1476, Ferrante expressed his own verdict on the Jews: “We, however, like and love every one of those Jews and we have been and always will be a source of favour and help to all of them” (nos tamen ipsos iudeos et quemlibet ipsorum amamus atque diligimus, et ipsis iudeis et cuilibet eorumfavori et auxilio semper fuimus et erimus).43 One special group that flourished consisted of the descendants of the Jews who had converted to Christianity in the late thirteenth century. Concentrated in Puglian towns such as Trani, these cristiani novelli or neofiti (as they long continued to be called) were heavily involved in trade and the urban property market, and were able, under Ferrante, to occupy important roles in civic government; in 1413, King Ladislas of Naples decreed that two out of the sixteen city councillors in Trani should be drawn from the community of neofiti. To what extent they preserved their Jewish beliefs and practices is doubtful, but in Trani they were treated as a distinct social group: for a time many lived in the same part of the city, and they tended to marry among themselves, thereby preserving some knowledge of their ancestry, and not impossibly of Judaism. Certainly, 40

41

42

The best general account of southern Italy in this period is G. Galasso, II Regno di Napoli, vol. I: Il Mezzogiorno angioino e aragonese, in UTET Storia d’Italia diretta da G. Galasso, vol. XV (Turin, 1992), 561 775. In addition to the fundamental work of Ferorelli, Gli Ebrei nell’Italia meridionale, 89 198, see, for the Aragonese period, V. Bonnazoli, “Gli ebrei del regno di Napoli all’epoca della loro espulsione. I parte: Il periodo aragonese, 1456 99,” Archivio storico italiano 137 (1979), 495 559; A. Silvestri, “Gli Ebrei del Regno di Napoli durante la dominazione aragonese,” Campania Sacra 18 (1987), 21 77; G. Petralia, “L’epoca arago nese,” in L’Ebraismo nell’ltalia meridionale, 79 114. Ferorelli, Gli Ebrei nell’Italia meridionale, 167. 43 Ibid., 194.

italy 113 the neofiti flourished under the benign rule of King Ferrante. Later, they would keep insisting that they were good Christians, but that was when conditions for the Jews and for any Christians suspected of heresy had become harsher following the collapse of the protective Aragonese dynasty in 1494–5.44 While King Ferrante assured the Jews in 1468 that they could enjoy the same rights and privileges in the places where they lived as the local Christians, the Jews were also later promised that extraordinary taxes imposed on the Christians could not be levied automatically on the Jews.45 The fundamental principle was that the monarchy had possession of the Jewish communities, and expressed its control through its decisions about when, where, and how much to tax the Jews, even though the term servi camere regie was not utilized within this period.46 Against this, local communities of Christians constantly solicited contributions from the Jews to special taxes, keeping the government busy with instructions to observe the exemptions granted to the Jews.47 Such disputes set up tension between Jews and Christians, and are arguably a major explanation of popular animosity toward the Jews in late fifteenth-century southern Italy.48 The problem was that separate taxation and total exemption from taxation were not by any means the same thing; but in the localities it seemed to be believed that the Jews were escaping the regular fiscal burdens imposed by Naples.49 Antagonism to the Jews in southern Italy was spread by wandering preachers such as Fra Gaspare in 1491, though the government in Naples reacted decisively in favor of the Jews. In Sicily, popular antagonism was expressed in increasingly frequent Easter riots, and constantly there was pressure on the Jews to move their synagogues or houses away from churches, as in Mdina, the capital of Malta. Nothing, however, compared to the massacre in 1474 at Modica; the pogrom in Modica took place on the Christian feast of the Assumption, with a minimum mortality of 360, not counting the imitative riots that followed 44

45

46

47 48 49

B. Scheller, Die Stadt der Neuchristen: Konvertierte Juden under ihre Nachkommen im Trani des Spätmittelalters zwischen Inklusion und Exclusion (Berlin, 2013); B. Scheller, “The Materiality of Difference: Converted Jews and their Descendants in the Late Medieval Kingdom of Naples,” The Medieval History Journal 12 (2009), 405 30. Ibid., 170 1; for Ferrante’s policy on interest rates, see Bonnazoli, “Gli Ebrei,” pt. 1, 539 40. Cf. C. Colafemmina, “La tutela dei giudei del regno di Napoli nei ‘Capitoli’ dei sovrani aragonesi,” Studi di storia meridionale 7 (1987), 297 310. Ferorelli, Gli Ebrei nell’Italia meridionale, 171. Petralia, “L’epoca aragonese,” 79 114. For the smaller towns in Apulia, see the pioneering studies of C. Colafemmina, espe cially Ebrei e cristiani novelli in Puglia. Le comunità minori (Bari, 1991).

114 the middle ages: the christian world 50 elsewhere. Christian preachers insisted that the Jews were teaching antiChristian blasphemies, but the Crown did not offer support to the Jewbaiters; indeed, the leaders of the Modica riot were executed. But the offense they had committed, it must be emphasized, was against the authority of the king, whose property the Jews were, rather than against the Jews themselves. Thus, even before the Jews were expelled from Sicily in 1492–3, the relations between Jews and Christians had begun to deteriorate. However, it is striking that the Jews still had many defenders in Sicily, including the nobles and city elites, who argued that expulsion was an absurd idea, since it would damage the economy. There are two explanations for why the Jews were expelled from Sicily: one looking to Sicily, the other to Spain. The disorder that anti-Jewish riots created; the unpopularity of the Jews themselves, increasingly demonized by a small but influential group of friars and business rivals; local expulsions of Jews from small towns – all these can be read as signs that the king’s representatives in Sicily were under pressure to clear all Jews from the island. A charge that the Jews had defiled a crucifix while it was being carried in the streets of a small town in eastern Sicily in December 1491 was later cited as grounds for the expulsion, rather as the accusation that the Jews of La Guardia had sacrificed a Christian child helped to precipitate expulsion from Spain.51 And the order came from Spain. It was not part of the original expulsion order directed at the Jews of Aragon and Castile, of March 1492, though the Jews of Sicily could have had few illusions that the expulsion of the Sephardim would leave them unscathed, and the text of the decree was similar to that issued in the Spanish lands of the Crown of Aragon.52 The edict expelling the Jews from Sicily was only published in mid-June. Jews were effectively deprived of a chance even to work for a living in the three months ordained for their departure; the Viceroy did, though, make an effort to ensure that the Jews were not mistreated in the localities before their departure. One concession was made, to the effect that the last Jews need not leave Sicily until January 12, 1493. It is possible that orders for the sequestration of Jewish goods were widely ignored, for the notarial 50 52

Roth, The History of the Jews of Italy, 251 2. 51 Ibid., 254. For the expulsion, see, in particular, E. Ashtor, “La Fin du Judaïsme sicilien,” Revue des études juives 142 (1983), 323 47, a critique of C. Trasselli, “Sull’espulsione degli ebrei della Sicilia,” Annali della Facoltà di economia e commercio, Università di Palermo 8 (1954), and C. Trasselli’s lecture “Gli ebrei di Sicilia,” printed in his Siciliani fra Quattrocento e Cinquecento (Messina, 1981), 135 57. Both Ashtor and Trasselli, in different ways, greatly revise the conclusions of Roth, Milano, and other authorities. See also F. Renda, La fine dell’ebraismo siciliano (Palermo, 1992); also E. Ashtor, “The Jews of Trapani in the later Middle Ages,” Studi Medievali ser. 3, 25 (1984), 1 30.

italy 115 contracts drawn up by Jews regulating their affairs before leaving the island rarely refer to this act of dispossession. Sometimes Jews asked for payment in kind, expecting to export their proceeds as sugar, leather, or even Florentine cloths.53 There was, nonetheless, another escape: converts to Christianity would have their property back. As in Spain, the Crown’s priority was thus not expulsion but conversion. For mass emigration also meant the loss of artisan skills; the Crown was firmly advised by the city councils of Palermo and Catania that the loss of Jewish expertise could not be countenanced, while King Ferrante of Naples was only too keen to acquire the craftsmen others had thrown out.54 Certainly, the effect of the expulsion order was to stimulate a lastminute wave of conversions.55 Occasionally, men would convert while their wives departed into exile, stronger in their religious convictions.56 In the eminent Sala family of Trapani, the widow of the banker Sadone and several young children took the road to exile, while one of Sadone’s sons, Paolo, became a Christian. In support of Ashtor’s view that poor and rich Jews converted, there is the social range of the neofiti who appear in the notarial acts of post-expulsion Sicily: old Jewish artisan skills, such as sugar production or the salting of tunny fish, were preserved in the New Christian communities. By 1516, the presence of large numbers of neofiti in Palermo had become a source of social tension. Research by Nadia Zeldes has confirmed that the former Jews of Sicily were hunted down by the Inquisition for similar reasons to the Jews of Spain, and that they retained similar religious practices.57 Reggio Calabria, on the mainland just opposite Sicily, became the focus of immigration, and a separate Sicilian judeca rapidly formed alongside the existing Jewish community. In Reggio, not surprisingly, the Jews faced hostile petty officials, such as one who had to be reprimanded in May 1492 for pulling hairs out of the beards of Sicilian Jews; the Summaria in Naples insisted that the king would be gravely upset by such news.58 Despite the enormous practical difficulties in crossing the Mediterranean, where unscrupulous captains sold their passengers as slaves or even slaughtered them, it was in Naples, Reggio, and other south Italian 53

54 55 57

58

There is rich documentation in Simonsohn, The Jews in Sicily, vol. VIII: 1490 1497 (Leiden, 2006). Ashtor, La Fin, 324, 326, 330; Trasselli, Siciliani, 152. Ashtor, La Fin, 332 3; Trasselli, Siciliani, 151 7. 56 Ashtor, La Fin, 331. N. Zeldes, “The Former Jews of this Kingdom”: Sicilian Converts after the Expulsion, 1492 1516 (Leiden, 2003). C. Colafemmina, “The Jews of Reggio Calabria from the End of the Fifteenth Century to the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century,” in G. Dahan, ed., Les Juifs au regard de l’histoire. Mélanges en l’honneur de Bernhard Blumenkranz (Paris, 1985), 255 62.

116 the middle ages: the christian world towns that the Jews exiled from Sicily and Spain encountered the most wholehearted welcome, probably doubling the size of the Jewish community of southern Italy. King Ferrante assured newly arrived Jews that they would be treated exactly as if they were natives of his kingdom. It is revealing that the king insisted his officials should record the trade (artificio o mercancia) of the head of each household.59 Hostility to the Jews was accentuated not merely as a result of the large-scale immigration of Spanish and Sicilian Jews, which generated local tensions.60 A political storm was gathering, which would remain over southern Italy for decades: Ferrante died in 1494 as Charles VIII of France made ready to vindicate ancient Angevin claims to the region. The short reign of Alfonso II saw no significant change in royal policy toward the Jews (one of his closest advisors was the Iberian exile Don Isaac Abravanel), but outrages occurred in every corner of the kingdom. Royal commands to respect the rights of the Jews were blatantly ignored. A few days before Charles’s army reached Naples, in February 1495, hostile Christian hordes sacked Jewish houses, destroying Abravanel’s library, while savage attacks on Jewish communities in Apulia resulted in their impoverishment.61 For fifty years, the Jews had benefited signally from the continued existence of an autonomous Aragonese government that not merely respected their privileges but extended them; but after 1494, even the Aragonese saw them as a liability, because their priority was to win back the loyalty of the south Italian majority. They were also less of an asset than before, because much of their wealth had been expropriated or destroyed. The return of the Aragonese dynasty to Naples after the defeat of the French, in July 1495, did not lead to an immediate improvement in the status of the Jews: rumors circulated that Jews and New Christians were to be expelled; local expulsions resumed. Perhaps the worst feature of these years for the Jews was the constant oscillation in government as the French withdrew, the Aragonese returned, the French invaded again, and then the Spanish under Ferdinand the Catholic finally took over, so they found themselves ruled by the very king who had expelled all the Jews from Spain and Sicily, including many of those now living in southern Italy.62 An early decision of the Catholic Monarchs was to expel the southern Italian Jews, and yet within a few months it had been suspended. 59 60

61 62

Ferorelli, Gli Ebrei nell’Italia meridionale, 93 4. Lopez, Napoli e la Peste 1464 1530, politica, istituzioni, problemi sanitari (Naples, 1989), 91 122, especially 101 22. Sonnazoli, “Gli ebrei,” pt. 1, 501 2. For the last forty years of Jewish existence in southern Italy, see V. Bonnazoli, “Gli ebrei del regno di Napoli all’epoca della loro espulsione. II parte: Il periodo spagnolo (1501 1541),” Archivio storico italiano 139 (1981), 179 287.

italy 117 The Viceroy, Gonzalo de Cordoba, ignored the recent large immigration from Spain and Sicily and brazenly insisted that the number of Jews in southern Italy was insignificant. He rather undermined his own case by arguing that expulsion would damage the economy.63 Indeed, following representations from the Neapolitan elite, Ferdinand actually confirmed Ferrante’s Jewish privileges, while insisting that the Jews of Naples must at last wear a badge.64 Even when the Jews were ordered out of southern Italy in 1510, 200 families were allowed to stay, subject to a 3,000-ducat annual tribute.65 In the last analysis, Ferdinand did not insist on the principle that southern Italy must become judenfrei. However, as in Spain, he was very much concerned with the failure of the New Christians to become sincere converts, though it is unclear whether he had the neofiti of Puglia on his mind or the Marranos newly arrived from Spain. Within southern Italy, the neofiti found themselves increasingly forced to defend their attachment to Christianity. They too were expelled in 1514–15, an act which was never undertaken in Spain itself. The final expulsion of the remaining Jewish families, and of a significant number of Jews who had filtered back into southern Italy, did not occur until 1541, under Charles V, and even then New Christians managed to establish themselves at the Viceroy’s court, playing an important role in the kingdom’s finances.66 The expulsions of 1492–3, 1510, and 1541 had the curious effect of turning the demography of Jewish Italy upside-down. Apart from Rome, the ancient centers of Jewish settlement were now empty, and the north of Italy had become the home to Jews from Iberia, Provence, Germany, and, of course, the Italian south, though many southern Jews had opted instead for the relative safety of the Ottoman Empire. Less intellectually distinguished than Spanish Jewry, the communities of southern Italy and Sicily had, nonetheless, shared with the Sephardim a capacity to integrate themselves into the life of the places they inhabited, and secured the willing protection of a series of kings who valued their presence not simply for fiscal reasons. THE NORTH r o b e r t b o n fi l

Before the burgeoning of the communes, Jews were almost completely absent from northern Italy, while from the thirteenth century throughout 63 65 66

Ibid., 180 1, based on Zurita, vol. I, fol. 326v. 64 Bonazzoli, pt. 2, 184. Ferorelli, Gli Ebrei nell’Italia meridionale, 213 14. P. Mazur, New Christians of Spanish Naples (Basingstoke, 2013).

118 the middle ages: the christian world practically the whole of the fifteenth, a growing flow heading northward, of the Jews of Italian origin who crowded the South, put the finishing touches to the migratory momentum set up there as a consequence of the Arab raids all over the ninth and tenth centuries, and reinforced by the introduction of Norman rule during the eleventh. The radical inversion of the topodemographical picture of the Jewish presence in the peninsula – i.e. the gradual eradication of the Jews in the South contrasting with the proliferation of Jewish settlements in the North – was strengthened throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by tiny but continuous downward streams of Jews of French, German, and Spanish origin, for the most part victims of persecutions, in search of more hospitable havens. Such migratory movements took place according to the usual pattern of Jewish settlement in the Diaspora, itself a variety of the normal dynamics of emigration and immigration in world history.67 First, and above all, people moved because of ineluctable necessity – expulsions and persecutions. Next, they were stirred up by assessments – objective as well as idiosyncratic – of their situation in terms of a sort of law of “supply and demand,” i.e. of the pros and cons of the possible choices of residence, such as the readiness of the gentiles to accept them, the degree of safety offered by the chosen city, expectations concerning the features and the attitudes of the ruling institutions, the nature of the socio-economic gentile frameworks, the existence of established Jewish communities supplying religious facilities (such as synagogal services and cemeteries), and so on.68 In the absence of an age-old tradition of Jewish presence (almost the only example of this being in Rome), the law of “supply and demand” also variously affected the attitudes of the gentiles, who needed cogent arguments to counter the ubiquitous anti-Jewish tendency of public opinion, or at least to neutralize it. Such arguments were usually encapsulated in recurring, but quite ambiguous, statements that the Jews were “necessary” – 67

68

Any attempt to list here a bibliography would not only transcend the limits of the present chapter but, a priori, be doomed to failure, especially in view of apparent radically contrasting opinions among specifically trained experts in the field. See, for instance, the baffling difference between the bibliographies appended to the outlines of André Armengaud and Paul André Rosental in Encyclopaedia Universalis, under “Migrations (histoire des),” the first in the 2009 edition and the latter in the 2010 edition. For a concise exposition of variables involved in the decision making processes concern ing choices of residence, see Robert Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy (Berkeley, 1994), 19 59. Needless to say, the summary drawn here adheres substantially to the narrative of that book, in which one can also find the relevant bibliography up to the date of its publication. Therefore, although many more studies were published in the years after (and, as far as possible, are here taken into consideration and cited below), unless explicitly stated otherwise, readers are referred to the list in that volume.

italy 119 that is to say, in terms which left (and still leave) the identity of the needy and the nature of the need open to imagination. Since, as is normally the case with similar concepts, historical narratives can only variously represent the countless specificities and developments over time, one must be very cautious in assessing the meaning of these terms. One must especially be aware that economic considerations cannot fully cover the topic, but must be assessed amidst a more comprehensive weighing of all kinds of microhistorical and prosopographic factors that may have determined the choices of both individual Jews and the gentile rulers, and consequently influenced decision-making processes. Jews and gentile rulers undoubtedly assigned a crucial role to the economic advantages that each side could expect from the other, and would negotiate and decide according to their respective evaluations of the actual requirements of the law of “supply and demand.” As far as the Jews were concerned, it made little difference whether they had to negotiate with republics, kingdoms, free communes, or lordships (signorie): in the long run, no matter how they had taken power and secured the running of their institutional organizations, rulers governed and behaved the same way, managing to maintain in equilibrium the variety of interests and worldviews of their citizens. As a consequence, they might even adopt different policies in different localities of the same city-state: Jews were, for instance, persistently rejected from the commercially and industrially developed capital cities of Genoa, Milan, Venice, and Florence, but not (at least not consistently) from other towns situated under their rule.69 69

It is almost impossible to give precise accounts of the towns situated over time under the same political rule, because the borders of the city states were in a continuous state of flux, but the randomly available evidence gives an approximate outline of the shifting picture. Among the localities subjected almost continuously to rule by Milan, for instance, groups of Jews settled in Crema, Cremona, Novara, Pavia, Voghera, and more; among those subjected to Venice, they settled in, for example, Este, Mestre, Padua, and Treviso. Some places such as Brescia, Soncino, and Verona changed hands according to their different fates. Among the places subjected to Florence, Jews ran pawn shops in San Miniato, Prato, Arezzo, Volterra, and elsewhere. In contrast, Genoa remained adamant in constantly rejecting the Jews from its domain, with the exception of a limited number of physicians allowed to settle temporarily, even in the capital city. Almost all significant documents relating to Milan are systematically registered in Shlomo Simonsohn, ed., The Jews in the Duchy of Milan, with Introduction and Notes (Jerusalem, 1982), vols. I and II; those relating to Genoa, in Rossana Urbani and Guido Zazzu, The Jews in Genoa, vol. I: 507 1681 (Leiden, 1999). An exhaustive list of individuals who ran pawn shops in Tuscany under Florentine rule, before the Jews were allowed to settle in the capital city, may be found in David Herlihy and Christine Klapisch Zuber, Les Toscans et leurs familles: une étude du Catasto florentin de 1427 (Paris, 1975) (English trans.: Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427 [New Haven, CT, 1985]). For the Veneto beyond the quite outdated,

120 the middle ages: the christian world Although on the surface one can perceive a sort of recurrent pattern, every case reflects quite differently the considerations involved in individual decision-making. As had frequently happened elsewhere, for instance in the Rhineland at the close of the eleventh century, some rulers did not hesitate to extend, to the Jews whom they thought could effectively contribute to the development of their cities, the same benefits offered to Christian potential immigrants. Thus in the charter issued to local rulers in 1426 by the Governor of the March of Ancona, which belonged to the Papal State, the Jews were explicitly included among the citizens exempted from certain fiscal burdens.70 To be put on equal footing with Christian citizens meant rights and protection almost equal to those of Christians,71 including lawful possession of houses and other sorts of real estate, exemptions from certain taxes, procedural standing in court in cases of litigation with Christian citizens, in addition to privileges more specifically related to freedom of religious worship. In fact, such liberal attitudes are typical of the early stage of growth of the northern city-states: they gradually waned and finally disappeared in the later stage of development – according to the above-mentioned law of supply and demand, the effort necessary to oppose the anti-Jewish trends of public opinion then obviously no longer paid. When and where they were invited to settle, the Jews were accordingly granted protection and privileges “as if they were citizens of old” (sicut cives, prout cives) – that is, their legal condition could be more or less comparable to that of the citizens, but they had to remain foreigners. The pattern of settlement of Jews in a place where they had not previously resided was stabilized by the granting of a privilege, i.e. a special permit of residence to foreigners, granted under specific conditions implying (as mentioned before) some sort of “necessity,” yet for a fixed period, as similar permits are today. Such permits were issued ad personam as special bilateral contracts: the rulers gave permission to this or that individual Jew to take up residence in their city for the purpose of carrying on a specific activity, according to a set of reciprocal conditions, listed in detail in the contracts, known as condotte (plural of condotta),72

70

71

72

but still useful, bibliography of Edgardo Morpurgo (“Bibliografia della storia degli ebrei nel Veneto,” Rivista Israelitica 7 [1910], 8 [1911] and 9 [1912]) one has to refer to the monographs on specific localities in the second updated edition of the Encyclopaedia Judaica. See Peter Partner, The Papal State under Martin V The Administration and Government of the Temporal Power in the Early Fifteenth Century (London, 1958), 231. As a rule, such rights included the guarantee of legal protection in cases of litigations crossing state borders, for, like Christian businessmen, the Jews were involved in business networks all over Italy. The term itself applied similarly to all sorts of bilateral contracts regulating appoint ments for the provision of specific services, such as the temporary appointment of

italy 121 usually lasting from three to five years, but in rare instances for fifteen or more. When they expired, they could be renewed, which is what usually happened, thereby establishing a certain continuity of the Jewish presence in many cities from which the Jews had been completely absent in the previous period. Nevertheless, the Jews were not automatically expelled from a city even when they were unsuccessful in getting the expired condotta renewed. Their residence was simply no longer founded on the legal basis of the privilege: in theory, they became liable to expulsion; in practice, as happens today, they were legally classed as unauthorized foreign residents, no longer deserving protection and privileges “as if they were citizens of old” – insofar as there was no formal decision to expel them, they ought to be treated under the provisions of Roman law and could go on negotiating for a renewal of the condotta. There are hundreds of condotte extant today, all of which present a more or less homogeneous set of general characteristics, while in points of detail they reflect the variety of local circumstances and the idiosyncrasies of the decision-makers. The Jew or Jews mentioned in the document were granted permission to exercise the function for which they were invited to take up residence in the locality – usually running a pawn-shop and consumer-lending to the needy; sometimes trading; more rarely, providing medical services to the poor. The beneficiaries of the condotta agreed to invest a certain capital sum, whose minimum level was sometimes specified but was, in any case, hardly considerable. The terms of the condotte stipulated, likewise, the conditions under which money could be lent: the highest approved rates of interest, the procedures for the auctioningoff of unredeemed pledges, the terms under which a monopoly might be granted, the nature of the taxes to be exacted, as well as the fiscal exemptions granted, and so on. Since consumer-lending to the needy was the service expected from those granted condotte, and implied a difference between privileged needy citizens and un-privileged country-men, low rates of interest for the citizens were in practice a tax paid by the Jews in exchange for the condotte. This was quite clearly specified in the military captains or of physicians charged by the city rulers to provide free treatment to the poor. During the sixteenth century, they were conferred on groups of Jews, viewed according to the Roman law as “legal persons” the universitates or nations of the Jews and this was the basis on which Jewish Communities were later formed. (For a detailed outline of the idea of universitas, see Pierre Michaud Quantin, Universitas expressions du Mouvement Communautaire dans le Moyen Âge Latin (Paris, 1970). Finally, the regime of the condotte became almost obsolete wherever ghettoes were established in accordance with Paul IV’s bullCum nimis absurdum, but those developments are beyond the scope of the present chapter.

122 the middle ages: the christian world minute-books of the rulers’ decisions, but very rarely mentioned in the condotte themselves, which usually took the form of acts of grace on the part of the governors, while the payments, calculated globally on the basis of the highest permitted rate of interest, represented a sort of hidden advance payment of taxes. For instance, the privilege granted by the rulers of Ascoli (Piceno) in 1297 – i.e., in a relatively early stage of urban development – to a number of Christians and four Jews, indicates precisely the terms of moneylending and the maximum interest that they were allowed to charge citizens, adding clearly that “with foreigners they are allowed to act as they wish”; in exchange for the privilege, the Jews pledged to pay 100 gold florins per year: in other words, the money-lenders would lose 100 florins a year by offering low rates to citizens, but also had to pay the same amount – 100 florins a year – as a “tax.”73 The condotta, therefore, represented a somewhat questionable transaction that the rulers were very careful not to elevate to the level of relationships openly and normally integrated into the city’s socio-economic fabric – a choice of the lesser of two evils in the interests of public order, as was also the case in relations with prostitutes.74 The way that the pawn-shop itself was conceived was based on an ambiguity similar to the one just highlighted. It was supposed to be plainly visible, but at the same time sufficiently out of the public eye – present and absent, precisely as Jews and prostitutes ought to be in the framework of Christian society. Like a house of prostitution, it had to be disguised, so that the outside should not give obvious clues to what went on inside, except to those who had already been inside. To those who had not yet succumbed to the temptation, the insignificant modesty of the exterior gave free rein to the imagination, beyond any conceivable reality, introducing a peculiar imaginary dimension to the perception of the Jew on the part of the medieval Christian mentality, as well as a sense of alienation in the Jews’ perception of their own vital space. A fairly accurate impression of that sense, as well as of the dynamics of settlement and the running of pawn-shops, as they were perceived by the Ashkenazic Jews settled in the Venetian area, is displayed in the Book of the Moneylender and the Borrower,

73

74

The document was published by G. Fabiani, Gli ebrei e il Monte di Pietà in Ascoli (Ascoli Piceno, 1942), Appendice I, 169 72. For a more telling example of a similar estimate in 1387 in Venice, see Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy, 38. As we will see shortly below, this kind of disparity between the rights of citizens and those of foreigners was crucial for the Jews when choosing where to live. This comparison entails much more than a rhetorical device for the sake of stressing the argument. See, for a more detailed discussion, Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy, 44 50, and the index, under “prostitutes.”

italy 123 penned in slightly ironical vein in the fifteenth century in the style of Maimonides’s Code:75 The city chosen to install a pawn shop must be surrounded by walls, its gates must be closed during the night . . . a fair must take place once a year and a market day once a week . . . it must have courts and judges, but the rights of people of the country side ought not be equaled to those of the citizens . . . The bank must be located in the best section of the city, close to the central crossroads, so that it is easy to reach, but off the main street, away from the market square, so that rich people are not ashamed to be seen going in. The entrance must be low and narrow, protected by a curtain to stop passers by seeing in, so they don’t recognize the faces of those taking out a loan. The curtain must be blue, so that the pawn shop is easily recognizable . . . The windows . . . should be sealed with paper, or with oiled parchment, if the money lender is poor, or with glass, if he is rich, to keep out drafts, because they could affect the functioning of weighing scales. The counter must be in the middle and must stretch across the room from one side to the other, completely separating the money lender from his customers. It should be wide and deep, so that the inner edge is out of the customers’ reach.

The six-panel predella representing the Miracle of the Profaned Host, painted by Paolo Uccello in 1468, displays a number of these details.76 The pattern above provides sufficiently wide-ranging explanation of the variety of manifestations of the presence of Jews in hundreds of Italian cities, as well as of their absence in hundreds of other ones. Thus, the fact that Jewish palaces and houses could not be nonchalantly expropriated can be understood as a sort of inertia recalling the early settlement on an equal footing with Christian entrepreneurs who had been invited during the crucial phase of economic expansion: this is the case, for example, in Padua and Mantua, where signs of this are recognizable even now; on the other hand, a complete absence of evidence of Jewish settlement can testify that the adversaries of the Jews had the upper hand, in the framework of local 75

76

The work, erroneously assigned to the seventeenth century, was published by A. N. Z. Roth in the Hebrew Union College Annual 26 (1955), 39 74. Its author seems to have been Master Kaufmann, the father in law of R. Judah Mintz, the Head of the Paduan yeshivah at the close of the fifteenth century, for a manuscript version of the work, today in the Ginzburg Collection of Moscow (Ms. 722), was copied in 1501. A French translation is provided by Léon Poliakov, Les banchieri juifs et le Saint Siège du xiiie au xviiie siècle (Paris, 1965), 310 28. For an annotated critical edition of the work, by the present writer, see Robert Bonfil, Book of Moneylender and Borrower (Jerusalem, 2015). The predella is presently in Urbino, Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Palazzo Ducale. The painting has recently been analyzed in an insightful essay, “The Contours of Tolerance and the Corpus Domini Altarpiece in Urbino,” included by Dana E. Katz in her book The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance (Philadelphia, 2008), 16 39. This scholar’s perspective is, however, partially at variance with my own.

124 the middle ages: the christian world micro-histories that do not require our attention here; and, finally, sporadic evidence of Jewish settlement according to the regime of the condotte hints at the micro-historical and prosopographic factors involved in the individual decision-making processes of Jews and gentiles alike. Of paramount importance were the attitudes of, and demands from, the papacy (i.e., the popes and the college of the cardinals, the curia) in Rome. As heads of the state of the Church, the popes played a very important role on the political chessboard of the Italian city-states. But, since the Jews were usually tolerated so that they could practice consumer moneylending to the poor, and since, according to universal consensus, every Christian ruler owed obedience to the canon law, which viewed consumer moneylending at usury as definitely forbidden, even when practiced by Jews, the popes could reasonably claim that formal ad hoc dispensations issued by the Apostolic Chamber should be sought from the heads of the Catholic Church in Rome.77 Some rulers who would not run the risk of a confrontation with the Holy See, particularly where there were strong anti-Jewish feelings among the public, or who presumed that showing allegiance to the papacy could be rewarding, politically or otherwise, required the Jews to take care of that procedure, which naturally implied the payment of a fee to the Roman Treasury. In other cases, rulers might believe that a display of independence vis-à-vis the head of the state of the Church could be more beneficial and would consequently manage to justify their decision on the basis of legally valid arguments. In a roundabout way, the common belief that the presence of the Jews was the lesser of two evils, as was also the presence of prostitutes, was thus also organically inserted between religion and politics in the profoundly ambiguous network of ties connecting the local socio-political and economic intricacies with the complexities of the decision-making processes in Rome. These complexities included the Franciscan claim that, in terms of Christian charity, where consumer moneylending to the needy was concerned, there were better ways of succumbing to the lesser of two evils. To that end, the Franciscans proposed to get rid of the Jews and replace them with the Monti di Pietà, halfway between modern credit banks and charitable institutions, encouraging nonproductive deposits from pious men and women persuaded by the promise of rewards in heaven. According to the Franciscan theologians, the fee of 5 percent charged by the Monti di Pietà for the covering of administrative expenses was not usury in the terms of canon law and should therefore be absolutely permitted. However, under the influence of theologians following the 77

See Poliakov, Les banchieri juifs, ch. 2.

italy 125 traditional Dominican stance, the Holy See was deeply reluctant to agree with this argument. And this was just one of a set of obstacles placed in the way of the Monti di Pietà. By placing an arbitrary ceiling on the amounts that could be loaned, by compelling borrowers to declare, under oath and under pain of arrest, that they were taking out the loan strictly for their own personal needs and not for commercial purposes or – worse still – to satisfy their appetites for vice and vanity, by encouraging more “governmental” than private administration (with the resulting proliferation of offices, sinecures, fiscal irresponsibility, embezzlements, and financial scandals), the Franciscan solution did not become truly practicable, and the Jewish usurers did not face a substantial threat during the fifteenth century.78 What they did suffer, however, were popular uprisings kindled by the angry preaching of friars insistently defending the founding of Monti di Pietà and accordingly pushing for the Jews to be driven out of the socioeconomic fabric of the cities. In fact, many sermons ended in pogroms, like the one that took place in Florence in 1488, after an inflammatory sermon by Bernardino da Feltre.79 Many witnesses confirm that this Florentine example was not exceptional: popular attacks on Jews frequently followed in the wake of Franciscan sermons, as did other kinds of anti-Jewish disturbances, including accusations of ritual murder. The accusation of having murdered a Christian child, “little Simon,” made against the Jews of Trent in 1475, is the most widely known among such manifestations, partly because this was the first time the new invention of printing was employed in the service of the hate campaign set up by the archbishop lord of the town. The Trent affair may indeed be considered paradigmatic for numerous other aspects which cannot be dealt with in detail here, including the recent outburst of age-old vested animosities clothed in academic garb.80 Nonetheless, what must be stressed is that more than a dozen 78

79

80

In fact, that did not happen until all obstacles, including authorization of the payment of interest to people who made cash deposits, had been removed. But this later evolution, which marked the beginning of a deep socio economic crisis in the Jewish communities, is also definitely beyond the scope of the present chapter. See Umberto Cassuto, Gli ebrei a Firenze nell’età del rinascimento (Florence, 1918; reprint Florence, 1965), 56 60. The bibliography on the tragic event of Trento has recently registered an extraordinary increase for a large number of reasons, variously interrelated though in a somewhat roundabout way. Scholars can now take advantage of a whole range of learned works directly connected with the publication of hitherto unknown, or hardly known, archival documentation relating to the trial. See Anna Esposito and Diego Quaglioni, Processi contro gli ebrei di Trento (1475 1478), vols. I II (Padua, 1990 2008); Iginio Rogger and Marco Bellabarba, Il principe Vescovo Johannes Hinderbach (1465 1486) fra tardo Medioevo e Umanesimo (Bologna, 1992); Rony Po Chia Hsia, Trent 1475 Stories of

126 the middle ages: the christian world similar cases occurred during the second half of the fifteenth century, most of which have been brought to light only recently – which shows how incomplete our knowledge in this area continues to be. We should not, however, unreservedly ascribe the blame for every misfortune that befell the Jews to the instigation of either itinerant friars or other bigoted rulers. If these people did indeed play a role in the generation of violence against the Jews, it was because they were particularly in tune with the generally negative atittude of public opinion regarding the Jews. The resulting controversy should, however, sufficiently explain the evidence of Jewish settlement in the phase characterized by the regime of the condotte, and the elusiveness of statistics relating to the Jewish population dispersed in the region. Since the number of big cities was quite small and, as we have seen, the most important among them excluded Jews from their urban areas, the choice was limited to localities which did not generally exceed 1–3,000 souls, i.e. 100 families or so, among which rarely could more than one Jewish family set up residence and make a living. And since the documentary evidence of condotte is not continuous, there is apparently no way to assess whether any named individual mentioned as beneficiary of a condotta in one place is the same person mentioned as beneficiary of a condotta elsewhere, some years later. One is therefore not allowed to draw speculative inferences from this kind of evidence. Should one take the risk to extrapolate from the next phase of urbanization, one might guess that, throughout the period considered in the present chapter, the Jewish population of northern Italy did not exceed 20–25,000 souls,81 scattered across dozens of tiny localities with overall populations hardly any bigger than those of a couple of buildings in a modern urban neighborhood. Within Christian spaces rarely exceeding a couple of square miles, a complex coexistence of Jews with their neighbors took place, both availing themselves of the same public areas (streets, squares) and governmental institutions (courts of justice, officers in charge of public order and administration), and, particularly, the structures in which public and private activities come together (markets, shops, taverns, hostels). That meant live encounters, involving all kinds of interaction: people bought

81

a Ritual Murder Trial (New Haven, CT, 1992). Mention should perhaps also be made of the provocative revisionist attempt of Ariel Toaff (Pasque di sangue Ebrei d’Europa e omicidi rituali [Bologna, 2007 and, in a slightly corrected edition, 2008), which kindled a host of mostly non scholarly debates, about which see Sabina Loriga, “Une Vieille Affaire? Les Pâques de sang d’Ariel Toaff,” Annales Histoire, Science Sociale 63 (2008), 143 72. For more specific figures, see Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy, index, under “demography.”

italy 127 and sold, did all kinds of business, socialized or quarreled, sometimes gave way to violence. Popular attacks in the wake of extraordinary events, such as the previously mentioned sermons of itinerant friars, were thus an inevitable part of the overall picture, for events like these were the best show in town and also took place in the same public space, generally in front of the Cathedral church, though they were not the only ones to kindle popular animosity. A joyful occasion among the Jews, usually a marriage, could suddenly bring a relatively huge number of foreign guests, showing off expensive clothes and other status symbols, who might give unsympathetic Christian observers the impression that their world was being turned upside-down. Sumptuary ordinances, such as those issued in Bologna and Forlì in 1416–18, clearly indicate the Jewish leaders’ concern with such issues.82 On the whole, then, coexistence meant efforts to remove as many as possible of the elements that could eventually jeopardize it, yet not at the price of giving up distinctiveness: Christians had to be Christians and Jews had to remain Jews, at least inasmuch as they would not succumb to the temptation of converting to Christianity. The socio-cultural identity of both sides had, therefore, to be very carefully defined, and particularly concerning the meaning of the Hebrew Bible, which formed part of the inherited authoritative texts of Jews and Christians alike. The struggle of the Jews in order to set up such a definition of identity had to be based on ambiguous foundations, naturally merging with the other aspects of ambiguity inherent to the Jewish situation: on one hand, they had to be tightly connected with the local socio-cultural frame, i.e. interaction with their Christian neighbors, yet, on the other hand, they had to be no less tightly connected with the socio-cultural frame of Jews elsewhere, and particularly of those who would eventually be considered leading authorities within that frame. In other words, the Jews had to define their socio-cultural identity in ambiguous terms of both presence in, and absence from, the local Christian cultural space, as well as presence in, and absence from, the world-wide Jewish cultural space.83 82

83

See Louis Finkelstein, Jewish Self Government in the Middle Ages, 2nd edn. (New York, 1964), 281 97. The varieties of Christian socio cultural self definitions with regard to Judaism, which recently came to the fore in the so called Judeo Christian dialogue, are, of course, only marginally relevant for the history of the Jews in our period and will therefore not retain our attention here. A number of explorations of aspects of Italian Jews’ conscious active choice to preserve a distinctive Jewish identity while at the same time being an integral part of the socio economic and cultural fabric of the environment in which they lived constitute the subject matter of the essays included in Robert Bonfil, Cultural Change among the Jews of Early Modern Italy (Farnham, 2010).

128 the middle ages: the christian world The connection with the local socio-cultural frame naturally implied knowledge of the vernacular language, awareness of matters of importance to the local Christian community, and some degree of proficiency in learned local culture, even if it could somehow challenge the Jewish one. The connection with the world-wide Jewish cultural space implied, first and foremost knowledge of Hebrew, for it could be maintained almost exclusively by letter-writing. As in the entire medieval Christian West, throughout the period considered here, Hebrew was in fact the exclusive language for Jewish literary utterances of all kinds, and most particularly for letter-writing, indispensable to the maintenance of socio-cultural connections between the relatively isolated Jews. And since it was essentially the artificial language of the traditional cultural heritage that bridged all Jewish space, it was eventually absorbed into educational policy aimed at training youngsters and adults to participate in distinctively Jewish cultural activities, such as talmudic study in yeshivot. Since, however, a gender bias was a basic component of the pre-modern mental attitudes shared by Jews and non-Jews alike, this educational policy did not extend to girls, who as a rule were taught just rudimentary elements of Hebrew, sufficient for reading prayerbooks and some works labelled as “women’s literature.” The gender-biased hierarchical view of society, therefore, caused a resolute splitting of the internal cultural space into male and female spheres, an aspect that was variously projected onto a number of additional planes that cannot be dealt with in detail here. It is sufficient to remark, for instance, that, in the hierarchy of social values, according to which men were held to be socially more important than women, boys and men “naturally belonged” to the category of “high” while girls and women would belong to that of “low,” i.e. men belonged to high culture as opposed to low culture. Quite rarely, women might engage in studies ordinarily pursued by men, yet only in extraordinarily limited circumstances that were usually determined by the women’s unique character, coupled with their families’ high social standing. The feminist revolution still remained a far cry from our period. It therefore does not come as a surprise that Jewish literary production was carried out exclusively by men – men trained in rabbinical studies, sometimes ordained rabbis. Examples of such men are present in every significant field, particularly biblical exegesis, talmudism, and philosophy (mostly theology). Their perspectives and proclivities are confirmed by the printers, who programmed their printing activity with an eye on the presumed demands of the public.84 A detailed discussion of their activity is, however, far beyond the scope of the present chapter. 84

A fairly comprehensive picture of the early trends in Hebrew printing is provided by the second updated edition of the Encyclopaedia Judaica, under “Incunabula”: IX, 759 69.

chapter 6

THE IBERIAN PENINSULA yom tov assis† and mark meyerson

THE TRANSITION TO CHRISTIAN RULE yom tov assis†

The result of the meeting between Jewish culture and Greco-Arabic culture in Muslim Spain was the emergence of a very special cultural symbiosis that left a profound impact on Jewish culture in general. During two centuries of relative tranquility, from 950 to 1148, the so-called Golden Age, the Jews of Al-Andalus created a religious and cultural center with very distinctive characteristics.1 It was then that the Jews applied the biblical word Sepharad to the entire peninsula and used it to identify their special cultural and religious trend within Jewry.2 As the Reconquista, the centuries-old wars waged by the Christian north against the Muslim south, brought more and more territories under Christian control, the number of Arabic-speaking or Andalusian Jews in the Hispanic kingdoms and principalities grew steadily. The Reconquista lasted more than seven centuries, with a long intermission of 250 years from the middle of the thirteenth century until the fall of Granada in 1492. The Christian conquests constantly pushed the border between Islam and Christendom in Iberia southward.3 The Jews in the conquered territories

† 1

2

3

2013 On the “Golden Age” of the Jews in Muslim Spain, see S. Morag, “The Jewish Communities of Spain and the Living Traditions of the Hebrew Language”; U. Simon, “The Spanish School of Biblical Interpretation”; and A. Mirsky, “Hebrew Literary Creation” all in H. Beinart, ed., The Sephardi Legacy (Jerusalem, 1992), vol. I, pp. 103 14, 115 36, and 147 87, respectively. S. Krauss, “The Names Ashkenaz and Sepharad” [Hebrew], Tarbits 3 (1932), 423 35; Y. Assis, “‘Sefarad’: A Definition in the Context of a Cultural Encounter,” in C. C. Parrondo, M. Dascal, F. M. Villanueva, and A. S. Badillos, eds., Encuentros & Desencuentros, Spanish Jewish Cultural Interaction throughout History (Tel Aviv, 2000), 29 37. On the early Reconquista, see J. O’Callaghan, A History of Medieval Spain (Ithaca, NY, 1975), 193 253.

129

130 the middle ages: the christian world remained in their quarters and continued to live in accordance with their customs and laws. These Jews were joined by masses of Jewish refugees who fled the Almohadic persecutions in Al-Andalus in 1148. These persecutions mark the end of Jewish life in Muslim Spain.4 All Jews, whether already resident in conquered territories or refugees from the south, continued to believe that they were the bearers of Sephardic culture and that Sepharad continued to exist under Christian rule. Their belief or claim that even under Christian domination the essential character of Sephardic culture remained unchanged is both right and wrong. While many of these Jews, particularly members of the intellectual elite, insisted on using Judeo-Arabic and treating the traditional Judeo-Andalusian themes, both they and the wider Jewish public were exposed to new linguistic and cultural influences, varieties of Romance languages, and Latin Christian traditions.5 Knowledge of Arabic remained an essential component of Jewish scholarship in the Hispanic kingdoms. Judeo-Arabic – that is, Arabic written in Hebrew characters – was still used in fourteenth-century Toledo and elsewhere. Jewish scholars were still using Judeo-Arabic writing in rabbinic commentaries and halakhic works. The use of Judeo-Arabic in important ordinances shows that, for leading sectors in Jewish society, the use of Arabic was still an important part of their cultural and Jewish identity.6 To a certain degree, these Jews were the bearers of Judeo-Arabic culture. They continued to show interests in science and philosophy. Some of the scholars who were born in Christian Spain wrote and behaved as if they were from Al-Andalus, and that is how they were considered by future generations. An obvious example is Judah al-Harizi.7 Many scholars in Christian Spain were familiar with the philosophical trends and linguistic styles of the Golden Age. Andalusian fashion and style remained in vogue in the Iberian kingdoms, particularly in the Crown of Castile. The mudejar 4

5

6

7

On the Almohadic persecutions, see A. S. Halkin, “On the History of the Almohadic Persecutions” [Hebrew], in The Joshua Starr Memorial Volume (New York, 1953), 101 10; D. Corcos, “The Attitude of the Almohads towards the Jews” [Hebrew], Zion 32 (1967), 137 60 (= Corcos, Studies in the History of the Jews of Morocco [Jerusalem, 1976], 319 42). A dramatic description of the persecutions in Morocco and Al Andalus can be found in Abraham ibn Ezra’s lament, in which the destruction of the communities of Lucena, Seville, Córdoba, Almeria, Majorca, and Málaga are placed beside those of North Africa. See D. Kahana, R. Abraham ibn Ezra [Hebrew], vol. I (Warsaw, 1894), no. 116, 140 3. R. Drori, “The Hidden Context: On Literary Products of Tri Cultural Contacts in the Middle Ages” [Hebrew] Pe’amim 46 47 (1991), 9 28. Y. Assis, “The Judeo Arabic Tradition in Christian Spain,” in D. Frank, ed., The Jews of Medieval Islam: Community, Society, and Identity (Leiden, 1995), 111 24. See Judah al Harizi, Kitiib al Durar, ed. J. Blau, P. Fenton, and J. Yahalom (Jerusalem, 2009), 9 54 (English section).

the iberian peninsula 131 style in architecture can be found in Christian palaces and Jewish buildings and synagogues even in the fourteenth century.8 However, there can be no doubt that, following the Reconquista, Jewish culture underwent a profound transformation, and the transition from the Muslim–Arabic to Christian–Romance domain marked a definite change in the cultural orientation of Sephardic Jewry. The period can certainly be described as one of continuity and change. Continuity is best illustrated by the ongoing use in Jewish communities in the Iberian kingdoms of some fundamental terms in Jewish life used under Islam. Let us take as examples Arabic terms from the Muslim period used in the Jewish communities in all the Christian kingdoms. The most obvious and important term is the very name of the Jewish community: aljama, aliama, alfama, an Arabic word meaning “community.”9 In all Latin, Castilian, Catalan, Aragonese, and Portuguese sources, the name of the Jewish community remained so until the very end of its existence. Similarly, the word muqademin for community leaders – in Castilian, adelantados – used in the Crown of Castile and the Kingdom of Aragon, is an Arabic term that the Jewish communities in these lands used until the Expulsion. Another term that was used in charters and other documents during the Reconquista, especially in the thirteenth century, was the Arabic word sunna, zunna, runna, aruna, for Torah or Jewish Law.10 jewish life under christian rule If the Jews of the peninsula as a community adopted on the whole a policy of neutrality during the long wars of the Reconquista, after 1148 they had every reason to be allied with the Christian side. The Almohads who came from North Africa to help their brethren in Al-Andalus decided to stay there, and introduced a policy of religious and cultural persecution. In 1148, Jewish life in Muslim Spain came to an abrupt and tragic end. Many Jews were killed, many were forcibly converted, while many of them escaped elsewhere. Most 8

9

10

Examples of mudejar buildings are the Alcazar in Seville built in the fourteenth century, and the synagogues in Córdoba and Toledo (El Transito), built in 1315 and 1354 respectively. On the cultural and artistic exchanges between Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Iberian Peninsula, see K. Kogman Appel, Jewish Art between Islam and Christianity: The Decoration of Hebrew Bibles in Spain [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv, 2001), 25 45. D. Romano, “Aljama frente a judería, cali y sus sinónimos ‘Sefarad,’” Sefarad 39 (1979), 347 54. Archivo de la Corona de Aragon (=ACA), Reg. 42, fol. 217v (= J. Regne, History of the Jews in Aragon, 1213 1327, ed. Y. Assis [Jerusalem, 1978], no. 766); Reg. 59, fols. 52v, 74 (= Regne, History, nos. 934, 953); Reg. 43, fol. 54v (= Regne, History, no. 1224); Reg. 57, fol. 155 (= Regne, History, no. 1412); Reg. 63, fol. 39 (= Regne, History, no. 1488).

132 the middle ages: the christian world refugees settled in the Iberian kingdoms, thus strengthening the Judeo-Arabic culture in the northern communities of the peninsula.11 In some places, the number of Jewish settlers in a locality outnumbered the non-Jews.12 Their integration in the Christian kingdoms was a success due to at least two factors. The refugees joined existing communities that belonged to the same tradition and with a similar background. Many of these communities had previously been under Muslim rule and their continued existence under Christian rule was the result of the Reconquista. A second factor was that the Christian rulers favored the settlement of Jews in their realms. This pro-Jewish policy was motivated by economic, political, and cultural considerations.13 For the Christian rulers, Andalusian Jewish refugees who fled the Almohadic persecutions were natural allies against the common foe. In addition, some of these refugees were the bearers of an advanced cultural and scientific legacy that the Christian rulers came to appreciate. Finally, during the whole period, the need for money dictated to a large extent the attitude of the Hispanic kings toward any group of people that had assets. The Almohads temporarily halted the Christian advance southward. It did not take the Christian kings long to resume a renewed attack with more vigor and power than before. The turning point was the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, when the Crowns of Aragon, Castile, and Navarre joined together and defeated the Almohads.14 Following this victory, the Crowns of Castile and Aragon renewed the Christian attack against the Muslims. King Fernando III of Castile (1217–52) and King Jaume I of Aragon (1213–76) led the most serious stage of the Reconquista. During their long reigns, both kings doubled the territories under their rule at the expense of the Muslims. The Crown of Castile conquered the whole of northern Andalusia and Murcia, while the Crown of Aragon added to its territories the Kingdom of Valencia and the Balearic Islands.15 11

12 13

14

15

See the account of a contemporary chronicler, Abraham ibn Daud, Sefer ha Qabbalah [The Book of Tradition], ed. and trans. G. D. Cohen (Philadelphia, 1967), 87 8, lines 448 68 (English section); pp. 65 6, lines 304 16 (Hebrew section). Note that ibn Daud writes, of his uncle Barukh and his brothers, the sons of of R. Yitshak Albalia, that “they emigrated [or fled] at the head of the refugees to the city of Toledo (Tulitula)” and not, as Cohen translated, that they “were [among] the first to flee to the city of Toledo.” See 66, line 314 (Hebrew section); 88, line 465 (English section). A. Herculano, Historia de Portugal, III, lib. VII (Amadora, 1980), 210. Y. Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1961 6), I, 46 59, 78 90, 111 50. On the Battle of Las Navas, see O’Callaghan, A History, 234 49. On the struggle between Muslims and Christians in medieval Iberia, see B. F. Reilly, The Contest of Christian and Muslim Spain, 1031 1157 (Cambridge, MA, 1992). O’Callaghan, A History, 333 57; J. N. Hillgarth, The Spanish Kingdoms, 1250 1516, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1976 8), I, 233 86.

the iberian peninsula 133 jews in the service of the crown during the reconquista Both kings needed to cope with the added responsibilities of the newly conquered territories: the control of a large and hostile Muslim population; the colonization of the new territories, especially those which were abandoned by their Muslim inhabitants; the administration of large areas under their control; and the economic management of all these areas. The Jews were ideal candidates to assist in these tasks. Their knowledge of Arabic was a great asset. They were employed as interpreters, translators, and diplomats. The Christian kings used Arabic-speaking Jews as interpreters during and after their military operations. They were used as mediators in negotiations, and prepared the Arabic versions of documents, such as treaties. The widespread use of Jews as interpreters in the service of the Crowns of both Castile and Aragon led to the adoption of the word trujaman (“interpreter, translator”), from Arabic, into Romance languages.16 Many Jews were members of diplomatic delegations, and at times acted as ambassadors to other Muslim authorities on the peninsula or in North Africa.17 Many of the interpreters were also physicians and the Arabic word alfakim or alhakim was widely used in Latin and Romance documents as a title of many Jews in the service of the Crown. Jewish courtiers were also employed in all the Iberian kingdoms as administrators and financiers, as we shall see below. As a group, the Jews paid regular taxes and extraordinary subsidies, proportionately far higher than any other group. At times, very substantial parts of tax revenues came from Jewish taxes. Of special interest in this context is Pope Honorius III’s letter to the archbishop of Toledo in 1219, in which is found Fernando III’s explanation of why he did not impose a distinctive garb on the Jews of Castile. Fernando had claimed that the Jews had thought of moving to the side of the Muslims and had conspired with them. As a result, the king, “whose income in large measure derives from these very Jews, can hardly raise his expenses.”18 Another example is the payment that the Jews of Catalonia had to pay to King Jaume II of Aragon for his expedition to Sardinia in 1323. In 1322, the king asked the Jews of the realm to pay 500,000 solidi, while the Catalan cities of Barcelona, Tarragona, Tortosa, and Gerona, and the bishops and abbots of the latter – 16

17

18

D. Romano, “Judios escribanos y trujamanes de arabe en la Corona de Aragon (Reinados de Jaime I a Jaime II),” Sefarad 38 (1978), 83 7. Y. Assis, “Jewish Diplomats from Aragon in Muslim Lands, 1213 1327” [Hebrew] Sefunot 3 [18] (1985), 11 34. S. Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century (New York, 1966), 150 1; partly published in F. Baer, Die Juden im christlichen Spanien, vol. II, Kastilien lnquisitionsakten (Berlin, 1936), no. 46, 24.

134 the middle ages: the christian world that is, the whole of Catalonia – paid altogether 535,000 sous.19 The taxes and subsidies the Jews were expected to pay made them an invaluable element in the eyes of the kings: their protection was in the royal interest.20 This unwritten alliance contributed to the growing Christian hostility that eventually brought disaster for the Jews. Capable and learned Jews played a very major role in the administration of the Crown of Aragon and in many of its constituents. In the founding countries of the Crown – that is, in the County of Barcelona (Catalonia) and in the Kingdom of Aragon, which were united under one king in 1137 – Jews acted as high officials and held official positions in the royal administration and finance. They signed Latin and Romance documents in Hebrew, adding impressive titles such as “Gizbar Catalunya” (“the Baile of Catalonia”).21 The peak of Jewish involvement in the government came following the vast expansion of the Crowns of Castile and Aragon and the Kingdom of Portugal in the first half of the thirteenth century.22 The Crown of Aragon came under Jaume I when he conquered the Muslim Kingdom of Valencia in 1238. Instead of annexing the conquered territories, Jaume I established a crusading Kingdom of Valencia which had a vast majority of Muslim inhabitants throughout the thirteenth century. His successor, Pere III the Great, established there an administration almost entirely composed of Jews. A crusading kingdom with a majority of Muslims, administered by Jews, was certainly an anomaly which could not have lasted long. In 1283, the Muslim nobility refused to join forces with the king against the French attack, and Pere III agreed to dismiss all the Jews from his administration as a prerequisite for their help.23 19

20

21

22

23

Y. Assis, “Jewish Capital and the Conquest of Sardinia by the Catalans,” Italia 9 (1990), 7 18, esp. 15. Y. Assis, Jewish Economy in the Medieval Crown of Aragon, 1213 1327, Money and Power (Leiden, 1997), 133 82. For examples, see Baer, Die Juden, I, no. 15, 8 9 (1121; Sheshet ben Shlomo, “Perfecto Hebreo”); no. 32, 22; no. 34, 23 4 (1158, 1160; Shealtiel [Saltell] ben Sheshet); no. 50, 41 3 (1189; Profet Benvenist, King Alfonso II’s aljachim); 51 3, 85 7 (first quarter of the thirteenth century; “Perfet Baile” or “Perfectus Bajulus” [of Barcelona]; in Hebrew, “Gizbar”); no. 89, 89 91 (1231; “Bondia Gracian”; in Hebrew, “Bondia Gizbar”); no. 90, 91 2 (1233; Salomon Bonafos, “bailulus domini regis in Catalonia,” and, in Hebrew, Shelomo Bonafos, “Gizbar Catalonia”); no. 94, 97 8 (1248; Vitalis Salamon, “baiulus domini regis in Barchinona,” and, in Hebrew, Vidal Shelomo, “Gizbar Barcelona”). For Portugal, see M. J. Pimenta Ferro, Os judeus em Portugal no seculo XIV (Lisbon, 1979), 13; Y. Assis, “Portuguese Jewry: Historical and Historiographical Aspects,” in Y. Assis and M. Orfali, eds., Portuguese Jewry at the Stake: Studies on Jews and Crypto Jews [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 2009), 9 12. Baer, A History, 162 77; J. L. Shneidman, “Jews in the Royal Administration of XIIIth Century Aragon,” Historia Judaica 21 (1959), 37 52; D. Romano, Judios al servicio de Pedro el Grande de Aragón (1276 1285) (Barcelona, 1983).

the iberian peninsula 135 Why did the rulers of the Hispanic kingdoms during the Reconquista favor Jews in their service? Many of these Jews knew Arabic, which was important in the newly conquered territories. Many of them were very capable in different domains and were efficient financiers. Most important of all, however, was their total loyalty to the king, who knew his Jewish officials posed no threat to his position. The Hispanic kings could dismiss their Jewish officials without fearing any reprisals. Paradoxically, the Jewish officials’ political power was due to their political debility. It was convenient for the Hispanic kings of the Reconquista period to use Jews rather than noblemen. Throughout the thirteenth century, there was a desperate need to settle non-Muslims in the vast territories that were conquered by the Christians. In some regions, Muslims fled and left behind them empty areas that remained, in some cases, desolate for generations. In other regions, the Muslim population stayed in place. In either case, the situation was problematic. In the former case, there was the need to colonize the area that would become desolate otherwise. In the latter case, the authorities felt the need to create a more favorable demographic balance by attracting nonMuslims to settle in the conquered territories. Serious efforts were made to offer Christian settlers advantages that would persuade them to move from the Christian north to the Muslim south. They were offered houses, gardens, orchards, and fields that had belonged to Muslims. In the distribution of property between the king’s subjects recorded in the lists of repartimientos, Jews too were beneficiaries. Such lists are available for Seville,24 Jerez de la Frontera,25 Majorca, and Valencia.26 The allocation of houses and fields to Jews in medieval Christian kingdoms is indicative of the special position the Jews occupied in the peninsula during the Reconquista. In certain cases, the property was given to the Jews freehold, with the right to sell, let, give or bequeath to anyone except Christians! The king considered property in Jewish hands basically as part of his treasure. The use of Jews as colonizers was due to the demographic problem caused by the large Muslim population that remained in the conquered territories and to the inability of the Crown to persuade sufficient numbers of Christians to move to the south.

24

25 26

Baer, Die Juden, II, no. 67, 50 3; J. Gonzalez, ed., Repartimiento de Sevilla (Madrid, 1951). Baer, Die Juden, II, no. 76, 58 60. Colección de documentos ineditos del Archivo General de la Corona de Aragón, vol. XI: Repartimientos de los Reinos de Mallorca, Valencia y Cerdeña (Barcelona, 1856), 304, 398, 508.

136 the middle ages: the christian world There was also an effort to attract Jews from other countries to settle in the territories of the Crown of Aragon, and most particularly in the newly conquered regions. In October 1244, before the end of the war in Valencia, Jaume I promised Jews who would settle in Valencia the same rights as the Jews of Barcelona.27 In June 1247, Jaume I issued a general invitation to foreign Jews who would settle in any of the territories of the Crown of Aragon. Special protection was promised to Salomon ben Amar and his entire family from Sidjilmassa who settled in Majorca.28 In the newly conquered territories, many Jews were appointed as baizes, administrators representing the king. Their appointment, in total contradiction to Christian doctrine that advocated the Jews’ humiliation as testimony to the veracity of Christianity, is the most eloquent illustration of the Jews’ status during this period. The appointment of so many Jews to important positions in all the Hispanic kingdoms during the thirteenth century, a most important period in the long process of the Reconquista, reflects, indeed, a legal and political status that was never equaled in any other country in medieval times. The loyalty of the Jewish officials to the king was total, and no Jew, however high a position he occupied, ever posed a threat to the ruler. The Jewish official had no more political ambition than the position he reached. The ruler could rely without reservation on the Jews’ absolute loyalty. The Jewish courtier understood very well that his political power was totally dependent on the ruler’s will and any slight failure or mistake may bring about his immediate dismissal. He had to be most efficient and could not afford to be any less than excellent in any task or mission he had to fulfill. In these aspects, he enjoyed a clear advantage over the other natural candidates to the same positions: members of the nobility. Jewish courtiers belonged to the upper class in Jewish society that was also the ruling class in the community. They were fathers, brothers, and sons of the communal oligarchy. Their political achievement was directly related to the status of the Jewish community and its importance in the eyes of the ruler. They were in some respects the emissaries of their communities. They were the patrons of Hebrew learning and Jewish scholarship, and they were considered representatives and spokesmen of their communities, and the protagonists of Jewish culture and identity. The Jewish identity of the Jewish courtiers was never doubted. Only in cases where they converted to Christianity was their connection to the Jewish people totally severed. Otherwise, Jewish courtiers were completely identified as Jews. They often signed their name in Hebrew and their 27 28

Colección de documentos ineditos, 290. J. Villanueva, Viage literario a las iglesias de España, vol. XXII (Madrid, 1852), 327 8.

the iberian peninsula 137 Jewish identity was clear and open. In fourteenth-century Castile, R. Menahem ben Zerah wrote a book entitled Tsedah Laderekh, a code ˙ he compiled for Jewish courtiers to use as a handy and useful of law which manual when they accompanied the king, or during their journeys in the service of the king, away from the Jewish community. In his introduction, the author states: And as I saw that those who are in our Majesty the king’s court are defenders and protectors of their people, each one of them according to his position and place, and indeed during the vicissitudes of the period and in the course of the events and matters that are not obligatory, they would be lax in fulfilling the commandments and particularly those who are traveling in the service of the king whom they serve and are constantly in touch with, and need to have information on prayer, blessings, and keeping the laws of food and Shabbat and festivals and in matters related to women and their mistake in relation to wine.29

A book like this, written in Hebrew and designed for fourteenth-century courtiers in Castile, is a good illustration of the remarkable balance that, on the whole, Sephardic Jewry maintained between the preservation and promotion of its Jewish identity and its deep involvement in the economic, cultural, and political life of the country. Shmuel ha-Levi Abulafia is a remarkable example of a courtier thus deeply involved in the political life of Castile, who would build in Toledo a magnificent synagogue which illustrates so well the position enjoyed by the Jewish elite.30 jewish self-government in the iberian kingdoms The appointment of Jews to administrative, political, diplomatic, and financial positions cannot be understood without reference to the status of the Jewish communities in the Hispanic kingdoms. The legally recognized Jewish community, known by its Arabic name aljama, enjoyed an autonomy that was unsurpassed in any other country in the Middle Ages. The autonomy that was granted to the Jewish community included almost full free religious practice, the establishment of an internal judicial system,

29 30

Menahem ben Zerah, Tsedah Laderekh (Zikhron Ya’akov, 1937), 7. For Shmuel ha Levi Abulafia, see Baer, A History, 362 4 and 448 n. 48; Baer, Die Juden, II, no. 187; B. F. Taggie, “Samuel ha Levi Abulajia [sic!] and the Hebraic Policy of Pedro I of Castile, 1350 69,” Fifteenth Century Studies 5 (1982), 191 208; for the synagogue, see the various articles in M. Orner, ed., La Sinagoga de Samuel ha Levi (“EI Transito”) Toledo España (Tel Aviv, 1992); F. Cantera Burgos, Sinagogas españolas (Madrid, 1955), 65 149; E. W. Goldman, “Samuel Halevi Abulafia’s Synagogue (El Transito) in Toledo,” Jewish Art 18 (1992), 58 69.

138 the middle ages: the christian world the right to maintain its own educational institutions, the creation of welfare organizations, and authority to impose communal taxes. The autonomy of the Jews was naturally restricted to their own internal affairs. Alfonso X, the Wise, of Castile continued the policy of his predecessors and favored a wide-ranging Jewish autonomy. The Castilian aljamas enjoyed a very strong judicial system. Disputes between Jews were tried in Jewish courts of law (bate din, sing. bet din), headed either by the adelantados or muqademin, the lay leaders, or dayanim, the Jewish judges. In principle, judgment was rendered according to Jewish law or Halakhah. A unique situation prevailed in the Crowns of Castile and Aragon in the field of criminal jurisdiction, which was not operative in exilic conditions. Capital punishment ceased even before the destruction of the Second Temple, and no Jewish court in the Diaspora had criminal jurisdiction. The Jewish community’s criminal jurisdiction on the Iberian peninsula, including the death penalty and corporal punishment, was exercised from the Muslim period and continued in the Hispanic kingdoms. In one of the earliest charters to be granted by the Aragonese King Jaume I to the Jews of Calatayud in 1229, the leaders of the community were authorized to exercise very wide judicial power, including capital punishment.31 In the Iberian kingdoms, the problem of informers was very widespread and serious, so much so that the Hebrew word malshin (“informer”) penetrated the Castillian language as malsin.32 In 1273, Jaume I authorized the Jews of Barbastro to conduct their own affairs with full autonomy, including over the death penalty for informers.33 Already, under Islam, the Jews of Sepharad enjoyed extensive criminal jurisdiction, and this was inherited by the Jews of Castile, the Kingdom of Aragon, and Catalonia, naturally with the full consent of the rulers. The extensive judicial autonomy was granted to individual communities. The rulers’ approval of criminal proceedings against informers, even when they were the ones who had received the information, shows that they were sensitive to the need for a feeling of security and safety among the Jewish communities in their realm. When R. Asher ben Yehiel (ha-Rosh) arrived in Sepharad, he was ˙ criminal jurisdiction, in contradiction to shocked that the Jews exercised 31

32

33

ACA, Reg. 202, fol. 201 r & v (= Regne, History, no. 6). This privilege was confirmed by Jaume II of Aragon in 1305. D. Kaufman, “Jewish Informers in the Middle Ages,” Jewish Quarterly Review 8 (1896), 217 38; F. Bofarull y Sans, “Los judíos malsines,” Boletín de la Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona 8 (1919), 207 16. ACA, Reg. 202, fol. 201 r & v.

the iberian peninsula 139 Jewish law. Following a serious case that occurred in Córdoba, he wrote: “You shocked me when you asked me in matters related to criminal jurisdiction, since in all countries I have heard about there is no criminal jurisdiction, except in Sepharad. When I arrived here I was very astonished how they exercised criminal jurisdiction without a Sanhedrin and they told me that that was a royal order.”34 His son Yehuda was already convinced that the circumstances in the Iberian peninsula justified the deviation from the halakhic norms. It is noteworthy that R. Yehudah ben ha-Rosh, after stating that nowadays when there is no Sanhedrin no criminal jurisdiction can be exercised, gave two reasons why this rule was not observed in Sepharad. First, gentile courts should not judge the people who would be saved according to their law but be executed according to our law (such as informers, who would have been acquitted according to their law, but executed according to Jewish law). It is interesting that R. Yehudah adopted here Maimonides’s opinion as far as the elimination of informers is concerned. Second, because of the need to take preventive measures in every generation to cope with the misbehavior of the time, the courts were given power to take measures that were designed to protect Jewish life and law.35 In another responsum, R. Yehudah expressed an even more favorable opinion about the criminal jurisdiction of the Jewish courts in Castile: “Blessed be the Lord who inspired the hearts of the kings of this country to grant powers to Israel to adjudicate and eliminate the evildoers, for otherwise Jewish existence in this land would have been jeopardized.”36 The charter Jaume I granted to the Jews of the city of Valencia in March 1239, at the beginning of the war against the Muslims there, is an excellent example of the favorable attitude of Jaume I the Conqueror toward the new Jewish communities in recently conquered territories. The charter allows Jews to adjudicate among themselves according to their law, permits the testimony of a Christian against a Jew only if there is another Jewish witness, and establishes that a Jew would only be required to take an oath on legem Moysi (“the Torah of Moses”). Furthermore, the charter treats Jews and Christians with astonishing equality in court. The Jew who sues a Christian must do so in a Christian court, while a Christian who sues a Jew must do so in a Jewish court. It is doubtful if this ever happened, but its very inclusion in the charter is significant. Another clause allows Jewish prisoners to leave the jail on Friday afternoon before the beginning of the Sabbath and return to prison on Monday! Jews could 34 35

36

R. Asher ben Yehiel, Responsa, ed. I. S. Yudlov (Jerusalem, 1984), 17:8. R. Yehudah ben HaRosh, Zikhron Yehudah (Berlin, 1846), no. 63. For Maimonides’s halakhic ruling, see Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Hovel u Mazik, VIII, 11. Ben HaRosh, Zikhron Yehudah, no. 58.

140 the middle ages: the christian world not be interrogated on Sabbaths and festivals, and were promised full royal protection.37 During the Reconquista, the communal regime was oligarchic. The limited reform that allowed the lower classes to share in the administration and the elections in the community in some parts of the peninsula came following a serious struggle that the poor fought against the rich elite.38 This struggle began in the Kingdom of Aragon, where the gap between the rich and the poor was widest. As a result of the social tension, the constitutions of many communities in the Crown of Aragon were changed to permit representation of the middle and lower classes in Jewish society.39 In many communities, where the constitutional reform did not lead to concrete improvement in the standard of the poor, associations or havurot, were established by the poorer Jews or by philanthropists.40 ˙ jewish culture in christian spain: symbiosis and polemics Parallel to the penetration of Christian influences from the north in the period of the Reconquista, Jewish influence from Franco-Germany grew in intensity from the end of the twelfth to the beginning of the fourteenth centuries. The influence of the Tosafists on the study of the Talmud and Halakhah in the Iberian peninsula was paramount. As stated above, the Almohadic persecutions put an end to the “Golden Age,” and afterward there remained nothing of the cultural, literary, and religious efflorescence that characterized the period. The emergence of a new center of Jewish scholarship in the Christian north launched a new era. Jewish scholarship on the peninsula continued to claim to be the heir of the Jewish Andalusian culture, but the impact of Jewish learning from Franco-Germany was very significant and everlasting.41 The settlement in Sepharad of Jewish scholars who had studied in Franco-German yeshivot is the clearest expression of this

37

38

39

40

41

ACA, Reg. 941, fols. 176v 177; F. Baer, Die Juden im christlichen Spanien, von Aragonien und Navarra (Berlin, 1929), no. 91, 92 4. Baer, A History, 212 36; Y. Assis, “The Jews in the Crown of Aragon and its Dominions,” in Beinart, ed., The Sephardi Legacy, I, 69 81. Y. Assis, “Poor and Rich in Jewish Society in Mediterranean Spain,” Pe’amim 46 7 (1991), 115 38. Y. Assis, “Welfare and Mutual Aid in the Spanish Communities,” in Beinart, ed., The Sephardi Legacy, I, 318 45. For a brief biography see, R. Abraham HaYarhi, Sefer HaManhig, Y. Rephael (ed.}, Jerusalem, 1978, vol. I, pp. 11 15 (Hebrew). B. Septimus, Hispano Jewish Culture in Transition: The Career and Controversies of Ramah (Cambridge MA, 1982), 26 38.

the iberian peninsula 141 influence. Among the settlers and the visitors who came from north of the Pyrenees, we find R. Abraham ben Nathan ha-Yarhi,43 R. Moshe of Coucy, R. Dan Ashkenazi,44 R. Asher ben Yehiel, and his sons.45 We should also add scholars, like R. Yonah Gerondi, ˙who studied in the yeshivot of the Tosafists.46 Rabbinic culture in Sepharad changed its orientation and reflected, in many instances, Franco-German impact in its content and methodology. The most outstanding halakhists in the Iberian peninsula in the thirteenth and at the beginning of the fourteenth centuries, R. Moshe ben Nahman (Nahmanides) and his disciple R. Shelomo ben Abraham Aderet, ˙integrated˙ in their works the approach and concepts of the Tosafists. Nahmanides combined successfully his Andalusian cultural and ˙ religious background with the new teachings that he received from the French and Provençal talmudic schools.47 Nahmanides, however, retained his intellectual and religious independence and˙ followed a course that was not dictated by either of the theological and religious schools. His independent mind and profound respect for the two trends, along with his by no means uncritical attitude toward both, can be best understood from the position he held in the Maimonidean controversy that took place at the time, in 1232, and in which scholars in Spain, Provence, and France were involved. Whereas the scholars in France sided totally with the antiMaimunists, those of the southern communities were deeply divided. Nahmanides’s approach, which combined respect and distance, was, there˙ all the more remarkable.48 fore, 42

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

A. Grossman, “Relations between Spanish and Ashkenazi Jewry in the Middle Ages,” in Beinart, ed., The Sephardi Legacy, 227 34. On the relations between the Jews of Spain and France in the Muslim period, see Grossman, “Between Spain and France Relations between the Jewish Communities of Muslim Spain and France” [Hebrew], in A. Mirsky, A. Grossman, and Y. Kaplan, eds., Exile and Diaspora (Jerusalem, 1991), 75 101. For a brief biography, see R. Abraham ha Yarhi, Sefer ha Manhig, ed. Y. Rephael (Jerusalem, 1978), vol. I, 11 15. I. Ta Shma, “Rabbenu Dan mi Galut Ashkenaz Asher bi Sefarad,” in Mehkarim be Kabalah, be Philosophia u be Sifrut ha Musar: Dedicated to Y. Tishbi [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1985), 385 94. I. Ta Shma, “Rabbenu Asher and His Son R. Ya’kov Ba’al ha Turim Between Ashkenaz and Sepharad” [Hebrew], Pe’amim 46 7 (1991), 75 91. I. M. Ta Shma, “Ashkenazi Hasidism in Spain: R. Jonah Gerondi the Man and His Work” [Hebrew] in Mirsky et al., eds., Exile and Diaspora, 165 94. B. Septimus, “‘Open Rebuke and Concealed Love’: Nahmanides and the Andalusian Tradition,” in I. Twersky, ed., Rabbi Moses Nahmanides (Ramban): Explorations in His Religious and Literary Virtuosity (Cambridge, MA, 1983), 11 34. A. Shohat, “Concerning the First Controversy on the Writings of Maimonides” [Hebrew], Zion 36 (1971), 27 60; M. Halbertal, By Way of Truth: Namanides and the Creation of Tradition, Jerusalem, 2006, pp. 334 52 (Hebrew).

142 the middle ages: the christian world In the field of the Kabbalah, too, Sepharad came under northern influences. Recent research has drawn attention to the Ashkenazic roots of the Kabbalah that developed in Barcelona in the second half of the thirteenth century.49 The Kabbalah became a major religious trend in Provence. Some of the most important Provençal scholars – such as R. Abraham Av Beth Din, R. Abraham ben David of Posquières, R. Yitshak Sage Nahor, and R. Asher ben David – were engaged in the study and teaching of the Kabbalah, though not all wrote openly on the subject. The role played by the Provençal Kabbalah in the emergence of the Kabbalah center in Gerona has been treated extensively.50 The Franco-German influence, however, was not the only factor in shaping the religious and intellectual agenda of the Jews in Spain. The controversies of 1232 and that of 1303–5 on the study of sciences and philosophy could not have taken place had the Judeo-Andalusian culture not spread in Christian Spain and not penetrated into Provence. While Maimonides was the last great scholar of the Andalusian school, he was also its most influential scholar, and his impact changed the course of Judaism in Christian Spain and, most particularly, in Provence, which, in the course of the thirteenth century, became the stronghold of the Andalusian tradition and the philosophical trend. Jews from Sepharad, such as Abraham ibn Ezra and Abraham bar Hiyya, were instrumental in transmitting the Judeo-Andalusian culture and the Greco-Arabic scientific, medical, and philosophical works into Provence during their journey there. Shortly afterward, Andalusian Jewish refugees who escaped from the Almohadic persecutions of 1148, and their descendants and disciples, produced an entire library of Jewish philosophy and Hebrew linguistics, as well as a huge collection of scientific, medical, and philosophical treatises in Hebrew, translated from Judeo-Arabic and Arabic. Members of the Qimhi and, most particularly, of the Ibn Tibbon families were the leading scholars, who brought about a cultural and religious revolution in the Jewish communities of Provence-Languedoc.51 49

50

51

M. Idel, “Ashkenazi Esotericism and Kabbalah in Barcelona,” Hispania Judaica Bulletin 5 (2007), 69 113; G. Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah, ed. R. I. Zwi Werblowsky (Philadelphia, 1987), 199 364; H. Pedaya, Name and Sanctuary in the Teaching of R. Isaac the Blind: A Comparative Study in the Writings of the Earliest Kabbalists [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 2001). Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah, 365 475; I. Tishby, “R. Ezra and R. Azriel and their Place in the Gerona Circle” [Hebrew] Zion 15 (1944), 178 85; Tishby, “The Writings of the Mystics R. Ezra and R. Azriel of Gerona” [Hebrew], Sinai 16 (1945), 159 78 (= Tishby, Studies in Kabbalah and its Branches, Researches and Sources [Hebrew], vol. I [Jerusalem, 1982], 3 20). Y. Assis, ‘“The Exile of Sefarad in Provence’: A Cultural and Religious Revolution in Provençal Jewry in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” Hispania Judaica Bulletin 7 (2009), Hebrew section 1 48.

the iberian peninsula 143 The emergence of the two trends led to the inevitable clash that tore apart the intellectual and rabbinic elite in the Iberian peninsula and Provence. The series of controversies from the beginning of the thirteenth century until the fourteenth arose as soon as the two trends succeeded in gathering sufficient followers. In the first stage, Maimonides was at the center of the polemics, and the first questions about some of his religious concepts and beliefs were sent from Castile to Provence, where Maimonides occupied an outstanding position and had attained the highest prestige.52 Parallel to the spread of Maimonides’s books – especially his code of law, the Mishneh Torah, written in Hebrew, and his Guide for the Perplexed after its translation into Hebrew by Shmuel ibn Tibbon and Yehuda Alharizi – which led to the emergence of a strong and deeply committed group of Maimuni followers, his opponents grew stronger under the influence of the Kabbalah and the growing impact of the Tosafists from north of the Alps.53 In the 1232 polemic, Maimonides was the focus of the controversy. His theological concepts, rationalistic interpretations, and halakhic decisions were challenged.54 In the 1303–5 polemics, the study of philosophy and sciences, as advocated by him and, more so, by his enthusiastic followers, was the target of the anti-Maimuni camp.55 royal protection and christian pressure The royal protection extended to Jews throughout the Iberian kingdoms did not reduce the traditional antagonism that the Christian Church developed against the Jews.56 On the contrary, the status of the Jews in 52 53

54

55

56

Septimus, Hispano Jewish Culture, 39 60. On the spread of the Mishneh Torah, see I. Twersky, Introduction to the Code of Maimonides (Mishneh Torah) (New Haven, 1980), 518 26. On the 1232 controversy, see J. Sarachek, Faith and Reason: The Conflict over the Rationalism of Maimonides (New York, 1935); Baer, A History, 96 110; D. J. Silver, Maimonidean Criticism and the Maimonidean Controversy (Leiden, 1965); A. Shohat, “Concerning the First Controversy on the Writings of Maimonides” [Hebrew], Zion 36 (1971), 27 60; B. Septimus, “Piety and Power in Thirteenth Century Catalonia,” in I. Twersky, ed., Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature (Cambridge, 1979), 197 230; Septimus, Hispano Jewish Culture, 61 74. For the 1303 5 polemics, see Baer, A History, 289 305; M. Halbertal, Between Torah and Wisdom [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 2000), 152 80; R. Ben Shalom, “The Ban Placed by the Community of Barcelona on the Study of Philosophy and Allegorical Preaching A New Study,” Revue des Études Juives 159 (2000), 387 404; M. Saperstein, “The Conflict over Rashba’s Herem on Philosophical Study: A Political Perspective,” Jewish History 1 (1986), 27 38. On the attitude of the Church to the Jews in the Middle Ages, see B. Blumenkranz, “The Roman Church and the Jews,” in C. Roth, ed., The Dark Ages: The Jews in Christian Europe, 711 1096 (Jerusalem, 1966), 69 99.

144 the middle ages: the christian world the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and the Jews’ involvement in the administration of the kingdoms totally contradicted Christian doctrine and aroused jealousy and hatred in all classes of Christian society. The Church could not tolerate flourishing and prosperous Jewish communities and powerful and influential Jewish courtiers in the Christian realms that were at the height of their crusading expansion against the Muslim infidels. Furthermore, the Jews were not behaving like a pitiful and humiliated minority, as defined by the Church, that was to suffer the consequences of their obstinate refusal to accept the Christian truth. The missionary zeal grew as the Reconquista reached the very peak of its victories in the first half of the thirteenth century with the spread of new enthusiastic and recently established monastic orders: the Franciscans and the Dominicans. From the early forties of the thirteenth century the Dominicans intensified their missionary activities. They were given permission to preach to the Jews.57 Their fiery sermons incited the masses that accompanied them. Whether the sermons were preached outside the Jewish quarter, inside it, or in the synagogue, they invariably ended with outbursts of violence. The king was usually sympathetic to the Jews’ complaints and gave orders that were designed to reduce tension and prevent violence.58 The most remarkable chapter in the relations between the Jews and the Church in thirteenth-century Iberia is the Barcelona Disputation of 1263. It was the first time that an attempt was made to prove the veracity of Christianity from post-biblical talmudic literature. Paulus Christiani, formerly a Jew, asked Jaume I to order the Jews to attend a public debate. Nahmanides was ordered to represent the Jewish side. The king agreed to his ˙request for freedom of speech. The disputation took place on four days, between July 20 and 31, 1263. Christiani wanted to prove, from the talmudic sources, that the messiah had already arrived and that his appearance canceled the validity of the commandments. The Latin and Nahmanides’s Hebrew accounts differ in their evaluation of the outcome. ˙ Scholars, too, differ in their analysis of the sources and the results of the disputation. Suffice it to say here that this disputation was certainly an exception – for the freedom of speech enjoyed by Nahmanides, for the way ˙

57

58

The first record of royal permission given to the Dominicans to preach to the Jews is from 1242. See Y. Assis, “The Papal Inquisition and Aragonese Jewry in the Early Fourteenth Century,” Mediaeval Studies 49 (1987), 393, and n. 8 for sources and literature. On the sermons preached by Dominicans in the Crown of Aragon, see Regne, History, nos. 209, 215, 217, 386, 723, 731 3, 735 6, 746, 2624, 2650, 2670, 2719, 2862, and 2934.

the iberian peninsula 145 the Christian side utilized post-biblical sources, and for the relative tolerance and mild results that followed its interruption by Jaume I.59 We should note that the sources quoted by Christiani were not forged, but he might have lacked the expert knowledge of the Talmud that was necessary to prove his arguments. This must have led Raimundus Martini to compose his remarkable collection of midrashic sources in Pugio fidei.60 Jaume I played a remarkable role throughout the episode. While he acted in accordance with his position as a crusading king eager to lead the Church into victory, he did not give up his role as the protector of his Jewish subjects. His own interest and the interest of the Crown of Aragon prevailed over any other consideration. The Disputation of Barcelona did not result in any terrible disaster for the Jews in the Crown of Aragon, as would happen during and after the Disputation of Tortosa 150 years later. The position of the Jews remained very strong, and for the king his Jewish subjects still constituted a valuable asset that needed to be protected. epilogue Throughout the period of the Reconquista, the Jews of the Iberian kingdoms enjoyed a position that had no parallel in any other part of the medieval world. Nowhere at that time did Jews occupy such important political, administrative, and diplomatic positions as did the Jews in Portugal, Navarre, and particularly in the Crowns of Castile and Aragon. Nowhere else in the medieval Jewish world did the Jewish community enjoy a status as high as that of Jewish communities in the Christian part of Sepharad. When the Reconquista achieved its greatest victories over Muslim Spain in the thirteenth century, the Jews found in the Hispanic kingdoms the safest area for their exilic existence. The destruction that befell the Jews of Muslim Spain under the Almohads in 1148 was followed 59

60

Here are some of the major works on the subject: I. Loeb, “La controverse de 1263 à Barcelone entre Paulus Christiani et Moise ben Nahman,” Revue des Études Juives 15 (1887), 1 18; Y. Baer, “The Disputations of R. Yehiel of Paris and Nahmanides” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 2 (1930 1), 172 87; J. M. Millas Vallicrosa, “Sobre las fuentes doc umentales de la controversia de Barcelona en el año 1263,” Anales de la Universidad de Barcelona, Memorias y comunicaciones (1949), 25 44; C. Roth, “The Disputation of Barcelona (1263),” Harvard Theological Review 43 (1950), 117 44; M. A. Cohen, “Reflections on the Text and Context of the Disputation of Barcelona,” Hebrew Union College Annual 35 (1964), 157 92; H. Maccoby, Judaism on Trial (London, 1982); A. Tostado Martin, La Disputa de Barcelona, 1263 (Salamanca, 1986); R. Chazan, Barcelona and Beyond: The Disputation of 1263 and its Aftermath (Berkeley, 1992). His sources also were not forgeries. See S. Liebermann, Shkiin, 2nd edn. (Jerusalem, 1970), 43 83.

146 the middle ages: the christian world by a period of relative peace and tranquility, of remarkable prosperity, and of unprecedented political status under the shadow of the cross. UNDER CHRISTIAN RULE mark meyerson

The ultimately tragic story of the Jews in the Iberian Christian realms of Castile, the Crown of Aragon, Portugal, and Navarre during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is one in which the interplay of politics and religion is central. Simply pointing to the phenomenon of anti-Judaism as the explanation for the expulsions of Iberian Jewry between 1492 and 1498 is inadequate, for religious antagonism was, in one way or another, omnipresent. The key questions to address are when, where, and how such religious animosity was exacerbated, manipulated, and channeled, and how it affected the Jews in particular moments and places. Specific political and social forces, in other words, lent anti-Judaism its distinct shape, location, and direction in Iberian history. After 1391, the existence of large numbers of conversos (baptized Jews and their descendants) in Castile and the Crown of Aragon added another layer of complexity to the problematic Jewish–Christian relationship. Understanding the fate of the Jews in late medieval Iberia thus requires close attention to the ethnic composition and political culture of the societies in which the Jews lived. For reasons that will become clear in the course of this section, the realm of Castile was usually the center and source of the destructive political, social, and religious movements that transformed and ultimately ended Jewish life in Iberia. That Castile would come to exercise peninsular hegemony was a factor of no little significance for Iberian Jews. Yet the history of the Jews in late medieval Iberia cannot be understood and narrated as a gloom-filled journey to inevitable expulsion. Rather, it should be viewed as a history of resilience and adaptation to change – sometimes abrupt and horrendously violent change. In some places, Jewish communities recovered so successfully from their setbacks that on the eve of the expulsions they were flourishing and enjoying fruitful relations with their non-Jewish neighbors. For many Jews, then, expulsion was not the anticipated product of local conditions or the necessary resolution of problematic relations with Christians; it was the result of the decision-making of monarchs, a process on which the Jews and their Christian neighbors had minimal influence.61 In the complex 61

Eleazar Gutwirth, “Towards Expulsion, 1391 1492,” in E. Kedourie, ed., Spain and the Jews: The Sephardi Experience 1492 and After (London, 1992), 52; Mark Meyerson, A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth Century Spain (Princeton, 2004), 65 137; Miguel Angel Motis Dolader, “Población, urbanismo y estructura política de las aljamas judías

the iberian peninsula 147 and volatile relationship between religion and politics, the imperatives of kings and the views of townsfolk on the ground were not necessarily in accord. By the turn of the fourteenth century, the Iberian Christian kingdoms had colonized and consolidated their control over the vast territories wrested from Muslim princes in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, while establishing the institutions of royal and ecclesiastical government. These realms had also developed distinctive political cultures. The Crown of Aragon was a federated polity composed of the principality of Catalonia, the kingdom of Aragon, and the kingdom of Valencia, each with its own laws, institutions, and parliaments (Cortes). The regional Cortes, which, by statute, met regularly, and which included representatives of the nobility, the clergy, and the towns, were assertive and resisted the attempts of kings to centralize their authority in accordance with the principles of Roman law, or even to obtain revenue unless their grievances were first met. Opposition to the monarchy consequently tended to be constitutional in nature and couched in constitutional terms. In the Crown of Aragon’s cities, there emerged a thriving bourgeoisie engaged in commerce and industry, whose most ambitious and powerful members did not view financial and administrative activity as incompatible with their status, and who were able and willing to serve the royal government in positions that had been held by Jews until King Pere II perforce removed all Jews from office in 1283.62 While the Jews of this realm thus suffered some loss in political and economic status in the fourteenth century, they were also less conspicuous and less open to attack by antimonarchical forces. The Jews, moreover, were not the only religious minority who might have attracted the attention of the realm’s political classes. There were massive Muslim populations who shared the public spotlight with the Jews and were also the focus of Christian hostility.63

62

63

de Aragón en el siglo XV,” Hispania 56 (1996), 885 944; Benjamin Gampel, “Does Medieval Navarrese Jewry Salvage Our Notion of Convivencia?” in B. Cooperman, ed., In Iberia and Beyond: Hispanic Jews between Cultures (London, 1998), 97 122; Maria José Pimenta Ferro Tavares, Os judeus em Portugal no século XV, 2 vols. (Lisbon, 1982), vol. I, 418. David Romano, Judíos al servicio de Pedro el Grande de Aragón (1276 1285) (Barcelona, 1983); Yom Tov Assis, The Golden Age of Aragonese Jewry: Community and Society in the Crown of Aragon, 1213 1327 (London, 1997), 13 14; Haim Beinart, Los judíos en España (Madrid, 1992), 123; Mark Meyerson, Jews in an Iberian Frontier Kingdom: Society, Economy, and Politics in Morvedre, 1248 1391 (Leiden, 2004), 63 78. John Boswell, The Royal Treasure: Muslim Communities under the Crown of Aragon in the Fourteenth Century (New Haven, 1977); Mark Meyerson, The Muslims of Valencia in the Age of Fernando and Isabel: Between Coexistence and Crusade (Berkeley, 1991), 10 98; David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1996), 93 165.

148 the middle ages: the christian world The much larger realm of Castile was institutionally more unified than the Crown of Aragon and its rulers thus had greater potential to exercise the kind of quasi-imperial authority that they claimed in legal compilations influenced by Roman law. Castilian kings, however, were constantly confounded by powerful nobles who had acquired land, titles, towns, and high administrative posts during the centuries of expansion. Noble opposition to the monarchy involved brutal power politics and rebellion; kings often had to rule through balancing one noble faction against the other. The Castilian Cortes, on the other hand, was weak. Normally composed of urban representatives alone, it did not meet regularly in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and never acquired the constitutional mechanisms to oppose the king effectively or deny him the taxes he desired. Noble families dominated Castilian cities; their social values and ideals of knighthood and lineage-based nobility pervaded urban life. Socially ambitious Christians thus tended to disdain performing some of the financial and administrative functions necessary for royal government, and left them for Jews to carry out. Jews consequently became an easy target for the monarchy’s noble opposition. Castile’s very small Muslim population, in contrast, hardly figured in the political discourse.64 Castilian Christians directed their animus primarily at Jews and, later, conversos. Portugal’s royal and noble houses had close ties with their Castilian neighbors and, like Castile, Portugal suffered from struggles between Crown and nobility. Yet, because many Portuguese nobles lacked the landed resources of their Castilian counterparts, they increasingly gravitated to the royal court. Over the course of the later Middle Ages, both kings and nobles in Portugal looked more and more to the Atlantic for political and economic opportunities. The small land-locked kingdom of Navarre was ruled by a French dynasty in the fourteenth century. The destinies of both Portuguese and Navarrese Jews would be shaped by events in Castile and the Crown of Aragon. The latter two, the most powerful realms with the largest Jewish populations, are necessarily the focus of this chapter. Throughout the fourteenth century, the fundamental relationship between the Iberian Christian monarchies and the Jews remained unchanged: in exchange for basic religious freedoms, communal autonomy, and royal protection of their persons and property, the Jews served 64

Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada, “Los mudéjares de Castilla en la Baja Edad Media,” in Actas del I Simposio Internacional de Mudejarismo (Madrid, 1981), 349 90; Ladero Quesada, “Datos demográficos sobre los musulmanes de Granada y Castilla en el siglo XV,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 8 (1972 3), 481 90.

the iberian peninsula 149 the monarchy, primarily in a fiscal capacity. Referred to in royal documents as “the royal treasure” or as “serfs of the royal treasury,” the Jews paid heavy, often exorbitant taxes, normally at higher rates than those required of Christian and Muslim subjects.65 Meeting such heavy fiscal demands continued to generate social and political tensions within Jewish communities. Lower- and middle-class Jews agitated against the oligarchies of wealth and learning that dominated communal governments; in many cases, they achieved – with royal support – a role in communal government through electoral and institutional reforms. The reforms in several respects paralleled those undertaken in contemporary Christian municipal governments. Oligarchic families, nonetheless, managed to maintain their power through astute politicking, patronage, and the prestige acquired through long and faithful service to the community.66 In Castile and Portugal, the royal court, where Jews could still hold office, remained a focus for the ambitions of members of the Jewish elite; as royal officials, they could also influence monarchs on their people’s behalf. Congruent with the more centralized political structures of their realms, Castilian and Portuguese kings also appointed head Jewish officials, called “court rabbi” (rab de la corte) and “chief rabbi” (rabi-mor), respectively. Despite their title, they were not religious functionaries but acted as the principal intermediaries between the king and “his” Jews in fiscal, judicial, and other important matters.67 The Crown of Aragon’s decentralization, as well as the objection of the Jewish communities themselves, inhibited the appointment of such Jewish ministers of Jewish affairs there. Once Jews 65

66

67

David Abulafia, “The Servitude of Jews and Muslims in the Medieval Mediterranean: Origins and Diffusion,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome (moyen âge temps modernes) 112 (2000), 687 714; Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, trans. Louis Schoffman, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1961), vol. I, 306 78, vol. II, 1 34; Yom Tov Assis, Jewish Economy in the Medieval Crown of Aragon, 1213 1327: Money and Power (Leiden, 1997), 133 82; Meyerson, Iberian Frontier Kingdom, 98 175, 227 37, 251 7; Maria José Pimenta Ferro, Os judeus em Portugal no século XIV (Lisbon, 1979), 128 34; Béatrice Leroy, The Jews of Navarre in the Late Middle Ages (Jerusalem, 1985), 80 92. Baer, History, I, 311 25, II, 35 73; Yom Tov Assis, “Poor and Rich in Jewish Society in Mediterranean Spain” [Hebrew], Pe’amim 46 7 (1991), 115 38; Assis, “Social Unrest and Class Struggle in Jewish Communities in Spain before the Expulsion” [Hebrew], in J. Dan, ed., Culture and History (Jerusalem, 1987), 121 45; Assis, Golden Age, 76 131, 237 41; Meyerson, Iberian Frontier Kingdom, 98 175; Beinart, Judíos en España, 135 41, 149 53; Leroy, Jews of Navarre, 33, 84 6; Ferro Tavares, Judeus em Portugal no século XV, I, 125 36, 215 27. Baer, History, I, 325 7, 354 60; Haim Beinart, “The Jews in Castile,” in Beinart, ed., Moreshet Sepharad: The Sephardi Legacy, 2 vols. (Jerusalem, 1992), vol. I, 38 42; Ferro, Judeus em Portugal no século XIV, 24 8; Ferro Tavares, Judeus em Portugal no século XV, I, 107 18; François Soyer, The Persecution of the Jews and Muslims of Portugal: King Manuel I and the End of Religious Tolerance (1496 7) (Leiden, 2007), 33 7.

150 the middle ages: the christian world were prohibited from occupying any posts in royal government, elite Jews concentrated on strengthening their authority within their own communities. They exerted some influence on the king as representatives of communities whose aggregate fiscal importance for the royal treasury was considerable.68 Monarchs also valued their Jewish subjects for the roles they played in local and regional economies as artisans engaging in a wide range of crafts, retail merchants, merchants involved to a limited extent in international trade, commercial brokers, farmers – especially for purposes of wineproduction – physicians, and, of course, moneylenders.69 Although only a minority of Jews lent money, and in many cases only did it part-time as a supplement to income from other occupations, the Jews’ provision of credit was crucial in two respects. Firstly, because canon and royal law forbade Christians to lend money at interest to their coreligionists, the Jews’ credit operations were essential for greasing the wheels of regional economies. Christian and Muslim farmers, artisans, and merchants relied on Jewish lenders to provide them with the small sums necessary for their agrarian, industrial, and commercial pursuits. Most loans were small – intended, for example, to tide a farmer over until the next harvest. Especially affluent Jews also lent money to nobles, municipalities, and princes. Royal laws established rates of interest, from 20 percent in the Crown of Aragon to 33.3 percent in Castile, and regular procedures for the 68 69

Assis, Golden Age, 15 18. Asunción Blasco Martínez, “La producción y comercialización del vino entre los judíos de Zaragoza (siglo XIV),” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 19 (1989), 405 49; Martínez, “Actividad laboral de una comunidad urbana del siglo XIV: la aljama de los judíos de Zaragoza,” in Les Sociétés urbaines dans la France méridionale et la Péninsule Ibérique au Moyen Age (Paris, 1991), 439 61; Martínez, “Pintores y orfebres judíos en Zaragoza (siglo XIV),” Aragón en la Edad Media 8 (1988), 113 31; Martínez, “Médicos y pacientes de las tres religiones (Zaragoza, siglo XIV y comienzos del XV),” Aragón en la Edad Media 12 (1995), 153 82; Yom Tov Assis, “Jewish Physicians and Medicine in Medieval Spain,” in Samuel Kottek and Luis García Ballester, eds., Medicine and Medical Ethics in Medieval and Early Modern Spain (Jerusalem, 1996), 33 49; José Hinojosa Montalvo, “Actividades judías en la Valencia del siglo XIV,” in Emilio Sáez, Cristina Seguro Graíño, and Margarita Cantera Montenegro, eds., La ciudad hispánica durante los siglos XIII al XVI, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1985), II, 1547 56; David Abulafia, A Medieval Emporium: The Catalan Kingdom of Majorca (Cambridge, 1994), 90 8, 125; Gabriel Secall i Guell, Els jueus de Valls i la seva època (Valls, 1980), 254 65, 275 90; Meyerson, Iberian Frontier Kingdom, 38 56; Michael McVaugh, Medicine Before the Plague: Practitioners and their Patients in the Crown of Aragon, 1285 1345 (Cambridge, 1993), 52 64, 97 103, 184 6, 191 5; Juan Carrasco, Sinagoga y mercado: estudios y textos sobre los judíos del Reino de Navarra (Pamplona, 1993), 114 19, 143 205; Ferro, Judeus em Portugal no século XIV, 35 6, 58, 105 34; Maurice Kriegel, Les Juifs à la fin du Moyen Age dans l’Europe méditerranéenne (Paris, 1979), 71 109.

the iberian peninsula 151 payment and collection of debts, as well as for penalizing insolvent or recalcitrant debtors. Monarchs were particularly concerned with the Jews’ credit operations because they were, secondly, fundamental to the Jews’ ability to shoulder a heavy fiscal burden. If the Jews were going to pay the king his taxes, then the king and his officials had to ensure that Christian and Muslim borrowers repaid the Jews – with interest, which amounted ultimately to an indirect royal levy on borrowers already obliged to pay a range of royal taxes or seigneurial dues.70 Even in good times, Christians resented their financial dependence on and sense of obligation to Jews, their socio-religious inferiors; debt litigation and collection left a lot of bruised feelings. Jewish creditors could give debtors some relief by granting them moratoria or by renegotiating payment schedules, but this might prove impossible when the king was squeezing “his” Jews for extraordinary revenue. During tough times of poor harvest, epidemic disease, and warfare – frequent afflictions of Iberian societies in the fourteenth century – the hostility of hard-pressed Christians toward Jewish moneylenders tended to mount.71 Probably no single Jewish activity attracted as much Christian attention, and as much Christian animosity, as moneylending, an occupation with which discontented Christians often associated all Jews. The issue of Jewish usury was most salient in Castile. There it was consistently a topic of public political discussion because of its association, in the minds of many Christians, with the alleged power and deleterious influence of Jewish financial officials at the royal court. Castilian kings continued to appoint such Jewish officials because, in the hornet’s nest of Castilian politics, they regarded Jews as more loyal and dependable than Christian nobles, who, in turn, resented Jews as the instruments of a centralizing monarchy.72 Faced with mounting royal taxes, the urban 70 71

72

Assis, Jewish Economy, 1, 26 7, 30 1, 47, 60 3. Ibid., 49 94, 128 31; Assis, The Jews of Santa Coloma de Queralt: An Economic and Demographic Case Study at the End of the Thirteenth Century (Jerusalem, 1988); Richard Emery, The Jews of Perpignan in the Thirteenth Century (New York, 1959); Elena Lourie, “Jewish Moneylenders in the Local Catalan Community, c. 1300: Villafranca del Penedés, Besalú and Montblanc,” Michael 11 (1989), 33 98; José Hinojosa Montalvo, “El préstamo judío en la ciudad de Valencia en la segunda mitad del siglo XIV,” Sefarad 45 (1985), 315 39; Antoni Furió, “Diners i credit. Els jueus d’Alzira en la segona meitat del segle XIV,” Revista d’Història Medieval 4 (1993), 127 60; Meyerson, Iberian Frontier Kingdom, 176 205; Nina Melechen, “Loans, Land, and Jewish Christian Relations in the Archdiocese of Toledo,” in Larry Simon, ed., Iberia and the Mediterranean World of the Middle Ages: Studies in Honor of Robert I. Burns, S.J. (Leiden, 1995), 185 215; Carrasco, Sinagoga y mercado, 119 39, 237 95, 305 31. José María Monsalvo Antón, Teoría y evolución de un conflicto social: El antisemitismo en la Corona de Castilla en la Baja Edad Media (Madrid, 1985), 66 7, 81 90.

152 the middle ages: the christian world representatives in the Cortes did what they could to ameliorate the circumstances of the Christian citizenry by repeatedly petitioning the king to remove all Jews from office, to discontinue the use of Jewish farmers and collectors of royal taxes, and to deal with Jewish usury, not so much by prohibiting it – since Christians needed credit – as by suppressing or reducing the debts Christians owed to Jews or granting the debtors moratoria. Kings sometimes acceded at least in part to such parliamentary petitions, but did not consistently fulfill their promises, if only because it was too difficult for them to change their mode of governing or their subjects’ ways of doing business.73 In the Crown of Aragon, Christians could not make the same connection between Jewish power and Jewish usury. True, Aragonese kings were sometimes served in an unofficial capacity by Jewish financiers and physicians; they also periodically confirmed, at the Cortes’ request, the legislation regulating Jewish lending, and occasionally ordered investigations into Jews charging interest beyond the set royal rate. Nevertheless, the political classes comprising the parliamentary estates in Crown territories no longer focused on Jews in relation to key questions of royal policy.74 In the minds of the Christian laity, economic or political concerns about the Jews were never completely separate from religious views about them that the Church had inculcated. That these views were increasingly antagonistic, partly as a result of trans-Pyrenean developments, meant that there was more flammable ideological material for political actors – especially Castilian actors – to draw upon and ignite. Christian laypersons with grievances about Jewish usury or apparent Jewish power easily found support among the clergy, who, in all Iberian realms, were consistent critics of royal policies toward Jews.75 Some clerics conducted campaigns against Jewish usury which lasted several years, and which involved attempted economic boycotts of Jewish moneylenders. Royal opposition 73

74

75

Ibid., 91 4, 100 3, 173 7, 211 25. See, e.g., the unsuccessful effort of Alfonso XI (d. 1350) to prohibit Jewish usury: José Amador de los Ríos, Historia social, política y religiosa de los judíos de España y Portugal (Madrid, 1960), 336 46, 385; Baer, History, I, 325 7, 354 62; Luis Suárez Fernández, Judíos españoles en la Edad Media (Madrid, 1980), 171 2, 174 8. Baer, History, II, 1 6, 17 18, 85 6; Yom Tov Assis, “The Jews in the Crown of Aragon and its Dominions,” in Beinart, ed., Sephardi Legacy, I, 54 8, 60 1; Jaume Riera i Sans, “Jafudà Alatzar: jueu de València,” Revista d’Història Medieval 4 (1993), 65 100; Asunción Blasco Martínez, “Solomon Anagni, Perpuntero of the King of Aragon and Deputy Merino of Saragossa (XIV Century),” in Harvey Hames, ed., Jews, Muslims and Christians in and around the Crown of Aragon (Leiden, 2004), 321 47. See, e.g., the ordinances of the synod of Zamora, 1312 13, transcribed in Amador de los Ríos, Historia, 935 8; and in Yitzhak Baer, Die Juden im christlichen Spanien. Urkunden und Regesten, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1929 36), vol. II, 118 20. See also Suárez Fernández, Judíos españoles, 153 61.

the iberian peninsula 153 and the need of many Christians for the Jews’ services, however, defeated the clerical offensives.76 The Church, in Iberia as elsewhere, had long worried that Christian contact with Jews would result in the latter leading Christians into religious error or into sexual relationships. Jewish leaders, of course, had similar concerns. Ecclesiastical synods enjoined Christians not to socialize unduly with Jews or to work in Jewish households, and they demanded that Jews wear a distinctive badge. Lay authorities often seconded these synods, though obedience and enforcement were inconsistent.77 Yet initiatives for spatial segregation, particularly the construction of walled Jewish quarters, came often enough from Jewish communities themselves, not just from Christians aiming to exclude Jews and prevent them from contaminating Christian society. The Jews desired greater protection for several reasons, some of them related to occurrences in the Crown of Aragon, which, by virtue of geography, was more exposed to transPyrenean developments.78 King Jaume II of Aragon (1291–1327) promoted Dominican and Franciscan missions to the Jews more energetically than his predecessors and tried to make conversion more attractive by ruling that proselytes should not lose any property as a result of their baptism. A number of Jews converted. As threatening to Jewish communities as the missionaries themselves were the Christian crowds which sometimes accompanied them, as well as recent apostates who, out of zeal for their newfound faith, preached to their erstwhile coreligionists, with royal license, or otherwise made trouble for them.79 Although Pere III (1336–87) did not encourage mendicant missions, he did provide financial assistance for new converts and permit some of them to preach to Jews.80 There is no record 76

77

78 79

80

Shlomo Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews: History (Toronto, 1991), 202 4; Baer, History, I, 309 10; Mark Meyerson, “Bishop Ramon Despont and the Jews of the Kingdom of Valencia,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 29 (1999), 641 53; Joseph Shatzmiller, Shylock Reconsidered: Jews, Moneylending, and Medieval Society (Berkeley, 1990), 45 52. Kriegel, Les Juifs, 39 59; Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, 127 65; Nirenberg, “Conversion, Sex, and Segregation: Jews and Christians in Medieval Spain,” American Historical Review 107 (2002), 1065 93. Assis, “Jews in the Crown of Aragon,” 62 8; Meyerson, Iberian Frontier Kingdom, 95 7. Assis, Golden Age, 53 8; Meyerson, Iberian Frontier Kingdom, 80 1. For essential back ground, Robert Chazan, Daggers of Faith: Thirteenth Century Missionizing and Jewish Response (Berkeley, 1989); Harvey Hames, The Art of Conversion: Christianity and Kabbalah in the Thirteenth Century (Leiden, 2000). Paola Tartakoff, “Jewish Women and Apostasy in the Medieval Crown of Aragon, c. 1300 1391,” Jewish History 24 (2010), 10 11; Alexandra Guerson, “Seeking Remission: Jewish Conversion in the Crown of Aragon, c. 1378 1391,” Jewish History 24 (2010),

154 the middle ages: the christian world of Castilian kings acting like Jaume II in support of mendicant proselytizing. Even so, the friars were doubtless active in Castile. The Jewish physician Abner of Burgos apparently succumbed to their arguments around 1320. Taking the Christian name Alfonso de Valladolid, he attacked Judaism in his Hebrew writings and advocated the forced conversion of the Jews in a Castilian version of one of them, Mostrador de justicia [Teacher of Righteousness].81 At this juncture, however, coerced baptism was much less the experience of Iberian Jews than of their brethren in France. There, in 1306, Philip IV’s decree of expulsion moved some Jews to convert; the Shepherds’ Crusade of 1320–1 resulted in the forced baptism or murder of many more. The shepherds crossed the Pyrenees and slaughtered over 300 Jews in Montclus in Aragon; royal authorities prevented the shepherds from perpetrating other massacres.82 In both 1306 and 1320–1, French Jews and Jewish converts sought refuge in Jewish communities in the Crown of Aragon. Even proselytes from Germany fled there. On account of the return of such converts to Judaism, papal inquisitors prosecuted and penalized individual Jews and entire communities for harboring them and encouraging their relapse. Jaume II opposed the inquisitors’ extension of their jurisdiction over the Jews as a violation of his authority over them. Unable to halt the inquisitors’ activities, he at least reduced the ruinous fines that they had imposed on Jewish communities.83 By the mid fourteenth century, inquisitors were prosecuting Crown Jews for necromancy and sorcery, regarded as transgressions of natural law, which, the inquisitors maintained, applied to adherents of all three faiths.84

81

82

83

84

37 45; Jaume Riera i Sans, “Les llicències reials per predicar als jueus i als sarraïns (segles XIII XIV),” Calls 2 (1987), 117 18, 121, 124 6, 131, 139 40. Baer, History, I, 327 54; Robert Chazan, “Undermining the Jewish Sense of the Future: Alfonso of Valladolid and the New Christian Missionizing,” in Mark Meyerson and Edward English, eds., Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Medieval and Early Modern Spain: Interaction and Cultural Change (Notre Dame, 1999), 179 94. Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, 43 92; William C. Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews: From Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians (Philadelphia, 1989), 214 51. Baer, History, II, 7 14; Assis, Golden Age, 58 63; Assis, “Juifs de France réfugiés en Aragon (XIIIe XIVe siècles),” Revue des Études Juives 142 (1983), 209 27; Assis, “The Papal Inquisition and Aragonese Jewry in the Early Fourteenth Century,” Mediaeval Studies 49 (1987), 391 410; Meyerson, Iberian Frontier Kingdom, 93; Paola Tartakoff, Between Christian and Jew: Conversion and Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1250 1391 (Philadelphia, 2012). Baer, Die Juden, I, 343 4; J. Vincke, Zur Vorgeschichte der Spanischen Inquisition. Die Inquisition in Aragon, Katalonien, Mallorca und Valencia während des 13. und 14. Jahrhunderts (Bonn, 1941), 83; Simonsohn, Apostolic See, 357; Mark Meyerson, “Samuel of Granada and the Dominican Inquisitor: Jewish Magic and Jewish Heresy

the iberian peninsula 155 Such fanciful charges against Jews were hardly new, but in the later Middle Ages they comprised a larger part of the ideological baggage that Iberian Christians brought to their encounters with Jews. As Christian devotion centered increasingly on the polyvalent symbol of the Body of Christ, the Jews appeared in a more negative light: as the alleged tormentors of the historical Christ in the Passion and of Christian children, whom they were accused of ritually murdering in re-enactment of the Crucifixion; as the alleged mockers and desecrators of the consecrated Host; and as outsiders to a Christian social body united through the Eucharist.85 Both ritual murder and Host desecration tales had circulated in northern Europe, and caused harm to Jews there, before they reached Iberia. The legal compilation of Alfonso X of Castile (1252–84), the Siete Partidas, mentioned the Jews’ customary ritual murder of children. Christians in the Crown of Aragon occasionally leveled accusations against local Jews for kidnapping or murdering Christian children.86 Stories of Jewish Host desecration, or of Jewish contempt for Eucharistic devotion, had gained sufficient currency in Christian Spain by the 1320s to inspire related charges against Jews. Yet none of these accusations resulted in serious violence against the Jews, and most prompted the intervention of royal officials on the Jews’ behalf.87 In the wake of the Black Death of 1348, however, Christians attacked four or five Jewish communities in Catalonia.88 On account of the Jews’ greater insecurity, three Jewish representatives – two Catalan and one Valencian – beseeched King Pere III in 1354 to intercede with Pope Innocent VI on the Jews’ behalf. They requested that the pope forbid the Christian masses to blame the Jews for plagues, famines, and earthquakes; to accuse Jews of Host desecration; or

85

86

87

88

in Post 1391 Valencia,” in Steven McMichael and Susan Myers, eds., Friars and Jews in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Leiden, 2004), 161 89. Kenneth Stow, “Holy Body, Holy Society: Conflicting Medieval Structural Conceptions,” in B. Kedar and R. Werblowsky, eds., Sacred Space: Shrine, City, Land (New York, 1998), 151 71. Dwayne Carpenter, ed., Alfonso X and the Jews: An Edition of and Commentary on Siete Partidas 7.24 “De Los Judíos’” (Berkeley, 1986), 64 5; Baer, History, I, 149, II, 6 7; Elena Lourie, “A Plot Which Failed? The Case of the Corpse Found in the Jewish Call of Barcelona (1301),” Mediterranean Historical Review 1 (1986), 187 220; Lourie, “Cultic Dancing and Courtly Love: Jews and Popular Culture in Fourteenth Century Aragon and Valencia,” in M. Goodich, S. Menache, and S. Schein, eds., Cross Cultural Convergences in the Crusader Period: Essays Presented to Aryeh Grabois on His Sixty Fifth Birthday (New York, 1995), 168 9 n. 39 for Valencia. Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven, 1999), 31, 85 7, 96 8, 110, 155 7; Meyerson, Iberian Frontier Kingdom, 91 2; Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, 220. Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, 231 43.

156 the middle ages: the christian world to urge violence against them for these reasons. They also asked him to limit the powers of the Inquisition to prosecute Jews. Pope Innocent evidently issued some bulls or writs in the Jews’ favor.89 Despite the problems and dire events enumerated above, there was considerable stability and normalcy in the day-to-day relations between Christians and Jews in many places over long stretches of time. For all the Christian complaints and ecclesiastical agitation about Jewish usury, as if it were the Jews’ sole means of livelihood, many Christians regularly borrowed from Jewish lenders and repaid them without incident, formed commercial partnerships with Jewish merchants, labored together with Jewish artisans and landowners, and sought the services of Jewish physicians. For all the Christian murmuring about undue Jewish influence and exploitative Jewish officials and tax-farmers, Christian kings and nobles consistently relied – sometimes hypocritically – on Jewish financial advisors and physicians, while ambitious Christians jointly farmed taxes with Jews and served in royal government alongside of – and in far greater numbers than – Jews. For all the legislation, especially ecclesiastical legislation, expressing Christian fear of Jewish contamination, socializing of all kinds between Christians and Jews was frequent – so frequent that it required the legislation’s iteration. Despite the stories in circulation about diabolical Jews desecrating Hosts and the like, and despite the activity of papal inquisitors, they were not a stimulus for the violence of Christian mobs against Jews, as they were in northern Europe, but were, at worst, ammunition for individual Christians with grievances against particular Jews. Religious antagonism and a certain amount of economic competition or resentment formed the seemingly permanent substratum of Jewish–Christian relations in Iberia. It took particular forms of political discourse in Castile to aggravate such systemic tensions and spark widespread outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence. To grasp the peculiarly destructive power of anti-Judaism in Castilian political culture, the ramifications of which were ultimately ruinous for all of Iberian Jewry, a comparison with the Crown of Aragon in the second half of the fourteenth century is instructive. The latter realm certainly had its share of serious anti-Jewish incidents, but they were isolated and unconnected, neither acquiring an aggregate force nor feeding wider political and social movements. Attacks on Jewish communities inspired by the advent of the Black Death in spring 1348 did not spread from 89

Baer, Die Juden, I, 348 59, for the Hebrew text of the so called “Accords of 1354”; Eduard Feliu, “Els acords de Barcelona de 1354,” Calls 2 (1987), 145 64, is a Catalan translation, with the commentary of Jaume Riera i Sans, “Guia per una lectura com prensiva dels acords” (164 73); Simonsohn, Apostolic See, 65 6.

the iberian peninsula 157 Catalonia to the kingdoms of Aragon and Valencia, even though much of the Christian political elite in both territories was already organized into “Unions” and in rebellion against Pere III on account of his authoritarian pretensions. In Valencia, Unionists sacked the Jewish quarter in the town of Morvedre in November and killed some of its inhabitants because of the social and political position the Jews occupied: they were the king’s “treasure” and they had close ties to local royalist noble families. Yet the Unionists, who focused on constitutional issues, never made anti-Judaism a part of their antimonarchical program or propaganda, even in the final days of their failing revolt, despite the probable ease of arousing a Christian citizenry terrorized by the Black Death.90 Subsequent waves of plague afflicting Crown territories did not unleash popular violence; instead, they elicited an almost ritual effort on the part of municipal and ecclesiastical authorities to prevent or halt such divine chastisement by segregating, albeit temporarily, the sources of Christian sin: the Jews, Muslims, and prostitutes with whom Christians habitually mingled.91 Although the public trials of Jews accused of Host desecration in Barcelona in 1367 and in Huesca in 1377 resulted in the torture and execution of five Jews, remarkably they did not trigger mass violence against the Jews. The trials were a bone of contention between Pere III, who opposed them, and his headstrong heir, Prince Joan, who conducted them with the encouragement of Dominican advisors. Pere was less successful at restraining his son than he was at putting a stop to a similar trial initiated in Lleida in 1383 by his nephew, the count of Urgell.92 The Jews’ ability to weather these storms indeed had much to do with the consistent policy of the long-reigning King Pere (1336–87), who endeavored to protect the Jews, foster their prosperity, and tax them as much as was feasible, even though their value to the monarchy as a fiscal resource was palpably diminishing.93 This was not simply the result of the aljamas’ financial exhaustion. More importantly, over the course of the later fourteenth century, a new fiscal regime was developing in the Crown of Aragon, in which new forms of taxation, such as indirect taxes and levies on industry and commerce, and new 90

91

92

93

Mark Meyerson, “Victims and Players: The Attack of the Union of Valencia on the Jews of Morvedre,” in T. Burman, M. Meyerson, and L. Shopkow, eds., Religion, Text, and Society in Medieval Spain and Northern Europe: Studies in Honor of J. N. Hillgarth (Toronto, 2002), 70 102. Agustín Rubio Vela, Peste negra, crisis y comportamientos sociales en la España del siglo XIV. La ciudad de Valencia (Granada, 1979), 33 46, 96 7; Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, 239 40. J. Miret y Sans, “El procés de les hosties contra.ls jueus d’Osca en 1377,” Anuari de l’Institut d’Estudis Catalans 4 (1911 12), 59 80; Rubin, Gentile Tales, 109 15. Baer, History, II, 28 34; Assis, “Jews in the Crown of Aragon,” 59 61; Meyerson, Iberian Frontier Kingdom, 144 6, 155 61, 164 73, 203 5, 215 16, 227 65.

158 the middle ages: the christian world credit mechanisms were central. These changes not only reduced the significance of the Jews’ contribution to the royal treasury, they also gradually began to reshape the troubled triangular relationship among revenue-hungry monarchs, taxpaying Jewish creditors, and taxpaying Christian debtors. The key development was the widespread and increasing use of the new credit instrument, the censal – basically, an annuity sold by the borrower to the lender in exchange for a certain sum, which was paid back, with interest, in the form of annual pensions. The rate of interest on the capital borrowed through the censal was 7.69 percent in the late fourteenth century, considerably lower than the rates charged by Jewish and other Christian lenders. Christian nobles and wealthy urban citizens with liquid capital purchased censals as a conservative form of investment that insured them a reliable annual income. These censalistas began to displace the Jews as the principal purveyors of credit, as municipal and aljama governments, ecclesiastical institutions, and individuals of all faiths began to sell censals to raise money. Prior to the disaster of 1391, the Jews of the Crown of Aragon were, by virtue of the censal, inching toward freedom from their peculiar form of thraldom – to the royal treasury and to the necessity of practicing usury.94 In late fourteenth-century Castile, by contrast, the political discourse of the nobility and parliamentary representatives, in which the Jews figured prominently, and the momentum of political events lent separate acts of anti-Jewish violence coherence and legitimacy. Assailing Jews became part of the wider pattern of political violence, integral to the ways in which the Christian elite vied for power. The lay elite, and certain members of the clergy, remained focused on Jews because Jews were consistently at the political center. That neither the Black Death and subsequent epidemics nor tales of Jewish ritual murder and Host desecration provoked widespread, destructive violence against Castilian Jews thrusts the importance of politics, and the Castilian way of conducting them, into relief. Castilian Jewish communities were much victimized during the conflict that raged between King Pedro I (1350–69) and his illegitimate half-brother Enrique de Trastámara, the future Enrique II (1369–79). Enrique had the support of many nobles who were disgruntled with the king’s despotic tendencies and unwillingness to grant them more perquisites in a period of economic difficulty. Urban folk too were unhappy because King Pedro pressed them for more taxes to support his expansionist wars against the Crown of Aragon.95 Both groups turned their attention to the Jews associated with royal government, especially its fiscal regime. Samuel Halevi Abulafia served Pedro as chief treasurer, and in other capacities. 94 95

Meyerson, Iberian Frontier Kingdom, 205 9, 258 61; Kriegel, Les Juifs, 99 100. Clara Estow, Pedro the Cruel of Castile, 1350 1369 (Leiden, 1995), 155 79.

the iberian peninsula 159 After his disgrace and death in prison in 1360, Jews from the Halevi and Benveniste families of Burgos assumed his tasks. Other Jews functioned noticeably as collectors and farmers of royal taxes. A Castilian king’s employment of Jews in such roles was hardly new; the novelty was the efficacy with which Pedro’s noble opponents manipulated this fact in their anti-monarchical propaganda. In order to gain popular support, Enrique and his allies portrayed Pedro as a tyrannical “Jew-lover” who was “promoting and enriching the Moors [who fought in Pedro’s army] and the Jews and making them lords.” Their war against Pedro took on the guise of a crusade, particularly in the eyes of the foreign mercenaries fighting for Enrique from 1366. But it was not Castile’s insignificant Muslim communities who were targeted; it was the Jews.96 The history of Castilian Jewry in the 1350s and 1360s reads like a litany of disasters. Enrique’s troops and the French Free Companies in his employ murderously attacked Jewish communities in Toledo, Cuenca, Nájera, Miranda del Ebro, Briviesca, and Palencia. The Jews of Águilar de Campoo and Villadiego suffered similar atrocities at the hands of English soldiers fighting for Pedro. Though foreign troops perpetrated the most horrendous violence, the Christian populace in Segovia, Ávila, Paredes, and Valladolid assaulted and robbed local Jewish communities and destroyed synagogues. Enrique also extorted huge sums from the Jewish communities of Burgos, Palencia, and Toledo. When desperate, King Pedro was no better: he had the Jewish community of Jaén sold into slavery for the purpose of repaying Granadan Muslims for their military aid.97 Before, during, and after the civil war, urban representatives in the Castilian Cortes conducted their own offensive against the realm’s Jews, making petitions to Pedro and Enrique that were much like those presented to kings prior to 1350. Considering Enrique’s anti-Petrine and antiJewish propaganda, members of the Cortes, and all other Castilians aware of political developments, had good reason to expect that the new king would institute real change. They were quickly disillusioned. Although Enrique II paid lip-service to the Cortes’ requests for discriminatory measures that were much in line with the decrees of ecclesiastical councils, in practice he proved to be no different from Pedro I and continued to rely on Jewish officials and tax-farmers. Under Enrique, the Sevillan Jew Yuçef 96

97

Julio Valdeón Baruque, Los judíos de Castilla y la revolución Trastámara (Valladolid, 1968), 25 43; the quote, cited on p. 39, is from L. Serrano, ed., Cartulario del Infantado de Covarrubias (Madrid, 1907), 217 19. See also Baer, History, I, 362 7. Valdeón Baruque, Los judíos de Castilla, 43 50; Monsalvo Antón, Teoría, 227 39; Eleazar Gutwirth, “History and Intertextuality in Late Medieval Spain,” in Meyerson and English, eds., Christians, Muslims, and Jews, 164 8.

160 the middle ages: the christian world Pichon played a prominent role in the fiscal administration; other Jews collected or farmed taxes – all this despite Pope Gregory XI’s admonition to Enrique in 1375. Jews were somewhat less noticeable in the government of Enrique’s successor Juan I (1379–90), but the damage had already been done.98 The chronicler Pedro López de Ayala acerbically captured the resentments of many Christians: “Here come the Jews . . . ready to drink the blood of the oppressed. They present their documents and promise jewels and gifts to the favorites.”99 Preachers played on the bitterness and frustration of Christians oppressed by taxes and economic conditions beyond their control. None did it better, and more ruinously, than Ferrán Martínez, the archdeacon of Écija in the archdiocese of Seville, home to one of Castile’s largest aljamas. In 1378, he began to agitate against the Jews, exhorting Christians not to socialize with Jews or allow Jews to live among them and to destroy the Jews’ synagogues. King Juan learned in 1383 that the archdeacon had gone as far as telling Christians that they could kill or harm Jews with royal approval. Anxious that Martínez would provoke “riots” against the Jews, the king and the archbishop of Seville, Pedro Gómez Barroso, attempted, with limited success, to restrain and silence him. The death of the archbishop in July 1390, followed by that of the king in October and the succession of a child, Enrique III, created the power vacuum Martínez needed.100 The archdeacon ignited the first explosion of violence against the Jewish community of Seville on 6 June 1391. Christian mobs killed hundreds of Jews and forcibly baptized many others. Over the course of the summer, the anti-Jewish violence spread throughout Castile – to Córdoba, Toledo, Cuenca, and Burgos, for example. The results were similar almost everywhere: murdered Jews, and terrorized Jews submitting to baptism. The previous years of political propaganda and discussion concerning the Jews, frequently punctuated with diatribes against the diabolic “Christkillers,” had planted the seeds of, and legitimized, the bloodshed and coerced conversions. In the absence of a strong, adult king, royal officials

98

99

100

Valdeón Baruque, Los judíos de Castilla, 53 88; Baer, History, I, 367 78; Monsalvo Antón, Teoría, 238 52. Pedro López de Ayala, Libro rimado de palaçio, ed. Jacques Joset, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1978), I, 136 7; Hillgarth, The Spanish Kingdoms, II, 138 9. Transcriptions of royal and archiepiscopal letters regarding the preaching and other anti Jewish activities of Ferrán Martínez are in Amador de los Ríos, Historia, 945 53. See also Emilio Mitre Fernández, Los judíos de Castilla en tiempo de Enrique III. El pogrom de 1391 (Valladolid, 1994), 35 44; Luis Suárez Fernández, La expulsión de los judíos de España (Madrid, 1991), 182 90.

the iberian peninsula 161 could do little to stem the tide of violence. In rare cases, such as in Murcia, the local authorities intervened to defend the Jews.101 The violence spread to the Crown of Aragon as well. While there was a fair amount of tension in the relations between Jews and Christians there, the Christians of this realm would not have attacked Jewish communities without the Castilian example – and, in the cases of Valencia and Barcelona, the involvement of Castilians. In fact, the first riot, in Valencia on July 9, 1391, began when a procession of youths marched on the Jewish quarter “shouting that the archdeacon of Castile is coming with his cross and that all the Jews should be baptized or die.” Notwithstanding the absence of Martínez himself, this is precisely what happened in Valencia, and then in many other cities and towns, most notably Palma de Majorca, Barcelona, and Girona. The presence of King Joan I and the energetic Jewish leader Hasdai Crescas in Zaragoza saved the Jews of this city, while local authorities˙protected the Jews in most other Aragonese towns and in Morvedre in the kingdom of Valencia.102 The Jews of Portugal and Navarre were spared the 1391 riots. Attacks on Jewish communities had occurred earlier in these realms, however – specifically in moments of political instability. After the death of the king of France and Navarre, Charles the Fair, in 1328, and before the arrival of the new rulers, Jeanne and Philippe d’Evreux, a Franciscan friar sparked a massacre of the Jews of Estella and robbery of the Jews of other towns.103 During the Portuguese dynastic crisis caused by the demise of King Fernando in 1383, a Christian mob assaulted the main Jewish quarter in Lisbon, the residence of David Negro and Juda Aben Menir, officials and tax-farmers of the late king. The future João I, of Avis, prevented serious violence.104 In 1391, some Castilian and Aragonese Jews took refuge in Portugal and Navarre. 101

102

103

104

Baer, History, II, 95 9; Mitre Fernández, Pogrom de 1391, 19 23, 28 31, 47 60; Monsalvo Antón, Teoría, 254 63; Suárez Fernández, La expulsión, 190 4; Isabel Montes Romero Camacho, “Antisemitismo sevillano en la Baja Edad Media: el pogrom de 1391 y sus consecuencias,” in La sociedad medieval Andaluza: grupos no privilegiados: Actas del III Coloquio de historia medieval andaluza (Jaén, 1984), 57 75. Baer, History, II, 99 117; Jaume Riera i Sans, “Los tumultos contra las juderías de la Corona de Aragón en 1391,” Cuadernos de Historia 8 (1977), 213 25; Riera i Sans, “Estrangers participants als avalots contra les jueries de la Corona d’Aragó el 1391,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 10 (1980), 577 83; Riera i Sans, “Els avalots del 1391 a Girona,” in Jornades d’història dels jueus a Catalunya (Girona, 1990), 95 159; José Hinojosa Montalvo, The Jews of the Kingdom of Valencia: From Persecution to Expulsion, trans. S. Nakache (Jerusalem, 1993), 21 66; Philippe Wolff, “The 1391 Pogroms in Spain: Social Crisis or Not?” Past and Present 50 (1971), 4 18; Meyerson, Jewish Renaissance, 22 7. José Goñi Gaztambide, “La matanza de judíos en Navarra en 1328,” Hispania Sacra 12 (1959), 5 33; Leroy, Jews of Navarre, 139 40. Maria José Pimenta Ferro Tavares, “Revoltas contra os judeus no Portugal Medieval,” Revista de História das Ideias 6 (1984), 161 73.

162 the middle ages: the christian world In both Castile and the Crown of Aragon, lower-class Christians were the main perpetrators of the violence, though members of the upper classes and clergy joined them in some towns. Offering accurate generalizations as to the motives of the assailants is impossible. The material motivation to rob the Jews was certainly evident, as was the religious motivation to perform the holy work of baptizing the Jews. Millenarian enthusiasm gripped some Christians: by removing the Jews, one way or another, they could create a new society. In Catalonia and Majorca, peasants and artisans thus inspired attacked elite Christians as well as Jews.105 The response of Jews to the horrendous violence varied. Those who could escape the Christian mobs did. Some died trying to defend themselves and their loved ones; some consciously chose martyrdom – “to sanctify the Name” – over conversion.106 Thousands perished. Yet many more received baptism under extreme duress, trying to save their own and their loved ones’ lives. Jewish intellectuals who had pursued philosophical studies, which could have inspired skepticism about Jewish traditions, perhaps found it easier to abandon their ancestral faith.107 Despair certainly played a role. The previous decades of political upheaval and violence in Castile had already led Jews to doubt whether messianic redemption would ever come for the Jewish people. Some prominent Jews succumbed to missionary arguments of this tenor, most notably the rabbi of Burgos, Solomon Halevi, who voluntarily converted sometime before the mobs attacked his community. Taking the name Pablo de Santa María, he later became the bishop of Burgos and a determined enemy of his former coreligionists.108 In the Crown of Aragon prior to 1391, economic 105

106

107

108

See the works cited in nn. 41 2, especially Wolff, “1391 Pogroms”; also Kriegel, Les Juifs, 206 15. Ram Ben Shalom, “Kiddush ha Shem and Jewish Martyrdom in Aragon and Castile in 1391: Between Spain and Ashkenaz” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 70 (2001), 227 77; Abraham Gross, Struggling with Tradition: Reservations about Active Martyrdom in the Middle Ages (Leiden, 2004), 45 50, 93 9. Baer, History, II, 130 8; Dov Schwartz, “The Spiritual Intellectual Decline of the Jewish Community in Spain at the End of the Fourteenth Century” [Hebrew], Pe’amim 46 7 (1991), 92 114. For a different perspective on the role and uses of philosophy among the Jews, see Daniel Lasker, “Averroistic Trends in Jewish Christian Polemics in the Late Middle Ages,” Speculum 55 (1980), 294 304; Lasker, Jewish Philosophical Polemics Against Christianity in the Middle Ages (New York, 1977). There is some debate over the date of Halevi’s conversion July 21 in either 1390 or 1391: see Baer, History, II, 139 50, 473 4 n. 38; and Benzion Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain (New York, 1995), 168 82. For further treatment of controversies among Jews and Jewish converts c.1391, see Frank Talmage, “The Polemical Writings of Profiat Duran,” Immanuel 13 (1981), 69 85; Michael Glatzer, “Between Joshua Halorki and Shelomo Halevi: Towards an

the iberian peninsula 163 and social hardship, rather than theological debate, had caused some Jews to seek baptism.109 Circumstances could not have been worse than they were in 1391. For the Jews of Castile and the Crown of Aragon, the violence of 1391 was devastating, a blow from which they never fully recovered. Some great Jewish communities, like those in Barcelona and Valencia, were completely destroyed; on account of the resistance of local Christians, royal efforts to resuscitate them failed. Others, in Seville, Toledo, Burgos, and Girona, were, after 1391, shadows of their former selves. Many Jews dispersed and resettled in smaller towns.110 In place of – or, in some locales, alongside – the Jews, a new ethnic group had been created: the baptized Jews, the conversos. Even though the Catholic Church had long disapproved of forced conversion, it had nonetheless determined that the sacrament of baptism, once administered, was ineffaceable. Whether they liked it or not, the conversos were, in the eyes of ecclesiastical and royal authorities, Catholics. Most conversos and their Jewish relatives and friends, however, saw matters differently: conversos were still part of the Jewish people. Some Majorcan, Catalan, and Valencian Jews therefore clandestinely shipped baptized relatives off to North Africa and Palestine where they could openly return to Judaism.111 In many places, Jews and conversos continued to meet for social, economic, and religious purposes, association which was in some cases facilitated by co-residence. Anxious about widespread judaizing among the conversos, royal officials took some steps to prevent their contact with Jews, such as limiting the visits of Jews to cities like Valencia which housed converso, but not Jewish, communities; fining Jews and conversos for mingling; and requiring Jews to wear a badge which would distinguish them from their baptized brethren. In the Crown of Aragon, papal inquisitors also

Examination of the Causes of Conversion Among Jews in the Fourteenth Century” [Hebrew], Pe’amim 54 (1993), 103 16; Eric Lawee, “‘Israel Has No Messiah’ in Late Medieval Spain,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 5 (1996), 245 79; Benjamin Gampel, “A Letter to a Wayward Teacher: The Transformations of Sephardic Culture in Christian Iberia,” in David Biale, ed., Cultures of the Jews: A New History (New York, 2002), 389 447. 109 Tartakoff, “Jewish Women and Apostasy”; Guerson, “Seeking Remission.” 110 Baer, History, II, 117 30; Mitre Fernández, Pogrom de 1391, 54 63; Hinojosa Montalvo, Kingdom of Valencia, 66 77, 258 67. 111 Joseph Hacker, “Links between Spanish Jewry and Palestine, 1391 1492,” in R. I. Cohen, ed., Vision and Conflict in the Holy Land (New York, 1985), 114 25; H. Z. Hirschberg, A History of the Jews of North Africa, 2 vols. (Leiden, 1974 81), vol. I, 384 8; Meyerson, Jewish Renaissance, 36 9, 43 4; Natalie Oeltjen, “A Converso Confraternity in Majorca: La Novella Confraria de Sant Miquel,” Jewish History 24 (2010), 55.

164 the middle ages: the christian world prosecuted conversos for continuing Jewish practices. The inquisitors’ zeal and questionable procedures – which included erroneously prosecuting Jews who had never been baptized – put them at loggerheads with monarchs working to revive and protect their Jewish communities.112 The twenty years after 1391 were a period of flux and uncertainty in both realms. Neither monarchy nor Church adequately addressed the problem of converso judaizing – that is, no thoroughgoing effort was made to educate the conversos in their new faith or to integrate them into Catholic society. As for the Jews, King Enrique III of Castile and his Aragonese counterparts Joan I (d. 1396) and Martí I (d. 1410) reverted to the policies of their predecessors to the extent that circumstances allowed.113 But there were other influential figures who wanted to finish the work the mobs had started in 1391. One was the Valencian Dominican Vicent Ferrer, the most charismatic preacher in Christendom. Moved by apocalyptic visions, Ferrer desired to hasten the End of Days by bringing Christians to penitence and converting Jews and Muslims. In 1411, he began preaching campaigns throughout Castile and the Crown of Aragon. Ferrer had denounced the violence of 1391, but the Christian crowds he attracted were often incited by his vehement sermons to attack the Jews compelled to listen to him. Because Ferrer was so keen to prevent the corrupting influence of Jews on Christians, especially on conversos, the governments of towns he visited took harsh measures to segregate the Jews and stop their contact with Christians. The friar won many converts from the demoralized Jewish communities he visited over the next five years, particularly because his preaching tours coincided with other pressures the reigning princes and Pope Benedict XIII exerted on the Jews.114 112 113

114

Meyerson, Jewish Renaissance, 36 57. Emilio Mitre Fernández, “Los judíos y la Corona de Castilla en el tránsito al siglo XV,” Cuadernos de Historia. Anexos de Hispania 3 (1969), 347 68; Baer, History, II, 110 30; Meyerson, Jewish Renaissance, 22 58. David Viera, “Sant Vicent Ferrer, Francesc Eiximenis i el pogrom de 1391,” in Karl Kobbervig, Arseni Pacheco, and Josep Massot i Muntaner, eds., Actes del Sisè Col.loqui d’Estudis Catalans a Nord Amèrica (Barcelona, 1992), 243 54; Francisca Vendrell, “La actividad proselitista de San Vicente Ferrer durante el reinado de Fernando I de Aragón,” Sefarad 13 (1953), 87 104; J. M. Millas Vallicrosa, “San Vicente Ferrer y el antisemitismo,” Sefarad 10 (1950), 182 4; Millas Vallicrosa, “En torno a la predicación judaica de San Vicente Ferrer,” Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia 142 (1958), 191 8; Juan Torres Fontes, “Moros, judíos y conversos bajo la regencia de don Fernando de Antequera,” Cuadernos de Historia de España 31 (1960), 82 91; Pedro Cátedra, “Fray Vicente Ferrer y la predicación antijudaica en la campaña castellana (1411 1412),” in J. Battesti Pelegrin, ed., “Qu’un sang impur . . . ”: Les conversos et le pouvoir en Espagne à la fin du moyen âge: actes du 2ème colloque d’Aix en Provence, 18 20 novembre 1994 (Aix en Provence, 1997), 19 46; Kriegel, Les Juifs, 217 21.

the iberian peninsula 165 After the premature death of Enrique III of Castile in 1406, Queen Catalina and Enrique’s brother Fernando – the future Fernando I of Aragon (1412–16) – acted as co-regents for the young Juan II. Inspired by Ferrer, in 1412 the regents issued harsh anti-Jewish laws. If fully enforced, they would have resulted in the Jews’ social isolation and economic asphyxiation. The legislation called for the removal of all Jews to separate urban quarters, the wearing of the Jewish badge, the dismissal of all Jews from government posts, and the prohibition of Jewish physicians from caring for Christian patients, and Jewish artisans from practicing many trades or from selling their manufactures to non-Jews. The laws had a dual aim: to persuade the Jews to convert and to discourage conversos from returning to Judaism.115 Ferrer was also, along with Benedict XIII, instrumental in resolving the succession crisis in the Crown of Aragon in favor of the Castilian Fernando, of the Trastámara family, in 1412. One of Ferrer’s converts was Pope Benedict’s Jewish physician, Joshua Halorki. Taking the Christian name Jerónimo de Santa Fé, he convinced the pope to organize the Disputation at Tortosa (1413–14) between Christians and Jews. Desirous of gaining support for his papacy at the time of the Schism by converting all the Jews, Pope Benedict required each Jewish community in the Crown of Aragon to send two to four scholars to debate with the Christian spokesman, Jerónimo. The Jews were compelled to respond to Jerónimo’s arguments that the messiah had come in Christ. It was less a disputation than an anti-Jewish demonstration that lasted nearly two years. It brought about the baptism of many despairing Jews who saw all forces, royal and ecclesiastical, arrayed against them.116 In 1415, Pope Benedict’s bull and King Fernando’s decree resulted in anti-Jewish legislation modeled on the Castilian laws of 1412. The Talmud was also condemned and copies of it were confiscated.117 The outcome of this sustained assault on Jews and Judaism on so many fronts between 1411 and 1416 was the conversion of thousands more Jews. 115 116

117

Baer, History, II, 166 9; Kriegel, Les Juifs, 216 17. Baer, History, II, 170 232; Antonio Pacios López, La disputa de Tortosa, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1957); Jaume Riera i Sans, La crònica en Hebreu de la disputa de Tortosa (Barcelona, 1974); Moises Orfali, “Jerónimo de Santa Fe y la polémica cristiana contra el Talmud,” Annuario di studi ebraici 10 (1980 4), 157 78; Frank Talmage, “Trauma at Tortosa: The Testimony of Abraham Rimoch,” Mediaeval Studies 47 (1985), 379 415; Talmage, “The Francesc de Sant Jordi Solomon Bonafed Letters,” in I. Twersky, ed., Medieval Jewish History and Literature (Cambridge, MA, 1979), 337 64. Francisca Vendrell, “La política proselitista del rey D. Fernando I de Aragón,” Sefarad 10 (1950), 349 66; Vendrell, “En torno a la confirmación real, en Aragón, de la pragmatica de Benedicto XIII,” Sefarad 20 (1960), 319 51.

166 the middle ages: the christian world In 1418–19, there was a volte-face in royal and papal Jewish policy. In Castile, Juan II came of age and the anti-Jewish laws of 1412 were rescinded. After the death of Fernando I of Aragon in 1416, the passage of Ferrer into France, and the Spanish kingdoms’ withdrawal of their allegiance from Pope Benedict XIII, in 1419 the new king, Alfonso V (1416–58), repealed the 1415 legislation, and the new pope, Martin V, annulled Benedict’s bull.118 The reversion to traditional policies facilitated a partial Jewish recovery in both realms. This recovery, of course, took place in a dramatically altered socio-religious landscape, one peopled with far fewer Jews and thousands of conversos. The fifteenth century saw a marked change in the pattern of Jewish settlement: a shift from major cities to towns and even seigneurial villages. In Castile, the home of the largest Jewish population by far, the Jews were especially dispersed, among 224 aljamas in more than 250 different places. Many cities had become less hospitable to the Jews because their governing classes were more intent on cultivating a particularly Christian civic identity and image. Towns and villages, where the large majority of Christians lived, tended to be more welcoming and could not afford the luxury of ejecting Jews who were still economically useful.119 One consequence of Jewish resettlement was a greater involvement in agriculture than before 1391. Jews purchased more land, which in some cases they leased to Christian or Muslim tenants and in other cases farmed themselves, sometimes along with hired labor. Some Jewish communities engaged in viticulture on a large scale and produced and marketed wine, especially kasher wine, for export. Jews became key players in the trade in agricultural commodities – wheat, wine, olive oil, and livestock – and also functioned as commercial brokers. Most Jews still labored as artisans in the production of textiles, leather goods, books, and silverware. Jewish physicians and surgeons remained prominent throughout the peninsula, as the personal doctors of kings and nobles and as employees of municipalities.120 118

119

120

A. Giménez Soler, Los judíos españoles a fines del siglo XIV y principios del XV (Zaragoza, 1950); Baer, History, II, 244 5; M. R. Jiménez Jiménez, “La política judaizante de Alfonso V a la luz de las concesiones otorgadas en 1419 a la aljama de Murviedro,” in IV Congreso de Historia de la Corona de Aragón, 2 vols. (Palma de Mallorca, 1959), 251 62; Jaume Riera i Sans, “Judíos y conversos en los reinos de la Corona de Aragón durante el siglo XV,” in La expulsión de los judíos de España: III Curso de cultura hispano judía y sefardí de la Universidad de Castilla La Mancha (Toledo, 1993), 76 7; Meyerson, Jewish Renaissance, 66 72. Baer, History, II, 244 53; Suárez Fernández, Judíos españoles, 233 7; Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada, “Las juderías de Castilla, según algunos servicios fiscales del siglo XV,” Sefarad 31 (1971), 249 64; Meyerson, Jewish Renaissance, 79 90, 241 2. Pilar León Tello, Judíos de Avila (Avila, 1963), 14 16; Justiniano Rodríguez Fernández, La judería de la ciudad de León (León, 1969), 130 9; María Gloria de Antonio Rubio, Los judíos en Galicia (1044 1492) (Coruña, 2006), 204 9, 217 27; Miguel Ángel

the iberian peninsula 167 In the commercial sphere, Jews continued to work as retail merchants, either in their own small shops or as peddlers moving goods from town to countryside. In the second half of the century, they were notably active in international trade. Portuguese Jews were involved in exporting sugar produced on the island of Madeira, as well as dried fruit, wine, and olive oil, to northern Europe; they imported northern European and Castilian textiles. These Jews participated in a growing international commercial network which included Jewish merchants from Castile, the Crown of Aragon, and North Africa, as well as conversos, who, in the Mediterranean at least, functioned as intermediaries between Jewish and Christian traders, facilitating the activity of the former.121 The Jews’ role as purveyors of credit persisted, to a lesser degree, in the fifteenth century; it remained a live issue, however, only in Castile. In most regions, Jews continued to provide small or medium-sized loans to Christian farmers, artisans, and merchants. Because lending at interest was now prohibited in the Crown of Aragon, Portugal, and Navarre, Jewish lenders and Christian borrowers agreed on loan contracts in which the interest was disguised. In these realms, “Jewish usury” ceased to be a matter of public outcry and parliamentary complaint in the fifteenth century. In the Crown of Aragon, the widespread use of the censal left the Jews as minor players in regional credit markets. They were upstaged by affluent Christian censalistas who, in Aragon and Valencia, invested in the public debt of Jewish aljamas and received annuities from

121

Motis Dolader, “Explotaciones agrarias de los judíos de Tarazona (Zaragoza) a fines del siglo XV,” Sefarad 45 (1985), 353 90; Motis Dolader, “Régimen de explotación de las propiedades agrarias judías en el noroeste del reino de Aragón en el siglo XV,” Hispania 48 (1988), 405 92; Motis Dolader, “The Socio Economic Structures of the Jewish Aljamas in the Kingdom of Aragon, 1391 1492,” in Moshe Lazar and Stephen Haliczer, eds., The Jews of Spain and the Expulsion of 1492 (Lancaster, CA, 1997), 67 88; Meyerson, Jewish Renaissance, 109 19, 129 34; Luis García Ballester, “A Marginal Learned Medical World: Jewish, Muslim and Christian Medical Practitioners, and the Use of Arabic Medical Sources in Late Medieval Spain,” in Luis García Ballester, Roger French, Jon Arrizabalaga, and Andrew Cunningham, eds., Practical Medicine from Salerno to the Black Death (New York, 1994), 367 70. Antonio Rubio, Los judíos en Galicia, 209 17; María Fuencisla García Casar, “Jewish Participation in Castilian Fairs: The Example of Medina del Campo in the Fifteenth Century,” in Alisa Meyuhas Ginio, ed., Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Mediterranean World after 1492 (London, 1992), 12 24; Eleazar Gutwirth, “El comercio hispano magrebi y los judíos, 1391 1444,” Hispania 45 (1985), 199 205; José Hinojosa Montalvo, “Actividades comerciales de los judíos en Valencia, 1391 1492,” Saitabi 29 (1979), 21 42; Meyerson, Jewish Renaissance, 113 19, 134 7; Jacqueline Guiral, “Convers à Valence à la fin du XVe siècle,” Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez 10 (1974), 99 121; Ferro Tavares, Judeus em Portugal no século XV, I, 279 94; Soyer, Persecution, 74 5.

168 the middle ages: the christian world 122 them. In Castile, on the other hand, credit markets were not restructured through common recourse to low-interest annuities. Even though there were plenty of Christian usurers, Jews remained, in the public perception, the usurers par excellence. The Castilian Cortes continued to remonstrate about them – sometimes urging lower rates of interest, other times trying to outlaw Jewish usury altogether.123 Jews still invested in farming royal and ecclesiastical taxes, pooling their resources with Jewish or Christian partners. Their activity in this area nonetheless diminished, perhaps partly out of political prudence but mainly because there were fewer Jews and, among them, fewer affluent ones. Jews also reemerged as officials in the Castilian royal court, though in both Castile and the Crown of Aragon conversos significantly outnumbered Jews as royal officials and tax-farmers.124 Abraham Bienveniste of Soria, for example, was one of the treasurers for Juan II and his favorite Álvaro de Luna, who appointed Abraham as rab de la corte. In this capacity, Abraham presided over a meeting of the representatives of the Castilian aljamas at Valladolid in 1432, in which they issued ordinances intended to regulate the life of all Castilian Jewry. The ordinances dealt with the system of Jewish education, judicial and fiscal affairs, dress, and social conduct. Crucial for providing the small and dispersed Castilian communities with an organizational structure, the ordinances were integral to a royal policy to foster the Jews of the realm.125

122

123

124

125

Meyerson, Jewish Renaissance, 90 2, 105 8, 128 9, 148 53, 244 5; Motis Dolader, “Socio Economic Structures,” 88 91; Dolader, Expulsión, I, 165 79; A. Durán Gudiol, La Judería de Huesca (Zaragoza, 1984), 130 2; Ferro Tavares, Judeus em Portugal no século XV, I, 310; Benjamin Gampel, The Last Jews on Iberian Soil: Navarrese Jewry, 1479 1498 (Berkeley, 1989), 33 9 though note that, in the changed circumstances following the expulsion of the Jews from Castile and the Crown of Aragon in 1492, the Navarrese Cortes did complain about Jewish tax farmers and moneylenders (123 6). Monsalvo Antón, Teoría, 177 9, 186 7, 295, 308 10, 321; Stephen Haliczer, “The Expulsion of the Jews as Social Process,” in Lazar and Haliczer, eds., Expulsion of 1492, 248; Luis Suárez Fernández Bilbao, “News about the Jewish Community upon its Departure,” in Lazar and Haliczer, eds., Expulsion of 1492, 267 70. Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada, “Los judíos castellanos del siglo XV en el arrendamiento de impuestos,” Cuadernos de Historia 6 (1975), 417 39; Suárez Fernández, Expulsión, 231, 240 1; Monsalvo Antón, Teoría, 279, 291, 295, 309 10; León Tello, Judíos de Ávila, 16, 19; Antonio Rubio, Judíos en Galicia, 169 97; Mark Meyerson, “The Economic Life of the Jews of Murviedro in the Fifteenth Century,” in Cooperman, ed., In Iberia and Beyond, 69 75; Meyerson, Jewish Renaissance, 119 27. Yolanda Moreno Koch, Los taqqanot de Valladolid de 1432 (Salamanca, 1987); Baer, History, II, 259 70.

the iberian peninsula 169 The rulers of Castile and the Crown of Aragon pursued traditional, paternalistic policies toward their Jewish subjects until the 1480s, despite the obvious fact that the latter provided much less fiscal revenue than they had prior to 1391. Now able to draw on other sources of revenue more efficiently, they pressured the Jews less, which reduced class struggles within Jewish communities.126 From the perspective of monarchs in all the Iberian realms, the Jews remained loyal subjects, still played a beneficial role in local and regional economies, and still paid some taxes, directly and indirectly through a wide range of sales-taxes and customs duties. And there was the weight of tradition: Iberian monarchs were not eager to homogenize plural societies that had existed for centuries.127 The Jews’ recovery after 1419 would have been impossible without a certain normalcy and stability in their interaction with Christians; royal goodwill alone was insufficient. Jewish–Christian relations ranged, as ever, from the amicable to the acrimonious. While there were no outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence in Castile in the first half of the century, on Majorca ritual murder accusations in 1435 led to the coerced conversion of what remained of the Jewish community.128 In intellectual life, there was both polemic and remarkable cooperation. Anxious to shield the faith of the remaining Jews, Joseph Albo (d. 1444) attacked Christianity in his Book of Principles, following the example of his teacher Hasdai Crescas (d. 1410), ˙ who had written his Refutation of the Christian Principles in the wake of the 129 1391 disasters. Rabbi Moses Arragel of Guadalajara, on the other hand, translated the Old Testament into Castilian on the request of Don Luis González de Guzmán, Master of the Order of Calatrava. The translation, the “Alba Bible,” was accompanied by a commentary that Arragel completed over an eleven-year period (1422–33) with the assistance of two friars.130 126

127

128 129

130

Suárez Fernández, Judíos españoles, 245 7; Javier Castaño González, “Las aljamas judías de Castilla a mediados del siglo XV: La Carta Real de 1450,” En la España Medieval 18 (1995), 183 205; Meyerson, Jewish Renaissance, 66 83, 157 8, 165 8. Even after the Jews were expelled, Fernando II of Aragon continued to protect his many Muslim subjects see Meyerson, Muslims of Valencia, 10 98. Monsalvo Antón, Teoría, 277; Baer, History, II, 245. Baer, History, II, 232 4; Isaac Husik, “Joseph Albo, the Last of the Jewish Philosophers,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 1 (1930), 61 72; Hasdai Crescas, The Refutation of the Christian Principles, trans. and intro. Daniel J. Lasker (Albany, 1992); Daniel Lasker, “The Impact of Christianity on Late Iberian Jewish Philosophy,” in Cooperman, ed., In Iberia and Beyond, 178 83; Lasker, Jewish Philosophical Polemics, 34 7, 47, 79 81, 136, 140 9, 177, 184, 210, 241 3. Sonia Fellous, La Biblia de Alba: De cómo rabí Mosé Arragel interpreta la Biblia para el gran maestre de Calatrava (Paris, 2001); Fellous, “Cultural Hybridity, Cultural Subversion: Text and Image in the Alba Bible, 1422 33,” Exemplaria 12 (2000), 205 29; Moshe Lazar, “Moses Arragel as Translator and Commentator,” in La Biblia de Alba an Illustrated Manuscript Bible in Castilian (Madrid, 1992), 157 200.

170 the middle ages: the christian world No matter how peaceful or constructive the relationship between some Jews and Christians, or how benignant the Jewish policies of kings, the growing controversy concerning the conversos complicated, and ultimately ended, Jewish life in the Iberian peninsula. It was a controversy with intertwined and inseparable religious, social, and political strands. During the first half of the fifteenth century, well-to-do and educated conversos rose rapidly to positions of power and influence. In Castile, conversos held posts in the royal financial administration once – and sometimes still – occupied by Jews.131 More impressively, in both Castile and the Crown of Aragon, conversos attained offices long denied to Jews. In the latter realm, conversos entered royal government almost immediately after their baptism;132 in many cities and towns in both realms, conversos established themselves in municipal government. Strategic marriages with families of the Old Christian elite smoothed the conversos’ ascent in some cases; in others, endogamy and ethnic solidarity facilitated their political success.133 Especially striking was the conversos’ rise in the Church: they became bishops, cathedral canons, and members of religious orders.134

131

132 133

134

Netanyahu, Origins, 237 43; Angus MacKay, “Popular Movements and Pogroms in Fifteenth Century Castile,” Past and Present 55 (1972), 45, 49 51; Nicolas Round, “Politics, Style and Group Attitudes in the Instrucción del Relator,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 46 (1969), 289 319; Norman Roth, Conversos, Inquisition, and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (Madison, 1995), 117 26. Baer, History, II, 276; Riera i Sans, “Judíos y conversos,” 76. Francisco Márquez Villanueva, “Conversos y cargos concejiles en el siglo XV,” Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos 63 (1957), 503 40; MacKay, “Popular Movements,” 46 8; MacKay, “The Hispanic Converso Predicament,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (5th ser.), 35 (1985), 159 79; John Edwards, Christian Córdoba: The City and Its Region in the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1982), 142 87; Linda Martz, A Network of Converso Families in Early Modern Toledo: Assimilating a Minority (Ann Arbor, 2003), 36 57; Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada, “Judeoconversos andaluces en el siglo XV,” in Actas del III Coloquio de historia medieval andaluza, 27 55; Francisco Cantera Burgos, Alvar García de Santa María y su familia de conversos. Historia de la judería de Burgos y sus conversos más egregios (Madrid, 1952); Angelina Garcia, Els Vives: una família de jueus valencians (Valencia, 1987), 51 82; María Isabel Falcón Pérez, Organización municipal de Zaragoza en el siglo XV (Zaragoza, 1978), 70 2. Luciano Serrano, Los conversos d. Pablo de Santa María y d. Alfonso de Cartagena, obispos de Burgos, gobernantes, diplomáticos y escritores (Madrid, 1942); MacKay, “Popular Movements,” 48; Monsalvo Antón, Teoría, 285 6; Roth, Conversos, 133 54; Gretchen D. Starr LeBeau, In the Shadow of the Virgin: Inquisitors, Friars, and Conversos in Guadalupe, Spain (Princeton, 2003), 200 23; Linda Martz, “Relations between Conversos and Old Christians in Early Modern Toledo: Some Different Perspectives,” in Meyerson and English, eds., Christians, Muslims, and Jews, 231 6.

the iberian peninsula 171 By the 1430s, Old Christians (Christians without Jewish or Muslim ancestry) were reacting adversely to the competition from conversos, or New Christians. Some municipalities took measures to bar conversos from holding local office or from practicing important and lucrative professions, such as those of notaries and brokers. The monarchs, the Church Council of Basel, and Pope Eugenius IV condemned these measures, asserting that the sacrament of baptism had spiritually regenerated the conversos, who were thus the equals of Old Christians in the eyes of Christ and His Church; their Jewish lineage should not matter.135 There was more than the threat of the conversos’ economic and political competition fomenting the evident racial bias of Old Christians – there was also the great uncertainty surrounding the conversos’ religious faith and practices. The large majority of those forced to convert in 1391 continued to see themselves as Jews and tried to practice Judaism as best they could; the converts of 1411–16, however, had made more deliberate decisions and were more likely to embrace and practice Catholicism. The children and grandchildren of this first generation of converts assumed a wide range of stances toward Judaism and Christianity: some adhered to Judaism while paying lipservice to Catholicism, and associated with Jews as much as possible; others lived a double life and practiced both Judaism and Catholicism, hedging their bets, as it were, for the afterlife; others became sincere Catholics and, in certain cases, the Jews’ worst enemies; and still others became skeptics who expressed doubts about both faiths. The salient point is that a significant segment of the converso population in any town continued, in some way, to adhere to and practice Judaism, sometimes none too secretly.136 Old 135

136

Riera i Sans, “Judíos y conversos,” 86 8; Netanyahu, Origins, 275 95; David Nirenberg, “Mass Conversion and Genealogical Mentalities: Jews and Christians in Fifteenth Century Spain,” Past and Present 174 (2002), 23 5; Vicente Beltrán de Heredia, “Las bulas de Nicolás V acerca de los conversos de Castilla,” Sefarad 21 (1961), 37 8. Baer, History, II, 270 7, 292 9; Haim Beinart, Conversos on Trial: The Inquisition in Ciudad Real, trans. Yael Guiladi (Jerusalem, 1981), 237 99; Renée Levine Melammed, Heretics or Daughters of Israel? The Crypto Jewish Women of Castile (New York, 1999); Carlos Carrete Parrondo, “Nostalgia for the Past (and for the Future?) among Castilian Judeoconversos,” in Meyuhas Ginio, ed., Jews, Christians, and Muslims, 25 43; Starr LeBeau, Shadow of the Virgin, 50 89; David Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit: The Religion of the Crypto Jews (Philadelphia, 1996); Anna Ysabel d’Abrera, The Tribunal of Zaragoza and Crypto Judaism, 1484 1515 (Turnhout, 2008); Garcia, Els Vives, 83 107; Stephen Haliczer, Inquisition and Society in the Kingdom of Valencia, 1478 1834 (Berkeley, 1990), 209 25; Encarnación Marín Padilla, “Relación judeoconversa durante la segunda mitad del siglo XV en Aragón: nacimientos, hadas, circuncisiones,” Sefarad 41 (1981), 273 300; Riera i Sans, “Judíos y conversos,” 82 6; Oeltjen, “Converso Confraternity”; Meyerson, Jewish Renaissance, 184 224.

172 the middle ages: the christian world Christians of all classes found it especially galling to see conversos occupying positions that they could not have possibly attained as Jews, knowing full well that a good number of conversos were, to all intents and purposes, Jews. Simmering resentment exploded into political violence and vicious polemic in Castile in 1449 and in subsequent years. Castilian cities and towns – particularly those in Andalucía and New Castile – were especially volatile because, first of all, conversos who gained office and influence in local government through financial acumen and commercial clout represented a glaring affront to the social ideals and values of urban societies still dominated by the rural nobility and their lesser noble allies. Powerful conversos, in short, had neither the nobles’ lineage nor their military background. Yet some elite conversos had allied with or married into Old Christian noble families and factions, which earned them the enmity of rival noble factions. The conversos’ noble enemies, of course, resented them as nouveaux riches upstarts, but they were able, crucially, to mobilize the Old Christian masses against the conversos with harangues that emphasized the New Christians’ Jewishness and sociopolitical illegitimacy. In the cities of the Crown of Aragon, by contrast, prominent conversos did not challenge prevailing social values to the same degree, and therefore did not draw as much attention to their ethnicity. These urban societies more easily accommodated families that climbed rapidly on the social and political ladder through commercial and financial enterprise; the military aristocracy exerted less influence in them.137 Second – and more importantly – the political dynamics in Castile that had caused anti-Jewish violence during the fourteenth-century civil war, and had led to the conflagration of 1391, persisted through much of the fifteenth century. Many nobles continued to oppose the monarchy and to employ anti-converso as well as anti-Jewish propaganda – which was ironic since many Jews had moved to seigneurial domains and were in the nobles’ employ. In any case, the vicious politics pitting noble-led factions against the monarchy, with its few Jewish and many converso servants, cast as much aspersion on Jews as it did on conversos, for the enemies of converso officials consistently linked them, accurately or not, to Jews and Judaism.138 137

138

Mark Meyerson, “Religious Change, Regionalism, and Royal Power in the Spain of Fernando and Isabel,” in Simon, ed., Iberia and the Mediterranean World, 105 10; Julio Valdeón Baruque, “Los orígenes de la Inquisición en Castilla,” in Inquisición y conversos: III curso de cultura hispano judía y sefardí de la Universidad de Castilla La Mancha (Madrid, 1994), 40 3; and works cited in n. 76, above. Hillgarth, The Spanish Kingdoms, II, 300 47; Monsalvo Antón, Teoría, 265 315; David Nirenberg, “Figures of Thought and Figures of the Flesh: ‘Jews’ and ‘Judaism’ in Late Medieval Spanish Poetry and Politics,” Speculum 81 (2006), 398 426.

the iberian peninsula 173 In 1449, Álvaro de Luna’s imposition of a new tax, which was to be collected by converso officials, provoked a rebellion in Toledo. Aside from attacking conversos and their property, the rebels, led by Pedro Sarmiento, promulgated the first fully articulated “purity of blood” statute and deprived some conversos of their municipal offices. They emphasized the conversos’ judaizing and their “perverse lineage,” which predisposed them to hate Christians and Christianity and to use public office to ruin Old Christians. The statute sparked a bitter debate about royal and ecclesiastical policy toward the conversos. Converso spokesmen, such as the Crown official Fernán Díaz de Toledo and the bishop of Burgos, Alonso de Cartagena – the son of Pablo de Santa María – argued that baptism created one unified and equal Christian people and that discriminatory legislation was unjust. Pope Nicholas V, at the instance of the converso cardinal Juan de Torquemada, condemned the Toledo statute, and Juan II reinstated the conversos in their offices.139 The reign of Enrique IV (1454–74) was no less turbulent and he was no less inclined than his father Juan to employ converso and Jewish tax-farmers and officials. The king’s noble enemies publicly criticized him for surrounding himself with Muslim and Jewish “infidels” and for being a friend and protector of the Jews. In 1469, the Cortes complained about the role of Jews in Enrique’s fiscal administration. Between 1465 and 1474, there were violent clashes between conversos and Old Christians in various cities and towns, where subsistence crises, inflation, and high taxes had heightened social tensions. In such a heated political environment, where the conversos’ Old Christian enemies often correlated the conversos’ supposed malignancy to their Jewishness, it is unsurprising that the years after 1450 saw a recrudescence in ritual murder accusations and violence against Jews, such as the murderous assault on the Sepúlveda community in 1468.140 In 1461, the Castilian Franciscan Alonso de Espina finished his influential Fortalitium fidei [Fortress of the Faith], a work aimed at the Church’s 139

140

Eloy Benito Ruano, Los orígenes del problema converso (Madrid, 2001), 39 140; Benito Ruano, Toledo en el siglo XV: vida política (Madrid, 1961); Albert Sicroff, Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre. Controversias entre los siglos XV y XVII, trans. Mauro Armiño (Madrid, 1985), 47 85; Nicolas Round, “La rebelión toledana de 1449. Aspectos ideológicos,” Archivum (University of Oviedo) 16 (1966), 385 446; Round, “Instrucción del Relator”; Netanyahu, Origins, 351 682; Martz, Network of Converso Families, 2 36; Nirenberg, “Mass Conversion and Genealogical Mentalities,” 25 35; Bruce Rosenstock, New Men: Conversos, Christian Theology, and Society in Fifteenth Century Castile (London, 2002); Alonso de Cartagena, Defensorius unitatis christianae: tratado en favor de los judíos conversos, ed. P. Manuel Alonso (Madrid, 1943); Carlos del Valle R., ed., Tratado contra los madianitas e ismaelitas, de Juan de Torquemada (Contra la discriminación conversa) (Madrid, 2002). Hillgarth, Spanish Kingdoms, II, 317 42; Sicroff, Estatutos, 87 91; MacKay, “Popular Movements,” 54 62; Netanyahu, Origins, 715 813; Monsalvo Antón, Teoría, 308 15.

174 the middle ages: the christian world natural and supernatural enemies, but especially at the Jews. The work included the traditional anti-Jewish calumnies, such as ritual-murder and Host-desecration accusations, and presented Jews as a grave threat to Old Christian society. Espina argued that the Jews were able to disseminate their false and dangerous doctrines inside Christian society through their contacts with the conversos, all of whom, he maintained, were judaizers. To support his case, he provided a detailed account of the conversos’ Jewish practices. The friar proposed the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and urged the establishment of an inquisition in Castile to prosecute the judaizers, since Castile, unlike the Crown of Aragon, lacked papal inquisitors.141 In 1464, episcopal inquisitors in Castile took action against conversos.142 The same year, in Valencia, the rather quiescent papal inquisitors were impelled into action when conversos began emigrating to the East to revert to Judaism and await the coming of the Jewish messiah. The fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 had engendered a messianic movement among some conversos and Jews in the Crown of Aragon and Castile.143 Still, this flurry of inquisitorial activity did not adequately address the phenomenon of converso judaizing, a significant problem for the Spanish Church. Although the conversos excited less controversy in the Crown of Aragon, constitutional opposition to the kings of the new Trastámara dynasty, especially in Catalonia, involved some action against conversos and Jews, the perceived and real allies of the monarchy. During the Catalan civil war (1462–72), Catalan troops opposing King Juan II (1458–79) sacked the Jewish quarter of Cervera and threatened the one in Tàrrega. Fearing rebel aggression, affluent converso families fled from Barcelona.144 In Valencia, city councillors who viewed converso officials as agents of a centralizing monarchy attempted unsuccessfully in 1478 to ban them from holding public office.145 141

142 143

144

145

Alisa Meyuhas Ginio, De bello judaeorum: Fray Alonso de Espina y su Fortalitium Fidei (Salamanca, 1998); Steven McMichael, “The Sources for Alfonso de Espina’s Messianic Arguments Against the Jews in the Fortalitium Fidei,” in Simon, ed., Iberia and the Mediterranean World, 72 95. Amador de los Ríos, Historia, 632 n. 1; Sicroff, Estatutos, 92 101. Mark Meyerson, “Seeking the Messiah: Converso Messianism in Post 1453 Valencia,” in Kevin Ingram, ed., The Conversos and Moriscos in Late Medieval Spain and Beyond, vol. I: Departures and Change (Leiden, 2009), 51 82; Eleazar Gutwirth, “Jewish and Christian Messianism in Fifteenth Century Spain,” in L. Dequeker and W. Verbeke, eds., The Expulsion of the Jews and Their Emigration to the Southern Low Countries (15th 16th c.) (Leuven, 1998), 1 22; Beinart, Conversos on Trial, 58 60. Riera i Sans, “Judíos y conversos,” 88 90; Alan Ryder, The Wreck of Catalonia: Civil War in the Fifteenth Century (Oxford, 2007), 118 19. Garcia, Els Vives, 77 82; Ernest Belenguer Cebrià, València en la crisi del segle XV (Barcelona, 1976), 73 81.

the iberian peninsula 175 The Jews’ relationships with conversos varied during the fifteenth century; they were not always as close and as positive as commentators like Espina suggested. In the earlier decades of the century, conversos were often still tied to Jews by kinship, a factor that strengthened the fealty of many to Judaism. Yet, for sincere converts, encounters with Jewish relatives were frequently bitter. Some conversos hoping to assimilate and obscure their Jewish roots agitated against Jews as a means of validating their own membership in the Catholic Church and society.146 Some Jewish leaders, for their part, viewed conversos warily and critically. They deemed economically and politically successful conversos a threat because they provided wavering Jews with examples of the benefits that baptism might offer. Some exiled rabbis in Algiers increasingly expressed doubts about the Jewish identity of conversos who remained in Spain instead of emigrating to lands where they could openly return to Judaism.147 Still, rabbis and other Jews living in Spain knew better. They recognized that many conversos identified with their ancestral faith and were doing their best to observe it; such conversos, for them, were part of the Jewish people.148 Indeed, as the decades passed and kinship ties gradually dissipated, religion became the main reason, beyond a vague ethnic identification, for conversos to fraternize with Jews. Jews assisted judaizing conversos in myriad ways: they gave them religious instruction, taught them Hebrew, provisioned them with kasher foodstuffs, presided at their “Jewish” weddings, invited them into their homes and sukkot (booths for the festival of Sukkot) and to their Sabbath and seder (Passover meal) tables, and brought them into their synagogues. Jews regarded these activities as positive acts of faith, part of their endeavor to bring about the redemption of the Jewish people.149 Isabel I of Castile (1474–1504) and her husband Fernando II of Aragon (1479–1516), the Catholic Monarchs, would attempt to sever this close relationship between Jews and judaizing conversos. The dynastic union of 146 147

148

149

Baer, History, II, 276 7; Meyerson, Jewish Renaissance, 188 200. Benzion Netanyahu, The Marranos of Spain From the Late 14th to the Early 16th Century, According to Contemporary Hebrew Sources, 3rd edn. (Ithaca, NY, 1999), 1 76. However, Moisés Orfali Levi, Los conversos españoles en la literatura rabínica: Problemas jurídicos y opiniones legales durante los siglos XII XVI (Salamanca, 1982), 25 36, 55 7, presents a different reading of the relevant rabbinic responsa; see also the review of Netanyahu’s work by Gerson Cohen in Jewish Social Studies 29 (1967), 178 84. Shaul Regev, “The Attitude Towards the Conversos in 15th 16th Century Jewish Thought,” Revue des Études Juives 156 (1997), 117 34; Abraham Gross, Iberian Jewry from Twilight to Dawn: The World of Rabbi Abraham Saba (Leiden, 1995), 103 14; and Netanyahu, Marranos of Spain, 77 203, for a different perspective. Beinart, Conversos on Trial, 3, 4, 60, 107, 189. 238, 242, 247 8, 251; Starr LeBeau, Shadow of the Virgin, 91 4; Meyerson, Jewish Renaissance, 200 14; Meyerson, “Seeking the Messiah,” 55 8.

176 the middle ages: the christian world Castile and the Crown of Aragon through their marriage meant that any measures they took in this regard, such as establishing a new inquisition or expelling Jews, could be instituted in both realms. The combined power of the two realms, moreover, ensured that the rulers of neighboring Portugal and Navarre, and their Jewish subjects, would also feel the effects of any such measures. The policies that Isabel and Fernando adopted toward their Jewish and converso subjects were closely related and, despite the Monarchs’ best intentions, inherently contradictory. On the one hand, they initially confirmed and renewed the protections and privileges their predecessors had granted to Jewish communities, encouraged the Jews’ economic activity, of course taxed the Jews – though usually not too heavily – and instituted in aljama governments a new electoral regime modeled on the system they were then imposing on Christian municipalities. The Monarchs’ perspective on Jewish policy was long-term. Prominent Jews continued to serve in the financial administration of the Castilian Crown – for example, Abraham Seneor, who was also the chief rabbi of Castile, and the exiles from Portugal Isaac and Joseph Abravanel. In the Crown of Aragon, Vidal Astori was the royal silversmith and served King Fernando as an envoy in Portugal and Castile. Converso officials – such as the Monarchs’ secretary, Luis de Santángel, and the treasurer of Aragon, Gabriel Sánchez – played a greater role than did Jews in the government of both realms.150 Isabel and Fernando, on the other hand, needed to solve the converso problem for religious and political reasons. Having won the throne of Castile for Isabel through military struggle, the Monarchs were determined to quell disorder in, and establish firm control over, Castilian cities, which required them to wade into the upheavals surrounding the conversos. They were also – and more importantly, as far as the conversos were concerned – intent on reforming the Spanish Church, in both Castile and the Crown of Aragon.151 The reform of Catholic laypeople, the Monarchs and their 150

151

Baer, History, II, 312 22; Suárez Fernández, Expulsión, 257 64; Meyerson, Jewish Renaissance, 77 8, 182 3, 225 7; Eleazar Gutwirth, “Abraham Seneor: Social Tensions and the Court Jew,” Michael 11 (1989), 169 229; Beinart, Expulsion, 413 60; Benzion Netanyahu, Don Isaac Abravanel: Statesman and Philosopher (Philadelphia, 1982), 3 60; Roth, Conversos, 126 33; Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada, “Actividades de Luis de Santángel en la corte de Castilla,” in Luís de Santàngel i el seu temps: Congrès internacional, Valencia, 5 al 8 d’octubre 1987 (Valencia, 1992), 103 18; Manuel Ballesteros Gaibrois and Roberto Ferrando Pérez, Luis de Santángel y su entorno (Valladolid, 1996). Tarsicio de Azcona, Isabel la Católica: Estudio crítico de su vida y su reinado (Madrid, 1964), 425 98, 557 622; José García Oro, Cisneros y la reforma del clero español en tiempo de los Reyes Católicos (Madrid, 1971); Hillgarth, Spanish Kingdoms, II, 394 410.

the iberian peninsula 177 clerical advisors realized, could not advance too far if judaizing conversos were permitted to remain among them spreading their noxious ideas and practices. A new inquisition, which the Monarchs themselves controlled, was well suited for addressing both the religious and sociopolitical aspects of the converso problem. It would eradicate the judaizers from among the Catholic faithful, of both Old and New Christian origin, and thus promote the Church’s spiritual welfare. At the same time, it would remove from the Castilian political scene at least some of the individuals embroiled in urban factionalism and also deprive the conversos’ political opponents of the religious ammunition they used against them. Acceding to the request of Isabel and Fernando, on November 1, 1478, Pope Sixtus IV issued a bull granting them the power to appoint inquisitors in Castile. The bull created a new hybrid institution in Castile, one which would be staffed by clergy but controlled by the Crown. The first tribunal of the new “Spanish” Inquisition was established in Seville in September 1480; by 1484, others had been set up in Córdoba, Ciudad Real (later transferred to Toledo), and Jaén.152 Fernando extended the new inquisition to the Crown of Aragon between 1482 and 1485 despite the protests of Catalan, Aragonese, and Valencian subjects who maintained that the imposition of the Castilian-run institution would violate their regional laws and disrupt their economies. The king regarded the existing papal inquisitors as inadequate to the task of eliminating the judaizing cancer eating away at the Spanish Church, for, aside from conducting a few trials in Valencia in the 1460s, they had scarcely taken any action against judaizing conversos in the Crown of Aragon. In October 1483, Fray Tomás de Torquemada became inquisitor general of the Crown of Aragon, a post he already held in Castile. The murder of the inquisitor Pedro de Arbués in the Zaragoza cathedral by a group of conversos in 1485 turned popular opinion in Aragon in favor of the Spanish Inquisition.153 Even before the new inquisitorial tribunals were up and running, Isabel and Fernando took steps in Castile to minimize the Jews’ contact with Christians, especially conversos. Between December 1477 and March 1480, 152

153

Beinart, Conversos on Trial, 20 47; Hillgarth, Spanish Kingdoms, II, 422 38; B. Llorca, ed., Bulario pontificio de la Inquisición española en su periodo constitucional (1478 1515), según los fondos del Archivo Histórico Nacional de Madrid (Rome, 1949), 49 54, 61; Azcona, Isabel, 379 94. Jaume Vicens Vives, Ferran II i la ciutat de Barcelona, 3 vols. (Barcelona, 1936 7), I, 365 424; Ricardo García Cárcel, Orígenes de la Inquisición española: El tribunal de Valencia (Barcelona, 1976), 37 67; J. A. Sesma Muñoz, El establecimiento de la Inquisición en Aragón (1484 1486): documentos para su estudio (Zaragoza, 1987), 7 24; William Monter, Frontiers of Heresy: The Spanish Inquisition from the Basque Lands to Sicily (Cambridge, 1990), 3 28; Baer, History, II, 358 89.

178 the middle ages: the christian world the municipalities of Soria, Cáceres, Seville, and Córdoba received royal instructions regarding the removal of local Jews to separate quarters. Responding affirmatively to the petition of the Cortes of Toledo in May 1480, the Monarchs decreed the complete and strict segregation of the realm’s Jewish and Muslim communities. Castile’s relatively few Muslims were a minor concern, however, since they had nothing to do with the conversos’ heresies. Although the decree’s aim was to prevent Jews from exercising a deleterious influence on New Christians, some urban governments interpreted it as a license to mistreat local Jewish populations.154 The Castilian legislation did not apply to the Crown of Aragon, but in 1481 the municipality of Zaragoza, inspired by events in Castile, attempted to move the site of the Jewish quarter farther away from Christians. The Monarchs, however, asserted their authority over the Jewish communities and countermanded the municipality’s order.155 Isabel and Fernando in general did not deviate from their policy of protecting the Jews, yet their efforts to limit the Jews’ contribution to converso judaizing had the effect of legitimizing aggressive anti-Jewish conduct.156 The inquisitors began prosecuting and punishing judaizing conversos in 1481 in Seville. They uncovered more evidence of what many, including Isabel and Fernando, already knew: the role of Jews in fostering the Jewish allegiance and practices of the judaizers.157 The inquisitors therefore ordered the expulsion of the Jews from Andalucía in January 1483, almost certainly after prior consultation with the Monarchs. The expulsion was carried out over the course of the next two years; Andalucian Jews emigrated to towns near the region in the vain hope of returning.158 In 1486, Fernando, in conjunction with Torquemada, commanded that the Jews be expelled from the archdiocese of Zaragoza and the diocese of Albarracín. For reasons that remain unclear, this order was not executed. The king, however, explicitly expressed his reason for desiring the removal of 154

155 156

157 158

Haim Beinart, “The Separation of Living Quarters between Jews and Christians in Fifteenth Century Spain” [Hebrew], Zion 51 (1986), 61 85; Beinart, The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain, trans. J. Green (Oxford, 2002), 7 18; Pilar León Tello, Los Judíos de Palencia (Palencia, 1967), 25 8; Luis Suárez Fernández, Documentos acerca de la expulsión de los judíos (Valladolid, 1964), 31 4, 299, 321. Baer, Die Juden, I, 897 903; Suárez Fernández, Expulsión, 294 5. F. Cantera Burgos, “La judería de Burgos,” Sefarad 12 (1952), 98 101; León Tello, Judíos de Ávila, 19; Suárez Fernández, Documentos, 65 72, 302, 310, 322 8, 344 50. Juan Gil, Los conversos y la Inquisición sevillana, 8 vols. (Seville, 2000), vol. I, 21 227. Haim Beinart, “La Inquisición Española y la expulsión de los judíos de Andalucía,” in Yosef Kaplan, ed., Jews and Conversos: Studies in Society and the Inquisition (Jerusalem, 1985), 103 23.

the iberian peninsula 179 Aragon’s largest Jewish community: because “heresy has developed from the interaction and contact that people of their lineage [conversos] have had with the Jews.”159 Even if Fernando and Isabel had still not arrived at the decision to expel all the Jews from their realms, their thoughts were tending, with the inquisitors’ urging, in this direction. The Inquisition was instrumental in turning popular opinion increasingly against the Jews during their last years in Castile and the Crown of Aragon. The inquisitors’ public Edicts of Grace, in which they detailed the conversos’ possible judaizing crimes, and the spectacular autos de fe, in which they publicly sentenced and executed, through the agency of lay officials, the judaizers, left little doubt that Judaism and Jews were the source of the heresies threatening Catholic society. Dominican preachers seconded the inquisitors in their anti-Jewish agitation. In 1488, the Inquisition produced a pamphlet asserting that Jews were obliged to hate all who did not believe in the Talmud. Even though the inquisitors were not meant to proceed against unbaptized Jews, but only against Christian heretics, they prosecuted some Jews in trials with a clear propagandistic purpose. In 1487–8, they tried Salamó Çaporta, a royal favorite who farmed all the Crown’s rents in Morvedre, for teaching Jewish texts to conversos and otherwise assisting them in their Jewish observances. They sentenced Çaporta to a heavy fine and two years in exile. In 1489–90, the Inquisition prosecuted Jews in Huesca for having arranged the circumcision of two conversos some twenty-five years earlier. The charges were founded on fact and resulted in the burning of several local Jews.160 The most sensational trial concerned the so-called “Holy Child” of La Guardia, near Toledo, in which a group of conversos and Jews was accused of profaning a Host and ritually murdering a Christian child. The conversos allegedly hoped to get magical protection against the Inquisition, while the Jews supposedly wanted to destroy all Christians by infecting them with rabies. Beginning in June 1490 and lasting over a year, this show-trial was conducted by inquisitors in Ávila under the supervision of Torquemada. The inquisitors never even proved that a child had disappeared and they used torture to extract confused confessions from the defendants, all of whom were burnt at the stake on November 16, 1491. News of the trial spread rapidly as the text of the sentence was read in pulpits all over Spain. It was, of course, communicated to Fernando and Isabel. That the case of the Holy Child 159

160

Archivo de la Corona de Aragón: Cancillería Real 3684, fol. 96 (May 12, 1486): “la heregia, ha procedido de la conversacion e pratica que con los jodios han tenido las personas de su linage.” Transcribed in Baer, Die Juden, I, 912 13; Baer, History, II, 381; Beinart, Expulsion, 22. Baer, History, II, 384 94; Meyerson, Jewish Renaissance, 126 7, 133, 136 7, 205 8, 235 6.

180 the middle ages: the christian world moved the Monarchs to decide finally to expel the Jews is unlikely, but it certainly prepared public opinion for the expulsion.161 Fernando and Isabel, however, could not easily have undertaken the expulsion of the Jews until they completed the decade-long process of conquering the sultanate of Granada, the last Muslim state on Iberian soil. After the capitulation of the Muslim rulers on November 25, 1491, the triumphant Monarchs entered Granada at the beginning of January 1492.162 The Jews of Granada, 110 households, were obliged to leave the city within a month. Ronda and Málaga, other cities in the conquered sultanate, had already been emptied of their Jewish populations. The Monarchs clearly wanted their new kingdom, which became a Castilian possession, to be free of Jews.163 On March 31, 1492, Fernando and Isabel signed the edict expelling all Jews from Castile and the Crown of Aragon. It required the Jews to depart from Spain within four months. The edict, however, was not promulgated until the end of April, the delay probably the result of the futile efforts of leading Jews to persuade the Monarchs to revoke it. The Jews, in effect, had only three months in which to arrange their affairs. They were permitted to sell their property and to take portable goods with them, excepting gold, silver, money, horses, and arms, the export of which was normally forbidden. They could convert their property into letters of exchange, which were handled by Genoese bankers and could be cashed abroad. With the constraints of time, however, Jews found it difficult to get a fair price for their property or to collect debts. They were subjected to considerable abuse by private individuals and officials.164 Though it is clear from the edict of expulsion that Fernando and Isabel took the views of the inquisitors into consideration, the final decision to expel the Jews was theirs. Authoritarian in their manner of governance and confident in their ability to promote the temporal and spiritual well-being of their realms, the Monarchs were not about to allow anyone else to make a ruling of such import. Their reason for expelling the Jews is clearly stated in the edict. Considering the enormity of the converso problem and the Monarchs’ great concern 161

162

163

164

F. Fita, “La verdad sobre el martirio del Santo Niño de la Guardia, o sea el proceso y quema (16 de noviembre de 1491) del judío Jucé Franco en Avila,” Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia 11 (1887), 7 134; Baer, History, II, 398 423. Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada, Castilla y la conquista del reino de Granada (Granada, 1988). Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada, Granada después de la conquista. Repobladores y mudéjares (Granada, 1988), 245 58; Beinart, Expulsion, 29 32. Beinart, Expulsion, 33 8, 55 279; M. A. Motis Dolader, La expulsión de los judíos del reino de Aragón, 2 vols. (Zaragoza, 1990); Suárez Fernández, Documentos.

the iberian peninsula 181 to promote the reform of the Catholic Church and society, the expulsion edict must be regarded as an unambiguous statement of why the Monarchs decided to rid their realms of their Jewish subjects. In the edict, the Monarchs summarized their previous efforts to curtail the Jews’ contacts with Christians as means of eliminating judaizing among the converso population: the segregationist legislation of 1480 and the partial expulsions of 1483–6. They also reminded their subjects of all the evidence of the Jews’ promotion of converso judaizing that the inquisitors had revealed over the past twelve years. They had, they asserted, little choice but to resort to radical measures.165 King Fernando made the same points in a more personal letter to the Count of Aranda just after he and Isabel had issued the edict. He admitted that “no small damage results to us” from the expulsion. Indeed, the loss of the Jews’ services, fiscal revenue, and contribution to local economies would not be inconsiderable. Fernando was well aware of the economic havoc already wrought by the Inquisition’s prosecution of converso merchants, artisans, and officials. Nevertheless, for him and his queen, the most important concern was “the salvation of the souls of our native-born Christian subjects.”166 Precision as to the number of Jews expelled is impossible. At the time of the expulsion, there were approximately 100,000 Jews in Castile and around 15,000 in the Crown of Aragon.167 Jews who accepted baptism could remain in Spain. While conversion of the Jews was not the aim of the expulsion edict, several thousand Jews chose to stay put as Christians instead of going into exile. Among the converts was Abraham Seneor, who became Don Fernán Pérez Coronel and remained an influential figure in royal government. The exiles emigrated to Portugal, North Africa, Italy, and Navarre; some made their way to Ottoman lands and to Palestine. Even though the expulsion edict explicitly forbade Jews to come back to Spain on pain of death, until 1499 the Monarchs actually permitted exiled 165

166

167

Maurice Kriegel, “La prise d’une décision: l’expulsion des juifs d’Espagne,” Revue Historique 260 (1978), 49 90; Beinart, Expulsion, 38 54; Meyerson, “Religious Change, Regionalism, and Royal Power.” For the text of the letter, Pilar León Tello, “Documento de Fernando el Católico sobre la expulsión de los judíos en el señorío del Conde de Aranda,” in Homenaje al Federico Navarro: Miscelánea de estudios dedicados a su memoria (Madrid, 1973), 237 48; for the translation, Beinart, Expulsion, 44 5. Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada, “Castile: An Overview (Thirteenth to Fifteenth Centuries),” in Christoph Cluse, ed., The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages (Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries): Proceedings of the International Symposium held at Speyer, 20 25 October 2002 (Turnhout, 2004), 157; Riera Sans, “Judíos y conversos,” 78 80; but see Beinart, Expulsion, 284 90, for a higher estimate of the number of Jews expelled from Castile and the Crown of Aragon: 200,000.

182 the middle ages: the christian world Jews to return to their homes as long as they converted.168 The policy decisions of the rulers of Portugal and Navarre, on whom Fernando and Isabel exerted no little influence, necessitated some flexibility regarding the question of return and conversion. Before 1492, Portugal and Navarre were already feeling the effects of Fernando and Isabel’s efforts to eradicate the judaizing heresy from their own realms. When the “Spanish” Inquisition began its work, many Castilian conversos fled to Portugal, though the municipal authorities in Lisbon and Porto did not welcome them.169 Castilian and Aragonese conversos who crossed over into Navarre got a better reception in Tudela and Corella. The flight to Tudela in 1485 of accomplices to the assassination of the inquisitor Arbués prompted the inquisitors in Aragon, backed by King Fernando, to demand that the Tudelans extradite the fugitives and otherwise cooperate with the Inquisition. The Tudelans refused. Fernando and Isabel then obtained the help of Pope Innocent VIII, in April 1487, in the form of a bull requiring all Christian rulers and magistrates to arrest and deliver all fugitive heretics to the Spanish Inquisition within thirty days. The Navarrese agreed to cooperate with the Spanish Inquisition early the following year, at the same time as their kingdom was becoming, through the intricacies of dynastic politics, a Castilian protectorate.170 King João II of Portugal (1481–95), aware of the outrage aroused by the Arbués murder, did not want his realm to become a refuge for fugitive judaizers. Hence, in 1487, he ordered episcopal inquisitors to prosecute such conversos. Their harsh procedures moved some conversos to emigrate. In October 1488, João issued an ordinance prohibiting the further immigration of Castilian conversos; in July 1493, he would have to reiterate it.171 After negotiations with Castilian Jews between March and mid-July 1492, King João granted permission to Jews expelled from Castile to enter Portugal temporarily. The refugees were obliged to pay an entrance tax and had to exit Portugal before April 1493. At least 30,000 Castilian exiles crossed into Portugal. Many were packed into refugee camps where the living conditions were poor and the mortality rates high. The king decided 168

169 170

Beinart, Expulsion, 329 412, 460 90; John Edwards, “Jews and Conversos in the Region of Soria and Almazán: Departures and Returns,” in Edwards, Religion and Society in Spain, c. 1492 (Great Yarmouth, 1996), article 6, 1 14; Miguel Angel Motis Dolader, “La conversión de judíos aragoneses a raíz del edicto de Expulsión,” in F. Ruiz Gómez and M. Espadas Burgos, eds., Encuentros en Sefarad: Actas del Congreso Internacional “Los judíos en la historia de España” (Ciudad Real, 1987), 217 52; Mark Meyerson, “Aragonese and Catalan Jewish Converts at the Time of the Expulsion,” Jewish History 6 (1992), 131 49. Soyer, Persecution, 92 8; Ferro Tavares, Judeus em Portugal no século XV, I, 423 7. Gampel, Last Jews, 71 88. 171 Soyer, Persecution, 98 101.

the iberian peninsula 183 to allow 600 Castilian families to remain in Portugal; they were dispersed throughout the kingdom. When the eight-month respite allotted to the rest of the exiles expired, most emigrated to North Africa or Italy; some converted and returned to Castile. Refugees who did not depart by the stipulated date were enslaved. The enslaved Castilian Jews numbered a few thousand. The children among them were sent to the Portuguese colony on the equatorial island of São Tomé to be raised as Christians; the majority did not survive into adulthood.172 Despite their dependence on Fernando and Isabel, the young rulers of Navarre, Jean d’Albret and Cathérine de Foix, granted refuge to some 1,800 Castilian and Aragonese Jewish exiles, probably counting on the refugees’ economic contributions. Fernando and Isabel, however, preferred that their erstwhile Jewish subjects either convert or leave the peninsula. In 1493, Fernando licensed Aragonese Jews in Navarre to pass through his realm to embark at Catalan ports. On July 30 of the same year, he and Isabel issued a call for Jewish refugees in Navarre and Portugal to accept baptism and return home.173 The Monarchs were uncomfortable with the existence of any professing Jews on the Iberian peninsula, whatever their origin. Having resorted to such drastic measures to end the conversos’ contact with Jews, they did not want the judaizing conversos – or potential judaizers – in Castile and the Crown of Aragon to be able to communicate with Jews in Portugal and Navarre. João II’s successor to the Portuguese throne, the ambitious Manoel I (1495–1521), was susceptible to pressure from Fernando and Isabel. Keen to further Portuguese overseas expansion, Manoel needed a stable and peaceful relationship with his Castilian neighbors. He achieved this through a marriage alliance with Princess Isabel, the Monarchs’ widowed daughter. In the marriage negotiations that were finalized in November 1496, Manoel agreed to expel the Jews and Castilian conversos from Portugal. On December 4, 1496, Manoel decreed the expulsion of the Jews. Yet Manoel did not want the Jews to depart, for he was all too cognizant of the economic harm that Portugal would suffer from the loss of an industrious population of some 30,000. The king therefore determined to force the Jews to convert, either before he issued the expulsion edict or shortly thereafter, upon realization that the large majority of his Jewish subjects preferred exile to baptism. In March 1497, Manoel ordered the seizure of all Jewish children aged 14 and below; they were to be distributed throughout the realm and brought up as Christians. The execution of this order had the intended effect: many desperate parents converted. Many, 172

Ibid., 101 38.

173

Gampel, Last Jews, 89 119.

184 the middle ages: the christian world however, still clung to Judaism. The king had most of the remaining Jewish adults herded into the courtyard of the Estaus palace in Lisbon, where, by the end of October 1497, almost all were persuaded to accept baptism. Among the inducements were the return of their children, exemption from royal taxes, freedom to reside in Portugal with their families, and the promise that no inquiries into their religious beliefs would be made for the next twenty years. A number of Jews committed suicide rather than convert. A few rabbis were permitted to leave Lisbon for North Africa. The Jews who had not gone to Lisbon were forcibly baptized in other towns. King Manoel had no illusions as to the faith of the thousands of Jews who received baptism under such conditions, but he hoped that they would become sincere Christians over time.174 The rulers of tiny Navarre, Jean and Cathérine, were not in a position to resist Fernando and Isabel. Manoel of Portugal’s expulsion – or, really, conversion – of his Jewish subjects at the suggestion of his formidable inlaws indicated clearly the steps that they had to take in Navarre. At the beginning of 1498, Jean and Cathérine commanded that all Jews, approximately 3,550 in number, leave Navarre before the end of March. Departing the peninsula from land-locked Navarre was difficult. Most Jews converted. The Navarrese expulsion and conversion finally removed all professing Jews from the Iberian Peninsula.175 As the history of Iberian conversos shows, however, Judaism would prove much harder to extinguish. 174

175

Soyer, Persecution, 159 240; Ferro Tavares, Judeus em Portugal no século XV, 427 500; Gross, Rabbi Abraham Saba, 8 26, 123 66; Gross, Struggling with Tradition, 65 85. Gampel, Last Jews, 120 34.

chapter 7

SOUTHERN FRANCE ram ben shalom

THE DAWN OF JEWISH PRESENCE IN SOUTHERN F R A N C E A N D T H E L E A D E R S H I P O F T H E N E ŚI’I M : M Y T H AND REALITY

The area of southern France called Provintsyah (“Provence”) in Jewish sources stretched from the Alps to the Pyrenees and included the regions of Provence, the Comtat Venaissin, Languedoc, Rousillon, and their immediate environs. From the era of Roman imperial rule until the year 1500, the area was governed by various Berber, Visigoth, and Frankish rulers, the Holy Roman Empire, Catalonia, the Kingdom of Aragon and its Majorcan offshoot, the counts of Toulouse, the House of Anjou, and, finally, the king of France, who, by the end of the fifteenth century, had annexed most of the territory. The Jews, although ruled by different political entities, saw themselves as sharing a common collective identity, rooted in longstanding local cultural tradition, including the same spoken language, religious customs, unique history, and founding myths, as well as social and educational values. Jewish settlement in the south of France dates back to Roman times, although information regarding the period prior to the late Middle Ages is sorely lacking, and it is unclear whether Jewish presence in the area was in fact continuous. In late Antiquity, Jewish settlement was concentrated in coastal cities such as Marseille, Arles, and Narbonne, along the Mediterranean axis stretching from Sicily to the eastern shores of the Iberian peninsula. According to Jewish tradition, the first Jews to settle in southern France were exiles from Jerusalem, who settled in Arles, Lyon, and Bordeaux, following the destruction of the Second Temple.1 Although it is not 1

S. I. Baer, ed., Seder ʿAvodat Yiśrael (Jerusalem: 1936/7), 112 13, based on a manuscript (copied in 1407) by Judah bar Eliezer Zvi of Troyes; S. Katz, The Jews in the Visigothic and Frankish Kingdoms of Spain and Gaul (Cambridge, MA, 1937), 6 7; E. Yassif, ed., The Book of Memory that is The Chronicles of Jerahme’el: A Critical Edition (Tel Aviv, 2001), 312 13, 505 6.

185

186 the middle ages: the christian world inconceivable that Jews might have arrived in Provence in the late first century, this oral tradition – recorded only in the thirteenth century – cannot be corroborated. The earliest reliable historical testimony regarding the Jewish presence in Arles dates to the first half of the fifth century, and concerns psalms sung by Jews, in Hebrew, at the funeral of Hilary, bishop of Arles (429–49).2 The oral tradition should be viewed in the context of widespread myths regarding the antiquity of the Jewish presence in western Europe, which seek to associate those communities with the venerable exiles from Jerusalem or with other important figures hailing from the academies of Palestine and Babylonia. This tradition developed in parallel, and apparently in dialogue, with the various legends concerning the Christianization of southern France, among which the narrative of the three Marys (according to Mark 15:40, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Mary-Salome) features prominently.3 In 507, the Burgundians and the Franks laid siege to Arles. The Jews of Arles took part in the city’s defense, alongside the Visigoths. Nevertheless (in Vita Caesarii, 542–9), they were later accused – in order to remove suspicions of treason from Caesarius, bishop of Arles (502–42), who had attempted to maneuver politically between the barbarian kingdoms – of having conspired with the enemy. This account, as well as the many references to Jews in Caesarius’s sermons, attest to their prominent presence in Arles, as an established and independent group. Although Caesarius sought the conversion of the Jews to Christianity, most of his efforts were devoted to creating clear boundaries between the religious groups, and to preventing Christians from adopting Jewish customs.4 In the late sixth century and the first half of the seventh century, a wave of anti-Jewish persecution, forced conversion, and expulsion swept through western Europe. Around the year 613, the Visigoth King Sisebut ordered the baptism of all of the Jews of his kingdom, which included the 2

3

4

H. Gross, Gallia Judaica (Amsterdam, 1969), 7; for assumptions of Jewish presence in Provence in the fourth century, see B. Blumenkranz, “Les origines et le Moyen Âge,” in Blumenkranz (ed.), Histoire des juifs en France (Toulouse, 1972), 13 14. R. Ben Shalom, Facing Christian Culture: Historical Consciousness and Images of the Past among the Jews of Spain and Southern France during the Middle Ages [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 2006), 299 301; S. Zfatman, The Jewish Tale in the Middle Ages: Between Ashkenaz and Sefarad [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1993); M. Chalon and P. Florençon, “Témoignages sur la présence des juifs à Lunel au Moyen Âge,” in D. Iancu Agou and É. Nicolas, eds., Des Tibbonides à Maïmonide: Rayonnement des juifs andalous en Pays d’Oc médiéval. Colloque international Montpellier, 13 14 décembre 2004 (Paris, 2009), 61 72, esp. 68 71. W. E. Klingshirn, Caesarius of Arles: The Making of a Christian Community in Late Antique Gaul (Cambridge, 1994), 7 8, 106 13, 177 81; W. E. Klingshirn, ed., Caesarius of Arles: Life, Testament, Letters (Translated Texts for Historians) (Liverpool, 1994), Book 1, 29 31, 4 5, 23 4.

southern france 187 Iberian peninsula and parts of southern France. In 629 or 633, the Frankish Merovingian King Dagobert also decreed that the Jews of France and Provence must convert to Christianity, or face expulsion. The paucity of historical sources makes it impossible to evaluate the true effect of these policies. In any event, it is clear that there was no overall Frankish policy of forced conversion. Julian of Toledo described the military expedition (672–73) of King Wamba of Spain into his territories between Narbonne and Nîmes, to suppress a local rebellion, behind which, he believed, stood the Jews. Even considering his anti-Jewish agenda, so prominent in his writings, Julian’s testimony reflects a significant Jewish presence in southern France.5 Gravestones, such as the one from Narbonne dated 688, bearing a Latin inscription and the Hebrew words “shalom ‘al yiśrael,” attest to this Jewish presence in the area.6 The Carolingian period (ninth and tenth centuries) was marked by stability and tolerable relations between the royal authorities and the Jews. In 820, a large number of Jewish refugees arrived in Arles from the center of France, primarily children sent by their parents, to escape an aggressive conversion campaign initiated by Agobard, archbishop of Lyon. This was part of Agobard’s broader anti-Jewish agenda, in conjunction with the rebellion (833) against Louis the Pious, whom he criticized for the privileges afforded by the Carolingians to the Jews.7 This affair is related to the clear historical evidence in the district of Narbonne of the presence of Jewish landowners, who worked large tracts of land to which they held allodial title and on which they employed Christians and pagan slaves. This phenomenon gave rise to a historiographical fantasy regarding the existence of a Jewish princedom in the area of Narbonne in Carolingian times, headed by a Jewish king of the House of David.8 All that can be corroborated, however, is the fact of Jewish land ownership. Members of the family of the Jewish Neśiim (families related to the House of David) of Narbonne were treated by the Christian population as the “kings of the Jews.”9 The designation “Jewish king of Narbonne” however, did not reflect the existence of an actual Jewish principality.10 5

6 7

8 9 10

J. Martinez Pizarro, The Story of Wamba: Julian of Toledo’s Historia Wambae regis (Washington, 2012), 49, 100. P. Frey, Corpus inscriptionum judaicarum, vol. I (Rome, 1936), doc. 670. B. Blumenkranz, Juifs et chrétiens dans le monde occidental, 430 1096 (Paris, 1960), 134 8; K. R. Stow, Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe (Cambridge, 1992), 33 6. A. Zuckerman, A Jewish Princedom in Feudal France, 768 99 (New York, 1972). G. Saige, Les Juifs du Languedoc antérieurement au XIVe siècle (Paris, 1881), 278. J. Cohen, “The Nasi of Narbonne: A Problem in Medieval Historiography,” AJS Review, 2 (1977), 45 76.

188 the middle ages: the christian world It derives, rather, from a local myth echoed in later Jewish sources, such as an addition to Abraham ibn Daud’s Book of Tradition (extant in a Provençal manuscript dating from the 1470s).11 The text describes the request of a delegation sent by Charlemagne to the caliph of Baghdad, asking the caliph to send Charlemagne a Jewish sage of the House of David. The caliph acceded to the Emperor’s request, sending him Rabbi Makhir. Later, when Charlemagne took Narbonne from the Muslims, he divided the city in three, entrusting the parts to the governor, the bishop, and Rabbi Makhir, respectively. The Jewish myth helped to consolidate the authority of the Neśiim in Narbonne, associating the founding of the yeshiva (“religious academy”) there with the Carolingian Renaissance. The Neśiim, who passed the title Naśi from father to son, led the Jewish community of Narbonne for some 300 years, making it the center of Jewish scholarship in Provence. The dynasty’s power stemmed from its estates – which, within a feudal system, enabled it to conduct an aristocratic lifestyle – and from the yeshiva it founded and headed in the city of Narbonne. Under the leadership of the Neśiim, the yeshiva of Narbonne trained generations of scholars, who went on to found new centers elsewhere, and whose rulings in matters of Jewish law were respected in Spain and northern France as well. In the thirteenth century, with the structural changes in the feudal system in Languedoc and the advent of French control, Narbonne began to decline as a center of Jewish scholarship. The Neśiim, forced to sell a large part of their estates, began to share communal leadership with a group of ten parnasim (prudentes homini) or notables – members of the up-and-coming merchant class – thereby creating a dualistic leadership, eventually resulting in their complete withdrawal from positions of secular leadership, toward the middle of the century. The Neśiim continued to serve in the capacity of spiritual leaders, but even their status as heads of the yeshiva was eroded when many Jews left the city in the years 1134–43, due to the war between the counts of Toulouse and Barcelona, and a number of students from the yeshiva of Narbonne founded new centers of Torah study in Lunel and Posquières. The Neśiim of Narbonne disappeared from southern France almost completely, however, following the expulsion of Jews from French lands in 1306.12 11

12

G. D. Cohen, trans., A Critical Edition with a Translation and Notes of The Book of Tradition (Sefer ha Qabbalah) by Abraham ibn Daud (Philadelphia, 1967), 10 11 n. 4. A. Garbois, “Neśiʾei Narbona. Li Dmutah u le Mahutah Šel Hanhagah Yehudit bi . Drom Sarfat bi Yemei ha Beinayim,” Michael 12 (1990/1), 43 66; S. H. Pick, “Jewish Aristocracy in Southern France,” Revue des Études Juives (REJ) 161 (2002), 97 121.

southern france 189 Benjamin of Tudela, in 1165, describes Torah sages and houses of study in Béziers, Bourg de St. Gilles, Arles, Montpellier, and Marseille. Benjamin gives special prominence to the yeshiva of Narbonne headed by Abraham ben Isaac. He also mentions the yeshiva of Lunel, headed by Meshulam ben Jacob, and that of Posquières, headed by Abraham ben David (Rabad).13 Over the course of the thirteenth century, these new centers came to eclipse the academy at Narbonne. The cultural ties between these Jewish centers and those of Spain began to take shape in the twelfth century. Scholars from Provence studied in Barcelona, and Spanish scholars such as Abraham ibn Ezra (1089–1164) and Abraham ben Hiyya (probably 1065–1136) resided for a time in southern France, translating books or writing independent Hebrew works there. Some view the activities of these two scholars as having prepared the ground for the reception of the culture of al-Andalus’s Jews in Provence.14 The significant cultural revolution occurred, however, only after the Almohad conquest (1148) and the destruction of Jewish public life in Muslim Spain. Among the wave of Jewish refugees that swept beyond the Pyrenees were the founders of two famous dynasties of translators and scholars: Joseph Kimhi (c.1105–70) who settled in Narbonne, and Judah ben Saul ibn Tibbon (c.1120–90) who settled in Lunel. The latter’s son Samuel is best known for his translation of Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed (1204), undertaken at the request of Jonathan ha-Kohen, head of the yeshiva of Lunel. Samuel also produced the first Hebrew editions of works by Aristotle and Ibn Rushd (Averroes), thereby ushering in a new era of translation, marked by the passage from Jewish-Arabic literature to classic works by Greek and Arab authors. Samuel ibn Tibbon was also the first interpreter of the Guide, and founder of the Maimonist philosophical school in southern France, Spain, and Italy.15 The cultural renaissance in southern France was a product of the convergence of the cultural wealth of the Almohad refugees and the flourishing yeshivot of Provence, headed by patron-scholars such as Meshullam ben Jacob of Lunel, 13

14

15

M. N. Adler, trans., The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela: Critical Text, Translation and Commentary (London, 1907), 2. Y. T. Assis, “‘The Exile of Sefarad in Provence’: A Cultural and Religious Revolution in Provençal Jewry in the XIIth and XIIIth Centuries” [Hebrew], Hispania Judaica Bulletin 7 (2009), Hebrew section 1 48. F. E. Talmage, Apples of Gold in Settings of Silver: Studies in Medieval Jewish Exegesis and Polemics, ed. B. D. Walfish (Toronto, 1999), 3 70, 359 81; R. Chazan, “Joseph Kimhi’s ‘Sefer ha Berit’: Pathbreaking Medieval Jewish Apologetics,” Harvard Theological Review 85 (1992) 417 32; C. Fraenkel, From Maimonides to Samuel ibn Tibbon: The Transformation of the Dalālat al Hāʾirīn into Moreh ha Nevukhim [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 2007).

190 the middle ages: the christian world Abraham ben David (Rabad) of Posquières, and Jonathan ha-Kohen of Lunel, who possessed both spiritual and financial authority and longed to discover the Arabic works of Spanish Jewry. The translation enterprise was not spontaneous at the beginning, not dependent only upon the translators’ personal preferences, but rather guided and commissioned. In the second half of the twelfth century, the spiritual leadership of Provençal Jewry would appear to have decided to combine Torah study with that of other wisdoms, including Hebrew grammar, Jewish philosophy, and ethics. Over the course of the thirteenth century, other patrons emerged who sought to encourage original works and translations by Spanish immigrants and travelers.16 The beginnings of Kabbalah in southern France in the twelfth century were in fact the earliest appearance of the kabbalistic movement in general. In the first two generations, Kabbalah was an esoteric, primarily oral doctrine, which focused on questions such as the kavanot (“mystical intentions”) of certain prayers. It was not only from Isaac the Blind’s circle (first half of the thirteenth century) that Kabbalah spread to the Iberian peninsula, to Catalonia and Castile, resulting in the creation of a number of esoteric circles there. Alongside this kabbalistic circle from Lunel (in which the system of emanation through the Sefirot developed) were other circles – in Arles and Narbonne, for example, where the two brothers Isaac and Jacob ha-Kohen of Soria had studied, later bringing new concepts (influenced by theories on the source of evil and by Ashkenazic mystical and esoteric thought) back to Castile with them. The dissemination of Kabbalah in Provence aroused opposition within other circles, such as that of the Maimonistic halakhists. Both sides may have already begun to fear the intervention of the inquisitors, due to the possible similarity between kabbalistic ideas and those of Catharist dualism, which flourished in the area and was brutally repressed.17 It should be noted that the dichotomy between philosophy and Kabbalah was not yet 16

17

See J. T. Robinson, “The Ibn Tibbon Family: A Dynasty of Translators in Medieval Provence,” in J. M. Harris, ed., Be’erot Yitzhak: Studies in Memory of Isadore Twersky (Cambridge, MA, 2005), 193 224, esp. 198 9; H. Schirmann and E. Fleischer, Toldot ha Śirah ha ʿIvrit bi Sfarad ha Notsrit u vi Drom Tsarfat (Jerusalem, 1996/7), 222 3; G. Freudenthal, “Goremim u Meniim be Hivvatserut Tenu‘at ha Targumim be Lunel ba Meah ha Y”b: Yehudah b. Sha’ul Ibn Tibon u Patronav R. Meshulam b’R. Ya‘akov ve R. Asher b’R Meshulam,” in A. (R.) Reiner, M. Idel, M. Halbertal, J. Hacker, and E. Reiner, eds., Ta Shma: Studies in Judaica in Memory of Israel M. Ta Shma (Alon Sehvut, 2011), 651 72. G. Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah (Princeton, 1991), esp. 35 48, 227 61; G. Scholem, Ha Qabbalah be Provans: Hug ha Rabad u Vno R. Yitsak Sagi Nahor, ed. R. Shatz (Jerusalem, 1963); G. Scholem, Teʿudah Hadashah le Toldot Reshit ha kabalah” (Tel Aviv, 1934), 141 61; M. Idel, “Ha Tefilah be Kabalat Provans,” Tarbiz 62 (1992/3),

southern france 191 unequivocal, and that not all of the kabbalists in Provence opposed Maimonides. We know, for example, of the circle of Narbonne (c. mid thirteenth century), which embraced the views of Maimonides together with Ashkenazic ideas. The Narbonne circle also sought to promote this conciliatory position among other kabbalistic circles.18 THE COMMUNITY AND ITS INSTITUTIONS

The earliest evidence of organized communities in southern France, dating from the early eleventh century, can be found in the responses from Arles to questions posed by Rabbi Meshullam ben Kalonymos of Lucca, Italy. The responses reveal the existence of written communal statutes (takkanot) intended to maintain internal discipline and regulate commerce for the benefit of the members of the community.19 Such legal autonomy was a privilege granted by the Christian authorities. In 1215, Michel de Mourèse, archbishop of Arles, granted the Jewish community the legal basis for its administrative structure: a council comprising three councilors (rectores), elected by the community for a term of one year, with the twofold task of running the affairs of the community and administering justice, by means of takkanot.20 A list of ordinances was enacted by the Jewish community of Pamiers and submitted, in 1279, for the approval of the abbot of Saint-Antonin, Bernard Saisset, who had jurisdiction over the city. The ordinances were intended to prevent Jews from drawing attention to themselves, and perhaps to promote greater social equality within the Jewish community, by seeking to restrain luxury and ostentation. The abbot, who confirmed the ordinances, with the approval of the municipal officers (consules), allowed the Jewish community to appoint arbitrators (two or more) for the collection and allocation of taxes imposed at their discretion. In the same document, the abbot also reduced the size of

18

19

20

265 86; H. Pedaya, “The Provençal Stratum in the Redaction of Sefer ha Bahir” [Hebrew], in M. Idel, Z. Harvey, and E. Schweid, eds., Shlomo Pines Jubilee Volume (Jerusalem, 1999/2000), II, 139 64; M. Idel, “ʿAl Kavanat Shemoneh ʿEsre Etsel R. Yitsak Sagi Nahor,” in M. Oron and A. Goldreich, eds., Massu’ot: Studies in Kabbalistic Literature and Jewish Philosophy in Memory of Prof. Ephraim Gottlieb (Jerusalem, 1994), 28, 45; J. Shatzmiller, “The Albigensian Heresy as Reflected in the Eyes of Contemporary Jewry” [Hebrew], in M. Ben Sasson, R. Bonfil, and J. R. Hacker, eds., Culture and Society in Medieval Jewry (Jerusalem, 1989), 350 2. R. Ben Shalom, “Hugei ha Kabalah be Provans ba Meah ha Y”g,” Tarbiz 82 (2014), 569 605. Y. Baer, “The Origins of the Organization of the Jewish Community of the Middle Ages” [Hebrew], Zion 15 (1950), 1 41, esp. 32 5 and n. 20. H. Gross, “Zur Geschichte der Juden in Arles,” Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 28 (1879), 151 2.

192 the middle ages: the christian world the Jewish badge, which the Jews of southern France were required to wear on their clothing in keeping with the decision of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215).21 The abbot’s positive and lenient approach contrasted with the position of the Crown of France in the matter of the Jewish badge, and was part of a policy adopted by the local feudal ruler to attract Jews to Pamiers from the surrounding areas directly controlled by the Crown. Most of the documentation regarding such takkanot comes from Latin sources. Great importance is thus ascribed to the Hebrew takkanot of the community of Reillanne (1313), which shed light on a number of aspects of Jewish self-organization. As customary, these takkanot were of a local nature, valid only for the specific community by which they were enacted.22 Practices varied from community to community: the regulations sometimes were enacted by all the taxpayers and sometimes by a part of the community.23 There were also supra-communal takkanot. Until the expulsion of 1306, these were enacted by the Neśiim, or at a gathering of community representatives, or by exchange of letters signed by the leaders.24 The internal structure of the Jewish communities of southern France and their institutions generally resembled those of the Jews of Spain. The most striking difference between them was associated with the courtier phenomenon, although there were periods in southern France, especially Languedoc, in which a small number of Jewish courtiers served as taxcollectors (baillies) on behalf of the French kingdom or the local nobility. This was particularly evident in the case of the counts of Toulouse, although the practice was greatly reduced following the Albigensian Crusade. Similarly, in 1229, Count Raymond VII prohibited the engagement of Jews as tax-collectors. Nevertheless, a number of public and semipublic positions in Languedoc remained in the hands of Jews and the phenomenon of Jewish courtiers often resulted in social unrest, until the expulsion of 1306.25 Contrary to Spain, however, there was no separate 21

22

23

24

25

J. B. Depping, Les Juifs dans le Moyen Age, Essai historique sur leur état civil, commercial et littéraire (Brussels, 1844), 131 2. See S. Schwarzfuchs, “Takanah mi Shnat 1313,” Bar Ilan Annual 4 5 (1966), 209 19; J. Shatzmiller, “Takanot Provansaliyot mi Shnat 1313,” Kiryat Sefer 50 (1975), 663 7. S. H. Pick, “Medieval Provençal Jewish Self Government,” Trumah 15 (2005), 108 9, 126 31. A. H. Freimann, Seder kidushin ve Niśuin Aharei Hatimat ha Talmud (Jerusalem, 1964), 55 7; Pick, “Medieval Provençal Jewish Self Government,” 111. M. Saperstein, Decoding the Rabbis: A Thirteenth Century Commentary on the Aggadah (Cambridge, MA, 1982), 111 17; G. Nahon, “Condition fiscal et économique des juifs,” in Marie Humbert Vicaire and Bernhard Blumenkranz, eds., Juifs et judaïsme de

southern france 193 class of Jewish courtiers in southern France, alienated from the leadership of the communities themselves. Despite the absence of such a class, the development of intellectual life in southern France, in philosophy and the sciences, closely paralleled that of Spain, and the philosophical controversies arose in both areas at the same time, dividing the communities into supporters and opponents. The case of southern France thus contradicts the theory that sees a correlation between the Jewish courtier class in the Iberian peninsula and the development of rationalist thought, and particularly the spread of Averroism.26 It was thus not the courtiers, with their broad, secular intellectual horizon, detached from their communities, residing among the great and powerful, who embraced radical philosophy as a means to material goals, but rather an authentic movement of Jews rooted in their communities and committed to philosophy because they believed that its combination with Judaism was the correct path to spiritual perfection. We know of the existence of fixed rabbinical courts and of courts of arbitration established ad hoc, to rule on a specific legal matter.27 In the first half of the twelfth century, the communities enjoyed a certain degree of judicial automony, even in criminal cases such as murder. Over time, however, this authority was greatly reduced. Jews often preferred the Christian legal system: notaries who drafted legal agreements in Latin, civil, and ecclesiastical courts. Numerous extant legal documents attest to the confidence Jews had in the efficacy and impartiality of the Christian judicial system.28 From the twelfth century on, jurisdiction over the Jews changed repeatedly, based on the political changes in the area and the influence of the German emperor, the count of Provence, the count of Toulouse, the king of Aragon, the local Church, the monasteries, and, beginning in the thirteenth century, city leaders, the counts of Anjou, the count of Poitiers (following the death of Raymond VII, count of Toulouse, in

26

27

28

Languedoc. XIIIe siècle début XIVe siècle (Toulouse, 1977), 72 3; M. Kriegel, Les Juifs à la fin du Moyen Age (Paris, 1979), 60. See I. Twersky, “Aspects of the Social and Cultural History of Provenҫal Jewry,” Journal of World History 11 (1968), 189. R. Ben Shalom, “The Jewish Community in Arles Ben Sheshet’s Responsum 266 as an Historical Source” [Hebrew], Michael 12 (1991), 21. J. Shatzmiller, “Rabbi Isaac ha Cohen of Manosque and His Son Rabbi Peretz: The Rabbinate and its Professionalization in the Fourteenth Century,” in A. Rapoport Albert and S. J. Zipperstein, eds., Essays in Honor of Chimen Abramsky (London, 1988), 61 83; Pick, “Medieval Provençal Jewish Self Government,” 131 6; J. Shatzmiller, “Community and Super Community in Provence in the Middle Ages,” in C. Cluse, A. Haverkamp, and I. J. Yuval, eds., Jüdische Gemeinden und ihr christlicher Kontext in kulturräumlich vergleichender Betrachtung: von der Spätantike bis zum 18 Jahrhundert (Hanover, 2003), 441 8, esp. 442.

194 the middle ages: the christian world 1249), the popes (in the Comtat Venaissin), and the king of France. Raymond Bérenger V (IV), count of Provence, died in 1245 and left the County to his daughter Beatrice, who married Charles I of Anjou (brother of Louis IX of France). Charles had to suppress a rebellion of the local nobility and important cities opposed to the accession of a prince of France. The city of Marseille, for example, rebelled against him three times – in 1251, 1256, and 1262 – and was defeated after an arduous siege. The first two treaties established that Charles would not have the right to tax Christians or Jews. It was only after the final rebellion that the terms of capitulation stipulated that henceforth the Jews would pay a tax to the count’s treasury. The Jewish tax was a symbol of the victory of the House of Anjou. Provençal Hebrew chronography preserved the memory of that fateful day: “On the day of celebration of Anjou (hagat ʾAnyub) in the ˙ County of Provence . . . [Charles I] seized all of the treasuries and took all of the keys, and exacted a great deal of money from the Jews, by his wish and will.” Complete control over the Jews confirmed Angevin sovereignty. The Jews could no longer maneuver between the various feudal forces to their advantage. Their negative view of this development is reflected in the expression hagat ʾAnyub, from the word hagah, which denotes both cele˙ 29 In the County of Provence, bration (of˙Anjou) and horror (of the Jews). the authorities did not use the term “servants of the king,” common in Aragon, France, and elsewhere, but, from the capture of Marseille in 1262, Jews were considered “property of the king” (as established in the articles of capitulation), and a decree issued by Charles I, in 1276, referred to “judeis nostris Provincie.” It is in this context that the tallage of the Jews was first imposed in 1262.30 Beyond the taxes imposed by the County, municipal taxes were a source of fiscal–social tension between the Jewish communities and local authorities. In the city of Digne, for example, the issue came before the courts in 1312. The authorities demanded that the Jews, who lived in the fortress, contribute to all taxes and levies, according to the value of their properties, and the court ordered them to pay all general taxes, as well as levies for the construction and repair of bridges, public roads, and canals.31

29

30

31

Solomon Ibn Verga, Shevet Yehudah, ed. Azriel Shohat and Yitzhak Baer (Jerusalem, 1947), 149. See J. Shatzmiller, “Provençal Chronography in the Lost Pamphlet of Shem Tov Schanzolo” [Hebrew], Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research (PAAJR) 52 (1985), Hebrew section, 55 7. On the Chronography, see below. N. Coulet, “La taille des Juifs de Provence sous Charles Ier,” Provence Historique 56 (2006), 131 43, esp. 135. D. Iancu Agou, Provincia Judaica, Dictionnaire de géographie historique des juifs en Provence médiévale (Paris, 2010), 49 50.

southern france 195 Mobility was common, and the Jews were generally allowed to leave one community and move to another. One of the questions sent to Rabbi Solomon ben Adret (Rashba), for example, described “a man who was in the city of Majorca, and divorced his wife in Montpellier; and this woman was born in Narbonne and [raised] in the city of Marseille.”32 Freedom of movement was one of the privilegia granted to the Jews – as in the privilegium enacted in 1284 by the archbishop of Narbonne, Pierre de Montbrun (1272–86) – and was contingent upon payment of the annual tax.33 This privilegium was part of an overall policy adopted by the archbishop to attract Jews to the city, in response to two, broad, regional trends: efforts (including tax exemptions) to induce Jews from France to settle in areas of southern France under Aragonese rule;34 and the repercussions of the financial and administrative takeover of Languedoc by Louis IX of France. Under the king of France, the burden of direct taxation was heavier, and Jews were more susceptible to financial exploitation, making Narbonne an attractive haven for Jewish immigrants from areas controlled by the Kingdom of France.35 Beginning in the 1270s, a general, annual tax called the “Jewish tax” (tallia judaeorum) was imposed, collectively, on all the Jews of the County of Provence, on the basis of their financial declarations (manifestationis bonorum). The documents reveal the existence of a supra-communal organization for the distribution of tax funds (universitas judaeorum provincie et forcalquerii), and elected representatives called “procuratores,” in charge of matters of taxation. The structure of the general organization and its geographical divisions changed over time, and were under the supervision of the royal sénéchal. The Jewish population of Provence reached its high point in the first decades of the fourteenth century, numbering an estimated 10–15,000 inhabitants, corresponding to about 3–4 percent of the total population of the County. This proportion increased in the large towns to as much as 7–10 percent. In 1340, the Jews paid the sum of 2,000 livres in taxes, reflecting – according to a contemporary estimate – some 4,000 householders and a population of approximately 20,000. This figure included refugees from Languedoc, who had settled in the County of Provence after the expulsion from France in 1306. A census conducted by King Robert of Anjou in 1341 places the Jews in the comital city of Aix alone at 1,205 persons in 203 households – that is, an average of 5.9 persons per household. 32 33

34

35

Solomon ben Adret (Rashba), Responsa [Hebrew], Part IV, resp. 197. J. Régné, Étude sur la condition des juifs de Narbonne du Ve au XIVe siècle (Narbonne, 1912), 98 107. Nahon, “Condition fiscal,” 54; J. Régné, History of the Jews in Aragon: Regesta and Documents 1213 1327, ed. and annot. Y. Assis (Jerusalem, 1978), docs. 364 6, 65 6. W. C. Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews (Philadelphia, 1989), 170 1.

196 the middle ages: the christian world The structure of the supra-communal organization changed as a result of demographic and economic changes experienced by the communities, especially after the Black Death (1348).36 Beyond the deaths from the plague itself, eleven Jewish communities were affected by the massacres and looting that followed. Consequently, Queen Jeanne reduced the general tax by half, and the universitas judaeorum had to undergo thorough reorganization.37 The same families performed leadership roles within the communities, and those of baillies, advisors, and accountants. Their members were successful merchants, moneylenders, businessmen, and especially physicians. A member of the community could hold such a position numerous times, and even for consecutive terms. The main function of these leaders was to collect and distribute community taxes. They were also responsible for the proper functioning of community institutions and the administration of public property, such as the synagogue – which included the school, the cemetery, the miqve (“ritual bath”), and charitable institutions.38 We know of the formation of professional guilds, reflected in strikes by Jewish ritual slaughterers in Montpellier and Aix, following the enactment of takkanot fixing the price of meat.39 The communities also maintained various aid societies: Talmud Torah (school), holim (aid to the sick), ma’or (illumination of the synagogue), ˙ tsedakah (assistance to the poor), kebarim (burial of the needy), arb’a kosot ˙ (Passover needs), for the marriage˙ of poor Jewish girls, and for the redemption of prisoners.40 The societies administered their own properties, including buildings and lands, generally received from bequests.41 36

37

38

39

40

41

J. Shatzmiller, “La perception de la Tallia Judeorum en Provence au milieu du XIV siècle,” Annales du Midi 82 (1970), 221 36; Shatzmiller, “Community and Super Community,” 441 8; É. Baratier, La Démographie provençale du XIIIe au XVI siècle (Paris, 1975), 13; D. Iancu and C. Iancu, Les Juifs du Midi: Une histoire millénaire (Avignon, 1995), 35. J. Shatzmiller, “Les Juifs de Provence pendant la peste noire,” REJ 133 (1974), 457 80; D. Iancu Agou, “Topographie des quartiers juifs en Provence médiévale,” REJ 133 (1974), 86, 113 14. Ben Shalom, “Jewish Community,” 10 15; J. Sibon, Les juifs de Marseille au XIVe siècle (Paris, 2011). See Pick, “Medieval Provençal Jewish Self Government,” 116; J. Shatzmiller, “L’organisation communautaire et les limites du ‘self government’ en Provence,” in Les juifs dans la Méditerranée médiévale et moderne; actes des journées d’études du Centre de la Méditerranée moderne et contemporaine et du Centre d’études médiévales de l’Université de Nice, Nice, 25 et 26 mai 1983 (Nice, 1986), 4. Nissim ben Reuben Gerondi, Responsa [Hebrew] (Königsberg, 1830), resp. 75, 58; P. Pansier, “Les œuvres de charité juives à Avignon du XIVe au XVIIIe siècles,” Annales d’Avignon et du Comtat Venaissin 10 (1924), 71 2. Iancu Agou, “Topographie,” 79 80; M. Wernham, La communauté juive de Salon de Provence d’après les actes notaires 1391 1435 (Toronto, 1987), 53 9; Ben Shalom, “Jewish

southern france 197 Notarial documents attest to the extent of Jewish involvement in economic life in southern France. Jews also owned agricultural land, particularly vineyards for the production of wine. In the field of commerce, Jews were prominent in the wool, leather, textile (including a number of shopowners), grain, almond, and oil trades. By the fifteenth century, there were hardly any Jews in the coral trade in Marseille, which had been a Jewish monopoly throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. From the thirteenth century on, Jews in Marseille were also involved in international maritime trade on a small scale, throughout the Mediterranean, with Acre and Alexandria, Sicily and Valencia, but primarily with North Africa.42 Many of the Jewish merchants also engaged in moneylending of moderate sums to a local clientele. Jews did not have a monopoly over the provision of credit, however, and there were many Christian moneylenders as well. Among the Jewish moneylenders were a number of prominent families, who dealt with large sums of money. Perpignan, in the thirteenth century – where, according to the notarial records, the Jews possessed considerable wealth and were, for the most part, moneylenders – would appear to have been an exception, inasmuch as its Jewish moneylenders had immigrated to Roussillon from Languedoc, when the opportunity arose to collect higher interest.43 Normally, however, the Jews did not engage exclusively in moneylending, but did so in addition to other commercial activities, generally lending moderate sums, primarily to Christians of the lower class. In some cases, though, Jewish communities lent large sums of money to Christian clergy, such as the archbishop of Arles.44 In the thirteenth century, a number of attempts were made in the Kingdom of France to ban Jewish moneylending altogether. The archbishop of Narbonne, Guillaume de Broue (1245–57), who sought to enforce the antiusury laws of the French king, Louis IX, first preached against Jewish moneylending in Narbonne and Capestang, at a meeting of rabbis and community

42

43

44

Community,” 25 31; D. Iancu Agou, “Structures communautaires chez les juifs de la cité d’Aix: Quelques exemples à la fin du Moyen Âge,” in Les sociétés urbaines en France méridionale et en Péninsule ibérique au Moyen Âge: Actes du colloque de Pau, 21 23 Septembre 1988 (Paris, 1991), 494 7. D. Iancu Agou, “Les Relations entre les juifs de Marseille et les communautés juives d’Afrique du Nord à la fin du XVe siècle,” in J. L. Miège, ed., Les Relations intercommu nautaires juives en Méditerranée occidentale, XIIIe XXe siècles; actes du colloque interna tional de l’Institut d’histoire des pays d’outre mer (GIS Mediterranee Aix en Provence) et du Centre de recherches sur les Juifs d’Afrique du Nord (Institut Ben Zvi, Université de Jerusalem), Abbaye de Senanque, May 1982 (Paris, 1984), 23 33; Sibon, Les juifs de Marseille. R. W. Emery, The Jews of Perpignan in the Thirteenth Century: An Economic Study Based on Notarial Records (New York, 1959), esp. 80 108, 131 3. Wernham, La communauté juive de Salon, 63.

198 the middle ages: the christian world leaders. He demanded that Jews cease lending money at interest from that point forth and, with regard to outstanding loans, collect only the capital without interest. It was in this context that the archbiship held a disputation with Meir bar Simeon of Narbonne, on the subject of Jewish moneylending.45 Although the Church was theoretically opposed to usury, in practice bishops, who were also feudal lords, acted to formalize loans and establish a fair system of credit, due to a realistic understanding of its necessity in economic life. The aforementioned privilege granted to the Jews of Narbonne by Archbishop Pierre de Montbrun (1284), for example, stipulated legal arrangements for the security of collateral held by Jews.46 The counts of Anjou, in Provence, also frequently changed their attitudes to moneylending. In 1274, and again in the years 1291–3, Charles I and Charles II attempted to ban moneylending, while King Robert, in 1310, ordered his officials in Provence to enforce the repayment of interest owed to Jews. This order was repeated in 1324 and again in 1329, yet, in 1322, he issued an edict against Jewish moneylenders.47 Interest was usually set at 25 percent. The stereotype of the malicious Jewish usurer sucking Christians dry, later reflected in Shakespeare’s Shylock, existed in the Middle Ages, and led to various forms of persecution, from riots to expulsion. There were other images as well, however, of kindly Jewish moneylenders who faithfully cultivated a Christian clientele and cared for their needs in a fair manner, including low interest and deferral of payment, treating them far better than their Christian creditors.48 Many Jewish artisans worked in textile-related fields, the manufacture of clothing (some at the court of King René, in Aix), and dyeing. In a number of cities, these were specifically Jewish crafts, and in Arles, in the years 1435–7, Jews would appear to have enjoyed a monopoly over the textile industry. Jewish craftsmen also included bookbinders, parchment-makers, construction workers, porters, and couriers.49 In the second half of the fifteenth century, and especially after 1463, Jews were barred from many 45

46 47

48

49

W. K. Herskowitz, “Judeo Christian Dialogue in Provence as Reflected in Milhemet Mitzva of R. Meir Hameili” (Ph.D. diss., Yeshiva University, 1974), 93. See also R. Chazan, “Anti Usury Efforts in Thirteenth Century Narbonne and the Jewish Response,” PAAJR 41 2 (1973 4), 45 67, who dates the debate to 1247 or 1248 (48 n. 12). H. Merhavia, “Li Zmano Shel ha Hibbur Milhemet Mitsvah (Ketav yad Parmah 155/2749),” Tarbiz 45 (1976), 297 8, suggests a later date, between 1254 and 1257. Régné, Étude, 201. J. Sibon, “La communauté juive de Marseille au début du XIV siècle. Un refuge pour les exilés du royaume de France?” in D. Iancu Agou, ed., Philippe le Bel et les juifs du royaume de France (1306) (Paris, 2012), 175 86, esp. 181. J. Shatzmiller, Shylock Reconsidered: Jews, Moneylending, and Medieval Society (Berkeley, 1990), esp. 69 70, 104 18. See D. Iancu, Être Juif en Provence au temps du roi René (Paris, 1998), 49 87.

southern france 199 crafts, due to the rise of Christian guilds, which sought to exclude those who were not guild members – i.e., non-Christians.50 The fields of medicine and surgery were particularly prominent among Jews, passing from father to son, within the same families. Jewish physicians served both the Jewish community and Christians of all social strata, from the royal court and high-ranking clergy to the monasteries and ordinary townspeople. In Marseille, for example, during the first half of the fifteenth century, there were 37 Jewish physicians – some 56 percent of all of the physicians in the city. In Aix, there were 27 Jewish physicians during the years 1400–50, and eight during the years 1460–80, in a Jewish population numbering some 350 souls. In Orange, 15 physicians and 1 surgeon are listed for the years 1310–80.51 The Jewish quarters in the main cities were located in one or two streets, although, most of the time, these were not “ghettos” in which the Jews were forced to reside. Nevertheless, and particularly beginning in the second half of the fourteenth century, Jews in a number of cities were required to move to a separate Jewish quarter. In cities under papal rule, such as Avignon and Carpentras, the process of restricting Jews to a specific quarter began in the mid fifteenth century. Elsewhere, as in Carcassonne, there is no evidence of a designated Jewish quarter. In Marseille, Aix, and other cities, Jews owned property outside the Jewish quarter, and Christians owned property inside the quarter.52 The designation of a street for Jewish residence was consistent with efforts to segregate and mark Jews, instigated by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) in Rome, which decreed that Jews must be distinguished from Christians by their dress, but gave no indication of how this should be achieved. Thus, in Aragon (which included Montpellier and Perpignan), it was decided that Jews must wear the round cape (which they wore of their own accord) and only those who did not wear the cape would be required to wear the Jewish badge. This arrangement was not to the Church’s satisfaction, however, due to the cape’s similarity to a cape worn by Christian clergymen. In 1248, Pope Innocent IV wrote to the bishop of Maguelone that he had heard that in his diocese, pilgrims and foreigners 50

51

52

P. Bernardi, “Juifs et organisation du travail en Provence au XVe siècle,” in D. Iancu Agou, ed., L’expulsion des juifs de Provence et de l’Europe méditerranéenne (XVe XVIe siècles). Exils et conversions (Paris, 2005), 329 36. Iancu, Être juif en Provence, 87 93; J. Shatzmiller, Jews, Medicine, and Medieval Society (Berkeley, 1994), esp. 106; Sibon, Les juifs de Marseille, 395 424. Iancu Agou, “Topographie,” 111 12; Marie France Godfroy, “La Communauté juive de Carcassone à la veille de l’expulsion de 1306,” in C. Iancu, ed., Les Juifs à Montpellier et dans le Languedoc à travers l’histoire du Moyen Âge à nos jours (Montpellier, 1988), 157 66, esp. 160; René Moulinas, Les Juifs du pape en France (Paris, 1981), 33 7.

200 the middle ages: the christian world mistakenly afforded Jews the respect reserved for Christian clergymen, and that the Jews should therefore be ordered to wear a more distinctive sign. The Church council held in Albi in 1254 noted that the round capes worn by the Jews severely undermined the dignity of the priesthood, and therefore decreed that Jews should refrain from wearing such capes. In the fourteenth century, however, Jaume II of Aragon (1291–1327) renewed the decree that only those who did not wear the round cape were required to wear the Jewish badge, which shows that the Church failed in its efforts to prevent Jews from wearing their traditional dress.53 The ongoing struggle in Provence over the size of the Jewish badge was thus an expression of attempts by the Church to distinguish between Jews and Christians in general, and members of the Christian clergy in particular. This phenomenon was part of a broader urban tendency to restrict social contact between Christians and Jews, by means of local statutes. In Avignon, for example, we find a statute from 1246, prohibiting the sale of meat of diseased animals and buying animals slaughtered by Jews. In Salon, in 1293, it was established that if Jews, prostitutes, or lepers touched bread, fish, meat, or fruit, they could be compelled to buy the food that they had touched. In 1306, Charles II decreed complete separation between Jewish and Christian butcher’s shops. Jewish use of the public baths in a number of cities was also limited to certain days of the week. Some have explained these restrictions as stemming from the widespread Christian perception of the Jew as impure, while others view such local statutes as an expression of efforts by the Church – which had sought, ever since the thirteenth century, to establish a counter-system to the talmudic prohibitions against Jewish social interaction with non-Jews. In practice, separation was difficult to maintain – witness the constant reiteration of the same prohibitions over the years.54 Relations between Jews and Christians extended to the economic sphere. The Jewish communities played a crucial role in urban economies, and the Jews of Provence participated fully in most areas of commerce, finance, and craft. They were employed by the civil authorities as cleaners, guards and messengers, and by ecclesiastical institutions – from the archbishop, who employed Jewish doctors and intermediaries, to the priests’ council that

53

54

S. Grayzel, rev. and ed., The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century (New York, 1966), 316 35. See O. Limor, Jews and Christians in Western Europe: Encounter Between Cultures in the Middle Ages and the Renasissance [Hebrew], vol. II (Tel Aviv, 1992), 224 30. M. Kriegel, Les Juifs à la fin du Moyen Âge (Paris, 1979), 37 41; L. Stouff, Ravitaillement et alimentations en Provence aux XIVe et XVe siècles (Paris, 1970), 52 3; Iancu Agou, “Topographie,” 52 3, 68 9, 83 4, 143 9.

southern france 201 entrusted its accounting and tax collection to Jews, and the mendicant monasteries that hired Jews as construction workers and vintners.55 Attitudes to the surrounding culture were thus colored by two points of departure: religious differences between Jewish and Christian societies, and the economic sphere common to Jews and Christians. In this context, the halakhic approach adopted by Menahem ha-Meiri of Perpignan, in ˙ was striking. Ha-Meiri deviated the second half of the thirteenth century, from the dominant halakhic view until his time, influenced primarily by the Tosafists, and ruled that Christianity (and Islam) should not be considered idolatry. His tolerant approach produced a new halakhic category – “the nations that are bound by the ways of religion and accept divinity” – distinguishing between the nations in talmudic times and the nations of his day. Contrary to the Tosafists, he did not seek a posteriori justification for the practices of the communities, but offered an a priori basis for economic and social interaction with Christians, and an egalitarian approach, with ramifications that went well beyond anything envisioned by his predecessors.56 This halakhic and philosophical religious tolerance found expression in intellectual contact between Jewish and Christian scholars and the reciprocal translation of scientific works from Latin to Hebrew and vice versa, using the local vernacular as an intermediary.57 PAPAL INQUISITORS, ANUSIM, PERSECUTION, AND EXPULSION

Inquisitors began to operate in the first half of the thirteenth century, as an arm of the Church in its battle against heresy, particularly in Lombardy and southern France. Unlike the Spanish Inquisition, active from the 55

56

57

L. Stouff, “Activités et professions dans une communauté juive de Provence au bas Moyen Âge, La Juiverie d’Arles 1400 1450,” in Minorités techniques et métiers; actes de la table ronde du Groupement d’Intérêt Scientifique, Sciences Humaines sur l’Aire Méditerranéenne, Abbaye de Sénanque, Octobre 1978 (Aix en Provence, 1980), 57 77. See J. Katz, Bein Yehudim le Goyim (Jerusalem, 1960/1); J. Katz, “Od ‘al ‘Sovlanuto ha Datit Shel R. Menahem ha Meiri,’” Zion 46 (1961), 243 6; J. Blidstein, “Yahaso Shel R. Menahem ha Meiri la Nokhri: Bein Apologeti kah le Hafnamah,” Zion 51 (1980/1), 153 66; E. E. Urbach, “Shitat ha Sovlanut Shel Menahem ha Meiri: Mekorah u Migbeloteha,” in I. Etkes and J. Salmon, eds., Jacob Katz Jubilee Volume (Jerusalem, 1980), 34 44; I. M. Ta Shma, “Yemei ʾEdehem,” Tarbiz 47 (1977/8), 197 210; Ta Shma, “Heʾarah le he’arah,” Tarbiz 49 (1979/80), 218 19; M. Halbertal, Between Torah and Wisdom [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 2000), 39 40. J. Shatzmiller, “Contacts et échanges entre savants juifs et chrétiens à Montpellier vers 1300,” in Vicaire and Blumenkranz, eds., Juifs et judaïsme de Languedoc, 337 44.

202 the middle ages: the christian world 1480s, the earlier inquisitors were not an arm of the state, but of the papacy. From its inception, and from a legal perspective, the inquisitors had no jurisdiction over the Jews. Nevertheless, inquisitors did not hesitate to attack Jews for spreading heretical ideas or aiding heretics. The inquisitors did have jurisdiction, however, over converted Jews suspected of having reverted to their old faith, as well as Jews who came into contact with them and supported their return to Judaism. The Jewish communities of southern France were the first anywhere in the Diaspora to encounter the inquisitors. The expansive view of jurisdiction received official sanction from Pope Clement IV, in the bull Turbato corde [With Our Heart in Turmoil], in 1267. The pope charged the Dominicans and the Franciscans with the task of investigating conversions of Christians and Jewish converts who had reverted to their former religion, and gave them the authority to punish Jews involved in such cases.58 A number of inquisitors had already acted in this fashion in 1232 or 1233, when an investigation into the works of Maimonides was initiated in Montpellier – based on the accusations of anti-Maimonistic informers – concluding in the burning of the Guide for the Perplexed and parts of Sefer ha-Mada’.59 In the first half of the twelfth century, the inquisitors acted mainly against Christian heretical sects, especially the Albigensians. After the publication of the Turbato corde, however, the inquisitors increased pressure on the Jews. Although the bull did not give inquisitors authority to interfere in internal communal affairs, the fear of Jewish influence on Christians outweighed the principle of non-interference. The inquisitors sought to limit interaction between Jews and Christians and to prevent close contact between converted Jews and their former coreligionists. Strict enforcement of the “badge of shame” stipulated by Church synods at Narbonne (1227), Béziers (1246), and Nîmes (1252) was central to this program, and both its size and shape were changed to that end. Broad interpretation of the Turbato corde allowed the inquisitor to investigate, torture, and try Jews suspected of social contact with Christians or “New Christians” in order to convert them to Judaism. The earliest evidence of such an investigation is from Manosque (1284), and pertains to the case against Abraham of Grasse and his family. The increasing power of the inquisitors aroused rivalries and disputes with local ecclesiastical authorities. Thus, in 1290, Pope Nicholas IV ordered the archbishops, bishops, and abbots in Arles, Aix-en-Provence, 58

59

Translation in E. A. Synan, The Popes and the Jews in the Middle Ages (New York, 1965), 118. J. Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti Judaism (Ithaca, NY, 1982), 44 60.

southern france 203 and Embrun to render assistance to the inquisitors in punishing Jews who enticed converts to return to Judaism and even sought to convert those who were Christian from birth. Forced conversion, rejudaization, and the Inquisition were thus an integral part of Jewish life – and there are indications of mass conversion to Christianity in the fourteenth century, in the wake of persecutions and expulsions. The levels of conversion to Christianity never reached those of Spain and Portugal, and there were no distinct social groups – parallel to the Jewish communities – of converts or anusim who sought to preserve their distinct identity, whether for internal reasons or as a result of external pressures.60 A number of accounts of the activities of the inquisitors have been preserved in the Hebrew chronography of Shemtov Schanzolo, included by Joseph ben Solomon ibn Verga in Shevet Yehudah. The chronicle ˙ the Jewish badge with associates the efforts of the inquisitors regarding the aggressive campaign of Paulus Christiani (instigator of the Barcelona Disputation of 1263) to convert all of the Jews. As part of his comprehensive plan, Christiani sought, in the early 1270s, to force the Jews of southern France to bear the badge of shame. In response to the propaganda of the converted Jew Christiani, and his successful bid in the matter of the Jewish badge, a meeting of the communities of Provence was held, at which two representatives were chosen – Mordechai ben Joseph of Avignon and Solomon (de Salon) of Tarascon – who managed to have the law rescinded for a time, until the inquisitors intervened. The latter fined the Jewish communities and placed Mordechai and Solomon under house arrest. 61 In 1306, King Philip IV (the Fair), brutally and without warning, expelled all of the Jews of France, thereby expropriating their property. Languedoc was a part of France following the Albigensian Crusade and the defeat of Raymond VI, count of Toulouse (c. 1209), the conclusion of the military campaigns (1224), and the consolidation of the king’s rights over the area (1229). Unlike the Jews of northern France, the Jews of Languedoc were relatively free to lend money, since the anti-usury laws enacted by Louis IX were more rigorously enforced in the north. They thus had many Christian debtors, whose debts were now transferred to the royal treasury. These debts were assiduously collected by the Crown in the years that followed.62 60

61 62

J. Shatzmiller, “L’inquisition et les juifs de Provence au XIIIe siècle,” Provence Historique 23 (1973), 326 35; M. Kriegel, “Prémarranisme et inquisition dans la Provence des XIIIe et XIVe siècles,” Provence Historique 27 (1977), 313 23. Shatzmiller, “Provençal Chronography,” 43 61, esp. 45 8. C. Balasse, 1306. L’expulsion des juifs du royaume de France (Brussels, 2008); Jordan, French Monarchy, 105 27, 211.

204 the middle ages: the christian world According to the extant documents, in comparison to other regions of France, the Jews of Languedoc had more wealth and property, and it has been suggested that the wealth of these Jews was the reason behind the expulsion of all of the Jews of the kingdom.63 The bills of sale included communal property, such as synagogues, schools, hospitals, ritual baths, bakeries, and cemeteries, as well as private property, including homes, jewelry, gold, and precious stones. The inventories also attest to the vigor and prosperity of the communities prior to 1306. The willingness of the Jews of Languedoc to renounce all of their property and to rebuild their lives as Jews in other regions should not be treated lightly. They set out in two directions: eastward to the Angevin County of Provence, the papal Comtat Venaissin, the Principate of Orange and beyond, to Savoy and Dauphiné; and to the Kingdoms of Aragon and Majorca. Although the Angevins were related to the kings of France, they adopted a different approach. In that same year, King Charles II promised all the Jews of Provence that he would safeguard their rights, and granted the refugees from Languedoc freedom of commerce. The refugees settled in the communities of Salon, Marseille, Avignon, Manosque, Trets, Draguignon, Orange, Tarascon, Pertuis, Arles, and Aix, as well as in smaller communities east of the Rhone.64 King Jaume II of Aragon opened the gates of his kingdom and, in the years 1306–7, allowed many communities to accept the expelled Jews. The Jews of Montpellier, who were under the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Majorca, were expelled three months after the other Jews of Languedoc. This was the result of negotiations between the king of France and the king of Majorca, who was a vassal of the king of France in Montpellier. Most of the Jews of Montpellier settled in Perpignan and Catalonia. Archival documents show, on the one hand, the difficulties the refugees experienced in some communities, and, on the other hand, the ways in which cultural affinity facilitated integration. In fact, many of the Provençal scholars continued to pursue their spiritual activities in Aragon, contributing to intellectual life in the fields of Halakhah, biblical exegesis, philosophy, the sciences, and poetry.65

63 64

65

Nahon, “Condition fiscal,” 51 84, esp. 78 9. R. Busquet, “Les privilèges généraux et la conservation des privilèges des juifs de Provence,” Mémoires de l’Institut historique de Provence 4 (1927), 221 32; M. F. Godfroy, “Les exilés du Languedoc. Cartographie d’une dispersion,” in G. Dahan, ed., L’Expulsion des juifs de France, 1394 (Paris, 2004), 177 87; J. Shatzmiller, “En Provence médiévale: les juifs de Gordes, 1312,” REJ 138 (1979), 351 4. Y. Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, vol. II (Philadelphia, 1961), 9; Y. T. Assis, “Juifs de France réfugiés en Aragon (XIIIe XIVe siècles),” REJ 142 (1983), 209 27.

southern france 205 Although it was not the first general expulsion in Europe (the Jews of England had been expelled in 1290), it was a deeply traumatic event, inasmuch as it obliterated centuries-old communities with independent and distinct local cultures and histories. Despite the terrible trauma it entailed, this expulsion left little trace in Jewish collective memory. In the case of Languedoc, however, the poet Reuben ben Isaac (who was among those expelled from Montpellier) commemorated the tragedy in a number of piyyutim (liturgical poems), which became a part of the liturgy of the community of Avignon.66 One noteworthy literary response to the expulsion can be found in the work Even bohan (January 1323), in which the author, Kalonymos ben Kalonymos of˙Arles, describes the anguish of his neighbors in Languedoc, stressing that such a cruel event was unprecedented. His words regarding the Jews’ loss of their homeland shows that, in the eyes of the Jews, the boundaries of Provence were not determined by the political frontiers established by monarchs and counts. The most important centers of Jewish scholarship were in Languedoc, which lay at the heart of Provence, which Jews and Christians alike perceived as a distinct sociocultural unit.67 The deep rift at the heart of this entity, and the intensity of the pain and suffering experienced, are also reflected in a letter by Simeon ben Joseph Duran of Montpellier (written some five months after the expulsion), which highlights the profound sentimental bond with the land and the view of expulsion as the act of a foreign French occupier, rather than that of a sovereign ruler. The letter focuses primarily on the suffering of the expellees, left with nothing, murdered along the roads as they wandered aimlessly. Duran describes how the wealthy had become beggars, and respectable women prostitutes, in order to feed their children.68 Duran’s expectation that God would restore the communities of Languedoc was apparently a realistic one. In 1315, Louis X allowed the Jews to return, on condition that they live in the same areas they had resided in prior to the expulsion. Communal property was restored, upon restitution being made to those who had bought them. They were given 66

67

68

See S. L. Einbinder, No Place of Rest: Jewish Literature, Expulsion, and the Memory of Medieval France (Philadelphia, 2009), esp. 61 83. Kalonymos ben Kalonymos, ʾEven bohan, 113. See S. L. Einbinder, “Recall from Exile: Literature, Memory and Medieval French Jews,” Jewish Quarterly Studies 15 (2008), 225 40; C. Devic and J. Vaissette, Histoire générale de Languedoc, ed. and rev. E. Barry, C. Chabaneau, E. Germer Durand, E. Mabille, P. Auguste Molinier, and E. Roschach (Toulouse, 1872), III, 170. D. Kaufmann, “Deux lettres de Siméon ben Joseph,” REJ 29 (1894), 227; G. Nahon, “Le figuier du Seigneur. Relations hébraïques méridionales des exilés de 1306,” in Iancu Agou, ed., Philippe le Bel et les juifs, 211 42.

206 the middle ages: the christian world permission to collect past debts that had not yet been collected by the Crown, contingent upon the payment of two-thirds of the recovered sum to the royal treasury. In 1317, King Philip V, successor to Louis X, ordered his officers to assist the Jews in collecting these debts.69 The Jews’ return was limited to a period of twelve years and entailed a sort of financial contract between the two sides. Only a part (perhaps a small part) of the expelled population returned to the Kingdom of France.70 This was primarily due to the erratic and unpredictable policies of the Capetian kings of France toward the Jews, from the days of Philip II Augustus, who expelled the Jews from the small royal demesne in 1182, through the entire thirteenth century, to the reign of Philip IV. The Jews of France, and particularly of Languedoc, served as pawns of Capetian policy, which used its jurisdiction over Jews to mark and define its rule in the south.71 In 1321, Jews were accused of having poisoned wells, with the help of lepers and Muslims in other lands. Many arrest warrants were issued in France, and many Jews were executed on charges of having poisoned wells. Consequently, the Jews were once again exiled, whether by royal edict or of their own accord, due to the pressure exerted by the masses and the acquiescence of the authorities with regard to these false accusations.72 This was the first and only time in France that expulsion was accomplished through acts of violence by the urban populace, rather than by the initiative of the Crown. The Jews fell victim to social strife between the urban classes and the monarchy. They headed once again for the same destinations.73 As a result of the expulsions, the inquisitors increased their vigilance. In some of the communities of Languedoc, a number of Jews had chosen baptism rather than leaving their homes. Some converted only in appearance, and continued to oberve the Jewish precepts. Among those who came back to Languedoc in 1315 were converts who wished to return to Judaism in a place where their identity was unknown. Efforts were made in Languedoc and in Aragon to restrict the passage of New Christians between the two countries. This was the context in which Bernard Gui, the inquisitor of Toulouse, conducted his activities. In one of the two cases of judaizing that he investigated, he gave a life sentence to a convert who had escaped from the duchy of Toulouse to Lerida in Aragon to live as a Jew, and had been returned to Toulouse by the inquisitor. Gui however, 69 70

71 72

73

See Jordan, French Monarchy, 243 9. See R. Kohn, Les Juifs de la France du Nord dans la seconde moitié du XIVe siècle (Louvain, 1988), 3 8. See Jordan, French Monarchy, 252 9. D. Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1996), 43 68. See Assis, “Juifs de France,” 312.

southern france 207 was primarily interested in investigating the charges of heresy against rabbinic literature. In 1319, he ordered the burning of two cartloads of talmudic manuscripts, on the accusation of heresy. Furthermore, it has been suggested that the bull issued by Pope John XII against the Talmud, in 1320, was inspired by Gui. Jacques Fournier, inquisitor of Pamiers (later Pope Benedict XII), also ordered the confiscation of books of the Talmud, and their burning, upon instructions from the pope.74 An interesting case that sheds light on the methods of the inquisitor is that of Baruch, a German Jew resident in Toulouse, who was forced to convert during the Shepherds’ Crusade (1320), which set out from France to the Iberian peninsula, passing through Aquitaine and attacking many Jewish communities there, including Cahors, Albi, and especially Toulouse.75 Baruch escaped to the community of Pamiers, where he returned to Judaism, was caught by the inquisitor, and was charged with heresy. He was interrogated by Jacques Fournier, who left a lengthy protocol that affords a glimpse of the methods of interrogation employed, as well as some insight into the states of mind of investigator and accused. The inquisitor did not accept Baruch’s basic claim that he had been baptized against his will, in the cathedral, under threat of death, since he did not protest or resist during the taking of the sacrament itself. Fournier ruled, based on precedents in canon law, that the baptism was not administered under “absolute compulsion,” and Baruch could therefore be tried as a heretic.76 An important literary response to these persecutions can be found in Kalonymus ben Kalonymus’s Even bohan, which includes a description of ˙ the persecutions, as well as Jewish the fear caused by and consequences of responses to them, and the reasons for them. Of particular importance are his descriptions of the two different Jewish responses to the violence: martyrdom and conversion. They constitute a valuable contribution to the historiographical debate regarding the apparent dichotomy between Ashkenazic martyrdom and Spanish–Provençal conversion, supposedly influenced by philosophical and scientific education and other factors that weakened the attachment to tradition. The words of Kalonymos show that in Provence, as in Ashkenaz during the Crusades and in Spain 74

75 76

Y. H. Yerushalmi, “The Inquisition and the Jews of France in the Time of Bernard Gui,” Harvard Theological Review 63 (1970), 317 76; J. Shatzmiller, “Converts and Judaizers in the Early Fourteenth Century,” Harvard Theological Review 74 (1981), 63 77; Assis, “Juifs de France,” 285 322, esp. 299 302. Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, 43 68. See B. S. Albert, Mishpato shel Barukh: ha Protokol ha Rishon Shel Shefitat Anus bi Fnei ha Inkvizitsyah (Ramat Gan, 1973/4 [1320]), 90 5; S. Grayzel, “The Confessions of a Medieval Jewish Convert,” Historia Judaica 17 (1955), 89 120.

208 the middle ages: the christian world during the persecutions of 1391, Jews chose both martyrdom and conversion, each according to his personal values and beliefs. Kalonymos criticizes those whose conversions were forced at first but eventually embraced. Of the martyrs of the Lepers’ Plot, he writes: “Celestial martyrs, into the heart’s flame, came each man and his household, as a bridegroom from his wedding canopy, they left prison to sanctify the name of their Father in heaven.”77 In the fourteenth century, the foundations of Jewish existence were shaken to the core by the outbreak of violence associated with the Shepherds’ Crusade and the Lepers’ Plot (1320–1), followed by the attacks precipitated by the Black Death (1348), which resulted in the destruction of some eleven communities. According to the testimony inscribed on a Pentateuch page by the sole survivor of the massacre at La Baume, the entire community – men, women, and children – was martyred. Unlike the victims of the Shepherds’ attacks, the Jews of La Baume were apparently not given the option of converting and saving themselves.78 Echoes of the martyrology of the Jews of Provence also reached Ashkenaz, where they found expression in the Memorbücher [Memorial Books].79 The communities of Provence then began a process of reconstruction, with the encouragement of the Angevin rulers and Pope Clement VI. In 1359, the Jews were once again allowed to return to France by John II, “the Good.” At first (1361), their return was limited to a period of twenty years, subsequently renewed a number of times by the Crown, until 1401.80 The reign of Charles V (1364–80) is recognized as a period of stability and relative security for the Jews. Despite the opposition of court scribes to the Jewish presence, and sharp criticism of the Crown’s favorable position toward usury, the king reconfirmed the rights of the Jews. During this period, the Jews enjoyed the status of foreigners, permitted to settle by the king’s grace for a given period of time. Their presence in France thus no longer had any basis in public law, but derived entirely from the privileges granted at the king’s pleasure. Consequently, in 1394, when it pleased the king’s successor, Charles VI, the Jews were finally expelled from France.81 77

78 79

80 81

Kalonymos ben Kalonymos, Even bohan (Tel Aviv, 1956), 115. On martyrology and conversion and the historiographical debate, see R. Ben Shalom, “Kiddush ha Shem and Jewish Martyrology in Aragon and Castile in 1391: Between Spain and Ashkenaz” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 70 (2001) 227 82. See Shatzmiller, “Les Juifs de Provence pendant la peste noire.” S. Salfeld, Das Martyrologium des Nürnberger Memorbuches (Berlin, 1898), 82. See also B. Dinur, Israel in the Diaspora, vol. II, 2 [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv, 1969), 627, para. 14. See Kohn, Juifs de la France du Nord, 17 29 and 252. S. Shahar, “Ha Yehudim be ʿEne sofre he Haśer u Maʿamadam ʿal pi ha Śavim ha Malkhutiim bi Yeme Sharl he Hamishi,” Zion 33 (1968), 1 14.

southern france 209 All of the expulsions were ordered by the temporal authorities, although the reasons given were the negative influence of the Jews on Christian faith and social morality. Beyond the primary motive of the Crown – i.e. the expropriation of Jewish property, whether out of greed or in order to maintain currency stability – a number of other causes can be cited: pressure from the lower classes, engendered by the practice of usury; the desire to garner popular support for the political goals of the monarchy; and the commitment of the Crown to national cohesion and the elimination of religious and moral deviation. In the background stood two central developments: a vision of Christian society that delineated spiritual boundaries, placing imagined forces of evil on the outside, and the growing tendency of temporal rulers to assume responsibility for the spiritual integrity of the realm.82 The repeated expulsions during the fourteenth century prevented any substantial revival of Jewish life in Languedoc. After the expulsion of 1394, only a small number of refugees settled in Provence, due to the political unrest, warfare, and brigandage that plagued the County at the time.83 THE REIGN OF KING RENÉ AND THE FINAL EXPULSION FROM SOUTHERN FRANCE

Political instability in Provence in the second half of the fifteenth century, including ongoing rivalry between the House of Anjou and the lords of Baux, also left its mark on the Jews, who were called upon from time to time to provide financial support for one house or the other. The arrival of King René “the Good” (1432–80), of the House of Anjou, in Provence in 1447 brought a significant change for the better. He initiated a series of commercial, agrarian, and judicial reforms, bringing economic prosperity, political stability, and intensive cultural activity. The Jews of Provence benefited not only from the economic reforms, but also from a strong central government that jealously guarded their rights. The king derived great economic benefit from the Jews, and the careful enforcement of the laws pertaining to them was an integral part of his centralized domestic policy.84

82

83 84

B. Z. Kedar, “Expulsion as an Issue of World History,” Journal of World History 7 (1996), 165 80. N. Coulet, “Chemins d’un exil: La Provence?” in Dahan, ed., L’expulsion, 193 206. G. Arnaud d’Agnel, “La Politique de René envers les Juifs de Provence,” Bulletin Historique du Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques (1908), 247 76; Kriegel, Les Juifs, 228 9.

210 the middle ages: the christian world René tried to stem the tide of religious fanaticism. In 1453, the Jews of Arles were accused of “slaughtering children and making haroset [a sweet, dark-colored paste made of fruits and nuts eaten at the˙ Passover seder] from their blood.” The matter was brought before the king and his local representatives. A legal proceeding was initiated, during the course of which the Jews of Arles were cleared of all charges. This and other cases show that accusations of ritual murder, originating in the north of Europe, also reached the south, although they were far less common there.85 In 1474, René issued a decree forbidding the baptism of Jews by force or deceit.86 On the other hand, René’s Christian devotion and contemplative nature resulted in a clear policy aimed at the conversion of Jews by persuasion. René became the patron of converted Jews and personally took part in their baptisms. The royal treasury supported poor converts, and Jews who broke the law would receive a royal pardon if they recognized the Christian messiah. Through conversion, a Jew could also acquire the rights of a citizen in another city, and even defer payment of his debts.87 The combination of a positive and tolerant approach to Christianity and sharp religious polemics rejecting missionary attempts and refuting Christology was characteristic of Provençal Jewish culture beginning in the second half of the twelfth century. In the fifteenth century, this approach is embodied by Isaac Nathan of Arles, who was the central leader of the Jews of Provence until the 1470s. Nathan directed much of his intellectual energy to the development of tools to serve Jewish polemicists. He wrote three polemical works, and the ethical work Meamitz koah. His greatest undertaking was the first Hebrew biblical concordance,˙ Meir Nativ (1437–47), composed in light of missionary efforts by the mendicant orders and the efficient use of the Latin concordance by Christian preachers and polemicists. His adoption of the Christian division of the Bible into chapters influenced Jewish Bible study for centuries to come, after the editor of the Rabbinic Bible (Mikraot gedolot; Venice, 1524), Jacob ben Hayyim ibn Adoniyah, chose ˙ to adopt the Christian chapter division as well, due to the importance of Nathan’s concordance. The characteristic Provençal tolerance is also reflected in Meamitz koah, which employs the Christian theological ˙ sins and four cardinal virtues – a choice concepts of the seven deadly

85

86

R. Ben Shalom, “The Blood Libel in Arles and the Franciscan Mission in Avignon in 1453” [Hebrew], Zion 63 (1998), 391 408; G. I. Langmuir, “L’Absence d’accusation de meurtre rituel à l’ouest du Rhône,” Cahiers de Fanjeaux 12 (1977), 235 49. Arnaud d’Agnel, “La Politique de René,” 254 9. 87 Ibid., 262 3.

southern france 211 Nathan justifies with the general belief that Jews should accept good and beneficial ideas found in the Christian religion.88 The County of Provence was annexed to the Kingdom of France in 1481, after René’s heir, Charles III of Maine, died and left his inheritance to King Louis XI. Provence was thus united with France, which had, in 1394, expelled all of its Jewish inhabitants. In the years 1484–8, under the reign of the young Charles VIII, a wave of anti-Jewish violence swept through the Arles–Salon–Tarascon area. The riots began in Arles, during the grape harvest of 1484. A large group of seasonal laborers (figonos) from Dauphiné, Basses-Alpes, or the Liguria region in Italy attacked the Jewish quarter, killed a number of Jews, destroyed and looted property, and forcibly converted about 50 Jews. The violence led many to emigrate, mostly to Sardinia, then under Aragonese rule, where some 200 Provençal refugees settled between 1486 and 1488. The Arles city council arrested and punished the rioters, and took steps to protect the Jews. In the following years, the city council took preventive measures during the grape harvest season. The attacks were followed by a number of local expulsions of Jews, by order of Charles VIII of France, from Arles (1493) and Tarascon (1497). The general expulsion order against the Jews of Provence was issued by Louis XII in 1498, with further orders issued in 1500 and 1501, due to incomplete enforcement of earlier orders.89 The Jews faced the choice of expulsion or conversion. In 1501, about half of the remaining Jews (some 1,000 souls) decided to remain and convert, assuming Christian names. Unlike in the Iberian peninsula, there was no phenomenon of “marranism” in Provence – i.e. a group possessing Jewish roots that developed a distinct identity, while preserving some Jewish traditions. In 1512, families of New Christians were required, by order of King Louis XII, to pay a special, discriminatory tax. The notarial archives were consulted in order to identify those with a Jewish past. This tax would appear to have replaced the Jewish tax (tallia judaeorum), abrogated following the expulsion.90

88

89

90

R. Ben Shalom, “A Minority Looks at the Mendicants: Isaac Nathan the Jew and Thomas Connecte the Carmelite,” Journal of Medieval History 30 (2004), 213 43; Ben Shalom, “Meir Nativ: The First Hebrew Concordance of the Bible and Jewish Bible Study in the Fifteenth Century, in the Context of Jewish Christian Polemics,” Aleph: Historical Studies in Science & Judaism 11 (2011); Ben Shalom, “The First Jewish Work on the Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Virtues,” Mediaeval Studies 75 (2013), 205 70. D. Iancu, Les Juifs en Provence (1475 1501). De l’insertion à l’expulsion (Marseille, 1981), esp. 110 24, 193 202. See D. Iancu Agou, Juifs et néophytes en Provence. L’exemple d’Aix à travers le destin de Régine Abram de Draguignan (1469 1525) (Paris, 2001); Iancu Agou, Être Juif en

212 the middle ages: the christian world The Jews expelled from Provence settled mainly in Italy, the Balkans (Turkey), and North Africa, where they established their own communities or joined local ones. The passage to Italy was easier, due to the longstanding ties between the communities of the two regions. The communities of Provence also had close family and commercial ties with those of the papal enclaves in Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin, which continued to exist over the coming centuries. Nevertheless, few Provençal Jews settled in these areas, due to opposition from local Christians.91

91

Provence, 133 67; J. Shatzmiller, “Encore la Tallia Judeorum,” in G. Sed Rajna, ed., Rashi 1040 1990: Hommage à Ephraïm Urbach (Paris, 1993), 589 97, esp. 589. See D. Iancu Agou, “Les Juifs exilés de Provence (1486 1525),” in F. Burgard, A. Haverkamp, and G. Mentgen, eds., Judenvertreibungen in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit (Hanover, 1999), 119 34; M. Perani, “Juifs provençaux en Sardaigne. Les réfugiés de 1486,” in Iancu Agou, ed., L’Expulsion des juifs), 77 85.

chapter 8

NORTHWESTERN EUROPE robert chazan

Throughout Antiquity and well into the early centuries of the Middle Ages, northern Europe was a backward hinterland to the more advanced civilizations of southern Europe. As Western Christendom began a process of vitalization toward the end of the first millennium, progress along the northern tier – particularly the western sectors of the northern tier – was especially notable. Already during the eleventh century, the knights of northern France made their way southward and reinforced the effort to push Muslims off the Italian and Iberian peninsulas; northern French warriors subsequently played a major role in the successes of the First Crusade. By the early thirteenth century, the Kingdom of France – centered in the north – and the Kingdom of England emerged as two of the most powerful polities in Western Christendom. Indeed, during the first half of the thirteenth century, the Capetian kings of France extended their power from their original base in the north all the way down to the Mediterranean. Along with military and political strength came impressive achievement in the intellectual and spiritual spheres as well, as some of the most vibrant cultural centers of the West crystallized in northern France and England. Northern Europe in general, and northwestern Europe in particular, were well beyond the perimeter of Jewish settlement in Antiquity and the first half of the Middle Ages. Jews had, at an early date, proceeded westward from their ancestral land in Canaan, but their movement was restricted to the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Muslim conquest of much of the Mediterranean basin fostered the growth of the Jewish population living under Muslim rule in both the southern and northern Mediterranean lands. During the first half of the Middle Ages, the largest centers of Jewish population on European soil were in those areas under the control of Islam. The vitalization of Western Christendom introduced major changes in worldwide Jewish demography. Initially, Christian conquest – or, in the Christian view, reconquest – of areas of the Italian and Iberian peninsulas brought important Jewish communities into the orbit of Roman Catholic 213

214 the middle ages: the christian world Europe. In the north, however, there were no areas with a pre-existent Jewish population to conquer. To the extent that a Jewish population was to coalesce in the north, it had to be the result of migration, and such migration did in fact take place, although the process is impossible to track in any detail. During the second half of the Middle Ages, increasingly numerous and large Jewish communities developed all across northern Europe, from England in the west through to Hungary and Poland in the east. These new Jewish communities continued their remarkable growth throughout the early modern and modern centuries, eventually dominating the world Jewish population. The situation of Jews in northern France and England was special, differing markedly from Jewish circumstances further eastward in the Germanic and Slavic lands. In northwestern Europe, rapid economic and political development created unique opportunities for Jews, and they were able to exploit these opportunities effectively. The Jews of northern France and England created an unusually close alliance with the ruling authorities and achieved remarkable success in the economic sphere, thereby contributing significantly to the maturation of these two kingdoms. Building on these foundations, the Jews of France and England fashioned communal institutions that fostered outstanding intellectual and spiritual creativity, catapulting themselves to a position of leadership in Jewish religious life and resulting in works that have become classics in the Jewish world over the subsequent centuries.1 However, the rapid rise of the Jewries of northern France and England gave way quickly to equally rapid decline. By the middle of the thirteenth century, Jewish well-being in both the economic and spiritual spheres was profoundly compromised across northwestern Europe. By the end of the thirteenth century, Jews were banished from England, and in the early fourteenth century the same fate befell the Jews of France. Although some Jews were permitted to return to France in 1315, a vibrant community did not take root prior to final expulsion in 1394. Thus, the story of these two Jewries was unique; it involved creation de novo, rapid and impressive growth and development, and precipitous decline and disappearance. The emergence of these two northwestern European Jewries is shrouded in obscurity. A curious narrative depicts developments in northwestern France during the closing years of the tenth century, specifically in the year 992.2 1

2

See the Martin Lockshin, “Bible Studies,” and Ephraim Kanarfogel, “Talmudic Studies,” Chapters 21 and 22, respectively, in this volume. This brief narrative can be found conveniently in Abraham Habermann, ed., Sefer Gezerot Ashkenaz ve Tsarfat (Jerusalem, 1945), 11 15. Unfortunately, the provenance of this source cannot be determined, nor can its date of composition be ascertained.

northwestern europe 215 The tale involves a disreputable Jew who traveled about northwestern France, posing sometimes as a Jew and sometimes as a Christian. This immediately suggests a rather primitive situation. Such masquerading would have been unthinkable in the better-organized twelfth or thirteenth centuries. Eventually, this disreputable fellow fell into dispute with a leading Jew of the town of Le Mans and hired thugs from Blois (whom he refused to pay their assigned recompense) to assassinate his rival. Interestingly, the killing of the Jew aroused Christian neighbors to rush to his aid. Eventually, the villain of the story hatched a plot against the entire Jewish community of Le Mans. He deposited a waxen image in the ark of the Le Mans synagogue, brought the local Christian ruler to the synagogue, and alleged that the Jews regularly pierced this waxen image in order to bring pain to the Christian ruler, precisely as they had earlier brought pain to Jesus, his messiah. Incensed, the ruler arranged a trial by battle between a member of the Jewish community and its accuser.3 At this point, our source breaks off, although there are hints throughout that the trial by battle in fact turned out auspiciously for the Jews. Thus, Jewish life was in evidence in northwestern France at the very end of the tenth century. The Jewish community of late tenth-century Le Mans had some kind of economic base and had built a synagogue for itself. We would, of course, like to know much more about this very early stage in the history of the Jews of northern France. A second brief narrative provides further evidence of Jewish life in the same area a few years later. The year specified is 1007, during the reign of Robert the Pious, king of France, who ruled from 996 to 1031. Using imagery from the Book of Esther, the author portrays a royal edict decreeing conversion or death for the Jews. Confronted with this choice, the Jews are described by the author as resolute in their rejection of baptism, willing to suffer death rather than deny their faith. A Jewish leader, Jacob ben Yekutiel of Rouen, challenged the forced conversion, insisting that religious issues such as conversion were the province of the Church and offering to travel to Rome and clarify the stance of the pope on this matter. According to our author, Jacob and the members of his family were imprisoned by his overlord, Duke Richard of Normandy. Miraculous divine intervention saved the life of the Jew and convinced Duke Richard to send him off to Rome. The description of the trip to Rome suggests a Jewish magnate of great wealth. The visit to the papal court proved highly successful, with the pope purportedly circulating a letter specifying the fundamental right of Jews to live peacefully in Christian society. This supposed letter contained in fact the central stipulations of the Constitutio pro Judeis, promulgated from the 3

This narrative can be found in ibid., 19 21.

216 the middle ages: the christian world twelfth century onward by most medieval popes.4 The visit to Rome concluded with the pope sending Jacob off with great honor and Jacob returning to his homeland, where he remained for twelve years. While much of this tale seems folkloric and its details somewhat questionable, the narrative ends on a prosaic but useful note. At the close of this twelve-year period, “Baldwin the count of Flanders sent a letter, inviting the grandee [Jacob] to come to him and indicating that he might bring with him thirty Jews to settle in his land.”5 According to the narrative, Jacob’s sojourn in Flanders was brief, as he expired after three months. Since the Jewish settlement in Flanders was so young, there was not yet a Jewish cemetery, and thus Jacob’s remains were brought back to Rheims for burial. Here we have what looks like a relatively reliable account of the establishment of a new Jewish settlement. This process involved a wealthy Jewish magnate, perception of potential Jewish economic utility, and the support of the local ruler. This was in all likelihood the paradigm for the establishment of many new Jewish settlements across northwestern Europe during the eleventh century.6 The establishment of the first identifiable Jewish settlement in England probably proceeded along these same lines. In the wake of the conquest of England by the duke of Normandy in 1066, the new king of England, William the Conqueror, most likely invited some of his Norman Jews to cross the Channel and establish a Jewish community in England, in much the same way that the count of Flanders earlier settled Jews in his domain. Interestingly, Jewish settlement in England lasted for more than two centuries, while Jewish efforts to create a foothold in the medieval County of Flanders proved unsuccessful. Sources for Jewish life in northwestern Europe during the eleventh century are sparse. Little non-Jewish evidence has survived, suggesting that the immigrating Jews had not yet left a significant mark on the majority environment. Jewish responsa literature – the addressing of legal questions to religious authorities for resolution – reflects a well-organized community of merchants spread across northwestern Europe.7 4

5 6

7

An early version of the Constitutio pro Judeis can be conveniently found in Solomon Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century, ed. and trans. Kenneth R. Stow, 2 vols. (New York, 1989), I, 92 5, #5. Habermann, Sefer Gezerot, 21. There is likewise a Hebrew narrative source for the creation of a Jewish community in the Rhineland town of Speyer. However, in this instance, we have as well the formal Latin charter of invitation. See Robert Chazan, Church, State, and Jew in the Middle Ages (West Orange, 1980), 59 for the Hebrew narrative, and 58 9 for the Latin charter. Many valuable early responsa from northern Europe have been collected and translated by Irving A. Agus, ed. and trans., Urban Civilization in Pre Crusade Europe, 2 vols. (New York, 1968).

northwestern europe 217 While there are recurrent references to Jewish agricultural activity, especially viticulture, these Jewish efforts do not seem to have been revenueproducing, but rather seem to reflect Jewish religious needs. Along with agricultural activity, Jewish moneylending is also missing from this early responsa literature. The central Jewish economic outlet is buying and selling, with Jews portrayed as local businessmen, as merchants traveling within a restricted radius, or as traders traversing considerable distances. Also obvious from the responsa is the effective organization of the young Jewish communities of northwestern Europe. While these young settlements lacked the venerable and powerful institutions of the older Jewries of the Near East and the Mediterranean basin, they fashioned institutions that represented them to the non-Jewish authorities and provided for a wide range of internal social, educational, and religious needs. By and large, the situation of the young Jewish communities of northwestern Europe seems to have been fairly secure. Although the two Hebrew narratives cited suggest occasional danger, they indicate no evidence of wide-ranging popular animosity. Both they and the responsa literature reflect relatively stable relations between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors. The papal call to the First Crusade in 1095 had as an unanticipated by-product some destabilization of Christian–Jewish relations. The sanctification of warfare against the enemies of Christendom and Christianity and the reinforcement of an internal sense of Christian cohesion within Western Christendom bore the potential for popular focus on the newly settled Jews of northwestern Europe as outsiders and enemies. Such perceptions seemingly surfaced only minimally in northern France and England, especially when contrasted with the serious outbreaks of antiJewish violence in the Rhineland.8 The only Jewish community in northwestern Europe known to have suffered assault in the early stages of the First Crusade is that of Rouen.9 This relative safety is most probably the result of both a lower level of popular agitation and a higher level of effective governmental oversight. The most impressive achievement of the young Jewry of northern France and England lay in its intellectual and spiritual creativity. Over the long history of the Jews, the evolution of such creativity generally involves lengthy centuries of maturation prior to the emergence of significant intellectual and spiritual movements and figures. The Jews of eleventh-century northern 8

9

On the Rhineland outbreaks, see Robert Chazan, European Jewry and the First Crusade (Berkeley, 1987). This incident is recounted by Guibert of Nogent in his memoir. See Paul J. Archambault (trans.), A Monk’s Confession: The Memoirs of Guibert of Nogent (University Park, PA, 1996), 111.

218 the middle ages: the christian world Europe constituted an impressive exception to this rule. By the end of the first century of genuine Jewish life in northwestern Europe, the Jews of this area had already fashioned durable cultural institutions, had produced one giant figure, and had laid the foundations for innovative twelfth- and earlythirteenth-century creativity. The late eleventh-century giant is Solomon ben Isaac of Troyes, in the county of Champagne, known to subsequent Jews as Rashi. Rashi’s personal odyssey indicates the early cultural pre-eminence of Rhineland Jewry in northern Europe. Rashi made his way eastward to the Rhineland in order to enjoy the fruits of the young Jewish academies founded there. Return to his native Champagne spared Rashi from the devastating attacks that decimated the Rhineland Jewish communities of Worms, Mainz, and Cologne in 1096. Ensconced in the small Jewish settlement of Troyes, Rashi studied and taught, and out of his studying and teaching emerged two masterpieces – his commentary on the Bible and his commentary on the Babylonian Talmud. Both works reflect remarkable erudition and innovative creativity; both quickly became authoritative across the Jewish communities of northern Europe and eventually into those of the south as well. They have retained their status as classics down into the twenty-first century. With the onset of the twelfth century, the pace of change across northwestern Europe accelerated. Three major twelfth-century developments affected Jewish life in northern France and England: economic progress, the efforts of the Church to control aspects of this progress, and the maturation of governmental authority across both areas. Ecclesiastical concern about the burgeoning northern European economy focused on Christian usury. Committed to the Deuteronomic prohibition of taking interest from a fellow-countryman, the leadership of the Church sought with considerable success to rein in moneylending among Christians. However, banking was – as it still is – the lifeblood of economic expansion. Thus, the combination of a need for the exchange of capital and the Church’s restrictive policies opened up an important new avenue of economic activity for the young Jewish communities of northern France and England, since both Christians and Jews saw in Deuteronomy 23:20 permission for the taking of interest by Christian from Jew and by Jew from Christian. This new avenue of economic opportunity facilitated a number of twelfth-century changes, some salutary for the Jews and some detrimental. The new involvement in moneylending allowed the Jews of northwestern Europe to profit considerably; it at the same time enabled them to make a useful – although by no means popular – contribution to general economic growth; it thrust them ever more deeply into an intense

northwestern europe 219 relationship with the rulers of northwestern Europe, with both beneficial and harmful results for the Jews; and it added a further negative image – that of moneylender – to the already potent negative imagery of newcomers and Jews. The most primitive form of moneylending involved (and still involves) extending funds against the security provided by deposit of objects as pledges or pawns, which could then be sold by the lender in case of default. The limitations of this kind of moneylending were many: the relatively small sums that could be lent against objects; the discomfort involved in storing and maintaining these objects; and the difficulty of disposing of them in case of default. With the maturation of both the economy and governance in northwestern Europe, a much more sophisticated and lucrative form of moneylending became possible for the Jews of northern France and England. This more advanced form of moneylending involved the government authorities in guaranteeing Jewish loans. While Jews continued to lend against pledges, the new-style lending promised considerable benefit to both the Jewish lenders and their governmental sponsors. Jews could avoid the complications associated with possession of pawns; they could also lend with far greater assurance of return; most importantly, they could lend far larger sums of money, using real estate – then, as now, extremely valuable – as the collateral for their loans. The governmental authorities seem to have concluded that the augmented flow of capital through the medium of Jewish moneylending would stimulate the burgeoning economies of their domains; more narrowly, these authorities could tax rather freely Jewish wealth accruing from lucrative moneylending. With the passage of time, the system of governmentally guaranteed loans became increasingly sophisticated and effective, especially in England, where governmental administration developed impressively. By the end of the twelfth century, government offices where Jewish loans were registered were found in many English urban centers. For a period of time, the system worked to the benefit of both the Jews and their governmental sponsors. A number of Jews in northern France and England prospered remarkably. The most famous of these wealthy Jews was Aaron of Lincoln, reputed to be the wealthiest Englishman of his era. Lesser-known English Jews and a coterie of northern French Jews amassed great wealth as well, very much to the advantage of the Jewish communities within which they lived. Governmental concern with profiting from Jewish lending seems to have reinforced the prior commitment to assuring security for the Jews of northern France and England. Despite the ongoing dangers associated with Crusading and popular antipathy to the new Jewish moneylending, the rulers of twelfth-century northern Europe

220 the middle ages: the christian world protected their Jews assiduously, enabling the Jewish communities of northwestern Europe to thrive physically and to augment their intellectual and spiritual achievement. While there is no way of knowing fully, it seems that the economy of northwestern Europe was indeed stimulated by Jewish moneylending. H. G. Richardson has shown that Jewish lending resulted in the rationalization of landholding in twelfth-century England. Barons no longer in step with the times lost their land through indebtedness to Jews; the new wealthy urban class eventually came to acquire these lands. To be sure, this reorganization of landholding was deeply resented by the dispossessed barons and was hardly popular with the Church and the populace at large, but it seems to have been a constructive contribution nonetheless.10 The French and English political authorities enjoyed considerable revenue benefits from Jewish moneylending. The extensive recording of indebtedness, which served Jewish business interests most effectively, meant that governments were well informed as to Jewish wealth and could levy taxes based on reliable knowledge of Jewish financial resources. This augmented taxation alerts us to some of the negatives of the sophisticated lending arrangements that developed in twelfth-century northern France and England. Heightened governmental exploitation was the first of these liabilities. A second was growing ecclesiastical questioning of, and eventually opposition to, the new Jewish business activity. Since it was ecclesiastical policy that first opened up this economic outlet to the Jews, the Church was especially sensitive to this issue. Initially, Church leaders sought to protect the vulnerable in Christian society from Jewish lending; eventually, opposition emerged to Jewish taking of interest from Christian borrowers altogether. With the passage of time, Church opposition became more vocal and, during the thirteenth century, was a significant factor in deteriorating Jewish circumstances. Finally, Jewish moneylending deepened the negative imagery of the Jews of northwestern Europe. Moneylending/banking has never been a popular economic activity. Given the New Testament projection of Jesus’ Jewish contemporaries as his only enemies, and the purported virulence of this enmity, Christian thinkers during late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages had embellished the imagery of Jewish animosity to Christianity and of Jewish malevolence. Increasingly, twelfth-century Jewish lending activities were perceived as vehicles through which venomous Jews did damage to Christian society. Notions of Jewish abuse of Christian sancta taken by Jews as pawns and of Jewish harm inflicted on unfortunate Christian 10

H. G. Richardson, The English Jewry under Angevin Kings (London, 1960).

northwestern europe 221 borrowers were overlaid on more traditional imagery of Jewish hostility and harmfulness. This combination is patent in the York massacre of 1190. Dangerous portents of anti-Jewish violence in England were manifest already at the time of King Richard’s coronation. In his absence, Crusade-related violence broke out in a number of locales. While the assault on the Jews of York was initially motivated by the somewhat standard Crusader sense of historic Jewish enmity, there are unique aspects to this attack. When a number of the besieged York Jews indicated readiness for conversion, the normal outcome would have been a joyous procession to the local church and baptism. Instead, these York Jews were slaughtered. Immediately thereafter, York Cathedral, in which the area’s loan documents were stored, was invaded, and the loan documents were removed and destroyed. Clearly, the powerful negative imagery associated with Jewish lending played a central role in a new form of anti-Jewish violence.11 Perhaps not coincidentally, the twelfth century saw the emergence of a new perception of Jews as here-and-now enemies of Christian society, ever poised to inflict physical harm on Christian neighbors, especially the weak and defenseless. This perception was deeply rooted in northwestern Europe, the area in which Jewish lending was especially prominent. One of the first known instances in northwestern Europe of the malicious murder allegation came in Norwich in 1144. There, the mutilated corpse of a young tanner was discovered outside town. As news of the crime filtered into Norwich, some burghers were immediately convinced that Jews were the culprits, while others rejected this conclusion.12 Allegations of gratuitous Jewish murder of Christians proliferated, with the authorities protecting their endangered Jews assiduously and successfully. In 1171, in the northern French town of Blois, Jews were accused of murdering a Christian youngster, with no corpse ever discovered. In this unusual instance, the local ruler – Count Theobald of Blois – had some thirty Jews executed, in a break with the normal governmental stance of protection. In the wake of this dangerous precedent, the Jews of northern France were successful in eliciting protective statements from a series of ecclesiastical and secular authorities, most prominently King Louis VII of France.13 The basic imagery of Jewish murderousness was quickly spun into more elaborate forms. Thomas of Monmouth, a post-1144 arrival in Norwich, 11 12

13

See R. B. Dobson, The Jews of York and the Massacre of 1190 (York, 1974). Thomas of Monmouth, The Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich, ed. and trans. Augustus Jessopp and Montague Rhodes James (Cambridge, 1896), 36. Robert Chazan, “The Blois Incident of 1171: A Study in Inter Communal Organization,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 36 (1968), 13 31.

222 the middle ages: the christian world penned in 1150 a treatise arguing the case for the sainthood of the murdered young Christian tanner, William of Norwich. In making his case, Thomas claimed that there was a witness to the murder, which was allegedly carried out in ritual format, with the Jews crucifying young William in imitation of their crucifixion of his deity.14 This claim constituted a powerful case for the sainthood of William; at the same time, it transformed the Jews of Norwich, and of northwestern Europe in general, from historic enemies of Christianity and Christians into contemporary foes and a significant danger to everyday Christian well-being. Despite the intensification of anti-Jewish perceptions, Jewish circumstances in twelfth-century Europe remained relatively secure. The authorities exercised effective control of their domains and remained committed to Jewish safety and security. The judicial murder at Blois constituted an exception to the normally protective governmental stance. The Rhineland violence associated with the First Crusade, which has often been projected as a turning point in Jewish circumstances in medieval Europe, signals no such turning point for the Jews of northern France and England. Jewish economic fortunes continued to improve, and Jewish cultural creativity flourished. The foundations laid by Rashi during the second half of the eleventh century were reinforced, and innovative intellectual schools emerged throughout the twelfth century, with Rashi’s own grandchildren playing major leadership roles. Rashi’s first great work was a comprehensive commentary on the Hebrew Bible, into which he absorbed many rabbinic traditions. At the same time, Rashi also regularly insisted on a more direct and contextual understanding of biblical verses and images. This latter tendency was extended by Rashi’s grandson, Samuel ben Meir, and a number of twelfth-century northern French Jewish biblical exegetes. This new school of contextual exegesis flourished throughout most of the twelfth century, contributing significantly to the rich corpus of medieval Jewish Bible commentary. How it was related to the tendency within Christian schools of the twelfth century toward direct and contextual understanding of the biblical text is not clear, but the parallels have often been noted and are striking.15 Equally influential was the continuation of the Rashi initiative of talmudic commentary. Rashi’s own comments on the Babylonian Talmud are pithy and relatively straightforward. They laid the foundation for a more extended and analytic style of talmudic exegesis. Once more, it was a grandson of Rashi, Jacob ben Meir, who seems to have led the way in this new direction. The innovative twelfth-century Talmud commentaries 14 15

Thomas of Monmouth, Life and Miracles, 20 1. See Martin Lockshin, “Bible Studies,” Chapter 21 in this volume.

northwestern europe 223 sought to move beyond the simple and direct, to treat the entire talmudic corpus as a unified and coherent entity, and to explain contemporary Jewish practice in ways that were consonant with the talmudic text. The underlying assumption was consistency – consistency of the Talmud in its entirety, and consistency between the Talmud and Jewish practice. Where two talmudic passages seemed at first blush to contradict one another, the Tosafists – the name given to this new school – sought to alter understanding of one or the other text in order to produce consistency. Likewise, when text and practice seemed to contradict one another, creative interpretation of the text was undertaken. Once again, recent scholars have pointed to the parallels between the Tosafist concerns and methods and those of the contemporary northern European schools of canon law, and once again it has been difficult to identify the channels through which the Jewish exegetes might have come to know the work of their Christian peers.16 Thus, the twelfth century emerges as a period of ongoing growth and development for northwestern European Jewry. The Jewish communities of northern France and England grew numerically, opened new avenues of economic success, strengthened their communal structures, and created vigorously in a number of intellectual and spiritual domains. To be sure, change was in the offing. For France, the lengthy reign of Philip Augustus – extending from 1179/80 to 1223 – constituted a period of transition, as the previously weak French monarchy began its ascent to a position of dominance on the European scene. At the outset of his reign, the young Capetian king was surrounded by powerful barons, determined to maintain and even expand their authority at the expense of the monarchy. At his death, Philip Augustus bequeathed to his son and heir a much larger royal domain and far more extensive royal authority. Within a few decades of his demise, royal France had grown to the dimensions it has enjoyed down to modem times, extending all the way to the Mediterranean; it had become one of the most powerful states in Western Christendom. These subsequent successes began with the crafty maneuvers and impressive achievements of King Philip Augustus.17

16 17

See Ephraim Kanarfogel, “Talmudic Studies,” Chapter 22 in this volume. For recent treatments of the reign of Philip Augustus, see John W. Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus: Foundations of French Royal Power in the Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1986), and Jean Flori, Phillipe August: la naissance de l’état monarchique (Paris, 2002). Both emphasize the historic significance of this reign.

224 the middle ages: the christian world When Philip Augustus ascended the throne, he was but one of many rulers across northern France who had Jewish clients whom they protected and taxed. Barons – powerful and weak – had such Jewish clients. One of the powerful barons with an extensive group of Jewish clients was the count of Champagne. We have already noted Solomon ben Isaac of Troyes (Rashi) as the first giant figure of Jewish intellectual and spiritual life in eleventhcentury northwestern Europe; Rashi and his fellow-Jews in Troyes were part and parcel of the Jewish clientele of the counts of Champagne. At the outset of the reign of Philip Augustus, the majority of the Jews of northern France lived under the authority of the barony. As the young king expanded his territorial holdings and his royal power, a larger number of Jews came under his direct jurisdiction, and royal policies began to affect increasingly the Jews of the northern French barons. The young king was heir to the Jewish policy of his predecessors. Jews had settled widely throughout the limited royal domain, enjoyed considerable protection, flourished economically by virtue of their moneylending, built effective internal governance, and created an impressive cultural legacy. Philip Augustus decided at the outset of his reign to alter the policies of his predecessors and to utilize the wealth of the Jews to bolster his weak position. His royal biographer, Rigord of Saint-Denis, rooted the early anti-Jewish moves in the Christian concerns of his monarch, citing the king’s anger over Jewish usury in and of itself, royal indignation over blasphemous Jewish abuse of Christian sancta taken as pledges, and the monarch’s awareness of the new allegations of gratuitous Jewish murder.18 The king’s alleged Christian concerns reflect growing Church agitation against Jewish usury and new popular anti-Jewish sentiment. Both pressures may well have influenced Philip Augustus and stimulated his antiJewish actions. At the same time, the early steps he took against the Jews of royal France brought him much-needed financial resources. The royal anti-Jewish steps began with a seizure of Jewish goods, on a Sabbath day early in his reign, in February 1181.19 Some time thereafter, King Philip undertook a more sophisticated move, which resulted in multiple gains. He ordered remission of debts owed to the Jews of the royal domain, with a fifth of the sums owed to be paid to the royal treasury. In so doing, the king curried favor with reform elements in the Church that were agitating strenuously against Jewish usury, won appreciation from 18

19

Rigord, Histoire de Philippe Auguste, ed. Elisabeth Carpentier, Georges Pons, and Yves Chauvin (Paris, 2006), 130 53. I have followed the dating suggested by William Chester Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews: From Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians (Philadelphia, 1989), 30, rather than the traditional 1180.

northwestern europe 225 debtors relieved of 80 percent of their obligations, and at the same time realized substantial revenue from the remaining 20 percent of the sums owed to Jews. The Church, the debtor class, and the royal treasury were all winners; the only losers were the Jews. In this clever step, we can see clearly negative aspects of the Jewish move into moneylending – arousing the opposition of the Church, evoking the hostility of the borrowers, and intensifying the power of the authorities over Jewish fate. In April of 1182, the king ordered the expulsion of Jews from the royal domain. The arrangements for exile allowed Jews to retain possession of their moveable goods, but confiscated Jewish real estate for the royal treasury. Jewish synagogues were ceded to the Church, which again may reflect genuine royal concern for the Church or at least the search for ecclesiastical support. Given the growing hostility toward the Jews and their moneylending, expulsion surely won considerable public approbation. At the same time, the expulsion secured, once more, substantial revenue for the royal coffers. The precise legal grounding for the expulsion is not clear. Some observers at the time assumed that the king exercised rights over the Jews as his feudal subjects; others were convinced that he was acting in his capacity as protector of the Christian faith and community. In any case, seen from the perspective of Philip’s difficult circumstances, the edict of expulsion was a clever and multi-purposed initiative; seen from the perspective of the Jews who suffered dislocation, it was a cruel and destructive act; seen from the perspective of subsequent Jewish history in medieval Western Christendom, it was a dangerous precedent, despite Philip’s own subsequent retreat from and implicit repudiation of his banishment of Jews. The impact of the expulsion of 1182 was mitigated to a significant extent by the small size of the French royal domain. The banished Jews could find new homes in neighboring baronies, which were not all that far away from their prior domiciles and which were part of the same social and cultural ambience. Nonetheless, the uprooting was surely painful to the royal Jews. Indeed, it caused considerable dislocation in those neighboring territories in which the banished Jews relocated. Given the limited economic outlets of these twelfth-century Jews, towns could absorb only a small number of Jewish businessmen or moneylenders. An influx of royal Jews meant a serious strain on the Jewish residents of the places that served as refuges. The initial anti-Jewish moves of the young monarch served multiple purposes and were arguably very useful. From a long-term perspective, however, they ultimately robbed the French monarchy of a valuable resource, in terms of both general economic stimulation and taxation. These losses in all likelihood moved Philip to reverse his edict of expulsion and reabsorb Jews into his domain. The occasion for this reversal was the

226 the middle ages: the christian world anti-usury agitation of a reformist preacher, Fulk of Neuilly. Fulk’s antiusury preaching moved a number of northern French barons to emulate their king and expel Jews from their domains. Philip took the opportunity provided by Jews in movement to invite them back into the royal domain. From 1198 onward, he pursued a new and once again sophisticated strategy of mollifying the Church, while at the same time insuring maximal revenue from his new Jewish clients. Subsequent to 1198, Philip Augustus enacted a series of edicts that limited Jewish moneylending in ways that reflect Church sensitivities and pressures.20 Key limitations began in 1206 with stipulation of a maximum rate that Jews might charge as interest. Such rate limitation would subsequently emerge as a major demand of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, but churchmen had already been arguing for this well before then. This stipulation was repeated in all of Philip’s post-1198 Jewish legislation. In addition, Philip further restricted Jewish usury by ordering, sometime between 1198 and 1223, that Jewish loans might not run for more than one year, thus eliminating potentially ruinous compounding of interest.21 The royal legislation also limited the range of objects that might be taken as pledges, outlawing initially the acceptance of ecclesiastical vessels or ornaments and subsequently prohibiting certain objects that might be essential to the livelihood of the borrower. Finally, Jews were prohibited from lending to certain segments of the Christian population, including clerics and those who earned their livelihood by their labor.22 All these limitations reflect major Church demands voiced regularly and insistently and suggest royal desire to curry favor with the ecclesiastical authorities. In the process, Jewish lending and Jewish profit were increasingly restricted. Along with concern for mollifying the Church, the post-1198 policies of Philip Augustus also reflect his desire to realize maximal revenue from his Jews and their business activities. The first step in maximizing revenue was stabilization of Jewish residential patterns. To the extent that Jews might circulate freely among various domains, tax revenues were jeopardized. Exploitation of Jewish business necessitated careful identification of residence patterns and – more important – tax obligations. King Philip Augustus was the first to control Jewish residential patterns and tax obligations, and he did so in a number of ways. At the point of recalling Jews into the royal domain, Philip Augustus established treaties with major neighboring holders of Jews, stipulating that each would respect the others’ rights over their Jews.23 Alternatively, 20 22 23

For this string of edicts, see Chazan, Church, State, and Jew, 205 11. 21 Ibid., 208. Ibid., 209 10. Robert Chazan, Medieval Jewry in Northern France (Baltimore, 1973), 75 6.

northwestern europe 227 the king bound the Jews themselves to the royal domain. At the time of the conquest of Normandy – an important step in augmentation of the royal domain and royal power – Philip Augustus required oaths and deposits from the Jews there now passing into his control that they would remain royal Jews.24 Thus, in multiple and effective ways, the mobility of the royal Jews was compromised, and royal control over the king’s Jews was enhanced. At the same time, King Philip began to emulate the closer supervision of Jewish lending already noted for earlier twelfth-century England. The initial edict of 1206 specified that Jewish loans were to be sealed with new seals and that only debts thus legitimized would be enforced. In the next legislation, enacted between 1206 and 1219, royal officials were enjoined to select “two proper men in each town, who by their oath will faithfully take charge of the Jews’ seal.” Special arrangements were made for enrollment of the debts of the Jews of Normandy. These special arrangements probably reflect the earlier and more sophisticated English and Norman regulation of Jewish lending.25 The result of all this was better royal knowledge about Jewish lending, which was an important step toward more effective exploitation of Jewish resources. Thus, the reign of Philip Augustus, which constituted a major transition in the extent of royal France and in the power of the monarchy, was likewise a period of transition for the Jews of northern France. By the end of this reign, the expanded royal domain harbored a larger number of Jews, now more closely controlled than had previously been the case. Church demands were increasingly influential in royal policy, and royal exploitation of Jewish business was now established on a firmer footing. The negative potentials in the Jewish turn to moneylending were increasingly being realized. The situation in late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century England was quite different. The growing power of the French monarchy under Philip Augustus contrasted with a loss of power by the English kings during the closing decades of the twelfth century and the opening decades of the thirteenth. The reign of King John – in particular from 1199 to 1216 – saw royal weakness and significant instability, both of which were detrimental to the Jews of England. The assaults associated with the Third Crusade, especially the unusual events in York already noted, are accurate reflections of the general instability of affairs in England. Indeed, a considerable portion of English Jewry, those living in Normandy, passed from the control of the English kings into the hands of Philip Augustus. 24

Ibid., 77.

25

Chazan, Church, State, and Jew, 208.

228 the middle ages: the christian world With the death of King Philip Augustus in 1223, his balanced post-1198 policy of mollifying the Church while at the same time extracting maximal profit from the Jews began to shift markedly. A major landmark in this shift was the edict of 1223, enacted shortly after the accession of King Louis VIII to the throne. In a move that was, in and of itself, a major innovation, the new king gained the assent of a large number of barons of northern France to a radical change in Jewish policy, which reflected the growing impact of the Church on the complex issue of Jewish lending. While Philip Augustus had shown considerable sensitivity to Church demands, he had at the same time strengthened control of Jewish residence patterns and Jewish business, in an effort to augment revenue from Jewish moneylending. Now, the new king and associated barons agreed to Church demands that would cost them much of this revenue. The key change reflected in the legislation of 1223 was withdrawal of all governmental support for Jewish lending. Jewish lending with governmental backing had constituted a major step forward in Jewish business affairs during the twelfth century, especially in England but in northern France as well. This new form of lending had allowed the Jews to prosper while enhancing governmental tax revenue. Now the entire system of governmental support was obliterated in northern France. “Henceforth, Jews will not have seals for the sealing of their debts.”26 In the words of William Chester Jordan, who has analyzed this edict closely, “an entire structure was collapsing.”27 Church leaders had long objected to governmental support for Jewish lending and related exploitation of Jewish profits. To churchmen, this arrangement seemed like a partnership between Jews and their lords to profit jointly, thereby implicating Christian authorities in the exaction of usury from their Christian subjects. This Church criticism had previously been implicitly rejected. Philip Augustus had balanced his mollifying the Church in numerous ways with ongoing support of Jewish lending and exploitation of the profits. Now the balanced policy was ending, and thorough capitulation of ecclesiastical pressure on the issue of Jewish usury was to become the norm for the Capetian monarchy. This damaging step for Jewish business affairs would, under earlier circumstances, have resulted in Jewish population movement. Jews would have fled domains in which governmental support was withdrawn, and would have sought refuge and resumption of their business in alternative domains. As noted, the legislation of 1223 was sealed by numerous 26 27

Ibid., 211 12. Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews, 96. Note Jordan’s precise analysis of this edict on 94 8.

northwestern europe 229 northern French barons, all of whom agreed to the new policy. In addition, the following stipulation was included: “It is to be known that we and our barons have decreed and ordained concerning the status of the Jews that none of us may receive or retain the Jews of another.” All the sealers of the ordinance agreed not to take possession of Jews fleeing the effects of the new legislation. There was in fact more: “This is to be understood both for those who have sworn to the ordinance as well as those who have not.”28 This last sentence suggests a move in the direction of royal legislation binding upon all barons living within the borders of royal authority.29 For the Jews themselves, this meant no escape from the edict. The new policy, reflecting total acceptance of Church demands, was to be yet more fully pursued during the lengthy reign of Louis IX, revered for his personal piety and his commitment to serving the Church through his royal authority. Two reflections of the saintly monarch’s views on the Jews have survived, and both are illuminating. The first was penned by the royal biographer, William of Chartres. William describes an interesting exchange between the king, who was contemplating complete prohibition of Jewish moneylending (which he, in fact, enacted), and unnamed royal advisors.30 These advisors pointed out the liabilities of the proposed royal prohibition. They noted – reasonably enough – that all societies require moneylending, as indicated by the king’s own recourse to bankers from time to time. Given this reality, moneylending would obviously continue in France, despite the anticipated royal prohibition of Jewish lending. This would necessarily result in Christians doing the inevitable lending, in contravention of Church law. While this argument certainly made considerable sense, the king rejected it, noting that matters relating to Christians who lend money and to their usury seem to be the concern of the prelates of the churches. “To me, however, pertain matters relative to the Jews, who are subjected to me by the yoke of servitude, that they might not oppress Christians through their usury and that they not be permitted, under the shelter of my protection, to infect my land with their poison.” This reported exchange suggests that Louis IX had embraced fully the conviction that Jewish presence in royal France was entirely the result of his support, which meant to him that pernicious Jewish behaviors were a blot on his soul. Also obvious here is the pious king’s sense that Jewish usury was harmful to the Christian populace of France and that this harm was 28 29

30

Chazan, Church, State, and Jew, 212. Note the classic article by Gavin I. Langmuir, “‘Judei Nostri’ and the Beginning of Capetian Legislation,” Traditio 16 (1960), 203 69. William of Chartres, “De vita et miraculis sancti Ludovici,” in Leopold Delisle et al., eds., Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France, 24 vols. (Paris, 1737 1904), 34.

230 the middle ages: the christian world ultimately his personal responsibility. To be sure, these rational conclusions seem to have been accompanied for the monarch by deep emotional overtones. Jews infecting the land with their poison is a striking image. This powerful emotional note is reprised in the closing words of the report: “Let them abandon usury or they shall leave my land completely, so that it no longer be polluted with their filth.”31 Louis IX had developed a thoughtful view of the place of Jews in his kingdom and of the role of their moneylending. At the same time, he seems to have responded viscerally to these issues as well. The second testimony is focused entirely on Louis’s visceral antipathy to Jews. It was provided by an unusual lay leader close to Louis IX. John of Joinville authored a remarkable memoir of his royal hero.32 In the early part of this memoir, John creates a hagiographic portrait of the pious monarch. In this section, John recalls a striking conversation between himself and Louis. The discussion involved the propriety of religious debate with Jews. As an indication of Louis’s views on this issue, the king told a story about an invitation purportedly extended to Jews by the monks of Cluny, for religious disputation. The setting for the story is dubious. Churchmen by the middle of the thirteenth century rarely if ever invited Jews to an open exchange of religious views. Rather, by that time, the Church had embarked on a concerted campaign to missionize among Jews by confronting them with Christian arguments in compulsory sermons or forced disputations. These forced engagements were hardly free and open exchanges; they involved the presentation of Christian arguments, to which the Jews might reply, with the proviso, of course, that these replies involve no denigration of Christianity. In any case, according to Louis, the first question was allegedly posed to the Jews by an infirm knight, who asked why they would have entered a church in view of their obvious rejection of its beliefs and principles. This question was then followed immediately by the knight’s beating the Jewish spokesman with his crutch, resulting in flight by the terrified Jewish group. This strange story, which hardly corresponds to thirteenth-century ecclesiastical realities, ends with physical violence against a group of Jews invited by the monks of Cluny themselves, and Louis heartily endorsed this unwarranted violence. Indeed, support for the violence inflicted by the knight was capped by the king with his closing observation on the story: “‘I agree myself,’ said the king, ‘that no one who is not a very learned clerk should argue with them [Jews]. A layman, as soon as he hears the Christian faith maligned, should defend it only by the sword, with a good thrust in the belly, as far as the sword will go.’” The sense conveyed by William of Chartres of intense royal antipathy to Jewish business 31 32

Ibid. John of Joinville, The Life of St. Louis, trans. Rene Hague (London, 1955), 35 6.

northwestern europe 231 activity is here supplemented by equally intense antipathy to Jewish religious views. That the pious monarch – renowned for his commitment to negotiated settlement of political disputes, rather than resort to arms – would urge running Jews through with a sword indicates extreme feelings on the Jewish issue. Under Louis IX, the assault on Jewish moneylending reached its culmination. Removal of the authorities from support of Jewish lending activities in 1223 was a significant step against Jewish banking business; total prohibition of Jewish lending was the final point in the process. As argued by the royal advisors cited by William of Chartres, moneylending did have to continue across northern France, and there is evidence that, by the middle of the thirteenth century, Italian bankers had become active there, and in England as well. It seems likely that the activities of the Italian bankers made Jewish moneylending less crucial to the northern French economy than it had earlier been and thus conditioned the principled stance of Louis IX. As reflected in William of Chartres, Louis IX offered his Jews alternatives. They could either abandon moneylending or abandon France. Precisely how Jewish moneylenders might remain in northern France and support themselves is not clear, given their marginal position in French society. It had been lack of broad economic opportunity that had initially moved the Jews to seize on the pressure against Christian banking back in the twelfth century and to fill the lacuna in finance. In any case, the result of this anti-usury campaign was a special kind of banishment; it was not wholesale expulsion, but it did seemingly result in some Jews leaving northern France. The Jews of northern France suffered simultaneously an attack by King Louis IX on the foundations of their religious life as well. One of the features of maturing Western Christendom during the thirteenth century was a growing interest in and concern with non-Christians, which meant largely the Islamic world but included the Jewish world also. Sometime during the 1230s, a southern French convert from Judaism to Christianity gained access to the papal court of Gregory IX with the allegation that the Talmud contained teachings contemptuous of Christianity and urged behaviors harmful to Christians. This convert – Nicholas Donin – was given a full hearing and convinced the pope and his associates that the matter deserved serious investigation. Donin was dispatched to the major rulers of Western Christendom, armed with letters of papal support for investigation of the Talmud.33

33

The trial of the Talmud in Paris has been treated extensively in John Friedman, Jean Connell Huff, and Robert Chazan, The Trial of the Talmud: Paris, 1240 (Toronto, 2012). The volume includes a translation of the Hebrew narrative account of the trial (Friedman), translation of the relevant Latin evidence (Huff), and a historical overview (Chazan). The papal letters authorizing the Donin mission can be found there, 93 5.

232 the middle ages: the christian world Not surprisingly, it seems that only King Louis IX of France was prepared to undertake the requisite investigation. In early 1240, large quantities of Talmud manuscripts were confiscated all across northern France. These manuscripts were studied carefully by Donin and what seems to be a team of fellow-converts. What eventuated was a set of translations of important talmudic passages into Latin, and a set of accusations against the Talmud, supported by citations.34 A trial of the Talmud was convened, with Nicholas Donin presenting the evidence against the Talmud and a group of northern French rabbis serving as witnesses for the defense. When the trial was over, the jury – composed of distinguished northern French ecclesiastics – ruled that the charges were substantiated, and ordered destruction of the offensive literature, with large quantities of Talmud manuscripts publicly burned in Paris in 1242. The aftermath of this event is instructive, allowing us to gain a deeper sense of Louis IX’s radical position on Judaism and Jews. While, in 1244, Pope Innocent IV – successor to Gregory IX – lauded King Louis IX for his anti-Talmud efforts, a meeting with Jewish leaders in 1247 occasioned papal rethinking. The Jewish leaders argued to the pope that prohibition of the Talmud in effect subverted the traditional Church position that Jews enjoyed a right to live in accord with their religious tradition in Christian society, for without the Talmud it was impossible to conduct a Jewish life. Impressed with this argument, while at the same time distressed over problematic talmudic materials, Pope Innocent IV called for a reexamination of the Talmud, with elimination of unacceptable material through censorship and return to the Jews of the rest of their Talmud. The papal order for re-examination was heeded, but the papal suggestion of censorship was not. The re-examination of the Talmud did take place in Paris, but the conclusion was that censorship of offensive materials was not possible, since the corpus in its totality was utterly offensive. The result was a renewed condemnation of the Talmud, which became royal policy for France thereafter.35 While most of Western Christendom adopted the papal compromise of censorship of the Talmud, royal France under Louis IX took the more extreme position of total prohibition. Growing Christian awareness of the Talmud – initially through knowledgeable converts from the Jewish community – eventuated in a second set of innovative Church efforts as well. Once again, the initiator was a former southern French Jew turned Christian. In this case, the convert made his way into ecclesiastical ranks, becoming a Dominican friar. Friar Paul Christian was convinced that, while there was offensive material in the Talmud that had to be excised, other talmudic teachings might be 34

Ibid., 102 21.

35

For the papal letter and the Parisian response, see ibid., 97 101.

northwestern europe 233 exploited for missionizing purposes. In his view, the rabbis of the Talmud occasionally voiced views that reflected their recognition of the truth of Christian doctrine. Friar Paul preached widely all across southern France, bringing his message of talmudic acknowledgment of Christian truth to Jewish audiences. His crowning achievement was a missionizing disputation with the distinguished Rabbi Moses ben Nahman in Barcelona in 1263.36 Somewhat later, toward the end of the 1260s,˙ Friar Paul gained the support of King Louis IX for a preaching campaign in northern France as well, which resulted in missionizing engagements with Jewish leaders in Paris.37 Yet another front had been opened in the Church’s battle with the Jewish minority of northwestern Europe. Once again, Louis IX was in the forefront of governmental support for this new effort. The lengthy reign of King Louis IX saw the imposition of a number of important Church policies and perspectives on the Jews of northern France. In the process, the pious monarch shook the foundations of Jewish economic activity and Jewish religious life. The rich Jewish intellectual and spiritual creativity that had first manifested itself toward the end of the eleventh century and had endured for a century and a half began to dissipate during the middle decades of the thirteenth century, as a result of the various initiatives undertaken by Louis IX. Jewish life in northern France would never regain the vitality it exhibited from the late eleventh into the early thirteenth century. While our focus is on Jewish life in northwestern Europe, it is important to note in passing the impact of the new French royal policies on the Jewish communities of southern France as well. In a general way, many of the developments notable in northwestern Europe – for example, a growing movement toward moneylending among Jews, burgeoning anti-Jewish motifs in the populace, innovative patterns of Jewish intellectual and spiritual life – made their way into southern Europe. In the case of French Jewry, the impact of the north on the south was far more direct and immediate. During the reigns of Louis VIII and Louis IX, the monarchs – whose seat of power was originally in the north – extended their authority over the south. Thus, the newly emerging stances of both kings on Jewish life, which were developed out of a northern European 36

37

On these developments, see Robert Chazan, Daggers of Faith: Thirteenth Century Christian Missionizing and Jewish Response (Berkeley, 1989), and Barcelona and Beyond: The Disputation of 1263 and Its Aftermath (Berkeley, 1992). For the royal order and a Latin source on missionizing engagements, see Chazan, Medieval Jewry in Northern France, 151; for an important Hebrew source, see Joseph Shatzmiller, ed., La Deuxième Controverse de Paris: Un chapitre dans la polemique entre chrétiens et juifs au Moyen Âge (Paris, 1994).

234 the middle ages: the christian world sensibility, became policy for the older Jewish communities of southern France as well.38 In England, too, the middle decades of the thirteenth century saw a marked decline in Jewish life, although the dynamics differed considerably. The twelfth-century Jewish movement into moneylending, backed by governmental authority, resulted in considerable Jewish profit, significant contribution to the economy of northern France and England, and important support for the maturing monarchies of both areas. At the same time, it spawned a number of dangers: it aroused ecclesiastical opposition; it evoked deep popular resentment; and it forced the Jews into a dangerously unbalanced relationship with the political authorities. In mid-thirteenth-century France, thorough governmental acceptance of Church perspectives triggered a decline in Jewish circumstances. In England, the dangers implicit in the asymmetrical relationship with the political authorities brought about deleterious change. The disastrous reign of King John ended in 1216, with the accession of Henry III. Henry’s lengthy reign of fifty-six years involved the building and strengthening of institutions that would prove durable and lasting, to the benefit of the monarchy and the kingdom. Along the way, however, the Jews of England served as a valuable resource, and suffered in the process. The problem was not governmental backing for ecclesiastical policies; the dynamic of decline in England involved governmental exploitation of Jewish wealth and business to the point of eventually destroying their foundations. Robert C. Stacey has analyzed meticulously the first half of the reign of Henry III in general, and its Jewish policy in particular. After studying Henry III’s taxation of the Jews throughout the 1240s, Stacey proposed the following conclusion: “There can be no doubt at all that Jewish fortunes in England changed dramatically and permanently between 1240 and 1260, and that this change was in large part a consequence of the new approach to Jewish taxation initiated by King Henry III and his council between 1239 and 1242.”39 As indicated by Stacey, English Jewry – like northern French Jewry – suffered deterioration from which it would never truly recover. During the closing decades of the thirteenth century and the opening decade of the fourteenth, the dynamics of decline played themselves out 38

39

On southern European Jewry, see Ram ben Shalom, “Southern France,” Chapter 7 in this volume. Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews, follows closely the imposition of royal policies in the newly appended territories of southern France. Robert C. Stacey, Politics, Policy, and Finance under Henry III, 1216 1245 (Oxford, 1987), 155.

northwestern europe 235 in northern France and England, culminating in the expulsion of English Jewry in 1290 and French Jewry in 1306. In both cases, the economic viability and usefulness of the Jews had been sapped – in northern France, as a result of Louis IX’s full-scale espousal of Church policy on Jewish moneylending, and, in England, as a result of Henry III’s depredations. In both areas, the loss of economic viability had been accompanied by growing popular hostility, as traditional Church imagery of Jewish hostility had evolved into widely believed tales of gratuitous murder of Christians by Jews, ritualized murder of Christians via crucifixion, murder followed by cultic utilization of Christian blood, and Host desecration. The remarkably rich archives of thirteenth-century England have enabled very close study of the situation of English Jewry during the reign of King Edward I. Belatedly – at least in comparison with his Capetian rivals – Edward I accepted ecclesiastical demands on the issue of Jewish usury. The key stipulation of his Statute of the Jewry, enacted in 1275, read as follows: Forasmuch as the king has seen that diverse evils and the disinheriting of the good men of his land have happened by the usuries that the Jews have made in time past and that diverse sins have followed thereupon; although he and his ancestors have received much benefit from the Jewish people in all time past; nevertheless for the honor of God and the common benefit of the people, the king has ordained and established that from henceforth no Jew shall lend anything at usury, either upon land or upon rent or upon any other thing and that no usuries shall run in time from the Feast of Saint Edward last past.40

Interestingly, Edward I acknowledges “much benefit from the Jewish people in all time past”; however, he concludes that the liabilities of Jewish economic activity outweigh the benefits. Citation of the liabilities of Jewish moneylending echoes the ecclesiastical complaints we have encountered recurrently. The king claims to be initiating his restrictions on Jewish moneylending “for the honor of God and the common benefit of the people.” Utilizing the copious English archival records, Robin R. Mundill has traced the impact of this legislation on the Jews of England from the mid1270s down to 1290, the year of expulsion. His close examination of these records leads him to conclude that Jewish life was not extinguished across England, and that Jews made some accommodation to the new law by 40

The document can be found in Robin R. Mundill, England’s Jewish Solution: Experiment and Expulsion, 1262 1290 (Cambridge, 1998), 91 293. I have cited the document above in more or less contemporary English usage. The same statute also instituted the special badge for the Jews of England, in very precise form: “And that each Jew, after he be seven years old, shall wear a badge on his outer garment, that is to say in the form of two tables [of the law] joined, of yellow felt of the length of six inches and of the breadth of three inches.”

236 the middle ages: the christian world branching out into forms of trade in commodities. At the same time, Mundill cites considerable evidence that Jews attempted to circumvent the new legislation and to continue, surreptitiously, their earlier moneylending activities. Mundill’s analysis concludes that Jewish efforts, legal and otherwise, could not and did not stem the economic decline of the late thirteenth-century English Jewry triggered by the new royal policy.41 The innovative legislation against Jewish moneylending also contributed to the development of a new perception of Jewish criminality. This new perception – arguably less damaging than the allegations of murder in various forms, and Host desecration – involved the clipping of coins and thus the debasing of the English currency. In November of 1278, a massive arrest of Jews was carried out, with Jewish homes and possessions carefully examined. Out of this examination emerged a large number of arrests, which included some of the leading financiers in the Jewish community. Over the course of the following years, many of these imprisoned Jews were found guilty and were sentenced to hanging. Thus, the allegation of coin clipping was reinforced by trials that ostensibly proved Jewish guilt and the truth of the charge. The negative imagery of England’s Jews thus received further support through the English courts.42 Again because of the rich archival repositories of thirteenth-century England, the expulsion of 1290 has been accorded extensive and thoughtful treatment by a host of scholars.43 This treatment has involved examination of both the long-term factors in, and the immediate circumstances of, the royal decision. Given the objectives of the present chapter, we shall focus on the former. We have noted and emphasized that, from the outset of their movement into northern Europe in general, and northwestern Europe in particular, the new Jewish settlers encountered a balance of opportunity and a formidable set of obstacles. These obstacles included a hostile general populace that precluded the development of a diversified Jewish economy; constant – and, in fact, accelerating – ecclesiastical pressure; and the closeness of the relationship with the political authorities that could devolve into excessive control and exploitation. As the societies of northwestern Europe continued their rapid maturation, the need for the Jewish economic contribution – once acute – dissipated. In particular, Christian moneylenders – often foreign Christian moneylenders – began to dominate the banking business, Church pressures against such lending notwithstanding. With the decline of the Jewish contribution to the 41 42

43

Ibid., chs. 5 6. See the careful study by Zefira Rokeah, “Money and the Hangman in Late 13th Century England: Jews, Christians, and Coinage Offences Alleged and Real,” Jewish Historical Studies 31 (1990), 83 109; and 32 (1993), 159 218. Note the review of prior views in Mundill, England’s Jewish Solution, 249 64.

northwestern europe 237 burgeoning economy of late thirteenth-century England, the forces negative to Jewish presence and activity could assert themselves. After Mundill has surveyed prior views on the expulsion of 1290, he proceeds to his own cumulative assessment. He focuses – not surprisingly – on those already identified. Popular antipathies toward the Jews had, by the end of the thirteenth century, found effective outlets for their expression in the increasingly well-organized towns and in parliament; ecclesiastical pressures were on the rise; the king was personally sympathetic to these Church pressures.44 This combination was lethal to Jewish interests. Mundill emphasizes yet one more factor, and that was the backdrop of expulsion in neighboring areas of northwestern Europe. Just as we have noted the contagion of expulsions across northern France in the closing decades of the twelfth century, so too a number of historians have pointed to the expulsion ordered by Edward I from Gascony in 1287, the expulsion of Jews from Anjou and Maine by Count Charles II, nephew of King Louis IX, and the expulsion from England in 1290.45 Likewise, this expulsion from England influenced the banishment from France sixteen years later. The expulsion of 1306 has not received the attention accorded that of 1290. The fullest analysis of it has been that of William Chester Jordan. Jordan begins his analysis by noting that Philip IV did not begin his reign in 1285 with the sudden changes introduced earlier by his predecessors Philip Augustus and Louis VIII. He notes the tangible impact of some of the expulsions of the 1280s and 1290s in royal France, into which the Jewish refugees made their way. We have noted earlier the ways in which this intrusion of refugees upset the limited economies of the host Jewish communities, and such upset surely was manifest to the larger Christian population of key French towns. Jordan also focuses attention on enhanced popular anti-Jewish sentiment in the Christian majority. The innovative Host desecration allegation in Paris in 1290; the establishment of a public shrine in memory of the miracle of the Host that, of course, simultaneously commemorated Jewish wickedness; and papal reinforcement of the miracle, the shrine, and Jewish malevolence – all heightened negative sentiments perceptibly.46 Shortly thereafter, the capital and the court were deeply moved by the canonization

44 45

46

For this analysis, see ibid., 265 76. For the document of expulsion from Anjou and Maine, see Chazan, Church, State, and Jew, 314 17; for Mundill’s discussion of the juxtaposition of the expulsions of 1287 and 1290, see Mundill, England’s Jewish Solution, 277 85. See Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven, 1999).

238 the middle ages: the christian world of King Louis IX, whose antipathy to the Jews and negative policies toward them have been duly noted.47 Finally, Jordan emphasizes royal profit from the expulsion of 1306. He details the confiscation of property and of loan documents and the protracted royal efforts to realize maximal revenues from these confiscated materials, which led to the creation of an extensive bureaucracy and the normal crimes of such bureaucracies. Indeed, the recall of some Jews to royal France in 1315 was largely related to enjoying profits from confiscated Jewish loans. While Jewish life resumed through much of the fourteenth century, the reconstructed community was but a shadow of its former vibrant self, until final banishment was decreed in 1394.48 Northern Europe, long the hinterland of medieval Western Christendom, began a process of vitalization at the close of the first millennium. In the process of rapid development of life in northern Europe, the areas of the northwest – northern France and England – took the lead. Cognizant of the need for capable urban dwellers, the rulers of northwestern Europe invited Jewish settlers and protected their new protégés. Some southern European Jews responded to these invitations and thereby laid the foundations for Jewish life in this exciting area. These Jewish settlers benefitted from their move, contributed to the broad advancement of their new home territories, and quickly responded to the cultural vitality of this environment with their own religious and intellectual creativity. At the same time, these new Jewish settlers encountered daunting obstacles, including the resistance of the Christian populace, the pressures of the Church, and excessive reliance on the ruling class. Over time, the impact of these impediments to Jewish life intensified, and Jewish fortunes began to decline. By the end of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth, creative Jewish life across the entire area came to a close. The legacy that remained had positive and negative elements. On the one hand, Jews had gained a foothold in northwestern Europe that would ultimately serve them well; they had fashioned vibrant forms of communal existence; and they had created works of lasting religious and cultural significance. On the other hand, their sojourn in northwestern Europe had resulted in a series of damning stereotypes that were to haunt Jewish life over the ensuing centuries.49 47 48

49

Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews, ch. 11. Ibid., ch 12. The document of recall from the year 1315 can be found in Chazan, Church, State, and Jew, 80 3. For a further sense of this balance in the Jewish experience in medieval Western Christendom, see Robert Chazan, Reassessing Jewish Life in Medieval Europe (New York, 2010).

chapter 9

GERMANY alfred haverkamp

JEWS AND CHRISTIANS: LONG TERM INTERACTIONS

From the late eleventh century, the former Kingdom of Eastern Francia, including its extensions east of a line marked by the Elbe and Saale, the Bohemian and Bavarian forests and the River Traun river, became known as the “Regnum teutonicum” or “teutonicorum” (“German Kingdom” or “Kingdom of the Germans”). For this entity, the Hebrew term “Ashkenaz,” taken from the Torah (Gen. 10:3, cf. 1 Chron. 1:6, and Jer. 51:27), gained currency in Jewish writings from the second third of the twelfth century. It included the “Land (of) Lothir,” which referred to the areas between Champagne and the Rhine. The Hebrew term was derived from the late-Carolingian kingdom of Lotharingia. The significance of “Lothir” in contemporary Jewish thought diminished after the persecutions of 1096 and was slowly reduced to a historical reminiscence.1 The distance was widening between the Jews in Tzarfat (including Champagne), on the one hand, and those in Ashkenaz, on the other – i.e., between Jewish settlements in the Romance and Germanic linguistic spheres. New features emerged distinguishing the Jewries of Tzarfat from those of Ashkenaz.2 Nonetheless, French continued to be used alongside the German vernacular in the kehillot on the western banks of the Rhine down to the thirteenth century. Other than in the Romance-speaking parts of Lotharingia, the German-speaking areas along the Rhine saw This chapter was translated from the German by Christoph Cluse, to whom I would like to extend my sincere thanks. 1 On “Lothir,” cf. Germania Judaica, vol. I: Von den ältesten Zeiten bis 1238, ed. I. Elbogen, A. Freimann, and H. Tykocinski (Tübingen, 1917 34; reprint 1963), xvii, 160 3; H. Gross, Gallia Judaïca: Dictionnaire géographique de la France d’après les sources rabbiniques, ed. S. Schwarzfuchs (Amsterdam, 1969), 293 305; and A. Grossman, The Early Sages of Ashkenaz: Their Lives, Leadership and Works (900 1096) [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1988), 313 15. 2 E. Kanarfogel, The Intellectual History and Rabbinic Culture of Medieval Ashkenaz (Detroit, 2013).

239

Ems

er

Ful da

W a

r

Speyer

Worms

arne

e Aar

Da

be nu

?

Inn

Augsburg

Regensburg

Würzburg

Passau

O d

?

ns En

n au

da

Prague

Meissen

rta

Vienna

Elbe

Wa

R aa b

Da nu be

0

0

?

25

50

50

75

100

200 km 100 miles

150

The Empire around 1200

Language border

Uncertain evidence

Other town

Cathedral city

Vist ula

The map largely rests on the documentation in A Haverkamp (ed ), Geschichte der Juden im Mittelalter von der Nordsee bis zu den Südalpen: Kommentiertes Kartenwerk, ed J Müller, 3 vols (Hanover, 2002) (for the areas of the German kingdom roughly west of the line Halberstadt–Bamberg–Nürnberg–Innsbruck between 1000 and 1520; cf A Peters, “‘Settlement, Assimilation, Distinctive Identity’ A Century of Historians and Historiography of Medieval German Jewry, 1902–2002,” Jewish Quarterly Review (JQR) 97 (2007), 237–79) For the county of Champagne, see the maps in S Benner and A Reverchon, “Juden und Herrschaft Die Champagne vom 11 bis frühen 14 Jahrhundert,” in C Cluse, A Haverkamp, and I J Yuval, eds , Jüdische Gemeinden und ihr christlicher Kontext in kulturräumlich vergleichender Betrachtung: von der Spätantike bis zum 18. Jahrhundert (Hanover, 2003), 151–213, esp 159, 165

Figure 9.1 Jewish settlements in the Regnum teutonicum around 12003

ne Sei

Chalon-sur-Saône

Strasbourg

Metz

M

?

Merseburg

Nuremberg

Bamberg

?

n

S

Halle

Magdeburg

Elbe

Erfurt

Bonn Münzenberg Andernach Koblenz Boppard Frankfurt Bacharach Aschaffenburg ? Trier Bingen Mainz Mai

Ruhr

W es

Necka r

3

M

Cologne

ubs Do

Me u s e

Châlons

Rheims

Troyes

he l

Sc

Neuss

o se l

dt

a

Rhin e

Lek Waal

Sa

Tr

ne Rhi u

r

Mol

er a al e

er

germany 241 an expansion of Jewish settlement from the twelfth century, and the “Jewish Rhinelands” gained importance, mainly through the three associated neighbors in the central Rhine area known to medieval Jews as kehillot ShUM (after the initials of “Shpira,” “Warmaisa,” and “Magenza”).4 At the same time, Jewish life also expanded eastward from this axis, see Figure 9.1. The central Rhine was one of the few regions (others were Lower Franconia and Swabia) where the kings relied on royal possessions and rights partly inherited from Carolingian times. Despite such density zones of imperial and dynastic rule, the limited powers of the German kings were in extreme disproportion to the enormous extent of their realm. Their claim to authority had been significantly extended after 955 and found expression in the imperial coronation of 962. From that time, they tried to strengthen their position in the old areas of the Kingdom by closely cooperating with bishops, whom they increasingly endowed with domains and rights. The bishops’ functions as religious office-holders and secular powers mutually reinforced and influenced one another. Hence the political role played by bishops was stronger here than in any other medieval Christian kingdom. From the late eleventh century, they were able to seize more and more independence from the kings. Numerous small-scale, or even local, units of governance were now gaining in importance. In this process, the kings/emperors began to lag behind, even in regions close to them. The Jews of Ashkenaz increasingly had to rely on support in their local and regional surroundings, more than in any other European kingdom. Thus, bishops played an eminent role for Ashkenazic Jewry from its very beginnings – particularly in the economically important regions in the West. The roughly forty dioceses of the German Kingdom centered on the cathedral cities,5 where religious, political, military, economic, and intellectual functions were concentrated and where, until the fourteenth century – and often much longer – urban life was most developed. Here, too, the earliest Christian town communes emerged from the late eleventh century, above all in the west of the German Kingdom. Civic communities created a new level in the structure of authority. Until the end of the medieval period, the cathedral city in 4

5

See, most recently, R. J. Barzen, “Die SchUM Gemeinden und ihre Rechtssatzungen: Geschichte und Wirkungsgeschichte,” in Generaldirektion Kulturelles Erbe Rheinland Pfalz, ed., Die SchUM Gemeinden Speyer Worms Mainz: Auf dem Weg zum Welterbe (Regensburg, 2013), 23 35. F. G. Hirschmann, Die Anfänge des Städtewesens in Mitteleuropa: Die Bischofssitze im Reich bis ins 12. Jahrhundert, 3 vols. (Stuttgart, 2011 12).

242 the middle ages: the christian world Western Ashkenaz was typically the home of the largest and most important Jewish community within a diocese. Increasingly from the beginning of the twelfth century, the Christian communities of these cities were the nearest and most important authorities for a Jewish community. The supreme importance of these kehillot for Jewish life in large measure rested on the Jewish cemeteries situated near the cathedral cities. Here, Jews from surrounding settlements – originally, mainly those from within the diocese – were laid to rest. Other than the local synagogue, a cemetery – the “house of [eternal] life” (beit ha-hayim) or “house of eternity” (beit ˙ for the Jews’ memories of their ‘olam) – provided a supra-local focus ancestors and the past of their community. Jews were bound by religious law to keep the cemetery as undisturbed as possible. This requirement provided a legal basis for the supremacy of the kehillah in the cathedral city over the Jewish settlements that emerged at a later date in the surrounding urban or proto-urban centers, and which were accordingly designated by other terms (yishuv and, in the more important cases, havurah). Often the cemetery district also coincided with a regional ˙ unit of taxation.6 The central functions of the kahal situated in the cathedral city gave rise to the term “Bishop of the Jews” (episcopus iudeorum), current only among Christians in Western Ashkenaz, as a title for the leader (parnas) of the kahal.7 The eastern lands remained “distant” from the Crown, except for those which, from the mid fourteenth century, became the heartlands of the Luxemburger and Habsburg royal houses after these dynasties had moved their centers to Bohemia and Austria. The secular power of the bishops, almost without exception, was much more circumscribed than in the West. Accordingly, the centers of baronial and noble rule were more important here for the emergence and status of Jewish communities. 6

7

R. Barzen, “Regionalorganisation jüdischer Gemeinden im Reich in der ersten Hälfte des 14. Jahrhunderts: Eine vergleichende Untersuchung auf der Grundlage der Ortslisten des Deutzer und des Nürnberger Memorbuches zur Pestverfolgung,” in A. Haverkamp, ed., Geschichte der Juden im Mittelalter, I, 293 366; C. Cluse, “Zu den räumlichen Organisationsformen von Juden im christlichen Umfeld,” in F. Irsigler, ed., Zwischen Maas und Rhein: Beziehungen, Begegnungen und Konflikte in einem europäischen Kernraum von der Spätantike bis zum 19. Jahrhundert. Versuch einer Bilanz (Trier, 2006), 285 96; A. Haverkamp, “Jüdische Friedhöfe in Aschkenas” [2011], in A. Haverkamp, Neue Forschungen zur mittelalterlichen Geschichte (2000 2011), ed. C. Cluse and J. R. Müller (Hanover, 2012), 103 14. A. Haverkamp, “‘Concivilitas’ von Christen und Juden in Aschkenas im Mittelalter” [1996], in A. Haverkamp, Gemeinden, Gemeinschaften und Kommunikationsformen im hohen und späten Mittelalter, ed. F. Burgard, L. Clemens, and M. Matheus (Trier, 2002), 328 32.

germany

243

THE NINTH TO LATE ELEVENTH CENTURIES

the b eginnings o f j ewish p resence In late Antiquity, there had been Jews settling west of the Rhine and perhaps south of the Danube, i.e., on the periphery of the Roman Empire. A continuity of Jewish settlement beyond the fourth century cannot be substantiated and appears extremely unlikely, given the very unfavorable general conditions and the great distance from the nearest known settlements in the French Midi.8 In the ninth century, itinerant Jewish merchants were active in what was to become the German Kingdom, but a first durable settlement cannot be observed until 890 ce in the important cathedral city of Metz, on the eastern periphery of Romania.9 While Jews appear to have moved from the Midi into some towns and cities in northern France,10 further evidence of fixed Jewish settlements in the German Kingdom, and for emerging communities, only appears after the defeat (in 955 ce) of the Hungarians, whose raids had even reached the areas west of the Rhine from around the turn of the tenth century.11

8

9

10

11

The only reliable source is a decree by Emperor Constantine of 321 ce, in which Cologne is explicitly mentioned; see A. Linder, The Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation (Detroit, 1987), 120 4, no. 7, and cf. 132 8, no. 9 of 330/1. Convincing archaeological evidence is lacking even for this major city. The hypothesis repeated in S. Schütte and M. Gechter, Von der Ausgrabung zum Museum: Kölner Archäologie zwischen Rathaus und Praetorium, 2nd rev. edn. (Cologne, 2012) that there was a continuity of Jewish settlement in Cologne from late Antiquity until 1349/1424, is rejected by M. Toch, The Economic History of European Jews: Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages (Leiden, 2013), 295 8. See also O. Harck, Archäologische Studien zum Judentum in der europäischen Antike und dem zentraleuropäischen Mittelalter (Petersberg, 2014), who, despite some reservations, holds that Schütte’s dating of the “synagogue findings” up to the fourth century are “still open to discussion” (242). This view does not take into account the essential preconditions for Jewish existence, nor does it reflect the criticism advanced by Toch. A. Linder, ed. and trans., The Jews in the Legal Sources of the Early Middle Ages (Detroit, 1997), 552 3, no. 873 (on 893 ce). The question is an open one and was debated, with interesting methodological implica tions, from 2001 by Michael Toch and the late Friedrich Lotter (Lotter, “Sind christliche Quellen zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden im Frühmittelalter weitgehend unbrauchbar?” Historische Zeitschrift 278 [2004], 311 27). See, most recently, Toch, Economic History. For this and what follows, see A. Haverkamp, “Beziehungen zwischen Bischöfen und Juden im ottonisch salischen Königreich bis 1090,” in Anna A. Esposito, Heidrun Ochs, Elmar Rettinger, and Kai Michael Sprenger, eds., Trier Mainz Rom: Stationen, Wirkungsfelder, Netzwerke (Regensburg, 2013), 45 87; A. Haverkamp, “The Beginnings of Jewish Life North of the Alps, with Comparative Glances at Northern and Central Italy (ca. 900 1100),” in A. M. Pult Quaglia and A. Veronese,

244 the middle ages: the christian world The earliest datable written evidence of Jewish settlement (or at least of plans for such a move) comes from places on the eastern periphery of the Empire in Magdeburg on the Elbe (965) and Merseburg on the Saale (982). For the pre-Crusade Jewish settlements in Regensburg (981), Mainz (1012), Worms (1034), Cologne (1010/12 or 1040), Prague (c.1090), and Trier (1066, or at least long before 1096), we have only sporadic ante quem datings. By contrast, the sources on Jews settling, by 1084, in the close vicinity of the cathedral city of Speyer offer unique insights. The main lines of a carta given to these Jews by Bishop Rudiger Huozmann (d. 1090) accord with a foundation narrative written soon after 1104 “from the viewpoint of the Jews of Speyer, originally from Mainz,” who had been closely involved in the drawn-out negotiations with the bishop and in the early settlement.12 It appears that these Jews, who saw their existence threatened in their “home city” (‫ )עיר מולדתינו‬by fierce fighting between the archbishop and leading local circles, put highest priority on the security of their lives and possessions in a fortified settlement near or in the walled cathedral city. Naturally, they were looking for economic safeguards, as well, especially in trade. They also obtained judicial competences for their community leader and the permanent grant of grounds for a cemetery, for this placed the new community on a par with the older kehillot. Securing these conditions required the favor and reliability of a potent Christian partner. In the 1080s, Bishop Rudiger, a learned man with some expertise in canon law, closely allied to the Salian crown and undisputed in his city, met these requirements. Rudiger granted the Jews liberties (in part corresponding with the privileges given by Carolingian rulers to individual Jews and their families13) that touch on every aspect of Jewish life. They were epitomized in Bishop Rudiger’s claim that he had granted the best law (lex) the Jewish people (populus iudeorum) could possibly have in any city of the German Kingdom, which implied his willingness to make further improvements. By means of the Jewish settlement, the bishop sought to increase “a thousandfold” the honor of his city, which was ranking far behind Mainz in urban development. The earliest references to Jews in Magdeburg and Merseburg – places with royal palaces, but barely marked by urban life – suggest that a Jewish

12

13

eds., Diversi angoli di visuale: fra storia medievale e storia degli ebrei. In ricordo di Michele Luzzati (Pisa, 2016), 85 102. The Latin charter is edited not without faults in A. Hilgard, ed., Urkunden zur Geschichte der Stadt Speyer (Strasbourg, 1885), 11 12, no. 11; for the Hebrew account, see E. Haverkamp, ed., Hebräische Berichte über die Judenverfolgungen während des Ersten Kreuzzugs (Hanover, 2005), 490 3 and 234 (quote), 262 3, 266 9. Linder, Jews in the Legal Sources, 333 8, nos. 572 3; 341, no. 576; 344 5, no. 580; see also A. Haverkamp, “Beziehungen,” 55, with n. 51.

germany 245 settlement was seen as a significant boost for the honor of a place. It was closely linked to the elevation of Magdeburg as the center of a new church province and to the establishment of a suffragan see in Merseburg (by 968, but planned since the defeat of the Hungarians in 955). The Jewish settlement in Regensburg was probably initiated a few years prior to its earliest attestation in 981. Other than the Jews in Magdeburg and Merseburg, those of Regensburg enjoyed a continuous history until their expulsion in 1519. When we look for the model adopted in Magdeburg and Merseburg, then Metz and, especially, the metropolitan sees of Trier, Cologne, and Mainz come to mind – cities that, together with Regensburg, formed the group of leading urban centers in the Empire. After 955, the archbishops of Trier (Heinrich, d. 964) and Cologne (Brun, d. 965) initiated urban building schemes in the immediate vicinities of the areas later known as the Jewish quarters. These two archbishops were involved in a network that also included the monastery of St. Mauritius in Magdeburg, the first archbishop (Adalbert, d. 981) of that city, the second bishop of Merseburg (Giselher, d. 981), and Bishop Wolfgang (d. 994), under whose office the first Jews settled in Regensburg. Their network was inspired by the powerful monastic reform movement of the Abbey of St. Maximin in Trier. This group of reform clerics, who exerted a strong influence in the cathedral cities and also harbored close relationships with the Crown under Otto I, further included Archbishop William of Mainz (d. 968). They also had in common that they enhanced the religious, cultural, and economic significance of their cities by establishing new monasteries, canonries, and other churches, following the model of Rome. As Jews had been present in the “eternal city” from time immemorial, their settlement in the cities north of the Alps was in line with the idea of imitatio Romae (which implied the imitation of Jerusalem).14 The learned protagonists on this stage were all distinguished by broad intellectual horizons and interests. They were interested in Greek (the second lingua sacra after Hebrew), and they would have viewed the Jews as “guardians of our written heritage” (custodes librorum nostrorum) following the Augustinian model.15 14

15

A. Haverkamp, “‘Heilige Städte’ im hohen Mittelalter” [1987], in A. Haverkamp, Verfassung, Kultur, Lebensform: Beiträge zur italienischen, deutschen und jüdischen Geschichte im Mittelalter, ed. F. Burgard, A. Heit, and M. Matheus (Mainz, 1997), 361 402; Hirschmann, Anfänge, iii, 1040 76. B. Blumenkranz, Die Judenpredigt Augustins: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der jüdisch christlichen Beziehungen in den ersten Jahrhunderten (Paris, 1973), esp. 177 8. For the strong interest in Greek language and literature at court since Otto I’s time, see Haverkamp, “Beziehungen,” 72.

246 the middle ages: the christian world Similar traits will later be found in Burchard of Worms (1000–25), the leading expert of his time in canon and other law, who included in his collection of decretals essential safeguards in favor of Jews. There is ample reason to assume that, in 1012, Burchard seized the opportunity to establish a lasting Jewish settlement in his city, after the Jews had been (temporarily) expelled from Mainz at the instigation of King Henry II, during a vacancy on the archiepiscopal see.16 Lacking other suitable grounds within the narrow confines of the walled city, he accorded them an area in the northern part, close to the wall, which was still under construction. In this way, the houses inhabited by Jews became part of that wall, and the Jews of Worms were personally involved in the defense of their city. The only other known Jewish settlement in the eastern stretches of the Empire before c.1090, in the urban agglomeration of the Bohemian capital of Prague, has to be accounted to the dukes/kings of Bohemia.17 ke h i l lo t : s o c i a l s t r u ct u r e a n d l e g a l f o u nd a t i o ns Some early Jewish settlers in the German Kingdom came from the neighboring colonies in northern France, which until the tenth century were but few, recent, and small.18 The majority hailed from southern Italy – mainly from Byzantine Apulia, where Jewish learning, favored by its Greek cultural setting, achieved its highest level in western Europe until the early twelfth century – and from the French Midi, where excellent centers of Jewish learning could equally be found. For Jews in these Mediterranean lands – who, like many of their Christian neighbors, suffered from continuing Muslim raids until far into the second half of the tenth century – the Empire north of the Alps gained attractiveness after the end of the Hungarian incursions. In Byzantine Italy, moreover, Jews had been targets of renewed persecution during the second quarter of the century.19

16

17

18

19

F. Lotter, “Die Vertreibung der Juden aus Mainz um 1012 und der antijüdische Traktat des Hofgeistlichen Heinrich,” in F. Burgard, A. Haverkamp, and G. Mentgen, eds., Judenvertreibungen in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit (Hanover, 1999), 37 74. The conditions of settlement in the various cores of Prague’s urban agglomeration improved at around the mid eleventh century; cf. A. Haverkamp, “Beziehungen,” 64. The identification of “Halle” in the Hebrew reports on 1096 is very problematic; see E. Haverkamp, ed., Hebräische Berichte, 42 3 n. 24, 482 with n. 1. The prevailing economic conditions in northern France were similar to those in the German Kingdom, while the political situation was different, particularly in the compact territories of the French Crown (Zarfat). The earliest reliable evidence of Jewish settle ments in Champagne exists for the end of the ninth century; cf. Benner and Reverchon, “Juden,” 154 61. Cf. A. Haverkamp, “Beziehungen,” 61.

germany 247 Jewish immigration was led by Jewish merchants, accompanied by their families and households, including Jewish servants as well as non-Jewish servants and slaves (a common feature in Christian and Jewish households of the Mediterranean). Due to the cultural divide between the South and the North, to the levels of literacy demanded by their religious life, and to their commercial experience, Jews in Ashkenaz (as in northern France and England), particularly during the first centuries of their presence, were better equipped for activities in trade and the monetary economy than were their new Christian neighbors. Christian rulers were ready to grant protection to Jews as a small religious minority, in return for exceedingly high tributes, which could rise further when more protection was needed. Neither the agrarian economy nor crafts offered realistic alternatives for the Jews.20 Favored by their contacts with the Mediterranean world, where the tradition of medical science was more widespread, some acquired special expertise in the wider field of medicine.21 Within the cathedral cities, Jews tried to live as close to the synagogue as possible for halakhic reasons. Their quarters were situated near the markets as hubs of urban life, and/or near the cathedrals.22 Daily contacts with Christians were inevitable in every respect. The social and legal make-up of the Jewish settlements was shaped by the lasting dominance of interfamilial relations, as was the case among the Christian town populace. However, the leading role of the Jewish family heads found a decisive support in their learning. The best-known example is provided by the Kalonymos family, who probably came to Mainz around the mid tenth century and whose name points to their origins in southern Italy. Extended families might defend their interests against unwanted Jewish newcomers by means of the ban of settlement (herem ha-yishuv).23 The established Jews ˙ also depended on their most important partners among the Christian ruling class to safeguard their peculiar position vis-à-vis the Christian majority. A prominent role was played by tsedakah, care for the poor.24 ˙ 20 21

22

23

24

Cf. Michael Toch, “Economic Activities,” Chapter 13 in this volume. The first record of a Jewish doctor in the German Kingdom only appears around 1130 cf. below. However, the liberties granted by Henry IV in 1090 imply that the Jews of Speyer and Worms sold not only spices (pigmenta) but also medical substances (antidota) to Christian customers. The fortified settlement of Jews in Altspeyer before 1096 was an exception of short duration. A. Grossman, “La structure sociale du judaïsme allemand au Moyen Âge,” in S. Trigano, ed., La Société juive à travers l’histoire, vol. I (Paris, 1992), 461 89, esp. 461 71. R. Barzen, “The Meaning of Tzedakah for Jewish Self Organization within a Non Jewish Environment,” in G. Bacon, A. Baumgarten, Y. Barnai, H. Waxman, and I. Yuval, eds., Iggud: Selected Essays in Jewish Studies, vol. II (Jerusalem, 2009), 7 17.

248 the middle ages: the christian world For the Jews in Ashkenaz, local self-government, rooted in the ritual community, was far more relevant than it was for neighboring Christians, or for Jews in the Mediterranean diaspora. In organizing their community, they not only adopted key elements from a rich Jewish tradition, they also created new rules based (though not dependent) on the authority of their leading scholars (who often proposed varying opinions). The new rules were more specifically suited to the conditions determined by the Christian surroundings and sometimes disagreed with formerly accepted rulings of the Babylonian academies. In cases such as the bans on polygamy and on divorce without a wife’s consent, they contributed to a significant improvement of the legal position of women.25 The core of the kahal in Ashkenaz from the tenth century lay in its function as a court of law closely related to the religious norms of life. In the kahal’s lasting form, high-medieval innovations gained more weight than Jewish tradition.26 These foundations of the Jewish community, shaped in accordance with Jewish law, were integrated into the guidelines, called lex, established in 1084 for the relations between Bishop Rudiger of Speyer and the local kahal, as well as between Jews and Christians in the city in general. There is good reason to assume that the other kehillot west of the Rhine and in Regensburg each had a similar lex, negotiated with the ruling bishops.27 25

26

27

I. G. Marcus, “A Jewish Christian Symbiosis: The Culture of Early Ashkenaz,” in David Biale, ed., Cultures of the Jews: A New History (New York, 2002), 449 516, esp. 472 8; A. Grossman, Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe, trans. J. Chipman (Waltham, MA, 2004); Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton, 2004), 33, 37. For the continuing debate, see I. J. Yuval, “Heilige Städte, heilige Gemeinden Mainz als das Jerusalem Deutschlands,” in R. Jütte and A. P. Kustermann, eds., Jüdische Gemeinden und Organisationsformen von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Vienna, 1996), 91 101; and G. J. Blidstein, “Individual and Community in the Middle Ages: ‘Halakhic’ Theory,” in D. J. Elazar, ed., Kinship and Consent: The Jewish Political Tradition in its Contempory Uses, 2nd edn. (New Brunswick, 1997), 327 69. On the wider context, see A. Haverkamp, “Jüdische Gemeinden”; C. Cluse, “Jewish Community and Civic Commune in the High Middle Ages,” in A. Gestrich, L. Raphael, and H. Uerlings, eds., Strangers and Poor People: Changing Patterns of Inclusion and Exclusion in Europe and the Mediterranean World from Classical Antiquity to the Present Day (Frankfurt am Main, 2010), 165 91. On the written lex, see above. The fact that such documents have not been preserved except in Speyer is due to the fact that Jewish archival and library holdings had low chances of survival; cf. A. Haverkamp, “Beziehungen,” 48 n. 14, and A. Haverkamp, “Verschriftlichung und die Überlieferung von Quellen zur Geschichte des aschkena sischen Judentums während des späten Mittelalters: Übersicht und Einsichten,” in A. Haverkamp and J. R. Müller, eds., Verschriftlichung und Quellenüberlieferung: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Juden und der jüdisch christlichen Beziehungen im spätmittelalterlichen Reich (13./14. Jahrhundert) (Peine, 2014), 1 64.

germany 249 Royal privileges in favor of Jews are rare. In 1090 Henry IV issued the first in a series of comprehensive charters for the Jewries of Speyer and Worms. In Speyer, the document was issued at the bequest of both the Jews and Bishop Rudiger. It repeats some of the clauses of the bishop’s charter of 1084 and continues along the same lines: freedom of trade and from customs is extended from the city to the whole realm; market rules from talmudic law are included, as are other, generally accepted norms, such as the prohibition of forced baptism, and further specifications, all of which accorded with the interests of both Jews and bishop.28 Soon after, these rulings were also issued in substantially the same form for the Jews of Worms. Here, however, the Jews were under the direct authority of the Emperor, as the bishop of Worms had lost his power in the city almost two decades earlier.29 In this way, the bishop and Jews of Speyer together created an effective basic repertoire of community-related legal rights for the Jews in the urban surroundings of these two ShUM cities. the pogroms of 1 0 9 6 Before 1096, significant anti-Jewish action is apparently only recorded for 1012 in Mainz.30 Attitudes and behavioral patterns from northern France appear to have been at work in the persecutions raging between April and early July 1096, and formed a deep rift in the Jewish–Christian relations within the German Kingdom.31 The pogroms were largely driven by “those signed with the cross” 28

29 30

31

Cf. above; Linder, Jews in the Legal Sources, 391 6, no. 609; F. Lotter, “Hostienfrevelvorwurf und Blutwunderfälschung bei den Judenverfolgungen von 1298 (‘Rintfleisch’) und 1336 1338 (‘Armleder’),” in Fälschungen im Mittelalter, vol. V (Hanover, 1988), 533 83; Y. Guggenheim, “A suis paribus et non aliis iudicentur: Jüdische Gerichtsbarkeit, ihre Kontrolle durch die christliche Herrschaft und die obersten rabi gemeiner Judenschafft im heiligen Reich,” in Cluse et al., eds., Gemeinden, 405 39. Linder, Jews in the Legal Sources, 396 400, no. 610. Cf. above, and n. 16. The reported endeavors by Archbishop Eberhard of Trier in 1066 to convert the local Jews by force, and his alleged murder, were a post 1096 “invention”; see E. Haverkamp, “‘Persecutio’ und ‘Gezerah’ in Trier während des Ersten Kreuzzugs,” in A. Haverkamp, ed., Juden und Christen zur Zeit der Kreuzzüge (Sigmaringen, 1999), 35 71, esp. 47 8. On the following, see I. J. Yuval, “Two Nations in Your Womb”: Perceptions of Jews and Christians [Hebrew], 3rd edn. (Tel Aviv, 2003; trans. into English: Berkeley, 2006; German: Göttingen, 2007; and French: Paris, 2012)], English edn., 135 97; E. Haverkamp, Berichte; E. Haverkamp, “What Did the Christians Know? Latin Reports on the Persecution of the Jews in 1096,” Crusades 7 (2008), 59 86; E. Haverkamp, “Martyrs in Rivalry: The 1096 Jewish Martyrs and the Thebean Legion,” Jewish History 23 (2009), 319 43; S. Shepkaru, “The Preaching of the First Crusade and the Persecutions of the Jews,” Medieval Encounters 18 (2012), 93 135; R. Chazan, “‘Let not a Remnant or Residue Escape’: Millenarian Enthusiasm in the

250 the middle ages: the christian world (crucesignati) heading for the Holy Land, a new movement which, in its social composition, motivations, and practices, was very diverse, and which also brought about “crusades” to other goals. The phenomenon was related to the rise of religious Leitmotifs concerning the incarnate Son of God (for whose crucifixion the Jews were held responsible) and the primeval Church, as well as to messianic movements (observable among both Christians and Jews). The situation had been aggravated by a lasting period of hunger, an increase in violent political conflicts, the crisis of authority involving the ruling powers, and the rise of new forms of self-government, especially in town communes.32 The Jews tried, successfully at first, to ward off the threat with payments of money. Some groups, mostly led by French and German nobles, bluntly aimed at wiping out the presence of Judaism by forcibly baptizing or killing all Jews – and at stealing their belongings. The reactions of the Christian town populace went all the way from supporting the Jews (as initially in Cologne) to taking an active part in the atrocities. The bishops in Speyer and Worms and the archbishops of Mainz, Cologne, and Trier tried by various means to defend the Jews. Due in part to their weak political position, their efforts were mostly in vain – with the notable exception of Speyer. In Regensburg, the attackers had to make do with driving all Jews into some stream or the nearby River Danube and “baptizing” them summarily with the sign of the cross. The Jews of Prague quickly received support from the duke of Bohemia’s troops and took part in the successful fight against their persecutors themselves. In other places, such as Mainz, in contrast, the Jews’ efforts – individually or collectively – to take up arms against the aggressors proved futile. Of those killed – around 3,000 – the large majority fell in the kehillot of Worms, Mainz, and Cologne. They included men and women of all ages who escaped forced baptism by sacrificing themselves for the “sanctification of the Divine Name” (kidush ha-Shem), or who were killed by fellow ˙ case of children) with that intention. Jews (their parents, in the The Hebrew documents on these events set up a literary monument to their deeds and sufferings. At the same time, they created a Jewish counternarrative to the rising Christian cult of martyrs. Both traditions accorded women a prominent role. The precise numbers of those who died and of those who underwent forced baptism are impossible to estimate. Jewish and Christian authors alike confirm that the great majority of those

32

First Crusade,” Speculum 84 (2009), 289 313; H. Soloveitchik, “Halakhah, Hermeneutics, and Martyrdom in Medieval Ashkenaz,” JQR 94 (2004), 77 108, 278 99; G. Mentgen, “Kiddusch ha Schem Selbstopferung als Glaubenszeugnis der Juden im Mittelalter,” in W. Drews and H. Schlie, eds., Zeugnis und Zeugenschaft: Perspektiven aus der Vormoderne (Munich, 2011), 151 65. See E. Haverkamp, Berichte, 3 9.

germany 251 forcibly baptized soon resumed the practice of Judaism, with imperial permission and no significant obstacles. Remembrance of the dead, veneration of the martyrs, and the memory of the first existential crisis for Jewish life in the German Kingdom were cultivated in families and communities, in memor-books, chronicles, and other literary writings. Accusations against murderous Christians and the plea to God for revenge were inextricably connected with these memories.33 Despite the fact that “self-sacrifice” as an ideal of Jewish martyrdom continued to be controversial among Ashkenazic Jews, the cult of the martyrs strengthened the religious significance of the “holy community” (kehillah kedoshah), above all in the ShUM cities. This reli˙ an older, Christian idea: that of the (cathedral) gious conception rivaled city as a “holy city,” an image of Rome and – ultimately – Jerusalem.34 FROM THE TWELFTH CENTURY UNTIL THE DISASTERS O F 1 3 4 8 –1 3 5 0

t h e g r e a t e s t e x t e n s i o n o f j e w i s h s e t t le m e n t In the German Kingdom, the level of urbanization rose from less than 500 towns to c.3,500 between 1150 and 1350 ce, when the process reached a maximum unsurpassed, at least in qualitative terms, until the nineteenth century. During the same time, the number of accounted Jewish settlements rose from no more than 10 around 1096 to over 1,000 on the eve of the persecutions at the time of the “Black Death” (1348–50).35 Many of these settlements consisted of no more than one or two Jewish families and were situated in “younger” towns or even rural settlements. The number of 33 34

35

Yuval, Perceptions, 135 9. See the seminal article by Yuval, “Heilige Städte.” On the Christian conception of “holy city,” which also found expression in the sacred topography of these urban centers from the tenth century, see above, n. 13. It is unclear to what extent the regional pogroms of 1336 8 had already brought an end to the Jewish settlements they affected. On what follows, see Germania Judaica II: Von 1238 bis zur Mitte des 14. Jahrhunderts, ed. Z. Avneri, 2 vols. (Tübingen, 1968); Germania Judaica III: 1350 1519 (vol. I: Ortschaftsartikel Aach Lychen, ed. A. Maimon in collabora tion with Y. Guggenheim; vol. II: Ortschaftsartikel Mährisch Budweis Zwolle, ed. A. Maimon, M. Breuer, and Y. Guggenheim; vol. III: Gebietsartikel, Einleitungsartikel und Indices, ed. A. Maimon, M. Breuer, and Y. Guggenheim) (Tübingen, 1987 2003); the regional studies in A. Haverkamp, ed., Geschichte der Juden, I, 33 186, 379 89, with maps series A and map F 6 in vol. III; also J. R. Müller, “Judenverfolgungen und vertreibungen zwischen Nordsee und Südalpen im hohen und späten Mittelalter,” in A. Haverkamp, ed., Geschichte der Juden, I, 189 91; and E. Brugger, “Von der Ansiedlung bis zur Vertreibung; Juden in Österreich,” in E. Brugger, M. Keil, and A. Lichtblau, Geschichte der Juden in Österreich (Vienna, 2006), 123 227.

252 the middle ages: the christian world Jews living in the kingdom reached a maximum in the early fourteenth century and then fell into a long decline, only to reach the same level again in the course of the nineteenth century. With the exception of the one in Metz, the kehillot affected by the pogroms of the First Crusade recovered in the twelfth century. By 1200, Jews had also settled in cathedral cities east of the Rhine and north of the Danube, as well as in a number of younger urban centers in important trading sites. By this time, the number of places with a Jewish presence had doubled in relation to 1096. In the thirteenth century, the expansion gained pace. It was favored to some degree by the Crown, though not as much as by the imperial bishops and by the rising force of the nobility. The density of Jewish settlement was highest along the Rhine, in the lower Moselle valley and in the Staufen imperial lands (with many royal towns) on the lower River Main, and in Franconia and Swabia. In the emerging urban centers in the east of the German Kingdom (the areas of “new settlement”), Jewish colonists had been arriving since the turn of the thirteenth century, together with Christians from the West and christianized Slavs. Most of these Jews came from the west of the Empire, though some seem to have been from the western Slavonic lands.36 Taking into consideration the sporadic nature of the documentation, the actual number of Jewish settlements in the German Kingdom is estimated at c.500 by the year 1300. The steep rise was interrupted or disturbed by several local pogroms. With increasing frequency, the charge of ritual murder was raised against the Jews. The worst disruptions were brought about by the regional waves beginning in the later thirteenth century. A fateful signal was given by the persecutions triggered at Oberwesel in 1287 through a charge of ritual murder, later complemented by allegations of “Host desecration.” The pogroms (and the veneration of “Good Werner,” the alleged ritual murder victim) were supported by the Counts Palatinate of the Rhine.37 Despite defensive efforts by the archbishops of Cologne and Trier, and King Rudolph, about twenty Jewish settlements were hit along the Moselle and Rhine rivers down to a few places north of Cologne. In Franconia, the region most densely settled by Jews at the time, the persecutions by “King Rintfleisch” in 1298 (later justified by allegations of Jewish “Host desecration” and also ritual murder) affected over 130 locations, disrupting or terminating the Jewish presence in many of them.38 36

37

38

Until 1300, the eastern lands of new settlement counted no more than about one dozen Jewish settlements. M. Schmandt, “Der Pfalzgraf, sein Pfarrer und der ‘gute Werner.’ Oder: Wie man zu Bacharach und Oberwesel ein antijüdisches Heiligtum erschuf (1287 1429),” Jahrbuch für westdeutsche Landesgeschichte 38 (2012), 7 38. Cf. A. Haverkamp, ed., Geschichte der Juden, iii, maps C 2.3 and C 4.3.

germany 253 Between 1300 and 1348, the number of Jewish settlements in the German Kingdom again doubled. West of the Rhine, the increase was most notable in Alsace and in the archbishopric of Trier. In the French-speaking county of Hainaut, the first Jews appeared in 1307, to settle in at least twenty places of mostly rural outlook. They obviously came from France. In the neighboring duchy of Brabant, in contrast, no such increase is recorded – probably due to a persecution by “crusaders” in 1309. The regions between the Rhine and Weser rivers, and in Thuringia between the Werra and Elster, likewise saw an increase far above average. In the margravate of Brandenburg, and possibly in the kingdom of Bohemia, this was at least five-fold. In contrast, a wave of persecution related to the “Armleder” riots, and inspired by Host-desecration and ritual-murder allegations, ravaged about sixty places in the western zones of dense Jewish settlement (northern Franconia, between Main and Lahn, in the central Rhine valley north of Mainz, on the lower Moselle, and in southern Alsace), between late July 1336 and the early summer of 1338. Starting in Pulkau in April 1338, around thirty, mostly smaller, Jewish settlements in Lower Austria, Bohemia, and southern Moravia were wiped out under allegations of “Host desecration,” and the notable expansion of the Jewish presence in the Austrian regions was stopped short. Mostly in Lower Bavaria, about twenty settlements were hit by pogroms starting in Deggendorf in September 1338, again under the pretext of “Host desecration.”39 Despite these persecutions, the proliferation of Jewish settlements and growth of Jewish communities were significant. The indigenous population increase was complemented, mostly along the Rhine, by the arrival of Jews expelled from England and France. In this way, Ashkenazic Jewry, which had formerly held a peripheral position in northern Europe, now adopted a central role. jews and urban life The proliferation of Jewish settlements went hand in hand with a stronger focus on their urban habitats and their agrarian surroundings. Market mechanisms and monetary relations were increasingly affecting the agrarian economy. This was strongly felt in viticulture, which was extremely sensitive to market conditions and exposed to high risks from unpredictable weather conditions. Accordingly, the expansion of Jewish settlements 39

Lotter, “Hostienfrevelvorwurf”; Brugger, “Ansiedlung,” 173 4, 211 19; Müller, “Judenverfolgungen,” 208 12. On the “Armleder” riots, see A. Haverkamp, ed., Geschichte der Juden, iii, map C 4.4; on Pulkau and Deggendorf, cf. A. Haverkamp, “Verschriftlichung,” 20 33 (with map on 23).

254 the middle ages: the christian world was most noticeable in regions characterized by viticulture: the central Rhine valley, Alsace, Franconia, and Swabia, as well as parts of Lower Austria and Moravia. New economic prospects for trade and for lending money to further segments of the Christian populace opened up, even for Jews with smaller resources in terms of capital and personal networks. In the western parts of the Empire, those Jews who lived in centers of communication were still active in trade, sometimes dealing in luxury items or in bullion, which was much in demand due to the rising mint outputs.40 In the eastern areas of “new settlement,” Jews traded in a wider array of goods, including agrarian produce and cattle. In all cases, the sale of moveables pawned to them formed a major part of this business. In the western regions of “old settlement,” the Jewish share in trade, money changing, and minting was pushed back during the thirteenth century by Christian merchants organized in professional confraternities (“guilds”) – or Hausgenossenschaften – of changers, who were gaining influence in the larger Christian municipalities. Jewish activities in crafts mostly focused on meat and textiles, where kashrut regulations made them necessary. Economic relations with Christians resulting from these activities are frequently reflected in conflicts between Jewish and Christian butchers, many of which surface in documents from the eastern regions. The hides of animals could be used for leather or parchment production. In this context, pragmatic solutions based on mutual trust could be reached by Jews and Christians.41 The first Jewish physician attested in the German Kingdom was Josua, who had served the influential archbishop of Trier, Bruno (1102–24), before he converted (voluntarily, as it seems) to Christianity. In a Christian source he was praised for his chivalric lifestyle (militaris habitus) at the archbishop’s court, and for his excellent knowledge of not only the human body but also the computus, Hebrew literature, and Jewish learning in general.42 From the 40

41

42

G. Maier, Wirtschaftliche Tätigkeitsfelder von Juden im Reichsgebiet (ca. 1273 bis 1350) (Trier, 2010); on viticulture, see H. Soloveitchik, Principles and Pressures: Jewish Trade in Gentile Wine in the Middle Ages [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv, 2003); Soloveitchik, “Can Halakhic Texts Talk History?” in Soloveitchik, Collected Essays, vol. I (Oxford, 2013), 169 223. See A. Haverkamp, “Juden in Deutschland und Italien während des späten Mittelalters: Bewegungen in kabbalistischen Zusammenhängen,” in F. Backhaus, G. Engel, G. Grebner, and R. Liberles, eds., Frühneuzeitliche Ghettos in Europa im Vergleich (Berlin, 2012), 81 148, esp. 85 6, 93 4. A. Haverkamp, “Baptised Jews in German Lands during the Twelfth Century,” in M. Signer and J. van Engen, eds., Jews and Christians in Twelfth Century Europe (Notre Dame, IN, 2001), 255 310, esp. 265, 277 8. Cf. J. Shatzmiller, “Doctors and Medical Practices in Germany around the Year 1200: The Evidence of Sefer Asaph,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 50 (1983), 149 64; Shatzmiller, Jews, Medicine, and Medieval Society (Berkeley, 1994). Regarding the enormous significance of the computus

germany 255 late thirteenth century, the evidence for Jewish doctors multiplies, first in the earliest surviving account books of noble rulers in the French-speaking west of the German Kingdom, and later in the serial documentation of towns along the Rhine. Despite frequent ecclesiastical prohibitions (e.g., in synods from 1277), Christian patients, including more and more townspeople, entrusted their physical well-being to these doctors.43 In the credit business, Jews held no monopoly. Many Christians, too, were providing for the fast-growing demand, despite the condemnations of “usury” voiced by ecclesiastics and members of the pastoral or mendicant orders, in the German Kingdom as elsewhere. Local, mostly urban, Christian moneylenders often gave out sums much higher than those advanced by leading Jewish bankers or consortia.44 Compared with Christians, Jews depended much more heavily on support from the ruling powers, who were accordingly able to extort higher sums from them in return. In emergency situations such as the hunger years of 1343/4 in the Lake Constance region, some Jews were ready to advance credit at lower rates than Christian (male and female) “usurers.”45 There were large differences among Jews active in moneylending. Not a few were unable to make a living from the proceeds.46 In the larger

43

44

45

46

in Jewish Christian relations, cf. C. P. E. Nothaft, Medieval Christian Texts on the Jewish Calendar (Leiden, 2014); Nothaft and J. Isserles, “Calendars beyond Borders: Exchange of Calendrical Knowledge between Jews and Christians in Medieval Europe (12th 15th Century),” Medieval Encounters 20 (2014), 1 3. Jewish doctors also provided other services for regional lords, such as trade in valuables: Maier, Tätigkeitsfelder, 104 5; W. Treue, “Verehrt und angespien: Zur Geschichte jüdischer Ärzte in Aschkenas von den Anfängen bis zur Akademisierung,” Würzburger medizinhistorische Mitteilungen 21 (2002), 130 202, esp. 140 1. Their clients included leading ecclesiastics who ran up large debts with Italian merchant bankers to meet the financial demands of the papal Curia. On Jewish moneylending in general, see J. Shatzmiller, Shylock Reconsidered: Jews, Moneylending, and Medieval Society (Berkeley, 1990). For a closer focus on the German Kingdom, see F. Burgard, A. Haverkamp, F. Irsigler, and W. Reichert, eds., Hochfinanz im Westen des Reichs 1150 1500 (Trier, 1996); A. Holtmann, Juden in der Grafschaft Burgund im Mittelalter (Hanover, 2003); C. Cluse, “Nachwort des Übersetzers,” in J. Shatzmiller, Shylock geht in Revision: Juden, Geldleihe und Gesellschaft im Mittelalter (Trier, 2007), 239 56. From the middle of the thirteenth century, and mostly west of the Rhine, secular and ecclesiastical lords gave out expensive concessions to a rapidly rising number of “Lombards” or “Cahorsins.” Cf. the two contributions by A. Holtmann and W. Reichert in A. Haverkamp, ed., Geschichte der Juden, i, 267 92. As told by the Franciscan friar John of Winterthur see D. Multrus, Armuts und Fremdheitsvorstelungen, Deutungshorizonte, Wirklichkeitsorientierungen und historische Hintergründe in der Chronik des franziskanischen Mönches Johannes von Winterthur (Trier, 2011), 192 208. A list drawn up by order of the Prince Elector Baldwin of Trier in March 1338 yields exceptional insight into this variance. See O. Volk, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft am Mittelrhein vom 12. bis zum 16. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden, 1998), 758 66.

256 the middle ages: the christian world Jewish communities, some Jews earned all or part of their livelihood as service providers – the shamash (beadle), teachers and scribes, or servants in the Jewish hospice (heqdesh). Others may have worked as retailers or served as intermediaries for Jews or Christians. Christian servants and wet-nurses were employed in the households or businesses of wealthy Jews (slaves are no longer attested after the twelfth century). This wide social spectrum is reflected in the Jewish alley or quarter.47 Many settlements consisted of a single house, or just a few more. In the larger Jewish quarters, wealthy Jews, who usually played a leading role in their kahal, often owned more houses than the one they lived in and let them out or handed them over to relatives or other Jews, under conditions unknown today. Some also owned houses in other places where they conducted frequent business. In the major towns, Jews continued to live in central areas, mainly because of their early presence during the process of urban growth. Population increase among both Christians and Jews generally led to higher densities of buildings and people in the central town areas. In the Jewish alleys or quarters, this phenomenon was particularly strong. Here, in most towns, Jews and Christians still lived in close neighborhood, often wall-to-wall.48 For reasons of religious law and, from the later thirteenth century, due to the experience of persecution, Jews endeavored to live closely together, and secure from Christian attackers. In the German Kingdom, as elsewhere, many churchmen shared the view that Jews were useful, even indispensable, for key concerns of 47

48

On the following, see A. Haverkamp, “The Jewish Quarters in German Towns during the Middle Ages,” in R. P. Hsia and H. Lehmann, eds., In and Out of the Ghetto: Jewish Gentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany (New York, 1995), 13 28; B. E. Klein, “Obrigkeitliche und innerjüdische Quellen: ein untrennbares Miteinander,” in R. Kießling, P. Rauscher, S. Rohrbacher, and B. Staudinger, eds., Räume und Wege: Jüdische Geschichte im Alten Reich (1300 1800) (Berlin, 2007), 253 84; G. Mikosch, “Zeichen, Bilder, Codes Prolegomena zu einer Semiotik jüdischer Räume in der mittelalterlichen Stadt,” in S. Ehrich and J. Oberste, eds., Städtische Räume im Mittelalter (Regensburg, 2009), 35 47. On the legal dealings occasioned by these close conditions, cf. B. Mattes, Jüdisches Alltagsleben in einer mittelalterlichen Stadt: Responsa des Rabbi Meir von Rothenburg (Berlin, 2003), 219 86; B. Laqua, “Nähe und Distanz. Nachbarrechtliche Regelungen zwischen Christen und Juden (12. 14. Jahrhundert),” in S. Hirbodian, C. Jörg, S. Klapp, and J. R. Müller, eds., Pro multis beneficiis. Festschrift für Friedhelm Burgard. Forschungen zur Geschichte der Juden und des Trierer Raums (Trier, 2012), 73 92; Laqua, “Kooperation, Kommunikation, Übersetzung. Zur Anlage und Überlieferung des Judenschreinsbuches der Kölner Laurenz Parochie,” in A. Haverkamp and Müller, eds., Verschriftlichung, 147 71; C. Scholl, Die Judengemeinde der Reichsstadt Ulm im späten Mittelalter: Innerjüdische Verhältnisse und christlich jüdische Beziehungen in süddeutschen Zusammenhängen (Hanover, 2012), 100 9.

germany 257 Christian traditions and belief. It seems, however, that this attitude was less pronounced here than in northern France, where leading scholars of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, in their search for the Jewish textual tradition (Hebraica veritas) of the Bible, co-operated with Jews.49 Intellectual encounters between Jews and Christians are, however, clearly attested in the ShUM communities, and reflected in Sefer Hasidim [The Book of the Pious]. According to this main work of the ˙Hasidei ˙ Ashkenaz, a sternly ascetic movement influenced (through the Kalonymos family tradition) by ancient mystical traditions of Judaism, it was not beyond imagination that some Jews read Christian texts in Latin, taught Hebrew to Christian priests, and negotiated with Christians concerning ways of jointly praying for rain. These close relationships are only recorded because the Hasidim were opposed to them (in the same way as they were opposed to Jewish men and women who failed to meet their elitist standards of piety).50 Unique insights into the shared practices of representation are offered by a Jewish family of bankers and scholars in Zurich around 1330, revealed in the design of their seals,51 as well as of their festive hall.52 Motifs of “profane” origin can also be found in slightly earlier Hebrew manuscript illuminations, the result of Jewish–Christian cooperation, from the Lake 49

50

51

52

On the “discovery” by a monk of the Life of St. Matthias the Apostle, who became the patron of an important monastery in Trier, in the library of a local Jew, who reportedly possessed manuscripts in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, see J. Aronius, Regesten zur Geschichte der Juden im Fränkischen und Deutschen Reiche bis zum Jahre 1273 (Berlin, 1887 1902), 142 3, no. 316; R. M. Kloos, Lambertus des Legia. De vita, translatione, inventione ac miraculis sancti Matthiae Apostoli libri quinque (Trier, 1958), 79, 85, 180. For the wider context, cf. S. Haeberli, Der jüdische Gelehrte im Mittelalter: christliche Imaginationen zwischen Idealisierung und Dämonisierung (Ostfildern, 2010), 94 103 (on the concept of Hebraica veritas); and M. Przybilski, Kulturtransfer zwischen Juden und Christen in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters (Berlin, 2010), 117 36. On Christian “Adversus Judaeos” writings of a later period, see M. Niesner, “Wer mit juden well disputiren”: deutschsprachige Adversus Judaeos Literatur des 14. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen, 2005). Marcus, “Symbiosis,” 484 90; J. Maier, Fremdes und Fremde in der jüdischen Tradition und im Sefär Chassidim (Trier, 2002); T. Fishman, “Rhineland Pietist Approaches to Prayer and the Textualization of Rabbinic Culture in Medieval Northern Europe,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 11, 4 (2004), 313 31. The two adult sons of Minna owned a seal, as was typical for prominent Jews (including a number of Jewish widows) and leading Christian burgesses. Cf. S. Shalev Eyni, Jews among Christians: Hebrew Book Illumination from Lake Constance (London, 2010), 88. On these and other Jewish seals, cf. A. Lehnertz, Judensiegel in Aschkenas (1273 1347), (2014), www.medieval ashkenaz.org/quellen/judensiegel.html. J. Shatzmiller, Cultural Exchange: Jews, Christians, and Art in the Medieval Marketplace (Princeton, 2013), 61 72.

258 the middle ages: the christian world Constance region.53 In Strasbourg, where, according to the municipal laws of 1220, the Jews had to provide the great banner for the standard wagon (i.e., the representative center of the urban militia), a Jew of French origin named Sampson Pine worked together with two local citizens between 1331 and 1336, translating for them a French Parzifal romance. Sampson translated into German orally, while the two Christians rendered the text in verse (almost 40,000 lines). Non-Jewish vernacular literature was in favor among many Ashkenazic Jews, as long as its contents and motifs were not expressly religious.54 In the German Kingdom, moreover, the rare efforts by papal legates and others to enforce a distinctive garb on the Jews, in accord with the canons of the Fourth Lateran Council, apparently proved fruitless.55 Jews were allowed to bear arms in the same way as their Christian neighbors. They were also involved in the defense of their home towns.56 jewish communities The differences among the Jewish kehillot were as many and as wide as among the Christian town communes. The synagogue and mikveh were indispensable for the religious infrastructure of any major Jewish settlement. Synagogue buildings with women’s sections are first attested around 1200 in the larger kehillot of the cathedral cities.57 For the Jewish 53 54

55

56

57

Shalev Eyni, Jews among Christians. Przybilski, Kulturtransfer; see, further, the spectacular analysis of one of the stone slates found in the debris of the medieval synagogue of Cologne, by E. Timm, “Ein neu entdeckter literarischer Text in hebräischen Lettern aus der Zeit vor 1349,” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 142 (2013), 417 43. Aronius, Regesten, 174 7, no. 395; F. Singermann, Ueber Juden Abzeichen: Ein Beitrag zur sozialen Geschichte des Judentums (Berlin, 1915), 36 43; M. Keil, “Kulicht schmaltz und eisen gaffel Alltag und Repräsentation bei Juden und Christen im Spätmittelalter,” Aschkenas 14 (2004), 51 81. Thus, the Jews of Worms in 1201 defended their city and themselves from the roofs of their houses, even on a Sabbath. On these, as on other issues, Herbert Fischer, Die verfassungsrechtliche Stellung der Juden in den deutschen Städten während des 13. Jahrhunderts (Breslau, 1931; reprint Aalen, 1969), is a milestone in research (see esp. 188 92); cf. A. Haverkamp, “‘Concivilitas,’” 333 7; A. Haverkamp, “‘Kammerknechtschaft’ und ‘Bürgerstatus’ der Juden diesseits und jenseits der Alpen während des späten Mittelalters,” in M. Brenner and S. Ullmann, eds., Die Juden in Schwaben (Munich, 2013), 11 40, esp. 35 8. On bearing arms, see C. Magin, “‘Waffenrecht’ und ‘Waffenverbot’ für Juden im Mittelalter zu einem Mythos der Forschungsgeschichte,” Aschkenas 13 (2003), 17 33. Harck, Studien, 217 342. On this and the following, see maps B 1.1 B. 5.1 in A. Haverkamp, ed., Geschichte der Juden, iii; also M. Keil, “Orte der jüdischen Öffentlichkeit: Judenviertel, Synagoge, Friedhof,” in E. Brugger and B. Wiedl, eds.,

germany 259 community, the synagogue represented a space of ritual, legal–judicial, and political centrality. In Cologne, cases brought against Jews by Christians (including clerics) over monetary claims were dealt with in the synagogue before a Jewish court, and then before the parochial court. In several towns and cities in southern Germany, cases between Jews and Christians were decided by a mixed jury. It convened in the synagogue courtyard and was presided over by two Christian judges nominated by the kahal.58 Major communities also had a house for entertainments, dancing, weddings, etc. In some towns, a Jewish bathhouse is attested (in Augsburg around 1290 it was used by Jews and their Christian houshold servants). A prominent marker for the standing and self-esteem of larger kehillot was the Jewish hospice, found in almost all Jewish communities that also had a cemetery. Hospices provided for the local and, especially, the itinerant poor, for the sick, and for Jewish travelers. They served as a new institutional focus for Jewish poor relief (tsedakah). Many Jewish men and women bequeathed them large sums for the ˙remembrance of their souls.59 From the thirteenth century, the Jewish communities solidified their network of cemeteries, with additional burial grounds near cathedral cities, but increasingly also in the vicinity of younger urban centers.60 Not only the cemetery “district” but other regional clusters of Jewish settlements too were treated by the Christian authorities as “lands” (medinot) from the early fourteenth century, in matters of taxation and beyond.61 The growing membership, functions, and importance of the kehillot not only called for better external safeguards but also required clearer rules for its internal relations. As in Christian town communes, this need was met by statutes (takkanot). Jewish communities thus acted as law-makers in many areas of Jewish law, but were also much more dependent on the widest possible consent from their members. Already in the eleventh

58

59

60 61

Ein Thema zwei Perspektiven. Juden und Christen in Mittelalter und Frühneuzeit (Innsbruck, 2007), 170 86. C. Cluse, “Stadt und Judengemeinde in Regensburg im späten Mittelalter: Das ‘Judengericht’ und sein Ende,” in Cluse et al., eds., Gemeinden, 365 86, esp. 365 70. I. J. Yuval, “Hospices and their Guests in Jewish Medieval Germany,” in D. Assaf, ed., Proceedings of the Tenth World Congress of Jewish Studies, vol. B I: The History of the Jewish People [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1990), 125 9; Grossman, “Structure sociale,” 477 8. The foundation of a Jewish leper house in the Mainz region around 1340 was bound up with expectations of high tax incomes on the part of the archbishop of Mainz and the Emperor; cf. F. J. Ziwes, Studien zur Geschichte der Juden im mittleren Rheingebiet während des hohen und späten Mittelalters (Hanover, 1995), 91 3. Above, nn. 11 12; A. Haverkamp, ed., Geschichte der Juden, iii, map F 4. Y. Guggenheim, “Jewish Community and Territorial Organisation in Medieval Europe,” in C. Cluse, ed., The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages (Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries) (Turnhout, 2004), 71 91; and cf. below.

260 the middle ages: the christian world century, some takkanot were enacted by majority vote. As in Tzarfat, the community council (tovei ha-‘ir) played the decisive role in passing takkanot from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries onward. The council was recruited from among the close-knit circles of halakhic scholars, the welloff, and the well-born. Some of the regular assemblies of leading scholars from the ShUM communities in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries drew up collections of takkanot to be applied in all three communities, and confirmed them in c.1220, 1223, c.1250, and 1381. They incorporated parts of northern French legal collections initiated, authorized, or spread by Rabeinu Tam (Jacob ben Meir, d. 1171), the grandson of the famous Rashi (R. Solomon ben Isaac, d. 1104). Together they formed a basis for a unique association of Jewish communities that existed alongside the league among the Christian communes of the three cities from the early thirteenth century. The Worms kahal used this legal means when it convened an assembly of all leading Jews from the “land of Worms” (medinat Warmaisa, a unit apparently modeled on the cemetery district of Worms) in 1307, to pass joint takkanot aimed at preventing anti-Jewish action from nobles, clerics, and townspeople following the recent expulsion of Jews from the French Crownlands. Exiles from France apparently had a direct impact on the continuous reception of French takkanot and other traditions in the Rhenish communities.62 The arrival of French Jews in Worms and Strasbourg did not proceed without conflict in these kehillot. Conflicts over shares in leadership and taxation were also rather common within Christian communities during the first half of the fourteenth century.63 Jewish communities recently founded could face even greater problems. A typical example is provided by the trading town of Stendal, a key town in the margravate of Brandenburg, situated west of the River Elbe. Here, around 1270–5 ce, a number of Jews refused to contribute to the taxes of the Jewish community, claiming that they had reached a separate tax agreement with the margrave. As the kahal was unable to resolve this central issue, they turned to outside rabbinic authorities, including R. Meir of Rothenburg. As on similar occasions, R. Meir ruled in favor of the Jewish community, referring to the general legal norm that “all inhabitants of a city are shareholders in the city walls, the civic patrols, the guards of armor and gates, the gates, the common kitchen (for the poor), the almsbox, and all the institutions 62

63

R. Barzen, “Takkanot Kehillot Schum: Die Rechtssatzungen der jüdischen Gemeinden von Mainz, Worms und Speyer im hohen und späteren Mittelalter” (Ph.D. diss., Universität Trier, 2005), 362 5; Guggenheim, “Jewish Community,” 82 4; Louis Finkelstein, Jewish Self Government in the Middle Ages (New York, 1964). Cf. A. Haverkamp, “‘Concivilitas,’” 342.

germany 261 they require, as well as in the taxes due to the lord of the city.” While R. Meir adduced talmudic passages for aspects of his legal reasoning, his position was mainly based on the custom in all of the German Kingdom and the example of the ShUM communities.64 Often the Jews maintained their bonds with the noble and ecclesiastical – or, sometimes, royal – overlords of their towns, even in cases where the Christian town commune had effectively dissociated itself from such rule. In other cases, such ties were reactivated. These triangular relationships lay in the interest of the Jewish community, as the kahal and its members depended on efficient safeguards both inside and outside the town walls. They might also profit from the fact that both the town lord and the municipality were intent on limiting the burdens their respective competitor laid on the Jews. In times of imminent danger, the lords as well as the resident Jews were ready to make concessions (such as reducing the interest rate) toward the Christian community and populace.65 The proximity of kahal and municipality was fundamental, and explains the analogies in leadership structure. The “heads of the community” (roshei ha-kahal) became an institutionalized council in numerous Ashkenazic kehillot over the course of the thirteenth century.66 Like the municipal council, the juden rat was the highest political and judicial authority. While it judged according to Jewish law, it depended on the support of the town lord and town commune when it came to enforcing punishment or tax against recalcitrant members. Effective diplomacy among Christians required the representatives of the kahal to receive additional legitimacy from Christian authorities. However, these authorities might use this requirement to interfere in the composition of the Jewish council or the acceptance of newcomers (herem ha-yishuv).67 ˙ 64

65

66

67

R. Meir ben Barukh, Responsa, ed. R. N. Rabinowitz (Jerusalem, 1986 [Lemberg, 1860]), no 108. I am grateful to Yacov Guggenheim for his edition and translation of the passage, based on MS Parma, Biblioteca Palatina, ebr. 65, fols. 36v 37v, and MS Oxford, Neubauer 844, fol. 82. Cooperation between the Jewish and Christian communities was formalized in 1297 in an agreement between the margrave of Brandenburg and the town council of Stendal. The agreement was to become the model for the relations between Jews and Christians in the towns of the margravate: J. R. Christophersen, Quellen zur Geschichte der Juden in der Mark Brandenburg, (2013), www.medieval ashkenaz.org/quellen/brandenburg.html (2013). A. Haverkamp, “Verschriftlichung,” 34 5, with the examples of Trier (May 1338, in connection with the “Armleder” pogroms, cf. above) and Vienna (June 1338, connected with the persecutions around Pulkau). Larger Jewish communities (as well as Christian communes in major cities) had councils of twelve, whereas smaller kehillot had fewer parnasim. New members of the Jewish council were co opted by majority vote, and membership was for life. A. Haverkamp, “‘Concivilitas’,” 328 33; Cluse, “Jewish Community,” 189 91.

262 the middle ages: the christian world In most towns by the end of the thirteenth century, burgess law and citizen status provided the legal means for closely associating the Jews and their kahal with Christians and their community. Depending on the political status of the municipal community, citizenship was granted by the commune’s representatives, at the behest of the lord or with his consent, under varying contractual conditions, to the local kahal as a whole, or to individual Jewish heads of household, permanently or for a fixed duration. For the Jews, the decisive implications of citizen status and its obligations toward the Christian community were the protection of religious practice, bodies, and possessions. This included public safeguards for retrieving loans, equal treatment in municipal law, and access to the local courts, but did not exclude the applicability of Jewish law and internal jurisdiction. Due to their religious alterity and autonomy, the Jews were neither allowed to take part in leading the exclusively Christian commune, nor in any way interested in such participation, as it effectively demanded that they give up their religion and leave the kahal.68 ˙ p r o x i m i t y t o t h e r u l e r a n d “ c ham be r s e r fdo m ” As before 1096, prominent Jews continued to maintain close relationships with the ecclesiastical or secular authorities. It was a natural result of the interconnections between town lords, municipal communities, and Jewish kehillot, but also of the specific functions individual Jews performed in the service of the ruler. During the first phase of Frederick Barbarossa’s reign (1152–90), Kalonymos ben Meïr, a scion of the Kalonymos family and parnas in Speyer, held a position of confidence at the imperial court in connection with the Emperor’s financial politics. Kalonymos was continuing the close relations of his family with the imperial court, expressed in the early-thirteenth-century legend of the arrival of their ancestors in Carolingian times. It is no coincidence that Emperors Frederick I and Henry VI showed favor to the Jews when they were acutely threatened by Crusaders in 1188.69 In later times, no Jews can be found in such functions at the courts of the “kings of the Romans” or Emperors. We do find them, however, in the service of ecclesiastical and secular rulers, despite the Church canons – reaffirmed at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and at later synods – 68

69

Nevertheless, some citizen registers until the mid fourteenth century list new Christian and Jewish burgesses together (Augsburg, Frankfurt am Main, Speyer); cf. A. Haverkamp, “‘Concivilitas,’” 315 19, 338 43; A. Haverkamp, “Juden in Italien,” 89 99. R. Chazan, “Emperor Fredrick I, the Crusade and the Jews,” Viator 8 (1977), 83 93; A. Haverkamp, Zwölftes Jahrhundert, 1125 1198 (Stuttgart, 2003; reprint 2005), 182 3.

germany 263 70 against employing Jews in positions of authority. Most of the evidence for Jews in the crucial field of financial administration comes from the areas of “new settlement” in the East and Southeast. Employing Jews in this field remained highly attractive for lay and ecclesiastical rulers. Jews, after all, were not bound by the ecclesiastical restrictions on moneylending, and they were in a position of dependency and unable to use their offices for building up lordships of their own. They could quickly provide capital at reasonable costs, capitalize the income from tolls rented or pawned out to them, or manage the expenses of court and administration. All of these options were used in exemplary fashion by Archbishop and Prince-Elector Baldwin of Trier (1307–54). Baldwin laid the financial foundations of his policies, which concentrated on the archbishopric of Trier but extended far beyond, with the help of “his” Jews. However, he also rigorously used the Jews’ growing need for protection in the wake of the “Armleder” riots to increase his hold on their bodies and possessions. In other respects, too, his demands were similar to those made on Christian serfs.71 With new emphases, the Prince Elector was pursuing a policy already explored some decades earlier by King Rudolph of Habsburg and by Baldwin’s brother, Emperor Henry VII, and then significantly intensified both by the Wittelsbach Emperor Louis and by his rival, Baldwin’s greatnephew Charles IV. The Christian advisors of these rulers exploited the broad concept of Jewish “chamber serfdom” to the extreme, adopting ideas from canon law and the Roman legal tradition. Ironically, they were drawing on a legal construct first formulated in the German Kingdom in 1236 by the chancery of Frederick II, precisely to express the basic affiliation of the Jews to the imperial crown – even an imperial monopoly over them – against the claims of the papacy. Frederick’s program had been occasioned by persecution at the hands of Crusaders. For the first time in the German Kingdom, the attackers had brought forward formal charges of ritual murder. The Emperor combined warding off this threat toward Jewish existence with establishing a new legal principle: At the bequest of Ashkenazic Jewry, he extended to all Jews in the German Kingdom the charter of rights granted by his grandfather, Frederick I, to the Jews of Worms (1157, renewing those given them by Henry IV in 1090). As before, the Jews were associated with the imperial chamber (i.e., the core of 70

71

Aronius, Regesten, 175 6, no. 395; M. J. Wenninger, “Juden als Münzmeister, Zollpächter und fürstliche Finanzbeamte im mittelalterlichen Aschkenas,” in M. Toch, ed., with E. Müller Luckner, Wirtschaftsgeschichte der mittelalterlichen Juden: Fragen und Einschätzungen (Munich, 2008), 121 38. A. Haverkamp, “Erzbischof Balduin und die Juden” [1985], in A. Haverkamp, Gemeinden, 39 88.

264 the middle ages: the christian world imperial rule), but this time they were also characterized as servi. In this way, the charter of 1236 not only adopted the “perpetual servitude” concept of popes and canonists, it also opened up new scope for interpretation in allowing the alignment of the legal position of Jews with that of unfree persons, even slaves.72 The favorable passages in the privilege of 1236 were adopted in later Jewry-laws by princes and kings in the eastern lands. Jewish emigrants to Italy used them from the late fourteenth century in their agreements (condotte) with the communes of upper and central Italy. Here, however, they were connected with civic status, while the ambiguous legal construction of “chamber serfdom” had never been used in the Patrimony of St. Peter or in “imperial” Italy. North of the Alps, by contrast, it became a commonplace in the chanceries of the kings and emperors. For the first time, King Rudolph I, in 1286, used it to justify his claims to the possessions of the “serfs of his chamber.” His extreme demands implied severe limitations on the Jews’ freedom of movement.73 With increasing frequency from the early fourteenth century, their extreme shortage of financial resources forced the German kings to pawn the taxes they claimed from Jews or even whole Jewish communities, sometimes along with the towns where they lived, to their allies. The Jews’ safety nets were jeopardized, if not destroyed, by this policy. The legal claims the Crown made on the Jews were intensified, especially when the king proclaimed the cancellation of debts owed to Jewish creditors.74 This practice stood in sharp contrast to the interests of numerous municipalities, barons, and other lords who held rights over the Jews. Not least, Louis the Bavarian’s assertion that he could “do as he liked” with his Jews also ran against his own professed aim of looking for better means of protecting them (to which end he introduced a new poll tax on all adult male Jews in the Empire).75 Nevertheless, Louis reportedly intervened

72 73

74

75

A. Haverkamp, “‘Kammerknechtschaft,’” 14 19. Rudolph was aiming at the possessions of R. Meir of Rothenburg, who had recently moved to Worms, and of R. Meir’s followers in the ShUM communities, in Oppenheim and the Wetterau region. Maybe moved by eschatological hopes, these Jews had left their homes a few months before without the king’s consent, as Rudolph claimed. See G. Mentgen, Quellen zur Geschichte der Juden im Erzbistum Mainz (1274 1347) (2015), www.medieval ashkenaz.org/quellen.html. For such measurers taken by Emperor Louis “the Bavarian,” see A. Haverkamp, “‘Kammerknechtschaft,’” 31 2; G. Mentgen, Studien zur Geschichte der Juden im mitte lalterlichen Elsaß (Hanover, 1995), 313 14. E. Isenmann, “Steuern und Abgaben,” in Germania Judaica III, iii, 2208 81, esp. 2225 6.

germany 265 against a ritual-murder charge raised in 1346 in his own residential town of Munich.76 from familiarity and conditional tolerance to pe rsecuti o n a nd e x p ulsi o n Since the turn of the fourteenth century, the policies of the kings/emperors were driven to a large extent by their lack of resources. This had direct adverse consequences for the Jews in the lands close to the Crown, not least as it also influenced the policies of the lay or ecclesiastical princes and other authorities, especially in the western areas of “old settlement.” Notwithstanding some similar incidents,77 the relations of most barons and nobles toward the Jews in the eastern lands of “new settlement” do not show the same tendencies. In the western parts, Jews suffered most extremely from the spread of local and (after 1287) regional pogroms. Many factors contributed to these convulsive events. The relative effects of the views expressed by theologians concerning the status of the Jews, the propaganda (mostly by mendicant friars) against the “Christ-killers,” and the efforts by popes, papal legates, and local ecclesiastics to restrict Jewish life according to the demands of canon law are all difficult to estimate. An increase in such activity can be observed in the German Kingdom between the 1260s and 1280s. Charges of “usury” were still mostly aimed at Christians, not against Jews (in the German Kingdom, this situation was only reversed in the fifteenth century).78 From 1275, new legal codes were spreading, which favored 76 77

78

Germania Judaica II, ii, 557 n. 20. These included the extortions from Bohemian Jews by King Wenceslas II in 1298 and by King John of Luxemburg in 1336 (Germania Judaica II, i, 91). The latter expropriated the Jews of Prague in 1336 (Germania Judaica II, ii, 659), and in 1345 allowed the town of Breslau (Wrocław) to mend the city walls with stones taken from the Jewish cemetery; see W. Cohn’s article, “Breslau,” now published posthumously in N. Conrads, “Die verlorene Germania Judaica: Ein Handbuch und Autorenschicksal im Dritten Reich,” Berichte und Forschungen: Jahrbuch des Bundesinstituts für Kultur und Geschichte der Deutschen im östlichen Europa (2008), 215 54, esp. 245, 252 3. Cf. C. Cluse, “Zum Zusammenhang von Wuchervorwurf und Judenvertreibung im 13. Jahrhundert,” in Burgard et al., eds., Judenvertreibungen, 135 63; Cluse, Studien zur Geschichte der Juden in den mittelalterlichen Niederlanden (Hanover, 2000), 171 85 (on Thomas Aquinas), 315 60 (on the construction and spread of anti Jewish legends), 360 74 (on the influence of the mendicant friars). On Berthold of Regensburg, cf. Haeberli, Gelehrte, 120 2; Przybilski, Kulturtransfer, 146 51; on the church synods of Vienna and Breslau, see S. Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century, vol. II, 1254 1314, ed. K. R. Stow (Detroit, 1989), 244 9. Anti Jewish statutes that went beyond those passed at the councils of Lateran (1215) and Vienne (1274), or adopted the synodal decrees of 1267, are rare in the synodal legislation passed under the influence of the

266 the middle ages: the christian world exclusion of and discrimination against Jews.79 Nevertheless, we can still find positive relationships between members of the two religious communities on a local level until the mid-1330s – i.e., before the “Armleder” pogroms began.80 In a number of cases in the western regions, the Christian town communities, at times acting together with ecclesiastical or lay overlords, were able to avert imminent danger.81 During the quarter of a millennium between 1097 and 1347, no persecutions of Jews can be traced in numerous major towns and cities,82 while many other towns, mostly small ones with weak defenses, saw a series of pogroms, such as the “Rintfleisch” and “Armleder” movements in Franconia, the “Pulkau” pogroms of 1338 in Lower Austria, Bohemia, and Moravia, and the persecutions around Deggendorf, mostly in Lower Bavaria, starting in the fall of 1338.83 Other than the pogroms of 1096, which apparently affected all the Jewish communities of the time, and the persecutions of 1348–50, those of the invervening period were local and regional in scope. However, supra-local factors were usually at work locally, and persecutions with a wider geographical scope showed motivations, developments, and effects that might vary from place to place.84 In the run-up to the Second Crusade in 1146/7, the preaching by a monk named Radulph caused persecutions

79

80 81

82

83

84

diocesan bishops between 1267 and the mid fourteenth century; cf. R. Richtscheid, Judenbetreffe in Synodal und Konzilsstatuten (2011), www.medieval ashkenaz.org/quel len/synodal und konzilsstatuten.html. In contrast to the Sachsenspiegel legal code, composed between 1220 and 1235 and often copied in northern Germany, the Schwabenspiegel, written c.1275 in or near Augsburg, and influential in southern and western Germany, had a strong anti Jewish bias. With the exception of the municipal legal code of Vienna, similar texts are rare in other parts of the German Kingdom. See C. Magin, “Wie es umb der iuden recht stet”: Der Status der Juden in spätmittelalterlichen deutschen Rechtsbüchern (Göttingen, 1999), 401 24. See above. On Augsburg in 1298, see above, n. 74. Other examples are provided by Würzburg (1336) and Colmar (1338), where towns, together with leading ecclesiastics and nobles, took action against the “Armleder” troops. These include the kehillot in the cathedral cities of Worms, Cologne, Trier, Strasbourg, Constance, Augsburg, and Regensburg. Cf. above. In Mainz, the Jews were persecuted in 1188, 1281, and 1283; in 1286, they were again accused of “ritual murder.” Thus, the gruesome “Jews’ battle” of Frankfurt in 1241 was possibly linked to fears among Christians of the Mongols and their alleged Jewish supporters fears that no doubt were shared in other places too, without causing pogroms; cf. Yuval, Perceptions, 284 8; D. Schnur, “Weltuntergang an der Wende zum Spätmittelalter? Der Frankfurter Pogrom von 1241 und seine Einbettung in jüdische Endzeiterwartungen,” in N. Eibisch and H. Klinge, eds., Endspiele: Zukunftserwartungen zwischen Weltuntergang und Utopia (Göttingen, 2015), 109 43.

germany 267 (of unclear extent) in several towns of the Rhineland, despite the efforts on the part of Bernard of Clairvaux and Archbishop Henry of Mainz, and the protective measures of King Conrad III.85 In 1188, Frederick I and Henry VI intervened against imminent threats to the kehillot in the central Rhine region. Crusaders killed Jews in Worms and Vienna in 1196. In later pogroms driven by Crusading zeal, for example in Erfurt (1221), Fulda (1235), and the duchy of Brabant (1309), charges of ritual murder, first insinuated in 1147, became more pronounced.86 From 1287 this accusation, and from 1298 the charge (first attested in 1290 in Paris) of Host desecration, became the most important motives or post-event “justifications” for massacres, which now spread throughout the traditional regions of Jewish settlement and royal interest. The charge of ritual murder was fed by Christian anti-Jewish interpretations of kidush ha-Shem, the (ritual) selfsacrifice in response to persecution and ˙forced baptism.87 “Host desecration” referred to other Jewish ritual practices, especially around Passover, and received a new emphasis from the growing public veneration of the Eucharist.88 Both accusations were often interwoven in chronicles and legends. The massacres raging between November 1348 and the summer of 1350 went far beyond the regions previously affected, though they were apparently more intense in the areas of “old settlement.” All existing Jewish settlements in these areas were heavily afflicted by them.89 The persecutions were fanned by the accusation (by no means believed by all Christian contemporaries) that the Jews had poisoned the wells. All Jews were thus implicated in a conspiracy to spread the new and unknown, pandemic plague, intending to kill all Christians – an extreme version of the myth of the murderous Jew. The charge aimed at the annihilation of all Jews – who were not even able to escape by accepting forcible baptism – as well as of their alleged Christian accomplices. This excessive expression of Christian anti-Judaism was certainly driven by the widespread panic in the 85

86

87

88 89

We can only localize the slaughter of twenty two members of the Würzburg kahal, killed against the local bishop’s will in 1147; see A. Haverkamp, Zwölftes Jahrhundert, 71 4; on Bernard’s role, see H. Breuer, “Die rheinische Kreuzzugspredigt des Heiligen Bernhard von Clairvaux: Überlegungen zur Herkunft der Glossen im Codex 23 der Kölner Dombibliothek,” Analecta Coloniensia 7/8 (2007/8), 83 177. Cf. above, and nn. 69, 72, and 83; generally, G. Mentgen, “Kreuzzugsmentalität bei antijüdischen Aktionen nach 1190,” in A. Haverkamp, ed., Juden und Christen, 287 326; on Brabant, see Cluse, Studien, 192 210. Yuval, Perceptions, 163 204; Jeremy Cohen, Christ Killers: The Jews and the Passion from the Bible to the Big Screen (London, 2007), 73 102; Mentgen, “Kiddusch.” Yuval, Perceptions, 205 6; Cohen, Christ Killers, 103 17. In a few places, mostly in the County of Burgundy, the Jews were expelled rather than killed.

268 the middle ages: the christian world face of the deadly disease, as were other convulsive changes in the attitudes and practices of many people. The first appearance north of the Alps of flagellants as a religious mass movement is only one symptom. The flagellants disputed the role of the church hierarchy by offering their own path toward salvation. Contemporary Jews watched them with apprehension fed by renewed eschatological expectations and by their experience of the Crusading movement, and saw in them harbingers of apocalyptic persecution. Also, many Christians later blamed the anti-Jewish violence on the flagellants. Some Christian writers, on the other hand, argued that the plague was caused by natural factors or saw it as God’s punishment for the sins of Christendom. This ties in with what the Jewish poet Israel (Suslin) ben Joel thought: that the plague was God’s punishment for the pogroms. From the Jewish perspective, it also seemed logical that some Christian contemporaries saw the real cause of the pogroms in the debts owed to Jews by the instigators and perpetrators of the massacre.90 The threat the plague posed to virtually everyone distinguished it from famine, which often spared the rich. Still, extreme economic hardship, such as in the famine years around 1315, could have similar adverse effects. Starting with 1096, economic crisis variously influenced the outbreak of, recruitment to, and outcome of anti-Jewish riots.91 Political instability also had a strong influence on pogroms (and was in turn aggravated by them, since the killings not only contravened Church norms but also violated the existing secular legal order). In many cases, the riots were used for political ends. This can be observed in connection with the “Good Werner” pogroms of 1287/8 and in the persecution against the Jews of Brabant in 1309, confined to towns involved in grave authority struggles with the duke. The “Rintfleisch” riots (April through July, 1298) in the royal heartlands of Franconia and Swabia were directly linked with the struggle for the throne between King Adolph of Nassau and Albrecht of Habsburg. Only after his election and accession to the throne could Albrecht put an end to 90

91

A. Haverkamp, “Judenverfolgungen”; F. Graus, Pest Geißler Judenmorde: Das 14. Jahrhundert als Krisenzeit, 2nd edn. (Göttingen, 1988), 155 340; C. Cluse, “Zur Chronologie der Verfolgungen zur Zeit des ‘Schwarzen Todes,’” in A. Haverkamp, ed., Geschichte der Juden, I, 223 42, and III, maps D 1 D 5; Cluse, Studien, 210 83 (esp. 276 82 on ‘“astrology, prophecy, and eschatology”); Cluse, “Zwischen Vorurteil und Vertrauen: Die Rettung der Regensburger Juden im Jahr 1349,” in G. Gemein, ed., Kulturkonflikte Kulturbegnungen: Juden, Christen und Muslime in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Bonn, 2010), 362 75. For example, in 1146/7 and 1195/6 (A. Haverkamp, Zwölftes Jahrhundert, 27, 34 5), and during the supply crises of 1337 and 1347 in Alsace (Mentgen, Studien, 354, 362). For the state of research, including the problem of climate change, see C. Jörg, “Teure, Hunger, Großes Sterben”: Hungersnöte und Versorgungskrisen in den Städten des Reiches während des 15. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 2008).

germany 269 the persecution. The “Armleder” riots, too, occurred in a phase of heightened political struggle. Just like the “Rintfleisch” pogroms, their leaders were either from the lower nobility or of doubtful origin. Together with a very mixed band of followers (among whom peasants, at times, formed a strong component), these leaders were able to exploit the weakened authority of the Emperor, who had been involved in a struggle with the Avignonese papacy from the beginnings of his reign. The implications of this struggle included the Franciscan “poverty controversy” and other rifts in the political structure. In numerous major towns and cities, “internal” tensions (usually related to “external” factors) reduced the councils’ and leading burgesses’ scope of action against those who attacked the Jews. In Alsace in May 1338, a number of town communities united with the bishop of Strasbourg and several nobles and knights to form a regional peace against insurgents and the “Armleder” bands. At the same time, the Habsburger Albert II, duke of Austria, Styria, and Carinthia, together with some members of the nobility, proceeded against the persecutors in Lower Austria, albeit with limited success. Soon after, he passed measures aimed at preventing further pogroms, in cooperation with his cousin (also named Albert), the bishop of Passau. The fact that he also (and more successfully) defended the Jews at the time of the Black Death earned him the epithet of a “supporter of Jews” (fautor iudeorum) among his enemies. On the other hand, Count Palatine Rudolph II, a nephew of Emperor Louis IV, was responsible for a series of pogroms in his own lands in 1343. He allegedly tried to obtain permission to kill all Jews in the German Kingdom from his uncle, who opposed his policies.92 At the time of the Black Death pogroms, the struggle for the Crown continued to influence the policies of Charles IV and the Wittelsbacher house down to May 1349. Except for the pogrom in Eger (Cheb), Charles was able to prevent pogroms in his own kingdom of Bohemia. He used his legal claim over the Jews in other parts of the German Kingdom to gratify his followers or win new allies, making far-reaching concessions, even to the extent of granting a royal pardon to a town in advance of the expected killing of the local Jews. In Nuremberg, just as in Strasbourg and Erfurt, groups who revolted against the municipal council fanned the atmosphere of fear created by the advance of the Black Death to bring about government changes. When they succeeded, the new council immediately proceeded to plunder and kill the Jews, in ways that could barely hide the grave breach of law under a thin veil of legal procedure. The beleaguered municipal leadership rarely had the military means to step in efficiently against the murderers, who also claimed a semblance of religious 92

Cf. A. Haverkamp, “Verschriftlichung,” 13 36 (fautor: 31); Ziwes, Studien, 244 7.

270 the middle ages: the christian world legitimacy. Even where the council’s position was unchallenged, as in Regensburg, it took great efforts to prevent the outbreak of anti-Jewish violence, and among the major towns only Regensburg and Goslar were successful.93 In many other towns, the municipal leadership’s interest in protecting the Jews was reduced by the fact that they had little or no share in the fiscal rights over them. Many ecclesiastical or secular barons, too, and many nobles, gave priority to their own interests when dealing with the Jewish minority – for whom, however, the matter was one of life or death. An extreme – and apparently exceptional – case is provided by Frederick II, landgrave of Thuringia and margrave of Meissen (1310–49), who personally backed the annihilation of the Jews in his own dominions and beyond.94 It is likely that more than half of the Jewish population was exterminated in the persecutions between 1348 and 1350/1. Some of them committed kidush ha-Shem; many others died of the plague. A few survived in the ˙castles of nobles or princes. It was the darkest hour for Ashkenazic Jewry, and it only reinforced the view that the German Kingdom was a “land of persecution” (erets gezerah), to recall the words of R. Judah (d. 1349 in Toledo), a son of one of R. Meir’s students, the influential scholar R. Asher ben Yehiel (d. 1327), who had fled to Spain with his family around 1300. ˙ The experience of disaster not only marked the physical existence of the survivors, it also influenced their memories, religious views, and practices. Moved by eschatological expectations, some Rhenish Jews even traveled from Heidelberg to Jerusalem after 1350. Here they became acquainted with the kabbalistic lore of Sepharad, which reinforced their messianic and mystical views and also contained a strong magical element. A member of the growing kabbalistic movement in Ashkenaz, Shimon ben Samuel of Regensburg, around 1400, attested to widespread messianic expectations at the turn of the century, writing that it was written in the Christian mandates that “Jews should be killed every fifty years.”95 93

94

95

In Regensburg, on October 3, 1349 only days after the fateful change of urban leadership in Nuremberg the mayor, 17 councilors, and 236 other influential burgesses took an oath to protect the local Jews and to prosecute anti Jewish violence as a breach of the city’s honor and dignity meaning its legal order, self image, and esteem. The measure also implied that they were safeguarding law and order in their city, as well as their fiscal rights over the Jews. Cf. Cluse, “Vorurteil und Vertrauen.” On Frederick II and the pogrom in Erfurt, see A. Haverkamp, “Judenverfolgungen,” 252 6, 276 8; M. Lämmerhirt, Juden in den wettinischen Herrschaftsgebieten: Recht, Verwaltung und Wirtschaft im Spätmittelalter (Cologne, 2007), 41 6; on Count Rudolph II (1343) and Duke Albert II, cf. above. I. J. Yuval, “Kabbalisten, Ketzer und Polemiker: Das kulturelle Umfeld des Sefer ha Nizachon von Lipmann Mühlhausen,” in K. E. Grözinger and J. Dan, eds., Mysticism, Magic and Kabbalah in Ashkenazi Judaism (Berlin, 1995), 155 71, esp. 164; Yuval, “Juden, Hussiten und Deutsche: Nach einer hebräischen Chronik,” in A. Haverkamp and

germany

271

THE MID FOURTEENTH THROUGH EARLY SIXTEENTH CENTURIES

c o n d i t i o n s o f j e w i s h l i fe For the long-term trends in central Europe, the marked population decline over about one century following the Black Death was a fundamental factor. Various economic trends caused new dynamics in the social fabric, both in the countryside – where large parts of the rural population, as well as numerous nobles and knights, were affected by reduced proceeds from the traditional agrarian economy and consequently needed credit – and in the larger towns. There were strong tendencies toward social variation and stratification, as well as painful struggles over participation and exclusion on all levels of the political system. The more independent towns and cities were haunted by tensions when the municipal councils attempted to monopolize all relevant political and fiscal rights, including those pertaining to the Jews, and to assert their supreme authority (Obrigkeit) over the Christian community, to enforce social discipline through numerous statutes (including dress codes), and to bring the community’s confraternal organizations and Church institutions under their control.96 In antagonistic ways, the conflicting parties argued on religious grounds. In this context, religious arguments also served to exclude Jews, “heretics,” and other groups – such as those working in “dishonorable” professions – or “Slavs” and “gypsies” who were increasingly categorized along ethnic lines. The effects of the Great Schism in the Western Church (1378–1417)

96

F. J. Ziwes, eds., Juden in der christlichen Umwelt während des späten Mittelalters (Berlin, 1992), 59 102, esp. 63; A. Haverkamp, “Juden in Deutschland,” 119; cf. below. The kehillot of Mainz, Nuremberg, and Worms held annual fasts on the anniversary of the 1349 persecution, and the lists of martyrs were read out: M. Breuer and Y. Guggenheim, “Die jüdische Gemeinde, Gesellschaft und Kultur,” in Germania Judaica III, iii, 2078 138, esp. 2136. See the overview in A. Haverkamp, “Juden in Italien”; Toch, Juden; and the surveys in Germania Judaica III, iii, 2079 327; on the urban contexts, see Isenmann, Stadt, esp. 407 17 (the municipal Obrigkeit and its religious foundations); also P. Moraw, “Die Kirche und die Juden,” in Germania Judaica III, iii, 2282 97 (especially on the implica tions of printing, 2295); H. Schreckenberg, Die christlichen Adversus Judaeos Texte und ihr literarisches und historisches Umfeld (13. 20. Jahrhundert) (Bern: Lang, 1994). On the increasing discrimination against Judaism in German literature (including Shrovetide and Passion plays), and its spread in manuscripts and print, see, for example, Klaus Wolf, “Das Judenbild in mittelalterlichen Dramen aus Worms, Mainz und Erfurt,” in F. Bussert, S. Laubenstein, and M. Stürzebecher, eds., Die jüdische Gemeinde von Erfurt und die SchUM Gemeinden: Kulturelles Erbe und Vernetzung (Jena, 2012), 150 6; on the various anti Jewish “customs” of the time, cf. G. Mentgen, “Der Würfelzoll und andere antijüdische Schikanen in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit,” Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 22 (1995), 1 48.

272 the middle ages: the christian world and the spirit of the ecumenical councils encouraged the barons to expand their religious and ecclesiastical authority and to enforce exclusive Christian orthodoxy in their territories. The development favored the popularization of Christian anti-Jewish tenets in coarser ways, in sermons (by “popular” preachers, mostly Dominican and Franciscan friars) as in other forms of representation.97 From c.1470, polemics against Judaism were increasingly spread in print. They had a strong influence on the attitudes and behavior of many, gaining additional force from renewed emphasis on the sufferings of Christ in Christian piety. The Jews were also directly affected by the eastward shift of the Crown’s regional focus of authority, by the Luxemburg dynasty from the mid fourteenth century and by the House of Habsburg from 1438. In their eastern territories, the trends of economic expansion and urban growth and the consolidation of secular princedoms were still strong even after 1350, despite numerous failures, the threat from the Ottoman Turks, and the turmoil caused by the Hussite movement in Bohemia. p r e s enc e r e d u c e d, m ob i l i t y i n c r ea s e d : p er s e c ut i o n , expulsion, emigration Following the catastrophes of 1336–8 and 1348–50, slightly more than 1,000 Jewish settlements can be accounted for until c.1520 – including, however, the numerous localities where Jews were again persecuted or (temporarily) expelled after the 1350s, such as Magdeburg (1356/7, 1384) or Breslau (1360). Thus, in many places, Jews only lived for short periods, in small numbers, and discontinuously. In the western regions, they returned to fewer than half of those places where they had lived before.98 New settlements and the expansion of existing ones were mainly features of regions outside the Jewish areas of “old settlement.” The eastward shift involved also the centers of Jewish learning, which generally suffered a long-term crisis from the large losses among the Jewish élite. Resettlement was a slow process, beginning in the 1350s. Jews preferred the larger towns, including the ShUM cities, because of the possibility of linking with important Jewish traditions there, especially the cemeteries. In most cases, it took decades until the Jews returned, and more time until they could constitute a kahal.99 Even the larger ones among these kehillot 97

98

99

See, for example, Isaiah Shachar, The Judensau: A Medieval Anti Jewish Motif and its History (London, 1974); H. Schreckenberg, Die Juden in der Kunst Europas: Ein histor ischer Bildatlas (Göttingen, 1996). See A. Haverkamp, ed., Geschichte der Juden, iii, maps A 4.5 A 4.6 and A 2.5 A 2.6; Toch, “Verfolgungen.” Cf. A. Haverkamp, ed., Geschichte der Juden, iii, maps E 2 and E 4.

germany 273 attained no more than one-third of their previous membership numbers, for short periods only. The first expulsions in the German Kingdom, from c.1390, still hit the generation of those who had survived the 1348–50 pogroms. Expulsions were a measure the kings and princes of western Europe had often enacted since 1182, whereas they had rarely been seen in Ashkenaz before 1350. Plans of individual barons to expel the Jews from their lands had remained largely without effect.100 The first Jews to be affected by the evictions after 1350 were those of the imperial city of Strasbourg and the Palatinate County on the Rhine (including the Upper Palatinate) in 1390. After that, expulsions spread to most of the baronial territories in the south and southeast down to Austria, as well as to Thuringia, Silesia, and Brandenburg. Expulsions were sometimes followed by readmission after a short interval.101 Local expulsions were particularly frequent during the 1420s and 1430s, when municipalities (in the Rhineland and in Swabia, including the Swiss lands) increasingly aimed at securing the lasting exclusion of Jews through charters from their overlords.102 The same regions saw a second wave between 1462 and the late 1470s. The last phase of frequent local expulsions occurred between 1495 and 1520 and mostly affected important Jewish communities in Alsace, Swabia, and Franconia, including Nuremberg and Ulm (1499), Rothenburg ob der Tauber (1519), and the venerable kahal of Regensburg (1519), which until 1476 had been spared from persecution. They also hit Jewish settlements far away from these heartlands, in Braunschweig (1510), in Bohemia and Moravia (1453/4), and Silesia (1504).103 Some expulsions went along with, or followed, persecution. The most horrific events of this kind occurred in Austria in 1420/1, when Duke Albrecht V had hundreds of Jews taken prisoner, tortured, forcibly 100

101

102

103

On the mandate in the last will of the duke of Brabant, in 1261, to “expel all the Jews and Cahorsins from his land unless they cease to commit usury,” see Cluse, “Zusammenhang,” 149; Cluse, Studien, 30 1, 174 85. This type of fluctuation can be observed on several occasions, for example, at Speyer (from 1405), Mainz (from 1438), and Eger (from 1430). On these “privilegia de non tolerandis Judeis,” see the chronological survey in D. Willoweit, “Die Rechtsstellung der Juden,” in Germania Judaica III, iii, 2165 207, esp. 2202 3. See the relevant entries in Germania Judaica III, and cf. the various articles by F. J. Ziwes, R. Ries, and F. Backhaus in Burgard et al., eds., Judenvertreibungen, 165 240; also Brugger, “Ansiedlung,” 221 7; Lämmerhirt, Juden, 461 3; Mentgen, “Judenvertreibungen”; C. Cluse, Darf ein Bischof Juden zulassen? Die Gutachten des Siffridus Piscator OP (gest. 1473) zur Auseinandersetzung um die Vertreibung der Juden aus Mainz (Trier, 2013).

274 the middle ages: the christian world baptized, despoiled, and executed, in what is known as the Gezerah of Vienna. The survivors were expelled.104 Such regional pogroms were unusual in this period. Even taking into account a number of local persecutions,105 the relative impact of pogroms on Jewish settlement was much lower than before 1350. Expulsions were a different matter: from the turn of the fifteenth century, the forced dislocation of Jews became a serious threat. In most cases, the exiles suffered considerable property losses, which made resettlement difficult. By the mid fifteenth century, only two of the cathedral cities west of the Rhine, the early basis for Ashkenazic Jewry, still had Jewish communities: Mainz and Worms.106 Due to further expulsions, the only remaining traditional kehillot in the areas of “old settlement” in the west and south were in Worms and Frankfurt. In this way, the Ashkenazim soon lost their centers, together with the fundamental functions they performed for the surrounding settlements. Jews no longer lived in the urban centers, the “birthplace” of Ashkenazic Jewry, but in small and minute towns, or even in rural settlements. These places were often subject to the rule of lesser noblemen, who were able to maintain a measure of political independence from the territorial princes in regions like Franconia and Swabia.107 Besides pogroms and expulsion, the emigration of numerous Jews, due to fear of violence and repression or in the hope of better conditions elsewhere, contributed to these fundamental changes, which had a lasting impact on the lives, options, and attitudes of Ashkenazic Jews all over the medieval German Kingdom.108 between p roximity and usefulness, excl usion a nd enmity After the pogroms of 1348–50, the returning Jews were usually able to inhabit their previous, central quarters in the towns. In almost all towns and cities, however, the overlords and/or municipalities had appropriated what was left of the Jewish houses and community institutions and denied the few returning survivors their property rights and the option of retrieving their debts from earlier loans. The Jews were forced either to buy these 104

105 106

107 108

Also in Ingolstadt (1384), several Silesian and Moravian towns (1453), Endingen (1470), various towns in Alsace (1476/7), and in Passau (1478). Toch, “Verfolgungen,” 2300 5. South of the River Danube, the Jewish presence after c.1450 was reduced to the time honored community of Regensburg (until 1519) and the rather less important one in Salzburg (until 1498); cf. A. Haverkamp, ed., Geschichte der Juden, iii, maps C 4.6 C 4.7. For an overview, see Kießling et al., eds., Räume. Cf. Germania Judaica III, i, 85 6, 558 9 and iii, 1777.

germany 275 properties back or to rent. More Christians now lived in the Jewish quarters or alleys than before the pogroms. It was not until the turn of the fifteenth century that some councils advocated a spatial separation between Jews and Christians. In only a few cases was such separation actually enforced.109 It would appear that Jews were not increasingly confined to moneylending after 1350. Rather, the increasing documentation and new types of sources reveal that, from around the late fourteenth century, Jews north of the Alps were active in a wide variety of economic pursuits in trade, crafts, and medicine.110 Still, lending money at interest remained their most important means of subsistence. Loans were given at very various rates of interest, depending on the customers’ reliability, their political and social standing, the pressures they were able to exert on the Jews, and possibly the current situation (as in times of economic hardship), but also according to the amount and duration of the loan. While Jews (notably, Jewish widows) were still able to advance high sums to barons and larger communes during the second half of the fourteenth century, such transactions declined steeply afterwards. Jewish activities as customs managers, capital providers, financial administrators, and familiares of princes (especially of bishops) also ended around the turn of the fifteenth century, while lending out money to the lower nobility and to the urban and rural populace became more important.111

109

110

111

Separation was enforced in Frankfurt in 1462, when the Jews were relocated to an exclusively Jewish quarter east of the former town wall (the neighboring Dominican monastery, though, was by no means “excluded”), and in Donauwörth in 1493, where the measure was clearly meant as discriminatory. Cf. Germania Judaica III, iii, 2571 2 (index, s.v. “Judengasse, Judenstraße”); A. Haverkamp, “Quarters.” Gilomen, “Kooperation,” 182 4, dates the beginning of “Ghettoization” in Geneva to c. 1408 30. On the increased seclusion of the Jewish quarter in Worms around 1480, which was apparently in the kahal’s own interest, see G. Bönnen, “Jüdische Gemeinde und christliche Stadtgemeinde im spätmittelalterlichen Worms,” in Cluse et al., eds., Gemeinden, 309 40, esp. 326 31. They span from trading and retailing in wine, grain, cattle, cloth, garments, medicine, and metals, through crafts such as bookbinding, dyeing, leatherwork, glass and window making, tailoring, painting and drawing (e.g. playing cards), dice production, gold , silver , and other metalwork, even expertise in mining, milling, or other technology, to medicine, with a great number of Jewish male and female doctors in diverse specialities. As before 1350, a great deal of regional variance has to be taken into account. Cf. Toch, “Tätigkeit.” See also the index to Germania Judaica III, iii, 2570 (s.v. “Handel”), 2589 (“Warenhandel”), 2555 8 (“Berufe”), and 2555 (“Ärzte, Ärztinnen”). Toch, “Tätigkeit”; Wenninger, “Juden,” 132 8; Cluse, “Nachwort”; M. Keil, “Mobilität und Sittsamkeit: Jüdische Frauen im Wirtschaftsleben des spätmittelalterlichen Aschkenas,” in Toch, ed., Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 153 80.

276 the middle ages: the christian world To a large extent, these developments resulted from enforced “cancellations” of debts owed to Jews, decreed from the 1370s. These were first ruthlessly practiced, with imprisonment and other means of pressure, by the dukes of Austria. In 1385, a coalition of greed between King Wenceslas and thirty-seven members of the Swabian League of Towns, together with further imperial cities, as well as territories such as the Upper Palatinate, set in motion a much larger scheme. A second confiscation in 1390, again condoned by Wenceslas, proved even worse for the Jews, who were affected in a number of Swiss towns, in Alsace, in the archbishopric of Trier and other parts of the Rhineland down to the Cologne region, but also in Bavaria.112 The legal situation of the Jews, too, was fundamentally weakened in the heartlands of Ashkenazic Jewry, their status as burgesses undermined. When Jews were readmitted to the towns, the authorities often combined Jewish burgess status with the most disadvantageous elements of “chamber serfdom.”113 On all levels of rule over the Jews, taxes and dues were now claimed and enforced with increasing willfulness. The only mitigating factor was that the various competing authorities were unwilling to allow others to loot, and thereby reduce, the Jews’ financial capacities.114 As a consequence of the worsening situation, the numbers of Jews who emigrated, often to Italy or other regions of the Mediterranean world, rose significantly from the mid-1380s. Most of these exiles were still from the better-off leading circles of the Rhenish, Swabian, and Franconian kehillot.115 The large capital losses of the remaining Jews, together with the emigration of those who had financial means and political influence, increased the Christian authorities’ readiness to expel them. They also changed the social set-up of the Jewish settlements fundamentally, continually reducing the kehillot’s means to provide for services that went 112

113

114

115

On Austria, see Brugger, “Ansiedlung,” 220; Germania Judaica III, iii, 1985; on the wider scale, Isenmann, “Steuern,” Germania Judaica III, iii, 2267 9. Immediately before the first “cancellation” of Jewish bonds in 1385, King Wenceslas had all Jews in Bohemia imprisoned in order to extort from them a high extraordinary tax (ibid., 1824). On 1390, see ibid., 2014 (Bern, Fribourg, Zurich), 1844, 1861, 2025 (Alsace), 2041 (archbishopric of Trier), 1866 (lords of Hanau), 2061 (Wetterau region), 1753 (Abensberg County), 1786, 1798, 1805 (Duchy of Bavaria). For further bibliography, see A. Haverkamp, “Juden in Deutschland,” 95. As early as October 1352, the council of Speyer claimed that all the Jews who henceforth settled in the city “shall be our own with body and property, for a just reason”; see A. Haverkamp, “Kammerknechtschaft,” 38. Isenmann, “Steuern”; C. Jörg, “Zwischen Basler Konzil, Königtum und reichsstädtischen Interessen: Die Kennzeichnung und Ausweisung der Augsburger Juden in europäischen Zusammenhängen,” in Brenner and Ullmann, eds., Juden in Schwaben, 62 92. A. Haverkamp, “Juden in Deutschland.”

germany 277 beyond the family sphere. This in turn enhanced the importance of the family in general, but the strain was also felt: it seems that the cohesive power of the family was reduced by a rising number of divorces.116 New provisions had to be made for those among the poor who were not integrated into the local families, for the sick, itinerant beggars (Schalantjuden), and indigent students.117 After Jews were readmitted, rulers and civic authorities were increasingly keen on keeping out poor or impoverished Jews, which often coincided with the interest of the Jewish community leaders. This policy is reflected in the fees demanded for settlement permits, and especially for citizen (burgess) status. In most places, the status of civis was only granted for a fixed term, as were the protective charters by princes or noblemen. In any case, it was conditional on a certain minimum tax being paid.118 The situation of the Jewish poor grew worse as the expulsions continued, leaving more and more gaps in the networks of poor relief provided by kehillot and Jewish families. Community integration may have been hampered, too, by what appears to have been a dwindling knowledge of Hebrew, mostly among the poor. The famous scholar Jacob Weil (d. 1463) “allowed the use of written Judaeo-German in court.”119 Taken together, the pressures from rulers and town communes, the dominant position of Jewish family heads, and the high rate of fluctuation among the few members of the reconstructed Jewish communities caused great risks for the functioning of a kahal, and it often took years, sometimes decades, before the returning Jewish settlers were able to establish one. In several kehillot, this situation led to open conflict. As in Christian communities, these quarrels frequently broke out among influential members over matters of taxation, personal rivalry, and injured honor. Often the town council intervened and thus further undermined the foundations of the kehillah, especially in its judicial functions. According to R. Israel Bruna (c.1400 until after 1477), who served the Jews of Regensburg as their rabbi for many long years, the herem ha-yishuv had become ineffective by ˙ the mid fifteenth century.120 Conflicts deeply affecting community life 116

117

118 120

At least in Frankfurt am Main, the change is also reflected in the cemetery, from c.1360. Relatives were now laid to rest as closely together as possible, and children aged 1 year or more next to their parents: Germania Judaica II, i, 244; III, i, 351. On divorce, see Israel J. Yuval, “An Appeal against the Proliferation of Divorce in Fifteenth Century Germany” [Hebrew], Zion 48 (1983), 177 216. Breuer and Guggenheim, “Gemeinde,” 2093 9; Y. Guggenheim, “Meeting on the Road: Encounters between German Jews and German Christians on the Margins of Society,” in Hsia and Lehmann, eds., Ghetto, 125 36; Barzen, “Meaning of Tzedekah.” See above, n. 68. 119 Germania Judaica III, i, 47 and n. 269. E. Zimmer, Harmony and Discord: An Analysis of the Decline of Jewish Self Government in 15th Century Central Europe (New York, 1970); Guggenheim, “Jüdische

278 the middle ages: the christian world might also arise from the competition between scholars for the community rabbinate, which became institutionalized around the mid fourteenth century and often played (or claimed) a key role in community leadership.121 Attempts to establish a supra-communal organization by convening delegated rabbinic scholars remained unsuccessful. The decline of Jewish self-government was hastened from the late fourteenth century, when ecclesiastical and lay princes appointed chief rabbis (Judenmeister) and endowed them with jurisdictional powers over the Jews in their respective territories. King Ruprecht continued this tradition when, in 1407, he appointed Israel of Rothenburg as Hochmeister over all other rabbinic authorities and, generally, all other Jews, male and female, in the “German lands.” New forms of organization on the territorial level, however, were at times more effective.122 Most Jews entrusted with such supra-local tasks had, at least occasionally, good relations with barons or kings/emperors and their courts. The same applies to a number of personal physicians to lay or (sometimes) ecclesiastical princes. A few Jews were employed as town physicians by municipal councils. These doctors served Christian patients as well as Jewish ones; sometimes, they also engaged in moneylending. As some Christian critics continued to insist, Christian patients were preferring Jewish doctors over Christian ones.123 As late as 1489, one decade before the expulsion, patricians in Nuremberg attended a Jewish wedding. Irrespective of many prohibitions, Jews and Christians (including clerics and nobles) gambled and drank together in taverns, met at dances or in the bathhouse, or had sexual intercourse.124 Some kehillot (such as Ulm and

121

122 123

124

Gerichtsbarkeit”; A. Haverkamp, “Jüdische Gemeinden”; Breuer and Guggenheim, “Gemeinde,” 2134 6; Willoweit, “Rechtsstellung,” 2187 93. Cf. M. Toch, “Macht und Machtausübung in der jüdischen Gemeinde des Mittelalters,” in M. Konradt and R. C. Schwinges, eds., Juden in ihrer Umwelt: Akkulturation des Judentums in Antike und Mittelalter (Basel, 2009), 137 55. I. J. Yuval, Scholars in Their Time: The Religious Leadership of German Jewry in the Late Middle Ages [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1988); Yuval, “Juristen, Ärzte und Rabbiner: Zum typologischen Vergleich intellektueller Berufsgruppen im Spätmittelalter,” in J. Carlebach, ed., Das aschkenasische Rabbinat: Studien über Glaube und Schicksal (Berlin, 1995), 119 31; Breuer and Guggenheim, “Gemeinde,” 2010 14. Guggenheim, “A suis paribus”; Breuer and Guggenheim, “Gemeinde,” 2129 34. Treue, “Geschichte jüdischer Ärzte”; further evidence will be found in Germania Judaica III, iii, 2555 (index, s.v. “Ärzte, Ärztinnen”). G. Mentgen, “‘Alltagsgeschichte’ und Geschichte der Juden. Die Juden und das Glücksspiel im Mittelalter,” Historische Zeitschrift 274 (2002), 25 60 ; J. R. Müller, “Sexual Relationships between Christians and Jews in Medieval Germany, According

germany 279 Regensburg) entrusted Christian men with guarding their cemetery. Christian women continued to serve as wet-nurses for Jewish infants.125 There were wide inconsistencies between these forms of familiarity in daily and festive circumstances, prohibited with increasing severity, and the political behavior of leading Christians. High dignitaries showed an opportunistic stance toward the Jews, and their behavior was contradictory.126 By the second quarter of the fifteenth century, however, the regions north of the Alps saw a more intense pressure from influential Churchmen in favor of enforcing special badges for the Jews, as decreed by the Council of Basel in 1438, and of other forms of compulsory segregation. Key figures in this process were the papal legate Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, and the observant Franciscan preacher Friar John of Capestrano, who toured Germany in 1451/2 and 1451–4, respectively. They were not the only preachers who regarded these and other anti-Jewish measures as cornerstones for the kind of “Church reform” they had in mind. While they met with some resistance from the barons, and especially from the imperial cities, they contributed to an atmosphere that led to pogroms and expulsions.127 Radical Jew-haters among the Christians instead used allegations of Host desecration, and especially ritual murder, to justify anti-Jewish violence. It is notable that the blood libel even found credence in court after the mid fifteenth century. Despite papal intervention, this is what happened in the Trent ritual murder case of 1475. The case and its wide literary echo in printed works strongly reinforced the impact of this antiJewish topos, especially in Germany.128 In the course of the fifteenth century, the charge of “usury” was voiced with increasing force and frequency. It was focused on Jewish moneylenders, even if their overall share in the business was dwarfed by Christian bankers, who were now

125 127

128

to Christian Sources,” in Bacon et al., eds., Iggud, 19 32. On converts to Christianity, see G. Mentgen, “Jüdische Proselyten im Oberrheingebiet während des Spätmittelalters: Schicksale einer ‘doppelten’ Minderheit,” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins 142 (1994), 117 39; C. Cluse, “Konversion, Inklusion, Exklusion: Zur narrativen Identität des ‘Taufjuden’ in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit,” in I. Patrut and H. Uerlings, eds., Inklusion/Exklusion und Kultur: Theoretische Perspektiven und Fallstudien von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Cologne, 2013), 164 87. Germania Judaica III, iii, 1188, 1503. 126 Ibid., 1013, 1926. Germania Judaica III, iii, 2573 4 (index s.v. “Kleiderordnungen u. Vorschriften, Judenkennzeichen”) and 2292. On the effects of preaching on pogroms and expulsions, see Cluse, Bischof, 35 53. Willoweit, “Rechtsstellung,” 2197 8; Moraw, “Kirche,” 2292 5; Toch, “Verfolgungen”; W. Treue, Der Trienter Judenprozeß: Voraussetzungen Abläufe Auswirkungen (1475 1588) (Hanover, 1996).

280 the middle ages: the christian world attaining high positions even north of the Alps.129 When, in 1420, Crusades were launched against the anti-clerical Hussites, the extreme anti-Jewish traditions of Crusading gained new force as Jews were accused of supporting this hereticized movement. The threat of “death or baptism” from the Crusading armies (mostly composed of mercenaries) became manifest in 1421 when they moved along the Rhine, through Nuremberg and Eger, toward Bohemia. The Crusading mentality also influenced the fateful Gezerah of Vienna (1420/1).130 Jewish sources reveal that Jews read these signs in light of the events of 1096 and 1309 and of their bad experience in the past decades, and that they prayed for a victory by the Hussites, in whom they saw “portents of the imminent victory of Judaism over Christendom.”131 These ideas may have drawn on earlier Jewish writings. Around the turn of the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries, protagonists of a mystical movement that had started among a number of Rhineland Jews in Jerusalem, and was spread by those of them who returned to the German Kingdom, read the deposition of King Wenceslas as “a sign for the inception of the messianic age.” The religious thought and practice of these kabbalists accorded a prominent role to the city of Jerusalem: they even devised a “plan to congregate the Jews of Ashkenaz there and save them from imminent catastrophe.”132 These experiences, memories, and interpretations reflect both the recurrent fears of persecution among many Jews and their thwarted hopes of redemption from their Christian oppressors. This alienation increased the Jews’ need for protection. Lords and, in particular, municipalities entrusted with their protection had to go to greater lengths to ensure it. It became more and more difficult to attain the consent of those who were involved in governance – the estates in the principalities, the councils, guilds, and other influential groups in the towns. The option of taking the 129 130

131 132

Cluse, “Nachwort,” and other bibliography cited in n. 44. Yuval, “Juden, Hussiten und Deutsche,” 65 6, 84 5; Mentgen, “Kreuzzugsmentalität,” 288 9, 310 11, 318 19; Germania Judaica III, iii, 1986 7; Brugger, “Ansiedlung,” 221 4; K. Schubert, “Die Wiener Gesera und der Freitod von Wiener Juden zur ‘Heiligung Gottes,’” in B. E. Klein and C. Müller, eds., Memoria Wege jüdischen Erinnerns: Festschrift für Michael Brocke zum 65. Geburtstag (Berlin, 2005), 541 52. Yuval, “Juden, Hussiten und Deutsche,” 78. Cf. above, n. 95. Jews may have known of the chiliastic prophecies current among some contemporary Spiritual Franciscans influenced by Joachimism, and vice versa. The Jewish messianic speculation focusing on the year 1400 was later realigned to the years 1403 and 1430. Cf. Yuval, “Juden, Hussiten und Deutsche,” 63; I. J. Yuval, “Magie und Kabbala unter den Juden im Deutschland des ausgehenden Mittelalters,” in K. E. Grözinger, ed., Judentum im deutschen Sprachraum (Frankfurt am Main, 1991), 173 88 (the quotation is from 181); Yuval, “Kabbalisten”; A. Haverkamp, “Juden in Deutschland,” 119 38.

germany 281 opposite route and expelling the Jews became increasingly attractive, especially in times when increasing poverty among Christians was blamed on “Jewish usury.”133 In quite a few cases, however, the decisions were soon repealed or revised, and, in contrast to the kingdoms of western Europe, they were never decreed, nor even intended, by the Crown. The Jews had formed a significant part of the communities from which they were expelled. Their presence was intimately bound up with every aspect of the lives of Christians and of their self-representations. Jews were much more than a “marginal group.” Thus, their expulsion from large parts of their Ashkenazic homelands was determined by a combination of religious, political, social, and economic motives that are difficult to disentangle, and whose relative weight for the individual decisions is hard to assess.134 133

134

These connections are most revealing for the cluster of local expulsions during the period of famine in the 1430s (cf. Jörg, Hungersnöte, 223 34, 342 57, and Cluse, Bischof, 29) and deserve greater attention for the last two decades of the fifteenth century and the early years of the sixteenth. Mentgen, “Judenvertreibungen”; G. Mentgen, “‘Die Juden waren stets eine Randgruppe’: Über eine fragwürdige Prämisse der aktuellen Judenforschung,” in F. Burgard, C. Cluse, and A. Haverkamp, eds., Liber amicorum necnon et amicarum für Alfred Heit: Beiträge zur mittelalterlichen Geschichte und geschichtlichen Landeskunde (Trier, 1996), 393 411; H. J. Gilomen, Juden in den spätmittelalterlichen Städten des Reichs: Normen Fakten Hypothesen (Trier, 2009), 42 8.

chapter 10

NORTHEASTERN EUROPE nora berend

The origin of the medieval Jewish population in the kingdoms of Hungary and Poland is a debated question.1 Although the existence of Jews in Roman Pannonia in the third century is attested by archaeological finds, notably tombstones, there is no evidence of continuity between them and the Jewish population of the medieval kingdom of Hungary. Speculations about the immigration of Jewish Khazars at the time of the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian basin in the late ninth century, and about the Khazar origin of the Jews in Poland (based on the now discredited “identification’” of toponyms) cannot be substantiated. Hypotheses based on linguistic arguments and pure speculation exist on Jewish migration from the Adriatic coast, Russian, Balkan, and Byzantine lands into Poland at some time between prehistory and the eleventh century; no firm evidence exists for any of these theories.2 By the second half of the tenth century, Jews appeared in Hungary. Around 955, Hasdai ibn Shaprut ˙ mentioned sending his letter from Cordoba to the Khazars via the Jewish 3 communities of many countries, including Hungary. Ibrahim ibn Yakub, around 965, wrote about Jews from Hungary trading in Prague. A certain 1

2

3

Overviews: Bernard D. Weinryb, The Jews of Poland: A Social and Economic History of the Jewish Community in Poland from 1100 to 1800 (Philadelphia, 1972); Jerzy Wyrozumski, “Jews in Medieval Poland,” in Antony Polonsky, Jakub Basista, and Andrzej Link Lenczowski, eds., The Jews in Old Poland, 1000 1795 (London, 1993), 13 22; Hanna Zaremska, Żydzi w średniowiecznej Europie Środkowej. W Czechach, Polsce i na Węgrzech (Poznań, 2005); Nora Berend, At the Gate of Christendom: Jews, Muslims and “Pagans” in Medieval Hungary, c. 1000 c. 1300 (Cambridge, 2001); András Kubinyi, “A magyarországi zsidóság története a középkorban,” Soproni Szemle 49, 1 (1995) 2 27. I thank Hanna Zaremska for her comments on the Polish sections of this chapter. Paul Wexler, “The Reconstruction of Pre Ashkenazic Jewish Settlements in the Slavic Lands in the Light of Linguistic Sources,” Polin: A Journal of Polish Jewish Studies 1 (1986), 3 18, gives an overview of the linguistic evidence. Hebrew text and Hungarian translation of all Hebrew sources concerning medieval Hungary: Shlomo J. Spitzer and Géza Komoróczy, Héber kútforrások Magyarország és a magyarországi zsidóság történetéhez a kezdetektől 1686 ig (Budapest, 2003), listing all previous editions.

282

northeastern europe 283 Sa’dyah, writing perhaps in the tenth century, mentioned Hungary as part of the galut (Jewish Diaspora). Scholars have suggested various dates for the appearance of a Jewish community in Poland, from the early eleventh century to the late twelfth.4 The basis for the earlier date consists of two responsa. One of these, probably written in the mid eleventh century, refers to Jewish merchants from abroad involved in a dispute in Krakow, and the other, perhaps around 1028, mentions Jews in a town which, according to one explanation, is Przemyśl (the interpretation of the name, however, is debated, and may denote a place outside Poland).5 Lithuania also had Jewish communities by the late fourteenth century, around the time of its personal union with Poland. The Hebrew names of the countries were “the land of Hagar” – perhaps from the similarity of the words “Hungaria” and “Hagar” – and “Polin” – derived from the German Polen, but explained from the Hebrew as “there find rest.” Diverse evidence, including halakhic connections manifest in responsa (sheelot u-teshuvot), naming patterns, and the style and lettering of tombstones, testifies to the western origin of Jews in Hungary and Poland, notably the migration of Jews from German lands.6 This was perhaps mostly linked to trade in the first instance.7 Individuals and small groups may have entered and settled in both realms in other ways, but there is no evidence at all about their origins and the chronology of settlement. Longdistance trade between western Europe and eastern lands included Jewish merchants, among others, from an early date, and Jewish communities were probably implanted in various locations along the trade routes linking western and eastern areas. In this way, Jews also started to trade commodities in the local markets. A trade route from Regensburg to Kiev passed 4

5

6

7

Compare Aleksander Gieysztor, “The Beginnings of Jewish Settlement in the Polish Lands,” in Chimen Abramsky, Maciej Jachimczyk, and Antony Polonsky, eds., The Jews in Poland (Oxford, 1986); and Weinryb, The Jews. For an overview, Jerzy Wyrozumski, “Les Juifs en Europe centrale et orientale au Moyen Âge et dans la perspective des temps modernes,” in Simonetta Cavaciocchi, ed., Il ruolo economico delle minoranze in Europa secc. XIII XVIII: Atti della Trentunesima Settimana di Studi, 19 23 aprile 1999 (Florence, 2000), 67 80. Hebrew sources concerning Poland: Franciszek Kupfer and Tadeusz Lewicki, eds., Źródła hebrajskie do dziejów Słowian i niektórych innych ludów środkowej i wschodniej Europy (Wrocław, 1956). On inscriptions: Alexander Scheiber, Jewish Inscriptions in Hungary from the 3rd Century to 1686 (Budapest, 1983); Marcin Wodziński, ed., Hebrajskie inskrypcje na Śląsku, XIII XVIII wieku (Wrocław, 1996). Weinryb dismisses these hypotheses; although the evidence is meager, it does exist: Alexander Gieysztor, “Les Juifs et leurs activités économiques en Europe Orientale,” in Gli Ebrei nell’Alto Medioevo, Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 26, 1 (Spoleto, 1980), 489 522.

284 the middle ages: the christian world through Hungary, and Jewish communities in the Kingdom of Hungary are attested along this route from the eleventh century on; so is interaction between them and Jews from Mainz and other German towns. Similarly, one branch of the west–east trade route led from German lands through Prague to Krakow and on to Przemyśl and Kiev, and Jewish communities sprang up along this route in Poland. Carinthia (Völkermarkt) and Styria or Steiermark (Pettau, now Ptuj, Slovenia), both with Jewish populations at least by the twelfth century, were also linked by trade routes to Hungary, through Vasvár and Körmend, which certainly had Jewish communities by the thirteenth century, and perhaps earlier. Other waves of immigration contributed to the growth of the Jewish communities during the medieval period. Cosmas of Prague claimed that Jews forcibly converted to Christianity during the First Crusade, in Bohemia, reverted to Judaism and fled to Hungary and Poland at the end of the eleventh century. Jews may also have arrived from German lands with the German eastward migration and settlement in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Some historians hypothesize the end of Jewish communities due to the Mongol invasion in Poland, and subsequent new settlement, but responsa confirm that Jews were not wiped out in the Mongol invasion of 1241; parts of Poland were not even affected by the incursion. Further Jewish immigration from the west due to persecutions and expulsions during the later Middle Ages is often inferred from indirect evidence; more concrete proof that Jews expelled from Germany settled in Poland is only available from the late fifteenth century.8 Although, in some cases, rabbis moved into Poland because Jews were expelled from, or fled from pogroms in, the west, sporadic references to rabbis, and rich or prominent members of a Jewish community from abroad (mostly from the thirteenth century on in Hungary, and from the fourteenth onwards in Poland), need not all be references to persecution. Jews moved around, settling in another country because of business concerns and cultural connections as well. Karaites also lived in Poland–Lithuania; they probably immigrated in the late fourteenth century from the Crimea, defined themselves separately from rabbinical Judaism, and spoke Kintschak, a Turkic language. Communities are attested in Troki near Vilna, from the late fourteenth century (they received a charter of privileges in 1441); in 8

Israel Bartal, “L’Implantation des ashkénazes en Europe de l’Est: Pologne et Lituanie,” in Jean Baumgarten, Rachel Ertel, Itzhok Niborski, and Annette Wierviorka, eds., Mille Ans de cultures ashkénazes (Grenoble, 1994), 82 92, for the whole medieval period; Shlomo Netzer, “Wanderungen der Juden und Neusiedlung in Osteuropa,” in Michael Brocke, ed., Beter und Rebellen: aus 1000 Jahren Judentum in Polen (Frankfurt, 1983), 33 49.

northeastern europe 285 Łuck, Volhynia, in the first half of the fifteenth century; and Halicz toward the end of the century.9 At the very end of the Middle Ages, some Jews expelled from Spain immigrated to Hungary and Poland.10 The most famous of them were Shelomo Sheneor, who eventually converted to Christianity in Hungary c.1510 and was known as Imre Szerencsés (Fortunatus), and Isaac Hispanus, the physician of John Albert of Poland and his successors. The earliest communities in both Hungary and Poland (particularly Silesia) lived in cities in the western part of the realm, close to the German areas from where immigrants arrived. By 1500, Jews in Hungary are attested from as far east as Szeged and Várad (today Oradea, Romania), as well as in the northeast, for example in Kassa (Košice, Slovakia) and Ungvár (Uzhorod, Ukraine), although most of the Jewish communities were still concentrated west and north of the Danube, in the western part of the kingdom. There were perhaps up to twenty Jewish communities in the kingdom by the end of the Middle Ages. Hypotheses concerning the size of Hungary’s Jewish population by the late Middle Ages vary between 2,500 and 20,000. In Poland, it is debated whether, because of the scarcity of written sources, significant discrepancies existed between the actual settlement of Jews (between, for example, the eleventh and thirteenth centuries) and their first appearance in local written sources in the fourteenth century, or whether hypotheses of Jewish settlements predating written documentation simply try to fit the evidence into preconceived theories. Thirteenth- and fourteenth-century settlements were primarily in the centers of princely power: Krakow, Kalisz, Wrocław, Gniezno, Sandomierz, Płock, Legnica, Głogów. Jews also appear in some villages, such as Tyniec and Sokolniki, where they probably received land through credit transactions. Jewish settlement expanded during the thirteenth century and thereafter. By the end of the fifteenth century, hypothetical calculations based on the amount of tax they paid, or the number of Jewish communities that appear in the sources, estimated the number of Jews to 9

10

Jerzy Kłoczowski, “Les Karaïmes (Karaïtes) en Pologne Lituanie,” in Philippe Contamine, Thierry Dutour, and Bertrand Schnerb, eds., Commerce, finances et société (XIe XVIe siècles). Recueil de travaux d’histoire médiévale offert à M. le Professeur Henri Dubois (Paris, 1993), 501 4; Stefan Gąsiorowski, Karaimi w Koronie i na Litwie w XV XVIII wieku (Krakow, 2008), ch. 3: “Początki dziejów Karaimów na ziemiach rusko litewskich” (I thank Hanna Zaremska for this reference). Jacob Elbaum, “The Influence of Spanish Jewish Culture on the Jews of Ashkenaz and Poland in the Fifteenth Seventeenth Centuries,” in Joseph Dan, ed., Jewish Intellectual History in the Middle Ages (Westport, CT, 1994), 179 97; András Kubinyi, “Spanyol zsidók a középkori Budán,” in Sándor Scheiber and Ármin Friss, eds., Magyar Zsidó Oklevéltár / Monumenta Hungariae Judaica, 18 vols. (Budapest, 1903 80), vol. XII, 19 26.

286 the middle ages: the christian world be between 4,500 and 30,000 (including Lithuania); another puts the size of the Jewish population in medieval Poland at about 0.6 percent of the total population. For both countries, precise calculations are impossible because of the fragmentary data they are based on. Ties between Jews in German and Hungarian, as well as Polish, lands continued to exist throughout the Middle Ages. The medieval Jews of Hungary and Poland were part of the world of Ashkenaz, with German influence detectable in many areas of Jewish life, including language. Some scholars assume an earlier existence of a Slavic-speaking Jewish population in central Europe (part of Kna’an), who then assimilated into Ashkenazic culture. The evidence of Slavic and Hungarian words in Hebrew texts, however, is more likely to be a sign that Jews were multilingual, and spoke the language of the local population as well. Responsa and other rabbinical texts note a number of similarities in Jewish customs in Hungary, Poland, and Germanic lands. They mention, for example, around 1400, the identical way of blowing the shofar (the ram’s horn blown at Rosh Hashana) and the same order of prayers in Hungary and Austria; in the mid fifteenth century, the resemblance of some formulas of divorce letters in Poland and Hungary, which conformed to older Austrian custom; and in the late fifteenth century, the similarity of Jewish rituals in Hungary and Poland to German, Austrian, Bohemian, and Moravian ones. Ties between Wiener Neustadt and Sopron were especially close: many responsa attest to the travel, trade, and financial transactions of the Jews of the two cities. Movement between Austria and Hungary is attested throughout the medieval period, taking a variety of forms. For example, in the thirteenth century, Jewish financiers moved between the two, serving the rulers of both. In the middle of the fifteenth century, a woman married to a Jew of Salzburg was divorced by get (a divorce letter from husband to wife) in Buda, and in another case a divorce letter was sent from Wiener Neustadt to Buda. Such movement existed between Poland and German areas too: a Jewish woman had moved from Germany (near Leipzig) to Poznań in Poland, leaving behind her husband, who then sent her a divorce letter. Jewish legal status in Hungary and Poland was on the whole more favorable than in western Europe. Both countries recognized the rights of hospites (“immigrants”), which included Jews, unless their status was specifically regulated in other ways.11 In the central medieval period, 11

Jürgen Heyde, “Jüdische Siedlung und Gemeindebildung im mittelalterlichen Polen,” in Christoph Cluse, Alfred Haverkamp, and Israel J. Yuval, eds., Jüdische Gemeinden und ihr christlicher Kontext in kulturräumlich vergleichender Betrachtung: von der Spätantike bis zum 18. Jahrhundert, Forschungen zur Geschichte der Juden A 13 (Hanover, 2003), 249 66; Erik Fügedi, “Das mittelalterliche Königreich Ungarn als Gastland,” in

northeastern europe 287 compared to the more extensive legislation in western Europe, restrictions on the interaction between Jews and Christians and on the possible sphere of Jewish activities remained more limited in Hungary and were not introduced in Poland. In Hungary, both László (Ladislas) I (1077–95) and Kálmán (Coloman, 1095–1116) prohibited Jews from holding Christian slaves. László also prohibited marriage between Jews and Christian women. Kálmán restricted Jewish settlement to episcopal centers, and allowed only the use of pagan slaves to work lands owned by Jews, in line with earlier imperial legislation. Commercial transactions between Jews and Christians were to be put in writing in sealed charters, and loans were minutely regulated. Other ecclesiastical prohibitions were not issued locally. Even the implementation of the laws that were introduced was delayed or not put into effect. For example, Jews settled in non-episcopal centers. The papal legate Philip, bishop of Fermo, prescribed red distinguishing signs for Jews in Hungary and Poland in 1279 at the provincial synod of Buda, but the deadline by which such signs were to be introduced was not filled in. Synodal legislation in Poland at Wrocław (Breslau) in 1267, under the papal legate Cardinal Guido of St. Lawrence in Lucina, introduced restrictions along the lines of the demands of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). Fearing Jewish influence on Christians through coexistence, the laws forbade Christians from inviting Jews to weddings and social occasions, and from sharing meals with or buying food from them. Jews were to wear a distinctive hat, to have no more than one synagogue in any town, not to live with Christian women, not to employ Christians, not to hold public office, and not to visit Christian baths and taverns. They were to sell their houses in the Christian part of the city and live in separate areas from Christians, and until then stay indoors with windows and doors closed when the Sacrament was carried in procession. Eventually, a red cloth circle rather than special Jewish hats became the distinctive sign for Jews. In practice, relations between Jews and Christians, and Jewish officeholding, continued, as shown by both direct evidence of these practices and later prohibitions which repeated the thirteenth-century injunctions. Even some of the later local synods legislated more leniently on Jews – for example, the 1285 synod of Łęczyca. The movement of Jews between different Christian kingdoms was the basis for the adoption of privileges that became the cornerstone of Jewish status in both Hungary and Poland. In responses to the demands of the elite of the Jewish community, rulers issued privileges, modeled on those of Fügedi, Kings, Bishops, Nobles and Burghers in Medieval Hungary (London, 1986), no. VIII.

288 the middle ages: the christian world Duke Frederick II (Babenberg) of Austria from 1244 (which themselves were based on German imperial privileges).12 The privileges granted to the Jews a (Christian) “judge of the Jews” (iudex iudaeorum) to whom the Jews could turn if they wished, and the ruler’s protection and jurisdiction: only the king or his representative could judge them in disputes between Christians and Jews. No restrictions were placed on trade: Jews were guaranteed free movement, and paid the same toll as Christians. The text regulated moneylending on pawns and landed estates, and the resolution of possible disputes, in great detail, safeguarding Jewish lenders. It gave physical protection and protected religious customs (including the observance of the Sabbath, and the transport of bodies for funeral), as well as granting internal autonomy and the right to property. Christians who wounded or killed Jews or harmed Jewish cemeteries and synagogues were to be severely punished, and Jewish children were protected from abduction. Christians accusing Jews had to produce Jewish as well as Christian witnesses. The version promulgated in Hungary in 1251 made minor changes and adaptations: it reduced fines and toned down the severity of punishments for Christians, allowed for exceptions to the rule of having Jewish witnesses if the facts were proven without a doubt, and changed some details of the regulation of moneylending. Local custom and urban laws provided protection in Hungary, and there was not much need, until the end of the fourteenth century, to invoke (and hence copy) Béla’s privileges. These privileges were then reconfirmed by Hungary’s kings in the fifteenth century. In 1264, Duke Bolesław the Pious of Kalisz issued these privileges for the Jews of his duchy (sometimes called the “Statute of Kalisz”). He borrowed not directly from Frederick, but from Přemysl Otakar II of Bohemia’s adaptation of the privileges (1262).13 Dukes of Silesia copied it in turn; from these, the charters of Bolko I of Legnica (1295) and Henry III of Głogów (1299) are preserved. Bolesław’s privileges were more extensive than Béla’s. Jews could buy merchandise, including food, on the market like Christians, and touch bread. The mintmaster was prohibited from 12

13

Alexander Büchler, ed., “Das Judenprivilegium Bélas IV vom Jahre 1251,” in Alexander Scheiber, ed., Jubilee Volume in Honour of Prof. Bernhard Heller on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday (Budapest, 1941), 139 46; Kodeks dyplomatyczny wielkopolski. Codex Diplomaticus Majoris Poloniae, vol. I (Poznań, 1877), no. 605 (412a). Zofia Kowalska, “Die großpolnischen und schlesischen Judenschutzbriefe des 13. Jahrhunderts im Verhältnis zu den Privilegien Kaiser Friedrichs II. (1238) und Herzog Friedrichs II. von Österreich (1244). Filiation der Dokumente und inhaltliche Analyse,” Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa Forschung 47 (1998), 1 20; Isaac Lewin, “The Historical Background of the Statute of Kalisz,” in Damian S. Wandycz, ed., Studies in Polish Civilization (New York, 1971), 38 53.

northeastern europe 289 accusing Jews of spreading false currency. Christians who heard a Jew call for help at night had to respond to the call. Christians accusing Jews of using Christian blood for ritual purposes were to be punished by death unless three Christian and three Jewish witnesses testified to the charge. Local custom and regulations in Poland lacked uniformity and continuity in the period of fragmentation, with variations between different regions and towns. Kazimierz III the Great (Casimir, 1333–70) reissued Bolesław’s privileges for the kingdom as a whole in 1364, and again in 1367. Legend, begun by Jan Długosz in the fifteenth century, explained King Kazimierz III’s favor to Jews through a love affair with a Jewish woman, Esther, but this lacks foundation. Kazimierz’s motives were most probably similar to those of many other Hungarian and Polish rulers who benefited from the existence of Jewish communities to underpin their own power. Then the king added new clauses to the privileges. This ‘Extended Privilege’ protected Jews from being brought before Christian ecclesiastical courts; gave Jewish elders the right to judge cases between Jews; granted Jews the right to reside anywhere; allowed Jews to rent, or receive in mortgage, noble estates; fixed the interest rate on loans; and allowed Jews to visit municipal baths. Whether these more extensive privileges were first granted by Kazimierz the Great and confirmed by Kazimierz IV in 1453, or were granted by the latter, who simply referred to Kazimierz III in order to give additional authority to an innovation, is a debated point. The only text that survives is that of Kazimierz IV. Some historians even suspected this text to be a forgery, but this view was based on prejudices rather than real evidence.14 Kazimierz IV was certainly motivated by a desire to secure economic means of strengthening royal power against nobles. In the late fourteenth century, similar privileges were given to Jews in Lithuania. In Hungary, a country-wide Christian judge of the Jews, who could rule in cases between Jews and Christians, and tax and protect the Jews on the Austrian model, was included in Béla IV’s privileges, but in practice the ruler only appointed such a judge in the late fourteenth century: he is first documented in 1371. The judge of the Jews was always one of the chief dignitaries of the royal court. He was to use Jewish jurors. The office was discontinued in the late fifteenth century, with other royal dignitaries exercising the functions of collecting tax or judging cases between Christians and Jews. From the late fourteenth century, cities also had their own judge of the Jews for local cases, appointed by the royal judge or elected by the city. Late medieval urban books attest to local written regulations: for example, Pozsony (Pressburg, now Bratislava, Slovakia) had a book 14

Sh. A. Cygielman, “The Basic Privileges of the Jews of Great Poland as Reflected in Polish Historiography,” Polin: A Journal of Polish Jewish Studies 2 (1987), 117 49.

290 the middle ages: the christian world dedicated to keeping records concerning the city’s Jews, and the urban lawbook of Buda regulated the status of Jews in the city.15 In Poland, the use of German urban law also affected the Jewish inhabitants of towns, who could not be citizens. In the last third of the fifteenth century, a Jewish praefectus Iudeorum was appointed by the king; the office was hereditary in the family of a Jew of Buda, Mendel. From the mid fifteenth century, this was one of the most important Jewish families in the kingdom for several generations, possessing several houses in the Jewish Street of Buda. The prefect had to divide the Jewish tax levied by the king among the Jewish communities and collect it. The amount of this tax differs in various medieval accounts, and may have been no more than a few thousand florins. The prefect also represented the Jews of Hungary before the king, helped to protect them and to receive compensation for wrongs suffered. By this time, the Jewish community of Buda was the most significant one in the kingdom; they were part of the procession greeting the new king when Matthias first arrived in Buda in 1458, and had the privileges of Béla IV reconfirmed. In Poland, the royal court, voivode (governor appointed by the king over a province) or the “judge of the Jews” judged cases between Jews and Christians, and cases between Jews on the demand of the Jews themselves.16 The voivode’s court probably functioned from 1334 in Krakow. The judge of the Jews, always a nobleman, was appointed by the voivode or the ruler. In the fifteenth century, some Jewish elders were also members of the court. Kazimierz IV modified the privileges, so that minor civil cases between Jews were no longer judged by the voivode’s court or the judge appointed by him, but only by the court of elders of the Jewish community. This court is documented from the fifteenth century in Krakow. Elders of the community (kehillah) are named in Kalisz (1287) and in some late fifteenth-century cases. Rare cases from the late fifteenth century concerning internal disputes between the Jews of Krakow attest to recourse to the royal court. The royal court also acted as a court of appeal.

15

16

Boglárka Weisz, “Zsidók a budai jogkönyvben,” in Ferenc Pitti, ed., “Magyaroknak eleiről” Ünnepi tanulmányok a hatvan esztendős Makk Ferenc tiszteletére (Szeged, 2000), 681 95. Stanisław Grodziski, “The Kraków Voivode’s Jurisdiction over the Jews: A Study of the Historical Records of the Kraków Voivode’s Administration of Justice to Jews, in The Jews in Old Poland, 1000 1795, ed. Antony Polonsky, Jakub Basista and Andrzej Link Lenczowski (London: I. B. Tauris, 1993), 199 218; Hanna Zaremska, “Le juif au tribunal: Cracovie, XVème siècle,” in The Man of Many Devices, Who Wandered Full Many Ways . . . Festschrift in Honor of János M. Bak, ed. Balázs Nagy and Marcell Sebők (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1999), 105 14.

northeastern europe 291 Jews paid tax to the ruler. In 1436, Sigismund of Hungary, when he reconfirmed the privileges of Béla IV, added that Jews living on the lands of local lords (and not in royal cities) also had to pay tax to the king. In practice, some magnates received royal privileges to settle and tax Jews on their domains. By the end of the Middle Ages, some Jews even moved to the lands of magnates to avoid royal taxation. In Poland, however, Jews settled almost exclusively in royal towns and paid directly to the ruler, who had a quasi-monopoly over them. The richest members of the Jewish community were in the rulers’ service as lessees of the treasury. Revenues from tolls, mines, taxes, and mints were farmed out for a fixed annual sum paid by the lessee to the treasury (in later medieval Poland, the lessee sometimes used the revenue to act as the financial agent of a ruler or nobleman); he then collected the revenues and kept the surplus. Jewish lessees are known from Hungary only in the thirteenth century. They were called “counts of the treasury,” not because they were nobles, but because the title refers to a royal administrator. One individual could lease one or more types of revenue. Yet this should not be understood in light of nineteenth-century roles whereby “foreigners” (including Jews) filled the functions of the middle class in economically backward countries. Jews did not fill roles for which Christians were unavailable. In Hungary, for example, there were six Jewish lessees of the treasury and twenty known Christian lessees in the thirteenth century. Rather, kings chose individuals whom they saw as more reliable because of their dependence on the king. In Poland, Jewish tax-farming continued in the late Middle Ages. Jewish tenants held tolls, and, before 1368, the salt mine of Krakow. Examples of tax-farming continued to occur in the fifteenth century, especially in the southern parts of the realm, with synodal prohibitions of the practice in 1267 and 1420 remaining a dead letter. Jewish roles in minting went beyond the collection of revenues to being mint-masters and minters.17 Around the mid eleventh century, two probably German Jews litigated in Mainz about a failed attempt to mint coins at the royal mint in Hungary. Jewish lessees of the treasury in thirteenthcentury Hungary were involved in minting, signaled by Hebrew letters serving as identifying marks on the coins. In Poland, Jews minted coins with Hebrew inscriptions from the late twelfth century to the end of the thirteenth, under senior dukes of Great Poland Kazimierz II (1177–81), Mieszko III (1181–1202), Přemysław I (1242–57), and Přemysław II 17

Csaba Tóth, “Pénzverés és pénzügyigazgatás (1000 1387),” in András Kubinyi, József Laszlovszky, and Péter Szabó, eds., Gazdaság és gazdálkodás a középkori Magyarországon: gazdaságtörténet, anyagi kultúra, régészet (Budapest, 2008), 163 84, esp. 173 5; Marian Gumowski, Hebräische Münzen im mittelalterlichen Polen (Graz, 1975).

292 the middle ages: the christian world (1279–96), as well as Mieszko of Kalisz (1186–93), and Bolesław of Kujawy (1186–95). Over 320 coin types were minted, and minting by Jews especially flourished under Mieszko III and his sons. The images on the coins included bishops, lions, birds, swords, the ruler’s bust, and crowns. The Hebrew inscriptions were blessings, the name of the ruler in Hebrew letters, a few times the name of the minter (Abraham, Joseph, Jacob, Menahem), and once that of the mint-master (nagid). The coins were minted˙ in Kalisz and Gniezno, and briefly (1186–7) in Inowrocław, capital of Kujawy (Kuyavia). A twelfth-century Evangeliary with illuminations from Kruszwica depicts Jewish minters. Jews also engaged in moneylending, especially in lending large sums to members of the nobility and the king. Some of the Jewish élite, moving between Austria and Hungary, provided capital for substantial loans. Such transactions also involved holding estates as surety in loan transactions. Polish Jews were active in moneylending against mortgages and promissory notes in the fourteenth century. Especially in southern Poland and Lithuania, from the fifteenth century on, entire villages passed into the hands of Jewish lenders when the debt could not be repaid, and were temporarily administered by them. Valuable liturgical objects were pawned as well, despite ecclesiastical prohibitions. For example, a Bible from Csatár (Hungary) was pawned by a nobleman from his family monastery in the mid thirteenth century, and in the early fourteenth century, a deposed abbot in Wrocław had pawned chalices, crosses, and other liturgical vessels to Jewish lenders. In the late Middle Ages, moneylending to the king and aristocracy remained an important activity for members of the Jewish elite – for example the Mendel family of Buda in the late fifteenth century. Lewko, financier and co-leaseholder of two salt-mines, lent money to and was a protégé of Kazimierz the Great and his heirs. Members of the Fischel family were court bankers of Kazimierz IV and his sucessors, while Jossman and Smerl lent money mainly to the gentry in the late fourteenth century. Yet in the fifteenth century a new form of moneylending came to dominate: small sums lent to the burghers and poor Christians by Jews who themselves were not rich, against pawns of everyday objects, such as clothing. In Poland, this is particularly well attested in the court records of Krakow.18 Transactions in which no interest was charged for a fixed period, after which a sum twice the amount loaned was to be repaid, became more frequent in Hungary. Loans there were further regulated in 1436, fixing the interest Christians were to pay the Jewish lenders at 2 percent a week. Kings could cancel the obligation to 18

Bożena Wyrozumska, Żydzi w średniowiecznym Krakowie: Wypisy źródłowe z ksiąg miejs kich krakowskich / The Jews in Medieval Cracow: Selected Records from Cracow Municipal Books (Krakow, 1995).

northeastern europe 293 repay interest or even the whole debt – as Sigismund, king of Hungary (1387–1437), did a number of times – while, in other cases, Jews had recourse to the king to ensure loans were repaid. Long-distance trade linking eastern and western lands from Kiev to Regensburg also fostered Jewish trade to and from Hungary. Hungarian precious metal and copper were sold in the Rhineland. Jewish trade between Mainz and Hungary already existed around the mid eleventh century. Traditionally, it has been argued that Jews engaged in longdistance slave trading until it disappeared in the twelfth century, but this interpretation has been challenged, and it is probable that Jews bought and sold slaves only for their own use.19 A few Polish Jews of the late medieval period, especially in the fifteenth century, were involved in long-distance trade with the Baltic Sea, the Crimea, and Constantinople. Local trade continued to some extent throughout the period. In the renewal of Jewish privileges in Hungary (1436), customs duties paid by Jews were to be equal to those paid by Christians. In Poland, not only the privileges granted by Bolesław and Kazimierz, but also local privileges – such as those of 1226 in Rosenberg, Silesia, or 1327 in Nowy Sącz near Krakow – granted Jews the right to take merchandise around the country, and to pay the same amount of toll as Christians. Examples of involvement in retail trade include Jewish merchants selling cattle, grain, timber, fish, and textiles, as well as selling unredeemed pledges, in the fourteenth century. The best-attested aspects of Jewish economic roles in Hungary and Poland are connected to trade and financial activity, although Jews were not confined to such roles. The role of Jews in agriculture as landlords can be inferred for at least part of the period from evidence of landholding and buying estates (and being donated estates by the king in thirteenth-century Hungary), as well as receiving estates as surety for loans. Jews retained the ability to own land at least until the end of the thirteenth century, and vineyards even later in Hungary. Jews resident in many Polish towns owned and cultivated land, in addition to other occupations. Jews were often forbidden from being members of guilds, but there are some exceptions. In 1389, privileges in Grodno allowed the Jews to be artisans. Certain trades were connected to the existence of the Jewish community, such as butchery, which ensured the ritual slaughter of animals. At the end of the Middle Ages, however, Christian guilds tried to eliminate, or at least severely limit, the activity of Jewish butchers. Sporadic references from the late fifteenth century exist to Jewish artisans in Poland, such as tailors, shoemakers, furriers, hatters, blacksmiths, and tanners. There were few of 19

Michael Toch, “Jews and Commerce: Modern Fancies and Medieval Realities,” in Cavaciocchi, ed., Il ruolo economico, 43 58.

294 the middle ages: the christian world these artisans, and some only catered for the Jewish community. Jewish doctors and midwives are known from the fourteenth century on, as well as domestic servants in the houses of well-to-do members of the community. Jewish doctors in the late fifteenth century attended Hungary’s royal family. The ruler’s favor engendered antagonism for both religious and economic reasons. Employment of Jews as lessees of the treasury and the granting of privileges raised ecclesiastical and noble opposition, while in the later Middle Ages the (often German) burghers, with their newly emerged economic power, started to protect their own interests and to limit Jewish involvement in trade and finance. At the instigation of the archbishop of Esztergom, papal letters repeatedly urged thirteenth-century kings of Hungary not to employ Jews and Muslims, in obedience to the Fourth Lateran Council’s legislation. Nobles and ecclesiastics also introduced this requirement into the Golden Bull (1222, renewed 1231). At stake were both ecclesiastical ideas of not allowing Jews to exercise power over Christians, and material interests of the archbishop linked to revenues from minting. Nobility and ecclesiastics also joined to put pressure on Kazimierz IV of Poland. The Franciscan Giovanni da Capistrano, in the mid fifteenth century (1454), tried to persuade King Kazimierz IV to withdraw the privileges he had granted to the Jews, and incited animosity against Jews in Krakow. He was backed by the archbishop of Krakow, Cardinal Zbigniew Oleśnicki, who saw the privileges as contravening ecclesiastical principles and the Christian faith, and by the nobles, discontented after military defeat. The king revoked the privileges (which were not officially reconfirmed until over a century later), but in practice continued his policies toward Jews. For example, in 1463, he fined the city council of Krakow when a pogrom was organized against the Jews in the wake of a call for Crusade against the Ottomans, and in the same year he fined the city of Poznań, as well as compelling it to readmit Jews, after the latter were despoiled and expelled, accused of causing a fire. In the late fourteenth and, especially, fifteenth centuries, as the power of burghers increased, they strove to curtail rival Jewish economic activities. Some late medieval towns tried to reduce the possibility of Jewish involvement in local trade: in the fifteenth century, Buda forbade their commerce apart from the sale of pawned objects, while Sopron prohibited their activity in selling certain merchandise. Several late medieval Polish towns put pressure on the king to constrict the economic rights of the town’s Jews.20 Some cities in the late fifteenth century imposed a variety of 20

For a detailed study of one case: Heidemarie Petersen, Judengemeinde und Stadtgemeinde in Polen: Lemberg 1356 1581, Forschungen zur Osteuropäischen Geschichte, 61, Osteuropa Institut der Freien Universität Berlin (Wiesbaden, 2003).

northeastern europe 295 restrictions: for example, Krakow in 1485 limited Jewish trade to unredeemed securities for loans on specific days, and caps and collars made by poor Jews; Lwów in 1488 restricted Jewish trade in cloth. Others received privileges to the effect of not having to admit Jews at all, mostly in order to exclude Jewish rivals from trade. That the inhabitants of Krakow repeatedly tried to enforce the regulation shows that law and practice did not match. The analysis of sixteenth-century and later evidence also demonstrates that restrictions on Jewish trade and Jewish shops were not kept in practice. In Poland, opposition to Jewish financial activities also emerged. In 1369, the citizens of Krakow complained to the king that Jews faked receipts concerning debts and took stolen objects as pawns; a Polish nobleman even appealed to the pope in 1392 against a Jewish usurer. In 1423, the Warta Assembly limited Jewish credit activities. At the end of the period, Jan Ostroróg (1436–1501), in a legal-political tractate, presented Jewish moneylending against pledges as an unjust activity. Information on Jewish communal life in central Europe is limited; a fuller picture emerges for the late Middle Ages. One or more Jewish streets, under various names (such as platea or vicus Judaeorum), existed in many cities. The earliest testimony in the written sources in Hungary concerns Esztergom at the end of the thirteenth century, and in Poland, Krakow in 1304.21 Buda and Krakow also had a “Jewish Gate” (first mentioned in 1366) in the town wall which was the end point of the street. Such streets did not constitute ghettos: Jews could live elsewhere and Christians lived on “Jewish streets,” and property was bought and sold between Jews and Christians. Jews, however, did prefer to live together, and evidence, where available, reveals a concentration of houses owned by Jews, interspersed with a few houses owned by Christians.22 The location of the Jewish street or streets in several cities moved over time, usually due to some form of Christian pressure. In the late medieval period, access could be blocked to protect the Jews against violence, as in Krakow in 1407 by royal agents. Responsa also show that Jews lived in villages. Toponyms (“Zsidó,” “Żyd” [“Jew”]) have been interpreted as a sign of a Jewish owner or settlement in both Hungary and Poland. Without additional documentation, this cannot automatically be assumed. Evidence even exists about a “Zsidó” family in thirteenth-century Hungary that was not Jewish, but most likely took its name from a property.

21

22

For a detailed study: Hanna Zaremska, “Jewish Street (Platea judeorum) in Cracow: the 14th the first half of the 15th c.,” Acta Poloniae Historica 83 (2001), 27 57. Mateusz Goliński, “Jews in Medieval Legnica Their Location in the Municipal Area,” in Marcin Wodziński and Janusz Spyra, eds., Jews in Silesia (Krakow, 2001), 17 32.

296 the middle ages: the christian world Synagogues, and in the later Middle Ages other buildings, constituted the core of the Jewish settlement – for example, in fifteenth-century Krakow, a complex of two synagogues, cemeteries next to them, and a poor-house. Jewish cemeteries were often outside the walls, sometimes on a hill. A few references exist to thirteenth-century cemeteries in Silesia and Kalisz, and more to fourteenth-century Polish ones. A few synagogues survive from the fourteenth century or later. Some towns had more than one synagogue, such as Krakow, Wrocław (three in 1349) and Buda (two by the fifteenth century). Jewish status entailed regulation by the Christian authority of varied aspects of Jewish–Christian interaction, but significant internal autonomy. Cases within the Jewish community were brought to a bet din, a purely Jewish court. The level of observance in these communities has often been questioned. A general laxity of Jewish observance and lack of organized communal life was inferred from references to lack of learning or limited learning, and from a few complaints about the behavior of Jews not respecting kashrut (“dietary laws”) or the Sabbath. Sometimes, the use of evidence to arrive at this interpretation is questionable. For example, a reference to differences in a divorce letter written in Hungary, compared to the custom in France, sometimes interpreted as the erroneous use of Hebrew, more likely signals minor differences. In the second half of the eleventh century, the Jewish community of Esztergom severely punished merchants from Regensburg who arrived in town after the start of the Sabbath, because the wheel of their cart had broken; the justification for the severe punishment was to prevent a bad example being followed. This has been used to argue about lax observance, ignoring the fact that the community itself initiated the punishment of the merchants. The most widely cited piece is a letter by Eliezer ben Yitshak toward the end of the twelfth century, referring to Poland, Galicia, and ˙Hungary as areas where Jews were too poor to study the Torah and employed whoever they could find as teacher and cantor. Eliezer therefore argued for the admissibility of charging for teaching Torah and other religious services. The level of local scholarship, however, should not be confused with the level of religious observance. Responsa, in fact, show that one should not generalize: the behavior of central European Jews ranged from scrupulous insistence on religious observance to complete disregard for the rules. Jacob ben Meir Tam in the first half of the twelfth century mentions that the Hungarian practice concerning listing all the names an individual is known by in divorce letters conforms to that in all Ashkenaz. In the early thirteenth century, a query concerned a certain Matityahu who caused the death of a child accidentally. As penance, he went into exile and moved to Esztergom; the community wondered whether he could lead the congregation in prayer.

northeastern europe 297 Jews in Hungary were concerned whether to use a hot spring as a mikveh (“ritual bath”). Many questions were asked about marriage, from verifying an engagement to the validity of marriage if the man used different names. One responsum discusses a case in which a divorce was imposed on a couple in Vladimir (Ludmir), and the recalcitrant husband had to be sent for in Chełm. Questions on kashrut were the most numerous – from whether it was possible to eat salted fish if it was mixed during transport with non-kasher salted fish, to whether wine was kasher if the barrel was stabbed by a Christian and some of the wine spilled out. A man even consulted two rabbis to know whether a tablecloth that had been in contact with a sack of flour could be used at Pesach after shaking it out or only after washing it, and whether dough could still be used for Pesach if one grain of wheat was found in it. The need to break up salt mined in Hungary in order to make it suitable to use on meat to eliminate the blood was emphasized. The meat of an ox sent from Wiener Neustadt to Sopron was judged to be treif (“non-kosher”) as the rabbinic seal had been removed from its covering. A man consulted a rabbi on proper mourning attire for distant relatives. All these queries clearly show a concern for religious rules among members of the community. There are, however, contrary examples as well. In the fifteenth century, a question sent from Lwów to Israel Bruna concerned the murder of one Jew by two others who were drunk; one subsequently wished to do penance, while the other did not care about what happened. Some other fifteenth-century cases involved attacks or theft committed against Jews by other Jews, non-respect for the rules of the Sabbath, and lack of knowledge of the rules of ritual slaughter. The level of learning itself in these communities is not a straightforward issue. Eliezer’s letter, the silence of the sources on local rabbis, and the questions from Hungarian and Polish communities sent to foreign rabbis have traditionally led scholars to the conclusion that there was no religious teaching and study locally. This image has to be modified to some extent. Sometimes, communities turned to rabbis elsewhere because they were part not simply of the Christian kingdom in which they were situated, but of the broader Jewish world. Specific links existed between certain communities and rabbis: close halakhic ties existed between Polish Jews of the first half of the thirteenth century and Rabbi Judah Hehasid of Speyer ˙ lands who (then Regensburg); it is possible that Jews from German migrated to Poland retained their connection to him. In the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century, Jews from Sopron frequently asked the rabbi of Wiener Neustadt, Shalom ben Yitzhak, for judgments. In a few cases, a Jew from Sopron even asked the more respected Rabbi Shalom to approve or revise the decisions on questions of ritual taken by Rabbi Meir from Sopron.

298 the middle ages: the christian world The “silence of the sources” may in part be due to the loss of manuscripts in both countries in modern times. As scholars started to study Hebrew manuscripts more extensively, they uncovered an increasing number of rabbis in medieval Hungary and Poland, but often nothing is known of them beyond their name. Rabbis (in the broad sense of spiritual leaders of communities) are attested in Hungary from the late eleventh century: initially, Jews from German lands who lived for a time in the kingdom passed judgments, then locals appear in the sources in the thirteenth century. Over a dozen Jewish Torah scholars in Poland are known from the thirteenth century.23 For example, R. Jacob Svara of Krakow, a kohen, “a great scholar versed in the entire Talmud,” married a woman who served as a wet-nurse, which caused a great controversy.24 A nursing woman could not marry, and the solution in similar cases was for the couple to divorce and remarry after the end of lactation; but, as a kohen (a priest, believed to be descended from the biblical Aaron), Jacob would not have been able to remarry his divorced wife. Lenient views about the permissibility of the marriage were expunged from most rabbinical literature; Jacob’s views on other matters crop up in some texts. R. Moses Poler (or Polak, or “of Polin”) was active around the middle of the thirteenth century, and many of his opinions are cited regarding ritual slaughter and other matters. Some scholars moved between German, Bohemian, and Polish towns, being active in different places at different points in their life. Only the name or one interpretation of a verse in the Torah is mentioned for some of the other Jewish scholars of thirteenth-century Poland. Other religious specialists, such as the shohet (ritual slaughterer) or hazan (cantor), also appear in ˙ countries, as do scribes ˙ in later medieval Poland. the sources of both Sometimes, the same person filled several functions at once. In the mid and late fifteenth century, some Jews are mentioned as owning Hebrew books in Poland. Fragments of late medieval Hebrew manuscripts survived from both countries, for example in book-bindings, which provide glimpses of what must have been a more lively Jewish life and culture, especially in the fifteenth century, than can be reconstructed today. Oral instruction and discussions between teacher and disciple, referred to a few times in commentaries but not systematically written down, mean that teaching was not absent, but left almost no traces in the sources. Most likely, Isaac of Nagyszombat (today Trnava, Slovakia), active in the first half of the fifteenth century, is the first rabbi from Hungary whose written work – the first Jewish literary work written in Hungary – is 23

24

Israel M. Ta Shma, “On the History of the Jews in Twelfth and Thirteenth Century Poland,” in G. D. Hundert, ed., Jews in Early Modern Poland (London, 1997), 287 317. Ibid., 294.

northeastern europe 299 conserved. His Sefer minhagim dealt with ritual customs in Austria, Hungary, and Steiermark. At the same time, there are also references to Jews who were illiterate and knew no Hebrew. Jewish communities developed over the course of the Middle Ages. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the community (kehillah) organization took firmer shape, with the richest members of the community serving on the board. In Poland, from the second half of the fourteenth century in some cities, only later elsewhere, Jewish communities developed varied political, administrative, and religious functions. An agreement was concluded in 1494 between the elders of the Jewish community in Krakow and butchers in the city, about the ritual slaughter of animals to provide for Jewish needs. As in the rest of Europe, the Jewish minority adopted many aspects of local practices, from names to building styles. Naming patterns in thirteenthcentury Hungary show the prevalence of German names among the Jewish élite, in conformity to their areas of origin. At the end of the fifteenth century, in Pozsony and Sopron, traditional Jewish names remained dominant, but the names of Jews from Hungary, even in German sources, were recorded in the order they would be in Hungarian – for example, “Schwartz Mendel von Ofen,” showing the adoption of the Hungarian pattern.25 Names of Jews in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Poland include many German names and Slavic translations of German names. Archaeological excavations of the thirteenth-century Jewish street of Buda did not indicate differences in the objects used in everyday life and buildings (insofar as this can be determined from the remains) between Jewish and Christian areas. The thirteenth-century synagogue of Wrocław and fourteenth-century synagogue of Kazimierz near Krakow show stylistic features of synagogues in German lands (e.g. Worms and Speyer). Some of the stylistic features of the early fourteenth-century synagogue of Sopron have been used to trace the south German origin of the Jews who commissioned it, and its early Gothic rose window is similar to that of the local Franciscan convent. The synagogue of Buda was built in 1461 in Gothic style, also used for the late fifteenthcentury synagogue of Krakow.26 Fifteenth-century Hebrew texts written in Hungary attest the use of some Hungarian words in Hebrew (for example köles [“millet”]). 25

26

Erzsébet Mislovics, “A nyugat magyarországi zsidóság névhasználati gyakorlata a késő középkorban,” in Boglárka Weisz, ed., Középkortörténeti Tanulmányok. A III. Medievisztikai PhD konferencia (Szeged, 2003. május 8 9.) előadásai (Szeged, 2003), 93 101, esp. 101. Studies: Ferenc Dávid, A soproni ó zsinagóga (Budapest, 1978); Izabella Rejduch Samkowa, “Die kunsthistorischen Probleme der ältesten Krakauer Synagogen,” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Martin Luther Universität Halle Wittenberg. Gesellschafts und sprachwissenschaftliche Reihe 37, 5 (1988), 54 62.

300 the middle ages: the christian world Sometimes, the influence of the majority and the incentives attached to being a Christian led to conversion to Christianity. Individual cases of conversion are documented throughout the Middle Ages. The opposite case, conversion to Judaism, was rare, but not unknown: for example, Avraham ha-Ger of Hungary, in the first half of the twelfth century, appears in a Hebrew source. Conversion to Christianity could lead to immediate economic benefits, but this was not always the case. For example, two Jews in Hungary converted because of the promise of the abbot of Pannonhalma to give them a yearly sum of money, but then the abbot did not keep his promise and the converts appealed to the pope. A musician who converted in Poland in 1469 became the king’s trumpeteer. Converted Jews were able to continue in royal employment when Jews could no longer hold such positions: John Ernuszt, a converted Jew from Buda was royal treasurer between 1467 and 1476, overseeing royal reforms. He was even appointed Ban of Slavonia. On the other hand, the expectations of a Jewish slave-girl who converted in the hope of improved status were disappointed and she clandestinely returned to Judaism, hiding in the Jewish community until she was sold to a new Jewish master. A certain Eliyah ben Netanel from Buda in mid-fifteenth-century Pozsony even allegedly left his Jewish faith several times, sometimes behaving as a Jew and other times as a Christian. Families could straddle the religious dividing line. The children of a prominent financier of Krakow, Smerl, converted to Christianity, but retained good relations with their Jewish mother. They bought houses from her in 1411 with the proviso that the mother could stay there until her death. At the end of the fifteenth century, a member of a prominent Jewish family in Krakow, the royal banker Stefan Fischel, converted with two of his sons, while his wife and other children remained in their faith. Often, a convert was referred to as “iudeus baptizatus.” Influences from the majority culture also triggered mechanisms for safeguarding Jewish life – among these, emphasis on separation and the denigration of Christians were common in medieval Europe. The few indications on central European Jewish views about the Christian majority fit into this framework. Christians were called “star-worshippers,” and Jesus the “suspended one.” One responsum renders the name of Neukirchen (“New Church”) as “New Nastiness” (ni’oi to‘evah ‫)ניאוי תועבה‬. Sources provide glimpses of the diversity of interaction between Christians and Jews, including cooperation and, increasingly, acts of violence. In the early fourteenth century, Jews and Christians of Körmend litigated together against a nobleman. Jews and Christians similarly acted together to mediate in a case between a local Christian and a Jew in Pozsony. Cooperation could take on different forms: at the end of the fifteenth

northeastern europe 301 century, a band of Jewish and Christian robbers worked in western Poland. Jews could seek redress against Christians. In late fourteenth-century Pozsony, a Christian burgher captured and robbed a local Jewish woman; the case went to the royal judge of the Jews and the burgher was imprisoned, his goods turned over to the woman’s husband. In fifteenth-century Krakow, Jews, including women, sued Christians for slander and abusive language. In 1495, the city court of Krakow fined a Christian for wounding a Jew in the latter’s own home, in the face and chest. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, the students of the University of Krakow were housed in the Jewish quarter, and told neither to become familiar with Jews – unless they were trying to convert them – nor to persecute Jews. In the following decades, Jewish properties were bought by the chapter and given to the university, and the Jews were moved to another street. In late fifteenth-century Poland, Christians and Jews were at times forced to keep the peace after a pogrom under threat of a fine to be paid to the king. Cases occurred of imprisonment of Jews by urban authorities in order to extort money: one detailed case is that of Jekutiel or Jekussiel who was imprisoned several times in this way in the early fifteenth century in Wrocław, appealed to the king, and was forced by the imprisonment of his whole family to swear to retract the appeal. After the death of Hungary’s King Matthias in 1490, several towns expelled the Jews or imprisoned them and extorted payments. Jews were not always victims: for example, a Jewish woman was jailed in Warsaw in 1473 for beating up a noblewoman. Although individual acts of violence occurred randomly throughout the Middle Ages, from the end of the thirteenth, and especially from the fourteenth, century, new types of violence and anti-Jewish behavior, linked to accusations against the Jews, spread in both countries.27 This was often violence on a mass scale, involving plundering Jewish property. In the late thirteenth century, a Jew named Jonah was killed, accused of Host desecration, and the murder of Jews in thirteenth-century Hungary is mentioned in other texts. In the second half of the fourteenth century, a woman who used to live in Esztergom asked a rabbi how to do penance: she had killed her children at the time of persecutions, but in the end escaped and moved to Poland. In 1446, the rabble broke into the synagogue and Jewish houses in Pozsony. In 1494, a blood libel against the Jews of Nagyszombat led to the execution of many. In 1496, the Jewish street in Buda was attacked by the mob, stealing pawned objects. In late fourteenth-century 27

Jacek Wijaczka, “Die Einwanderung der Juden und antijüdische Exzesse in Polen im späten Mittelalter,” in Friedhelm Burgard, Alfred Haverkamp and Gerd Mentgen, eds., Judenvertreibungen in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, Forschungen zur Geschichte der Juden, A 9 (Hanover, 1999), 241 56.

302 the middle ages: the christian world Poland, as in German lands, it seems that Jews were accused of causing the pestilence and some were killed as a consequence in 1349, although there are only scant Memorbuch references to Krakow and Kalisz, and one brief mention in a western chronicle. Jews in Poznań were killed in 1464, held responsible for a recurrence of the Black Death. Jews were accused of ritual murder in 1347, and appealed to the pope for protection. Such accusations recurred, leading to the killing of Jews. For example, according to Długosz’s account, in 1407 in Krakow a canon incited the congregation after a sermon, claiming to have received information that the Jews killed a Christian boy the previous night in the town, to use his blood; the Christians attacked the Jews, plundered, and killed many. The forced conversion of Jews accompanied the attacks. Długosz and other sources also claimed that, in 1399, a Christian woman stole Hosts from the Church of the Dominicans in Poznań, which she sold to Jews, who abused them. After the miraculous recovery of the Hosts, the bishop ordered that a chapel be built on the site. According to one version of the story, the rabbi and the elders of the community were burnt. Host desecration was another recurrent accusation, despite Polish rulers’ efforts to protect the Jews against it through their privileges.28 Jews were also accused of arson when a fire broke out in Poznań in 1447. Jewish houses themselves were set on fire during anti-Jewish riots, for example in Krakow in 1407, 1477, and 1494. The authorities often tried to protect the Jews; during the attack in 1464, the Jews of Krakow were even taken to Wawel Castle. Yet attacks became more frequent in the second half of the fifteenth century. The position of Jews deteriorated from the fourteenth century: economic restrictions, new types of violence, and expulsions appeared in both countries. In fourteenth-century Hungary, Jews could no longer be lessees of the treasury, or purchase land. Sometime before 1360 (the exact date is debated), Louis I the Great expelled the Jews from Hungary, although he readmitted them a few years later. By the fifteenth century, distinguishing clothing was in use, although members of the elite were able to gain immunity from having to wear it. Humiliating elements, until then absent, appeared in legal sources. During the Middle Ages, a simple oath for Jews, to be taken outside the synagogue on the ring of the door, or inside on the Torah, prevailed, without degrading formulas.29 By the early sixteenth 28

29

Detailed study of another case: Hermina Joldersma, “Specific or Generic ‘Gentile tale?’ Sources on the Breslau Host Desecration (1453) Reconsidered,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte. Archive for Reformation History 95 (2004), 6 33. Alexander Scheiber, “A Medieval Form of Jewish Oath,” Journal of Jewish Studies 25, 1 (1974), 181 2; For Poland, Hanna Zaremska, “Iuramentum Iudeorum żydowska przysięga w średniowiecznej Polsce,” in E scientia et amicitia: Studia poświęcone profesor owi Edwardowi Potkowskiemu (Warsaw, 1999), 229 43.

northeastern europe 303 century (and perhaps already during the fifteenth), negative, humiliating aspects similar to its German models were introduced. The early fifteenthcentury lawbook of Buda referred to the Jews as “vile, stubborn, stinking” infidels.30 In Poland, apart from the efforts of individual towns to limit Jewish economic activity, wider-ranging restrictions were also put forward. The mid fourteenth-century statutes for Little Poland restricted Jewish moneylending to being done in exchange for pledges, rather than mortgages of landed estates. Similar restrictions were included in the decisions of the nobility’s assembly at Warta in 1423. The archbishop of Gniezno, Mikołaj Trąba, who participated at the Council of Constance, introduced corresponding anti-Jewish legislation at the synod of Kalisz in 1420, which was soon adopted by the archbishopric of Lwów as well. In 1495, Grand Duke Alexander expelled Jews from Lithuania, although the decision was reversed in 1503. It has traditionally been thought that Bolesław V expelled the Jews from Warsaw in 1483, and Jan Olbracht expelled the Jews from Krakow in 1495, but both have now been refuted.31 We should, however, beware of assuming a straightforward linear chronological development toward increased persecution. Specific historical moments fostered persecution or, on the contrary, protection. Thus, for example, King Kálmán of Hungary (1095–1116) issued extensive restrictive legislation concerning the Jews, in parallel to his attempt to convert the kingdom’s Muslim minority. His overarching concern was to ensure the purity of the Christian faith and the unity of the Christian Kingdom of Hungary, a concern inspired by his education in view of an ecclesiastical career. This did not determine the framework for Jewish life for the rest of the Middle Ages. Rather, in the mid thirteenth century, Béla IV issued privileges to the Jews, as did later rulers. Thus, in 1291, the urban privileges of Pozsony granted the liberties of citizens to Jewish inhabitants. In 1324, Charles I granted the same liberties to all freemen wishing to settle in Sopron, be they Christians or Jews. Similarly, some instances contradicted the trend toward growing restrictions in the late Middle Ages. In 1387, Jews of Lwów were among those guaranteed their privileges in the city by Jadwiga. Jagiello, in his decrees for Volhynia in 1432, granted Jews the same rights that they had in Krakow and Lwów. The Jews of Buda on horseback, equipped with swords and a flag, took part in the festivities 30

31

Karl Mollay, ed., Das Ofner Stadtrecht. Eine deutschsprachige Rechtssammlung des 15. Jahrhunderts aus Ungarn (Budapest, 1959), ch. 191, 126. Hanna Wegrzynek, “Czy w 1483 r. książę mazowiecki Bolesław V wygnał Żydów z Warszawy? Możliwości interpretacji dokumentów miejskich,” in Stanisław Rosik and Przemysław Wiszewski, eds., Causa creandi: O pragmatyce źródła historycznego (Wrocław, 2005), 513 17; Bożena Wyrozumska, “Did King Jan Olbracht Banish the Jews from Cracow?” in Andrzej K. Paluch, ed., The Jews in Poland, vol. I (Krakow, 1992), 27 37.

304 the middle ages: the christian world surrounding the 1476 marriage of Matthias to Beatrice of Naples, and her coronation. Jews in Poland were not forbidden from wearing arms, either. Both kingdoms have been seen as lands of “tolerance” where Jews could achieve high positions at court, where massacres and expulsions did not mar Jewish life, and where Jewish communities could flourish under the explicit protection of the rulers, who granted written privileges to these communities.32 The basic contrast on which this image is based is true: Jews were expelled from most of western Europe by 1500, but not – despite partial and reversed expulsions – from Hungary and Poland–Lithuania. Yet the underlying explanatory framework of a tolerant central Europe does not stand up to scrutiny. The comparatively better position of central European Jews should not be mistaken for harmonious coexistence. Violence and pogroms did take place, perhaps even more than we know, as some instances are only attested by a solitary reference in the sources. Indeed, royal protection raised ecclesiastical, noble, and eventually urban resistance; royal privileges and synodal legislation could be in conflict, and towns in the later Middle Ages endeavored to restrict the sphere of Jewish activities. The position of Jews in these areas can be explained by, on the one hand, legal systems that developed for composite societies, and, on the other, royal policies. Both kingdoms included many different ethnic and religious groups with their own privileges, thus Jews were not the exception to the general rule of a homogeneous Catholic society. Privileges were granted to a number of hospes (immigrant and internal migrant) groups. The traditionally invoked explanation for tolerance, economic necessity in backward countries, has been exaggerated. Rather, Jews played a significant part in the building of royal power, and royal protection was crucial for Jewish status. The expulsions of Jews from most of western Europe, and then the Ottoman conquest of a large part of Hungary, led to the rising significance of the Jewish communities of Poland–Lithuania in the early modern period. 32

For discussions: András Kubinyi, “Zur Frage der Toleranz im mittelalterlichen Königreich Ungarns,” in Alexander Patschovsky and Harald Zimmermann, eds., Toleranz im Mittelalter, Voträge und Forschungen, 45 (Sigmaringen, 1998), 187 206; Jerzy Wyrozumski, “Die Frage der Toleranz im Mittelalterlichen Polen,” Universitas Iagellonica Acta Scientiarum Litterarumque MXXV Schedae Historicae, Fasciculus C, Studia Germano Polonica 1 (Krakow, 1992), 7 19; Jerzy Wyrozumski, “L’Idée de tolérance à l’université de Cracovie dans la première moitié du XVe siècle,” in Sophie Włodek, ed., Société et église: Textes et discussions dans les universités d’Europe centrale pendant le Moyen Âge tardif. Actes du Colloque de Cracovie, 14 16 juin 1993, organisé par la Société Internationale pour l’Étude de la Philosophie Médiévale (Turnhout, 1995), 133 42.

part ii SOCIAL AND INSTITUTIONAL HISTORY

chapter 11

THE SOURCES ephraim shoham steiner

INTRODUCTION

During the last few decades, social history has become a fashionable method of studying the past. Yet in his textbook for advanced students of social history written on the eve of the third millennium, Miles Fairburn outlined a set of seven methodological problems that face historians of past societies when they come to reconstruct the social and institutional image of those societies. These problems are not absent from our attempt to map the sources of the social and institutional history of Jews living in medieval Western Christendom, and they should be constantly present in our minds when we draw our historical conclusions. One of these predicaments was what Fairburn called problem #5: “the problem of socially constructed data.” “Most data on subordinate and deviant groups in past time,” he writes, “were generated by dominant groups and their agents. Can these data tell us anything about the actual values, actions and beliefs of subordinate/deviant groups, or do the data only tell us something about the perceptions and responses of the dominant groups?”1 Indeed, the knowledge of past societies is mediated to us through the texts and writings of those who had mastered the art of letters. In the past, and especially in medieval Europe, this group was small, though not a minority but rather an elite. This chapter represents a brief survey of the sources from which we can learn about the social and institutional history of the Jews in medieval Western Christendom. Most of the sources that will be discussed henceforth fall under the category of the “problem” listed above. Both the sources constructed and penned by non-Jewish authors about Jews in medieval Western Christendom, and the inner Jewish source material, all came from a very specific social circle, namely the male learned elite on both sides of the denominational divide. This is not the only “problem.” The majority of sources that will be discussed in this chapter suffer from yet another methodological “shortcoming,” for they 1

M. Fairburn, Social History: Problems, Strategies and Methods (New York, 1999), 12.

307

308 the middle ages: the christian world were not written in a vernacular language spoken by the inhabitants of medieval Western Christendom. The intimate knowledge of both Hebrew and Latin, the languages of the overwhelming majority of the sources, was restricted to a relatively small percentage of the two respective groups.2 We should be constantly mindful of these methodological obstacles. The sources for institutional history, usually associated with the dominant classes, enable historians to reconstruct a relatively unmediated picture of the social and religious institutions, based on reading the sources at a level closer to “face value.” On the other hand, social history should be dealt with more hesitantly. We should bear in mind that the dominant strata of society – both Jews and non-Jews – did most of the writing and thus projected their thoughts, ideas, and expressions of the right social order into the sources, leaving behind records of a rather biased nature. These records are therefore to be analyzed critically and cautiously, with regard both to themselves and to those elements of society that did not leave a “paper trail,” but who nevertheless appear in the records and whose “muffled voices” may be heard from between the lines. The attempt to reconstruct the past is heavily influenced by the sources at the historian’s disposal. Recent scholarship has adopted a very wide perception of what can serve as a historical source. Our knowledge of the social and institutional history of medieval Judaism is becoming more nuanced and varied than that of the earlier attempts at this venture. If, in the past, historical narratives, legal documentation, and archival material served as the backbone of social and institutional historiography, today historians look at a much wider variety of sources. The past half-century of research has proved that the classical sources, as important as they may be, should be part of a larger body of sources that aid us in our attempt to draw a detailed picture of a past society. The scope of sources that are now discussed in the social and institutional historiography includes both a wider variety of literary sources and material sources, from within the Jewish communities as well as from the Christian society in which Jews lived. We should, however, remember that there is a considerable dissimilarity in the variety and abundance of sources in the different regions 2

Although Ephraim Kanarfogel has recently argued that the level of literacy among the male sector of the medieval Ashkenazic Jewish society was relatively higher then pre viously thought, there is a world of difference between the intimate knowledge and understanding of one’s mother tongue and the ability to decipher and broadly compre hend the meaning of a sacred text recited liturgically in the holy space or learned in an academic surrounding. See E. Kanarfogel, “Levels of Literacy in Ashkenaz and Sepharad as reflected by the Recitation of Biblical Verse Found in the Liturgy,” in J. R. Hacker, Y. Kaplan, and B. Z. Kedar, eds., From Sages to Savants: Studies Presented to Avraham Grossman [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 2010), 157 86.

the sources 309 of medieval Europe. The Apennine peninsula serves as a fine example of a relatively well-documented region, due to the longevity as well as geographical dispersion of Jewish communities. As a result, we have a wide variety and a considerable number of documents. This, however, is not the case north of the Alps. Here we have some areas that are well documented, while we have others with very little documentation or none at all. Furthermore, given the deportations and expulsion of Jews from many areas in northwestern Europe after 1290, many of the possible documents that might have aided our research were most probably lost. Charters, chronicle entries, responsa literature, religious poetry, halakhic documents and discussions, extracts from biblical and talmudic commentary, exempla stories used by homilists, as well as archaeological findings (both architectural and artefacts), and illuminated manuscripts are now among the wide range of sources used by historians of social and institutional history to paint a nuanced picture of Jewish life in medieval Europe. As we move forward in time from the earlier years of the medieval European Jewish existence circa 950, the number of sources at our disposal grows gradually. INSTITUTIONAL HISTORY

The institutional history of the period we focus on is of great importance. It is during this period in this geographic area that both Jewish and Christian authority developed, and the creation of established institutions manifested itself with a growing awareness of record-keeping and written registers. In this survey, I wish to scan some of the main sources that were used by social historians and institutional historians when they came to reconstruct the social and institutional history of medieval European Jewry. I will also attempt to highlight the new trends in this field and point to sources that are being used in recent scholarship, and shed new light on the established conventions of Jewish medieval social and institutional life. When analyzing the sources at our disposal, we can generally discern two groups of sources mentioned above that fall clearly into the following categories: • inner Jewish sources, for the most part penned in Hebrew • sources whose origin and language are from outside the Jewish community.

The inner Jewish material differs greatly from the non-Jewish. The typical material used by medievalists to reconstruct institutional history, such as charters, privileges, fiscal and financial records, as well as chronicle entries, is very scarce in Hebrew. The reason for this most likely has to do with the eventual expulsion of Jews from western Europe. With the disappearance of

310 the middle ages: the christian world the institutions (community, synagogue, charitable foundations, etc.), the records that were probably meticulously kept up to the expulsion lost much of their relevance overnight with the dispersal of the community as a vibrant entity. When a Jewish community such as that of Speyer established in 1084 was forced to leave their home town permanently, probably between 1513 and 1529 (the exact date is unknown), it was coerced into leaving behind a legacy of institutional life that lasted more than 400 years. These institutions were no doubt documented and left behind a “paper trail” of written records. It was at this point that Jews had to decide what would serve best in a diaspora, the records of a local institution that abruptly ceased to exist (for example, a synagogue, a yeshiva, a charitable institution like a hospital) or other documents like liturgical writings, legal dossiers, and books of religious scholarship. In times like these, it seems local institutions instantly lost their relevance and value in the economy of preservation. Indeed, we know of a Jewish charitable institution like a hospital in the French town of Provins in 1244 only from the non-Jewish records.3 No reference to the existence of such an institution in this locality has survived in Jewish internal records. As for the almost-absence of Jewish chronicles, save those that deal with the extreme cases of religious persecutions and pogroms (like those describing the Crusades or the Black Death), this issue has been at the center of a heated debate over J. H. Yerushalmi’s monograph Zakhor.4 However, given the close proximity of Jews and non-Jews in the urban matrix of western Europe, the patterns of local institutions in the two groups probably tended to resemble one another. Rainer Barzen has recently demonstrated this in his study of the Jewish supra-communal organization of kehillot ShUM.5 This study points to the similarity in pattern between the local regional organizations on both sides of the denominational divide. 3

4 5

H. Gross, Gallia Judaica. Dictionnaire géographique de la France d’après les sources rabbiniques (with supplement by S. Schwarzfuchs) (Amsterdam, 1969), 493 5; G. Dahan, “Quartiers juifs et rues des juifs,” in B. Blumenkranz, ed., Art et archéologie des juifs en France médiévale (Toulouse, 1980), 26; E. Taitz, The Jews of Medieval France: The Community of Champagne (Westport, 1994),125 6 nn. 44 6. W. C. Jordan points out that this institution was abandoned in 1306 with expulsion of northern French Jewry see Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews From Philip August to the Last Capetians (Philadelphia, 1989), 215 n. 17 and 309 n. 94. Y. H. Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle, 1982). R. Barzen, “Jewish Regional Organization in the Rhineland: The Kehilot Shum around 1300,” in C. Cluse, ed., The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages (Tenth Fifteenth Centuries), Proceedings of the International Symposium held at Speyer 20 25 October 2002 (Turnhout, 2004), 233 44. See also Barzen’s Takkanot Kehillot Schum. Die Rechtssatzungen der jüdischen Gemeinden von Mainz, Worms und Speyer im hohen und späten Mittelalter, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Hebräische Texte im Mittelalterlichen Deutschland, 2 (Hanover, forthcoming).

the sources k e h i l l ah

311

The most important component of medieval Jewish institutional history is that of the community or the kehillah (or, in some sources, the kahal). However, before dealing with this social organ, we should dedicate a separate discussion to a more fundamental institution – the family. fami ly The sources for the study of the medieval European Jewish family are not abundant, yet they vary. As Elishevah Baumgarten states, they were for the most part written in northern France and Germany during the High Middle Ages, and include halakhic sources, exempla stories, ritual books and custom manuals (sifrei minhag), books on commandments (sifrei mitsvot), as well as commentary on liturgical poetry (piyyut). In addition, Baumgarten argues that an intimate knowledge of the contemporary Christian family may have a telling effect with regard to our knowledge and understanding of this fundamental element in Jewish institutional history. The close proximity in which Jews and Christians lived in the medieval northern European urban environment suggests a similarity between the two. Baumgarten also makes the observation that scholars of Jewish social and institutional history lack many of the sources that serve European medievalists when researching the history of family life. Indeed, we have very few sources that provide demographical and statistical data regarding the Jewish medieval family. Furthermore, many of the sources that enabled recent scholarship on family are nonexistent with regard to the Jewish family. Archaeological excavations, a relatively new source used by historians for social information, have provided useful data; nevertheless, there are still very few medieval Jewish homes that have been excavated. A rather extensive project attempting to unearth medieval Jewish homes is in progress under the supervision of archaeologist Sven Schütte in the medieval Jewish quarter in Cologne. Other Jewish quarters and Jewish alleyways were documented and excavated during the 1990s, but a database of archaeological findings that will help us in the reconstruction of family, communal, and social history of northwestern European Jewry is a venture for future work.6 6

On excavations carried out in Regensburg, see S. Codreanu Windauer, “Regensburg: The Archaeology of the Jewish Quarter,” in Cluse, ed., The Jews in Europe, 391 403 (and the bibliography). On the current Cologne project, see www.museenkoeln.de/archaeolo gische zone. On the layout of medieval Jewry, see also Pamela Manix’s piece on the “Mapping of the Medieval Jewry in Oxford,” using the town’s documentation (404 15). An earlier attempt to reconstruct the Jewish quarter from documentation can be found in A. Haverkamp, “The Jewish Quarters in German Towns during the Late Middle Ages,”

312 the middle ages: the christian world Scholars of the medieval family, such as Roland Finucane, have used hagiography and miracula literature in their attempt to reconstruct aspects of the medieval family. Unfortunately, sources of this nature are totally absent from the medieval Jewish sphere. There have been some attempts to make general demographic statements about the Jewish medieval family. Avraham Grossman, in his seminal study on the early Ashkenazic sages,7 acknowledged the size of the Jewish family in the earlier years of the Ashkenazic existence and adopted Bernard Blumenkranz’s observation that families that had fewer than three children were the exception. Blumenkranz, as well as other scholars, has primarily used the lists of the martyrs of 1096 preserved in Memorbucher (the memory books kept in many Ashkenazic communities to commemorate the dead, highlighting those martyred in antiJewish riots or individual acts of anti-Jewish violence, and communal benefactors).8 Indeed, with the paucity of other lists of individuals, most of the studies that have been conducted on the size and composition of the Jewish family use these books. One of the first of these studies was that conducted by S. Salfeld on the Nürnberg Memorbuch in the final years of the nineteenth century. Based on this source, as well as on other sporadic accounts of martyrdom that relate to the number and gender of the nuclear family members, scholars have attempted to reconstruct the demographic patterns of the medieval Ashkenazic family. One such recent attempt is Kenneth Stow’s chapter on the Jewish family in his book Alienated Minority.9 Stow suggests that, although there are methodological problems with the lists of families in the Memorbucher, the demographical data that can be extracted are of invaluable importance, and he goes on to draw demographical, institutional, and social conclusions from these data. The Memorbucher supply us with yet another feature of family history, the names borne by Jews in medieval Europe. In this respect, the Memorbucher are an invaluable source, for they give us a close look at the name-giving patterns among medieval Jews of both sexes. Most of the other medieval Jewish and non-Jewish sources supply us

7

8

9

in R. Po Chia Hsia and H. Lehmann, eds., In and Out of the Ghetto: Jewish Gentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1995), 13 28. A. Grossman, The Early Sages of Ashkenaz: Their Lives, Leadership and Works (900 1096) [Hebrew], 2nd edn. (Jerusalem, 1988), 8 9. E. Baumgarten, Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz: Men, Woman and Everyday Religious Observance (Philadelphia, 2014), 103 37. K. R. Stow, Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1992).

the sources 313 predominantly with the names of the learned or economically active male elite who were more likely to leave a documented trail.10 community Jewish communal organizations, and most of the institutions, probably date back to the establishment of Jewish settlements in the Diaspora as early as the fifth century BCE. When we encounter the western European Jewish community in the High Middle Ages, the community or kehillah is already a well-established and vibrant social institution with a documented legacy. However, the establishment of the first communities north of the Alps in the eighth and ninth centuries brought about a new model of a local community, rather different from its Mediterranean and Mesopotamian predecessors and contemporaries. One of the first attempts to collect the references to Jews and their institutions in both Hebrew and non-Hebrew source material from the medieval European sphere was that of Julius Aronius, who published an annotated collection of documents relating to the history of Jews in France and Germany as early as the late nineteenth century.11 This work gives in chronological order, under each date, an abstract of every entry in the medieval chronicles and documents relating to the Jews of this region up to 1273. Not all the entries refer to communal and institutional life, yet this is still an invaluable collection of sources. The publication was interrupted by the death of Aronius, and was completed by the aforementioned Siegmund Salfeld.12 These collections were the prelude to the work on Germania Judaica that began in the first decade of the twentieth century. To date, this encyclopedia serves as a primary reference book for sources that document the social and institutional history of medieval European Jewry. It is a historical-geographical encyclopedia for the history of the Jews in the Holy Roman Empire, initiated by the Gesellschaft für Förderung der Wissenschaft des Judentums (“The Society for the 10

11

12

Another source for Jewish given names are the medieval Jewish epitaphs. For Germany, we have today the Steinheim Institute (University of Duisburg Essen) online search engine for Jewish epitaphs in Germany: www.steinheim institut.de/cgi bin/epidat. See later for discussion. Another early collection worth mentioning is Meir Wiener’s summary of entries referring to Jews in various medieval German documents translated from the Latin into German: M. Wiener, Regesten zur Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland während des Mittelalters (Hanover, 1862). J. Aronius, Regesten zur Geschichte der Juden im fränkischen und deutschen Reiche bis zum Jahre 1273 (Berlin, 1887 1902). Salfeld himself published the Nürnberg Memorbuch, an invaluable source in itself for the social and institutional history of medieval Ashkenazic Jewry: S. Salfeld, Das Martyrologium des Nürnberger Memorbuches (Berlin, 1898).

314 the middle ages: the christian world Promotion of Jewish Studies”) in Berlin. The first volume, covering the time from the first appearance of Jews in this area until 1238, was published in 1934. After the Holocaust, the Leo Baeck Institute edited the second volume (1238–1350), and a third volume reaching to the end of the Middle Ages was prepared by a team at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which also included researchers from Germany and Austria. The project is still active today and volumes that survey Jewish life in the region in the early modern period are being edited and published. Another project of a similar nature but on a smaller scale was the Gallia Judaica published in Paris by Henri Gross in 1897.13 Gross’s book became the touchstone for every discussion on French Jewry in the Middle Ages. Since the 1970s, several other projects have collected documents on the Jews in medieval northern France, such as Norman Golb’s study on the Jews of Rouen, Gerard Nahon’s Inscriptions hébraïques (1986), and his “Synodes et Taqqanot en France” (1985–8). The efforts to collect the documentation led to surveys and monographs that focus on the social and institutional history of medieval French Jewry. Among the works that discuss these matters are: Robert Chazan’s Medieval Jewry in Northern France (1973), William C. Jordan’s The French Monarchy and the Jews (1989), and finally Simon Schwarzfuchs’s Hebrew survey of the social and institutional history of northern French Jewry, A History of the Jews in Medieval France (2001).14 Another important survey in this respect is Avraham Grossman’s The Early Sages of France, an impressive attempt to reconstruct the biographies of the Jewish sages, founders of the northern French school, both as intellectuals and as communal and socio-religious leaders.15 In the absence of a centralized government north of the Alps by the eleventh century, equivalent to the Caliphate in Baghdad, the Jewish communities were well into the process of establishing themselves as independent institutional entities. The ability to live in a predominantly 13

14

15

A newer edition with updates by Israeli scholar Simon Schwarzfuchs appeared in Amsterdam in 1969: H. Gross, Gallia Judaica (Amsterdam, 1969). R. Chazan, Medieval Jewry in Northern France: A Political and Social History (Baltimore, 1973); N. Golb, Les Juifs de Rouen au moyen âge: Portrait d’une culture oubliée (Rouen, 1985; expanded English version: The Jews in Medieval Normandy: A Social and Intellectual History [Cambridge, 1998]); G. Nahon, Inscriptions hébraïques et juives de France médiévale (Paris, 1986); Nahon, “Synodes et Taqqanot en France au XIIe siècle,” Annuaire de l’ École Pratique des Hautes Études, Ve section: Sciences religieuses 94 ( 1985 6), 331 4; ibid., 95 (1986 7), 237 40; ibid., 96 (1987 8), 27 40; Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews; S. Schwarzfuchs, A History of the Jews in Medieval France (Tel Aviv, 2001). A. Grossman, The Early Sages of France: Their Lives, Leadership and Works [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1995).

the sources 315 Christian environment was legally governed by acquisitioning written privileges and charters from the local authorities (either royal, baronial, or ecclesiastical, or a mixture of all three). Historians of medieval Jewry read these privileges carefully in order to understand the social status of Jews in these respective communities. Legal historians like Guido Kish delved deeply into the legal charters and law books of medieval Germany and drew conclusions both on the legal status of the Jews and on the institutional aspects of Jewish existence. As the Prague-born Kisch writes in the preface to his work: “The purpose of the study is rather to interpret and evaluate Jewry-law against the background of the history of law and legal institutions generally.” Kisch saw in the Jewry-laws an invaluable source for much more than legal history. He was also well aware of the sources his study had left out, and makes the following remark after completing his 655-page volume: “Much work still remains to be done. The complexity of subjects such as Jewry-laws of the town laws or canon Jewry-laws during the middle ages . . . almost surpasses the capacity of any single scholar.” It should be noted that the English version published in the late 1940s and reprinted in the 1970s was preceded by a few earlier works of a more limited scope in German before the Holocaust, such as the study on the Jewry-laws of the famous medieval German legal collection known as the Sachsenspiegel.16 Unlike Kisch, who used the non-Hebrew sources to shed light on the social and institutional history of the Jews in medieval Europe, Louis Finkelstein preferred to publish sources from within the pale of the Jewish communities. In his Jewish Self Government in the Middle Ages, first published in New York while he was at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 1924, he focused on the legal documents of the rabbinical synods (takkanot). Finkelstein published both the Hebrew text and a translation into English as well as a discussion of each text. In addition, the entire collection was prefaced by a 105-page introduction, most of which was dedicated to the medieval western European material. Among the documents he included were the takkanot attributed to the early Ashkenazic sage Rabbi Gershom ben Yehudah of Mainz (Rabbenu Gershom Meor Ha’gola c.960–1028), those attributed to Rabbi Shlomo ben Yizchak (Rashi 1040–1105), and those to Rashi’s grandson Rabbi Jacob ben Meir “Tam” (Rabenu Tam 1100–71). Finkelstein’s invaluable collection is to date one of the most important sources of knowledge of the local and regional institutions of Jewish self-governing mechanisms established during the course of medieval European Jewish history.17 16 17

Guido Kisch, The Jewry Law of the Medieval German Law Books (New York, 1937). Louis Finkelstein, Jewish Self Government in the Middle Ages (with a foreword by Alexander Marx), 2nd edn. (New York, 1964).

316 the middle ages: the christian world In the famous privilege granted by Bishop Rüdiger Huzmann of the Rhineland town of Speyer to the Jewish community in 1084, we hear that Rüdiger grants the Jews in his walled town the right to have internal institutional autonomy. A Jewish magistrate was to be appointed and a synagogue elder or official (archon) was mentioned as the Jewish equivalent of the bishop with regard to the Jews of the town. (It is only in later sources from Cologne [1159] that we first hear of an episcopus Judeorum, a Jewish bishop.) Arrangements of a similar nature appear to be common in many of the Jewish communities in northwestern Europe. In recent years, we see a renewed effort to bring forth the sources that shed light on medieval European Jewish institutional history. German scholars, and centers established especially in Germany and elsewhere in central Europe, play a facilitative role in this respect. Two examples may illustrate this effort. Since the mid 1990s, Alfred Haverkamp of Trier University has played an important role in this endeavor. Today, the Arye Maimon Institute for the History of the Jews in Trier (AMIGJ), founded by Haverkamp, is in the midst of producing the “Corpus der Quellen zur mittelalterlichen Geschichte der Juden im Reichsgebiet” [Corpus of Sources concerning the History of the Jews in the Roman–German Empire during the Middle Ages]. The purpose of this project is to record all relevant sources on the history of the Jews in the Roman–German Empire between 1273 (where Julius Aronius’s book ended) and 1519 (the beginning of the era of the Reformation). The project focuses on those sources that can be categorized chronologically and spatially. It pays special attention to the provenance of the sources and the way they have been recorded, in order to correct any sorts of distortion and one-sidedness in the perception of Jewish history in the light of the specific conditions of historical tradition. This approach comprises not only the attempt to reconstruct Jewish “archives” of the Middle Ages, and in general to identify traces of Jewish memory in the Christian historical tradition, but also is an attempt to find memories of Christians in the Jewish historical tradition. The outline of the project, as well as a detailed description, may be found online.18 Another example comes from Austria, where the Institute for Jewish History in Austria and its project coordinators, Eveline Brugger and Birgit Wiedl, have been working since 2003 on publishing medieval sources regarding Jews in the different areas in Austria. There is a remarkably high number of medieval sources on the history of Jews that may be recovered in already existing publications, but they are scattered in many collections, as well as in archives, in Austria, and there are also documents 18

www.uni trier.de/index.php?id=6902.

the sources 317 that have not been published yet. These sources provide information on the institutional as well as social standing of Jews and on Christian–Jewish relations in this region. Funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), the institute has published three volumes of sources (available also online as a pdf file) from the earliest period up to 1386.19 One of the merits of this project is that sources from neighboring countries are included if they refer to events on Austrian territory, thus providing scholars with an even broader geographical scope. The publication consists of a chronological series of document summaries. Additionally, an extensive index, as well as detailed comments, will be added to the relevant documents to make the source texts accessible to the reader. These projects will provide scholars and students of medieval Jewry with a much larger, more comprehensive database for the study of institutional and social history of medieval northern and central European Jewries. It should be noted, however, that most of the non-Jewish sources disclose very little information about how the Jewish institutional mechanism actually operated and how the officials were chosen, what their assigned tasks were, and how government operated. Were the internal Jewish officials appointed externally by the ruling Christian élite, or were they elected from within the community, and in what fashion? In order to get a clearer picture, we need to examine Jewish sources. h a l a k h i c li t e ra t u r e As noted earlier in our discussion of Louis Finkelstein, halakhic literature plays a crucial role in our attempt to reconstruct institutional history. Jewish adjudicators and jurists concerned themselves with the establishment of Jewish legal and social institutions, and tried as best they could to enforce their authority over their coreligionists. With a lack of coercive power similar to that of their Christian neighbors, Jews developed a set of rules and regulations for establishing and maintaining the power of their local institutions: the tribunal (bet din), the supra-communal assemblies (va’ad hakehillot), and the supra-communal individual leadership. It should be noted that we know more about the local authorities and less about supra-communal matters. We know quite a bit about individuals who served as supra-communal authorities, for example the twelfthcentury Rabbi Jacob ben Meir “Tam” of Ramerupt in northern France 19

E. Brugger and B. Wiedl, Regesten zur Geschichte der Juden im Mittelalter, vol. I: Von den Anfängen bis 1338, Hg. vom Institut für Geschichte der Juden in Österreich, StudienVerlag (Innsbruck, 2005); available for download: www.injoest.ac.at/projekte/l aufend/mittelalterliche judenurkunden/index.php?lang=EN.

318 the middle ages: the christian world or the thirteenth-century Rabbi Meir ben Baruch of Rothenburg ob der Tauber in Germany. Responsa Another important source for documenting the inner Jewish institutional developments is the responsa literature. Responsa literature was “born” in the ninth century and, ever since the beginning of the “Wissenschaft das Judentums,” it has become part and parcel of the study of Jewish societies, both outside and inside Europe. Haym Soloveitchik, in his methodological introduction The Use of Responsa as a Historical Source, has pointed out the benefits, as well as the limitations, of using this genre of legal text.20 “Jews,” he says, “left behind relatively very few chronicles and histories.” These two genres recorded the greater events of the medieval period and focused on the figures of outstanding individuals. Given the paucity of these sources, there is very little material in the few chronicles that survived that may teach us about social life and everyday life in Jewish communities. Given this, as well as the other methodological issues discussed above, we are left with relatively very little source material. The responsa, an attempt to mediate and negotiate the general principles of Jewish law for individual cases, were rather meticulously penned down and copied through the centuries in an attempt to collect a body of legal pretexts for halakhic authorities. Responsa literature deals with very personal as well as communal, institutional, and social issues. However, studying history from legal halakhic responses is no easy undertaking. First and foremost, we have vey few responsa that came down to the modern reader from the legal authorities that made the rulings. Almost all the corpus of responsa, most especially the earlier texts in print as well as in manuscript form, is the product of later copiers and compilers, rather than the authors themselves. Avraham (Rami) Reiner claimed that, in some instances, the respondent himself collected and may have edited his own halakhic correspondence and compiled it into a compendium of legal pretexts. Reiner goes on to suggest that some of the files containing the responsa of Rabbi Jacob ben Meir “Tam” were indeed collected and edited by him and later incorporated into collections that made their way to the current printed editions.21 In a later period, for the famous Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg, who left behind him a vast correspondence, attempts were made during the later years of his life, at times by individuals from his most 20

21

H. Soloveitchik, The Use of Responsa as a Historical Source: A Methodological Introduction [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1990). A. R. Reiner, “Rabbenu Tam and his Contemporaries” [Hebrew] (Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University Jerusalem, 2002), ch. 1.

the sources 319 intimate circles, to compile the responses. But these were probably the exception and not the rule. Many legal adjudicators’ work survived sporadically or has not survived at all, and only traces and echoes of its existence has come to modern attention.22 However, most responsa were edited posthumously by later compilers who collected the halakhic responses and rulings of a deceased master. In many cases, these or even later copyists and compilers took the liberty of curbing and cropping the texts, and left only what in their mind were the most important aspects of the written responsum.23 Many historically important details, such as names, dates, places, and the particular intricacies of the cases that didn’t serve the jurisprudential purposes of the later compilers, were lost in the process. It is up to the modern historian to reconstruct the text and occasionally recreate the missing parts that were left out. Direct disciples and family members were more cautious and the compiled collections were carefully put together. MS London Beit Din 14 is a fine example of this. Penned in the fourteenth century, this manuscript is a copy of an original compilation of responsa attributed to Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg, which was edited under the supervision of his brother, Rabbi Avraham ben Baruch, and other close disciples. Simcha Emanuel, the leading authority on Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg, suggests that the work on this collection may even have started during the lifetime of the illustrious Rabbi Meir (d. 1293), probably while he was in captivity (1286–93), and been completed posthumously. The collection itself was finalized in 1310, and the MS in question is a copy made in 1381. In other cases, the editor or compilers are unknown to us and scholars can only speculate as to who the editors, copyists, and compilers were. However, although prone to methodological obstacles, this source is still invaluable to the study of institutional and social history. Responsa that preserved the original questions, and at times even the original phrasing used by the plaintiff, reflect the issues and halakhic problems that concerned all strata of medieval Jewry. Furthermore, at times, responsa literature reflects the hesitations of local adjudicators, as we find questions addressed from the local judicial level to a supracommunal authority. These texts grant us an opportunity to probe the mind-set and mentality of medieval Jewries, understand the supra22

23

S. Emanuel, Fragments of the Tablets: Lost Books of the Tosaphists [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 2007). A fine example is Simcha Emanuel’s attempt to reconstruct the responsa of the towering medieval German master Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg. See his brief account on the matter: S. Emanuel, “Unpublished Responsa of Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg as a Source for Jewish History,” in Cluse, ed., The Jews in Europe, 283 94.

320 the middle ages: the christian world communal institutions and an inter-regional network of ties and links. In a recent article, Ephraim Kanarfogel has reconstructed the intricate relationship between the Ashkenazic talmudic academies in Germany and the regional courts that functioned in Speyer, Worms, Mainz, Cologne, Regensburg, and elsewhere. The vast majority of the sources that were mustered and used in his argumentation came from printed as well as manuscript editions of responsa literature.24 A similar attempt was made even more recently by Avraham (Rami) Reiner who discussed the relationship between the academy and the judicial court, as well as between a supra-communal leader and a regional judicial court. Reiner focused on the relationship between the aforementioned Rabbi Jacob ben Meir “Tam” and the regional courts of northern France (Paris, Troyes, etc.).25 Responsa serve as a source for the regional courts, and the function of individual persons such as the prominent Rabbi Jacob ben Meir “Tam” as secondary avenues of appeal. It is also an invaluable source for the regional conferences that took place in relatively heavily populated Jewish areas (such as the Rhineland and northern France). In these meetings, the individuals that governed the respective communities attempted to regulate behavior using the combined authority of more than the local Jewish community. It is from this literature that we learn of the community convention in Troyes in northern France in 1160, as well as the regional conventions in Germany in 1196, in 1220, and later on. These were the venues where the takkanot (“regulations”) were decided upon. The halakhic regional conventions served also as sites where grievances and complaints were heard, especially in cases where the plaintiffs were under the impression that they had been previously mistreated by local communal authorities, or that the local authorities had misunderstood them. 24

25

E. Kanarfogel, “Religious Leadership during the Tosafist Period: Between the Academy and the Rabbinic Court,” in J. Wertheimer, ed., Jewish Religious Leadership Between Image and Reality (New York, 2004), 265 305. This work by Kanarfogel was preceded by the much earlier work of Moshe Frank see M. Frank, Kehilot Ashkenaz u’Batri Dine’hem [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv, 1937). Kanarfogel used similar sources and similar methods in investigating another medieval European institution, the appointment of prayer leaders in medieval European communal synagogues. See E. Kanarfogel, “The Appointment of Hazzanim in Medieval Ashkenaz: Communal Policy and Individual Religious Prerogatives,” in H. Kreisel, B. Huss, and U. Ehrlich, eds., Spiritual Authority: Struggles over Cultural Power in Jewish Thought (Beersheba, 2010), 5 32. A. R. Reiner, “Rabbinical Courts in France in the Twelfth Century: Centralisation and Dispersion,” Journal of Jewish Studies 60 (2009), 298 318.

the sources 321 Such is the case that was preserved in a question posed to the famous Rabbi Eliezer ben Joel Halevi (Ra’avia, c.1140–c.1223) by his younger contemporary, Rabbi Simcha ben Shmuel of Speyer (Rabbi Simcha addressed the question to two of his older contemporaries, Rabbi Ephraim of Bonn and Rabbi Eliezer, c. 1193–6, as Avigdor Aptowizer has concluded in his preface to the book of Ra’avia). The case Rabbi Simcha wrestled with was that of a man who wished to divorce his wife. The halakhic problem was that the wife was mentally ill. From the question, preserved in a collection of Rabbi Eliezer’s response, we hear that the husband, who was from a rather poor family, had used an interesting argument. According to Halakhah, one cannot divorce a spouse unless he or she may be considered compos mentis, for a divorce needs mutual consent. However, from the early eleventh century, it was customary among Ashkenazic Jews to follow the ban (herem) ˙ associated with the name of Rabbi Gershom ben Yehudah of Mainz (“Meor Ha’Gola,” 960–1028) that forbade polygamy (unlike that which was practiced in Jewish communities under Islam). The husband appealed to Rabbi Simcha claiming that, since he had no offspring (a mutual child of the couple had not survived), he should be granted one of three options: either (1) be allowed to have marital relations with his insane wife so she could bear his children; or (2) be allowed to wed another wife without divorcing the first, thus violating the ban; or (3) be allowed to sever the marital bond connecting him to his non compos mentis wife disregarding the ban, in order for him to remarry and fulfill the biblical dictum “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:28). In the husband’s mind, the biblical dictum from Genesis surpassed the power of Rabbi Gershom’s eleventh-century ban and Rabbi Simcha should rule in his favor. Rabbi Simcha was reluctant to do so, and, realizing the gravity and potential precedent embedded in the problem, he sought the help of two older masters, Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Ephraim. In his response, Rabbi Eliezer acknowledged the gravity of the situation and reminded Rabbi Simcha of a case that was brought before the supracommunal tribunals. The response on the related matter deals with another plaintiff, one “son of Shmuel b. Azriel of Mainz,” whose wife was “indeed crazy.” In an attempt to secure a divorce, he appealed to the local court at Mainz and, when he felt that he was not treated fairly, he first “annulled the prayers” (bitul or ikuv ha’tefila),26 and then turned to ˙ 26

The annulment or delaying of prayers was an inner communal mechanism designed to enable one to draw public attention to a serious grievance and to demand communal intervention. On this mechanism, see M. Ben Sasson, “Appeal to the Congregation in Islamic Countries in the Early Middle Ages,” in S. Elizur, M. D. Herr, G. Shaked, and A. Shinan, Knesset Ezra: Literature and Life in the Synagogue Studies Presented to Ezra Fleischer [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1994), 327 50.

322 the middle ages: the christian world a supra-communal tribunal that presided over such cases during the “assembly of the communities” (va’ad hakehillot).27 From these rather short responses, we can very quickly learn of the existence of an intricate system of courts of appeal that presided in cases where a plaintiff felt he or she had been mistreated on the local level. Other mechanisms were the “annulment of prayers,” referred to above, an ancient socio-institutional instrument designed to express an individual’s grievances with the established system. Another aspect of Jewish institutional life that can be studied from responsa, which in recent years has been receiving considerable attention and a growing interest from the social and institutional point of view, is charity and communal welfare.28 Halakhaic Compendia, Custom Manuals, and Liturgy Responsa literature is not the sole source for Jewish rabbinic information and the study of institutional history. One of the most important medieval Jewish institutions was the synagogue. The synagogue as an institution was governed by rules of proper decorum and a strict, though evolving and vibrant, liturgical code. Most of this information available to the modern scholar is delivered through the various Halakhah and custom manuals composed from the twelfth century on, as well as the local prayer-books and mahzorim from the ˙ respect are the different parts of medieval Europe. The earliest sources in this custom manuals and halakhic books that came from the student circle of Rabbi Shlomo ben Issac (“Rashi”) of Troyes. Reference books like the Sefer ha-Pardes (literally: The Book of the Orchard) and the Sefer ha-’oreh (literally: The Book of the Fig Collector – this poetic name for a compiled work derives from the special Hebrew verb for picking figs29) are but two examples. 27

28

29

An in depth discussion of this matter: E. Shoham Steiner, On the Margins of a Minority: Leprosy, Madness and Disability among Jews in Medieval Europe (Detroit, 2014), 106 14. R. Barzen, “The meaning of ‘Tzedakah’ for Jewish Self Organization within a Non Jewish Environment,” in G. Bacon, A. Baumgarten, J. Barnai, C. Waxman, and I. J. Yuval, eds., Iggud: Selected Essays in Jewish Studies, vol. II: History of the Jewish People and Contemporary Jewish Society (Jerusalem, 2009); Y. D. Galinsky, “Public Charity in Medieval Germany: A Preliminary Investigation,” in Y. Prager, ed., Toward a Renewed Ethic of Jewish Philanthropy (New York, 2010), 79 92; Baumgarten, Practicing Piety, 103 37. Regarding Sepharad, see Galinsky, “Jewish Charitable Bequests and the Hekdesh Trust in Thirteenth Century Spain,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 35 (2004), 423 40. The reason for this name may be associated with the talmudic allusion to the Tree of Knowledge (Ets Ha’da’at) in the Garden of Eden as a fig tree (Babylonian Talmud Brachot 40a), unlike the Christian tradition that alludes to the apple tree as the Tree of Knowledge. This Christian tradition is based on the semantic proximity between the Latin word for “apple” (malus) and the Latin for “wrong” or “evil” (malum).

the sources 323 In addition, we find Sidur Rashi, a liturgical work with notes and references attributed to the great northern French eleventh-century master. In these collections as well as in the collection attributed to Rashi’s disciple Rabbi Simcha ben Shmuel of Vitry (Mahzor Vitri), one can find numerous rulings ˙ regarding the proper synagogue liturgy rite and decorum. These sidurim and Mahzorim should not be confused with books by the ˙ same name used today. Indeed, both the medieval and the contemporary Mahzorim are home to synagogue liturgy, yet today the name usually refers to a˙ Jewish festival or high holiday prayer-book. The medieval mahzor and Mahzor Vitri are volumes that included, alongside the prayer, a vast˙ amount ˙ of other material: rites, customs, liturgical exegesis, as well as other matters of everyday halakhic conduct. By carefully studying these and similar sources, we may arrive at a more nuanced knowledge of this very important aspect of Jewish institutional life in the Middle Ages. Material from the twelfthcentury compendia were later incorporated, partially or completely, in larger collections of liturgical works that developed alongside a literary genre of synagogue rites and customs that were arranged following the Jewish calendar and put together in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The late thirteenth and early fourteenth century saw a considerable growth in the genre of custom manuals (sifrei minhagim), which serve as an invaluable source for many of the customs – as well as the social and institutional reasons for them – that governed the liturgical life of late medieval Jewries. The most influential of these was the Sefer Maharil or Minhagei Maharil [The Book of Maharil, or The Customs of Maharil],30 compiled by the students of Rabbi Jacob ben Moshe Halevi Segal Mulin (acronym: Maharil – Moreynu Ha’Rav Yakob Levi, 1360–1427).31 Rabbi Jacob lived in Mainz in the second half of the fourteenth century and the first quarter of the fifteenth century. He moved to Worms in his later years, and died and was buried there. Maharil’s book was widely accepted in his lifetime and has been consulted by later authors. It acquired importance due to its extensive use by sixteenth-century Krakow sage Rabbi Moses Isserles 30

31

S. J. Spitzer, ed., The Book of Maharil: Customs by Rabbi Yaacov Mulin [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1989). This, as well as other source books relating to Ashkenazic tradition, were published by the Mifal Torath Chachmey Ashkenaz of the Machon Yerushlayim (“The Project for Publishing the Writings of the Ashkenazic Sages in the Jerusalem Institute”). This religious establishment has been publishing for over thirty years the materials in question in an annotated edition, based on the earliest printed editions as well as the variant manuscripts of these books, with introductions, reference notes, and commentaries. For the biographies of Maharil, his students, and contemporaries, see: Y. Y. Yuval, Khachamim Be’doram: The Spiritual Leadership of German Jewry in the Late Middle Ages (Jerusalem, 1985).

324 the middle ages: the christian world (Ra’mah) when he was preparing his addenda to Rabbi Joseph Karo’s Shulhan Arukh (literally: Set Table), known as “The Mapa” (literally: The˙ Table Cloth). Isserles preferred compiling nuanced addenda to the already-existing and widespread Shulhan Arukh rather than competing with ˙ Sixteenth-century printers inserted its popularity and compiling a new book. this corpus of Ashkenazic rites and customs as endnotes to the Karo text, thus making the Shulhan Arukh accessible and relevant to Ashkenazic Jewry ˙ as well. Maharil’s work on customs is one of the more influential and commonly cited works in Isserles’s authoritative addenda. Maharil, of course, was not alone in this venture of putting together definitive custom manuals. In the late thirteenth century, more than 100 years prior to Maharil’s book, German halakhic authorities started compiling their rites and customs, due to the increasing localization of the rites and the evergrowing sense of insecurity among medieval Franco-German Jewry.32 Maharil’s contemporary, Rabbi Avraham Klauzner,33 as well as Klauzner’s Austrian disciple Rabbi Eisik Tirna,34 wrote shorter custom manuals that serve as important sources for late medieval Jewish institutional history. Simcha Emanuel suggested that these custom manuals were actually earlier manuals from the late thirteenth century that were consulted and constantly updated well into the fourteenth. The number of manuscripts, as well as the constant emendations and additions to material serves as proof, he argues, of the fact that these texts were very popular, and are thus important as sources for the institutional history of medieval Jews.35 LITURGY

Scholarship on Ashkenazic rite and liturgy is a well-established field, beginning with the research by the members of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, such as Leopold Zunz and Ismar Elbogen, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.36 In recent years, however, there has been a growth of an interdisciplinary approach to this material, which for many years prior was discussed almost exclusively by scholars of Jewish literature and poetry. Jewish cultural 32

33

34

35

36

J. R. Müller, “Erez gezerah: ‘Land of Persecution’: Pogroms Against the Jews in the regum Teutonicum from c.1280 to 1349,” in Cluse, ed., The Jews of Europe, 245 60. Sefer Haminhagim (Rulings and Customs) of Rabbi Avraham Klauzner [Hebrew], ed. S. J. Spitzer (Jerusalem, 2006). Sefer Haminhagim (Rulings and Customs) of Rabbi Eisik Tirna [Hebrew], ed. S. J. Spitzer (Jerusalem, 1979). S. Emanuel, Fragments of the Tablets: Lost Books of the Tosaphists [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 2006), 219 37. See his vast bibliography of the subject. I. Elbogen, Jewish Liturgy: A Comprehensive History, ed. and trans. R. P. Scheindlin (Philadelphia, 1993).

the sources 325 historians and historians of Jewish society have incorporated these liturgical sources, as well as the exegesis of liturgy, into their scope of interest and historical analysis. These scholars have pointed out that the topics that appear in the piyutim, as well as the genre of piyut exegesis that was common in Franco-German Jewish culture, show its importance in a wider scope as a source that reflects both institutions and social trends. Avraham Grossman, for example, has studied both liturgical poems and the genre of liturgical exegesis compiled by the German and French sages in both his books about the lives of the individuals who shaped Jewish institutional life in medieval northern Europe, and has shown what these genres reflect about both poets and exegetes. Sussan Einbinder has drawn on northern French liturgical poetry from the High Middle Ages in order to present us with a new angle on issues of grave social and institutional importance, such as incidents of martyrdom and the expulsion of the Jews from France in 1306.37 Israel Yuval has used extracts from the religious poetry of German Jewry to advance his claim about the vengeful nature of the Ashkenazic notions of salvation and the very strong anti-Christian feeling among Ashkenazic Jews, especially in the aftermath of the 1096 riots.38 On the other hand, scholars of piyut are currently more attuned to the historical relevance of their source material vis-à-vis the social and institutional aspects of medieval Jewry, as can be seen from the works of Avraham Fraenkel, Elisabeth Hollender, and Peter Lehnardt.39 SOURCES FOR SOCIAL HISTORY

Almost all the sources mentioned in the first part of this chapter may serve for the study of social history as well as for the study of medieval Jewish institutional history in northern Europe. Indeed, since as early as the 37

38

39

S. Einbinder, Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France (Princeton, 2002), and Einbinder, No Place of Rest: Jewish Literature, Expulsion, and the Memory of Medieval France (Philadelphia, 2009). I. J. Yuval, Two Nations in your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. B. Harshav and J. Chipman (Berkeley, 2006). Yuval had looked at these sources as early as his ground breaking article on the nexus between the 1096 martyrdom and the twelfth century blood libels. Avraham Gross has also used Ashkenazic liturgical poetry in his studies of the martyrdom of 1096. See A. Gross, Struggling with Tradition: Reservations about Active Martyrdom in the Middle Ages (Leiden, 2004). E. Hollender, Piyut Commentary in Medieval Ashkenaz (Berlin, 2008); L. Zunz, Rites of Synagogues Liturgy, ed. A. Fraenkel [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 2016); Avraham Fraenkel, Abraham Gross, and Peter Sh. Lehnardt, eds., Hebräische liturgische Poesien zu den Judenverfolgungen während des Ersten Kreuzzugs, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Hebräische Texte aus dem mittelalterlichen Deutschland, 3 (Wiesbaden, 2016).

326 the middle ages: the christian world Wissenschaft das Judentums movement in the late nineteenth century, the sources mentioned above have been part and parcel of the study of Jewish social history. I would, however, like to point out a few sources that have been utilized in the classical study of Jewish social history as well as new sources whose incorporation into current research is one of the contributions of the last few years of scholarly inquiry. The employment of these sources helps us shed new light on the questions that have concerned researchers for over a century and enabled us not merely to deepen our understanding of medieval Jewish social history but to pose new questions. One such important source is Sefer Hasidim. Sefer Hasidim has been on the desktop of Jewish studies researchers since the late nineteenth century. It was known in an abridged version printed in Bologna in 1538 and had been printed several times since, gaining special popularity among eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Hasidim. It was the efforts of the late eighteenth-century Christian Hebraist Giovanni Bernardo De Rossi that revealed the existence of a much broader edition of Sefer Hasidim that today is in the Palatine Library at Parma, where De Rossi held his academic position until his death in 1831. In 1891, Rabbi Judah Wistinezki published this manuscript in an annotated edition in Berlin, with the M’kitzei Nirdamim society. Judah Freimann added a preface and some indexes to this edition and reprinted it in 1924 in Frankfurt am Main. Since the early twentieth century, Sefer Hasidim has been the focus of many scholarly attempts that have used and analyzed its over 2,500 articles as the source material for their attempts at uncovering medieval European ethical, intellectual, and religious history.40 In a 1938 article in the newly established Hebrew periodical Zion, Itzhak Baer was one of the first scholars to use Sefer Hasidim to uncover the socio-religious agenda of its co-author and compiler Rabbi Judah ben Shmuel “ha-Hasid” (“the Pious”). Later on, similar attempts were made by other scholars˙ of the so-called Jerusalem School, such as Gershom Sholem in his monumental book Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, and Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson in a series of articles that dealt with the social agenda of German Pietism.41 In the mid 1970s and early 1980s, this invaluable 40

41

In the volume of collected essays printed by Shazar publishing house in Jerusalem in 1986, editor Ivan Marcus included two articles from the earliest scholarship on Sefer Hasidim: Avraham Epstein’s 1903 article from the Hebrew scholarly journal Ha’Goren about Rabbi Shmuel ben Kalonimus of Speyer (Rabbi Judah the Pious’s father), and an article by Y. N. Simchoni from the Hebrew journal Ha Tsefira of 1917 about the social phenomena of medieval Ashkenazic Pietism. For a more recent study about these two figures: E. Shoham Steiner, “Exile, Immigration and Piety: The Jewish Pietists of Medieval Germany from the Rhineland to the Danube,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 24 (2017), 234 60. G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 2nd edn. (New York, 1946), 80 118; H. H. Ben Sasson, “The Distribution of Wealth and of Intellectual Abilities According to Ashkenazi Hasidism” [Hebrew], Zion 35 (1970), 61 79.

the sources 327 source became the focus of social history. In 1976, Haim Soloveitchik published a long article in the first issue of the journal AJS Review titled “Three Themes in Sefer Hasidim.” Almost simultaneously, the late Israel M. Ta-Shma published a less exhaustive, yet nevertheless ground-breaking, article relating to the religious obligation to study Torah (Talmud Torah) as a socio-religious problem within the framework of Sefer Hasidim, highlighting the tension between the German Pietists and the more rationalistic northern French Tosaphists.42 This renewed interest in Sefer Hasidim culminated with the appearance of Ivan G. Marcus’s book, Piety and Society: The Jewish Pietists of Medieval Germany, in which Sefer Hasidim was comprehensively addressed and studied as a source for social history to look at the social circle from which the book originated, its relationship with its surroundings, as well as, in general, the Ashkenazic society in whose midst the compiler and his rather small circle of adherents had lived.43 Since these ground-breaking works, Sefer Hasidim has served as a hallmark source for scholars of Jewish social history. In 1985, the Dinur Center at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem presented scholars with a printed facsimile of the important Parma manuscript, prefaced by Ivan Marcus. More recent contributions to our knowledge of this invaluable source and its social implications come from two exciting projects. The first was led by Alfred Haverkamp, Peter Schäfer, and Israel Yuval, with a team of researchers (Saskia Dönitz, Rami Reiner, René Richtscheid, and others) who worked to prepare a critical tradition commentary and partial translation into German of Sefer Hasidim.44 The other project is the Princeton University Sefer Hasidim Database (PUSHD). This online database is a digitized innovation of the early twentyfirst century, and it marks a new era in the presentation of sources for medieval Judaism to scholars.45 In the online chapter discussing the receptions of Sefer Hasidim on the PUSHD website, we find the following: 42

43

44

45

H. Soloveitchik, “Three Themes in Sefer Hasidim,” AJS Review 1 (1976), 311 57; I. M. Ta Shma, “The Mitzvah of Talmud Torah as a Socio Religious Problem in Sefer Hasidim,” in I. G. Marcus, ed., The Religious and Social Ideas of the Jewish Pietists in Medieval Germany: Collected Essays [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1987), 237 52. I. G. Marcus, Piety and Society: The Jewish Pietists of Medieval Germany (Leiden, 1981). Marcus has revisited his scholarship on Sefer Hasidim in his recent book: I. G. Marcus, “Sefer Hasidim” and the Ashkenazic Book in Medieval Europe (Philadelphia, 2018), which focuses less on the social and more on the book culture of Sefer Hasidim. This project, “Juden und Christen im ‛Buch der Frommen’ (Sefer Hasidim) Edition, Übersetzung und Commentierung ausgewählter Texte zur Geschichte der Juden und der jüdisch christlichen Beziehungen im mittelalterlichen Deutschland,” sought to use Sefer Hasidim as a lens into Jewish Christian relations in medieval Germany. Some preliminary findings of this project have been published. See P. Schäfer, “Jews and Christians in the High Middle Ages: The Book of the Pious,” in Cluse, ed., The Jews of Europe, 29 42. The database is free and only requires registration. It’s accessible through this web address: https://etc.princeton.edu/sefer hasidim/index.php.

328

the middle ages: the christian world

Sefer Hasidim was not handed down to us as a uniform treatise whose copies have identical structure and wording. All manuscripts included in our database are identified as belonging to Sefer Hasidim because they contain sections identical or closely related to one of the two larger and principal versions of Sefer Hasidim the Bologna printed edition and the Parma manuscript. The order of these sections, however, varies from manuscript to manuscript; moreover, some of them are shor tened, whereas others are expanded on account of quotations from the Tanakh or the Gemara, as well as because of presumably scribal elucidations in French and German. MS Parma H 3280 and the Bologna printed edition of 1538 include almost all the text of the other thirteen manuscripts plus many other sections that can be found only in MS Parma and the Bologna print. Consequently, these thirteen manuscripts may conditionally be considered as belonging to three groups (Parma, Bologna, and mixed) based on several factors: the presence of sections from one of the thirteen manuscripts in either the Bologna edition or the MS Parma, phraseological similarity, and the sequence in which sections or topics run. Those manuscripts that contain material not included in the MS Parma or the Bologna printed edition are attributed to the mixed group.

The database enables students and scholars to search for words and phrases in all the important manuscripts of Sefer Hasidim and compares the different textual traditions. Scholarship on Sefer Hasidim and its social significance, to the circle of Pietists as well as to the larger Ashkenazic contemporary community, continues. In 2017, a conference held in Jerusalem marked 100 years of scholarship on Sefer Hasidim and the 800th anniversary of the passing of Rabbi Judah the Pious, the person most associated with Sefer Hasidim’s authorship and editing. Various aspects of scholarship were discussed, marking new avenues for further research, among them social and institutional aspects of medieval Jewish life pertinent to this invaluable source. e xe m p l a s t o ri e s a n d l i t e r a r y p r os e Our discussion on Sefer Hasidim brings us to yet another group of sources that has received growing attention over the years. Sefer Hasidim is home to more then 400 exempla stories. These stories, as well as many others from “neighboring” genres, like the historic legend, hagiography, tales, and novella, have moved gradually from the realm of literary scholarship to the forefront of the socio-historical discussion. The scholarly work of Robert Bonfil on the relationship between Sefer Hasidim and Megilat Ahima’az (literally: The Scroll of Ahima’az), a southern Italian, partially ˙ ˙ eleventh century, may serve as legendary chronicle from the mid 46 a reference point on this topic. One of the first scholars to realize the historical as well as the cultural importance of folktales as socio-historical 46

Megilat Ahimaaz: The Chronicle of Ahima’az with a collection of Poems from Byzantine Southern Italy [Hebrew], ed. B. Klar (Tarshis, 1974); for an English translation and

the sources 329 sources was the late nineteenth-century Bucharest-born Rabbi Moses Gaster of London. As early as 1887, he had published a book titled Jewish Folk-Lore in the Middle Ages, in which he discussed this and other issues. It was in his older age that Gaster supplied readers of English with a comprehensive translation of the Yiddish Ma’ashe Buch (literally: The Book of Tales).47 Ma’ashe Buch is a late medieval construct that was first printed in Basel in 1602.48 Since Gaster, many scholars have come to realize the importance of the Yiddish tales for social history of medieval Jewry. It was in the Middle Ages that the stories were formulated and crystalized, and in the early modern Jewry that they were penned and eventually printed. Sara Zfatman made quite a few contributions in this respect, the latest being her synthesis on the Jewish tale in the Middle Ages.49 Realizing the potential of this genre in both Yiddish and Hebrew, scholars have published collections of medieval Jewish tales – some with social and historical contextualization.50 Nevertheless, the use of these tales by scholars of history drew critique from folklorists. It was Eli Yassif who contested the way in which historians like Robert Bonfil, Elchanan Reiner, and others have extracted their social arguments from this literary genre. In an article in the aforementioned Israeli historical society’s quarterly Zion, Yassif lamented what in his view were the methodological mishandlings of folklore texts by historians.51 Historian Moshe Rosman eloquently

47

48

49

50

51

a scholarly discussion of this source, see Robert Bonfil, History and Folklore in a Medieval Jewish Chronicle: The Family Chronicle of Ahima’az ben Paltiel (Leiden, 2009). M. Gaster, Jewish Folk Lore in the Middle Ages, Jewish Chronicle (London, 1887); Gaster, Ma’aseh Book: Book of Jewish Tales and Legends, trans. from the Judeo German by Moses Gaster (Philadelphia, 1934). The dating and original language of some of its components have been the focus of a scholarly debate. Eli Yassif claimed that the Ma’aseh Buch relies at least partially on earlier Hebrew tale collections like the Hebrew Sefer Ma’asiyot (MS Oxford Bodli. Or. 135). See E. Yassif, “Sefer Ha’ma’asim: Character, Origins and Influence of a Collection of Folktales from the Time of the Tosaphists,” Tarbiz 53 (1984), 409 30. S. Zfatman, The Jewish Tale in the Middle Ages: Between Ashkenaz and Sepharad [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1993). From p. 81, and until the end of this monograph, Zfatman focuses on Ashkenazic folk narratives as sources for social history. Zfatman is currently preparing a collection of all the Hebrew and Yiddish hagiographic tales about Rabbi Judah Hasid and his father Rabbi Shmuel Hasid, both in print and in manuscript. H. Pesach and E. Yassif, Ha’abit Hashed Ve’habetula (Jerusalem, 1998); E. Yassif, The Hebrew Collection of Tales in the Middle Ages [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv, 2004), and more recently his edition and discussion of the MS Jerusalem 803182: E. Yassif, Ninety Nine Tales: The Jerusalem Manuscript Cycle of Legends in Medieval Jewish Folklore [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv, 2013); Rella Kushelevsky, Tales in Context: Sefer ha Ma’asim in Medieval Northern France (Detroit, 2017). Yassif published extensively on this topic. His major work on the subject is The Hebrew Folktale: History, Genre, Meaning, trans. J. S. Teitelbaum (Bloomington, 1999).

330 the middle ages: the christian world made a case for the defense of historians’ use of folktales as sources of social history, arguing for the sake of “the art of historiography” and bringing forth a few examples of how social historians have properly extracted important information from folk narratives. Yassif responded to Rosman in a reconciliatory article in the same issue of Zion, in which he toned down his criticism.52 Other researchers have also used this source material in an attempt to draw a more nuanced picture of Jewish social life in medieval Europe. Fine examples are the recent works of Lucia Raspe and Eva Haverkamp.53 CEMETERIES AND EPITAPHS AS SOURCES FOR SOCIAL HISTORY

The last group of sources consists of inscriptions related to Jewish burial grounds in the respective dwelling places of medieval European Jews. 52

53

Yassif’s critique appeared in “Legends and History: Historians Read Hebrew Legends of the Middle Ages” [Hebrew] Zion 64 (1999), 187 220. Rosman answered Yassif in the following volume of Zion: 65 (2000), 209 18. A few years later, Rosman’s defense was published in English in: M. Rosman, How Jewish is Jewish History? (Liverpool, 2007), 154 67. For where Yassif had weakened his criticism, see Zion 65 (2000), 217 29. Eva Haverkamp has also supplied researchers with a new edition of the Hebrew chronicles relating to the events of the First Crusade: E. Haverkamp, ed., Hebräische Berichte über die Judenverfolgungen während des Ersten Kreuzzugs, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Hebräische Texte aus dem mittelalterlichen Deutschland, 1 (Hanover, 2005). E. Haverkamp, “Martyrs in Rivalry: The 1096 Jewish Martyrs and the Thebean Legion,” Jewish History 23 (2009), 319 42. In this article, Haverkamp discusses what seems to be the intimate Jewish knowledge of the surrounding cults of saints and how this played a facilitative role in fashioning the martyrology of the 1096 riots in the Hebrew chronicles linked to these events. Lucia Raspe has published quite widely on the historical background of Jewish folktales and legends that deal with people, places, and the constructed memory of historical events. See her book Jüdische Hagiographie im mittelalterlichen Aschkenas, Texts and Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Judaism, 19 (Tübingen, 2006), and some of her articles, such as: Raspe, “Sacred Space, Local History, and Diasporic Identity: The Graves of the Righteous in Medieval and Early Modern Ashkenaz,” in R. Boustan, O. Kosansky, and M. Rustow, eds., Jewish Studies at the Crossroads of History and Anthropology: Tradition, Authority, Diaspora (Philadelphia, 2011); Raspe, “Asher Halevi and the Founding of Jewish Worms: Genealogy, Liturgy, and Historiography in Medieval Ashkenaz,” in G. Bacon, A. Baumgarten, J. Barnai, C. Waxman, and I. J. Yuval, eds., Iggud: Selected Essays in Jewish Studies 2 (History of the Jewish People and Contemporary Jewish Society) (Jerusalem, 2009), 41* 55*; Raspe, “A Medieval Sage in Early Modern Folk Narrative: The Case of Rashi and Godfrey of Bouillon,” in D. Krochmalnik, H. Liss, and R. Reichman, eds., Raschi und sein Erbe: Internationale Tagung der Hochschule für Jüdische Studien mit der Stadt Worms, Schriften der Hochschule für Jüdische Studien Heidelberg, 10 (Heidelberg, 2007), 125 61.

the sources 331 In studying social history, the quantitative question is of great importance. Just how many people are we talking about? What is their proportion to the total population? What was the gender division, or the ratio between adults and children? The nature of the historical period, and the paucity of our knowledge about medieval demography as a whole, and of medieval Jewish communities in particular, make it difficult to answer such quantitative questions. We have already discussed the Memorbücher that provide some pathways toward a more educated guess about the demographic issue. Apart from the lists of names in the Memorbücher, another way of finding partial answers to these questions is to study the remains of Jewish communities – principally, Jewish cemeteries in Europe. Most of these cemeteries have not been studied. Even those in western Europe that have been studied via archaeological excavation have been of limited value. In many cases, the excavators of the early twentieth century did not carry out sufficiently comprehensive anthropological and osteo-archaeological analysis of a type that could help to answer such questions. The exceptions are a few in Germany, France, and England, in which both the epigraphic findings (gravestones) and the human remains themselves have been studied. Most prominent among these is the medieval Jewish cemetery of Jewbury, in York, England. A comprehensive excavation and survey were conducted there in 1981, and its findings were published in 1994 by the York Archaeological Trust, in cooperation with the British Council of Archaeology. The partial anthropological and medical examinations of the human remains by scholars at the University of York produced information on the demographics of the Jewish community in England during this period.54 A larger number of individuals were interred in this cemetery, compared with others that have been excavated in Germany, France, and Spain, where the findings have been so meager as to make it difficult to draw conclusions.55 In some places – for example, the old Jewish cemetery in Cologne – the digs were rescue excavations conducted when the area around the cemetery was undergoing rapid urban development at the beginning of the twentieth century. An attempt was made then to salvage the human remains and to rebury them at an alternative site. In the Cologne case, research was directed principally at the gravestones, not 54

55

J. McComish Lilley, G. Stroud, D. R. Brothwell, and M. H. Williamson, eds., The Jewish Burial Ground at Jewbury (York, 1994). For a summary of the important findings in outline form, see ibid. (Jane McComish is the current name of Jane Lilley). For a summary of archaeological studies of Jewish cemeteries in Europe, including a map, see J. McComish Lilley, “Interpretation of Excavated Remains,” in Lilley et al., eds., Burial Ground, 360 1.

332 the middle ages: the christian world the human remains.56 In York, with no epigraphic findings, the human remains were the primary focus of the research. The findings were consistent with broader findings from studies of other contemporary cemeteries in York, as well as of other medieval cemeteries around Europe, which served as a basis for comparison for the Jewbury study. The old York cemetery is an eye-opener, yet a unique case. The paucity of the archaeological evidence of the nature found at the York Jewbury, as well as the limited ability to make use of it, takes us back to the textual findings related to the cemeteries, namely the tombstones. This reality brings us back to the epigraphic material from cemeteries. It may have been as early as the fifteenth century when the aforementioned Ashkenazic Jewish sage Rabbi Yakob ben Moshe Ha’levi Mulin (Maharil) of Mainz had used an ancient Jewish tombstone that was allegedly found in the Mainz Jewish cemetery dating back to the third century AD. Maharil used the date on the stone to provide material proof for the claims medieval German Jewry had for Jewish presence in Germany dating to late antiquity, as part of the Jewish attempt to bolster their antiquity vis-à-vis their Christian neighbors.57 Jewish cemeteries have drawn scholarly and scientific attention since the early modern period, as can be seen from Falk Wiesemann’s recent vast and very detailed bibliography Sepulcra judaica.58 By the mid nineteenth century, the Wissenschaft das Judentums movement was well aware of the importance of these findings and scholars were 56

57

58

The excavation findings are summed up in two articles by Adolph Kober from the 1940s; see A. Kober, “Jewish Monuments of the Middle Ages in Germany: One Hundred and Ten Tombstone Inscriptions from Speyer, Cologne, Nuremberg and Worms (1085 1428),” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research (PAAJR) 14 15 (1944 5), 1 92, 149 220. No anthropological study was conducted on the osteo archaeological findings of these excavations. The Jewish cemetery of Barcelona was excavated in the 1940s see A. Duran Sanpere and Y. J. Ma Millas Vallicrosa, “Una Necropolois Judaica en El Montojuich de Barcelona,” Sefarad 7 (1947), 231 59. Here, the focus of study was the socio anthropological aspects of the findings from the graves (clothing, jewelry, and other accessories; form of burial, etc.), but the human remains themselves were not studied. This was not out of negligence; research methods in the 1940s did not allow the production of information from such findings to the extent possible today. The quote from Maharil reads: “and he (Maharil) also said that once in his time they found an epitaph in the (Jewish) burial ground in Magenza (=Mainz) and the date on the epitaph suggested that eleven hundred years had passed from the time it was put there until our time and the inscription read ‘designated handmaid’ (shifah harufa)”; see S. J. Spitzer, ed., The Book of Maharil: Customs by Rabbi Yaacov Mulin (Jerusalem, 1989), 723, §49. For a discussion of this quote and its role in Jewish Christian polemics, see Grossman, The Early Sages of Ashkenaz, 2. Falk Wiesemann, Sepulcra judaica: Jewish Cemeteries, Death, Burial and Mourning from the Period of Hellenism to the Present: A Bibliography (Essen, 2005).

the sources 333 making attempts to provide more data on medieval Jewish epitaphs, those found in loci at the cemeteries, as well as gravestones that were robbed from the cemeteries and become building material in secondary use.59 A quick survey of Wiesemann’s bibliography reveals the relative abundance of research conducted before the Holocaust. It was not until recently, with the comprehensive efforts of Michael Brocke from Duisburg-Essen University and the Salomon Ludwig Steinheim-Institut fur Deutsch–Judische Geschichte (“Salomon Ludwig Steinheim Institute for German-Jewish History”) that the social aspects of these finding were presented.60 The same institute is also in charge of the aforementioned EpiDat Project, which is designed to provide online data for all gravestone inscriptions in Germany, including all the existing medieval collections of tombstones.61 One such medieval collection was found in the 1980s in the German city of Würzburg in the cellar of a medieval house away from the cemetery. A team of researchers has been working on this find, headed by Karlheinz Müller.62 Since then, scholars have begun extracting social data from it. One such attempt is Avraham (Rami) Reiner’s series of articles based on the findings.63 Reiner followed a scholarly path that attempted to draw social and institutional conclusions about the European Jewish communities from data associated with cemeteries and gravestones.64 The final example of this attempt at using the cemetery findings to draw socio-historical conclusions consists of the works of Avriel Bar-Levav on 59

60

61 62

63

64

One famous example of this phenomenon is at Regensburg where the apostate Johannes Pfefferkorn had encouraged the local burgers to pillage the cemetery in the aftermath of the expulsion of the Jews from the city in 1519. The Latin records indicate that 4,200 stones were carted away. See E. Carlebach, “Between History and Myth: The Regensburg Expulsion in Josel of Rosheim’s Sefer Ha’miknah,” in E. Carlebach, J. M. Efron, and D. N. Myers, eds., Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Prof. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (Hanover, NH, 1998), 44. M. Brocke and C. Muller, Haus des Lebens. Jüdische Friedhöfe in Deutschland (Leipzig, 2001). http://steinheim institut.de/cgi bin/epidat#wahl. On this finding and its significance, see K. Müller, “Würzburg: The World’s Largest Find from a Medieval Jewish Cemetery,” in Cluse, ed., The Jews of Europe, 379 90. In this article, Karlheinz Müller provides the outline of the joint German Israeli project to decipher, publish, and contextualize the 1,500 gravestones and stone fragments found in Würzburg. The published corpus can be found in K. Müller, S. Schwarzfuchs, and A. R. Reiner, eds., Die Grabsteine vom Jüdischen Friedhof in Würzburg aus der Zeit vor dem Schwarzen Tod (1147 1346), vols. I III (Würzburg, 2011). A. R. Reiner, “The Role and Significance of the Titles Written on the Tombstones in the Würzburg Cemetery,” in K. Müller et al., eds., Die Grabsteine, vol. I, 235 92. For a collection of works of this nature, see S. C. Reif, A. Lehnardt, and A. Bar Levav, eds., Death in Jewish Life: Burial and Mourning Customs among Jews of Europe and Nearby Communities (Berlin, 2014).

334 the middle ages: the christian world the social meaning of death and dying in medieval and early modern Europe, which relied both on custom manuals, ethical wills, and research on epitaphs and gravestone inscriptions.65 As in many other fields in the humanities in general, and in Jewish Studies in particular, over the past few decades our knowledge and the sources at our disposal have grown considerably. Nevertheless, there is still considerable work to be done in uncovering the sources for the social and institutional history of medieval Ashkenazic Jewry and making them accessible for future research. 65

A. Bar Levav, “We Are Where We Are Not: The Cemetery in Jewish Culture,” Jewish Studies 41 (2002), 15 46.

chapter 12

DEMOGRAPHY AND MIGRATIONS michael toch

The population history of medieval European Jews has been treated extensively though unevenly. While origins and the ensuing streams of migration have always greatly exercised scholarship (as well as popular imagination), numbers and vital statistics were usually given a wide berth, even though all suffer equally from a dearth of reliable information.1 For some regions, the state of research allows only perfunctory remarks, while others have been investigated in a much more thorough manner.2 Based on what facts can be established or reasonably surmised, this chapter will address origins, expulsions, migrations, numbers, and family structures of the different European Jewries. The Jewish nuclei of medieval Europe defined themselves religiously, culturally, and linguistically as parts of the broader entity of a Jewish people historically anchored in the Middle East. Indeed, most of them can be followed back to the Middle Eastern Jewish populations of Antiquity, although nowhere by direct evidence for actual migration but rather by tenuous traces of ritual and literary traditions that must have been carried abroad by migrants and were often reworked into myth.3 Against this mainstream approach, a persistent strain in scholarship is still postulating 1

2

3

For an exposition of the problems, see S. W. Baron, “Population,” in Encyclopedia Judaica (EJ), 2nd edn. (Detroit, 2007 [Jerusalem, 1971]), XVI, 381 2, 387 9. For a rare quantitative approach, see S. DellaPergola, “Some Fundamentals of Jewish Demographic History,” in S. DellaPergola and J. Even, eds., Papers in Jewish Demography (Jerusalem, 1997), 11 33. Germania Judaica, vol. I: Von den ältesten Zeiten bis 1238, ed. M. Brann, I. Elbogen, A. Freimann, and H. Tykocinski; vol. II: Von 1238 bis zur Mitte des 14. Jahrhunderts, ed. Z. Avneri; vol. III: 1350 1519, ed. A. Maimon and Y. Guggenheim (Tübingen, 1934/63, 1968, 1987 2003). Nothing of similar meticulousness exists elsewhere. Even though there is a Nouvelle Gallia Judaica project, for France one has still to make do with H. Gross, Gallia Judaica. Dictionnaire géographique de la France d’après les sources rabbiniques (with supplement by S. Schwarzfuchs) (Amsterdam, 1969 [Paris, 1897]). Partly making up for this deficiency is R. Chazan, Medieval Jewry in Northern France (Baltimore, 1973), 207 20. A Historical Lexicon of the Jews in Italy is in preparation, while the Hispania Judaica project publishes sources and regional studies. See the chapters by R. Bonfil, S. Bowman, and I. Marcus in M. Fishbane, ed., The Midrashic Imagination: Jewish Exegesis, Thought, and History (Albany, 1993); and,

335

336 the middle ages: the christian world non-Jewish origins for both Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews, claiming that communities consist mostly of converts from other faiths, most notably the Khazars.4 A similar assertion has been made for central and northern France, where converts in late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages were thought to have been sufficiently numerous to produce the substantial Jewish population emerging there in the eleventh century.5 There is little probability and no evidence at all to support such notions. On the contrary, recent genetic studies have significantly strengthened the traditional view of a Jewish Diaspora derived from an ancestral homeland. One found the paternal gene pools of Jewish communities in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East to have descended from a common Middle Eastern ancestral population.6 Another study observed an extremely close affinity between Diaspora Jews and non-Jewish Middle Eastern populations.7 Yet another study asserts for Ashkenazic Jewry a significant female founder ancestry deriving again from the Middle East.8 Incidentally, this would seem to invalidate a widespread notion that females generally “were taken” from gentile populations. A critical examination of both the sources and previous scholarship on the early medieval settlement of Jews in Europe will distinguish between two spheres, south and north, and two periods, from late Antiquity to c.

4

5

6

7

8

most recently, R. Bonfil, History and Folklore in a Medieval Jewish Chronicle: The Family Chronicle of Ahima’az ben Paltiel (Leiden, 2009). For the hypothesis of Yitzhak Schipper on the Khazar origins of Polish Jewry and its scholarly criticism, see the sympathetic account by J. Litman, The Economic Role of Jews in Medieval Poland: The Contribution of Yitzhak Schipper (Lanham, MD, 1984). For a recent linguistic reworking of this notion, see P. Wexler, The Ashkenazic Jews: A Slavo Turkic People in Search of a Jewish Identity (Columbus, OH, 1993); Wexler, The Non Jewish Origins of the Sephardic Jews (Albany, 1996). The year 2008 saw the publication in Hebrew of yet another polemic denying Jewish nationhood, ostensibly on Khazar grounds: Shlomo Sand, When and How Was the Jewish People Invented? (Tel Aviv, 2008). In place of the huge and usually contentious literature on the subject, see now P. B. Golden, H. Ben Shammai, and A. Róna Tas, eds., The World of the Khazars: New Perspectives (Leiden, 2007). R. H. Bautier, “L’Origine des populations juives de la France médiévale, constations et hypothèse de recherche,” in X. Barral i Altet, D. Iogna Prat, A. M. Mundó, J. M. Salrach, and M. Zimmermann, eds., La Catalogne et la France méridional autour l’an mil (Barcelona, 1991), 306 16. M. F. Hammer, A. J. Redd, E. T. Wood et al., “Jewish and Middle Eastern Non Jewish Populations Share a Common Pool of Y chromosome Biallelic Haplotypes,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97 (May 9, 2000), 67 9. K. Skorecki, S. Selig, S. Blazer, et al., “Y Chromosomes of Jewish Priests,” Nature 385, 32 (January 2, 1997). Doron M. Behar, E. Metspalu, T. Kivisild, et al., “The Matrilineal Ancestry of Ashkenazi Jewry: Portrait of a Recent Founder Event,” American Journal of Human Genetics 78, 3 (2006), 487 97.

demography and migrations 337 9 800, and afterwards until c. 1050/1100. Such examination will make short shrift of myths of origin disseminated by medieval Jews from Spain to Poland, usually of an arrival early enough to clear their ancestors of the responsibility for deicide. It will also relinquish the idea of an unbroken Jewish presence from classical times in many of Europe’s regions. Continuity, in clearly declining numbers, is evident only around the Mediterranean seaboard: in Byzantium, in Italy from Rome southwards, in a few places in southern France, more doubtful on the eastern Spanish shore, possibly also in the Black Sea region. This finding can be seen to fit a recent intriguing hypothesis on a linguistic–cultural separation that developed in late Antiquity between eastern rabbinical and western biblical Judaism. In the process, the western Diaspora was left without ties to the new centers of Judaism, and might as a consequence have largely assimilated into the Christian community.10 Whether by identity loss or forcibly through the upheavals of the “Barbarian Migrations,” an early medieval demographic low is unmistakable. In contrast, by the ninth/tenth century, new growth, slow at first and then accelerating, becomes visible everywhere. It is part of a general population increase apparent in most parts of Europe, which in turn reflects more stable conditions attained after the turmoil of the first medieval centuries, the restoration of political order, a revival of trade, and also a more productive agrarian regime. This central medieval growth phase was to be terminated by a late medieval low which again parallels general demographic trends. In the High Middle Ages, Jewish populations came to be concentrated in a number of regions: Sepharad – that is, Muslim and Christian Iberia; Provincia, the French south with a northwards extension along the Rhone axis; the realm of Ashkenaz – initially encompassing northeastern France, Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, then extending westwards into the Low Countries, Normandy, and England, and in the later Middle Ages into northern Italy and Poland–Lithuania; central and northern Italy; a southeastern Romaniote zone of Byzantium, the Balkans, and parts of southern Italy; and an elusive domain in and to the south of Kiev, Russia. Significant numbers of Jews in Europe lived for centuries under Arab rule, until these regions – Sicily and the greater part of Iberia – came again under Christian dominion from the eleventh century onward. There were great 9

10

M. Toch, “The Jews in Europe, 500 1050,” in P. Fouracre, ed., New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. I: C. 500 c. 700 (Cambridge, 2005), 547 70. Full references can be found in the demographic chapters of M. Toch, The Economic History of the Jews in Medieval Europe: Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages (Leiden, 2013). A. Edrei and D. Mendels, “A Split Jewish Diaspora: Its Dramatic Consequences,” Journal for the Study of the Pseudoepigrapha 16 (2007), 91 137.

338 the middle ages: the christian world variances in numbers, with Spain, Ashkenaz, southern France, the Italian south, and possibly also Byzantium leading, and eastern Europe lagging far behind.11 This hierarchy was, however, very unstable, and would be overturned by wholesale or partial expulsions: from a range of northern French principalities in the course of the thirteenth century; from England (1290); from the Kingdom of France (1306/94); and from Provence after its incorporation into France (1481); from Spain/Sicily/Portugal (1492/7) and the Kingdom of Naples (1510); as well as from many towns and principalities in Germany and Italy in the course of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Further to affect population numbers were recurrent bouts of mass conversion, most prominently in the early medieval Byzantine Empire, in the Rhineland in 1096, in southern Italy 1290–3, in Iberia after 1391 and during the entire course of the fifteenth century. It was only after the end of the Middle Ages that the center of gravity, in population as in intellectual activity, shifted to the Ashkenazic realm of eastern Europe. Compared to the extensive documentation in the late Antique eastern Empire, in Byzantium of the first medieval centuries evidence diminishes sharply, in numbers and in intelligibility. The hitherto abundant inscriptional evidence dwindles to almost nothing. It is tempting to read this dearth as a demographic low fitting the general trend in the Byzantine Empire. In contrast, population seems to have picked up again from the mid tenth century onwards, paralleling the Byzantine state’s military and political resurgence. From the vantage point of Benjamin of Tudela’s travel report of around 1168, a denser pattern of Jewish settlement than previously becomes apparent, but one still much below the late Antique high point.12 The traveler witnessed communities in Corfu, Arta, Aphilon (Achelous), Patras, Naupaktos, Corinth, Thebes, Chalcis, Salonika, Drama, and other localities, and on the Greek islands of Lesbos, Chios, Samos, Rhodes, and Cyprus. He found the largest ones in Thebes with 2,000 Jews, in Salonika 500, and in other towns from 20 to 400. His numbers can in all probability be understood to designate heads of households, and should therefore be multiplied by a household coefficient of between 5 and 10.13 11

12 13

For some necessarily impressionistic numbers, see Baron, “Population.” The figures in K. Stow, Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 7, certainly need to be reduced. Most reasoned are the figures provided by DellaPergola, “Some Fundamentals,” table 1. D. Jacoby, “Benjamin of Tudela in Byzantium,” Palaeoslavica 10 (2002), 180 5. DellaPergola, “Some Fundamentals,” 18 19. For a case study on the ratio of individuals to families, albeit in fifteenth century Germany, see M. Toch, “The Jewish Community of Nuremberg in the Year 1489 Social and Demographic Structure” [Hebrew], Zion 45 (1980), 60 72.

demography and migrations 339 As in Antiquity, this settlement structure was still oriented toward the Mediterranean littoral by a road system, albeit now much-reduced, connecting the coastal cities to inland towns. From this pattern, a far-reaching though not self-evident demographic conclusion has been drawn: “It is therefore legitimate to presuppose, even though no additional documents are as yet available, the existence of Jewish groupings in many more ports and commercial cities of Asia Minor at different periods of Byzantine history and, especially, following the Empire’s territorial expansion in the late 10th century.”14 Something similar had already been stated by a medieval commentator, Abraham ibn Daud of Toledo (1161), who remarked on the presence of Jews “on all the islands of the Greek sea from the land of Venice and Genoa as far as Constantinople and Byzantium.”15 There was thus a clear continuity of the Jewish presence in the eastern Empire from late Antiquity until the High Middle Ages, ebbing and surging at a pace apparently attuned to that of the population at large. Secondly, there was geographical dissemination and a migratory flow throughout the Byzantine space and into southern Italy and the Muslim Middle East and North Africa. We have no information on demographic changes during the troubled times from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, except for the arrival, at the very end of the period, of significant numbers of Jews fleeing Spain and Portugal for the much more benign regime of the Ottoman state. In Italy, in late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, our review of the sources has found a clear preponderance of the south, with 16 places of Jewish habitation in evidence, as compared to the north and center (excluding Rome) with a mere 7. In only a small minority of locations – Rome and some towns in the south – is there a continued presence from Antiquity to the early Middle Ages. A similar quantitative disparity, somewhat less pronounced, holds for the more numerous places where Jews settled for the first time during the Middle Ages – 18 in the south as against 11 in the north and center. There is also a difference, in favor of the south, in the extent and quality of documentation. Documents on real Jewish people, chiefly notaries’ records, are extant only from the south and from Lucca in Tuscany, even though such documents were written and preserved in many more northern places. In contrast, in many towns of the north one typically has no more than a single hagiographic reference, burdened with a huge question mark of reliability inherent in this type 14

15

Z. Ankori, Karaites in Byzantium: The Formative Years, 970 1100 (New York, 1959), 116 17. Gerson D. Cohen, ed., A Critical Edition with a Translation and Notes of the Book of Tradition (Sefer ha Qabbalah) by Abraham ibn Daud (Philadelphia, 1967), 93.

340 the middle ages: the christian world of source. Compared to Byzantium, the low rate of continuity indicates a considerable difference in the stability of the Jewish presence.16 Altogether, the number of communities in Italy overall is small, much smaller than in Byzantium. The church reformer Petrus Damiani (1007–72), who spent all his life in Italy, remarked in the prologue to his treatise “Against the Jews” (1040–1) that writing such a polemic was barely worth the effort, as “the Jews are now almost deleted from the face of the earth.”17 This might have been somewhat exaggerated, as witnessed by Benjamin of Tudela’s Italian itinerary a century later. In geographical order of his journey, he noted the following places and numbers of households: Genoa 2, Pisa 20, Lucca 40, Rome 200, Capua 300, Naples 500, Salerno 600, Amalfi 20, Benevento 200, Melfi 200, Ascoli 40, Trani 200, Taranto 300, Brindisi 10, Otranto 500, Messina 200, Palermo 1,500. The list can be supplemented for Catania, where a document of the year 1145 lists 24 Jewish families belonging to the local church, all bearing Arabic names.18 Thus, for population numbers too, the north and Rome are clearly eclipsed by the south. This does not mean that the southern communities were uniformly large. Palermo is clearly outstanding, a result of its particular bloom in Muslim Sicily. Benjamin’s numbers add up to a total of 4,832. Taking into account a few places not visited by him in the north and on the eastern seaboard, opting for his numbers to mean families rather than individuals, and assuming a high ratio of 10 persons per family, his total can reasonably be rounded up and translated to about 50–60,000 individuals.19 Such numbers obtained for a period when the Jewish population – as, indeed, the general one – was clearly on the rise again. In the thirteenth century, Italy shows no change in the distribution of the Jewish population, which remained mainly concentrated in the south of the peninsula. Toward the end of the century, a violent drive to baptize the Jews in the Kingdom of Naples reduced numbers significantly, possibly by as much as half. Rome too appears to have lost some of its Jewish 16

17

18 19

For visual confirmation of this finding, see map B VI 18, “Die jüdische Diaspora bis zum 7. Jh. n.Chr.,” in Horst Kopp and Wolfgang Röllig, eds., Tübinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients, Teil B. Geschichte (Wiesbaden, 1992). Die Briefe des Petrus Damiani, ed. K. Reindel (Munich, 1983), part 1, 66, no. 1. I owe this reference to my friend Alexander Patschovsky of Munich. Cf. D. Berger, “St. Peter Damian: His Attitude Toward the Jews and the Old Testament,” Yavneh Review 4 (1965), 80 112. S. Simonsohn, ed., The Jews in Sicily, vol. I (Leiden, 1997), 395 6, no. 173. On the strength of Benjamin of Tudela, a total of 40,000 is given by A. Milano, “Gli ebrei in Italia nei secoli XI e XII,” La Rassegna mensile di Israel 43 (1977), 567 637, esp. 627, and by S. W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, vol. IV: High Middle Ages, 500 1200, 2nd edn. (Philadelphia, 1957), 24. Here, as elsewhere, the great unknown is the household coefficient.

demography and migrations 341 inhabitants when the Holy See relocated to Avignon slightly later. From Rome or southern Italy, Jewish moneylenders moved north and settled in numerous places in the north and center of the peninsula. There they were to meet, somewhat later, a similar immigration of credit experts coming from Germany. These were the beginnings of a unique Italian feature, the mosaic of Romaniote, Ashkenazic, and eventually also Sephardic and Portuguese congregations, often within the confined space of a single town, as still visible today in Venice. For the mid fifteenth century, a total of possibly 300 or more places of Jewish residence has been suggested – usually, however, with a very small number of families in each. The one significant exception was still Sicily. When the expulsion of Jews from Spain was repeated on the island, a total of 6,300 Jewish-owned houses were confiscated, which has been seen to represent almost 40,000 souls.20 In relation to surface area and general population numbers, this would make the Sicilian community the most densely populated one in all of medieval Europe. In the south of Italy, a family structure in step with Mediterranean patterns can be made out. Families were large and extended over generations, as witnessed by a document of 1041 from Capua.21 It lists two groups of adult male Jews united by parenthood and common property. One was made up of eight descendants of the same ancestor, Judas, divided over three generations and regrouped as a father and his cousins, the sons of brothers. The other group consists of four descendants of an ancestor called Dunissus, grouped in two generations of parallel patrilineal cousins. Amongst the first was also, as in so many places, the son of a certain Jonas “who has become a Christian,” which begs again the question of the demographic impact of apostasy, both individual and collective. On the Iberian peninsula, the sparse Jewish population of Roman late Antiquity seems by all indications barely to have persisted in subsequent Visigothic times.22 There is indeed a spate of documentation setting in immediately with the Visigoths’ conversion to Catholicism (589) and running up to the Arab conquest of 711. This derives almost entirely from ecclesiastical and royal legislation, with one clearly influencing the 20 21

22

Sergio Joseph Sierra, “Sicily,” in EJ, XVIII, 543. Codice diplomatico Verginiano, ed. P. M. Trapeano (Montevergine, 1977), vol. I, 180 2, no. 47. For an attempt to disentangle the confusing source, see H. Taviani Carozzi, “Les Juifs dans les cités lombardes d’Italie du Sud (Xe XIIe s.),” in P. Arabeyre et al., eds., Villes et sociétés urbaines au moyen âge. Hommage à M. le professeur Jacques Heers (Paris, 1994), 269 80, esp. 276. Thus, this author’s thesis, developed contra received opinion see Toch, “The Jews in Europe, 550 1050,” and, in full, the chapter on demography in Spain in Toch, Economic History of the Jews.

342 the middle ages: the christian world other in a rising spiral of missionary zeal. The sheer bulk and fervor of these writings are unlike anything else encountered in early medieval Europe. Scholarship has usually understood this outpouring as a response to a tangible challenge, of proselytizing, economic or social domination, or other manifestations of Jewish expansionism. Only a substantial Jewry, a force to be reckoned with, could have generated such a threat. From this premise, a Jewish aristocracy of landholders, international merchants, and slave traders has been constructed. However, outside polemics, no evidence exists for this assumption and the inferences drawn from it. In contrast, the data available by the late tenth and early eleventh century reflect a different order of magnitude, both in the count of places inhabited and in population numbers. This appears to parallel the general demographic curve in alAndalus. Growth in Spain is thus clearly tied to a more favorable Arab regime, and quite possibly also to immigration from North Africa. These together produced a Sephardic Jewry showing no visible similarity to and continuity with the few quite indistinctive Jews of the Roman and Visigothic periods.23 How many people? Eliyahu Ashtor made a valiant attempt to compute the Jewish population of Muslim Spain according to the estimated area of the Jewish quarters of the different towns. These numbers were to be multiplied by a coefficient of mean density per hectare which he derived from studies on overall town populations. Thus, Ashtor computed over 5,000 souls for Granada and Seville, close to 4,000 for Toledo, 2,000 for Almeria, and over 1,000 for Zaragoza, Tudela, and Huesca.24 His procedure has been severely criticized as inflating what David Wasserstein basically saw as “a small minority by their numbers and their distribution in the Iberian peninsula,” whose “largest community in al-Andalus is unlikely to have counted more than eight or nine hundred individuals.”25 Actually, Ashtor’s totals are not so far removed from this estimate, except for the largest places. Counting together all his numbers and adding a few more hundred in places not included for some reason in his tally, one arrives at around 25,000 souls in all of Muslim Iberia in the mid eleventh century. Taking heed of Wasserstein’s critique, but disregarding his warning that “we do not know, and we cannot know how many Jews there were in al-Andalus,” one might put the total somewhere in the 23

24 25

H. Sivan, “The Invisible Jews of Visigothic Spain,” Revue des Études Juives 159 (2000), 369 85. E. Ashtor, “The Number of Jews in Muslim Spain” [Hebrew], Zion 28 (1963), 34 56. D. Wasserstein, The Rise and Fall of the Party Kings: Politics and Society in Islamic Spain, 1002 1086 (Princeton, 1985), 191 and n. 3; Wasserstein, “Jewish Élites in al Andalus,” in D. Frank, ed., The Jews of Medieval Islam: Community, Society, and Identity (Leiden, 1995), 101 10, esp. 109.

demography and migrations 343 region of 15,000. Whether counting 25,000 or 15,000, the Jews of Muslim Iberia were but a small minority, despite their dazzling cultural achievements. In the course of the eleventh century, they were to become an even lesser one, as the political anarchy in the Taifa states drove sizable numbers of people to take refuge in the expanding Christian kingdoms to the north. Already by the early century, there were Jews in far-away León who bore Arabicized names, as did almost all those appearing in the sources in Tudela long after it passed under Christian rule in 1115, or in Christian Toledo throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In the twelfth century, the Almohad persecution put an end to the existence of numerous communities, of which the most famous was Lucena. In the Christian north, the time-line for the establishment of Jewish communities is quite clear. Barcelona and Gerona, by the late ninth century, were the earliest, doubtlessly due to the impetus given these parts by Carolingian colonization in Catalonia. Elsewhere in the north at this time, Jewish communities are only found in places under Muslim rule in the Ebro valley. In León-Castile, Jews came to be present in the capital during the tenth century, and in other places, in the course of the following one. In the Kingdoms of Aragon and Navarre, they appear no earlier than the eleventh to early twelfth century. The locales were first seats of political and military power, then in the course of time also road junctions along the Santiago route and, in the Ebro basin and between Burgos and León, medium and small towns functioning as service centers for the agricultural hinterland. There are faint indications for single Jews living or sojourning in the countryside. Altogether, the formation of a Jewish presence was part and parcel of the substantial demographic growth undergone by the Christian realms in the tenth, and especially the early eleventh, century. One would greatly like to be able to quantify this growth, but the material at disposal simply does not provide for such a question. There is one sole indication for population numbers, from Barcelona on May 17, 1079. As a rough estimate, the number of Jewish households in the town at this time was in the region of 60, which would make a total number of souls between 240 (coefficient of 4 per household) and 480 (coefficient of 8). Even given a large margin for error, these are very modest dimensions for such an important city. Other places in Christian Spain were not likely to have had greater numbers. The development of the Jewish population in Iberia did not follow a linear pattern of growth. For the longer part of the period under scrutiny, it was of very modest dimensions and confined to a small number of places. Under such adverse conditions, it is difficult to see an uninterrupted presence even in the most important locations. Expansion set in late, roughly a century after the Muslim conquest, in a few places, including maybe two in

344 the middle ages: the christian world the Christian north. The tenth, and especially the eleventh, centuries saw further population growth, by now also in the developing Christian realms, apparently reaching its apogee toward the end of the thirteenth and in the early fourteenth century. By then, the Christian Reconquista of almost all parts of Muslim Iberia had opened manifold opportunities for the advancement of Jews in urban trades and crafts and in the administrations of the Christian states. This favorable state of affairs must have brought about considerable population growth and a proliferation of communities throughout the peninsula. It was roughly ended with the onset of persecution in 1391 and the tremendous pressure for conversion during the fifteenth century, which are estimated to have brought down Jewish population numbers by at least half.26 At the time of the expulsion of 1492, the already much-depleted number of Jews has been estimated at around 100,000 people, while a larger number remained behind as conversos. Thus, from the eleventh/twelfth to the late thirteenth century, the Jewish population of Iberia grew at a fast pace to be the largest one in Europe, only to shrink again in the late Middle Ages due to forced and voluntary conversion, as well as through straightforward persecution.27 In Gaul, too, Jewish settlement followed an uneven course. Going by the archaeological record as well as by a critical examination of the written sources, there were very few places of Jewish habitation in late Antiquity and the first medieval centuries. A transient presence can be noticed in the fourth century on the Roman borders along the Rhine and Danube, with a somewhat stronger one in Trier, possibly also in Cologne. Slightly later, Jews were found in a few towns of Gaul, primarily in the south, and one each in central and northern Gaul. Only in Arles, Narbonne, and possibly Marseille did Jewish habitation continue uninterrupted into the ninth to the eleventh centuries. As in other parts of Europe, the post-Carolingian era saw considerable growth altogether. In the south, Jews came to live in ten localities, three old-established and seven new ones. In the center, there were four settlements, all newly established. Growth was most pronounced in the north, in twelve localities, all of them recently set up. However, all these places were situated inland, not a single one in the dynamic zone of trade emporia and “gateway” settlements developing in the valleys of the rivers Scheldt, Meuse, and Rhine, and on the continental shores of the North Sea. The communities in northern Gaul became the western branch of Ashkenazic Jewry, with congregations in the Île-de-France, Maine26

27

Y. Baer, History of the Jews in Christian Spain (Philadelphia, 1978), vol. I, 189 96; vol. II; Y. T. Assis, Jewish Economy in the Medieval Crown of Aragon, 1213 1327 (Leiden, 1997), 8. Compare the maps of communities for the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries, in S. Schwarzfuchs, “Spain” in EJ, 2nd edn. (2007), 70, 77.

demography and migrations 345 Anjou, Bourgogne, Champagne, Lorraine, and Normandy. This chronology and geography leave little room for an intriguing hypothesis raised recently – namely, that the French part of Ashkenazic Jewry derived from immigrants from Germany.28 Settlement in Germany did not chronologically precede that in northeastern France. Neither do its modest dimensions suggest free demographic resources, certainly not in the tenth century that was the time of initial settlement in both parts of Ashkenaz. Rather, our investigation supports the established view of a slow spread from south to north, with origins both in southern France and in Italy.29 The early communities in the north of France in the late tenth and first half of the eleventh century must have been very small, as implied in a responsum of Joseph Tov-Elem: “our brethren in the surroundings of Sens and in Auxerre and two souls in Châlons-sur-Marne.”30 Rashi is considered to have presided in Troyes over no more than 100 to 200 fellowJews.31 In southern France in the later twelfth century, where Benjamin of Tudela witnessed a new phase of population growth, he reported, in larger places such as Arles, Narbonne, and Lunel, 200 to 300 Jews (again most probably families, rather than individuals); in smaller ones, like Posquières, 40; and in a middling one like Saint Gilles, 100. More to the north, in the same period, the list of the martyrs of Blois notes about 40 families or about 150 to 200 souls. The Jewish population of Paris has been estimated to number, in around 1292, between 500 (by a coefficient of 5) and 1,500 (coefficient of 10).32 As in most other parts of Europe, in France the greatest number and widest distribution was attained during the third quarter of the thirteenth century, with at least 130 communities, and possibly close to 220, in all of northern France.33 By some estimates, about 100,000 Jews were affected by the expulsion of 1306, but numbers might easily have been much lower. Recurring expulsions and the losses incurred during the Black Death further reduced the Jewish population. 28

29

30 31

32

33

S. Schwarzfuchs, “L’Opposition Tsarfat Provence, la formation du Judaïsme du Nord de la France,” in G. Nahon and Ch. Touati, eds., Hommage à Georges Vajda (Louvain, 1980), 135 50. A. Grossman, “Jewish Migration to and Settlement in Germany in the 9th 11th Century,” in A. Shinan, ed., Emigration and Settlement in Jewish and General History [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1982), 109 28; M. Toch, “Jewish Migrations to, within and from Medieval Germany,” in S. Cavaciocchi, ed., Le Migrazioni in Europa. Secc. XIII XVIII (Florence, 1994), 639 52. I. A. Agus, ed., Responsa of the Tosaphists [Hebrew] (New York, 1954), no. 1. S. W. Baron, “Rashi and the Community of Troyes,” in H. L. Ginsberg, ed., Rashi Anniversary Volume (New York, 1941), 47 71, esp. 58. R. Chazan, “Jewish Settlement in Northern France 1096 1306,” in Revue des Études Juives 128 (1969), 41 65, esp. 46 and nn. 4, 5. Chazan, Medieval Jewry, 207 20.

346 the middle ages: the christian world By the end of the Middle Ages, there remained maybe a few thousand souls on French soil. From Rouen in Normandy, Jews crossed the Channel to settle from the late eleventh century in England, first in London, where a Jewish quarter is mentioned by c.1127.34 By 1141, there were Jews at Oxford, and by 1159 they had settled in nine further places: Norwich, Lincoln, Cambridge, Winchester, Thetford, Northampton, Bungay, Gloucester, and Worcester. The murderous attacks beginning on September 3, 1189, and continuing early in 1190 brought total ruin to at least four communities, York, Stamford, Bury, and Lynn, and loss of life and property to further ones. A tax roll from the year 1194 lists twenty-one contributing communities, with London, Lincoln, and Canterbury by far the most affluent and, by implication, also the most populous ones. About half these Jewries were located at major ports. In the same year, and as a clear consequence of the massacres, the archae system of royal supervision over Jewish credit deals was instituted. Of the twenty-one towns mentioned in the 1194 tax list, nineteen are known to have been the seat of such a supervisory institution, and, by inference, the locale of a more important Jewry. There are indications that the first decades of the thirteenth century saw some immigration from abroad, possibly in the wake of the expulsion from Britanny, and also from other places in France. During the second half of the thirteenth century, between 1262 and 1290, Jews were to be found in over eighty different locations, many of them regional centers (shire towns), albeit in some cases numbering a single family alone. Apparently, Jews also lived – although it is unclear for how long – in some rural or remote localities. However, by the mid-century their presence had become increasingly tenuous, with expulsions from a number of places and legislation restricting residence solely to archae towns. Thus, in 1275, the Jews of Marlborough were moved to Devizes, those of Gloucester to Bristol, those of Worcester to Hereford, and those of Cambridge to Norwich. There is no scholarly consensus on the size of the Anglo-Jewish community as a whole or of its constituent members, as neither tax-rolls nor the numbers of the slain in 1189 provide reasonable indications. Mean family size has been estimated at 4.25 persons, a very low estimation arrived at by analogy with calculations for Rhineland Jewry, which in turn have been found unreliable (see below). Indeed, recent studies on the families of some 34

For this and the following: J. Hillaby, “Jewish Colonisation in the Twelfth Century,” in P. Skinner, ed., The Jews in Medieval Britain: Historical, Literary, and Archaeological Perspectives (Woodbridge, 2003), 15 40; R. Mundill, “Medieval Anglo Jewry: Expulsion and Exodus,” in F. Burgard, A. Haverkamp, and G. Mentgen, eds., Judenvertreibungen in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit (Hanover, 1999), 75 97.

demography and migrations 347 Anglo-Jewish magnates have come up with much higher numbers of children – an average of over 8 – and thus much larger families.35 A now somewhat dated estimate, by Cecil Roth, puts the number of places of residence on the eve of the expulsion in 1290 at about 33, and the total number of Jews at 4,000. A more recent one speaks of about 2,000 total Jewish population in the 1280’s.36 Most English Jews went into exile in France, a significant number (estimated at between 70 and 300 souls) to Paris, where by the end of the century they made up between 7 and 20 percent of the Jewish inhabitants. In Germany, Jewish life for a long time was a small-scale affair.37 It is improbable that the migrants to Germany made up more than a few dozen families in the ninth century, maybe a few hundred in the tenth. Taking into account the demographic effect of settled life, for the end of the tenth century the estimate of 4–5,000 persons appears realistic.38 Indicating a lengthy period of formation, between the mid tenth and the mid eleventh century a mere five communities were established. There were to be eight more during the second half of the eleventh century. In the course of this century, there was a marked growth in numbers, nourished by ongoing immigration, most probably from France and to a lesser degree from Italy, as well as by internal demographic growth. It appears that proselytes, though present, contributed but a handful of persons to early Jewish population. By 1096, the few localities in existence had come to harbor sizable numbers, reaching in Mainz a total of at least 650 to 700 souls, in Worms not less than 400 to 450 and possibly more, and even larger numbers in Cologne. To give significance to such figures, one has to take into account the small dimensions of even the most important towns of the period. Mainz and Worms most probably had no more than 5–8,000 inhabitants right into the twelfth century. Trier never made it above 10,000 during the whole Middle Ages. Only Cologne, already the largest town by the late eleventh – early twelfth century, grew substantially, to something in the region of 30,000 in the thirteenth century. With numbers between 500 and 1,000 souls per town, Jews must indeed have been a very important element of early urban society, constituting up to 10 percent, or more, of the total urban population. Sober estimates of the Jewish 35 36

37

38

Hillaby, “Jewish Colonisation,” 35 n. 72. EJ, VI, 412 13; R. Mundill, England’s Jewish Solution: Experiment and Expulsion, 1262 1290 (Cambridge, 1998), 27. Details, maps, and references for the following are in M. Toch, “The Formation of a Diaspora, the Settlement of Jews in the Medieval German Reich,” Aschkenas 7 (1997), 11 34. Grossman, “Migration of Jews,” 127.

348 the middle ages: the christian world population on the eve of the First Crusade agree to a reasonable total of 20–25,000 souls.39 After the bloodletting and forced conversions of 1096, life was reestablished in all the places affected. Thus, it seems that the tangible demographic impact of 1096 was not as catastrophic as Hebrew writings of the time (and much of modern historiography) would have it.40 Still, reconstruction must have absorbed most energies, for during the whole first half of the twelfth century there were only 5 new localities settled. By the end of the century, the number of German towns harboring Jews had more than doubled. In the first half of the thirteenth century, over 60 new places of residence appear in the sources, amongst them important towns like Frankfurt am Main. The pace further quickens in the second half of the thirteenth century, with 260 new places counted. With no good regional economic histories available, it is difficult to explain this growth in exact local terms, but this was the high tide of urbanization in Germany. The number of towns in central Europe has been estimated for the year 1250 at 1,500, three times as many as 100 years earlier. By 1300, their number had doubled again.41 The half-century between 1300 and 1348 marks the high tide of Jewish settlement in medieval Germany. With over 500 new places of residence, it reached a number of locations and a geographical extent unmatched until the nineteenth century. Population numbers in this period can be obtained from the lists of martyrs written in the wake of the persecutions of the thirteenth century. In 1241, the relatively young but substantial community of Frankfurt am Main mourned 180 victims, and over 20 were forcibly baptized. During the Rindfleisch persecution of 1298, 21 persons were killed in the small town of Röttingen, 26 in the village of Hürnheim in Swabia, 470 in the middling town of Rothenburg ob der Tauber, and over 700 in the large city of Nuremberg. It stands to reason that the numbers represent all or most of the Jews in these places. While Jews at no time made up a sizable part of the total population of the Empire, their share in many towns of the central Middle Ages was a significant one. The largest communities – Erfurt or Nuremberg, for example – were, at the end of the thirteenth and in the early fourteenth century, around 1,000 souls strong: at least 5 to 10 percent of the total town population. The greater part of places of residence had, of 39 40

41

Ibid. A finding corroborated from literary sources: S. Schwarzfuchs, “The Place of the Crusades in Jewish History,” in M. Ben Sasson, R. Bonfil, and J. R. Hacker, eds., Culture and Society in Medieval Jewry: Studies Dedicated to the Memory of Haim Hillel Ben Sasson [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1989), 251 67. P. Moraw, Von offener Verfassung zu gestalteter Verdichtung. Das Reich im späten Mittelalter 1250 bis 1490 (Berlin, 1989), 100 1.

demography and migrations 349 course, much smaller numbers – a dozen to a few hundred souls. For them, a mean percentage of 0.5 to 0.8 percent of the urban population stands to reason. So does an estimate of a total of about 100,000 Jews in the German Empire by the year 1300.42 Altogether, from the beginnings and up to 1348, around 1,000 places of Jewish residence have been counted in the different regions making up the medieval German Reich (including Bohemia, Moravia, and parts of the Netherlands and Switzerland). This comprises both places where Jewish life continued unbroken over centuries and places where Jews resided only for a short time. The main regions were the Rhineland, southern Germany, and Franconia, with a solid net of towns of varying size. In Bavaria and in the north, settlement was significantly less dense. In the east (Silesia, Moravia, and Lower Austria), it was again more substantial. Early places of Jewish residence were usually larger and older towns, mostly the ones ruled by bishops or directly by the king. In the course of the thirteenth century, Jews settled in independent cities under nominal royal rule as well as in towns dependent on a territorial prince. By the year 1300, Jews also inhabited a significant number of villages – nevertheless, the lifestyle of the great majority remained an urban one. The mid fourteenth century marks an almost complete wiping of the slate. In the turmoil and bloodshed of the Plague years, only 58 Jewish communities would enjoy an uninterrupted existence.43 In many places, whole communities, numbering not infrequently hundreds of souls, were wiped out. By the end of the fourteenth century, residence had been reestablished in most of the more important towns. Jews also settled, yet again or for the first time, in medium-sized or small places. There were once more Jews in all German territories, in some regions in almost as dense concentrations as on the eve of 1348, in others more thinly spread. However, the foundations of the fifteenth century cannot be viewed as real growth. For one, whole regions such as Austria, Bavaria, or Silesia were emptied by expulsions. New foundations can sometimes be identified as resulting directly from expulsions from nearby towns, distributing a population amongst a number of smaller places. Such refuges would often be villages; sometimes also suburbs of the town concerned. The rural character still barely discernible in the pre-Plague period thus became a prominent feature in the fifteenth century. Around 25 percent of all the 42 43

Baron, Social and Religious History, XII, 15. This is to correct the figure of thirty three given by me in Toch, “Siedlungsgeschichte der Juden Mitteleuropas im Wandel vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit,” in A. Haverkamp and F. J. Ziwes, eds., Juden in der christlichen Umwelt während des späten Mittelalters (Berlin, 1992), 29 39, esp. 30. Also, the total number of places of Jewish residence given there on p. 29 as 1,038 needs to be corrected to 1,022. This article, based on the material of Germania Judaica III, lays the groundwork for the following.

350 the middle ages: the christian world places of Jewish residence counted during the later Middle Ages were villages, in a broad belt from Alsace in the west across southern Germany and to Moravia in the east – exactly the regions in which a rural lifestyle was to become the typical form of existence in the early modern period and into the nineteenth century. By the end of the fifteenth century, one counts over 1,000 localities in which Jews had resided from the post-Plague years onward. But even less than in the preceding period does that impressive number represent a substantial and growing population. Rather, it portrays forced mobility. There were still some major towns that would host a Jewish community over the time-span of a generation or more. For the greater number of places, though, Jewish presence was extremely shortlived and transient, sometimes just a single year or little more. The communities of the later Middle Ages were much smaller in numbers than their forerunners of the pre-Plague period. More than half of the places of residence for which there are figures housed no more than 1 or 2 families. Close to 30 percent had no more than 10 families, and only less than 5 percent, 20 families or more. This would usually mean around 300 souls, a far cry from the communities numbering up to and over 1,000 people in the pre-Plague period. By a cautious estimate, the total Jewish population of the German Empire in the early fifteenth century was in the region of 7,000 to 8,000 families – around 40,000 souls or so, roughly a quarter of 1 percent of the general population.44 By the end of the century, this number must have diminished even further. In 1987, a ground-breaking effort was made to establish the size and structure of the Ashkenazic family around the year 1100.45 Using the memorial lists of the nearly 500 martyrs of the 1096 persecution in Mainz, Kenneth Stow computed a mean number of 1.7 children per family and the size of the average Rhineland family at 3.77 persons. The typical Jewish family was thus found to have been small, urban, and twogenerational, an impression reinforced by the paucity (in the Mainz source of 1096) of extended (multigenerational or joint) family units. Stow expanded his numerical finding by use of literary sources, to arrive at the picture of a “partially non-role-differentiated, close-knit, affective nuclear family, oriented to the needs and feelings of its individual members, which thoroughly embodied the Jewish norm.”46 In a sense, this is a value 44

45

46

Y. Guggenheim, “Social Stratification of Central European Jewry at the End of the Middle Ages, The Poor,” in D. Assaf, ed., Proceedings of the Tenth World Congress of Jewish Studies: Division B [Hebrew], vol. I (Jerusalem, 1990), 130 6, esp. 130. K. R. Stow, “The Jewish Family in the Rhineland in the High Middle Ages: Form and Function,” American Historical Review 92 (1987), 1085 1110; Stow, Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 196 209. Stow, “Jewish Family,” 1086, 1107.

demography and migrations 351 judgment that reverts to the popular view of an archetypical Jewish family, emotionally involved and decisively at odds with the norms of surrounding society, something out of Woody Allen’s Radio Days. For Stow, such disparity might have even been responsible for the violence of the Crusaders of 1096, who “may have been threatened by the Jews’ social stability, at whose core the Jewish family stood.”47 This is, of course, sheer hypothesis, and there are significant question marks to such use of numbers. Decades earlier, the same data had been used to arrive at the conclusion that families with fewer than 3 children constituted an exception, not the rule.48 An exhaustive study of the lives of the scholars in the eleventh century concluded that they had on average 4 children, more than double Stow’s number.49 A case study from Nuremberg, albeit four centuries later, found the Jewish households of that town to contain an average of 4.3 male persons above the age of 13.50 Some were small and housed nuclear (twogenerational) families, while others were large and multigenerational. Altogether, this is a combination more attuned to the varying life-cycles of families than the unitary structure made out by Stow. With no further sources to shed light on the problem, the size and composition of the Ashkenazic family of the tenth to eleventh centuries (or, by the same token, of the somewhat later Anglo-Jewish one) remain open questions. In eastern Europe, the sizable Roman-time Jewish settlement along the shores of the Danube and the Black Sea found no early medieval continuation. The earliest evidence for a renewed Jewish presence speaks of a transient one, of traders coming mostly from the west – Germany – and less frequently from the east – “the lands of the Turks.” These merchants crossed Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland on their way to and from Russia, but some of them were also active in the former countries. A stable resident community settled in Kiev in the tenth century, possibly of Khazar origin.51 In Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland, Jews settled in very small numbers – a single community in each – in the eleventh century. Outside these few principal places, further settlement did not set in before the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Thus, eastern Europe was populated by Jews considerably later, and at considerably lower density, than all other 47 48

49

50 51

Stow, Alienated Minority, 209. B. Blumenkranz, “Germany, 843 1096,” in C. Roth, ed., The World History of the Jewish People. Ser. II: The Dark Ages. Jews in Christian Europe 711 1096 (Tel Aviv, 1966), 162 74, esp. 165. A. Grossman, The Early Sages of Ashkenaz: Their Lives, Leadership and Works (900 1096) [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1988), 8. Toch, “The Jewish Community of Nuremberg in the Year 1489.” N. Golb and O. Pritsak, Khazarian Hebrew Documents of the 10th Century (Ithaca, NY, 1982).

352 the middle ages: the christian world regions of Europe. This goes far to explain the cultural profile – an Ashkenazic one – derived from the west and exhibited by eastern European Jewry from its very first appearance in the sources.52 Of a possible pre-Ashkenazic stratum – Byzantine, Turkish-Khazar or Slavonic – little to nothing can be made out in the sources, including the onomastic material.53 Disregarding the manifold myths on the origins of Polish Jewry, one can safely state that its establishment was in the main a product of a late medieval migration.54 In the fourteenth century, Jews moved from long-settled Bohemia, as well as from Silesia and Pomerania – to which they had come from Germany during the thirteenth century as part of their eastward movement – into further Slavonic regions. In the fifteenth century and, even more so, in the sixteenth, this movement grew in terms of the numbers of people involved and of communities founded. Against 9 localities in the fourteenth century, about 60 towns were settled in the following one, and about 200 localities during the sixteenth century. This eastern European population, numbering by the end of the period above 10,000, was to become the social and cultural hub of early modern Ashkenazic Jewry and by far the most important part of the Jewish people of modern times. Forced emigration as a corollary of expulsion looms large in the annals of medieval Jewry. However, this is but part of the story, for voluntary migration was at least as important for the demographic profile. This can be illustrated by turning once again to the German case, which has been extensively researched. Very similar conditions have been pointed out for France by Robert Chazan.55 Jewish settlement in Germany expanded from west to east, from the long-settled regions of the Rhine valley into areas undergoing processes of commercialization and monetary development. This expansion must have involved a continuous, although not necessarily connected, series of migrational moves, undertaken for the sake of economic betterment by individual families, and resulting in the construction of new communities. If names of origin are any indication, such migrations in most cases covered relatively short distances and exhibit a movement to and fro between smaller peripheral places and the larger central ones. This is indeed a pattern of migration not peculiar to Jews. The prevalence of 52

53

54

55

I. M. Ta Shema, “On the History of the Jews in Twelfth and Thirteenth Century Poland,” in G. D. Hundert, ed., Jews in Early Modern Poland (London, 1997), 287 317. A. Beider, “Jewish Given Names in Eastern Europe,” Revue des Études Juives 157 (1998), 169 98. See also above, n. 4, for the polemical tinge of these issues. For this and the following, B. Weinryb, The Jews of Poland (Philadelphia, 1973), 22 32, esp. 31, table. Toch, “Jewish Migrations,” for the earlier literature; Chazan, “Jewish Settlement,” 49 50.

demography and migrations 353 short-range movements and the general west–east direction are, however, only part of the picture. Other purposes and concerns cut across this basic pattern. Economically potent individuals and families would sometimes move great distances from one urban center to another. This would typically be achieved by setting up a son or son-in-law in the new place, entering into partnerships, and acquiring houses and permits of residence. Very different, yet as frequent, were the wanderings of students in search of reputed teachers and personal fortune. For those unable or unwilling to go into business, yet capable of scholastic distinction, traditional Jewish values made religious study a preferred career choice. An autobiography recently discovered in a Hebrew manuscript source allows a rare glance at what this meant for the individual.56 It opens with the year 1370, when the author left his parental home in Düren in western Germany at age 13, and went to Mainz to study. Called home on the occasion of his father’s death, he was captured by robbers between Bonn and Cologne, and subsequently released and returned to his mother’s home in Düren. A year later, at the age of 14 or 15, he joined the army of the duke of Jülich to fight in the west against Brabant. His mother’s annoyance at this adolescent escapade set him off on a second trip of studies. He reached Koblenz (still on the Rhine), moved eastwards to Rothenburg/Tauber, and farther east to Austria. There he married, far from his mother, and after five years returned to his homeland. He continued to wander after his marriage as well: between 1375 and 1390, he moved six times along the River Rhine, living twice in Siegburg, in Düren again, twice in Andernach, and again in Koblenz. In Siegburg, he was again imprisoned and then released. His third trip of studies was cut short by the death of his sisters, who had been living in Andernach and Cologne. In Koblenz, he made a living as cantor, butcher, and innkeeper, not exactly the career in Hebrew studies his mother had had in mind for him. Back in Andernach, where the tale ends, he was imprisoned a third time and then severely wounded by a local non-Jew. The description of his troubles ends with the prayer to be granted the privilege of going to Jerusalem with his family.57 Such individual moves could also reach a critical mass: following the migration of some important scholars, between 1390 and 1420, Austria in the far southeast became the undisputed center of religious learning in Jewish Germany. 56

57

I. J. Yuval, “A German Jewish Autobiography of the Fourteenth Century,” Binah 3 (1994), 79 99. For actual travel to the Holy Land, see E. Reiner, “Between Ashkenaz and Jerusalem,” in Shalem [Hebrew], vol. IV (Jerusalem, 1984), 27 62.

354 the middle ages: the christian world For more distant voluntary migrations, one has to turn to regions where Jews could establish a livelihood as moneylenders. For German Jews, the earliest and, to the close of the Middle Ages, most important such region was northeastern Italy. The frst German Jews appear in Trieste, Bassano, Treviso, Cividale, and possibly also in other places from the middle to the end of the thirteenth century. They occur in much larger numbers after the persecutions of the mid fourteenth century, and especially from the end of that century onwards. Near to Germany and lying along the main trade routes from the Jewish centers of Swabia, Franconia, and Austria over the Alps, Venice’s mainland dependencies and adjacent territories were settled in the course of the fifteenth century by small but numerous nuclei of Ashkenazic Jews. This settlement, centered on the main community of Treviso and scattered over a large number of small localities, was exclusively Ashkenazic in its cultural make-up and forms of organization. Venice itself was frequented by German Jews from the early fourteenth century. Of the bankers allowed to settle there between 1382 and 1397, and again from 1509 onwards, many, if not the majority, were Ashkenazim, from the mainland (Terraferma), as well as direct immigrants from Germany. German Jews of northern Italy, some of them already born in the country, migrated farther south, where they met and to some extent mingled with Italian and (after 1492) Spanish Jews. When viewing emigration to Italy, one is well advised not to see it as a purely Jewish matter. It was yet another aspect of a general migration of Germans, of different classes and for a host of reasons, to Italy and especially toward Venice. However, Jews moved even farther afield, using the Venetian colonies as stepping-stones for settling in the eastern parts of the Mediterranean basin. Of these places, Candia in Crete has been the most thoroughly researched. After an early single appearance in 1271, there was an important contingent of Italian-German and German immigrants in the second half of the fourteenth century, strong enough to control the economic and culturalreligious life of Jewish Crete. From the mid fifteenth century onward, German Jews also immigrated to the expanding Turkish Empire. A wellknown indication comes from a letter of c. 1438/9 from Rabbi Isaac Zarfati, of French descent, born in Germany and writing from Adrianople.58 He stressed the tribulations of Israel in Germany and praised the Ottoman Empire both as a safe land route to Israel and as a haven for persecuted Jews. Turning around an old-established Jewish preference, Isaak Zarfati 58

A. Jellinek, Zur Geschichte der Kreuzzüge (Leipzig, 1854), V VII (German synopsis), 16 25 (Hebrew text). For the person and dating, see J. Hacker, “The Jewish Community of Salonica from the 15th to the 16th Century” [Hebrew] (Ph.D. thesis, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1978), appendix A.

demography and migrations 355 was not the only one to advocate living under the half-moon rather than under the cross.59 In all of Europe, Jews made up but a very small part of the general population. At the height of population growth, in thirteenth-century Castile the proportion of Jews in the overall population has been estimated at 0.4%, in Aragon of the same period at 2%, in Provence at 3%, and on the island of Majorca at as much as 6%. Since, in most regions, Jews were city dwellers from their very arrival, population numbers are more significant in the urban context. Numbers close to 1,000 souls in some German towns of the late eleventh and again in the thirteenth century, similar numbers in Provençal and Languedoc towns, or even larger ones in twelfth- and fifteenth-century Sicily, signify a much higher local proportion than totals by country – in some places, as much as 10% and above.60 While Jews were of insignificant overall numbers, yet in many places and during considerable periods of time they had a significant share of town populations. They were also highly visible, for reasons of urban topography as well as for cultural ones. Their concrete topographical horizons were framed by the Jewish quarter, which in many places was part of the most ancient urban core.61 The quarters and streets of the Jews were often situated at the very center of towns, in close proximity to cathedrals and town-halls, central markets and squares, through-roads and gates. These were highly desirable locations within the urban fabric. When the status of Jews declined during the later Middle Ages, in many places this meant marginalization by relocation to the outskirts of town. Jewish quarters could be wholly or partly walled in and shut up by gates, a feature found in some places such as Speyer in Germany as early as the eleventh century. Up to the thirteenth century, this fitted Jewish needs for protection as well as the wishes of town governments and of the Christian neighbors. From then onward, authorities enforced walled-up windows, gates, and increasingly higher walls – all steps leading to what can properly be called a ghetto. A German example shows how this worked: the Jewish quarter of Nuremberg, newly constructed after the massacre of 1349, needed no surrounding walls to be 59

60

61

B. Septimus, “‘Better under Edom than under Ishmael’: The History of a Saying” [Hebrew] Zion 47 (1982), 103 11. M. Toch, Die Juden im mittelalterlichen Reich (Munich, 1998), 5 13; W. C. Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews: From Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians (Philadelphia, 1989), 113; E. Ashtor, “Palermitan Jewry in the Fifteenth Century,” Hebrew Union College Annual 50 (1979), 219 51, esp. 225 6. For an overview, see A. Haverkamp, “The Jewish Quarter in German Towns during the Later Middle Ages,” in R. Po chia Hsia and H. Lehmann, eds., In and Out of the Ghetto: Jewish Gentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1995), 13 28.

356 the middle ages: the christian world a closed-off complex that could only be entered through two houses serving as gates. In Passau, the Jews were moved before 1412 to the outskirts of town, to a narrow strip bounded on two sides by running water and dominated from above by the town fortress. Total segregation appeared in Germany, however, only in 1462, in Frankfurt am Main.62 For Spain, the other Jewish center in continuous existence until the end of the Middle Ages, the time sequence was similar.63 For most of the period, the Jewish quarter would be typically defined by some elements of enclosure, with full segregation reached only at the end of the Middle Ages. Until about 1300, there was a close fit between general and Jewish population history, the latter being an outrider of the former. The growth of Jewish settlement serves as an outstanding illustration of the vitality of medieval Jewry. Up to that point in time, it also provides us with an excellent tool of analysis, still little utilized, for the development of local and regional economies increasingly characterized by mutual interdependence and market ties, and mediated by the use of coined money and credit. By around 1300 – somewhat later in Iberia – this analytical tool ceases to be of benefit. Increasingly, the demography and patterns of Jewish settlement were shaped by other forces, mainly the complicated interplay of popular anti-Judaism with the rivalries of royal, ecclesiastical, princely, noble, and urban interests. If the early Middle Ages were a time of contraction and the central ones an age of expansion, then the later Middle Ages were surely a period of adversity. 62

63

F. Backhaus, “Die Einrichtung eines Ghettos für die Frankfurter Juden im Jahre 1462,” Hessisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte 39 (1989), 59 86. H. Beinart, “The Law on Separate Jewish Quarters,” in Beinart, Chapters in Judeo Spanish History [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1998), vol. I, 112 68.

chapter 13

ECONOMIC ACTIVITIES michael toch

The economic history of medieval European Jews has been extensively researched for a long time, producing a vast volume of local and regional studies, but few attempts at synthesis.1 Facing a baffling variety of conditions in different periods and regions, most scholars have opted for conceptual clarity by considering the urban/commercial/credit nexus as the exclusive framework for Jewish economic pursuits. This envisages a tightly restricted range of activities, the occupation of a narrow economic niche, and a livelihood totally dependent on functions performed in the service of the majority society. From this viewpoint, some scholars have taken the additional step of postulating an innate and timeless Jewish inclination for these pursuits and none other. Another sort of exceptionalism portrays Jews as unrelenting agents of economic innovation, in agriculture, trade, crafts, and, of course, credit. Such exaggerations derive from stereotypes broadly held, on the most basic level from a lingering persuasion that the minority must necessarily perform an economic function in and for majority society, and that there is a purpose beyond just making a living.2 This chapter will discuss a number of livelihoods that were indeed at the heart of the Jewish occupational structure, as well as significant 1

2

One still has to make do with the very outdated work by G. Caro, Sozial und Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Juden im Mittelalter und der Neuzeit, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1908 20). There is also the highly learned work, sadly lacking in references, by I. Schipper, History of the Jewish Economy [ Yiddish] (Warsaw, 1930). I hope to fill this gap with a three volume series, of which volume I has appeared as M. Toch, The Economic History of the Jews in Medieval Europe: Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages (Leiden, 2013). For the early Middle Ages, the following is based on that volume; for later dates, on my own studies and those of many others. On historiographical excesses, see the scathing critique by T. Oelsner, “The Place of the Jews in Economic History as Viewed by German Scholars,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 7 (1962), 183 212; and M. Toch, “Jews and Commerce: Modern Fancies and Medieval Realities,” in Toch, Peasants and Jews in Medieval Germany (Aldershot, 2003), no. XV. For a more forgiving approach, see L. K. Little, “The Function of the Jews in the Commercial Revolution,” in Povertà e ricchezza nella spiritualità dei secoli XI e XII (Todi, 1969), 273 8.

357

358 the middle ages: the christian world variations over time and space. All this has to be viewed in the context of Jewish demographics, especially the generally slight population numbers in most parts of Europe, which impinge directly on the economic impact that can realistically be attributed to Jews. In all regions of Europe there existed an interior Jewish economy geared to producing educational, religious, ritual, and even some material goods, as well as to providing internal community services. This “hidden” economy was operated by members of the poorer Jewish classes, male and female. Varying in extent, it was everywhere sizable in relation to overall numbers. To illustrate by one exceptionally well-documented example from Nuremberg, Germany, in the year 1489: its 15 licensed Jewish households of professional moneylenders, then with a total adult population of 76 registered males, included 10 private teachers and 9 male house servants, as well as an unknown number of maids.3 Only one household, that of a widow, had no hired help. In that year, 1489, the Nuremberg community also had in its pay a rabbi, a cantor, a beadle of the synagogue, a gravedigger and his wife who “washed the corpses and kept watch over them,” a baker, a cook, a butcher, a water carrier, a messenger, a horse groom, and a barber, and probably some more females in similar serving tasks. Further lowly occupations operating in that town’s market were those of a broker and a female hawker, as well as dealers in foodstuffs. In the medical profession, there were in Nuremberg midwives, male and female healers, and eye surgeons, all humble practitioners far removed from the elite of Jewish doctors who had attended kings, princes, and prelates all over Europe since the early Middle Ages. How representative is this sample of occupations stemming from the very end of the Middle Ages, a mere ten years before the city of Nuremberg decided that a continued Jewish presence, and specifically moneylending, was not in its interest?4 The sharp cleavage between moneylenders and serving classes, and nothing much in between in the way of other livelihoods, characterizes only one – albeit sizable – part of the European Diaspora: England during the entire lifespan of its Jewry, and, in the later Middle Ages, the realm of Ashkenaz, including the German Jews moving into Italy. In other regions and earlier periods, a different and more variegated occupational structure applied, as will be shown in the following. We shall start with the earliest instances of landholding, and go on to 3

4

M. Toch, “Nürnberg,” in A. Maimon, M. Breuer, and Y. Guggenheim, eds., Germania Judaica, vol. III/2 (Tübingen, 1995), section 5b. M. Toch, “umb gemeyns nutz und nottdurfft willen. Obrigkeitliches und jurisdiktio nelles Denken bei der Austreibung der Nürnberger Juden 1498/99,” in Toch, Peasants and Jews, no. XIII.

economic activities 359 review crafts, entrepreneurship, trade, credit, and other callings. The main divergence to arise is indeed between northern and central Europe on one hand, and the Mediterranean south on the other, but this is not a complete or rigid one. As time goes by (and the quality and quantity of source documentation steadily increase), the differences become less accentuated. AGRICULTURE AND LANDED PROPERTY

In 1957, Salo Baron wrote that “a full length monograph on the Jewish share in the development of the agricultural resources of the Iberian peninsula and the adjoining Italian and French regions should prove extremely rewarding.” In 1959, Bernhard Blumenkranz published evidence for the existence of “Jewish farmers and vine growers in early medieval Burgundy.” In 1960, Eliyahu Ashtor envisioned in Iberia a “body of Jewish peasantry,” “simple Jews,” “farmers who defended their rights most stubbornly.” For Ashtor, this held vital meaning: “As long as they were not compelled . . . the Jews never, any time or any place, showed a tendency to earn their bread as nonlaborers.”5 Does the documentary record bear out this eager assessment by three leading scholars of the twentieth century? The most substantial and unequivocal evidence for landed property – leases, sale deeds, and sharecropping contracts – sets in during the ninth/ tenth century in the Iberian Peninsula, in Italy – especially the south, and in southern and central France. Such direct documentation is almost totally lacking farther north, but responsa literature hints that landholding was in all probability substantial in tenth- to twelfth-century Ashkenaz, which was at that time mainly confined to the wine-growing regions of western Germany and eastern France. This was a period of renewed population growth, when investment in land and in agricultural production made eminent economic sense. In most places, by the eleventh – at the latest, by the twelfth – century, Jewish lands were being sold, or transferred by some other ways, into Christian hands. Disinvestment can be seen as a rational economic move that took advantage of the high level of land prices attained by then. It does not rule out ecclesiastical prohibitions and expropriation by secular lords, both explanations that have been offered for the process. However, this was not at all the end of landholding by Jews. In the High and late Middle Ages, in different regions of winegrowing 5

S. W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, vol. IV: High Middle Ages, 500 1200, 2nd edn. (New York, 1957), 316; B. Blumenkranz, “Cultivateurs et vignerons juifs en Bourgogne du 9e au 11e siècle,” Bulletin philologique et historique du comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques (1959), 120 1; E. Ashtor, The Jews of Moslem Spain (Philadelphia, 1992 [Hebrew edn., 1960]), vol. I, 267, 268, 271.

360 the middle ages: the christian world Europe and also in more distant places, they were yet again involved in agricultural concerns.6 Contrary to the widely held picture of an immovable rural world, one did not need to cling to the soil for generations in order to invest in this sector, especially in the suburban agricultural market economy in which Jews were mainly engaged. Rather, Jews managed to acquire and lease land anew and develop other procedures of agricultural investment – for instance, as financiers of wine production.7 By the same token, they would sell holdings or liquidate their engagement if required by changing economic or political conditions. In the ninth to twelfth centuries, landed possessions in all regions consisted mainly of small plots typically located in the suburbs of towns. The majority were vineyards, as in the Scroll of Ahimaaz, where Amittai ben Shefatiyah of Oria, ancestor of the writer, “one day went out to his vineyard and his estate [or “hereditary possession”].”8 Extant data for the size of vineyards shows they ranged from a ¼-hectare to 2 hectares, almost exactly the scope still prevalent today all over winegrowing Europe. There were also fruit gardens, olive and fig groves, and especially valuable single almond and mulberry trees. As for larger properties, one 12 kilometers distant from town appears in a lease contracted in 1003 by a Jew in Lucca, Tuscany. Clearly an economic enterprise, it consisted of two homesteads with courtyards, vegetable gardens, vineyards, olives, and chestnut trees. All this had previously been held by the lessee’s father and worked for him in a sharecropping arrangement by others, apparently non-Jews.9 There were also arable fields, and, in the countryside around Toledo, “white land,” fallow soil “that is not yet worked.” Larger estates in Spain were 6

7

8

9

A pick of a huge literature: A. Holtmann, “Jewish Settlement and Economic Activity in the Medieval Franche Comté: The Account Books of Heliot of Vesoul,” Jewish Studies 40 (2000), 69 82; A. Ducellier, “Les Juifs des Marches aux XIVe XVe siècles: sort commun et traits distinctifs de trois communautés (Ancone, Fano, Pesaro),” in C. Benayoun, A. Medam, and P. J. Rojtman, eds., Les Juifs et l’économique, miroirs et mirages (Toulouse, 1992), 68 71; M. Toch, “Economic Activities of German Jews in the Middle Ages,” in Toch, ed., Wirtschaftsgeschichte der mittelalterlichen Juden: Fragen und Einschätzungen (Munich, 2008), 181 210; M. A. Motis Dolader, “Régimen de explotación de las propie dades agrarias de los judios en el noroeste del reino de Aragón en el siglo XV,” Hispania 48 (1988), 405 92. For the halakhic complications arising from this engagement, see H. Soloveitchik, Principles and Pressures: Jewish Trade in Gentile Wine in the Middle Ages [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv, 2003). R. Bonfil, History and Folklore in a Medieval Jewish Chronicle: The Family Chronicle of Ahima’az ben Paltiel (Leiden, 2009), 308. V. Colorni, “Gli ebrei nei territori Italiani a nord di Roma,” in Gli Ebrei nell’alto medioevo, Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 26, 1 (Spoleto, 1980), 257.

economic activities 361 usually granted by rulers to Court Jews employed in their service. In contrast, smaller plots would frequently be handed down in the family or bought, sold, and exchanged in the land market. There were significant concentrations of Jewish property, but everywhere the lands owned by Jews intermingled with those of non-Jews. For instance, in a suburb of Barcelona, the vineyard of a Jew bordered on three sides on those of fellowJews. In a village about 10 kilometers southwest of Toledo, the vineyard of a non-Jew was surrounded in all four directions by vineyards belonging to Jews. In one village, near Granada, the holdings of one Jew were substantial enough for the whole place to be called after him.10 To what purposes was this landed property put? The most widespread use was clearly to supplement the household’s supply of wine. This accords with the need to invest Jewish labor to safeguard kashrut, the need for working hands at vintage time, and the nearby location of most holdings, as in a responsum by Gershom ben Judah “Light of Exile” of Mainz (c. 960–1028): “When the days of vintage came and he was at the gathering of the grapes, he went out there with his wife and left no one in his house except for one small daughter and a Gentile maid and wet-nurse.”11 Another function of landholding was social. In Iberia, Jews close to rulers flaunted their social standing, elevated lifestyle, and proximity to power by the possession of large estates, often given by the ruler himself. Other Jews clearly labored by the sweat of their own brow, as is revealed by a number of responsa and by Hebrew form letters for sharecropping contracts, in which both the owner of the holding and the laborer hired to work it were Jewish. There were thus Jews – not a great many – who depended for their livelihood entirely or mainly on agricultural pursuits. But the size, type, and location of holdings strongly suggest that, for most, such engagement was not the main occupation, but rather a subsidiary one. Altogether, the existence of a “body of Jewish peasantry” is difficult to establish, in France, Italy, or Iberia. What one can make out in Iberia, where the quality of source material is best, and occasionally also in France, are agricultural entrepreneurs. Some managed estates belonging to an absentee landlord, usually an ecclesiastical body. Others leased land for its produce and put vacant soil back into cultivation, usually by contracting with non-Jewish peasants and laborers 10

11

J. Miret y Sans and M. Schwab, “Le Plus Ancien Document à present connu des juifs catalans,” Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona 8 (1915), 229 33; P. León Tello, Judíos de Toledo (Madrid, 1979), vol. II, 9, no. 19; Isaac Alfasi, Responsa (Pittsburgh, 1954), no. 131. A. Grossman, “The Attitude of the Sages of Ashkenaz to Communal Rule,” Shnaton ha Mishpat ha Ivri [Yearbook of Hebrew Law] 2 (1975), 195 8.

362 the middle ages: the christian world to carry out the actual work. Yet others bought up and marketed agricultural produce – sometimes as a corollary to the working of the land, more often as a semi-commercial or fully commercial enterprise.12 Plots were continuously bought, sold, mortgaged, and willed away – in short, treated as a commercial commodity. Still, owners sometimes felt an attachment to their land, as in a query to Rashi: “And I was distressed that the estate [or ‘hereditary possession’ – in Hebrew, nahala] of my fathers should be dispossessed by the gentile.”13 For some, land and its income could bring a measure of security otherwise lacking in this commercially minded society, as in a Spanish query from the mid tenth century: “This man Hezron does not understand merchandise and knows not his way in negotiating deals; he should not be trusted with money so as not to lose it in trade, and his assets should not be invested with others in partnership as they would burden him with their losses; but it should be invested in landed mortgage so that he should enjoy the fruits.”14 Agricultural entrepreneurship was indeed a fitting means to apply a number of resources: the urban habitat and proximity to urban markets, the possession of know-how and of capital looking for profitable investment, and the demand stimulated by a growing population, economy, and polity in the later tenth and eleventh centuries. Jews participated alongside many others in this booming activity, which has been credited, for Barcelona, with having “established the bases for initial accumulation of capital, which facilitated the development of market-oriented production around the year 1100.”15 What appears, then, to have been distinctive about the Jewish place in the Mediterranean agriculture of the period was its flexible commercial or entrepreneurial character, alongside the much more traditional function of small-scale household production. We shall see below that, fittingly, agricultural concerns were also present at the dawn of Jewish moneylending. Outside this entrepreneurial/urban milieu, Jewish agriculturists did not fare well, as shown by the following two examples. In 1239/40, the southern Italian administration of Emperor Frederick II made plans to recruit Jewish settlers from Jerba, off the African coast. The purpose was to introduce to Sicily the know-how of date-palm cultivation, as well as indigo, henna, and 12

13 14

15

W. C. Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews (Philadelphia, 1989), 60, 115; A. Blasco Martinez, “La producción y comercialización del vino entre los judíos de Zaragoza (siglo XIV),” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 19 (1989), 405 49; E. Ashtor, “The Jews of Trapani in the Later Middle Ages,” Studi Medievali ser. 3, 25 (1984), 19. Rashi, Responsa, ed. I. Elfenbein (New York 1943), no. 240. A query to Moses ben Hanokh (d. c.965): J. Müller, ed., Responsen der Lehrer des Ostens und Westens (Berlin, 1888), no. 178. J. E. Ruiz Domenec, “The Urban Origins of Barcelona: Agricultural Revolution or Commercial Development,” Speculum 52 (1977), 286.

economic activities 363 “other various seeds which grow in North Africa and yet are not now seen to grow in Sicily.”16 To these prospective settlers, the status of “serfs of the chamber” was to be attached, at exactly the same time as that same ruler applied the same servile status to a large Muslim peasant population forcibly transplanted from Sicily to southern Italy. In late medieval Germany, exceptionally good sources have led to the discovery of a belt of small rural and semi-rural communities around the town of Frankfurt am Main and its key Jewish community.17 In addition to working small plots for their own provision, the main livelihood of these people was a combination of petty moneylending, the peddling of urban craft goods in the countryside, and the supply of rural products, including kosher meat and wine, to Frankfurt. Amongst these “village Jews” of Hessen, forerunners of the early modern cattle and horse dealers of fame, some were considered experts at fattening fine geese. This “art” (the word used by the sources) was highly appreciated by the counts, to the point that whole rural communities of Jews were forced to render yearly deliveries of this delicacy.18 Thus, even exotic expertise brought little advantage, but rather laid these Jews open to pressure and forced contributions. Agriculture, ostensibly the most “normal” of all occupations, was least likely to serve the minority as a lever for influence, but rather integrated Jews into the economic patterns of village society and thus into larger groups of the powerless and impoverished. CRAFTSPEOPLE, ENTREPRENEURS, PHYSICIANS

“The Torah is being fulfilled in Ashkenaz more than in other countries because they take interest from the gentiles and do not need to work in crafts, and therefore they have leisure to study the Torah.”19 From the pen of a late medieval German-Jewish talmudic scholar, this is one more selfcongratulation to stress the supreme value put on religious studies. Does it also indicate the absence of Jewish men and women making a living from crafts? Such humble people were the least likely to leave written traces of their existence, if only for their occupational indistinctness: many of them earned their living by various professions practiced simultaneously or alternately, as in a Hebrew autobiography of 1382: “I settled in Coblence 16

17

18

19

D. Abulafia, “The End of Muslim Sicily,” in J. Powell, ed., Muslims under Latin Rule, 1100 1300 (Princeton, 1990), 119 20. M. Toch, “Wirtschaft und Geldwesen der Juden Frankfurts in Spätmittelalter und Frühneuzeit,” in K. Grözinger, ed., Jüdische Kultur in Frankfurt am Main von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Wiesbaden, 1997), 25 46. U. Löwenstein, ed., Quellen zur Geschichte der Juden im Hessischen Staatsarchiv Marburg 1267 1600 (Wiesbaden, 1989), vol. II, 323, 469, 531; vol. III, 53. Joseph ben Moshe, Leket Joscher, ed. J. Freimann (Berlin, 1903), part I, 119, section B.

364 the middle ages: the christian world and served the community as cantor, kosher butcher, examiner (of food stuffs) and innkeeper.”20 Another reason is the insignificance of such mostly indigent persons as taxpayers: there was no reason to list them individually in the records. They became of interest to authorities only when perceived in policing terms, as undesirable elements. In late medieval central Europe, workers in crafts indeed made up only a small part of the Jewish population.21 Still, the range of crafts was quite broad and at least partly directed at a non-Jewish clientele; however, the numbers found were mostly in single digits. There were producers of bags and purses, belts, saddles, sheaths, maybe also of bellows, as well as furriers and cobblers. In textiles, there were weavers, dyers, tailors, and (female) producers of veils. In metals, one finds knife grinders and a number of sword cutlers and goldsmiths. Jews were also drawn toward somewhat artistic occupations, as producers of playing cards (among them a woman of Worms) and of dice; as illuminators, printers, and bookbinders. In Prague, there were a manufacturer of mousetraps, brewers, a distiller of spirits, a miller, a turner, and a bricklayer. Glazing, mentioned in eight different places, was apparently a Jewish profession. The highest concentration of crafts is found in Bohemia, while the German west has only isolated instances, most probably because of the hostility of craft guilds, which were much more powerful there. In other parts of Europe and other periods, more significant numbers of artisans are in evidence – for instance, in Reconquista Spain, where they formed a considerable part of the urban classes.22 Jewish craftsmen and craftswomen, some of them experts in coral-working, are found in substantial numbers in thirteenth-century Marseille, as well as in other towns of the French south.23 In southern Italy,24 Sicily,25 and Byzantium,26 Jews traditionally played a prominent part in specialized craft production, such as 20

21

22 23

24

25

26

I. Yuval, “A German Jewish Autobiography of the Fourteenth Century,” Binah 3 (1994), 79 99. This judgment is based on a huge mass of manuscript sources assembled over the course of the project Germania Judaica, III: M. Toch, “Die wirtschaftliche Tätigkeit,” in Maimon et al., eds., Germania Judaica, III/3, 2139 64. There is nothing comparable for earlier periods. Y. Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, vol. I (Philadelphia, 1978), 197 212, 424 5. E. Ashtor, “The Jews in the Mediterranean Trade in the Later Middle Ages,” Hebrew Union College Annual 55 (1984), 166; A. Cremieux, “Les Juifs de Marseille au moyen âge,” Revue des Études Juives 46 (1903), 45, 46, 72, 266. C. Roth, The History of the Jews of Italy (Philadelphia, 1946), 84 90; D. Abulafia, “Il Mezzogiorno peninsulare dai bizantine all’ espulsione (1541),” in C. Vivanti, ed., Gli Ebrei in Italia, Storia d’Italia (Turin, 1996), 13. D. Abulafia, “Le attività economiche degli ebrei siciliani attorno 1300,” in Italia Judaica V: Ebrei in Sicilia sino all’espulsione del 1492 (Rome, 1995), 89 95. D. Jacoby, “Silk in Western Byzantium before the Fourth Crusade,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 84/5 (1991/2), 462 7, 485 7.

economic activities 365 tanning, cloth-dyeing, silk and glass manufacture. In Gaeta in 1129, the townspeople wanted to secure their part in the profits of a dyeing establishment operated by Jews, as well as from “other of their craft.”27 King Roger II of Sicily forcibly settled at Palermo a good number of Jewish and Christian silk weavers seized during a raid on Thebes (1147). When negotiations opened a few years later, the Byzantine court asked only for its abducted Christian subjects, not for the Jews.28 Some twenty years later, the traveler Benjamin of Tudela found ten dyers in Brindisi – actually, all the Jews in that place.29 In 1231, Emperor Frederick II – or his southern Italian bureaucrats – devised a state monopoly over silk production, to be manned and handled almost exclusively by Jewish craftsmen and entrepreneurs.30 Once again, it was the classification as “serfs/slaves of the royal chamber” that counterbalanced special skills or possession of a market niche. Fifteenthcentury Palermo is another well-documented instance of this predicament, as well as of the Mediterranean crafts pattern. This large community exhibited a wide range of professions: there were sugar planters, much in demand in a period when the island’s sugar industry was undergoing a renaissance, and some were involved in oil production and, of course, viticulture. Artisan crafts included not just dyeing and tanning, but metalworking, carpentry, cloth production, and shoemaking. There were also Jewish tunny fishermen.31 Such a wide range of skills was cited by the local government as an argument against the expulsion decreed in 1492 by the Catholic kings of Spain, but it could not prevail against a decision taken far away on the Iberian mainland. There is thus no doubt about the existence of numerous artisans in the Mediterranean south, many of them textile workers. Still, nothing in the record warrants the bold statements with which research abounds – for instance, that: In Salerno, the Jews monopolized . . . the dyeing and weaving industries . . . In Amalfi, the manufacture of silk and woolen brocades and dyed cloths eagerly sought after, for they were considered to be equal to the finest Venetian wares was begun by Jews in the 10th century. At Catanzaro, long an important seat of industry, they are said to have begun silk manufacture about 1072.32 27

28 29 30 31

32

Codex diplomaticus Cajetanus, pars 1, ed. the Benedictine monks of Monte Cassino (1887), 240 2, no. 377. On the Thebes raid, see Jacoby, “Silk,” 462 3 and n. 54. Benjamin of Tudela, Itinerary, ed. and trans. Marcus Nathan Adler (London, 1907), 15. Roth, History of the Jews of Italy, 88 9, 87 8. E. Ashtor, “Palermitan Jewry in the Fifteenth Century,” Hebrew Union College Annual 50 (1979), 232 7; D. Abulafia, “Le comunità di Sicilia dagli Arabi all’espulsione (1493),” in Vivanti, ed., Storia d’Italia, 45 82, 69. Roth, History of the Jews of Italy, 86; E. Ashtor, “Gli ebrei nel comercio mediterraneo nell’alto medioevo (sec. X XI),” in Gli ebrei nell’alto medioevo, Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’aAlto Medioevo, 26, 1 (Spoleto, 1980), 423.

366 the middle ages: the christian world Entrepreneurs with technical expertise provide an intriguing chapter of occupational history.33 It opens with a reference by Ibrahim ibn Jacub, the Jewish traveler from Cordoba (before 970), to a salt refinery situated in Germany on the river Saale and worked by Jews. This allusion, outlandish as it might be, returns almost 300 years later, when a Latin source mentions at the very same place, near Halle on the river Saale, the Jewish member of a consortium engaged in salt refinery. In the southern French metropolis of Narbonne, from the tenth to the twelfth century, Jews owned and operated a good part of the salt-pits or salt lakes (étangs) in the town’s surroundings. In the same period, at least two clusters of water-driven flour mills were run in Narbonne by Jews. This too bore a marked commercial character, with shares and parts acquired and sold according to circumstances. A further object of entrepreneurship in the south of France and in Spain was the harvesting and marketing of kermes, a crimson dye-stuff for high-quality textiles obtained from the dried bodies of the females of a tiny insect – Kermes ilicis – that lives its entire life on an oak tree or shrub common in Mediterranean regions. Yet another enterprise was the ownership and operation of baking ovens – at least in two cases from France in partnership with non-Jews.34 In Spain, there were Jewish building contractors and, in an investment shared with the count of Barcelona, the holder of a monopoly over public bath-houses in the town. Southern France and Spain, with their significant Jewish populations (and excellent documentation), thus appear as focal points of Jewish entrepreneurship in the mobilization of local resources. Even so, the scope of such enterprises was limited, and it seems excessive to credit them with more than local significance. Yet another category included minters, moneychangers, tax farmers, and toll-collectors, and all sorts of administrative personnel and officials. Privileges granted to Jewish communities in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries included the license to change coin and deal in precious metals, a clause surely inserted upon insistence of the Jewish petitioners. Rulers were keen to develop their coinage and taxation, both as a source of income and as a symbol of sovereignty. They saw fit to employ Jews in official and semi-official positions, in southern France, in Germany, in eastern Europe, and most abundantly in both Muslim and Christian Spain. In Iberia, Jewish tax-collectors, administrators, and diplomats played for some time a considerable part in royal governments. On a more humble scale, one 33

34

For references for the following paragraph, see ch. 7 of Toch, Economic History of the Jews. Responsa of the Early Geonim, ed. David Kassel (Berlin, 1848), no. 123; Rashi, Responsa, no. 111.

economic activities 367 might mention an entrepreneur organizing agricultural development and settlement activities in the service of the bishop of Würzburg. Jewish minters and toll-collectors appear as patent fact in halakhic discussions of the twelfth/thirteenth centuries. Possibly these were the “secular dignities and public offices” to which Jews in Germany had been elevated, in clear violation of ancient church canons, as Pope Gregory IX complained in a letter to the German prelates in 1233.35 This heyday of Jewish officialdom was brought about by the convergence of two conditions: political fragmentation that shifted sovereign rights into the hands of local authorities; and the incipient bloom of Jewish moneylending, which made available the extensive capital necessary to farm tolls, customs, and taxes. Together, these conditions were to apply for a time in the principalities and kingdoms of Spain, southern France, and later Germany and Italy, but not in the much more tightly ruled kingdoms of England and northern France. The reverse side to this monetary surge was the development of the stereotype of the Jew as a counterfeiter of coins. In late medieval Germany, meticulous bookkeeping by princely and town administrations produces a rich harvest of information on the technical expertise of some Jews.36 Usually one learns of these individuals when they were rewarded: for disclosing the secrets of an unspecified “art” (in Frankfurt in 1454, this meant “the strange art” of blowing up fortifications); for the manufacture of guns, gunpowder, and other military equipment; for building mills and the model of a mill; for drainage work and the laying of pipes; for employment in minting, mining, and the working of precious metals. In 1455, one Michael served the landgrave of Kassel as an alchemist, apparently to satisfaction. Another practitioner of the occult was less lucky: having dabbled in Nuremberg in alchemy of silver and gold, he was branded on the forehead and cheeks and expelled from town. Such people led a mobile existence, moving from one place to the other, as migrants and at the invitation of rulers, even to localities where the Jews had previously been expelled. Mobility was especially characteristic of Jewish physicians. Before 821, a bishop, apparently of Salzburg, asked an acquaintance to send him “that Jewish or Slav doctor called N.”37 The letter was included in a collection of form letters, a clue that the call for such a doctor was perhaps not a single 35

36

37

S. Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century (Philadelphia, 1933) vol. I, 198 9. References for the following paragraph can be found in Toch, “Die wirtschaftliche Tätigkeit.” Karl Zeumer, ed., Formulae Merowingici et Karolini aevi, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH) (Hanover, 1882), 448.

368 the middle ages: the christian world occurrence. Jewish physicians attending Christian rulers, lay and ecclesiastic, became a fixed feature in Latin writings. Their proximity to the elite made them a convenient literary device for expressing different messages, for good and for worse. The Annals of Hincmar of Reims note for the year 877 the death of Emperor Charles II “the Bald”: “Charles, stricken by a fever, drank a powder, which his Jewish doctor Zedechias, whom he loved and trusted all too much, had given him to cure his sickness.” The tale was immediately taken up by two further chroniclers – however, with some reservation: “It is said; rumor has it.”38 Another literary use plays again upon the theme of proximity, when long and friendly discussions with a patron bishop culminate in the “good” Jewish doctor’s conversion.39 In one such tale, the Jew is presented as “most erudite in the art of physics, the best in computing, the most perfect in Hebrew letters and all the science of Judaism, and one who led a chivalrous lifestyle.” This sounds hyperbolic, but elevated social standing is indeed much in evidence with Jewish doctors in contemporary Spain, as well as with the ones who attended German emperors in the later Middle Ages. Of the latter, some were given honorary doctorates, and one was even ennobled – however, only after actually converting.40 By the High Middle Ages, real Jewish doctors have become a permanent fixture everywhere in Europe (as well as in the Islamic realm), both to cater for the elite and as humble surgeons, bonesetters, and oculists offering their skill in the market-place, as specialists in ophthalmology and dentistry, and as women practicing general medicine as well as midwifery. There were veterinary surgeons, but also one “blind baptised Jew, who dabbled in quack medicine” and was expelled from Frankfurt am Main in 1497.41 Between 1350 and 1520, over 160 Jewish physicians, surgeons, and other medical practitioners are actually known by name in Germany. Their real number might well have been larger. Significantly, they are also found in regions that by then had been altogether emptied of Jews. Within Jewish society, doctors apparently did not command much prestige. Eliezer ben Nathan of Mainz (c. 1090 to c. 1170) 38

39

40

41

The Annals of Saint Bertin, trans. Janet Nelson (Manchester, 1991), 202. The other chronicles are Annales Vedastini and Regionis chronica, in R. Rau, ed. and trans., Quellen zur karolingischen Reichsgeschichte (Darmstadt, 1969, 1960), vol. II, 292; vol. III, 252 3. R. Koepke, ed., Gesta episcoporum Leodiensium, vol. VII, MGH Scriptores (Hanover, 1846), 216; Georg Waitz, ed., Gesta Treverorum, vol. VIII, MGH Scriptores (Hanover, 1848), 195. M. Wenninger, “Zur Promotion jüdischer Ärzte durch Kaiser Friedrich III,” Aschkenas 5 (1995), 413 24. D. Andernacht, Regesten zur Geschichte der Juden in der Reichsstadt Frankfurt am Main von 1401 1519 (Hanover, 1996), no. 2896.

economic activities 369 attributes to the physician and the artisan the same level of nuisance inflicted on their neighbors by the constant coming and going of their customers.42 TRADE

Everywhere in Europe, and in every period of the Middle Ages, Jews had a part in commerce. Like moneylending, trade was not necessarily practiced by the greatest number, but its profits, like those of moneylending, placed Jewish communities as a whole in the higher income range. For sizable parts of European Jewry, this facilitated a comfortable living standard and enabled them to purchase legal independence from rulers. Does this commercial engagement make Jews into a “trading-nation”? Does it mean, as has been claimed by an almost unbroken consensus in scholarship, that Jews possessed an “ascendancy,” even a “supremacy” or “hegemony,” in the Mediterranean and continental trade of early medieval Europe, and especially in the slave trade?43 Privileged and protected by rulers, uniquely equipped by talmudic law, innate inclination, or the Diaspora experience of community organization and family ties, Jews are believed to have been the only ones able to bridge the borders between Christianity and Islam. Such views, which reflect nineteenth- and twentieth-century polemics, apologetics, and stereotypes, can today be discarded.44 They assume a system and purpose where none existed. They disregard the rich sources on non-Jewish merchants, conferring on the very few documented Jewish ones a weight and influence incommensurate with their still small population numbers and very limited spatial distribution across Europe. Wide-ranging conclusions have been drawn – sometimes made up – from an exceedingly thin documentary basis in Latin. By integrating the Hebrew record, one can arrive at a more convincing, if less glamorous, interpretation. As Ashkenazic Jewry developed from the tenth century onwards, commerce was the mainstay of its livelihood, in central and northern France as well as in western Germany. This was succinctly stated by Gershom ben Judah: “Because their [the Jews’] livelihood depends on their 42

43

44

Eliezer ben Nathan, Sefer Even ha Ezer, ed. S. Ehrenreich (New York, 1926), responsa no. 45. For the Mediterranean, the latest to state this conviction forcefully was Ashtor, “Gli ebrei nel commercio mediterraneo,” 406, 475. For continental Europe, out of a huge mass of writings, see R. Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1976), 60 2; A. Verhulst, “Economic Organisation,” in R. McKitterick, ed., The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. II (Cambridge, 1995), 508. I have developed this view in Toch, “Jews and Commerce,” and extensively in vol. I of Toch, Economic History of the Jews in Medieval Europe.

370 the middle ages: the christian world commerce/merchandise.”45 Movement of merchants was frequent, but took place mostly along local circuits and well-known itineraries between inland markets. Some traveled abroad, to and from Hungary, Poland, possibly also parts of Russia, but no intercontinental ventures involving Ashkenazic Jews are known of. Even so, these were hardy travelers; being on the move was their normal condition, as one of them explained in a legal argument: “I wished to take to the road, like all other men.”46 In their inventories, one finds very little of glittering Oriental treasures and nothing at all of the slave trade. A blend of staple goods and more costly merchandise was bought, transported, and sold: salt, wine, dyes, medicine, salted fish, cattle, hides and pelts, ready-made garments and textiles – including silk – gilded and copper vessels, and some precious metals. The customers were bishops and priests, in one case the treasurer of a bishop, affluent ladies including a queen of Hungary (the only royalty mentioned in the sources), magnates, and counts: in short, the upper classes. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, trade by Jews appears to have declined in northern Europe in favor of an ever-increasing engagement in credit operations. There is no evidence that they were directly barred from trade by intervention of Christian merchant guilds, as has been assumed for a long time. Rather, they were drawn out of trade by a set of new general circumstances: strong demographic growth, rapid urbanization, and the broad expansion of market ties. Under these booming conditions, the task of entrepreneur and merchant shifted from provisioning the aristocracy with small quantities of choice merchandise to financing and organizing the production and distribution of mass consumer goods. The servicing of such huge and growing systems – in size, complexity, and capital outlays far in excess of the earlier pattern – was beyond the resources of a numerically still tiny Ashkenazic Jewry. Physical conditions had changed too and the rising tide of religious enmity made the traveling Jewish merchant into an endangered species. Conversely, the same set of circumstances made the sedentary handling and lending of money increasingly attractive, providing, once more, huge profit margins. By the later Middle Ages, as moneylending increasingly turned into pawnbroking, the pattern changed again, giving rise to petty trade in forfeited pawns. As has been shown for Frankfurt and its surroundings, the Jews of that city supplied the itinerant trade carried out by rural Jews with a range of cheap goods of daily 45

46

The Responsa of Rabbenu Gershom Meor Hagolah, ed. Shlomo Eidelberg [Hebrew] (New York, 1955), no. 21. I. A. Agus, ed. and trans., Urban Civilization in Pre Crusade Europe (New York, 1968), 112. References for the following can be found in Toch, “Economic Activities of German Jews.”

economic activities 371 consumption, garments, metal vessels, and other household goods. In return, the rural Jews would supply their coreligionists of the urban center with foodstuffs, both for home consumption and for the market.47 In Italy, the few Jewish merchants on the record definitely did not participate in the thriving overseas trade of their cities of domicile. The most important mercantile centers, such as Venice and Genoa, did not allow Jewish residence at all, while the handful of Jews admitted in the bustling port of Amalfi were all textile artisans. For Muslim Spain, the Cairo Genizah is seen as evidencing a small but lively set of Jewish merchants actively involved in the Middle Eastern trade, as part of a network that was centered in Tunisia and Egypt and included Muslim Spain and Sicily. However, nowhere did they connect to and work in tandem with Jewish merchants from Christian lands, in Spain, in northern Europe, in Italy, or even in Byzantium. Thus, the greater numbers of European Jewish traders appear to have been active on the local and regional stage, rather than carrying out spectacular intercontinental ventures. One typical example might have been that of the Jew Salomon, who is reported around the year 993 to have met the abbot of the venerable monastery Saint-Victor of Marseille, while traveling the road with four asses laden with honey. The source, an edifying tale designed to show off the abbot’s sagacity, might be discounted as yet another pious invention. However, some 150 years later, in the very same region, a certain count had a substantial income from “the honey, cinnamon and pepper that he derives from the Jews.”48 Jewish trade activities in the south, including maritime ventures, appear to have continued in some parts, at least initially. By the thirteenth century, however, Jews in eastern Spain were clearly blocked from participating in the stormy expansion of the Catalan overseas trade.49 The Italian mercantile emporia – among which Venice has been thoroughly investigated – had two policies toward Jews and their economic activities: exclusion back at home, but a measure of cooperation in some islands of the Mediterranean, where the Italian masters employed native Jews as local agents.50 One can thus generalize: the initially prominent – albeit never 47 48

49

50

Toch, “Wirtschaft und Geldwesen der Juden Frankfurts.” B. Guéraud, ed., Cartulaire de l’abbaye de Saint Victor de Marseille (Marseille, 1857), vol. I, 106, no. 77; G. Saige, Les Juifs du Languedoc antérieurement au XIVe siècle (Paris, 1881), 12. Y. T. Assis, “The Jews of Barcelona in Maritime Trade with the East,” in Exile and Diaspora: Studies . . . Presented to Professor Haim Beinart [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1988), 257 83. D. Jacoby, “Venice and the Venetian Jews in the Eastern Mediterranean,” in G. Cozzi, ed., Gli Ebrei e Venezia (secoli XIV XVIII) (Milan, 1987), 29 63.

372 the middle ages: the christian world domineering – and then diminishing participation of Jews in the longdistance and luxury trade belonged to an increasingly outdated social and economic order of aristocracy. The astonishing feats of the Genizah merchants are not part of a European story. Since the twelfth century at the latest, Jews as traders had no intrinsic advantage and nothing particular to offer, surely nothing akin to the economics of scale wielded by urban Christian merchants who were backed in both north and south by guilds, city states, town leagues, and naval power. MONEYLENDING

One of the earliest extant responsa from France (toward the end of the tenth century) portrays a man busy “in the affairs of the archbishop of Narbonne, supplying his needs; and in the matter of the salt of the archbishop by which he earns income with much effort; exchanging his gold and silver; investing in merchandise; contracting with a junior partner; and lending money for interest.”51 A first aspect of credit concerns monetary operations between Jews. The basic problem was the need for venture capital and ready cash. The obvious solution, borrowing from fellow-Jews, ran into the stern biblical prohibition: “Unto a foreigner thou may lend upon interest, but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon interest” (Deuteronomy 23:20–1). In the Mediterranean south, the dominant mode of raising business capital, from fellow-Jews and non-Jews, was by mortgaging landed possessions and agricultural produce. In the north, where agricultural property was much more limited, a number of circumventions of the biblical ban came to be permitted by the halakhic experts. For longer-term partnerships in trade ventures, the legal instrument of ‘Iska was developed. Very similar to the Italian commenda contract, it guaranteed the sedentary partner a part of the profits in return for his investment, while the actual work was carried out by a junior partner traveling the roads. After much deliberation, the regular interest-bearing loan too was legalized, provided the subterfuge of a pawn and a non-Jewish intermediary were employed.52 The sheer amount of halakhic discussion is a conclusive pointer to the widespread need for ready cash, as is the ubiquity of partnerships. Of course, Jews mainly lent to and took interest from non-Jews. In the early period, the tenth and eleventh centuries, credit operations should 51

52

Responsa of the Early Geonim, no. 140. I have slightly reshuffled the order of sentences in the quotation. H. Soloveitchik, Pawnbroking: A Study in the Inter Relationship between Halakah, Economic Activity and Communal Self Image [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1985), 9 10, 25 81.

economic activities 373 mostly be seen as the by-product of the commodity trade. In this environment, chronically short of coined cash, barter, delayed payment, pawns put up as security until completion, and straightforward loans were all part and parcel of selling merchandise. Early moneylending was also intertwined with landholding and the traffic in agricultural produce. In central France of the mid tenth century, a good number of landed properties, small plots of vineyards, were mortgaged for two to three years to Jews by their gentile neighbors, as surety for small loans. In all cases, interest was to be paid in produce: a yearly quantity of new wine. This indicates the existence of a local low-end lending market in rural areas. It also speaks of trade in wine produced by non-Jews, a business apparently much less abhorrent to Jews than has been thought.53 Credit operations backed by landed property were, of course, also conducted with the well-heeled. All over Europe, moneylending to non-Jews fully came to the fore by the twelfth century. In England, Jews were solely engaged in credit from their first arrival in the wake of the Norman Conquest. In northern France, moneylending was important enough to color the very perception of Jews as usurers. Abelard (died 1142), in his “Dialogue of a Philosopher with a Jew and a Christian,” put a speech of vindication in the mouth of his Jew: “We are allowed to possess neither fields nor vineyards nor any landed estates, because there is no one who can protect them for us from open or devious attack. Consequently, the principal gain that is left for us is that we sustain our miserable lives here by lending money at interest to Gentiles.”54 In Germany, the move to moneylending was a long process, not completed, by all signs, before the mid thirteenth century. The sources shed little direct light on personal motives for borrowing money. For instance, there is no mention of the expenses incurred by Crusaders taking the cross, a matter frequently conjectured by historians to have plunged people into debt. In regard to kings, princes, prelates, and town governments, it is safe to infer that many loans were motivated by political necessity. Thus, in 1297, the archbishop of Salzburg needed money to redeem the valley of Gastein which one of his predecessors had pawned away almost three centuries earlier.55 In a complicated arrangement, he borrowed 600 silver marks from a consortium of one local Jew and two foreign ones. By the thirteenth century, there were already 53 54

55

Soloveitchik, Principles and Pressures. Peter Abelard, Dialogue of a Philosopher with a Jew and a Christian, trans. P. Payer (Toronto, 1979), 3. Eveline Brugger, “Sechs hundert marchen silbers, di er uns schuldich was um di Gastewn . . . Juden als Geldgeber des Salzburger Erzbischofs beim Kauf des Gasteiner Tales,” Salzburg Archiv 27 (2001), 125 34.

374 the middle ages: the christian world commoners amongst the patrons, and by the early fourteenth century they made up a significant part of the clientele. The largest numbers were burghers, and there were also peasants. The Hebrew customer-list of an anonymous Jew active in and around the Bavarian market town of Straubing from the years 1329–32 provides a cross-section of the more affluent society of the region: lesser nobility, burghers of towns and market-places, village priests, and – the largest group – peasants and rural artisans. A similar structure has been found in Perpignan in southern France, and will appear wherever sources are sufficiently detailed.56 Many of these humble customers did not borrow money to ward off destitution. The peasants around Straubing took out most of their loans in the fall – after the harvest was in and the pigs were slaughtered, when food was plentiful. If hunger does not account for recourse to borrowing, what, then, does? Significantly, much of the information on credit in the countryside – indeed, on early credit in general – comes from regions that specialized in viticulture. It has recently been suggested that viticulture and its regular need for money inputs provided the initial stimulus for Jews to move from trade to moneylending.57 By the later Middle Ages, people of the lower classes everywhere replaced the more affluent as the main clientele of moneylenders. In Bingen on the Rhine, a detailed inquiry was undertaken in the year 1427.58 In this town of 2,500 inhabitants, no less than 142 men and women were recorded as owing yet unpaid debts. Amongst them were a chaplain, a toll-official, and the daughter of someone called a lord. However, the vast majority were artisans and other poor people. There were altogether 606 still unpaid loans, amounting to a total of 2,270 Gulden, not an exorbitant sum. The arithmetic mean stood at 16 Gulden per borrower and 70 Gulden per lender. The average loan was rather small, running in most cases from half a Gulden to 10 Gulden, with only a small fraction above that sum. The people of Bingen thus had modest credit needs. For some of them, recourse to the moneylender was a rare or singular occurrence; for the majority, this was a routine matter. The prize goes to one man so insignificant to the clerk that his Christian name remained unrecorded, who borrowed a total of 8 Gulden in 49 transactions from 10 different Jews. This hierarchy of demand was matched on the supply side by a hierarchy of 56

57 58

M. Toch, “Geld und Kredit in einer spätmittelalterlichen Landschaft,” Deutsches Archiv 38 (1982), 499 550; R. W. Emery, The Jews of Perpignan in the 13th Century (New York, 1959), 64 5. Soloveitchik, Principles and Pressures. The source is a yet unpublished manuscript, first transcribed and utilized by Yacov Guggenheim, in Staatsarchiv Würzburg, catalogue number G 17337. My thanks to Yacov for his transcription.

economic activities 375 small, middling, and high-ranking financiers. At the lower end, there were the anonymous Jews of Bingen, their names unknown even to their customers: “the Jew,” “a Jew,” “in the house of the Jew.” At the top end, one finds a man like Jekel of Ulm, later of Nördlingen, Constance, and Nuremberg.59 He ran his business together with three sons and two sonsin-law. Between 1368 and 1402, he was active all over southern Germany, with family branches in Ulm, Constance, Strasbourg, and Reutlingen. For loans to an aristocrat, he received as pledge the town of Langenau and the domain of Albeck, both of which he subsequently sold, on credit, to the town of Ulm. Other customers were the town governments of Nuremberg, Augsburg, and Constance. In 1385, he headed by far the list of Jewish bankers whose assets had been seized in Nuremberg. Going by the lifestyle and status symbols displayed by many Jews, such as housing, servants, clothes, and the jewelry bequeathed in wills, moneylending afforded substantial rewards, at least to its top practitioners. Another clue is provided by the considerable taxes collected from Jews. It is exactly in the period when moneylending became a major occupation that the sources begin to speak of systematic taxation. The very first extant list of taxes levied by a German emperor on towns and their Jewries (1241) does not include the largest and fiscally most potent communities of Cologne, Mainz, Würzburg, and Regensburg.60 In the cities that were listed, Jews paid 13 percent of all the taxes raised, a highly disproportionate share compared to their population numbers. Apparently without causing problems of solvency, the Jewish tax yield in Frankfurt am Main grew eight-fold between 1241 and 1319.61 This astonishing fiscal capacity could not have been sustained without the high turnover of lending money against interest. At the same time, a system was developed, varying in detail but similar in purpose and method, to supervise Jewish lending. This brought together a number of functions: overseeing of interest rates for reasons of social policy; control over collateral, mainly landed property, to keep an eye on the politically critical movements of aristocratic estates; accounting access to totals of business volume for purposes of taxation; and, last but not least, the claim to outstanding debts when the Jewish lender, the king’s serf, had died and his or her estate escheated to the lord. As practiced time and again all over Europe, this meant that Jewish property – including the debts owned by Christians to the moneylender – was property of the king and could be expropriated, partly or wholly, from dead Jews or from living ones. 59 60

61

Maimon et al., eds., Germania Judaica, III, 1504 5. Jacob Schwalm, ed., Constitutiones et acta publica imperatorum et regum, vol. III, MGH (Hanover, 1904 6), 1 6, no. 1. Karl Bücher, Die Bevölkerung von Frankfurt am Main im 14. und 15. Jahrhundert. Socialstatistische Studien (Tübingen, 1886), 526 601.

376 the middle ages: the christian world Nowhere was the system of supervision as elaborate as with the English “Exchequer of the Jews” and its local branches, the “archae Iudeorum” or “registries of deeds.”62 But compulsory registration of credit operations is found all over Europe, be it with notaries, regular courts of law, or special officers. So are inquests into Jewish lending and Christian borrowing, undertaken by royal, princely, and town authorities alike. Instances of such investigations are found in England and in the French kingdom at the very beginning of the thirteenth century, and in the above-mentioned small German town of Bingen as late as 1427.63 In some places, inquests preceded decrees of expulsion. The whole machinery of supervision and control operated also vis-à-vis the customers of lending. Jewish bankers depended on the government, its agents, and its legal machinery to collect debts, recoup capital and interest, foreclose on collateral when the lender failed – in short, to employ the machinery of authority against the Christian borrower in order for the Jews to carry out their business. On the part of rulers, such assistance rendered created religious anxieties, and with some especially conscientious monarchs, such as Saint Louis of France, even deep feelings of guilt. It also laid authorities open to criticism and heavy pressure, especially when combined with accusations of corruption and the taking of bribes from the Jews. This is one pertinent reason for the steady worsening of the status of Jewish moneylenders. The ubiquitous employment of pawns as security gave rise to further tensions. To pawn ecclesiastical utensils endowed with the quality of holiness to the unbelieving Jews was increasingly felt to be sacrilegious. Little less fraught with difficulties was the privileged status granted to Jews (and Lombards) in regard to stolen goods. Civil authorities trod a thin line between the need to deter theft and the wish to promote the smooth performance of the market. Thus, it became accepted practice to allow the lender to swear that such pawns had been accepted in good faith as security, rather than acquired as cheap goods of doubtful provenance. Conversely, an increasing range of objects were prohibited as pawns: ecclesiastical utensils; goods whose wet or bloody condition suggested theft or robbery; the weaponry and armor of the members of urban militias; the buckets, axes, and shovels kept at different locations in town in case of fire; and a whole range of tools and raw materials essential for the livelihood of artisans. In short, accepting pawns as security could easily develop into pawnbroking, 62

63

H. G. Richardson, The English Jewry under Angevin Kings (London, 1960), 116 20, 135 60. Ibid., 167 8; Jordan, French Monarchy, 64 7 for the great inquests of the 1240s, see 145 6; G. Sivéry, “Le Mécontentement dans le royaume de France et les enquêtes de saint Louis,” Revue historique 545 (Jan. Mar. 1983), 3 24.

economic activities 377 a practice fraught with social problems, as was to become very clear in the later Middle Ages. A connected development was the late medieval shift in the make-up of the clientele: less aristocracy, less bourgeoisie, and many more people of the lower middle and lower classes. This was accompanied by an increasing vulnerability of Jewish moneylending to confiscation and legal obstruction, and a diminishing willingness of civil authorities to provide assistance to lenders. The transformation is clearly reflected in the nature of collateral, and indicates a darkening cloud of suspicion on both sides of the divide. The simple promise to pay, still found in the early decades of the fourteenth century in rural Bavaria, has practically disappeared from the record. Instead, there is a whole arsenal of anticipatory securities: warrantors to stand surety; the promissory note claimable in court; entering the particulars of debts in a notary’s register, a court book, or other registers kept by political authorities. The main collateral, the pawn or pledge, could take many different forms: designation to proceeds of tolls or tithes; landed property, like houses, fields, or vineyards – with some aristocratic debtors, even whole fortresses, villages, or manors; and, of course, the pawn, pure and simple: farm animals, merchandise, and stock. Most common were utensils of daily life, such as domestic furnishings, furniture, tableware, clothing, textiles, furs, jewelry, weapons, armor, tools, and books. There was an effort by lenders to counter the loss of legal security by turning to tangible assets, the sale of which would offset lost debts. This too was counteracted by the tendency of authorities – visible in many places in Germany, Italy, and Spain toward the end of the fifteenth century – to limit the lender’s disposal of forfeited pawns in favor of the debtor. They did so by enforcing the registration of debts, by allowing the debtor extended and repeated terms to redeem the pawn, and by compelling the lender to put up pawns for compulsory sale. Behind these measures, one senses the deep uneasiness and resentment that “Jewish usury” aroused. E C O N O M I C S A N D C H R I S T I A N –J E W I S H R E L A T I O N S

The existence of a quantitatively significant, poor, and increasingly destitute Jewish underclass was known to Christian society. But during the Middle Ages such knowledge had little impact on the way Jews were perceived. The prevailing view was dominated by the image, then the stereotype, of the “rich Jew.”64 It was only during the fifteenth century, and fully in the early modern period, that it was joined by a second inverted 64

R.Po chia Hsia, “Economic Structure and Religious Representations in an Anti Semitic Discourse,” in R. Po chia Hsia and H. Lehmann, eds., In and Out of the Ghetto:

378 the middle ages: the christian world stereotype, the itinerant peddler immortalized in the figure of the “wandering Jew.” Thus, the Jews a Christian would normally meet were indeed part of the possessing classes, merchants or moneylenders who, by definition, needed to be affluent, who lived and acted in a befitting manner and used the status symbols associated with it. These might be dwellings (stone houses, if only to safeguard valuable pledges); sumptuous attire, clothes, and jewelry, singled out for criticism very early; lavish festivities; servants. This created a profound dissonance in the minds of the majority society, for whom Jewry was to be the theological servant of Christianity and Jews were supposed to be ruled by Christians. Yet, in reality, there was any number of concrete situations that must have appeared to be the wrong way around, with Jews at the top and Christians at the bottom. The lender–borrower situation is the classical case of such dissonance, especially when it deteriorated, as happened frequently, into open conflict in court. It is not by chance that a special court ritual, the so-called “Jewish oath,” had to be designed to offset the wrong hierarchy of Jew as plaintiff and Christian as defendant.65 A similar hierarchy existed between Jewish doctors and Christian patients – again, a relationship built right into the occupational spectrum of medieval Jews. In addition to their religious role in the context of Christian belief and religious practice, Jews were tolerated to live in Christendom for a restricted range of economic functions. By the central Middle Ages, “normal” economic pursuits – trade, crafts, and agriculture – did not count anymore in the equation. This came about for both economic and cultural–religious reasons. In the course of the reshaping of the European economy during this period, Jews retreated from such occupations. They left fields where the minority had little chances of transforming economic pursuits into political assets. Instead, they concentrated in a number of related occupations central to the concerns of political authority, on whose support their very existence as a religious minority depended. Jews as handlers of money for some time created a high degree of political usefulness. Thus, fiscality produced a counterweight to religious, cultural, and social “otherness.” However, the very functions for which they were tolerated generated a new and highly eruptive type of resentment,

65

Jewish Gentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1995), 161 76. For the personal tinge of credit relationships, see W. C. Jordan, “Jews on Top: Woman and the Availability of Consumption Loans in Northern France in the Mid Thirteenth Century,” Journal of Jewish Studies 29 (1978), 39 56. For the court ritual, see M. Toch, “Mit der Hand auf der Thora: Disziplinierung als internes und externes Problem in den jüdischen Gemeinden des Spätmittelalters,” in G. Jaritz, ed., Disziplinierung und Sachkultur in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit (Vienna, 1999), 157 71.

economic activities 379 a heightened sort of “otherness.” For the first time in the history of Christian–Jewish tension, there was an economic agenda. Economic antiJudaism deepened as Jewish moneylending lost its high-ranking clientele to Christian bankers and financiers. Tax returns dwindled and their – that is, the Jews’ – usefulness for rulers and élites diminished, while at the same time their potential as a trigger and scapegoat for social unrest increased. By the late thirteenth century in England and France, and by the end of the Middle Ages in most other parts of Europe, Jewish money business had lost its bargaining power. Jews had become unable to convert their economic pursuits into political utility and influence.

chapter 14

COMMUNAL AND RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATION jeffrey woolf

Throughout the Middle Ages, Jewish life in the Diaspora was synonymous with the autonomous Jewish Community, the kehillah. The kehillah provided the Jews with much more than self-government. It enabled them to carve out psychological and sacred space for themselves, within a larger, usually hostile, population, with whom they often lived in close proximity. This space provided them with a defensive buffer, a refuge in the face of the ongoing deterioration of Jewish legal and economic status over the course of the High and late Middle Ages. The kehillah weakened the assimilatory dynamic that normally obtains between majority and minority groups. Finally, it facilitated the development of a rich inner life by which they could define themselves in terms of their religious and historical past, alongside their expectations of future vindication.1 Self-rule was critical for Jewish existence for a number of reasons. Medieval society, under both Cross and Crescent, lacked any concept of citizenship, much less equal rights for all residents. Both Islam and Christianity were rooted in the belief that each represented the sole path to salvation, as vouchsafed by God. Each aspired to bring all of mankind into its embrace, and dreamed of a world which was totally devoted to its, respective, Truth. Each envisioned a homogeneous society made up of believers. The presence of unbelievers in the Respublica Christiana and the Dar al Islam required some sort of accommodation, until their ultimate conversion. For Islam, the problem was less acute than it was for Christianity. While Islam taught that earlier revealed monotheistic religions had been superseded, they retained some residual validity. During his campaigns against the Jewish tribes in the vicinity of al-Medina, Muhammad had developed a basic policy for tolerating non-Muslims (Qur’an, sura 9, 29). These guidelines were later expanded and canonized in the so-called “Pact of Umar.” Essentially, in return for payment of extraordinary taxes and 1

R. Chazan, The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom (Cambridge, 2006).

380

communal and religious organization 381 acceptance of accentuated second-class status, monotheistic non-Muslims (Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians) were guaranteed physical security and freedom to worship and live in accordance with their laws and traditions. According to this protected status, known as the dhimma, as long as Jews stayed within their place, they could live their lives as they wished and their communal autonomy was respected. Jewish fortune under Muslim rule was very uneven, and frequently oppressive. However, the important point is that Jewish self-rule was built into Muslim religious and political theory. The challenge that the Jews (and Judaism) posed for Christendom was more immediate, more fundamental, and less easily negotiated. From the time of Paul, it had been a fundamental assumption of Christian thinkers and legists that, with the coming of Jesus, the Jews had fulfilled their historical mission and would now descend the stage and fade into oblivion. In addition, tolerating the presence of willful deicides in their midst would be problematic, at best. Hence, the continued toleration of Jewish populations within Christendom required both theological explanation, and the setting of policy. The former was ultimately supplied by Augustine of Hippo. In Civitas dei, he provided the theoretical basis for continued Jewish toleration by invoking a verse from the Book of Psalms (59:12): “Slay them not, lest my people forget” (Book 18, 46). According to Augustine, God was telling the Christians to suffer the existence of the Jews so that the latter may serve as living testimony to the events in the Gospel, or, as described by Jeremy Cohen, “living letters of the Law.” It was a deft interpretation on Augustine’s part. On the one hand, it acknowledged the problematic nature of Jewish survival (“Slay them not”). On the other hand, it provided a theological basis for tolerating them. Legal considerations provided another important contribution to Jewish communal existence. Medieval European society was largely corporate in structure. One’s identity, status, rights, and obligations were defined by the larger group (serf, cleric, nobleman) to which one belonged. With very rare exceptions, Jews did not fit into any of these frameworks and lacked formal legal standing. At the same time, local and regional rulers were usually most interested in regularizing Jewish residence in their domains, because of their potential for stimulating commerce, and as an open-ended source of tax revenues. They resolved this conundrum through the enactment of charters and privilegia which, as the word implies, were “private laws” that filled this void. These charters delineated the broad range of rights, prerogatives, immunities, and obligations of both the Jews and the authorities. For the Jews, the critical phrase in these charters was that which allowed them to live “according to their Law” (legem suam). This clause constituted

382 the middle ages: the christian world de facto recognition of the religious and juridical autonomy of the community. Thus, while the constitutional basis for the kehillah was set by governmental charter, its substance, and the texture of communal life, was firmly founded upon Jewish Law and lore. From the vantage point of medieval society, the community was, legally and socially, a corpus separatum. The kehillah provided social support for Jews, and was the key vehicle for socializing and instilling Jewish behavioral norms and values in its members and to its posterity. It created a spatial and psychological context that grounded the Jews emotionally, spiritually, and socially. It is commonly assumed that the structure and content of life within the kehillah were critical to the anomaly of Jewish survival over the course of the long years of European exile. It provided a separate, homogeneous social space in which Jews found relief from their ever-deteriorating status in Christian society. It significantly retarded the centrifugal dynamic that normally obtains between majority and minority groups, leading to extensive abandonment of the minority’s identity and religion. It also provided the structural context for the religious and cultural efflorescence of medieval Franco-German Jewry. Officially, the medieval Jewish community in Ashkenaz had no formal hierarchy. Decisions were by a majority vote of enfranchised males. The obvious question was, of course, who were these individuals? The answer varied from place to place, and from time to time. On the one hand, from the tenth century onward, wealthy merchants tended to exert significant authority within each community. This was only natural, since it was their commercial activity that was sought by the local authorities and which led the Jews to be invited to settle throughout Christian Europe. Other Jews, who accompanied them, were perforce subservient to them. In this regard, there is a marked similarity between the situation that obtained in the Jewish communities, and that which characterized the nascent Christian communes where merchants and other grandees dominated lesser artisans (to borrow terms from the Italian communes, the popolo grasso and the popolo minuto, respectively). In larger or more established kehillot, which hosted rabbinic scholars and academies, the situation was more nuanced. Through the High Middle Ages, there was a significant overlap between the mercantile and scholarly élites. There was no professional rabbinate among Ashkenazim until the fourteenth century, as accepting remuneration for teaching the Torah, or adjudicating Jewish Law, was deemed to be forbidden. Rabbis earned their living from commerce and were an intrinsic part of the governing oligarchy. Tensions between lay and scholarly leaders, while not unknown, were not a defining characteristic of communal life. This changed drastically from the mid

communal and religious organization 383 fourteenth century onward. Largely as a result of the reconstruction of Ashkenazic Jewry, after the Black Death (1348–50), a professional rabbinate was instituted. At the same time, toward the later Middle Ages, wealthier members seized ever greater power. This resulted in often vicious controversies between lay and rabbinic leaders in Germany, Austria, and Italy. Theoretically, all male members of the community were enfranchised to vote on legislative initiatives and matters of communal policy. This principle first emerges clearly in one of the earliest sources describing communal governance: a mid-eleventh-century responsum from the French town of Troyes. The Jews of Troyes approached two of the leading scholars of the Rhineland, R. Eleazar ben Isaac and R. Judah ben Meir ha-Kohen (both of whom lived in Mainz), with a difficult case of communal discipline which touched upon the very basics of communal authority and conduct. One of the questions that they posed was: in “the case of small communities such as ours, where the ‘lesser ones’ hearken to the ‘great ones’ . . . do we need to ask their opinion?” In other words, while universal enfranchisement implicitly obtained, the dynamics of broad dependence upon the wealthier members of the kehillah effectively guaranteed that the popolo minuto could be presumed to defer to the popolo grasso. That dependence underlay the very right of residence of the non-merchant population. Communal charters were granted by the authorities to these more powerful elements, and others were offered residence upon their sufferance. Furthermore, this contingent form of citizenship was frequently backed up by resort to an institution known as the “Settlement Ban” (herem ha-Yishuv). According to the terms of herem ha-Yishuv no one ˙ could ˙settle in a community without explicit permission. All of this allowed the more powerful elements to ensure their dominance. It is true that, from the twelfth century onward, the lower strata of the community did start to assert themselves. The subsequent institutional history of Ashkenazic communities, until the end of the Middle Ages, was characterized by tensions between theoretical universal enfranchisement and the reality of oligarchic power. The autonomy that characterized the medieval Ashkenazic kehillah affected its relations with other communities. Our earliest records, which go back to the late tenth century, indicate that it was an accepted fact that no community was permitted to interfere in the internal affairs of another. The only exception was in the event that one community was in flagrant violation of Jewish Law (which, in a profoundly pious population, was essentially irrelevant). Otherwise, no community could force its will on another. This rule held even in cases where Jews in hamlets, who were economically and religiously dependent upon larger communities, were not obliged to assist the latter in times of extraordinary distress.

384 the middle ages: the christian world At the same time, a strong bond of mutual concerns, shared values, and fate led these ostensibly atomized communities to significant combined activity in the common interest. Periodically, communities would meet to decide upon joint action in time of crisis, or to enact ordinances to address matters of common concern. In many cases, these were advanced at the initiative and/or with the support of the leading rabbinic scholars of the day (e.g. R. Gershom ben Judah Me’or ha-Golah, Rashi, R. Jacob Tam, and R. Meir of Rothenberg). These were, however, only considered binding if they were ratified by each community separately. Legislation that traditionally bears the name of R. Gershom Me’or ha-Golah (d. 1029) was known simply as “The Ordinances of the Communities” (takkanot hakehillot). Similarly, there were a series of legislative acts that were simply known as “The Ordinances of ShUM” (takkanot ShUM), after the three great Rhenish communities Speyer, Worms, and Mainz, which sponsored them (1196). Many of these ordinances, however, effected far-reaching, even revolutionary, changes in Ashkenazic religious and communal life. Among these were the famous ban on polygamy, the sanctity of private correspondence, protection of women from arbitrary divorce, regulation of the rights of an individual to appeal a court verdict, and provisions for universal education. These acts of legislation continued through the High and late Middle Ages. In time, many became a permanent part of Ashkenazic legal tradition. As already noted, the kehillah was far more than a basis for legal status and religious self-rule. It embodied the group’s values, socialized its members to internalize them, and fostered the cohesion that survival in a hostile environment required. Put differently, its physical boundaries limned its “sacred geography,” and its institutions provided the “sacred canopy” that enveloped its members. From the early tenth century, medieval Ashkenazim described themselves as being part of a “Sacred Community,” or Kehillah Kedoshah. This ˙ phrase was not simply a pious mode of self-reference. It conveyed to its members two profound messages. Each community constituted an undifferentiated, organic whole, and was an extension of the larger body politic of the Jewish People. In addition, by extension, it embodied the highest ideals of Judaism and instilled those ideas in its members. A good way of approaching these overlapping messages is by examining the process by which Jews were separated from the community: excommunication (nidoi or herem). ˙The power of herem was due to several factors. To begin with, there were ˙ the terrifying curses and imprecations that were rained down upon the head of the malefactor. Equally terrifying, though, was the belief that a ban separated the individual both from the kehillah, and “from all the members

communal and religious organization 385 of the Exile.” It transformed its object into a non-person. He could not be called to the Torah or discharge any ritual actions on behalf of the community. Even when present in the synagogue, he was not included in a prayer quorum (minyan). If he slaughtered an animal, its meat was deemed non-kosher. If he touched wine or baked bread, it was forbidden to others, as if they were the “bread of gentiles and the wine of [idolatrous] libation.” He was shunned socially. No one was allowed to come within 4 square cubits of him. And, since his legal status was conditional upon his membership in the kehillah, unless he actually converted to Christianity, he was consigned to legal limbo. Herem was a living death. ˙ Viewed more broadly, excommunication possessed even deeper significance. Declarations of herem are marked by the repeated emphasis that the decree was undertaken˙ by “the entire community” kol ha-kahal). In other ˙ the community who words, it was not simply the individual members of were casting a member out. It was the kehillah, as an undifferentiated whole, that did so. The kehillah transcended the character traits and failings of its individual members, and embodied the values and virtues of the Torah. It was experienced as an extension of a larger reality, Kneset Yisrael, itself the (semi-)mystical embodiment of the totality of the Jewish People. The perception that the community represented an undifferentiated whole, irrespective of its absolute numbers, underlay its basis in Jewish Law. Talmudic tradition had provided an essentially contractual basis upon which communal authority may be based: “The townspeople are also at liberty to fix weights and measures, prices, and wages and to inflict penalties for the infringement of their rules” (T. Baba Metsia 11, 23, and BT Baba Batra 8b). Communal life, then, would be based upon collective decisions. This model was extensively invoked, and implemented, by medieval Spanish authorities, such as R. Solomon ben Aderet (Rashba; 1235–1310) and R. Isaac ben Sheshet Perfet (Rivash; 1328–1408), when they were called upon to define the nature of communal authority in Iberia. Ashkenazic tradition, from our earliest records, adopted a totally different and unexpected model for its governance: that of a rabbinic court (bet din). Thus, in the middle of the eleventh century, when the Jewish community of Troyes asked the sages of Mainz about the source of communal prerogatives, the latter replied (Sefer Kol Bo, no. 142): All Israel is obligated to compel and to force one another to set him upon the truth, upon the law and upon God’s statutes and His teachings. And we find this [borne out] in the Torah, in the Prophets and in the Hagiographa. It is written in the Torah (Deut. 17, 9): “And you shall come to the priests the Levites, and to the judge that shall be in those days etc.” And it is written (ibid. 16, 8): “Judges and officers shall you appoint thee in all your gates . . . [and they shall judge the people with honest judgment].” This teaches that the officers receive the reward due the

386

the middle ages: the christian world

judges, and the reward of each is equal. In the Prophets, as it is written (Jud. 2, 18): “And the Lord was with the judge.! In the Hagiographa, as it is written (Neh. 13, 25): “And I contended with them, and cursed them.”

This answer is, at first blush, a non sequitur. The Jews of Troyes had asked for an explanation of the theoretical bases for communal governance. Yet the rabbis replied with a string of citations dealing with the dignitas, prerogatives, and authority of established rabbinical courts. This answer is difficult to understand. Courts are generally either subsidiary elements of a communal structure, or represent parallel jurisdictions. Why, then, would one base the legitimacy of a community’s authority on a basis as limited as that of a court? This conundrum led both Avraham Grossman and Haym Soloveitchik to the conclusion that there was a deeply rooted tradition among Franco-German Jews that it was the court that projected its authority upon the community and determined its parameters of action. Yet courts are manned by learned individuals. True, many of the more important communities in France and Germany were headed by men of scholarly attainment, even great scholarly attainment. Nevertheless, it was obvious that many members of the smaller communities did not fill even the minimum requirements to serve as judges. Apparently, such niceties were irrelevant for medieval Ashkenazic Jews. Their sacred communities embodied the institution of the bet din. The fact that oft-times minuscule, not particularly learned, communities described themselves in such grandiloquent terms was not just a function of their need to anchor their activity in traditional legal categories. It expressed the deep-seated selfimage that characterized all Ashkenazic communities. The kehillah was believed to be imbued with sanctity, which derived from the immutable covenant between God and Israel. Holiness was attained and expressed through the observance of Jewish Law and lore. Franco-German Jews aspired to a religious ideal that encouraged extraordinary religious gestures (Rashi, Ex. 22:29 s.v. kodesh). They evinced a pronounced tendency toward legal stricture in˙ religious observance. The sources reflect a clear tendency toward the cultivation and adulation of supererogatory Pietism (perishut) and, not infrequently, of outright asceticism. The Torah, and its study, stood at the apex of Ashkenazic religious values and national self-awareness. This emphasis resonates throughout Rashi’s Bible commentaries which reflect the basic values of the community for which he wrote. Already, at the start of his Bible commentary, Rashi declares that “[The world was created] for the sake of the Torah,” and that the world’s continued existence depended upon Israel’s acceptance thereof (Rashi, Gen. 1:1 s.v. Bereshit and 31 s.v. yom).

communal and religious organization 387 Jews in medieval Franco-Germany took their study obligations very seriously. At an early age, sons were introduced to the study of the Pentateuch, with instruction placing special emphasis upon the completion of the weekly Torah portion. Bible instruction was accompanied by exposure to rabbinic interpretations – from the twelfth century on, through Rashi’s Bible commentary. In this way, the child was not only exposed to the basic elements of Jewish religious literacy. He was instilled with the most cherished values of the Ashkenazic community, which Rashi carefully coded into his writings. It was assumed that every male Jew was obligated to dedicate specific hours to Torah study. Ongoing involvement in the study of Torah by all members of the community was a serious communal concern. Thus, the ordinances of the combined communities of Speyer, Worms, and Mainz (takkanot ShUM; 1220) dictated that “every man should set aside a definite time for study, every day. If he is unable to study Talmud, he should read the Bible, the weekly portion or the midrash, according to his ability. He who does more and he who does less are equally valuable, so long as his intentions are for the sake of Heaven.” Those who were unable to study on their own might gather at public lessons in the synagogue on the Sabbath, where the weekly Torah portion or Ethics of the Fathers (Avot) might be expounded (Mahzor Vitri sec. 424). There were, of course, those who did not study at all, and this rule implies as much. Nevertheless, there was a regnant assumption that a person’s individual awareness and daily schedule were limned by Torah study. Women’s education, on the other hand, was informal, mimetic, and uneven in its extent. Prayer was the second pivot of medieval religiosity and an equally central factor in the texture of communal life. Rabbinic Judaism maintains a delicate balance between spirituality and law, between charisma and norm, and between prayer and study. Medieval Franco-German Judaism is often perceived to have emphasized the latter over the former. It is true that, from the twelfth century onward, representatives of the Tosafist School of talmudic analysis advanced the idea that practically exclusive emphasis upon the study of the Talmud represented the highest form of spiritual activity. Nevertheless, throughout the Middle Ages, prayer vied with Torah study for primacy. The individual’s day was framed by the morning and evening synagogue services, which all were expected to attend. Thus, like their Christian neighbors, their daily rhythm revolved around their liturgical schedule, and created a sacred rhythm to the day. Worship was practiced as a primarily communal obligation, even when a minyan was unavailable (and the uniquely public portions of the liturgy could not be recited). This

388 the middle ages: the christian world is indicated by a responsum of R. Isaac of Dampierre (quoted in Hagahot ha-Maimuniot, Hil. Tefilah, 8 no. 1): Ri [= R. Isaac] was asked about one who took a vow . . . forbidding his fellow from entering his home; and the synagogue is in his house. Can he permit the prohibi tion [engendered by the vow] to go to pray in the synagogue, even though there is no minyan in the city, even with the one who was foresworn? He replied: “It appears to me that this is a matter of a mitzvah [and therefore allowed]. Certainly, this is true when there, periodically, is a minyan; but even when there is never a minyan, it is a mitzvah to include him in worship. Let them go to the House of God as a group. Since they set there a place for their prayers they will better be able to position themselves for prayer and to direct their prayers to their Heavenly Father. In this way, they [fulfill the requirement to] all the more pray in a set place, since they pray in a place that they set aside exclusively to pray. As a result, he can annul his vow in order to go to the synagogue to pray with his fellow. For a person’s prayer is heard in the synagogue. Isaac b. Samuel.

Group prayer was an independent value (“in order to go to the synagogue to pray with his fellow”), “even when there is never a minyan.” A fortiori, though, prayer with a minyan was an even more valuable obligation, and medieval Ashkenazim went to extraordinary (and sometimes questionable) legal lengths to ensure its existence. The Ashkenazic sense of community was rarely stronger than when it gathered for prayer. It was not by chance that Ashkenazic Jews instituted the recitation of a special prayer for the community, at the apex of the Sabbath morning service, following the reading of the Torah, when one could assume maximal attendance in the synagogue. This prayer asked that God’s blessing be bestowed upon “this sacred community, and those in every location.” As opposed to all other parts of the liturgy, it was recited by the precentor while facing the community. This drove home the point that “the entire congregation is holy, and God is in their midst” (Perushei Sidur ha-Tefilah la-Rokeah, II, 561). Since communal prayer was central to the individual’s sense of belonging, and the spiritual well-being of the community as a whole, serious efforts were made to ensure that as many members as possible participated. The thirteenth-century authority R. Isaac ben Moshe of Vienna was asked whether a layman could acquire the honor of carrying the Torah Scroll to and from the Ark, in return for a charitable donation, where this dignity had previously been the sole prerogative of the precentor. R. Isaac argued that the precentor had no presumptive right to this (or any other) synagogue honor. He observed that “in such a case, it is relevant to say (Prov. 14:28): ‘The King’s Glory is found in a multitude of the People.’” Conceptually, as noted earlier, the community at prayer melded into an organic whole and subsumed the individual. If one arrived at the

communal and religious organization 389 synagogue late, he was instructed to immediately join the community, in situ, and skip over all of the intermediary prayers. If an individual was unable to pray with the community (e.g. due to illness), he was instructed to coordinate his prayers with those of the kahal, so that he could take advantage of the special “hour of grace” that devolved upon the world when the community gathered in worship. Even the appearance of nonparticipation was to be avoided. Mahzor Vitri (Secs. 35 and 47) asserts: “One who enters the synagogue and finds the congregation standing, should stand as well. If they are seated, he should also sit, lest he appear to be separating himself from the community.” Communal worship, per se, was of a totally different character. The Talmud had already made a definite distinction between “private prayer” (tefilat yahid) and “communal prayer” (tefilat ha-tsibur). The central prayer of˙ the liturgy, the ‘Amidah or Shemonah ‘Esreh, is recited twice, first individually and then out loud by the prayer leader. It was commonly agreed that, for purposes of the repetition, the congregation melded into an undifferentiated whole. Thus, the prayer of this integrated community was the effective equivalent of the communal sacrifices that were offered in the Temple in Jerusalem, on behalf of the Jewish People, as a whole. It was widely believed that God’s Presence in-dwelled in the Synagogue, much as it did in the Holy Temple. The equation of the Synagogue with the Jerusalem Temple was central to Ashkenazic Weltanschauung, and impacted upon a wide range of laws, customs, and beliefs. Thus, for example, contrary to the overwhelming majority of rabbinic authorities, Rashi (and others) asserted that, when the priests bless the people in the synagogue, one must not look at them, as the Divine Presence materially hovers over their hands, as it did in the Temple (Rashi, Megilah 24b s.v. Kohen). However, God’s Presence was not only a function of the synagogue, per se, but of the presence of a minyan. The twelfth-century exegete R. Ephraim of Bonn referred to the biblical verse (Ex. 29:45) “And I will dwell among the children of Israel, and will be their God.” The verse originally referred to the Tabernacle in the desert. However, Ashkenazic commentators highlighted the idea that the Tabernacle was simply a means for the desired end of God causing his Presence to dwell among his chosen people. More frequently, in this and related connections, Ashkenazic writers invoked a verse from Psalms (82:1): “God stands in the congregation of God.” This, in turn, invoked a well-known talmudic passage (Berakhot 6a): It has been taught: Abba Benjamin says: A man’s prayer is heard only in the Synagogue . . . Rabin b. R. Adda says in the name of R. Isaac: How do you know

390

the middle ages: the christian world

that the Holy One, blessed be He, is to be found in the Synagogue? For it is said: “God stands in the congregation of God.” And how do you know that if ten people pray together the Divine presence is with them? For it is said: “God stands in the congregation of God.”

Clinching the point, we encounter a ubiquitous quote, which is not found in our texts of the Talmud: “R. Yohanan said: A man’s prayer is heard only with the community.” As one scholar has noted, “the community was the necessary condition for realizing a degree of Divine immanence that was otherwise impossible.” As a result of all of this, communal solidarity was not only a practical necessity. It was a religious imperative. Practically, individual Jewish legal standing was determined by membership in the kehillah, and communal payment of taxes to the local rulers was a sine qua non of continued protection and residence. Failure to bear one’s share endangered the political and economic viability of the whole. As a result, separating oneself from the community threatened the kehillah both physically and spiritually. Hence, in commenting on the Mishnah’s exhortation not “to separate yourself from the community,” R. Jacob ben Samson exhorted his brethren first to “participate with them in the governmental yoke,” and only then “in fasts and in prayer” (Mahzor Vitri, sec. 425). Individual attempts to bypass communal organization, and to strike separate deals with the Christian authorities, plagued Ashkenazic communities throughout the Middle Ages, and beyond. Individuals who did so were deemed to be traitors (moser) and informers, and every means available to the community was used to punish them. It is important, though, to highlight the axiological expression of R. Jacob’s comment. Proactive participation in mutual aid and charity (tsedakah) was an essential expression of belonging to a sacred community. ˙The weekly blessing of the kahal kadosh highlighted the obligation of its members to ˙ wayfarer and alms for the poor.” The types of provide “bread for the support were many. Jewish poor and unemployed were to be given priority when one searched for workers. Alms were collected on a regular basis, and those who refused to pay their fair share were condemned as “abandoners of the community” (poresh min ha-tsibur), precisely as defined by R. Jacob ben Samson. More broadly, it was axiomatic among medieval Ashkenazim that their behavior must conform to high moral standards (Katz, 1960).2 They constantly invoke the verse: “The remnant of Israel shall do no iniquity, nor speak lies, neither shall a deceitful tongue be found in their mouth” 2

J. Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance (New York, 1960).

communal and religious organization 391 (Zeph. 3:13). Thus, R. Shimon ben Isaac extols the community gathered together for a wedding (Piyute R. Simon ben Yitshak, 187 lines 70–4): By leave of the remnant of the Holy People here assembled, Full of mitzvot as a pomegranate, their business dealings are honest. They do and they compel others, with the fear of God, to be faithful And they are careful to fulfill every mitzvah that comes their way. They are called the “children of the Living God,” and were chosen As His portion [my translation JRW].

While the ideal might often have been observed in the breach, the presumption of communal piety is highly instructive. Over and over, talmudic commentators and legal decisors explain that there can be no presumption of deceit or malfeasance, because “the remnant of Israel shall do no iniquity.” Hence, the community developed remarkable institutions whose purpose was to ensure the prevention of injustice. The most notable of these was the right of an injured party to halt (or, even, prevent) the conduct of communal worship, until he was satisfied that he would receive a hearing. In light of the considerable importance that Ashkenazim attributed to communal worship, this license is striking. The fact that it was actively enforced says much about the communal self-image and its sense of moral rectitude. That moral rectitude was rooted in a self-aware posture of Imitatio dei. As Rashi notes, “I will make myself like Him and adhere to His ways.” Unmediated awareness of God’s Presence seems to have filled the sacred space of the kehillah kedoshah. An indication of this is provided, once again, ˙ “The Lord stands in the congregation (‘edah) of God; by the verse (Ps. 82:1): in the midst of the judges does He judge.” Rabbinic tradition had invoked this verse in several, distinct connections. In line with the simple meaning of the verse, ‘edah was taken to refer to a court, whose just deliberations are blessed with God’s presence (Rashi, Ps. 82:1, under e-lokim). Rashi’s Bible commentary suggests that the idea that God’s Presence in-dwells among judges had special valence among medieval Ashkenazim. Thus, when the Bible states (Gen. 18:1) that “God appeared to [Abraham] in the Plains of Mamre, while he was sitting at the entrance of the tent at the heat of the day,” Rashi comments that Abraham “wanted to rise [when] G-d said to him, ‘Sit, and I will stand, and you will thereby teach your descendants that I am destined to stand in the assembly of judges while they remain seated,’ as it is said: ‘God stands in the assembly of judges.’” Rashi’s remark is puzzling, because the verse poses no real textual difficulty. It would, therefore, appear to be educational in nature. Rashi may have sought simply to express his view of the authority of local rabbinical courts, and their religious kerygma. On another occasion,

392 the middle ages: the christian world he had gone as far as asserting that one who took an oath not to obey a communal decree had sworn in vain, as he had “sworn to revoke a commandment [of the Torah]” (Teshuvot Hakhmei Zarefat ve-Lothair, no. 24). In other words, obeying a community decree was a biblical obligation, on the order of hearing the Shofar on Rosh Hashanah and observing the Sabbath. In addition, this and other comments significantly broaden the expanse wherein the Shekhinah was felt to dwell. In this Bible commentary, God’s Presence hovers over Jews whenever a court is in session. The upshot is that, since the Shekhinah is present whenever a court convenes, and the kehillah was an extension of a bet din, God’s Presence is present in the community, per se, whenever it occupied itself in study, prayer, and judgment or communal administration. In a word, the limits of the Shekhinah’s in-dwelling were co-terminous with the boundaries of the kehillah, as the latter was part of an organic whole, the living metastasis of Kneset Yisrael.

chapter 15

SCHOOLS AND EDUCATION ephraim kanarfogel

INTRODUCTION

The claim that virtually every Jewish male in medieval Europe was literate in Hebrew (and could read the prayer-book) is vastly overstated. Nonetheless, many did receive at least a rudimentary education in Jewish texts and traditions, and some were able to engage in the study of Torah on more advanced levels.1 Indeed, the prodigious literary productivity of leading medieval talmudists, halakhists, and biblical scholars in both southern and northern Europe suggests that a great deal of study (and educational training) was taking place. And yet, identifying sources within the rabbinic corpus (and in other forms of medieval Jewish literature) that focus essentially and specifically on the educational process and its infrastructure is difficult at best.2 It is almost as if medieval Jewish scholars in Christian Europe were so engrossed in their studies that they did not have the time (or the inclination) to write about how they were trained. Moreover, determining how widespread the

1

2

See, e.g., E. Kanarfogel, “Prayer, Literacy and Literary Memory in the Jewish Communities of Medieval Europe,” in R. Boustan, O. Kosansky, and M. Rustow, eds., Jewish Studies at the Crossroads of History and Anthropology (Philadelphia, 2011), 250 70. The education of women was very uneven, and occurred only on an individual basis, within a limited number of families and homes. See, e.g., Ivan Marcus, “Mothers, Martyrs and Moneymakers: Some Jewish Women in Medieval Europe,” Conservative Judaism 38, 3 (1986), 34 45; and Judith Baskin, “Some Parallels in the Education of Medieval Jewish and Christian Women,” Jewish History 5 (1991), 41 51. A notable exception is the educational blueprint called Sefer Hukei ha Torah. As we shall see below, however, the disputed provenance of this document, and the additional problem of whether it reflects a utopian aspiration or a practical educational system that was actually in operation, limits its usefulness as a historical source. The Cairo Genizah, on the other hand, yields a rich cache of education related documents and descriptions for the medieval Muslim world. See, e.g., Moshe Sokolow, “Jewish Education in the Muslim World in the Middle Ages,” in Marina Rustow, ed., Cambridge History of the Jews, vol. V (Cambridge, forthcoming).

393

394 the middle ages: the christian world more advanced levels of education were (with any degree of precision) is also not an easy task.3 Given the relative paucity of sources, and the need to utilize the sources that are available as effectively as possible, this treatment of medieval Jewish education will be organized by region. Although there are occasionally significant differences between the various time periods within the Middle Ages that must be noted, discussion of the educational theories and practices in individual regions over time, and use of the available sources from different periods in tandem with each other, often yields a more complete picture. We will begin with Spain and move northward. Southern France (Provence and Languedoc), which was geographically and culturally proximate to Spain, often adhered to Spanish educational conventions. At the same time, its methods of talmudic study often pointed northward to Ashkenaz (northern France and Germany), where we will conclude our survey. Comparisons between south and north will further allow us to clarify the points of uniqueness in the approaches of each area. ELEMENTARY AND HIGHER EDUCATION AND TORAH STUDY IN SPAIN

In the Jewish communities of Spain, parents were expected to develop good character traits and acceptable social behavior in their young children, even before the age of 5 or 6 when more formal educational training began. Indeed, Christians throughout medieval Europe noted the extent to which Jews taught modesty and purity of speech (in addition to religious precepts) to their very young children,4 just as they noted the strong commitment that Jews had to the education of all of their children.5 3

4

5

See E. Kanarfogel, Jewish Education and Society in the High Middle Ages (Detroit, 2007), 11, 15 19. We shall limit our remarks here to disciplines that were part of the Jewish educational curriculum throughout Europe, such as talmudic, halakhic, and biblical studies. Thus, for example, the framework in which Jews in Spain and Provence learned techniques for studying and writing general philosophy (or secular poetry) will not be discussed. See, e.g., G. D. Cohen, ed., A Critical Edition with a Translation and Notes of The Book of Tradition (Sefer ha Qabbalah) by Abraham ibn Daud (Philadelphia, 1967), editor’s introduction, xvi xxviii; and David Berger, “Judaism and General Culture in Medieval and Early Modern Times,” in J. J. Schacter, ed., Judaism’s Encounter with Other Cultures (Northvale, NJ, 1997), 61 94. See, e.g., the formulations by R. Shem Tov Ibn Falaqera (published by A. M. Habermann, in Qovez ‘al Yad 11 [= (n.s.), 1, 1936], 82); and R. Menahem ha Me ’iri (in his commentary to Psalms 22:6); R. Menahem ibn Zerah, Tsedah la Derekh (repr. Jerusalem, 1977, fol. 32a (1:3:14); Sefer ha Berit le R. Yosef Kimkhi, ed. F. Talmage (Jerusalem, 1974), 26: Hagahot Rabbenu Peretz to Semag, fol. 3a; M. Gudemann, Ha Torah veha Hayim, 1:89 90; and Kanarfogel, Jewish Education and Society, 39. See Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1952), 78, and R. W. Southern, Medieval Humanism and Other Studies (New York, 1970), 11.

schools and education 395 The detailed structure of communal government and management that emerged in Christian Spain from the late twelfth century onward suggests that the educational services for elementary-level students in that region were formally organized.6 Indeed, the community as the hirer (or supervisor) of elementary-level teachers, or melamdim, is found in the writings of several Spanish rabbinic authorities (and in Genizah documents as well). Thus, for example, R. Meir ben Todros ha-Levi Abulafia (Ramah, 1165–1244) penned the following comment on a talmudic passage which delineates the responsibilities of a city to hire melamdim: “We derive from here that the community must appoint teachers in every city . . . [Moreover,] their salaries must be paid by the community. This is best, because it allows the children of the poor to learn in the same manner.”7 Writing at the turn of the thirteenth century, R. Bahya b. Asher of Zaragoza stresses that the leaders of each community must make sure that schools for young children are established in every town and city. They will be punished if they fail to do so, because “the essence of Torah [study] must take place during one’s youth.”8 Nonetheless, Yom Tov Assis has argued that, despite the stated requirements for structured elementary education within the communities of medieval Spain, the system did not always yield the desired results in practice. On the economic side, although there were schools made available by the communities, the wealthier members often did not send their children to these schools, rendering them, at least partially, the province of the less affluent. There was no systematic concern for educating those who were poor, although there is evidence for individuals like Joseph ha-Kohen of Tortosa, who dedicated his home in the Jewish quarter as a studium (“study center”) for poor children. He stocked this place of study with quite a number of books, provided a large sum of money for continued maintenance and support of this institution, and appointed a special administration to oversee it. However, this institution (and others like it) was outside the direct control of the community and the duly appointed communal leadership. For the most part, the extensive funding provided 6

7

8

See, e.g., Shalom Albeck, “Yesod Mishtar ha Kehillot bi Sefarad ‘ad ha Ramah (1180 1244),” Zion 25 (1960), 85 121; Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain (Philadelphia, 1978), vol. I, 212 36; vol. II, 21 4, 35 73, 120 30, 259 70; A. A. Neuman, The Jews in Christian Spain (Philadelphia, 1942), vol. I, 19 59, 112 46; and Y. T. Assis, The Golden Age of Aragonese Jewry (London, 1997), 67 160. See Yad Ramah le Bava Batra (Warsaw, 1882), ch. 2, sec. 58. See also Ramah’s collection of responsa, Teshuvot Or Tsadikim (Warsaw, 1902), #241, and Bernard Septimus, Hispano Jewish Culture in Transition (Cambridge, MA, 1982), 12, 112, 124. See Bahya’s Kad ha Kemakh in Kitvei Rabbenu Bahya, ed. C. Chavel (Jerusalem, 1970), 432.

396 the middle ages: the christian world for education in Spain came from individual donors, rather than through communal funds or initiatives.9 Although the parents were often the ones to hire melamdim for their children, the contracts in Spain between the parents and the teachers were set forward in formal documents that were written in the vernacular (and often notarized), and typically consisted of three elements: the schedule or curriculum of study; the period of study; and the compensation. The duration of this type of arrangement was often for a year at a time, and the subjects taught were designated as “Hebrew letters” and “the Torah of Moses,” as well as “Jewish law” and “Talmud.” There are references to contracts between wealthier Jews and tutors that are more expansive, as well as discussion concerning less wealthy parents who could not meet the terms of the contract that had been executed. In at least one instance, indigent parents offered to serve the tutor in various ways in exchange for his teaching their son. Some communities, however, did appoint special teachers to instruct the poorer children, and these teachers were paid from communal charity funds (hekdesh). There are also instances in thirteenth˙ century Castile where the community as a whole (not just the parents of the children in question) paid the teacher’s salary. In order to strengthen the effectiveness of the educational process, a number of Spanish communities in the fourteenth century (in both northern and southern Spain) established educational collectives (havurat Talmud Torah) that essentially managed funds that were earmarked˙ for educational purposes. These havurot were directed and managed by individuals who were leading members˙ of the community; indeed, R. Judah, son of R. Asher ben Yehiel (Rosh), became involved in one such effort, and encouraged others to do˙so. Monies for education were collected from those who were granted membership in these leadership groups, and funds were also raised from assigning ‘aliyyot to the Torah. Some havurot controlled buildings in the ˙ Jewish quarter that could be used as schoolhouses, or as sources of income (derived from providing lodging and from other uses), which could be added to the funds available for Jewish education. The havurat Talmud Torah in ˙ Zaragoza received the approbation of the Crown, although it was not considered part of the official leadership structure of the Jewish community. By the early fifteenth century, the communities themselves sought to provide and to regulate educational services for all children.10 9

10

See Assis, “Jewish Elementary Education in Christian Spain (13th and 14th Centuries): Communities versus Charitable Sources,” in R. Feldhay and I. Etkes, eds., Education and History [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1999), 147 9. See ibid., 150 6. See also Assis, “’Ezrah Hadadit u Se’ad bi Kehilot Yisra’el bi Sefarad,” in H. Beinart, ed., Moreshet Sefarad (Jerusalem, 1992), 259 63, 276 9.

schools and education 397 On the advanced levels as well, Spanish Jewry favored a more formalized (and community-based) educational system. A number of responsa authored by leading rabbinic authorities in Spain (including Rosh, following his arrival there in 1304–5) and R. Solomon ibn Adret (Rashba, d. c.1310) demonstrate that the Spanish communities favored a series of aggressive enterprises that involved the lending of funds by these institutions to Jews even at fixed rates of interest (with the profits to be put back into the institutional coffers), to provide funds to support Torah study, and even to support study by non-indigent students. Similarly, we find instances of people who donated vineyards or set up trust funds to allow Torah study to be supported perpetually, using the sums that were generated each year. Moreover, efforts were made in several Spanish communities to tax their members in order to support yeshiva students.11 Heads of academies in Spain had long received generous stipends from the community in order to maintain their academies and to defray, or even to eliminate, the financial burdens of their students. When Samuel ha-Nagid (d. 1056) indicated that he would support all of those who wished to make Torah study “their profession” (toratan umanutan), he did not specify the age or stage of development that a student had to achieve in order to be eligible. Just as Samuel provided texts for the various students who needed them, he was apparently prepared to sustain mature scholars as well as budding ones. To be sure, it is difficult to identify the precise point at which a yeshiva student entered the realm of professional scholarship, when he could receive money from the community (or from individuals) not merely because he was a student of an academy, but by virtue of his own status as a dedicated, mature talmudic scholar. Indeed, as inheritor of the legacy of the Geonim, whose academies developed extensive systems of support and fundraising (as well as general organization), Andalusian Jewry was predisposed to providing support for its accomplished scholars. Jewish communities in Spain continued to do so throughout the Middle Ages, despite Maimonides’s well-known and strongly held position that Torah scholars who chose not to work for their livelihood, but to live on the salaries provided by willing benefactors, were profaning the name of God. Maimonides’s older Andalusian contemporary, R. Abraham ibn Daud, refers to important scholars who were

11

See, e.g., Teshuvot ha Rashba, 1:669, 3:291, 4:64, 5:249; the responsum of Nachmanides (d. 1270) published in S. Assaf, Sifran shel Rishonim (Jerusalem, 1935), 101 (#68); and Teshuvot ha Rosh, 3:13, 7:4, 59:5. See also Y. D. Galinsky, “Halakhah, Kalkalah ve Ideologiyah be Beit Midrasho shel ha Rosh be Toledo,” Zion 72 (2007), 387 419.

398 the middle ages: the christian world supported by patrons, and to talmudic scholars and rabbinic judges who received salaries from their communities.12 R. Judah ben Barzilai of Barcelona (c.1100) provides talmudic justification for these practices. Moreover, he maintained that communal support for both rabbinic judges and scholars is both prevalent and obligatory.13 Although Spanish halakhists of the thirteenth century were sensitive to the Maimonidean position that a rabbinic scholar should derive his sustenance from secular pursuits (and a scholar who was able to do so without significant difficulty should indeed pursue this path), they advised members of the community to identify and to support those scholars who needed help in order to continue to study seriously and in an uninterrupted fashion, as well as those who needed support in order to maintain their academies. The nuanced approach of Rabbenu Yonah of Gerona (d. 1263), which preserved the Maimonidean ideal only in a very limited way, appears to reflect this dichotomy as well, although at one point Rabbenu Yonah writes simply that an individual who wished to further the study of Torah should “come to the aid of rabanim and talmidim who study for the sake of Heaven. He should contribute toward the support of scholars, so that they will remain in his city and study Torah because of him.”14 All of the aforementioned Sephardic halakhists, however, including Maimonides, approved of the granting of tax exemptions to qualified scholars. Ramah and R. Asher ben Yehiel (in a responsum addressed to ˙ a Spanish community) granted tax exemptions even to those rabbinic scholars who had professions (that generated some income), but still devoted significant amounts of time to their studies. According to Ramah, a rabbinic scholar was exempted by the Talmud from paying taxes “not because of his poverty but because of his Torah [knowledge].” Although there were Spanish communities that did not grant tax exemptions to scholars who were not devoted exclusively to study, the fact is that some form of exemption was the norm in Sephardic communal and intellectual life.15 12

13 14

15

See Abraham Ibn Daud, Sefer ha Qabbalah, trans. G. Cohen (Philadelphia, 1967), 66, 70 1, 74 7, 80 3. See also Neuman, The Jews of Spain, II, 64 5; Teshuvot ha Rashba, 1:386, 2:260. See Jacob b. Asher, Arba’ah Turim, Hoshen Mishpat, sec. 9. See Igeret ha Teshuvah, ed. B. Zilber (Bnei Brak, 1968), 22 3; Perush Rabbenu Yonah ‘al Sefer Mishlei (Tel Aviv, 1963), 41 (10:15), and 69 (14:4); R. Yerocham b. Meshullam, Toledot Adam ve Havvah (Venice, 1553), fol. 17a (2:1, citing Rabbenu Yonah); and E. Kanarfogel, “Compensation for the Study of Torah in Medieval Rabbinic Thought,” in R. Herrera, Of Scholars, Savants and Their Texts (New York, 1989), 135 7. See I. Ta Shma, “’Al Petur Talmidei Hakhamim me Misim Bimei ha Benayim,” 313 16, and B. Septimus, “Kings, Angels or Beggars: Tax Law and Spirituality in a Hispano Jewish Responsum,” in I. Twersky, ed., Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature

schools and education 399 Similarly, the appointment of rashei yeshiva and communal rabbinic leaders, in both Muslim and Christian Spain, was in the hands of the communities. The ketav minoi and ketav takanta, found in R. Judah ben ˙ instruments for these proceBarzilai of Barcelona’s Sefer ha-Shetarot, were dures, and payments for rabbis and heads of academies were connected to their appointments.16 Despite the fact that the granting of semikhah (“ordination”) in Spain might have been briefly suspended between the times of Rif (d. 1103) and of his leading student, Ri Migash (d. 1141), a professional rabbinate, whose members (including rabbis, judges, and heads of academies) were officially appointed and funded by their communities, existed in Sepharad throughout the Middle Ages.17 Advanced talmudic academies in Spain, like the academies of the Babylonian Geonim, were named after and known by the community that housed and supported them, and most directly benefited from them. In addition, the leading academies in Spain were significantly larger than their Ashkenazic (Tosafist) counterparts, and were located in structures and settings that were owned and maintained by the community.18 These disparate developments may be explained by the fact that the communities in Spain were keenly interested in ensuring that the dedicated class of talmudic scholars among them be perpetuated, in order to continue to regulate matters of Jewish law and custom. Since outstanding scholars who could train students thoroughly were not to be found in abundance, Spanish communities established extensive means of support and wellstructured institutions to encourage capable students to develop and hone their abilities at the feet of qualified masters, and to foster additional scholarship. In Ashkenaz, however, where high-level scholarship was perceived as the norm, as we shall see, the communities did not feel the need to maintain formal structures and practices (or scholarly privileges and regulation) in order to aid and to protect their scholars and students.19

16 17

18

19

(Cambridge, MA, 1979), 315 27. Within medieval Ashkenaz, only Sefer Hasidim expresses a view similar to that of Ramah and Rosh. See Kanarfogel, Jewish Education and Society, 95. See Judah b. Barzilai, Sefer ha Shetarot, ed. S. Z. H. Halberstam (Berlin, 1898), 131 2. See Neuman, The Jews in Spain, II, 86 91; Albeck, “Yesod Mishtar ha Kehillot bi Sefarad,” 114 21. See Mordechai Breuer, “On the Typology of the Western Yeshivot in the Middle Ages” [Hebrew], in I. Etkes and Y. Salmon, eds., Studies in the History of Jewish Society in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods (Jerusalem, 1980), 45 55; Maharam: Teshuvot, Pesukim u Minhagim, ed. Kahana, III, 134; and Kanarfogel, Jewish Education and Society, 66 7. See Kanarfogel, Jewish Education and Society, 64 5, and Ta Shma, “’Al Petur Talmidei Hakhamim me Misim Bimei ha Benayim,” 317 20. On the training provided in Spain for biblical and grammatical studies, philosophy, and science, see e.g., Abraham ibn

400

the middle ages: the christian world JEWISH EDUCATION IN PROVENCE, OCCITANIA, AND LANGUEDOC

The educational configuration within southern France was similar to the situation in Christian Spain, although there are a number of significant differences as well. There are references to scholae inferiore (petites écoles or ha-midrash ha-qatan) in Provençal cities. On the basis of other sources as well, some have posited that these terms are evidence for the existence of structured (or formal) elementary schools that were regulated (and funded) by these cities and communities.20 R. David Kimhi (d. c.1235), the prolific Provençal biblical exegete, describes aspects of communal involvement in the educational process in a letter penned to R. Judah Alfakar (and preserved in Abba Mari of Lunel’s Minhat Kena’ot): ˙ ˙ Our homes are generously open to all wayfarers who seek rest, there are those who study Torah day and night and those who support the poor anonymously and constantly. There are also among us those who dedicate books on behalf of poor children who would not otherwise have them and they pay the cost of instruction (sekhar limud) in Scripture and Talmud (ba-mikrah uve-Talmud).21 ˙

The Hevrat Talmud Torah was one of four or five aid societies that were ˙ established in Perpignan.22 On the more advanced levels, stipends were frequently granted to students at Provençal yeshivot. Benjamin of Tudela describes this funding as it was distributed in a number of Provençal locations, most notably in Lunel: “The students who come from distant lands to study the Law are taught, boarded, lodged and clothed by the community, so long as they attend the house of study.” Benjamin also notes that, at the academy of Posquières, the academy head, R. Abraham ben David (Rabad, d. 1198),

20

21

22

Ezra, Yesod Mora (repr. Jerusalem, 1958), 1 3 (ha sha’ar ha rishon = ed. Y. Cohen [Jerusalem, 2002], 63 77); Profiat Duran, Ma’aseh Efod, ed. Jonathan Friedlander (Vienna, 1865), 41; Nahum Sarna, “Hebrew and Bible Studies in Medieval Spain,” in R. D. Barnett, ed., The Sephardi Heritage (New York, 1971), 323 66; and Berger, “Judaism and General Culture in Medieval and Early Modern Times.” See Jean Régné, “Étude sur la condition des juifs de Narbonne,” Revue des Études Juives 58 (1909), 98; Arye Grabois, “Écoles et structures socials des communautés juives dans l’Occident aux IX XII siècles,” in L. C. Rust, ed., Gli Ebrei Nell’alto Medioevo (Spoleto, 1980), 937 62; Grabois, “Les écoles de Narbonne au XIII siècle,” in Marie Humbert Vicaire and Bernhard Blumenkranz, eds., Juifs et judaïsme de Languedoc (Toulouse, 1977), 141 57; and the discussion in Simcha Assaf, Mekorot le Toledot ha Hinukh be Yisra ’el, ed. S. Glick (Jerusalem, 2002), vol. 1, 737 8. See Assaf, Mekorot, II, 165). Cf. Frank Talmage, R. David Kimhi: The Man and His Commentaries (Cambridge, MA, 1975), 14 16. See Teshuvot ha Ran, #1, 75; and cf. Assis, “Jewish Elementary Education,” 150 4.

schools and education 401 covered (from his own money) the expenses of “anyone who did not have the necessary funds (mi she’ein lo le-hotsi).” On the one hand, these subsidies must have been rather extensive, since they were designed to pay for “all [the students’] needs,” in the words of Benjamin. On the other hand, these subsidies were only extended to those students who were needy. However, the descriptions of the practices for other Provençal academies that were maintained by the communities in which they were located (rather than by wealthy individual scholars like Rabad) do not refer at any point to what the students could or could not afford. Thus, in Lunel, stipends were extended to all students, so that their studies there would not cost them anything.23 While often headed by leading scholars, the established academies at Béziers, Marseille, Montpellier, Lunel, and Narbonne were known and identified in Provençal texts of the period primarily by their locale. Indeed, it is possible to trace (as but one example) at least four generations of scholars at Narbonne, who headed the well-established academy there from the late eleventh century through the twelfth. Provençal rabbinic literature through the twelfth century designates rabbinic courts as yeshivat zekenim and academies as yeshivat talmidim. Indeed, one who held the title of˙ rosh yeshiva in Provence was almost automatically appointed as the head (or as a member) of the rabbinic tribunal in that city.24 Although there is little explicit information about tax exemptions for scholars, a passage in Qalonymus ben Qalonymus’s Even ha-Bokhan suggests that fairly extensive tax exemptions were offered, similar to the practice in Spain.25 Indeed, it appears that the well-developed scholarly organization of the Geonic academies had an impact in Occitania, just as it played a role in Spain.26 The level of study in the Provençal academies appears to have been quite high. Although Provence tended to point mostly south (to Spain) with respect to educational organization, there were a number of curricular and methodological aspects for which the direction of influence was different. 23

24

25

26

See M. N. Adler, ed., The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela (London, 1907), 3 5; B. Z. Benedikt, “Le Toledotav shel Merkaz ha Torah bi Provence,” Tarbits 22 (1951), 86 9, 93; I. Twersky, Rabad of Posquières (Philadelphia, 1980), 25. See also the studies cited below in n. 74. See I. Ta Shma, “Seder Hadpasatam shel Hiddushei ha Rishonim la Talmud,” Qiryat Sefer 50 (1975), 334; Twersky, Rabad of Posquières, 24; Bendedikt, “Le Toledotav shel Merkaz ha Torah bi Provence,” 86 7, 103 4; and Shlomo Pick, “The Jewish Communities of Provence until the Explulsion of 1306” (Ph.D. thesis, Bar Ilan University, 1996), 306 n. 15, 315 19. See Even ha Bohan, ed. A. M. Habermann (Tel Aviv, 1956), 56; and I. Ta Shma, Halakhah Minhag u Metsi’ut be Ashkenaz, 1000 1350 (Jerusalem, 1996), 255 (n. 11). See, e.g., Twersky, Rabad of Posquières, 216 26; and Neuman, The Jews of Spain.

402 the middle ages: the christian world Like those of the Geonim, the talmudic and halakhic works of R. Isaac Alfasi and later Maimonides penetrated quickly and effectively into Provence, and, from the mid twelfth century on, a struggle ensued as to whether the Talmud should be studied in its entirety to serve as the ultimate source of Jewish law, or whether it was sufficient (and indeed more productive) to work primarily with the abridged Talmud that had been created, in effect, by Rif in his Halakhot Rabbati, or with the highly concentrated corpus of Jewish law gathered in the Mishneh Torah of Maimonides.27 As Israel Ta-Shma has conclusively shown, however, leading Provençal talmudists of the twelfth century whose works were linked to these Sephardic anchors, such as R. Zerahyah ha-Levi Ba’al ha-Ma’or and Rabad of Posquières, were also quite familiar with the methods of Rabbenu Tam and other northern French Tosafists, and made significant use of this learning in a number of different contexts.28 Moreover, the Provençal teachers of Nahmanides (and others among their colleagues) chose to travel north to ˙ with Ri of Dampierre and other Tosafists rather than to remain in study Provence, or to travel immediately to Spain.29 Although all of these issues remained fluid during the thirteenth century,30 the tendency of several leading scholars in Provence to engage in the study of the less practical tractates in Seder Kodashim (and elsewhere) also reflects an intellectual kinship ˙ Ashkenaz, as we shall see; in Spain, the “three Talmudic or relationship with orders” (Mo’ed, Nashim, Nezikin) were studied almost exclusively.31 The leading Provençal ˙talmudist in the late thirteenth century, R. Menahem ben Solomon ha-Meiri (1249–1316), provides some suggestive ˙ 27

28

29 30 31

See, e.g., I. Ta Shma, Ha Sifrut ha Parshanit la Talmud, vol. I (Jerusalem, 1999), 192 4, 208 16. See ibid., 202 6; and Ta Shma, Rabbenu Zerahyah ha Levi Ba’al ha Ma’or u Bnei Hugo (Jerusalem, 1992), 206 12. Note that, while Ibn Daud barely refers to the Tosafists in his Sefer ha Qabbalah (ed. Cohen, 88 90), the anonymous, late twelfth century Provençal addendum to Sefer ha Qabbalah is aware of several important rabbanim in northern France. See Arthur Zuckerman, A Jewish Princedom in Feudal France, 768 99 (New York, 1972), 386; and Aryeh Grabois, “Ha Keronikah shel Almoni mi Narbonne,” in Proceedings of the Sixth World Jewish Congress (Jerusalem, 1973), vol. II, 83 4. See I. Ta Shma, Kneset Mehkarim (Jerusalem, 2004), vol. II, 118 21. See Ta Shma, Ha Sifrut ha Parshanit la Talmud, vol. 2 (Jerusalem, 2000), 145 58. See, e.g., Yaacov Sussmann, “Rabad on Shekalim? A Bibliographical and Historical Riddle” [Hebrew], in E. Fleischer, Gerald Blidstein, and Bernard Septimus, eds., Me’ah She’arim: Studies in Medieval Jewish Spiritual Life in Memory of Isadore Twersky (Jerualem, 2000), 131 70; E. Kanarfogel, “The Scope of Talmudic Commentary in Medieval Europe,” in S. L. Mintz and G. G. Goldstein, eds., Printing the Talmud (New York, 2005), 43 52; and Kanarfogel, “Talmudic Studies,” Chapter 22 in this volume.

schools and education 403 insights into the curriculum of the talmudic academies in this region, while also arguing for some different educational emphases. After composing a work of unabridged talmudic analysis (his Hiddushim, of which only portions have survived), Meiri composed his Bet˙ ha-Behirah, which is a deft combination of interpretational analysis, together with˙ systematic halakhic presentation. Meiri notes that Maimonides had produced the “perfect code” in his Mishneh Torah. The problem surrounding this work, however, is that, because it was composed and positioned to become a central work of study, this caused rabbinic scholars to abandon the study of the Talmud, a development that was viewed by many as unacceptable. Therefore, Meiri sought to incorporate the most attractive features of Mishneh Torah in a work of interpretation that followed the order of the Talmud. By means of his unique sobriquets, Meiri refers to leading rabbinic scholars from the Maghreb and Andalusia, from Franco-Germany, from Languedoc, and from Catalonia. He also deals with a number of historical issues in talmudic interpretation (and halakhic decision-making), such as the relatively small amount of Geonic material that survived to his day (despite the importance of a number of Geonim and their works). His talmudic interpretations betray a decidedly rationalistic orientation, seen especially in his treatment of aggadah, which is found alongside his strong commitment to practical halakhic study. Although Meiri was quite familiar with Provençal philosophical traditions, his Bet ha-Behirah was struc˙ who sought tured, at least in part, to demonstrate that those philosophers to eliminate the Talmud (and its sometimes intricate and impractical dialectic) as the main source for Jewish legal studies were in error.32 ELEMENTARY EDUCATION IN ASHKENAZ

As was the case for both Spain and Provence, the central figure in the education of young children within northern France and Germany was the tutor or melamed. In most instances, the tutor was hired for only one student, but he sometimes taught several at the same time. In such a situation, each father would reach an agreement with the melamed for his own child, or a group of parents might offer the melamed a collective sum. In any event, the number of students that each elementary-level teacher typically taught nowhere begins to approach the limit of twenty-five students that is indicated within talmudic literature. The nearly fifty responsa of Ashkenazic origin that deal with the hiring and termination 32

See Gregg Stern, Philosophy and Rabbinic Culture: Jewish Interpretation and Controversy in Medieval Languedoc (London, 2009), 70 84; and cf. Moshe Halbertal, Bein Torah le Hokhmah (Jerusalem, 2000), 51 62.

404 the middle ages: the christian world of melamdim are all based on situations in which the child’s parent is the hirer. Moreover, specific references to educational services are glaringly absent in the lists of services that Ashkenazic communities were required to provide for their members.33 Indeed, it appears from all available sources that there was no elementary school per se in either northern France or Germany, and there were no distinct school buildings or teachers maintained by the communities for their children. If a parent did not wish to hire a melamed, or if there were no teachers available, there was no village or town school to which the child could turn. Scattered references to schola in Ashkenazic texts more probably refer to synagogues than to discrete schools.34 In light of this reality, R. Meir of Rothenburg (d. 1293) ruled in the thirteenth century that a father could be compelled to hire a melamed or to teach the child himself, and an ordinance promulgated by R. Jacob (b. Meir) Tam (1100–71) in the mid twelfth century, that a father who had taken leave of his family must continue to provide not only their living expenses but also adequate funds for Torah education (in accordance with the talmudic requirement recorded in Ketubot 50a) should be understood in this way as well.35 As seen from several passages in Sefer Hasidim, this form of education, which was centered on the melamed and left his hiring completely up to the

33

34

35

See, e.g., R. Meir mi Rothenburg: Teshuvot, Pesaqim u Minhagim, ed. I. Z. Kahana, vol. I (Jerusalem, 1957), sec. 24; Teshuvot Maharam mi Rothenburg defus Prague (Budapest, 1895), #434 5, 865; I. A. Agus, “Ha Shilton ha Atsma’i shel ha Kehilah ha Yehudit Bimei ha Banyaim,” Talpiyot 6 (1953), 109; Kanarfogel, Jewish Education and Society, 125 6, nn. 31 2; and see now S. Emanuel, Teshuvot Maharam mi Rothenburg ve Haverav (Jerusalem, 2012), vol. I, 293, 652 3; vol. II, 748, 751 3, 757 8, 802, 879 81, 959. Note also the ruling of R. Yehiel of Paris (as reported by R. Isaac of Corbeil) that, if a mother had hired a tutor who had already begun to teach the child, the father must honor (and pay for) the arrangement that his wife had made. See H. S. Sha’anan, “Piskei Rabbenu R”I mi Corbeil,” in Sefer Ner li Shema’ayah: Sefer Zikaron li Zikhro shel R. Shema’ayah Sha’anan (Bnei Brak, 1988), 28 (sec. 76). See, e.g., Simeon Luce, “Catalogue des documents du Tresor des Chartes,” Revue des Études Juives 2 (1886), 17 18, 42. There are less than a handful of references to hadarim (chambres) in Ashkenazic texts for the period prior to 1348; see Assaf, Mekorot, I, 751, and W. C. Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews (Philadelphia, 1989), 21. Post 1348, this term (which appears more frequently) mainly connotes the living quarters for (older) yeshiva students, although it may also refer to educational sites for younger children. See Assaf, Mekorot, I, 21, n. 676; M. Breuer, “Ha Yeshivah ha Ashkenazit be Shilhei Yemei ha Benayim” (Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1967), 47; and Breuer, Ohalei Torah (Jerusalem, 2004), 402 5. See Sefer ha Yashar le Rabbenu Tam (Heleq ha Teshuvot), ed. S. Rosenthal (Berlin, 1898), sec. 31, and cf. the formulation of R. Isaac of Dampierre (d. 1189) in Sefer Mordekhai ‘al Massekhet Sanhedrin, sec. 705.

schools and education 405 36 parents, placed poor children at a distinct disadvantage. Indeed, a similar kind of problem was experienced within Christian society, and church leaders put forward procedures for its amelioration, such as requiring local churches to provide masters for poor children.37 The opening of municipal and guild schools in Germany in the late thirteenth century was also undertaken, at least in part, as a response to this problem.38 There were instances in which wealthy fathers, as an act of charity, paid for melamdim for poor children, who would not otherwise have been able to receive instruction. Wealthier fathers were also able to ensure that their sons received instruction even in situations where not enough tutors were available. However, despite the extensive system of communal government and regulation that was operant in medieval Ashkenaz, it is clear that (charitable) funds for education were not always abundant.39 The small size of the Jewish communities in medieval Germany and northern France is also an important factor in explaining why individual residents hired the melamdim, without any involvement or assistance from the town or the city in which they lived.40 Not surprisingly, then, the term beit sefer within Ashkenazic literature does not refer to a community school. Rather, it refers most often to the home of the melamed (or to rooms rented by him) to which his students

36

37

38

39

40

See Sefer Hasidim (Parma), ed. J. Wistinetski (Frankfurt, 1924), secs. 630, 671, 751, 822; and cf. Moses b. Jacob of Coucy, Sefer Mitsvot Gadol (Venice, 1569), ‘aseh 12. See, e.g., the canon promulgated by Pope Alexander III at the Third Lateran Council in 1179, recorded in Decretales Gregorii IX (Paris, 1601), 5:5:1 (= J. D. Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum collectio, vol. II [Florence, 1778; repr. 1961], cols. 227 8). The text of this canon, along with a translation, can be found in H. J. Schroeder, Disciplinary Decrees of the General Councils (St. Louis, 1937), 229, 556. This statute was confirmed and then extended by Pope Innocent IV at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, suggesting perhaps that the canon of 1179 had not been especially effective. See, e.g., G. Pare, A. Brunet, and P. Tremblay, La Renaissance du XIIe siècle: Les écoles et l’enseignment (Paris, 1933), 81; Brian Tierney, Medieval Poor Law (Berkeley, 1959), 19 20; and R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven, 1953), 194. See Lynn Thorndyke, “Elementary and Secondary Education in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 15 (1940), 400 8. See Louis Finkelstein, Jewish Self Government in the Middle Ages (New York, 1924; repr. 1964), 59 61, 220, 247 9, and Assaf, Mekorot, I, 213 14. On Jewish communal size in northern France, see Shalom Albeck, “Yahaso shel Rabbenu Tam li Be’ayot Zemano,” Zion 19 (1954), 104 5; S. W. Baron, “Rashi and the Community of Troyes,” in H. L. Ginsberg, ed., Rashi Anniversary Volume (New York, 1941), 58 62; Bernhard Blumenkranz, “Quartiers juives en France (XIIe, XIIIe, XIVe siècles),” Mélanges de philosophie et de littérature juives 3 5 (1958 62), 77 86. For Germany through the period of the First Crusade, see Avraham Grossman, Hakhmei Ashkenaz ha Rishonim (Jerusalem, 1981), 6 9.

406 the middle ages: the christian world came to be taught,41 or to the home of the student(s), where some melamdim lived (and were compensated, either partly or completely, through their room and board). In addition, this term might refer to the local synagogue where the melamed taught children from the surrounding community.42 But even in this type of arrangement, the community was not the administering agent, and the parents made the appropriate arrangements with the melamed.43 To be sure, the quality of melamdim could vary greatly. For every experienced, competent tutor, there might be one who was a gambler or one who was unqualified to teach because he was ignorant or lazy, or one who was not much older than his pupil.44 There is also conflicting evidence about the social status of the melamed within Ashkenazic society. As we shall see, medieval Ashkenazic Jewry was generally reticent to allow a teacher of Torah to be compensated for his instruction, since the precept of teaching Torah was meant to be performed “for free,” based on a talmudic derivation (Nedarim 37a) from Deut. 4:5, in which it is stressed that Moses taught the laws of the Torah be-hinam (“without compensa˙ some fairly sophisticated tion”). Although the Talmud itself proposes methods to allow the teacher of advanced students to be paid (such as sekhar batalah, the opportunity benefits that the teacher would forgo if he had been˙ employed in a different profession or position), Ashkenazic halakhists permitted teachers of young children to be compensated simply because they were also providing a service, of watching the child and protecting him from harm (sekhar shimur). Although the melamed could thus receive direct compensation for his teaching, his prestige was thereby lessened since he was not included in the scholarly class of teachers who must theoretically teach without compensation, in emulation of Moses. Moreover, melamdim were granted tax exemptions by the communities not as a scholarly privilege (that was extended to heads of academies and other advanced-level teachers), but rather because the melamed typically 41

42

43

44

See the responsum of R. Judah ha Kohen published (from two manuscripts) by A. Grossman in ‘Alei Sefer 1 (1975), 33; and Sefer Hasidim, ed. Wistinetski, secs. 764, 1512. See Tosafot ‘Eruvin 72a, s.v. u modin; R. Isaac b. Moses of Vienna, Sefer Or Zarua’ (Zhitomir, 1862), pt. 2, fol. 46a (sec. 172); Tosafot Kidushin 59a, s.v. ‘ani; Teshuvot R. Meir mi Rothenburg (defus Prague), #37; and Sefer Hasidim, secs. 1073, 1497, 1500. See Sefer Rokeah le R. Eleazar mi Vermaiza (Venice, 1549), sec. 296; Sefer Hasidim, ed. Wistinetski, secs. 462, 821; Rashi to Berakhot 17a, s.v. le bei kenishta; and Sefer Mordekhai ‘al Masekhet Bava Batra, sec. 621. See, e.g., Teshuvot Maharam (Cremona, 1557), #310; Teshuvot Maharam defus Prague, #488; Teshuvot Maharam (Berlin, 1891), 276 (#55); Sefer Hasidim, 820, 827; S. Salfeld, Martyrologium, 38; and cf. Teshuvot Rabbenu Gershom, ed. S. Eidelberg (New York, 1955), 165 (#71).

schools and education 407 earned a small amount of money; in some instances, as noted, a melamed might work for room and board alone.45 Some were able to earn additional monies from other activities, although melamdim were also enjoined from taking on too much “outside work” since this might diminish their capacity to teach properly.46 Several Tosafist texts attributed a measure of pedagogic skill even to the average melamed. There was a degree of recognition of a melamed’s abilities, and of the difference that a capable melamed could make in allowing his students to achieve higher levels of education and knowledge.47 At the same time, however, the position of the melamed was not accorded great societal respect, even though Ashkenazic Jewry considered the study of Torah overall to be the noblest pursuit. Precisely what the melamdim taught also appears to have varied, although there were several basic touchstones. In the introductory (programmatic) section of his Sefer Rokeah, R. Eleazar ben Judah of Worms (d. 1230) offers ˙ of˙ beginning studies, which seems to correspond to the following sequence the reality of his day: “At first [the child] should learn to recognize the letters and then to put them together; these are called words. And then, he should study the verse and then the parashah and then the Mishnah and then the Talmud.”48 Sefer Hasidim refers to a melamed ‘ivri, whose task was to teach the student to recognize Hebrew words, although fathers apparently undertook this basic task themselves in many instances.49 We shall have occasion to note below that Mishnah was not taught as a separate discipline in the yeshivot of Ashkenaz during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, just as biblical studies typically lagged far behind talmudic studies in the curricula of the higher educational levels. Nonetheless, 45

46

47

48

49

Teshuvot Maharam (Lemberg, 1860), 131; Teshuvot Ba’alei ha Tosafot, ed. I. Agus (New York, 1954), #103; Teshuvot Maharam (Cremona), 198; Teshuvot Maharam defus Prague, #541. See Teshuvot Maharam defus Prague, #37; Mordekhai ‘al Massekhet Ketubot, sec. 232; Mordekhai ‘al Massekhet Bava Batra, sec. 674; Teshuvot Rabbenu Gershom, ed. Eidelberg, #72; Sefer Or Zarua’, piskei Bava Metsi’a, sec. 246; and cf. Tosafot Pesahim 49a, s.v. lo matsa. See, e.g., Tosafot Bava Kama 85a, s.v. ro’in ‘oto; Tosafot Rabbenu Peretz ‘al Bava Metzi’a 77a, s.v. savur; and cf. Eliav Shochterman, “Dinei Hinnukh be Mishpat ha ‘Ivri ‘al pi Mekorot ha Talmudiyim ve Sifrut ha Poskim shel Yemei ha Benayim” (MA thesis, Hebrew University, 1969), 52 76. R. Eleazar b. Judah of Worms, Sefer Rokeah, 11; and cf. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory (Cambridge, 1990), 29 30, 107 21. For typical lengths of the teaching terms of the melamdim, see the sources gathered in B. Z. Dinur, Yisra’el ba Golah, vol. II (Jerusalem, 1966), pt. 6, 37 8. See Sefer Hasidim, sec. 820, and E. Shochetman, “Dinei ha Hinnukh ‘al pi ha Mishpat ha ‘Ivri,” 26 9.

408 the middle ages: the christian world elementary-level tutors taught the Bible to their young students from the preCrusade period and beyond, as a means of introducing the student to the reading and understanding of Hebrew. R. Isaac ben Moses Or Zarua’ of Vienna (d. c.1250 – a student of leading Tosafists in both northern France and the Rhineland) refers to melamdei tinokot who taught the weekly portion, ostensibly with either Targum Onqelos˙ or Rashi’s commentary.50 The sections in Sefer Hasidim that discuss biblical studies for children attempted to guide that study, not create it.51 In discussing the halakhic status (and rights) of a tutor who resigned, Ri of Dampierre describes a melamed who was hired to teach an entire sefer, or half the sefer, without any time limit; the sefer in question was a book of the Bible.52 Already in the early eleventh century, a responsum from Rabbenu Gershom discusses the case of a tutor who was contracted to teach his student “all of Scripture” and subsequently claims that he in fact did so.53 It would appear that the melamed in Ashkenaz was involved primarily with younger students. Indeed, the tutor is very often referred to as a melamed tinokot (teacher of young children). Moreover, the Ashkenazic responsa that ˙deal with the employment of the melamed consistently address issues that reflect a fairly young student pool, such as the responsibilities of the tutor (as well as the status of his compensation) in cases of prolonged student illness. As we have seen, the typical melamed taught material that did not require great depth or breadth of knowledge. We can assume that, at most, they taught biblical reading, translation and basic interpretation, and perhaps the rudiments of talmudic studies. In medieval Christian society, a nobleman would retain a tutor for his child until the basic educational process was complete. A student striving to become a scholar then had to seek out a cathedral school and its master(s), or perhaps a monastic school.54 In Jewish society, once the 50

51

52

53 54

Sefer Or Zarua’, pt. 1, Hilkhot Keri’at Shema, sec. 12; and see also pt. 2, Hilkhot Keri’at ‘arba parshiyot, sec. 389. See, e.g, Sefer Hasidim, secs. 666, 752, 820. Mishnah, as a distinct discipline of study (in Sefer Hasidim, secs. 748, 796, and in R. Eleazar b. Judah of Worms, Sefer Rokeah), was advocated by the German Pietists alone; see also Kanarfogel, Jewish Education and Society, 68, 88 91; Breuer, Ohalei Torah, 118 20, 123 5; Teshuvot ha Ran, #1, 75, and cf. Assis, “Jewish Elementary Education,” 150 4; Avraham Grossman, “Yihus Mishpahah be Ashkenaz ha Kedumah,” in Etkes and Salmon, eds., Studies in the History of Jewish Society, 9 23. On the study of piyut in Ashkenazic yeshivot, see Breuer, Ohalei Torah, 264 5. Ri’s formulation is recorded in Sefer Or Zarua’, piskei Bava Metsi’a, sec. 242. Cf. Teshuvot Maharam defus Prague, #477. See Teshuvot Rabbenu Gershom, ed. Eidelberg, #71. See, e.g., J. H. Mundy, Europe in the High Middle Ages (London, 1979), 464 5; and Pare et al., La Renaissance du XIIe siècle, 22 3.

schools and education 409 rudiments of talmudic study were assimilated, the student either sought out a local teacher, who delivered lectures to groups of students in his home or in the synagogue, or traveled to a higher-level study hall or academy. In the responsum referred to just above, Rabbenu Gershom describes an arrangement whereby A was hired by B to take charge of the latter’s son and to “enter him into the gates of the scholars in the morning and at night.” Presumably, the father hired this tutor to help his son make the transition from private study with a melamed to studying in an academy or study hall. While the teacher in these institutions had certain responsibilities to the student, he was as not as responsible to the father as the melamed was.55 ADVANCED STUDIES

The most advanced academies in Ashkenaz, those of the Tosafists, focused primarily (although not exclusively) on talmudic and halakhic studies. These study halls were quite small, however, taking in somewhere between ten and twenty-five students at most.56 The students resided mainly in the home of the Tosafist teacher who led the bet midrash (and in the surrounding area) and as such, these batei midrash were often located in relatively small towns or villages.57 The academy head did not receive a salary; students paid their own living expenses and the amount of money that a student had available to spend for this purpose often determined the length of his stay with a particular teacher.58 There were tax exemptions and other forms of loans and grants that might support an advanced-level teacher and his students,

55 56

57

58

See also Teshuvot Maharam defus Prague, #251; and Teshuvot R. Hayim Or Zarua’, #167. See, e.g., M. Breuer, “On the Typology of the Western Yeshivot,” 51 5; Meir b. Barukh (Maharam): Teshuvot, Pesukim u Minhagim, ed. Kahana, III, 134; and Kanarfogel, Jewish Education and Society, 66 7. See e.g., Tosafot Kidushin 33b, s.v. ‘ein, and 59a, s.v. ‘ani; Tosafot ‘Eruvin and Sefer Or Zarua’, pt. 2, fol. 46a (sec. 172); Teshuvot Maharam defus Prague, #539, 971; R. Samson b. Tsadoq, Sefer Tashbets (Warsaw, 1876), secs. 5 6; Sefer Hasidim, secs. 954, 968, 1526, 1985; Urbach, Ba’alei ha Tosafot, I, 487. Cf. Norman Golb, Toledot ha Yehudim be ‘Ir Rouen Bimei ha Benayim (Tel Aviv, 1976), 36 40, and Golb, “Les Écoles rabbiniques en France au Moyen Age,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 102 (1985), 243 65. See, e.g., A. M. Habermann, Gezerot Ashkenaz ve Tsarefat (Jerusalem, 1971), 164 5 (in the elegy for Dolce, the martyred wife of Eleazar of Worms); Sefer Hasidim, secs. 765, 778 9, 919, 1283, 1327, 1493; Sefer Or Zarua’, pt. 1, sec. 762; I. Ta Shma, “Mitsvat Talmud Torah k Be’ayah Hevratit Datit be Sefer Hasidim,” Sefer Bar Ilan 14 15 (1977), 110; Breuer, “Ha Yeshivah ha Ashkenazit be Shilhei Yemei ha Benayim,” 11 12; and Kanarfogel, Jewish Education and Society, 49 50.

410 the middle ages: the christian world although it appears that even these lesser privileges were not always in effect.59 The tradition first reported in Menahem ben Aaron ibn Zerah’s ency˙ clopedia-like Tsedah la-Derekh (composed in mid-fourteenth-century Castile), of sixty students who sat before the leading Tosafist Ri of Dampierre (each of whom had totally mastered a tractate from among those that comprised the Mishnah and Talmud), is most likely a conflated account. Because the leading Tosafist study halls throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries received and shared material from earlier generations and teachers, the impression created is that large numbers of teachers and students were involved in the formation of Tosafot texts. In fact, however, there are fewer than 100 Tosafists known to us (from northern France and Germany), all told.60 In Germany, the local rabbinic court (bet din) may have been the locus and center of Tosafist teachings, rather than the study hall. Here again, however, we are dealing with a relatively informal educational setting, attended by small numbers of active students.61 Several larger societal and cultural issues impacted the formation and development of the Tosafist academies, which can be noted only briefly here. The academies at Mainz and Worms during the pre-Crusade period served as magnet institutions. During the Tosafist period, however, students traveled not to a long-standing institution of higher learning in a particular locale, but rather to the home of a leading Tosafist teacher (wherever that might be), just as budding scholars in the Christian world wandered from one leading cathedral master to another, even following particular masters (such as Peter Abelard) as they moved from place to place. Indeed, the shift in Christian society, from monastic schools as the leading and most active educational institutions during the tenth century, to cathedral masters (and their schools) by the middle of the eleventh century – and the concomitant change from the monochromatic methods of collatio and lectio to the more dynamic methods of quaestio and disputatio – also anticipates and adumbrates changes in methods of rabbinic study from the pre-Crusade period to the Tosafist period.62

59

60 61

62

See Kanarfogel, Jewish Education and Soicety, 45 9, 62 5, 91 5; and I. Ta Shma, “’Al Petur Talmidei Hakhamim me Misim Bimei ha Benayim,” in Y. D. Gilat, ed., ‘Iyunim be Hazal, ba Mikra uve Toledot Yisra’el (Ramat Gan, 1982), 316 19. See Jacob Katz, Halakhah ve Kabalah (Jerusalem, 1986), 348. See Kanarfogel, “Religious Leadership during the Tosafist Period: Between the Academy and the Rabbinic Court,” in J. Wertheimer, ed., Jewish Religious Leadership: Image and Reality (New York, 2004), vol. I, 265 305. See Kanarfogel, Jewish Education and Society, 56 9.

schools and education 411 The Tosafists saw to it that a close reading of the text of the Talmud (and of Rashi’s commentary), followed faithfully by full-fledged dialectical interplay, became the dominant mode of talmudic interpretation and study. They moved beyond the collections of rulings and customs that preceded them, which had paved the way for the straightforward, local interpretation of the Talmud, which reached its zenith in the commentaries of Rashi (who had studied for a time in both Mainz and Worms). Just as the cathedral masters and their new methods were criticized by twelfth-century churchmen, such as Rupert of Deutz and Bernard of Clairvaux,63 the method of the Tosafists was criticized by the German Pietists (Hasidei Ashkenaz), who were especially concerned that it would ˙ lead to incorrect halakhic conclusions and would be intellectually deleterious for those students who were not as capable as the Tosafists. In addition, the German Pietists stressed the importance of halakhic studies, as well as the study of midrash, Mishnah, and the Bible (as distinct disciplines) on different educational levels, motivated in part by their desire to provide appropriate venues and study texts for Ashkenazic laymen.64 The unbridled success of the Tosafist academies overall, as seen in the impressive composition of Tosafot and other related halakhic works, is perhaps the single most important factor that allowed the system of education in medieval Ashkenaz to remain informal (and unevenly funded). As long as such high-level talmudic thinking and writing were being generated, it did not seem necessary to re-organize or to organize more formally the variant components of the educational process. To be sure, this approach might have excluded some students of lesser means, and ostensibly favored students who married into the families of academy heads (which was a fairly widespread occurrence, given the relatively small size and number of the Tosafist academies).65 Nonetheless, students of ability seemed to be able to find appropriate outlets for their aptitude and level of achievement. There were study halls that analyzed and worked with texts 63

64

65

See Kanarfogel, “Progress and Tradition in Medieval Ashkenaz,” Jewish History 14 (2001), 287 315; I. Ta Shma, “The Tosafist Academies and the Academic Milieu in France in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Parallels that Do Not Meet” [Hebrew], in I. Etkes, ed., Yeshivot and Battei Midrashot (Jerusalem, 2006), 75 84; and Kanarfogel, The Intellectual History and Rabbinic Culture of Medieval Ashkenaz (Detroit, 2013), 84 110. See Kanarfogel, Jewish Education and Society, 68, 88 91; Breuer, Ohalei Torah, 118 20, 123 5; Teshuvot ha Ran, #1, 75, and cf. Assis, “Jewish Elementary Education,” 150 4; Grossman, “Yihus Mishpahah be Ashkenaz ha Kedumah.” On the study of piyut in Ashkenazic yeshivot, see Breuer, Ohalei Torah, 264 5. See Grossman, “Yihus Mishpahah be Ashkenaz ha Kedumah”; and Kanarfogel, Jewish Education and Society, 68.

412 the middle ages: the christian world of Tosafot, and may have wished to produce imitations of these texts and methods. Aside from raising expectations and perhaps yielding some poor or less substantive results, this kind of competition did not have any lasting negative impact.66 Indeed, rabbinic formulations that emanated from both Germany and northern France suggest that capable students did not hesitate to open their own study halls, even within the proximity of their teachers.67 As long as the level of study was high and the new teachers were intellectually able, this was considered to be a most noble pursuit and purpose in medieval Ashkenaz. Only at the end of the fourteenth century do we begin to hear of any noticeable difficulties with this educational approach. The so-called Ashkenazic semikhah controversy at that time may have been, at least in part, a reflection of these developments as well.68 SEFER HUKEI HA TORAH: A UNIQUE EDUCATIONAL ˙ ˙ DOCUMENT AND CONCEPTION

As we near the end of our discussion of educational theories and practices in the Jewish communities of medieval Christian Europe, we are in a better position to appreciate the challenges of understanding and utilizing what is arguably one of the most explicit educational sources and blueprints of the day, Sefer Hukei ha-Torah (hereafter SHH). Found in only one manu˙ ˙ copied by a German hand ˙ in 1309), this detailed treatise script (which was describes a two-tiered educational system. Goals and problems in education on both the elementary and advanced levels are identified and addressed.69 The most novel provision of this document calls for the establishment of special study halls for perushim (lit. “separatists”), accomplished students who would remain totally immersed in their studies for a period of seven 66

67

68

69

See Haym Soloveitchik, “Three Themes in the Sefer Hasidim,” AJS Review 1 (1976), 339 54; I. Ta Shma, “Talmud Torah ki Be’ayah Datit ve Hevratit be Sefer Hasidim,” Shenaton Bar Ilan 14 15 (1977), 98 113; E. Kanarfogel, “Between the Tosafist Academies and other Batei Midrash in Ashkenaz in the Middle Ages” [Hebrew], in Etkes, ed., Yeshivot and Battei Midrashot, 85 108; and Kanarfogel, Jewish Education and Society, 79 88. See Kanarfogel, “Rabbinic Authority and the Right to Open an Academy in Medieval Ashkenaz,” Michael 12 (1991), 233 50. See, e.g., Jacob Katz, “Rabbinical Authority and Authorization in the Middle Ages,” in Twersky, ed., Studies in Medieval Jewish History, I, 41 56; M. Breuer, “Ha Semikhah ha Ashkenazit,” Zion 33 (1968), 15 46; and Y. Y. Yuval, Hakhamim be Doram (Jerusalem, 1989), 322 50. See MS Bodl. 1309, fols. 196r 199r.

schools and education 413 years. Isadore Twersky has succinctly summarized the essential provisions of SHH as follows: ˙

It strives, by a variety of stipulations and suggestions, to achieve maximum learning on the part of the student and maximum dedication on the part of the teacher. It operates with such progressive notions as determining the occupational aptitude of students, arranging small groups in order to enable individual atten tion, and grading the classes in order not to stifle individual progress. The teacher is urged to encourage free debate and discussion among students, arrange periodic reviews . . . and utilize the vernacular in order to facilitate comprehension. Above all, he is warned against insincerity and is exhorted to be totally committed to his noble profession.70

Since the publication of SHH by Moritz Guedemann in 1880,71 scholars ˙ provenance, and purpose of this work.72 have argued about the date, Attempts to identify the place and time in which SHH originated essentially employed two methods. The first was to focus˙ on terms or phrases in the text that either ruled out or suggested a particular location. For example, since SHH refers to a certain custom as minhag Tsarefat, it is ˙ was not composed in northern France. On the other likely that this text hand, since the text refers to unspecified Geonim as the originators of certain practices, and also refers to practices of R. Sa’adyah Gaon and the Babylonian exilarch, it is possible that SHH is of Babylonian origin, or was ˙ produced in a western center that remained in the Geonic orbit or was 73 especially faithful to Geonic traditions. Others attempted to identify institutions within the text. The midrash ha-gadol, which was to be maintained by the surrounding communities, is akin to the yeshivot in southern France, as described by Benjamin of Tudela in his travelogue Mas’at Binyamin.74 Norman Golb has maintained that 70 71

72

73

74

See Twersky, Rabad of Posquières, 25 6. See M. Güdemann, Geschichte des Erziehungswesens und der Cultur des abendländischen Juden wahrend des Mittelalters (Vienna, 1880), vol. I, 92 106, 264 72. A photo offset and a punctuated transcription were published in Nathan Morris, Le Toledot ha Hinnukh shel ‘Am Yisra’el (Jerusalem, 1977), vol. II, 417 23. See also Assaf, Mekorot, I, 202 11; Golb, Toledot ha Yehudim be ‘Ir Rouen, 181 4; and Kanarfogel, Jewish Education and Society, 106 15. Joseph Dan, in Encyclopedia Judaica, XIV, 1009 1100, notes that more than twenty scholars have undertaken the identification of this text. Cf. Assaf, Mekorot, I, 198 202. See David Kaufmann, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt, 1908 15), vol. II, 210 15. To support his view, Kaufmann cites a series of liturgical poems describing schools that were established and maintained under Babylonian influence in a manner similar to the system presented in SHH. Cf. Assaf, Mekorot, I, 199. See B. Z. Dinur, “Be Eizo Erets Nithabru Hukei ha Torah?” Kiryat Sefer 1 (1924), 107; Dinur, Yisra’el ba Golah, I, pt. 3, 326 n. 38; B. Z. Benedikt, “Le Toledotav shel Merkaz ha Torah bi Provence,” 98; Twersky, Rabad of Posquières, 25 6.

414 the middle ages: the christian world the midrash ha-gadol existed in northern France, with one such school located in Rouen,75 while Gershom Scholem and Isadore Twersky have identified the text as of Provençal origin, based on the observation that the perushim who studied in the midrash ha-gadol matched the prototype of (the ascetic and mystically inclined) Provençal rabbinic scholars in the twelfth century.76 Complicating the effort to ascertain the provenance of SHH is the ˙ question first raised by Isadore Loeb in 1881 (in his review of Guedemann’s work) as to whether the provisions of SHH were actually in effect in some ˙ blueprint or suggestion.77 Salo community, or SHH was simply a utopian ˙ Baron has written that “[SHH ] doubtless originated in one of the northern ˙ communities under the impact of Provençal mysticism or German-Jewish Pietism of the school of R. Judah the Pious and Eleazar of Worms. This view was arrived at because of the unique statutes of the work, for which we have no record of their practice.” Statutes such as the consecration of the sons of Kohanim and Levites for Torah study, and the mandate for establishing a permanent group of scholars through which the community could fulfill its obligation to study, were “expressions of pious wishes, but were never enacted by any communal authority.”78 If, however, the SHH document was of Provençal origin, it is likely that ˙ its program was actually in effect to some extent, or at least represented active educational institutions and practices, since the educational organization outlined (on both the elementary and advanced levels) is quite similar to that of Provence in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.79 If, on the other hand, SHH is of Ashkenazic origin, this treatise was probably ˙ As has been noted above, there was nothing in a theoretical blueprint. Ashkenaz comparable to the highly organized and communally funded educational institutions described in SHH. ˙ 75 76

77 78

79

See Golb, Toledot ha Yehudim be ‘Ir Rouen, 36 40. See G. Scholem, Reshit ha Kabalah (Tel Aviv, 1948), 84 91; Scholem, Ursprung und Anfange de Kabbalah (Berlin, 1962), 202 10 (Eng. edn.: Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah [Princeton, 1990], 227 35); and Twersky, Rabad of Posquières, 27 8. See Revue des Études Juives 2 (1881), 159 60. See S. W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, vol. VI (Philadelphia, 1958), 140 1, and 375 n. 163. Although SHH is never cited in subsequent medieval or early modern rabbinic literature, there are some later works that display some similarities. See R. Samuel Kaidonower, Emunat Shmu’el (Frankfurt, 1683), fol. 37a; and Assaf, Mekorot, 200 2. It is doubtful, however, whether either of these later sources was based on an actual remnant of SHH. See Adler, ed., The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, 3 5; Benedikt, “Le Toledotav shel Merkaz ha Torah bi Provence,” 86 9, 93, 98; Twersky, Rabad of Posquières, 25. See also Dinur, “Be Eizo Erets Nithabru Hukei ha Torah?” 107; Dinur, Yisra’el ba Golah, I, pt. 3, 326 n. 38.

schools and education 415 While all attempts to identify the origins of SHH with certainty may ˙ prove fruitless, I would suggest that the commonality and connection between SHH and the German Pietists merit further consideration. Sefer Hasidim is˙ replete with guidance aimed at maximizing the individual achievement of every student, including a heavy emphasis on separating students of different abilities (which would allow the brighter student to develop fully and keep the weaker student from becoming frustrated). The frequently expressed concerns in SHH about teachers allowing their ˙ own affairs to cause distractions, the prohibition against teachers having any additional employment, and against the academy head from engaging in prolonged conversation when it was time to teach – all find close parallels within Sefer Hasidim, as does the separation of the bet midrash of the perushim from the home of the academy head and main teacher.80 Another possible key to the origin of SHH that has not received sufficient attention lies in the practices and˙ phrases that appear to be similar to monastic ideals. The perushim, who are chosen originally through some form of parental consecration, ensconced themselves in their fortresses of study, away from all worldly temptations. They were to devote all of their time to the holy work of God (melekhet shamayim), and to serve as representatives of the rest of the community in this endeavor. It is thus possible that SHH represents an attempt to recast the discipline ˙ education, which was certainly known to (and and devotion of monastic perhaps even admired by) European Jewry, in a form that was compatible with Jewish practices and values.81 80

81

See, e.g., Sefer Hasidim (Parma), secs. 800, 821 5, 828, 830, 1492, 1496. Both SHH and Sefer Hasidim, secs. 747, 805 6, 1474, uniquely understand the notion in Deuteronomy 33:10 that the kohanim and Levites “will not see or recognize their families” to refer to the fact that they will be consecrated as youngsters and separated from their families for a lengthy period of time in order to study Torah deeply. See Kanarfogel, Jewish Education and Society, 102 5. See, e.g., David Berger, The Jewish Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 1979), 27, n. 71; Talya Fishman, “The Penitential System of Hasidei Ashkenaz and the Problem of Cultural Boundaries,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 8 (1999), 201 29; and Kanarfogel, “A Monastic Like Setting for the Study of Torah,” in L. Fine, ed., Judaism in Practice: From the Middle Ages through the Early Modern Period (Princeton, 2001), 191 202.

chapter 16

ANNUAL CYCLE AND LIFE CYCLE elisheva baumgarten

Mahzor Vitri, the late eleventh-century compendium written primarily by Rashi’s student, R. Simha of Vitry, opens with a quotation from the Talmud concerning the everyday activities of Jews: “It was taught: R. Meir used to say, a man is bound to say a hundred blessings daily and in the Talmud of the Land of Israel it says, there is not a man in Israel who does not perform one hundred commandments every day.”1 This description of Jews performing daily rituals is the start of hundreds of pages of instructions pertaining to the way Jews were to observe Jewish custom – daily, annually, and throughout their lives. Mahzor Vitri followed a number of earlier models, such as the prayer-books written by the sages of Babylonia, and included not only the prayers and ritual activities required within and outside the synagogue, but also long discussions on the different customs practiced throughout the day.2 The different mahzorim written in medieval Europe were aimed at the more erudite Jews and were intended to be guides instructing community members on how to go about their daily lives as Jews – especially, but not exclusively, regarding liturgy.3 In many cases, the mahzorim were kept in the local synagogue so that they could be consulted as˙ needed, and were used for daily prayers, annual festivals, and life-cycle rituals. The Hebrew word mahzor (“cycle”) is evidence of the repetitive nature of the book, and a reflection of the way medieval Jews used it to guide them throughout the year and over the course of their lives.4 During the Middle 1

2

3

4

Simha of Vitry, Mahzor Vitry, ed. Aryeh Goldschmidt (Jerusalem, 2004), 1: aleph. This quotation is based on BT Menahot 43b. For a discussion of many of these sources, see: Lawrence A. Hoffman, The Canonization of the Synagogue Service (Notre Dame, 1979), 160 74, 187 8, and see Shoham Steiner, “The Sources,” Chapter 11 in this volume. About Mahzor Vitry, see Avraham Grossman, The Early Sages of France:. Their Lives, Leadership and Works [Hebrew], 3rd edn. (Jerusalem: 2001), 395 410. This is why it is called Mahzor Vitri, since it was intended to guide the people of Vitry: Ernst Goldschmidt, “Mahzor Vitry,” in Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, eds., Encyclopedia Judaica, 2nd edn. (Detroit, 2007), vol. XIII, 366 7.

416

annual cycle and life cycle 417 Ages, mahzorim such as these were expanded into sifrei mitsvot, popular ˙ late twelfth- and thirteenth-century scholars in northern among the Europe, in which instructions appeared in connection with specific commandments arranged according to different criteria. There were also “custom” books that became popular in the fourteenth century as guides for community members,5 containing valuable information on the daily, annual, and life-cycle rituals observed by medieval Jews. The thousands of details that fill these works are evidence of the tremendous number of everyday activities through which medieval Jews performed their identity, and enacted their belonging to their communities, and, in a broader sense, to the Jewish religion.6 Anthropologists, and especially historical anthropologists, have argued convincingly over the past decades that rituals related to the life cycle, the annual cycle (such as festivals or fasts), or the daily cycle offer a convenient vantage point from which to analyze collective identity, as they provide access to collective mentalities rather than the ideas of select individuals.7 Rituals address the whole human being and establish relations between individuals within and outside the group.8 These rites reflect, conflict with, and affirm a variety of beliefs and ideas at play in society. As Jack Goody has suggested, “ritual is work,” and the more effort required, the more important the ritual.9 Work is evident in rituals that are planned far in advance and are of a more public nature, but it is also part of everyday activities, whether they take place in public or in private. To a certain extent, the study of ritual is an area where the perpetual imbalance between the elite, whose writings have reached us, and the much larger majority of the other members of the community, whose lives are for the most part untold, can be somewhat readjusted – although, in some cases, only marginally. Rituals allow a glimpse at the tensions that characterized the community and its self-definition, as well as the community’s ideals. Moreover, in as much as all the members of the community 5

6

7

8

9

Israel M. Ta Shma, Ritual, Custom and Reality in Franco Germany, 1000 1350 [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1996), 94 111. While Judaism is most often referred to as a religion of practice, most scholarship discussing Jewish identity has tended to focus on the realm of belief rather than that of practice. Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York, 1992), 94 117; Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, 1990). Bell, Ritual Theory, 30 66; Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (New York, 1997), 94 106. Jack Goody, “Against ‘Ritual’: Loosely Structured Thoughts on a Loosely Defined Topic,” in Sally F. Moore and Barbara G. Myerhoff, eds., Secular Ritual (Assen, 1977), 25 35.

418 the middle ages: the christian world participated in at least some rituals, the latter can be said to reflect a world shared by many community members and provide insight into joint values as well as tensions, social values alongside religious beliefs.10 This article will examine two areas of practice through which Jews in medieval Europe defined themselves, vis-à-vis each other and vis-à-vis the surrounding Christian culture within which they lived in northern Europe – life-cycle events observed within the Jewish community and the annual-cycle rituals observed throughout the year.11 The focus will be on public rituals in which more than one person, or, as is most often the case, the entire community, participated. Our sources, the medieval Hebrew accounts of customs and laws concerning annual and life-cycle activities, were written by elite scholars and often intended for their peers, or, at the very least, for male members of their communities who could read Hebrew and understand basic halakhic discussions. However, the activities they describe and prescribe were not performed only by a small intellectual elite; rather, all members of the community – male and female, young and old, rich and poor, learned and ignorant – took part in them on one level or another. Moreover, by following rituals and their development over time, it is possible to identify those elements that remain constant and those that are subject to change, thus affording the basis for an understanding of the issues at play in society. The many medieval additions in mahzorim and custom books provide an understanding of the ways rituals˙ expressed social, cultural, and religious identities subject to historical forces, social expectations, and pressures.12 The Jewish life cycle, from cradle to grave, has been the subject of much study since the late 1990s. Yet few studies have treated the medieval Jewish

10

11

12

For a useful formulation of this idea, see: Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra, “Parody and Polemics on Pentecost: Talmud Yerushalmi Pesahim on Acts 2?” in Albert Gerhards and Clemens Leonhard, eds., Jewish and Christian Liturgy and Worship: New Insights into its History and Interaction (Leiden, 2007), 279 93. Many of these rituals were conducted similarly in Spain. However, very little research to date has examined the Spanish context. See: Yom Tov Assis, The Golden Age of Aragonese Jewry: Community and Society in the Crown of Aragon (Portland, 1997), 255 87. An important source for the discussion of many small details regarding the annual and life cycle events discussed in this chapter is Daniel Sperber’s books on Jewish custom, Minhagei Yisrael: Mekorot u Mehkarim, 7 vols. (Jerusalem, 1989 2007). Some of these essays were translated into English: The Jewish Life Cycle: Custom, Lore and Iconography. Jewish Customs from the Cradle to the Grave, trans. Ed Levin (Ramat Gan, 2008). For a survey of this topic among Christians in medieval Europe, see Katherine L. French, The Good Women of the Parish: Gender and Religion After the Black Death (Philadelphia, 2008), 50 84.

annual cycle and life cycle 419 13 life cycle as a whole, preferring to focus on its different stations, often studying the symbols at play within rituals and comparing the Jewish rituals to those of neighboring Christian communities.14 Following Ivan Marcus’s lead, tremendous emphasis has been put on the acculturation of elements and ideas from medieval Christianity alongside religious polemics,15 whereas other studies have also paid attention to gendered aspects of rituals within medieval communities.16 In contrast to life-cycle events, the annual cycle has hardly been studied from a holistic ritual perspective. While different aspects of liturgy and halakhic detail have been discussed, an attempt to see the annual feasts and fasts in a broader perspective is still a desideratum.17 In the pages that follow, many life-cycle and annual events will be outlined. Attention will be paid to continuity, as well as to innovative aspects of these rituals introduced by medieval European Jews. In addition, each ritual will be examined in light of the double context within which it took place: its symbolic meaning within Jewish tradition at large, as well as in the context of Jewish life as a religious minority in medieval Christian Europe. In the concluding section of the chapter, I will point to some of the shared features and symbols in medieval life-cycle and annual-cycle rituals, and reflect on the importance of these rituals in defining medieval Jewish identity. LIFE CYCLE RITUALS

Like most annual-cycle events, defined a priori as communal events, life-cycle rituals were also public and shared by parts, if not all, of the community. 13

14

15

16

17

Ivan G. Marcus, The Jewish Life Cycle: Rites of Passage from Biblical to Modern Times (Seattle, 2004). For birth rituals: Lawrence A. Hoffman, Covenant of Blood: Circumcision and Gender in Rabbinic Judaism (Chicago, 1996); Shaye J. D. Cohen, Why Aren’t Jewish Women Circumcised? Gender and Covenant in Judaism (Berkeley, 2005); Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton, 2004). Marriage and death have hardly been analyzed in gendered terms to date. Ivan G. Marcus, Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe (New Haven, 1996). Baumgarten, Mothers and Children; Hoffman, Covenant of Blood; Cohen, Why Aren’t Jewish Women Circumcised? Since a number of studies in the late nineteenth century that addressed aspects of holidays, for example Israel Abrahams, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 1917 [c.1896]), only a few studies have addressed the annual cycle. See for example, Hoffman, Canonization; Lawrence A. Hoffman and Paul Bradshaw, eds., The Making of Jewish and Christian Worship (Notre Dame, 1991); Hoffman and Bradshaw, eds., Life Cycles in Jewish and Christian Worship (Notre Dame, 1996); Paul F. Bradshaw and Lawrence A. Hoffman, eds., Passover and Easter: Origin and History to Modern Times (Notre Dame, 1999).

420 the middle ages: the christian world The Jewish communities in medieval northern Europe were relatively small, ranging from a handful of families to a few hundred. Throughout the High Middle Ages, they were close-knit communities in which most people knew each other.18 In communities such as these, life-cycle rituals were community affairs and many of them took place in public space, more often than not in the synagogue.19 Life-cycle events, as classic rites de passage, follow the tri-part sequence, described by Arnold van Gennep and expanded by anthropologists such as Victor Turner, that includes a separation from the community and from the initiate’s former state, a period of transition and liminality, and finally a reincorporation into the community.20 birth In small communities, such as those described at the outset, birth was far less frequent than one would assume.21 Given the high percentage of medieval infant mortality, one can understand the extent to which birth was an occasion for both joy and trepidation. Birth was not a solitary affair of concern only to immediate family members. The birthing chamber was a crowded space, filled with the local midwife, any helpers she had, and close family and friends of the parturient. Men waited outside the birthing chamber, or, in some cases, male activity surrounding birth was removed to the synagogue. Medieval and early modern writings describe the many precautions taken by Jews during birth, including the marking of the birthing space with protective amulets and, in extreme cases, the placing of one of the community’s Torah scrolls in an adjacent room, melding between the home and the synagogue.22 Once the baby was born, the mother was cared for by the midwife and by her friends. If the baby was a boy, the women of the community began 18

19

20

21

22

For an overview of the medieval Jewish community in northern Europe, see: Kenneth Stow, Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1992); Mark R. Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages, 2nd edn. (Princeton, 2008); Asher Frishman, The Early Ashkenazi Jews Since their Settlement in North West Europe to the First Crusade [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv, 2008). The importance of the synagogue in medieval European life cycle rituals is noteworthy, since this focus of ritual was a departure from late antique custom and changed yet again in the early modern period. For a summary of Van Gennep and Turner, see Bell, Ritual Theory, 94 117. For an anthropological analysis of Jewish birth rituals, see: Nissan Rubin, The Beginning of Life: Rites of Birth, Circumcision and Redemption of the First Born in the Talmud and Midrash (Tel Aviv, 1995). In communities that numbered twenty families, there probably were no more than a few births each year since families were at different stages of life. Baumgarten, Mothers and Children, 100 18.

annual cycle and life cycle 421 preparing for the circumcision by making candles to help illuminate the synagogue during the event. The father designated the circumcisor and the family members or friends who would fill ritual roles, as ba’alei brit, during the ceremony.23 The medieval circumcision ceremony took place in the synagogue and, as a ritual, was second in importance only to the marriage ceremony. It was considered a great honor to be chosen to participate in the ceremony and the many arguments that arose among community members around the designations of these honors reveal the tensions within families and communities concerning these issues. On the eighth day after the birth of a boy, early in the morning, the community would assemble and the circumcision would take place immediately after the daily morning prayers. The baby was prepared at home, washed and dressed, and then brought by a procession of women to the synagogue. The washing of the infant as well as his transportation was quite a spectacle and it was considered a distinction to be given the role of carrying him to the synagogue. This honor went to a woman, who continued to play an active role in the ritual within the synagogue, at least until the late thirteenth century. The medieval ritual followed a format well known from earlier texts, and included a number of blessings for the circumcision as well as supplications for the health of the mother and child. The infant was passed from hand to hand and finally circumcised while being held by a designated man or woman, known as the ba’al/ at brit (often called the compere or sandek). Wine was given to the baby and his parents, and finally a large meal was held by the parents after the circumcision.24 The medieval ritual contains a number of innovations concerning place, participants, and liturgy. The celebration of circumcision in the synagogue itself is one such innovation, as are the addition of the ba’alei brit. This role underwent further change during the thirteenth century, at which point women were forbidden to serve as ba’alot brit. This change was itself a reflection of a general shift in attitudes toward women in the thirteenth century that has been documented in a number of contexts.25 The circumcision liturgy was also slightly altered after 1096 when a verse 23

24

25

For descriptions of the circumcision ceremony, see: R. Jacob and Gershom the Cutters (ha Gozerim), Sefer Zikhron Brit, ed. Jacob Glassberg (Berlin, 1892), and the main books of customs, such as Mahzor Vitry, ed. Simon ha Levi Horowitz (repr. Nürnberg, 1923), 616 28; Eleazar b. Judah, Sefer ha Rokeah ha Gadol (Jerusalem, 1960), 300; Jacob b. Moses Moellin, Sefer Maharil, Minhagim, ed. Shlomoh J. Spitzer (Jerusalem, 1989), “Laws of Circumcision,” 476 89. For a summary of the ritual as it was held during the High Middle Ages, see Baumgarten, Mothers and Children, 55 91. See Baumgarten, “The Family,” Chapter 17 in this volume.

422 the middle ages: the christian world from the book of Ezekiel was added: “When I passed by you and saw you wallowing in your blood, I said to you: ‘Live in spite of your blood’(16:6).” This verse is seen as expressing the heightened feelings, and determination of Jews to continue circumcising their children and resist baptism, after the deadly and traumatic events of that year.26 The medieval innovations pointed to above were in fact in line with practices associated with baptism in medieval Christian society. The importance of the co-parents, or ba’alei brit, is a shared feature most probably adapted by Jews from their surroundings, as is the importance of holding the ritual in a central communal space such as the synagogue.27 This appropriation of Christian practice served internal Jewish purposes as well, such as networking or confirming gendered hierarchies within the Jewish community. It is especially interesting in light of the anti-Christian nature of circumcision, seen as a direct contrast to Christian baptism – a sacrament Jews went to tremendous lengths to avoid.28 Additional, less formal, birth rituals existed as well. Sefer Hasidim (thirteenth century) records a ritual for newborn boys in which a Pentateuch was laid under the infant’s head. He was then given a quill, with the aspiration that he would write holy words.29 Girls did not have any formal naming ceremony, until the fourteenth century, when one appears to emerge as indicated by sources from the period, although the ritual itself may in fact predate its first appearance in writing. This ritual, known as Hollekreisch, took place thirty days after birth, in the home, for both boys and girls. During this ceremony, the infants were given a name, Hebrew or vernacular, while young children participated in a process in which the baby was lifted up and the children shouted “Holle, Holle, what will this child be called?” This ritual has been explained as a Jewish adaptation of a Germanic rite to Frau Holle, who was known as a she-demon who kidnapped unbaptized children. Also taking place thirty days after birth was the customary pidyon haben ritual,30 which all firstborn sons were required to undergo. 26

27

28

29

30

David Wachtel, “The Ritual and Liturgical Commemoration of Two Medieval Persecutions” (MA thesis, Columbia University, 1995). Joseph Lynch, “Spiritale Vinculum: The Vocabulary of Spiritual Kinship in Early Medieval Europe,” in Thomas F. X. Noble and John J. Contreni, eds., Religion, Culture, and Society in the Early Middle Ages: Studies in Honor of Robert E. Sullivan (Kalamazoo, MI, 1987), 181 204. Elisheva Baumgarten, “Baptism and Circumcision: Developments of a Jewish Ritual in Christian Europe,” in Elizabeth Marks, ed., Circumcision: New Perspectives on an Ancient Rite (Hanover, 2003), 114 27. Judah b. Samuel, Sefer Hasidim (Bologna), ed. Reuven Margaliyot (Jerusalem, 1960), #1145. Ernst N. Z. Roth, “Al ha Hollekreisch,” Yeda Am 7, 52 (1962), 86 8; Baumgarten, Mothers and Children, 92 9.

annual cycle and life cycle 423 The birth rituals were extensive and reflect a number of aspects of medieval Jewish life: they underscore the tremendous store set in children, especially in light of medieval mortality; they emphasize the entrance of the child, especially the male child, into Jewish tradition; they accentuate patriarchy and the importance of male offspring in Judaism; and they highlight belonging to the Jewish – as opposed to the Christian – community. However, while emphasizing Jewish difference, it is interesting that many of the medieval novelties are in fact nuanced adaptations of Christian rituals surrounding birth and baptism. torah study The next ritual in a child’s life was unique to males and was the initiation into the world of formal schooling. Girls appear to have studied at home with tutors, and no particular ceremony marked the beginning of their education.31 Young boys, on the other hand, at around ages 5, 6, or 7 underwent a full-fledged ritual. A Torah initiation ritual is known from twelfth- and thirteenth-century texts in medieval northern France and Germany. Ivan Marcus has studied this ritual in depth and has demonstrated the extent to which it expressed the adaptation, as well as the refutation, of the Christian culture within which medieval Jews lived. Boys were taken to the synagogue by their fathers, covered with a mantle or a tallit, and then sat on their teachers’ laps where they read some biblical verses and ate cakes covered with honey, as well as eggs inscribed with biblical verses. This ritual took place symbolically on the festival of Shavuot (Pentecost) and many of the commentators who explained the ritual and its symbols connect between the individual child’s commencement of Torah study and the communal experience of receiving the Torah in biblical times and as part of the yearly cycle on Shavuot.32 Marcus has suggested that many of the symbolic elements, such as the cakes, the holding of the child on the rabbi’s lap, as well as the descent to the river bank where the boys declared that the Torah is like the water of life, can be contrasted with symbols used by Christians, and that some of the Jewish practices are simultaneously adaptations of Christian practice and declarations of Jewish identity. Taking place in the public arena, the ritual reaffirmed social values and hierarchies as well: the child is separated from his mother, who up until this point had been his main caregiver, and 31

32

Judith R. Baskin, “Women and Ritual Immersion in Medieval Ashkenaz,” in Lawrence Fine, ed., Judaism in Practice: From the Early Middle Ages through the Early Modern Period (Princeton, 2001), 142. Marcus, Rituals; Marcus, “Honey Cakes and Torah: A Jewish Boy Learns His Letters,” in Fine, ed., Judaism in Practice, 123 4.

424 the middle ages: the christian world joins the male community of Torah learners, a world from which medieval Jewish women were barred. The ritual fell out of use after the end of the thirteenth century, although traces of it appear in later texts into the early modern period.33 A life-cycle ritual that is lacking in medieval texts is that of bar mitzvah. Recent scholarship has disagreed about whether or not the dearth of discussions about the bar mitzvah was evidence of its absence in medieval culture. Israel Ta-Shma argued that the bar mitzvah was a known concept in medieval Europe and was accompanied by a rite, albeit not a major one.34 Others have argued that it came into being only in early modern times, and in some ways replaced the school initiation ritual.35 This latter theory fits in well with parallel developments in medieval and early modern European Christian society, where the age at which children participated in their first mass was postponed from 6 or 7 to 13 or 14, and the confirmation ritual was gradually introduced.36 m ar r i a ge In many ways, the most significant ritual in medieval Jewish life was marriage. The act of marriage included a sequence of rituals that could stretch out over a period of years, from the initial commitment of two people to marry until the actual marriage, while the latter was accompanied by preparations for weeks before and many festivities in the weeks after.37 Jewish children in medieval society were often matched at a very young age and married around the age of sexual maturity. A small number of women were married before their teens as well.38 These young men and women were supported by one or both sets of parents during the first years of their 33 34

35

36

37

38

Marcus, “Honey Cakes.” Israel M. Ta Shma, “The Earliest Literary Sources for the Bar Mitzva Ritual and Festivity” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 68 (1999), 587 98. Roni Weinstein, “Rites of Passage in Sixteenth Century Italy: The Bar Mitzva Ceremony and Its Sociological Implications” [Hebrew], Italia 11 (1994), 77 98; Marcus, Rituals, 83 101. Kathryn Ann Taglia, “The Cultural Construction of Childhood: Baptism, Communion and Confirmation,” in Constance M. Rousseau and Joel T. Rosenthal, eds., Women, Marriage and Family in Medieval Christendom: Essays in Memory of Michael M. Sheehan (Kalamazoo, MI), 255 88. Nissan Rubin, The Joy of Life: Rites of Betrothal and Marriage in the Talmud and Midrash (Tel Aviv, 2004); Avraham Haim Freimann, Seder Kidushin ve Niśuin. Mehkar Histori Dogmati be Dinei Yisrael (Jerusalem, 1945); Avraham Grossman, Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Europe in the Middle Ages (Waltham, 2004), 49 67; Roni Weinstein, Marriage Rituals Italian Style: A Historical Anthropological Perspective on Early Modern Italian Jews (Leiden, 2004). Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 33 48.

annual cycle and life cycle 425 married life. Changing medieval statutes demonstrate that marriage was an economic and social alliance, the terms of which were negotiated and contracted. Moreover, among medieval Jews, once contracted, promises to marry were seldom broken.39 While there were surely men and women who did not marry, marriage was the norm and there is little discussion of unmarried men and women in medieval Jewish sources. The marriage ritual began with the contract of marriage, in which the terms of marriage were agreed upon by the fathers. Late medieval sources discuss this ritual in great detail and one can only wonder what ceremonial gestures besides a handshake accompanied the ritual before this period. In the early Middle Ages, it was customary for the betrothal and engagement to take place some time before the formal matrimonial nuptials, resulting in couples who were bound to each other and who required a divorce if they did not marry, but who were not in actuality married. During the High Middle Ages, it became standard that the erusin (engagement) and niśuin (marriage) took place together at the marriage ceremony.40 The ritual process for the bride began sometime before her wedding when she began to follow her body’s menstrual cycle so as to be prepared to immerse and marry at a time when she could be sexually available to her husband. She then immersed in the mikveh and had various meals with friends and relatives. This was not just a personal experience, as additional women in the community, as well as her peers, took part in the process and helped the young bride prepare for the wedding day. Bridegrooms also received instruction. In this way, the marriage of one couple was a socialization process for many.41 Marriages took place on Friday. The ritual began early in the morning and was accompanied by music and much show. The bride symbolically entered the domain of the groom in the synagogue courtyard and both stood under a cloth or tallit, symbolizing the new home they were constructing together. This was followed by the traditional seven blessings.42 Esther Cohen and Elliott Horowitz have pointed to a shift in medieval Jewish nuptials that corresponds with a similar change in medieval 39

40 41

42

Ibid., 51 4; Israel J. Yuval, “Ha Hesderim ha Kaspiyim shel ha Niśuin be Ashkenaz be Yemei ha Benayim,” in Menahem Ben Sasson, ed., Religion and Economy: Connections and Interactions. Collected Essays (Jerusalem, 1995), 191 207. Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 49 51. For example: Mahzor Vitry, ed. Horowitz, 584 603. For a comparative perspective on how the ritual developed over time, see: R. Jousep (Juspa) Schammes, Minhagim de Kehilat Kodesh Wormeisa [Wormser Minhagbuch], ed. Benjamin Salomon Hamburger and Erich Zimmer (Jerusalem, 1988), vol. II, 1 59. For a classic description, see Eleazar b. Judah, Sefer Rokeah, 239 40.

426 the middle ages: the christian world Christian culture: the sanctification of the marriage ritual over time, much like marriage became a sacrament in twelfth-century medieval Christian Europe.43 The marriage ritual was followed by a celebratory feast, as well as dancing and singing. In addition, rituals took place on the Sabbath before the wedding, and during the course of the week after the wedding, when the seven blessings were repeated each night. The bride and groom were escorted not only by family members but also by shushvinim, chosen escorts who also received ritual honors in the synagogue on the Sabbath before the wedding.44 During the course of the Middle Ages, the figure of the rabbi gained a greater presence in the marriage ritual. In general, the presence of a quorum – and, in fact, often the entire community – at the ritual constitutes a gradual shift from the traditions of Antiquity, when marriages took place before two witnesses, to those of the medieval period, when it was expected and in fact required that a larger audience be part of the ceremony.45 Of course, not all those marrying were doing so for the first time. Medieval mortality, as well as divorce, meant that there were many men and women who underwent the ritual more than once. The ritual for women remarrying was slightly different: they did not marry on Fridays, their bride-price was lower, and some of the symbols used at the ritual were altered. Thus, for example, the vessel broken or thrown at the wedding symbolized the body of the bride and differed in shape according to whether she was a virgin or a woman who was remarrying.46 Other rites of passage related to the dissolution of marriage were the rituals of divorce and levirate marriage (yibum and halitsah). Divorce was a fairly common phenomenon in medieval society˙ and the divorce rite presents an interesting contrast to that of marriage, which was public and included the entire community. This ritual took place in front of a court of three judges along with two male witnesses, and although the entire community could witness the ritual, they often did not. The woman received a writ of divorce that released her from her husband. This writ allowed her to remarry after three months had passed, provided that she could confirm that she was not pregnant. In some cases, the divorce writ 43

44

45

46

Esther Cohen and Elliott Horowitz, “In Search of the Sacred: Jews, Christians and Rituals of Marriage in the Later Middle Ages,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 20 (1990), 225 50. This custom is described at length in Mahzor Vitry, ed. Horowitz, 584 603, and by Weinstein, Marriage Rituals, 368 73, 406 10. Cohen and Horowitz, “In Search,” 230 4. See also Baumgarten, “The Family,” Chapter 17 in this volume. R. Jacob Mulin, Sefer Minhagim, 463 75.

annual cycle and life cycle 427 was sent to the woman, indicating that she herself was not present in the rabbinic courts.47 The care taken in the medieval period to ensure that a divorce was valid is an issue that was addressed in late Antiquity as well. However, in medieval Europe the caution regarding divorce grew tremendously. A first important change was the inability of a man to divorce his wife without her consent. This has been seen as an attempt to stabilize marriage, but no matter what the motivation behind the ban its scope continued to be extended over time, and it effectively made divorce much less obtainable. By the fifteenth century, every divorce had to receive the approval of the community, and, in some cases, of an umbrella community leadership.48 Thus, much like marriage, divorce was far from a private affair. Another public ritual connected to marriage was levirate marriage. As Jacob Katz demonstrated a number of decades ago, the medieval Jewish European community gradually shifted from marriage within the paternal family (yibum) to releasing the woman from her obligation toward her dead husband’s family (halitsah).49 Distinction must also be made ˙ between the Jews living in northern Europe and those in Spain, where bigamy remained accepted well into the High Middle Ages, and, as a result, divorce, yibum and halitsah were performed differently. The topic of ˙ future attention.50 medieval divorce awaits death Death, the final life-cycle event, was ever present in medieval life, because of the high mortality of medieval people and the fact that in medieval Jewish communities, as in all pre-modern communities, people died in the home. This was compounded by the all-too-pervasive threat of death as a result of religious persecution, which, while far from being the rule, was such a factor of Jewish life in the High Middle Ages that it left its mark on the liturgy. The moment of death was of great import in medieval society in general, and one with special implications for Jews living among medieval 47

48

49 50

Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 239 41, summarizes this issue. Israel J. Yuval, “An Appeal against the Proliferation of Divorce in Fifteenth Century Germany” [Hebrew], Zion 48 (1983), 177 216. See also: Michael S. Berger, “Two Models of Medieval Jewish Marriage,” Journal of Jewish Studies 52 (2001), 59 84. This issue is addressed at length in Baumgarten, “The Family,” Chapter 17 in this volume. Jacob Katz, “Yibum ve Halizah ba Tekufah ha Betar Talmudit,” Tarbiz 51 (1981), 59 106. See: Assis, Golden Age, 261 5; Assis, “The ‘Ordinance of Rabbenu Gershom’ and Polygamous Marriages in Spain” [Hebrew], Zion 46 (1981) 251 77.

428 the middle ages: the christian world 51 Christians. In the medieval cultural context, as in many religious traditions, death was the final station in this world before progressing to the far more important world to come – where one was sent to Heaven or to Hell. In medieval Europe, the question of what happened in this world included theories about Judgment Day – the practical arrangements in Heaven, Hell, and, for Christians, Purgatory as well.52 Of all the rituals discussed here concerning the life cycle, death was perhaps the most visible. Parting from one’s dead required leaving the boundaries of one’s own community space. Although it is true that all the rituals discussed above required a negotiation of this space, since all included an act of leading the initiates from their homes to the community premises (i.e. the synagogue or its courtyard), death required much more than this. It required exiting the community space altogether and approaching another “territory” – the cemetery.53 The fear of imminent death was a constant presence in medieval life, and led many Jews to prepare for death continuously, with repentance serving as a key element in the liturgy, since death could occur at any time. Tellingly, and somewhat symbolically, one of the items that one brought into marriage during this period was a shroud.54 The beginning of the death ritual can be defined as the moment when someone was very sick or when someone was in the midst of a process that could possibly end in death, such as giving birth. In such moments, gifts were often made, whether to family members or to the community, by the dying man or woman. These gifts often included instructions concerning the person’s inheritance, as well as charitable donations that were to be made posthumously. Elliott Horowitz has described the act of dying in the early modern period as an elaborate ritual with many stages, which included wearing a tallit, the ritual washing of hands and kissing of the dead’s forehead by family members, as well as the recitation of the confession by/for the dead (Shabbat 32a). In medieval times, some of these aspects are 51

52

53

54

Compare this description of Jewish death to: Frederick S. Paxton, “Birth and Death,” in Thomas X. Noble and Julia H. M. Smith, eds., Cambridge History of Christianity: Early Medieval Christianities c. 600 1100 (Cambridge, 2008), 285. Michel Lauwers, La Mémoire des ancêtres, le souci des morts: Morts, rites, et société au Moyen Âge: Diocèse de Liège, XIe XIIIe siècles (Paris, 1997); Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall, “Introduction: Placing the Dead in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” in Gordon and Marshall, eds., The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2000), 1 16. Yechiel Schur, “The Care for the Dead in Medieval Ashkenaz” (Ph.D diss., New York University, 2008), 63 8. This was also the custom in Genizah society: Shlomo Dov Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, vol. IV (Berkeley, 1983), 188 9.

annual cycle and life cycle 429 alluded to, but the full range of activities is mentioned as the standard only in later periods.55 After determining that a person was in fact deceased and no longer alive, the corpse was not left alone until burial. A guard, whether a family member or someone else, was positioned by the body, and to some extent – at least on a symbolic level – all communal activity was supposed to stop until the deceased was buried.56 Water was thrown out of the house, a handkerchief was hung in a visible place, and all windows in the house were opened.57 A notable difference between Jewish and Christian practice in medieval Europe has to do with the announcement of death. Whereas Jews did certain things that made death visible to other members of the community, they did not announce the death loudly. In contrast, church bells were rung when a Christian died. Yehiel Schur, who has studied the care of the ˙ dead in medieval northern Europe, has suggested that this difference expresses the Jews’ minority status and that not only was death not announced publicly but that some medieval sources hint at the wish of the Jewish community to hide local deaths from their Christian neighbors. Many of the sizable Jewish communities in medieval Europe had their own cemeteries on the outskirts of the city.58 In some cases, this land was given to the community as part of their terms of settlement; in other cases, it was bought over time. Smaller communities or those that did not have cemeteries would travel, often by boat, with the deceased, to bury them. Most cemeteries had a small structure within them, called a beit teharah, ˙ and in these rooms the body was washed and dressed in shrouds. Medieval Jews believed that the dead would be resurrected and immediately join in the religious activities related to the messiah. For this reason, the shrouds one was buried in, and especially the shoes one wore, were of great

55

56

57

58

Elliott Horowitz, “Speaking to the Dead: Cemetery Prayer in Medieval and Early Jewry,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 8 (1999), 303 17; Avriel Bar Levav, “We Are Where We Are Not: The Cemetery in Jewish Culture,” Jewish Studies 41 (2002), 15 46; Bar Levav, “Ritualization of Jewish Life and Death in the Early Modern Period,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 47 (2002), 69 82. This follows the instructions in Masekhet Smahot, but in communities where there were people appointed to take care of the dead, life went on: Schur, “Care,” 43 5. Similar practices were hanging sheets to mark the house where the dead was lying and spilling out water that had amassed in different vessels: Moritz Güdemann, Geschichte des Erziehungswesens und der Cultur des Abendländischen Juden (Vienna, 1880), vol. I, 210 11. Different cemeteries are marked on maps of medieval cities; see the maps in the collection of articles edited by Christoph Cluse, ed., The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages (Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries) (Turnhout, 2004).

430 the middle ages: the christian world 59 importance. After washing the body, it was placed in a coffin that was built on the premises. Funerals were usually sparsely attended, and only in the case of the death of a very prominent community member would the notables of a city attend. After the burial, the mourners would return home barefoot and proceed to sit shiva for a week. This meant that they mourned their dead at home according to known custom, which varied slightly from place to place, and only after this week did they return to their mundane activities. Following the shiva, a gradual process of emerging from mourning was observed, with strictures on participation in festivities for over a year.60 The death of a spouse imposed restrictions on remarriage and usually required widows and widowers to wait a particular period of time before doing so.61 Another custom that was greatly expanded and developed in the medieval period was the recital of Kaddish by mourners, and especially by the children of the deceased, during the year after death. Children also fasted on the anniversary of their parents’ death (Jahrzeit), gave to charity, and lit candles in their memory.62 These practices, present in late Antiquity, grew all the more prominent in the medieval period as a reflection of the rise in the economy of salvation within Christian culture, which included charity and payment for masses for the dead, alongside fasts and candles that were supposed to help the dead to reach heaven.63 All of these rituals point to the prominent belief in connections between the dead and the living in medieval culture. Death was not perceived as a final separation – rather, the living and the dead were in constant contact through deeds performed by the living.64 To sum up this survey of life-cycle rituals, an important emphasis in the medieval period was the increasing involvement of community members and of communal authorities in the rituals spanning birth to death. The rituals involved prominent members of the community’s elite as well as family members and friends. All rituals were held within community 59 60

61

62

63

64

Schur, “Care,” 45 57. For descriptions of these customs, see: Mahzor Vitry, ed. Goldschmidt, III, 642 73; R. Eleazar b. Judah, Sefer Rokeah, 182 95; R. Jacob Mulin, Sefer Maharil, “Laws of Mourning,” 598 609. A woman had to wait three months to determine that she was not pregnant, according to Tractate Yebamot, ch. 11:6. See: Andreas Lenhardt, “Christlicher Einfluss auf das Jahrzeit Kaddisch,” Judaica. Beiträge zum Verstehen des Judentums 58 (2002), 281 96; Lenhardt, Qaddish. Untersuchungen zur Entstehung und Rezeption eines rabbinischen Gebetes (Tübingen, 2002). Megan McLaughlin, Consorting with Saints: Prayers for the Dead in Early Medieval France (Ithaca, NY, 1994). Patrick J. Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 1994), 77 94.

annual cycle and life cycle 431 space, including death rites, which took place in the Jewish cemetery outside the city. These rituals served many collective functions: emphasizing religious beliefs, marking community boundaries, and in some cases expressing or alleviating social tensions. Recent studies of particular rituals have emphasized the similarity of features in Jewish and Christian ceremonies and have discussed the ways Jews incorporated and appropriated elements from the surrounding culture into their life-cycle rituals. Yet, despite this appropriation – or perhaps because of it – life-cycle rituals were expressions par excellence of religious identity. Within the Jewish community framework, rituals expressed local hierarchies as well as matters of class and gender, and provided a framework for social networking and identification. ANNUAL CYCLE RITUALS

Whereas the life-cycle rituals accompanied individual lives, incorporating individual milestones within the communal framework, the annual cycle and its observances were shared by all members of the Jewish community. Some Jews lived in very small communities and did not have a public space in which to observe the annual cycle. They most probably celebrated festivals within their homes. These Jews often traveled to larger urban centers for the high holidays, as well as for some life-cycle events. In contrast, most urban Jewish centers celebrated the Jewish annual cycle both within the home and in the local synagogues and other public spaces. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to delve into the daily rituals of medieval Jews, it is important to emphasize here that, by their many small and repetitive actions, they all contributed to the solidification of medieval Jewish identity. Boundary markers such as food and clothing were part of a constant process of distinguishing Jews from their surroundings.65 Daily prayers that took place in the community institutions, and for which most of the community gathered morning and evening, were a way of expressing community solidarity and belonging, as well as fulfilling the ritual obligation of prayer.66 Another important way of emphasizing Jewish distinctiveness was the annual cycle of feasts and fasts. With the exception of a number of medieval innovations, the Jewish annual cycle was centuries-old, based first 65

66

Robert Bonfil, History and Folklore in a Medieval Jewish Chronicle: The Family Chronicle of Ahima’az ben Paltiel (Leiden, 2009), 172 88; Elisheva Baumgarten, Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz: Men, Women, and Everyday Religious Observance (Philadelphia, 2014), 172 94. For more examples, see Baumgarten, Practicing Piety, 60 9.

432 the middle ages: the christian world and foremost on the Bible, as well as subsequent pre-medieval additions.67 By late Antiquity, the Mishnah and both Talmuds set out the laws regarding the observance of different holidays and fast days. The liturgy for these days was set in the Gaonic period in the compositions known as Seder Rav Amram Gaon and Seder Rav Sherira Gaon.68 This liturgy was supplemented over time, especially by piyutim, some of which were written in late Antiquity, but others were added in the medieval period by notable authors.69 Much like the characteristics of the life-cycle rituals noted above, the annual cycle was observed publicly and was inclusive of most, if not all, members of the Jewish community, with adult men being the most central in its performance. It included a fixed liturgy and many prescribed ritual activities, practices for within the synagogue and at home. As part of these events, several feasts that included symbolic activities surrounding food were held each year. Thus, much as we saw in the context of life-cycle events, the different festivities in the annual cycle included not only liturgy but symbolic eating, as well as other symbolic objects and behaviors. Moreover, despite the antiquity of many aspects of Jewish rituals, once they were performed in the context of medieval Christianity different features of observance began to take on new meanings. This was especially significant because of the ongoing dialogue and competition between the religions, and in light of the fact that the Christian ritual cycle was based, to a certain extent, on the Jewish one. A number of scholars have pointed to the similarities between the Jewish and Christian festivals. While some of these similarities could be considered universal – most religions have days of rest such as the Sabbath – others are much more closely related.70 Scholars have long noted the parallels between Jewish and Christian holidays: Hanukah–Christmas, ˙ 67

68

69

70

Ismar Elbogen, Jewish Liturgy: A Comprehensive History, trans. Raymond P. Scheindlin (Philadelphia, 1993). See Stefen C. Reif’s section on “Liturgy” in “Liturgy and Piyut,” Chapter 24 in this volume. See Elisabeth Hollender’s section on “Piyut” in “Liturgy and Piyut,” Chapter 24 in this volume. Abrahams, Jewish Life, 156 60. More recently: Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites, Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (Princeton, 2006), 248 50; Güdemann, Geschichte des Erziehungswesens, III, 270 4; Bradshaw and Hoffman, eds., Passover and Easter: Origin and History to Modern Times; Bradshaw and Hoffman, Passover and Easter: The Symbolic Structuring of Sacred Seasons (Notre Dame, 1999); Israel J. Yuval, “Christliche Zeit und jüdische Zeit. Das Paradox einer Übereinstimmung,” in Christoph Cluse, Alfred Haverkamp, Israel J. Yuval, eds., Jüdische Gemeinden und ihr christlicher Kontext in kulturräumlich vergleichender Betrachtung: von der Spätantike bis zum 18 Jahrhundert (Hanover, 2003), 33 48.

annual cycle and life cycle 433 Purim–Fastnacht, the Great Sabbath (Shabbat ha-Gadol) – Palm Sunday, Passover–Easter, Shavuot–Pentecost; and a reversed parallel – the Jewish time of happiness from Adar-Pesach as opposed to the Christian period of sadness during Lent, as well as the Jewish period of sadness during the Omer, between Passover and Shavuot, as opposed to the post-Easter time of joy.71 All of these holidays included a number of different aspects. The holidays, like the observance of the Sabbath, often required a complete abstention from work and, as such, differentiated the Jews from the Christians among whom they lived.72 The holidays, like the Sabbath, required the preparation of food, as well as bathing and elaborate dressing. This was notable at specific dates like Passover or Rosh Hashanah but also significant in light of the fact that Friday was a day of fast among Christians, whereas it was a day of Jewish preparation for the Sabbath. Jews were going to bathe whereas Christians were refraining from doing so.73 Jews and Christians, who lived side by side in medieval courtyards, often shared ovens and therefore knew what food was being prepared by the other. On the Sabbath days, as well as the holidays, Jews could certainly be seen not only in their finery, but also toting ritual objects; and the sounds of communal gatherings, including prayers, the blowing of the shofar (ritual ram’s horn), and other such noises, certainly reached the ears of their neighbors. Christian domestic servants who worked in Jewish homes, as well as neighbors, were aware of the different holiday and Sabbath customs and were often called upon to perform activities Jews could not carry out on holy days.74 Alongside the festive cycle of the year was another, parallel, cycle of great significance in the medieval world, that of fasting. Over and above the public fasts in the Jewish calendar – the Day of Atonement and the Ninth of Av, as well as the four other minor fasts that were already known and in place from late Antiquity75 – medieval Jews, like their ancestors, fasted fairly frequently, either to commemorate different historical events or to 71

72

73 74

75

Israel J. Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Barbara Harshav and Jonathan Chipman (Berkeley, 2006), 205 55; Sarit Shalev Eyni, “Cosmological Signs in Calculating the Time of Redemption: the Christian Crucifixion and the Jewish New Moon of Nissan,” Viator 35 (2004), 265 87. For a recent collection of discussions about the Sabbath, see: Gerald Blidstein, ed., Sabbath: Idea, History, Reality (Be’er Sheva, 2004). Bonfil, History and Folklore, 174. Jacob Katz, The Sabbath Gentile: The Socio Economic and Halakhic Background to the Employment of Gentiles on Jewish Sabbaths and Festivals [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1983). Jacob M. Milgrom and Moshe D. Herr, “Fasting,” in Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, eds., Encyclopedia Judaica, 2nd edn. (Detroit, 2007), vol. VI, 719 23.

434 the middle ages: the christian world ward off dangers. In addition, there were periods of mourning in which Jews did not fast but abstained from certain food or from hair-cutting as well as celebrations. These took place in the spring (Omer) and in the summer (during the weeks before the Ninth of Av). Individuals fasted during the months of iyar and elul and shovavim76 and during the ten Days of Awe, between the New Year and the Day of Atonement. They also fasted after a bad dream occurred (ta’anit halom), or as a pious act of devotion, ˙ with some affliction or worry, as either independently or in connection penance for a deed done, or on the anniversary of the death of a family member.77 Modern scholarship has paid little attention to these fasts to date, except for in passing or in connection with specific halakhic issues.78 However, as Israel Abrahams noted over a century ago, a pious Jew could spend close to half the year fasting!79 In addition to the set fasts and festivals throughout the year, there were additional occasions for fasting. Each man or woman took care of the salvation of his or her own soul by fasting individually, but there were also communal fasts of a public nature that could include members of the community who did not fast regularly, such as children. For example, the Jews in the Rhine Valley commemorated attacks on their community by fasting and reciting a special liturgy each spring. Besides fasting, these special prayer days often included other abstinent behaviors. For example, the people of Blois took upon themselves fasts after the persecution of their community, but also vowed not to wear silk clothes or eat certain foods.80 Much like the holiday rituals, these fasts are based on Jewish practices from late Antiquity.81 At the same time, they also resonated with contemporary Christian practices, in which fasting was not only an expression of extreme ascetic piety,82 but also part of the daily, weekly, and annual 76

77 78

79 80

81

82

The fasts of shovavim tat are eight Thursdays of the winter months of an intercalated year. The acronym is composed of the initial letters of eight consecutive weekly Pentateuch portions starting with Shmot (Exodus). Ibid., 719 23. Sperber, Minhagei Yisrael, according to the Index, using the word “fast” or, in Hebrew, zom. Abrahams, Jewish Life, 141; Baumgarten, Practicing Piety, 51 102. R. Ephraim b. Jacob of Bonn, The Book of Memoirs (Sefer Zekhira): Penitential Prayers and Lamentations, ed. with introduction and notes Abraham M. Habermann (Jerusalem, 1970), 33. As discussed in the Mishnah, fasting was a regular occurrence in the event of peril, drought, or famine: Mishna, Ta’anit, ch. 4; and see: David Levine, Communal Fasts and Rabbinic Sermons Theory and Practice in the Talmudic Period [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv, 2001). For descriptions of extreme ascetic fasting, see: Caroline Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, 1987).

annual cycle and life cycle 435 cycle of penitence. Christian laity observed many fasts. However, once again, while fasting was a practice shared by Jews and Christians, it also announced religious difference since Jews and their neighbors fasted on different days and for different purposes.83 Medieval sources indicate that, within the urban setting, the Jews’ Christian neighbors, business partners, and clients were well aware of Jewish routines. Medieval urban settings were not large and any celebrations were evident in the city space, especially since Jews took an active role in the urban economy and their holidays required them to cease from their regular activities. Some of the Jewish preparations for holidays were evident, whether baking matzah for Passover or sitting in sukot during the week of Tabernacles.84 This is not to say that Christians were familiar with the ideology behind rituals, but they did know where to find their neighbors when they were not at home or what different ritual situations involved. Thus, for example, one medieval source tells of a Jewish woman who went to the synagogue and came home to find that her candles had been blown out by the wind. Her Christian neighbor immediately offered to rekindle the lights for her. In this case, one can see a neighborly familiarity with the laws of Sabbath that do not permit the Jewish woman to relight her candles.85 A second example of Christian familiarity with Jewish practice has to do with Passover and is both an example of the dependence of Jews on their Christian neighbors and, at the same time, evidence of the tensions between Jews and Christians. Jews bought their bread from the local monastery. However, a problem arose on Passover when they did not wish to receive their regular allotment, while the Christians wished to supply them with it. In contrast, other medieval responsa demonstrate that Christians often brought Jews gifts of bread on the last day of Passover so that they could have hametz (“leaven”) immediately after the holiday was over.86 And if Christians were aware of some aspects of Jewish ritual, it is probable that Jews were even more familiar with the details of Christian 83

84

85 86

Sarah Hamilton, The Practice of Penance, 900 1050 (Rochester, 2001), 42 3; Peter Biller, “Confession in the Middle Ages: Introduction,” in Peter Biller and A. J. Minnis, eds., Handling Sin: Confession in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 1998), 1 35. Descriptions and illustrations of matzah baking show a tremendous amount of activity in courtyards. Since these courtyards and ovens were shared by Jews and Christians, Christians must have been aware of what was happening. MS Paris héb. 326, fol. 19a. R. Solomon b. Isaac (Rashi), Responsa Rashi Solomon b. Isaac, ed. Israel Elfenbein (New York, 1943), #114, 142; Hagahot Maimoniyot, Hilkhot Hametz u Matza, ch. 1, Halakhah 4 (standard edns.). My thanks to Judah Galinsky for these references.

436 the middle ages: the christian world celebrations. These festivals and fasts not only had implications for commerce but also impacted the public space as well, as most festivals were accompanied by elaborate processions. Medieval celebrations of holidays were often complex performances.87 Thus, for example, the Lent–Easter season had many parts – Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday itself – to mention just those that were public. During the High Middle Ages, the palms would be blessed publicly on Palm Sunday, marking the start of the Holy Week, beginning with a procession through town to the church. In some places in Germany, a donkey with a representational “figure” would also be part of the procession. Once inside the church, Sunday mass was celebrated and the Passion was divided into three parts, one of which represented the Jews and their alleged treatment of Jesus. On Holy Thursday, a mass marked the end of the fast, and another mass commemorated the Last Supper. On Good Friday, a procession with the cross was accompanied by singing, and later this developed into the “Stations of the Cross.” Many aspects of the public ritual during Holy Week had an anti-Jewish character, and Jews were treated with growing suspicion during this time, until in some places they were forbidden to be on the streets during these holy days.88 Israel Yuval has compared this ritual process leading up to Easter to the days surrounding Passover, which began with the Great Sabbath (Shabbat ha-Gadol). Yuval has argued that the Jewish Great Sabbath gained importance only after the year 1000. He has suggested that many of the details in the rituals around Passover have clear Christian parallels in the Easter ritual and, as a result, sees tremendous give-and-take between Jewish and Christian culture. For example, as time went by, special liturgy was adapted to mark the date, and it became increasingly popular and well known. Passover was also preceded by preaching and teaching. Another ritual was that of removing the leaven (bedikat hametz) and burning it on Passover eve. This was followed by the seder ritual that included the eating of the afikoman (the last matzah eaten as part of the Passover seder). The Passover meal contains many more small rituals, such as the eating of matzah, dipping vegetables in salt water and the preparation of haroset (a food made of nuts and apples, eaten as part of the Passover ˙ritual).89 Illuminations of the seder ritual often include images of messiahs on donkeys. 87

88

Joanne M. Pierce, “Holy Week and Easter in the Middle Ages,” in Bradshaw and Hoffman, eds., Passover and Easter: Origin and History to Modern Times; John Baldovin, “Holy Week, Liturgies of,” in Peter Fink, ed., The New Dictionary of Sacramental Worship (Collegeville, MN, 1990), 542 52. Pierce, “Holy Week.” 89 Yuval, Two Nations, 248 55.

annual cycle and life cycle 437 Beyond these symbolic similarities, medieval sources and especially Christian law show the flashpoints of tension around these holidays. For example, the Fourth Lateran Council, section 68, declared that: They [Jews] shall not walk out in public on the Days of Lamentations (the last three days of Holy Week) or the Sunday of Easter for as we have heard certain ones among them do not blush to go out on such days more than usually ornamented and do not fear to poke fun at Christians who display signs of grief at the memory of the most holy Passion.90

Further study of liturgy, as well as other holiday and Sabbath rituals, including food and dress, may lead to an even more connected history of medieval annual-cycle rituals, identifying the unchanging, archaic elements handed down across the generations, as well as those elements and customs that reflect the realities of Jewish life in Christian Europe. THE LIFE CYCLE AND THE ANNUAL CYCLE: A JOINT EXAMINATION

Medieval Jewish annual-cycle events have received hardly any attention to date, especially from a ritual studies point of view. Many issues require further study, such as the participation of lay versus elite members of society, men and women, adults and children.91 However, in light of the tremendous attention paid in recent years to some life-cycle events, as well as many common themes that emerge from the joint examination of the life cycle and the annual one, I will conclude by pointing to three examples of connections that emerge from some of the topics discussed in this article. As stated at the outset, rituals express social tensions and hierarchies, reinforcing difference and subordination. One of the permanent features in all life-cycle as well as annual-cycle rituals was the distribution of honors, whether in the synagogue or outside it. Thus, when a boy was circumcised, ba’alei brit were chosen, and when he was initiated into formal schooling, someone was chosen to take him to the synagogue wrapped in a tallit. Brides and grooms were accompanied to the hupah,92 and the dead were ˙ included the choosing of accompanied to burial.93 Annual-cycle events community members who were honored with blessing the Torah during the weekly and festive readings, to be hatan torah or hatan breshit on ˙ ˙ 90

91

92 93

Solomon Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century (New York, 1966), vol. I, 308 9. I have discussed some of these aspects in Baumgarten, “The Family,” Chapter 17 in this volume. Weinstein, Marriage Rituals, 358 63. Rubin, The End of Life; Schur, “Care,” 63 6.

438 the middle ages: the christian world Simhat Torah, as well as many other small roles given out on weekly and festive occasions.94 One obvious hierarchal element is that most of these roles were carried out by men, with women given much more minor parts, even in life-cycle rituals.95 Moreover, throughout the medieval period, there were changes in attitudes concerning the participation of minors and women in different ritual activities, such as hearing the shofar or blessing the four species on Tabernacles. Other communal tensions, such as those between scholars and those who were not scholars, traditional divisions between kohanim (of priestly descent), Levites, and Israelites, as well as between families more and less prominent, all provided opportunities to network socially and declare community hierarchies. In this way, the rituals performed by the community expressed internal community politics in different ways that have yet to be explored by modern scholars. A second area of study is that of symbols.96 Rituals included many symbols. Some, like the shofar on New Year or the four species taken on Tabernacles, originated in the Bible. Others did not. Eggs, for example, featured as symbols in many rituals. Eggs were eaten by children beginning to study Torah; they were eaten before weddings and when returning from the cemetery after burial. Eggs were also eaten on the eve of the Ninth of Av.97 Even more prominent are other foods, such as bread and wine, that were constant features of Jewish festivals. Although many of these symbols were not new in the medieval period, it is noteworthy that the repetitive use of them helped to bind the rituals together and took on fresh meanings during this time. One can wonder how the Jewish ritual use of wine and bread in medieval Jewish festive rituals took on additional significance in the context of the growing importance of the Eucharist in medieval Christian Europe, alongside blood libel accusations, many of which were connected with Passover. The final example of connections between rituals are the formative events in Jewish tradition referred to in the interpretation of the different life-cycle rituals and then echoed in the annual-cycle celebrations, as well as 94

95

96 97

See, for example, the intricate instructions in Mahzor Vitry, 596 600, and in late medieval custom books: R. Jacob Mulin, Minhagim, Hilkhot Shabbat Breshit, 400 1. Pierre Bourdieu, “Rites as Acts of Institution,” in John G. Peristiany and Julian Pitt Rivers, eds., Honor and Grace in Anthropology (Cambridge, 1992), 81 8; Megan McLaughlin, “Women and Men,” in Miri Rubin and Walter Simons, eds., Cambridge History of Christianity: Christianity in Western Europe 1000 1500 (Cambridge, 2009), 190. Sperber, The Jewish Life Cycle. Shmuel Glick has collected many parallel customs that exist in traditions of marriage and death: Light has Dawned: The Relation between Marriage and Mourning Customs in Jewish Tradition [Hebrew] (Efrat, 1977), 74 86, details the parallel use of eggs.

annual cycle and life cycle 439 in the liturgy. For example, the allusion to the Jewish reception of the Torah at Sinai is repeated time and again when interpreting aspects of medieval Jewish life-cycle rituals, all of which are compared to Mount Sinai.98 Medieval commentators explained that the Torah initiation rite for boys, the circumcision ceremony, and the marriage ritual all symbolize and re-enact the acceptance of the Torah by the Jewish people. This event is also remembered on the holiday of Shavuot, which, during the medieval period, came to symbolize the reception of the Torah par excellence,99 as well as in other rituals that commemorated the departure from Egypt culminating at Mount Sinai and mentioned every Sabbath and holiday. Much as I indicated in the discussion of different rituals above, this statement concerning Sinai, despite its antiquity, was not disconnected from the religious polemic and tension with Christian communities who saw themselves as connected to this same tradition. In conclusion, ritual activity expressed and transmitted the connection between Jews within communities, those in specific communities and those in other communities around the medieval world, and with the Jewish tradition. The Jewish calendar united all members of the Jewish communities and distinguished them from their neighbors.100 At the same time, ritual symbols, practices, and ideas also conveyed shared and distinct values that were part of Jewish experience in a medieval Christian environment. Medieval life-cycle and annual-cycle rituals defined, contested, and affirmed social and religious identities, making those who celebrated these rituals part of their individual families, communities, religious traditions, and the medieval world at large. 98

99

100

See, for example, R. Eleazar b. Judah’s explanation of the Torah initiation ritual and the wedding ceremony, Sefer Rokeah, 239 40. In biblical times, Shavuot was first and foremost an agricultural holiday, whereas in medieval Europe it was the holiday celebrating the reception of the Torah: Marcus, Rituals, 83 8. Lawrence A. Hoffman, “Reconstructing Ritual as Identity and Culture,” in Hoffman and Bradshaw, eds., The Making of Jewish and Christian Worship, 22 41; Albert Gerhards, “Crossing Borders: The Kedusha and the Sanctus,” in Albert Gerhards and Clemens Leonhard, eds., Jewish and Christian Liturgy and Worship (Leiden, 2007), 38.

chapter 17

THE FAMILY elisheva baumgarten

When Louis the Pious granted his charter to the Jews allowing them to settle in France in the early ninth century, he gave the privilege to R. Domatus and his relative Samuel and their families.1 While much notice has been taken of the trader status of the Jews who were admitted to the kingdom and who made it their home, little attention has been paid to the fact that these merchants were not admitted alone. Permission had previously been granted to traders to pass through the area.2 The innovation here was the admission of Jewish traders into the Kingdom with the expectation that they would settle in these areas.3 This chapter will discuss the medieval European Jewish family, focusing on the Jewish communities of northern Europe in the High Middle Ages. Jewish family history, like all family history, is one of longue durée, in which changes were often gradual. Yet, even as family frameworks were slow to change, other aspects of medieval life changed rapidly – depending as they did on social and legal factors such as fluctuations in the status of Jews in medieval Europe, as well as economic considerations and urban expansion – and the family responded to these changes in turn. Thus, for example, as the number of cities in medieval Europe in which Jews were allowed to settle became increasingly limited,4 extended families found it difficult to settle together, and this profoundly affected the way the family functioned. Despite the tremendous strides in research since the mid-1990s concerning the medieval Jewish family, studies of family have often 1

2

3

4

Julius Aronius, Regesten zur Geschichte der Juden im fränkischen und deutschen Reiche bis zum Jahre 1273 (Berlin, 1902; repr. Hildesheim, 1970), # 81. See Michael Toch who suggests that Jews are one group among many of different traders: The Economic History of European Jews: Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages (Leiden, 2013), 190 3. Mark R. Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 2008), 79 80, discusses this transformation. Israel J. Yuval, Scholars in their Time: The Religious Leadership of German Jewry in the Late Middle Ages [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1988), 277 9.

440

the family 441 taken a fragmented approach rather than examining the family as a unit. This chapter will suggest that the family was a basic mode of organization of medieval Jewish society – one that has often been overlooked; it will propose some of the benefits of paying more attention to the family as a fruitful environment for examining transformations within Jewish society; and will point to some of the knowledge that has been gained concerning the Jewish family, and indicate areas of further research. Before turning to examine aspects of medieval family life, one must ask the most basic question: what constituted a family in the Middle Ages? The definition of what constitutes a family (familia in Latin) is not stable, and changes with different cultures and contexts. In studying the medieval Christian family, many historians have demonstrated that the family was defined as all of those living around the same hearth, establishing a connection based on place rather than blood.5 In other times and places, family was defined by other criteria – either limited to immediate blood relatives or extended to larger family networks, either paternal or maternal.6 For the purpose of this chapter, I distinguish between two definitions of family, both found in medieval texts as well as in common use today. The first is the nuclear family unit consisting of parents and children. In medieval Hebrew sources, this unit was not called a family (mishpaha) ˙ but rather a bnei beit av: all of those who lived in one house and were connected to one father, a term which in and of itself is evidence of the patriarchal and patrilineal nature of the medieval Jewish family.7 The term “bnei bayit” without the qualifier “av” referred to all those living under the same roof, including servants and guests, and is parallel to the definition of the Latin familia common in medieval Europe, as mentioned above.8 Medieval sources used the Hebrew word mishpaha to describe the extended family.9 It is noteworthy that this word was ˙not used frequently in these sources and, when it was used, it was often associated with the 5 6

7

8

9

David Herlihy, Medieval Households (Cambridge, MA, 1982), 1 28. For example: Shlomo Dov Goitein, A Mediterranean Society (Berkeley, 1978), vol. III, 1 46. See, for example, Rashi, Ex. 12:3, s.v. “se lebayit: se lebeit avot”; Rashi, BT Yoma 55b, s.v. “vesasa lenedavah.” Sources that discuss the laws of Passover, discuss many “bnei bayit” that include servants see R. Haim b. Isaac, Drashot Maharah Or Zarua’, ed. Menahem Avitan (Jerusalem, 2002), 30 7, #21, “velishat isot.” However, in some cases, there does seem to be a distinction between the nuclear family and the members of the household. For example, Rashi explains that Pharaoh’s household was not a “beit av” but rather what he calls a “meisnede,” which comes from the French maison and refers to all those living in one house: Gen. 45:2, s.v. “vayishma.” The sources explain that one mishpaha has many batei av Rashi, Joshua 7:14, s.v. “lebatim.”

442 the middle ages: the christian world community at large.10 Instead, the term krovim (“relatives”) was often used, ˙ or marriage relations between and in this way pointed to the blood 11 members of the community. This chapter will discuss both these forms of family.12 BETWEEN COMMUNITIES AND INDIVIDUALS

The family unit, both nuclear and extended, has often been sandwiched between two other, more standard, ways of looking at medieval Jewish life. The first is that of community: whether on the local or the regional level, community life and communal hierarchies have been the focus of much research to date.13 The second is that of the individual – most often the male individual, but at times also groups of women or individual women.14 Situated in between were the families that made up the communities and to which the individuals, men and women, belonged. The family unit, rather than the community, played a role in many aspects of daily and community life. As noted above, the nuclear family unit was the defining factor when granting permission to Jews to reside in the medieval European cities throughout the Middle Ages and reflected the patterns of settlement and expulsion throughout the period. This mode of settlement (according to family units) is apparent in accounts of the Jews in England, northern France, and Germany throughout the High Middle Ages.

10

11 12

13

14

An apparently obvious place to find the word mishpaha referring to nuclear families was within the Crusade chronicles, since family members were killed in some cases as a group. Interestingly, the word does not appear. Rather, when the killing is described, the whole array of family members is described: fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, etc. for example, Eva Haverkamp, ed., Hebräische Berichte über die Judenverfolgungen während des Ersten Kreuzzugs (Hanover, 2005), 249, 355, 373. For the use of the word karov (“relative”), see ibid., 273, 275. For a similar set up in a different medieval context: Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, III, 1 2. Communities were at the heart of much scholarship around 1948 and thereafter. See, for example, the collection of essays put out by Haim Hillel Ben Sasson, The Medieval Jewish Community [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1976). Scholars have merited special attention. See the writings of Avraham Grossman and Ephraim Elimelekh Urbach, for example: Ephraim Elimelekh Urbach, The Tosaphists: Their History, Writings and Methods, 4th edn. (Jerusalem, 1980); Avraham Grossman, The Early Sages of Ashkenaz: Their Lives, Leadership and Works [Hebrew], 3rd edn. (Jerusalem, 2001); Grossman, The Early Sages of France: Their Lives, Leadership and Works [Hebrew], 3rd edn. (Jerusalem, 2001). For women, see Avraham Grossman, Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe (Waltham, MA, 2004); Judith R. Baskin, ed., Jewish Women in Historical Perspective (Detroit, 1991).

the family 443 Because the focus of research to date has been on the community framework alongside the lives and intellectual creativity of individuals, the family has been fragmented into its components – men, women, and children – or alternatively has been absorbed into the community at large. Recent research on gender and women in medieval society has led to a further blurring of the family as a unit, since such research has focused almost exclusively on women and has removed them from their families or conflated their families with them, thus turning family history into women’s history. An additional characteristic of discussions of the family to date is the marginalization of family life to private life – conceived as that which did not take place in the public sphere. However, not only is the usefulness of this dichotomy between public and private in itself questionable,15 but also families, as will become evident in the pages that follow, were not confined to the private sphere, but were visible in the most public arenas of medieval Jewish life. Religious polemic is the one area in which the Jewish family has been both discussed and emphasized in research, although more as an ideal or a symbol than as a concrete actuality. The Jews of northern Europe lived among Christians – a society in which celibate rather than family life was the ideal. In contrast, among medieval Jews, as in Jewish communities in other times and places, marriage, procreation, and family life were the only accepted normative option. This contrast between the Jewish and Christian ideals was one that was often drawn by both Jews and Christians of the period. Some modern scholars have even gone as far as declaring that the Christian preference for celibacy is so at odds with the centrality of family in Jewish society that it is impossible to compare the idea and reality of family life between the two groups. As a result, these scholars have suggested that the sphere of family was the most Jewish of all spaces in the medieval world.16 Ideology notwithstanding, most of the Christians among whom Jews lived resided within their family units, and all Christians lived in family frameworks at some point in their lives. Indeed, the homes lived in by urban Jews and Christians shared similar set-ups and material commodities. Moreover, the Jewish home, the primary space the family occupied, was not accessed by Jews alone. Most urban Jewish homes were serviced by 15

16

Joan B. Landes, ed., Feminism, the Public and the Private (Oxford, 1998). This whole book is a collection of essays devoted to this topic. A blatant statement of this thinking was made by Israel Abrahams, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 1917 [c.1896]), 113, 131, 137, 140, 156, but the same idea has come across in more recent scholarship, albeit between the lines: see K. Stow, Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 196 209.

444 the middle ages: the christian world Christian men and women who often dwelled within the home, and worked within it on a regular and ongoing basis. These same homes also served as places of business and commerce, and, as such, were visited by non-Jews and Jews alike. Nor was access to the domestic space limited to family members and servants. Leading scholars held their classes within their homes, as did some tutors, opening them to community members. Family celebrations took place in the home, as did mourning rituals. This chapter will examine the role of the family unit in a number of aspects of medieval Jewish life: legal, ritual, economic, and the everyday. Throughout the chapter, limited comparisons will be made with contemporary Christian family life. FAMILY FRAMEWORKS

Much information about medieval family life is still obscure as there is a dearth of community and family records. While sources from medieval Europe indicate that the nuclear family, consisting of parents and children, was the unit around which family life was organized, the sources also indicate that there were intricate and elaborate networks between members of extended families. Thus, even the most basic question – the size of the medieval nuclear family – does not have a clear answer. The question of family size has been tackled a number of times over recent years. In light of the lack of sources on everyday life and of community registrars, there are two types of sources that have been tapped. The first group of sources consists of prosopographic details concerning the lives of prominent community members such as rabbis and other wellknown figures. Most were scholars whose children were also scholars, and were important enough to merit special attention and mention. These details present a very partial glimpse of medieval families, even those of the learned elite, since they mention only the ones continuing the tradition of their fathers. Daughters are, of course, omitted, unless those daughters married other important scholars. A good example of this lack of basic information is the ongoing debate concerning the size of the family of R. Solomon ben Isaac (Rashi) – namely, whether Rashi, known as “the father of the daughters,” had three, or perhaps four, girls.17 Even with regards to such an important and well-known figure, these basic details are unknown. Yet it was based on this (rather partial) knowledge that Avraham Grossman estimated the average scholarly family to have had some four children.18 This estimate does not, however, reflect the number of births 17 18

Grossman, Early Sages of France, 124 5, where he documents the previous approaches. Grossman, Early Sages of Ashkenaz, 8 n. 32, 10.

the family 445 per family. Nor does it allow for a comparison between scholarly families that constituted the intellectual and often economic elite, and other families within the community. A second group of sources that have been analyzed at length is made up of the lists of the dead from the Nuremberg Memorbuch, which included people killed during the First Crusade (1096), the Rintfleisch attacks (1298), attacks during the Black Death (1348), and other such events. These lists do not have a consistent structure. While some listed the names of the dead parents and those of their children, others mentioned the man by name and noted that he was killed with his wife and a specific number of children, or just noted that he was killed with his wife and children without mentioning how many there were.19 Moreover, the fact that a family consisting of parents and children was killed does not indicate that all the children were killed. As such, this information is also partial. Based on these lists, Kenneth Stow suggested that the average Jewish family had two to three children and that Jews must have been aware that their families were smaller than those of their Christian neighbors. He suggests that this was perhaps the result of a conscious use of birth control.20 While both these estimates are based on different groups of sources, neither is conclusive. What they do provide is a possible numerical framework for Jewish family life. Each medieval Jewish community consisted of a particular number of families, the smallest communities numbering a mere handful and the largest consisting of hundreds of families.21 These family groups did not form houses or clans, although there is evidence that political ties between family members were a force within the community.22 Nuclear families were created by the older generation of the community. Like their Christian neighbors, Jewish parents arranged matches for their children, often when the children were young, as part of a solidification of social and economic networks. Many examples reveal that these matches were often made between families in different cities, as engagement agreements include conditions concerning the need for the bride or groom to

19

20

21

22

Siegmund Salfeld, Das Martyrologium des Nürnberger Memorbuches (Berlin, 1898) con tains many lists. We still await a comprehensive study of this book. The lists were often based on community tax lists. Kenneth R. Stow, “The Jewish Family in the Rhineland: Form and Function,” American Historical Review 92 (1987), 1085 110. This is in contrast to early modern times when the Jewish population was decidedly more rural. See Debra Kaplan, Beyond Expulsion: Jews, Christians and Reformation Strasbourg (Stanford, 2011), 1 10. R. Judah b. Samuel, Sefer Hasidim, ed. Reuven Margaliyot (Jerusalem, 1984), #179.

446 the middle ages: the christian world 23 travel. In the medieval period, such a move often resulted in a parting from the family of birth for long periods of time, if not forever. As a result, the negotiations of terms in such a marriage contract were often elaborate. Medieval sources indicate that some young girls married before they reached the age of majority, defined as 12½. While these marriages seem to have been common according to some sources, other sources indicate the involvement of young men and women in determining their future spouses, a practice that suggests that they were not minors.24 Avraham Grossman has estimated that approximately 25 percent of the couples consisted of child-brides.25 Early modern sources indicate that boys also got married at a very young age, well before they reached their late teens.26 It is hard to determine systematically how old men and women were when they married and most of the evidence we have is anecdotal.27 However, the general impression arising from the texts indicates that parents were making matches for their children, and that some of them, especially the girls, were very young, although rarely minors.28 In comparison, information on the age of marriage amongst urban Christians seems to indicate that, while Christian couples were also often very young,29 Jewish couples were even younger. Some medieval sources suggest that this was a result of the insecurity Jews felt living as a minority society. Jacob Katz suggested that this was because of the desire to regulate sexuality and emphasize the importance of Torah study, and while he was discussing the late Middle Ages, this logic could hold for the High Middle Ages as well.30

23

24 25 26

27

28

29

30

Judith R. Baskin, “Mobility and Marriage in Two Medieval Jewish Societies,” Jewish History 22 (2008), 223 43. Ariel Erlich, “Niśuei Ketanot” (MA thesis, Hebrew University, 2009), 51 82. Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 33 48. Jacob Katz, “Marriage and Sexual Life among the Jews at the Close of the Middle Ages” [Hebrew] Zion 10 (1945), 21 54. Thus, for example, R. Isaac b. Abraham recounts the difficulties he had with his wife before he reached maturity, suggesting that he was married at a very young age. Furthermore, in the case he discusses in which a claim of impotence is filed against a man, he suggests that this is common in marriages in which the couple is young: R. Isaac b. Moses, Sefer Or Zarua’ (Zhitomir, 1862), vol. I, #653; Teshuvot Maimoniyot, #6. On this response, see Urbach, The Tosaphists, I, 262 3. For marriage age in late Antiquity, see: Adiel Schremer, Male and Female He Created Them (Jerusalem, 2003). See also Michael Satlow, Jewish Marriage in Antiquity (Princeton, 2001). Martha Howell, “Marital Property Law as Socio Cultural Text: The Case of Late Medieval Douai,” in Philip L. Reynolds and John Witte Jr., eds., To Have and to Hold: Marrying and Its Documentation in Western Christendom, 400 1600 (Cambridge, 2007), 421 5. Katz, “Marriage and Sexual Life,” 44 7.

the family 447 A central factor when arranging marriages was the question of the family’s reputation and status, both that of the immediate family and of the extended one as well. This was determined by lineage and wealth, as well as by scholarship. The family’s background, history, and reputation often went together with the latter two factors. Thus, R. Eleazar ben Judah wrote that his wife was “the daughter of aristocrats”31 when he praised her after her death. The Italian root of her name, Dulcia, indicated her belonging to the prestigious German Jewish families who originated in Italy and were considered the founding families of the community.32 If our knowledge of nuclear families seems scant, information on extended family networks within medieval Ashkenaz is even more so. With the exception of the complex web of interconnections between scholarly families, little can be said about the way ties between the different nuclear families functioned in communal life. It is clear from the sources that both paternal and maternal connections were important, although paternal links were highly visible, as each medieval Jew was known by his/her name and by the name of his/her father, and sons were usually named after their grandfathers, whereas the maternal connections were quickly hidden. In this spirit, following a discussion in tractate Yebamot, medieval commentators state that one’s family identity is defined only by the paternal and not by the maternal side.33 FAMILY LAW

Most of the sources that have reached us from the medieval period discussed family matters and arrangements that had legal implications. The High Middle Ages were a period in which many new statutes and conventions were introduced within the marriage framework. Most famous of these were two statutes, both attributed to R. Gershom ben Judah – known as R. Gershom Light of the Exile – which took root in the High Middle Ages: one asserting that a man may not marry two wives, and one declaring that a man may not divorce a woman without her consent.34 31 32

33 34

Abraham M. Habermann, ed., Sefer Gezerot Ashkenaz ve Tsarfat (Jerusalem, 1945), 165. The poem written in memory of Dulcia by her husband R. Eleazar b. Judah is perhaps the most utilized source for learning family history. See Ivan G. Marcus, “Mothers, Martyrs and Moneymakers: Some Jewish Women in Medieval Europe,” Conservative Judaism 38, 3 (1986), 34 45; Judith R. Baskin, “Dolce of Worms: The Lives and Deaths of an Exemplary Medieval Jewish Woman and her Daughters,” in Lawrence Fine, ed., Judaism in Practice: From the Middle Ages through the Early Modern Period (Princeton, 2001), 436 7. BT Yebamot 54b. About the period in which these statutes came into being, see Grossman, Early Sages of Ashkenaz, 132 48.

448 the middle ages: the christian world Although much of the research to date has focused on the first of these statutes, the second had consequences that were more far-reaching, especially since bigamy does not seem to have been common. In seeking to examine the issue of divorce in the Middle Ages, modern research has tended to focus primarily on two particular issues: the continuous practice of divorce among Jews living within a Christian society in which divorce was banned; and the economic and legal motivations behind these statutes. Some scholars have linked the increasing restrictions on Jewish divorce in medieval Europe to the Christian environment and suggested that Jews were hesitant to be seen as destroying the sanctity of marriage. Thus, although divorce continued to be permitted, it had to be modified.35 This has been tied to the need (or lack of need) to restrict bigamy. Others36 have argued that bigamy was an issue because of the habits of Jewish traders who frequently had a wife in each port along their way. This second explanation, however, does not explain the new demand for the consent of women to divorce. Several suggestions have been made to explain this novel statute, a matter seen as increasingly important for analysis, in light of the impression, arising from medieval sources, that divorce was far from rare during this period. One explanation for what appears to be a plentitude of divorce cases37 was women’s ability to support themselves as a result of what was perceived as women’s central role in the family economy, a topic that will be addressed below. Another explanation is that children fulfilled the commitment made for them by their parents as minors, by marrying their intended, but would divorce should the marriage prove unsuccessful.38 Scholars have suggested that R. Gershom’s insistence on the woman’s consent to divorce led to an imbalance of sorts. Before R. Gershom’s amendment, there were three possible scenarios: women could “rebel” and refuse to do their duties to their husbands and then would be divorced and receive the monies agreed in their ketubah (the marriage agreement given by husband to wife);39 they could be divorced against their will by their husbands; or they could acquiesce to divorce. Following R. Gershom’s amendment, men could no longer divorce their wives as easily. However, 35

36 37

38

39

For this approach, see Ze’ev Falk, Jewish Matrimonial Law in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1966). Most notably Grossman. One must note that it is impossible to determine to what extent this is true since we have no comparable information from the early Middle Ages. We do not know to what extent they were involved in determining these choices. See Simcha Emmanuel, “Bittul Shidukhin,” in Gershon Bacon and Aaron Gimani, eds., Mehkarim be Toldot Yehudei Ashkenaz (Ramat Gan, 2008), 157 202. Mishna Ketubbot, 4:5.

the family 449 women could still rebel and force their husbands to divorce them. This appears to have created an imbalance, as Elimelekh Westreich has suggested, and, during the thirteenth century, one can hear many voices complaining about women’s ability to initiate divorce, and especially about the ketubah money they could collect. As a result, the thirteenth-century rabbis sought to restrict women’s ability to “rebel.”40 Medieval sources suggest that the number of women demanding divorce as “rebellious” wives had grown tremendously over time. It is hard to know whether this was a rhetorical ploy or a reality, but, by the end of the thirteenth century, a woman who “rebelled” had to agree to forgo the money promised to her in her ketubah.41 Scholars have estimated the rate of divorce within the medieval communities to have been quite high, approximating that a full one-third of marriages ended in divorce. This argument is based on lists of town inhabitants and the percentages of divorce within these lists. In addition, they have pointed to the overwhelming number of halakhic responses concerning divorce.42 Not only were there many divorces but most individuals, especially if they were young at the time of the divorce, remarried. There are multiple cases that discuss terms of inheritance under such circumstances. Despite this, we have no real numerical information regarding the extent of divorce and only the breadth of discussion on the topic can indicate its frequency. Another medieval legal development emerges from community ordinances concerning the economics of marriage. Medieval statutes address the question of payments made by both the bride’s and the groom’s families before and during the marriage. Dowries and inheritances were balanced against each other and, as mentioned above, the ketubah also played a role in these financial arrangements. As such, the dowry, the ketubah, and the inheritance complemented each other. The details of these arrangements have been studied more extensively for the period after the mid twelfth century.43 The value of the ketubah was unified in medieval Ashkenaz and was very high. This high sum was meant to assure the wife’s control of the family assets after her husband’s death.44 After 40

41 42

43

44

Westreich seeks to present the legal system as constantly searching for such balances; see Elimelekh Westreich, Temurot be Ma’amad ha Isha ba Mishpat ha Ivri (Jerusalem, 2002), 155 9. See also Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 231 52. Westreich, Temurot be Ma’amad ha Isha ba Mishpat ha Ivri, 155 9. Israel J. Yuval, “An Appeal against the Proliferation of Divorce in Fifteenth Century Germany” [Hebrew], Zion 48 (1983), 177 216. Israel J. Yuval, “Monetary Arrangements and Marriage in Medieval Ashkenaz,” in Menahem Ben Sasson, ed., Religion and Economy: Connections and Interactions [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1995), 191 208. Irving Agus, “The Development of the Money Clause in the Ashkenazic Ketubah,” JQR 30 (1939/40), 221 56.

450 the middle ages: the christian world divorce, its financial terms had to be negotiated, and the sum of the ketubah was less important than any agreement made between the families at the time of marriage or over the years. Most dowries were much smaller than the sum of the ketubah.45 Until the thirteenth century, the only money paid at the time of marriage was the dowry, paid by the bride’s family. In turn, the groom’s family promised their share in the form of an inheritance which the man would inherit after the death of his parents. Women were often given only a small share of the inheritance, the dowry being considered as part of their inheritance. By the mid thirteenth century, a change takes place, and a dual dowry system seems to have been current. Both families contributed to the financial base of the couple, rather than having them wait for the man eventually to inherit his father’s wealth. The reason for this seems to have been the result of a shift to money lending as the main economic occupation of most Jews, and the subsequent need for starting cash. Another innovation of the late twelfth century was a statute of R. Tam’s. According to this statute, if the bride died within eighteen months of marriage without offspring, the money her family had put up as a dowry was to be returned to them. This statute is evidence both of the investment marriage required and of the very real fear of mortality in this period. In the late thirteenth century, a counter-statute was accepted, stating the same concerning the groom.46 It is interesting to note that this was not dissimilar to a custom prevalent among Christian communities in northern France, as outlined by Martha Howell, who has studied the custom in Douai specifically but has argued that it was part of a wider northern French phenomenon. In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, it was customary that money was returned to families if one of the partners died without live offspring within the first period of marriage, and both the man’s and woman’s families contributed equally to marriage agreements with counter-agreements.47 Not only were complex financial arrangements characteristic of the details surrounding marriage, but when one spouse died, intricate legal negotiations ensued in which both men and women took an active part. In a social reality in which remarriage was common, these arrangements could at times be very complex. The attempt to prevent certain women, such as nursing mothers, from remarrying, exposes the concerns of the community authorities, who were worried about the fate of offspring from

45 47

Yuval, “Monetary Arrangements,” 193 9. Howell, “Marital Property,” 422 33.

46

Ibid., 201 5.

the family 451 previous marriages. At the same time, the urgency that some women felt to remarry demonstrates the need these women, perhaps those who were less well-off, felt to be part of a couple rather than on their own. This seems to have been true especially for younger women, and, in these cases, it is possible that their families put pressure on them to remarry as well.49 The rigorous manner in which medieval legal authorities sought to bind young women to their children points to the need to protect them. At the same time, these cases are indicators of the strengths and the weaknesses of the family networks. Another area in which change occurred in the High Middle Ages is that of levirate marriage. In a case in which the husband dies without offspring, Jewish law allows for two separate options: the first being yibum – marrying the brother of the dead man – and the second being halitsah, by which this same brother is released from marrying his brother’s ˙widow. Yibum became less viable after the ban on bigamy, although it is not clear to what extent it was implemented in the case that the levirate brother already had a wife. Moreover, already in the eleventh century, R. Jacob B. Yakar decreed that a woman cannot be married to her levir against her will. Rashi too claimed one could go to great lengths, including promising a monetary reward to a levir who would forgo his claim, and then revoking the promise after the woman was released from the levir’s hold.50 The sources described many a case in which the levir exerted severe pressure on the woman’s family for monetary compensation in order to dismiss his claim on his deceased brother’s wife. By the mid twelfth century, some legal decisors, such as the powerful R. Tam, had decreed that all women must be allowed to undergo the ritual of halitsah rather ˙ practice of than be levired. Although there is some evidence of continual levirate marriage after R. Tam’s time, it seems that this was only when both the man and woman were interested in this marriage. Besides the formal arrangements of marriage and its dissolution that were ordered by Jewish law, many other aspects of family life were regulated according to ancient customs and practices. These were combined with the prevalent local customs, as we saw above in the case of 48

48

49

50

Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton, 2004). Christiane Klapisch Zuber, Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Chicago, 1985), 119 24, points to the sexual threat posed by young unattached widows. For early modern Europe, see Moshe Rosman, “Lihyot Isha Yehudiya be Polin Lita,” in Israel Bartal and Israel Gutman, eds., The Broken Chain: Polish Jewry Through the Ages (Jerusalem, 2001), 431 4. For a summary, see Jacob Katz, “Yibum veHalitsah ba Tekufah ha Betar Talmudit,” Tarbits 51 (1981), 59 106; Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 90 101.

452 the middle ages: the christian world counter-dowries and provisions in case one of the spouses died. Since Jewish communities had autonomy over internal affairs, many other legal aspects of life depended on ancient precedents that were then tempered by medieval European conventions. In some cases, the forces behind these conventions went hand in hand with traditional Jewish law. The area of economics is an example of the way traditional frameworks were redefined in medieval times but also were used to change common customs. FAMILY ECONOMICS AND PROFESSIONS

The medieval marriage system was not just the legal framework for conjugal unions, it was also the foundation of economic networks that spread out over cities and larger areas. These indicate that economic partnerships between members of an extended family were not at all rare and that when these relationships went sour, much was at stake.51 Jews engaged in a variety of different trades and occupations. They were active at the local fairs that took place at set times during the year. They frequently did business from their homes and also regularly visited their Christian clients, in both Christian homes and institutions.52 Women were also active businesswomen, in partnership with their husbands, or, in some cases, with their siblings. The legal discussions regarding women in business often question the permissibility of the deals made by women without their husband’s consent. We also have records of women as independent business owners. This was true especially of widows, as is evident from tax records, but also within families.53 Large and small-scale business enterprises often employed other Jews, and family ties, beyond those of spouses and children,54 were central in these cases.55 To what extent did family tradition determine the area of trade or to what extent were individuals entrepreneurs? It is impossible to determine this without relevant lists of individuals and their professions, but it seems that some métiers were handed down within the family, perhaps passing from the maternal to paternal side. This is evident in the 51

52 53

54 55

An early modern example is the family of Glückel of Hameln. See Glikl, Memories 1691 1719 [Hebrew], ed. and trans. from Yiddish by Chava Turniansky (Jerusalem, 2006), 609 22. Irving A. Agus, The Heroic Age of Franco German Jewry (New York, 1969), 108 13. For tax records, see Moritz Stern, “Verzeichnis der Judenbürger zu Nürnberg, 1338,” Die israelitische Bevölkerung der deutschen Städte 3 (1893/4), 9 14; David Herlihy, Opera Muliebria: Women and Work in Medieval Europe (Philadelphia, 1990), 131 6. Haym Soloveitchik, Wine in Ashkenaz in the Middle Ages [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 2008). Robin R. Mundill, “The Island’s Jews and their Economic Pursuits,” in Christoph Cluse, ed., The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2004), 221 32.

the family 453 medical professions and is probably common in others as well. It also follows the patterns common among medieval Christians. Another issue that comes up in the legal sources is that of the rules that governed family and community corporations. Much attention has been paid to the regulations that prevented one member of the community from usurping the business of another community member. This included rentals, regular customers, and other defined areas of business.56 According to the legal responses, there seems to have been an assumption that, within the family, such issues could always be worked out. Despite this, it is clear that there were often instances of disputes regarding the authority and responsibility of different family members. If one member of the family did not keep a promise given, were the others responsible? Who headed these corporations and what role did different family members play? On the whole, it seems that the pater-familias was held accountable for all business done by other family members. A key example of the tensions around this issue of accountability pertains to the responsibility men had over their wives, and the question of the extent to which Jewish women could be involved in and be responsible for business transactions. The medieval Ashkenazic communities acted in contrast to the talmudic principle that women may not bear witness to business transactions (or any other event) and that they are not to be trusted with money.57 Instead, as has been much quoted, they determined that, in their times, women were active business partners and, if they were denied participation, all business would cease.58 Many husbands and wives were partners. The responsa literature contains numerous cases in which women were asked to confirm men’s accounts or to testify to what they themselves did with monies. And, at least during the High Middle Ages, this was an area in which women were allowed to give testimony – again, in contrast to the dictates of talmudic texts.59 William Jordan has demonstrated that, in the realm of moneylending, Jewish women led an active trade with Christian women, pointing to a female business network of sorts.60 Information about travel in the medieval period also indicates that married women often traveled alone on business, without their spouses, and that it was not an unusual 56 58 59

60

Soloveitchik, Wine in Ashkenaz, 79 86. 57 BT Baba Kamma 119b. R. Eliezer b. Nathan, Sefer Even ha Ezer (Jerusalem, 1984), # 115. Alyssa Gray, “Married Women and ‘Tsedaqah’ in Medieval Jewish Law: Gender and the Discourse of Legal Obligation,” Jewish Law Association Studies 17 (2007), 168 212. William C. Jordan, “Jews on Top: Women and the Availability of Consumption Loans in Northern France in the Mid Thirteenth Century,” Journal of Jewish Studies 29 (1978), 39 56. See also Herlihy, Opera Muliebria, 142 53.

454 the middle ages: the christian world occurrence for women to be out of town for lengthy periods of time.61 However, it is interesting to note that discussions of women’s independence were often paralleled by those of children’s independence. Thus, for example, Sefer Hasidim discusses the charity given by women and children without the husband/father’s permission, and tells first of a son who wishes to give charity and is told not to, and then of a wife in the same situation. Both were given the same advice, to take money from the husband/father, as if for other needs, and then give the money to charity. In both cases, the father’s authority was not questioned – rather, his subordinates misled him.62 As opposed to married women who were under their husband’s authority, women who were divorced or widowed continued to fill central roles in business and were often recognized as independent by local authorities, as can be seen from the tax lists that have survived. These tax lists were based on nuclear families, although it is impossible to know whether some people were excluded from tax lists because they paid taxes together with members of their more extended families. It is also impossible to determine the extent to which widows continued their husband’s business or were involved in their own trade, yet the tax lists point to their contribution to their communities. In England, for example, where the king took onethird of every inheritance, many widows are listed as having paid these sums, and their families are listed as paying these sums after their death.63 An additional source indicative of women’s wealth are the lists of donations intended to commemorate the souls of women after death. In these lists, women are almost always listed on their own rather than together with their husbands. It seems that, while some of these donations were made after the death of the person being commemorated, many were pledged before death by the individuals themselves. On the whole, women contributed about one-third the sum that men did, which can be seen as an indication of their active, although still less central, role in the medieval economy.64 Although there is much evidence of women’s active participation in business from the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century,65 it seems, 61 62

63

64

65

Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 114 22. R. Judah b. Samuel, Sefer Hasidim, ed. Judah Wistenetsky (Frankfurt am Main, 1924), #844, 1051. Pam Manix, “Oxford: Mapping the Medieval Jewry,” in Cluse, ed., The Jews of Europe, 409 13. The lists were published by Salfeld, Martyrologium, and by Stern, “Verzeichnis der Judenbürger zu Nürnberg,” 9 14. Martha Keil, “Public Roles of Jewish Women in Fourteenth and Fifteenth Century Ashkenaz: Business, Community and Ritual,” in Cluse, ed., The Jews of Europe, 317 30.

the family 455 at least from a formal perspective, that women’s activities within the family business became conditional on having explicit permission from their husbands.66 In other words, there was a change in the authority women commanded, and, despite the large scope of activities that emerges from the sources, it appears that women were no longer able to make decisions as freely. Research on Christian women and their role in the economy indicates a similar shift after the late thirteenth century. The growth of guilds prevented women from being as central as they had been in the past. In addition, among Jews, business was restricted by many additional regulations that also might have left their mark on the structure of family businesses.67 FAMILY TIES

Wealth and profession were central factors in determining family and community status. Other factors were the scholarly import and tradition of the family. These were all part of the matchmaking process as parents tried to make advantageous matches for their children. An advantage when determining a match was the learned nature of the men in a family. Many family ties existed between central legal decisors: Rashi’s family and his two famous grandsons, R. Tam and Rashbam; R. Tam’s star pupil, R. Isaac of Dampierre, was his nephew; the extended Kalonymus family was an important scholarly family; and R. Asher ben Yehiel was succeeded by ˙ sufficient to demonhis son, R. Judah ben Asher. These few examples are strate the abundance of family connections between scholars. It is also significant that, unlike in the Christian world, where scholars lived in same-sex environments removed from their families, Jewish scholars lived within family frameworks and not monasteries. Virtually all the women mentioned by name in the source material were the wives, daughters, mothers, or sisters of important scholars. Women who are mentioned as having communal authority were always related to important rabbis. In fact, Rashi’s explanation of who was an important woman (isha hashuva), a definition mentioned in the Talmud, pointed ˙ association. As he states, an “important woman” is one precisely to this who is related to an important man.68 Women in scholarly families were 66 67

68

Gray, “Married Women and ‘Tsedaqah.’” Herlihy, Opera Muliebria; and, recently, Martha Howell, “The Gender of Europe’s Commercial Economy 1200 1700,” Gender and History 20, 3 (2008), 519 38. Rashi, Ketubbot, 75a s.v. “be isha hashuva.” This differed significantly from that of most contemporary Christian scholars, who, more often than not, did not have families to carry on their traditions, as they were celibate.

456 the middle ages: the christian world also relatively knowledgeable in the area of Jewish law. While the main references to them and their knowledge was to their ability to pass on the traditions of their male relatives, it is obvious that they were aware of these traditions and of the reasons for them, and in some cases their opinions were accepted without any further questioning.69 Family relations were not only an asset when seeking a marriage partner: they were a key to power, connections, knowledge, and authority passed on from one generation to the next. Families trained their offspring in the “family business,” whether this was trade or scholarship. Not only were scholars and merchants related to each other, other community roles and jobs were passed down within the family as well. Thus, the shelihei tsibur ˙ (the cantors and others who prayed publicly for the community) were 70 related, as were circumcisers and other professionals. Women also learned these professions from their relatives and women are mentioned as prayer leaders.71 Medical practitioners also passed their knowledge from one generation to the next. On the whole, one can say that family ties played a tremendous role in determining the professional activities of their family members, a role that has hardly been noted or emphasized in research to date. This training began at a young age and was cultivated for many years. TOWARD A SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE FAMILY

As a result of the legal nature of medieval Hebrew sources, it is easier to outline problems facing medieval Jewish families than to glimpse their everyday practices. A few areas of inquiry can be delineated: history of childhood Children were central to the lives of families. Phillipe Ariès’s pioneering study of medieval childhood has been influential in both Christian and Jewish studies of the same. His thesis that medieval childhood did not exist and that after infancy children were defined as small adults, along with the thesis attributed to Ariès by later scholars – namely that, in the past, parents did not love their children – have been scrutinized and on the whole

69

70

71

Adolf Berliner brings examples of these women that are often repeated by contemporary scholars: Aus dem inneren Leben der deutschen Juden im Mittelalter nach gedruckten und ungedruckten Quellen. Zugleich ein Beitrag für deutsche Kultur geschichte (Berlin, 1871). Elisheva Baumgarten, “Thus Sayeth the Wise Midwives: Midwives and Midwifery in Thirteenth Century Germany” [Hebrew], Zion 65 (2000), 45 74. In fact, this is one of the few female professions mentioned on gravestones.

the family 457 refuted based on Christian sources pertaining to Christian society.72 Scholars of medieval Judaism began to examine childhood well after their colleagues studying Christianity. While the earlier studies on the topic argued rather simplistically that Jews loved their children and valued them, while Christians did not,73 often attributing this to their minority status, later studies provided a more balanced picture that concurred with the refutation of many aspects of the Ariès thesis.74 Jewish children were cared for within the home, mainly by their mothers and other female caretakers, who were often Christian women employed there. While fathers are mentioned as enjoying playing with their children, taking them to the synagogue and educating them, the care of young children was viewed as a female duty, even if men often shared some of the chores. When infancy is discussed in medieval sources, it is in the context of initiation rituals such as circumcision, or redemption of the firstborn,75 as well as the daily care of infants and especially their nutrition, which consisted first and foremost of breast milk provided by the mother, or more often by a hired wet-nurse, who was often a Christian woman who lived within the home or nearby.76 Children were educated by their mothers until approximately the age of 6, when the boys began more formal schooling, either with a tutor at home or at the tutor’s home, and in some cases at the local synagogue. Most boys learned basic reading and writing skills, with the more talented continuing to advanced study. A unique feature of the medieval Jewish community in northern Europe was that all boys learned how to read, resulting in a high degree of male literacy. Jewish girls continued their education at home, most often schooled by their mothers, although there are sources that indicate that some girls had tutors as well. Few medieval sources discuss girls’ education, and those that do broach the topic focus on what girls should not learn more than what 72

73

74

75

76

For a survey of this scholarship, see Barbara Hanawalt, “Medievalists and the Study of Childhood,” Speculum 77 (2002), 440 60. See Simcha Goldin, “Die Beziehung der jüdischen Familie im Mittelalter zu Kind und Kindheit,” Jahrbuch der Kindheit 6 (1989), 211 56; “Jewish Children and Christian Missionizing,” in Israel Bartal and Isaiah Gafni, eds., Sexuality and the Family in History: Collected Essays [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1999), 97 118. Ephraim Kanarfogel, “Attitudes Toward Childhood and Children in Medieval Jewish Society,” Approaches to Judaism in Medieval Times 2 (1985), 1 35; Israel M. Ta Shma, “Children in Medieval Germanic Jewry: A Perspective on Ariès from Jewish Sources,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 12 (1991), 263 80; Baumgarten, Mothers and Children, 2 4. For further details on these rituals, see Elisheva Baumgarten, “Annual Cycle and Life Cycle,” Chapter 16 in this volume. Baumgarten, Mothers and Children, 126 44.

458 the middle ages: the christian world they did learn. Thus, Sefer Hasidim suggests that girls should learn what they need to do to perform ritual activities but that they should not learn the deep reasons for the commandments, nor should they learn directly from books.77 It is not known to what extent Jewish women could read Hebrew. While there are numerous examples of women from the scholarly families who could, this does not seem to have been true of all women, as it was for all men. However, since Jewish boys began their formal schooling already knowing their letters, it raises the question of whether it wasn’t in fact their mothers who taught them, even if they could not do more than this. Some medieval sources suggest that medieval Jewish women often prayed in the vernacular, which seems to suggest that they could not pray in Hebrew, while others do not mention this matter. At the same time, there are sources that indicate that women were often taught to read and write in the vernacular, as this was seen as being useful to them as businesswomen.78 Networks of connections existed between the women in any given community that helped to educate girls and women on different areas of law and custom. Most of the women who are mentioned as instructing other women in areas of law, such as ritual purity or the laws of kashrut, were related to prominent male scholars, and in many cases their instructions were attributed to these male relatives. Medieval childhood is one of the aspects of family history that has received significant attention over the last decade. Yet histories of some areas of childhood that would help create a broader family history have yet to be written – relations between siblings and children’s work, for example, are two topics that would allow a fuller understanding of family networks and that are still a desideratum. f a m i l y s e t ti n g s Medieval nuclear families lived within one house, with additional family members there only as guests. We have little information about the size of these houses or the numbers of rooms within a family dwelling place. Scholars have assumed that the Jewish family’s living conditions were similar to those of their non-Jewish neighbors, with whom they shared ovens in the courtyards. A number of sources indicate that in many homes all members of the family slept in one bed, and in some cases students even 77

78

Sefer Hasidim (Parma) (“SHP”) Sefer Hasidim (Das Buch der Frommen), 2nd edn., ed. Judah Wistinetzki (Frankfurt, 1924), 835. For a summary, see Judith R. Baskin, “Some Parallels in the Education of Medieval Jewish and Christian Women,” Jewish History 5 (1991) 41 52.

the family 459 slept together with their teachers and their teachers’ families. This changed in the early modern period as houses grew bigger and greater emphasis was placed on privacy. As noted above, the house was also often occupied by servants, Jewish and/or Christian. Individuals met regularly in the markets, on the streets, and especially in the synagogue and other community institutions. The synagogue served as a central meeting place where prayers took place twice daily and where all the adult members of the community gathered. Sources from the twelfth and early thirteenth century suggest that men and women attended the synagogue on a daily basis.79 The end of the thirteenth century marked a change in women’s synagogue attendance as it became accepted that women who were menstruating should not enter the synagogue for prayers.80 Young children often came to the synagogue with their parents, as they are mentioned in passing in different sources. Attitudes toward children in the synagogue apparently underwent a change in the later Middle Ages when it became more acceptable to leave them at home with servants, and there were many discussions of decorum in the synagogue. Religious ritual was both individual and communal and was performed at home and in public. Although much of the research concerning religious practice in the Middle Ages focuses on and assumes male participants, the sources also discuss the practice of all members of the family: men, women, and children. During the High Middle Ages, children and women are mentioned as being called up to the Torah as part of the services, in circumstances in which the community was so small that there were not enough adult men to fulfill these duties. This practice was later restricted to adult men. Women also participated in the quorum needed for the grace after meals, at least until this practice was objected to in the fourteenth century. Moreover, women were active participants in rituals around Passover, such as searching for the hamets on Passover eve or reclining at ˙ the seder table, like the men.81 Other more individual deeds were performed by women and children as well. Some women chose to perform positive time-bound commandments, which traditionally are the obligation of male adults and not of women and children. Thus, the sources tell of women who put on phylacteries 79 80

81

Baumgarten, Mothers and Children, 65 79. Elisheva Baumgarten, “And They Do Nicely,” in Rami Reiner et al., Israel M. Ta Shma in Memoriam (forthcoming). “‘And they do nicely’: A Reappraisal of Menstruating Women’s Refusal to Enter the Sanctuary in Medieval Ashkenaz” [Hebrew], in Rami Reiner, Joseph Hacker, Moshe Halbertal, Moshe Idel, and Elhanan Reiner, eds., Ta Shma in memoriam (Jerusalem, 2011) 85 104. Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 174 97.

460 the middle ages: the christian world and tzizit (fringed four-cornered garments) and who insisted on hearing the shofar (ram’s horn) or observing the special commandments of the holiday of Sucot (Tabernacles). These women were attested to especially in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century sources.82 During these same centuries, there is much information about the observance of these same precepts by male children. This follows a more ancient tradition that, as part of their education, boys were taught to observe many of these commandments long before they reached the age of obligation, which was formally defined as 13. Thus, children donned phylacteries from the moment they could be trusted to keep their bodies clean. They also wore tzizit, heard the shofar, and sat in the sukkah (booth used for the festival of Tabernacles). This custom changed somewhat toward the end of the thirteenth century when the instruction of children in these precepts was delayed to the age of 13 – for example, in the case of phylacteries – because of concerns over the purity of young boys’ thoughts before they married.83 It is interesting to note that the end of the thirteenth century was a definitive period as far as women’s and children’s participation in ritual and in community affairs was concerned, an issue that has been noted in contemporary Christian society as well.84 The synagogue was not just the locus of prayer and religious community rituals. In many communities, it also functioned as a judiciary center. The local bet din was often situated in the synagogue, and family problems and cases featured in the discussions and the decisions. Moreover, the synagogue served an additional judicial role. It was customary that an individual who had a complaint about injustice within the community would stop the prayer services at assigned moments, demanding a solution to his or her problem and complaint. Women as well as men took advantage of this vehicle for social justice and, in this respect, the synagogue served as a family court or as an arena for resolving monetary disputes within a family or between families. Over and above these judicial and ritual functions, the synagogue was a center of social interaction. Community members met in the synagogue; communal meals were held in the synagogue and in the homes of different families during times of joy and sorrow surrounding family events. 82 83 84

Baumgarten, Mothers and Children, 90 1; Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 273 82. Baumgarten, Mothers and Children, 90 1. Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, 2004); Kathryn Ann Taglia, “The Cultural Construction of Childhood: Baptism, Communion and Confirmation,” in Constance M. Rousseau and Joel T. Rosenthal, eds., Women, Marriage and Family in Medieval Christendom: Essays in memory of Michael M. Sheehan (Kalamazoo, MI, 1998), 255 88.

the family 461 Families were together in communal events and expressed their family ties in visible public rituals as well. For example, when children came out of the synagogue, they were expected to kiss their parents publicly.85 Children sat with their parents in public and were expected to help them if they needed assistance of any sort. As such, the family was on display publicly. Extended families also expressed their ties in the community forum. They were expected to support each other in cases of disagreements and political struggles. As a number of sources indicate, if one had a dispute with one member of an extended family, one could expect other members of that family to be involved.86 j e w i s h f a m i l i e s, c h r i st i a n f a m i l i e s Throughout this chapter, I have drawn comparisons between Jewish and Christian families, pointing to both similarities and differences. In many cases, these are parallel phenomena that were part of each religious group’s family frameworks. One area in which Jewish and Christian family lives were intertwined was within the medieval Jewish–Christian dialogue and polemic, and the reality that resulted from the tremendous effort to convert Jews made by the Church in the High Middle Ages. Although we do not have definitive numbers, it is evident that many Jews chose to convert to Christianity. Scholars have noted that among these converts were adolescent boys and adult men, and that men were more likely than women to convert without their families, whereas women who converted did so either because they were already on the fringes of society or as part of their family framework. Conversion of one member of the family was the impetus for many family changes. Married women needed to obtain divorces from their converted husbands, and questions of inheritance arose as well. When death followed conversion, it had to be determined to what extent a dead convert should still be mourned as a Jew. These issues were under debate throughout the Middle Ages, much as Christians debated how to accept these converts into Christian society throughout the period. Children who converted by will or by force, either with or without a parent, required further guidance and were the subject of different debates. They also featured in medieval miracle stories told by Christians and Jews, 85

86

For example, Sefer Hasidim, ed. Margaliyot, # 179: “And a man should not live in a place where there are groups of families because these [people] cannot be reprimanded because the family protects them so that they will not be embarrassed in public [lit., in the eyes of the families in the city].” For example, Rashi, Avodah Zara 17a, s.v. “Avi hadayhu”; Sefer Hasidim, ed. Wistenetsky, # 102, 937.

462 the middle ages: the christian world each with their own emphases. It is clear then that the image of the Jewish family in Jewish and Christian eyes played an important role in medieval culture and in shaping inter-religious dialogue and understanding. The family was a unit of import in many spheres: personal, ritual, religious, communal, and economic. The family was present in the private and the public spheres, and included much more than just immediate family members. This survey is far from exhaustive and it points not only to what we can already claim to know but also to the many lacunae. Not only are we lacking a fuller material and social history of family life, but also we have little information about an emotional history – about the nature of ties between siblings and between the different generations within the family. This survey has attempted to demonstrate the centrality of the family and of family dynamics in the economic, religious, and social frameworks of the period and to point to the importance of examining the family as a unit rather than deconstructing it into its parts.

part iii SPIRITUAL AND INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

chapter 18

THE SOURCES daniel j. lasker

When Jews migrated to the medieval Christian world, they brought with them the shared heritage of all Jewish communities. The most basic texts of that heritage, irrespective of origin or place of residence of any particular Jewish group, were the Bible (and its Aramaic translations), and postbiblical rabbinic literature in its many forms – namely, the Talmud, the midrashic literature, and the liturgy. These fundamental texts were then supplemented by the unique contributions to that heritage which mirrored developments of the societies from which the immigrants came and in which they made their new homes. Thus, Jews in Christian Spain and those areas which are now southern France (collectively known in Jewish literature as “Provence”) brought with them the cultural accomplishments of Andalusia (Islamic Spain), accomplishments which themselves were the result of a long history of Jewish acculturation to Islam and Arabic which began with the Islamic conquests in the seventh century CE. Jews in Spain and Provence had a keen interest in science and philosophy, as well as poetry and the study of Hebrew grammar. In contrast, Jews in northern Europe, most notably France and Germany, having arrived there from the Middle East by way of Italy, did not carry as much cultural baggage with them. Unlike their southern neighbors (widely known as Sephardim) who generally followed rationalistic modes of thought, while being knowledgeable of traditional Jewish sources as well, the northern Jewish communities (the Ashkenazim) were more restricted in their intellectual outlooks. A discussion of sources of Jewish spiritual and intellectual history in the medieval Christian world must take into account the diversity of Jewish communities in that world. There were, however, certain uniform aspects of the literature produced by these different groups. First, despite the fact that Jews in Christian countries spoke a variety of vernacular languages, their literature is written overwhelmingly in Hebrew, although a few works were composed in Aramaic and others are in Hebrew with a strong Aramaic component. Toward the end of the Middle Ages, some Jews began writing in the vernacular; none, however, wrote in Latin until the sixteenth century. Second, Jewish culture was halakho-centric (based on 465

466 the middle ages: the christian world Jewish law), even in areas where talmudic study competed with philosophy and science for the loyalty of the intelligentsia. Although the different communities interpreted Jewish law in diverse ways, each had its own unique customs, and not all Jews were equally observant, Halakhah was a central unifying factor. Third, no Jewish community was hermetically sealed away from any other community, and, therefore, there was considerable cross-fertilization of ideas in the Jewry of Christendom. The following will be a general account of the sources of Jewish creativity in the medieval Christian world; specific treatments will follow in subsequent chapters of this volume. BIBLE AND COMMENTARIES

The Hebrew biblical text was standardized in ninth-century Tiberias by a group of Jewish sages known as the Masoretes.1 The Masoretic text was accepted by all Jews, both under Islam and under Christianity. Nonetheless, there were still slight textual inconsistencies in the handwritten biblical texts which were in use in Jewish communities, and biblical commentators occasionally differed among themselves concerning the correct text. There was little need, however, for any editorial activity on the text itself. What was less clear was how the text was to be understood. Although rabbinic literature is replete with interpretations of the Bible, and rabbinic legal expositions of biblical texts were accepted as binding in the Middle Ages, there were Jews who did question the accuracy of previous interpretations and wrote their own new running commentaries to the Bible. These commentaries were motivated not only by an intrinsic search for the definitive meaning of a holy, canonical text that often was obscure, but also by developments in the cultural life of the other monotheistic religions. Both Islam, with its running commentaries on the Qur’an, and Christianity, with its understanding of the Hebrew Bible as a precursor for Christianity, inspired Jewish authors to look more closely at the biblical text and offer explanations of its meaning. Jewish running commentaries on biblical books were first written in Judeo-Arabic in the Islamic realm, but most remained untranslated and generally had little effect on later commentaries written in Hebrew in Christian countries. 1

An overview of Jewish biblical commentaries, as well as non Jewish ones, can be found in Magne Saebo, ed., Hebrew Bible / Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation, vols. I II (Göttingen, 1996 2008); for accounts of the major Jewish exegetes, see Ezra Zion Melamed, Mefarshei ha Mikra. Darkheihem ve Shitoteihem, 2 vols. (Jerusalem, 1975).

the sources 467 Jews in Christian Europe had diverse methods of biblical interpretation. The first major biblical commentator under Christianity was R. Solomon ben Isaac, known as Rashi (France, 1040–1105), who combined what he considered peshat (namely, the simple or contextual meaning, including ˙ glosses with translations into the French vernacular) with a large admixture of rabbinic legendary material. Although Rashi often distinguished between peshat and more fanciful rabbinic comments, at other times he seems to have˙considered the midrash (non-contextual exegesis) to be the accurate interpretation of the text. This popular mixture, and Rashi’s pellucid style, led to canonical status for his commentaries, which encompassed every book of the Bible. Eventually, every Jewish community, no matter what its intellectual outlook, accepted his commentaries as authoritative and the benchmark against which later commentaries were to be compared. This popularity can be measured by the large number of supercommentaries which were composed in an attempt at elucidating Rashi’s interpretations. The mid-twelfth-century generation of Rashi’s grandchildren, most notably his daughter’s son R. Samuel ben Meir (Rashbam), extended the peshat method, often taking an even more literal view of the biblical text, ˙ eschewing the midrashic material which makes Rashi’s commentaries so appealing. Often, one can understand Rashbam’s comments only by comparing them to the interpretations of Rashi and seeing what it was that he found misleading in his grandfather’s exegesis. Rashbam’s peshat ˙ approach regularly led him to present interpretations of the laws in the Pentateuch which were at variance with the accepted legal traditions, but he did not intend for his commentary to have any practical implications since he was fully committed to observing Jewish law as outlined in rabbinic literature. Rashbam’s methodology, as well as that of his colleagues, may have been influenced by the biblical studies of Christian scholars of the Victorine school, with whom they were in close contact; if so, they represent a Jewish response to the Christian “Twelfth-Century Renaissance.” Other important members of the French school of biblical interpretation who engaged in peshat exegesis were R. Joseph Kara, R. Eliezer of Beaugency, and R. Joseph Bekhor˙ Shor. By the end of the twelfth century, however, this exegetical movement was no longer active. Sephardic biblical commentators also generally disavowed the midrashic approach, putting a much greater emphasis on the peshat, often based on grammar, a field of study which had progressed to a great˙ extent in Islamic Spain. The leading representative of this trend was R. Abraham ibn Ezra (1089–1164), who left Andalusia and wandered in many Christian countries in Europe, where he composed his commentaries. As the first Sephardic author to write biblical commentaries in Hebrew, Ibn Ezra attempted to

468 the middle ages: the christian world expose northern European Jewish communities to the grammatical method which had developed under Islam. As part of this project, Ibn Ezra also wrote a number of grammar books summarizing the accomplishments of the innovative Hebrew grammarians who had written in Arabic. As a corollary to his peshat comments, Ibn Ezra was quite critical of those commentators who used ˙the biblical text as a springboard for either midrashic or scientific expositions, even though he, himself, was occasionally guilty of the same tactic. His commentaries, which include much philosophical material and occasional hints at secret doctrines, were the beneficiaries of subsequent supercommentaries by authors trying to decipher Ibn Ezra’s obscure references or to understand his science, philosophy or grammar. Ibn Ezra’s commentaries have had an impact on the works of Benedict (Baruch) Spinoza (1632–77) and on modern biblical scholarship. An additional Sephardic methodology of biblical interpretation makes recourse to mystical teachings, often hinting at esoteric doctrines which were considered embedded in the biblical text even if not stated explicitly. The first major commentary to include mystical material was by R. Moses ben Nahman, known as Nahmanides (Catalonia – Land of Israel, ˙ Nahmanides was critical ˙ 1194–1270). of Rashi, usually in regard to his use ˙ of midrashim, but he saved most of his ire for Ibn Ezra’s literalism. He was especially acerbic when reacting to Ibn Ezra’s rationalistic rejection of rabbinic traditions. Nahmanides himself often hinted at a mystical content ˙ which was developed further by R. Bahya ben in the text, an approach Asher (Aragon, fl. 1291). Mystical exegesis of the Bible reached its apogee at the end of the thirteenth century in the Zohar’s quasi-midrashic running commentary to the text. A large number of biblical commentators were centered in Provence, most of whom were influenced by Maimonides’s philosophical teachings in one way or another. R. David Kimhi (Radak, 1160–1235) tried for a balance between peshat and midrash, presenting a moderate conservative ˙ view of the Bible, rejecting overtly literal readings of some supernatural passages in both biblical and rabbinic literature. Kimhi was the most prominent representative of a family of biblical exegetes and grammarians, and his grammatical works Sefer Mikhlol [Comprehensive Book] and Sefer ha-Shorashim [The Book of Roots], based upon Andalusian understandings of Hebrew, were extremely popular. R. Levi ben Gerson (Gersonides, 1288–1344), R. Nissim of Marseille (early fourteenth century), R. Joseph ibn Caspi (mid fourteenth century), and other Provençals interpreted the biblical text in a rational manner, treating both anthropomorphisms and many supernatural events as allegorical. The last great medieval exegete was Don Isaac Abarbanel (1437–1508) who started his career in Portugal, fled to Spain, and was exiled in 1492 to

the sources 469 Italy. On the one hand, his lengthy biblical commentaries were marked by conservative rationalism with a great respect for rabbinic tradition and his Jewish exegetical predecessors. On the other hand, one can detect in his works stirrings of modernity reflecting a Christian Renaissance environment, such as sensitivity to issues of context, authorship, and chronology, as he often arrived at conclusions about the text which were seen by some contemporaries and successors as beyond the pale of accepted Jewish beliefs. TALMUD AND LAW – EXEGESIS, CODES, MONOGRAPHS, AND RESPONSA

Differences between Ashkenaz and Sepharad can be detected in divergent attitudes toward the Talmud, the main source of intellectual activity among Ashkenazic Jewry but only one field of study among Sephardim. 2 Legal literature in both countries can be divided into commentaries, codificatory literature (codes and monographs), and responsa. Almost all of this literary activity centered on the Babylonian Talmud which was accepted as authoritative for the whole Diaspora; there was some recognition of the Jerusalem Talmud but it did not carry the same authority as the Babylonian, nor was it the basis of halakhic development. Note should be taken as well of communal enactments (takkanot) which were promulgated through the centuries even though these rabbinic court decisions are generally more important for social than for intellectual history. commentaries As was the case with the Bible, the first great talmudic commentator was Rashi. Drawing upon older exegetical traditions, including those of R. Gershom ben Judah (c.1000, known as Me’or ha-Golah [“The Light of the Exile”]), Rashi presented clear interpretations of often obscure talmudic passages. He aimed for simplicity of expression, usually giving very short glosses on difficult terms and rarely presenting extended discussions of the talmudic pericopes (sugyot). Similar to Rashi’s biblical commentaries, his talmudic commentaries (which cover almost every tractate, although some of those attributed to him are not his) soon became canonized and eventually were printed with almost every edition of the 2

For a good overview of Jewish law, see Menachem Elon, Jewish Law: History, Sources, Principles, 4 vols. (Philadelphia, 1994). Material pertaining to the Christian Middle Ages is found especially in vols. II III. See also N. S. Hecht, B. S. Jackson, S. M. Passamaneck, Daniela Piattelli, and Alfredo Rabello, eds., An Introduction to the History and Sources of Jewish Law (Oxford, 1996), 271 357.

470 the middle ages: the christian world Talmud. Rashi was also concerned with establishing the correct text of the Talmud, which, unlike the Bible, had never benefitted from careful editorial work. His readings, however, were often a function of his interpretative stance and not of a comparison of manuscript variants. Although Rashi’s commentaries were extremely useful for a basic understanding of the text, the generation of his grandchildren and their extended students engaged in a much more dialectical analysis of the Talmud. The most prominent of these scholars, known collectively as the Ba’alei ha-Tosafot (Tosafists – literally “those who added commentaries”), were: Rashi’s grandsons, R. Jacob ben Meir of Ramerupt (Rabbeinu Tam, d. 1171) and Rashbam; his great-grandson, R. Isaac ben Samuel the Elder of Dampierre (Ri ha-Zaken, d. c.1189); and R. Samson ben Abraham of Sens (c.1150–c. 1216). In ˙addition to the French school, there were also German Tosafists, such as R. Eliezer ben Joel ha-Levi (Ravyah, author of Sefer Avi ha-‘Ezri and Sefer Aviasaf, d. c.1225), R. Isaac ben Moses of Vienna (Riaz, author of Or Zarua’, a comprehensive discussion of many areas of Halakhah, d. c.1250), R. Meir ben Baruch of Rottenberg (Maharam, d. 1293), and R. Mordecai ben Hillel ha-Kohen (author of Sefer haMordekhai, d. 1298). These commentators compared and contrasted pericopes from diverse sources in an attempt to solve any possible internal contradictions in the whole talmudic corpus. They also took up perceived inconsistencies between what was the ostensive meaning of the Talmud and the general Ashkenazic practice. Unwilling to assume that local custom was incorrect, the Ba’alei ha-Tosafot endeavored to read their own practices into the text. In this way, they were able to make rabbinic literature relevant to their own age. There were Sephardic commentators who adopted the Tosafist method, most notably R. Zerahiah ben Isaac ha-Levi Gerondi (Razah, twelfth century, a contemporary of the earliest Tosafists), Nahmanides, R. Samuel ben Abraham Adret (Rashba from Barcelona, d. 1310),˙ and R. Yom Tov Ishbili (Ritba from Seville, d. 1330), but their interests were much more varied than those of their northern European counterparts. Razah’s Sefer ha-Ma’or used the North African Isaac Alfasi’s code (Hilkhot ha-Rif, eleventh century) as the basis of his talmudic interpretations, as did R. Nissim ben Reuben Gerondi (Ran, c.1310–c.1375). The most prominent Provençal commentator on the Talmud was R. Menahem ben Solomon Meiri (1249–1316), also known for ˙ and his acceptance of Christianity and Islam as his moderate rationalism monotheistic religions. Some medieval Jews wrote commentaries on the midrash (both in the Talmud and in extra-talmudic collections). The main concern of these mostly Sephardic commentators was to reconcile rabbinic statements, which often tended toward supernatural exaggerations, with a rationalistic

the sources 471 worldview. Ashkenazim, being more interested in the legal ramifications of rabbinic literature, did not devote much attention to the midrash, which they often accepted at face value. c o d i fi c a t o r y l i t e r a t u r e ( c o d e s a n d m o n o g r a p h s ) The earliest legal codes and monographs were written under Islam, initiated by the Geonim, who were the first Jewish authors to write treatises on discrete subjects. The most prominent fully fledged code was Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah (Egypt, c.1180), which included all talmudic law, whether it was applicable in Maimonides’ own time or not, organized under fourteen main rubrics. This code was influential among Sephardic Jews, despite its having been subjected to stringent criticism by the Provençal R. Abraham ben David of Posquières (Rabad, d. 1198). It made little impact, however, upon Ashkenaz until R. Meir ha-Kohen, student of R. Meir of Rottenburg, wrote Hagahot Maimoniyyot [Maimonidean Glosses] (end of the thirteenth to beginning of the fourteenth century), which supplemented Maimonides’s work with Ashkenazic practices. Maimonides’s Book of Commandments was used as the basis of R. Moses of Coucy’s Sefer Mitzvot Gadol [Major Book of Commandments] (first half of the thirteenth century). The Book of Commandments was also the starting point of the anonymous Sephardic Sefer ha-Hinnukh [The Book of Education] (late thirteenth century). The first comprehensive law code in Christendom was Arba’ah Turim [Four Columns], by R. Jacob ben Asher (d. c.1343), which, ˙unlike Maimonides’s all-encompassing Mishneh Torah, deals only with laws which were still in effect. R. Jacob was the son of R. Asher ben Yehiel ˙ (known as Rosh, d. 1328), the leading Ashkenazic rabbi of the time, who fled Germany and settled in Toledo. R. Asher’s main book of law was Piskei ˙ ha-Rosh [The Decisions of Rabbi Asher], which formed almost a running synopsis on the Talmud, including both Ashkenazic and Sephardic rulings. This combination of traditions was followed in the Arba’ah Turim as well, ˙ of the law by his son, who may have been influenced in part by the model code of Alfonso X (the Wise), Siete Partidas [The Seven Parts] (c.1265). The four columns of the Tur (as it is popularly known) are: Orah Hayim [The Path of Life], dealing with daily, Sabbath, and holiday laws;˙ Yoreh De’ah [He Will Teach Knowledge], which covers dietary laws, ritual purity, vows, circumcision, mourning, and other religious rituals; Even ha-‘Ezer [The Stone of the Helper], codifying laws related to marriage, divorce, and issues of personal status; and Hoshen Mishpat [The Breastplate ˙ pertaining mostly ˙ of Judgment], which lays out judicial laws, to monetary questions, which were judged by Jewish courts in the Diaspora. This

472 the middle ages: the christian world system of four major sections, as well as the specific subjects of each paragraph and sub-paragraph, set the example for almost all future Jewish law codes. Mention should be made as well of halakhic monographs which deal with one particular subject or with related subjects: Sefer ha-Manhig [Book of the Leader] by R. Abraham ben Nathan ha-Yarhi (late twelfth century, dealing with prayers, holy days, and other ritual matters); Sefer ha-Terumot [Book of Donations] by R. Samuel Sardi (first half of the thirteenth century – laws of loans and business obligations); Torat ha-Adam [Rules of Man] by Nahmanides (laws pertaining to issues around the end of life, mourning, and ˙the afterlife); and Torat ha-Bayit [Rules of the House] by Rashba (ritual law). responsa Although there is evidence in the Talmud that some Jewish communities wrote to the rabbis for legal guidance, only in the Geonic period did this custom become a regular feature of Jewish life and create a formal genre of legal questions (she’elot) sent to leading rabbinic authorities (decisors/ poskim), who would supply definitive rulings (responsa/teshuvot). Jews in Christian Europe maintained this tradition, and the rabbinic responses would then become case law to be used as precedents by subsequent decisors. Responsa also provide an incomparable source for reconstructing daily life and social patterns of medieval Jews. The medieval authors, however, rarely issued their own responsa in collective volumes (that was left either to their immediate successors or to modern scholars using previously unpublished manuscripts). The authority of a particular rabbi derived from his legal acuity and from his acceptance among his contemporaries and future generations, and not from any institutional standing. One of the earliest writers of responsa was R. Gershom ben Judah, the first great Ashkenazic rabbinic authority. Other important Ashkenazic writers of responsa were Rashi, Rabbeinu Tam, R. Eliezer ben Nathan of Mainz (Ra’avan, twelfth century), and Maharam of Rottenberg. The most important collection of Sephardic responsa is that of the Rashba; the legal responses of R. Asher ben Yehiel (Rosh) span both the Ashkenazic and Sephardic worlds. R. Isaac ˙ben Sheshet (Rivash, 1326–1408) and R. Simeon ben Zemah Duran (Rashbaz, 1361–1444) were born and educated in Sepharad, but their responsa were generally issued from North Africa, to which they fled in light of the anti-Jewish riots of 1391. The latter wrote compositions in many fields, including exegesis and theology.

the sources

473

THEOLOGY: PHILOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM

philosophy Perhaps the most significant difference between Ashkenaz and Sepharad was in the area of theology.3 Sephardic Jewry, loyal to its Andalusian sources, was generally committed to rationalism, in one form or another, and interpreted traditional Jewish sources in light of extra-textual considerations ultimately derived from non-Jewish sources. Although medieval Jewish rationalism was not all of one piece, it is generally characterized by a non-literal understanding of sacred texts intended to reread tradition in light of philosophical insights. Thus, both the Bible and rabbinic midrash were often the objects of allegorical exegesis – e.g., anthropomorphic descriptions of God were interpreted in line with absolute divine incorporeality, and the interventionist, immanent God of traditional Judaism was replaced with the transcendent God of philosophy. Core Jewish doctrines, such as creation of the world, prophecy as a result of divine choice of the prophet, reward and punishment as a function of observance or violation of the commandments, and supernatural divine involvement in history were also frequently understood allegorically. This was generally not the case in Ashkenaz, where the traditional biblical and rabbinic texts were usually taken literally and rationalistic interpretations were looked upon with distrust, if not with downright hostility. Hence, a discussion of Jewish philosophy in Christendom revolves around Sephardic thinkers and those in the Sephardic cultural sphere (from Provence and Italy). A major reason for the discrepancy of outlooks was the scientific heritage of Jewish life under Islam. When the first exiles from Andalusia arrived in Christian Iberia and Provence, they were struck by the scientific ignorance of their new neighbors, including in the fields of astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and grammar. R. Abraham Bar Hiyya (first half of the twelfth century) and R. Abraham ibn Ezra pioneered the writing of scientific and philosophical treatises in Hebrew. The Ibn Tibbon family (father Judah, late twelfth century; son Samuel, early thirteenth century; grandson Moses, mid thirteenth century; and Samuel’s son-in-law Jacob Anatoli, who was active in Italy in the mid thirteenth century as well) was at the forefront of cultural transition of the Andalusian heritage, translating Arabic texts written by Muslims, Jews, and Greeks (having been translated from Greek 3

For overviews, see, e.g., Colette Sirat, A History of Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1985); Daniel H. Frank and Oliver Leamon, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Cambridge, 2003). These works, like most accounts of medieval Jewish philosophy, include material from both the Islamic and Christian realms.

474 the middle ages: the christian world into Arabic, usually by way of Syriac) into Hebrew. Samuel’s translation of Maimonides’s Moreh Nevukhim (Arabic original: Dalalat al-Ha’irin [Guide of the Perplexed]), begun during the lifetime and under the patronage of the Master, was a major stimulant of subsequent philosophical speculation (there is a less literal translation by the poet Judah al-Harizi which was done slightly later, and it is from this rendition that the first Latin translation was made). While Sephardic and Provençal rationalism was often a source of friction, both within those communities and with Ashkenazic Jewry, it made an unmistakable impression on the cultural life of this section of European Christendom. The agenda of Jewish philosophers in Christian Europe was generally a function of the influence of Maimonides and the Muslim interpreters of Aristotle, most notably Averroes (d. 1198); Christian scholastic philosophy began to make an impression on Jewish thought only toward the end of the Middle Ages. Central theological questions included the nature of God, the origin of the world, the status of prophecy, the binding character of the natural order, and the attainment of human perfection. A number of thinkers who followed Maimonides tended to interpret him as a radical Aristotelian who denied any positive content of human knowledge of God; believed that the world was eternal (despite Maimonides’s explicit protestations to the contrary); asserted that prophecy is limited to individuals with intellectual achievements; looked upon biblical and rabbinic reports of miracles with skepticism; and thought that the observance of Jewish law, at most, might contribute to perfection, but not guarantee it. These views were developed, refined, debated, and propagated by a long line of medieval rationalists. In the thirteenth century, the Ibn Tibbon family and Isaac Albalag tended to more radical interpretations of philosophy, whereas Shem Tov Falaquera (c.1225–95) presented a moderate approach in an attempt to make rationalism palatable to larger sections of the population. Tensions among extreme rationalists, moderate rationalists, and anti-rationalists led to major disputes concerning philosophy and Maimonides’s works. The first major rounds of controversies broke out in the first third of the thirteenth century, and the Sephardic anti-rationalists enlisted French rabbis in support of their anti-Maimonidean position. Although Nahmanides was not in agreement with Maimonides, he defended ˙ against his detractors. Another main controversy was in the the Great Eagle first decade of the fourteenth century, partially triggered by radical interpretations of Scripture by R. Levi ben Abraham of Villefranche (c.1235 – after 1305), and culminating in a ban on philosophy issued by Rashba in Barcelona in 1305. This ban, however, did not prevent such Provençal thinkers as R. Nissim of Marseille, R. Joseph Caspi, and R. Moses Narboni from continuing to pursue a radical agenda into the fourteenth century.

the sources 475 Jewish philosophers were active in Italy as well. Moses ben Solomon of Salerno (d. 1279) wrote a commentary on the Guide of the Perplexed, an Italian–Hebrew philosophical lexicon, and two anti-Christian polemics. Hillel of Verona (c.1220–c.1295) was a defender of Maimonides and one of the earliest Jews to be influenced by Latin Scholasticism. His Tagmulei haNefesh [The Rewards of the Soul] reviews contemporary views concerning the soul and includes long passages of Thomas Aquinas translated into Hebrew. Immanuel of Rome (late thirteenth, early fourteenth century) and Judah Romano (early fourteenth century) both wrote philosophical commentaries on the Bible. Immanuel is best known for his Mahbarot ˙ their [Notebooks] – a series of poems, many irreverent, which took some of inspiration from his contemporary Dante Alighieri. The leading Jewish philosopher of the first half of the fourteenth century was R. Levi Ben Gershom (Gersonides, 1288–1344), author of Milhamot ˙ in ha-Shem [Wars of the Lord], an accomplished scientist – especially astronomy – whose Aristotelianism was more radical than Maimonides’s in some areas, yet more conservative in others. By the end of the century, however, there began a backlash against Aristotelianism, perhaps in response to the deteriorating situation of Jews in Iberia. R. Hasdai Crescas (1340–1410/11) led this reaction in his Or ha-Shem [Light ˙of the Lord], providing trenchant criticisms of Aristotle, Maimonides, and Gersonides. Crescas’s approach was not universally accepted, even among his students, but the fifteenth century was marked by conservative rationalism such as that of R. Joseph Albo, R. Abraham Bibago, R. Joseph Hayyun, and R. Isaac Arama. The last great Iberian thinker was Don Isaac Abarbanel, a moderate rationalist, who strongly defended Maimonides against his detractors and criticized his more radical interpreters, even when finding much that was distasteful in Maimonides’s reinterpretation of Jewish tradition. mysticism Although many Sephardic Jews accepted rationalist assumptions in one manner or another, not all of them shared this outlook. 4 In fact, the most sophisticated mystical approaches to Judaism developed in Spain apparently in part as a reaction to the strict rationalist thought of Maimonides and his followers. Mystical traditions seem to have moved from the Middle East through Italy and then to Germany and Provence. The first major mystical book in Christendom was Sefer ha-Bahir [The Book of 4

See Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, multiple editions; Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven, 1988).

476 the middle ages: the christian world Brightness], which was either produced or edited in Provence in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, based on earlier sources and attributed to the Tanna R. Nehunya ben Haqanah. Presented as midrashic interpretations of Genesis, Bahir outlined various divine realms (the sefirot) and presented mystical interpretations of biblical verses, the commandments, Hebrew letters, cantillation signs, and sacred names. This work influenced the thirteenth-century Gerona school, including Azriel and Ezra of Gerona, and its most significant representative, Nahmanides. Another important mystic in the mid thirteenth century was ˙Abraham Abulafia, who wrote mystical essays based upon Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed, and who presented methods which he believed would help one attain prophecy; his form of ecstatic mysticism is often called “prophetic Kabbalah.” Theosophical Kabbalah as such developed in late-thirteenth-century Castile, when the Sefer ha-Zohar [The Book of Splendor] first appeared. Although attributed to the second-century Tanna Simeon bar Yohai (which undoubtedly was a major cause of the Zohar’s subsequent attainment of canonical status), its most likely author/compiler was R. Moses de Leon (perhaps working with a school of mystics or serving as the main redactor; some sections of the Zohar as we know it apparently post-date De Leon). De Leon and his contemporary R. Joseph Gikatilla, author of Sha’arei Orah [Gates of Light] presented full-blown theosophical systems, describing the divine realms and their relation with the physical world and humanity. The Zohar’s expressive language – with its impressive use of symbolism, including erotic imagery, and its fanciful interpretations of biblical texts and Jewish ritual practices – was particularly appealing, even though the book was written in an archaic Aramaic. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, there were Jewish thinkers who tried to accommodate the two methods of thought in one way or another, accepting both systems as true and explaining one in terms of the other (e.g., identifying the kabbalistic sefirot as the philosophical divine attributes). Some devotees of Kabbalah, however, attacked philosophy vigorously as a form of heresy – such as the early-fifteenth-century Shem Tov ibn Shem Tov in his Sefer haEmunot [Book of Beliefs]. Eventually, Kabbalah as expressed in the Zohar and developed by the sixteenth-century R. Isaac Luria displaced philosophy as the central theological system for most Jews. Jewish mysticism also had a major impact on Jewish religious law, creating many new customs which gained universal acceptance. Various forms of mysticism were adopted by Ashkenazim as well. German Pietists (Hasidei Ashkenaz) combined particular loyalty to Jewish law with a˙ number of innovative practices, including selfabnegation, some of which have parallels in contemporary Christianity.

the sources 477 The main text of these Pietists was Sefer Hasidim [The Book of the Pious], generally attributed to Judah the Pious (d. 1217), but most likely including material from Judah’s father Samuel and his student Eleazar of Worms. Ashkenazic legalists, such as the Tosafists, were also influenced by a number of mystical concepts, although in general their theology reflected biblical and rabbinic patterns of thought and they were usually careful not to express esoteric doctrines too explicitly. One of these legalists, R. Moses Taku (early thirteenth century) launched an attack on Jewish rationalism, even in its more moderate forms. Toward the end of the Middle Ages, however, certain Sephardic philosophical ideas attracted a number of Ashkenazic Jews, especially some who lived in Prague at the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth centuries.5 Theological ideas – both philosophical and mystical, as well as traditional rabbinic concepts as found in the midrash – were often disseminated by means of sermons. Not all rabbis issued their sermons in written form, but some of them did, most notably R. Jacob Anatoli, R. Jonah Gerondi (mid thirteenth century), R. Joshua ibn Shueib (early fourteenth century), R. Nissim Gerondi, and R. Isaac Arama. LITURGY AND POETRY

Jewish daily liturgy began to emerge at the end of the Second Temple period and continued to be developed through the Tannaitic and Amoraic periods.6 Although the Babylonian Geonim endeavored to standardize both the order and text of the prayers, divergences remained among different liturgies, most notably the Sephardic and Ashkenazic rituals, as well as those of smaller communities, such as in Italy and in Greek-speaking lands. In addition, the standard order of prayers was supplemented by liturgical poetry (piyutim) which was specific to each ritual, and in Christian Europe certain new prayers were developed in the light of specific circumstances (such as dirges in the wake of tragedies, some of which were incorporated into the lamentations recited on the Ninth of Av). The Ashkenazic ritual is firmly set in Mahzor Vitri by R. Simhah ben Samuel, a student of Rashi’s (before 1105). ˙This work included many of Rashi’s legal decisions, functioning as a comprehensive ritual guide built around the liturgy. In addition, it recorded many of the piyutim of the 5

6

For a comprehensive overview of Ashkenazic thought, see Ephraim Kanarfogel, The Intellectual History and Rabbinic Culture of Medieval Ashkenaz (Detroit, 2013). For a general overview of Jewish liturgy, see Ismar Elbogen, Jewish Liturgy: A Comprehensive History, trans. Raymond P. Scheindlin (Philadelphia, 1993).

478 the middle ages: the christian world French rite. The most prominent Sephardic liturgist was David Abudraham who wrote an important commentary on the prayer-book. Although many of the most important piyutim were written either in the Land of Israel under Byzantine rule or in Geonic Babylonia, medieval European Jews continued to write ritual poetry, some of which was incorporated into the prayer-book. Although the Sephardic tradition was more attuned to both secular and religious poetry because of the Arabic traditions in Andalusia, Ashkenazic poets also composed poems for various occasions. In fact, one of the few parts of the Sephardic intellectual heritage which interested Ashkenazic Jews was poetry. Both Ashkenazic and Sephardic decisors struggled with the propriety of interrupting the regular order of service in order to add newly written material which was not part of the standard liturgical heritage, and in general the Ashkenazic authorities, following the lead of Rabbenu Tam, were more amenable to finding allowances for such a procedure. Some Ashkenazic authors also wrote commentaries on the piyutim – whose Hebrew can be a challenge even to the most educated Jews – presumably to obviate the problem of additions to the prayers which were beyond the understanding of the average worshipper. Many prayer-books and Passover haggadot were illustrated, reinforcing the message of the text. Important illustrated ritual collections are the Worms Mahzor (first part, 1272), the London Miscellany (c.1280–90), the Leipzig Mahzor (fourteenth century), the Sarajevo Haggadah (c.1350), and the Rothschild Miscellany (second half of the fifteenth century), which includes thirty-seven religious and secular compositions. The illustrations, which often reflected or responded to contemporary Christian attitudes and styles, served aesthetic, didactic, and polemical purposes. INTERRELIGIOUS POLEMIC

Jewish argumentation against other religious forms goes back to the prophets who ridiculed idol-worshipping polytheists.7 Rabbinic literature also includes passages which criticize or denigrate non-Jewish religious practices and beliefs, including a few fleeting references to Christianity. Polemic as a Jewish literary genre, however, was first seen in the Islamic period when Jews began to criticize the competing religions, most notably 7

Literature on the subject has been growing in the past decades; see, e.g., David Berger, The Jewish Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 1979); Samuel Krauss, The Jewish Christian Controversy: From the Earliest Times to 1789, ed. William Horbury (Tübingen, 1995); Daniel J. Lasker, Jewish Philosophical Polemics Against Christianity in the Middle Ages, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 2007).

the sources 479 8 Christianity but also Islam to a certain extent. In the Christian world, Jewish polemics against the majority religion developed into a well-defined body of literature. Even before the advent of specifically anti-Christian polemical treatises in the second half of the twelfth century, some authors in Christian Europe were already reacting to the majority religion, partially in response to the massacres of the Crusades. Some biblical interpretations can be seen as reflecting an attempt to refute Christian understandings of certain “Christological” verses, although the extent to which polemic informed the early Ashkenazic exegetical enterprise is a matter of dispute. Jewish chronicles of the Crusades, as well as some of the poetry written in their wake, includes some nasty descriptions of Christians, even if there are no explicit arguments against Christian doctrines. The first specifically anti-Christian polemic issued in Christian Europe was Sefer Nestor ha-Komer [The Book of Nestor the Priest], a Hebrew translation of the anonymous Judeo-Arabic Account of the Disputation of a Priest. The original claimed that a proselyte priest had written this work for his erstwhile co-religionists to explain why he rejected Christianity; the translation names this priest as “Nestor.” This work influenced most later polemical works, including the first two original Hebrew-language polemics, Sefer Milhamot ha-Shem [The Book of the Wars of the Lord] ˙ and Sefer ha-Berit [The Book of the Covenant] by by Jacob ben Reuben Joseph Kimhi, both around 1170. Jacob ben Reuben and Joseph Kimhi had roots in Andalusia and their polemical works demonstrate the transition of anti-Christian arguments from the Islamic to Christian realms. The thirteenth century saw an intensification of Christian pressures upon Jews; part of their strategy included staged public disputations. In Paris, 1240, the former Jew Nicholas Donin accused rabbinic literature of blasphemy against Jesus and Christians, and he was answered by R. Yehiel of Paris. The Jewish defense was unsuccessful in preventing the burning of˙ the Talmud in 1241 or 1242. Another former Jew, Pablo Christiani, initiated the Disputation of Barcelona, 1263, culling rabbinic literature for proofs of the truth of Christianity. The Jewish protagonist was Nahmanides, whose ˙ defense against account of the disputation set the basic lines of the Jewish the Christian use of Jewish literature, a form of argumentation which saw one of its highlights in Raymond Martini’s Pugio Fidei [Dagger of Faith] (1278). 8

There are various explanations for why there is more Jewish anti Christian polemic than anti Islamic polemic under Islam, such as the lack of a specific Islamic mission to the Jews and the dangers inherent in criticizing Islam. Jewish criticism of Christianity in the absence of a Christian missionary threat indicates that Jewish objections to Christianity were not solely a reaction to Christian attacks on Judaism.

480 the middle ages: the christian world Jewish polemicists employed a number of techniques in their criticism of Christians and their doctrines, and here, too, one can see the distinction between the Sephardic and Ashkenazic approaches. Although almost all Jewish polemicists employed exegetical arguments based on the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and, after Paris and Barcelona, rabbinic literature, the Sephardic (and Italian) authors also used philosophical argumentation as well. Moses ben Solomon of Salerno (d. 1279), Hasdai Crescas ˙ and other (d. 1410/11), Profiat Duran (d. 1414), Joseph Albo (d. 1444), Jewish philosophers argued that Christian doctrines are inherently illogical, contradicted by reason, as well as being self-contradictory. For instance, the Jewish polemicists argued, a triune God, both one and three, makes no sense, in addition to being at odds with God’s absolute unity. In Ashkenaz, greater emphasis was put on vulgar ridicule of Christian practices, most notably in the late-thirteenth-century anonymous Nitsahon ˙ Yashan [The Old Book of Polemic]. For example, the sacrament of confession is said to be a tactic employed by male priests to find out which of their women parishioners were adulterers and thus susceptible to their advances. By the late fourteenth century, some Sephardic-type rationalistic arguments reached Ashkenaz as well, as can be seen in Yom Tov Lipmann Mülhausen’s Sefer Nitsahon [The Book of Polemic], written in approximately 1400 in the wake of˙a public dispute with an apostate which led to riots and murder of Jews. In the fifteenth century, the debate continued in those areas of western Europe where Jews were still resident, most notably in Spain. In 1413–14, once again Jewish leaders were coerced to participate in a public disputation, this time in Tortosa. While the debate dragged on there for many months, Christian missionaries were free to circulate among the Jewish communities whose rabbis were forcibly occupied with the disputation. Much Jewish creativity in fifteenth-century Iberia reflected the situation of Christian pressure, and the presence of many conversos living among Jews who remained steadfast in their religion. SCIENCE AND MEDICINE

Jewish interest in science and medicine was found mainly in Iberia, Provence, and Italy, and was influenced by the Andalusian background on the one hand and developments in Latin Christendom on the other.9

9

Cf. the multiple volumes of the journal Aleph: Historical Studies in Science & Judaism; Steven Harvey, ed., The Medieval Hebrew Encyclopedias of Science and Philosophy (Dordrecht, 2000); Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook, vol. VIII (Leipzig, 2009), 13 315.

the sources 481 Although there is evidence of some Ashkenazic interest in the sciences, there were no active Jewish scientists in medieval northern Europe. Jews had an especial interest in astronomy since the Jewish calendar is based upon celestial phenomena. Since, however, the calendar had seen its final redaction in the Geonic period, there was no practical, religious application to this science, and most descriptions of the astronomical bases of the calendar were not dependent upon the authors’ own calculations and observations. The most accomplished medieval Jewish astronomer was Gersonides who invented the Jacob’s staff – a surveying instrument used in making nautical and astronomical measurements – and recorded astronomical tables. The first purveyors of scientific knowledge in Christian Europe were emigrants from Andalusia, Abraham bar Hiyya and Abraham ibn Ezra, both of whom were conscious of the fact that those Jews who read only Hebrew were unfamiliar with the scientific accomplishments of Arabicspeaking Jews and Muslims. They, therefore, composed a number of treatises intended to explain the basic structures of science – mathematics, geography, logic, astronomy, and others – to their new compatriots. Their works were pioneering, especially in their coining of Hebrew neologisms to translate Arabic technical terms. These treatises were eventually overshadowed by subsequent compositions which reflected both advances in science and the clearer Hebrew style of the Ibn Tibbon family. The most prominent example of a popular scientific composition is the anonymous Ruah Hen [Spirit of Compassion], apparently written in thirteenth˙ ˙ Provence or Italy. This work was a principal source of Jewish century views of science even into the modern period, by which time it was totally anachronistic. The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw the rise of what might be considered Hebrew encyclopedias, intended to teach a Jewish audience the whole range of scientific knowledge. The most prominent of these were Midrash Ha-Hokhmah [The Study of Wisdom] by Judah ben Solomon ˙ – after 1274); De’ot ha-Filosofim [The Opinions of the ha-Kohen (c.1215 Philosophers] by Shem Tov ibn Joseph Falaquera; Sha’ar ha-Shamayim [The Gate of Heaven] by Gershom ben Solomon (last quarter of the thirteenth century); Livyat Hen [Graceful Wreath] by Levi ben Abraham of Villefranche; and Ahavah˙ba-Ta’anugim [Love in Rapture] by Moses ben Judah (mid fourteenth century). These works were attempts at organizing already-known scientific knowledge, most of which came from the heritage of Islamic science, and not at innovating new understandings. Provence was the most important center for Jewish medicine, most likely because of the influence of the medical school at the University of Montpellier which was operating as early as the mid twelfth century. At the

482 the middle ages: the christian world same time as the Ibn Tibbon family was translating philosophical texts from Arabic into Hebrew during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a number of Provençal Jews were pioneering the translation of Latin medical texts into Hebrew. Indeed, until the fifteenth century, medicine was the predominant subject of Latin to Hebrew translations. CHRONICLES

Jews were rarely interested in history for history’s sake, and their accounts of the past usually had either a didactic or apologetical motive. The first medieval Jewish chronicles in Christendom both came from Italy: Sefer Josipon [Book of Josippon], roughly based on Josephus’s works (mid tenth century), which describes Jewish history until the destruction of the Second Temple; and Megillat Ahimaaz [Scroll of Ahimaaz] by Ahimaaz ben Paltiel (1054), which is ˙more or less a family chronicle describing life in southern Italy. The most noteworthy chronicles in medieval Christendom were written as accounts of Jewish suffering during the Crusades. There are three major accounts of the atrocities which befell Rhineland Jewry in 1096, known as the Mainz Anonymous, the Solomon bar Simson Chronicle, and the Eliezer bar Nathan Chronicle.10 There is no general agreement among historians as to the exact authorship, the time of composition, and the historical accuracy of these accounts. It is clear that the authors used their compositions to justify the various Jewish responses to the catastrophe, from Jews who killed their families and themselves to avoid being forcibly converted, to Jews who gave in to conversionary pressure but remained believing Jews even afterwards. The glorification of martyrdom, even when accompanied by the slaughter of one’s own family, made a great impact on Ashkenazic self-image in future generations. Similarly, the negative attitude toward Christianity, as expressed in the chronicles’ acerbic tone and use of terms of opprobrium, also influenced subsequent Jewish attitudes toward the dominant religion. A subcategory of chronicles is the travelogue, the most prominent of which was Benjamin of Tudela’s account of his travels between 1159 and 1173. Starting out in Zaragoza, and proceeding to Provence, Italy, Greece, Constantinople, Syria, the Land of Israel, Iraq, Iran, and Egypt, Benjamin described his travels, and the Jewish communities he encountered along 10

English translations of the three chronicles are available in Shlomo Eidelberg, trans. and ed., The Jews and the Crusaders: The Hebrew Chronicles of the First and Second Crusades (Madison, 1977); for a discussion, see Robert Chazan, God, Humanity and History: The Hebrew First Crusade Narratives (Berkeley, 2000).

the sources 483 the way, in great detail. This account is thus crucial for knowledge of twelfth-century conditions of Jews in Christian and Islamic lands. TRANSLATIONS

Much of Jewish culture in Christendom was based on Hebrew translations of literature written in other languages, by both Jews and non-Jews.11 Though the majority of Jewish translations into Hebrew were executed from the Arabic, by the fifteenth century more translations were being made from Latin into Hebrew than from Arabic. The most prominent translators from Arabic were the aforementioned Ibn Tibbon family in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Their choice of subjects for translation – Jewish, Muslim, and Greek – set much of the agenda for Jewish intellectualism in Christian countries. Translations from Latin, however, had a much smaller impact on Jewish communities, since many of the translated treatises were medical in nature. The extent to which Latin Scholasticism influenced European Jewish thinkers is a matter of debate, and it was only in the fifteenth century that there was a clearly identifiable movement that could be called “Hebrew Scholasticism.”12 Translated works covered many genres, most notably philosophy and science (Jewish and other), and Halakhah (such as Maimonides’s Commentary on the Mishnah and Sefer ha-Mitzvot). Biblical commentaries and halakhic monographs written in Judeo-Arabic were generally left untranslated, lessening the impact of these works on the Hebrew reading public who, at most, learned about them from citations in works written by Arabic-literate authors. Medieval translations into Hebrew tended to be very literal and, thus, the reader could receive a feel for the original composition. The Ibn Tibbon family also provided lexicons explaining new philosophical terms, many of which they, themselves, had coined. Tibbonide Hebrew became standard, making it difficult to read translations which used different terminology and ensuring that those works translated by the Tibbonides would have the most impact on Jewish culture in Christian countries. Jewish life in medieval Christian Europe was replete with intellectual achievements that were partly responsible for continued Jewish 11

12

See Moritz Steinschneider, Die hebraeischen Übersetzungen des Mittelalters und die Juden als Dolmetscher: ein Beitrag zur Literaturgeschichte des Mittelalters, meist nach handschrif tlichen Quellen (Berlin, 1893). The terminology is Mauro Zonta’s; see his Hebrew Scholasticism in the Fifteenth Century: A History and Source Book (Dordrecht, 2006); see also Latin into Hebrew: Texts and Studies, vol. I: Studies, ed. Resianne Fontaine and Gad Freudenthal; vol. II: Texts, ed. Alexander Fidora, Harvey J. Hames, and Yossef Schwartz (Leiden, 2013).

484 the middle ages: the christian world identification and solidarity. This short survey indicates that many factors went into the making of this intellectual heritage, both external and internal, and it is because of these many factors that that heritage is so multifaceted and diverse. Many of the sages mentioned herein were involved in more than one intellectual pursuit, showing that they perceived Jewish culture as one seamless whole. Preservation of these Jewish intellectual accomplishments has been difficult in the modern era because of Jewish assimilation and acculturation to the wider society, including secularization. These factors, however, contribute to new and different forms of Jewish intellectual achievements.

chapter 19

LANGUAGES AND TRANSLATIONS david m. bunis and james t. robinson

LANGUAGES david m. bunis

The linguistic history of the Jews in medieval Europe reflects the traditional Jewish desire to maintain a distinctive identity, often through conservative ties to the past, tempered by a considerable openness to the contemporaneous non-Jewish surroundings,1 and a propensity toward innovation. Thus, on the one hand, to ensure the free and open exchange with their gentile neighbors necessary for their own welfare and prosperity, the Jews of medieval Europe tended to adopt as their everyday languages varieties of the languages used by the predominant co-territorial non-Jews. When social or political shifts led their neighbors to adopt a new language, the Jews often did so as well; and when voluntary or forced migrations brought Jews to new linguistic environments, they might replace their former languages with varieties of those used by their new neighbors. On the other hand, as members of a group who felt themselves distinct from their gentile neighbors, and who were related to as such by those neighbors, it was natural for the medieval Jews as groups always to distinguish themselves somewhat from the co-territorial non-Jews – linguistically,

1

There is an extensive research literature on the individual languages used by Jews in medieval Europe, as well as on the Jewish language phenomenon as a field of inquiry. For general treatments of the field, see Herbert H. Paper, ed., Jewish Languages: Theme and Variations (Cambridge, MA, 1978); Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, trans. Shlomo Noble and Joshua Fishman (Chicago, 1980); Paul Wexler, “Jewish Inter Linguistics: Facts and Conceptual Framework,” Language 57, 1 (1981), 99 145; John Myhill, Language in Jewish Society: Toward a New Understanding (Clevedon, UK, c.2004); David M. Bunis, ed., Languages and Literatures of Sephardic and Oriental Jews (Jerusalem, 2009); Bernard Spolsky, The Languages of the Jews: A Sociolinguistic History (New York, 2014); Lily Kahn and Aaron Rubin, eds., Handbook of Jewish Languages (Leiden, 2015); Joshua L. Miller and Anita Norich, eds., Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures: Comparative Perspectives (Ann Arbor, 2016). For basic bibliography, consult the Jewish Language Research Website: www.jewish languages.org.

485

486 the middle ages: the christian world culturally, and in other respects – even while speaking a variety of their neighbors’ language as their everyday tongue. The outcome was the creation in medieval Europe of Jewish varieties of languages belonging to the Indo-European, Semitic, Kartvelian, and Turkic language families, differing from the non-Jewish correlates in varying degrees in different places and at different times. In some instances, the Jewish varieties would constitute distinctive ethnolects or religiolects; in others, especially after the fifteenth century, they would develop into autonomous Jewish languages. Much of the medieval Jews’ linguistic uniqueness was rooted in the incorporation into their everyday language of material originating in Hebrew, the most ancient, shared language of Jewry worldwide, and Jewish varieties of Aramaic, used widely by Jews in the Land of Israel and other parts of the Middle East following the decline of Hebrew. Throughout medieval Europe, Jews tended to write their everyday languages in the Hebrew alphabet taught in their religious schools. They gave their children – especially the boys – Hebrew names (sometimes in addition to others). In their daily languages, they employed words, expressions, and other linguistic structures of Hebrew and Aramaic origin, as well as elements drawn from immediately preceding communal languages. They frequently connected verbally the events and experiences of their own everyday lives with the episodes, practices, and realia of Jewish life in ancient times, as recounted in Hebrew sources such as the Bible, and, in later times, under the influence of texts often combining Hebrew and Aramaic – such as the Talmud and liturgical texts – and of medieval rabbinical texts and oral traditions. The present chapter offers an overview of the languages used by the Jews of medieval Europe, with an emphasis on their distinctive characteristics. It should be noted that our knowledge of the languages used by European Jews in the Middle Ages is based largely upon contemporaneous written sources composed by Jews. A fundamental problem with this corpus is that it may not accurately reflect the everyday varieties of speech actually used by Jews, but may have been influenced by the literary norms prevalent among non-Jewish writers of the period, with which some medieval Jewish literati were familiar, as well as by certain stylistic norms internal to the Jewish community. For example, perceived pressure to conform to non-Jewish literary norms might have caused writers to replace distinctive Jewish structures and lexical items used in actual everyday speech with their non-Jewish literary equivalents. Although adherence to the literality principle informing the pan-Jewish sacred-text translation tradition would have led Bible translators to imitate the syntax of the original Hebrew or Aramaic target text and thus to distance themselves

languages and translations 487 from the syntactic patterns used in the everyday speech of gentiles (and perhaps Jews), the same translation tradition would tend to cause them to avoid incorporating into their translations everyday Hebrew–Aramaicorigin lexemes, as well as lexemes borrowed from new contact groups in lands of immigration. Thus, popular Jewish speech throughout medieval Europe might in fact have been more Hebraized, and richer in metaphoric allusions to Jewish history, institutions, and habits, as well as borrowings from new co-territorial contact languages, and elements coined through internal innovation, than the extant corpus suggests. Perhaps it also diverged from the everyday language of co-territorial non-Jews in ways undocumented in literary writing: in sound system, intonation, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Such divergences from the non-Jewish correlates are in fact well documented for later stages of those languages – for example, Judezmo (Ladino), Yiddish, Jewish Italian (or “Italkic Laaz,” “Italkian”), Jewish Provençal (“Shuadit”), and Jewish Greek (“Yevanic”) – which survived into the post-medieval era. The occasional need for code elements to enable discreet, secret communication between Jews in the presence of gentiles, and even the Jewish propensity for satirical creativity through the use of words and allusions unique to the group, sometimes at the expense of other groups, probably made the Jews of the Middle Ages linguistically more distinctive than the surviving literary corpus would lead us to believe. g r e ek sp e e c h t e r ri t o r y ( ye v a n i c ) Probably the earliest locally created, distinctively Jewish linguistic varieties which arose in medieval Europe were somewhat Hebraized varieties of Greek, written in the Hebrew alphabet and used by the Jews of the Byzantine Empire (“Romaniotes”). The highly stylized nature of the few available texts – mostly translations of Biblical passages – makes it difficult to know how the medieval Jews actually spoke Greek, and how distinctive their Greek was.2 Through contact with Turkish following the Ottoman conquest of Greek-speaking lands in the fifteenth century, late medieval Jewish Greek underwent influence from the language of the Ottomans. In northwestern Greece, in cities such as Ioannina, Arta, and Patras, descendants of the Byzantine Jews continued to use Jewish varieties of Greek into the twentieth century. 2

Julia G. Krivoruchko, “Medieval and Early Modern Judaeo Greek Biblical Translations: A Linguistic Perspective,” in James K. Aitken and James Carleton Paget, eds., The Jewish Greek Tradition in Antiquity and the Byzantine Empire (New York, 2014), 152 70; Krivoruchko, “Judeo Greek,” in Kahn and Rubin, eds., Handbook of Jewish Languages, 194 225.

488

the middle ages: the christian world ROMANCE AND IBERO ARABIC SPEECH TERRITORY (LA‘AZ, YAHUDIC)

Traveling along the trails blazed by the Roman legions and other Roman colonizers, popular-Latin-speaking Jewish merchants, entrepreneurs, scholars, and others made their way from Rome to what were to become other parts of Italy, France, Provence, and the regions of the Iberian peninsula, where they established Jewish communities. As is demonstrated by their tombstones, as well as in various writings surviving from the period, in late Antiquity the Jews of Rome had primarily spoken varieties of Greek. They later adopted popular Latin but preserved certain elements from their Greek, especially words denoting concepts of significance in Judaism, and also made use of elements of Hebrew–Aramaic origin. By at least the ninth century, the popular Latin used among the nonJews in the diverse regions of western Europe which had been under Roman domination was well on the way to developing into the various regional Romance languages and dialects, including varieties of Italian, French, Provençal, Catalan, Castilian, Portuguese, and so on. The Jewish communities in each region came to speak linguistic varieties that, in their Romance components, resembled the languages of their popular-level neighbors. However, they continued to share reflexes of certain lexical items of Greek and Hebrew–Aramaic origin harking back to the Jewish Greek of their ancestors, which caused David S. Blondheim (1925) to suggest that all of the medieval varieties of Jewish Romance ultimately derived, through vertical evolution, from a common Jewish-Latin ancestor, which had been adopted by Jews who had formerly spoken a Jewish variety of Greek.3 The tendency of the medieval Jewish Romance speakers themselves to perceive their languages as descendants of a common Jewish-Latin ancestor would seem to be reflected in the fact that when they wrote in Hebrew, they tended en bloc to refer to their local varieties of Romance as la‘az/‫ לעז‬or lo‘ez/‫“( לועז‬Jewish Romance” – from Mishnaic Hebrew la‘az/ ‫לעז‬, referring to Greek, reflecting earlier Biblical Hebrew l-‘-z/‫ז‬.‫ע‬.‫ל‬, which denoted a language foreign to the Jews, such as Egyptian), or as the geographically more specific la‘az se˘ faradi / ‫“( לעז ספרדי‬Sephardic or Spanish la‘az”), la‘az italki /‫“( לעז איטלקי‬Italian la‘az”), and the like.4 But ˙ ˙borne by Jewish Romance in each region to the the greater resemblance 3 4

David S. Blondheim, Les Parlers romans des juifs et la Vetus Latina (Paris, 1925). In line with his characteristic approach to Jewish languages, using the speakers’ group internal terminology, Solomon Birnbaum (“Jewish Languages,” in I. Epstein, E. Levine, and C. Roth, eds., Essays in Honour of the Very Rev. Dr. J. H. Hertz . . . on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday (London, [1944]), 51 67) proposed the name “Italkian” for Jewish Italian (cf. Hebrew ’italkit [“Italian”]), “Zarphatic” for Jewish French (cf. medieval

languages and translations 489 language used by the neighboring gentiles than to the varieties of Romance used by Jews in more remote regions prompted Kurt Levy to argue instead that the diverse varieties of medieval Jewish Romance derived through horizontal development from the varieties of Romance which evolved among gentiles in each region, rather than from a common Jewish-Latin progenitor.5 Max Weinreich posited a compromise explanation for the phenomenon of Jewish Romance languages: the varieties of Romance used by the Jews in medieval western Europe were heirs to a common linguistic patrimony originating among the Jews of Rome, with roots in earlier Jewish Greek, but, through linguistic accommodation to the local gentile population with whom they interacted intensively on a daily basis, over time the language of the Jews in each individual region tended increasingly to approach that of the co-territorial non-Jews.6 As was noted, the common Jewish-Greek heritage is evidenced by a small but distinctive lexical component of Jewish-Greek origin found, in divergent forms, in all of the Romance languages used by Jews in medieval western Europe. Perhaps most outstanding among these are derivatives of Jewish-Greek meletáō – the Greek correspondent appears three times in the Greek New Testament (Mark 13:11 meletate, 1 Timothy 4:15 meleta, Acts 4:25 emeletēsan) – through Jewish-Latin *meletare. In the Middle Ages, the Jewish Romance reflexes denoted “contemplation, study, reading (especially of a Jewish text).” The verb appears, for example, in Jewish Romance translations of Deuteronomy 6:7: Hebrew: We˘ -shinnantam (le˘ vanekha) ((‫“( )ושננתם )לבניך‬And thou shalt teach them [diligently to thy children]”) Jewish French: (Paris 1240) maderas; (Parma MS 2780, beginning of fourteenth century) e mad(e)ras os Jewish Italian: (Italian Maqre darde˘ qe) meldare; (Parma MS 7, from 1484) meltarai; (Parma MS 6, from 1499) meldarei

5

6

Hebrew Sare˘ fat [“France”]), and analogous names for other Jewish languages. Following the Middle Ages, the speakers of some Jewish Romance languages began referring to their languages as “Jewish,” e.g., Judezmo djudezmo (originally denoting “Judaism”), Florentine Jewish Italian giudesco (David M. Bunis, “The Names of Jewish Languages: A Taxonomy,” in Francesco Aspesi, Vermondo Brugnatelli, Anna Linda Callow, and Claudia Rosenzweig, eds., Il mio cuore è a Oriente. Studi di linguistica storica, filologia e cultura ebraica dedicati a Maria Luisa Mayer Modena (Milan, 2008), 415 33); but this practice seems to have been unknown in the Middle Ages. Kurt Levy, “Historisch geographische Untersuchungen zum Judenspanischen,” Volkstum und Kultur der Romanen 2 (1929), 342 81. Max Weinreich, “The Jewish Languages of Romance Stock and Their Relation to Earliest Yiddish,” Romance Philology 9 (1956), 403 28.

490

the middle ages: the christian world

Judezmo (1547, reflecting pre expulsion tradition): I meldarlasás a tus fijos Jewish Provenc¸ al: (prayer book, Roth MS 32, Lazar edn.): e maudaras elas Jewish Catalan: (Ok. 9, fol. 20b): i maldarlasas

The translation meletâs appears in the Jewish-Greek translation of the Pentateuch published for the Romaniote community of the Ottoman Empire in Constantinople in 1547, alongside the Ladino translation meant for the Empire’s Sephardim.7 This suggests that the verb enjoyed continuous use among Jewish-Greek speakers themselves from the early Middle Ages into the sixteenth century. The most obvious distinctive feature characterizing Jewish languages in general in opposition to their non-Jewish correlates is their Hebrew–Aramaic component. Because they denote concepts central to traditional Jewish religious and cultural life, some incorporations from Hebrew–Aramaic are common to all Jewish Romance languages, if not to all Jewish languages. Their often divergent phonological realizations result from the distinctive pronunciations of Hebrew which developed among the individual Jewish Romance subcultures, especially at the popular level – each instance appearing to constitute a unique adaptation of the pronunciation of Hebrew which had been used by speakers of the Jewish-Greek and Jewish-Latin progenitors of the Jewish Romance languages, in accommodation to the phonological tendencies of the specific language. For example, the Hebrew month of Adar (‫)ֲאָדר‬ seems to have been realized in early Jewish Greek, as in later Jewish Greek, as Athar (phonetically, [aˈðar]), with the unpointed letter dalet pronounced like Greek delta (or voiced interdental th [ð] as in English bother; cf. αδαρ in Esther 3:7 in the Septuagint). Perhaps it was maintained as such among Jews speaking a variety of Latin, although the sound did not exist in Latin itself. The sound did come to exist in medieval Castilian: it corresponded to the reflex of Latin intervocalic -t-, which became -d- (pronounced -dh-) in Spanish (e.g., nadar, or “nathar,” from Latin natāre [“to float, swim”]). The sound was also a part of Ibero-Arabic; and thus the Jews of Muslim Castile would have had no problem realizing unpointed dalet as the voiced sound th. When, following the Expulsion of 1492, Jewish Castilian was transported to the Ottoman Empire and became the primary basis for Ottoman Judezmo, the realization Athar was preserved into the modern era among Judezmo speakers in the regions which were to become Greece and Turkey. But in regions of the Empire in which the sound system of Judezmo speakers was affected by local languages such as Slavic, Romanian, and Italian, which 7

Blondheim, Les Parlers romans, 75 9; Dan Eliezer, “The Tradition of the Italian Jewish and other Romance language Translations of the Bible and its Relationship to the Early Translations” [Hebrew] (Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1994), 78 83.

languages and translations 491 lacked the dh sound, it was replaced by occlusive d; so that in Judezmo on Slavic and Romanian territory, the month came to be realized as adar, as in Modern Jewish Italian. Not all words of Hebrew–Aramaic origin in Jewish languages of Romance or other stocks show a clear connection to Judaism. Often they are emotive, carrying humorous or ironic senses or providing euphemisms for taboo concepts. Some such elements appear in several of the Jewish Romance languages, suggesting common origin in early Jewish Greek or borrowing from one Jewish Romance language into another. For example, Jewish Italian akhlare (“to eat [gluttonously],” from Hebrew a-kh-l/‫ל‬.‫כ‬.‫א‬ [“to eat”]) and gannaviare (“to steal,” from Hebrew ganav/‫“[ גנב‬thief”]) have analogues in synonymous Judezmo ahlar and gan(n)avear. Some analogues derive from the same Hebrew root but show different base forms; for example, Jewish Italian dabberare (“to speak,” from the verbal infinitive daber/‫ )דבּר‬versus Judezmo diburear (“to speak in a foreign or incomprehensible language,” from dibur/‫“[ ִדבּור‬speech”]). Judezmo of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries already shows numerous verbs of this type; some of them have correspondents in later varieties of other Jewish Romance languages, e.g. enheremar (“to excommunicate” – Heb. herem/‫“[ חרם‬excommunication”]; also Italkic Laaz inharamare); others do ˙not, e.g. malsinar (“to inform against” – Heb. malshin/‫“[ מלשין‬informer”]), badkar (“to search’” – Heb. b-d-·k/‫ק‬.‫ד‬.‫)ב‬, darsar (“to lecture” – Heb. d-r˙ sh/‫ש‬.‫ר‬.‫)ד‬. Jewish Italian (Italkic La‘az or Italkian) There is textual evidence of Jewish Italian, written in the Hebrew alphabet and having distinctive Italian and Hebrew–Aramaic components, from the tenth century into the modern era. Texts through the fifteenth century include glossaries of the Bible (from the tenth century) and of other works; translations of the Bible, Haggadah, prayer-book, and other Hebrew texts; an original elegy for Tishah Be’Av; and other contributions. Diverse variants of Jewish Italian were used in numerous Jewish communities of Italy, among them Ferrara, Florence, Mantua, Modena, Rome, Venice, and the regions of Piedmont and Reggio Emilia, and in Corfu and Zakynthos.8 There are some unique lexemes, such as Domedeth/Deth (“God,” vs. Italian Dio). The distinctiveness of the grammatical system reflects the 8

Michael Ryzhik, “Il cambiamenti nel giudeo italiano nel corso del Cinquecento,” in Francesco Aspesi, ed., Il mio cuore è a oriente: Studi di linguistica storica, filologia e cultura ebraica dedicati a Maria Luisa Mayer Modena, Milan, 2008, 527 45; Aaron D. Rubin, “Judeo Italian,” in Kahn and Rubin, eds., Handbook of Jewish Languages, 298 365.

492 the middle ages: the christian world tendency toward analogical leveling and structural simplification characteristic of Jewish languages in general. Umberto Cassuto suggested that the southern features which tend to be found in diverse varieties of postmedieval Jewish Italian are the result of the northward immigration of the Jews of Italy after the expulsion of the Jews from the Kingdom of Naples in 1540.9 Languages of the Jews of Iberia The linguistic history of the Jews of Iberia is essentially one of the accommodation of the Jewish communities to the non-Jewish ethnic group predominating at the particular time and in the specific place. As alluded to by Shelomo ibn Gabirol (c.1021–c.1058) in his Hebrewlanguage “Prologue to the Book of Grammar,” the Jews of eleventhcentury Spain were “given over to languages distant from Hebrew, and utterly strange to the lips of the Jews, half of whom spoke in the manner of Edom, and half with the darkening tongue of Kedar.”10 That is, in areas under Christian domination (referred to by medieval Jews as Edom/ ‫)אדום‬, the Jews spoke somewhat Judaized varieties of Ibero-Romance, while, from 711, when Muslim invaders from North Africa occupied parts of Iberia, the Jews in those regions shifted to Judaized varieties of IberoArabic. Jewish Arabic (Yahudic)

In Jewish Ibero-Arabic, written in the Hebrew alphabet during the period often referred to as the “Golden Age of Spanish Jewry,” rabbinical scholars composed prose works on biblical exegesis (e.g. Moshe ben Shemuel haKohen ibn Jikatilla, eleventh century), Hebrew grammar and the lexicon (e. g. Yehuda ben David Hayyuj, tenth–eleventh century, who was born in Fez ˙ ibn Janah, eleventh century), rhetoric and poetry (e. and died in Spain; Yona ˙ eleventh–twelfth century), Jewish law, g. Moshe ben Ya‘aqov ibn ‘Ezra, ethics, logic, philosophy and medicine (e.g. Yehuda ha-Levi, 1080–1141; Maimonides, twelfth–thirteenth century, who contributed to all of these fields), theology (e.g., Bahya ibn Paquda, eleventh–twelfth century), and other fields. There is also˙Iberian Judeo-Arabic poetry on diverse themes, and numerous personal letters in the language are preserved as well. The pronunciation of Hebrew and Aramaic among the Iberian JewishArabic speakers was probably Arabicized, reflecting, for example, waw/‫ ו‬as 9 10

Umberto Cassuto, “Parlata ebraica,” Vessillo Israelitico 57 (1909), 254 60. Peter Cole, ed., Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol (Princeton, NJ, 2001), 47.

languages and translations 493 w, het/‫ ח‬as h, tet/‫ ט‬as t, ‘ayin/‫ ע‬as ‘, sadi/‫ צ‬as s, and qof/‫ ק‬as q. The surviving ˙ evidence ˙ ˙ unique˙ fusions of Hebrew ˙ ˙ Arabic words with the Arabic texts and definite article al-, such al-pasuq (biblical verse, Heb. pasuk/‫)פסוק‬, characteristically Arabic broken plurals of Hebrew words such as ˙plural pawāsīq (biblical verses), Hebrew roots incorporated in the Arabic verbal system (e.g., z-k-w/z-k-y / ‫י‬.‫כ‬.‫ז‬/‫ו‬.‫כ‬.‫“[ ז‬to have the privilege of”]), and compounds merging Arabic and Hebrew elements, such as Salāt al-Shaharit (“Morning ˙ Hebrew˙ shaharit/‫שחרית‬ prayer service,” cf. Arabic salā(t)/ ‫“[ ﺻﻼﺓ‬prayer”], 11 ˙ ˙ originally [“morning prayers”]). Jews even adopted certain Arabic terms denoting key concepts in Islam, but used them within the context of Judaism, such as al-Qur’ān/ ‫ﺍﻟﻘﺮﺁﻥ‬, used with reference to the Torah. The principal, Arabic-origin component of the language used by the Jewish writers in Islamic Spain, as in other places, often bore a closer resemblance to the language spoken by local gentiles than to the formal literary Arabic of Muslim authors. The impact of Arabic on the Jews in Spain was not limited to actual linguistic usage: Muslim ‘arabiyya, an exultation over Arabic as the language of the Qur’an and consequently a desire to cultivate it maximally, had its parallel in the deep pride the Jews of Muslim Spain took in the Hebrew language and led to their concerted efforts to expand the language and prove that it was at the least the equal of Arabic in all spheres. In their Hebrew, in both poetry and prose, the Jews of Muslim Spain were profoundly influenced by the structure and lexicon of Arabic as well as by its flourishing literary genres, leading to the borrowing of words (e.g., markaz [“center”] becoming synonymous merkaz/‫)מרכז‬, concepts (e.g., Hebrew kav/‫קו‬, originally meaning “thread,” acquired the additional ˙ sense of “line” under Arabic influence), and grammatical structures (e.g., use of the demonstrative before the noun, as in ze ha-sefer/‫“[ זה הספר‬this book”] instead of sefer ze/‫ ;)ספר זה‬the coining of new words based on Arabic models (e.g. mahut/‫“[ מהות‬essence”] after Arabic māhiyya(t)/‫ ;)ﻣﺎﻫﻴﺔ‬semantic broadening and loan translations of Arabic expressions (e.g. sh-l-l/‫ל‬.‫ל‬.‫ש‬, originally referring to “spoils,” came to mean “negate” under the influence of Arabic s-l-b/‫ ;)ﺳﻠﺐ‬and the adoption of diverse Arabic poetic devices such as the muwashshah and kharja (discussed further below) in their Hebrew compositions. ˙

11

Joshua Blau, A Dictionary of Mediaeval Judaeo Arabic Texts (Jerusalem, 2006), 504, 273, 537; see also Blau, The Emergence and Linguistic Background of Judaeo Arabic: A Study of the Origins of Middle Arabic (Leiden, 1981); Geoffrey Khan, “Judeo Arabic,” in Kahn and Rubin, eds., Handbook of Jewish Languages, 22 63.

494

the middle ages: the christian world Jewish Ibero-Romance (Iberian La‘az)

With the re-conquest by Christians of parts of Islamic Spain, the Jews there shifted back to Judaized Ibero-Romance as their primary everyday language, while preserving within it elements from their earlier Jewish Ibero-Arabic. The earliest use of Ibero-Romance by Jews is documented in the kharjas, or final stanzas in Romance, which appeared at the end of Hebrew poetic compositions called muwashshahat, known from the eleventh century.12 Often placed in the mouths of ˙women characters, the kharjas were apparently rooted in popular songs of the period. An example from the poetry of Yehuda ha-Levi, in a language resembling Mozarabic with incorporations from Arabic (ya Rabb/‫ﻳﺎﺭﺏ‬, li-l-habīb/‫)ﻟﻠﺤﺒﻴﺐ‬, is: ˙ Vayse meu corachón de mib: ya Rab, si me tornarád? Tan mal meu doler li-l-habib! ˙ Enfermo yed, cuánd sanarád?

(“My heart has left me, Oh Sir, will it return to me? So great is my pain for my beloved! It is sick, when will it be cured?”)

These Romance passages demonstrate a certain knowledge among the Jews of Islamic Spain of Ibero-Romance and the popular oral literature cultivated in it, even during the period in which they preferred Jewish Arabic as the language of daily communication and, along with Hebrew, as the language of serious literature. Perhaps, in addition to Judeo-Arabic, varieties of Jewish Ibero-Romance also enjoyed some spoken use among the Jews of Islamic Spain, especially for communication with local Christians. Maimonides’s Glossary of Drug Names includes hundreds of terms for drugs in Judeo-Arabic and Spanish, as well as other languages. Romance terms also appear in the responsa literature of rabbis in Muslim Spain. Jewish Castilian (Old Judezmo, Old Sephardic La‘az)

In re-Christianized Iberia, the Jews increasingly used Judaized Ibero-Romance as their everyday language. In each section of Iberia, the Jews tended to speak a variety of Ibero-Romance close to that of their immediate Christian neighbors. However, Jewish Castilian, spoken and written in prestigious Castile, which had the largest concentration of Jews in the peninsula and served as the seat of the Spanish court, may also have functioned as a kind of supra-regional Jewish Ibero-Romance variety or lingua franca, facilitating communication among 12

The pioneer in the study of this genre was Samuel Miklos Stern, “Les Vers finaux en espagnol dans les muwaššahs hispano hébraiques,” Al Andaluz 13 (1948), 299 348.

languages and translations 495 Jews throughout Iberia. Knowledge of it would have been useful to Jews from more peripheral regions who traveled to Castile or other parts of the country to study or engage in trade. The tradition in several Iberian Jewish communities of publicly reading the Book of Esther in the vernacular (la‘az) during Purim, ostensibly for women unfamiliar with Hebrew, is already discussed in the responsa of Moshe ben Nahman (or Ramban, Gerona 1194 – Eres Yisrael 1270), Nissim ˙ ben Reuven of˙ Girona (Catalonia, 1320–76), Valencia-born Yishak BarSheshet Perfet (1326–1408), and others. The translation of the˙ Hebrew phrase ha-’ahashte˘ ranim be˘ ne ha-ramahim / ‫האחשתרנים בני הרמחים‬ ˙ (“swift horses˙ bred from stud mares,” Esther 8:10) as los potros fijos delas eguas / ‫לוש פוטרוש פיגוש דלאש איגואש‬, adduced by Bar-Sheshet, suggests that the overwhelmingly literal, but also partially interpretive, Ladino calque translation tradition, well documented after the Expulsion and featuring a Hispanic component resembling Old Castilian, had already been established by this time.13 In the apologetic introduction to the quasi-Ladino Bible translation published, in the Latin alphabet, in Ferrara 1553 by two conversos who had returned to Judaism, it was explained that the “barbarous and strange” language characterizing their translation was necessary in order to preserve the “lenguaje que los antiguos Hebreos Españoles vsaron” (“language which the old Spanish Hebrews used”).14 As in other European Jewish communities which adopted languages of Indo-European origin, the pronunciation of Hebrew among the Jewish Ibero-Romance speakers lost much of its Semitic quality, with waw/‫ו‬ now realized as v, het/‫ ח‬as kh, tet/‫ ט‬as t, syllable-initial ‘ayin/‫ ע‬as zero, ˙ sadi/‫ צ‬as s, qof/‫ ק‬as˙ k, and shin/‫ש‬ often as s.15 The varieties of Ibero˙Romance, including their Hebrew–Aramaic components, used by the Jews of medieval Castile in original writings are documented in texts written in the Hebrew alphabet, in a characteristic Ibero-Jewish cursive script resembling that which served as the model for the font used to print the first edition of Rashi’s commentary (Reggio di Calabria, 1475) and thus eventually called “Rashi script.” The transcription system used in the texts demonstrates its developers’ familiarity with the Romanization used by 13

14

15

David M. Bunis, “Distinctive Characteristics of Jewish Ibero Romance, Circa 1492,” Hispania Judaica Bulletin (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), 4 (2004), 105 37; Bunis, “Judezmo (Ladino),” in Kahn and Rubin, eds., Handbook of Jewish Languages, 366 451. Biblia en lengua Española (Ferrara, 1553), fol. iia; David M. Bunis, “Tres formas de ladinar la Biblia en Italia en los siglos XVI XVII,” in Iacob M. Hassán, ed., Introducción a la Biblia de Ferrara (Madrid, 1994), 315 45. David M. Bunis, “The Whole Hebrew Reading Tradition of Ottoman Judezmo Speakers: The Medieval Iberian Roots,” Hispania Judaica Bulletin (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) 9 (2013), 15 67.

496 the middle ages: the christian world Christians to write Spanish (for the example, the tendency to denote vowels by the matres lectionis alef/‫ א‬and he/‫[ ה‬for a], waw/‫[ ו‬for o, u] and yod/‫[ י‬for e, i]), but also includes preservations from the earlier Iberian Jewish-Arabic transcription system (for example, gimal+diacritic/‫ ’ג‬for ǧ and ž).16 The surviving texts include personal letters; commercial writings; communal ordinances such as the takkanot (regulations) governing the Jews of Castile, set down in Valladolid in 1432; and literary creations such as the Proverbios morales of Shem Tov Ardutiel de Carrión, composed after 1350 and dedicated to King Pere I (the Hebrew-letter text includes 560 verses); and the anonymous poem Koplas de Yosef Hasadik. The 1430 Roman-letter Bible translation supervised by Rabbi Moshe Arragel of Maqueda, which came to be known as the Bible of the House of Alba, was commissioned by Don Luis de Guzmán, Grand Master of the militaryreligious Order of Calatrava. Popular literary texts in Spanish composed by Christians were made available to Jewish readers through Hebrew-letter transcriptions. The language of texts commissioned by or dedicated to non-Jews closely resembles the literary language used by Christian Spaniards of the period, with which their authors were evidently familiar. But original texts composed by and for Jews, such as the communal regulations of Valladolid, were richer in elements of Hebrew and Arabic origin, and retrospectively may be viewed as examples of “Old Judezmo.”17 For example, with regard to community members obliged to pay money they owed, the rabbis wrote: ‫נון איש נואישטרה אינטיסיון די שיאיר מחייבים ממון אל קי נון איש מחויב‬ Non es nuestra entiçión de seer mekhayevim/‫ מחייבים‬mamón/‫ ממון‬al ke non es mekhuyav/‫מחויב‬ (“Our intention is not to demand money of one who is not obligated to pay.”)

The Hebraisms (ser) mehayev/‫“( מחייב‬to obligate”), mamón/‫ממון‬ (“money”), and mehuyav/‫“( ˙מחויב‬obligated”) continued to play a role in ˙ post-Expulsion Judezmo into the modern era. The Valladolid regulations

16

17

On Hebrew letter spelling and the Hebrew and Aramaic component of pre Expulsion texts, and some Muslim Spanish analogues, see David M. Bunis, “Jewish and Arab Medieval Ibero Romance: Toward a Comparative Study,” in José Alberto R. S. Tavim, Maria Filomena Lopes de Barro, and Lúcia Liba Mucznik, eds., In the Iberian Peninsula and Beyond, vol. II (Cambridge, 2015), 64 148. For a historical periodization of Judezmo, see David M. Bunis, “The Language of the Sephardic Jews: A Historical Sketch,” in Haim Beinart, ed., Moreshet Sefarad, vol. II (Jerusalem, 1992), 399 422.

languages and translations 497 were written in a scribal style, characterized by switching between Hebrew and the vernacular, occasionally in mid-sentence, which would be maintained by the descendants of the Jews of Iberia in the Ottoman Empire and north Africa into the modern era. Although the Hispanic component in original pre-Expulsion Jewish Ibero-Romance literary texts meant for Jewish readers seems also to diverge little from the language preserved in Spanish texts by non-Jews from the same era, this may well reflect a tendency on the part of the Jewish authors to accept the non-Jewish varieties as literary norms. It is quite possible that popular Jewish usage differed from the language documented in the Hebrew-letter texts. Support for this suggestion is found in the lexicon of sixteenth-century Hebrew-letter texts produced by the descendants of the Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire. For example, these texts include words of Arabic origin – such as ziara (“pilgrimage [to Jerusalem or to the graves of family members or sainted Jews],” from Arabic ziyāra/‫ﺯﻳﺎﺭﺓ‬ [“visit”]), (ala)mema (“turban, rabbinical hat” – Ar. al-‘imāma/‫)ﺍﻟﻌﻤﺎﻣﺔ‬, and others – which had obviously been incorporated into Jewish speech before the Expulsion but are absent in pre-Expulsion texts, perhaps because they were considered unsuitable for literary use during that period. Sixteenth-century Hebrew-letter texts from the Ottoman regions also exhibit phonological and grammatical features which were probably known among the Jews of medieval Spain – such as the final stress in the word djudió (“Jew”) and the ending -sh denoting the second-person plural in conjugated verbs (e.g., topásh [“you (pl.) find”]) – but had been rejected in pre-Expulsion literary texts because they differed from literary Spanish of the time (cf. Spanish judío, and second-person plural verb forms with a final stressed vowel + -is, e.g., topáis). From the sixteenth century on, elements apparently incorporated into Jewish speech from non-Castilian regions of Iberia – such as kaler (“to have to”) from Catalan caler, and akavidar (“to warn”) from Portuguese cavidar, or Aragonese – were widespread in Ottoman Judezmo, suggesting that they had already been a part of Jewish speech before the Expulsion.18 The gap which probably existed between the language used by an elite group of Iberian Jews who tended to accept literary Castilian as a normative model and those who preferred popular forms current in everyday Jewish speech is illustrated by the diminutive form roskilya, denoting a type of baked good, which appears in Rabbi Joseph Karo’s halakhic classic, Shulhan Arukh,19 ˙ Judezmo as opposed to the form roskita, which appears in the popular 18

19

See, for example, Aldina Quintana, “Aportación lingüística de los romances aragonés y portugués a la coiné judeoespañola,” in Bunis, ed., Languages and Literatures, 221 55. Shulhan Arukh, Orah Hayim (Venice, 1555), sec. 168, 3.

498 the middle ages: the christian world translation of part of the Shulhan Arukh published in Salonika in 1568 – during Karo’s own lifetime. ˙The form used by Karo corresponds to normative Castilian rosquilla (from rosca), while roskita exemplifies an alternate diminutive still employed by Judezmo speakers to this day. Medieval literary texts by non-Jews demonstrate that the Jews’ neighbors were also cognizant of the fact that Jewish speech was somewhat distinctive. For example, in the morality poem Danza general de la muerte [General Dance of Death], composed at the beginning of the fifteenth century, one of the diverse members of medieval Spanish society whom Death calls upon to dance with him is a Jewish rabbi. He is addressed with the words: “Venit vós, rabí, acá meldaredes” (“Come, rabbi, here you will study”). The rabbi replies: ¡Oh Elohim e Dio de Habrahánque prometiste la redepçión, non sé qué me faga con este çatán [. . .] Valedme, dayanes, que mi entendimiento se pierde del todo con grand afliçión.

(“Oh God (and) God of Abraham Who promised the Redemption, I know not what to do with this devil [. . .] Guard me, judges, for my understanding Is lost completely with great affliction.”)

Death then taunts him with the words: Don rabi Baruc, que siempre estudiastes en el Talmud e en los sus doctores e de la verdad jamás non curastes; por lo qual avredes penas e dolores, llegadvos acá con los dançadores e diredes por canto vuestra berahá.20

(“Master Rabbi Baruch, you who always studied In the Talmud and its doctors, And never cared about the truth, For which you shall suffer grief and pains. Come here with the dancers and say while chanting your blessing.”)

The text demonstrates that the gentile author was familiar with Hebraisms in the Jews’ speech, such as the Hebrew-origin title of address rabí (Heb. rabbi/ ‫ ;)רבי‬the nouns Elohim/‫“( אלהים‬God”), dayanes (“judges” – typically derived from Hebrew dayyan/‫ דיין‬and the Spanish plural ending -es), berahá (“blessing” – Heb. be˘ rakha/‫ )ברכה‬and çatán (“devil” – Heb. śatan/‫ ;)שטן‬personal names such as Avraham/‫ אברהם‬and Baruch/‫ ;ברוך‬and˙ the name of the core Jewish text, the Talmud/‫תלמוד‬. It also indicates an awareness of the Jews’ preference for Hispanic-origin Dio instead of Dios when referring to 20

Erika Mergruen and Raúl Berea Núñez, eds., Danza general de la muerte (Mexico City, 2007), 148 53. The English translations are by the present author.

languages and translations 499 God, and their use of the verb meldar to denote Jewish study. In some texts, Christians acquainted with “Jewish” lexemes such as meldar explained them to others lacking such knowledge – for example, the word receives the following note in the Censura libri Talmud (II, 78 n. 3), intended for gentiles: “meldar en la ley, quod est legere in Brivia et in Talmud” (“to read/study the Torah, which is to read in the Bible and Talmud”). When the Expulsion and the physical separation from Spain brought an end to the influence on the Iberian Jews of the normative trends in the developing literary Spanish, the natural tendencies of popular Jewish speech were given free rein in the emerging Ottoman Judezmo literary language, which eventually became an entirely independent literary vehicle in which diverse oral and written works were composed. 21

Jewish varieties of Catalan (Catalonian La‘az or Catalanic) and other non-Castilian Ibero-Romance

The surviving Jewish Catalan texts in Hebrew letters, which also incorporate lexemes of Hebrew–Aramaic and Jewish-Arabic origin, were written in Navarra in the fourteenth century and consist of communal documents recording commercial transactions. With the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, Jewish Catalan was probably brought with the refugees from Catalonia to the Ottoman Empire, where synagogues bearing the name Kahal Kadosh Katalán (“Catalonian Holy Congregation”) were established. But, linguistically, the Jews from Catalonia probably assimilated quickly to the majority of Iberian refugees, who were from Castile, and adopted the emerging Judezmo koiné, the bulk of which derived from Jewish Castilian, which began to take shape throughout the Ottoman regions at the end of the fifteenth century. The use of other nonCastilian Jewish varieties of Ibero-Romance, such as Aragonese, Galician, Catalan, and Portuguese, sparsely documented in Hebrew-letter texts,22 21

22

Dio is, in fact, the natural Hispano Romance reflex of Latin Deus, perhaps preferred by the Jews because of its seeming singularity; the final s in Spanish Dios, which in this word does not in fact denote plurality, bears the conservative influence of Church Latin. For example, see Devon L. Strolovitch, “Old Portuguese in Hebrew Script: Convention, Contact, and Convivéncia” (PhD. diss., Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 2005); Devon Strolovitch, “Judeo Portuguese,” in Kahn and Rubin, eds., Handbook of Jewish Languages, 553 93; Meritxell Blasco Orellana, José Ramón Magdalena Nom de Deu, and Miguel Ángel Motis Dolader, Crestomatía de fragmentos hebreos y hebraicoaljamiados de Aragón (siglos XIV XV) (Barcelona, 2012); Alexia Teles Duchowny, De magia (Ms. Laud Or. 282, Bodleian Library): edição e glossário, 4th edn. (São Paulo, 2014); Ilil Baum, “Judeo Catalan Jewish Multilingualism and Linguistic Contact in Medieval Catalonia” (PhD. diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2018).

500 the middle ages: the christian world also came to an end with the Expulsion from Spain and the forced conversion of the Jews in Portugal. However, all of these non-Castilian Ibero-Romance varieties left traces in Ottoman Judezmo. Jewish French (Zarephatic La‘az or Zarephatic) ˙ ˙ In the Middle Ages, varieties of French were used by the Jews of what are today northern France and parts of west central Germany. Hebrew-letter textual evidence dates from the eleventh century, primarily in the form of the le˘ ‘azim, or glosses of the Bible and Talmud, incorporated in the commentaries of Rashi (1040–1105) and Moshe ha-Darshan (eleventh century).23 From the mid thirteenth century, there are also contributions in fields such as poetry, astronomy, medicine, and commerce. The surviving corpus offers few significant divergences from non-Jewish French (e.g., Gé [1279] rather than Dieu for “God”) and incorporates few Hebraisms.24 However, as noted above, this may be related to the kinds and quality of the texts rather than actually reflecting the everyday reality of Jewish speech. Persecution and expulsions of the Jews of the region led them to emigrate and replace their language with variants of the languages used by the gentiles in their new places of residence, such as the Rhineland region, where they adopted varieties of German (see below, Yiddish), and England, where they acquired varieties of English,25 thereby bringing to an end the medieval use of varieties of French by the end of the fourteenth century. Jewish Provençal (Shuadit) Hebrew-letter texts in medieval Jewish Provençal are known from the eleventh century, and include a fourteenth-century poem in praise of Queen Esther, a dictionary of Hebrew roots by Joseph Caspi (c.1280– c.1340),26 and a prayer-book for women. With the dispersal of the Jews from southern France following their expulsion in 1498, Jewish Provençal in that region fell out of use. However, Comtat-Venaissin was under the direct jurisdiction of the Pope, and a small Jewish community managed to survive there into the modern era, speaking a distinctive variety of 23

24

25

26

Arsene Darmesteter and David S. Blondheim, Les gloses françaises dans les commentaires talmudiques de Raschi (Paris, 1929 37). Marc Kiwitt and Stephen Dörr, “Judeo French,” in Kahn and Rubin, eds., Handbook of Jewish Languages, 138 77. Judith Olszowy Schlanger, Hebrew and Hebrew Latin Documents from Medieval England: A Diplomatic and Palaeographical Study (Turnhout, Belgium, 2016). Cyril Aslanov, Le Provençal des Juifs et l’hébreu en Provence: le dictionnaire Sarsot ha Kesef de Joseph Caspi (Paris, 2001).

languages and translations 501 Provençal, which they may have called “Shuadit” (< Heb. ye˘ hudit/‫יהודית‬ [“Jewish language”]).27 Some of its features were ostensibly documented by neighboring gentiles in works of satire and Christmas carols. g e r m a n i c sp e e c h t e rr i t o ry ( y i d d i s h ) Around the year 1000, some speakers of Jewish Romance immigrated from Italy and France to German speech regions, where they adopted varieties of Germanic.28 Their pre-languages, Jewish Italian and Jewish French, left a modest lexical imprint on the unique Jewish form of Germanic which began to arise, called “Earliest Yiddish” by Max Weinreich. In a sense paralleling the Jewish Greek and some of the Jewish-Arabic elements which formed a substratum in medieval Jewish Castilian, the Romance preservations in early Yiddish were often related to the traditional Jewish way of life. Léyenen (“to read from the Torah”) and cholnt (“Sabbath dish prepared on Friday and kept warm over night”) originated in Jewish French (cf. Modern French lire < Latin legere [“to read”], chaud < calens, calentis [“warm”]), respectively, while bentshn (“to recite the grace after meals”) derives from Jewish Italian (cf. Modern Italian benedicere < Latin benedicere [“to bless”]). Personal names passed down from generation to generation, such as feminine Shprintse and Yente/Yentl (cf. It. speranza [“hope”]; It. gentile and Fr. gentille [“kind”]) and masculine Anshl (cf. It. angelo [“angel”]), were also preservations from Jewish Romance made to accommodate to the evolving Yiddish sound system. Rashi’s Bible and Talmud glossaries contain a few glosses bilshon ’Ashkenaz / ‫“( בלשון אשכנז‬in the language of Ashkenaz, or Germany”). Some idea of the Old Yiddish spoken before the sixteenth century may be gained from passages ostensibly representing the language of Jews appearing before rabbinical courts in the responsa of Ashkenazic rabbis such as Jacob Moellin (Maharil, c.1365–1427) of Mainz, although the original 27

28

Zosa Szajkowski, The Language of the Jews in the Four Communities of Comtat Venaissin [Yiddish] ([New York], 1948), vii; George Jochnowitz, “Had Gadya in Judeo Italian and Shuadit (Judeo Provençal),” in Joshua Fishman, ed., Readings in the Sociology of Jewish Languages (Leiden, 1985), 241 5; Adam Strich and George Jochnowitz, “Judeo Occitan (Judeo Provençal),” in Kahn and Rubin, eds., Handbook of Jewish Languages, 518 52. For overviews, see Uriel Weinreich, “Yiddish Language,” in Encyclopedia Judaica, vol. XVI (Jerusalem, 1972), 789 98; Lily Kahn, “Yiddish,” in Kahn and Rubin, eds., Handbook of Jewish Languages, 642 748. Dovid Katz, “Hebrew, Aramaic and the Rise of Yiddish,” in Fishman, ed., Readings in the Sociology of Jewish Languages, 85 103, instead argued that Yiddish first arose among speakers of Jewish Aramaic who made their way to western Europe; while Paul Wexler, Two tiered Relexification in Yiddish: Jews, Sorbs, Khazars, and the Kiev Polessian Dialect (Berlin, 2002), sought the origins of Yiddish among Jewish speakers of Sorbian and other West Slavic languages.

502 the middle ages: the christian world testimony and texts from the early fifteenth century might have differed from the edition published in the sixteenth century. Medical writings are known from the late fourteenth century.29 Attempts at artistic writing include biblical tales in rhyme, known from the fourteenth century; for example, Cambridge University Library manuscript T.-S. 10K22, from the Cairo Genizah, written around 1382 and offering stories of Abraham, Isaac, Joseph, and Moses in verse, as well as fables. Renditions of the Book of Esther and the midrashim relating to it are known from the fifteenth century, as are translations of the Hebrew liturgy, and original poetry composed for use during religious festivities, such as weddings and circumcisions, celebrated outside the synagogue. Re-workings of medieval romances, as well as Hebrew-letter transcriptions of German literary creations composed by Christians, demonstrate that such material was also familiar to and appreciated by Ashkenazim of the Middle Ages. In their manuscript and later printed Yiddish texts, the pre-sixteenth-century Yiddish speakers employed a characteristic variant of the Hebrew alphabet known as ma-/mesheyt (‫)משיי”ט‬. As was noted with respect to the Hispanic component of medieval Jewish Castilian (or Old Judezmo), the strong resemblance between the overwhelming Germanic component in texts written by medieval Ashkenazim and the language of their Christian neighbors, and the sparseness of Hebraisms in them, may mean nothing more than that their authors had acquired a familiarity with the varieties of Germanic used by non-Jews in their literary creations and accepted those varieties as literary norms. Among the medieval Yiddish speakers, the Ashkenazic pronunciation of Hebrew and Aramaic arose, probably in response to the encounter between the earlier realization of Hebrew used by their Jewish Romance-speaking ancestors from France and Italy and tendencies which developed in the German-speaking lands. The features which came to distinguish the Hebrew and Aramaic of the Yiddish speakers from their co-religionists in medieval western Europe who spoke Jewish languages of non-Semitic stock included: the distinction between patah ( ) as a and qamas (ָ ) as o, ˙ ō or a diphthong ˙(e.g., aw, segol (ֶ ) as e and sere (ֵ ) as ey, holam (ֹ ) as long ˙ ˙ oy), she˘ wa (ְ ) as indistinct ǝ, the realization of sadi/‫ צ‬as ts and unpointed ˙ tav/‫ ת‬as s, the lack of a distinction between pointed and unpointed gimal (‫ )ג ;גּ‬and dalet (‫)ד ;דּ‬, and a tendency toward penultimate stress (e.g., ‫תיו‬ ָ ‫“[ ְּבִמְצווֹ‬with His commandments”] bǝmitsváwsov rather than bemisvotáv). Their pronunciation differed from that of speakers of Jewish Arabic in Spain in other respects as well (e.g., in the absence of pharyngeal 29

For bibliographical references to research publications, see Jean Baumgarten, Introduction à la littérature Yiddish ancienne (Paris, 1993), 106 n. 32.

languages and translations 503 sounds such as h, ‘, s, and t in their Hebrew–Aramaic, and of consonant ˙ gemination). ˙ ˙ Although Hebraisms are rare in many of the Old Yiddish texts, those that do appear are often not purely religious terminology, but, as is the case with many of the Hebraisms found in later Yiddish, comprise elements of daily vocabulary, euphemisms, and the like, suggesting that everyday Old Yiddish speakers might actually have been in the habit of employing much more material of Hebrew–Aramaic origin than most of their own contemporaneous literature would suggest. The Worms holiday prayer-book from 1272, for example, contains the following Old Yiddish fragment: ‫ש ֵויר ִדיש מחזור אין בית הכנסת ְטרְגא‬ ְ ‫גוּט טק אים ְבּטְגא‬ Gut tak im betaγe se ver dis makh(a)zor in beys hakneses traγe (“May a good day come to him who carries this prayer book into the synagogue”)

A manuscript list of medical remedies from Mestre (across from Venice), 1474, contains Hebraisms still widely used in Modern Yiddish, such as (to use their modern pronunciations) ponem (‫“ ;פנים‬face”), kadokhes (‫;קדחת‬ “ague”), retseyekh (‫“ ;רוֵֹצח‬murderer”), der harget (‫)הרגט‬, hot (“murdered”), peyger (‫“ ;ֵפֶגר‬corpse”), zokher (‫“ ;זכר‬male”), nekeyve (‫“ ;נקבֿה‬female”). The last stanza of the anonymous Yiddish Passover “Song of the Kid,” from the fifteenth century, begins with the words (those of Hebrew origin are italicized): “Da kam Hako[daush]bo[rukh]hu (‫)]הקדוש ברוך הוא=[ הקבה‬ un’ shekhtit (‫ט