The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom: 1000-1500

by Robert Chazan

Overview

Between the years AD 1000 and 1500, western Christendom absorbed by conquest and attracted through immigration a growing number of Jews. This community was to make a valuable contribution to rapidly developing European civilisation but was also to suffer some terrible setbacks, culminating in a series of expulsions from the more advanced westerly areas of Europe. At the same time, vigorous new branches of world Jewry emerged and a rich new Jewish cultural legacy was created. In this important historical synthesis, Robert Chazan discusses the Jewish experience over a 500 year period across the entire continent of Europe. As well as being the story of medieval Jewry, the book simultaneously illuminates important aspects of majority life in Europe during this period. This book is essential reading for all students of medieval Jewish history and an important reference for any scholar of medieval Europe.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521846660
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	11/23/2006
Series:	Cambridge Medieval Textbooks
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	364
Product dimensions:	5.59(w) x 8.74(h) x 1.02(d)

About the Author

Dr Robert Chazan is currently S. H. and Helen R. Scheur Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University.

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Cambridge University Press
978-0-521-84666-0 - The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom, 1000–1500 - by Robert Chazan
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INTRODUCTION

An observer viewing world Jewry in the year 1000 would have readily discerned an obvious Jewish demographic distribution and an equally obvious configuration of Jewish creativity. The oldest, largest, and most creative Jewish communities were located in the Muslim sphere, stretching from Mesopotamia westward through the eastern littoral of the Mediterranean Sea, across North Africa, and over onto the Iberian peninsula. Somewhat smaller, but still sizeable and venerable were the Jewish communities of the Byzantine Empire. Our putative observer might have noted, as an afterthought, the small Jewish settlements in western Christendom, huddled along the northern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, in Italy, southern France, and northern Spain; he might have – reasonably enough – not even bothered to mention them, for they would hardly have seemed worthy of serious attention.

   Our observer would almost certainly have known that this pattern of Jewish demography and creativity had been established more than a thousand years earlier, long before the rise of Islam to its position of power during the seventh century. He would have been aware that, subsequent to the exile of the Jews from their homeland in the sixth pre-Christian century, two major centers of Jewish life had emerged, one as the result of Jewishresettlement in Palestine and the other as a result of the decision of Jews to secure for themselves a permanent place in Mesopotamia. He would have known that the great religious–political leaders of world Jewry had been the patriarchs of Palestinian Jewry and the exilarchs of Mesopotamian Jewry; that the classical texts of post-biblical Judaism were the (Palestinian) Mishnah, the Jerusalem (Palestinian) Talmud, and the Babylonian (Mesopotamian) Talmud; that the distinguished rabbis whose teachings were enshrined in the Mishnah and the two Talmuds were all residents of either the Holy Land or the Mesopotamian territory that Jews anachronistically called Babylonia.

   Our hypothetical observer would also have recalled that Palestinian Jews had, from a fairly early date, made their way westward, creating new centers of Jewish life all along the Mediterranean shorelines. He would have been aware that the centers in what are today Syria and Egypt were the oldest and largest of these western communities. Newer and smaller settlements stretched out all along the southern and northern coastlines of the Mediterranean Sea – across North Africa, through Asia Minor, and into what is today Italy, southern France, and Spain.

   With the rise of Islam during the seventh century and its remarkable conquests, the overwhelming majority of world Jewry fell under the rule of the new religion and the empire built upon it. The only Jewries left outside the realm of Islam were the Jewish communities of the shrunken Byzantine Empire, along the northeastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, and those of the relatively backward western Christian states in Italy, southern France, and northern Spain, along the northwestern shores of that same sea.

   While we do not have the kind of observations just now suggested from the year 1000, we do possess the writings of a European Jew who traveled from west to east during the middle decades of the twelfth century. This Jew, Benjamin of Tudela, did not attempt the kind of assessments just now suggested. However, his travelogue – generally rather dry and boring – does provide a first-hand sense of the various areas of Jewish settlement he encountered.¹

   Benjamin made his way down the Ebro River from his home town, reached the Mediterranean, visited some major Spanish port cities, traversed much of southern France, and crossed over into Italy and down the peninsula. Throughout this portion of his journey, he encountered a variety of Jewish communities. The largest of these numbered a few hundred souls or males or households.² When Benjamin reached the Byzantine Empire, he encountered much greater urban enclaves and much larger Jewish communities. In Constantinople, he found a city far exceeding in size, wealth, and culture anything he had seen further west. The Jewish community numbered some three thousand. Again, it is not clear whether this means souls, males, or households. In any case, the Jewish community of Constantinople was many times larger than any Benjamin had encountered in the Roman Catholic sphere of southern Europe.

   When Benjamin entered the realm of Islam, he was overwhelmed by what he found. The city of Baghdad, then arguably the greatest city in the Western world, captivated him. His description of the size and splendor of the city reveals an utterly enthralled visitor. The Jewish communities of the Islamic realm in general far surpassed in size and strength those of the Roman Catholic world from which he came. In Damascus, Benjamin found three thousand Jews; in Alexandria, seven thousand Jews; in Baghdad, the staggering number of forty thousand Jews.³ In Baghdad, according to Benjamin, there were twenty-eight synagogues and a Jewish officialdom that enjoyed remarkable prestige and respect in the caliph’s court. While Benjamin limits himself to fairly specific and often pedestrian observations, his travelogue indicates clearly an Islamic realm far superior to Byzantium and Roman Catholic Europe, and Jewish communities that reflect the same ordering of size, strength, and creativity. Even though Benjamin traveled at a time when the balance of power had already begun to shift, he still found that the Jewries under Muslim domination were larger and more fully developed than those under Christian control.

   Pressed to predict what the future might hold, our hypothetical observer in the year 1000 would have assumed that the known configuration of Jewish life would surely last into the indeterminate future. In general, of course, most of us have great difficulty in imagining radically altered circumstances. Such a lack of imagination would have hardly been the only factor influencing our observer, however. For there was nothing in the year 1000 to suggest that radical change was in the offing. The constellation of world power appeared remarkably stable. Islam’s domination seemed to be challenged seriously by no one, neither the Greek Christians of the eastern sectors of the Mediterranean nor the Latin Christians of the western sectors of Europe. Our observer of the year 1000 would surely have concluded that the contemporary power structure was unlikely to shift and that Jewish life would thus continue along the lines currently discernible.

   Benjamin, traveling and writing in the middle of the twelfth century, had the benefit of a century and a half of change. By time he made his journey, western Christian forces had driven the Muslims

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   Europe, circa 1250

out of their Italian strongholds and had begun to push the Muslims southward on the Iberian peninsula. Western Christian armies had even managed to journey eastward and conquer portions of the Holy Land, including the symbolically important city of Jerusalem. Yet it is unlikely that even Benjamin could have envisioned the further changes in the offing.

   Were our hypothetical observer of the year 1000 in a position to view world Jewry in the year 1250, halfway through our period, and again in the year 1500, he would have been stunned by the changes. While the Jewries of the Muslim world remained in place in the years 1250 and 1500, they were well on their way to losing their position of demographic and creative eminence. They were in the process of being supplanted in their physical and cultural primacy by the diverse Jewish communities of western Christendom. The rise of Latin Christendom to its central role in the Western world, achieved from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, brought in its wake – not surprisingly – a parallel ascendancy of the Jewish communities it harbored and attracted.

   Periodically – but not all that often – new powers have erupted from fringe areas and radically altered the power structure of the Western world. Such an unanticipated eruption and restructuring took place during the seventh century, when the forces of Islam exploded unexpectedly out of the Arabian peninsula and overwhelmed both the Neo-Persian and Byzantine empires. A more recent example of this restructuring has involved the rise of the United States to its central position in the West, in the process usurping the hegemony long associated with such European powers as England, France, Germany, and Spain. It was between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries that these European powers – especially England, France, and (Christian) Spain – emerged from their relatively backward state and began to dominate the Western world. The rapid and unexpected emergence of Roman Catholic western Christendom transformed the West and, in the process, realigned the pattern of world Jewish population, authority, and creativity that had remained relatively static for almost a millennium and a half. As a result of this seismic shift in the world power structure, the Jews became and have remained a European and eventually North Atlantic people.⁴

   Herein lies the enormous significance of the period we shall study for Jewish history. This era of roughly five hundred years – approximately 1000 to 1500 – established an entirely new pattern of Jewish settlement and civilization. The geographic lexicon of the Jewish people had heretofore been almost entirely Near Eastern; Jerusalem, Tiberias, Antioch, Damascus, Sura, Baghdad, Alexandria, Cairo were dominant and resonant names. Now, new names came to the fore – Mainz, Cologne, Paris, London, Toledo, Madrid, Cracow, Warsaw, Vilna, and eventually New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles as well. The earlier Semitic languages of the Jewish people – Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic – declined, to be replaced by the languages of the West – German, French, Spanish, and English. Political ideas and ideals underwent radical alteration, as did cultural and religious norms and aspirations. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of these changes.

   The relocation of the center of Jewish gravity from the Middle East and North Africa to Europe involved, above all else, a new religious and cultural ambiance. During the period under consideration, the Jews established themselves firmly within the Christian orbit. To be sure, the history of Christian–Jewish relations did not begin in the year 1000. Christianity was, after all, born in the Jewish community of Palestine. Fairly quickly, however, the religious vision centered around the figure of Jesus of Nazareth won adherents beyond Palestinian Jewry. The original leadership of the Jesus movement had been entirely Jewish; as that movement evolved into Christianity, new and gentile leadership came to the fore. The rapid spread of Christianity took place outside of Palestine, across the length and breadth of the Roman Empire, and involved a largely gentile population. Despite its Jewish roots, Christianity established itself as a separate religious faith, the patrimony of a set of non-Jewish peoples.

   So long as the vast majority of Jews lived outside the orbit of Christian power, the Jewish issue was muted for the Christian authorities. Church leaders, it is true, produced an extensive anti-Jewish literature during the first Christian millennium. Much of that literature, however, was theoretical, focused on buttressing convictions as to the rejection of Old Israel (the Jews) and the election of a New Israel (the Christians). Genuine engagement with real Jews was, however, limited. From the Jewish side, the lack of engagement with Christianity is yet more marked. Up until the year 1000 and well beyond, we possess not one single anti-Christian work composed by Jews living within western Christendom.⁵ Down through the end of the first millennium, the Jews of the world, concentrated in the realm of Islam, were hardly obsessed with Christianity and Christians.⁶

   With the displacement of the center of Jewish population to western Christendom, serious engagement from both sides had to begin. Jews and Judaism penetrated the Christian consciousness in a far more immediate way than heretofore. This meant the augmentation of anti-Jewish argumentation, the adumbration of more extensive policies for the Jewish minority living within western Christendom, the evolution (perhaps deterioration would be more accurate) of Christian imagery of Jews, and the eruption of new forms of anti-Jewish animus and violence. For the Jewish minority, the changes were equally momentous. Jewish life was now constrained by new policies and new dangers; Jews were now regularly exposed to the blandishments of the majority Christian religious faith; Jewish leaders had to learn more about that majority faith and to fashion anti-Christian argumentation that would enable their Jewish followers to resist missionizing pressures and remain loyal to Judaism.

   The story of medieval Jewry in western Christendom constitutes a critical element in the saga of the Jewish people; at the same time, this story illuminates significant aspects of majority life in medieval western Christendom. As scholarly attention has shifted away from the leadership groups on the medieval scene – popes, bishops, emperors, kings, and dukes – toward a broader swath of humanity, awareness has developed of the variegated nature of what once seemed a monolithic society. The Jews have come to occupy a significant place in recent study of medieval western Christendom. They provide an intriguing litmus test for treatment of out-groups in an overwhelmingly Christian society; they are especially valuable in that – unlike most other out-groups – they have left a literature of their own, to supplement the data available from the majority perspective.

   Indeed, for most of the time period we shall be studying, and most of the geographic areas under consideration, there was a very special quality to the Jews as a minority presence in western Christendom. Generally, the Jews constituted the only legitimate dissenting religious group in all of society.⁷ Minority status is never easy; to be the only legitimate religious minority is even more precarious. Often, as we shall see, the negative aspects of this minority status have been highlighted, and there surely was much that was limiting and harmful. At the same time, the successes of the venture should by no means be overlooked. In many ways, the Christian majority – or at least

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   Europe, 1490

elements of it – and the Jewish minority cooperated effectively in fostering Jewish presence and activity that proved of immediate and long-term benefit to majority and minority alike.

   The spatial boundaries of this study are easy to delineate and are hardly controversial. The designation “western Christendom” points to the distinction between the eastern and western areas of the Christian world, with the eastern centered in the imperial court at Constantinople and the western centered in the papal court at Rome. On another level, eastern Christendom was constructed around Greek language and culture, while western Christendom was constructed around Latin, its linguistic derivatives, and its culture. With the passage of time, these two segments of the Christian world pulled further away from one another. This process of disengagement and differentiation culminated in the bloody Fourth Crusade of 1204 and the sacking by western Christian troops of the eastern Christian imperial city of Constantinople.⁸

   While there was considerable unity within western Christendom – religious, cultural, and political – that unity should by no means be overstated. This vast area harbored considerable differences as well. The fault lines were both horizontal and vertical. Perhaps the most significant fault line lay in the distinction between the Mediterranean lands of southern Europe and the more remote lands of the north. The Mediterranean lands of the south had been fully absorbed into the Roman Empire and had been richly infused with Roman civilization and culture. Remnants of Roman civilization and culture were (and are) everywhere palpable across the southern tier of Europe. In contrast, the lands of northern Europe had been only brushed by the contact with Rome and had preserved much of their Germanic heritage.⁹ In a general way, the southern sector of medieval western Christendom was far more advanced in the year 1000 than were the areas of the north. That situation, however, was to change rapidly and dramatically.

   The remarkable vitalization of western Christendom subsequent to the year 1000 took place most markedly in the heretofore backward north. By the year 1500, England and France had emerged as large and powerful monarchies on the Western scene, contesting Spain for preeminence. Indeed, part of the French kingdom’s success lay in its absorption of previously independent southern territories into the expanded royal domain, centered in the north. Paris and London were the greatest cities of medieval western Christendom by the year 1500; strikingly, they had both been backward provincial towns five hundred years earlier. There is perhaps no more eloquent testimony to the centrality of northern Europe in the great awakening of medieval western Christendom that took place between 1000 and 1500.¹⁰

   There is a second major fault line as well, one that proceeds on a vertical axis, and that is the distinction – particularly noteworthy in the north – between western Europe, on the one hand, and central and eastern Europe on the other. In the year 1000, the most potent political authority in western Christendom seemed to be the German emperor. Rooted in imperial lore and tradition, the German throne seemed likely to remain the strongest political power among the emerging states of western Christendom. Such was not, however, to be the case. The far less imposing kings of France, England, and Spain learned how to manipulate the feudal system to their advantage, slowly converting local rule and royal prerogative into large, stable, and increasingly puissant monarchies. Germany slipped far behind its more westerly neighbors in economic development, political maturity, and cultural creativity. Further east, at the fringe of medieval western Christendom, such kingdoms as Hungary and Poland slowly began to develop by the end of our period.

   Finally, there is yet one more important geographic distinction, involving interior areas of western Christendom and those exposed to outside forces. On many levels, differences emerged between those lands generally insulated from outside aggression and with a relatively homogeneous population (in which Jews were prominent as the only legitimate dissenters), on the one hand, and territories that bordered on other realms and in which populations were heterogeneous, on the other.¹¹ The lands of the east – Italy in the south and Hungary and Poland in the north – were very much exposed to external intrusion, as was the Iberian peninsula in the southwest. There were salient differences between exposed and interior areas in terms of majority self-image and in terms of the populations with which the Christian majority (even in a few instances the Christian ruling minority) had to deal.

   We shall have to be constantly aware of these important geographic distinctions. They will play a key role in understanding the roots of Jewish life in the south, the establishment of important Jewish communities in the rapidly developing north, the banishment of these new Jewish centers to the eastern peripheries of northern Europe toward the end of our period, and the eventual disappearance of almost all Jewish life from the western sectors of Europe by the year 1500. It is impossible to make the kind of generalizations necessary in an overview such as this without occasionally slighting one or another geographic sector of large and complex medieval western Christendom. Ideally, there should be available more focused studies of medieval Jewish life for each of the geographic regions included in medieval western Christendom.¹²

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© Cambridge University Press

Table of Contents

List of maps; Preface; Introduction; Part I. Prior Legacies: 1. The Muslim legacy; 2. The Christian legacy; 3. The Jewish legacy; Part II. The Pan-European Roman Catholic Church: 4. Theological doctrine; 5. Ecclesiastical policies; 6. Imagery of Judaism and the Jews; 7. Cultural and spiritual creativity: danger, challenge, stimulus; 8. Looking ahead; Part III. The Older Jewries of the South: 9. Southern France; 10. Christian Spain; 11. Italy and Sicily; Part IV. The Newer Jewries of the North: Northern France: 12. Northern France; 13. England; Part V. The Newer Jewries of the North: Germany and Eastern Europe: 14. Germany; 15. Eastern Europe; Part VI. Material Challenges, Successes and Failures: 16. Obstacles and attractions; 17. The governing authorities; 18. Successes; 19. The dynamics of deterioration; Part VII. Spiritual Challenges, Successes and Failures: 20. Proselytizing, conversion and resistance; 21. Strengthening traditional lines of Jewish cultural creativity; 22. Innovative lines of cultural creativity; 23. New and creative Jewish culture; Epilogue; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"...this book is highly readable and well conceived." -Dean Phillip Bell, H-HRE

" Robert Chazen has presented a clear, concise, yet complex synthetic history of medieval European Jewish communities from 1000-1500. There is much here of use for a variety of readers..."
- Dana Wessell Lightfoot, Canadian Journal of History

"...well rounded and highly informed presentation..." -Michael Toch, The Medieval Review

"As a survey of Jewish-Christian relations, this is certainly a good starting point for students." -R. N. Swanson, Sixteenth Century Journal

Editorial Reviews

"...this book is highly readable and well conceived." -Dean Phillip Bell, H-HRE

" Robert Chazen has presented a clear, concise, yet complex synthetic history of medieval European Jewish communities from 1000-1500. There is much here of use for a variety of readers..."
- Dana Wessell Lightfoot, Canadian Journal of History

"...well rounded and highly informed presentation..." -Michael Toch, The Medieval Review

"As a survey of Jewish-Christian relations, this is certainly a good starting point for students." -R. N. Swanson, Sixteenth Century Journal

From the Publisher