This course will cover the roots of the culture of the Ashkenazic Jews starting from the earliest presence of Jews in Europe outside the Iberian peninsula. This isn’t a course on European Jewish history, so we won’t be considering, for example, the history of the Jews of France or Italy. It’s also not about Jewish religious history, so we won’t cover the development of European Jewish scholarship or events like the Christian trials of the Talmud and we won’t be covering the numerous contributions of all of the famous rabbis and scholars of Europe. It’s also not a course on European Jewish persecution and antisemitism—although we’ll come across many such instances—so we won’t be covering in any detail the Crusades or other numerous Jewish persecutions that occurred. What we will do is trace the development of Jewish communities across Europe from pre-Roman times to the end of the Middle Ages and examine these communities and their cultures during this period and will conclude with the establishment of the Ashkenazic communities of Germany, Poland, and Lithuania. As we did in the course on Sephardic Jews, we will stop our coverage at the Early Modern Period, prior to the Reformation, and only briefly consider the development of the great centers of Yiddish civilization in Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and western Russia, since most of you are fairly familiar with this period of modern history.
Figure 1. Europe, 150 BCE
(click figures to enlarge; to really enlarge, right-click, select "View Image," and then, if you see a magnifying-glass
cursor on the resulting image, left-click it )
Italy. History has no physical record of any significant Jewish presence in Europe, apart from the Jews living in the Iberian peninsula and possibly Greece, before the second century BCE. In 161 BCE, Judah Maccabeus sent Jason ben Eleazar and Eupolemus ben Johanan as envoys to Rome; the book of 1 Maccabees reports that they signed a treaty with the Roman Senate (Figure 1 shows the Roman Empire during Hasmonean times). While the historical accuracy of this event has been challenged by some scholars, there is secure evidence that an embassy was sent to Rome in 139 BCE by Simon Maccabeus to strengthen the alliance with the Romans against the Seleucid kingdom. Later Hasmonean delegations brought more Jews to Rome and Jewish merchants came there with their families. In the middle of the second century BCE, the Jewish author of the third book of the Sibylline Oracles, in addressing the group he called the “chosen people,” wrote, “Every land is full of thee and every sea.” Witnesses from the most diverse backgrounds, such as Cicero (106–43 BCE), Strabo (63 BCE–ca. 24 CE), Philo (20 BCE–50 CE), Seneca (ca. 4 BCE–65 CE), and Josephus (37–ca. 100 CE), all wrote about Jewish populations living in cities around the Mediterranean—most, of course, in Judea, Turkey, and Egypt, but others in Greece and Italy. So how did Italy come to have such a large population of Jews? A considerable number came as slaves, as we’ll see.
In the mid-first century BCE, Jewish prisoners of war were brought to Rome in three waves, when the Romans began to interfere in the Hasmonean rule of the Jewish state. The first wave came in 63 BCE in the wake of Pompey’s campaign in Judea, when the Romans intervened in a civil war between Hyrcanus II, the high priest, and his younger brother Aristobulus II, who became rivals for the kingship of Judea after the death of their mother, Alexandra. To ensure Aristobulus’ behavior, Pompey arrested Alexander, his oldest son, to take him to Rome. The second wave, in 57–55 BCE, was a consequence of Aulus Gabinius’ campaign in Judea against a rebellion led by Alexander, who had escaped from Pompey’s custody and assembled a force, an event mentioned in Philo’s writings. Then the third wave of prisoners came in 53–51 BCE when Gaius Cassius Longinus, then a senior official in Syria (and one of the future assassins of Julius), quashed the rebellion in Galilee of one Pitholaus, a partisan of Aristobulus. Pitholaus was executed and according to Josephus, some 30,000 of his supporters were enslaved with a number being sent to the Roman slave market. This number is likely inflated; perhaps 3,000 to 6,000 were involved.
Figure 2. Synagogue at Ostia Antica
Figure 2. Synagogue at Ostia Antica
During the reign of Augustus (b. 63 BCE; r. 27 BCE–14 CE), about 5 CE, more than 7,000 Jews were said to have accompanied the envoys who traveled to Rome to demand the removal of Herod Archelaus (23 BCE–ca. 18 CE; r. 4 BCE–6 CE). Despite the problems that Rome had with the Jews of Judea, in Italy itself the Roman emperors of the first century BCE, including Julius, Agrippa, and Augustus, appear to have had cordial relations with the Roman Jews and their communities grew in size. When Julius was assassinated (44 BCE), it is reported that the Jews mourned his death for a month. The Jewish community of Rome is the oldest documented Jewish community in Europe, even including any in Spain.
Figure 3. Roman Empire, first century CE
Figure 4. Jewish Dispersion, 100–300 CE
Dating from the reign of Claudius (r. 41–54 CE), one of the oldest securely identified synagogues in Europe was built in Ostia Antica, Imperial Rome’s seaport (Figure 2). It served the resident Jewish community as well as transient sailors. After the war between Rome and Judea in 66–73 CE, the Romans brought Jewish prisoners to Rome to serve as slaves; however, at this point the majority of Roman Jews were proletarian and by the late first century CE, the Jewish community consisted of merchants, craftsmen, and pedlars as well as actors, poets, scholars, and physicians. Following the Bar Kochba revolt of 132–135 the Jews were exiled from Jerusalem and many more Jews were sent as slaves to Rome (Figure 3 shows the towns settled by Jews by the first century CE). By the mid-second century it appears Rome contained about twelve synagogues, although it is not clear whether all were in existence at the same time. The Jewish community of Rome was highly organized, but its roots in Asia Minor seem to be clear from language: it appears that Greek was used as much as Latin since the different functions of its community were presided over by heads called archontes or gerousiarchoi, while the leader of the synagogue was called the archisynagogos; however, it’s unclear if this person was a spiritual or administrative leader. Estimates have been made of a Jewish population in greater Rome of 50,000 during the second century. During this period the Jewish population density was significant; Jews comprised about 25 percent of the total population of the Eastern Roman Empire and ten percent of the empire as a whole (see Figure 4).
Elsewhere in Italy a significant number of Jewish communities existed during and following the late first century BCE. In the south, well-established Jewish populations were located in the regions of Sicily, Naples, Apulia (heel), and Calabria (toe). By the second century CE in Sicily, Palermo was said to contain about 1,500 families and Messina about 200 families. In the north during this period, Jews came to live in Tuscany, Lombardy, Piedmont, and the territory of Genoa. But they were never numerous in most areas; only in Milan, Turin, and Genoa were there communities of some importance.
Figure 5. Arch of Titus
Politically, imperial Rome had long recognized the Jews as a religio licita (a permitted religion) and they were viewed as full citizens of the state. However, this status at first applied only to those living in Italy, but in 212, Caracalla issued his eponymous edict that granted full Roman citizenship to all free men in the Roman Empire. Before this edict, the privilege of being granted full Roman citizenship to residents of other regions of the empire was limited to local rulers, other prominent individuals, and descendants of Roman citizens. Jews were involved in all areas of pre-Christian Roman society from commercial activities such as shipping and manufacturing to intellectual ones including jurisprudence and academics. Despite their integration into society, the Jews of Rome could never forget the reality of their lost independence; this was memorialized on the Arch of Titus while the sacred objects from Herod’s temple depicted on the Arch could be seen in the Templum Pacis (Temple of Peace) on Capitoline Hill (Figure 5).
Greece. Jews have lived in Greece possibly as early as the Babylonian exile. Scholars have speculated that the “Sepharad” mentioned by Obadiah, an early exilic-period prophet, could have referred to the city of Sparta; this is as good an identification as any. If Sepharad is identical to Sparta, then it would be safe to assume that this sixth-century-BCE Grecian region contained a significant population that came from Judea. Joel 3:6 mentions Judeans being sold as slaves to Greece and Ezekiel 27:13 refers to a Phoenician slave trade with Greece; these texts were written in the early days of the exile, perhaps about 580 BCE. While it’s been suggested that the first organized “Jewish” communities in Greece (actually at this time these would be just communities of Judean expatriates) were established in approximately 400 BCE, the earliest physical evidence for Judean Greeks comes from an inscription reading “Moschos, son of Moschion the Jew” dated to about 300–250 BCE that was found in Oropos, a small town located on the coast north of Athens and east of Thebes. In the second century BCE, one Hyrcanus, a leader in the Jewish community of Athens, was honored by the placement of his statue in the city marketplace. During this period there were Jewish communities all over Greece, especially in the larger cities of Sparta, Athens, Delphi, Corinth, and Thessalonica. Archaeologists have excavated a number of ancient synagogues in Greece, including the Agora Synagogue of Athens and the Delos Synagogue, both dating to approximately the second century BCE.
The oldest continuously active Greek Jewish community is the community of the Romaniote Jews, a word derived from the ancient name for the people of Byzantium, Romaioi. Oral traditions of the Romaniotes describe the arrival of the first Jews in Ioannina in western Greece near the Ionian Sea shortly after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. According to the story, ships transporting Jewish captives to Rome as slaves were blown off course and beached in a storm and in this fashion a community of Jews came to western Greece, where they settled in Ioannina. The Romaniotes are theologically and culturally distinct from the Ashkenazim, who came to Greece from the Rhineland and Bavaria in 1421, and the Sephardim, who settled in Greece after the 1492 expulsion from Castile and Aragon. In addition to the community in Ioannina, by the second century CE additional communities were present in Thebes, Chalcis, Corfu, and Arta, and on the islands of Lesbos, Chios, Samos, Rhodes, and Cyprus.
Figure 6. Jewish and Christian Dispersion
If a quarter of the population of the Eastern Roman Empire was Jewish as most historians believe, then where did all those Jews come from? Actually it appears that a large number were converts. Earlier, during the period that Judea was ruled by the Hasmoneans, the Jewish faith was vigorously promoted, in many cases by force. The Hasmoneans absorbed the Edomites (Idumeans), Moabites, and other neighboring peoples under Jewish rule, and these peoples became Jewish by nationality. Herod, king of Judea (r. 37 BCE–4 CE), was an Idumean. During the first century CE, a period influenced more by Greek culture than Roman, many pagans, worshipers of Zeus and Hermes, saw Judaism as an attractive and welcoming religion and significant numbers began observing Jewish practices without actually formally converting—a group that became known as the “God-fearers,” in Hebrew, yerim, and referred to in the Talmud as “proselytes of the gate,” although any link between the yerim and ordinary converts has been challenged by some scholars. It appears that many, if not most, of the “God-fearers” circumcised their sons who thereby were able to fully embrace the Jewish faith. In this fashion, the practice of Judaism spread throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Figure 6 shows the spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire.
The gentiles who converted did not think of themselves as a separate community or even as a member of a “religion” and neither did the Jews of ethnic Judean descent. There were no outwardly apparent signs that identified the religion any one person practiced. The idea of “religion” was a concept that didn’t form until hundreds of years later. One’s religion simply consisted of one’s cultural practices, for Jews this included the belief in a unitary deity, avoiding certain foods, and observing the holidays and Shabbat. In addition, Jews observed the practice of ritual circumcision. Outside Palestine, Hebrew and Aramaic were all but forgotten and any religious services were conducted in the vernacular. During the first and second centuries CE, Jews as well as Christians were flooded with proselytes from among the pagans of Greece, Italy, and nearby regions. It is virtually impossible to determine the proportions of “native” Jews and converts; the simple idea of being Jewish itself had virtually no meaning to these people. They self-identified as being followers of the laws of Moses, but otherwise considered themselves to be residents (as well as citizens) of the lands wherein they lived. This idea of residency rather than religion persisted in many lands throughout Europe until about the seventh century when Christianity began to become the dominant religion throughout Europe; this is when the Christians began to identify the Jews as “outsiders,” religious outcasts to be separated from society.
Figure 7. Roman Empire in the Second Century
During Constantine’s reign (r. 306–337), the policies of the Roman Empire became distinctly pro-Christian (the traditional date for Constantine’s “conversion” is given as 312 but most scholars question the idea that any conversion actually occurred) and the capital of the empire was moved to Byzantium in 330 (and renamed Constantinople) to be more central in administering the affairs of the empire—closer to the real trouble spots and population concentrations (Figure 7). Under Constantine and later emperors, Jews usually enjoyed the right to practice their faith without molestation. While circumcision was punishable by death if performed on a non-Jewish child and by exile if performed on a non-Jewish adult since it was considered to be mutilation of the body, the law permitted its performance as part of Jewish religious practice. Also, Byzantine law recognized synagogues as places of worship and prescribed penalties for causing any damage to them; in civil cases Jewish courts had the force of Roman law and Jews could not be compelled to violate the Shabbat and Jewish festivals. The Jews alone among all of the peoples of the empire were specifically exempted by law from the obligation to participate in the ceremonies of the state religion.
Within the Roman Empire from about 350 to 476, when Italy and Rome itself fell to the Ostrogoths, and during the following years in the remaining Eastern Roman (or Byzantine) Empire, the Christian emperors adopted a series of anti-Jewish laws (find a summary here). For example, the Theodosian Code of 435–438 prohibited, among other things, the construction of new synagogues, the holding of military and most public offices, and proselytizing. Jews who instigated a conversion were to be punished (the punishment specified by the law was to be severe but its nature was left vague) and Christians who converted would forfeit their property to the state.
When the Romans advanced their conquests into the west, Jews were present with the legions as both mercenaries and provisioners to the forces. Since the Roman legions usually traveled with their soldiers’ families when they were not on military campaigns, families of the Jews came too resulting in small Jewish presences springing up in the empire’s far-flung reaches. The outposts and administrative centers established by the legions quickly grew into regional capitals and these important towns attracted settlers, merchants, and traders, Jews among them, who followed in search of economic opportunities.
Similar economic migrations happened in eastern Europe, where Jewish communities grew along the northern coast of the Black Sea, especially in Crimea. Like the remote communities of the West, those in the East were at first quite small, never numbering greater than perhaps 150 families in most areas.
Figure 8. Italy and the Balkans
Figure 9. Gravestone found at Esztergom
Figure 10. Southeastern Europe
Balkans. There is evidence of Jewish communities in many areas of the Balkans as early as the late second century CE (Figure 8). An inscription in Latin discovered at Ulpia Oescus (in Gigen in the modern province of Pleven, Bulgaria) that bears a menorah and mentions archisynagogos Joseph is accepted as firm evidence of the presence of a Jewish community in this town. Emperor Theodosius I in 379 issued a decree concerning the persecution of Jews and destruction of synagogues in Illyria and Thrace, an indication of Jewish settlement in the Balkans during the Roman period.
There were also early Jewish communities in the region of modern-day Romania as early as the second century CE. Inscriptions and coins have been found at Sarmizegetusa and Orşova in Dacia. In the northern Balkan area of Croatia it appears that Jewish communities began to appear early in the first millennium, when Jews began arriving as traders and merchants. Archaeological excavations in Osijek found a synagogue dating from the third century. Also probably dating from the third century, a gravestone was found in Esztergom in Hungary, north of Budapest (Figure 9). The stone has a carved three-legged menorah with rounded arms. Archaeological explorations in Solin (ancient Salona, the Roman capital of Dalmatia) found Jewish graves from the third century. Small Jewish communities from the Roman period are also known in Serbia. Despite all these findings hardly any detail is known of these Balkan communities until the late Middle Ages.
Crimea. There is evidence that small Jewish communities began to grow in southeastern Europe in the third century in the area that is now Ukraine (Figure 10). They were established by arrivals from Greece and the Levant and were supplemented by later arrivals from Persia and Byzantium who were fleeing from religious persecution. In the late first millennium BCE, this region was inhabited by a group of tribes collectively known as “Scythians,” a people of Iranian origin, who appear to have been quite friendly toward Jewish newcomers. By the second century CE, the tribes in Crimea, those of the Sarmatian group, had forged close ties with Jewish residents. The so-called “Schechter Letter,” found among the documents from the Cairo genizah, refers to the Alani (a subgroup of the Sarmatians) and states that “... some of them observe the laws of the Jews.” A number of clans of the Alani, together with the Germanic Vandals and Suevi, rampaged through central Europe into France and Spain during the fifth century, preceding the Visigoth invasion.
By the fourth century the Goths had supplanted the Sarmatians and we have records of close associations between these Germaics and Jews. Tombstones always provide very useful cultural information and one from Partenit, a city on the Crimean coast, bears the name “Herefridil haKohen.” The Goths were Jewish? There is no evidence for this but there are many tantalizing clues that quite a few Jewish practices had become adopted into the cultural practices of these eastern Germanic and Asiatic peoples—we’ll see more of this later.
Greece. Scholars attempting to reconstruct the history of Jews in the Byzantine Empire during the eleven centuries that the Eastern Roman Empire existed have found it to be a difficult, almost impossible task. Not only were the borders of the empire constantly changing, all the sources of information are fragmentary. The political development of the Byzantine Empire was actually based on its ancient Greek cultural heritage even as its policies became intimately associated with the rise of Christianity, with the result that the state fully supported the christianization of the empire through legislation of religious matters and attempts to abolish nonconforming beliefs, which were treated as heresy. These policies became first apparent under Constantine who, as we have seen, moved the seat of the empire from Rome to Byzantium (Constantinople) during the period 324 to 337. It was during this time that a close association was established between church and state and political unity became synonymous with religious unity.
In this environment Judaism was actually tolerated and the laws of the state protected Jewish synagogues and customs, with the strange result that Judaism actually enjoyed a better status than heterodox Christianity. During Constantine’s reign, it’s clear that he openly favored the Christians, whether or not he actually converted. After his reign, the situation for the Jews began to deteriorate and Christian theologians, mainly those having a Greek background, began to develop virulent anti-Jewish writings that described the Jews as being in league with Satan and as god-killers. Because the Roman emperors tended to follow the Arian sect (which held the belief that Jesus as the son of God did not always exist but was created by God and is therefore distinct from and inferior to God) and were not as hostile to the Jews as the clerics were becoming, they did not pay much attention to this anti-Jewish theology. Despite this, however, those writings could not have failed to have some influence on them. Once the emperors embraced Catholicism, the Jewish condition declined markedly. As we’ll see, in their pursuit of religious unity, the emperors developed laws to apply consistent pressure on non-Christians, Jews included, to convert, and this pressure resulted in the Jews becoming the target of discriminating and restrictive legislation that relegated them to the margins of society.
Figure 11. Jewish World in 300
Figure 12. Roman Gaul
Figure 13. Archeological discoveries on the Roman border
Figure 14. Ring
Figure 15. Europe in 450
Figure 16. Europe in 500
Austria. As we mentioned earlier, wherever the Roman legions traveled, merchants and traders were not far behind. Thus we find small settlements of Jewish traders becoming established in central Europe, in areas near Vienna and Augsberg as early as the first century CE (Figure 11 shows the Jewish dispersion as of 300). In Halbturn in modern Austria, archeologists discovered a gold-scroll amulet containing the words of the Shema prayer in the grave of a Jewish infant that dates from the third century.
Belgium-France-Germany. The Romans divided the northwest region of their empire into the provinces of Germania Inferior (Germania II, modern Belgium, southern Netherlands, and western Germany—the western Rhineland) and Germania Superior (Germania I, generally northeastern France and western Switzerland) (Figure 12). The region lying between the empire’s northern border and the Baltic Sea, east of the Rhine, was known as Germania Magna. While the existence of Jewish settlements in the western provinces, including Lutetia (Paris) and Lyon in Gaul, and Trier, Cologne, and Mayence (Mainz) in the Rhineland, can be inferred as early as the first century CE, the first verifiable physical evidence for their presence in the Rhineland is a document dating from 321, an edict of Constantine containing rules for the admission of Jews to the Cologne city council that mentioned a presumed synagogue that was prominently located adjoining the headquarters of the praetorian guard and the residence of the governor. An edict was issued by emperor Valentinian between 368 and 373 that prohibited the quartering of the military in synagogues and mentioned Trier in particular. In Augusta Raurica (modern Kaiseraugst, on the Rhine River about 170 miles south of Trier in modern Switzerland) a ring was discovered that bears an engraving of a menorah and dates from the middle to late fourth century (Figures 13, 14).
Trading routes became established into Gaul and small communities grew in Paris (Lutetia), Rheims (Durocorteron), Tours (Turonum), and Orléans (Aurelianum), and in southern Gaul in Bordeaux (Burdigala), Lyon (Lugdunum), and Toulouse (Tolosa) (see Figure 12). The communities along the Mediterranean coast, including Marseille (Massalia), Narbonne (Narbo), and Avignon (Arausio), probably had a significant Jewish population even earlier, possibly as early as the third century BCE, but evidence for this is scant. European Jewish presence was limited to where the Romans went. There is no evidence of any Jewish presence in the West outside the Roman Empire before the early fourth century CE.
England. Apparently a small but transient community became established in London in southeastern England in the first century CE. Archeologists have discovered traces of a presumed Jewish presence in Roman army camps in England, but there is no record of any continuous Jewish community in England until the eleventh century.
The invasion out of the Russian steppes by the Huns in the fourth century precipitated major population movements across Europe; both smaller groups as well as entire tribal federations fled westward away from the advances of the Huns (Figure 15). The Vandals, accompanied by the Suevi and clans of the Alani tribes, engaged in the most dramatic migration, traveling from eastern and central Europe into Gaul, Aquitaine, and Iberia, then continuing into northern Africa. The subjugation of eastern and central Europe by the Huns only lasted some eighty years, whereupon in 451 their forays into Gaul led by Atilla were halted at Chalons by a combined Roman and Visigothic force. Atilla died two years later and the Hun empire dissolved within two years after that. Europe was profoundly changed during the chaos during and following the Hun invasion. The Western Roman Empire completely disappeared after the Ostrogoths invaded Italy; Rome itself fell in 476 (Figure 16). Aquitaine and Iberia had already been occupied by the Visigoths and northern Gaul by the Franks.
What about the Jews of northern Europe during the upheavals of the fourth and fifth centuries? During this tumultuous period of the late Antiquity, Jewish communities suffered as much as those of the general population. But they did manage to survive mostly intact, and there even are stories connecting the Jews with the Huns. One such account is from the tenth-century writings of Abbot Heringer of Lobbes in northern Gaul, who wrote that the Huns were said to be proud of their Jewish origin. Of course the idea that the Huns were Jewish is absurd, but it does speak to the possibility that there may have been Jews among the Asiatic invaders who rampaged through Europe. Of course it’s possible that this report simply could have been anti-Jewish rhetoric, but in Gaul of the tenth century this kind of religious polemic was unknown.
In the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, the Jews were under constant pressure by the Church to convert, but the role of the state in attempting to deal with the Jews was at best ambiguous; Theodosius II (408–450) continued to recognize the autonomy of the Jewish communities in internal community matters, but the law code that bears his name (of 425) placed many restrictions on the Jews: limitations were placed on where they could live; they were prohibited from holding public office, building synagogues, keeping slaves, and were subjected to extraordinary taxes. The code even specified the clothing they were permitted to wear. Citizenship rights for Jews were curtailed but the civil law did attempt to protect Jews from the Church’s attempts to degrade them and to prevent the Church from inciting the general populace against them. The result of these persecutions was to cause Jewish communal life to become more important in terms of religious observance and cultural practices.
A century later, under Justinian (527–565), with the adoption of Justinian’s codification of Roman law (535–537), limitations on the Jews were expanded. Justinian collected, in the law code bearing his name, all of the laws of the empire since its earliest days including thirty-three laws that pertained to the Jews. This code became the basis of the legal status of the Jews in the empire and had special provisions that applied to the Jews’ civil responsibilities; for example, the code provided that Jews must pay taxes to support local government despite its prohibition against their holding office. Besides being denied public jobs and being subject to selective taxation, Jews were forbidden to build new synagogues (and were later prevented from repairing existing ones). Teaching of the Talmud and Tanakh was prohibited. The empire even passed laws in an attempt to dictate the composition of the Jewish religious service. Justinian attempted to regulate matters of Jewish worship precisely because, apart from Christianity, Judaism was the only legally recognized religion. Despite Judaism having legal sanction, in several places in the code references are made to the “Jewish superstition,” so its toleration was accompanied by harsh anti-Jewish rhetoric.
When Justinian banned the teaching of the Talmud and the Tanakh, a literary genre known as the piyyut, a liturgical composition written in a poetic form, quickly became a substitute, and large numbers of new compositions rapidly appeared. As an evolutionary development of the psalm genre, versions of piyyutim actually had been written during Temple times, but the composing of liturgical poems had virtually ceased until their writing was revived in Palestine in about the fourth century CE. Now, however, their style had changed; the modern form of the piyyut written in Palestine and later in Europe and Babylonia was based on some type of poetic metrical rhyming scheme or word pattern. Authors of piyyutim usually displayed their ingenuity by writing their compositions as alphabetical acrostics or embedding their name or the name of the intended precentor in the texts. We are familiar with many early piyyutim because their use quickly became a standard in prayer books. Examples of piyyutim we use today include El Adon, Ein Keloheinu, Yigdal, Adon Olam, and L’kha Dodi; these were written between the fourth to sixteenth centuries in Palestine, Babylonia, Italy, Spain, and Turkey. Since the worship liturgy itself had not been proscribed by Justinian’s law, as a response many piyyutim were designed for inclusion in services to foster such basic Jewish precepts as belief in God, love for the Torah, and observance of the Sabbath and religious festivals. Many of these religious poems also recalled stories from ancient times that showed God’s support of the people of Israel. Composition of piyyutim flourished throughout the Byzantine Empire and Babylon, reached their heights in medieval Spain, and continued to be composed in Italy, France, and Germany well into the late Middle Ages and beyond.
The Justinian Code served as the basis of later European codes, especially in its laws concerning the Jews. Justinian was able to bring many lands of the former Western Roman Empire under the control of the Byzantine Empire, but after the seventh century the empire’s power waned considerably and the significance of Byzantine Jews in Jewish history was likewise reduced. Their role in history became minor compared to the Jewries of western Europe and the Muslim Orient. But their role in the development of Ashkenazic liturgy was immense. Some scholars trace minhag Ashkenaz, the Ashkenazic order of prayer, to central and southern Italy, and a historian of Jewish music has demonstrated that melodies commonly used in Ashkenazic synagogues in the Germanies of the eleventh and twelfth centuries were known (and presumably used) in central Italy in the tenth century.
Figure 17. Jewish World in 600
Figure 18. Jewish populations in western Europe
At the end of the period of late Antiquity, we find Jewish communities, most of them small, dispersed throughout the regions of the European continent that were once part of the Roman Empire (Figure 17). In the Western Roman Empire, the largest population of Jews by far was concentrated in Spain and southern France. In these areas and in other parts of western Europe the anti-Jewish literature of Greek Christian theologians had very little effect. Under Roman rule, Jews and Christians had lived together and interacted closely. In fact, Church councils in Spain in the early fourth century were convened precisely to develop laws intended to isolate the Jews from the Christians, but the fact that periodic councils over the next several hundred years revisited the same topics show that the Church had considerable difficulty in achieving this objective. The supplanting of Roman rule in Spain by the Visigoths in the early fifth century did not markedly change the status of the Jews until Visigothic king Reccared converted to Catholicism in 586; this began a period of 125 years of severe persecution for the Jews of Spain.
Italy. During the mid-fifth century, the major Jewish communities of Italy included Rome, Milan, Genoa, Naples, and Tarrentum; in Sicily, Palermo, Messina, and Agrigentum; and in Caralis on Sardinia. In 476 Rome fell to the Ostrogoths, but the institution of the papacy was not much affected. In fact, after the Ostrogothic chief Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus, the last Western Roman emperor, Pope Simplicius (r. 468–483), proclaimed Odoacer king of Italy. During the fifth and sixth centuries, the papacy was not seriously concerned with the Jews and few anti-Jewish canons were enacted (Figure 18). Ravenna was the capital city of the Western Roman Empire from 402 until 476 and continued as the Ostrogothic capital. In 519 its synagogues were destroyed by Christians. When this happened, the Ostrogothic king Theodoric compelled the Christians to pay for their rebuilding; this may account in part for the Jews’ enthusiastic support of the Ostrogoths in their war against the forces of Justinian under Belisarius in the Byzantium Empire’s campaign to recapture Italy. Their service in Naples was particularly notable; the defenses of the city during Belisarius’ siege of the city in 536 were maintained almost entirely by Jews.
The various attempts to make Italy a province of the Byzantine empire ultimately failed, but the Byzantine Empire did manage to recapture major portions of Italy from the Ostrogoths and took Ravenna in 540. Ravenna became the capital of an exarchate established by Justinian to govern Italy, and under this government the Jews suffered much oppression. In 568 the Lombards, under the leadership of Alboin, invaded Italy and also chose Ravenna as their capital. The Lombards were a Germanic people who lived peacefully with the Jews, even after the Lombards became Catholic. The popes of the Lombard period were neutral or even favorable in their treatment of the Jews. This might have been the result of the political situation in Italy—the popes were so absorbed with the incessant internal and interstate squabbles that the Jews were mostly left alone. Since the Jews were also engaged in international trade, their contribution to local economies was essential. Historians do not have very much to say about the Jews of this period, which suggests that they lived under reasonable conditions.
In the Frankish Kingdom to the north, which consisted of modern central and northern France and western Germany, the Jewish communities were considerably smaller than in Spain and southern France and were not very much different from those of the Christians. This may explain why the ruling German Franks treated the Jews no differently than the Romanized non-Jews. Jews continued to hold governmental offices until the early seventh century. In Frankland, the Merovingian king Clovis (ca. 466–511) became Catholic in about 500, several generations before the Visigoth king Reccared. However, even though Church councils attempted to influence the Frankish kings to isolate the Jews and impose economic restrictions on them, they made very little progress until the reign of Dagobert I (ca. 603–639). During the early seventh century the Frankish kingdom experienced a sudden influx of refugees from the Visigothic kingdom, Jews fleeing from the decree of forced conversion by the Visigothic king Sisebut in 613. Possibly in emulation of Sisebut’s anti-Jewish policies, under Dagobert’s rule the Jews in the Frankish kingdom experienced a sudden increase in anti-Jewish laws, the most significant of which called for the expulsion of Jews by a certain date or death if not converted to Christianity. It appears from records, however, that this edict was only used against certain individuals or communities, since only a year after its effective date a council held at Rheims renewed canons dealing with Jews holding Christian slaves, celebrating Jewish holidays, and holding public office. By the end of the seventh century, most of the laws and policies of the kingdom pertaining to the Jews returned to pre-Dagobert conditions.
In an extension of the conditions of late Antiquity under Roman rule, Jewish communities of the Rhineland continued to be self-governing. The decree of Constantine of 321 mentioned earlier that was addressed to the community of Cologne attests to a community organization that resembled the Jewish communities of Italy and the eastern Mediterranean region. During the period of turmoil associated with the Hun invasion of the Germanies there was a general exodus from urban areas of the non-Jewish populations. The resulting continuous presence of the urban Jewish communities in the Rhineland served to stabilize and strengthen the community structures. However, virtually nothing is known of the details of community life, including education, ritual practices, literature, or political organization of these communities. What can be inferred from the events of later centuries, however, is that a very strong Jewish identity existed in these communities and was maintained, including the observance of the dietary laws, Shabbat, and holidays.
In the Roman period, Jews of this region were primarily engaged in agriculture and trade. The imposition of laws in late Antiquity prohibiting Jews from owning slaves or employing Christian laborers made agriculture infeasible with the result that most turned to commerce. Under Frankish rule Jewish trade began to expand and Jewish merchants began to diversify into providing luxury goods to the nobility and clergy. The professions of money-lending and medicine were rare for the Frankish Jews at this time. Charlemagne (768–814) was one of the most important rulers of the Middle Ages. While the laws of the Frankish Kingdom may have discriminated against the Jews, his actions did not; in fact, he actually promoted their expanding commercial activities. Charlemagne consolidated Europe as no one had since the demise of the Roman Empire. He ruled from the Ebro River in Spain to the Elbe River in Germany, east to Austria, and south to Rome. In 799 Pope Leo III crowned him “Holy Roman Emperor.” Charlemagne’s son, Louis the Pious, was even more favorably disposed to the Jews than his father, and the Jews had become so economically important to the Frankish economy that the market day of Lyon was changed from Saturday to a weekday. You can imagine that this gave the Church fits.
Figure 19. Radhanite trading routes
By the ninth century, a merchant group involved in long-distance trade encompassing the whole of Eurasia had developed. They became known as the “Radhanites” after a Muslim document named these traders as radhaniya (a word derived from the Persian meaning “to exchange”) (Figure 19). From the Frankish kingdom to the Balkans the Radhanites gathered steel weapons, slaves, and furs for export to the Muslim world; then, following the sea routes to India or the Silk Road to China they returned to Europe via either Persia or Khazaria, bringing easily transported commodities that were in high demand such as spices, perfumes, jewelry, oils, incense, and silk.
Several sources speak of these prosperous Jewish merchants who were protected by the rulers of the kingdoms through which they traded and who enjoyed tremendous social prestige. Their influence among the nobility was so great that when Agobard, the archbishop of Lyon, attempted to mount an intensive campaign restricting all Jewish activities, his efforts completely failed, likely because they would also have restricted the activities of the Radhanites. Agobard’s anti-Jewish attempts were fairly typical of the anti-Jewish bias of the western Christian clergy who feared the influence of Jewish customs on the Jews’ Christian neighbors, particularly the Jewish Sabbath-observance laws. Also, apparently Jews were not averse to proselytizing among the Christians and frequently were successful in attracting converts, some of whom were well known—the most celebrated was Bodo, the deacon of the emperor Louis the Pious, who under the guise of a pilgrimage to Rome, traveled instead to then-Islamic Saragossa, Spain where he converted, was circumcised, and took the name Eleazar. Episodes like this caused grave concern within the Church hierarchy and one result was the enactment of stricter regulations limiting contacts between Jews and Christians.
It was a result of events like these that Agobard began composing his anti-Jewish writings. In letters dated between 822 to 828 he complained that the Christian peasants were becoming attracted to Judaism. In addition to his letters, he published a tract titled On the Superstitions of the Jews and introduced Church legislation requiring Jews to attend Christian sermons and went even further by attempting to have Jewish children baptized without their parents’ consent. The implementation of these canons was quickly blocked by Louis the Pious. Since there are few written accounts from the Jews of ninth-century western Europe, Agobard’s tract provides important evidence about their lives.
In 846, Amulo, who succeeded Agobard as archbishop, wrote a tract addressed to the emperor Charles the Bald urging the adoption of anti-Jewish legislation. The tract was prompted by Christians’ continued fascination with Judaism and contained his arguments against the Jewish religion and in favor of Christianity. In 845 and 846 a church synod of the cities of Meaux and Paris enacted a number of anti-Jewish regulations, likely also at Amulo’s instigation. In these canons Jews were to be prohibited from converting their slaves to Judaism, building new synagogues, appearing in public during Easter, and serving in public office. These canons were not ratified by Charles the Bald and they were never implemented. Consequently it is unlikely that they had any effect on Jewish life, but their existence, and that of similar canons enacted but not adopted by civil authorities in other countries, illustrates the pervasive fear within the clergy of the influence that the Jews had over the local populace as well as over the rulers.
Figure 20. Jewish communities in western Europe
After the Carolingian period (751–987, the regencies of the descendants of Charlemagne), subtle shifts in their cultural, religious, and scholarly composition began to occur in the Jewish communities near Paris and the regions of Champagne and the Rhine valley. Earlier migrations of extended families, often led by rabbinical scholars, had come to these regions from southern Europe, particularly from Italy and southeastern France, to join the established communities there (see Figure 20). While these communities were quite small at first, they began to grow rapidly, increasing from about 4,000 persons at the beginning of the eleventh century to some 20,000 by the century’s end, although this upper figure is in some dispute. The unique patterns of internal organization, cultural and religious life, and scholarly orientation of these communities formed the basis of the culture that was destined to become known as “Ashkenazi.”
Various historical events and tales from the ninth and tenth centuries have become the stuff of legend while other events are so unusual that they seem to be legend. For example, in 797 a Jew named Isaac was part of a delegation that included two Frankish noblemen who were sent by Charlemagne to Harun al-Rashid, the caliph of Baghdad, to negotiate a treaty of friendship; Charlemagne (whose name means “Charles the Great”) was about to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor and he anticipated some serious objections from the Byzantines who considered themselves the successors of the ancient caesars and thus they, not Charles, should carry that title. Since the caliph was the ruler of Byzantium’s hereditary enemy, Charlemagne wanted to reassure the caliph that the Franks had no intention of opening any hostilities in the East. Including a Jew in the delegation was an astute idea, since few apart from the Jews could match their knowledge of Arabic customs and language and would have the ability to develop friendly local contacts. On the return journey the delegation’s two Franks died, leaving Isaac as the only member to return from the trip, but he returned to Charlemagne’s court in Aachen in 802 with a number of precious gifts from the caliph—one of them being an elephant (see details here). This account is not legend; the elephant, named Abu l’Abbas, lived at Aachen for almost a decade. Charlemagne even took him on a campaign to Denmark in 804 to quell a minor revolt. The elephant died, probably of pneumonia, in about 810.
There is another tale based on events from this period that tells the famous legend about Charlemagne’s losing his horse in battle—although there is a remote possibility that elements of the story could be true as it could account for the high honor that the Jews of Narbonne enjoyed. Meier, son of Simon of Narbonne, wrote in Milchemet Mitzvah (1240) that it was a well-known fact that at the siege of Narbonne, King Charles, having had his horse killed under him, would himself have been killed but for a Jew who dismounted and gave the king his horse at the cost of his own life, for he was killed by the Muslims. In reward for the Jew’s service the king gave the Jewish community a third of the city and granted them the right to live under a “Jewish king” as the Saracens lived under a Saracen king. According to a document that once existed in the Abbey de la Grasse (it was lost following the French Revolution), under the emperor Charlemagne a “king of the Jews” ruled over a section of the city of Narbonne, a possession that Charlemagne confirmed in 791, and even in the mid-twelfth century, descendants of the ruling family enjoyed great prestige.
It seems that this story grew to engender more in the same vein, one involving a noted German Jewish family. Some background: the storied Kalonymus family emigrated from Lucca in Italy to Mainz in Germany around 917. Chassidic sources from the thirteenth century, likely influenced by the Carolingian legend about King Charles’ horse, attributed the family’s migration to the initiative of a king named “Charles” (probably Charles the Bald, Charlemagne’s grandson). Of the stories told about scions of this family, one is about the battle of Crottona near Calabria, Italy, against the Muslims in July 982, where a Jew named Kalonymus gave his horse to Emperor Otto II of the Holy Roman Empire, thus saving the Emperor’s life.
Although the elephant was clearly an impressive gift (perhaps the caliph was tired of keeping the animal properly fed and cared for), upon his return from Baghdad, according to yet another legend, Isaac was accompanied by another individual of far greater significance for the Jews of Europe than the elephant. This person was Makhir, a scholar from the Babylonian academies, who is credited with founding the important rabbinical academy of Narbonne. Many scholars believe that although there is no reason to doubt that a Baghdad Jew returned to France in Isaac’s entourage, since the story has become included in many confused accounts about the growth of the Narbonne community, the role of Makhir in founding the academy may have been one of the many embellishments of these accounts. Later authors, writing about the history of Narbonne seem to have conflated and confused three independent events and incorporated them into Charlemagne’s association with the city’s history: the 917 moving of a member of the Kalonymous family from Lucca to Mainz, the 802 settlement of Makhir in France, and the arrival in Spain of a distinguished member of the house of David, Natroni bar Chabibai, from Baghdad in about 772.
Figure 21. Europe in the tenth century
Apart from the presence of Jews in Greece, Jews had also established small communities in the areas of modern-day Romania, Croatia, Albania, Bulgaria, Austria, Serbia, and Ukraine before the tenth century, and Jews began arriving in Poland during the tenth century, but tiny Polish communities of Jews probably existed earlier, established as trading stations of the Radhanites in the late ninth century. Cosmas of Prague, a Bohemian priest and historian, wrote in his work “Chronicle of Bohemians” (ca. 1119), that the Jews were driven from Bohemia into Poland by the crusaders of 1098, suggesting that Jews had arrived in the Slavic lands of Moravia and Bohemia from Germany before the eleventh century (see Figure 21). The kingdom of Poland was founded in 1025 and a well known Polish folk legend maintains that the first Polish king was Jewish. In addition, several works from the thirteenth century claim that the early rulers of Austria were Jewish princes; this claim probably resulted from their names which are of Turkic origin and resemble Jewish names of the period. Of course these and similar tales most likely reflect folk memories of earlier Avar or Magyar overlords of whom some may have professed Jewish beliefs.
There is evidence of Jews fleeing Byzantine persecution settling in Bulgaria in the late seventh century and in the tenth century Jews arrived from Italy and the Republic of Ragusa (coastal Croatia), becoming merchants working on the Danube; during this period Jews were permitted to engage in trade. A Jewish source, the Sefer haDinim, “Book of Laws,” written by Judah haKohen some time before 1028, described how Jewish merchants traveling east to Russia sold their goods to Jewish residents of Cracow. This strongly suggests that Turkic Jews had arrived in western Slavic lands in earlier years.
The fact that there were people who practiced Judaism who lived in the Slavic territories earlier than the ninth century is evidenced by a mid-ninth century communication between Boris, the czar of the Bulgars, and the pope. Boris wrote to the pope to seek guidance on Christian law and to clarify Christian teachings about various religious customs and practices. The list of items for which Boris sought clarification is illustrative of the confused state of religious identity that was present in eastern Europe. His questions included ones on such topics as which is the proper day of rest—Saturday or Sunday; which animals may be properly eaten; whether animals that have not been ritually slaughtered may be eaten; what is the proper procedure for offering the first fruits; whether burial rituals may be performed for suicides; whether fasts should be observed during a drought; how many days must the husband wait before resuming marital relations after his wife has given birth; what are the laws of using tefillin; and whether women must cover their heads in a house of prayer. One can only imagine the reaction of the pope upon receiving this request for information about such “Christian” matters.
Figure 22. Khazaria in 700
In the far east of Europe in the mid-seventh century, a unique nation arose centered around the southern area of the Ural Mountains, the Caspian Sea, north Caucasus, and Ukraine. This was the nation of Khazaria, a Turkic people whose kingdom flourished between 652 to 1016 (Figure 22). Originally a nomadic people, their religion was Tengri shamanism and they spoke a Turkic language. The earliest known information about the Khazars comes from about 550, when these people formed a part of the western Kök Turkic kaganate. In the middle of the seventh century a series of civil wars broke apart the Turkic Empire and the Khazars became an independent people.
At its maximum extent, Khazaria encompassed the modern regions of southern Russia, the northern Caucasus, eastern Ukraine and Crimea, western Kazakhstan, and northwestern Uzbekistan, and by the eighth century Jewish Khazars were present as far west as Bessarabia in modern Romania. During the course of the seventh century Khazaria absorbed its neighboring Turkic tribes including the Sabirs and Bulgars. Some of the Bulgars were forcibly relocated to modern-day Bulgaria while other Bulgar clans fled to the upper Volga River region where they founded an independent state known as Volga Bulgharia. During the ninth century, the period of their greatest power, the Khazars controlled the eastern Slavs, Magyars, Pechenegs, Burtas, and the Huns of the north Caucasus and exacted tribute from other neighboring tribes. The memory of this nation still exists in the Caspian Sea region; all of the modern local languages name this body of water the “Khazar Sea.”
In a series of battles between 890 and 920 known as the Arab-Khazar Wars, Khazaria blocked Islam from significantly spreading north into the region around the Black Sea and Caspian Sea. The result was that the Caucasus region and the city of Derbent became the boundary between the Khazars and the Arabs. Khazaria also played an important role in the politics of eastern Europe by acting as a buffer state between the Islamic world and the Christian world. There were frequent skirmishes between the Byzantine Empire and Khazaria, and Khazaria also fought frequent battles with the barbarian Kievan Rus tribes of central Russia. One sign of Khazaria’s international stature was that a Khazarian princess became the bride of a Byzantine emperor.
Communities of Jews had been present in the Crimean peninsula since Roman times, and when the Khazars came to control this region, they came into close contact with the local Jews. Khazaria also lay astride an important trading route, the Silk Road, along which the Radhanites carried goods such as silks, furs, candlewax, honey, jewelry, silverware, coins, and spices between Europe and the Orient. During the late first millennium, the Jewish communities of the Crimea were augmented by refugees fleeing the Mazdaq rebellion in Persia and the persecutions of Byzantine emperors Leo III and Romanus I Lecapenus. Possibly as a result of the swelling Jewish communities of Khazaria, and very likely because of the rulers’ desire not to adopt the religions of the peoples with which Khazaria was at war, the country famously adopted Judaism as their state religion.
A Jewish record of this kingdom comes down to us from—of all places, Islamic Spain. The Córdoban caliph’s Jewish minister, Hasdai ibn Shaprut, had heard rumors of the existence of this distant Jewish kingdom and wanted to learn more. Eventually, in 960 he was able to send a letter to the Khazar king and soon received a reply in which the king related the story of the conversion of his kingdom to Judaism. According to the king’s letter, in about 838 King Bulan adopted Judaism after supposedly holding a debate between representatives of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim faiths. Extracts of their correspondence are located here. Another account of their adoption of Judaism was best expressed by the Arabic writer Dimashqi who wrote that when the Jews fleeing persecution in other lands arrived in Khazaria, they offered their religion to the Khazar Turks who “found it better than their own and accepted it.” Whatever the true story, the basis of the Khazars’ choice of religion was certainly rooted in international politics.
The first Jewish kings, Bulan and Obadiah, introduced classic rabbinic Judaism to the Khazars and the Khazar nobility and many of the common people apparently became Jews. King Obadiah later established synagogues and Jewish schools. By the tenth century Hebrew became commonly used for the writing of Jewish documents and it has been estimated by Omeljan Pritsak, professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University, that by the tenth century the Jewish population of Khazaria numbered as many as 30,000.
The Khazar nation began its decline in the late tenth century under repeated attacks by the Kievan Rus; the turning point came in 965 when the Rus Prince Svyatoslav conquered the Khazar fortress of Sarkel in northern Crimea and the kingdom finally fell in 1016. Many Jewish residents apparently migrated westward into Hungary, Romania, and Poland, joining existing Jewish communities, while others fled to the Byzantine Empire.
Up to now we’ve discussed the social, political, and religious state of Europe for the period leading up to the ninth and tenth centuries. We’ve attempted to briefly lay the groundwork for how Jewish communities became dispersed throughout Europe, how the Jews interacted with their neighbors, and how they fared economically and socially. Now we shall turn to the actual development of the Ashkenazic Jewish peoples.
In western Europe in the sixth century and later, the Jews lived under the successive rule of the Burgundians, Franks, and Merovingians, and under these rulers Church influence was quite weak. The Jews were able to pursue any occupation that was open to their Christian neighbors and consequently engaged in agriculture, trade, crafts, and industry. Jews even owned and operated ships that sailed the Mediterranean carrying passengers and trade goods. Interesting descriptions by travelers using Jewish ships exist; one of these chronicles mentions the terror the passenger felt when the ship he was aboard became caught in a storm and the Sabbath began, whereupon the captain ceased tending the ship to say the Shabbat prayers. Jews could engage in any occupation they desired. It was only later, after Church pressure forced Jews out of most occupations that they slowly turned to money-lending, which the Church had begun to prohibit to Christians as an improper, sinful occupation. Church influence was especially weak under the Merovingian rulers, who gave little support to the efforts of the Church to restrict the civic and social status of the Jews. Conditions began to change under Charlemagne, who used the canonical laws of the Church to help develop the loosely associated parts of the Frankish empire into a coherent entity.
Before the ninth century information about the social and religious life of the Jews in all of Europe (apart from Spain) is scarce, but enough is known about the general history of this period to show that by the ninth century Christianity had grown to the point that it had become the dominant social and political force in Europe. During the last few centuries of the first millennium the political and economic system throughout Europe was feudalism. Local rulers tended to manage their holdings by force of arms and the lives of most of the population was constantly subject to violence. The populace in general hated their rulers and the higher local Church authorities such as the archbishops, who were autocratic and brutal in their attitude to the masses.
In Charlemagne’s empire under his successor, Louis the Pious, the status of the Jews remained much the same as earlier. They were allowed to engage in commerce but were required to pay higher taxes than those assessed to Christians. To oversee and protect Jewish privileges, the government even appointed a special officer called the “Judenmeister.” Charlemagne’s successors, those of the Carolingian dynasty, tended to accede to the demands of the Church to include and enforce in civil law the antisemitic decrees of canonical law.
Between the ninth and twelfth centuries there were about 1.5 million Jews in Christian Europe. Since the Jews were not part of the feudal system and did not serve the ruling classes as either serfs or vassals, they were mostly spared the oppression and constant warfare that made life miserable for most Christians. The Jews did not suffer the slave-like conditions of the serf classes and as a result their living conditions were more humane and healthier than those of the Christians. Also, the Jews were permitted to live under Jewish law which was considerably fairer and more ethical than feudal law. Since most Jews were literate, they were employed in crucial occupations like international trade, financial services, as government functionaries, and as physicians. Because of these valuable services they were usually protected by kings, princes, and even bishops.
While local rulers and clergy were callous and autocratic in their treatment of the serfs, the institution of the papacy tended to be far more lenient in attempting to improve the lives of the common folk, issuing proclamations calling for just treatment of the people and trying to mitigate the constant social violence. The most notable Church attempt to limit the violent turmoil of the period was the “Peace of God” (pax Dei) proclaimed in about 989 in order to pacify the feudal authorities and prevent the constant warfare that so disrupted society. The Peace of God movement began in Aquitaine, Burgundy, and Languedoc, areas where central authority had most completely fragmented. In its original form, the “Peace of God” granted immunity from violence to defenseless noncombatants, particularly peasants and clergy. A limited pax Dei was first decreed at the Synod of Charroux and from this site the policy spread to most of western Europe over the next century, and continued to survive in some form until at least the thirteenth century. In its ultimate formulation, the pax Dei prohibited nobles from invading churches, beating the defenseless, burning houses, and similar outrages. In a synod of 1033, merchants and their goods were added to the protected groups.
By the early eleventh century it had become apparent that while the pax Dei was helpful in reducing violence against the most helpless classes, it was doing little in reducing the violence between other groups, particularly the nobles and their knights; the upholding of the so-called “codes of honor” resulted in many local disturbances. The Church’s attempt to limit this fighting was called the “Truce of God” (treuga Dei); this policy extended the Peace of God and was first proclaimed in 1027 at the Council of Toulouges, a town of Roussillon. The “Truce of God” was intended to set aside certain days of the year when violence was not allowed. Initially the ban was against fighting on Sundays and holy days but eventually it became extended to include all of Lent and then even to every Friday.
Figure 23. Jewish migrations into Germany
This brings us to the cusp of European history: the period of the Crusades. But before we address the phenomenon of the Crusades we need to review conditions in both the Jewish communities of eastern Europe, which we will cover presently, and those of the Rhineland and northern France. This region, from the Rhineland in the north to Strasbourg (Alsace) in the south, was called Ashkenaz by its medieval Jewish residents, this being the name the Jews used for Germany itself (see Figure 23). The terms Ashkenazim or Ashkenazi Jews strictly mean “German Jews,” but later the use of the terms became expanded to refer to all Jews from central and eastern Europe as well. The origin of the term Ashkenaz is unclear. Some scholars conjecture that the term may have originated as a result of the similarity in sound between the Arabic name for northern European countries, “As-Skandz,” and Ashkenaz. The first use of the term to describe a Jewish population appears as early as the tenth century in Jewish rabbinic and diplomatic writings under Islam; these documents include one from Baghdad (Saadia Gaon’s commentary on Daniel 7:8) and another from el-Andalus (a letter from Hasdai ibn Shaprut to the king of the Khazars mentioned earlier). In both of these sources the term refers to the Jews of northwestern Europe.
The name Ashkenaz actually first appears in the Bible in Genesis 10 where it refers to a son of Gomer, grandson of Japheth and great-grandson of Noah. In ancient Assyrian inscriptions, the term Ashkuza refers to the Scythians (Ishkuz) and regions in Anatolia such as Ascania and Lake Ascanius bear versions of this name. The term also appears in the midrash collection Genesis Rabbah (ca. 400–600), where Rabbi Berechiah mentions it as the name of one of several Germanic tribes or regions. His view is likely based on the Talmud (Yoma 10a; jt. Meg. 71b), where Gomer, the father of Ashkenaz, is translated into Aramaic as “Germamia,” a word that is otherwise unknown; it could be a corruption of a Greek word that may have existed in the Greek dialect of the Palestinian Jews. Whatever the reason, the result was that the Talmud linked the name “Ashkenaz” with a word that sounded almost like the Latin “Germania.” It’s possible that medieval Jews were thinking of Berechiah’s midrashic source when they adopted the name Ashkenaz for their lands; its use quickly became widespread in describing northwestern Germany. Rashi, writing in the latter half of the eleventh century, spoke of both the language of Ashkenaz and the country of Ashkenaz in referring to Germany.
Jews living in southern France, Spain, and northern Italy spoke more than half-a-dozen Jewish versions of Romance languages in addition to their local languages. These included Judeo-Italian, Judeo-Catalan, Judeo-Latin or La’az, and two Judeo-French dialects called Zarphatic (tsarfatit). The origin of Ladino (Judeo-medieval Spanish) is unclear but apparently its first use was in early Torah translations where it employed a medieval Castillian-Latin dialect and was used, at least in written form, perhaps up to about 1250. The development of a specifically Judeo-Spanish language didn’t occur until after the expulsion from Spain in 1492. This language is called Judismo, and its development is presumed to have occurred just prior to and after the expulsion because Judismo’s Spanish is frozen into sixteenth-century Spanish, preserves almost no earlier Spanish vocabulary and grammar, and didn’t evolve any further since its speakers no longer had continuing contact with native speakers of Spanish.
During the tenth and eleventh centuries, when Jews from southern France and northern Italy migrated north to the Rhineland and northern France in increasingly large numbers, they began speaking medieval German but added many words in Zarphatic and La’az. To this mix, vocabulary derived from the Talmud (biblical and rabbinic Hebrew and Aramaic) was added. This combination of languages soon became the primary language spoken by western European Jews and the resulting dialect (pidgin, perhaps) was the origin of Yiddish; the written form of the language used Hebrew characters since its speakers were most familiar with that alphabet. When the Jews of France and Germany later migrated eastward into Slavic lands, they formed communities mostly apart from the existing populations but the Yiddish they spoke absorbed much local vocabulary. In this manner the Yiddish language evolved from its Germanic roots into a separate language. To illustrate the multi-lingual sources of Yiddish and its eastern and western usages, consider the Yiddish words for the men’s ceremonial head covering. In western Yiddish the word is kappel or kepl from the German for “little cap”; in the East the cap is called a yarmulke, a word having Turkic roots. Romance origins can be discerned in the Yiddish word meaning “to pray.” In the West the word is oren, derived from the Latin orare (origin of “orate”) while in the East the word is daven, another word of Turkic origin.
Even the foods came to differ between the Jews of Germany and those of the East. The rich Shabbat egg-bread was called challah in the East while in Germany it was known as barches. Traditional dishes like bagels, blintzes, and gefilte fish, common and popular among east European Jews, were unknown to German Jews, who prepared kosher versions of German dishes such as Sauerbraten, Knödel, Stollen, and Zwetschgendatschi (Bavarian plum-cake). The ubiquitous Shabbat afternoon dish, a stew called cholent, was common throughout Europe, but the German Jews instead prepared a sweet dish called Schalet. Despite these minor linguistic differences, Yiddish quickly developed into the lingua franca of Ashkenazic Jews.
We mentioned earlier that in about 917, Rabbi Moses Kalonymus ben Judah of Lucca, Italy and his son Judah, together with their extended family, emigrated to Mainz where their descendants became one of the most eminent Jewish families in Germany. One of the earliest known religious works from Germany is the Kalonymus Responsa, written ca. 940. This responsa is regarded as the first Ashkenazic work.
The social and economic lives of the Jews in the Frankish kingdom and the Germanies were uncomfortably entwined with those of the Christians. While the Franks and Germans could be called to arms at any time, as frequently occurred during those times of turmoil, the Jews were exempt from military service, leaving them free to pursue their occupations, mainly as merchants. In fact, between the Carolingian period and the First Crusade, the Jews living in the Rhineland were merchants who were almost entirely engaged in long-distance trade. Later, after Church pressures limited Jewish occupations, the Jews increasingly turned to money-lending as a way to earn capital. At first, money-lending was exclusively practiced by the monasteries, but in 1179 at the Third Lateran Council, the Church adopted Canon 25 which declared that those who engage in usury were to be excommunicated (usury was the all-embracing term for lending at interest). With this new law in effect, the monasteries were compelled to end lending at interest. Meanwhile, the Jews, who were becoming increasingly forced out of occupations in agriculture, the crafts, and even long-distance trade, had unused capital that could be lent at interest to earn a living. The practice of Jewish money-lending had begun in the Frankish territories and spread mainly to England with the Norman conquest in 1066. Money-lending did not play as great a role in the Germanies as it did in France and England. Also, the Jews did not hold a monopoly on this occupation; some Christians also engaged in this business with the permission of authorities, regardless of whether the Church approved. After the Third Lateran Council, Church doctrine prohibited loans at interest or where an origination fee was charged.
Despite this prohibition, at least one church organization did engage in money-lending, but with a twist. The organization charged no interest and had no up-front fee. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Knights Templars made loans that expected repayment after an agreed period but required periodic partial payments on the loan. These partial payments were not credited against the principal, however, and a final payment of the total initial loan was eventually required. Essentially they were “renting” money. Apparently such loans were not considered to be made at interest, and it appears that the Church at first found no problem with this kind of loan. Obviously loan terms like these were very disadvantageous to the borrower, and in fact it was the lending of the Templar order that precipitated their downfall.
Philip IV “the Fair” of France (1268–1314; called thus for his complexion, not his actions) became heavily in debt to the order and when he requested a further loan to finance a war with England they refused; in a complex series of moves, Philip eventually denounced the Knights and destroyed the order, and this is how he did it. In an attempt to raise funds, Philip decided to tax the church. Pope Boniface VIII objected, but Philip maintained that as king, he could tax whomever he pleased. Boniface summarily excommunicated Philip, so Philip had him kidnaped and beaten. Boniface, an elderly man, died within a month of this treatment and was succeeded by Benedict XI. Although Benedict reversed the excommunication, Philip could not persuade Benedict to do his bidding. Within a year Benedict was dead, being poisoned, as it was said, at Philip’s orders. Then Philip bought the election of the next pope, Clement V, who moved the Holy See to Avignon which ensured that the pope would be fully under Philip’s control (and thus began the papal schism.) An investigation of the Templar order under Clement soon resulted in the arrest of thousands of its members throughout Europe for heresy (not for money-lending but for trumped-up charges including apostasy, idolatry, heresy, obscene rituals and homosexuality, and financial corruption and fraud).
Besides the “sanctioned” or open sources of lending, “black-market” lending also existed. Also, clerics in the Holy Roman Empire found ways of circumventing the Church’s prohibition on lending at interest. Many bishops and abbots were known to “invest” their treasuries’ funds with the Jews who would then lend to Christians and provide the clerics with decent returns on their money. Interest rates were based upon risk, and as you can imagine, risks were enormous. In recognition of these risks, in some countries the legal rates of interest ranged from 20 to 160 percent per year—or even greater. In 1244 under Duke Frederick II of Austria, the official charter with the Jews set the maximum interest rate at 173-1/3 percent per year.
The financial activities of all of the medieval kingdoms—from the economies of the countries to the enterprises of the burghers—were based largely on the ability to borrow capital. The ability of public and private individuals to engage in any financial dealings necessitated readily available cash that the Jews could provide. Borrowers would turn to Jews rather than Christian lenders for several reasons. First, unlike the terms of the Templars, the loan terms offered by the Jews were fair and total repayment amounts were clear. Then, because of their careful oversight by the authorities, the Jews were meticulous and were known to be scrupulously honest. Also, their interest rates tended to be better than those of the Christians. In fact, whenever the Jews were driven out of a region, their loss as lenders was almost universally bemoaned. Despite this and despite their crucial role in the financial structures of the various countries where they lived, the involvement of the Jews in Christian business matters was resented because Jewish contact was to be avoided, even though the Jews’ money was essential. Put another way, Jewish capital was indispensable but Jewish business practices, especially money-lending, were considered immoral.
Figure 24. Jewish settlements in the Rhineland
Despite the Jews’ unpopularity, their influence allowed them to settle in various towns throughout the Rhineland (see Figure 24)—in fact, some towns actually sought Jews as residents, with the local rulers granting them privileges and charters that provided the legal basis for their existence. In 1084 Bishop Rüdiger of Speyer granted privileges (see the text here) to the Jews following the model of the letters of protection that Louis the Pious had issued (approximately 826–7). Some of the rights included the rights of residence, a guarantee of undisturbed burial grounds, autonomy in regulating community affairs, and even certain economic benefits.
The privileges granted to the Jews who settled in the towns of northern France and Germany are indicative of the relatively cordial, if uneasy, relations that existed between the Jews and Christians from the ninth until the late eleventh centuries. The presence of close economic ties between the Jewish and Christian communities is illustrated quite clearly by the responsa literature from this period, since dealings with Christians sometimes produced thorny halakhic problems—the precepts of Jewish law did not always agree with the needs of commerce. For example, it was necessary to formally exclude Christians from the halakhic category of “idolaters,” otherwise Jews could not transact business with them.
In a sense, the ruling governments treated the Jews no differently than other special corporate groups, for example, the guilds of craftsmen. Medieval governments recognized the different legal systems that existed for artisans and tradesmen; these groups had their own laws that were generally observed and defended by the rulers who granted to the Jews a similar level of legal autonomy. Obviously the jurisdiction of Jewish law was limited to internal community affairs. Where disputes involved Jews and Christians, Jews were obliged to appear in Christian courts; this usually created problems for both Jews and Christians alike. For the Jews a particular problem involved the oath of truthfulness the courts required; the Christian elements of the judicial oath were objectionable to the Jews. The compromise was the so-called “Jewish Oath,” a version that Jews could accept but still had legal validity. Some versions of these oaths were quite bizarre and consisted of actions and statements that were particularly humiliating to the Jews but because of their length and complexity it seems doubtful many of these oaths were actually used in practice. For example, one oath, from the thirteenth-century “Schwabenspiegel” code written by a Franciscan friar, required that the oath-taker don a belt of thorny branches, stand partially or fully naked in a body of water, spit on his penis three times, and then recite the oath which included cursing himself as if he had committed perjury. Another legal code, one from Saxony, mandated that the oath be recited while standing nude or barefoot on a fresh skin of a sow. Wherever the Jewish legal system conflicted with that of the Christians, the decisions of Christian courts had to be accepted by the Jew. There is a Jewish precept in talmudic law that recognizes the authority of the government: dina de-malkhuta dina, that is, “the law of the king is the law.”
Notice, however, that the very fact that the governments accommodated the religious sensibilities of the Jews is an indication of their acceptance by the ruling classes. This acceptance was not a result of any charitable or moral reasons. The Jewish communities chiefly existed under charters of protection granted by the local authorities or even the sovereign and the charters came with a price, a huge price, in the form of special levies, bribes, and “gifts.” These costs were in addition to the Jews’ taxes, which were also exorbitant. As an example, the Jews of the Holy Roman Empire of the mid-thirteenth century paid into the Imperial treasury twelve percent of the total revenue received. Also, the total of the taxes the Jews paid amounted to twenty percent of the total revenue collected from all of the cities of the empire. Since the Jews only comprised a tiny fraction—less than one percent—of the population, their taxes were a significant burden. But even the acceptance by the Jews to such heavy tax burdens had its limits. For example, in the late thirteenth century some Germanic rulers adopted “taxation” laws for the Jews that were essentially an outright theft of property. The rabbis ruled that such laws were not laws at all since they violated the empire’s extant and long-standing fair-treatment codes. Sometimes these larcenous laws were relaxed as a result of community complaints or at the direction of a higher authority, but if the Jews complained too strenuously they risked expulsion from the ruler’s realm.
Figure 25. Procession of Jews meeting Pope Martin V, Council of Constance, 1417. (Chronicle of Ulrich von Reichthal, town hall library at Basel)
As an example of the kind of official exploitation and blackmail the Jews endured, we’ll consider the case of the city of Constance in Germany. The Jews played an important role in the economy of the city during the thirteenth century, but in 1332 the Jews of that city were forced to flee after some 330 were burned at the stake and the synagogue destroyed, likely because of a charge of host desecration (the host is the wafer that represents Jesus’ body that is integral to the communion ceremony in Church ritual—more about this later). Soon after this event, the town council persuaded them to return. In 1349 the community was exterminated during a flagellant riot (more about this later, too) and the tombstones from their cemetery were used in the construction of a cathedral. Jews were allowed to return in 1378, but then in 1385, Wenceslaus IV (r. 1378–1400), the ruler of the territory that included Constance, annulled all debts owed to the Jews. During the period 1414–18 the Jews were forced to finance a significant portion of the costs of the city’s Church Council. In 1417, the pope granted the Jews documents of protection endorsed by Emperor Sigismund (Figure 25), which temporarily assisted the Jews but in 1430, with a large amount of additional costs still outstanding, they were forced to pay the rest under threat of being burned at the stake. Jews from neighboring cities helped raise the needed funds. During the period of 1443–48, the Jews of Constance were imprisoned on a charge of ritual murder (we’ll also discuss this later) and were expelled in 1448. Jews were not allowed back into Constance until 1847.
It was in the tenth and eleventh centuries that the ultimate pattern of Ashkenazic Jewish communal structure began to emerge, a structure that was based upon Jewish communal roots from antiquity—cohesive communities that managed their own affairs through internal ordinances and maintained orderly relations with the Christian rulers through their community leaders. Communities managed the lives of its members according to Jewish law and maintained social institutions such as schools, synagogues, mikva’ot, and cemeteries, and internal government functions including courts, tax-collecting bodies, and welfare structures. While many communities may have been associated by cooperative agreements, each was essentially autonomous in most areas. The Christian government allowed the Jewish communities to impose punishments on its members including fines, flogging, imprisonment, and cherem (excommunication). The sentences that were imposed were binding on the parties and couldn’t be appealed to a Christian court. The leaders of the community were typically prominent rabbis, scholars, and sometimes leading merchants who were known for their intellectual and commercial, if not their political, acumen.
The community, known as the kehillah, was led by a small committee or board—sometimes even by a single individual, as was common in Italy and, before their communities became large, in the Slavic countries. Rarely did boards exceed twelve members. Electing board members and being elected to board service was limited to taxpayers, but scholars, who were usually exempt from paying taxes, were eligible to elect and to be elected. In larger communities, certain board members were sometimes delegated the authority to act in areas of their competence to allow the kehillah to function efficiently. One of the major functions of the kehillah’s board was to apportion the tax levy and to collect the funds for distribution to the taxing authorities and to the community functions that the taxes supported. In fact, it was frequently at the demand of the local rulers that communities create a governing body to regulate their internal affairs; this was to facilitate the rulers’ collection of taxes as efficiently as possible. Sometimes the ruling authorities required the kehillot to submit their legislation to them for their approval and ratification.
The position of the communities’ rabbis was not as leaders; rabbis worked at lay professions in addition to serving as teachers and scholars and, except in large communities, rarely held salaried positions. Rabbis did not lead the prayer services; that function was performed by knowledgeable community members. The rabbi’s authority in the community was usually limited to adjudicating disputes between kehillah members and serving as a member of the beit din, the religious court, where the rabbi used his knowledge of Jewish law in service to the court’s functions. Most communities appointed lay members to their courts to serve with the rabbi since most matters that came before the beit din involved commercial disputes and persons who possessed knowledge of commercial and financial affairs greatly assisted in deciding cases.
In larger communities with more resources, the kehillah sometimes employed a rabbi who served as the kehillah’s chief rabbi. Besides a rabbi, the kehillah might also employ persons serving in specialized occupations, such as a chazzan (cantor), shamash (sexton or beadle), sofer (scribe), and shochet (ritual slaughterer). The largest communities were even known to employ a physician. The most fascinating of all of the kehillah functionaries appeared during the late Middle Ages; this was the shtadlan, who was a combination of a lobbyist, public relations specialist, and solicitor (in the British sense). The shtadlan served as an intercessor figure who negotiated for the safety and benefit of the kehillah with the ruling authorities. This individual was typically well versed in the laws of the country and frequently spent more time in the capital city than in the community. There are many accounts of the accomplishments of some shtadlanim in preventing the passage of laws affecting their communities, from unfair or unfounded accusations, and in some cases, saving the community from expulsion or loss of lives.
The organizational structure of the kehillah was simple—it was composed of a governing board of elected laymen, as mentioned above. A layman almost always presided as its head; rarely did a rabbi lead a kehillah. One of the most interesting feature of the Ashkenazic community was the development of intercommunal organizations that began to appear in Germany during the High Middle Ages. Called the Landjudenschaften, these organizations became very important in the communities of Poland and Lithuania well into the eighteenth century. The authority of the Landjudenschaften became so developed that in some countries they became known as the “Jewish Diet.” The president was called the parnass u’manhig (“provider and guide”) and the organization employed a chief rabbi, a secretary-treasurer who maintained meticulous books and minutes of meetings, a shamash, and frequently a shtadlan. The most noted of all of the parnassim and later, Jewry’s greatest shtadlan, was Josel of Rosheim (Joseph Ben Gershon Loanz, c. 1480–1554). At its ultimate height of importance, the Landjudenschaftenen of Poland and Lithuania, known respectively as the Council of Four Provinces and the Council of Lithuanian Jewry, had each developed fully tripartite organizational structures consisting of the three governmental branches of executive, legislative, and judicial personnel.
Socially, the Jews of the High Middle Ages, in keeping with the tendency of all minorities to group together and being motivated by security, economic needs, and cultural dictates, settled closely and occupied their own streets, or in larger communities lived in separate neighborhoods. Such groupings of individuals having like interests were not unique to the Jews; members of the craft associations and guilds tended to do the same. Thus in medieval towns one would find streets where the cobblers lived, streets of the tailors, and similar guild groupings. Since the authorities generally took responsibility for the Jews’ protection they agreed with the tendency of Jews to live together, but this living arrangement was in no way related to the later forced segregation into ghettos imposed by authorities.
Figure 26. Ashkenazi expansion in eleventh century
By the tenth century major communities had grown in Trier, Metz, Cologne, Speyer, Worms, and Mainz (Figure 26). The Jewish community in Cologne is the oldest in Europe north of the Alps, dating to before 321, and medieval Jews thought of the city as the “Jerusalem of the north.” The Jewish cemetery known as “Heiliger Sand” (Holy Sand) in Worms is regarded as one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries in Europe with the first burials taking place there as early as the year 1076.
Mainz was first settled in the tenth century, the “Judensand” Jewish cemetery, situated on a former Roman burial ground, contains graves from this period but when the Jewish community was dissolved in 1438, many gravestones from the Middle Ages were gradually carried off and used during the next few centuries to construct local fortifications in the town. By the mid-fourteenth century, Mainz possessed the largest Jewish community in Europe: some 6,000 citizens.
Concerning Mainz, historian John Man wrote, “Mainz was the capital of European Jewry.” The city was noted throughout Europe for its Jewish academy that operated for over 300 years. It became the home of the noted eleventh-century scholar Gershom ben Judah, who was known after his death as the “Light of the Diaspora” because of his extraordinary humility, piety, and scholarship. Gershom was the first scholar to bring copies of the Talmud to western Europe; further, he issued responsa that helped the Jews of the Rhineland adapt to European culture. Gershom’s academy attracted Jews from all over Europe; Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo ben Yizhak, 1040–1105), the noted biblical scholar, was among those who studied at Mainz and in Worms.
The intensive study of the Talmud fostered by Gershom and his students built upon the culture and traditions of the Jews of the Rhineland, producing within them such a devotion to Jewish law that they seem to have considered life without Judaism not worth living—a level of devotion that did not become apparent until the time of the Crusades, when many Jews were forced to choose between their religion and their lives. Within the communities of northern France and the Rhineland there was a broad range of spiritual activity, including worship, study of the Talmud and halakhah, and interpretation of sacred texts. In the late eleventh and twelfth centuries biblical exegesis flourished in this region, especially in the north of France. Chief among the scholars active during this period was Rashi who is considered to be the greatest medieval commentator on the Talmud and one of the leading biblical exegetes of all times. For the first time in northern Europe writings, Rashi’s commentaries made implicit references to a different form of Christian aggression against the Jews. The Christians had become adept at interpreting biblical passages in a typological fashion—these christological interpretations were advanced by Christian scholars who were frequently aided by apostatized Jews who turned their Judaic knowledge into Christian attempts to challenge Jewish beliefs and gain new converts. Rashi was followed by his disciples, the school of the Tosafists (tosafot means “additions” and refers to talmudic interpretations adding to those of Rashi—commentaries commenting on Rashi’s commentary); the Tosafists were active mainly around Normandy, Champagne, and Paris.
While the Jews living in the regions of northern France and the Rhine River valley were developing the distinct culture that would become known as Ashkenazic, the Jews of Spain were developing in a different cultural direction to become Sephardim. Sephardic culture slowly spread during the Middle Ages into southern France and a form of Sephardic culture eventually reached southern Italy and parts of the Balkans and Greece. However, Jewish society and culture in northern Italy, Greece, and eastern Europe during the High Middle Ages were considerably different from that of the northwest and even from each other.
Figure 27. Schism of the Catholic church
In the mid-eleventh century a major schism occurred in the Catholic Church: in 1054 the Church split over doctrinal issues and the Catholic Church, whose leadership was based in the papacy in Rome, remained the religious capital of Christianity of western and much of central Europe (Figure 27). The eastern Church, which became known as the Eastern Orthodox Church, was located in Constantinople and became the official church in most of eastern Europe and Asia Minor, although there were some regions of overlapping influence, such as in Hungary, the Balkans, and southern Italy.
Italy. Much of southern Italy was controlled by the Byzantine Empire from the sixth to the eleventh centuries, and under some of its rulers Jews endured periods of forced conversions. In the mid-tenth century Islamic forces invaded Sicily and ruled until the eleventh. In 1071 the Byzantine presence in southern Italy came to an end when the region came under Norman rule. The culture of the Jews of northern and central Italy continued in much the same way as their culture under Roman rule, and under the influence of the nearby Islamic territories, Jews practiced medicine and worked as merchants, artisans, and craftsmen. For example, in southern Italy and in Sicily the Jews had a virtual monopoly on glassmaking and dyeing. Organized persecution by the Church was uncommon, and the Italian Jews of the Middle Ages developed their own rites, now known as the Benè Romí (vicinity of Rome and the Papal States) and minhag Italiani (in northern Italy). The cultural and religious basis of Italian Jewry was, for a thousand years, oriented toward Palestine, in contrast to the orientation of the Jews of Spain who looked to Babylon for their liturgical direction. The differences in religious rites between Italy and Spain can be traced to the adoption by Italian Jewry of the prayers and practices of the rabbis of the Mishnah. Spanish Jewish culture developed under the strong influence of Islam, whose roots were in Arabia and Babylon; Spanish Jewry depended upon the guidance of the Babylonian academies in the development of their liturgy. The cultural and liturgical roots of Ashkenazic Jewry can be traced to the Jews of northern and central Italy, since the Jews from this region brought their culture into northern Europe when they emigrated.
By the turn of the millennium, craft and artisan guilds had developed and the Jews of Italy were gradually forced out of most occupations, being allowed to trade only in used clothing and to be money lenders. When the Normans began their rule of southern Italy and Sicily, the Jews were given even greater freedom than they had at any time in the past; they were considered the equals of the Christians and were permitted to follow any career. In addition, Jews were given jurisdiction over their own affairs. The Norman treatment of the Jews was so liberal that there was no other country where the canonical laws against the Jews were so frequently disregarded. Of course, conditions for the Jews did not remain this good for long. By the fourteenth century anti-Jewish laws were operating in full force, and in the sixteenth century the Jews were forced to live in ghettos. After the Jews were expelled from Spain and later from Provence, Italian Jews developed a culture that included elements of both Ashkenazic and Sephardic practices. Their history is interesting and complicated but for the purposes of this course we won’t consider them further.
Figure 28. Jewish communities of Byzantium
Greece. Jews in Greece during the High Middle Ages had, like those of Italy, a different cultural background (Figure 28). The original Jewish population dated back to very early Roman times, and many Jews had emigrated to Greece from Asia Minor, including from Judea. During the middle-first century CE, the “Romaniot” Jewish community came into being; this community differed considerably from the Jews of western Europe and even from the Jews living under Islam in north Africa. These Jews preserved their Greek names and language and developed their own customs and rites that included reading scriptures in Greek translation (using the Hebrew alphabet) in synagogue services.
Jewish communities existed in the capital, Constantinople, and in many commercial centers along the Mediterranean coast such as Sparta, Corinth, Thebes, and Apulia, where Jewish artisans played a significant role in silk production, which was a state monopoly. Jews also participated in the weaving and dyeing industries and worked as tanners, major activities in Constantinople. Because the Church held significant power over secular affairs, however, Jews were faced with periods of forced conversions and experienced expulsions from some cities, including Constantinople. Late in the Middle Ages (1421), the Greek Jews were joined by immigrants fleeing from Germany and in 1492, by Sephardic Jews who had been expelled from Castile and Aragon. Since the Jews of Greece played only a small and peripheral role in Ashkenazic culture, we won’t discuss this group further.
Eastern Europe. The area of eastern Europe that we will discuss includes Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Poland, and the Balkans. Areas of Russia proper and the Baltic countries did not have any significant (if any) Jewish population during the early Middle Ages, while Ukraine (the Crimea) contained the Jewish remnants of the communities of the Khazars, those who did not flee to the west after the Russians defeated Khazaria. Later, of course, this region became immensely important in Jewish history.
While not certain proof of a tenth-century Jewish population in Vienna, a document exists that mandates equal status of the Jewish and Christian merchants on the Danube River. However, any physical records of significant numbers of Jews in Austria do not exist until the twelfth century when two synagogues were constructed in Vienna. (Notice even then that synagogues tended to come in pairs—the one you attend and the one you wouldn’t set foot into.)
A Jewish presence in Hungary in the late medieval period is first documented in a letter, mentioned earlier, written in about 960 by Hasdai ibn Shaprut, the Jewish minister of el-Andalusian Córdoba, to King Joseph of the Khazars. In it he wrote that the Slavic ambassadors to whom he entrusted the letter had promised to deliver it to the “King of Slavonia,” who would send it to Jews living in the “country of Hungarin,” who, in turn, would transmit it farther. A Jewish traveler and merchant, most likely a Radhanite from the el-Andalusian town of Tortosa who was known by his Arabic name of Ibrahim ibn Jakub, in his chronicles from about the same time wrote that Jews traveled from Hungary to Prague for business purposes. There is also a possibility that Jewish Khazars may have been among the Hungarian troops that invaded part of Bulgaria in the second half of the ninth century. By the late eleventh century the rulers of Hungary began to introduce anti-Jewish legislation similar to that of other parts of Europe.
The earliest written record of Jews arriving in Poland dates to about 966. In this year Ibrahim ibn Jakub wrote in his chronicles that he encountered Jewish merchants living in Silesia along the trade routes leading eastward from the Germanies to Kiev and Bukhara. His writings were the first to describe the Polish state under the rule of prince Mieszko I. It’s not until the eleventh century that Polish chronicles mention a Jewish population living in Gniezno; at that time this was the capital of the Polish kingdom. The other areas of eastern Europe continued to be home to very small Jewish populations until after the Crusader period.
In one of the most popular theories about the origin of the First Crusade, when the Church saw that its mid-eleventh century “Peace of God” and “Truce of God” attempts at pacification to calm the strife between the knights of local barons and even between European countries were flagging, a solution suddenly presented itself. An ambassador from the Byzantine Empire appeared at the Papal Palace in Rome seeking the support of Pope Urban II. The Byzantine emperor hoped that the pope could persuade the kings of the western countries to send troops to aid the Byzantines in defending their lands against the attacks of the Turkish Muslims. This request fit with the pope’s desire to find a way to steer the violent proclivities of the militants of France and Germany away from fighting among themselves—he could raise his own army to go to the aid of the beleaguered Byzantines in their battles against the Muslims and thereby restore the Holy Land to its former Christian rule. Thus was born the idea of the Holy Crusade; the Crusade period of history was to change the landscape of Europe forever, especially in its effect on the lives of Jews everywhere in Europe.
In November of 1095 Urban II proclaimed an appeal to all Christians to form a holy army to go to the aid of their Byzantine brethren. He declared an “indulgence” (a remission of all sins) for anyone who participated in this holy war. The Church even distributed special insignia, a cloth cross, to be sewn on the crusaders’ outer garments. The effect of the pope’s appeal was electric on both Christians and Jews. The former were seeking an immediate outlet for their newly found pietism and faith, not to mention aggression, while the latter understood only too well the danger that such a violent religious movement would unleash on their communities. They knew that the enmity of the Christians would fall on their people—after all, the Jews were very aware that they were viewed, as the Muslims were, as enemies of Christ, and their communities were right here at home, much closer than those of the Muslims far away in the Holy Land.
The First Crusade began to mobilize in the spring of 1096 in northwestern France, mostly around Paris, but it became clear very early that the Jews would be its first victims. One major Crusader leader, a Frankish knight named Godfrey of Bouillon, its lord in fact, who became the first ruler of the “Kingdom of Jerusalem” in 1099, announced to the organizing nobles,
...[we must] go on this journey only after avenging the blood of the crucified one by shedding Jewish blood and completely eradicating any trace of those bearing the name “Jew,” thus assuaging his own burning wrath.
When Henry IV of the Holy Roman Empire heard of this pledge, he issued an order prohibiting the killing of any Jews. But there was widespread, if disorganized, violence against the Jews of northern France; it appears that in order to finance the purchase of arms, armor, and provisions, some Crusaders borrowed funds from Jews, and then rationalized that the killing of Jews was simply an extension of killing infidels in general, and proceeded to do so. Furthermore, the likelihood that killing Jews could erase the loan was an idea that was not lost on these people.
Figure 29. First through Third Crusade
Figure 30. The German Crusade
Urban’s appeal for a crusading army had an unintended effect. The end of the eleventh century was a period of severe economic hardship; the level of social unrest was enormous and the people of the lower social classes, whipped into a millennial fervor by preachers and suffering from severe economic stresses, needed an outlet for their pent-up energies. Instead of an orderly and trained army, as the Byzantine ambassador had hoped to get, the first groups that set out for the Holy Land were, in essence, a number of unruly peasant mobs that were led, not by people with military training, but by people who thought that they could win battles through faith and numbers. These mobs set out with virtually no provisions and very few weapons. The peasants carried their farm implements for weapons and brought food for perhaps a week. When the first groups of Crusader mobs set out from Rouen and Evreux in France (Figure 29), they immediately began plundering those Jewish communities for supplies and loot; the French Jews sent urgent messages of warning to the communities in the Rhineland.
Even though they were alerted to the danger of the Crusaders by their French neighbors, the Jewish communities of the Rhineland felt that they would be insulated from any harm. After all, they lived peacefully with their Christian neighbors and had the support of the local nobles and church leaders. Furthermore, the Rhineland did not lie on the path eastward from France toward Asia Minor. But the first group of Crusaders didn’t come from France, it came from close by. Originating in Flanders in the spring of 1096 was a group that grew to become 15,000 strong. It was led by Peter the Hermit, an antisocial friar, and an impoverished knight named Walter Sans Avoir and is known as the “People’s Crusade”; while this mob may have been involved in violence against the Jews, its members certainly extorted the communities through which they passed to obtain money and provisions (see Figure 29, "Popular Crusade"). Two other Crusader groups formed near the Rhineland around the same time and were led by a priest named Volkmar and a petty noble named Gottschalk (Figure 30). Volkmar’s and Gottschalk’s groups traveled to the east, the first group attacking the Jewish community of Prague and the other, that of Ratisbon (Regensburg).
So far the Rhenish communities had escaped any serious damage. What they didn’t count on was the hatred against Jews held by some of the Crusader leaders. Later that spring, a group of some 10,000 to 15,000 Crusaders led by a brutal noble named Emicho of Flonheim (or Leisingen) set out from France but diverted northeast into the Rhineland, making a target of Speyer, Worms, Mainz, Trier, Metz, and Cologne. The Jews of these communities, when they heard of the advancing horde, obtained assurances of protection from the local authorities and their Gentile neighbors. However, when the Crusaders attacked the communities, the small forces that the authorities could muster were no match for the great numbers of the Crusader mobs, and besides, many of the defenders actually sympathized with the attackers. The Jews defended themselves as best as they could but the mobs still murdered Jews wherever they were to be found. Horrific stories have been written about how Jews were slaughtered and about how many killed their family members and then committed suicide (kaddish haShem, “sanctifying God’s name”) rather than accepting baptism or being slain by the mob.
Many Jews fled to nearby castles and bishops’ keeps seeking protection; sometimes the bishops and nobles were able to save those refugees. Four cities may serve as examples of the effectiveness of the authorities’ protection of their Jewish communities. John, the bishop of Speyer and a successor of Rüdiger, was held in high esteem by the community. When the Crusader riots broke out in Speyer, John appeared with a large number of troops and quickly quelled the riots. He arrested the ringleaders and punished some of them by cutting off their arms. He had his troops bring the Jews to the local castles where they were protected from further violence. As a result, very few Jews lost their lives. In contrast, in Worms, where the local bishop was disliked and opposed by the community, neither the clergy nor the populace took any protective measures; the bishop merely advised the Jews to accept baptism. A few were forcibly baptized but the population was murdered. Mainz, our third example, was the largest of these cities, and the archbishop and city leaders tried to protect the Jews by locking them in the episcopal palace. The rioters broke into the palace and killed a large number of them, but fifty-three escaped when the archbishop Ruthard put them on boats and sent them to Rüdesheim to try to keep them safe. Then Ruthard demanded that this group convert; when they refused, they were turned over to the mob and were killed. In our last example, Bamburg, most Jews escaped slaughter because they were herded into the Regnitz River and involuntarily baptized en masse but in 1097 Emperor Henry IV, over the strong opposition of the Church, allowed them to return to Judaism. Throughout Germany, after the perils passed, many who saved their lives by fleeing from the rioters were able to return to their homes.
Even though the Crusade did not precipitate a mass emigration of Jews to the East, as many have assumed, its effect on the sense of security of the Rhineland’s Jewish peoples was immense. Not only did the Jews of Germany suffer greatly, also Jews all across Europe were affected by the havoc wreaked by the soldiers and mobs of the Crusade. The news of the distant Crusader rampages against other Jewish communities soon reached the Rhineland from the East. The news of the fate of the mobs of the “German Crusade,” the groups led by Emicho, Volkmar, and Gottschalk—most members of these mobs were massacred by troops of Hungary when they tried their plundering tactics there—did not assuage their grief. This was the end of an era. The ability for Jews to engage in long-distance commerce was gone. No longer could the Jews assume that they were part of a larger community of Christians and Jews that could peacefully coexist, albeit with a little friction and some restrictive laws which could be tolerated. Now they learned that they were considered to be enemies of the majority, hated and subject to sudden violence. They saw first-hand how the commoners had now come to believe that attacking Jews was an acceptable thing to do in times of religious or social unrest.
How many Jews actually perished in the upheavals of the First Crusade? The twelfth-century chronicles written by Jews about this event shape our understanding of the events of this period but these later accounts appear to be considerably exaggerated when compared to contemporaneous records. It has been suggested that some twelve thousand individuals perished in the Rhineland between May and July of 1096; other sources claim that over five thousand Jews were slaughtered in all of Europe during 1096–97, but the true death toll is completely unknown. Whatever the death toll truly was, the Jewish communities of the Rhine were quickly re-established and life resumed. But conditions had forever changed and in increasing frequency Jews found themselves targets of persecution and, in later years, expulsion from their communities.
A remnant of the wanton killing of Jews in the First Crusade is preserved in our liturgy. As a result of the massacres of the populations of entire towns and the practice of kiddush haShem by a number of Jews, Ashkenazic Jews soon began to include the recitation of the Kaddish, the Aramaic prayer that sanctifies God’s name, as a memorial of a deceased relative. They also developed the Yizkor prayers and added this memorial service to be recited on the last day of the three pilgrimage festivals of Sukkot, Pesach, and Shavuot, and to the Yom Kippur service.
Figure 31. Travels of Benjamin of Tudela
We have a remarkable record of the conditions that existed for Jews in southern and eastern Europe, Asia Minor, and north Africa during the middle of the twelfth century that includes the documentation of numerous communities not known from any other source (Figure 31). Sometime around 1165, a traveler named Benjamin set out from his home in Tudela in Navarre of northern Spain; the chronicle of his travels is considered by historians to contain accurate descriptions of everyday life in Europe and Asia of the Middle Ages. We don’t know the purpose of Benjamin of Tudela’s trip; it may have been a pilgrimage to Israel or it may have had a commercial purpose. Since he began the chronicle of his trip immediately upon embarking on it, he may have intended to document the potential hospitality of the Jewish communities along his route for the use of others who might want to travel in his footsteps or even for those fleeing persecution. This may account for his faithful recording of the nature of the places he visited, the occupations of the people he met, and even censuses of the towns he passed through. He recorded visiting more than 300 towns and cities along his route before his returning home in 1173. The account of his travels in areas of Asia precedes that of Marco Polo, who traveled the Silk Road a century later.
Figure 32. Travels of Petachiah of Ratisbon
Another remarkable traveler of this period was Petachiah ben Ya’akov, known as Petachiah of Ratisbon (Regensburg). The actual dates of his travels are uncertain; he left Regensburg and settled in Prague, the capital of Bohemia, and most likely set out from Prague sometime between 1170 and 1180 (Figure 32). He arrived in Jerusalem prior to 1187 since he described it as the “Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem,” which fell to the Muslims in that year. Much of his travelogue was lost, but since a surviving edition written by Judah the Pious exists, Petachiah must have returned to Regensberg prior to that sage’s death in 1217.
From the extant report by Judah the Pious, Sibuv haOlam (A World Trip), Petachiah traveled east from Bohemia, through Poland, Ruthenia, southern Ukraine (which he called Kedar), and the Crimea. He found remnants of the Khazars in the Crimea and described them as well as the early Crimean Karaite community. He then turned southeast, continuing in the lands of the Kipchak Khanates and south into the Caucasus to Armenia and stayed for a period in Nisibis. From there he went on into Mesopotamia, visiting Nineveh, Sura, Pumbedita, and Baghdad before turning east to Persia and traveling as far as Hamadan. Returning to Mesopotamia, he journeyed up the Euphrates and stopped at the little countries of Aleppo and Damascus. He continued on to the Kingdom of Jerusalem where he visited holy sites in the Galilee and Judea. He most likely then continued his trip by sea, because the next places that are described are in Greece. From there, presumably, he returned home via the Balkans. He was not as keen an observer as was Benjamin of Tudela, but his reports do provide detailed information about the Jewish aspects of his journey, including shrines, graves of holy men, and descriptions of Jewish communities and their leaders.
Figure 33. The Rhineland, 1100-1200
Figure 34. The Rhineland, 1200-1300
It seems that the violence of the Crusade and other persecutions of the Jews of Germany and France had little effect on the immigration and settlement of Jews from other regions into northwestern Europe (Figure 33). During the first half of the twelfth century, it appears that Germany, at least, had become so attractive to immigrants that the communities felt obliged to apply a herem ha-yishuv, a ban on newcomers, to prevent the settlement of outsiders in their communities without the permission of community leaders. Limiting settlers had several objectives: the communities could limit their size thus avoiding creating problems with their Christian neighbors, they could protect their members from economic competition, and they could prevent socially objectionable people from settling. Despite the existence of this limitation on immigrants, the ongoing migrations of Jews to the East and the violence and persecutions the Jews suffered, large numbers of Jewish settlers continued to flow into the region and by the end of the thirteenth century the Jewish population had increased enormously (Figure 34). By the middle of the fourteenth century, Jewish communities had grown to occupy the entire Rhine River valley, and most of these communities appear to have thrived even considering the anti-Jewish laws, expulsions, and violence that many endured.
In the aftermath of the First Crusade, one of its most immediate effects on Jews’ lives was that international commerce had become closed to them as their primary occupations. Before the Crusade, Jews had a virtual monopoly on trade between the East and Europe. But now the presence of European Christians in the Holy Land opened the entire Levant to Christian commercial enterprise, dramatically reducing the influence of Jewish merchants operating in both the East and the West. Furthermore, Jews found that they could no longer travel safely—their travels could no longer be protected effectively by the rulers of the lands along the major trading routes, thus curtailing their trading activities further. It’s possible that one of the primary reasons that Benjamin of Tudela made his trip was in an attempt to seek out safe routes for Jewish traders to follow. Since Jews could not travel to buy and sell goods, they had to limit their activities to their immediate town or vicinity. Consequently they found themselves increasingly needing to deal with Christians and thus instances of contract disputes between Christians and Jews grew significantly. Furthermore, the tax demands of the civil authorities were increasing sharply. Civil taxes were levied not on the individual Jew but on the entire community that then allocated each family’s share. Many Jews felt that their tax shares were being unfairly allocated. A major change was needed in the social organization on the Jewish communities to deal with intercultural contacts and internal community practices, and the first response to this need was in Troyes in France.
In Troyes somewhere around 1160, a distinguished group of scholars assembled to discuss these emerging social problems. The group was led by Jacob ben Meir, known as Rabbeinu Tam, his brother Shmuel ben Meir (Rashbam)—grandsons of Rashi—and Eliezer ben Nathan (Ra’avan). It included more than 250 rabbis and scholars from all over France. The members of this synod enacted a number of communal decrees that covered Jewish-Christian relations and also decided many issues that related to the internal functioning of the Jewish community. Some of these decisions included the following:
Of course the Rhenish communities had experienced many of the same problems, but the synod at Troyes was only binding on French Jews. So in about 1196, a group of community leaders from towns throughout the Rhineland assembled in Mainz for their own synod and adopted most of the decrees from Troyes and added a few of their own. In 1220 a second meeting was held to strengthen these decrees. Here are some specific decrees:
They even added decrees about dress and appearance:
Figure 35. The Sh"UM cities
These decrees are known as the Takkanot Shum (Enactments of ShU″M) after the names of three Rhenish cities, Speyer, Worms, and Mainz, that confederated to create the ShU″M league (so called after their Hebrew names Shpira, Vermayza, and Magentza) (Figure 35). The Takkanot were continually updated and amended by league members over a period of several decades. The ShU″M cities developed into the major center of Jewish life during medieval times. They are regarded as the cradle of Ashkenazic culture.
Jews were invited to settle in many towns and provinces of Europe during the eleventh and twelfth centuries because their presence brought prosperity to the region. But the political situation for the Jews beginning in the period following the First Crusade was one of alternating acceptance followed by legal persecution, offers of protection followed by periods of high taxation, and invitations to settle followed by expulsion. Every civil and ecclesiastical authority, it seems, had its taxes: the kings and emperors; the dukes, princes, and barons; the bishops; and the towns all exercised the power of taxation. In some cases the church insisted on Jewish property owners paying tithes, since the church claimed that the Jews’ property in the past must have been owned by a Christian. In other cases the rulers allowed bishops the right to levy taxes on Jews living in their diocese. We mentioned earlier that in Germany, the total of the taxes the Jews paid amounted to twenty percent of the total revenue collected from all of the cities of the empire, while the Jews only comprised less than one percent of the population. Eventually the authorities, usually encouraged by the Church and sometimes the commoners, expelled the Jews (and in the process confiscated their property and annulled or assumed ownership of any outstanding loans).
The relationship of the Jews and the Church was much more complex than with the secular governments, and consisted of several issues; chief among them were its secular viewpoint for Christian-Jewish contacts, its theology concerning the status of the Jews, and how the Jews were actually treated by local Church authorities.
The Church’s official secular policy concerning the Jews is illustrated by the Sicut Iudaeis bull first issued by Pope Calixtus II in about 1120. This was a comprehensive act intended to protect Jews who suffered during the First Crusade and it forbade a large number of anti-Jewish activities, including, for example, harming Jews, taking their property, coercing them to convert, disturbing the celebration of their festivals, and interfering with their cemeteries, all on pain of excommunication. Twenty-three popes from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries reissued this bull and it was even included in canon law under the title Constitutio pro Iudeis. In all of its formulations it stressed that the fundamental rights of the Jews were to be safeguarded, but papal authority was generally so limited that these bulls had no real effect in protecting the Jews.
The Church’s theology had a more far-reaching effect. These doctrines were based on the writings of Augustine (354–430) that claimed that the Jews had been preserved by God to be witnesses to the truth of Christianity. Under Augustine’s doctrine, the Jews were the recipients of God’s messianic prophecies, and even though they rejected those prophecies out of blind stubbornness, the continued existence of the Jews attested to the prophecies’ validity. The fact that the Jews now lived as a despised nation, humble and subservient to the Christians, was proof of God’s punishment for their having rejected Christ, and the Jews must be kept in ignominy and misery as testimony to the truth of Christianity. These Augustinian doctrines strongly implied that the Jews were to be protected.
However, as the awareness of the nature of the talmudic texts that interpreted biblical law filtered down the Church hierarchy from the theologians to the preachers, many local clergy—priests and bishops—felt that the Jewish religion, which was now based on talmudic halakhah instead of biblical law, had progressed past the point where the Jews could serve as witnesses to the truth of Christianity. This Church faction viewed the Talmud as an illegitimate and illegal interpretation of the Bible; the Talmud constituted a form of heresy that had to be abolished. It was these ideas that led to the trials of the Talmud that began in France in the twelfth century.
The Church leadership was extremely uncomfortable with any attempt to deny the validity of the interpretation of Scripture that the Talmud represented. After all, if the Church were to condemn the validity of biblical interpretation represented by the Jewish Oral Law, would that not severely compromise its own claim of being the sole interpreter of Scripture? The Church continued to attempt to minimize this kind of attack on Jewish beliefs, but never managed to fully assert its authority to have its local clergy practice tolerance of Jewish theology and throughout European history the papacy was completely ineffective in enforcing its protective decrees.
The third issue was the behavior of local clergy in their relationships with Jews—this varied tremendously. We’ve already mentioned the Bishop of Speyer, who in 1084 issued an invitation for Jews to live in his domain. This was an example of secular tolerance. An example of religious tolerance may be found in the writings of Gilbert Crispin, Abbot of Westminster and disciple of Anselm of Canterbury, who, during the period of 1090–95, wrote the work, Discussion between a Jew and a Christian, that purports to be a record of a friendly disputation between Crispin and a Jew from Mainz; in it the Jew states various objections to some fundamental tenets of Christianity, thus permitting the author to expand on them in a non-confrontational manner. An extract of this work is here. Despite such instances of tolerance, the general treatment of the Jews by the clergy responded to that of the common people rather than to that of the Roman hierarchy.Indeed, in many cases the local clergy tended to incite violence by the masses against the Jews through inflammatory preaching and by encouraging false rumors. We shall see the effect of this anti-Jewish activity when we cover the Black Death catastrophe and the blood libel slanders.
Finally, the Church issued legislation in an attempt to influence monarchs to adopt laws to govern their kingdoms’ societies. One quite famous synod, called by Pope Innocent III and known as the Fourth Lateran Council, took place in 1215 and enacted a number of canons of which many applied to Jewish-Christian relations.
Actually, the pointed hat, which was awkward and uncomfortable to wear, could be found in illustrations far more than on Jews’ heads. And its obligatory adoption was slow—in Augsburg, for example, the Jewish hat and badge did not become mandatory until 1434. Of course not all rulers adopted all of these canons into their secular laws, but some did, and most of the Church’s canons became part of the civil law at some time in most countries during the Middle Ages.
Before we can discuss the beginnings of the great Jewish civilization of eastern Europe, we need to examine the eastward movement of the Jewish populations of western Europe that began even before the First Crusade. Population movement eastward in the tenth and eleventh centuries was fairly small, but it was present. Word of the growth of new communities in the East came to the Rhenish Jews and where new communities are growing, economic opportunities are created. The Jews were attracted by these opportunities and, later, by the possibility of escaping the ever-increasing persecutions and restrictions the local church and rulers were imposing. There is no record of when Jewish emigration from the Rhineland to Poland actually began. We referred earlier to the existence of a journal account of the Spanish-Jewish merchant Ibrahim ibn Jakub from about 960; in it he mentions trading by Jews in Cracow, and speaks of Mieszko I, the first duke of Poland, giving credence to his account. More Jews arrived following the period of the First Crusade; according to a historian known only as the “Chronicler of Prague,” they were fleeing persecution in Bohemia. During this period there was also immigration from areas of eastern Europe into Poland, coming from Hungary, the Balkans, and even Ukraine. In addition, in the tenth and eleventh centuries there are records of Jews emigrating from Bavaria and the Rhineland to Vienna. Later evidence of a Jewish presence in Poland comes from archeological evidence, twelfth-century Polish coins bearing Hebrew inscriptions that were likely carried to Vienna by Jewish merchants operating in Poland.
Figure 36. Early immigrations into Central Europe
During the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the areas of Ashkenazic influence spread slowly (Figure 36). But the twelfth century in Europe marked the appearance of a new attitude of Christians toward the Jews. Prior to the twelfth century, the common Christian and his local clerics perceived the Jews as the archaic remnant of a religion that had been surpassed by Christianity. The presence of members of this religious minority led to a form of rivalry where the minority needed to be repressed in order to maintain the image that it had actually been surpassed. The fact that Jews were seen as wealthy and prosperous, having secure occupations, and being favored by the nobility, was at odds with the view of the Jews that the Church was attempting to foster. The existence of laws that prohibited proselytizing speaks to the reality that some Christians were attracted to Judaism—that it held some kind of fascination for them—for how could Jews be so successful in face of the stern opposition of the Church unless they had some unknown secret?
Furthermore, the violence against the Jews during the First Crusade taught the masses that in most cases, even though laws prohibited violence against the Jews, attacks and riots against the “enemies of Christ” were rarely punished. Preaching by the Church against the Jews had internalized hatred against them within the common citizen; the mental image of the Jew as a person to be despised was to last well past the end of the Middle Ages—even to modern times. Jews were said to be impure, they were heretics, they were a threat to Christians, and they would contaminate anyone who came into their presence. This fear was the primary reason that led to the laws that Jews wear distinguishing emblems and that prohibited Jews from associating with Christians.
Figure 37. Blood libels and host desecration
In the middle of the twelfth century, a horrific accusation against the Jews was made. In 1144, the young William of Norwich (East Anglia in England) went missing. His body was eventually discovered, but it was only after the passage of several months that a local cleric decided that he had been murdered by Jews for ritual purposes. This was the first recorded instance of what became known as the “blood libel”: the accusation that during Passover, the Jews must kill a Christian, typically a child, crucify him, and drink his blood as part of the ritual (Figure 37). When the Jews of London were required to pay an enormous fine in 1130–31 for having killed a “sick man,” this could have been an earlier incident of a blood libel. Actually the first known instance of the blood libel was made in the writings of the antisemitic Greek writer Apion (ca. 20 BCE– ca. 48 CE) who claimed that the Jews sacrificed Greeks in the Jerusalem Temple. Also during the Roman period, similar charges had been made against the Christians by their pagan persecutors. Now, after the passage of over a thousand years, this charge was being levied again.
Where did the idea for such a charge come from? It certainly couldn’t have been recalled from ancient history. Possibly the idea came from the convergence of two completely different lines of thought. First, in a horrified response to the unprecedented violence wreaked on the Jews during the First Crusade, Church authorities issued proclamations and bulls condemning the anti-Jewish violence and forbidding the murder of Jews on the pretext that they, like the Muslims, were infidels. Commoners were put on notice that killing Jews because they were Jews was wrong. So the commoners and local clergy needed to devise another reason to justify their murder. And such a reason could be found, thanks to the proximity of Purim to Easter. During Purim some Jews would celebrate by making an effigy of Haman and hanging him (Esther 7:10). Of course the effigy would be dressed like a Christian, and Christians saw in this practice a re-enactment of the crucifixion. A Christian interpretation of this practice could have led to the formulation of all of the other bizarre claims that surrounded the blood-libel accusations: that Jews needed Christian blood to re-enact the “passion of the crucifixion,” that blood was needed to bake matzoh for Passover, that it was needed for the sacramental wine used in the seder, that it soothed the pain of a child during circumcision, or even that it cured the bad odor, fetor Judaicus, that was believed to emanate from Jews’ bodies—supposedly a result of their rejection of Jesus.
On the other hand, Christians knew that when the Jews were attacked during anti-Jewish rioting, many of them killed their families and themselves rather than to submit to conversion. If Jews could kill their own families—kill their children—what then would keep them from killing innocent Christians when given the chance? Indeed, since the Jews didn’t hesitate to kill the Savior, why wouldn’t they try to kill Christians however they could? Jews could poison wells, burn down Christian homes, and kidnap and murder Christian children. Then, of course, if the Christians killed Jews, it would be a self-defensive act. Logical reasoning was no bar to such thoughts—for example, the idea that Jews themselves used the same wells they were accused of poisoning never seemed to arise. The result of these lines of reasoning together with the people’s underlying fear and disgust of the Jews quickly led to the unleashing of numerous libels and imaginary tales.
During the remainder of the twelfth century, instances of blood libel occurred in Gloucester and Winchester in England, in Pontoise in France, in Bamberg in the Holy Roman Empire, and in Prague in Bohemia. In 1235, the Jews of Fulda were accused of murdering five boys for ritual purposes. The case was brought to the emperor, Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, who appointed a inquest committee consisting of leading clerics and Christian hebraists to investigate the validity of the charge. When this group soon declared that ritual murder was a myth, the imperial diet which met in Augsburg in 1236, exonerated the Jews of Fulda. This decision of the German empire about the validity of the blood-libel charge had no effect on its recurrence, however; by the end of the thirteenth century the charge became an almost annual occurrence in the Germanies. When Passover was not involved, the blood libel is sometimes termed “ritual murder.” An instance of ritual murder occurred in 1171 in Blois, France, where the local Jews were accused of killing a young Christian; here thirty-one individuals were burned alive. The blood libel became so familiar in the popular culture of the day that Chaucer, the great fourteenth-century English poet, had his heroine of The Prioress’s Tale in the Canterbury Tales relate such a blood-libel story.
Figure 38. Serratia marcescens on a wafer
Yet another anti-Jewish libel concerned the desecration of the host. Christians illogically believed that Jews also thought that the wafers represented Jesus’ body and would attempt to obtain hosts to “torture” them. Sometimes a miracle would be observed to occur: a host was bleeding! Surely a Jew must have somehow gotten access to it; any likely Jews were sought and charged with stabbing the wafer to desecrate it. Then the miraculous wafer would be made into a holy relic and its shrine became the destination of pious pilgrims seeking cures for their ailments. Modern science has shown that the “bloody” areas in question that could appear on the wafers were most likely caused by the growth of colonies of the microbe Serratia marcescens which forms scarlet colonies on foods of high starch content and low acidity kept in a warm, humid place—or, also likely, someone, perhaps a priest, would simply sprinkle blood on the wafers to create a pretext for attacking Jews (Figure 38). In addition to stabbing the hosts, Jews were accused of boiling, crushing, burying, or burning them, or using them in magical rituals designed to curse Christians. The first recorded instance of host desecration was made in 1243 at Berlitz, near Berlin. The reaction was swift and deadly; all the Jews of Berlitz were burned on the spot, which was subsequently called “Judenberg.” An accusation of theft and desecration of the host occurred in Brussels in 1370; as a consequence the local Jews were burned at the stake and in the fifteenth century a cult of the miraculous host developed in Brussels. In the fourteenth century the ritual murder libel became more complex. Under this formulation, the Jews were now said to kill Christian children in order to obtain the host to desecrate it.
Yet another myth grew in the Middle Ages against the Jews. In their constant attempts to re-enact the crucifixion, they were periodically accused of stealing images of Jesus from churches in an attempt to “wound” him by stabbing or mutilating the image. This kind of accusation is actually the earliest of any of the other libels; its first appearance was in 1062 in Pescara, Italy, where the Jews were accused of taking an image of Jesus to the synagogue on the evening of Good Friday and mutilating it. The basis of this accusation probably lay in the knowledge of the Jews’ belief that ritual images were to be abhorred, a decree found in the Ten Commandments.
Besides the fear and loathing of the Jews that most common Christians held, how could such incredible stories continue to spread about them? Of course superstitions and belief in the occult were common during the Middle Ages, but historians have shown that in addition to the social and theological motives of persecuting the Jews, there was a strong economic motive as well. First, the property of the accused Jews frequently would be distributed among the accusers and any loans that the Jews held would be voided. Also the local clerics, in pursuing the accusations, would greatly enhance their standing in the community and that could be translated into financial reward, since the site of the precipitating event, be it the display of the relic or the grave of a beatified “martyr,” would become a destination for pilgrims, bringing in money and generating widespread fame.
Even though the nobility and Church leadership spoke frequently against these libels, it had no effect on the number of accusations that occurred—most were actually instigated and promoted by local clergy despite the opposition of their superiors. Opposition to these libels came from the highest sources. We mentioned above the case of Fulda in 1235–36, where Frederick II refuted an accusation of ritual murder; in addition, in 1247 a papal bull was issued by Innocent IV, Lacrimabilem Judaeorum, that denied the allegation that Jewish law prescribed the ritual consumption of a Christian child’s heart. Other condemnations of the blood libel were reiterated by popes Alexander IV in 1255 and Gregory X in 1272 .
Figure 39. Migrations in Central Europe
Drang nach Osten. If Jewish population movements from Germany into the East were not an immediate response to the First Crusade, as many historians now believe, what then provided the impetus for many Jews to leave their homes in the Rhineland and move hundreds of miles east to unknown lands? You’ll recall that in the fifth century, Europe’s population underwent a massive population shift from east to west. Much of this movement was in response to invasions of Europe by Asiatic tribes, but not all of this movement could be ascribed to invasion. Other reasons for population movement could have included periods of low crop yields (Europe suffered those periodically), climate change (such as the “Little Ice Age” of sixteenth- to seventeenth-century Europe), or even a response to increasing population density (locals being driven out by settlers arriving from further east). It appears that the eastward movement in the twelfth century resulted from just one of these pressures: population growth. In this case the eastward population movement of the Germans is known by historians as the “Drang nach Osten,” “yearning for the East,” and its cause appears to be linked to growing populations in the Rhenish, Flemish, and Saxon territories of the Holy Roman Empire and resulted in the emigration of Germans into lightly populated Poland (primarily Silesia) and Lithuania (Figure 39). The German nobility, the Slavic rulers, and the medieval Church all supported these movements. In increasing numbers, the Jews of the Rhineland were among those who emigrated from Germany to the East, and these Jews brought with them the patois of German and Hebrew that eventually became Yiddish.
Long-distance travel in the early second millennium was difficult and risky, particularly for families. Stories have come down to us about how some journeys were made. Families would travel in groups by mule cart—easy prey for raiders. In fact, a prominent twelfth-century religious text, the Sefer Chasidim, made the incredible recommendation that men wear the garb of priests because priests were thought to be much less frequently disturbed by highway violence. The text also allowed women to wear male disguises for protection, including wearing false beards, despite the strong biblical and talmudic prohibitions against women dressing as men. And possession of swords and armor was commonplace, even for the women; these protections were a necessity for travelers. Provisions—food and water and fodder for the beasts—were not a significant problem, since the travelers could trade goods with local farmers—coinage being useless away from populated areas—to obtain basic foodstuffs like eggs, milk, grains, and vegetables. Meat? None. During the Middle Ages consumption of meat was a rare treat, reserved for the Sabbath and holidays. Of course, not eating meat while traveling took care of the kashrut problem.
In about 1145, preparations began for the Second Crusade (see Figure 29), which was announced by Pope Eugene III in response to the fall of the Crusader state of Edessa of southern Turkey. Unlike the First Crusade, this one was led by European kings, including Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany, who were accompanied by a number of other important European nobles. Eugene granted the same indulgences as Urban II did in the First Crusade, and Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux and the most respected cleric of the period, was chosen to recruit for the war. The connection of this crusade to the Ashkenazic Jews is two-fold: First, to help finance it, Peter the Venerable of Cluny advised Louis VII to confiscate Jewish property. Although their property was spared, the Jews were nevertheless compelled to make a considerable financial contribution. Then, while the fundraising for the crusade had begun, a fanatical French monk named Raoul (called Rudolf in Germany) traveled to Germany and began inciting massacres of Jews in Cologne, Mainz, Worms, and Speyer, claiming that Jews were not contributing financially to the rescue of the Holy Land. The archbishops of Cologne and Mainz appealed to Bernard to silence Rudolf; Bernard himself traveled to the Rhineland, located Rudolf, and sent him back home to his monastery.
The Second Crusade failed in all of its attempts to retake the lands that the Muslims had captured from the Christian kingdoms in the Middle East. Their only success actually occurred while they were en route to the Middle East—in Portugal, where they were able to help the Portugese army capture Lisbon from the Moors. The result was the Third Crusade of 1189–92 (also known as the Kings’ Crusade). Jews of England and northern France suffered particularly as a result of this crusade. Although it had some successes, the Christians again failed in their primary objective to capture Jerusalem.
Figure 40. Expulsions in the Middle Ages
Apart from localized expulsions, until the end of the thirteenth century no country had expelled all its Jews. This changed in 1290 when Edward I expelled the Jews of England. In all cases of this and later European expulsions, the rulers had underlying financial motives. As long as the Jews could provide needed tax revenue, their presence was useful. When other sources of revenue became available, the presence of Jews would no longer be necessary. In the case of England, the Jews’ primary occupation of money-lenders/bankers had been challenged by several European trading groups (one group was known as the “Lombards”) who had come from southern France and Italy and set up competing businesses. During the course of the thirteenth century the Jews’ contribution to the king’s revenue decreased from greater than 14 percent to only one percent. In 1275, Edward I introduced the “Statute of Jewry” that mandated that during the following fifteen-year period, Jews were to be progressively prohibited from lending to Christians. After the passage of the statute, the Jews were only able to maintain a low level of money-lending activity. With the resulting extreme decrease in their economic utility, the Jews were now no longer essential to the kingdom and they could be expelled, with the added benefit that their homes and any of their outstanding loans would become the king’s property (Figure 40). This wasn’t a large expulsion; it’s estimated that there were only about 3,000 Jews in England at the time. Also, Edward allowed them to take whatever cash and portable property they owned with them and even arranged for ships to take them to France. Jews weren’t officially allowed back into England until the eighteenth century but were unofficially permitted to return in 1655.
In continental Europe, the fourteenth century was a period of constant expulsions of Jews, mainly in the West. As a country, France was more monolithic than any other western continental kingdom, consisting of the central area of modern France and, later, Provence in the south. The first expulsion in France was decreed in 1306 by Philip IV the Fair. Jewish loans and property were seized. Soon the economy began to suffer and in 1315, Louis X allowed them to return, only to be expelled again in 1322. This cycle was repeated in 1359 when Jews returned to France but were again expelled in 1395. However, areas of France outside its central core were not affected by these cycles of expulsion and return: Jews were never expelled from Alsace and Lorraine, Avignon in Comtat Venaissin, and the county of Nice.
Germany as an “empire” was divided into numerous smaller kingdoms that mostly operated almost autonomously from the empire. The fifteenth century saw the largest incidence of expulsions from its city-states. Jews were expelled in 1400 from Prague; in 1420, 1438, 1462, and 1473 from Mainz; in 1424 from Cologne; in 1440 from Augsburg; in 1475 from Tyrol; in 1492 from Mecklenburg; in 1493 from Magdeburg; and from 1450 to 1519 from towns in Bavaria, Franconia, Swabia, Nuremberg, Brandenburg, and Regensburg. Austria was part of the Holy Roman Empire, and the first Austrian expulsion was from Vienna in 1420 by Albrecht V Ladislaus. During the years between 1440 and 1457, most of the Jews were expelled from Austrian territories although licenses to stay in certain areas could be purchased for a price.
In Eastern Europe Jews were usually not troubled by expulsions. These countries were the medieval equivalents of “third-world” countries and Jews were essential to their economies. Even still, Jews in Hungary, Silesia, and Lithuania all experienced isolated and regional episodes of expulsion.
Figure 41. Migrations into the thirteenth century
Poland. With persecution of the Jews being a constant threat across Europe during and in the aftermath of the Crusades, in the thirteenth century Poland became a haven for the Jews because of its relative tolerance. During this period, Polish nobility began a determined effort to attract immigrants and Jews in particular (Figure 41). The Slavic countries of Europe had experienced great devastation and depopulation during the Mongol invasions in 1241 (by Ogedei, a son of Genghis Khan) and therefore encouraged Jewish immigrants to settle the towns and villages by offering so-called “charters of privilege” to Jews who settled in a number of towns. As a result, immigrants flocked to Poland from Bohemia, Moravia, Germany, Italy, Spain, and colonies in the Crimea.
Earlier, in the twelfth century, Polish rulers had created numerous economic opportunities for the Jews in their territories. One such opportunity was the operation of a Polish mint. Under Mieszko III, first a prince and later the ruler of all Poland during the years 1138 to 1202, Jews worked as engravers of coinage dies and as supervisors of all the mint’s workers. They also produced coinage for subsidiary Polish duchies under the princes Casimir the Just, Boleslaus the Tall and Ladislaus Spindleshanks, striking coins called “bracteates” from pure silver and emblazoning them with inscriptions in Hebrew. One such inscription reads, “barukh Mishko krol Polski,” “blessed be Mieszko, king of Poland.” These coins circulated widely throughout Europe and were known for the purity of their silver; in fact, an Elizabethan-era British account that discusses this Polish coinage uses the term “sterling” in reference to the “Easterling” experts who minted these Polish silver coins. Some think that this was the origin of that British monetary term—“easterling silver.”
A “charter of privilege” or “privilege” was a basic legal document used in the Middle Ages to grant special rights or protection to an individual or a group. In this period when few organized codes of law existed, royal charters were necessary to confer any special rights to groups (such as merchants or Jews), institutions (for example, cities, churches, or monasteries), and individuals. The most famous of all of the charters of privilege granted to the Jews of Polish towns is one known as the “Kalisz statute.” (Extracts of the statute are here.) Granted in 1264 by Boleslaus the Pious, a successor to Mieszko III as king of Great Poland, it was strenuously opposed by the Church. This statute is based on one issued by Ottokar of Bohemia (1254) and closely resembles the ones issued by Frederick of Austria (1244) and Bella IV of Hungary (1251). It appears that this one was used, in turn, as the model for the Silesian statutes later issued by Prince Bolko I of Silesia (1295) and Prince Henry of Glogau (1299). The Kalisz statute exempted Jews from the legal and political jurisdiction of municipal officials and minor nobles; the Jews were to be subject only to princely courts. Jews were guaranteed the rights of free trade and the full authority to engage in money-lending, except that the only permitted security for loans could be “immovable property.” In it Jews were described as “slaves of the treasury” and granted protection of person and property as well as freedom in conducting religious services. They were also permitted to organize their communities on the principle of self-government. Eventually a number of other communities extended similar privileges; the major ones included Cracow, Brest, Vilna, and Minsk.
Later charters of privilege expanded Jewish privileges even more. Several of the most important of these additional rights included one that invested Jewish community leaders with the authority to judge cases between Jews, another granted permission to slaughter cattle according to Jewish ritual, and another stipulated that a Jew could not be brought before Christian ecclesiastical courts. It’s possible that this last privilege was intended to protect Jews from persecution by the Church for alleged religious crimes such as ritual murder or desecration of the host. It’s notable the accusation of ritual murder or host desecration was actually prohibited by Polish law. Although the reasons they protected the Jews with these privileges are certainly rooted in economics, later rulers, including Władysław II Jagiełło (r. 1377–1434), Casimir IV (1447–92), and Alexander (1502–06) maintained that they protected Jews because the principle of tolerance was in accordance with God’s laws or because the king’s tolerance should also be extended to Jews.
In the thirteenth century, Christian theologians and legal scholars began to write about the theological idea of “serfdom of Jewry,” an idea of the innate subservience of an entire group of people—a concept that was actually formulated in antiquity by Augustine. The status of Jews in western Europe was not that of serfs who were tied to the land and were essentially slaves of their lord, as we mentioned earlier. Jews had now become regarded as the personal property of the ruler, an extension of the kingdom’s treasury, and as such, a property to be protected by the ruler. Around 1236, Frederick II (r. 1212–1250) of the Holy Roman Empire granted to the Jews this “privileged” status of “serfs of the chamber,” thus placing them under imperial protection. This idea rapidly spread to France and to the Spanish kingdoms of Aragon and Castile. Under the laws of “serfdom of the chamber,” Jews were protected when traveling, they were free to move their residences, and were made exempt from special taxes and assessments imposed by local rulers. But on the other hand, this status gave the Jews the same status as ordinary property, furnishing the sovereign with justification to treat “his Jews” any way he liked; as his “property” he could rob or expel them, pawn their services (or taxes) to local nobles, and could acquire or cancel any debts owed to them. The charters of protection issued in Poland and Lithuania seem to be outgrowths of this “serfdom of the chamber” theology because in these kingdoms the official status of Jews seems to have been that of freemen “attached to the treasury,” that is, dependent upon the king. By the end of the fourteenth century, the powers of the Polish monarchy had so weakened that the kings had given the local nobles a free hand in how they treated Jews. This was not necessarily always bad for the Jews since their treatment at the hands of the local nobles ranged from being banned from living in certain cities to being employed in responsible governmental positions.
Jewish culture grew rapidly in eastern Europe. Part of the impetus came from Casimir III the Great, who in 1343 invited all Jews persecuted in western Europe to emigrate to Poland. Casimir was the ruler of all of Poland’s principalities; he reformed the Polish army and Polish civil and criminal law. He reaffirmed the charter of Kalisz of Boleslaus and added further provisions to safeguard the Jewish population of Poland. This became very significant when eight years later the Black Death plague struck central and eastern Europe. Attacks began against the Jews similar to those that occurred in Germany, but the royal protections afforded by Casimir’s charter prevented the violence from spreading beyond isolated local areas. This period also saw the beginning of another major immigration into Poland from western Europe, larger than any of the previous ones, mostly as a result of the numerous expulsions from German cities.
From thirteenth-century Regensburg in Bavaria at virtually the geographic center of Europe, the Jewish people spread out to the east bringing their language and culture to the sparsely settled Slavic lands. They traveled to Moravia, Bohemia, Poland and Lithuania, and western Russia (modern Belarus or White Russia and Moldova or Red Russia). And as they settled further and further east, their German culture became modified by that of the Slavs. One could point to Regensburg as the radiant of the new Jewish world, its origin, and later, its western boundary.
Figure 42. Jewish migrations; Rindfleisch and Armleder massacres
The expulsions of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as well as antisemitic violence in the Rhineland caused an ever-increasing number of Jews to find their way east. Several notable events occurred at the end of the thirteenth century and in the middle of the fourteenth. In 1298 a particularly brutal noble, a Franconian knight named Rindfleisch, instigated the massacre of thousands of Jews in the Rhineland during a civil war between Adolph and Albert I of Nassau (Figure 42). Some 146 Jewish communities were attacked and many were destroyed. Rindfleisch, who may have been heavily in debt to Jewish moneylenders, claimed a divine mission to exterminate “the accursed race of the Jews” following a rumor of desecration of the host.
Yet another major incidence of anti-Jewish violence occurred beginning in 1336 in Bavaria and Franconia and spread to the Rhineland and Alsace. This is known as the “Armleder” massacres, so called after a leather arm piece worn by its peasant members in emulation of the metal armor worn by knights. Led by noblemen as well as burghers, the mobs ravaged some 120 communities and were encouraged by some secular as well as Church authorities. Although the major attacks finally ended by 1338, further disturbances caused by the Armleders continued until the appearance of the Black Death.
Figure 43.Spread of the Black Death
Figure 44. Route of the flagellants and Black Death areas
The Black Death caused more than the death of some thirty to sixty percent of Europe’s population (Figure 43). It also brought the end of medieval society, affecting virtually the entire continent, and it took some 150 years for Europe’s population to recover. The plague entered Europe from the Mediterranean basin in about 1347, starting in a number of seaports located from Greece to Provence. It spread rapidly north, engulfing virtually all of Europe within three years. What could be the cause of such a great calamity? Contemporary scholars and others offered all kinds of theories, including unfavorable astrological signs, bad air, “contagion,” earthquakes, and, of course, the Jews.
Preceding the outbreak of the plague, in the middle of the thirteenth century a pietistic movement called the “flagellants” had arisen in the church (Figure 44). These were bands of reactionary militants who practiced self-mortification, whipping themselves until they drew blood. Initially tolerated by the church, they were later condemned and treated as heretics. The pope banned the movement in Italy in 1261, but it didn’t die—it moved into Germany and France and got stronger. The flagellants would travel through the countryside and stir up the populace. When the plague began, the activities of the flagellants increased dramatically. Bands of flagellants roamed through the Rhineland putting on displays of self-mortification. Sometimes bystanders would attempt to collect the blood they shed because it was reputed to possess healing powers. Many of the flagellants were preachers, and they quickly found a message to deliver about the plague: Jews seemed curiously unaffected by it, fewer of them died, so they must be responsible—the Jews were poisoning the water and this was the cause of the plague. The result of these slanders came immediately.
As Jean de Venette, prior of a Carmelite convent in Paris in the fourteenth century, wrote about the plague:
As a result of this theory of infected water and air as the source of the plague the Jews were suddenly and violently charged with infecting wells and water and corrupting the air. The whole world rose up against them cruelly on this account. In Germany and other parts of the world where Jews lived, they were massacred and slaughtered by Christians, and many thousands were burned everywhere, indiscriminately.
In February 1349, the citizens of Strasbourg burned 2,000 Jews on the orders of the city council despite the fact that the plague hadn’t yet reached Strasbourg. Six months later, in August, the Jewish communities of Mainz and Cologne were exterminated. By 1351, some sixty major and 150 smaller Jewish communities had been completely destroyed in Germany alone.
Authorities began to notice that many times when the flagellants entered a town where the plague was not present, it would break out soon thereafter. Thus many towns banned their entry. Some local rulers and communities protected their Jewish populations and in others the Jews attempted to defend themselves against rioters. But many thousands of Jews perished, if not from the disease, then from violence. The papacy tried to intervene in the wanton slaughter of the Jewish populace. Twice in 1349, on July 4 and September 26, Clement VI issued bulls that denounced the accusations that ascribed the plague to a Jewish plot and also issued orders to prohibit the flagellant processions that had reached alarming proportions.
What about the flagellants’ claim that Jews were not affected by the plague—that Jews were not dying in similar numbers to their Christian neighbors? This propaganda has actually survived into modern times with the explanation that it is indeed true: supposedly fewer Jews fell ill and died because they practiced better hygiene and in general tended to have better nutrition. We know now that this is not true; Jews actually perished at the same rate as everyone else. So how did the flagellants’ claim arise? Probably because they noticed as they traveled from city to city that they saw hardly any Jewish corpses (recall that Jews wore distinguishing clothing or emblems) among the heaped-up dead in the fields. But we all know about the reverence that Jews show to the met, the body of the deceased, that no Jew would ever leave unattended whatever the risk. So by not seeing many Jewish corpses, it appears that the traveling flagellants assumed that there were few Jewish dead.
Figure 45. Ashkenazic expansion, sixteenth century
Figure 46. Areas of Ashkenazic culture, Middle Ages
While the plague devastated the population of most of Europe, there remained pockets of unaffected areas—in southern France, Holland, and a small part of Germany. However, most of Poland was spared the worst of the epidemic and Poland again became the refuge for more Jews fleeing the intensified persecutions and massacres of western Europe that followed the Black Death. At the end of the fourteenth century there were only nine Jewish settlements in Poland; in the fifteenth some fifty more were established with a total population exceeding 14,000 individuals. By the sixteenth century more than two hundred communities had become established in Poland, Lithuania, and White Russia (Figure 45).
During the Middle Ages, Jewish culture spread throughout Europe with population movements tending toward a west-to-east direction. As populations moved, the immigrants into the new territories began to absorb some customs of the local residents. In this manner, the Ashkenazic culture became split into a number of distinct subcultures (Figure 46). Although northern Italy is considered to be the cradle of Ashkenazic culture, it developed into maturity in the Rhineland and many of its cultural practices were adopted in northern France. During the numerous periods of expulsions, emigration from Germany into northern Italy occurred, and during the High and Late Middle Ages, major episodes of emigration to the East were frequent.
The hospitality of the Polish kings together with Poland’s favorable economic opportunities resulted, as we have seen, in a rapid increase in Jewish immigration into the kingdom. Beginning approximately in the fourteenth century Poland and Lithuania were loosely confederated and these kingdoms occupied most of east-central Europe. While most immigrants appear to have arrived in Poland-Lithuania from the West, there is much evidence that supports the idea that many Jews also came from the Slavic and Turkic lands to the east. An example of this evidence can be found in the Jewish community of Brest-Litovsk in Lithuania. The first historical document that mentions the Brest-Litovsk Jewish community is the “Right to Inhabit” decree issued in 1388 by the grand duke Vitold. This charter of privilege is based on the Kalisz charter of 1264 and in addition to the privileges granted to the Jews of Brest, it guaranteed all the Jews of Lithuania equal standing in rank and jurisdiction. Historical records from this community show that the language and customs of the community derived from Germany. However, a significant local Jewish population was also engaged in agriculture, strongly implying their eastern origin, since Jews were not involved in agricultural occupations in the Holy Roman Empire, Silesia, Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, and northern Italy. The western Jews were occupied as merchants, in trades, and as money lenders. Agriculture as a Jewish occupation in the West during the Middle Ages was limited to small areas in central and southern France and Spain, southern Italy, and Sicily.
During the high Middle Ages and continuing for hundreds of years, Poland and Lithuania were kind of like the “Wild East” of Europe, complete with cowboys—Yiddish-speaking cowboys, to be precise. Until almost the eighteenth century, every year Jewish cowboys drove thousands of head of cattle west from Poland and Lithuania to the cities of central Europe, such as Regensburg, Vienna, and Brieg (on the Oder). In addition to Jewish cattle dealers being major players in the cattle market, Jewish horse-traders were the primary providers of horses to the cavalries of most European armies.
Figure 47. Jewish world in the late Middle Ages
Jews did not only emigrate to the Slavic lands as part of the German Drang nach Osten movement. We mentioned earlier that they left their home after being expelled, were fleeing violence and oppression, and were searching for better economic opportunities—or even for all of these reasons. The pressures to leave western Europe started most intensely during the twelfth century and further insecurity resulted from the episodes of expulsions that took place throughout England, Spain, France, and parts of Germany. Added to this, the waves of indiscriminate killings that occurred in Germany in particular between 1298 and 1349—blood libel and host desecration riots, the Rindfleisch and Armleder massacres, then the riots of the Black Death, probably every Jew that was able to move very likely tried to do so. Furthermore, religious persecutions were not the only destabilizing pressure on Jewish life in the West. In the second half of the fourteenth century and the first half of the fifteenth, the Holy Roman Empire became involved in the Hussite revolution that resulted in a war with Bohemia that lasted some fifteen years. This event triggered in 1421 a “crusade” against the Hussites, a group that the Church branded as heretics; again Jewish populations were massacred and any remaining sense of security for the survivors was completely destroyed. Another wave of eastern migration was the result. All of these factors, together with the knowledge of the successes of the earlier settlers in Poland and Lithuania, induced large numbers of Jewish residents of Germany, Bohemia, Moravia, and even from Italy and Spain, to emigrate to Poland and Lithuania long after the original German drive had died out. Significant numbers also migrated to the Ottoman Empire (Figure 47).
The Jews who had emigrated to Poland brought with them the forms of social organization that had evolved in the lands of Ashkenaz. Jewish communities throughout eastern Europe were modeled on these western social structures; for example, the structure of the kahal was almost identical in Alsace of the southern Rhineland, Bohemia of central Europe, and Poland; and even the structures of the so-called “Councils of the Lands” that were normally associated with Poland and Lithuania were not at all different from similar community organizations that had existed in Bohemia and Moravia.
The religious and educational character of the new communities of Poland and Lithuania preserved the religious practices, formulation of prayers, and methods of teaching in elementary schools (the heder, “classroom”) and in the talmudic advanced schools (yeshivot), were also all modeled on those in Germany. This basic uniformity in Jewish education and religious practice that existed for several centuries across eastern and western Europe enabled students to move freely between the yeshivot of Poland and those of the West, while attending services was a similar experience everywhere in this region. Thus rabbis and scholars from Poland could easily travel anywhere in the Ashkenazi domain, serving as spiritual leaders or as teachers in communities distant from Poland where they could (and did) marry into the Jewish leading families of Germany and Bohemia.
Figure 48. Europe, 1500
On the cusp of the sixteenth century, a political map of Europe shows the interstate dynamics of the times (Figure 48). In the center is the Holy Roman Empire (delineated by a purple line); it consisted of a very loose confederation of self-governing small kingdoms, many of which frequently squabbled with one another. To the east lie the subsidiary kingdoms of Bohemia/Moravia/Silesia (which became closely allied with Hungary) and the Habsburg Kingdom (Austria). Poland and Lithuania, which in the latter part of the sixteenth century consolidated into a commonwealth under a single ruler, was by far the largest state in Europe.
During the fourteenth century a major change occurred in the leadership of Jewish communities throughout Europe. Scholars or prominent businessmen virtually always became the community leaders, but in many cases their becoming the leaders was facilitated by their relationship with the ruling powers. For example, in France in about 1360, Rabbi Mattathiah ben Joseph was the spiritual leader of the Paris-to-Dijon region. The French king, Charles V, liked him personally and allowed him much freedom in building the community life of the community. After Mattathiah died, his son R. Yochanan Treves claimed the right to succeed his father as France’s rabbi based on his being ratified by the monarch. It appears that there was nothing wrong with Yochanan’s credentials; the community simply wanted the right to name their own rabbi. This was not an isolated occurrence. Commonly, in many areas of Europe, seekers of rabbinic office frequently asked for and obtained the support of non-Jewish authorities to enable them to secure the post over a rival candidate. The authorities were happy to ratify or even impose a candidate on the community who would owe them a debt and over whom they could exert influence. The position of community rabbi was in danger of degenerating into a political position.
The chief rabbi of Vienna, Meir ben Baruch haLevi (the Maharam Levi, 1320–1390), among others, saw this danger and the Maharam issued a regulation that became widely accepted by European communities. Prior to this regulation, a person could become recognized as a rabbi simply through his family connections. It was common for a rabbi’s son who, after being taught by his father, became entitled to be known as a rabbi in his own right. R. Meir’s regulation changed this method of becoming entitled to be recognized as a rabbi. He urged that Jewish communities refrain from accepting anyone as a rabbi unless the candidate could produce a document signed by a well-known rabbinic authority attesting to the candidate’s character and knowledge. In essence this was a revival of the ordination (semichah) practice of the tanna’im of the first and second centuries CE. This reform was quickly and enthusiastically adopted by communities all over Europe and especially by the Jews of Poland.
As we pointed out earlier, the Jews’ skills and abilities made them ideal colonizers of the sparsely settled regions of eastern Europe. In fact, most of the new towns that had grown on the frontiers of Poland and Lithuania had been populated by a Jewish majority. The Jews at first had engaged in land-leasing from the nobles and in trade and crafts. With the general eastward migration of Germans, Bohemians, and Silesians into Poland came Christian farmers, artisans, tradesmen, and merchants; the Polish nobility had also encouraged their immigration for the purpose of establishing a middle class. These people saw in the Jews challenging competitors, and the Church sought to introduce into Poland all of the restrictions on Jewish life that had developed in western Europe over the previous hundreds of years. The policies and charters of the Polish kings provided some protection against any legal persecution, but there were also extra-legal avenues available to harm Jews. Among these were campaigns to prejudice the common population against the Jews by using the charges of host desecration and blood libel, which produced the expected riots. Unlike those in western Europe, these riots were short-lived; the authorities took swift action against the violence.
Close to the end of the fourteenth century, Władysław II Jagiełło, the Grand Duke of Lithuania (r. 1377–1434), married Poland’s queen regnant, Jadwiga, uniting the two countries. Władysław was a strong ruler and defended the Jewish population of Poland from restrictive Church canons and from the attempts of Polish nobility to exploit the Jews. Successive rulers were weaker and sometimes acceded to the demands of the nobles and the Church to establish restrictions on the Jews. Relations between the Christian tradesmen and merchants and the Jews, long characterized primarily by rivalry and animosity, soon led to official bans on Jews engaging in numerous occupations. Eventually the Jews could no longer engage in agriculture while Christian guilds forced them out of occupations in the trades. The Jews’ ability to work as merchants became severely curtailed. Thus ensued a period of significant change in the economic opportunities of the Jews. But the attitude of the rulers toward the Jews remained lenient. King Sigismund I of Poland proclaimed in 1534 that Jews would not be required to wear identifying insignia on their clothes. The noted fifteenth-century rabbi, Moshe Isserles of Cracow (the Rema), wrote, “In this country there is not such a ferocious hatred of the Jews as Germany.” There is a telling report written to Rome in 1564 by a papal legate that reads in part, “In these territories there are a great number of Jews who are not as despised as is elsewhere the case. They do not live in a state of degradation, and they are not restricted to despised professions. They own land, they engage in trade, and they study medicine and astronomy.... They bear no distinguishing insignia, and they are even permitted to bear arms. In short, they possess all civil rights.”
The Jews’ services as administrators were still valued, however, and their abilities as tax collectors were useful, so some Jews served in those positions well into the seventeenth century. But the general Jewish population was becoming increasingly shunted out of commerce and the trades, while frequent persecutions caused them to avoid living close to Christians. The result was the rise of the shtetl, Yiddish for “little town.” The earliest shtetlekh (plural) probably began as early as the earliest Jewish settlements in the Slavic lands, somewhere in the eleventh century, but by the fourteenth century they could be found all over Poland and most of Lithuania. A shtetl is a village where the majority of the residents consist of Jews. Within these self-contained villages Jews were free to work at their own occupations—in the crafts and trades and as merchants; however, they had little to do with Christians, both by law and inclination. The shtetl had little in common with the ghetto, which was another late Middle-Ages creation whose purpose was to isolate the Jews from the Christians under the guise of “protecting” them. In Europe, Jews were first forced to live in their own district, the Judengasse, in Frankfurt in 1462, but this wasn’t a true ghetto. The first ghetto was established about fifty years later in Venice; here the authorities locked the gates from the outside and Jews were only infrequently allowed to leave the ghetto district.
In closing this part of my presentation, I’d like to quote Moses Isserles. He wrote in Responsa No. 73, “It is preferable to live on dry bread and in peace in Poland” than to remain in better conditions in lands more dangerous for Jews. He even made a pun on the Hebrew name of Poland (Polin or Polania), explaining that it derived from the Hebrew words, poh lin, “here [you should] dwell.” Historians have noted another pun made by the period’s authors on Poland’s name: po (“here”), lan (“dwells”), ya (“God”). S.Y. Agnon, in opening his book, “Book of the Polish Jews” (1916), mentions this founding myth, that Polin was a message from heaven for Jews to “live here.” Historians speak of the “Golden Age of Poland” referring to the great civilization that grew there. This relatively tranquil period ended in 1648 when significant episodes of anti-Jewish violence came to the East. For some three hundred years, the Jews lived (mostly) comfortably in Poland, but the mid-seventeenth century brought much violence and misery to the Jews of the East. Despite this, the eastern communities grew extensively and spread throughout Poland, Lithuania, western Russia, and Ukraine into the great Ashkenazic civilization of Poland and the Pale of Settlement of Russia.
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Moses A. Shulvass, The History of the Jewish People: Volume II, Early Middle Ages, Regnery, 1982
Moses A. Shulvass, The History of the Jewish People: Volume III, Late Middle Ages, Regnery, 1982
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