Overview: The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom, 1000-1500

Overview: The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom, 1000-1500

Medieval W. Christendom
Introduction

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

Pressed to predict what the future might hold, our hypothetical observer in the
year 1000 would have assumed that the known configuration of Jewish life would surely
last into the indeterminate future. In general of course, most of us have great difficulty in
imagining radically altered circumstances. Such a lack of imagination would have hardly
been the only factor influencing our observer, however. He would probably have known
that the demographic distribution of world Jewry encountered in the year 1000 had been
stable for nearly eight hundred years. Such stability would have created an impression of
permanency—a sense that this is the way things have always been and will always
continue to be.

Moreover, there was nothing in the year 1000 to suggest that radical change on
the broader world scene was in the offing. The constellation of world power appeared
remarkably stable. Islam’s domination seemed to be challenged seriously by no one,
neither the Greek Christians of the eastern sectors of the Mediterranean nor the weaker
Latin Christians of the western sectors of Europe. Our observer of the year 1000 would
surely have concluded that the contemporary power structure was unlikely to shift and
that Jewish life would thus continue along the well-established lines currently discernible.
Were our hypothetical observer of the year 1000 in a position to view world
Jewry in the year 1250—halfway through our period—or in the year 1500, he would have
been stunned by the altered circumstances of Jewish life. While the Jewries of the
Muslim world remained in place in the years 1250 and 1500, they were well on their way
to losing their position of demographic and creative eminence. They were in the process
of being supplanted in their physical and cultural primacy by the diverse Jewish
communities of western Christendom. The rise of Latin Christendom to its central role in
the Western world, initiated from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, brought in
its wake a parallel ascendancy of the Jewish communities it harbored and attracted—a
development insufficiently noted but by no means surprising.

Periodically—but not all that often—new powers have erupted from fringe areas
and radically altered the power structure of the Western world. Such an unanticipated
eruption and restructuring took place during the seventh century, when the forces of
Islam exploded unexpectedly out of the Arabian peninsula and overwhelmed both the
Neo-Persians to the east and the Byzantines to the west, in the process carving out a vast
empire that stretched from western India to the Atlantic Ocean. A more recent example
of this restructuring has involved the rise of the United States to its central position in the
West, usurping the hegemony long associated with such European powers as England,
France, Germany, and Spain. It was between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries
that these European powers—especially England, France, and Spain—emerged from
their relatively backward state and began to dominate the Western world. The rapid and
unexpected emergence of Roman Catholic Latin Christendom transformed the West and,
in the process, realigned the prior patterns of world Jewish population, authority, and
creativity. As a result of this seismic shift in world power structure, the Jews became and
have remained ever since a European and eventually North Atlantic people, fully a part of
the Christian West.

Herein lies the enormous significance of the period covered in this section of the
COJS websites. This era of roughly five hundred years—approximately 1000 to 1500—
saw the onset of an entirely new pattern of Jewish settlement and civilization. Prior to
the year 1000, the Jews had been overwhelmingly a Near and Middle Eastern people.
The languages, politics, and cultures of the Jews from their earliest days down through
the year 1000—a period of some two millennia—had been shaped by the larger Near and
Middle Eastern context in which Jewish life was concentrated. During the period
between 1000 and 1500, the prior patterns of Jewish life began to shift, as western
Christendom became home to an increasingly large and eventually dominant percentage
of world Jewry. This new context for Jewish living was by no means simple or
comfortable. Problems, pressures, and persecution abounded. Nonetheless, the
displacement of the Jews from their earlier Near and Middle Eastern settings into their
new European ambiance went on inexorably, as Jews were determined to carve out for
themselves a place in the dynamic new centers of Western civilization. Difficulties
notwithstanding, the result was the onset of a brilliant, albeit difficult new period in the
long history of the Jewish people.

The Church and the Jews

The period between 1000 and 1500 was characterized, above all else, by the
creation of a significant Jewish presence in medieval western Christendom, forcing both
the Christian majority and the Jewish minority to new awareness of and interaction with
one another. Rapidly developing western Christendom consisted of sprawling and
diverse territories, housing a wide variety of ethnic, linguistic, and cultural communities.
The major force that held the heterogeneous elements of Europe together was the Roman
Catholic Church, and thus the Church played a dominant role in the fate of the emergent
Jewish communities of medieval western Christendom.

To be sure, the history of Christian-Jewish relations did not begin in the year
1000. Christianity was, after all, born within the Jewish community of Palestine. Indeed,
the complex evolution of Christianity out of a Jewish matrix fostered a highly charged
and deeply ambivalent stance on the part of the subsequent Christian world towards
Judaism and the Jews. On the one hand, Jews were respected by Christians as the first to
acknowledge the one true God in the universe; at the same time, it was difficult for
Christians to comprehend how the Jews could squander their original insight, how they
could have failed to acknowledge the messianic figure promised in their own sacred
writings. On the one hand, these Jewish sacred writings were respectfully made an
integral part of Christian Scripture; on the other hand, Christians were convinced that
Jews grossly misread these sacred writings. On the one hand, the Jews represented the
biological descendants of the original Israel; on the other hand, they were viewed as
superseded by the spiritual descendants of the original Israel, i.e. Christians and
Christianity.

Jesus and his immediate circle have left us no writings of their own, making
reconstruction of the earliest phase of Christian history difficult or perhaps impossible.
While there is wide-ranging disagreement as to the activities and messages of Jesus, it is
broadly agreed that he saw himself as a Jew, was seen by his contemporaries as a Jew,
surrounded himself with Jewish followers, addressed primarily his fellow-Jews, and was
feared and persecuted by the Romans as a danger to the stability of the Jewish
community of Palestine.

Paul is the first figure in the Christian world to leave his own writings. He was
not one of Jesus’ immediate disciples; in fact, he was not a Palestinian Jew at all. Rather,
Paul brought to his belief in Jesus the differing perspective of a diaspora Jew. Despite
the lack of knowledge of Jesus’ own message, there is broad agreement that Paul
introduced new themes and emphases, reflective of his somewhat different background.
Paul’s writings show a sense of mission to the gentiles and complex wrestling with the
place of Judaism and the Jews in the cosmic order. On the one hand, Paul regularly
castigates the Jews for their failure to recognize Jesus and his unique place in history; at
the same time, he proclaims ongoing loyalty to the people from whom he came, with a
firm conviction that God—despite his wrath with the Jews—would eventually accept
them once more. Paul’s ambivalence set the tone for subsequent Christian thinking.
The writers of the gospels post-dated Paul and introduced into their depictions of
Jesus and his disciples themes that evolved subsequent to the completion of Jesus’ earthly
mission. Despite Jesus’ crucifixion at the hands of the Romans, the gospel writers
portray only one salient conflict during Jesus’ lifetime—the conflict between the
messianic figure and the disbelieving leaders of the Jewish people. The Jews are pictured
as guilty of two major offenses—first, failure to recognize Jesus as Messiah and then,
more stunningly, responsibility for his crucifixion. The gospels’ portrait of the Jews in
fact serves to erase some of the complex ambivalence of the Pauline view; there is little
in the gospels that proclaims God’s ongoing love for the Jewish people. The depiction of
Jewish responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus served to stigmatize the Jews over the
centuries, to create potent anti-Jewish imagery associated with a core event in Christian
sacred history.

Early Christian attitudes to Judaism and the Jews were rich with resentment over
what was perceived as Jewish failure to perceive and acknowledge the truth of Jesus as
Messiah. As Christianity developed rapidly across the Roman Empire, a new stance
emerged, that of defensiveness. The Jewish foundations of much Christian thinking and
the absorption of the Hebrew Bible into Christian Scripture created a concern that newly
converted Christians might be susceptible to Jewish influence. These concerns led in two
directions. On the spiritual plane, they led to heightened denigration of Judaism in an
effort to emphasize the distinctions between Christian truth and Jewish error; on the more
practical plane, they led to calls for segregating Jews from Christians so that there might
be no harmful contact.

In the early fourth century, a decisive change took place in the status of
Christianity within the Roman world. With Constantine, Christianity ceased to be a
persecuted sect and evolved into the new foundation for imperial rule. With Christian
accession to power, there was suddenly a need to define formally the place of Judaism
and the Jews in Christian society. Constantine himself seems merely to have ratified the
older status of the Jews as a legitimate religious tradition, to be limited in ways that
would preclude any untoward Jewish impact on Christianity and Christians.

In the late fourth and early fifth century, it fell to the great theoretician of
Christianity, Augustine of Hippo, to adumbrate a doctrine of Judaism that synthesized the
various pre-existent elements and set the parameters for subsequent Christian policy vis-
à-vis the Jews. Augustine established a recognized place for Jews in Christian society.
Jewish presence was justified in a number of ways. In part, it was clearly God’s will, as
Augustine reprised the Pauline sense of eventual reconciliation between God and the
Jewish people. More immediately, the Jews served a number of useful functions for their
Christian hosts. They proclaimed the truth of the Hebrew Bible, thus establishing a firm
foundation for the Christian claims that Jesus fulfilled divinely revealed predictions of
messianic advent. Moreover, Jewish sinfulness and immediate divine punishment served
as a useful object lesson for all of humanity, proving beyond any doubt that God rewards
righteousness and punishes sin.

The Augustinian doctrine of basic Jewish rights also set the parameters for
subsequent Church policies. Jews were to comport themselves in ways that entailed no
harm whatsoever to Christianity and Christians, and Christians were to be mindful always
of their responsibility to preach Christian truth to their Jewish neighbors. Finally,
Augustine also buttressed prior imagery of the Jews. Despite acknowledging the truth of
the Hebrew Bible, Jesus’ Jewish contemporaries failed thoroughly in understanding the
truths that God had revealed to them through the prophets, and later Jews compounded
that initial error with their own obtuseness. Projecting punishment of the sinful Jews as a
powerful object lesson—advanced by Augustine as one of the bases for Jewish rights in
Christian society—strongly reinforced the gospel portrayal of Jewish wickedness and
cemented that imagery in subsequent Christian consciousness.

So long as the overwhelming majority of world Jewry lived outside the orbit of
Christian power, as has been described for the pre-1000 period, the Jewish issue was
muted for the Christian authorities. Church leaders produced an extensive anti-Jewish
literature during the first Christian millennium. Most of that literature, however, was
defensive and intended for Christian audiences, focused on buttressing convictions as to
the rejection of Old Israel (the Jews) and the election of a New Israel (the Christians).
Genuine engagement with real Jews was limited. From the Jewish side, the lack of
engagement with Christianity was yet more marked. Up until the year 1000 and well
beyond, we possess not one single anti-Christian work composed by Jews living within
western Christendom. Down through the end of the first millennium, the Jews of the
world, concentrated in the realm of Islam, were by and large unconcerned with
Christianity and Christians.

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

Medieval western Christendom was unified by broad commitment to Christianity
and general acceptance of the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. The legacy
bequeathed by antiquity to the medieval Church and its believers included doctrine and
policy, both of which were expanded and developed during our period and profoundly
influenced the Jews of medieval western Christendom. The historic ambivalence already
highlighted remained prominent. For medieval Jews, this ambivalence was positive in
that it included benign elements; it was problematic in that it included harmful elements;
additionally, the ambivalence itself often proved dangerous, as popular thinking had great
difficulty in maintaining the complicated balance that the Church demanded. For many
in medieval European society, if the Jews had rejected Jesus and had forced his
crucifixion, then they were legitimate objects of hostility and anger; the mitigations
developed by the Church were often too complex for many among the masses to absorb.
Church doctrine posited the dignity of Judaism and the Jews alongside their
shortcomings. Jews were seen as the first to acknowledge God as ruler of the universe,
the first bearers of the covenant with the one true God, and the first human community
acknowledged by God as his chosen partners. In the Church view, the Jews had however,
from the very beginning, shown signs of inability to live up to the demands of the
covenantal relationship. The stories of Israelite rebelliousness against Moses and the
strictures of the prophets against Israelite and Judean shortcomings reflect those early
failures vividly. Eventually, Jewish sinfulness became unbearable, as Jesus’ Jewish
contemporaries rejected the divinely appointed Messiah sent to redeem them. God had—
according to the Church—no choice but to replace the Jews with a new covenant people,
a new and true Israel. There were thus reasons to honor the Jews and to disdain them,
reasons to welcome them and to reject them. The Pauline sense of an eventual return of
the Jews to their senses and an eventual reconciliation with God further complicated
matters. To the extent that this Pauline view was espoused seriously, it lent additional
support to balancing the doctrinal scale. Despite the powerfully negative portrait of the
Jews in the gospels, Jews were to be viewed benignly in terms of both their past and their
ultimate future.

The basic directions of Church policy flowed directly from the fundamental
doctrine just now indicated. Because of their past and future and their present theological
usefulness, the medieval Roman Catholic Church insisted upon a legitimate place for
Jews in Christian society. The basic rights of the Jews were proclaimed repeatedly by the
leadership of the Church. Beginning in the twelfth century, popes promulgated regularly
a Constitutio pro Judeis, a statement of basic Jewish rights, which included personal
safety, protection of Jewish property, freedom from coerced conversion, and security for
Jewish sacred space. Jews could not be assaulted or robbed, with the culprits maintaining that their actions were legitimate, because the victims were Jews. Jews were not to be
brought to the baptismal fount by violence, and Jewish sacred space was to be inviolable.
Beyond the formal statements, the leadership of the Church in fact recurrently
demanded in practice recognition of these rights. Thus, for example, when anti-Jewish
violence unexpectedly broke out in 1096, as part of the early stages of the First Crusade,
Church leadership made note of the fact and, armed with this foreknowledge, made
strenuous efforts to insure Jewish safety during the subsequent crusading ventures. These
efforts were by and large successful, as the ecclesiastical leadership of the second and
subsequent crusades insisted regularly that Jews were not to be harmed as part of the
crusading enterprise. As increasingly irrational charges about Jews evolved during the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Church leadership made similar efforts. These efforts,
however, were somewhat less consistent. On the one hand, the mid-thirteenth-century
allegation that Jews use Christian blood in their Passover rituals was decisively rejected
by the papacy. On the other hand, when the charge of host desecration by Jews surfaced
in Paris in 1290, the leadership of the Church proclaimed the sanctity of the site of an
alleged host desecration and consequent miracle, in effect endorsing the dangerous new
claim.

The issue of forced baptism was especially complex. On the one hand, the
Church proclaimed unceasingly that force should not be used to win converts, that
conversion was a matter of the heart and had to be undertaken with fullest understanding
and commitment. The Church saw forced baptism as insincere and thus inappropriate to
the spiritual life of the convert; indeed, it projected forced baptism as a danger to the
Christian community, since the likelihood of backsliding and heresy among forced converts would be high. However, despite continued warnings against coerced
conversion, when force was in fact exercised in conversion, the status of the convert
turned out to be problematic. In the wide-ranging riots on the Iberian peninsula in 1391,
when large numbers of Jews converted under duress, many out of a sense that their
conversion would be nullified when normalcy was re-established, the Church was
unwilling to permit those forcibly converted to return to the Jewish fold, thereby creating
a significant problem of insincere converts among the New Christians.

Jews had a right to secure existence in medieval Christian society, but that right
was accompanied by clearly defined limitations. Jews were expected to comport
themselves in ways that would entail no harm to the Christian faith and society that
hosted them. This translated, first of all, into prohibition of any Jewish blasphemy of
Christianity. Jews were utterly forbidden to utter any statement or engage in any
behavior that might be disrespectful of the ruling faith. For this reason, free and equal
religious discussion between Christians and Jews was unacceptable, since it might entail
Jewish criticism of the Christian faith. As we shall see, Christian missionizing was
carried out under very controlled circumstances, which afforded no opportunity for
Jewish criticism of Christianity. It is worth noting the asymmetry in this regard.
Christians were perfectly free to denigrate Judaism and did so regularly; Jews were,
however, precluded from any criticism of Christianity. The governing structure of
medieval western Christendom did not include equal treatment for all as a basic tenet;
indeed, it rejected any such notions of equality.

A major crisis for Europe’s Jews was precipitated in the 1230’s and 1240’s, when
an apostate from Judaism named Nicholas Donin appeared at the papal court and claimed that the Talmud, the cornerstone of Jewish religious life in medieval Europe, was replete
with blasphemies, including attacks on Jesus and Mary. Pope Gregory IX and his court
were deeply distressed over this allegation and empowered Donin to undertake fuller
investigation and to initiate requisite actions if the allegations were proven true. The
scene of Donin’s follow-up activities was Paris, the site of the court of the pious King
Louis IX of France—eventually Saint Louis—and of the famed University of Paris.
Donin and a team of apostates knowledgeable in Hebrew translated important sections of
the Talmud and organized their translations into a set of accusations. Armed with these
accusations, Donin engineered—with royal backing—a trial of the Talmud, in which
Donin himself served as prosecutor and four leading French rabbis appeared as witnesses
for the defense. The Talmud was found guilty of blasphemy, and large quantities of
rabbinic texts were burned in Paris in 1242, in a public display that sullied the Parisian
populace’s perceptions of Judaism and the Jews and that sent the Jews of northern France
into deep mourning.

The condemnation and burning of the Talmud had extensive aftermath. The Jews
themselves argued that destruction and prohibition of the Talmud in effect contradicted
the basic right of Jews to live as Jews in Christian society, for without the guidance of the
Talmud Jewish life was impossible. Pope Gregory IX’s successor, Pope Innocent IV,
was moved by the Jewish argument and sought a compromise whereby blasphemy would
be eliminated, without robbing the Jews of their Talmud and thus of their basic religious
rights. He urged the authorities in Paris, ecclesiastical and lay, to have the Talmud re-
examined and to return to the Jews those portions that were free of blasphemy. In effect,
this meant a policy of censoring the Talmud, which became the dominant stance for the
rest of the Middle Ages in most areas of western Christendom. In the French kingdom,
however, the conclusion of the re-trial of the Talmud was that its blasphemies were so
pervasive and horrific as to preclude return of the books to the Jews. The Talmud
remained outlawed throughout the rest of the stay of the Jews in the French kingdom.

Jews were prohibited from inflicting harm on Christianity and harm on Christians
as well. The most obvious harm that Jews could inflict of Christians was to wean them
away from their faith. Jews might under no circumstances entice Christians out of the
Christian fold. One of the pre-medieval legacies of the Church was insistence that Jews
be prohibited from positions of power over Christians, since power often translates into
influence. With the passage of time, the concern with Jewish influence moved from
power to contact. Increasingly, the Church began to enact ecclesiastical legislation that
called for segregation of the Jews, so that they not enjoy the proximity to Christians that
might engender religious influence. The Church demanded that Jews be forbidden from
living in small villages, where Christian-Jewish contact would be inescapable, and that
Jews be restricted to certain sectors of towns, again in an effort to diminish Christian-
Jewish contact.

The most radical of these efforts at segregation came in 1215, at the Fourth
Lateran Council, where the assembled leadership of the Church enacted a stipulation that
Jews be readily distinguishable from Christian neighbors by virtue of their garb.
Distinguishing garb eventually took many forms, the most common of which involved
badges sown on the outer garments of Jews and special Jewish hats. All these efforts at
enhanced segregation of the Jews were ultimately dependent on the lay authorities for
enforcement. Many of the lay authorities of medieval western Christendom were slow in supplying the requisite enforcement, but the pressure of the Church was unremitting and
over time Jews of Europe were in fact increasingly segregated.

Jewish religious influence on Christian neighbors took an unusual turn in fifteen-
century Spain, under the special circumstances already briefly noted. The persecutions of
1391 had led to massive Jewish conversion, in many instances based on the mistaken
assumption that, when normalcy returned, the forced converts would be permitted to
return to their ancestral faith. When such permission was not forthcoming, the New
Christians had to make the best of matters. The result was that, by the 1470’s, evidence
began mounting of massive insincerity within New Christian circles. Some voices in the
Church urged that the problem be addressed in sympathetic terms, with warmth and a
renewed commitment to educating the former Jews into their new Christian identity.
Other voices viewed the problem as one of criminality and insisted on punishment of the
malefactors through the office of the inquisition. For the latter group, the Jews played a
major role in the heresy of the New Christians,through active or even inactive
encouragement of a return to Judaism. Thus, in this view, only removal of the Jews
altogether would aid in the solution of the problem of heresy among the New Christians.
While the notion of Jewish harm inflicted on Christians was primarily an issue of
the religious sphere of life, with the passage of time this notion could easily be expanded
and in fact was. With the Jewish move into heavy concentration in money-lending
during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, churchmen—who regarded themselves and
were regarded by others as protectors of the Christian masses—began to call for
limitations that would safeguard vulnerable Christians. The most prominent of these
safeguards was demanded at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, already noted for its enactment of distinguishing Jewish garb. With respect to Jewish moneylending, the
assembled leaders of the Roman Catholic Church legislated that Jews not lend money at
exorbitant rates of interest, which were proving harmful to Christian borrowers.
Jewish rights were carefully balanced against multiple restrictions upon Jewish
behaviors. Transgressions on the part of individual Jews were a matter with which the
lay authorities were expected to deal. Individual Jews who blasphemed against
Christianity or enticed Christians out of the fold were guilty of criminal behaviors and
were liable to punishment. What then of purported transgressions on the part of the entire
Jewish community? Such group transgressions could legitimately eventuate in
banishment of such Jews. This was the formal basis for the spate of expulsions that
began to afflict medieval European Jewry from the late twelfth century onward. In some
instances, the banishments reflected secular concerns and interests, although Christian
piety was always highlighted in the formal edicts. On the Iberian peninsula toward the
end of the fifteenth century, the Church in fact took the lead in calling for expulsion of
the Jews, on the grounds that Jewish presence and influence were at the root of the
backsliding—i.e., heresy—of the large number of New Christians (whose complicated
existence has just now been noted) in society.

Church policy of protection and limitation was complicated by yet one more
element, and that involved the commitment to preaching Christian truth to the Jews.
During the early part of our period, the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, the
commitment to proselytizing was limited, and Christian anti-Jewish argumentation was
intended largely to bolster internal Christian convictions. By the middle of the twelfth
century, as western Christendom became increasingly strong and aggressive, genuine missionizing ardor developed. During the middle decades of the thirteenth century, the
new commitment eventuated in a concerted and well-orchestrated campaign. The
objective was no longer to reassure Christians; it was to win over Jews. In this more
aggressive setting, the key issues for the Church involved finding the proper venues for
delivering the Christian message and discovering lines of argumentation that might be
effective with Jewish audiences.

Jewish circumstances in medieval western Christendom set the stage for effective
delivery of Christian claims to Jewish audiences. Because of Jewish dependency upon
the lay authorities of western Christendom, the political establishment could force Jews
to present themselves to hear Christian claims. What was required was simply the
willingness of the political leadership to enact such decrees, and many were quite willing
to do so. Jews protested strenuously, arguing that forced exposure to Christian preaching
and teaching contravened the basic right of Jews to live as Jews in Christian society. To
this Jewish claim, Church and lay leadership responded that the only force exerted
involved confrontation of Jews with Christian arguments. Such forced confrontation in
no way diminished Jewish freedom of choice. Jews were free to hear Christian claims
and reject them.

The most common format for forced confrontation with Christian claims was the
compulsory sermon. Jews were ordered by the lay authorities to hear the sermons of
preachers, often of the Dominican Order, which had been organized to combat heresy
through rigorous argumentation and—subsequently—to utilize knowledge of religious
truth and mechanisms of intellectual combat to preach the faith to non-Christians as well.
To the extent that Jews could influence the venue of these forced sermons, they much preferred to have them take place in synagogues, where at least the Jewish audience felt a
measure of familiarity and comfort. In the wake of such forced sermons, rabbis often
gave counter-addresses, intended to rebut the Christian claims and to reinforce the
audience’s sense of Jewish truth.

The so-called forced disputations were an offshoot of the forced sermon. The one
liability, from the Christian perspective, of the forced sermon was the lack of overt
Jewish response. Christian preachers had no way of assessing audience reaction—were
their Jewish listeners reacting positively, negatively, or with total indifference? The
forced disputation was intended to bring Christian preachers into contact with Jewish
leaders, to engage the Jewish leaders with Christian arguments, and to force these Jewish
leaders to respond publicly. These public disputations have often been misunderstood by
moderns as open-ended discussions of religious truth, which they certainly were not.
Again, under no circumstances were Jews to be allowed to criticize the ruling faith.
These public disputations were carefully orchestrated engagements, in which the
Christian side was empowered to advance its claims and the Jewish side was limited to
parrying these claims. In some instances, such as the famed Barcelona disputation of
1263, there is no evidence of Christian success; in other cases, such as the equally well-
known Tortosa disputation of 1412-1415, the protracted public disputation resulted in
considerable Jewish conversion.

Engaging the Jews was only the first step. Equally important was creation of
arguments that would resonate effectively with the coerced Jewish audience. Of course,
the Christian-Jewish argument was, by our period, ancient, and lines of argumentation
from both sides had long been articulated. Not surprisingly, the minority group—i.e., the Jews—was considerably more knowledgeable as to the claims of the majority, since they
had to fend off these claims. As ecclesiastical leadership became seriously committed to
the missionizing enterprise, it became increasingly aware of the existence of long-
established Jewish lines of resistance. Effective Christian argumentation necessitated
recognition and circumvention of these well-established Jewish counter-claims.

Thus, the first element in the new missionizing campaign involved fuller
knowledge of the Jews, their well-established lines of anti-Christian argumentation, and
their vulnerabilities. The key to all of this lay in the Hebrew language, the language of
Jewish cultural tradition and Jewish creativity in medieval western Christendom. The
Church amassed new knowledge of Hebrew in two ways, first through converts from
Judaism to Christianity, who brought their Hebrew knowledge with them, and then
through establishment of schools for the study of Hebrew—and Arabic as well. Slowly, a
cadre of preachers knowledgeable in Hebrew and Jewish texts was created, and through
them traditional Jewish rebuttals of traditional Christian claims became better known.
Since this was a period of rapid advance in Christian—and Jewish—intellectual
life, Church leaders committed to the new proselytizing felt a measure of confidence in
these advances. They now knew that many of the traditional Christian claims based on
traditional biblical prooftexts were familiar to Jews and had long ago elicited Jewish
rebuttals. There was not much point in going over the same ground. On the other hand,
major gains had been made in biblical studies, so there was some sense that the new lines
of exegesis, especially the emphasis on grappling with the original Hebrew text of what
Christians viewed as their Old Testament, might proved useful in exploring new avenues
of biblically-grounded missionizing argumentation.

Yet more confidence was invested in the new developments in philosophy and
theology. These advances gave many Christian the sense that Christianity was the only
truly rational faith and that it might be proven directly and exclusively through a reliance
on reason, with no recourse to revelation whatsoever. The great thirteenth-century
Dominican philosopher-theologian of the University of Paris, Thomas Aquinas, went so
far as to undertake an entirely rational case for the truth of Christianity. His Summa
contra gentiles set out to show that any rational human, armed onlywith the tools of
reasonable inquiry, could and would come to the conclusion that Christianity represented
truth. These advances created a powerful sense of confidence in Christian circles. For
the missionizing enterprise, however, philosophic argumentation proved only minimally
useful. Philosophic argumentation was extremely complex and sophisticated. A
synagogue audience of Jews would be utterly incapable of following such arcane
argumentation.

Perhaps the most strikingly innovative line in Christian missionizing
argumentation involved the claim that rabbinic literature, when read properly, supported
Christian truth claims. By the middle decades of the thirteenth century, the Church was
becoming increasingly familiar with the Talmud and the rest of the rabbinic corpus. As
noted, one direction in which this awareness led was a focus on anti-Christian material in
the Talmud and condemnation of rabbinic literature on grounds of blasphemy. This
attack was—as noted—initiated in the 1230’s by an apostate named Nicholas Donin. Yet
another apostate, Friar Paul Christian of the Dominican Order, exploited his knowledge
of the Talmud in quite another direction. Beginning in the 1240’s, he began preaching to
Jewish audiences that the rabbis of old had in fact recognized and acknowledged Christian truth. This could be clearly seen—he argued—in their comments on major
biblical verses and in their free-standing dicta.

As an example of the former, we might note exegesis of Isaiah 52-13-53-12, the
famous “Suffering Servant” pericope. Medieval Christians argued regularly that this
passage refers to Jesus as Messiah; medieval Jews claimed argued with equal vehemence
that the passage speaks only of the Jewish people, God’s truly suffering servants. Friar
Paul adduced rabbinic statements to show that rabbis of old had in fact acknowledged
that the “Suffering Servant” passage refers to the Messiah, thereby indicating an implicit
acknowledgement of Jesus’ messianic role and Christian truth. As an example of free-
standing rabbinic statements, Friar Paul often made reference to the widely repeated
rabbinic notion that, on the day the Temple was destroyed, the Messiah was born. For
Friar Paul, this well-known teaching indicated that authoritative rabbis recognized that
the Messiah had in fact come. That Messiah could only have been Jesus of Nazareth.
Friar Paul’s new line of argumentation won considerable backing in ecclesiastical
circles and—by extension—among lay authorities as well. From the 1240’s on, Friar
Paul preached widely in synagogues, using his new line of argumentation from rabbinic
texts. In 1263, with the support of the Dominican leadership and King James the
Conqueror of Aragon, he was able to coerce the outstanding rabbinic figure of the times,
Rabbi Moses ben Nahman of Gerona, into a forced disputation in the capital city of
Barcelona. The confrontation seems to have been rather dramatic, with a large audience
of Christians and Jews in attendance.

So far as we can tell, there was no significant conversion in the wake of this
engagement. However, Rabbi Moses’s claims of total victory over his Dominican foe seem exaggerated. The new approach was by no means derailed by the rabbi’s careful
and clever efforts. By the end of the 1260’s, Friar Paul had won the backing of the pious
king of France—the same Louis IX we have already encountered as supporter of the
Donin assault on the Talmud—for a missionizing engagement with the rabbis of Paris. In
the wake of both these encounters, another Dominican, Friar Raymond Martin, was
moved to convene a research team to collect rabbinic material and construct a wide-
ranging missionizing manual entitled the Pugio Fidei (Dagger of Faith), which adduced
thousands of rabbinic sources and worked them into a systematic presentation of the key
truths of Christianity.

Proselytizing among the Jews remained a high priority of the Church all through
the remaining centuries of the Middle Ages. The record is mixed—little to no success in
certain areas and certain periods and considerable success in other areas and epochs.
During and after the violence of 1391 on the Iberian peninsula, the Church seems to have
been especially successful in its protracted efforts to bring dispirited Jews to the
baptismal fount.

Medieval Church doctrine and policy vis-à-vis Judaism and Jews were complex
and nuanced, and they evolved as the contact between the Church and ever-expanding
Jewish population of Europe intensified. The Church had yet one last avenue of
influence on Jewish fate in medieval western Christendom, through the imagery it
purveyed. Once again, this imagery was rooted in a prior legacy. With regard to
imagery, however, the Church exercised far less control than it did over doctrine and
policy. Imagery of Judaism and Jews was far more flexible, far more responsive to the
evolving realities and anxieties of the medieval scene.

Popular Perceptions and Popular Violence

Popular perceptions of the Jews were heavily negative during our period. This
negativity had numerous sources. Perhaps the simplest was the fact that the vitalization
of western Christendom attracted Jews to areas of Europe in which Jews had not
heretofore settled. Newcomers are rarely welcome, and resistance to immigrants in
sedentary societies, such as medieval Europe, was especially intense. As we shall see,
many of the rulers of medieval western Christendom saw in the Jews a valuable asset and
encouraged their immigration. Such support had little impact on popular opinion; in fact
to some extent the support of rulers only served to make the Jews more unpopular.

The medieval Islamic world was characterized by considerable diversity of
population, which included a wide range of racial, ethnic, and religious groupings. While
medieval Europe was ethnically and linguistically fragmented, it was unusually
homogeneous in religious terms. This meant that, in medieval western Christendom, the
Jews in almost all areas stood out as the lone legitimately dissenting element. Such
conspicuousness can never be positive for a minority community. The uniqueness of the
Jews in medieval Europe focused undue and dangerous attention on them.

Initial popular resistance to the Jews meant, among other things, serious
limitations on the ways in which Jews might support themselves. Especially in the new
areas of settlement, Jews tended to arrive in order to fill limited economic niches and
never truly succeeded in diversifying their economic base. From the twelfth century on, the Jewish specialty became money-lending, which meant additional popular hostility,
since money-lenders have never been beloved figures in most societies.
While popular resistance was grounded in significant measure in the newness of
Jews in many areas, in their status as the only legitimate dissenting group in most sectors
of Europe, in their obvious alliance with the lay authorities, and in their economic
specialization, clearly the most salient factor in negative popular perceptions of Judaism
and Jews lay in the imagery regularly purveyed by the Church. As was true for doctrine
and policy, see too the basic elements in imagery of Judaism and Jews were bequeathed
to the medieval Church from the ancient period, although here too—as in the case of
doctrine and policy—there was considerable room for medieval expansion of the prior
legacy.

As noted recurrently, the legacy from antiquity included considerable
ambivalence, both positive and negative elements. This can be gleaned graphically from
the formal medieval representations of Synagoga (The Synagogue, i.e. Judaism) found
outside many medieval churches, opposite the contrastive image of Ecclesia (The
Church, i.e. Christianity). Synagoga is regularly portrayed as a beautiful and hence
dangerous female figure. This figure is often shown with a crown slipping off her head,
with a scepter falling out of her grasp, with tablets of the law dropping out of her hands,
and with a blindfold across her eyes. The negatives are obvious, yet they are balanced to
a degree by the beauty of the female figure and the recognition that she once possessed a
crown of royalty, a staff of authority, and the tablets of the law—again evidence of a
distinguished heritage, allegedly sullied by obtuseness and loss of that heritage. The Pauline legacy taught that the achievements of the past would result in eventual divine
reconciliation with his recalcitrant former people.

Unfortunately for the Jews of medieval western Christendom, perhaps the most
formative imagery bequeathed from the past came from the gospel accounts of Jesus’s
ongoing struggle with his Jewish contemporaries. In these narratives, Jews function as
the enemy—the dominant, indeed only oppositional force to Jesus’ ministry. This image
was encountered regularly at every Easter season, one of the two high points of the
annual Christian calendar. Recollection of the events that led up to the Crucifixion and of
the Crucifixion itself served as preamble to the culminating drama of the Easter season,
the Resurrection. Thus, in a highly influential and inflammatory way, Jews were
introduced into the most important and moving rituals of the Christian calendar, always
in the role of villains and enemy figures.

As western Christendom began to develop during the eleventh century, it almost
immediately turned aggressive, engaging Muslims forces on the Italian and Iberian
peninsulas. Already during the push on the Iberian peninsula, the battle with the Muslim
foe activated the sense of Jews as historic enemies. Pope Alexander II wrote a striking
letter to the bishops of Spain, praising them for their protection of Jews in the face of
Christian violence that had been sparked by the war against the Muslims. The letter
reflects the extent to which the new campaign against Islam sparked anti-Jewish
sentiment.

This association—the contemporary Muslim foe and the historic Jewish enemy—
was to lie at the core of the limited but intense violence that accompanied the launching
of the First Crusade. When Pope Urban II preached the crusade in Clermont in late 1095, he surely never mentioned the Jews, nor did he anticipate any anti-Jewish implication in
his message. In fact, the major baronial armies that formed the core of the crusading
force and that secured the remarkable Christian victory in Jerusalem in 1099 show no
sign of anti-Jewish animus and were not implicated in the anti-Jewish violence.
However, the exhilarating papal call resonated widely in Christian society,
energizing more than the military elites. Popular preachers absorbed the papal message
and spread it among the lower classes. In the process, new themes and hues were added,
not the least of which involved Jews. In this popular view, the careful distinctions of the
Church leadership as to the target of the new undertaking and as to the proper Christian
stance toward Judaism and the Jews were obscured. A simpler and more radical call was
created, urging that—given a new engagement with enemies of Christendom—the
Muslim far-off enemy was in fact less heinous than the nearby Jewish enemy. Whereas
the former merely denied Jesus, the latter had been responsible for his crucifixion. This
unwarranted, but potent extension of the crusading enterprise served as the foundation for
the limited but radical assaults on Rhineland Jewry in 1096.

Church leadership, as it became aware of this distortion of its message, repudiated
the unwarranted extension and reiterated its traditional stance of non-violence toward
Jews. There was no major repetition of the bloodshed of 1096, although every new
crusade evoked the anti-Jewish slogans and the danger of anti-Jewish attacks. The
sloganeering and attendant dangers were minimal when the crusading venture was
carefully planned and well organized; they became more pronounced in the spontaneous
and populist crusading episodes.

During the twelfth century, the imagery of Jews as enemies—prominent in
traditional Christian thinking and praxis and activated during the crusading period—took
a dangerous new turn. While the traditional imagery highlighted the Jews as historic
enemies, voices in western Christendom began to circulate the notion that twelfth-century
Jews were in fact as profoundly hostile as their ancestors had been more than a
millennium earlier. In a letter to King Louis VII of France, on the eve of the Second
Crusade, the influential abbot of Cluny, Peter the Venerable, claimed that contemporary
Jewish blasphemy was well known, revealing that twelfth-century Jews maintained the
hostility of their first-century forebears. Eschewing violence against the Jews, Peter
urged nonetheless that Jews be forced to defray crusading costs in recognition of their
historic and contemporary enmity toward Christianity.

Peter’s claims were dangerous, but his voice was that of a major and learned
Church leader, fully aware of the traditional safeguards to Jewish life promised by
Christian tradition. In less learned circles, the balanced doctrines and policies of the
Church were less well rooted and understood. In popular circles, the notion took hold
that Jewish enmity went beyond blasphemy against Christianity, that Jews were intent
upon bringing physical harm upon their Christian contemporaries. The notion of
groundless Jewish murder took hold in public imagination in many areas of western
Christendom, especially in northern Europe, where the Jewish presence was quite new.
Discovery of a body, especially the corpse of a Christian youngster, would regularly elicit
the claim that the Jews had committed murder, for no other reason than simply the
Christian identity of the victim. Once again, the authorities of church and state rejected
the allegations and by and large protected the Jews effectively, but the notion of groundless Jewish murder made dangerous inroads into folk thinking during the twelfth
century.

The notion of groundless Jewish murder held the potential for embellishments of
all kinds. During the middle decades of the twelfth century, the first of these
embellishments suggested that the purported Jewish murders were carried out in a
symbolic manner. Attempting to prove that a murdered Christian youngster, William of
Norwich, had died a martyr’s death and hence deserved to be venerated as a saint, a
Norwich clergyman named Thomas of Monmouth created the motif of Jewish ritual
murder, claiming that the Jews of Norwich had in fact crucified the young lad in a
repetition of their historic role in the crucifixion of Jesus. Here the sense of
contemporary Jewish hatred of Christianity and Christians took even fuller shape.
According to Thomas, not only was there ongoing and unabated Jewish hatred, even the
format of killing hearkened back to ancient Jerusalem. Association of young William
with Jesus as a fellow sufferer at the hands of the Jews made a powerful case for William
as martyr, which was Thomas’s avowed goal; in the process he profoundly embellished
the imagery of Jewish enmity to Christianity and Christians. In this incident, the
authorities of church and state repudiated Thomas’s claim, but the notion of ritual murder
penetrated the popular psyche deeply, obviously playing on deep-seated human fears for
children.

By the middle of the thirteenth century, the embellishment of the claim of Jewish
murderousness took yet another turn, into the allegation that the murders were rooted in
Jewish ritual, that Jews required Christian blood for their Passover ceremonies. The
combination of the new claim of Jewish murderousness with the centrality of blood in the biblical account of the exodus from Egypt fostered this new turn. The blood libel was
destined for a long history, which stretches from the thirteenth century down into the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries, despite lengthy and carefully documented denials by
major figures in church and lay hierarchies.

Mention has already been made of the host desecration allegation that first
surfaced in Paris at the end of the thirteenth century. Here the core elements continued to
involve alleged Jewish hatred of Christianity and Jesus. The sense of victims shifted,
however, from contemporary Christians back to Jesus himself, transubstantiated into the
host wafer. Jews were accused of attempting to harm Jesus once again, this time through
maltreatment of the host via boiling, piercing, or mutilating. The reports of host
desecration were regularly accompanied by tales of miracles accomplished by the
maltreated host, exposing the purported Jewish hatred and cruelty. Church leadership
was less vigorous in combating the allegations of host desecration than it was in
challenging the ritual murder accusations and the blood libel.

Finally, when Europe suffered the disastrous catastrophe of the Black Death in the
mid-fourteenth century, the accumulated imagery of Jewish malevolence played into the
desperate quest to identify the agents of the unmanageable calamity. In a Europe where
death was everywhere and the normal human efforts to control plague seemed to achieve
nothing, purported agents of the crisis like the devil and witches were sought out. Given
the folklore of Jewish enmity and malevolence, the Jews were added to the catalogue of
purveyors of the disease and were regularly subjected to violent persecution. Once again,
the efforts of the established leadership groups to protect the Jews were sincere. However, given the level of societal disruption, these efforts were only minimally
successful.

The potent anti-Jewish imagery set the stage for recurrent outbreaks of popular
violence. In antiquity, the major instances of physical violence against Jews stemmed
overwhelmingly from established authorities, e.g. the Assyrian destruction of the Israelite
kingdom in the eighth pre-Christian century, the Babylonian assault on Jerusalem early in
the sixth pre-Christian century, the Seleucid decrees against Judaism of the second pre-
Christian century, Roman destruction of Jerusalem in the first century, and Roman
persecution of the second century. In the Middle Ages, anti-Jewish violence came from a
different direction, from mobs fired by anti-Jewish sentiment and freed from normal
societal constraints by one or another crisis.

The first of these popular outbreaks took place in 1096, in association with the
call to the First Crusade. As noted, Pope Urban II almost certainly made no mention of
Jews and intended no anti-Jewish implications to his call to a holy war. The major
militias that responded to the papal challenge and that successfully conquered Jerusalem
in the summer of 1099 seem to have been immune to any anti-Jewish implications of
their campaign. In the Rhineland, however, both crusaders and their burgher
sympathizers translated the papal call into a justification for anti-Jewish violence, some
of it extreme. A number of major Rhineland Jewish communities were destroyed in heir
entirety. As noted, the Rhineland bloodbath was not repeated during the subsequent
major crusades, as the ecclesiastical and lay leadership of Europe were fully prepared for
anti-Jewish sentiment and were committed to insuring that it not eventuate in violence.

At the end of the thirteenth century, however, societal disintegration in the
German lands coupled with the proliferating anti-Jewish imagery previously depicted set
the stage for a massive outbreak of violence that gain cost thousands of Jewish lives.
This violence was exceeded by the anti-Jewish assaults of 1348-49. The spread of the
Black Plague disrupted normal societal life all through Europe. Unable to cope with the
devastation of the plague, frantic Europeans sought all kinds of keys to the calamity,
often focusing on alleged henchmen of the devil to explain what seemed inexplicable.
Assaults on Jewish communities spread all across the continent, despite the efforts of the
authorities to dampen the violence. Again, the proliferation of anti-Jewish imagery in
conjunction with societal breakdown set the stage for massive violence.

The last major episode of anti-Jewish violence of our period took place on the
Iberian peninsula in 1391. Again, the long-term cause was societal resentment and the
spread of anti-Jewish calumnies; the immediate cause was a breakdown in royal authority
all across the peninsula. The result was massive violence, with large numbers of Jews
electing to convert, rather than forfeit their lives. In many cases, the conversion was
insincere, based on the notion that forced conversion was in fact illegitimate and on the
assumption that return to normalcy would eventuate in return to Judaism. The latter
assumption proved in the event mistaken.

Thus, the medieval centuries saw considerable development of the prior legacy of
ecclesiastical doctrine, policy, and imagery with respect to Judaism and the Jews.
Doctrine and policy showed considerable evolution, but could be fairly well controlled by
the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church. Not so with imagery of Judaism and the
Jews. During the period between 1000 and 1500, this imagery was widely reinterpreted and expanded by the folk mentality of western Christendom, almost exclusively in
negative directions. The result was a set of stereotypes that caused considerable harm to
the Jews of Europe, serving as a key factor in the recurrent outbreak of severe anti-Jewish
violence across Europe. Indeed, this medieval imagery continued to wreak havoc
through the post-medieval centuries as well.

The State and the Jews

Given the considerable negativity of the Church’s doctrines, policies, and
imageries and the lack of pre-1000 Jewish population in western Christendom, the
obvious question is how a burgeoning European Jewish population developed in the
period between 1000 and 1500. The answer lies in the fact that some—but by no means
all—elements in European society were interested in fostering Jewish presence and that
the Jews themselves were attracted to dynamically developing western Christendom. The
most important of the majority elements committed to bringing Jews to western
Christendom were the secular rulers of Europe, who saw in the Jews a valuable resource
and potentially useful allies. The positive perspectives of the ruling class were not shared
by other important sectors in society and were always mitigated by the complex doctrines
and policies of the Roman Catholic Church and the deteriorating popular imagery of
Judaism and Jews. Nonetheless, the interest of the rulers of Europe in the Jews and their
power to create positive conditions for Jewish life constituted the key—from the majority
side—to evolving Jewish circumstances in medieval western Christendom.

The Roman Catholic Church was concerned with the spiritual well-being of
medieval western Christendom and was very much constrained by pre-existent doctrines
and policies. The secular authorities of Europe were focused on the material
circumstances of their realms and their own immediate interests; they were relatively
unfettered by pre-existent doctrines and policies. This is not to say that there were no
prior realities that impinged on these rulers. While the Church, by virtue of its focus on
the spiritual, could be oblivious to the mundane differences that distinguished the various
sectors of a highly heterogeneous European continent, the secular authorities were deeply
affected by these differences. For comprehending the alternative fates of the diverse
Jewish communities of medieval western Christendom, the regional differences that
divided the various geographic areas of Europe must be fully recognized.

The fault lines in medieval Europe were both horizontal and vertical. Perhaps the
most significant fault line lay in the distinction between the Mediterranean lands of
southern Europe and the more remote lands of the north. The Mediterranean lands of the
south had been fully absorbed into the Roman Empire and had been richly infused with
Roman civilization and culture. Remnants of Roman civilization and culture were (and
are) everywhere palpable across the southern tier of Europe; in contrast, the lands of
northern Europe had been only brushed by contact with Rome and had preserved much of
their Germanic heritage. In a general way, the southern sector of medieval western
Christendom was far more advanced in the year 1000 than were the areas of the north.
That situation, however, was to change rapidly and dramatically.

By virtue of its inclusion in the Roman world, the southern sectors of Europe had
long been populated by Jews. Jewish communities were to be found all across the northern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. To be sure, the largest of these communities in
the year 1000 were to be found in those areas of Europe that were under Muslim control,
specifically the southern sectors of the Italian and Iberian peninsulas. As noted, the only
Christian areas that harbored small Jewish enclaves were the central and northern regions
of the Italian peninsula, southern France, and the northern regions of the Iberian
peninsula. The reality of Jewish presence in some areas of Christian Europe in the year
1000 and the more imposing reality of sizeable Jewish communities in areas that would
be conquered by Christian warriors beginning in the eleventh century created the
backdrop to the growth of European Jewry in the southern tiers of the continent.
The remarkable vitalization of western Christendom subsequent to the year 1000
took place most markedly in the heretofore backward north. By the year 1500, England
and France had emerged as large and powerful monarchies on the Western scene,
contesting the kingdoms of Spain for preeminence. Indeed, part of the French
monarchy’s success lay in its absorption of previously independent southern territories
into the expanded royal domain, centered in the north. Paris and London were the
greatest cities of medieval western Christendom by the year 1500; strikingly, they had
both been backward provincial towns five hundred years earlier. There is perhaps no
more eloquent testimony to the centrality of northern Europe in the great awakening of
medieval western Christendom that took place between 1000 and 1500.

Prior to the year 1000—unlike the situation in southern Europe—there were no
old and well-established Jewish communities in northern Europe. Jews had traveled
across and traded in the reaches of northern Europe, but had not chosen to settle there.
The vitalization of these heretofore backward areas and the encouragement offered by its rulers stimulated Jewish immigration. Jews moved northward in increasingly large
numbers and founded important and creative Jewish settlements. Not surprisingly, these
Jews were regularly seen as dissidents—the only legitimate non-Christians in the area—
and as newcomers, with all the resistances that dissidents and newcomers normally elicit.

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

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