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The Slavs 543

the Slavic tribes in the Balkans retained independence and their own political

structures. The term ‘Sclavinia’ is often met in Byzantine sources, and means,

most probably, a Slavic tribal territory independent of imperial rule. Quite early

on, moves were made to change this state of affairs. The politics of Byzantium

concerning the Balkan Slavs were varied. Already by the second half of the

seventh century attempts were being made to absorb the tribes living closer to

the capital into the socio-economic system of the metropolitan state. This was

partly successful in Thrace: the Thracian theme which had originally included

only the early provinces of Europa and Adrianopolis was organised in 680–687

and represented the return of imperial power over these territories. It is likely,

however, that some of the Slavic tribes living there retained their autonomy.

It was more difﬁcult to subdue the Macedonian and Greek Slavs by force.

Military expeditions were organised against them (by Constans II in 656, and

Justinian II in 686). Great numbers of Slavs taken prisoner in these expedi-

tions were resettled in Asia Minor. The tribes that came under Byzantine rule

were obliged to pay tribute, supplying military aid and fulﬁlling other obliga-

tions. More than once it was necessary to renew military action against muti-

nous Slavic tribes. In other territories they retained relative independence. The

Helladian theme organised in 695 included Attica, Boeotia and several islands,

but without those areas of Greece that had been settled by Slavic tribes.

In the peripheral areas, far from the main centres of the Empire, the power

of the Byzantine state was more nominal. Relatively early we see signs of socio-

economic changes leading to transformation of Slavic tribal organisations into

separate states, albeit ones with fairly weak political institutions. Sometimes an

important role in this process was fulﬁlled by foreign elements, as occurred for

example in the north-eastern part of the Balkan peninsula, where at the end of

the seventh century the core of the Bulgar state appeared. This was organised

by the so-called Proto-Bulgars, a nomadic tribe of Turkic origin. At the end

of the seventh century, after the collapse of Great Bulgaria, this people had

arrived in ‘Little Scythia’ by the Danube delta. Under the leadership of the

khagan Asparuch they had come from the Azov and Black Sea steppes along

the traditional routes of the peoples of the steppes. Byzantium, perceiving the

danger posed by the Bulgars, sent an expedition against them, which ended

in defeat for the imperial army. The Proto-Bulgars moved to the territory of

Lower Moesia, and in 678–680, according to the early ninth-century account of

Theophanes Homologetos,subdued the Seven Clans and Severs (Siewierzanie),

the Slavic tribes already living there, and resettled them on the periphery of

the territory which they occupied, that is, on the frontier between the Avars

and the Bulgars, and in the Balkan foothills. The Bulgars thus strengthened

their hold over the territory between the Danube, the Balkans and the Black

Sea, and began to threaten the Byzantine possessions in Thrace. This forced

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544 zbigniew kobyli

nski

the Byzantines to sign a ‘dishonourable’ treaty with them in 680/1 by which

they were allowed the rights to inhabit the territory that they held but which

obliged them to pay a tribute. The Slavic tribes, which found themselves under

the political and economic domination of the nomadic Proto-Bulgars, none

the less retained their ethnic and organisational differentiation and their own

tribal leaders.

In the north-west fringes of southern Slavic territory, among the Alpine

Slavs, a proto-state political organisation was also forming. At the end of

the sixth and beginning of the seventh century the Carantanian Slavs were

dependent on the Avars, but this dependence was weaker than that of the

tribes inhabiting the Carpathian basin. In the period of the crisis of the Avar

state in the 630s, Carantania became independent of the Avars. From this

time come references to the rule of a Prince Valluk over the ‘Vinedian March’

(identiﬁed with Carantania). The relationship of Carantania with the state of

Samo is debated, but it cannot be discounted that there was some co-operation

in the interests of ﬁghting a common enemy. After the collapse of Samo’s state,

and once most of its territory had been retaken by the Avars, Carantania proper

in the valleys of the Drava (Drau) and Mur rivers retained its independence and

for some time defended itself effectively against the Lombards and Bavarians

to the west and the Avars to the east. It was in this period that a process of

internal consolidation and socio-economic change took place, which was to

lead to the creation in Carantania of an early form of state.

We have now seen how by the year 700 the Slavs had colonised the eastern

half of Europe and stabilised the western border of their settlement from the

rivers Elbe and Saale in the north, and southwards almost in a straight line

down to the Istrian peninsula on the Adriatic Sea.

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PART III

THEMES AND PROBLEMS

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chapter 20

THE JEWSINEUROPE500–1050

Michael Toch

introduction and sources

The early Middle Ages saw the establishment of Jewish life in major parts

of Europe. In this period the Mediterranean–Hellenistic Jewry of antiquity

separated and developed into Byzantine–southern Italian, Roman, Catalan–

southern French and Arabic–Sicilian branches. During the later part of the

period Ashkenazic (north-western and northern European) and Sephardic

(Iberian) Jewry came into being as distinctive entities very different from earlier

patterns. There were (probably) also some Jews in eastern Europe, of which

almost nothing is known but a vague association with Byzantium. Jews held

to a common creed yet differed in language, religious custom and ritual, social

organisation, occupations and legal standing, a fact that militates against easy

historical inferences from an ostensibly ﬁxed character. At different times and

to differing degrees, they were under the inﬂuence of the centres of gravity –

demographic, religious, intellectual – of Jewish life in the Middle East, espe-

cially Palestine and Babylonia. Compared to these, throughout most of the

period under consideration, European Jews in numbers or intellectual creativ-

ity were yet barely remarkable. None the less, modern historians have usually

accorded them a signiﬁcance out of proportion. In this they faithfully followed

medieval churchmen, to whom Jews presented a challenge far in excess of their

actual presence and impact.

It is thus not by accident that our view is further hampered by an ambiguous

and severely unbalanced source tradition. For the greater part of Europe there

exists a considerable body of texts of ecclesiastical provenance – the Lives and

miracles of saints, chronicles and histories, epistles, form letters, the decisions

of synods, canonical collections, theological treatises – complemented by law-

codes, imperial or royal legislation and charters. However, in the light of recent

studies into hagiography and religious polemics, many of these sources should

be handled with great circumspection, cautioning us from na

ıvely quarrying

547

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548 michael toch

them for straightforward data. Clerics all over Europe employed Judaism and

Jews to drive home moral and theological messages destined for internal Chris-

tian consumption. Not every metaphorical reference – for instance the denun-

ciations of a seventh- or eighth-century canonical collection from Ireland, to

cite an extreme case – speaks of actually living Jews.

Foralong stretch, information provided by Jews themselves, funeral epig-

raphy and a family history in Hebrew, come solely from the Mediterranean

south.

So do the ﬁrst literary works produced by Jews in Europe: religious

Hebrew poetry written in southern Italy from the ninth century onwards.

Somewhat later Responsa literature sets in, ﬁrst in Arab Spain and then in

Germany and France. These deliberations and decisions of the rabbis, drafted

in response to litigation and requests for religious-legal advice, constitute the

main medieval corpus of information on internal Jewish life.

Some data can

be culled from the writings of the Babylonian heads of Talmudic academies,

even though their contacts were mainly restricted to Jews in Muslim Spain

and Byzantium.

By the end of the tenth century the immense wealth of the

Cairo Genizah begins to shed light on Jews in the Muslim world including

Arab Sicily and, to a much lesser degree, in Muslim Spain and Byzantium.

The fact that almost none of the many thousand documents of the Genizah

bears on Latin Europe is an incisive comment on the widely held notion of a

Jewish mobility (and solidarity) straddling continents.

Indeed, the order of

magnitude of Jewish life in northern and western Europe is strongly indicated

by the veritable absence of a written record produced by Jews, as compared

to Italy, the Middle East and North Africa. By the same token, its emergence

between the late ninth and the eleventh century speaks of a decisive change

in the presence of Jews. Fittingly, by then something of the daily stuff of life

too, property and landed possessions, comes to light in Latin cartularies and

Hebrew deeds from France, Italy, Spain and Germany.

population

In the course of Roman antiquity Jews came to be a signiﬁcant ingredient

of some town populations of the Empire. In Byzantine parts, mainly in Asia

Linder (1997), pp. 593–5.See the debate between Lotter (2001) and Toch (2001a) and (2001b).

Noy (1993) and (1995); Klar (1944/74), pp. 11–41 = Salzman (1924).

Klar (1944/74), pp. 55–108,cf. Schirmann (1966). The tenth-century Book of Yosippon, an ancient

history of Israel, was also written in Italy, cf. Bowman (1993).

Bar-Ilan University (2002). For translations see Agus (1965), Mutius (1984–90); for orientation

Grabois (1987/93).

Mann (1973); cf. Brody (1998), pp. 19–34.

Mann (1931), pp. 3–59; Ashtor (1964); Goitein (1968); Ben-Sasson (1991); De Lange (1996); Gil (1997);

Simonsohn (1997).

Toch (2001c).

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The Jews in Europe 500–1050 549

Minor and to a lesser degree in Greece (Thessalonica) and on the isles (Cyprus,

Crete and Rhodes), the foundation of Jewish communities goes back to the

pre-Christian era, and that of Constantinople to the period of Theodosius

II, if not earlier.

In later times various places are mentioned in the sources,

mostly in Asia Minor,

but the fragmentary state of the documentation makes

it impossible to retrace local developments. For example, the author of a tenth-

century religious poem called himself ‘Menahem the Small, son of R. Mordecai

Corizzi from the community of Otranto’. His family had probably moved to

Italy from Koritsa, nowadays Albania, and this is the only indication that

there were Jews there. Menahem’s cultural background was surely a Byzantine

one, as evident from his frequent use of Greek terms.

The list of places of

settlement grows signiﬁcantly once the Karaite nuclei and the later evidence

of Benjamin of Tudela (c.1160)are taken into account.

With great caution

one can assume renewed growth beginning in or after the mid-tenth century,

parallel to and possibly caused by Byzantine reconstruction in the east and in

the Mediterranean. It is safe to state that two phenomena mark Byzantine Jewry.

Even with the basically hostile attitude of government there was a continuity of

the Jewish presence in the Eastern Empire. Secondly, there was a geographical

dissemination and migratory ﬂow throughout the Byzantine space, including

the Middle East with Palestine, Egypt and North Africa (three areas not treated

in the following), as well as southern Italy. The former regions remained in

some contact with Jewish Byzantium even after the Arab conquest. Although

there are no direct indicators except cultural afﬁnities, Byzantine Jewry appears

to have been the medieval foster mother, via Italy, for much of European

Jewry.

In Italy epigraphy and textual sources single out Rome as the oldest com-

munity, going back to Republican times and continuously inhabited by Jews.

NorthofRome, Jews organised in proper communities are still mentioned in

the early sixth century in Genoa and Milan. They then disappear from the

record, to resurface, haltingly and only as individuals, in the eighth century

(Pavia, Asti) and in greater numbers and detail from the tenth century onwards

(Ravenna, Verona, Pavia, Treviso, Lucca, Rimini, Ancona).

The main body

of Jews outside Rome lived in the south, on the mainland and in Sicily, in areas

mainly under Byzantine rule or inﬂuence until the coming of the Arabs and

the Normans. In late antique Apulia and Calabria they must have made up a

signiﬁcant ingredient of urban population. Emperor Honorius in 398 saw the

Jacoby (1993), esp. pp. 126–7, and (1995).

Adrianople,Corinth, Sparta, Chios, Pylae, Ephesus,Mastaura, Attaleia, Synnada, Nicaea, Cotyaeum,

Amorium, Khonai, Strobilos (?), Seleucia: Starr (1939), passim; Ankori (1959), pp. 113–19.

Roth (1966b), p. 257.

Ankori (1959), passim;Adler (1907).

Zimmels (1966). A case study: Ta-Shma (2001).

Toaff (1996).

Colorni (1980).

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550 michael toch

very functioning of town governments threatened by their claim to exemption

from service in the curiae.

This southern centre of gravity, including Sicily,

remains prominent in the sources of the sixth century, funeral epigraphy and

the extensive correspondence of Pope Gregory I, as well as in the poorly docu-

mented seventh century.

Jews are mentioned in southern Lazio (Terracina),

in Campania (Venafro, Naples, Nola), in Apulia (Taranto, Oria), in Venosa at

the northern border of the province of Basilicata, in Sicily (Palermo, Agrigent,

Syracuse), in Sardinia (Cagliari), and without exact location in the papal pat-

rimonies of Campania and Sicily. Afterwards it is difﬁcult to decide whether

there was serious disruption, slow decline or hidden continuity, except for

Venosa, where there is an almost unbroken epigraphic record as well as writ-

ten evidence to Jewish settlement, including in villages around the town.

Deﬁnitely by the early tenth century Jewish life had picked up again, on the

mainland in places like Gaeta, Benevento, Capua, Naples, Salerno, Siponto,

Lavello (?), Trani, Taranto, Oria, Bari and Otranto, and in abundance in Arab

Sicily. The latter, superbly documented by the Cairo Genizah, saw a consid-

erable inﬂux from North Africa and Egypt.

By then the contours of Jewish

culture in southern Italy, as compared to late antiquity, had decisively changed.

Funerary conventions demonstrate that up to the sixth century Italian Jews

articulated their identity in the idiom of their surroundings, especially by the

use of Greek, which connected them to the Hellenistic–Byzantine diaspora.

Now they did so exclusively in Hebrew, employing the rabbinical vocabulary

and mind-set of the Mesopotamian houses of Talmudic learning, as well as

developing a rich religious poetry drawing from Palestinian sources.

Myths

of origin too point to the re-establishment of intellectual ties between southern

European Jewry and the centres of religious learning and law in the Middle

East.

Visigothic Spain (not including Septimania, which is treated below with

Gaul) confronts us with an enigma. From the ﬁfth and sixth centuries there

is a small number of epigraphs, four or ﬁve altogether from Tarragona and

To r tosa on the eastern coast, as well as some legislation.

At most this hints at

modest Jewish life in a few places. In stark contrast, there is a spate of documen-

tation setting in immediately with the Visigoths’ conversion to Catholicism

(589) and running up to the Arab conquest of 711. This derives almost entirely

Codex Theodosianus xii.1.158 = Linder (1987), no. 29.

Noy (1993), passim; Linder (1997), pp. 417–43; Colafemmina (1980).

Leon (1953/54); Klar (1944/74), p. 16 = Salzman (1924), p. 68.

Above, note 7.

Simonsohn (1974); Zimmels (1966); Klar (1944/74), pp. 55–108;cf. Schirmann (1966).

In southern Italy: Klar (1944/74), pp. 12–16 = Salzman (1924), pp. 62–7;cf. Bonﬁl (1983). In Spain:

Cohen (1960–61). In Narbonne: R

egn

e(1912/81), pp. 13–30,cf. Grabois (1997).

Noy (1993), pp. 247–61; Linder (1997), pp. 217–33 (Lex Visigothorum or Breviarum).

The Jews in Europe 500–1050 551

from ecclesiastical and royal legislation, with one clearly inﬂuencing the other

in a rising spiral of missionary zeal.

In the same polemical vein run theological

and historical treatises, by Isidore of Seville, Julian of Toledo and some lesser

authors.

The sheer bulk and fervour of these writings are unlike anything

else encountered in early medieval Europe. Scholarship has usually under-

stood this as a response to a tangible challenge, of proselytising, economic or

social domination, or other manifestations of Jewish expansionism. Only a

substantial Iberian Jewry, a force to be reckoned with, could have been capa-

ble of generating such a threat. From there a Jewish aristocracy of landholders,

international merchants and slave traders has been postulated.

However, out-

side legal and theological polemics there is no evidence for this assumption and

the inferences drawn from it. The incongruity makes sense if understood as

representing separate phenomena: on one hand, for political and religious pur-

poses not yet clear, an escalating obsession with Judaism as declared enemy to

be eradicated; on the other hand rather few genuine Jews, who in the course of

the seventh century were apparently forced to convert, become crypto-Jews or

emigrate. The collaboration of Iberian Jews with the Arab invaders of 711 has

been adduced as support for the traditional view. Examination of the sources,

however, has found this ‘ﬁfth column’ to be a myth.

It belongs to the highly

popular topic of ‘Jewish treason’, whose literary history can be traced back to

the hagiographic account of the siege of Visigothic Arles in 508.

Developed

in Visigothic Spain and Septimania and also by expatriate Spaniards, it is a

literary invention serving polemical purposes. Real Jews in Visigothic Spain

thus appear to have been less than a signiﬁcant entity, even though as an idea

they loomed very large in the minds of rulers and churchmen.

Some hundred years after the conquest of Andalusia sources in three lan-

guages start speaking of Jews.

They bear Arab names, speak and write Arabic

and appear thoroughly adjusted to the North African–Oriental Jewry to which

the Cairo Genizah bears such eloquent testimony. Thus it stands to reason that

after 711 a sizeable immigration from North Africa took place, which estab-

lished Sepharad,anew Iberian Jewry with a different cultural proﬁle and an

order of magnitude unlike any Jewish population outside the Middle East.

Only there could be found a ‘Jewish town where there are no Gentiles’, Lucena

Linder (1997), pp. 484–538 (Toledo iii–xviii), 257–332 (lv). On this legislation, see also Barbero and

Loring, chapter 7 above.

Albert (1990); Cohen (1999), pp. 95–122;Gonz

alez-Salinero (1999).

Thus the thesis of Bachrach (1977) and Lotter (1999).

Roth (1976); Toch (2001b), pp. 474–7; see also Katz (1937), pp. 114–17.Onthe events leading up to

the Arab conquest of Spain, see Barbero and Loring, chapter 13 above.

Cyprianus, Vita S. Caesarii, MGH SRM iii,p.468.

Mann (1973), pp. 485–7; Ashtor (1964); Baer (1929). Cf. Beinart (1992), pp. 14–20;Roth (1994),

pp. 73–112.

552 michael toch

south of C

ordoba. The Babylonian sage writing this in the mid-ninth century

exaggerated only slightly, as borne out by slightly later Arabic sources.

Jews

lived in nearly all major towns and apparently also in many more small ones, as

well as in villages. They are explicitly mentioned in C

ordoba, Seville, Calsena,

Lucena, Granada, Illiberi, Badjana, Ja

en, Toledo, Calatayud and Saragossa. In

this climate ﬂourished personalities like Hasdai ibn Shaprut (c.915–c.970/5),

physician and senior diplomat to emir ‘Abd al-Rahman III of C

ordoba, proliﬁc

letter-writer, tireless defender of Jews abroad, and patron to a circle of Hebrew-

Arabic poets as well as to Rabbinical learning.

As in the Italian case sketched

above, the Jewish culture emerging in Spain drew from the centres of learning

and law in the Middle East to develop within a short time a distinctive proﬁle

of its own, in which Arab inﬂuences were a major component. These were

indeed the beginnings of a Sephardic ‘golden age’ of medieval Jewish life.

The demographic upswing so noticeable in al-Andalus appears to have carried

Jewish life also into Christian lands. From the ninth century onwards Jews,

some of them called by Arabic names, appear sparsely in the north-east in places

like Gerona, Barcelona, Tarragona and Tortosa, as well as in the countryside;

in the north in Puento Castro, Castrojeriz near Burgos, Le

on, Sahag

un and

Belorado; in the west in Coimbra, Corunna, M

erida and B

eja.

Despite occa-

sional manifestations of religious zeal, the exigencies of border warfare and

colonisation appear to have led rulers of the Christian principalities to adopt

a more tolerant attitude than their Visigothic ancestors.

In Roman Gaul Jews had left only some ﬂeeting traces, probably of itinerant

merchants.

The epigraphic record is limited, late and conﬁned to the south:

four inscriptions between the seventh and the tenth centuries from Narbonne,

Auch, Arles and Vienne.

Against such scantiness, for two hundred years

(449–647/53) there is quite a profusion of literary and legal sources: letters of

Sidonius Apollinaris and Pope Gregory I, hagiography by Gregory of Tours

and others, Gregory’s Histories of course, and the councils of the Septimanian

and the Frankish church, altogether thirteen between 465 (Vannes) and 647/53

(Chalon-sur-Sa

one). This richness has uniformly been viewed as conﬁrmation

for a substantial Jewry established all over Gaul. However, a closer look at

the sources, both as literary genres and by themselves, raises some questions.

Mann(1973), p. 487;M

aillo Salgado (1993). Bachrach (1977), pp.69–70,bymistakingthis Andalusian

town for Ausona (Vich) in Catalonia, argues for the systematic employment of Jewishﬁghters, settlers

and ofﬁcials in the establishment of the Spanish March.

Ashtor (1973), pp. 155–227; but cf. Roth (1994), pp. 79–86; Cohen (1960/61), pp. 115–19.

Cohen (1960/61), pp. 94, 113–23; Ashtor (1973), pp. 228–63, 382–402; the articles in Beinart (1992);

Assis (1995). For a cautionary note, cf. Cohen (1994).

Cantera Burgos (1966); Ashtor (1973), p. 116;Romano (1991).

Thus my reading of the evidence adduced by Blumenkranz (1969) and (1974).

Noy (1993), pp. 263–70, 281–3.