Fouracre P. The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 1: c. 500-c. 700

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The Jews in Europe 500–1050 553

Among the stock miracles performed by holy bishops we ﬁnd the conversion

to Christianity of the Jews of their town.

Given the widespread Augustinian

notion of the Jews as the proverbial unbelievers but eventual witnesses to

Christian truth,

making them see the light is indeed a feat worthy of a holy

bishop and clear proof for his saintliness. In addition, such performance heals

dissent and re-establishes harmony within the city, yet another rhetorical task

of hagiography pointed out by recent scholarship. This double purpose also

animates the hagiographic accounts of Jews lamenting the dead bishop of their

town.

In a similar vein, they are made advocates for the saint’s power, for

example when one Jew’s sarcasm sets in proﬁle a healing miracle performed

by St Martin at Bordeaux.

On the strength of these texts the existence of

organised communities has been asserted for a number of places – Tournai,

Paris, Nantes, Tours, Orl

eans, Bourges, Bordeaux, Uz

es. Unconﬁrmed by other

evidence, such literary devices are hard to accept as speaking of actually existing

Jews. In consequence, the notion of an early medieval settlement by Jews of

central, western and northern Gaul is untenable, with the possible exception

of Clermont. This does not rule out occasional appearances of individuals in

these regions. Settled communities, apparently reaching back to Roman times,

did however exist in Narbonne, Arles and Marseilles. They should be seen as

part of the littoral Mediterranean pattern characteristic of late antiquity and

the very early medieval period.

Between the mid-seventh and the mid-eighth centuries no sources mention

Jews in Frankish lands. Of the time of Charlemagne there is some anecdotal

and legislative evidence for Jews in the emperor’s entourage and, slightly, else-

where.

The references do imply the existence of roving merchants, in one

case of a physician, but not yet of settled communities, as has been asserted

for instance in Aachen. First indications for change emerge during and after

Louis the Pious’ reign. Hinting at a likely source for growth, there is at least

one documented and one more possible case of immigration from Spain.

Additional evidence from the eighth and ninth centuries points to sizeable,

probably growing numbers of Jews in the south.

From there settlement

spread out along the Rh

one river to the centre of France, to Vienne, Lyons,

Twice in Bourges: MGH AA iv.2,p.24; MGH SRM iv,pp.374–5.InClermont: Gregory, Hist.

v.11, ed. Buchner, i,p.298;Venantius Fortunatus, Carmina v.5, MGH AA iv.1,pp.107–12.InUz

es:

Aronius (1902), p. 12.

Blumenkranz (1949); Cohen (1999), pp. 23–71.

Toch (2001b), pp. 469–74, with references.

Gregory, Libri Quattuor de Virtutibus S. Martini, iii.50, MGH SRM i.2,p.644; similar in Gregory,

Hist. v.6; iv.5, ed. Buchner, i,p.292; ii,p.8.

Aronius (1902), nos. 68, 71–5, 80.

Linder (1997), pp. 341–2, 367.

Noy (1993), pp. 281–3; Linder (1997), pp. 443–4, 368–74;Dhuoda, Liber Manualis, PL 106, col. 117.

For legends tied to Narbonne see Grabois (1997).

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554 michael toch

acon and Ch

alons.

Slowly in the course of the tenth and deﬁnitely by the

early eleventh century, proper communities become visible in Maine-Anjou,

Bourgogne, Champagne, Lorraine and Normandy.

Such growth is clearly

conﬁrmed by the onset of intellectual production of French Ashkenazic schol-

ars, especially their religious-legal deliberations, which now attest to commu-

nity institutions and a settled way of life. Their writings become distinctive

enough to reconstruct biographies of some sages. By the eleventh century this

body of learning and law-ﬁnding became independent enough to dissociate

itself from the tutelage of the Babylonian sages.

The growth of the northern French community is tied to the parallel devel-

opment, chronologically and in terms of cultural afﬁnity, of German Jewry.

Here too no continuity can be assumed from the Jews apparent in late antique

centres like Cologne and Trier.

Here too in the ninth and early tenth cen-

turies some brief hints attest to itinerant merchants. In the course of the next

century some more must have arrived, from Italy as well as from France.

Their ﬁrst places of residence, at the end of the ninth century, were Metz

and slightly later Mainz. Only during the second half of the tenth century

is there sparse evidence from Hebrew sources for some elements of organised

structures. By the late eleventh century these had expanded to populous and

thriving communities at Trier, Cologne, Mainz, Speyer, Worms, Regensburg

and Prague, and probably also at Magdeburg. Ashkenazic Jewry in both its

northern French and its German branches began to expand geographically at

the very end of our period. In England the arrival of Jews, from Normandy, is

clearly tied to the Conquest. The few Jews making an appearance in eleventh-

century eastern Europe apparently came from Byzantium as well as from

Germany.

In both peripheries, more substantial settlement only took place

after c.1100.

The early settlement history of Jews in Europe should then distinguish

between two spheres, south and north, and two periods, from late antiquity

to c.800, and afterwards until c.1050/1100. Continuity from classical times in

probably declining numbers is found only around the Mediterranean seaboard:

in Byzantium, in Italy from Rome southwards, and in a few places in southern

Linder (1997), pp. 333–8, 341–3, 368–9; Agobardi Opera, Epist. 11, 14,pp.195, 231.

For the Latin sources see Devroey (2000), pp. 347–53, for the Hebrew ones Gross (1897/1969), passim.

Agus (1966); Grossman (1995).

Toch (1998a), pp. 5–6, 80–2.

For Cologne such continuity has been postulated by arbitrary archaeological interpretation, cf. Toch

(2001a), pp. 12–13, note 26.For the archaeological record see Lapp (1993).

Grossman (1975) and (1982). Cf. Schwarzfuchs (1980) for an alternative view, by which the commu-

nities of northern France derived from immigrants from Germany.

Mann (1920), ii,p.192;Starr (1939), pp. 183, 192–3; Agus (1965), nos. xix, xxi, lxv.For the impon-

derables of the Chazars’ kingdom, Kievan Russia and Hungary see Dunlop, Ettinger and Scheiber

in Roth (1966).

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The Jews in Europe 500–1050 555

France and eastern Spain. By the end of the ninth century new growth, slow at

ﬁrst and then accelerating, becomes visible everywhere. In Spain (and possibly

also in Sicily) this is clearly tied to the more favourable Arab regime, to immi-

gration from North Africa and to new links forged with the Oriental centres

of Jewish learning. In Italy and southern France the sources for expansion are

still obscure, but trends are similar. In central and northern Gaul and western

Germany, called in Hebrew Ashkenaz or Lothir,Jewish presence was a new

phenomenon wholly dependent on immigration from the south. From there it

drew demographic and cultural resources, to be transmitted and transformed

with a time lag to the north. By the eleventh century both northern and south-

ern Jewries had come of age: part of the European landscape, strong enough

to claim their intellectual independence from the centres of religious authority

in the Middle East.

occupations

One view has hitherto dominated the understanding of Jewish livelihoods in

the early Middle Ages: privileged and protected by rulers, uniquely equipped

by their Talmudic law, community organisation and family ties, as well as by

inbred inclination and/or the Diaspora experience, Jews were the proverbial

long-distance traders connecting Europe with the Middle East and Muslim

Spain. In the earlier period they are thought to have done so along with

other Orientals; from the Carolingian period and into the eleventh century on

their own. For many scholars they even possessed a veritable monopoly over

commerce, particularly in the slave trade.

This notion has to be discarded. It

is clearly tied to contemporary (nineteenth- and twentieth-century) polemics

and apologetics. It assumes a system and purpose where none existed. Its

documentary basis is exceedingly thin and lends itself to a more convincing,

even though less glamorous interpretation.

At the beginning of our period Pope Gregory I in his letters affords a reason-

ably comprehensive gaze over parts of the Mediterranean scene. His evidence

matches the information provided by late antique epigraphy from the city of

Rome, indicating a pattern of varied occupations. Jews appear in substantial

numbers as coloni on papal estates in Sicily, but also as possessors of estates

worked by Christian coloni and originarii in Etruria; as a buyer of precious

metal and plate; as a ship owner heavily in debt and deprived of his vessel

in Palermo; moving between Marseilles and Rome on their business, proba-

bly as merchants; and settled in Naples, as purveyors of slaves from Gaul for

For the extensive historiography see Devroey (2000) and Toch (1998a and b, 1999, 2000a and b,

2001a and b).

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556 michael toch

ofﬁcials in their town.

In other sources Jewish owners sail their ship along

the Provenc¸al coast, while at Naples Jews take upon themselves to provide the

besieged city with food.

Some merchants appear in the Byzantine space of

the sixth and seventh centuries.

In Constantinople there is a glass worker,

admittedly suspect: his trade conveniently supplies the stage and means for a

miracle, the furnace in which his boy, converted to Christianity, miraculously

survives.

At Tours there arrived a Jew in order to realise a debt owed him in

lieu of public taxes, promptly to be murdered by a converted Jew. Some mer-

chants in species (spices?), indeed magna species,are active in Clermont, and so

is one at King Chilperic’s court, ‘who served him as a buyer of spices’.

It is

difﬁcult to decide whether a Jewish physician at Bourges was real or a literary

invention designed to highlight a healing miracle.

Given the chronology of

settlement outlined above, the few Jews roaming the Merovingian realm most

probably were visitors from the south.

Later data augment the range of Mediterranean livelihoods and point to a

quickening economic pulse. In northern Italy a Jew formerly associated with

Charlemagne’s court was held to be an expert in precious metalwork. In main-

land Italy there were additional practitioners of this craft, and considerably

more merchants and craftsmen.

In Byzantium, Muslim Spain and Sicily, one

ﬁnds yet more merchants, and, signiﬁcantly, craftsmen and entrepreneurs in

textiles, tanning and, to judge from slightly later evidence, silk working.

For

the eleventh century the Cairo Genizah evinces an intensive trade by Jews

between Egypt, the Maghreb, Muslim Spain and Arab Sicily, in which Jews

Gregory, Registrum Epistularum ii.38, v.7, viii.23, iv.21, i.45, vi.29, ix.105 (see Linder (1997), pp. 423,

428–9, 432, 426–7, 418, 431, 436); Epistulae ix.40, MGH Epp. ii,p.68.Areference to Jewish coloni

in Clermont (Venantius Fortunatus, Carmina v.5, MGH AA iv,p.110)isprobably nothing more

than literary allegory, cf. Goffart (1985), pp. 486–7.

Gregory of Tours, Liber In Gloria Confessorum, c.95, MGH SRM i.2,p.809;Procopius, Gothic War

i.8,p.85.

Doctrina Jacobi,pp.214–19;Nelson and Starr (1939).

Evagrius, Ecclesiastical History iv.36,p.241;Gregory of Tours, Glory of the Martyrs, c.9,trans. Van

Dam (1988), p. 29; Georgii Syncelli Ecloga Chronographica ii,p.654.But cf. Benjamin of Tudela and

the Cairo Genizah on later glassmakers: Adler (1907), pp. 26, 30;Goitein (1967), index. In early

modern Germany this was a Jewish craft.

Gregory of Tours, Hist. vi.5; vii.23, ed. Buchner, ii,pp.8, 118.

Gregory of Tours, Hist. v.6, ed. Buchner, i,p.292.

MGH SRL,p.372; Linder (1997), pp. 349–50, 159, 375–6, 384–5;Starr (1939), pp. 124, 161, 169;Mann

(1931), p. 24;Milano (1954), passim; Colorni (1980), p. 260.

Merchants: Mann (1920), i,pp.87–93, 204–5; ii,pp.87–92, 214, 344, 364;Starr (1939), pp. 121,

191, 214;DeLange (1996), pp. 21–7; Linder (1997), pp. 151–2, 159.Crafts: Starr (1939), pp. 137, 148,

167–9;Goitein (1967), p. 50;Bresc (1998); Jacoby (2001), esp. p. 12; Ashtor (1973), pp. 271–5; Cohen

(1960/61), pp. 66–7.

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The Jews in Europe 500–1050 557

of Christian Europe however did not take part.

Physicians remain a fre-

quent feature, some of them metaphorical but others true historical ﬁgures,

such as Shabbetai Donnolo from tenth-century Oria, the earliest medieval

medical writer and a distinguished philosopher, or his contemporary, the

already mentioned Hasdai ibn Shaprut in Spain.

Even Pope Gregory’s I Jew-

ish coloni of Sicily may have had eleventh-century heirs on the island of Chios,

although their serfdom was probably of more of a legal than an economic

nature.

The ownership of agricultural land by Jews is deﬁnitely demonstrated by

Latin charters of the ninth to eleventh centuries in Italy, Christian Spain, and

southern and east-central France.

It must surely have been more widespread

than is indicated by the chance survival in ecclesiastical charters. Ownership,

transmission and mortgage of landed property come up many times in Responsa

arising from actual litigation.

They dominate the formula books for Hebrew

deeds extant from Muslim Spain and southern France.

Apparently non-

Jews worked such lands, more often vineyards than ﬁelds, for their Jewish

proprietors, sometimes in partnership arrangements suggestive of sharecrop-

ping. Signiﬁcantly, of all the Mediterranean regions only Byzantium is absent

from the record of Jewish landholding, perhaps because of the sorry state of

the evidence. However it seems more likely that here the tight control of an

inherently hostile state apparatus as well as the high degree of urbanisation

indeed prevented Jewish ownership. If this was the case, the Empire’s sway

did not extend to southern Italy, where ownership of agricultural land is well

attested.

Sparse references to landholding in northern France and Germany cannot

compare to the extent of ﬁndings from the south.

The contrast reﬂects an

important difference. In the north, Latin writers, when not engaged in religious

Ben-Sasson (1991); Simonsohn (1997); Goitein (1968), p. 211;Gil(1997), i,pp.559–70;cf. Citarella

(1971); Toch (2001c).

MGH Form., p. 448; Annals of St Bertin s.a. 877; Gesta Episcoporum Leodiensium, c.44, MGH SS vii,

p. 216; Life of St Nilos;Starr (1939), p. 162.OnDonnolo see Sharf (1976).

Linder (1997), pp. 160–3;cf. Argenti (1966).

Italy: Colorni (1980), pp. 247, 248, 257;Starr (1939), p. 141, 257; MGH Diplomata Regum et Impera-

torum Germaniae ii.2,p.520.Spain: Romano (1991), pp. 328–31; Linder (1997), p. 559;Baer (1929),

p. 2;Blumenkranz (1960), p. 23, nn. 132–5.France: Linder (1997), pp. 443–4, 365–75; Latouche

(1966); Blumenkranz (1960), pp. 24–30, and (1989).

Work in progress by the author.

Rivlin (1994); Mutius (1994), (1996) and (1997).

Metz before 945:Blumenkranz (1960), p. 29,n.195; near Orl

eans before 972:Halphen and Lot

(1908), p. 82; eleventh-century Normandy: Golb (1998), pp. 552–3; tenth-century Regensburg: MGH

Diplomata Regum et Imperatorum Germaniae ii.1,p.279.This does not yet include the Hebrew record,

see note 61.

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558 michael toch

polemics, perceived Jews only as merchants and physicians.

They were not

wrong in this observation. In the Hebrew record, from the second half of

the tenth century onwards, commerce is the patent mainstay of livelihood in

central and northern France as well as in western Germany. This was succinctly

stated by Gershom ben Jehuda ‘Light of the Exile’ of Mainz, the foremost

Ashkenazic religious authority of his time (c.960–1028): ‘Their [the Jews’]

livelihood depends on their commerce/merchandise.’

The Hebrew record

also allows corrections to some inﬂated inferences drawn from Latin sources.

Movement of merchants was plentiful but took place mostly along local circuits

and well-knownitineraries between inland markets, at times also abroad, to and

from Hungary, Poland, possibly also Russia. There is very little of the treasures

of intercontinental commerce, nothing at all of the slave trade. A blend of staple

goods and more costly merchandise was bought, transported and sold: salt,

wine, dyes, medicine, salted ﬁsh, cattle, hides and pelts, ready-made garments

and textiles, also silk, gilded and copper vessels, and some precious metals.

The customers were bishops and priests, in one case the treasurer of a bishop,

afﬂuent ladies including a queen of Hungary (the only royalty mentioned in the

sources), magnates and counts, in short the upper classes. A foremost issue in

the discussions of the rabbis is the deplorable fact that Jews borrowed money

from Jews, by direct interest-bearing loan in the north and by mortgaging

landed property in the south. Creating capital for commercial ventures was

thus a problem at this early stage, and so was competition in a constricted and

highly personalised market. When rivalry got out of hand, hatred, murder and

the instigation of Christian authorities against the Jews could follow.

Among

the earliest community legislation two ordinances were designed to curb such

anarchy: Herem ha-yishuv, which gave the community the right to veto the

settlement of newcomers; and Maaruﬁya (a term of Arabic derivation), by

which the community assigned a potential customer to a single merchant.

Money changing and bullion transactions were part of the merchant’s activities,

important enough to be regulated by religious authority so as to avoid the taking

of interest between Jews. In this time of monetary dearth merchants certainly

made some funds available as loans, especially to their privileged customers,

with and without interest. However, most of the references adduced for early

Notker, Gesta Karoli i.16; ii.14, MGH SRG xii,pp.19–20, 77; Linder (1997), pp. 348, 344, 333, 336,

341, 351, 349, 377–8, 380, 382; MGH Leges i,p.363, cap. 19.

Mutius (1984), i,p.58.Further references in Toch (1998b) and (2000b). See also Brody (1998), p. 134,

for merchants visiting a fair, possibly St Denis in the mid-ninth century.

See the Hebrew horror tale, embellished as an instance of religious persecution, placed in late tenth-

century France: Habermann, Book of Persecutions,p.12,cf. Chazan (1970). Incidentally, it uncannily

parallels Gregory of Tours: Gregory, Hist. vi.17, ed. Buchner, ii,pp.34–6.

Rabinowitz (1945); Eidelberg (1953).

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The Jews in Europe 500–1050 559

money lending are better understood as debts arising from the provision of

goods.

Despite the clear preponderance of trade as livelihood, not each and

every Jew was a merchant. There were lowly craftsmen as well as Jews and

Jewesses of the serving classes, even slaves. Clearly, these people had no legal or

economic footing of their own and must have existed as part of the households

of afﬂuent merchant families.

During the whole period under consideration, such households also

included non-Jewish slaves, a fact that gave rise to great ecclesiastical agita-

tion. Much of this is yet more religious polemic, making use of the metaphors

of slavery and enslavement in order to point out the scandalous corruption of

order: Jews are on top rather than at the bottom, where they belong according

to Augustinian theology. Modern historians have usually taken this barrage of

indignation as evidence for a slave trade dominated by Jews from Merovingian

times and into the eleventh century. Amongst others they point to an infra-

structure of Jewish ‘colonies’ spread over the entire European-Asiatic continent,

which must have served as a relay system of slave transport. But most of these

entrep

ots, for instance the much-quoted Verdun, had yet no Jewish population

at all. Our recent re-evaluation of the Latin, Hebrew and Arabic sources has

found unambiguous references to only two European Jews actually dealing in

slaves, one in the sixth and the other in the ninth century. In addition, one of the

numerous synodal exhortations might possibly relate to actual slave trade (by

Christians and Jews). All other texts speak of slaves employed in households,

possibly also by merchants as transport personnel. Given even some additional

unrecorded slave traders, this is still a far cry from a network conveying many

thousands of European slaves, indeed a whole army of Sakaliba,fromthe

eastern fringes of Europe to the realm of Iberian as well as oriental Islam.

Did early medieval Jews wield a mercantile hegemony or even monopoly?

Foranumber of considerations, the answer must be no. To begin with, one

must beware of exaggeration. For example, one scholar who sought to highlight

the inﬂuence of the Jews in early medieval Europe described a certain Priscus

as ‘a wealthy Jewish merchant and government ofﬁcial who dealt with kings

and controlled the mint at Chalon-sur-Sa

one’.

If we are to believe Gregory

For instance Dhuoda, note 40 above; or archbishop Anno of Cologne, Vita Annonis iii.11; MGH SS

xi,p.502.

Gregory i, Epistulae vi.29; ix.105, Linder (1997), pp. 429–30, 436; Agobardi Opera,p.195;Meaux–

Paris 845–6, can. 76: Linder (1997), p. 548.For the sources as well as for scholarly ﬂights of fancy, most

notably by Charles Verlinden, see Toch (1998b), (1999) and (2000a). The most recent analysis of the

slave trade by McCormick (2002), pp. 733–77, interprets some sources differently. Slave trading by

Jews in the Muslim world still awaits elucidation, but see the negative assessment of Goitein (1968),

p. 140, and Roth (1994), pp. 153–62.

Bachrach (1977), p. 56. The source (note 54 above): ‘Iudaeus quidam Priscus nomine, qui ei ad

species quoemendas familiaris erat’.

560 michael toch

of Tours in this case, Priscus was indeed Jewish, probably a merchant, and

dealt with King Chilperic. The rest of the statement is simply not justiﬁed by

the source in question. Scholars have frequently been led astray by the phrase

Judei et ceteri mercatores (‘Jews and other merchants’), which appears a number

of times in slight variations.

Rather than read this as Jews the proverbial

merchants, with the ‘other merchants’ added just as an afterthought, it is better

understood as a simple distinction by the main trait apparent to the writers of

these texts: Jews by their religious adherence, Christians by occupation, thus

‘merchants, Jews and others’. The very phrase constitutes irrefutable proof,

backed up by the whole range of modern research, for the existence of merchant

groups other than Jews in Carolingian and later times.

Ibn Khordadbeh’s

mid-ninth-century account on the Radhanites, hitherto a crown witness for

European Jews trading from Spain to India and back again, has deﬁnitely

been proven to relate to oriental Jews.

Their economic contacts followed a

very different pattern and cast no light on the position of European Jews in

international commerce, as amply conﬁrmed by the Cairo Genizah.Established

substantially by c.1000, written in a period of commercial expansion in the

Mediterranean and by merchants who wereintimately informed of the affairs of

their business partners, this huge repository of business information mentions

numerous merchants from Europe, but hardly any European Jews. The ones

noted, from Byzantium, came to attention only when they were taken by

Arab pirates in the Mediterranean and carried to Alexandria for ransom.

Consequently, if a trade system existed, Jews of Europeand of the Muslimworld

did not operate it in tandem.

Responsa literature mentions frequent exchanges

between scholars, sages and students, but almost no commercial contacts even

within Europe, between Ashkenaz and Sepharad.Once the evidence misread

for slave trading has been discounted, as it must be, the whole intercontinental

trade system is reduced to the humbler proportions indicated above. Such

proportions agree with population numbers, which during most of the period

were yet slight (in the south) or non-existent (in the north). When numbers

began to grow in the eleventh century, powers much more signiﬁcant than the

Jews were already dominating the trade of Europe.

In the south, Jews found livelihood in varied occupations, including crafts,

trade and the working of landed property. In the north, they were indeed mainly

Linder (1997), pp. 344, 349, 377, 380, 382, 384, 389; MGH SS iii,p.758.

For instance Verhulst (1970) and (1995); Devroey (2000); McCormick (2002).

Gil (1974). For the source, Pellat (1993).

Above, note 56, the references by Mann (1920) and Starr (1939), cf. Goitein, p. 211.One possible

exception, though not datable, is a Byzantine Jew in Egypt (?) in contact with Crete: De Lange

(1996), pp. 21–7.

Cf. Toch (2001c).

The Jews in Europe 500–1050 561

engaged in commerce, and their arrival from the later Carolingian period

onwards is one indicator for the renewal of commercial activity. However, at

no point did Jewish trade constitute the critical mass needed to provide the

bridge between Occident and Orient. Thus three interrelated myths should

be laid to rest: of Jewish ubiquity, of commercial hegemony and of the slave

trade.

jews in christian society

For the attitudes of Jews towards their host society there exists one primary

source, extant in a number of variants, the acerbic Hebrew travesty of the

Christian Gospel known as Toldot Yeshu (The Life of Jesus). This source is

almost impossible to place in time and may well stem from outside Europe,

even though Christians had known of its existence since Agobard of Lyons.

Toldot Yeshu and other indications in liturgy and religious poetry point to

a‘polemical imperative’ in early medieval Jewish culture that is almost the

matching image of the Christian approach to Judaism. Sources extant from

the twelfth century onwards indicate a complex mixture of hesitant attraction

and belligerent repulsion, acculturation and at the same time self-imposed as

well as enforced separation.

Modifying the traditional picture of isolation

and segregation, a recent re-examination of the religious polemics of medieval

Christians and Jews thus sees an ongoing two-way trafﬁc, in which each side

sought to appropriate the other’s symbols of God’s love, holiness and purity.

Of Christian attitudes towards Jews we know more than of any other aspect.

To judge from the main extant body of sources, the writings of churchmen, the

basic attitude towards Jews and Judaism was a mixture of confrontation, agita-

tion, and frustration at the negligible concrete results. Attempts at explanation

have usually viewed early medieval Judaism as a single entity endowed with

remarkable resources and posing a tangible threat. According to this view, it

must have been allied at different points to secular, typically royal interests, in

order to have been able to defeat much of the ecclesiastical interference. This

in turn has been expanded to constitute a ‘Jewish policy’ of kings, favourable to

an important constituency of Jews and at variance with a supposedly uniform

ecclesiastical line. In this view ecclesiastics reacted to a real challenge and to

concrete issues.

An alternative approach takes as point of departure the existence in Chris-

tianity of a ‘polemical imperative’, which employed Judaism as a body of beliefs

Krauss (1902); cf. Bonﬁl (1994b).

Sapir Abulaﬁa (1985); Marcus (1996); Toch (1998a), pp. 120–42.

Yuval (1999) and (2000).

562 michael toch

and behaviour in direct denial of Christian truth.

In this discourse the Jew’s

function was one of illustration, of personifying such attitudes. However, for

theological reasons succinctly argued by Augustine, rejection was to be bal-

anced by a modicum of toleration of the Jews as bookkeepers of and eventual

witnesses to Christian truth. Both principles were laid down in an extensive

and much copied body of imperial constitutions, especially the Codex Theo-

dosianus, and in numerous writings of the Patristic period.

They permeated

also the genres of history, hagiography and ecclesiastical law-making. Playing

out the principle of rejection, theological treatises, polemical tracts and syn-

odal legislation re-enacted the stubborn wickedness attributed to Jews in the

Christian exegesis of the Old and New Testaments. In hagiography and histo-

riography, Jews were assigned the complementary role implicit in the principle

of toleration, of mouthpieces of denial eventually swayed to testify to Christian

truth and sanctity. By the onset of the Middle Ages the vocabulary, grammar

and syntax of this ambiguous discourse were already in place. For internal eccle-

siastical developments only recently explored, the later Carolingian period saw

anew surge of theological anti-Judaism.

Thus, ‘constructions of Jews and

Judaism, embedded in the dictates of Christian theology and hermeneutics,

continued to enjoy a life of their own’.

The writings thus produced make up the vast majority of sources at our

disposal. They dwell upon a small number of concrete issues – the scandal

of slaves in Jewish hands, of Jews tempting or forcing Christians into prose-

lytism, of Jews lording it over Christians. Jewish proselytising appears as the

most important bone of contention, if one were to judge by the frequency with

which it was addressed in writing. The literary setting is usually the same, posi-

tioning wily Jews bent on seduction against simple Christian folk incapable

of protecting their own faith.

Scholarship has by and large accepted such

texts as evidence for a genuine and successful Jewish drive to win converts.

The mere logic of slavery was thought to provide proof, since slaves are by

deﬁnition helpless objects for the designs of their masters. Jewish slave dealers

too have been pressed into service: they buy up slaves in order to swell the

ﬂock of Israel.

The converts of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages were

thought to be numerous enough to produce the substantial Jewish population

of central and northern France emerging in the eleventh century.

There is

Cohen (1999), pp. 5–65, the quotation on p. 39.

Linder (1978), pp. 400–13.For the texts and authors see Linder (1987); Blumenkranz (1963); Schreck-

enberg (1995).

Albert (1996); Heil (1998a and b).

Cohen (1999), p. 94.

For instance Amulo, PL 116, cols. 170d–171a.

For instance Blumenkranz (1960), p. 160.Cf.Toch (2000a), for more examples of dubious source

readings.

Bautier (1991).