Jews

E

Under Christian Rule

From the 8th century to the late Middle Ages, culture remained largely stagnant and undistinguished in Christian Europe while flourishing in the Islamic world. Beginning in the 8th century the kings of the Franks and the Holy Roman Emperors encouraged Jews to settle in Provence (now part of southern France) and the Rhineland (now part of Germany). Communities in Aix, Marseille, and elsewhere in Provence and in Mainz, Speyer, and other cities of the Rhineland became early centers of European Jewish life and retained their importance for centuries.

The encouragement of Jewish settlement resulted from an assumption that Jews had useful economic skills, especially as traders. As Jews neither owned land nor worked the land as peasants for feudal masters, they depended directly on European rulers for protection. That dependence meant that rulers could safely entrust the Jews with economic privileges without any threat to their own power. The economic privileges heightened resentment that the European masses already felt toward Jews, a resentment rooted in religious difference. The arrangement did not lead to any sustained persecution of Jews for several centuries, however.

The situation of European Jews changed in 1096, the year of the first Crusade, a military expedition to take control of the Holy Land (Palestine) from Muslim rulers. As the Crusader armies gathered, they directed their religious hostility at Jewish communities of the Rhineland, massacring the people and destroying the settlements. Local authorities lacked the forces to stop the rampaging Crusaders. In some communities, the Jews preferred to commit collective suicide rather than fall into the hands of the mobs. The Crusades inaugurated a new era in the life of the Jews of Europe.

V

The Late Middle Ages: 1096 to 1492

After the Crusades began in 1096 and aroused hostility toward Jews, surviving Jewish communities in central and northern Europe became increasingly isolated from the surrounding culture. Although Jews still exercised a fair degree of control over their religious and cultural affairs, their circumstances did not encourage thinking about much beyond their religious traditions. Jewish literature focused primarily on the Talmud. Scholars produced new and monumental commentaries on the Babylonian Talmud to make it widely known and understood among European Jews. In addition, after the Crusades mystical trends emerged among European Jews who turned inward and wished for more direct contact with the divine. The most important form of Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah, developed in Spain. Jewish poets also wrote elegies and dirges commemorating the sacrifices of the Jews who were killed in 1096. Jews in Germany developed their own language, which came to be known as Yiddish. Yiddish began as a dialect of the German language spoken at that time but branched off from it and became a distinct Jewish language, written in Hebrew letters.

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A

Persecution

European Jews lived in increasingly precarious circumstances after the Crusades. Accusations that they killed Christians, usually children, to use their blood for some ritual purpose became commonplace. Although Christian leaders routinely denounced these so-called blood libels as false, the stories nevertheless persisted into the 20th century. Many church leaders, however, enforced the principle of Saint Augustine that Jews should live in humiliating circumstances. Roman Catholic Church councils held in 1179 and 1215 prohibited Jews from employing Christians, prohibited Christians from living in Jewish neighborhoods, insisted that Jews wear a special badge as a mark of their degradation, and prohibited Jews from appearing in public on Easter and other Christian holy days. These councils also had a permanent impact on the economic life of Jews by prohibiting Christians from lending money to each other with interest. This prohibition left the activity of moneylending entirely to the Jews, just as additional actions excluded them from other areas of economic activity. By the end of the 12th century the Jews of Europe lived largely as peddlers and moneylenders.

B

Expulsion from Western Europe

Their position as moneylenders generated further hostility toward Jews and played a role in a gradual expulsion of Jews from Western and central Europe. The Jews were expelled from England (after all debts to them were canceled) in 1290. They were driven from France in 1306 and, after some had been allowed back into France, again in 1394. The German lands of the Holy Roman Empire expelled Jews piecemeal throughout the 15th century.

Hostility toward European Jews intensified as a result of the Black Death, an epidemic of bubonic plague from 1347 to 1351 that wiped out as much as a third of Europe’s population. Although the plague killed Jews as well, they made a ready scapegoat and were accused of causing the pestilence by poisoning the water in wells. In many regions Europeans responded by destroying or expelling Jewish communities. By the mid-15th century few Jews remained in west Europe, and many German lands had driven out their Jews as well.

C

Migration to Poland

Most of the Jews expelled from Western and central Europe in the 1300s and 1400s traveled eastward into Poland, where they established what became the largest European Jewish community up to that time. In the first centuries after their arrival in Poland, Jews largely escaped the violence and persecution they had experienced elsewhere in Europe. At that time Poland was the most ethnically, linguistically, and religiously diverse region of Europe. During the 16th and 17th centuries Jews in Poland developed a sophisticated religious and economic life. They created new approaches to Talmudic study and produced profound studies of Jewish law and legal reasoning. In cities such as Kraków, L’viv (now in Ukraine), and Poznañ, Jews became prominent as merchants, moneylenders, and, in a few instances, physicians.

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