The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom, 1000-1500 (review)

Robert Chazan has written a characteristically thoughtful and provocative book. The fact that it appears in the splendid Cambridge Medieval Textbooks series means that medieval Jewish history may find a wide readership in medieval survey courses or more specialized seminars. Chazan has balanced effectively the need to explain the basic contours of medieval Jewish history with original insights that demonstrate why the subject is so crucial.

Chazan recognizes that a one-volume chronological narrative is impossible, given the geographical range of Jewish settlement and the great variety of social, economic, and theological issues that shaped the Jewish experience. Instead, he divides his work into sections that survey the experience of Judaism against the background of early Christianity and Islam. He then uses the history of the Roman Church as the fulcrum on which to balance a discussion of Christian attitudes toward Jews. The next three chapters form a unit that describes what he terms the older Jewries of southern Europe, the new Jewries of France and England, and the new Jewries of Germany and the East. The two final chapters treat what Chazan calls the material and spiritual challenges of these Jewish communities. Chazan brings a lifetime of scholarship and teaching to capture forcefully the north-south divide in Jewish experience and culture, the ability of Jews to resist conversionary pressure by creating a vibrant internal culture, and the remarkable shift in the center of the Jewish population from Islamic to Christian countries.

Beyond these important points, Chazan also tries, perhaps less successfully, to link the medieval experience of the Jews to some kind of fundamental reshaping of Jewish character or talents. He argues first that Jews in medieval Europe demonstrated a mobility and innovation in their economic attitudes that made them essentially "modern." It may be doing a disservice to the nature of Jewish integration into medieval society to focus on what seemingly set them apart for many Christians engaged in money lending, trade, and were willing to emigrate to explore new economic possibilities. Chazan is very clear to make the Jews a part of medieval society, but then partially undermines this by emphasizing the Jews' exceptionalism and their role as a harbinger of some kind of modernity.

Inevitably, any book attempting to understand the medieval Jewish experience must confront the nature of persecution. Chazan handily and wisely dismisses the traditional vision of Jews as the victims of constant violent persecution. There is an interesting tension in the book between this open-minded approach and a recurring reliance on categories that seem to describe a constant animus between Jews and Christians. For example, Chazan sees a Christian desire for a homogenous society that increasingly rejected Jews as aliens. He also repeatedly emphasizes a constant popular fear and animosity toward the Jews. The focus on uniformity relies too heavily, I think, on a vision of a monochromatic medieval society. There was widespread religious diversity (among Christians themselves in terms of religious orders, local loyalties, and theological disputes) as well as diversity based on nationality, ethnicity, and status that could and did find a place for the Jews. Certainly, some kingdoms did expel their Jews, but Chazan makes it clear that these actions were not the inevitable end points of the Jewish experience.

As with Christian anxiety over Jewish "diversity," so too does Chazan's emphasis on a constant popular fear of the Jews run counter to the more complicated vision of Jewish history that he himself presents. The problem with such a characterization is the very point that Chazan himself makes about the possibility of positive relations between Jews and Christians as well as the Jewish ability to explore new territories and settlements. How could the Jews have survived for any time if there had been such unremitting antagonism and fear as a constant part of Christian attitudes toward the Jews? That there could be explosive violence and that anxiety and even hatred tainted many relations between...