The Dialectics of Citizenship: Exploring Privilege, Exclusion, and Racialization

Chapter 4. Medieval European Citizenship: Christian Rights and Jewish Duties

67 CHAPTER 4 Medieval European Citizenship Christian Rights and Jewish Duties Without neglecting the fantastically rich and polyphonic complexity of the historical universe unfolding in Western Europe from the 12th century onwards, the most appropriate way to grasp its specificity is to relate it to the signification and the project of (social and individual) autonomy. The emergence of this project marks the break with the “true” Middle Ages. CORNELIUS CASTORIADIS, “THE RETREAT FROM AUTONOMY: POSTMODERNISM AS GENERALISED CONFORMISM,” 2001 It would certainly be wrong to say that democracy succumbed after the collapse of the Roman Republic. The problem is rather one of historical sources—and the lack thereof. Democratic experiments in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, or the Pacific region are simply not as well documented to base an analysis of the dialectics of citizenship on them.1 The history of medieval European city-states, however, provides a rich case of analysis within the context of this book, as it allows for a highlighting of the advances of democratic self-rule on one side, and the contrasting exclusion from these city-states on the other. Following the logic and rationale established earlier, which is not to compare cases, but rather to explore each one separately for salient characteristics, this chapter takes a closer look at the developments in Western Europe after the decline of the Roman Empire in the West in the sixth century c.e. Thus, whereas the previous chapter focused strongly on the included and what citizenship meant to them, this chapter takes a closer look at the excluded, 68| Chapter 4 how their exclusion was constructed and justified, and what their exclusion meant to them and to the democracies that practiced and enforced it. Of special interest is the situation of the excluded group par excellence during this time period: Jews. The first focus in this chapter thus consists of an analysis of the relationship between Christian rights and Jewish duties and exclusion. The second interest pursued in this chapter is the analysis of the internal dynamics of the emerging, mostly Florentine, democratic republics, as they provide an example for a renewed attempt at self-rule and the pursuit of autonomy (Castoriadis 2001). This focus also allows me to continue the theme of a critique of the Western tradition. In the West, with the decline of the Roman Empire came a decline of democratic principles and institutions, and feudalism dominated the political landscape. Roman Catholic religion became the universal eschatological principle, and around it, the Roman Catholic Church constructed a Manichean world of good and evil; believers and heathens; Christians, Jews, and Saracens; pious religious followers and rebellious witches. It was only when the Reformation started driving a wedge into the solid power of the Catholic Church, thus considerably weakening it, that democracy again found some space to expand, giving gradual rise to modern democracies and their dominant manifestation in nation-states (Zakaria 2003). Before that, democracy and citizenship were practiced only on a very small scale for a very limited period of time—for example, in a number of relatively small city republics in northern Italy, emerging around the late tenth century. The scarcity of sources and the scantiness of our knowledge about what citizenship meant concretely during the long stretch of time from 44 b.c.e., when Julius Caesar effectively ended the Roman Republic and made himself dictator, to the late eighteenth century, when the American, French, and Haitian revolutions brought citizenship and democracy back to the European map, allows for only a very sketchy depiction of the dialectics of citizenship. CHRISTIAN RIGHTS, JEWISH DUTIES According to Leonard Glick (1999), during the eleventh century the development in Europe was marked by a double movement: as Christians prospered, Jews slid into a precarious situation. To some analysts, animosity and mutual hatred was such an integral part of medieval life that they called it a “structural fact of social and legal existence” (Bossy 1998: 54). Indeed, Medieval European Citizenship| 69 exclusion of such “others” as Jews was functional in strengthening the bond that united all those coming together to form communities during medieval times (Smail 2001: 94). The question I seek to explore here is what were the causal relations that linked Christian prosperity and expanding citizenship to Jewish exclusion. According to Glick (1999), “For Christians the changes were in the form of remarkable social and economic advancement, while for Jews precisely the...