Jews in the Notarial Culture: Latinate Wills in Mediterranean Spain, 1250-1350 (review)

162 SHOFAR Fa1l1998 Vol. 17, No.1 by the subject should read Irving Howe's A Margin ofHope or Alfred Kazin's Starting Out in the Thirties or A Walker in the City. Frederic Cople Jaher History Department UniversityofI1linois at Champaign-Urbana Jews in the Notarial Culture: Latinate Wills in Mediterranean Spain, 1250-1350, by Robert I. Bums, S.1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. 280 pp. $45.00. Robert I. Bums, S.1., a noted historian ofthe interplay ofMuslim, Christian, and Jewish cultures in medieval Mediterranean Spain, discovered some of the documents in this fascinating book while researching an unrelated topic in notarial registers in the Catalan Pyrenees. As he studied notarial codices recording legal transactions from the period 1250-1350, he found a number of Latin wills and codicils which had been drafted for members of the region's Jewish community. Further investigation also revealed similar Latin documents recording Jewish testamentary wishes in the central archives in Barcelona. Bums's study, which discusses these medieval Latinate Jewish wills from Aragon, Catalonia, and Majorca, including five executed by women, examines the notarial culture oflate medieval Europe and asks why SpanishJews would have hired Christian notaries to prepare wills according to the forms of Roman law. In the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries Aragon-Catalonia was a commercial-maritime society with a heterogeneous population of Jews, Christians, and Muslims united under fairly recently imposed Christian authority. Joining a longestablished native Jewish community, many Jews of the region were recent arrivals. Some had fled north from Almohad Muslim persecutions, while others had fled south from Christian persecutions and expulsions in France; an even larger proportion of the population came from North Africa. Regardless of their origins, Jews were predominantly urban and overwhelmingly investors, merchants, and lenders. While both Jews and Christians were anxious to live lives as separate from each other as possible, members of each society interacted in a number of social, commercial, and governmental contexts. Moreover, Jews played a significant role at the royal court. While Jews appear in a variety of notarial documents, Bums believes that wills offer a special window into medieval society since their status as legal documents, economic records, and social mirrors can illuminate numerous facets of individual and community dynamics, from measures of the property and resources of a family or group, to degrees of acculturation as indicated by names (most Jews in Catalan regions, for example, had Romance names), to the value ascribed to objects such as books, to Book Reviews 163 information on the frequency and forms of charitable bequests. While Jews in Christian Spain probably also made Hebrew wills, none has survived directly. Bums sees these Latinate Jewish wills, written by notaries who used the same le~al formulas and rhetoric available for Christian clients, as an acculturative phenomenon, indicative ofsignificant Jewish integration into aspects ofArago-Catalan life. It is striking that the witnesses to these wills, often as many as seven individuals, always include a preponderance of Christians. The major question this important volume addresses is why Jews, established in their own political and juridical semi-autonomous communities, with their own inheritance laws and scribal traditions, would have employed Christian notaries to make their wills. Bums offers a number of persuasive answers, noting first that the two societies were joined by so many personal and commercial connections that neither was as alien to the other as might appear on the surface. Jews customarily entered many business documents in the Christian notary's register, and a will could easily seem another such contract. Moreover, Jews in Spain had never accepted rabbinic prohibitions against using non-Jewish courts, and Spanish rabbinic authorities generally accepted Jewish use ofgentile notarial documentation under various interpretations of the talmudic principle that "the law of the kingdom is the law." Bums writes that Jews also resorted to Latinate wills in order to overcome aspects of rabbinic inheritance laws which ordained, among other things, a double share for firstborn sons, that a husband receive his wife's estate, and that a wife did not inherit her husband's property. This last issue, in particular, was frequently challenged in medieval Spanish Jewish communities; in fourteenth-century Toledo, for...