At the Gate of Christendom: Jews, Muslims, and “Pagans” in Medieval Hungary, c. 1000–c. 1300 by Nora Berend, and: Society and Culture in the Huguenot World, 1559–1685 ed. by Raymond A. Mentzer, Andrew Spicer (review)

REVIEWS 204 compensated for by the rich illustrative material, particularly maps, which makes the best possible use of archaeological evidence. BORIS TODOROV, History, UCLA Nora Berend, At the Gate of Christendom: Jews, Muslims, and “Pagans” in Medieval Hungary, c. 1000–c. 1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001) 340 pp. Society and Culture in the Huguenot World, 1559–1685, ed. Raymond A. Mentzer and Andrew Spicer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002) 241 pp. Two new books recently published by the Cambridge University Press offer new investigations into the interrelationship of religion and social identity. Although disparate in terms of geography and chronology, both contribute to a growing body of scholarship that is rethinking the role of religion in the premodern world, and its interplay with social and national identity. Such issues have important implications in light of current events. In the book on medieval Hungary, At the Gate of Christendom: Jews, Muslims and ‘Pagans’ in Medieval Hungary, Nora Berend has found a unique topic that presents a wide range of questions on religion and social identity. Although Hungary was part of the Christian west and adhered to Roman Christianity, we must consider it to be first and foremost a frontier society. It was Christianized relatively late, and so many of the traditions of its not-too-distant pagan past were still prevalent between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. In addition, Hungary remained in close proximity with the non-Christian world throughout the middle ages. All of this provides a very different context within which to examine religious identity than in Western Europe, which already had a longstanding history of being Christian by the High Middle Ages. Medieval Hungary contained three groups of non-Christians: Jews, Muslims, and Cumans, who were essentially animistic pagans of Asiatic origin. Significantly , these groups migrated into Hungary, and were not conquered subjects. This gave them the status of hospites or foreign guests, which created a different dynamic between religious minorities and the Christian state than existed in regions with a greater history of confrontation between Christian and on-Christian groups. The Christian king of Hungary used these minority groups to enhance his military and financial power by establishing alliances with them and granting them privileges and protection in exchange for their loyalty. In doing so the crown often ignored the objections of Church envoys from Rome. These arrangements varied, and no single group was consigned to a specific function. For example, Jews in Hungary did not function exclusively as financial agents to the crown as they did in other Christian kingdoms. Thus social, legal, and economic structures were as important in influencing the attitudes towards minorities as religious belief. This case study offers a nuanced view of social relations between minority and majority groups in which co-existence and enmity were often concurrent. While Christian Hungarians could often be found living in Jewish neighborhoods , Jews were often targets of popular violence and persecution. Baptism did not necessarily ensure the Cumans’ acceptance into Christian society. Although they shared a religious identity with Christian Hungarians, they retained REVIEWS 205 many aspects of their traditional culture and were consequently looked down upon. Thus religious persuasion did not necessarily ensure a particular social status. Berend suggests that we conceptualize attitudes towards religious minorities in medieval Hungary not in terms of being tolerant or intolerant, but as a spectrum of integration and exclusion that varied according to time, place, and circumstance . “The question … is not whether a country was tolerant or not to its non-Christian minorities during the middle Ages. Instead, we should ask what interconnected forms of acceptance and rejection existed regarding groups outside Christianity in each specific case. In Hungary, policies towards the three groups [of religious minorities] differed; we do not witness the birth of a “persecuting society” that was equally oppressive to all marginal groups, but rather we can observe the varieties of attitudes towards these groups” (270). The ambiguity of acceptance and exclusion is perhaps one of the most interesting points that Berend makes. It was a dynamic that operated from several different sides and directions, meaning that groups that were excluded in one way might be integrated in another, all the while they might...