Medieval English Rabbis: Image and Self-Image

Abstract

The tendency to underestimate medieval English rabbis can be found during the Middle Ages and in modern times. One reason for this is the assumption that the Jewish community in medieval England was simply an outpost of French Jewish culture, while another is simple ignorance about the literary heritage of English rabbis. During the nineteenth century, as Jews in Great Britain struggled against obscurity and prejudice, their medieval predecessors became a useful foil for asserting a Jewish place in modern British society.

"The neglect of the British situation is explicable largely on the grounds that, compared with other northern, Ashkenazic communities, the Anglo-Jewish community was not perceived to have produced the scholarly superstars so evident in France and Germany."¹

there is something tantalizing about the Jews of medieval England. So much about them is unknown, perhaps unknowable, and even those facts that are well known and ostensibly unquestionable have drawn attempts to bend, crack, or otherwise move them. The chronologically first fact known about this Jewish community is that it came into being only after the Norman Conquest.² There were no Jewish communities in Anglo-Saxon England.³ But, as Cecil Roth commented on the first page of his History of the Jews in England, "Fantasy has … attempted to carry the story back to a remote antiquity."⁴ The end of the medieval Anglo-Jewish experience is also clear—the Edict of Expulsion of 1290 did not allow for any continued Jewish presence in England.⁵ That has not stopped various people from believing that Jews continued to live in England for centuries, and indeed that all of the goldsmiths, importers, pepperers, moneylenders in fourteenth-century London were secretly Jews.⁶ This wishful thinking seems to compensate for an underlying fear, expressed by Patricia Skinner in the opening quote—that not only was the period of time spent by Jews in medieval England brief and episodic, but their cultural achievements during that period were insignificant and mediocre. In this way, prevalent attitudes towards medieval English Jewish literature mirror the characterization of Early Middle English literature as "one of the dullest and least accessible intervals in standard literary history, an incoherent, intractable, impenetrable dark age scarcely redeemed by a handful of highlights."⁷

The thousands of Latin documents preserved in the Exchequer of the Jews and other royal archives teach a great deal about one aspect of the Jewish presence in England. Although they provided enormous detail about financial dealings involving Jews, they almost never afford even a glimpse of the day-to-day life of the Jews, or what the Jews themselves thought.⁸ To understand how English Jews saw themselves, we must turn to their own works. Rabbinic texts are inherently intertextual, explicating and echoing classic texts from the Bible and the Talmud. By reading medieval rabbinic English works closely, within and against their literary and historical context, we can salvage some traces of their authors' self-image. From there we will turn to the ways in which that image was re-shaped by modern writers to suit their varying needs.

Medieval Self-Image

The Jewish scholars of medieval England included the authors of several grammatical works, and a single poet, Meir ben Elijah of Norwich, whose liturgical compositions have received a great deal of academic attention.⁹ Grammar is not usually very revealing, nor are Meir of Norwich's poems particularly rich in historical detail. There are two areas, however, in which we possess a large body of writings by roughly a dozen different English rabbis. These are discussions of Jewish law (Halakhah) and comments on the Bible that became, for the most part, embedded within the rabbinic heritage of medieval France and Germany. Often, comments by English rabbis were copied in the margins of classic works such as Isaac of Corbeil's Sefer Mitzvot Katan (Small Book of Commandments) or Mordechai ben Hillel's eponymous legal anthology from late thirteenth-century Germany.¹⁰ Some of those glosses subsequently found their way into the printed editions of those works, and thus into the mainstream of modern rabbinic knowledge. These passages throw light on the ways in which medieval English rabbinic scholars perceived themselves and their place in the world—both in their immediate geographic context, in relation to the Christian majority society, and vis-à-vis the larger Jewish communities on the Continent.

In 1201, King John famously declared the Jews to be "our property."¹¹ An exegetical passage, probably attributed to an important Cambridge Jew who lived at the beginning of the thirteenth century, may provide a glimpse of the Jewish response to this declaration.¹² By 1194, Benjamin of Cambridge was the wealthiest Jew in Cambridge, and before that he probably studied in Champagne with Rabbi Jacob Tam, who died in 1171.¹³ In a collection of biblical exegesis from medieval France, a tense conversation is described between Rabbi Benjamin and a Christian:¹⁴

A Christian (min) asked Rabbi Benjamin: Fool! Why do you tie knots and hang strings on the edges of your clothing? He responded: See what comes before—the story of the wood- gatherer [on Shabbat]. Moses said to God: Lord of the world, how can Israel remember Shabbat, which is only once a week? So God gave him the commandment of Tzitzit, about which it says "So that you will remember"—it is a sign that we are servants of God. Like a man who ties a knot in his belt to remind himself of something. And like masters who make a sign on the clothes of their servants so that they will not escape. When we look at it, we remember God's commandment.

The foundations of this passage lie in classic midrash literature (rabbinic exegesis from the sixth to ninth centuries), which reads Numbers 15:37–41 about the fringes which the people of Israel are commanded to hang from their clothes in light of the preceding passage (verses 32–36) about a man who violated the Sabbath by collecting wood. Earlier interpretations found a range of associative connections between the verses, and emphasized the role of the tzitzit in reminding the Israelite of his religious obligations.¹⁵ For example, according to Lekah Tov, an eleventh-century commentary from Byzantium, Moses defended the wood-gatherer by explaining to God that he simply forgot about the prohibitions of the Sabbath day, to which God responded by telling the people of Israel to make themselves a reminder so that they would not forget.¹⁶

Benjamin's account, however, was not a simple exegetical discussion; it was a confrontation with a Christian who ridiculed Jewish observance of the tzitzit commandment.¹⁷ Rabbi Benjamin responded by invoking the exegetical question of context found in earlier sources, but his answer to that question took it in a new direction by adding a second metaphor. Rather than serving as a reminder, tzitzit are a marker of Jewishness. While a man who ties a knot in his belt is trying to remind only himself, the master who placed his mark on the clothes of his servant was speaking to the general public. It was not only lest the servant forget who his master is, but for the rest of society who would see the servant and be mindful of his lord. Servants of noble English households were indeed beginning to wear livery bearing their master's symbol.¹⁸ If such a servant tried to escape, passersby could easily identify him and return him to his master. The converse is not said, but is implied—if some passerby tried to claim this servant for himself, the master's mark on the servant's clothes would reveal him as a thief.

This novel emphasis on clothing as the marker of a servant, introduced by Benjamin of Cambridge into an existing midrashic mould, may be read as his attempt to respond to contemporary legal realities. As the King of England claimed the Jews as his own property, Benjamin asserted that the fringes on their clothes marked the English Jews as servants of God—and not servi camerae.

The self-image of English Jews was at odds not only with their image in the eyes of English Christians, but also with the way they were seen by Jews in other regions. Medieval German Jews perceived the Jews of England as an extension of the French Jewish community. This perception ignored the significant ties between English Jews and Germany, but it lives on in scholarship to this day.¹⁹ In fact, subtle but meaningful cultural differences existed between the Jewish communities in each of these three regions—Germany, France, and England.²⁰

One example of the equation between English and French Jewry is found in a responsum by Meir ben Baruch of Rothenburg (d. 1293), the most important German rabbinic authority of the thirteenth century. According to classic rabbinic law, a married man cannot force his wife to move from one land to another, but within the same land, he can force her to move to a different city.²¹ The Rabbis delineated the "three lands" in their region—Judea, Galilee, and Transjordan. Meir of Rothenburg was asked how to apply this rule to his own time. He responded:²²

It seems that France and the Land of the Island, and Ashkenaz, and the Land of Canaan are divided into lands, because they are divided in their language.

Meir of Rothenburg emphasized the linguistic criterion because, as he went on to point out, adopting political borders as the relevant criterion would create too many divisions (and, by implication, making it impossible for a husband to force his wife to move anywhere beyond her home town).²³ All of the German-speaking areas were to be considered a single land, as were the Slavic regions (known collectively as Canaan).²⁴ Likewise France and England ("The Land of the Island"), even though divided politically and even geographically, ought to be considered a single region for marriage, since they shared the same language.²⁵

A more striking statement identifying the Jews of France and England as a single entity was written by another thirteenth-century German scholar, a disciple and relative of Samuel of Bamberg whose name is unknown. This scholar composed a commentary on the prayer book in the spirit of the German Pietists, Haside Ashkenaz, a small sub-group of mystics and ascetics that formed around Judah the Pietist of Regensburg and Eleazar Rokeah of Worms.²⁶ The Pietists found hidden significance in the numerical aspects of the Hebrew prayers—the number of words or letters in each section of the prayer order.²⁷ This particular author pushed those calculations to a polemical extreme by claiming that alternative versions of the prayer texts recited by Jewish communities outside of Germany were illegitimate because they changed the number of words and letters—thus erasing their mystical significance. In one particularly harsh section he wrote:²⁸

The prayer for Rosh ha-Shanah (New Year) is written in order, and nothing may be added or subtracted—even one word—because it was copied from the autograph commentary of Rabenu (our Rabbi) Judah the Pious son of Rabenu Samuel the Pious, saint and prophet, son of Rabenu Kalonymos the Elder son of Rabenu Isaac son of Rabenu Eliezer the Great. Anyone who adds or subtracts even one letter, his prayer will not be heard, because it is all measured and weighed, the letters and words. Many secrets emanate from it, and whoever fears God must beware of omitting or adding. He should not heed the French and the men of the islands of the sea, who add several words, because the spirit of wisdom is unpleased by them, because they did not receive the reasons for the prayer and the secrets. Because the early Pietists would hide the secrets and the reasons, until our holy rabbi, Rabenu Judah the Pious, the memory of the righteous is a blessing. He passed them on to the pious members of his family, in writing and orally, may God repay his effort and may his remuneration from the Lord of Israel be complete.

Judah the Pious represented, for this writer, the ultimate source of authentic mystical prayer traditions. Providing the counterweight as those who change the words of the prayers, without regard for the esoteric significance lost in the process, were "the French and the men of the islands of the sea." The German Pietists had directed some of their harshest criticism, and occasional ridicule, at the rabbinic scholars of northern France (known as the Tosafists for their commentaries on the Talmud, referred to as Tosafot).²⁹ While the Tosafists valourized intellectual acuity and innovation, the Pietists craved traditionalism and simplicity. Haside Ashkenaz watched with dismay and envy as the Tosafists swept along generations of enthusiastic young students. "The French" were the hare to the German Pietist tortoise. Lumping the Jews of England in with the French, as this thirteenth-century polemicist did, was meant as an insult to the English.

On their own terms, however, English Jews were distinct from their French brethren, notwithstanding their significant ties and similarities.³⁰ They did not hesitate to disagree with French rabbis, even with the most prestigious among them. Moses of London, a very powerful member of the Jewish community and the leading rabbinic scholar in England during the mid-thirteenth century, boasted of his argument with Yehiel of Paris, the most prominent Tosafist of his time:³¹

A case came before us, of Reuben who died leaving his widow Rachel and a small son … and a court was convened, and I sat in judgement with Rabbi Isaac b. S. and Rabbi Joseph of Saulieu … and I sent a "flying scroll" about it to Paris.³² Rabbi Samuel ben Solomon of Château-Thierry responded with a long letter in agreement with me, and Rabbi Yehiel (of Paris) disagreed with me. They were exceedingly lengthy, and I have their letters, and there are many arguments that can be gathered against them, but there is not enough time to respond at length as befits (you), our teacher the Rabbi. May your peace increase forever—your friend, Moses ben Rabbi Yom Tov, may he rest in peace.

Moses of London and his son Elijah Menahem were dominant figures within the medieval English rabbinic community, wielding significant political, financial, and intellectual power.³³ They saw themselves as autonomous within the confines of that community, and as equals to the rabbis of France. French rabbis may have ignored them, as they ignored other rabbinic cultures.³⁴ But throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Jewish scribes in France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy chose to incorporate the comments of Moses, Elijah, and their compatriots into their miscellanies and glosses, preserving and ossifying the medieval English rabbis in the margins of a larger European rabbinic identity.

Modern Image

By the sixteenth century, the rabbis of England had faded entirely from Jewish memory. Rabbi Elijah Mizrahi (d. ca. 1526), an important leader of the Romaniote (Greek speaking) Jews in Constantinople, came across a responsum written by Moses ben Yom Tov of London to Moses of Evreux.³⁵ The opinion voiced by Moses of London, that a divorce writ delivered to a woman by messenger at night was valid, stood in opposition to the other medieval authorities that Mizrahi was familiar with, who considered such a divorce invalid because it was handed over at night, a time when judgement cannot be rendered. Mizrahi upheld the majority opinion, dismissing Moses of London as an outlier:³⁶

We have not found a single one of the decisors who disagreed with this [ruling disqualifying a divorce delivered at night] except for a gloss in the name of Rabbi M[oses] ben Y[om] T[ov] which, as I wrote earlier, is entirely unreliable. Besides, his name is not mentioned in any of the books or in any statement by any decisor at all.

For Mizrahi, Moses of London's descent into oblivion was itself a reason to ignore his rulings. If his opinions had, in general, been ignored by generations of rabbinic scholars, this was presumably not the result of a historical accident, but because his rabbinic scholarship was not worthy of becoming part of the tradition.³⁷

Perhaps the most poignant illustration of the effaced memory of the medieval English rabbis is found in Shoshan Yesod ha-Olam, a manuscript volume of Jewish magic (practical Kabbalah) compiled by Joseph Tirshom in the Ottoman Empire sometime between 1510 and 1530.³⁸ Among the thousands of recipes and incantations recorded in the book are several that are attributed to Elijah of London, including one that begins with the following introduction:³⁹

The procedure for asking a question [from God], as received by Marcus from Rabbi Joseph ben Abraham of Allemagne which is in Lunel, and from Rabbi Elijah of London ben Rabbi Moses, may God protect him. At the beginning of the procedure, he should fast for three consecutive days, immersing each day and avoiding the ways of the world as much as he can. During those three days he should write [divine] names in order to practice their recitation. Then he can begin. I found: this is the [divine] name that was inscribed on Aaron's forehead, and it is the true Tetragrammaton. Spelled out with the niqqud (orthographical pointing), it becomes seven letters.

The magical techniques prescribed in this recipe stem from the linguistic mysticism of Ashkenazic and Castilian Kabbalah.⁴⁰ There was a thirteenth-century rabbi named Joseph ben Abraham who lived at least part of his life in Germany ("Allemagne") and whose name appears here and there in medieval Ashkenazic works.⁴¹ However, the reference to "Allemagne which is in Lunel" is obviously inaccurate, combining places from northern and southern Europe. Many Jewish mystics were in the habit of posthumously recruiting the names of obscure medieval rabbis in order to add an element of authenticity and antiquity to their pronouncements.⁴² That is clearly the case here. Plucked from the margins of medieval manuscripts and just familiar enough to an educated Jewish reader to trigger a vague sense of recognition, the name of Elijah Menahem of London was inserted into this magical corpus in order to lend some additional mystery to an unattributed magical recipe.⁴³

The first Jews to resettle in England after the 1290 expulsion were Spanish and Portuguese Jews, many of whom had converted at some point in their family histories to Christianity. They all identified themselves as Sephardim, from the communities of Sefarad—Spain and Portugal, and as proud heirs to a heritage from another place and time.⁴⁴ These descendants of refugees and converts were in fact notorious, throughout their diaspora, for their superior attitude towards other Jewish cultures that they came across.⁴⁵ It is not surprising that they showed no interest in the Jewish community that had existed in England centuries before, for it was a community that had, to their knowledge, no bearing whatsoever on their own self-definition as Spanish-Portuguese Jews.⁴⁶

By the nineteenth century, the Jewish presence in England was both more naturalized and more varied. Waves of immigration had given the Jewish population a more Eastern European character, but also a diminished sense of clear identity. It was in that context that the first attempts were made by English Jews to tell the story of medieval Anglo-Jewry for a modern audience.⁴⁷ One of the first accounts was published anonymously by Grace Aguilar in 1847.⁴⁸ Aguilar's family were Spanish-Portuguese Jews, and many of her publications were dedicated to glorifying that community.⁴⁹ Her account of the history of the Jews of England tried to play up its positive aspects, but at least in its medieval portion, was a prime example of what Salo Baron famously called "lachrymose" Jewish history.⁵⁰ Drawn exclusively from Latin sources, it was an account of Jewish suffering in England, referring to those Jews as hapless, miserable, inoffensive, and unobtrusive.⁵¹ By contrast, "[i]n Spain and Portugal [the Jews] had always held the highest offices, not only in the schools by in the state and the camp; nay, royalty itself, in more than one instance, was closely connected with Jewish blood."⁵²

It was only towards the end of the nineteenth century that attempts were made to professionalize the study of Anglo-Jewish history, in the wake of trends in Western Europe, and to add depth to that history, beyond the by-now familiar narrative of persecution.⁵³ The Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition, held in London in 1887 and accompanied by a series of public events, was an ambitious project aiming "to promote a knowledge of Anglo-Jewish History" and through that to discover new materials for writing that history.⁵⁴ The most significant response to the impetus of the Exhibition was the publication in 1893 of Joseph Jacobs' The Jews of Angevin England. In this magisterial work, Jacobs included "every scrap of evidence I could find in the English records, whether printed or inedited, that relates to the Jews of England up to the year 1206."⁵⁵

Its truly innovative feature, however, was the inclusion of numerous Hebrew texts, translated into English, relating to the Jews of medieval England. As Jacobs explained, he translated many of the Hebrew passages himself, but for the rabbinic texts he relied on the help of Solomon Schechter. An eminent scholar of rabbinic literature born in today's Romania, Schechter moved from Germany to Great Britain in 1882 and from 1890 had lectured in rabbinics at Cambridge University.⁵⁶ In acknowledging his debt to Schechter, Jacobs described the way in which they worked together: Jacobs indicated to Schechter those passages that he understood to be relevant to English Jewry, and Schechter then explained them to Jacobs. At that point, Jacobs proceeded to identify the rabbis mentioned in the rabbinic texts with "Jews named in the English records"—a process which he emphasized that Schechter was not involved in.⁵⁷

Joseph Jacobs was an extraordinarily prolific and talented scholar, making lasting contributions to the study of English folklore, sociology, and Jewish history.⁵⁸ But his Jewish education was extremely limited, and he was acutely aware of his inability to understand rabbinic texts on his own; nevertheless, he had never allowed obstacles like that to stop his literary ventures.⁵⁹ The Jews of Angevin England also played a role in Jacobs' larger goals:

Jacobs was at pains to show that Jews in general were an assimilable group. In the light of the massive population shifts taking place, Jacobs' studies were designed to allay the fears not only of the British government but also of other countries now confronted with great numbers of Jewish refugees. Wherever they went, he maintained, Jews soon participated to the fullest extent in the culture of their adoptive lands, displaying diligence, sobriety, and thriftiness.⁶⁰

Their participation in local culture (but perhaps not their sobriety) was illustrated by one text, transcribed from manuscript and translated for Jacobs by Israel Abrahams: "It is surprising that in England they are lenient in the matter of drinking strong drinks of the Gentiles and along with them."⁶¹ The quotation was taken from the Talmud commentary of Rabbi Elhanan ben Isaac, an important French Tosafist who was killed in 1184. The translation was inaccurate and missed the point, since it was not all "strong drinks" that were under discussion, but specifically beer. Rabbinic law places a strict ban on Gentile wine, and on drinking wine together with Gentiles.⁶² However, those stringencies were applied only to wine, and not to other alcoholic beverages.⁶³ England is not a significant wine-growing region, and the English drink of choice in the Middle Ages was beer.⁶⁴ The Jews of medieval England were known among their French compatriots as being accustomed to drinking beer produced by Gentiles, and of drinking it in the company of Gentiles—in short, taking full advantage of the fact that it was not wine. Some French Tosafists felt that this was too lenient; since beer filled the social role played by wine on the Continent, it should be prohibited in the same way.⁶⁵ After all, drinking wine with Gentiles was forbidden lest it lead to social interaction, which could lead to friendship, which could lead to marriage between Jews and Gentiles. Obviously, beer could lubricate social interaction in the same way as wine. But, since imposing new limitations could bring negative repercussions upon English Jewry, Rabbi Elhanan felt it was best to leave things as they were, with no limitations on beer drinking even in England.

This passage, included by Jacobs in his book, went on to play a role in his actual life. According to his friend Israel Zangwill, Jacobs asked Zangwill to arrange a meeting with G. K. Chesterton, who was known as an anti-Semite:⁶⁶

The meeting took place at the Cheshire Cheese, where if the duel of Aryan and Semite came off without casualties, it was perhaps because I had prudently made provision in the spirit of one of the Tosaphoth of Rabbi Elchanan translated by Jacobs in The Jews of Angevin England. "It is surprising," comments the worthy Rabbi, "that in the land of the isle the Jews are lenient in the matter of drinking strong drinks of the Gentiles and along with them … But perhaps as there would be great ill-feeling if they were to refrain from this, one must not be severe on them."⁶⁷

Zangwill was being facetious, since neither he nor Jacobs would have refrained from drinking non-kosher wine with Chesterton.⁶⁸ But that snippet of information about the medieval English Jews, made accessible to Zangwill through Jacobs' book, provided him with just enough information to frame a meeting of British writers in early twentieth- century London as the reenactment of a centuries-old modus vivendi between Jews and Christians in England.

The need to find a usable Anglo-Jewish past was not limited to the secular elite. Rabbi Naftali Levy was a Polish rabbi who served in London as a chicken-slaughterer from the 1880s, and composed several books in the traditional mode of rabbinic learning.⁶⁹ In 1888, immediately after publishing his edition of Hebrew deeds from medieval England, Myer Davis published a letter in the Jewish Standard, an Anglo-Jewish newspaper, asking for help from rabbinic scholars in identifying some of the Jewish names mentioned in the documents he had just published:⁷⁰

Understanding that you count among your subscribers and readers a goodly number of Hebrew and Rabbinical Scholars, I venture to ask some of them to assist me in an enquiry I am instituting. The volume of "Shetaroth" (deeds) that has just appeared brings to light the existence, during the 13th century, of several English-born Rabbonim. I forward a list of these, and would fain ask rabbinical scholars and students to furnish me with any references they may have met with that mention the abode, career, or any particulars, indeed, of these eminent Rabbis.

The question elicited a series of responses in the same newspaper by Naftali Levy, who was able to supply rabbinic sources mentioning some of those same names.⁷¹ Levy ended his series of brief columns with the exhortation:⁷²

Our lot has fallen in a more peaceful age, but we should yet try to learn the lesson of self-surrender and of unquestioning obedience which comes to us as a message from the mighty dead who lived in this island, which has become our home as well. If we model our lives on theirs, the future of English Judaism will be assured, and it will not be unworthy of those great men who have given to this country its due place in the history of Hebrew literature.⁷³

Later that same year, Levy published a version of the correspondence in a Hebrew journal for rabbis, and in 1891 he included the Hebrew version in his volume of responsa.⁷⁴ In translating his English-language newspaper correspondence with Davis into a Hebrew rabbinic responsum, he also recast Davis's question:

The question of one of the wise men of our city here of London, whether there is any memory or remnant among the great rabbis of the rabbis of England who lived in this land before the Expulsion, before the Exile of Israel from the land of England in the year 5050 Anno Mundi (=1290 CE). After the present-day discovery of documents in the royal archives, authorized contracts from the government written in Hebrew and confirmed by the great rabbis from as early as the year 995 (=1235)—have the names of these rabbis been found in the writings of the rabbis who lived in those times, and did they preserve their memory as a blessing in their words?

The question for Levy was not simply an academic attempt to identify the names in the financial documents, as it was for Davis. The medieval documents, and especially the Hebrew Starrs, had proven beyond any doubt that Jews were alive and active in England during the Middle Ages. But what sort of Jews were they? Did they include rabbis and scholars? The annals of Jewish history were, to be honest, the volumes of rabbinic literature that fill every traditional library throughout the Diaspora. If the Jews of medieval England were absent from that library, then they didn't really count. As he explained at the end of his responsum, Levy believed he had "performed a kindness with the living as well as with the dead, by reviving the great rabbis who left a written memory of the Talmudic literature in England."⁷⁵

Over the course of the twentieth century, several important works by medieval English rabbis were published, and the dimensions of their contribution became clearer.⁷⁶ But the fear that this corpus, and in fact the entire historical legacy of English Jews, is "plagued by irrelevancy and insignificance"⁷⁷ continues to haunt its students. In 1937, Cecil Roth declared that Anglo-Jewish literature "affords no grounds for apology or shame" and that England "need not be ashamed of the results," although he dispensed with the medieval portion of those results in one and a half paragraphs.⁷⁸ When, in one of his last lectures, Roth asked "Why Anglo-Jewish History?" his best answer was "Because it is fun."⁷⁹ With a more cynical sense of humour, Ephraim Elimelech Urbach suggested that the English rabbis suffered from bad luck, because those portions of their heritage that were preserved reflect the least important and least original thinkers among them.⁸⁰

The Jewish community of medieval England was geographically isolated, one of the only island communities. It was numerically insignificant, a tiny minority of the English population and much smaller than Jewish communities in nearby regions.⁸¹ The intellectual elite, the rabbis whose writings have been preserved, responded by asserting themselves as a viable alternative to the royal legal system and to foreign rabbinic communities. If their modern heirs and students were disappointed by the achievements of the rabbis of medieval England, it is at least partly because of what they had hoped to find.