Jews and The Documentary Culture of Medieval England

The recent publication of Judith Olszowy-Schlanger's annotated facsimile adds much to our understanding of medieval England. The first volume in the Series Hebraica of the Monumenta Palaeographica Medii Aevi, it builds upon Olszowy-Schlanger's long engagement with the manuscript evidence for Jews and knowledge of Hebrew in medieval England. The documents under consideration constitute the 'largest documentary corpus in Hebrew from medieval Europe' (p. 31) and this review provides the opportunity to examine how the documentary evidence has been used to reassess the place of Jews within medieval English society, culture, and governance.

Olszowy-Schlanger's edition is a magisterial opus, both in its scholarship and in its materiality. Olszowy-Schlanger's deep knowledge of the languages, documents, and people of medieval England enables her to shed new light on known documents, as well as to identify new charters, unmask forgeries, and provide new analyses. The edition's two atlas-format volumes encompass all known documents from medieval England containing Hebrew in full or in part—a total of 316 items comprising 258 on parchment and 58 tallies, pieces of wood used by the royal exchequer. Each item is presented in high-quality colour images. This is accompanied by transcriptions of the entire document (primarily in Hebrew, but also providing Latin or French texts) and translations of the Hebrew texts. A detailed 'Material Description' section describes the document's parchment (none of the documents was written on paper), ink, pricking and ruling, justification, as well as additional marks, and, wherever appended, seals. This is followed by a detailed palaeographical study, which includes the identification of scribes (where known), and a comparison with other documents in the corpus. A 'Commentary' section provides Olszowy-Schlanger with the opportunity to summarize the text, comment on its significance, and provide information on the parties involved, the language employed, and the places mentioned. Commendably, it also explicates the rationale for ascertaining date and provenance, wherever not mentioned explicity in the document. Each entry ends with a bibliography of editions and catalogues.

The edition is preceded by a lengthy introduction (pp. 15–152), which supplies context, analysis, and aids to deciphering the documents and exploring their wider significance. Its opening section provides general background on 'English Jews and their Documents in the Middle Ages'. This is followed by a discussion of the various documents in the corpus, their external characteristics, script, and scribes. The language of the documents is then analysed in depth, with the final section examining the typology and formulae of the documents. The edition concludes with two appendices: a chronological list of documents and a list of documents according to provenance. The introductory part is interspersed with useful and illustrative tables, supplying, for example, abbreviations and letter-forms in individual scribes' works, property prices and rents, legal formulae, or the analysis of parallel Hebrew and Latin documents.

As a whole, the documents reflect the complex situation of Jews in medieval England. Jews were always a small fraction of the population (three or four thousand out of a population of five million), but with an impact on English culture and economy that exceeded their numbers. Jews were physicians, merchants, and scholars. Due to the numerous restrictions levied upon them by Church and Crown, their main occupation was money-lending, a profession frowned upon by the Church, but central to the growing economies of Europe in the high Middle Ages. This shaped the nature and significance of the Jewish population. In 1240 their cumulated assets were about a third of the total circulating coinage in England; when in 1186 the bonds to Aaron of Lincoln—one of the wealthiest members of the community—were confiscated, they were valued at £75,000. This is reflected in the nature of our sources, which are overwhelmingly concerned with economic transactions...