Jews and Apostates in Medieval Europe \-\- Boundaries Real and Imagined

The chief trauma in the historical memory of the Jews of Franco-Germany ('Ashkenaz') in the Middle Ages was the persecution of 1096, when thousands of crusaders slaughtered the Jews in towns along the Rhine. The particulars of this grim episode are detailed in three twelfth-century Hebrew texts, which emphasize the experience of the Jewish martyrs, allegedly about two thousand in Worms and Mainz alone. The main event in these tales of carnage is the slaughter of Jews by Jews: parents killed their children, each other and themselves when the enemy was at the door, and there was no escape. The narratives do make fleeting mention of those Jews who survived by accepting baptism, but that is not primarily what these Hebrew accounts are about.

The historical record of the First Crusade persecutions, and the mass martyrdom in particular, became the hallmark of Ashkenazic Jewry in modern historiography. Yitzhak Baer, one of the most influential scholars of Jewish history, called the Franco-German diaspora 'the purest embodiment of the people of God', and added that 'the rule of the Torah, in theory and practice, was manifested there to the utmost degree'.¹ For Baer, the voluntary martyrdom of Ashkenazic Jewry in 1096 testified to the purity of their faith, and this mindset held sway for most of the twentieth century. The memory of the First Crusade has resonated so powerfully in modern Jewish historiography, in large measure because it contrasts starkly with the historical memory of the other great diaspora, Iberian Jewry ('Sepharad'). Here the salient image is the conversion of thousands of Jews in the fifteenth century, especially in the wake of the Tortosa Disputation of 1412-14. Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jewry have thus been placed in opposition, with the former marked as faithful owing to their heroic self-sacrifice in 1096, and the latter as weak-kneed because of their large-scale apostasy.

To understand the different responses to religious confrontation in the two realms, modern scholars have focused on the intensity of the cultural interaction with the Christian environment. The Jews of Spain are known to have been deeply integrated into the overall political, economic and social structure. They were also highly acculturated, with the relatively affluent acquiring a broad general education in addition to the traditional Jewish curriculum, and exhibiting cultural tastes similar to those of their Gentile neighbours. In contrast, the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz are usually depicted as having shared neither of these characteristics, and for many historians their social and cultural insularity was the key to their steadfastness in 1096.

Historians have recently begun to question the reliability of the Hebrew First Crusade narratives, and to suggest that the apostates were more numerous and apostasy less atypical of the 1096 experience than was once thought.² If true, this new perspective is of singular importance, because it undermines the Ashkenaz- Sepharad dichotomy: one can no longer reduce the medieval experience to a binary structure of cultural engagement versus insularity. Deliberation between these two options has characterized the internal debate over Jewish identity throughout Jewish history. The Old Testament is replete with warnings about the dangers of fraternizing with idolatrous neighbours, while in Late Antiquity the following talmudic dictum succinctly expresses a positive attitude towards cultural engagement: 'He found a pomegranate, ate its contents and disposed of its peel'.³ The Maimonidean Controversy, which erupted in Maimonides' lifetime and repeatedly thereafter through the ages, surrounded this same dilemma.

For modern historians, beginning with the nineteenth-century devotees of the 'Science of Judaism' (Wissenschaft des Judentums ), Sephardic acculturation embodied the strategy they hoped would grant Jews an entrée into European society; whereas Ashkenazic Jewry appeared benighted and isolated, and thus presented a counter-model. A shift began in the 1920s and 1930s, with leading historians such as Baer taking a dim view of Sephardic worldliness and apostasy, and hailing Ashkenazic insularity and fortitude. The shift probably represents the decline, following the First World War, in the European belief in rationalism and progress, and the greater appreciation of religious spirituality and mysticism. Subsequently, the destruction of European Jewry during...