The Jews of Northern Europe in the Early Medieval Period

Northern France, England, and Germany

The early medieval period witnessed the emergence of important Jewish communities in northern France, England, and Germany. These fledgling settlements, from which Ashkenazic Jewry would develop, were tiny compared to the much older Jewish communities of southern Europe, North Africa, and the Near East. And although we know of individual Jews who were active in the Carolingian Empire during the ninth century, it is only toward the end of the tenth that we first see recognizable communities in these northern lands. 

The timing for the shift is significant, as it was at that moment that northern Europe embarked on a sustained period of population growth and economic expansion. Over the course of the next century, a familiar pattern repeated itself in region after region. Local rulers, eager to promote the economic development of their largely agrarian realms, granted charters to Jewish merchants, guaranteeing them the right to settle, engage in commerce on favorable terms, and live according to their own religious laws.

The Charter of Rudiger of Speyer

One such charter, issued in 1084 by Rudiger, a bishop and the temporal ruler of Speyer, reads as follows:

When I wished to make a city out of the village of Speyer, I, Rudiger, surnamed Huouzmann, bishop of Speyer, thought that the glory of our town would be augmented a thousandfold if I were to bring Jews. The Jews whom I have gathered I placed outside the neighborhood and residential area of the other burghers. In order that they not be easily disrupted by the insolence of the mob, I have encircled them with a wall. . . . I have accorded them the free right of exchanging gold and silver and of buying and selling everything they use. . . . I have, moreover, given them out of the land of the Church burial ground to be held in perpetuity. I have also added that, if a Jew from elsewhere has quartered with them, he shall pay no toll. Just as the mayor of the town serves among the burghers, so too shall the Jewish leader adjudicate any quarrel that might arise among them or against them. . . . In short, in order to achieve the height of kindness, I have granted them a legal status more generous than any which the Jewish people have in any city of the German kingdom.¹

Rudiger’s document attests to the economic opportunities that attracted Jews to northern Europe, but it also calls our attention to the Jews’ vulnerability as newcomers in the region whose privileges, while extraordinary, were guaranteed by little more than the whim of the ruler. And though obviously intended as a generous gesture, Rudiger’s provision of a walled-off area as a secure place for Jewish residence makes it clear that some Christians in Speyer already harbored resentment toward their new neighbors.

Jewish Communal Organization

Given the conditions under which the medieval Jewish communities of northern Europe emerged, it is understandable that they should have been organized differently from those in Islamic lands. 

In the absence of the kind of superstructure provided by the offices of the gaonate and the exilarchate, which purported to exercise authority over broad regions in the Islamic world, Jewish communal life in northern Europe was more fragmented, with the Jewish populations of individual towns typically acting independently of one another. This is not to say that coordination between different local communities was ever entirely lacking, however; over the course of the twelfth century a trend toward centralization is clearly visible. 

The arrest and trial of forty Jews in the town of Blois in 1171, following the alleged murder of a Christian boy, activated an intercommunal network across northern France and Germany that quickly set to work petitioning ecclesiastical and temporal authorities in the hopes of securing the prisoners’ release. Although these efforts failed, the episode has rightly been seen as a step in the direction of establishing lasting structures of intercommunal self-government. The dissemination of religious injunctions across northern France and Germany, including the famous ban on polygamy attributed to Gershom ben Judah (d. 1028), known as Rabbenu Gershom, a leading rabbinic authority in Mainz, offers yet another glimpse of the emergence of a more centralized form of communal organization.

Jewish Economic Activity

Although there is considerable evidence for Jewish involvement in agriculture, textiles, tanning, and other crafts in southern Europe, Jews in the north concentrated more heavily in trade. Over the course of the twelfth century, however, new economic opportunities opened as Jews were increasingly drawn to moneylending. 

Jewish Moneylending

Two principal factors encouraged this new specialization: a growing demand for capital in the rapidly developing European economy and the church’s increased opposition to what it perceived as the sin of usury. As the latter was, at least initially, focused on the behavior of Christians, an opportunity was created for enterprising Jews who saw possibilities in filling an economic void. Jewish moneylending played an important economic role, and in certain cases their services were appreciated. Still, high rates of interest coupled with the church’s stigmatization of usury stoked popular resentment of Jews in many quarters. 

The precarious position of Jewish moneylenders both economically and socially became even more apparent in the thirteenth century as the church sought to stamp out what it perceived as societal harm caused by usury by limiting the interest rates that Jewish moneylenders were allowed to charge.

Intellectual Activity

In these new areas of Jewish settlement, important centers of learning and cultural production developed too, first in German towns and later in northern France. Overall, Jewish intellectual life in northern Europe was more circumscribed than what we have seen in the Islamic world, with the main thrust of educational energy devoted to the mastery of traditional areas of religious scholarship. Biblical exegesis and Talmud study loomed especially large in the curriculum. 

Rashi

Illustrative of this situation is the literary legacy of Solomon ben Isaac (d. 1105), known as Rashi, the outstanding rabbinic figure in northern France and Germany during the second half of the eleventh century. Although Rashi wrote in a variety of genres, he is best known for his monumental commentaries on the Bible and the Talmud. These works, which quickly became classics, say a great deal about the intellectual world of Rashi’s contemporaries and successors.

Contacts with Christian Society

This should not be taken to mean, however, that Jewish intellectual life was completely cut off from the surrounding Christian environment. Although with some exceptions Jews in this period did not read or write Latin, the scholarly language of Christian society, they spoke the dialects of the regions in which they lived and certainly conversed with their non-Jewish neighbors. And these channels of communication could open even internal religious texts to new readings. 

One notable example is the series of exchanges that took place during the twelfth century between Jewish biblical exegetes and Christian scholars at the school of St. Victor in Paris. The importance for both camps of identifying the plain sense of scripture— peshat in Hebrew, sensus litteralis in Latin—suggests a shared goal in matters of biblical interpretation. 

In similar fashion, it has been suggested that the unique tosafistic approach to talmudic text that appeared in twelfth- and thirteenth-century northern France and Germany may have been influenced by the dialectical method then in use in cathedral schools in the same region. Both scholastics and Tosafists championed a revolutionary approach to authoritative writings, focusing their energies on identifying and then resolving, through incisive logical analysis, discrepancies in the received text.

The German Pietists

Northern European Jewry’s engagement with its cultural surroundings is also evident in the particular and elitist form of pietism (different from the Sufi-inspired pietist movement, mentioned earlier, in the Islamic East) that developed in the Rhineland region. Ascetic behaviors, including acts of self-mortification, played a central role in the distinctive praxis of the German Pietists (Ḥasidei Ashkenaz).

While the Book of the Pious (Sefer ḥasidim), an anthology of moral instruction and exempla compiled in the early thirteenth century, presents these unusual practices as rooted in ancient esoteric traditions, historians have noted their remarkable similarity to the demanding penances observed by the Pietists’ Christian contemporaries. But the Pietists’ appropriation of Christian penitential practices, like the Andalusian composition of Hebrew poetry in modes and forms drawn from Arabic poetry, should not be seen as a slavish imitation of the dominant culture. Instead, it is more accurately to be viewed as an instance of what Ivan Marcus calls “inward acculturation,” illustrating the various maneuvers through which Ashkenazic Jewry expressed its collective identity in relation to the surrounding society by “internalizing or transforming various genres, motifs, terms, institutions, or rituals of Christian culture.”² 

Liturgical Poetry

Here, too, poetry writing was an important area of cultural activity. Jews in northern Europe composed little in the way of secular poetry, and unlike the Jews of al-Andalus, who explored entirely new genres and styles in their liturgical verse, the Jews of northern France and Germany in this period continued to write religious poetry in the classical mode of piyyut, especially as it developed in Italy during the ninth and tenth centuries. 

It is possible to identify several features that distinguish northern European liturgical poetry from its Byzantine antecedents, such as its use of a distinctive register of Hebrew, reflective of the local linguistic environment, and its intensified reliance on rabbinic texts (which should come as no surprise given their centrality in the cultural world of Ashkenaz). In a similar vein, poets in these lands also composed halakhic poetry, some of which was likely intended for study rather than liturgical performance, or as introductory verse to works of Jewish law. 

By the twelfth century, the piyyutim that embellished the standard liturgy had become more or less standardized, forcing poets to seek new outlets for their creative energies. One consequence was a new emphasis on writing poems for specific life cycle events or for less celebrated occasions on the Jewish calendar, such as for the Sabbath preceding a wedding or on the occasion of a circumcision. Such works, which take as their subject matter the lives of individual members of the community, represent a significant departure from the more generalized focus of earlier forms of piyyut that address the collective experience of the Jewish people. 

An emphasis on the particular also appears in the many piyyutim composed in commemoration of localized experiences of persecution, such as the anti-Jewish violence in the Rhineland associated with the First Crusade.