Defining the Early Medieval Period

A Coherent Period

While any attempt to divide the uninterrupted flow of human events into discrete units of time is somewhat arbitrary, the end points of the present volume mark off a remarkably coherent and recognizably unified period in Jewish history. At its very center stands the transformation of Jewish culture resulting from the dynamic encounter with Islamic civilization, a process that commenced in earnest with the Arab conquests of the seventh century and reached its high point in the Jewish intellectual and literary achievements of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. 

To be sure, many additional subplots and historical byways—some with little or no direct connection to this central theme—emerge from the sources. We encounter, for instance, Jewish inscriptions from Byzantine southern Italy, evidence for Jewish merchant activity in Carolingian France, and the rapid growth of Jewish communal life in eleventh-century Germany. 

Yet for all that, between the years 600 and 1200, the overwhelming majority of the world’s Jews—an estimated 90 percent of them—lived under Islamic rule, and it was within the orbit of Islamic civilization that the greater part of Jewish cultural activity in those centuries was undertaken. And even areas like those just mentioned, which at first glance would seem to have been cut off from developments in Islamic lands, were, because of the increasingly interconnected nature of Jewish society, in contact with individuals and ideas that emanated from the East.

The Beginning of the Early Medieval Period

The curtain rises at the dawn of the seventh century, when the rabbinic literary legacy, the bedrock of much of later Jewish cultural expression, was well on its way to achieving its classical form, and a new civilizational force, Islam, was just emerging. Muḥammad’s career—in which Jews were to play a considerable part—was already underway, but its full significance was yet to be appreciated by those living beyond the borders of Arabia. 

An Apocalyptic Text from Before the Islamic Conquest 

Among the earliest sources from this period is the Book of Zerubbabel, a Jewish apocalyptic text that foretells the defeat of Armilos, the son of Satan and the embodiment of the Byzantine Empire, at the hands of a scorned messianic figure. Composed in Palestine just prior to the arrival of conquering Arab armies, the text contains no apparent reference to the new religion or its prophet. It is, rather, entirely shaped by a preoccupation with elements of Christian belief, while the fierce, centuries-old conflict between the Byzantine and Persian Empires reverberates just beneath the surface. But within just a few years, the seemingly eternal realities against which the prognostications of the Book of Zerubbabel are set would be altered beyond recognition. 

The Islamic Conquest

By the middle of the seventh century, armies expanding northward from Arabia would strip vast territories, including the biblical Holy Land, from the Byzantines and absorb in its entirety the sprawling Persian state. And in these very lands, the first Arab empire would come into existence. 

An Apocalyptic Text from After the Islamic Conquest 

In this new religious and political milieu, Jewish writers in Palestine would once more try to make sense of the world around them and, in so doing, would again turn to the very store of apocalyptic traditions that had inspired works like the Book of Zerubbabel, updating and adapting them to account for the dramatic military successes of Muḥammad’s followers.

One of these new apocalyptic texts, the Secrets of Simeon bar Yoḥai, which recounts what purports to be a vision imparted to the rabbinic sage Simeon bar Yoḥai, may have been written just one or two decades after the Book of Zerubbabel. In it, Arabs assume center stage as divinely sent liberators, freeing Jews from the oppression of their Byzantine overlords and ushering in the age of messianic redemption.

The End of the Early Medieval Period

The end point of the early medieval period is rather less self-evident and deserves some explanation. 

Does The First Crusade Indicate the End Point?

One possible cutoff is 1096, the year the First Crusade got underway. As the first instance of large-scale violence directed against the Jews of medieval Europe, that campaign has often been seen as a turning point, dividing the early medieval period, when church and state were generally protective of Jews, from the later Middle Ages, when those same institutions became increasingly aligned in their efforts to exclude Jews and Judaism from western Christendom.

In recent decades, however, historians have largely abandoned such a sweeping view of the First Crusade’s impact. While by no means diminishing the severity of the attacks that took place in the Rhineland communities of Speyer, Worms, Mainz, and Cologne in the spring of 1096, scholars no longer tend to regard those events as a watershed for European Jewry, particularly in light of the rapid reconstruction and repopulation of the affected communities in the years immediately following the outbreaks and the sustained period of intellectual progress and economic growth that continued into the thirteenth century in the region as a whole. 

Such a reassessment of the First Crusade’s historical significance as a turning point becomes all the more necessary when we broaden our perspective to include the much larger population of Jews living in the Islamic world, for whom it had even less meaning as a paradigm shift. The consensus view, in fact, of historians of European Jewry is that the restrictive canons of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 represent a more plausible indicator of hardening attitudes toward Jews and Judaism within Latin Christendom than does the First Crusade. 

Centering the History of Jews in the Islamic World

And, taking into consideration developments more directly relevant to the history of Jews living in the Islamic world, the year 1200 falls between two crucial events in the historiography of the Jews in the orbit of Islam. 

The Almohads

The first is the 1146 arrival in the Iberian Peninsula of Almohad invaders from North Africa, whose violently intolerant rule ravaged Jewish life in the southern, Islamic portion of Spain and brought to a close the remarkable literary culture associated with it. 

The Cairo Geniza

The second is the tapering off—by around 1250—of the rich documentary materials from the Cairo Geniza as a result of broader demographic, political, and cultural shifts connected with the rise of the Mamluk state in Egypt.

Neither of these two dates constituted a hard stop. The literary, intellectual, and artistic traditions that developed in Islamic Spain were mostly transferred to Christian lands and the Geniza documents continue to illuminate Jewish life in Egypt and elsewhere into the Mamluk period (1250–1517) and beyond, though in reduced numbers. Nonetheless, in both cases, we are dealing with changes in the source record that in turn point to deep structural realignments in the Islamic world.

The Shift to Western Christendom

Among the most important of these realignments shows that the dynamism that characterized Jewish intellectual and cultural life in the Arabic-speaking world during the preceding centuries was, by the year 1200, increasingly being ceded to Jewish communities in Christian Europe. The enrichment of Jewish intellectual life in western Christendom itself correlated with a sizable increase in the Jewish population there, a result of Jewish migration as well as of territorial conquests. 

The year 1200 is thus a transitional moment, a point when an intellectually invigorated and numerically enlarged European Jewry had begun to absorb and integrate the prior legacies of the Islamic East on the one hand and was confronting rising economic, legal, and social pressures on the other.