The Jews of Southern Europe and Byzantium in the Early Medieval Period

The Early Medieval Christian World

During most of this period, the Christian world was by no means as politically unified as the Islamic world. What later were single nation-states, such as Spain, Germany, and Italy, were divided into competing small municipalities and kingdoms, in some cases sharing neither a single political authority nor even a common vernacular language. Religious unity was lacking as well, with the western Roman Empire divided from the eastern Roman (“Byzantine”) Empire, which by the twelfth century was centered in Constantinople. 

It is especially difficult, therefore, to generalize about the status of Jews living under Christian rule. At the very least, however, we must distinguish between the southern European lands, which had had a long-standing Jewish presence dating back to Roman times, and the northern European world, where Jewish immigrant populations had only just begun to establish themselves in the tenth century, with an influx of Jewish merchants. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, sizable Jewish communities in northern Europe—England, northern France, what later became the Netherlands, Germany, and Austria—were just starting to flourish.

Jews in the Byzantine Empire

The case of the Byzantine Empire is complicated. The rise of Islam and its territorial (and economic) expansion meant that Byzantium lost many of its Jewish communities over the course of the seventh to tenth centuries, at the same time that Greek-speaking Jews formed close-knit networks across and through the Mediterranean. The middle of the tenth century saw a so-called Byzantine renaissance, which drew Jews again to Byzantine lands.

Byzantine Jews tended to live in small towns. Others seem to have been farmers, though larger communities were found in Constantinople, Salonika, and Thebes, which were home to numerous other ethnic and religious minorities: Turks, Slavs, Armenians, and others. Jews worked in the textile and tanning industries, both trading in leather and cloth and producing it, as tanners, weavers, and dyers. They spoke Greek, the vernacular, and sometimes Arabic, and they wrote in Hebrew and Aramaic sometimes mixed with Greek. Beginning in the tenth century, we begin to see literary and scientific works in Hebrew being written by Byzantine Jews. 

Jews Crossing Borders

Despite the religious and political differences between the Islamic and Byzantine empires, Jews increasingly moved between the two realms. The letters of Byzantine Jews, written in Hebrew, Arabic, and Greek and preserved in the Cairo Geniza, attest to travel between Egypt and the Byzantine Empire. Northern Europe was not entirely cut off either; early Hebrew scientific and philosophical texts appear to have traveled from Byzantium up the Italian Peninsula to Ashkenaz, and have been found copied into later Ashkenazic manuscripts. This path of transmission was particularly fruitful. The first center for the translation of Judeo-Arabic texts into Hebrew was the south of Italy (Bari, Calabria), where texts by Sa‘adya in particular were translated; these too worked their way northward into Ashkenaz.

Evidence for Jewish Communities

Few sources written by Jews have reached us from southern or eastern Christian lands—northern Spain, Sicily, Italy, southern France, Greece, and Asia Minor—at least not from the early part of the period, namely, before the tenth century—but there are enough of them to show the presence of Jewish communities in those locations and, in some cases, to allow us to chart important transformations within the Jewish community. A survey of Jewish funerary inscriptions from southern Italy dating from the fifth to ninth centuries, for instance, reveals a number of apparently interrelated shifts that occurred over the course of those centuries: Greek and Latin were abandoned in favor of Hebrew, epitaphs began to incorporate substantive citations of biblical and rabbinic texts, and the title rabbi became increasingly common and was used in ways that suggest that it signified a recognized function. Taken together, these features offer evidence of the growing importance of rabbis and rabbinic institutions between the eighth and tenth centuries.

Twelfth-Century Mystical Circles in Southern Europe

One of the most noteworthy developments in twelfth-century southern Europe was the appearance of mystical circles whose writings laid the groundwork for the speculative tradition known as kabbalah. 

The Book of Brilliance (Sefer ha-bahir), which surfaced in southern France in the final decades of the twelfth century, had an especially profound impact. Written in the style of a midrash, the book is made up of parables attributed to the rabbis of the Mishnah. Arguably, the work’s most significant contribution is its description of the dynamic inner life of God using a symbolic system of ten divine emanations, called sefirot. The striking presence within this scheme of a feminine aspect—the shekhinah (“divine presence”)—has drawn considerable attention from modern scholars, who have debated whether its appearance should be understood as a response to the concurrent revival of devotion to the Virgin Mary in the Western Church. 

We hear of Jewish mystical or proto-kabbalistic circles first in Arles, Lunel, and Narbonne, but in short order, their esoteric traditions were carried across the Pyrenees and took root as well in Catalonia and Castile, where they were committed to writing in the mid- to late thirteenth century.