Challenges to the Jewish Community in the Early Medieval World

As a minority population, Jews in both Christian and Islamic lands faced periods of persecution. 

The Position of Jews in Christian Lands

Official church doctrine during the early medieval period permitted Jews to reside in the domains of Christian lords and to practice their religious traditions without fear of harassment. And that tolerant ecclesiastical position was matched by the policies of temporal rulers who were eager to see Jewish merchants settle within their realms. Nonetheless, deeply ingrained stereotypes and resentment toward Jews within the general population could easily be stirred up and at times resulted in grave consequences. 

The First Crusade and Anti-Jewish Violence

Twelve years later, in the spring of 1096, the Jews of Speyer and the nearby towns of Mainz and Cologne suffered a serious eruption of anti-Jewish violence as populist militias, responding to Pope Urban II’s call to liberate Christian populations in the Near East, attacked Jewish communities in the Rhineland. Faced with the choice between conversion and death, some men and women opted to die as martyrs. A clear deviation from the original objective of what would come to be known as the First Crusade, the violence caught church officials and temporal rulers by surprise. Significantly, both groups endeavored to protect the Jews within their jurisdiction (not, in every case, with success).

The actual number of lives lost is difficult to assess, and historians have generally emphasized the many indications that Jewish life in the Rhineland quickly rebounded in the aftermath of 1096. But if the First Crusade did not constitute a decisive turning point in the legal status and economic position of the Jews in northern Europe, it did have a significant impact on the culture of those communities. 

The Impact of the First Crusade

The most visible responses to the First Crusade violence are found in the realms of literature and ritual practice. In the decades following the trauma of 1096, Jewish writers produced poetic laments (kinot), memorial lists, and vivid chronicles, all of which helped forge a collective identity oriented around the ideal of religious martyrdom. As many have observed, the prominence of this idea reflects both an internalization and a subversion of powerful Christian symbols, providing us with another instance of “inward acculturation.” 

Women play a prominent role in a number of these compositions. Among the most moving of these are Eleazar of Worms’s poems for his murdered wife and two daughters. His lament for his wife, based on Eshet ḥayil (the “woman of valor” passage from Proverbs 31:10–31), modifies the biblical source to match his real wife’s actual accomplishments. While many of the laments found a place in the synagogue liturgy for the Ninth of Av, the annual commemoration of the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, one of them, Av ha-raḥamim (“Merciful Father”), had over time a much more profound impact on Jewish culture, due to its eventual inclusion in the regular Sabbath service in the Polish-Lithuanian rite.

The Status of Jews in Northern Europe

Long-lasting structural changes to the status of European Jewry come into clearer view during the twelfth century. Jewish involvement in moneylending intensified during this period. While in the short run such activity was indeed profitable, in the long run it made Jews economically vulnerable. Jewish concentration in the profession would prove especially problematic when, in the early thirteenth century, both ecclesiastical and temporal authorities began to take new aggressive measures to curtail all forms of usury, including Jewish moneylending. And because Jewish lenders routinely turned to lords and barons as the sole authorities capable of enforcing their loan agreements, moneylending also had the effect of tying Jewish political fortunes ever more closely to the unpredictable whim of their rulers.

Accusations of Ritual Murder 

No less troubling are the signs that deeply hostile views of Jews were surfacing and eroding the long-standing protections they had enjoyed in Christian lands. In 1150, Thomas of Monmouth wrote a pamphlet titled “The Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich” in which he falsely accused the Jews of that town of kidnapping and murdering a young Christian boy six years earlier in conjunction with the observance of Passover. That young William is portrayed as “an innocent lamb” who was made to wear a crown of thorns reveals how the age-old image of Jews as Christ killers was informing new fears of the Jews’ hostility toward medieval European society. 

From the middle of the twelfth century, accusations of ritual murder and the related charge that Jews sought to desecrate the Eucharist wafer spread with alarming speed across Europe. In 1171, the stereotype of Jewish murderousness resurfaced in the French town of Blois, when, as noted earlier, the town’s Jews were rounded up and tried for the alleged murder of a Christian. Two things make this episode especially troubling. 

As neither a body nor any physical evidence of the crime was ever produced, the entire case rested on unsubstantiated witness testimony, and government authorities, which in the past had reliably sought to protect Jews from baseless attacks, failed to intervene at Blois. The end proved tragic. Thirty-one Jews were burned to death, and the remainder were imprisoned or forcibly converted. Blois thus directs our attention to the dangers that lay ahead for Europe’s Jews, as monstrous fantasies weakened the historic protections that had secured their existence.

Jewish Anti-Christian Polemics

One response to the increasingly hostile environment of twelfth-century Europe is found in Jewish polemical writing. For centuries, the Life of Jesus (Toledot Yeshu), a scurrilous retelling of the gospel tradition, circulated among Europe’s Jews, occasionally stoking the ire of churchmen. Constructed out of stories about Jesus scattered throughout the Talmud, the text mocks many of the central themes of the Jesus narrative. Mary is an adulteress who wants to keep her infidelity and the resulting pregnancy secret; Joseph is a Roman soldier; and Jesus is a wayward student who is expelled from the rabbinic study house. 

What is new in the twelfth century is the appearance of works that challenge church doctrine and Christian society through reasoned argument rather than through storytelling. The first such work is Joseph Kimḥi’s Book of the Covenant, composed in Narbonne in the 1160s. Structured as a dialogue between a Christian and a Jew, the book makes a case for the moral superiority of Judaism. Kimḥi’s efforts to respond to charges concerning the harmful effects of Jewish moneylending are especially noteworthy. 

Roughly a decade later, Jacob ben Reuben, a northern European Jew, wrote the Book of the Wars of the Lord, which exhibits an entirely different approach, as it is the first extant critique of the New Testament by a Jewish author. Jacob’s initial foray deals only with the book of Matthew; over time, however, Jews developed critical commentaries on the entire gospel tradition, which incorporated their extensive knowledge of other Christian scriptures as well.

The Islamic World

Jews in the Islamic world faced a somewhat different set of challenges. Basic guarantees were rooted in the dhimmī system, and these proved remarkably durable over the entire early medieval period. While we hear of localized cases in which Jews were subjected to excessive taxation, discriminatory legislation, or even physical assault, the basic legal structure that ensured the Jews’ safety, their religious freedom, and their right to engage in all forms of economic activity remained unquestioned. 

While negative tropes about the Jews were certainly pervasive in the Islamic world, Jews living in those lands contended with few of the most vicious stereotypes confronted by Jews in parts of Christian Europe. The pernicious image of the Jew as the enemy of Christian society at large had no counterpart in the Islamic lands.

Al-Ḥākim bi-Amr Allāh

An episode in eleventh-century Cairo can help illuminate the different experiences of Jews in northern Christian Europe and the Islamic world during moments of crisis. Beginning in 1004, the Fātimid ruler al-Ḥākim bi-Amr Allāh (996–1021) promulgated a series of harsh decrees that directly attacked the Jewish population of Egypt. Among his most severe measures were the destruction of houses of worship and the requirement to convert to Islam. But while calamitous, al-Ḥākim’s reign of terror had no abiding impact; indeed, after his mysterious death in 1021, his various enactments were annulled precisely because they lacked any basis in the Islamic legal tradition. It is also important to note that Jews were never the exclusive targets of al-Ḥākim’s arbitrary decrees. An erratic ruler prone to self-aggrandizing religious delusions, al-Ḥākim took discriminatory action against Jews, Christians, and Sunni Muslims. Jews were thus never seen as the sole, or even principal, enemy.

The Almohads

A crisis during the twelfth century highlights yet another key difference between communities in Latin Europe and the Islamic world. In the 1140s, a movement of religious revival took hold among the Muslim Berber population of the Atlas Mountains. In the name of the absolute unity of God, the Almohads (Arabic: al-Muwaḥḥidūn, “monotheists”) overthrew in relatively quick succession the Muslim rulers of North Africa and southern Spain. In their zeal, they also broke with long-standing legal norms when they required Jews residing in their newly conquered lands to convert. Historians debate how long this policy was enforced, but regardless, the immediate response was momentous. 

Several Jewish sources confirm that Jews converted to Islam to save their lives. Indeed, there is good reason to conclude that the family of Moses Maimonides were among the many who survived the Almohad conquest of al-Andalus by outwardly embracing Islam.

Conversion or Death

This readiness to feign conversion during the period of Almohad persecution has been taken as indicative of an important practical difference between Jews in Christian Europe and in Islamic lands. Pointing to those sources that laud the willingness of Jews in the Rhineland to die as martyrs rather than undergo baptism during the First Crusade, some historians have argued that Jews in Islamic lands simply felt less revulsion toward the dominant religion than did their brothers and sisters in Latin Europe and accordingly were more prepared to apostatize. 

But this approach gets at the issue from the wrong angle, presuming as it does a real difference in behavior. Regardless of the Ashkenazic ideal of the religious martyr, we know that in most cases, most Jews—regardless of where they lived—opted to convert when faced with the choice between apostasy or death. At the same time, letters by eyewitnesses make it clear that some Jews did choose death over conversion during the Almohad takeover of North Africa. 

Commemoration of Persecution

What distinguished these communities, then, were not courses of action but modes of commemoration. Jewish communities in Christian Europe generated a variety of textual forms and yearly occasions to perpetuate the memory of specific acts of martyrdom, rare though they may have been. Jewish communities in the medieval Islamic world, by contrast, responded with far more equanimity to moments of crisis, lavishing less attention on the martyrs and accepting with greater tolerance those who converted.

Finding Safe Haven in Christian Lands

The Almohad invasion of al-Andalus had a second consequential outcome. Those who did not convert or die—the vast majority of the Jews of Islamic Spain—eventually left. While some, like Maimonides’ family, settled in North Africa and then Egypt, many more found safe haven in southern European Christian territories: northern Spain and southern France. The arrival of the Almohads thus put an end to one of the most vibrant centers of Jewish cultural activity in the Islamic world. 

But ideas, like people, can travel. And so, refugees from Muslim Spain like the Ibn Tibbon and Kimḥi families, who settled in Narbonne in southern France, set to work in their new homes translating the Judeo-Arabic masterpieces of al-Andalus into Hebrew, making them available to avid new Jewish audiences. Satisfying the demand for these works by Jews who could not read Arabic, they helped keep the memory of al-Andalus alive and, in the process, shaped Sephardic identity for centuries.