Living Together, Living Apart: Rethinking Jewish-Christian Relations in the Middle Ages

by Jonathan Elukin

This book challenges the standard conception of the Middle Ages as a time of persecution for Jews. Jonathan Elukin traces the experience of Jews in Europe from late antiquity through the Renaissance and Reformation, revealing how the pluralism of medieval society allowed Jews to feel part of their local communities despite recurrent expressions of hatred against them.

Elukin shows that Jews and Christians coexisted more or less peacefully for much of the Middle Ages, and that the violence directed at Jews was largely isolated and did not undermine their participation in the daily rhythms of European society. The extraordinary picture that emerges is one of Jews living comfortably among their Christian neighbors, working with Christians, and occasionally cultivating lasting friendships even as Christian culture often demonized Jews.

As Elukin makes clear, the expulsions of Jews from England, France, Spain, and elsewhere were not the inevitable culmination of persecution, but arose from the religious and political expediencies of particular rulers. He demonstrates that the history of successful Jewish-Christian interaction in the Middle Ages in fact laid the social foundations that gave rise to the Jewish communities of modern Europe.

Elukin compels us to rethink our assumptions about this fascinating period in history, offering us a new lens through which to appreciate the rich complexities of the Jewish experience in medieval Christendom.

Genres: History, Religion, Jewish, Christianity, Judaism, Nonfiction

208 pages, Hardcover

First published April 9, 2007

Reviews

[Karl Steel · Rating 2 out of 5]

I hope this study of how Jews lived among Christians has suggested that many of the fundamental characteristics and experiences of convivencia can be seen in non-Spanish settings. Jewish-Christian relations in northern Europe is actually convivencia in a minor key. Seeing the medieval past in this light will perhaps help to eliminate or at least challenge the false dichotomy between the experience of Jews in Spain (and other Mediterranean settings) and of Jews in northern European societies in the Middle Ages. Jews of England, France, Italy, and Germany were deeply integrated into the rhythms of their local worlds. They faced many of the same challenges and uncertainties as their Christian neighbors. They navigated a world of unexpected violence but recurring stability, ad hoc policies of repression and toleration. All of this suggests that Jewish-Christian relations were dynamic and cannot be understood only in terms of persecution. Jewish-Christian interaction in medieval Europe created if not a history of toleration then habits of tolerance. (136-7)

By trying to write as though the Holocaust were not the inevitable future of European Jews, Elukin aims to shift our attention away from lachrymose history to quotidian survival. In the early middle ages, at least, we shouldn't confuse clerical antijudaism with general attitudes: how much power did Church councils really have, he asks, and what could an antisemitic king do when he could barely hold onto his (Visigothic) throne? Moreover, he argues, violence was not typical for Jews, or, at least, not particular for Jews, given the endemic violence of polities lacking much infrastructure, standing armies, or police forces, and given the general violence of medieval public rhetoric, devoted as it was to praise or blame. Instead, violence should be understood as only occasionally afflicting the Jews, who, despite it all, almost always came back to the cities or regions that expelled or massacred them. Sometimes this took a generation, as in the Rhine valley following 1096; sometimes this took centuries, as in England following 1290. But it always happened. Elukin implies, in brief, that we should not believe we know better than the Jews: if they thought it was safe to move back, why shouldn't we?

Elukin offers some fascinating evidence: Jews in early medieval Sicily established a shrine to Elijah on the model of a Christian saint's shrine; Jews in Rheims offered to bring out their Torah to help break a drought; the Jews of eleventh- and twelfth-century Speyer had to take their turns guarding the town walls; English 'ritual murder' shrines were financially unsuccessful; interfaith marriages and Christian conversions to (what we now call) Judaism occurred...every so often. But a brief work that covers this much temporal and geographical territory (from 5th-century Minorca to 17th-century Germany) must necessarily skim; it's further marred by its credulous handling of medieval historiography (for a comparison, and also for a complication of the categories of "Jew" and "Christian," see the work of Daniel Boyarin, who is fully aware of the work of, say, Bloch and Foucault); and, especially, it hardly considers the counterarguments. Rhetoric against heretics could get nasty, yes, and violence against Jews should be understood within the larger context of medieval European cultures; but surely the repeated massacres and expulsions of Jews, and the centrality of antijudaism to, say, the development of Mariolotry suggests that Jews were a special object of hatred for medieval Christians.

Furthermore, that Jews did not feel themselves to be in danger does not mean that they were not in danger. We here in their future can see patterns they couldn't. Yes, Jews held on to Spain even after 1391; they moved back to the Rhine valley after 1096; they petitioned to return to England in 1320. These were mistakes. Elukin seems to assume that Jews were rational actors. But people aren't rational, or not only rational. A comparison, mutatis mutandis to avoid any sense that I'm blaming the Jews for what they suffered: in 2010, in this time of climate change, people continue to occasionally enjoy good weather, and to live near the water; no doubt many Pakistanis will move back to the coast after this latest round of flooding subsides; no doubt we Americans will continue hyperconsuming until we meet our well-deserved end. This doesn't mean we're not in danger. It just means that, like people generally, we're insufficiently pessimistic, unable to do what we should to escape our coming doom.

For a much less friendly review, with charts on violence against Jews in medieval Germany, see Michael Toch in The Catholic Historical Review 95.3 (2009): 604-7.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lets face it, the image of a city dwelling money lending jew harassed by a lynch mob and exploited by some seedy corrupt official has been ingrained in our collective European psyche, be it shakespear's "the merchant of Venice" or years of less "subtle" forms of antisemitism and pogroms cumulating with the holocaust.

However, Jonathan Elukin book, an extended essay as he self admits, sets out to remind us of two things; one that for most of the time for most jews in Europe life went on without violence and two that the realities of the late medieval and modern times should not be projected on the earlier centuries.

In a brief overview, starting with the merovingians, visigoth and langobards, Elukin paints a picture of a world where jews had a place not as merchants and money lenders but as craftsmen, doctors, farmers, laborers, bakers, cooks both free and unfree to varying degrees and like their Christian and pagan neighbors in dialogue with the new rulers of the fractures western empire. This was not a world of Ghetto's or visible markers but one facet of a diverse world.

Albeit interesting and I must confess confronting my own assumptions on the matter; what is lacking is how Jewish society evolved and changed with the changing European society. We jump from the Merovingians to the first crusade and the murder of jews by the mass hysteria in the holy roman empire and following similar moments of mass killings. Here the author wants to emphasize the role of officials during and aftermath of the killing which is far less accommodating of the murders then one might have assumed and again how dramatic these killings were because they were far less common then portrayed. The latter chapters then go into the expulsion of jews by English, French and Spanish kingdoms in the 13th 14th and 15th century as well as more localized expulsions from German towns. Here to Elukin emphasizes that far from some deep well of hate for Jews, these expulsions more often then not were less dramatic then one might have assumed and often only temporary with Jewish Europeans adopting a semi nomadic life style bouncing between cities,regions and kingdoms.

But what was the driving factor of it all; on this Elukin is a bit more hesitant. He refers to greed, the wish to control Jews and moments of paranoia and fear (like during the plague years). Even more hesitant is an idea which just begs for further research; that the early medieval period with its many diverse religious communities as well as localized identities offered more chance for Jewish individuals to integrate whilst in the following centuries they became a more isolated exception in a world of larger kingdoms with far less accommodating Christian and pro nationalist identities, the Jewish society become others whilst before they were one of. But even with this dynamic, Eluking, emphasizes, Jewish individuals kept living in small towns and villages where for most of the time they could live their lives.

Just yesterday I saw an article in the guardian on how the increasingly authoritarian Israeli state and threat of violence from surrounding armed groups, is pushing for migration of more liberal Israeli to Europe and I could not help but marvel at the timing. Because several times Eluking comments how Jews tried to resettle in regions such as the kingdom of England decades after the expulsion; in a way history is repeating itself and Jewish European societies might have longer live then had been expected.

I wish the segment on the earlier medieval period had been longer and had included the lands ruled by the Byzantine empire but as the author says himself, it is an extended essay.

[P. Es]

dangers of lachrymose jewish history p.4-

"Another" a stronger symbol than hindsighting 'Othering', as Augustine view reigned, (as Frederiksen elaborated and Schwartz "all can be saved" on the masses conjectures) p.148

papal bulls protecting jewish property by those othewise antagonistic...antagonism SHARED ABOUT OTHER GENTILES...(back to ancient world norms among Jews, Rabbinic figures, Talmud, Greek philosophers) p.90-

Jews NOT singled out - violent society legally and otherwise (recalling the letter of the law even under jewish sovereignty in eretz israel) p.6-7

negative more likely to survive historical account than normal relations; "the dog did not bark" news - entering the particular dynamics of Jewish collective memory amid constant self-Othering and reminding oneself of the obvious situation of "one of these is not like the other") p.89

low level of pilgrimage or donation at blood libel martyr shrines p.97

Jews WERE big in Medieval slave trade p.35,41,50
DID have economic safeguards and privileges p.99-

Explusions (often presumed perpetual) - were often not perpetual and for situational reasons p.117

Peasant/popular violence NOT natural, but orbited privileges and protections the christian masses didn't receive by contending royals, officials, etc. p.106