Jewish Life In The Middle Ages

Israel Abrahams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135068295
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

First published in 2010. Long the standard authority on the subject, this classic work is the enlarged and revised edition begun by Israel Abrahams, one of the most distinguished Jewish scholars of his time, and completed after his death by the renowned Anglo-Jewish historian Cecil Roth. Through his writings, Abrahams made many aspects of Jewish culture and history, previously known only to scholars, accessible to a wider audience. In this volume, illustrated with distinctive woodcuts and prints, he deals with Jewish life in Europe from the tenth to the sixteenth century and the influence of Jewish thought on European culture. The work is arranged in twenty four chapters, which deal with the synagogue as the centre of social life; with the inner life of the synagogue; communal organization; the institution of the ghetto; social morality; the slave trade; monogamy and the home; home life; love and courtship; marriage customs; trades and occupations; the Jews and the theatre; the Purim-play and the drama in Hebrew; costume in law and fashion; the Jewish badge; private and communal charities; the medieval schools; the scope of education; medieval pastimes and indoor amusements; personal relations between Jews and Christians; and literary friendships. This magisterial book is a treasury of the rich cultural and historical life of the Jewish people.

JEWISH LIFE IN THE MIDDLE AGES.

CHAPTER I.

THE CENTRE OF SOCIAL LIFE.

THE medieval life of the Jews had for its centre the synagogue. The concentration of the Jewish populations into separate quarters of Christian and Moslem towns was initially an accident of Jewish communal life. The Jewish quarter seems to have grown up round the synagogue, which was thus the centre of Jewish life, locally as well as religiously.

This concentration round the synagogue may be noted in the social as well as in the material life of the middle ages. The synagogue tended, with ever-increasing rapidity, to absorb and to develop the social life of the community, both when Jews enjoyed free intercourse with their neighbours of other faiths, and when this intercourse was restricted to the narrowest possible bounds. It was the political emancipation, which the close of the eighteenth century witnessed, that first loosened the hold of the synagogue on Jewish life. Emancipation so changed the complexion of that life that the Jewish middle ages cannot be considered to have ended until the French Revolution was well in sight. But throughout the middle ages proper the synagogue held undisputed sway in all the concerns of Jews. Nor was this absorption a new phenomenon. Already in Judea the Temple had assumed some social functions. The tendency first reveals itself amid the enthusiasm of the Maccabean revival, when the Jews felt drawn to the house of prayer for social as well as for religious communion. The Temple itself became the scene of some festal gatherings which were only in a secondary sense religious in character¹. Political meetings were held within its precincts². Its courts resounded on occasion with cries for the redress of grievances³. King and Rabbi alike addressed the assembled Israelites under the Colonnade, which was joined to the Temple by a bridge⁴.

The synagogue in the middle ages filled a place at once larger and smaller than the Temple. In the middle ages politics only rarely invaded the synagogue. Bad government, in the Jewish view, was incompatible with the kingdom of God⁵, but the Jews learned from bitter experience that they must often render unto Caesar the things that were God's. The Jews of the middle ages may have been alive to the current corruption, but they readily administered the public trusts which were sometimes committed to their care. Though they doubtless used their power at times to the advantage of their co-religionists, the Jewish holders of financial offices enjoyed a high, if rather ‘unpopular’ reputation for fidelity to their royal emplovers. Their honesty, as well as their amenability to kingly pressure, may be inferred from the frequency which they were entrusted with confidential posts in Spain and Italy. But the despotic government of the middle ages entailed an insecurity of political status which prevented Jews from participating much in the discussion of public affairs. The Jews gained nothing and lost much by their courageous partisanship of Don Pedro of Castile against his half-brother Henry de Trastamara (1350–1369)¹. Santob de Carrion, a Jewish troubadour of that age, compiled moral and political maxims for the king, but such an incident could hardly be paralleled. The Jews, on the other hand, frequently joined the general population in patriotic movements; but beyond the regular recitation of a prayer for the sovereign², politics were excluded from the liturgy. Occasionally, special prayers were inserted which involved a partisan attitude on questions of the day. Thus in 1188 the Jews of Canterbury prayed for the monks as against the archbishop in a local dispute³. At a much later date, the Jews of Rome erected a trophy in front of one of their synagogues in honour of the temporary establishment of a republican government⁴.

Such instances of political partisanship finding expression in the synagogue were rare in the middle ages, for even under the most favourable circumstances the Jews were subject to sudden and sweeping changes in their relations to the government. But it would be an error to suppose that this fact carried with it as a corollary the exclusion from the synagogue of wide and comprehensive social interests. The seventeenth was the gloomiest century in the pre-emancipation history of the Jews, but until the beginning of the sixteenth century they were never for long cut off from the common life around them. Nay, their interests were wider than those of their environment, for they had the exceptional interest of a common religion destitute of a political centre. It is hard to exaggerate the importance of this factor in moulding Jewish life. Thus was begotten that cosmopolitanism which broke through the walls of the ghettos, and prevented the life passed within them from ever becoming quite narrow or sordid.

It was the synagogue that made this influence effective. Owing to the love of travel innate in the Jewish con-sciousness and stimulated by repeated expulsions, the Jew of many an isolated place became familiar with the manners of foreign co-religionists who would find their way to the local synagogues. The vehicles of this moral traffic were travelling preachers and teachers, bringing new ideas and quaint information as to passing events; beggar-students who, when the conquering Moslems, and later on the Christian Crusaders, demolished the schools in one town, found their way to other schools of repute whereat to continue their studies; merchants and artisans who plodded many a weary mile in search of work¹ and brought with them new fashions and new handicrafts; strolling cantors who would be hailed by the many for their new hymns and new tunes; pious pilgrims who had set out from home for the Holy Land with but a hazy perception of the length and difficulty of their proposed journey, but imbued with a rich fund of enthusiasm idealized and communicable;¹ professional wayfarers, who would bring, by word of mouth or by letter, the moral influence of great Rabbinical authorities, who, with no organized power outside their own local congregations, yet imparted their inspiration to a widespread circle, centering now in Babylon, now in Cordova, at one time in Cairo, at another in the Rhine country; excited mystics who carried confused but rousing tales of the wondrous doings of ever-new claimants to the Messiahship, and fanned that smouldering dream of an ideal future which brightened the present hideous reality and made it tolerable.²

Thus Jewish life was not narrow, though its locale was limited. As a legalized institution the ghetto itself was unknown till the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Venetian and Roman ghettos being created almost contemporaneously at that period. Hence the predominance of the synagogue in medieval Judaism cannot be altogether attributed to the isolation of Jews from the social life of their contemporaries. There were, indeed, influences enough at work to drive the Jews from the world. For centuries they were legally barred from professional careers and honourable trades, though individual Jews contrived to overleap the barriers; they were forced to become usurers, though at first fully conscious of the obloquy attaching to a traffic banned by the Church and despised by the men of honour of all peoples in all ages. The cruellest result which persecution worked was to produce insensibility to this obloquy on the part of many Israelites. But all these attempts to isolate the Jews from the rest of mankind only partially succeeded. Even when the persistent efforts of Innocent III had spent themselves in branding the Jews as a race outside the pale of humanity, when the Inquisition had done its worst, when the Black Death had spread its baleful cloud between Jew and Gentile, still the former shared something of tbe general life. In Spain and Italy this participation is most clearly marked, but until the sixteenth century the Jews were nowhere entirely divorced from the ordinary national life.

But this general life lacked centralization. This statement may be illustrated by the phenomenon that no country in the middle ages possessed a national drama. National drama needs a national centre, and not even the concentrating genius of a Charles the Great could bring homogeneity into the heterogeneous mass over which he ruled. This lack of a common basis for national life became more marked when feudalism and chivalry fell. The seething thirteenth and fourteenth centuries show us national life in the making, not national life made. The Crescent ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• The Kegan Paul Library of Archaeology and History
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Author's Preface
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Introduction
• CHAPTER I. THE CENTRE OF SOCIAL LIFE.
• CHAPTER II. LIFE IN THE SYNAGOGUE.
• CHAPTER III. COMMUNAL ORGANIZATION.
• CHAPTER IV. INSTITUTION OF THE GHETTO.
• CHAPTER V. SOCIAL MORALITY.
• CHAPTER VI. THE SLAVE TRADE.
• CHAPTER VII. MONOGAMY AND THE HOME.
• CHAPTER VIII. HOME LIFE (continued).
• CHAPTER IX. LOVE AND COURTSHIP.
• CHAPTER X. MARRIAGE CUSTOMS.
• CHAPTER XI. TRADES AND OCCUPATIONS.
• CHAPTER XII. TRADES AND OCCUPATIONS (continued).
• APPENDICES. OCCUPATIONS OF THE JEWS
• CHAPTER XIII. THE JEWS AND THE THEATRE.
• CHAPTER XIV. THE PURIM-PLAY AND THE DRAMA IN HEBREW.
• CHAPTER XV. COSTUME IN LAW AND FASHION.
• CHAPTER XVI. THE JEWISH BADGE.
• CHAPTER XVII. PRIVATE AND COMMUNAL CHARITIES. THE RELIEF OF THE POOR.
• CHAPTER XVIII. PRIVATE AND COMMUNAL CHARITY (continued). THE SICK AND THE CAPTIVE.
• CHAPTER XIX. THE MEDIEVAL SCHOOLS.
• CHAPTER XX. THE SCOPE OF EDUCATION.
• CHAPTER XXI. MEDIEVAL PASTIMES AND INDOOR AMUSEMENTS.
• CHAPTER XXII. MEDIEVAL PASTIMES (continued). CHESS AND CARDS.
• CHAPTER XXIII. PERSONAL RELATIONS BETWEEN JEWS AND CHRISTIANS.
• CHAPTER XXIV. PERSONAL RELATIONS (continued). LITERARY FRIENDSHIPS.
• INDEX OF HEBREW AUTHORITIES
• GENERAL INDEX