The Jew Next Door

Daily relations between Christians and Jews in the Middle Ages

By Norman Roth

The following article is reprinted with permission from Medieval Jewish Civilization: An Encyclopedia (Routledge).

Daily Relations--Neighborly but Volatile

One of the most important, and at the same time most misunderstood, aspects of medieval Jewish life is the relations that existed between Jews and their Christian neighbors on a daily basis. It is perhaps not surprising that confusion exists about this, because it was a paradoxical relationship.

On the positive side, Jews and Christians were in fact neighbors who lived side by side, and normal conditions prevailed between ordinary Jews and their neighbors for the most part. On the negative side, these relations could quickly deteriorate or be disrupted entirely at the slightest provocation.

Did Anti-Semitism Exist in the Middle Ages?

Contrary to popular belief, rarely, if at all, was the source of disruption the Church. With some notable exceptions, for example, the imposition of wearing the distinguishing sign or badge, or the attempt to limit or even eradicate the charging of interest on loans, ecclesiastical authorities rarely intervened in the lives of Jews. Even in the short-lived and in the end impossible attempt to curb interest, they realized that the only punitive action they could take was the threat of excommunication of Christians, who borrowed money from Jews on interest.

This does not, of course, mean that all individual bishops, theologians, or popes were “friendly” toward Jews; many of them were outspoken enemies, and it scarcely matters whether this was a “theological” enmity based on hatred of Jewish “heresy” and blindness to the Christian “truth” or whether it was an actual personal hatred of the Jews as such. Nonetheless, it is true that most of the animosity was directed at “Judaism” (perceived religious beliefs or, more important, the failure to “properly” understand the Bible) and not at the Jews as such; thus, there really was no such thing as anti-Semitism in the medieval period, nor indeed until the nineteenth century when that racist theory was invented. (The one exception to this was precisely the racist anti-semitic theory that attacked conversos, Jewish converts to Christianity in fifteenth century Spain).

The Jewish Mystique

In the popular imagination of ordinary Christian people, a certain mystique attached to Jews. It was obvious that they were different; they dressed differently, Jewish men wore their hair and beards long (whereas by no means all Christian men did), and they worshipped differently.

Probably few ordinary Christians could have known precisely what being a Jew meant, since ignorance of the Bible and indeed of their own religion was so widespread. Most Christians, including even the nobility, were illiterate. Few went to church at all; and even for those who did, the services were incomprehensible, conducted in Latin with priests facing the altar, which was separated and enclosed from the people.

The local clergy were usually as illiterate as the laypeople, and sermons were rarely preached. These facts must serve as a corrective to any false notions that medieval Christians “blamed” Jews for the crucifixion. Sources indicate that even in the High Middle Ages supposedly educated nobles often had little or no knowledge of the basic gospel stories, and much less did the peasant or working class.

The “Jewish mystique” manifested itself in many ways: for instance in Franklin Gaul and Visigothic Spain in the fifth and sixth centuries, Jews were often asked to bless the crops of their Christian neighbors, a function traditionally of the priest. The notion that Jews had some kind of direct pipeline to God continued throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, and in the common custom of asking Jews to offer special prayers, outdoors and with their Torah scrolls, when there was a need for rain (this continued at least into the seventeenth century in the Ottoman Empire and in Egypt)….

Status of the Jews

The Jews in the Middle Ages was neither an “alien” (legally or in any other way) nor a “stranger” nor is it true that the main, “if the only” reason for discrimination against him was religion. Certainly economic factors, such as the hated role of the moneylender and jealousy of Jewish financial success, played a major role.

Yet once again [historians] assert that “of course” the roots of popular hatred of the Jews can be traced to religious differences, primarily the position of the Jew as “a deliberate unbeliever” The Jew, religiously speaking, “knew the truth but refused to recognize it” This is correct, of course, but the fact that this was only the theological position, taken over also by canon law, is nowhere acknowledged.

The ordinary Christian layperson held no such lofty theological conceptions. They were not themselves so religious as to waste precious time and thought on the theological nor other differences between themselves and Jews. For the most part, they neither hated or loved the Jews, they simply got along with them as neighbors; however, as stated previously, they were also ignorant and intensely superstitious and the least rumor could turn them against their Jewish neighbors.

As is always true in human relationships, the situation of the Jews among Chrsitians was complicated. For the most part, they got along well enough, contrary to what [historian Salo] Baron aptly termed the “lachrymose conception of Jewish history,” which sees everything as unrelieved hostility and persecution. Hostile acts against the Jews were, in fact, rare and what is often forgotten is the long period between such incidents during which more or less normal relations prevailed.

Norman Roth is a professor of Jewish History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.