This essay begins by noting and dismissing the standard perception of Jewish economic activity as limited to banking and moneylending, including the perception that Jews have somehow or other been inherently limited to such economic activities and incapable of pursuing a more normal distribution of economic pursuits. The essay then addresses a range of Jewish economic activities, beginning with agricultural activity stimulated by Jewish ritual needs. The essay continues by amassing evidence of Jewish craftsmen and Jewish physicians, and Jews in trade. There is full consideration of the field of Jewish moneylending. This consideration begins with evidence of the efflorescence of Jewish moneylending during the twelfth century. The essay notes the range of Christian borrowers from Jewish lenders, emphasizing the differences between the wealthy class of borrowers who used the funds for profit and the poorer class of borrower who used the funds for subsistence. The essay also notes the role of governments in supporting the Jewish lending activities and the ambivalent stance of the Church.

The article emphasizes the great variety of Jewish historical writings of the Middle Ages. Based on the explicit perceptions expressed by medieval authors and copyists about their own work, a definition of Jewish historical writings is provided. Already a short survey of important works shows the existence of distinctive traditions in the writing of history: In southern Italy the early works were oriented towards the Second Temple period, local family traditions and the relationship to the Byzantine Empire and the East. The prevailing topics of Ashkenazic historiography were persecution, the Jewish reaction and local history; in southern France, the interest focused on shalshelet ha-qabbalah ( “chain of tradition”), the succession of rabbinic scholars. In Sepharad, both models -- persecution accounts as well as shashelet ha-qabbalah -- were written and merged together. These different traditions have developed in long reception histories and are also visible through the common use of model texts and intertextual relationships. Acknowledgment of agency of Jews, even while applying biblical foils, and interest in the causality of events are obvious in these texts. Further characteristics are inter alia their ethical function, their use as counter-narratives against Christian claims as well as their diverse geographical and chronological scope.

In comparison with the Hebrew literature of the medieval Islamic world, the Hebrew literature of the Christian Mediterranean—comprising Christian Iberia, southern France, and the Italian Peninsula—has received little scholarly attention. This essay provides an overview of Hebrew poetry and prose from the region from social and literary perspectives and notes both continuities and points of distinctiveness across the region. The essay offers special treatments of poetics, translation, and inter-religious polemics as well as a revision of the scholarly consensus, which has typically judged literary production in comparison with earlier, especially Andalusian, Hebrew poetry.

Throughout the Middle Ages, Jewish life in the Diaspora was synonymous with the Jewish Community (qehillah). The qehillah regularized Jewish legal status within both the Christian and Muslim orbits, and provided Jews with a significant degree of self-government. In addition, it provided a framework wherein the members of the community were able to carve out psychological for themselves. This space provided them with a defensive buffer, a refuge in the face of the ongoing deterioration of Jewish legal and economic status over the course of the High and Late Middle Ages. More importantly, the community facilitated the development of a rich religious and cultural life. Autonomy, perforce, stimulated the development of Jewish Law. Scholars who pursued the study and application of the Law developed theories of rabbinic and communal authority; while creating mechanisms for the study, application and implementation of that Jewish Law in unparalleled circumstances. Spiritual life in all communities was centered upon the synagogue (Bet Knesset). An all-encompassing regimen of prayer, study and labor fostered a sense of communal élan and unique purpose, which was frequently characterized as rendering the transforming the Jewish community into a ‘Sacred Community’ (qehillah qedosha). Over all, patterns of communal life created for its members a profound sense of psychological separateness that strengthened Jewish self-awareness in an often-hostile environment.

Although often taken for granted, the family was the most basic mode of organization of medieval Jewish society. This article focuses on the families that comprised the Jewish communities of Northern Europe in the High Middle Ages. The family was the primary unit within which most Jews lived and through which one received permission to reside in specific locations. It was also central in legal, economic and personal negotiations, playing an important role in the determination of marriage, education, professional choices and other opportunities. The essay discusses the role the family played in multiple areas of medieval Jewish life and points to areas for further study that will enhance our knowledge of medieval Jewish family life.

Byzantine Jewry occupied a central place in the medieval Jewish world. It served as a commercial and cultural conduit between east and west, north and south. It developed a rich culture of its own, building on ancient foundations in Hellenistic Judaism and the Roman empire. The Karaite schism and the Venetian and Genoese conquests during the Fourth Crusade introduced divisions, but these did not profoundly affect the commercial or cultural life of the communities. Byzantium was the meeting place between Judaism and Greek Orthodox Christianity, which had some fruitful consequences on both religions, despite the theological hatred of Jews promoted by the Church.

This essay begins by tracing broad patterns of Jewish demography in medieval Europe from late antiquity down into the early centuries of the Middle Ages, projecting decline down through the ninth century and the onset of growth thereafter. This growth is then traced in detailed treatment of sectors of Europe during the second half of the Middle Ages, beginning in the older centers of Jewish settlement in the Mediterranean sectors of Europe and then proceeding to the newer sites of Jewish population in the north. The essay ends by noting the impact of forcible relocation on the one hand and the evidence of voluntary Jewish population movement on the other.

This chapter offers a Weber-inspired, sociologically informed account of the reception of the sciences and of rationalist philosophy by European Jews in the 12th-14th century. My main focus is on the appropriation of the sciences, the process through which the European Jewish cultures “imported,” integrated, and legitimized initially alien bodies of secular knowledge. The cultural tongue of European Jews was Hebrew and so I attend to the phases through which the Hebrew corpus of writings on science was constituted. (Space limits did not allow treating Jewish scholars’ own scientific activity, for which readers are referred to Science in Medieval Jewish Cultures of 2011.) The constitution of the Hebrew bookshelf of secular learning has to be considered separately for each of the three centers: Midi (“Provence”), the major center of cultural transfer; the Italian Peninsula; and Christian Spain. (In Ashkenaz and Tzarfat the reception of secular bodies of knowledge was virtually nil.) Another distinction is that between the appropriation of bodies of knowledge from Arabic and from Latin. Also, the reception of knowledge in the sciences (astronomy, astrology, mathematics, natural science, psychology, etc.) and in medicine have to be discussed separately, the respective social processes having been different: e.g., in the Midi, the scientific bodies of knowledge originated mainly in Arabic culture with little input from Latin, while in medicine the reception from Arabic was gradually complemented by a reception from Latin. In the Italian peninsula, however, small scientific-philosophical bodies of knowledge were smoothly transferred from Arabic into Hebrew, contrasting with the virtual absence of parallel processes in the Midi. A number of literary genres are considered: works written by Arabophone scholars in Hebrew and discussing scientific matters (Maimonides’s Book of Knowledge is a major instance); so-called “encyclopedias” written in Hebrew by Arabophone scholars with the aim of offering their brethren a “digest” of significant bodies of knowledge; and, above all, Hebrew translations (essentially from Arabic) of significant works. I present some of the authors and translators engaged in this massive cultural transfer and discuss their motives. I also offer some statistics about the distribution of Hebrew translations according to disciplines, source language, and centuries. The distinctive sociological characteristic of the Arabic/Latin-into-Hebrew translation movement is that it was entirely decentralized: the translated bookshelf resulted from a large number of uncoordinated grass-roots initiatives by many authors, patrons, and translators, who wrote and translated texts according to their own agendas and preferences. In this respect, the cultural transfer into Hebrew cultures contrasts with the Greek/Syriac-into-Arabic and Arabic-into-Latin translation movements, both of which were initiated and sustained by political authorities and were centrally coordinated. We have to do here with a notable cultural change within Judaism. It began before Maimonides, but the latter’s new religious ideal made the study of the sciences and of philosophy into a religious obligation. Maimonides gave the Jewish appropriation of “alien wisdom” a crucial theological and halakhic legitimization and, thusly, a crucial impetus. Nonetheless, Maimonides’s charismatic authority notwithstanding, the great majority of Jewish intellectuals continued to give absolute priority to Tradition and remained reserved or hostile to the rationalist religious ideal. Consequently, as a rule, science was not institutionalized and remained the province of isolated individuals. This goes a long way toward explaining why science did not take off in medieval Jewish cultures. The bottom-line is that, globally, Jewish culture was a consumer rather than a producer of scientific knowledge. The Jewish engagement with science in Europe is more a part of Jewish cultural history than of the history of science.

While the Byzantine Jewish communities retained Palestinian characteristics, the other European rites were more reminiscent of Babylonia and Spain, and that of Provence reflected its position at the crossroads of Italy, Spain and France. The Ashkenazi rite ultimately became the strongest of the European traditions and was much affected by the German Jewish mystics of the twelfth century. Some authorities applied the rules of biblical Hebrew to the liturgy and others demonstrated a more liberal approach to the participation of women. Grander liturgical volumes appeared in the Ashkenazi communities but rarely matched the beauty of those of the Spanish world. The printing presses of Italy, Germany, Netherlands and Poland at first produced the majority of Jewish prayer-books. Innovative prayers concerning the dead were a feature of Ashkenazi liturgy.

The study covers the period from the late-ninth to the early-sixteenth centuries. Within this period, the late-thirteenth to mid-fourteenth centuries marked the turning point, shaped more by attitudes and actions among the Christian majority than among Jewish agents. Our findings indicate intensified anti-Jewish tendencies, rooted in religious developments in Western Christendom. According to circumstances, however, these tendencies had a varying impact across time and space. The frequent religious and ecclesiastical reform movements of Western Europe offer cases in point. In the 'German' Empire north of the Alps the monastic reforms of Saint Maximin and Gorze were essential for shaping the historical circumstances in which the foundations of Ashkenazic Judaism were laid in the tenth and early-eleventh centuries. The concept of 'honor' was used by leading ecclesiastics such as bishop Rudiger of Speyer in 1084 to justify the settlement of Jews, but also by civic authorities later on. It is significant for the long-term tendency, therefore, that the late-medieval expulsions from cities like Trier, Cologne, and Regensburg were eventually also legitimized by reference to the idea of honor.