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

INTRODUCTION
AFTER TEACHING a course on relations between Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages for several years, I noticed a recurring query posed by many students. How did Jewish communities continue to survive in Europe despite facing what seemed to be endless persecution, violence, and expulsion? A fundamental question to be sure, but one to which I did not have a ready answer. My own work on the conversion of Jews to Christianity grew out of the sense that relations between Christians and Jews were driven largely by Christian antagonism to Jews.1 In trying to resolve the paradox of persecution and survival with my students, I felt I was missing the real significance of Jewish-Christian relations. I began to think of ways to respond to this larger issue of the long-term resilience of Jewish-Christian relations in medieval Europe. The result is this book, really an extended essay, which tries to reorient our understanding of the meaning of the history of Jews in medieval Europe.
For too long scholars have tried to find that meaning in the nature of Jewish suffering in the Middle Ages. Their conclusions reflect the rhetoric of dispersion and suffering embedded in classical Jewish and Christian thought. Jews themselves drew on the biblical tradition of exile to understand their condition under Christian rule. Even before Christianity's advent as the official religion of the Roman world in the fourth century, Jews were used to the idea of living in a diaspora. Whether Jews experienced life outside the Land of Israel exclusively as suffering and trial has recently been challenged.2 Whatever the truth of the long-term experience, the idea of suffering in the diaspora quickly became embedded in liturgical and other forms of Jewish religious culture after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE.
Yosef Yerushalmi has analyzed how early rabbinic tradition and later medieval Jewish authors of prayers and chronicles created a kind of endless loop of Jewish suffering. They associated contemporary persecutions with traditional dates of traumatic destruction such as the fall of the Temple. In this foreshortened and essentially ahistorical sense of the Jewish past, all episodes of suffering and persecution were essentially the same; they all derived from God's testing and chastisement of the Jews.3
Even after the Enlightenment and the growing acceptance of Jews into European society, these liturgical memories of persecution and suffering provided the mental parameters of Jewish historiography of the nineteenth century. Jewish scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement--following in the footsteps of earlier eighteenth-century enlightened scholars (maskilim)--heroically tried to assert the value and vitality of the Jewish past using the tools of modern historical research. However, they could not (or did not wish to) escape fully from the narrative of persecution and suffering.4 The suffering of the Jews--or perhaps the survival of the Jews despite great suffering--was a way for nineteenth-century historians such as Heinrich Graetz to strengthen a sense of Jewish community as well as signal a break with the past. History could show that the emancipation of the Jews in modern Europe, albeit imperfect, offered an escape from the persecution and obscurantism of the past. At the same time, it was thought the Jews played a crucial role as messengers of ethical monotheism and were full participants in the history of Europe. Ultimately, Zionist historians disdained much of the Jewish past as a history of persecutions and diaspora, or recast it in more palatable terms emphasizing the survival of the Jewish nation.
The dispersion and suffering of the Jews made perfect sense to Christians. The Church Fathers saw the dispersion of Jews as justified punishment for the Jewish rejection of Jesus. Moreover, the denigration of Jews was cited by generations of Christian polemicists as proof of God's rejection of Israel. The Augustinian model of toleration of the Jews, which would prove so important to Jewish-Christian relations, was still based on the divinely ordained subservience of Jews to Christians.
Protestant historians who studied the Middle Ages, building on humanist prejudices of the Renaissance, saw medieval Catholic Europe in general as a superstitious and violent deformation of true Christianity. The medieval treatment of Jews fit what they thought was a cruel and corrupt church. Once Protestants moved beyond Lutheran anger at the Jews for not converting, eighteenth-century scholars such as Jacques Basnage articulated a more sympathetic view of Jewish history.5 The Catholic historical tradition answered the Protestant challenge with its own romanticized vision of a hierarchical and natural medieval world.