Abstract In recent years, the topic of ›rural Jewry‹ has become a separate subject of research on Jewish history. However, despite numerous relevant regional studies, there are still no uniform methodological and conceptual guidelines for this understudied area. There is disagreement as to whether rural Jews were a transitional phenomenon since the great expulsions of Jews in the late Middle Ages, or whether they were a population group that existed throughout the ages with their own way of life and culture. It is doubtful that there was such a thing as a ›typical rural Jew,‹ however this may be defined. Rather, it can be assumed that there were always great social and other differences within the rural Jewish community, and that a visible process of change took place over the centuries in the early modern period. What has been established in general research on rural Jews can also be demonstrated using the example of Hesse, especially the landgraviates and the dominions of the knights of the empire. In order to substantiate the findings of research on rural Jewry to date, four case studies from Hesse are presented, all of which relate to the influence of the authorities on the cultural system of rural Jews. The topics covered include the normative influence of the Hessian landgraves on the situation of rural Jews, the relationship between village Jews and their Christian neighbours, using the example of a conflict over common land, the internal social structure, using the example of a ›small‹ court Jew from Michelstadt, and the readjustment of the village charity system of the Jews in Reichelsheim under pressure from the state administration.
Abstract The theological foundations for the ecclesiastical images of the High Middle Ages depicting Jews in hell were laid as early as late antiquity by the Church Fathers, who drew on biblical passages. In the early Middle Ages, however, neither hell nor the Last Judgement was a subject of ecclesiastical art. This changed from the late 11th century onwards, and particularly with the emergence of the great Last Judgement portals in the 12th and 13th centuries. In France, almost every new cathedral now featured a large Last Judgement scene on one of its portals. Some of these also included statues of Ecclesia and Synagoga, but none featured figures of Jews. The situation was quite different in Germany, where the Last Judgement images produced from the 1220s onwards, whilst not as extensive as in France, usually depicted one or two Jews amongst the damned. The reason for this lies, on the one hand, in the Church’s anti-Jewish stance, which had been evident since the 12th century but was increasingly publicised following the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, and, on the other hand, in the differing policies towards Jews in Germany and France. Whilst the French kings had been pursuing a strongly anti-Jewish policy since the reign of Philip Augustus, Jews in Germany were granted privileges by the king and the princes right up until the 14th century. In response, the Church sought to portray Jews as sinful, enemies of God and therefore a threat to the salvation of the faithful. Geographically speaking, there is a broad correlation between the regions where images of Jews in hell and ›Jews’sow‹ images were prevalent. Detailed studies included in this essay examine the role of Jews in the Last Judgement scenes at Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne and Bamberg, as well as the statues of the Synagogue at the churches of Notre-Dame in Paris and Saint-Seurin in Bordeaux.
Abstract The evolving political status of the Jews of Moravia offers a fascinating case that helps see the changing role of law in the machinery of political change in the Habsburg Monarchy in the 17 th and 18 th centuries. This paper traces the peculiar history of Moraviaʼs Jewish communities from local communities, to supracommunal organization (vaʼad ha-medina), to the intent of absorption into the state. After tracing the legal foundations of communities in general and their function in early modern state-formation I will explore, how the Moravian Jewish communities contributed to this process. The underlying hypothesis being that corporate Jewish communities in Moravia competed with other societal groups (nobility and royal towns) in the complex process of state-formation in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Habsburg Monarchy. In the core of the paper, I will compare two corpora of law – the Shai Takkanot , the »autonomous« constitution of Moravian Jewry since 1650, and Maria Theresaʼs General-, Policey-, Process- und Commercialordnung for the Jewry in the Margravate of Moravia from 1754 – and try to place them on the continuum between communal self-government and state-imposed law making.
The first printed medical texts in Yiddish were only available from the first half of the 17(th) century onwards. They are addressed to those Jews who were - for a lack of financial means - unable to consult a physician or barber-surgeon, or for various reasons were not used to do so, as they lived, in rural areas where there was no doctor, at least not an academically trained physician. A striking example of this genre is medical handbook written in Yiddish and published in Prague in 1655. Be'er Mayim hayim (Well-Spring of Living Waters) was compiled by Issachar B & auml;r Teller on the bases of various written sources and his own experience as barber-surgeon.
The evolving political status of the Jews of Moravia offers a fascinating case that helps see the changing role of law in the machinery of political change in the Habsburg Monarchy in the 17(th) and 18(th) centuries. This paper traces the peculiar history of Moravia's Jewish communities from local communities, to supracommunal organization (va'ad ha-medina), to the intent of absorption into the state. After tracing the legal foundations of communities in general and their function in early modern state-formation I will explore, how the Moravian Jewish communities contributed to this process. The underlying hypothesis being that corporate Jewish communities in Moravia competed with other societal groups (nobility and royal towns) in the complex process of state-formation in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Habsburg Monarchy. In the core of the paper, I will compare two corpora of law - the Shai Takkanot, the "autonomous" constitution of Moravian Jewry since 1650, and Maria Theresa's General-, Policey-, Process- und Commercialordnung for the Jewry in the Margravate of Moravia from 1754 - and try to place them on the continuum between communal self-government and state-imposed law making.
In recent years, the topic of > rural Jewry < has become a separate subject of research on Jewish history. However, despite numerous relevant regional studies, there are still no uniform methodological and conceptual guidelines for this understudied area. There is disagreement as to whether rural Jews were a transitional phenomenon since the great expulsions of Jews in the late Middle Ages, or whether they were a population group that existed throughout the ages with their own way of life and culture. It is doubtful that there was such a thing as a > typical rural Jew,< however this may be defined. Rather, it can be assumed that there were always great social and other differences within the rural Jewish community, and that a visible process of change took place over the centuries in the early modern period. What has been established in general research on rural Jews can also be demonstrated using the example of Hesse, especially the landgraviates and the dominions of the knights of the empire. In order to substantiate the findings of research on rural Jewry to date, four case studies from Hesse are presented, all of which relate to the influence of the authorities on the cultural system of rural Jews. The topics covered include the normative influence of the Hessian landgraves on the situation of rural Jews, the relationship between village Jews and their Christian neighbours, using the example of a conflict over common land, the internal social structure, using the example of a > small < court Jew from Michelstadt, and the readjustment of the village charity system of the Jews in Reichelsheim under pressure from the state administration.
The theological foundations for the ecclesiastical images of the High Middle Ages depicting Jews in hell were laid as early as late antiquity by the Church Fathers, who drew on biblical passages. In the early Middle Ages, however, neither hell nor the Last Judgement was a subject of ecclesiastical art. This changed from the late 11th century onwards, and particularly with the emergence of the great Last Judgement portals in the 12th and 13th centuries. In France, almost every new cathedral now featured a large Last Judgement scene on one of its portals. Some of these also included statues of Ecclesia and Synagoga, but none featured figures of Jews. The situation was quite different in Germany, where the Last Judgement images produced from the 1220s onwards, whilst not as extensive as in France, usually depicted one or two Jews amongst the damned. The reason for this lies, on the one hand, in the Church's anti-Jewish stance, which had been evident since the 12th century but was increasingly publicised following the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, and, on the other hand, in the differing policies towards Jews in Germany and France. Whilst the French kings had been pursuing a strongly anti-Jewish policy since the reign of Philip Augustus, Jews in Germany were granted privileges by the king and the princes right up until the 14th century. In response, the Church sought to portray Jews as sinful, enemies of God and therefore a threat to the salvation of the faithful. Geographically speaking, there is a broad correlation between the regions where images of Jews in hell and > Jews'sow < images were prevalent. Detailed studies included in this essay examine the role of Jews in the Last Judgement scenes at Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne and Bamberg, as well as the statues of the Synagogue at the churches of Notre-Dame in Paris and Saint-Seurin in Bordeaux.
This article examines the life of Rachel Lumbard of Nottingham, a Jewish woman who appears in English national records from 1221-1251. Placing Rachel's & raquo;archival debris & laquo; in the context of critical archival studies, recent work on & raquo;hostile archives & laquo;, and the difficulties of writing ordinary women's histories, it uses the legal and financial remnants of Rachel and her family, along with critical imagination and informed speculation, to construct a narrative about her business networks, household, choices, and fate. This is the first study of Rachel, the eldest child of the better-known David Lumbard of Nottingham. It argues both that she must be included alongside her brothers in any consideration of the family's history, and that her story provides a case study for how to engage archives hostile to their subjects, particularly to recover the lives of Jewish women in England, without reifying the silences and biases of oppressive non-Jewish records.
The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to economist Muhammad Yunus in 2006 in recognition of his work on microcredit theory and its implementation has also given further impetus to historical research on small loans. While Jewish small loans in the fifteenth-century Holy Roman Empire, which are comparatively well documented, have already been the subject of some research, there is still a lack of relevant studies for the period before the Black Death pogroms. This is primarily because small-scale loans were rarely recorded in writing, and much of the relevant documentation has been destroyed. However, an evaluation of the few surviving written records suggests that small loans and microloans already dominated lending by Jewish moneylenders in the German Kingdom in the thirteenth and first half of the fourteenth centuries.
The Viennese Jew David Steuss can safely be considered the richest and most successful Jewish moneylender in late medieval Austria. Sources on him consist mainly of business documents, most of which are debt instruments or related charters resulting from credit transactions. This article analyzes the information that can be gleaned from this kind of documentation with regard to David Steuss' background and family connections, his social and business networks in Austria and abroad, his relationship with the territorial rulers, his general standing in Jewish and Christian circles, and his descendants' handling of his legacy. Thus, the documentation of his exceptional career demonstrates the potential of sources on Jewish moneylending as a basis for research beyond the scope of purely economic history.
Medieval credit transactions operated in a landscape of uncertainty, where the presence or absence of written documentation did not guarantee financial security. While written debt instruments provided a formal record of obligations, lenders and borrowers navigated risk not only through documents but also through oral agreements, court acknowledgments, and physical collateral. This article examines the conditions under which creditors in fourteenth-century German towns opted for written documentation over alternative forms of collateral and the underlying factors influencing this choice. Rather than serving as static proof, written debt instruments could be undermined by shifting obligations, partial repayments, or contested claims. By tracing how creditors wielded physical documents in court and used them as instruments of negotiation, this article highlights the dual function of written collateral as both legal proof and material leverage, revealing how individual moneylenders navigated credit relationships and made strategic choices to manage risk within the shifting dynamics of medieval urban economies.
Jewish men and women appeared before various courts in medieval Austria. Many of the trials dealt with disputes arising from their activities as moneylenders and pawnbrokers. Jews defended their claims before municipal and manorial courts, especially for forfeited pledges, and sued their debtors for their rights, or found themselves as defendants accused, for example, of defaulting on levy or rent payments. The Christian courts made no distinction in their treatment of Jewish and Christian parties. As direct subjects of the ruler, however, Jewish moneylenders were also able to appeal to the ducal court. In addition to providing insights into the everyday practice of moneylending and pawnbroking and the problems associated with it, the court documents also reveal the knowledge that Jews had of the complex structures of medieval court systems.
This article deals with two registers of outstanding loans contracted with Jewish moneylenders in the town of Mons and its surroundings (county of Hainaut). They were drawn up in the course of the persecutions at the time of the Black Death, during the summer of 1349. It is claimed that the registers, at least in part, constitute translations from the Hebrew account books kept by the moneylenders themselves. Where they give details, they allow insights into the Jews' accounting practices, offering rare additions to what we know from the few extant Hebrew account books of the later medieval period. This concerns, inter alia, the practice of calculating interest. Given the short-term nature of the loan contracts, compound interest could accrue.
For a short time from 1240 to 1256, a Jewish community from Sijilmassa was resident in Palma de Mallorca and took part in a variety of economic and social relationships, participating in a culture of trust. Using the concept of »trust work,« this study explores mechanisms of risk, character, and uncertainty management, in the form of interest rates, guarantors, collateral/pledges, promise and fides phrases, oaths, and flexible repayment terms. Analysis is based on two small databases of transcribed contracts: one containing 69 contracts involving Jews from Sijilmassa identified in the registers of the Arxiu del Regne de Mallorca and a Comparative Set of 245 loans written between 1240 and 1256. Findings suggest that both Jews and Christians participated in a shared culture of trust in credit financing and that interpersonal relationships, rather than community identity, shaped decisions to engage in various forms of trust work.
