Medieval Jews,Belonging and ‘Lived Citizenship’

This special issue addresses a fundamental paradox of Jewish life during the Middle Ages. On the one hand, Jews lived in particular locations for hundreds of years: They spoke the language of the place, engaged in its economic and civic life and experienced its traditions. On the other hand, despite this embeddedness, the Christian or Muslim majority often regarded Jews as perpetual outsiders: adherents of a different religious tradition, they were cast as existing in exile, cut adrift from their homeland.

The studies gathered here, paying special attention to spatial dynamics, explore how Jews navigated this tension and demonstrated a sense of local belonging. They illustrate the usefulness, for both medieval and Jewish studies, of the concept of ‘lived citizenship’ and shed new light on systems of medieval majority–minority relations.

In his article, ‘Experiences of Citizenship in Late Medieval Southern German Lands’, Olivier Richard contrasts ‘lived citizenship’ to ‘formal citizenship’. Whereas the latter conferred rights and duties and was not always available to Jews, ‘lived citizenship’ derived from the experiences that ‘made the status of citizen visible’. By ‘triggering emotions’ and providing a sense of community, these experiences ‘made citizens aware of their political identity’ and fostered a sense of belonging.

At the heart of ‘lived citizenship’ was participation in local practices. For medieval Jews, this often involved behaving in parallel to other urban groups in spaces that, as Richard puts it, ‘people charged with their own sense of belonging’. Frequently, such spaces were out of doors, in plain view. For instance, in French and German lands, many local practices were enacted on city streets and in town squares. In her article, ‘When Rulers Came to Town’, Hannah Teddy Schachter shows that when a ruler passed through a town, Jews—like other groups—came out to greet them and participated in choreographed performances of fealty and pride. Moshe Yagur’s article, ‘Living in the City’, exposes how the Jews in eleventh-century Fusṭāṭ resided throughout the city, instead of clustering in a ‘Jewish quarter’; far from being segregated, the Jews of Fusṭāṭ even resided in homes that shared courtyards with non-Jews.

The ‘lived citizenship’ of Jews included behaving like other groups in spaces central to the dominant legal and political culture, such as courts and town halls. Annika Funke’s case study of Münzenberg, ‘Settlement Policy and Competition in Towns’, shows that Jews in some small rural German towns actively negotiated with the city councils and town lords in order to regulate local Jewish immigration. Andreas Lehnertz’s article, ‘Swearing Oaths and Affixing Seals’, shows that Jews in the Holy Roman Empire swore oaths—oaths of naturalisation, oaths for admission to office and oaths pertaining to everyday business transactions—in Christian court rooms, in the presence of Christian members of the urban commune. In addition, in these spaces, Jews—like non-Jews—affixed personal and communal seals to written records to finalise contracts. Crucially, these seals conveyed pride in local Jewish identity. For example, the great seal of the Jews of Regensburg was emblazoned with the text: ‘Seal of the Jewish Community of Regensburg’.

Jews expressed a sense of local belonging also by publicly cementing social and professional bonds. Lenhertz shows that, when Jews swore oaths, they forged or reinforced relationships with other parties, becoming embedded in key networks. Yagur demonstrates that Jews’ spatial integration into the urban environment of Fusṭāṭ carried wide-ranging social implications. Not only did Jews share living spaces with non-Jews, which in its own right created bonds between Jews and non-Jews, but they also rented homes to and from non-Jews and shared ownership of properties with them. In such arrangements—which Yagur notes existed in Alexandria, Jerusalem, Damascus, Tyre, Kairouan and other cities of the Islamicate world—Jews were professional and financial partners, landlords, tenants and clients of non-Jews. As such, they were part and parcel of the social fabric of the cities in which they lived.

Elucidating Jews’ experiences of ‘lived citizenship’, the studies in this special issue illustrate two broad features of the system of majority– minority relations that medieval historian Brian Catlos has outlined. ¹ One is that the specificities of local conditions fundamentally shaped majority–minority dynamics and, to a great extent, accounted for their overall variegation. Due to a myriad of local factors, the ways Jews demonstrated a sense of belonging in Arles, for instance, differed from the ways Jews demonstrated this sense in Fusṭāṭ, and vice versa. Second, Jews—like all individuals—belonged simultaneously to multiple communities. They belonged to a group defined by religion and also to groups defined by sex, age, social class and so on. Thus, at times, when Jews demonstrated a sense of local belonging, they did so both as Jews and also, say, as members of a particular profession or other collective.

As the studies gathered here demonstrate, medieval Jews often simultaneously embraced their identities as Jews and their identities as denizens of a particular city or region. This dynamic is observable in the nature of the material objects that some Jews used to publicly represent themselves during royal entry processions. Schachter shows how, on such occasions, urban Jews expressed their collective identity by displaying an interchangeable array of distinctively Jewish objects, including prayer shawls, etrogim, Hebrew banners and Torah scrolls. Lehnertz’s research showcases a similar dynamic, revealing that Jewish communal seals were typically bilingual, featuring inscriptions in both Latin and Hebrew. Jews’ religious and local identities were thus complementary.

Richard observes that experiences of ‘lived citizenship’ were shaped by social hierarchies and divisions. ² This was certainly the case for Jews, whose sense of belonging had limits. Illustrating the tension that existed between the inclusion and exclusion of Jews in medieval Christian communities, Schachter describes a ritual that took place at royal processions. Jews would invite Christian rulers and their retinues to kiss their Torah scrolls, and these grandees would refuse to do so, merely inclining their heads, instead. This example illustrates how a Jewish sense of belonging could involve accepting a circumscribed and inferior social rank. It also shows how Christian acceptance of Jews as part of an urban mosaic was laced with an ideological rejection of Judaism.

Funke’s research adds another dimension to the interplay between Jewish inclusion and exclusion. It reveals that some Jews instrumentalised Christian anti-Judaism in the course of exercising their own sense of local belonging. In participating in selecting prospective Jewish newcomers, Jewish pawnbrokers in Münzenberg leveraged the anti-Jewish sentiments of Christian authorities. They made common cause with authorities who sought to reduce the size of the local Jewish population in order to reject prospective Jewish immigrants whose arrival would threaten their own economic standing.

The expulsions of Jews from Christian Europe during the later Middle Ages leave no question about the endurance of the view among non-Jews that Jews did not belong. ³ The studies gathered here, however, demonstrate that, this conviction notwithstanding, medieval Jews and non-Jews often co-created experiences of ‘lived citizenship’ that fostered a strong sense of local Jewish belonging. By behaving publicly in similar ways to other groups and cultivating meaningful social and professional relationships with non-Jews, Jews were often integral to local communities, and these communities, in turn, were constitutive of Jewish identities.