Chapter 6
European cohesion was facilitated by the system of communication—along rivers, roads, and coastlines—and by the increasingly pervasive culture of Christianity. Its presence affected the landscape—cathedrals seen by travellers from afar, especially in northern Europe, once the lofty Gothic prevailed; the presence of individuals in habits or in penitential chains on European roads; the soundscape with processional chants and the ringing of bells; and even the smell of cities (during Lent the smell of roasting meat was absent from city streets).
European identity depended on what it rejected just as much as it did on what it affirmed. So fears and anxieties, objects of hate and disgust form part of this history too. Christian teaching offered a message of hope through redemption, a path to salvation. Those outside the Christian body were destined to live in sin, a menace to themselves and to others. The Carolingian theologian and courtier, Hrabanus Maurus (c.780–856), described pagan gods as demons, who ‘even persuaded people to build temples … and to set up altars to them, on which they should pour out for them blood both of animals and even of men’. Through Christianization previous social customs were substituted, but also partly incorporated. The first generations after conversion often sought the co-existence of pagan ways with Christian rituals. The Hungarian leader Géza (d. 997) converted to Christianity in 972 and obliged his people to do so, but he also continued to ‘sacrifice both to the omnipotent God and to various false Gods’. As we have seen, his son Stephen (d. 1038) ruled as king of Hungary from 1000, and was revered as a saint for his commitment to Christianity and his devotion to the Virgin Mary.
In most regions of Europe, for some part of our period, Christians were at war with non-Christians. Differences between groups evident in patterns of kinship or customs of eating and dress—polygamy, eating of prohibited foods—combined with violent encounter to produce a strong sense of ‘otherness’. These perceptions were captured in poetry, paintings, polemic tracts, and chronicles. The Paris-educated priest Gerald of Wales (c.1146–c.1223) wrote four works about the strangeness of the Irish and the Welsh, who seemed barbarous and incomprehensible, at the borders of the civilized Anglo-Norman polity. The encounter between Christianity and Islam was powerfully represented in the heroic epic, probably as old as the event it depicts—the Battle of Roncevaux in the Pyrenees, of 778—known to us from 12th century manuscripts: the Chanson de Roland, Roland’s Song. In it, Charlemagne and his men confront different Muslim types—bold Muslim emir, wise advisor, female convert to Christianity—and enact feats of often foolhardy bravery. A literary tradition of border ballads and miracles tales exploited the themes of Christian–Muslim military rivalry, up to the 15th century and the fall of the last Muslim stronghold, Granada, in 1492.
Yet not all otherness was experienced at borders, or confronted through military encounters. A Parisian chronicler described the arrival in 1427—in the midst of the fair at St Denis, north of Paris—of a group of dark skinned, black haired, exceedingly poor families. This is the first mention of the nomadic groups whose origins may be in Gujarat and who are variously called gypsies, Egyptians, Bohemians, or gitanes.
The relationship between Christians and Jews in Europe was old and complex. Jewish life was based on the holy texts that Christians also revered as the Old Testament. These Hebrew texts—translated into Latin in the late 4th century by St Jerome (c.347–420)—provided Christians with prophecies that foretold Christian history: the Sacrifice of Isaac prefigured death on the Cross, the Burning Bush offered an image for the unsullied virginity of Mary. Augustine saw scripture as a bond between Jews and Christians, and argued for toleration of Jews within the Empire, as living testimony to Christian truth and future converts at the end of time.
Jews lived in Roman cities, where they witnessed the rise of Christianity. When Barbarian rulers issued law codes for their Christian kingdoms, they sometimes included clauses about Jews. The Visigothic rulers of Spain wove attitudes to Jews into dynastic politics. Recarred tolerated Jewish presence in 589, but his successor Sisebut introduced harsh economic restrictions on Jewish labour and livelihood. King Recceswinth required, in 681, that Jews convert or go into exile: ‘whoever he may be, shall have his head shaved, receive a hundred lashes, and pay the required penalty of exile. His property shall pass over into the power of the king.’ This legislation was overturned a few decades later following the Muslim conquest of Iberia, and the relative toleration of Jews and Christians it introduced.
By 1000 economic and urban growth attracted Jews from southern Europe to settle along the rivers Rhone and Rhine. There they worked on the land or as artisans, workers in metals and textiles. New ways of thinking about Jews developed in these centuries, in the centres of learning where theological debate was intense. As the ambition and reach of Christian institutions grew, so it became increasingly clear which people stood outside the societas christiana. When the armed pilgrims on their way to ‘liberate’ Christ’s tomb in Jerusalem passed through the cities of the Rhineland in spring 1096, they deemed the Jews to be ‘killers of Christ’ and massacred hundreds.
In the many new monasteries and in cathedral schools the basic Christian concepts were debated: ‘Cur deus homo?’ (Why was the incarnation necessary?) asked the monk Anselm, later Archbishop of Canterbury; ‘Was Mary, mother of God, touched by original sin?’ asked Odo of Cambrai (1050–1113), bishop of Tournai in northern France; ‘What is the role of intention in the judgement of human action?’ asked the maverick Parisian teacher of philosophy Peter Abelard (1079–1142). The Jew was a privileged sparring partner for those who thought most deeply about Christianity: versed in scripture, yet resistant to the allure of Christianity.
Such debates led to polemics with the Jews, who denied the Incarnation, rejected the notion of Virgin Birth, saw belief in the Trinity as a form of idolatry, and were puzzled by the sacramental powers of water, bread, and wine. Their views were submitted to polemical treatment, sometimes alongside Muslims and pagans. The Cluniac monk Peter the Venerable (c.1092–1156) wrote works against Jews, Muslims, and Waldensian heretics; Peter Alfonsi, whom we have already encountered, against Muslims and against Jews.
Outside the intellectual realm, thinking about Jews took place within royal and aristocratic courts and in bureaucratic circles. Dynasts benefited from the unique legal and economic control they had over Jews, their dependants. In large parts of Europe Jews were encouraged to offer credit and to lend against surety. In a charter of 1244, Duke Frederick of Austria defended a Jew’s right to secure a pledge forfeited by failure to repay and promised to defend such pledges for the Jew ‘against violence’. The kings of England and France placed their Jews under the protection of sheriffs and seneschals so that Jews could prosper and in turn share their profits with the king.
Kings were also amenable to other considerations and influences: the complaints of influential aristocrats, indebted to the Jews, who would see them expelled, or worse; or, from the early 13th century, pressure from the dynamic new branches of the church—like the Franciscans and Dominicans. These preachers sought to animate religious commitment among lay people, often by re-telling dramatic versions of the Crucifixion. This participatory piety pitted Jews as ‘killers’ of God and enemies of contemporary Christians. New narratives were invented in which Jews were accused of child murder and ritual abuse of Christian sacred objects. Feeling was particularly heightened during Holy Week, with its frequent preaching, public processions, and religious drama.
Rulers vacillated between the lobbying of friars, who often served as personal chaplains and confessors to royals, and the desire to maintain law and order in their domains, while benefiting from the services rendered by Jews. In turn, Jewish leaders pleaded, offering gifts as sweeteners to avert expulsion or abuse. Policies towards Jews thus differed greatly from one reign to another according to the character of rulers and the challenges they faced: Henry III of England was highly active in his attempts to convert Jews, and his son Edward I ceded to the pressure of knights and churchmen to expel the Jews from England in 1290. In 1304 the Jews were expelled from France, only to return and be expelled again in 1394. King Peter IV (1319–87) of Aragon protected Jewish communities, which helped finance his Mediterranean wars, while his son John (1350–96) favoured unfounded allegations of sacramental desecration brought against them in the 1370s.
Following the accusation of well-poisoning levelled against Jews during the Black Death, expulsions became more frequent. The movement of Jewish settlement in the 14th and 15th centuries matched that of political refuge and economic opportunity, from western Europe eastwards, and this led to the creation of large communities in Bohemia, and Poland-Lithuania. The most dramatic transformation in the conditions of European Jews occurred in the century that ended in their expulsion from Spain in 1492. Urban violence in Iberian cities in the 1390s led to mass conversions of more than 100,000 Jews. These ‘new’ Christians were made by the water of baptism, yet Christians avoided marrying into ‘new’ Christian families and continued to harbour suspicion towards these conversos. The tensions were so acute that the kings of Castile established their own local inquisition, with the task of investigating conversos denounced as secretly still harbouring sympathy with the faith of their ancestors. This fault-line of mistrust became so acute that Ferdinand and Isabella—the Catholic Monarchs of a united kingdom of Castile and Aragon—ordered the expulsion of the Jews from the kingdom.
In this manner a global diaspora was created. The Jews of Spain were received for settlement in north African emirates, by the Ottoman rulers, and in Italian cities. They maintained the language of Spanish Jews—ladino—a European vernacular which soon became a global one. A few decades later the expulsion of Muslim converts—Moriscos—followed.
Even in their absence, in regions where they were little known—like Scandinavia—or in countries from which they had been banished—like England after 1290—Jews were ever present in the European imagination: in the narratives of Jesus’ life and the life of his mother; above all in depictions of the Crucifixion. The Hebrew Bible was present at every Christian service, in the Psalms that guided Christians through joy and tribulation. A combination of hatred, fear, and fascination characterized the relationship of Europe with its most intimate, neighbouring ‘other’.