Why Did Medieval Northern French Jewry (Ṣarfat)

Disappear?

Ivan G. Marcus

“I am so easily assimilated.”1
“The ultimate question concerns the willingness and ability of individu-
als to recognize themselves and to survive as a group.”2

We often assume that only two European Jewish subcultures out of many sur-
vived into modern times. We call the Jews formerly from central Europe and
Iberia Ashkenazi and Sefaradi respectively.3 This essay explores the history of
the third major medieval Jewish community that was forced to emigrate, the
Jews of royal France (Ṣarfat).
What has hardly been noticed, let alone explained, is that despite being
about the same size as the Iberian Jews in 1492, approximately 100,000 strong,
northern French Jews seem to have melted away into other nearby diasporas
when they were forced to leave royal France in 1306.4 They resettled in lands

1 Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Bernstein, “I am So Easily Assimilated,” from Candide com-
posed by Leonard Bernstein.
2 Sergio DellaPergola, World Jewry Beyond 2000: The Demographic Prospects (Oxford: Oxford
Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, 1999), 8.
3 How this came about in modern Jewish historiography deserves further investigation.
For now, see Heinrich Graetz, A Popular History of the Jews, 6 vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish
Publication Society, 1891–98), 4:421: “As the Spanish Jews turned portions of European and
Asiatic Turkey into a new Spain, the German Jews transformed Poland, Lithuania, and the
territories belonging thereto, into a new Germany. For several centuries, therefore, the Jews
were divided into Spanish and German speaking Jews. . . .” (my emphasis). This reductionist
reading of late medieval and modern Jewish history as consisting of two primary diaspora
cultures seems to be a consequence of the Sephardic mystique. See Ivan G. Marcus, “Beyond
the Sephardic Mystique,” Orim 1:1 (1985): 35–53, and Ismar Schorsch, “The Myth of Sephardic
Supremacy,” Leo Baeck Yearbook 34 (1989): 47–66. Graetz needed medieval Iberian Jewry as
his model in his pro-emancipation argument from Jewish history. Everything else, including
French Jewry, let alone Asian and African Jewries, was irrelevant.
4 For the demographic estimates for France, see Bernhard Blumenkranz, “En 1306: chemins
d’un exil,” Evidences 12 (1962): 23. My thanks to Kirsten Fudeman for sending me a copy of
this article. Robert Chazan, Medieval Jewry in Northern France: A Political and Social History
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 195; Simon Schwarzfuchs, Les juifs de
France (Paris: Albin Michel, 1975), 111; William Chester Jordan, The French Monarchy and the
100 Marcus

that form a crescent from the northern European lowlands in the north to
Catalonia in the south.5 Unlike the Jewries of Iberia and the German Empire,
the Jews of royal France did not continue to exist as a distinctive diaspora com-
munity down to modern times.6
Like some emigré Jews from German lands who incorporated “Ashkenazi”
into their names, or Maimonides, a former Iberian Jew who identified himself
as “ha-Sefaradi,” several notable individuals, mainly rabbis, continued to refer to
themselves using “ha-Ṣarfati” as part of their name.7 But unlike these individual

Jews: From Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1989), 202, 215; Susan Einbinder, Judah D. Galinsky, and William Chester Jordan,
“Introduction to the Articles on Expulsion,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 15 (2008): 223. For Spain,
see Haim Beinart, “The Expulsion from Spain: Causes and Results,” in Moreshet Sefarad: The
Sephardi Legacy, ed. Haim Beinart (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1992), 2:36–39.
5 Blumenkranz, “En 1306,” 17–23. See, too, Chazan, Medieval Jewry in Northern France, 195;
Jordan, French Monarchy and the Jews, 214–38; and Gérard Nahon, “Zarfat: Medieval Jewry
in Northern France,” in The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages (Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries),
ed. Christoph Cluse (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 216–17. For Iberia, see Yom Tov Assis, “Juifs de
France réfugiés en Aragon (XIIIe–XIVe sìcles),” Revue des études juives 162 (1983): 285–322.
6 See Robert Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1994), 186, who notes the problem and offers the poverty of the exiled French Jews as an
explanation—they were too poor to create communities of their own in Italy. Among
those who noted that northern French Jews dissolved into nearby Jewish communities, see
Simon Schwarzfuchs, “L’opposition Tsarfat-Provence: La formation du Judaïsme du nord de
la France,” in Hommages à Georges Vajda, ed. Gérard Nahon and Charles Touati (Louvain:
Peeters, 1980), 150 and Nahon, “Zarfat,” 217: “Beyond France, the exiles of 1306 and 1394
did not form a community united through lineage, language, and memory as did the Jews
expelled from Spain in 1492 and Portugal in 1496.” And see Kirsten A. Fudeman, Vernacular
Voices: Language and Identity in Medieval French Communities (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 12, who notes that works written in Hebraico-French (medieval
French written in Hebrew characters) “waned and died with the death of the expulsion
generation or shortly thereafter.” For the story of northern French Jews after 1306, see Roger
Kohn, Les Juifs de la France du Nord dans la seconde moitié du XIVe siècle (Paris: Peeters, 1988);
Céline Balasse, 1306: L’expulsion des Juifs du royaume de France (Brussels: De Boeck, 2008);
Daniele Iancu, Les juifs en Provence (1475–1501) (n.p.: Institut historique de Provence, n.d.);
Gilbert Dahan with Elie Nicolas, L’expulsion des Juifs de France 1394 (Paris: du Cerf, 2004);
Daniele Iancu-Agou, L’expulsion des Juifs de Provence et de l’Europe méditerranéenne: exils
et conversions (Paris: Peeters, 2005); Maurice Kriegel, Les Juifs à la fin du Moyen Âge dans
l’Europe méditerranéenne (Paris: Hachette, 1979).
7 For “Ashkenazi,” see, for example, R. Bezalel b. Avraham Ashkenazi (sixteenth-century
Palestine); for Maimonides as “Sefaradi,” see his autobiographical comment at the end of
his commentary to the Mishnah, Mishnah ʿim perush Moshe ben Maimon, ed. Yosef Qafiḥ
(Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Kook, 1976–78), vol. 3 (end). For “ha-Ṣarfati,” see, for example,
why did medieval northern french jewry disappear ? 101

Ashkenazim and Sefaradim, Jews who later called themselves “ha-Ṣarfati” were
not part of a French-speaking community of “Ṣarfatim” generations after 1306,
parallel to the other individuals who came from one of the persisting European
Jewish subcultures of Sefarad or German Ashkenaz.
Why not? The evidence suggests that unlike the Jews of medieval central
Europe and Iberia, the Jews of medieval France did not exist as a legally orga-
nized community and had not developed a strong collective identity before
their expulsion. It is also not clear that they ever thought of themselves as
belonging to a special Jewish subculture of Ṣarfat. Rather, they simply thought
of themselves as Jews who lived in exile in Ṣarfat.8
The Sefardim took their name from the biblical prophetic book of Obadiah
(1:20), which mentions “Sefarad,” a place in western Asia. In that verse, “Sefarad”
is associated with past greatness: “the exile of Jerusalem that is in Sefarad.” The
Targum Jonathan already identified that Sefarad with Roman Hispania, and
Sefaradim knew who they were from the beginning. Iberian Jewish pride and
a lofty collective identity as “the exile of Jerusalem in Sefarad” are as old as the
career of Ḥasday b. Shaprūṭ in the Umayyad caliphate of Cordoba. This sense
of pride and identity continued through the history of the Ṭāʾifa kingdoms
and the career of Shemuʾel ha-Nagid and his circle, Yehuda ha-Levi on his way
to the land of Israel, Maimonides in Egypt, in the history of Jewish courtiers
in the Iberian Christian kingdoms, and beyond the expulsion of 1492 down to
modern times.9

Bonfil, Jewish Life, 169; Franz Kobler, ed., Letters of Jews Through the Ages (New York: Hebrew
Publishing Company, 1952), 284; David B. Ruderman, The World of a Renaissance Jew: The
Life and Thought of Abraham ben Mordecai Farissol (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College
Press, 1981), 28; David B. Ruderman, Kabbalah, Magic, and Science: The Cultural Universe of
a Sixteenth-Century Jewish Physician (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 74,
among others.
8 Nahon, “Zarfat,” 210: “The Kings and barons of France never mentioned the Jewish communi-
ties because they refused to recognize them as such.”
9 The term is in the printed Targum Jonathan in standard rabbinic bibles, to Obadiah 1:20. On
the courtier class in al-Andalus, see Gerson D. Cohen, ed. and trans., Sefer ha-Qabbalah: The
Book of Tradition (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1967), introduction. For the later
Sefaradim, see Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews of Christian Spain, 2 vols. (Philadelphia:
Jewish Publication Society of America, 1961–66); Yosef Kaplan, An Alternative Path to
Modernity: The Sephardi Diaspora in Western Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2000); Esther Benbassa
and Aron Rodrigue, eds., Sephardi Jewry: A History of the Judeo-Spanish Community, 14th–20th
Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); and Zion Zohar, ed., Sephardic and
Mizrahi Jewry: From the Golden Age of Spain to Modern Times (New York: New York University
Press, 2005).
102 Marcus

“Ashkenaz” derives from a list of names of the descendants of Noah’s son

Japhet (Gen. 10:3), the son later associated with Christian Europe. Its geograph-
ical location in biblical times is uncertain, and there is no biblical attribute
about those who lived there. Early Rhineland Jews referred to themselves as
“anshei Rinus” (people of the Rhine) or “anshei Lotir” (people of Lotharingia),
not as the people of “Ashkenaz,” the land of the Alemanni or Germans. How
and when “Ashkenaz” came to refer to Jews living in German lands is still not
clear.10
But like the Jews of Sefarad, the Jews of Ashkenaz also saw themselves as
heirs to Jerusalem and a great Jewish past no longer there. In the trauma of the
anti-Jewish riots of 1096, the self-image of activist holy martyrs and of Mainz
as another Jerusalem Temple emerged in the piyyuṭim and Hebrew narratives
that were written and copied after the events.11 Sefarad and Ashkenaz show
signs of claiming to be “the” diaspora of the Jewish people that Rome had
exiled from Jerusalem.
Like Sefarad, Ṣarfat, too, derives from the Book of Obadiah (1:20), but it has
no special attributes in that verse. In the Targum, Ṣarfat is rendered simply as
“Ṣarfat.”12 Unlike Ashkenaz and Sefarad, the Jews of France never came to see
themselves as heirs of a great collective past or as a legally or culturally defined
community in Jewish history.
The absence of a strong collective communal identity does not mean that
there were no uniquely French Jewish features that persisted in enclaves
elsewhere. German Pietist Jews (ḥasidei Ashkenaz) refer disparagingly to the
wording in the prayers of some “French and Island Jews,” meaning those from
northern France and England. This probably refers to Jews who might have left

10 See Samuel Krauss, “The Names Ashkenaz and Sefarad” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 3 (1932): 423–
30; Jehuda Rosenthal, “Ashkenaz, Sefarad and Zarefat,” Historia Judaica 5 (1943): 58–62;
Eliʿezer Meʾir Lipschuetz, “Ṣarfat u-Sfarad,” in Ketavim (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Kook,
1947), 1:199–209.
11 See Avraham David, “Historical Records of the Persecutions during the First Crusade
in Hebrew Printed Works and Hebrew Manuscripts” [Hebrew], in Facing the Cross: The
Persecutions of 1096 in History and Historiography, ed. Yom Tov Assis et al. (Jerusalem:
Magnes Press, 2000), 193–205. On Mainz as the Jerusalem Temple, see Ivan G. Marcus,
“From Politics to Martyrdom: Shifting Paradigms in the Hebrew Narratives in the 1096
Crusade Riots,” Prooftexts 2 (1982): 40–52 and especially Alan Mintz, Hurban: Responses to
Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 94–100.
12 See Targum Jonathan to Obadiah 1:20 and also to 1 Kings 17:9 in standard rabbinic bibles.
That “ṢaRF(at)” is a near reverse anagram for FRa(n)Ṣe, see Menahem Banitt, Rashi:
Interpreter of the Biblical Letter (Tel Aviv: Chaim Rosenberg School of Jewish Studies,
1985), cited in Fudeman, Vernacular Voices, 59.
why did medieval northern french jewry disappear ? 103

northern France and entered the German Empire after the temporary expul-
sion of 1182. Under pressure from the German Pietists, French Jews modified
their prayer books to replace French custom with the German Ashkenazi rite.
After 1306, the French rite dissipated quickly, and few manuscripts survived the
fourteenth century.13
Some northern French liturgical traditions persisted into early modern
times in papal towns in southeastern France, and after the eighteenth century,
in Asti, one of three communities in northwestern Italy (the acronym APAM
stands for Asti, Fossano, and Moncalvo). For most of their prayers, Asti adapted
the German-Jewish rite practiced by Ashkenazi Jews who had settled in north-
ern Italy, but they retained the old northern French rite for the New Year and
Day of Atonement services. Even those texts were slightly modified, as com-
parison with Spanish and southern French versions attests. These special rites
were never published and were copied by hand as late as the twentieth cen-
tury. We find earlier examples of French liturgical patterns only in a few rare
Hebrew manuscripts.14
In early sixteenth-century northern Italy, we still read in the responsa
of Rabbi Azriʾel b. Shelomo Diena (d. 1536) about “those of us who are the
Ṣarfatim.” He also refers to “Ashkenazim” and “Loʿazim” (Italian Jews), but
identifies with the customs of the “Ṣarfatim” of Piemonte (1:80). Moreover,
he justifies following medieval French rabbinic precedents because “we are
descended from them and should honor and not deviate from their opinions,
even though they are no longer living” (1:318).15

13 See Avraham b. Azriʾel, ʿArugat ha-bosem, ed. Ephraim Urbach (Jerusalem: Mekize
Nirdamim, 1939–63), 4:92–99 and Colette Sirat, “Un rituel juif de France: Le manuscript
hébreu 633 de la biblioth̀que nationale de Paris,” Revue des études juives 119 (1961): 7–39.
On the northern French rite after 1306, see Daniel Goldschmidt, “Leqeṭ, shikheḥa, u-feʾah
le-Maḥzor APaM” in idem, Meḥqarei tefillah u-fiyyuṭ (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1980
[1954]), 80, and Sirat, “Un rituel juif,” 8n1.
14 Goldschmidt, “Leqeṭ,” 81. But see now Elisabeth Hollender, “Reconstructing Manuscripts:
The Liturgical Fragments from Trier,” in “Genizat Germania”: Hebrew and Aramaic Binding
Fragments from Germany in Context, ed. Andreas Lehnardt (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 71.
15 See R. ʿAzriʾel b. Shelomo Diena, Sheʾelot u-teshuvot, ed. Yacov Boksenboim (Tel Aviv:
University of Tel Aviv, 1977–79), 1:152, lines 2–3 and last line. See other references to
“ṣarfatim” in ibid., 1:10, 79–81, 149, 160, 181. I thank Robert Bonfil for the reference. On the
uncertain place name, see Simon Schwarzfuchs, “The Name Daiena” [Hebrew], Alei Sefer
17 (1993): 133–35. Earlier, we find Rabbi Joseph Colon (Mahariq) (d. ca. 1480), another
member of the late medieval French rabbinic elite, elevated to leadership in northern
Italy, referring to himself as “Yosef Qolon b. . . . Shelomo Ṣarfati” and to “anu ha-Ṣarfatim.”
See Simon Schwarzfuchs, “Yohanan Tr̀ves et le dernier refuge de l’école talmudique
104 Marcus

A distinctive French rabbinic tradition and memory, however, is different

from a collective cultural and political one. In contrast to the Jews of Sefarad
and Ashkenaz, French Jewish culture had a weak collective identity, and its
boundaries were so porous that French Jews did not consider themselves to be
a separate Jewish subculture at all, let alone one that was superior to others.
How they viewed themselves needs to be explored and not assumed by anal-
ogy to the well-known diaspora Jews of Sefarad and Ashkenaz.
Several significant indices of group identity found in Iberian and German
Jewish subcultures are missing or different in the case of the Jews of north-
ern France. They had no central non-Jewish political patron at the formative
stage of its settlement; no protective charters from any central or even regional
Christian political authorities that granted political status to Jewish communi-
ties in France; no foundation legend attached to a central political ruler; no
special Jewish version of the majority’s vernacular language. Moreover, in its
formative era, their rabbinic elite was open to the absorption of different ele-
ments from other rabbinic cultures from outside its border, and there were
hardly any lasting signs of a collective memory of a French Jewry after they
were forced to leave northern France.
An important difference between northern French Jews, on the one hand,
and the Jews of Iberia and central Europe, on the other, is the presence in
Ashkenaz and Sefarad of strong central governments—the German Empire
and the Umayyad caliphate respectively—and the absence of any equivalent
central political authority in northern France during the period of early Jewish
settlement. The active role played by a central authority helped give early
Ashkenaz and Sefarad a collective identity.
Although Jewish merchants in Ashkenaz identified with the local towns
to which they moved from the late tenth century, they also knew that they
lived in an empire. Charlemagne, whom Pope Leo III crowned “Emperor of
the Franks and of the Romans” in Rome in 800, became the embodiment
of the Holy Roman Emperors (translatio imperii), even though the Byzantine
throne was not vacant. The Saxon, Salian, and Hohenstaufen emperors claimed

français apr̀s l’expulsion de 1394,” in Rashi et la culture juive en France du nord au moyen
âge, ed. Gerard Nahon and Charles Touati (Paris: Peeters, 1997), 93 and references. On
French rabbinic continuity, see Jeffrey R. Woolf, “Between Diffidence and Initiative:
Ashkenazic Legal Decision-Making in the Late Middle Ages (1350–1500),” Journal of Jewish
Studies 52 (2001): 95n57 and references.
why did medieval northern french jewry disappear ? 105

to be successors to Charlemagne, and they appointed bishops and archbishops

in the imperial towns to serve them in their political administrations.16
In Islamic Spain, the beginnings of collective Jewish life that took place
in the mid-tenth century did so under the regime of the newly proclaimed
Umayyad caliph, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Nāṣir (III). He claimed to be the real caliph
in 929, over and against the false ones of the Fatimid Shīʿīs in the Maghrib, later
in Cairo, and against the Abbasid assassins of his Umayyad ancestors, now rul-
ing from Baghdad. Although the Iberian caliphate broke up into several petty
(ṭāʾifa) kingdoms in the early eleventh century, the formation of Sefaradi Jewry,
like that of early Ashkenazi Jewry, took place under the protection of a central
political regime. Jews in Ashkenaz and Sefarad each shared a sense of political
superiority that the German emperors and Iberian caliphs claimed over their
rivals. These western political claimants formed and supported the western
Jewish communities of Ashkenaz and Sefarad, each of which understood itself
to be the successor to “Jerusalem.”17
In contrast, French Jews in the tenth and eleventh centuries lived in a
decentralized society, made up of competing feudal barons, not a strong royal
house. As the western parts of the former Carolingian Empire devolved into
multiple feudal territories, the Jews there lived in towns that belonged to a
hodgepodge of polities in which the strong men were more powerful than the
king of France who ruled only over his tiny domains in Paris and the surround-
ing patrimony of the Île de France. The absence of a single central political
ruler in northern France had significant consequences for the Jews who settled
there, the most salient being that no one treated them as a single legal commu-
nity. Consequently, they did not develop a collective French Jewish identity.18

16 On medieval Germany, see John B. Freed, “Germany: 843–1137” in Dictionary of the Middle
Ages, ed. Joseph R. Strayer (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985), 5:472–78; Timothy
Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages: Ca. 800–1056 (London: Longman, 1991), and
Alfred Haverkamp, Medieval Germany (1056–1273), trans. R. Mortimer and H. Braun (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
17 On the Umayyad caliphate in Iberia and the subsequent petty kingdoms see David
J. Wasserstein, The Caliphate in the West: An Islamic Political Institution in the Iberian
Peninsula (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Janina M. Safran, The Second Umayyad
Caliphate: The Articulation of Caliphal Legitimacy in al-Andalus (Cambridge: Center for
Middle Eastern Studies of Harvard University, 2000), and David J. Wasserstein, The Rise
and Fall of the Party-Kings: Politics and Society in Islamic Spain 1002–1086 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1985).
18 On medieval France, see John W. Baldwin, “France: 987–1223,” in Dictionary of the Middle
Ages, 5:152–66; Elizabeth Hallam, Capetian France, 987–1328 (London: Longman, 1980).
106 Marcus

A significant feature of this political difference is reflected in the presence

or absence of charters of protection for different medieval Jewries. These texts
derive in form and substance from Carolingian charters issued to individual
Jewish merchants in the early ninth century. Whereas the Jews in Angevin
England, in the growing northern Christian kingdoms in Iberia, and in the
towns and entirety of the German Empire all received such empowering char-
ters, neither the barons nor the kings of France issued charters of protection
to the Jews in France until well after the largest population had already been
expelled in 1306. Instead, royal legislation designed to restrict Jewish economic
activities in the growing royal domains in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
was addressed to Jews as individuals, not to Jewish communities.19
This lack of collective protection or even recognition of the Jews in north-
ern France as a legal corporation may be reflected in some peculiar features
of the periodic political hostility that some Jewish communities experienced
there from time to time. Sometimes referred to as “judicial anti-Semitism,”
Christian temporal authorities, not mobs or rogue Christian enthusiasts, occa-
sionally promoted rather than questioned or ignored accusations that threat-
ened the lives or religious culture of medieval Jews living in northern France.
Among these is the unusual instance of the Count of Blois’s support for the
burning of the Jews of Blois in 1171 after a murder libel that lacked any forensic
evidence; the positive and vigorous response by the king of France to a broad
papal call to temporal rulers in Christendom to investigate the Talmud—a
response that resulted in the burning of wagonloads of volumes in Paris in
1242; and, after Troyes became part of the royal domains, the burning of the
Jews of Troyes in 1288, capped by the demographically significant forced emi-
gration and confiscation of the property of the Jews of royal France in 1306.20

19 See, Robert Chazan, ed., Church, State, and Jew in the Middle Ages (New York: Behrman
House, 1980); Julius Aronius, Regesten zur Geschichte der Juden im fränkischen und
deutschen Reiche bis zum Jahre 1273 (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1970 [1887–1902]).
20 On Blois, see Robert Chazan, “The Blois Incident of 1171: A Study in Jewish Inter-communal
Organization,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 36 (1968): 13–31
and Fudeman, Vernacular Voices, 61–88. For the first Talmud trial, see Isidore Loeb, “La
controverse de 1240 sur le Talmud,” Revue des études juives 1 (1880): 246–62; 2 (1881):
248–70; 3 (1881) 39–57; Robert Chazan, “The Condemnation of the Talmud Reconsidered
(1239–1248),” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 55 (1988): 11–30;
John Friedman, Jean Connell Hoff and Robert Chazan, The Trial of the Talmud: Paris,
1240 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2012); Judah Rosenthal, “The
Talmud on Trial,” Jewish Quarterly Review 47 (1956–57): 145–69; Solomon Grayzel, ed.
and trans., The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century, rev. ed. (New York: Hermon
Press, 1966), 239–43; William Chester Jordan, “Marian Devotion and the Talmud Trial of
why did medieval northern french jewry disappear ? 107

Jews in central Europe and Iberia, of course, were also subjected to restric-
tive royal legislation as well as periodic mob violence, and they too were even-
tually forced to move out of the empire’s cities or the Iberian kingdoms. But
there is a difference. In the empire and in Castile and Aragon, early charters
recognized Jews as legal communities under the protection of temporal power,
usually royal authority. Northern French Jews alone did not have a strong royal
patron supporting and forming them into a political collective when they
settled and developed their own cultural traditions.
The Jews of northern France also did not express a collective identity by
inventing a foundation legend that invoked Charlemagne or another central
political figure as their founder. In contrast, when Jews in the German lands
wanted to remember how their community had come about, a member of the
Qalonimos family of immigrants from Italy claimed that “King Charles” had
invited one of their ancestors to migrate from Lucca and settle in Mainz. Even
the Jews of Provence appealed to a memory that Charlemagne had founded their
community in Narbonne by bringing there a Jewish royal figure, Rabbi Makhir.21
In Iberia, the philosopher Rabbi Avraham Ibn Dāwūd constructed a formal
collective memory that the rabbinical academy in Cordoba came under the
new leadership of Rabbi Moshe because God acted through the agency of the

1240,” in Religionsgespräche im Mittelalter, ed. Bernard Lewis and Friedrich Niewöhner

(Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1992), 61–76. For the second trial, see Joseph Shatzmiller, La
deuxième controverse de Paris (Paris: Peeters, 1994). For Troyes, see Susan Einbinder, A
Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 126–54; Kirsten Fudeman, “Restoring a Vernacular Jewish
Voice: The Old French Elegy of Troyes,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 15 (2008): 190–221;
Kirsten Fudeman, “These Things I Will Remember: The Troyes Martyrdom and Collective
Memory,” Prooftexts 29 (2009): 1–30.
21 Aryeh Graboïs, “Le souvenir et la légende de Charlemagne dans les textes hébraiques
médiévaux,” Le moyen âge 72 (1966): 5–39; Jeremy Cohen, “The Nasi of Narbonne: A
Problem in Medieval Historiography,” AJS Review 2 (1977): 45–76; Joseph Shatzmiller,
“Politics and the Myth of Origins: The Case of the Medieval Jews,” in Les Juifs au regard
de l’histoire: Mélanges en l’honneur de Bernhard Blumenkranz, ed. Gilbert Dahan (Paris:
Picard, 1985): 49–61; Ivan G. Marcus, “The Foundation Legend of Ashkenazic Judaism,” in
Hesed ve-Emet: Studies in Honor of Ernest S. Frerichs, ed. Jodi Magnes and Seymour Gitin
(Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998): 409–15; Avraham Grossman, “Sheqiʿat Bavel va-ʿaliyat ha-
merkazim ha-yehudiyim ha-ḥadashim be-Eropa ba-meʾa ha-11: agada u-meziʾut,” Divrei
ha-Aqademiya ha-Leʾumit ha-Yisraʾelit la-Madaʿim 8 (Jerusalem, 1999), 159–85; Elisabeth
Hollender, “‘Und den Rabbenu Moses brachte der König Karl mit sich’: Zum Bild Karls
des Großen in der hebräischen Literatur des Mittelalters,” in Karl der Große in den
europäischen Literaturen des Mittelalters. Konstruktion eines Mythos, ed. Bernd Bastert
(Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004), 183–200.
108 Marcus

caliph in whose court the first Iberian Jewish courtiers fashioned the traditions
of Sefarad. Regardless of its other contexts, the center of gravity in this “story
of the four captives” is clearly Iberia as compared to Baghdad, Qayrawan, and
Fusṭāṭ.22
In the late twelfth century Jewish subcultures in medieval Europe all seemed
to need a founder. The exception was northern France. Like the English Jews,
who were really a northern French diaspora for about two hundred years, the
Jews north of the Loire did not create a foundation legend. French rabbinic
memory did include a tradition about the transfer of learning from east to
west (translatio studii) of a Rabbi Eliyyah b. R. Menaḥem as a western intellec-
tual successor of the Babylonian Hayya Gaʾon, but northern French Jewry cre-
ated no political foundation legend with a central temporal figure like either
Charlemagne in German Ashkenaz or the Umayyad caliph in Sefarad.23 This
difference follows from the fact that there was no central northern French
political institution in the years of early Jewish settlement and no corporately
recognized northern French Jewry down to their forced migration in 1306.
Several Jewish families that immigrated, not one dominant one, settled in
northern France. Compare southern Italy and the family accounts in Megillat
Aḥimaʿaṣ; in Provence, the stories about Rabbi Makhir; in the German Empire,
where the Qalonimos family projected itself into a leadership position and
constructed a foundation legend in the late twelfth century; and in Iberia,

22 See Cohen, Sefer ha-Qabbalah, 46–48 [Hebrew]; 63–66 [English]. Eve Krakowski reads
“the story of the four captives” as being more about the pre-eminence of the Jewish elite
class, compared to others in Iberia, than about Iberia’s greater importance over other
Jewish communities. An Ibero-centric reading is also found in Shatzmiller, “Politics
and Myth of Origins,” 51–52. Her doubts about Cohen’s messianic interpretation of Ibn
Dāwūd’s work provide an important corrective, however. See Eve Krakowski, “On the
Literary Character of Abraham Ibn Daud’s Sefer ha-Qabbalah,” European Journal of Jewish
Studies 1 (2008), 239n67. On the political features of these foundation stories (transla-
tio imperii), not only their intellectual character (translatio studii), see Arnold Franklin,
“Shoots of David: Members of the Exilarchal Dynasty in the Middle Ages” (PhD diss.,
Princeton University, 2002), 213–41.
23 See Avraham Grossman, Ḥakhmei Ṣarfat ha-rishonim (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1995),
574n122, and Menahem (Marc) Hirshman, “The Priest’s Gate and Elijah b. Menahem’s
Pilgrimage” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 55 (1986): 217–27 and idem, “ ‘R. Elijah Interpreted the Verse
Concerning Pilgrims’ (Shir Rabba 2, 14, 7): Another Medieval Interpolation and Again R.
Elijah,” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 60 (1991): 275–76.
why did medieval northern french jewry disappear ? 109

where Rabbi Moshe b. Ḥanokh stars as a Sefaradi leader in the story of the four
captives.24
Only northern French Jews did not brag about one early family or outstand-
ing intellectual personality at the center of a political foundation story. Rashi
and his intellectual dynasty came later and did not construct a political foun-
dation story of their own because there was no credible political figure on
whom to build it.
Given this difference in northern France, it is not surprising that French Jews
did not imitate the battle over the legacy of Charlemagne that took place in the
late twelfth century between the German Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, and
the court of the French king, Philippe Augustus. Each Christian rival claimed
to be Charlemagne’s heir.25
Whereas in the German Empire, Jewish writers claimed Charlemagne as
the founder of the Mainz Jewish community, no French Jewish author claimed
Charlemagne to be the founder of a northern French Jewish community in
competition with the Rhineland Jews of Mainz, Worms, Speyer, and Cologne.
By this time, it was too late for a political reorganization of the various local
and regional Jewries that had evolved separately and locally in the baronial
territories of northern France.
When Provencal Jews fashioned a story about Charlemagne and a Rabbi
Makhir in a foundation legend, it was designed to compete with Ibn Dāwūd’s
claim to the intellectual and political leadership of Iberia. As with language
fields, in which the Jews of Provence related to those of Iberia, they also

24 For Italy, see Robert Bonfil, History and Folklore in a Medieval Jewish Chronicle: The Family
Chronicle of Ahimaʿaz ben Paltiel (Leiden: Brill, 2009); on Provence, Cohen, “Nasi of
Narbonne”; on the Qalonimides, Ivan G. Marcus, “The Political Dynamics of the Medieval
German-Jewish Community,” in Authority, Power and Leadership in the Jewish Polity,
ed. Daniel Elazar (Lantham: University Press of America, 1991), 113–37 and Grossman,
Ḥakhmei Ashkenaz, 101–102, 392, 396–98; on Iberia, Cohen, Sefer ha-Qabbalah, 46–48
[Hebrew]; 63–66 [English].
25 On Charlemagne’s legacy in the Middle Ages, see Bastert, ed., Karl der Große. For
the campaign in the twelfth-century German Empire to claim Charlemagne for the
Hohenstaufens, see R. Folz, Le souvenir et la légende de Charlemagne dans l’empire germa-
nique médiéval (Paris, 1950); Peter Munz, Frederick Barbarossa: A Study in Medieval Politics
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969), 242–44n2, where the French and German
uses of Charlemagne are compared. On France’s self-image which the German reappro-
priation of Charlemagne was meant to challenge, see Joseph R. Strayer, “France: The Holy
Land, the Chosen People, and the Most Christian King,” in Action and Conviction in Early
Modern Europe: Essays in Memory of E. H. Harbison, ed. Theodore K. Rabb and Jerrold E.
Seigel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 3–16.
110 Marcus

created their foundation legend in relation to the Jews of the south. The Jews
of northern France might have been expected to do the same in relation to the
Jews of German lands.26 They did not. The absence of a French Carolingian
foundation story is telling, especially in light of the political rivalry between
the temporal heads of an emerging royal France and the German Empire
across the Rhine.
In northern France, Rashi and his descendants transformed but did not
begin northern French rabbinic learning any more than Rabbi Moshe b.
Ḥanokh had in Cordoba. Adapting the Talmudic tale of the Babylonian scholar
Hillel the Elder, a Babylonian outsider who became the head of the Jerusalem
academy, the story of the four captives makes clear that there had been native
Jewish rabbinical leadership before R. Moshe arrived in Spain, but the new-
comer was more learned than his predecessor. His arrival constituted a coming
of age of Iberian rabbinic knowledge in Sefarad.27
There also had been rabbinic figures in northern France throughout the
eleventh century, but Rashi’s daunting achievement and his prolific dynasty
of Tosafist Talmud glossators put northern French rabbinic scholarship on
an entirely new footing.28 Unlike the achievement of R. Moshe b. Ḥanokh in
Cordoba, Rashi achieved his authority through sheer intellectual power alone.
No central or even local political figure empowered Rashi; there was no deus
ex machina like a ransom from capture at sea or an imperial invitation to
immigrate.
Thus it is not surprising that Rashi and the Tosafist school that followed filled
the void elsewhere occupied by a centrally founded Jewish community with its
new leadership.29 Northern French rabbis created a belated, elitist, rabbinic
identity, not a collective communal and political identity that was linked to
a founding central political protector. This, too, made northern French Jewry
different from the medieval Jewish diaspora communities that persisted after
they were forced to migrate.

26 Cyril Aslanov, “The Juxtaposition Ashkenaz/Tzarfat vs. Sepharad/Provence Reassessed—A

Linguistic Approach,” in Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts 8 (2009): 49–65.
27 See Cohen, Sefer ha-Qabbalah, 47–48 [Hebrew]; 65–66 [English], and for the Hillel
topos, see tPes 4:13–14 and bPes 66a, discussed in Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, Rabbinic Stories
(Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2002), 71–79.
28 On Rashi, see Grossman, Ḥakhmei Ṣarfat ha-rishonim, 121–253, and for the Tosafists,
Ephraim E. Urbach, Baʿalei ha-tosafot, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1980).
29 See Chazan, Medieval Jewry in Northern France, 28, who notes that in northern France
Rashi’s dynasty (“a chain of giant figures”) played a role in forming a rabbinic elite identity
analogous to a broader communal collective memory among German Jewry.
why did medieval northern french jewry disappear ? 111

Still another distinction between northern French Jewish culture and both
the Jews of central Europe and of Iberia is the way the French Jews approached
the vernacular language they spoke. The Jews of Iberia made the transition
from Arabic to Castilian Spanish in the course of their history, developed it
into their own version as Ladino, and took it with them into the Ottoman
Empire after 1492. The Jews of central and then eastern Europe adapted Middle
High German into Yiddish and brought it with them into the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.30
The Jews of northern France did not develop their own dialect of the local
vernacular. There was no Judaeo-French dialect that continued to be a spo-
ken and written language. Rashi and others wrote thousands of leʿazim in their
writings. Some read “romances” in Hebrew transliterations of the Old French,
but a Jewish version of French did not persist as a Jewish vernacular in a cohe-
sive French-speaking Jewish diaspora.31
From the sixteenth century, French Jewry consisted of two regionally dis-
tinctive early modern Jewish communities, a few thousand mainly Portuguese
conversos who lived in the southwest, and about forty thousand Jews of the
Ashkenazi tradition in Alsace-Lorraine. As in its medieval beginnings, in
the tenth and eleventh centuries, modern French Jewish history starts in a
decentralized pattern of different regional settlements, until the revolution
and Napoleon tried to control and redefine the vestiges of any rabbinic self-
governing structures. Ironically, the medieval French monarchy had already
treated French Jews as individuals, the very goal advanced by some leaders of
the revolution.32
A lack of a well-defined collective identity in northern French Jewish cul-
ture is also reflected in an unusual openness to influences from other Jewish
rabbinic subcultures, especially when compared to German Ashkenaz in their

30 On Ladino, see Aron Rodrigue, “The Ottoman Diaspora: The Rise and Fall of Ladino
Literary Culture,” in Cultures of the Jews: A New History, ed. David Biale (New York:
Schocken, 2002), 863–85 and Benbassa and Rodrigue, Sephardi Jewry, 60–64. On Yiddish,
see Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1980). On both, see Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Making Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino
Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).
31 See Menahem Banitt, “Une langue phantôme: Le judeo-français,” Revue de linguistique
romane 27 (1963): 245–94; Fudeman, Vernacular Voices, 28–59.
32 See Frances Malino, The Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux: Assimilation and Emancipation in
Revolutionary and Napoleonic France (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1978);
Paula E. Hyman, The Jews of Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1998); Esther Benbassa, The Jews of France: A History from Antiquity to the Present, trans.
M. B. DeBevoise (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
112 Marcus

formative stage in the late tenth and eleventh centuries. Northern French rab-
bis were not always as self-sufficient or isolationist as has been claimed.33 To
be sure, Spanish and German Jews adapted Arabic or Christian practices and
internalized them through “inward acculturation,” but this aspect of openness
did not always apply to an openness to other Jewish subcultural influences.34
Isolationist German Ashkenaz was in the beginning, as when Rabbenu
Gershom ignored the geʾonim in Baghdad. By the mid-eleventh century and
later, especially in Mainz, the rabbis of German Ashkenaz were more defer-
ential toward the geʾonim and quoted them often. Later the German rabbis
went to northern France to study the Tosafist methods and bring them back.
Memory of the burning of wagonloads of Talmuds in Paris in 1242 is preserved
in the Ninth of Av liturgy by a German Jew, Rabbi Meʾir of Rothenburg, who
was then a student in Paris, not by a medieval French Jewish witness.
But even when German Jewish writers later took in elements from other
Jewish elites, they had no doubt about themselves. The ideology of martyrs
that was fashioned in the early twelfth century in the wake of the trauma of
1096, on the one hand, and the elitist ideology of ascetic pietism that some
descendants of the original Qalonimos founding families articulated in writing

33 Haym Soloveitchik, “The Halakhic Isolation of the Ashkenazic Community,” Jahrbuch

des Simon-Dubnow Instituts 8 (2009): 41–47, ignores the early stages of French rabbinic
culture, in the time of Rabbenu Gershom b. Yehuda of Mainz (d. 1028), who was more
self-reliant than the contemporary rabbis of northern France that were more open to out-
side influences. For Iberian influences on northern French rabbinic culture, more than on
German counterparts in the early years of the settlement of both, see Avraham Grossman,
“Bein Sefarad le-Ṣarfat,” in Galut aḥar golah: Meḥqarim be-toledot ʿam Yisraʾel mugashim
le-Professor Haim Beinart li-mlot lo shivʿim shana, ed. Aaron Mirsky et al. (Jerusalem:
Ben Zvi Institute, 1988), 75–101; idem, “Relations between Spanish and Ashkenazi Jewry
in the Middle Ages,” in Moreshet Sefarad, ed. Beinart 1:223–27; idem, Ḥakhmei Ṣarfat ha-
rishonim, 539–86, especially 572ff. Soloveitchik dismisses this formative period because
he arbitrarily begins medieval French rabbinic history with Rashi and the Tosafists:
“France in the eleventh century had no indigenous tradition. It was an intellectual back-
water. . . . The French tradition . . . was the creation of Rashi (d. 1105) and his descen-
dants, i.e. his grandson Rabbenu Tam and great-grandson Ri. . . .” Soloveitchik, “Halakhic
Isolation,” 44. Precisely. Before Rashi, northern French rabbis were open to others and
not self-reliant. This phenomenon is historically as worthy of analysis as is the era of the
“greats” that followed. It should also be noted, pace Soloveitchik, that Rashi himself was
influenced by Spanish exegesis, as Grossman has shown, Ḥakhmei Ṣarfat ha-rishonim, 561
and elsewhere.
34 Ivan G. Marcus, Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1994), introduction, and idem, “A Jewish-Christian Symbiosis: The
Culture of Early Ashkenaz,” in Cultures of the Jews, ed. Biale, 450–516.
why did medieval northern french jewry disappear ? 113

by the end of the twelfth century, on the other, expressed attitudes of religious
and cultural self-confidence and superiority that lasted for centuries, defining
Ashkenazi Jewish culture and even influencing later communities that were
strongly led by Iberian and Ashkenazi emigrés, such as Safed.35
In contrast to the initially closed posture of medieval German rabbis to out-
side rabbinic views, northern French rabbis, at least in the beginning, were
open to absorbing and assimilating other rabbinic approaches and opinions
in their legal thinking.36 Rabbis from northern France traveled to Babylonia
or Jerusalem to meet Babylonian master Hayya Gaʾon whose family was linked
to one of theirs by marriage. The elders of Troyes in the mid-eleventh cen-
tury appealed to Rabbi Yehuda ha-Kohen in Mainz to settle a local dispute; R.
Yehuda did not write to anyone else. In their biblical commentaries, Rashi and
his school made use of Spanish Jewish philological interpretations, whereas
the German Pietists reveled in numerical and alphabetic permutations that
were an indigenous development of earlier Palestinian rabbinic midrashic
techniques. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, at least, German Jews were
interested in what was going on in northern France only to criticize their ways
of praying. If the Jewish Pietists of medieval Germany later wrote down some
of their unusual traditions as a protest to the innovative and arrogant Tosafists,
they were reaffirming their own values over and against those of their western
neighbor, not internalizing them. Only later would everyone in Ashkenaz and
even in Sefarad “go Tosafist.”37
Even later, French rabbis broke their geographical isolation in an even more
dramatic fashion. Hundreds emigrated to the land of Israel in large groups in
the Middle Ages. German Pietists advised their followers and other Jews to stay
home, and most did not make the move. As was true of some Christian monas-
tic groups, the Jewish Pietists in Germany who opposed pilgrimage to the Holy

35 On the culture of later Ashkenaz in eastern Europe, see Edward Fram, “German Pietism
and Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century Rabbinic Culture,” Jewish Quarterly Review
96 (2006): 50–59; but also Jacob Elbaum, Teshuvat ha-lev ve-qabbalat yissurim (Jerusalem:
Magnes, 1992) and especially Mendel Piekarz, Bi-mei ṣemiḥat ha-ḥasidut (Jerusalem:
Mosad Bialik, 1998), who demonstrates more than Fram that standard East European
Jewish piety was strongly influenced by German Pietism until the modern Hasidic move-
ment opposed it. Gershon Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century:
A Genealogy of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) calls these
phenomena “early Pietism” and “later Pietism,” respectively.
36 Grossman, Ḥakhmei Ṣarfat ha-rishonim, chapter 10.
37 See Ivan G. Marcus, Piety and Society: Jewish Pietists of Medieval Germany (Leiden: Brill,
1981), 168n80.
114 Marcus

Land acted as though being Pietists was itself a pilgrimage and a physical jour-
ney was ill advised.38
A sign of, and perhaps a factor contributing to, a French Jewish sense of not
being a separate Jewish subculture is seen in how Rashi refers to Jews living in
exile. When Rashi talks about the condition of exile, he focuses not on living
in France or on French Jews, even though he uses thousands of French leʿazim
in his writings. Rather, as has been noted in a different context, Rashi writes
about all of Jewry as keneset Yisraʾel, a generic expression of Jewish identity,
not a regional one.39
In contrast, the German Jews referred to the qedoshim or martyrs of 1096
and the later descendants of survivors of 1096 distinguished themselves as
Pietists in contrast to other Jews even in Germany, to Jews of France and the
Islands, and to all other Jews and Christians and they saw themselves as a new
Jerusalem even as did the Jews of Iberia. As a result, it is highly questionable
if the Jews of northern France had more than a very superficial sense of them-
selves as anything other than Jews living in exile, waiting for redemption to the
land of Israel, but not as living in a French “diaspora home.”40

38 Israel Ta-Shma, “ʿInyanei Ereṣ Yisraʾel,” Shalem 1 (1974): 81–82; idem, “ʿAl odot yaḥasam
shel qadmonei Ashkenaz le-ʿerekh ha-ʿaliya le-Ereṣ Yisraʾel,” Shalem 6 (1992), 326n6;
Ephraim Kanarfogel, “The Aliyah of Three Hundred Rabbis in 1211, Tosafist Attitudes
Toward Settling in the Land of Israel,” Jewish Quarterly Review 76 (1986): 191–215. Compare
the German-Jewish Pietists’ opposition to pilgrimage or emigration to the land of Israel
with Christian monastic writers’ claims that the monastic life itself took the spiritual
place of a physical pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and that the physical pilgrimage should
be avoided. On the latter, see Ora Limor, “ ‘Holy Journey’: Pilgrimage and Christian Sacred
Landscape” in Christians and Christianity in the Holy Land: From the Origins to the Latin
Kingdoms, ed. Ora Limor and Guy G. Stroumsa (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 326 and the
literature cited there. Ta-Shma, “ʿAl odot,” 316n5, already noted a Christian Dominican
parallel to German-Jewish opposition to travel to the Holy Land.
39 See Haym Soloveitchik, “The Midrash, Sefer Hasidim, and the Changing Face of God,”
in Creation and Re-Creation in Jewish Thought: Festschrift in Honor of Joseph Dan on the
Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Rachel Elior and Peter Schäfer (Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck, 2005), 165–77. Soloveitchik criticizes the German-Jewish Pietists for not using the
generic term that Rashi uses, keneset Yisraʾel (catholic Israel), but one can also infer posi-
tively from Rashi’s use of that generic term that he considered himself a Jew in exile in
general, not a Jew of Ṣarfat in particular. On the German-Jewish Pietists’ sectarian vision
of the world in which one would not expect references to “keneset Yisraʾel,” see Marcus,
Piety and Society.
40 An interesting exception to the general pattern is a Hebrew non-liturgical poem from
medieval northern France. A Jew leaving France for Germany compares German Jews
unfavorably to French Jews. German Jews look like goats with beards under their chins,
why did medieval northern french jewry disappear ? 115

The collective memory of French Jews was different and weaker after their
expulsion than it was for Iberian Jews after 1492/7 and for the Jews of Ashkenaz
after 1096 and the Black Death. When Susan Einbinder set out to document
the impact 1306 left on those Jews who were forced to leave in 1306, she found
very restrained memory. There were some laments, and some Jews who relo-
cated to the papal communities of southeast France apparently continued to
recite them until the eighteenth century. But even these Jews dispersed and
melted into other Jewish communities. This is evidence of an absence, not a
presence. When Provence was annexed to the kingdom in 1486, Jews could live
on French soil only in the Comtat Venaissin, which included Avignon, where
the popes had resided in the so-called Babylonian Captivity, and in other small
towns under papal rule. The communities that wrote about it did not survive
the ages.41
Given everything else, this should not be surprising. Lacking strong political
patronage backed by charters of protection or a foundation legend, without a
unique Jewish language, and showing an openness to outside Jewish rabbinic

and their women act unnaturally and are “on top,” a gibe perhaps at inverted domestic
hierarchy expressed as sexual deviance. It is possible but not demonstrable that a Jewish
émigré wrote it after 1306, as there are no definitive references to exile or persecution.
It has been preserved in two Hebrew manuscripts that date from the fourteenth and
sixteenth centuries, respectively. See Abraham Habermann, “Shirei ḥol ashkenaziyim,”
Sinai 15 (1945): 292; and a bilingual version in T. Carmi, ed., The Penguin Book of Hebrew
Verse (New York and Philadelphia: Penguin Books and Jewish Publication Society, 1981),
452. The poem is briefly discussed in Elisheva Carlebach, “Early Modern Ashkenaz in
the Writings of Jacob Katz,” in The Pride of Jacob: Essays on Jacob Katz and His Work, ed.
Jay M. Harris (Cambridge, MA: Center for Jewish Studies Harvard University, 2002), 70
and Kirsten Fudeman, Vernacular Voices, 146–47, 211–12n90. German Jews with goat-like
beards correspond to illuminations in the Bird’s Head Haggadah from fourteenth-century
Germany: see the many images in Marc Michael Epstein, The Medieval Haggadah: Art,
Narrative & Religious Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 18–43. Why
the Jewish men are represented in this manuscript with blond hair is unclear, and the
theme of women on top also deserves further treatment.
41 See Susan L. Einbinder, “Recall from Exile: Literature, Memory and Medieval French Jews,”
Jewish Studies Quarterly 15 (2008): 225–40 and eadem, No Place of Rest: Jewish Literature,
Expulsion, and the Memory of Medieval France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2009). The publication of forty-six liturgical poems in Avignon in 1767 may reflect
the desire of local Jews in the papal towns to preserve a northern French memory of
1306, but those Jews did not remain a community after the revolution dispersed them.
See Jordan, French Monarchy and the Jews, 216 and especially Einbinder, No Place to Rest,
62–63 and 183n7.
116 Marcus

traditions, why should French Jews have developed a collective memory as

Jews did in Ashkenaz or Sefarad?
What survived 1306 of French Jewry, then, was the legacy of Rashi and the
Tosafists, the French rabbinic dynasty, not French Jews as a community, not
Judaeo-French, not a northern French Jewish foundation myth, and not a
strong French Jewish collective memory. Rashi and the Tosafists did conquer
the rabbinic world, and the printed Talmud became a French page.42 In the
revolution that print engendered, spreading regional cultures throughout the
Jewish world, northern French rabbinic culture became universal. But by being
universally adopted, the Rashi–Tosafist “national” origins were almost forgot-
ten. Like the other French Jews, whom Christian political leaders treated as
individuals, not as a legal community, members of the school of Rashi saw
themselves as individuals who were concerned with keneset Yisraʾel, not the
culture of Ṣarfat. Rashi, Rabbenu Tam, Rabbi Yiṣḥaq of Dampierre and their
students may serve as a symbol of medieval French Jewry, but they are not the
same as medieval French Jewry. Rashi and the Tosafists are among the Jewish
immortals; northern French Jewry was a Jewish diaspora that disappeared.

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 Jews, Christians and Muslims in
Medieval and Early Modern Times
A Festschrift in Honor of Mark R. Cohen

Edited by

Arnold E. Franklin
Roxani Eleni Margariti
Marina Rustow
Uriel Simonsohn

LEIDEN | BOSTON