Pattricia Skinner

Confronting the 'Medieval' in Medieval History: The Jewish Example
Author(s): Patricia Skinner

Source: Past & Present , Nov., 2003, No. 181 (Nov., 2003), pp. 219-247
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society
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VIEWPOINT
CONFRONTING THE 'MEDIEVAL'

IN MEDIEVAL HISTORY: THE
JEWISH EXAMPLE*
Ask any professional, western, historian what field s/he works
in, and it is almost certain that the response will include some
reference to periodization: 'medieval Italy', 'early modern
gender', 'modern diplomatic history'. Such responses are
ingrained into historians' training: they are the direct result of
the rise of scientific history in the nineteenth century, with its
emphasis on structuring what was then a fairly limited field of
political history according to a tripartite scheme (first articu-
lated in the seventeenth century) of ancient, medieval and
modern eras, with the medieval referring to c.500-1500 CE.1
Admittedly, a few scholars have dared to confront the hegem-
ony of such a scheme for western European studies: for example,
Jacques Le Goff proposed an extension of the 'Middle Ages'
to the nineteenth century, and, conversely, Warren Hollister
called for a complete jettison of that concept;2 while the idea
* The research for this paper was generously funded by the Leverhulme Trust,
which awarded me a Research Fellowship for 2001 to pursue the question 'Did the
Jews Have a Middle Ages?' I am grateful to colleagues at the University of South-
ampton, particularly David Cesarani, Tony Kushner and Chris Woolgar, for having
helped with specific problems, and to David Abulafia and Tony Kushner for having
read and commented on earlier drafts.
1 Timothy Reuter, 'Medieval: Another Tyrannous Construct?', Medieval Hist. Jl,

i (1998), surveys the development of the term. The current article was inspired by
Reuter's work, and I benefited greatly from his generous encouragement up to his
death in 2002. I dedicate this article to his memory.
2 Jacques Le Goff, 'For an Extended Middle Ages', Europe, dcliv (1983), 19-24,
repr. in his The Medieval Imagination, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago and
London, 1988), 18-23; C. Warren Hollister, 'The Phases of European History and
the Nonexistence of the Middle Ages', Pacific Hist. Rev., lxi (1992). On more gen-
eral problems of periodization, see Paul Courtney, 'The Tyranny of Constructs:
Some Thoughts on Periodisation and Change', in David Gaimster and Paul
Stamper (eds.), The Age of Transition: The Archaeology of English Culture, 1400-1600
(Oxford, 1997); Lawrence Bessermann (ed.), The Challenge of Periodization: Old
Paradigms and New Perspectives (London, 1996). The journals Radical History Review,
Ivii (1993), Journal of Japanese History, cccc (1995), and Clio, xxvi (1997), also car-
ried articles on the problem.
? The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2003

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220 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 181
of a pre-industrial or pre-revolutio
to 'pre-modern' increasingly being use
ments before the late eighteenth ce
scheme has proved tenacious both wit
history: in a form of historical 'col
has also appropriated the ancient/med
describe periods of Hindu, Muslim
with an inherent value judgement of
of 'dark age'.3 Indeed, the appearan
decade of the Medieval History Journ
publisher but with an editorial team
that there is little enthusiasm for dev
Most medieval historians recognize
concept of the 'Middle Ages' is a me
convenience to render historical time
functional utility is challenged when
historiographically under-represented
historians have long argued that peasa
does not fit into the picture of dynam
tripartite framework (Le Goff's work
use of the longue duree as an organizi
tory, too, has taken up the issue: the
article, 'Did Women Have a Renaissanc
bold challenge to male-centred peri
found few direct heirs within women's
gender historians, particularly within
queer theory, have returned to the co
hegemonic terms in historical disco
critique of a periodization which privi
3 Reuter, 'Medieval', 38; Kathleen Biddick, 'Tra

Burger and Steven F. Kruger (eds.), Queering the Middle Ages (Minneapolis,
2001), 193.
4The Medieval History Journal, i, 1 (1998), edited by Harbans Mukhia, con-
fronted its problem by a special issue entitled 'Contextualising the Medieval', and
included articles on the appropriateness of the term 'medieval' to Indian, Chinese
and Arabic history. Since this promising start, however, its contents have largely
ignored the subject. Cf. R. A. Oliver and Anthony Atmore, Medieval Africa, 1250-
1800 (Cambridge, 2001).
5 For an extreme statement, see Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, 'History that Stands
Still', in his The Mind and Method of the Historian, trans. Siin Reynolds and Ben
Reynolds (Chicago, 1981), ch. 1.

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THE 'MEDIEVAL' IN MEDIEVAL HISTORY 221
'medieval'.6 New research in history, however, still u

adopts these labels - because of indifference, or sur
prevailing paradigm which is not easily discarded?
overriding reason is a lack of credible alternatives.
By contrast, historians of another marginalized
Jewish minority in Europe, have, from the early y
twentieth century, sporadically taken up period
subject for debate. But because Jewish history has
an almost entirely separate discipline within the ac
reasons discussed below), the results of such debate
almost entirely internalized within specialist Jew
tions, causing hardly a ripple in the wider field
study of the Jewish example confronts the general
incontrovertible and uncomfortable fact that his or her 'medieval'
period from 500 to 1500 is not a universal concept: it can be
challenged and could be replaced. The problems of fitting
minority histories into the majority scheme of periodization
may fatally undermine that scheme's appropriateness to historical
study in a globalized, postmodern world, but they also offer a
means to explore alternative schemes.8
6 Joan Kelly, 'Did Women Have a Renaissance?', in Renate Bridenthal and Claudia
Koonz (eds.), Becoming Visible: Women in European History (Boston, 1977), repr. in
Joan Kelly, Women, History and Theory (Chicago, 1984), ch. 2; Kelly's work found
one genuine successor in Julia M. H. Smith, 'Did Women Have a Transformation
of the Roman World?', Gender and History, xii (2000); a brief essay, which showed
no sign of knowing about Kelly's article, is Yvonne Knibiehler, 'Chronology and
Women's History', in Michelle Perrot (ed.), Writing Women's History (Oxford,
1992); Joyce W. Warren and Margaret Dickie (eds.), Challenging Boundaries:
Gender and Periodization (Athens, Ga., and London, 2000), is not as wide-ranging
as its title suggests because it focuses on American literature. But Joyce Warren's
introduction (p. xiii), demonstrates the growing awareness of 'otherness', of the
need to question established systems, and of the realization that what has been
regarded as 'true' is simply someone's creation; see also Steven F. Kruger, 'Medieval/
postmodern: HIV/Aids and the Temporality of Crisis', in Burger and Kruger
(eds.), Queering the Middle Ages, 252-4.
7 The Hebrew-language literature includes Haim Z. Dimitrovsky, 'Is There a Jewish
"Middle Ages"?'; and Jacob Katz, 'The Middle Ages in Jewish History', both in
M. Bar-Asher (ed.), Mehqarim be-Mada'ei ha-Yahadut [Research in Jewish Studies]
(Jerusalem, 1986); see also Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, 'What is the Jewish Middle Ages?',
in his collected studies, Retsef u-Temurah [Continuity and Change] (Tel Aviv, 1984).
8Jerry H. Bentley, 'Cross-Cultural Interaction and Periodization in World
History', Amer. Hist. Rev., ci (1996), 749. Jeremy Cohen (ed.), From Witness to
Witchcraft: Jews and Judaism in Medieval Christian Thought (Wiesbaden, 1996), 9,
acknowledges in his introduction that the essays in the volume venture beyond the
'chronological limits of the middle ages' - surely an opportunity for discussing at
some length the applicability of those limits to Jewish history.

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Periodization is not simply a dry p

schematic chronologies. Periods gi
narratives.9 To study the way they are
graphical traditions is to reach to the
of those traditions.10 A period is not fo
selected pair of dates: it is a judgem
sociocultural developments which
these and accords them significanc
the Jewish 'Middle Ages', therefore,
contemporary concerns of modern,
some, there does not seem to be a
traditional definition of 'medieval'."1
outline of what that is.
WHAT WERE THE 'MIDDLE AGES'?
The traditional term 'Middle Ages' has a theological o

early Christian writers the medieval period repre
time between the first and second Coming.'2 It thus
applicability to the Jewish experience. It does not qu
pond to the 'this time' between the destruction of
Temple (70 CE) and the coming of the Messiah wh
prised both Talmudic and medieval periods in mediev
thought.13 Most medievalists, however, use the more
definition of the Middle Ages as the period ending in t
9 Mordechai Breuer and Michael Graetz, Tradition and Enlightenmen

(New York, 1996), 1.
10 Michael A. Meyer, 'Where Does the Modern Period of Jewish Hist
Judaism, xxiv (1975), 329, rightly states that, 'All-embracing schemes
tion . . . rest more on stipulation than on inference', which highlight
and ideological motivations behind many attempts at creating the
'Emphases in Jewish History' (1939), repr. in his History and Jewish
A. Hertzberg and L. A. Feldman (Philadelphia, 1964), 69, admits tha
logical problem 'will necessarily be left to the more or less arbitrary
individual historian'.
11 For example, Elliott Horowitz, 'The Way We Were: Jewish Life in the Middle
Ages', Jewish Hist., i (1986), is little more than an extended review of Thbrese and
Mendel Metzger, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages: Illuminated Hebrew Manuscripts of
the Thirteenth to Sixteenth Century (New York, 1982), and does not even challenge
their periodization.
12 Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions ofJewish History (Berkeley and Oxford, 1993), 104.
13 Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Studies in Jewish-Gentile Relations in
Medieval and Modern Times (London, 1961), 26.

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European Renaissance of the sixteenth (in Italy, the f

century, which was defined by a return to the study
authors, a humanism which would become entangl
Reformation anticlerical polemics, and a sense of
from the preceding 'dark' age.14 How far the Jews we
by and/or participated in this movement has been the
much debate: although the ancient Jewish commun
eastern Mediterranean had become increasingly He
there is no reason to suppose that Jewish intellect
the achievements of the classical era in the same w
non-Jewish contemporaries. Furthermore, the div
between antiquity and the early Middle Ages is har
given that the medieval Romano-Christian world -
Jewish world perhaps even more so - saw itself as a c
tion of ancient times.15 The consensus of opinion i
Renaissance' did not signal a new era for Jews.16
common with the tendency in traditional history,
increasingly questioned the primacy of 'The Renais
pivotal moment,17 numerous other 'renaissances'
intellectual life have been identified, ranging from th
the nineteenth centuries.18 For Lionel Kochan, 'Th
14 Andrew Pettegree, 'The Early Reformation in Europe: A German

International Movement?', in Andrew Pettegree (ed.), The Early Re
Europe (Cambridge, 1992), 3-4; Le Goff, Medieval Imagination, 18. Lionel
Kochan, The Jew and his History (New York, 1977), 104, quotes Franz Rosenzweig's
view that the concept of the Middle Ages could not be grasped until 'a new period
thought itself able to extend a fraternal hand to a classical antiquity over a whole
"dark" millennium'.
15 Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, 16.
16Israel Abrahams, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages (1896, repr. Philadelphia,
1911), 140; G. F. Abbott, Israel in Europe (London, 1907), 390; Robert Bonfil,
'The Historian's Perception of the Jews in the Italian Renaissance: Towards a
Reappraisal', Revue des dtudesjuives, cxliii (1984), 70; Robert Bonfil, 'How Golden
Was the Age of the Renaissance in Jewish History?', in Ada Rapoport-Albert (ed.),
Essays in Jewish History, 2nd edn (Atlanta, 1991), 90, contrasts the output of Christian
and Jewish authors in this period, and comes to the conclusion that 'the Jewish
production of the Renaissance and Baroque periods should be considered the
swansong of medieval Jewish historiography'.
17 Paula Findlen and Kenneth Gouwens, 'Introduction: The Persistence of the
Renaissance', Amer. Hist. Rev., ciii (1998).
is For example, Bernard S. Bachrach, Early Medieval Jewish Policy in Western
Europe (Minneapolis, 1977), 82, 104, 124 (southern Italy in the late eighth
century); Cecil Roth, A Short History of the Jews, 4th edn (London, 1953), 172;
Abbott, Israel in Europe, 70 (Muslim Spain); Leonard Glick, Abraham's Heirs: Jews
and Christians in Medieval Europe (New York, 1999), 68 - a 'virtual renaissance' in
(cont. on p. 224)

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Renaissance' followed the greatest catastrophe of all, the

Holocaust,19 a point discussed further below.
Similarly, another perceived turning point in western European
history, the Reformation of the Church, has only limited
relevance for the history of the Jewish community. Although
Martin Luther's initial writings condemned the ill-treatment of
Jews on the grounds that they were future converts to his vision
of Christianity, his optimism soon turned to intense disap-
pointment which found expression in increasingly anti-Jewish
writing. The Counter-Reformation also produced its fair share
of anti-Jewish texts. Indeed, revisionist views of the Reformation
more generally now see it more as a continuation of medieval
ecclesiastical debate than the onset of modern thought - a
continuity which the historiography of Jewish communities had
already recognized.20
II
DEFINITIONS OF THE JEWISH MIDDLE AGES
Historians of the Jews have, therefore, sought alternative

parameters for the Middle Ages. Broadly speaking, these scholars
fall into three categories: those who shape a medieval period
citing external pressures or legal constraints on the Jews; those
who, by contrast, focus on significant inner developments of
the Jewish community; and, finally, those who, more recently,
have taken the social conditions of the Jews into account in
(n. 18 cont.)
the activities of Rabbi Gershom ben Judah of Mainz (c. 960-1040); Werner Keller,
Diaspora: The Post-Biblical History of the Jews, trans. Richard and Clara Winston
(New York, 1969), 408 - the nineteenth century, an 'astounding renaissance'.
19 Lionel Kochan, The Jewish Renaissance and Some of its Discontents (Manchester,
1992).
20 Mordechai Breuer, 'Prologue: The Jewish Middle Ages', in Breuer and Graetz,
Tradition and Enlightenment, 57; E. Gordon Rupp, Martin Luther and the Jews
(London, 1972); David Bagchi, 'Catholic Anti-Judaism in Reformation Germany:
The Case of Johann Eck', in Diana Wood (ed.), Christianity and Judaism (Oxford,
1992), 253-63; Hollister, 'Phases of European History and the Nonexistence of the
Middle Ages', 20; H. A. Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil (New
Haven, 1989); Edith Wenzel, 'Martin Luther und der mittelalterliche Antisemitismus',
in Alfred Ebenbauer and Klaus Zatloukal (eds.), Die Juden in ihrer mittelalterlichen
Umwelt (Vienna, Cologne and Weimar, 1991), 301-19. On the period as a whole,
see Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages
(New York, 1993).

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order to produce what might be called a functional de

related to circumstances rather than fixed chronologi
The first type is exemplified by the approach o
Marcus. In his classic source book, The Jew in the
World, 315-1791,21 originally published in 1938, h
that the medieval period for the Jews encompassed
chronological span between discriminatory legislat
by the Roman emperor Constantine in the fourth cen
the beginnings of the dismantling of such discriminatory
by the French State in the post-Revolution 1790s. Tha
took his periodization from events external to the Jew
munity which impacted on it, is not surprising: he w
historical tradition which still centred around the nat
something which the Diaspora Jewry was still to achiev
therefore, used external political pegs on which to
chronology - and his model of a long Jewish Mid
shaped by external forces, has been widely adopted.22
On the other hand, the US-based scholar Salo Baron
the 'long Middle Ages' model as a 'purely legalistic a
and instead viewed the mid seventeenth century as
point, when the Jews began to resettle western Europe
up the East.23 In fact, as early as 1896 Israel Abra
argued that '[t]he expression "the Middle Ages" . . .
to the inner life of the Jew ... has little or no relevan
21jacob R. Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World: A Source Book

(1938; revised edn, with introduction and notes, Marc Saperstein, Cinci
22 For example, Abrahams, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages, 1; Abb
Europe, 32; Guido Kisch, 'Research in the Medieval Legal History o
Proc. Amer. Assoc. for Jewish Research, vi (1934-5), 126; Keller, Di
Anna Foa, The Jews of Europe after the Black Death, trans. Andrea Gro
and London, 2000), 215; David N. Myers, 'Of Marranos and Memory: Yosef
Hayim Yerushalmi and the Writing of Jewish History', in Elisheva Carlebach, John
M. Efron and David N. Myers (eds.), Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in
Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (Hanover and London, 1998), 9: '[Yerushalmi's]
long Jewish Middle Ages running from the destruction of the Second Temple to
the late eighteenth century'; Ivan G. Marcus, 'Medieval Jewish Studies: Toward an
Anthropological History of the Jews', in Shaye D. Cohen and Edward L. Greenstein
(eds.), The State of Jewish Studies (Detroit, 1990), 116.
23 Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 2nd edn, 18 vols.
(Philadelphia, 1952-83), iii, p. v (quotation: ibid., ix, p. v).
24 Abrahams, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages, p. xvii (my emphasis). Elliott Horowitz,
'Jewish Life in the Middle Ages and the Jewish Life of Israel Abrahams', in David N.
Myers and David B. Ruderman (eds.), The Jewish Past Revisited: Reflections on Modem
Jewish Historians (New Haven and London, 1998), 157, notes that Abrahams'
statements on periodization have largely been ignored by subsequent historians.

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Abrahams, this inner life revolved aro

So intimately has Jewish social life been
that many subsequent authors have
Jewish law and ritual as the reason f
interest of Jews in their own history f
after Josephus (first century CE).25 In
ular to dissociate altogether from Hi
entire Diaspora - that is, from the
eighteenth-century Jewish Enlightenm
Dawidowicz suggests that, after the de
in 70 CE, the enduring and unchanging
were the Covenant with God, a cycle o
erance, the martyrdom of Jews for Go
of redemption.26 This formulation sugg
the unchanging story of Jews as victim
scheme, there might not be a medieval
More recently, a third definition of t
emerged. Instead of concentrating on
rather narrow aspects of Jewish intell
sought to identify something which un
community and sets it apart from p
centuries, such as demography or a s
from the past.28 Perhaps the clearest f
that is, eschewing a fixed chronolog
25 Kochan, Jew and his History, p. ix: 'Jewish his

historical discipline or enquiry independent of Jud
26 Lucy S. Dawidowicz, 'What Is the Use of Jewish
Use of Jewish History?, ed. Neal Kozodoy (New
Kochan, Jew and his History, 104, 106, who stat
epochs and that the Jew had had no history since 7
of Enlightenment scholar Franz Rosenzweig, who
the people from all the temporality and historicity of
and Some of its Discontents, 54. But Yosef Hayim
Reflections on Jewish Historiography of the Sixteen
for Jewish Research, xlvi-xlvii (1979-80), 616, rej
history'.
27 For example, Keller, Diaspora, p. xx: 'Only a confrontation with the long histori-
cal agony of the Jewish people can sanctify the present efforts toward a new course'
(my emphasis). Kochan, Jewish Renaissance and Some of its Discontents, 90-117, dis-
cusses the problem of the Jew-as-victim, and of the Holocaust as the inevitable
outcome of such a formulation.
28 Breuer, 'Prologue: The Jewish Middle Ages', 75, distinguishes the medieval
period from the early modern in Jewish history by the upsurge of the Jewish
population in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; Israel J. Yuval, 'Rishonim and
(cont. on p. 227)

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defining the Middle Ages by the conditions in whic

community lived - has been that of Ivan Marc
gested that Jews 'lived in a medieval setting wh
organized as a self-governing religious minority with
host society that was monotheistic in religious ideo
either Christian or Muslim'. David Biale's unifyi
similarly, the issue of power and powerlessness, lead
definition of the Jewish Middle Ages as 'that period af
had ceased to have a political center in the land
still enjoyed political autonomy and privileged statu
of their dispersion'. Since this criterion fitted the G
world as well as later centuries (Salo Baron had,
earlier, termed the situation of the Jews in the sec
centuries CE 'political medievalism'), Biale's start da
fuzzy, whilst his end date varies according to regio
Spanish expulsion in 1492 to the break-up of th
Polish State in the eighteenth century.29
What both these definitions have in common, however, is
that they have freed themselves from the necessity of struggling
to fit the entire Jewish experience into one common, unified
periodization. More than with any other field, Jewish history
and its periodization migrate geographically with the Jews
themselves. A securely documented Jewish presence begins in
England, for example, only in the late eleventh century, and in
Switzerland in the early thirteenth.30 The multiple and repeated
phenomenon of expulsion of the Jews from small territories or
entire states from the 1180s to the 1490s means that whilst one
(n. 28 cont.)
Aharonim, Antiqui et Moderni: Periodization and Self-Awareness in Ashkenaz', Zion,
Ivii (1992), concentrates on rabbinical commentaries to reveal how, in the fifteenth
century, rabbis of Ashkenaz (Germany) began to make a distinction between them-
selves and their post-Talmudic predecessors, drawing the line in the mid fourteenth
century.
29 Marcus, 'Medieval Jewish Studies', 115; David Biale, Power and Powerlessness
in Jewish History (New York, 1986), 59; Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious
History of the Jews, 1st edn, 3 vols. (New York, 1937), i, 252.
30 Irving Agus, 'Preconceptions and Stereotypes in Jewish Historiography', Jewish
Quart. Rev., 1 (1959-60), 242, makes the point that nineteenth-century nationalist
historiography is largely responsible for creating the undifferentiated pattern of
treatment of the Jews in history. This will be explored further below. On Britain,
see Patricia Skinner, (ed.), The Jews in Medieval Britain: Historical, Literary and
Archaeological Perspectives (Woodbridge, 2003); on Switzerland, see Uri Kaufmann,
'Geschichte der Juden im Bereich der heutigen Schweiz in Mittelalter und frfiher
Neuzeit', Aschkenas, i (1991).

68.237.29.160 on Mon, 11 Dec 2023 04:43:47 +00:00
Jewish community enjoyed a 'golden

encing persecution or was displace
multiplicity of expulsions, indeed, m
for very good parameters for a Euro
The expulsion from Spain in 1492
function as a convenient breaking
history of all Jews. G. F. Abbott s
viewpoint that '[t]he banishment of
the close of the thirteenth centur
compared with their expulsion fro
fifteenth'. Benzion Netanyahu points
was 'enemy no. 1' of the Jewish peop
and that if one takes into account the losses to the Jewish
community through execution, conversion and expulsion, the
destruction was of such awesome proportions that it was 'simi-
lar, in its relative and collective outcome . . . to that undergone
by world Jewry in World War II'. The actual impact of the
expulsion itself has undergone some revision recently, but we
need to be cautious of making this one event into a turning
point in the fortunes of the whole of European Jewry. What it
clearly did do was stimulate Jewish writers into writing about
their recent history: its significance may have been exaggerated
by the richness of source materials.32
III
WHAT WAS 'MEDIEVAL' ABOUT THE 'MIDDLE AGES'?
The functional definitions of Ivan Marcus and David Biale

provide an alternative to the problem of finding a single
date for the Jewish Middle Ages, but do not mean that we n
to treat Jewish history as a series of microhistories or fragme
31 Expulsions took place in the French royal domain under Philip II Augustus
1182 (reversed in 1198); in England in 1290; in French royal territory definitive
in 1306 and 1322; in Germany each area expelled its Jews at a different tim
between 1196 and 1476; Spain expelled its Jews in 1492.
32 Abbott, Israel in Europe, 165; Benzion Netanyahu, 'Sainchez-Albornoz' View
Jewish History in Spain', in his Toward the Inquisition: Essays on Jewish and Con
History in Late Medieval Spain (Ithaca and London, 1997), 128; Edward Peters,
'Jewish History and Gentile Memory: The Expulsion of 1492', Jewish Hist., ix
(1995), 19. Marcus, 'Medieval Jewish Studies', 116, rejects the 1492 Expulsion as
an end date, arguing that to accept it is to accept the claim that the Spanish-Jewish
experience is central and supremely significant in Jewish history.

68.237.29.160 on Mon, 11 Dec 2023 04:43:47 +00:00
Instead, only the need to work within hard dates is

and unconventional comparisons of regions across w
of time become possible and desirable. In essence
Biale have modified an earlier way of defining
'Middle Ages', focusing on the qualitative sense of t
eschewing the value judgements which accompan
judgements arguably provided the raison d'etre of m
historiography and merit further discussion. Let u
Jacob Marcus. His 'medieval' period was one of ex
lative oppression of the Jewish community, and
alone among his contemporaries in his opinion that
Ages were distinguished by their bleakness.33 Fo
other early twentieth-century scholars, aristocrati
astical discrimination and persecution provided
feature of an undivided medieval period which extended
beyond 1492 (though the role of the Church in this oppression
has been much debated)34 And, with the exception of the
'Golden Age' of Spanish Jewry under Muslim rule, stretching
roughly from the tenth century to the mid twelfth, the Middle
Ages are more frequently cast as a period of unremitting trial
for the Jewish communities.
This image owed its popularity to the Wissenschaft des
Judentums movement, born in Germany in the early nineteenth
century out of the preceding Haskalah, and accompanying
the move towards Jewish religious reform. Indeed, one of the
pioneers of this scientific approach to Jewish history, Leopold
Zunz (1794-1886), saw the medieval period as one of continuous
suffering; while his later contemporary, Heinrich (Hirsch)
Graetz (1817-91), concentrated his investigation of the history
33 James Parkes, The Jew in the Medieval Community (1938; 2nd edn, New York,
1976), 88: 'the major note of the period is tragedy'.
34 In his seminal works, James Parkes was adamant that 'the church did far more
than the princes to ensure the final degradation of the Jewish communities in
Europe': see his Jew in the Medieval Community, 108. Parkes's influential view is
evident in John Gilchrist, 'The Perception of Jews in the Canon Law in the Period
of the First Two Crusades', Jewish Hist., iii (1988); Robert Chazan, Medieval Stereotypes
and Modern Antisemitism (Berkeley and London, 1997), 95; Friedrich Lotter, 'The
Scope and Effectiveness of Imperial Jewry Law in the High Middle Ages', Jewish
Hist., iv (1989). Salo W. Baron, 'The Jewish Factor in Medieval Civilisation'
(1941), repr. in Robert Chazan (ed.), Medieval Jewish Life: Studies from the Proceed-
ings of the American Association for Jewish Research (New York, 1976), 43-4 n. 66,
challenges the dominant view that most of medieval Jewry's misfortunes can be
blamed on the Church.

68.237.29.160 on Mon, 11 Dec 2023 04:43:47 +00:00
of the Jewish people on the twin the

the ages and their intellectual life, e
the Haskalah in the mid eighteenth
Middle Ages as a period of persecu
approach to Jewish history - had or
seventeenth-century chronologies of Je
ages (themselves rooted in the reactio
In the following century such exte
been cited as the main reason for the
of European Jewry by Enlightenm
Mendelssohn (1729-86).35
Alongside this strand of external pe
Enlightenment thought also confron
Jewish community. Although Haska
had made extensive use of mediev
texts, they had nevertheless emphasi
binical authors as the symbol of a
and their influence on the later Wissenschaft scholars is clear.36
The Reformers took up the image to show how certain ele-
ments of Jewish culture, such as mysticism (Kabbalah) and a
longing for political redemption, had developed as adaptive
strategies in the face of outside oppression, and were merely
accretions to 'real' Judaism. At the same time, the founders of
Wissenschaft, including Immanuel Wolf, emphasized that the
35 Leopold Zunz, The Sufferings of the Jews during the Middle Ages, revised and ed.
George Alexander Kohut, trans. A. L6wy (London, 1907); Heinrich Graetz,
Geschichte der Juden von den diltesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart, 11 vols. (Leipzig,
1870-97), published in English as The History of the Jews from the Earliest Times to
the Present Day, ed. and trans. Bella L6wy, 5 vols. (London, 1891-2); Ismar
Schorsch, 'The Lachrymose Conception of Jewish History', in his From Text to
Context (Hanover, 1994), 376-88; Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A
Biographical Study (London, 1973). Strikingly, Arlette Farge, 'Method and Effects
of Women's History', in Michelle Perrot (ed.), Writing Women's History (Oxford,
1992), 15, identifies an early tendency in women's history towards a 'miserabiliste'
treatment highlighting the oppression of women. Susannah Heschel has recently
castigated Jewish women's studies for setting up their subjects as heroines or
victims: Michael Brenner and David N. Myers (eds.), Jiidische Geschichtsschreibung
heute: Themen, Positionen, Kontroversen (Munich, 2002), 139.
36 Biale, Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History, 109. See also Hillel J. Kieval,
'Caution's Progress: The Modernization of Jewish Life in Prague'; and Emanuel
Etkes, 'Immanent Factors and External Influences in the Development of the
Haskalah Movement in Russia', both in Jacob Katz (ed.), Toward Modernity: The
European Jewish Model (New Brunswick and Oxford, 1987), 71-3 and 13-22
respectively. The opinion of the maskilim found its way into the historiography:
Abrahams, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages, p. xviii.

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science of Judaism should explore 'all the circumstances,

characteristics and achievements of the Jews', and not under-
stand Judaism 'in that more limited sense in which it only
means the religion of the Jews'.37
It was in some ways inevitable that Jewish historians adopted
a negative view of the medieval period. Writing during and just
after the political emancipation of the Jews throughout the
nineteenth century, they wanted not only to compare modern
developments with medieval ones, but also to emphasize the
distance between the medieval and modern situations within
the Jewish community. They were keen to demonstrate that t
image of Jews as inward-looking, autonomous and communit
centred - Marcus's functional definition of 'medieval' - had
now been replaced by their willingness to contribute, to bec
full citizens of the state in which they lived, in short, to dis
their tradition: hence the depiction of any setbacks to the em
cipation process, and the continuation of rabbinical powe
relics of medievalism. Wissenschaft scholars participated ful
in this secularizing, assimilationist agenda, with the aim of c
cally analysing the sacred and normative texts of Judaism.38
37 Heinrich Graetz, 'The Structure of Jewish History', in Heinrich Graetz

Structure of Jewish History, and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Ismar Schorsch (
York, 1975), 70, argued in 1846 that Judaism in the strict sense of the word sh
not be treated solely as a religion, but also as a social movement. He also
commented that Kabbalah 'continues to this day to spread ruin among Jews':
Heinrich Graetz, 'Stages in the Evolution of the Messianic Belief' (1865), ibid.,
168. This prevailing view was rejected by Gershom Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah
(1962), ed. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, trans. Allan Arkush (Princeton, 1987), 3. The
German-Jewish Scholem 'created almost single-handedly the academic study of
Jewish mysticism': David Biale, Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah and Counterhistory
(Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1979), 2. See also Rivka Horwitz, 'Franz
Rosenzweig and Gershom Scholem on Zionism and the Jewish People', Jewish
Hist., vi (1992); Immanuel Wolf, quoted in Michael A. Meyer (ed.), Ideas of Jewish
Hist. (Detroit, 1987), 143.
3s Agus, 'Preconceptions and Stereotypes in Jewish Historiography', 251, states:
'They viewed the past as a contrast to a highly idealized present'. Talia Fishman,
'Forging Jewish Memory: Besamim Rosh and the Invention of Pre-Emancipation
Jewish Culture', in Carlebach, Efron and Myers (eds.), Jewish History and Jewish
Memory, 72, concurs that the nineteenth-century reformers 'portrayed premodern
Jews as inhabitants of a Dark Age'. Moses Mendelssohn's disciple, David
Friedlinder, rejoiced that the rabbis who, 'he was certain, still lived in the twelfth
century, were now, "thank God, bereft of all power"': Michael A. Meyer, 'Reflections
on Jewish Modernization', ibid., 372; Michael Toch, Die Juden in mittelalterli-
chen Reich (Munich, 1998), 70-1. See also Julius Carlebach (ed.), Wissenschaft
des Judentums: Anfiinge der Judaistik in Europa (Darmstadt, 1992); Andreas
Gotzmann, Eigenheit und Einheit: Modernisierungsdiskurse des deutschen Judentums
der Emanzipationszeit (Leiden, 2002).

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The view expressed here is very sim

European Enlightenment as a whol
era as a necessary stage to pass throug
but one whose socio-political vestig
As Michael Graetz demonstrates, h
Wissenschaft scholars to promote th
same lines, and with the same metho
German universities, did not lead to
German academy. Zunz's petition t
chair in Jewish studies to be set up
attempts to establish Jewish cultura
the German university system were
and beyond the Second World War
post-emancipation Jewish communiti
fully integrate into the new nation
In the wake of anti-Semitic events at the end of the nineteenth
century and beginning of the twentieth, the term 'medieval' was
pressed into service again, as a way to understand and ration-
alize more recent history. Actions against the Jews in modern
nation states seemed to contemporary and later historians to
have drawn their inspiration from medieval precedents.40 The
medieval blood libel and accusations of ritual murder re-
appeared in Syria in 1840, Prussia in the same decade, Ge
in the 1880s, Austria-Hungary in 1882 and Russia in 1
1893 a bill was brought to the German Diet, asking for th
tents of the Talmud to be subjected to official examinati
stark echo of thirteenth-century France and the swiftly re
39 Michael Graetz, 'Eine wissenschaftliche Revolution am Rande der Gesel

in Michael Graetz and Hannelore Kiinzl (eds.), Vom Mittelalter in die Neuzeit:
Jiidische Stddtebilder. Frankfurt, Prag, Amsterdam (Heidelberg, 1999), 7-17. A local
case study illustrating the complexity of the relationship between the Haskalah,
Emancipation and Jewish modernity is Simone Liissig, 'Vom Mittelalter in die
Moderne? Anfiinge der Emanzipation der Juden in Sachsen', Dresdner Heft: Beitriige
zur Kulturgeschichte, xlv (1996).
40 See, for example, Marcus, Jew in the Medieval World, 97, on a decree of
Frederick II for the Jews of Prussia, 1750; Abbott, Israel in Europe, 287, on the
same ruler; Keller, Diaspora, 349, on dress and employment restrictions introduced
in Vienna in 1753 and 1764. In some countries, such as Hungary, medievalism was
a survival, not a revival: Michael Silber, 'The Historical Experience of German
Jewry and its Impact on Haskalah and Reform in Hungary', in Katz (ed.), Toward
Modernity, 108. Keller, Diaspora, 343, sums up the situation: 'Insofar as the Jews
were concerned, the rulers of the much-praised Age of Enlightenment did nothing
to change the traditional medieval restrictions and medieval views'.

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German condemnation of 1509. The Czarist Russian

in particular, were held up as examples of mediev
barism.4' By definition, then, 'medieval' for early
century historians functioned as shorthand for barba
and irrational.
One exception worthy of note was the work of Salo Baron.
Baron protested that the Middle Ages had seen nothing to
compare with the pogroms, and set out in 1928 on a lifelong
war against the lachrymosity of Jewish history. Baron targeted
the Middle Ages as an era for which the tale of strife had been
most overdone. Although he greatly expanded his treatment of
the period from 500 to 1650 in the second edition of his Social
and Religious History of the Jews, he did not alter a word of his
original judgement, in the first edition of 1937, that 'the
average medieval Jew, compared with his average Christian
contemporary ... was the less unhappy and destitute creature'.
In 1941 he revisited this theme, asserting that the height of
medievalism was not really attained until the enforced ghetto,
41 On blood libel: in Syria, see Heinrich Graetz, ed. Schorsch, 53; in Prussia
and Germany, see Abbott, Israel in Europe, 306, 424; in Austria-Hungary, see
Roth, Short History of the Jews, 385; in Russia, see Lucy S. Dawidowicz, 'The
True History of Babi Yar', in her What Is the Use of Jewish History?, 105. A strik-
ing contemporary account is that of Heinrich Graetz who, in his anonymously
published The Correspondence of an English Lady on Judaism and Semitism [1883],
has his protagonist remonstrate: 'Should my children or grandchildren tremble
when somewhere in Egypt, Prussia or Hungary a Christian child disappears or is
whisked away in some theatrical fashion, and the culprits delight in exploiting it
by [sending] drunken katzaps or fanatical Magyars against us?', repr. in Heinrich
Graetz, ed. Schorsch, 192. On the Talmud: in general, see Roth, Short History of
the Jews, 383; in France, see Abbott, Israel in Europe, 425; in Germany, see
Keller, Diaspora, 285. On pogroms, see [Graetz], Correspondence of an English Lady,
215: 'the medieval scenes of plundering, vilifying and maiming Jews broke out
once more in southern Russia'. The anachronistic term 'pogrom' rapidly gained
currency among historians to describe medieval developments: see Abrahams,
Jewish Life in the Middle Ages, p. xviii; Abbott, Israel in Europe, 337; Foa, Jews of
Europe after the Black Death, 3, 13; Mark R. Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: The
Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1994), 74, 145, 169; Richard Landes, 'The
Massacres of 1010: On the Origins of Popular Anti-Jewish Violence in Western
Europe', in Cohen (ed.), From Witness to Witchcraft, 80; Paul Hyams, 'The
Jewish Minority in Medieval England, 1066-1290', Jl Jewish Studies, xxv (1974),
271, 276, 283; Anna Sapir Abulafia, 'From Northern Europe to Southern
Europe and from the General to the Particular: Recent Research on Jewish-
Christian Coexistence in Medieval Europe', Jl Medieval Hist., xxiii (1997), 187;
Malcolm Barber, 'Lepers, Jews and Moslems: The Plot to Overthrow Christendom
in 1321', History, lxvi (1981), 5, 10; David Abulafia, 'Una comunita ebraica della
Sicilia occidentale: Erice, 1298-1304', Archivio storico per la Sicilia orientale, lxxx
(1984), 185.

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authoritarian community and inte

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
ological parameters, therefore, Baron concurred with his
contemporaries in his interpretation of the term 'medieval'. In
this scheme, the 'modern' era began once Jews started to be
emancipated.42
IV
WHAT DID 'MODERNITY' MEAN?
In order to understand better how Jewish historia

the medieval era, therefore, we need to ask what
meant to these later generations. The question o
modernity has received a considerable amount of r
tion,43 but we can gain a sense of what moderni
Jewish scholars by looking at the example of the A
historian Cecil Roth. Early in his career, Roth a
periodization in European history was essentially th
Jews and Gentiles, with 1492 as a cut-off date. Wh
so, when the bulk of his contemporaries accepted a long
Middle Ages up to the first signs of political emancipation in
1789? Two reasons become apparent from reading his work.
The first was his overwhelming urge to have Jewish history
accepted within the mainstream of the discipline: in 1928 he
had written a sharp essay castigating the narrowness of Jewish
historiography, arguing that it should discard 'Rabbinic influ-
ence' if it was not to remain 'an outcast in the universities'.
Tellingly, he added, 'Until a man's academic position is
assured, he cannot dare to let it be known that he is seriously
interested in questions relating to Jewish scholarship'. Thus,
secondly, Jewish history had to blend in with the mainstream,
including adopting its chronological scheme, in order to
42Salo Baron, 'Ghetto and Emancipation: Shall We Revise the Traditional

View?', Menorah Ji, xiv (1928); Baron, 'Jewish Factor in Medieval Civilisation', 40,
37 n. 54, respectively. It is less well known that Baron's campaign was preceded by
some thirty years by Abrahams's similar view of the Middle Ages: see Horowitz,
'Jewish Life in the Middle Ages and the Jewish Life of Israel Abrahams', 155. Quotation
from Baron, Social and Religious History of the Jews, i, 24 (the same statement appears
in both first and second editions).
43 Arnold M. Eisen, 'Rethinking Jewish Modernity', Jewish Social Studies, new
ser., i (1994); Meyer, 'Where Does the Modern Period of Jewish History Begin?'.
See also the essays in Katz (ed.), Toward Modernity.

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facilitate the entry of Jews into the academy. Rot

influenced by the Wissenschaft approach, and
scribed to the traditional viewpoint of the mediev
of darkness for the Jewish community.44
Modernity in European Jewish studies, theref
moving away from a specifically Jewish history, su
characteristically 'medieval' elements - in partic
contained separateness - in exchange for accept
wider academic world. To Roth and James Parkes,
rise of anti-Semitism in 1930s Europe signalled a r
an earlier era.45 What astonishes the reader of Rot
works now is his optimism that minimizing the di
Jewish history or stressing its achievements would
such movements. Unlike his contemporaries in Germ
Roth was not forced to flee his native land to p
search: fourth-generation Wissenschaft scholars lik
Scholem and Fritz (Yitzhak) Baer were able to f
safety and institutional support only by moving to
'EPISTEMOLOGICAL RUPTURE':46 MEDIEVAL STUDIES

AFTER THE SHOAH
If attempts to draw on precedents for modern anti

often sought those precedents in the medieval period,
also apparent that constructions of the medieval perio
Jewish historiography, at least, were profoundly affec
44 Cecil Roth, 'European History and Jewish History: Do their E

cide?', Menorah l1, xvi (1929); Cecil Roth, 'Jewish History for Our O
Menorah Jl, xiv (1928), 432-3. On Roth's career, see Chaim Raphael,
Cecil Roth', Commentary (Sept. 1970); and Lloyd P. Gartner, 'Cecil Ro
of Anglo-Jewry', in Dov Noy and Issachar Ben-Ami (eds.), Studies in
Life of the Jews in England (Jerusalem, 1975).
45 Cecil Roth, 'The Medieval Conception of the Jew: A New Interpr
Israel Davidson (ed.), Essays and Studies in Memory of Linda R. Miller
1938), 183, stated that 'this ghastly [blood] libel . . . still haunts the Jew
parts of the world even at the present day'; writing in 1937, Parkes, Jew
eval Community, 384-5, highlighted the contemporary 'medieval insecurity
affect[ing] the lives of millions of Jews who had believed that it had at last become a
thing of the past'. The British periodical Picture Post had continued this tradition by
carrying pictures of the situation in Germany after Kristallnacht in November 1938
with the banner headline 'Back to the Middle Ages': Picture Post, 26 Nov. 1938.
I am grateful to Tony Kushner for drawing my attention to this article.
46 David N. Myers, 'Of Marranos and Memory', 13.

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catastrophic events of the mid tw

enormity of the Shoah effectively s
accompanied modernity, and forced
view of the so-called 'advances' of the modem over the medieval
situation. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the writings of
Hannah Arendt, whose indictment of modernity included a
bitter attack on the way modern nation states had emancipated
their Jews but had effectively denied them full equality by
requiring them to provide financial services to the state, thereby
setting in motion the conditions for the rise of anti-Semitism at
the end of the nineteenth century.47
The horror of the Holocaust also shook confidence in historical
objectivity: Jonathan Boyarin attributed the lack of serious
cultural criticism of the pre- and post-war Jewish situation
precisely to the barrier thrown up by the Shoah, and Gerd
Korman commented: 'So many dogmatic judgements were being
made about the people in the disaster that Clio's most devoted
disciples were bound to find it difficult to retain their position of
detached fair-mindedness'. The trauma is apparent in the writing
of Dawidowicz, who praised the commitment to their people and
religion of Jewish historians who, she argued, produced work not
only to satisfy their intellectual curiosity, but also 'out of the desire
to use Jewish history as an instrument for Jewish survival'.48
As Holocaust scholarship began to take off in the 1960s,
however, it provided medieval scholars with a useful language
to describe the medieval situation, in a complete reversal of the
medieval models used by pre-war writers to describe modern
developments. The word 'solution' became popular, and some
scholars seem to have felt a need to acknowledge modern
47 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd edn (London, 1958), 3-53.
See also Larry May and Jerome Kohn (eds.), Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later
(Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1996).
48 Jonathan Boyarin, Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish Memory (Minne-
apolis, 1992), 83; Gerd Korman, 'The Holocaust in American Historical Writing',
Societas, ii (1972), repr. in Michael R. Marrus (ed.), The Nazi Holocaust: Historical
Articles on the Destruction of the European Jews, i, Perspectives on the Holocaust
(Westport, 1989), 286. I am grateful to David Cesarani for this reference. See also
Philip Friedman, 'The European Jewish Research in the Recent Jewish Catastrophe
in 1939-1945', Proc. Amer. Assoc. for Jewish Research, xviii (1949), remarkable in its
appearance so soon after the catastrophe; and Dawidowicz, 'What Is the Use of
Jewish History?', 19. The danger of such attachment was clearly recognized by
Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, 12, who urged the historian to apply as much
academic rigour to his (sic) own religious group as to others.

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Jewish history even when it bore little relevance t

ject.49 Now this development may simply represen
emotive language designed for maximum impact w
ing public, but there is no doubt that it hints a
which medieval studies risks being swept up into th
approach to Jewish history, which sees all anti-Je
as in some way prefiguring the Holocaust itsel
whelming scale of the Shoah also meant that his
forced into a reassessment of the significance of
oppression that the Jews faced from medieval legi
for example, has questioned the image of Jewi
history as a period of powerlessness, but his revisi
takes him into dangerous territory when he argues
that the Jewish badge of the Middle Ages performe
function. A measure of the sensitivity of the subj
that the word 'holocaust', used by both medieval
authors to describe acts of hostility against the Je
dropped from modern discussions.50
VI
SEPARATE HISTORIES, SEPARATE PERIODS: DOES JEWISH

HISTORY NEED A 'MIDDLE AGES'?
Some of the diachronic parallels drawn by Jewish

have been based on fairly shaky foundations. Neverth
tendency to reach across wide spaces of time raises th
49 For example, Robin R. Mundill, England's Jewish Solution (Cam

Landes, 'Massacres of 1010', 101; Shlomo Simonsohn, 'Lo stato attuale della
ricerca storica sugli ebrei in Italia', in Italia judaica: atti del I convegno internazionale,
Bari, 18-22 maggio 1981 (Rome, 1983), 34. Several of the studies in the Ecclesias-
tical History Society's conference on 'Christianity and Judaism', for example,
seemed to be forcing references to the modem tragedy into their own topics of
research: see Joan Greatrex, 'Monastic Charity for Jewish Converts: The Requisition
of Corrodies by Henry III', who points out that the attitude of the thirteenth-
century Church towards the English Jews could not be dealt with entirely dis-
passionately, 'for living in our midst are survivors of the recent Jewish holocaust';
and Bagchi, 'Catholic Anti-Judaism in Reformation Germany', who states that
reading the anti-Judaic tracts of the Catholic cleric Johann Eck was now even more
unpleasant in the light of the Holocaust - both in Wood (ed.), Christianity and
Judaism, 134 and 260 respectively.
50 In the preface to the 1947 edition of his Short History of the Jews, p. vi, Cecil Roth
acknowledged that his statement in 1937, that the medieval massacres were 'unex-
ampled in history', had now been tragically overtaken by events; see also Biale, Power
and Powerlessness in Jewish History, 37-8, 67.

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as to whether periodization is actu

history. Jacob Katz, for example, ha
Jewish social history, focusing on t
ments rather than narrow, period-
divorced from their precedents and
contends, the dialectical relationship b
present for modern Jews, who define
often only partly conscious, tension w
tively breaks down much conventiona
is echoed by Amos Funkenstein, wh
that even the nineteenth-century con
hypostatization, that not everything
necessarily "fits together"'.51
But if periodization is to be rejected
to the school which sees Jewish his
story of an unending cycle of dest
Does the sense of identification with
by Boyarin 'panchrony',52 render Jew
perhaps shapeless, where neither li
51Jacob Katz, 'The Concept of Social History

Historical Research', Scripta Hierosolymitana, ii
aspect of Jewish social history was Jews' abilit
times of persecution, and he reiterated his views
works: see Jacob Katz, 'On Jewish Social Histo
Historiography', Jewish Hist., vii (1993). See als
Historian of Jewish Culture', Jewish Social Stu
Funkenstein, 'Periodization and Self-Understand
Modern Times', Medievalia et Humanistica, v (
Does the Modem Period of Jewish History Beg
Chronicle of Richard of Devizes of the Time of Ki
John T. Appleby (London, 1963), 3: 'they began i
the Jews to their father the Devil. It took them so l
the holocaust (holocaustum) was barely complete
in the Medieval Community, 70, calls the first crusa
ocaust'; Roth, Short History of the Jews, 213, refe
ing. Graetz had used the term for the Inquisition
the Marranos 'could not of course be satisfied w
doctrine of love by means of human holocausts: H
in Jewish History' (1887), in Heinrich Graetz, ed.
52 Boyarin, Storm from Paradise, 36. Margaret
Concepts of Time and Modern Anti-Judaism: Ou
(ed.), Christianity and Judaism, 490, has, by cont
time as linear and historical, in opposition to th
time where each new event is experienced as a r
mythical event. In fact the contrast is not quite s
memorializing function of Jewish history surel
repeating itself, even if the archetypal events are

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cyclical patterns can really convey its essence? If s

mean that Jewish history can never satisfactorily
into a general history still largely reliant on period
Such a question, ultimately, arises from the fact
history has developed as an almost entirely separ
within the academy, and this translates into his
which has often failed to contextualize the Jewish
Biale criticizes historians who 'fall back on the
Jewish uniqueness and assume that the Jewish trad
in some splendid isolation from the rest of the wor
however, such isolationism could be seen as a perfe
response to (indeed, rejection of) the earlier, ass
efforts of historians trying to 'fit' Jewish history into
frameworks created by non-Jewish scholars. The e
twentieth century may have convinced some schol
only way to preserve Jewish history in its authenti
nated form was indeed to maintain its exclusivit
the Second World War, there is still clear evidence of the
hostility of the academy to the field: the Spanish historian
Sinchez-Albornoz, writing in 1956, blamed 'Hebrew scholars
and many other enemies of my fatherland, Spain' for creating
an image of the Jews as victims of medieval Spanish legislation,
and Michael Graetz points out that Jewish studies did not
receive institutional support in Germany until the 1970s.53
That such a siege mentality was, and in some respects still is,
present is suggested by the numerous studies which criticize the
introspective nature of Jewish histories of the Middle Ages for
their lack of contextualization. Ellis Rivkin, for example, uses
the case of the Inquisition trials of the conversos in Spain as an
illustration of how Jewish historians have uncritically taken at
face value sources whose picture is highly coloured by the
specific motivation of their Catholic authors. Ivan Marcus
usefully summarized the problem in an article in 1990, in
which he concluded that historical positivism dominated Jewish
medieval history, assuming historical facticity in texts which
were not written as histories per se, but might have had a
53 The accusation of isolationism was levelled at Heinrich Graetz by Salo Baron:

'World Dimensions of Jewish History' (1962), in Baron's History and Jewish Histori-
ans, ed. Hertzberg and Feldman, 24. Also Biale, 'Confessions of an Historian of
Jewish Culture', 45; Netanyahu, 'Sanchez-Albornoz' View of Jewish History in
Spain', 127, 149; Graetz, 'Eine wissenschaftliche Revolution', 15.

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completely different origin and mo

seems to have hit medieval Jewish
the delay perhaps owed more than
to the urge to document uncritic
Jewish life in a post-war world i
become paramount.54
The Holocaust also shocked non-Jewish historians into 'a
new and much wider-ranging sense of the importance of Jewish
history for European history', and medieval Jewish studies
benefited from the increased interest. Ostensibly, Jewish scholars
welcomed this development: Boyarin highlights the 'luxury' for
Jewish scholars of having few non-Jewish scholars working in
their fields of history and culture, but argues that this is not an
ideal situation, and that 'Jews will only be in a safe and healthy
position when our self-image can be challenged and enriched
by an informed critique from a variety of others'. His view
echoed that of the philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, who early in
the twentieth century had argued that the new learning (that is,
the rational, scientific history exemplified by Wissenschaft) was
best undertaken by he 'who brings with him the maximum of
what is alien. That is to say, not the man specializing in Jewish
matters'.55 But Boyarin's statement perpetuates the notion that
Jewish history has to be treated differently - 'our' history can
54 Ellis Rivkin, 'The Utilization of Non-Jewish Sources for the Reconstruction of

Jewish History', Jewish Quart. Rev., xlviii (1957-8); John Edwards, 'Why the Spanish
Inquisition?', in Wood (ed.), Christianity and Judaism, 227-8, who thinks Rivkin is
over-pessimistic; Ivan. G. Marcus, 'History, Story and Collective Memory: Narra-
tivity in Early Ashkenazic Culture', Prooftexts, x (1990). Cf. the views of Dawidow-
icz, 'What Is the Use of Jewish History?', 9: 'Those medieval documents were not
history proper'; and Funkenstein's comment, Perceptions of Jewish History, 10-12,
that even without 'historiography proper' the Jews never lost their historical
consciousness. On what constitutes 'historiography proper', see Yerushalmi, 'Clio
and the Jews'; 608-13. That the reliability of medieval sources for Jewish history is
still very much a live issue is illustrated by the ongoing debate between Friedrich
Lotter and Michael Toch: Friedrich Lotter, 'Totale Finsternis fiber "dunklen Jahr-
hunderten": Zum Methodenverstfindnis von Michael Toch und seinen Folgen',
Aschkenas, xi (2001); and Toch's response: ibid. The early tendency to document,
without much critical analysis, has a strong parallel in women's history, and has
recently also been identified in the burgeoning study of medieval masculinity: see
Becky R. Lee, 'Men's Recollections of a Women's Rite: Medieval English Men's
Recollections Regarding the Rite of the Purification of Women after Childbirth',
Gender and History, xiv (2002), 225.
55 Peters, 'Jewish History and Gentile Memory', 16; Boyarin, Storm from Paradise,
104; Nahum N. Glatzer (ed.), Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought (New York,
1953), 231.

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be critiqued by 'others', but the sense of identificatio

history, being able to put oneself in the place of th
actors (an act of love, according to Colin Richmond)
be possible for those 'others'. Baron stated this explici
ing those scholars 'who look at Jewish history from
rather than (like most of their predecessors) as inside
unconscious "feeling" for what was historically rele
past generations', and Franti'ek Graus concurred (wi
menting on its desirability) that the insertion of th
own views into the history being written was more heig
Jewish history.56 These statements assume a purpos
history - one so self-evident to its practitioners tha
thought necessary to reflect on its practice until as
1990s - which is more than simply the scientific, ob
detached recounting of significant events. Put bluntly, J
tory was so entwined with Jewish self-identity that it c
undertaken by non-Jewish practitioners. (That this
issue is illustrated by a recent volume of essays whi
the matter in several contributions.) Moreover, Jew
acquired an overtly political purpose with the cre
State of Israel in 1948, which further reinforced its excl
VII
ISRAEL AND THE SHAPING OF JEWISH HISTORY
For the Zionist founders of the modem Israeli academy, history

was central to shaping the new nation. As Efraim Shmueli
demonstrates, the so-called Jerusalem School of Jewish history
56 Colin Richmond, 'Parkes, Prejudice and the Middle Ages', in Sian Jones,
Tony Kushner and Sarah Pearce (eds.), Cultures of Ambivalence and Contempt
(London and Portland, Or., 1997), 226; Salo Baron, 'Newer Emphases in Jewish
History' (1963), repr. in his History and Jewish Historians, 101; Frantisek Graus,
'Die Juden in ihrer mittelalterlichen Umwelt', in Ebenbauer and Zatloukal (eds.), Die
Juden in ihrer mittelalterlichen Umwelt, 54.
57 David N. Myers, 'Introduction', in Myers and Ruderman (eds.), Jewish Past
Revisited, 2; Simonsohn, 'Lo stato attuale della ricerca storica sugli ebrei in Italia', 31,
points out that much work has been descriptive rather than analytical. It is noticeable
that specialist Jewish history journals have only relatively recently begun to publish
historiographical articles on a regular basis, for example, Proc. Amer. Assoc. for Jewish
Research from c. 1980 (after a couple of pioneering post-war articles). Yerushalmi,
'Clio and the Jews', 607, stated in 1979 that 'a sophisticated history of Jewish histori-
ography . . . remains a desideratum', and this is still the case today. Brenner and
Myers (eds.), Jiidische Geschichtsschreibung heute, goes some way towards that goal.

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had a specific agenda to explain and m

and continuity; it heavily criticized
Jewish history by Gentile scholars (w
was following the more objective r
periodizations for Jewish history wh
Land of Israel. Israeli scholars thus found rather different
parameters for the Middle Ages which drew on the internal
tory of the community. For example, Haim Hillel Ben-Sasso
History of the Jewish People starts with the Arab conquest
Palestine in 636, but ends the Middle Ages with the spiritual
of Judaism in the seventeenth century. Ben-Zion Dinur cho
the migration to Israel of Judah the Hasid in 1700 as his
point.58 The problem with such boundaries, however, was t
they drew their importance more from their significance to
twentieth-century State of Israel than from contemporary o
ion, and do not help very much with the periodization
European Jewish history.
But an Israeli vantage point again questions the value o
fixed, chronological boundaries. Elliott Horowitz makes
apposite comment that 'under the influence of nationali
conceptions of history . . . the corporate aspects of the Jew
experience' have come to the fore as subjects for study.
Zionists, the Jewish nation had a continuous history as a sin
entity throughout history, an approach which had the pote
to smooth out the clear differences visible, for example, in
medieval period. Perhaps recognizing this, the history of
Diaspora took on new meaning: for Israeli scholars it wa
'fraught with dangers'. Some, including Yitzhak (Fritz) B
switched from studying the Diaspora period altogether, claim
that the study of medieval Judaism was too contaminated w
58 Efraim Shmueli, 'The Jerusalem School of Jewish History: A Critical Evalua

Proc. Amer. Assoc. for Jewish Research, liii (1986). Modem Israeli scholarsh
similarly rejected the Wissenschaft approach, which, far from being the 'new
sacred Torah' of Jewish historiography, is now seen as 'little more than an apo
for German-Jewish assimilation': David N. Myers, 'Between Diaspora and Zio
History, Memory and the Jerusalem Scholars', in Myers and Ruderman (eds
Jewish Past Revisited, 92-3; also Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, History of the Jewish
(London, 1976); Ben-Zion Dinur, Israel and the Diaspora (Philadelphia, 1969).
Ben-Sasson's characterization of the 'Middle Ages' opening with Muslim conquest
echoes the scheme discussed earlier in Indian history, and has similarly political
overtones. Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross, 9, discusses the trend among Israeli
historians (reflecting modem political conditions) to portray Jews as victims of an
oppressive medieval Islam, and terms this 'neo-lachrymose' history.

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prejudiced views of the State and of Christian-Jewi

As one who had witnessed and escaped the Holocaus
ticism is understandable. 'In popular Zionist poli
and historical consciousness, the Diaspora perio
excised, expunged from memory'.59 Such a mov
with the growth of interest in social and cultural h
been suggested, may diminish the importance of p
for Jewish history.60 The absurdity of trying to fix
boundaries is further pointed up by the fact that ev
been criticized as a key date, expressing the 'regnan
periodization of Jewish history which posited the
fateful turning point in Jewish history'.61
VIII
POSTMODERN POSTSCRIPT?
Because the origins of modem Jewish history lay in t

of a group of young German Jews, the subsequent
Jewish existence in Germany and the horror of the H
59 Horowitz, 'The Way We Were', 75. Also Ilan Halevi, A History

Ancient and Modem (London, 1987), 164; Myers, 'Introduction', i
Ruderman (eds.), Jewish Past Revisited, 9; and Israel J. Yuval, 'Yitzhak
Search for Authentic Judaism', ibid., 78. Isaac E. Barzilay, 'Yisha
and Shalom (Salo Wittmayer) Baron: Two Contemporary Interprete
History', Proc. Amer. Assoc. for Jewish Research, lx (1994), 29, rem
never fully articulated the 'problems' with the medieval period whi
abandon it. Graus, 'Die Juden in ihrer mittelalterlichen Umwelt', 54,
opinion that Diaspora history is essentially a continuous and undiffe
See also Myers, 'Between Diaspora and Zion', 98. Salo Baron, 'Wh
(1960), repr. in his History and Jewish Historians, 19, said that the you
his eagerness to start a new life . . . is prepared to consider the history
as relevant only insofar as it relates to the First and Second Jewis
wealths, and then start it over again in 1948'. Thus Jewish histories of
argued, privileged the heroic fighter for Israel over the religious mart
of ancient Israel over figures of medieval and early modem times: 'N
ses in Jewish History' (1963), repr. ibid., 99. Kochan, Jewish Renaiss
of its Discontents, 101, argues that the State of Israel has so associated i
Shoah as to devalue the pre-State past in Jewish history.
60 Paula E. Hyman, 'The Ideological Transformation of Modem Jew
ography', in Cohen and Greenstein (eds.), State of Jewish Studies,
Jewish Social History'.
61 Heinrich Graetz, ed. Schorsch, 42. Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish
makes the pertinent comment that in terms of a disastrous turning point,
lation of Judea after the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE was more calam
actual destruction of the Temple sixty-five years earlier. Glick, Abrah
agrees that Temple worship had assumed a secondary role well before it

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will always be intimately bound up

history. For Lionel Kochan, the real 'Jewish renaissance' is
encompassed in the efforts of the post-war community to regroup
and rediscover its past; by implication, his 'medieval' period
ends with the establishment of the Israeli nation. But because
the modern era brought such destruction, there is a strong
strand of Jewish thought which suggests that modernity is at a
end for the Jews. Michael A. Meyer highlights the Zionist
historical vision of Ben-Zion Dinur, for whom the modern era
ended with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948:
'For the last generation, Jewish history has been essentia
post-modem'. Boyarin echoes the opinion that the mid twentie
century break in modern Jewish history means that Jew
culture and identity have an especially acute relationship to t
problematics of postmodernism. Among historians, Funkenst
has engaged most visibly with postmodernist discussion, a
has recently argued that there is an increasing acceptance
among historians that there is no one, coherent master-narrat
he suggests instead that Jewish history should embrace t
'disharmonic polyphony of competing views'.62
The postmodern turn in historical studies may, ironical
reinforce the separateness of Jewish history. For if knowledg
tied to power and no one way of organizing knowledge ca
claim a monopoly, and if, therefore, Jewish history 'need no
prove itself before the bar of another culture with pretensio
to rationality and universality',63 and has already entere
postmodern phase, then by definition it may continue it
detachment as a subject of study, but with a whole new ration
for doing so. What it has in common with other areas of his
tory, nevertheless, is the fact that even though it pretends to
pan-Jewish coverage, it is indelibly marked by national trad
tions: German Jewish refugees took with them recogniza
European methodologies when they emigrated to Israel and t
United States. But their legacy has been subtly changed in bo
countries, and there is a growing awareness that the commona
of Jewish experience across regions and periods is not necessa
62 Meyer, 'Where Does the Modern Period of Jewish History Begin?', 332-
Boyarin, Storm from Paradise, p. xiv; Amos Funkenstein, 'Jewish History am
Thorns' [Hebrew], Zion, ix (1995) - quotation from English summary, p. xxii.
63 Eisen, 'Rethinking Jewish Modernity', 12.

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a given fact. There is now also a perceptible desire

the history of Jewish historiography, which inclu
dialogues with non-specialists.
IX
CONCLUSIONS
The Jewish example has much to offer the historia

regions and cultures in grappling with the proble
majority periodization of history. First, the subjectivi
nitions of the 'medieval' confirms history-writing as
the shaping of a group identity, but also shows how
can acquire a pejorative meaning to suit present-
concerns. Historians can no longer subscribe to a v
history as progressive improvement, but we might c
develop a greater sensitivity to the differing experiences
groups within medieval society at moments of p
change. Second, the word 'medieval' is, in fact, far
fully deployed with a functional meaning - that is, d
what social and political conditions the Jews lived
than one tied to absolute chronology. The common
Jewish history, as Funkenstein and Biale point out, i
subjection of the communities to a local power, a
which fluctuates between regions and periods. This f
possibility of multiple and overlapping medieval eras i
settings, might profitably be sought in other areas o
history. The most obvious groups to reconsider mi
be women and peasants, both of whom, through thei
from the political process, have laboured under l
trictions not of their own making. Both groups have b
ered to have timeless histories, but are usually still s
the categories of 'medieval' and 'modem' when stud
lessness is not a useful concept, in that it removes th
from what is still considered the 'significant' dy
event-based History. Instead, we might begin with de
'women lived in a medieval setting', for example, '
had little or no control over property', or, 'when
no separate legal identity' or, 'when they had no co
their reproductive function'. All these concepts h
deployed in women's history, but with little thought

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differentiated periodization mig

might then find that Jewish wome
rather different time-frame to that
poraries, and of their male co-relig
to identify positive attributes of the
between classes or regions when
All that this necessitates is an initial effort to define our terms
and parameters.
Third, confronting the meanings of 'medieval' reveals how
the dominance of religious observance is strongly associated
with the term in both Jewish and non-Jewish narratives, and
how 'modernity' equates to 'secularization' or reform. The
processes of the emergence of Reform Judaism might well pro-
vide new models for traditional history. We have touched upon
the apparent connection between the continuities in Jewish
religious observance and the lack of history-writing among Jews
until the Haskalah. The tension between tradition and history
(or, expressed in other terms, between Jewishness and moder-
nity), so effectively highlighted by Yerushalmi,64 has begun to
be resolved through Jewish historians widening the scope of
their enquiries beyond Judaism to Jewish culture, enabling the
uniqueness of the latter to be fruitfully integrated into 'main-
stream' history without losing its own special character. At the
same time, such broadening encourages non-Jewish historians
to enter the field. However, the Jewish example demonstrates
forcefully that the absence of history-writing, whilst it may
throw up significant obstacles to the researcher, does not mean
the absence of history. Early medievalists and anthropologists
are familiar with this phenomenon, but its existence within the
otherwise highly literate Jewish community may be a unique
case.
Fourth, the uncritical use of 'medieval' as a

modern events is an all-too-regular occurrence
our understanding of the events themselves and
of the Middle Ages. The politicization of the te
and media coverage of Islamic movements serve
force prejudices, a particularly live issue in view
situation in Israel itself.
64 Yosef H. Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982; revised
edn New York, 1989).

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Finally, one might argue that Jewish historiography

series of responses to crisis or change, rather than a
process, and this may explain its relative tardiness in
an articulated theory to accompany the undoubtedly
work of recovering the often fragmented histories o
Jewry. Again, a striking parallel with women's history
the phenomenon of separate generations of femini
rediscovering and re-articulating ideas which their pre
unknown to them, had already identified, simply thro
of institutional support for their endeavours, speak
for the Jewish experience. Could one also identify a r
pattern of crisis-response in post-1096 crusade commem
post-1492 expulsion accounts, post-1789 scientific h
the post-1945 upsurge in academic study of Jewish
And might a similar model be sought in other areas of
sparse or discontinuous historical narratives? Whilst t
caust has exerted a negative influence in that many h
earlier periods viewed the subject with a teleological l
generated a wealth of valuable scholarship on ear
history. As the urge to document and recover is n
more sophisticated analysis, Jewish history and medi
ies can only benefit from the increased dialogue. This
longer consist of seeking medieval precedents to the
the Nazi regime. Such a search is surely in vain.
University of Southampton Patricia Skinner

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Confronting the 'Medieval' in Medieval History: The Jewish Example

Author(s): Patricia Skinner

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3600790

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CONFRONTING THE 'MEDIEVAL'

1 Timothy Reuter, 'Medieval: Another Tyrannous Construct?', Medieval Hist. Jl,

? The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2003

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3 Reuter, 'Medieval', 38; Kathleen Biddick, 'Tra

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'medieval'.6 New research in history, however, still u

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Periodization is not simply a dry p

WHAT WERE THE 'MIDDLE AGES'?

The traditional term 'Middle Ages' has a theological o

9 Mordechai Breuer and Michael Graetz, Tradition and Enlightenmen

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European Renaissance of the sixteenth (in Italy, the f

14 Andrew Pettegree, 'The Early Reformation in Europe: A German

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Renaissance' followed the greatest catastrophe of all, the

DEFINITIONS OF THE JEWISH MIDDLE AGES

Historians of the Jews have, therefore, sought alternative

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order to produce what might be called a functional de

21jacob R. Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World: A Source Book

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Abrahams, this inner life revolved aro

25 Kochan, Jew and his History, p. ix: 'Jewish his

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defining the Middle Ages by the conditions in whic

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Jewish community enjoyed a 'golden

WHAT WAS 'MEDIEVAL' ABOUT THE 'MIDDLE AGES'?

The functional definitions of Ivan Marcus and David Biale

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Instead, only the need to work within hard dates is

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of the Jewish people on the twin the

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science of Judaism should explore 'all the circumstances,

37 Heinrich Graetz, 'The Structure of Jewish History', in Heinrich Graetz

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The view expressed here is very sim

39 Michael Graetz, 'Eine wissenschaftliche Revolution am Rande der Gesel

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German condemnation of 1509. The Czarist Russian

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authoritarian community and inte

WHAT DID 'MODERNITY' MEAN?

In order to understand better how Jewish historia

42Salo Baron, 'Ghetto and Emancipation: Shall We Revise the Traditional

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facilitate the entry of Jews into the academy. Rot

'EPISTEMOLOGICAL RUPTURE':46 MEDIEVAL STUDIES

If attempts to draw on precedents for modern anti

44 Cecil Roth, 'European History and Jewish History: Do their E

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catastrophic events of the mid tw

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Jewish history even when it bore little relevance t

SEPARATE HISTORIES, SEPARATE PERIODS: DOES JEWISH

Some of the diachronic parallels drawn by Jewish