Jewish communities

Jewish communities, whether in Christian areas of Europe or in Islamic Spain, were rather larger, and far more influential, than communities of heretics, because they could have a more public presence. Jews tended to live in towns, usually on major trade routes such as the valley of the Rhine. It has been estimated that Rouen, one of the largest communities, had about 3,000 Jewish inhabitants by C.1200, although this figure may well be too high. Links between towns throughout Europe and far beyond were maintained through marriage, through the travel of rabbinical students to study with famous scholars, and through trade. Wherever Jewish communities existed, however, they were subordinated to polities that upheld alien religions, and, although Muslim and Christian rulers most of the time afforded protection to Jewish subjects, they were not always able, nor always motivated, to ensure the safety of the latter against hostile mobs. In 1148 the Almohads, taking power in al-Andalus, reversed a long tradition of Muslim tolerance, and many Jews left southern Spain for the Christian north. In Christendom, periods of crusading preaching were especially dangerous for Jews: at the start of the First Crusade the Jews of Mainz, Worms, and Cologne were massacred by followers of the unauthorized popular wave of the First Crusade in 1096. At the start of the Third Crusade, a group of Yorkshire landowners, embittered by debts, massacred the Jews of York in 1190. In 1290 Edward I expelled all Jews from England, and in 1294 and 1306 ordinances of Philip IV restricted the rights of Jews in France. Commemoration of victims of persecution was one of the main responsibilities of Jewish communities, and has preserved some detailed accounts of family life. Increasingly, archaeological excavations are providing evidence of the physical presence of Jewish communities in towns. Each had to have a synagogue (some towns had more than one), a ritual bath, and a slaughterhouse; Rouen in addition had a sizeable school, built of stone. These buildings were usually grouped close together, and members of the community often lived nearby, though this was not invariably the case. Leadership within the community was shared between the scholarly elite of rabbis, who might be quite numerous (nearly half the male heads of households among the Jews of Mainz in 1096 were rabbis), and the wealthier members of the community; in negotiations with Christian authorities, the richest and most prominent figure acted as leader, and was termed ‘bishop’ of the Jews by the Christians. Very occasionally this leader might represent Jews within a whole region, as in late-thirteenth-century Franconia, where Meir ben Baruch of

Rothenburg was a spokesman for Jewish communities in dealings with the emperor.