Jews in Outremer

The first ten years of Frankish rule in Outremer witnessed significant changes in the number and size of the Jewish communities. The capture of Jerusalem on 15 July 1099 was followed by the massacre of its Muslim and Jewish populations. Some Jews survived, including those who were either ransomed or sold into slavery, and those who found refuge in the citadel were allowed to go to leave with the Fatimid garrison.

The crusader conquest thus put an end to the Jewish community in the Holy City, for the first time since the seventh century. Jews were not permitted to return to Jerusalem, as the Franks promulgated a law forbidding non-Christians to dwell in the city. As the Franks massacred much of the indigenous non-Christian population in towns taken by storm in the period 1100-1110, the Jewish communities of Haifa (mod. Hefa, Israel), Caesarea (mod. Har Qesari, Israel), Acre (mod. ‘Akko, Israel), and Beirut were temporarily extinguished, while those of Jaffa (mod. Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel) and Ramla fled on the eve of the crusader conquest.

As a result, Tyre (mod. Sour, Lebanon) and Fatimid Ascalon (mod. Tel Ashqelon, Israel) became the biggest Jewish communities in Palestine. Later Jews were allowed to return to their cities, with the exception of Jerusalem. By 1170, as attested by the Spanish Jewish pilgrim Benjamin of Tudela, there were communities in the coastal cities of Beirut, Sidon (mod. Sai'da, Lebanon), Tyre, Acre, Caesarea, and Ascalon. In the hinterland there were urban communities in Tiberias (mod. Teverya, Israel), Saphet (mod. Zefat, Israel), and Banyas (mod. Baniyas, Syria), and in some villages of Galilee. Individual Jews (often one or two families of dyers) were found in towns and villages elsewhere. Although there were Jewish communities in the principality of Antioch and county of Tripoli, most surviving evidence relates to Jews in the kingdom of Jerusalem.

The legal status of the Jews in Outremer was similar to that of the other non-Frankish communities, and thus not much different from that during Muslim rule, when they belonged to the dhimmi (protected peoples) of the Muslim state. Like all non-Franks, Jews were forbidden by law to hold landed property, and depended on Frankish lords, the king, ecclesiastical institutions, or the Italian maritime communes. Jewish males over fifteen had to pay the poll tax. Though the inhabitants of the cities enjoyed freedom of movement, those who lived in the villages were probably serfs. Jews were judged in the Court of Burgesses (Fr. Cour des Bourgeois) in criminal cases and in the Court of the Market (Fr. Cour de la Fonde) in other cases, whenever defendant and plaintiff were from different religious communities. Where both were Jews, cases were dealt with by the communal Jewish courts.

The conquest probably caused a decline in the economic conditions of the Jews of Palestine; much property was damaged, while even those communities that were not directly affected, such as those of Ascalon and Egypt, had to spend large sums of money on the ransom of captives. Notwithstanding the economic decline, Jews continued to work in their traditional professions, particularly glass manufacture and commerce in the cities, and agriculture in the countryside; other typical professions were medicine, pharmacy, and dyeing. In the thirteenth century the Jews of Acre became involved in international maritime trade, and were also increasingly active in money lending.

The conquest of much Christian territory by Saladin had a great impact on the fate of the Jewish communities, as many of them remained under Muslim rule after 1192. A community was established once more in Jerusalem, but Ascalon was abandoned when the city was razed to the ground on Saladin’s orders. The largest community was at Acre, which grew as a result of immigration from Europe and the neighboring countries (particularly Egypt). Acre became one of the most important centers of Jewish studies in the entire region, and the ordinances of its rabbinical court were accepted even by the communities of Egypt and Syria. The reestablished community of Jerusalem was heterogeneous, including refugees from Ascalon, Jews from North Africa, and immigrants from France and England who arrived in

Jihad

1209-1211. These three groups led a quarrelsome existence until the destruction of the city walls by the Ayyubids (1219), when most of the Jewish population left. A new community was established after 1244, but dispersed on news of the Mongol invasion of Palestine in 1260.

Attempts to reestablish a community in Jerusalem during the second half of the thirteenth century failed. Rabbi Moshe ben Nahman (Nahmanides), who moved to Jerusalem from Spain in 1267, replaced the precept of pious pilgrimage to the Holy Land with that of its settlement; he considered the return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land as a historical necessity and argued that the defeats of the Franks and the state of constant warfare were proof that no gentile nation could hold the land of Israel for long, since it was divinely destined for the Jewish people. Nahmanides restored a house to serve as Jerusalem’s synagogue, but after only a few months he moved to Acre.

The second major community in the thirteenth century was Tyre, which had been continuously in Christian hands since 1124, and which grew due to immigration from the West, while communities also existed in Beirut and Gaza. Those of Jaffa, Caesarea, and Sidon evidently disappeared, but the rural communities of Galilee were little affected by political upheavals. The community of Saphet was relatively large, but seems to have disappeared during Frankish rule of the city (1240-1266) and was only reestablished following the Mamluk conquest in 1266. Tiberias, a traditional burial place for the Jewish diaspora from the third century, remained an important place of pilgrimage for Jews. At Hebron (mod. Al-Khalil, West Bank), the site of the Tombs of the Patriarchs, a community was reestablished after 1187, having been abandoned by Jews in 1099.

The general trend during Frankish rule was that the communities in the coastal cities flourished, whereas those in the hinterland declined. The fall of the residual kingdom of Jerusalem in 1291 put an end to the two most important Jewish communities in Palestine, Acre and Tyre, and also affected the close contacts between the Jews of Palestine and Europe, resulting in a decline in pilgrimages and immigration from Europe. The Jewish communities reverted to the predominantly Eastern character they had had before the crusader conquest, with links primarily to the Jews of Egypt.

-Sylvia Schein

Bibliography

Ashtor-Strauss, Eliyahu, “Saladin and the Jews,” Hebrew Union College Annual 27 (1956), 305-326.

Goitein, Solomon D., “Geniza Sources for the Crusader Period: A Survey,” in Outremer: Studies in the History of the Crusading Kingdom of Jerusalem presented to Joshua Prawer, ed. Benjamin Z. Kedar, Hans Eberhard Mayer, and R. C. Small (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi Institute, 1982), pp. 306-322.

Prawer, Joshua, “Social Classes in the Crusader States: The ‘Minorities,’” in A History of the Crusades, ed. Kenneth M. Setton et al., 6 vols., 2d ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969-1989), 5:59-115.

-, The History of the Jews in the Latin Kingdom of

Jerusalem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

Schein, Sylvia. “The Jewish Settlement in Palestine in the Crusader Period (1099-1291),” in The Jewish Settlement in Palestine 634-1881, ed. A. Carmel et al. (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1990), pp. 23-39.