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Living Together, Living Apart: Rethinking Jewish-Christian Relations in the Middle Ages, by Jonathan Elukin. Princeton University Press, 2007. 193 pp. $24.95.
With Living Together, Living Apart, Jonathan Elukin sets out to address one of the most important yet least studied conundrums in the field of Jewish-Christian relations in the Middle Ages. “How,” Elukin asks, “did Jewish communities continue to survive in Europe despite facing what seemed to be endless persecution, violence, and expulsion?” (p. 1). Arguing that the focus has for too long been on Jewish suffering at the hands of R. I. Moore’s “persecuting society,” Elukin sets out to restore the balance, providing a survey of Jewish-Christian relations at their most peaceful and settled.
In the first three chapters, Elukin searches medieval Europe from late antiquity through the thirteenth century for examples of Christian-Jewish coexistence. Chapter One, covering late antiquity through the early Middle Ages, compares the fate of Jews in 5th-century Minorca, Gregory of Tour’s account of Merovingian Gaul, Gregory the Great’s impressions of Italy at the turn of the 7th century, and the legislation of Visigothic Spain. Chapter Two explores how the development of separate religious and secular identities in the Carolingian empire acted as a buffer between Church-sanctioned violence and the everyday lives of Jews, before exploring the development of a fierce local loyalty that trumped religious difference after the breakup of a united Carolingian power. A quick look north, at the close relationship between Jews and some German rulers, concludes the chapter. Chapters Three and Four explore the High Middle Ages. The former focuses on the cultural and intellectual integration made possible by the Hebraism that swept through academic Europe during the twelfth-century renaissance, as well as the increasingly accessible experience of conversion, while the latter explores the social connections that led Christians to shelter their Jewish neighbors during times of crisis. Elukin writes for a non-specialist audience—the book is a response to questions from his undergraduate classrooms—and the work provides a good general survey of exactly how Europe’s Jews survived, and indeed thrived, in between violent pogroms and persecutions.
In the final two chapters, Elukin takes a more thematic approach to his subject, reassessing the impact of “violence” and “expulsion” on the attitude and outlook of Europe’s medieval Jews. Elukin seeks to downplay the severity of both. The anti-Jewish polemic, including tales of ritual murder and blood libel, long held up as prime examples of medieval anti-Judaism, he claims, “probably circulated only among a literate clerical elite” (p. 94). Violence was usually in the form of “unexpected outbursts” (p. 99) instigated only by “the occasional radicalized friar” (p. 94), the “quirks of religiosity of individual rulers or clerics” (p. 96), and maverick monks “with a particular animus toward Jews” (p. 103). According to Elukin expulsions, too, were the result of “individual rulers at moments of crisis” (p. 117) and “royal religious prejudices” (p. 118) rather than of a concerted anti-Jewish program sponsored either by church or state. Instead of viewing these events as frightening and insurmountable obstacles, Jews confidently maneuvered through complex local and political relationships to survive and thrive. Elukin concludes the work with a call to expand our current understanding of Spanish convivencia to include the “ongoing habits of pragmatic tolerance” (p. 138) that he believes best characterize Christian-Jewish relations across medieval Europe.
It is in these last two chapters that I take issue with some of Elukin’s arguments. The sheer number of “radicalized” leaders whose religious fervor is directed against the Jews becomes impossible to explain without the sort of systematic church program Elukin so staunchly denies. By whom were these men and women radicalized? And why were so many, lay and religious alike, primed to take out their frustrations, whatever the trigger, on local Jewish populations? No mention is made, amongst talk of Jews sheltered by Christian neighbors, of those who saw Kiddush ha-Shem as the only escape from Christian violence.
The question that Elukin asks is the right one. The paradox of Jewish persecution and simultaneous survival in medieval Europe demands to be addressed. Yet if historians of the past century have been too quick to emphasize Jewish suffering, Elukin’s response swings the pendulum too far in the other direction. Historians must try to understand, rather than resolve, the contradictions of Jewish-Christian relations in Medieval Europe. Negotiating medieval Europe was a complex task for the Jewish community, and Christian attitudes towards the Jews in their midst were multi-faceted. If medieval Jews lived with anything, it was not the confidence of sure survival or the certainty of ultimate defeat, but the messy reality of both possibilities. Nevertheless, in broaching the subject of more positive relations, Elukin succeeds in opening the door for historians to embrace this paradox head-on.
Sarah Lamm
Downing College
Cambridge University |
