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ing, therefore, that during his visit to the Balkans in the 1160s
Benjamin of Tudela found an entire Jewish community of 200
families in the village of Crissa who “sow and reap on their
own land” (Travels, pp. 12 (Heb.), 10 (Eng.)). Similar forced
conversions occurred in Visigothic Spain, Merovingian Gaul,
and Langobard Italy in 613–61, and were replaced in Spain by
many sharply discriminatory laws against the Jews who survived
or were allowed to return before the Muslim conquest
of 711–2. To all intents and purposes these hostile actions put
an end to all forms of organized Jewish life there and only a
small Jewish remnant remained under Catholic domination
in central and southern Italy. Even if not all the Jews left these
countries, their ownership and cultivation of land must have
practically ceased, while returning Jews may have had little
incentive or opportunity to acquire new agricultural property.
Similar effects were later produced by the successive expulsions
of Jews from royal France, England, Spain, Portugal,
various Italian states, and other parts of Christian Europe between
1182 or 1290 and 1600.
An equally important factor was the growth of European
feudalism. Land now not only became the source of economic
power but also the mainstay of political and military force. He
who owned land exercised dominion over a multitude of peasants
whether they tilled the soil as half-free sharecroppers so
long as the Roman colonate persisted, or as villeins furnishing
parts of their produce and corvée labor to their masters.
While since Pope Gregory the Great the Church had allowed
Jews to maintain Christian coloni on their land, it became increasingly
awkward for Jews to be either vassals taking oaths
of fealty to Christian lords, or seigneurs administering such
oaths to Christian barons. Remarkably, this system persisted
in Provence up to the 12th century and beyond. In Angevin
England, kings also protected Jewish feudal holdings through
decrees such as that issued by Richard the Lion Heart in 1190
in favor of one Isaac, son of R. Joce, and his sons or, more
broadly, through the generic decree by John Lackland in 1201.
It was in the royal interest to protect the Jewish holding of a
“baronial state, claiming for themselves wardships, escheats,
and advowsons,” as did Henry III. Even the antagonistic Edward
I had to allow Jews to acquire feudal possessions if their
noble owners defaulted on the payment of their debts. But the
antagonisms aroused in such cases contributed to the baronial
revolt against the crown in 1264–66. The barons argued
that the kings selfishly promoted feudal acquisitions by Jews
because through the royal overlordship over Jews noble property
was thus indirectly transferred to the royal domain. Ultimately,
beginning in 1269, the kings themselves had to oblige
Jewish creditors to dispose of such foreclosed estates to Christian
owners within a year. In short, feudalism and Jewish landholdings
appeared incompatible in the long run and it was the
weaker Jewish side which had to yield ground.
On the other hand, unlike under Islam, Jewish landowners
were not subjected to a special land tax. “In our entire
realm,” declared *Meir b. Baruch of Rothenburg, “[Jews] pay
not tax on land. Sometimes capitalists have tried to change
economic history
this system, but when the matter was brought before us, we
disallowed it” (Responsa (Prague, 1607), 50c no. 452). In other
areas, however, the general land taxes became so burdensome
that the Barcelona rabbi Solomon b. Abraham *Adret complained
that “frequently the very best fields yield insufficient
harvests to pay the royal taxes” (Responsa, 3 (Leghorn, 1778),
no. 148). More universal and irksome was the ecclesiastical
drive to force the Jews to pay tithes on property they acquired
from Christian owners, lest the parish priests or monasteries
lose the income from such lands. Finally, the Fourth Lateran
*Council of 1215 insisted that these contributions be universally
collected from Jews, riding roughshod over the religious
scruples of some Jewish pietists who saw in such payments
subsidies for the erection of churches and monasteries devoted
to the worship of another faith.
Employment of Christian agricultural workers by Jews
became another important issue, anti-Jewish agitators of all
kinds clamoring that Jews be forced to cultivate the land with
their own hands. The nobles, on the other hand, even in Mediterranean
countries, often tried to eliminate Jewish landholdings
altogether. Such a proposal was advanced, for instance,
by the Castilian Cortes in 1329. These opponents readily overlooked
the early medieval Jewish pioneering contributions
to European agriculture. Coming from the more advanced
Eastern countries, Jewish groups settling in the West are often
still remembered in such names as Terra Hebraeaorum,
Judendorf, Żydaczów, and the like. Even a Spanish name like
Aliud is probably a derivative of Al-Yahud. As late as 1138 three
Jews of Arles bought from Abbot Pontius of Montmajour the
entire output of kermes of the district of Miramar, thus stimulating
the farmers to produce that dyestuff. They were also
very active in introducing the silkworm into Sicily and other
Mediterranean countries.
Yet it was only the opposition of the crown which prevented
general prohibitions of Jewish land ownership. Wherever
such were enacted, they usually bore a local character
and even these were not always fully implemented. Even
in fervently anti-Jewish Germany after the *Black Death of
1348–49, the assertion of the author of the Rechtsbuch nach
Distinctionen (iii. 17, 1) that “Jews are not allowed to own real
property in this country” was a clear exaggeration. In the
Mediterranean lands, especially, Jews continued to own and
cultivate landed properties; this they did to the very end of
their sojourn in Spain, Portugal, Provence, Sicily, and Naples.
Their endeavors were particularly flourishing in those areas
where extensive orchards and vineyards, located in the neighborhood
of towns, enabled them to combine fruit production
with other occupations. Queen Maria of Aragon was not
wrong when in 1436 she upheld the right of *Huesca Jewry to
dispose of the grain and wines produced on its property, “since
the Jews of the said city for the most part live as workers and
cultivators of fields and vineyards and derive a living from the
latter’s produce” (Baer, Urkunden, 1 (1929), pt. 1, 858f. no. 535).
The city council of Haro (Faro), close to the Navarrese border,
complained that Jewish and Muslim landowners in the district
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