JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

Rise of Christianity and Islam
Under the Roman Empire, to the fourth century, the position
of the Jews was on the whole good. Although looked down
upon, both because of the “superstitions” to which they adhered
and their lowly economic status, their religion was tolerated,
and from 212 they enjoyed Roman citizenship with all
its advantages and responsibilities along with the other free
inhabitants of the empire. With the Christianization of the
empire, however, their position deteriorated, though at first
socially more than juridically, the ground being prepared for
their systematic degradation which was to become the rule in
Christian Europe in the Middle Ages. The Barbarian invasions
probably affected the Jews, as a mainly urban element, more
than the rest of the population, so that it seems their numbers
were drastically reduced in this period. Moreover, the new rulers,
once they adopted Christianity – especially in its Catholic
form – were unable to preserve the delicate balance between
sufferance and intolerance that had been achieved under the
earlier Christian emperors – all the more so since this period
witnessed the periodical triumph of religious fanaticism in the
*Byzantine Empire, setting a baneful example to the rest of the
Western world. Restrictions were imposed by the Church at
an early date; from 305 successive *Church Councils repeatedly
reissued discriminatory legislation. Hence the period between
the fifth and eighth centuries was punctuated all over
Europe by religious riots, coercion, compulsory baptisms, and
widespread expulsions, culminating in the great disaster to the
Jewish community of Spain under the Visigoths, about which
we are particularly well informed. The Jewish population of
Western Europe was now, it seems, reduced to relative unimportance,
except perhaps in some parts of Italy.
Conditions changed for the better in the eighth century.
The Arab conquests opened up Spain to new colonization
which seems to have attained significant proportions – at first,
it is true, in a quasi-Asiatic cultural setting – but this was destined
to be temporary, waning with the Reconquest and the
expansion of the Christian kingdoms. Simultaneously, and
apparently with the sedulous encouragement of the Carolingian
rulers in France, Italy, and Germany, Jewish merchants
and traders (typified in the *Radanites who had their base in
the Rhone delta) became active in Western, then in Central
Europe, establishing a fresh nexus of Jewish communities or
reinforcing the old. In Eastern Europe – an outlet for their
exports of the manufactured products of the West, a source
of their purchases of raw materials and slaves – they presumably
joined up with older Jewish settlements that had spread
northward from the Black Sea and Crimea or along the Danube
valley. This period moreover coincided with that of the
near-extinction of the old settlement in Ereẓ Israel and the
drastic dwindling of that of Mesopotamia and the neighboring
lands, due in part to political and in part to economic causes.
The result was that in this period, approximately between 800
and 1050, there took place either a mass transference of the
Jewish population from East to West, or else a phenomenal
expansion of the one and dwindling of the other which had
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much the same effect. From the 11th century, in any case, the
center of Jewry and of Jewish intellectual life was transferred
to Europe, where it was to remain for nearly 1,000 years. The
new settlers were moreover of a different type in many respects
from the old. They (especially those of Northern Europe)
might be termed “Talmud Jews” who guided their lives
in every respect according to the detailed prescriptions that
had become evolved recently in Ereẓ Israel and especially
Mesopotamia, and considered that the study of the Talmud
was the greatest of religious duties and of personal pleasures.
Hence, when the great talmudic academies of Mesopotamia
decayed in the 11th century, those of Northern Europe – especially
France and the Rhineland – were ready to take their
place; and the former rabbinic traditions were perpetuated
there for centuries. In the south of Europe, particularly in
Spain, a somewhat different intellectual tradition prevailed,
literature, belles lettres, philosophy, and poetry attaining new
heights. At the same time, the position of the Jews, straddling
the Latin-Christian and the Arab-Islamic cultures, qualified
them in a unique degree to perform the function of middlemen
in intellectual as well as economic activities; and while
on the one hand they participated in the scientific and philosophical
activities of the Islamic world, on the other they were
to a great extent responsible for the transference of the superb
fruits of these activities to the 12th-century Christian world,
and so helped to bring about the Latin renaissance and the
revival of learning in Europe.
Medieval Position
It is possible to exaggerate the well-being of the Jews in Europe
in the Dark Ages, but there can be no question as to the
great and tragic difference that resulted from the *Crusades.
Hitherto, attacks on the Jews had been sporadic and occasional,
but from the onslaught on the Jewish communities in
France and the Rhineland in 1096 they became commonplace
during any period of religious excitement or incitement; not
only when the Christian forces marched against the infidels
or heretics, but when such preposterous charges as that of
the *blood libel (from 1141) or of the desecration of the *Host
(after 1215) were brought up against the Jews. The stimulus
given to European trade by the Crusades and the expansion
of the Italian trading republics undermined the position of
the Jewish international merchants. As a result of this, combined
with the fact that at this period the Church’s attack on
the practice of usury reached its climax, the Jews of Northern
Europe especially were now driven into the profession of
*moneylending – encouraged and protected by their rulers,
whose systematic and rapacious system of taxation converted
this into a primary source of revenue for themselves. On the
other hand, the profession of moneylending, besides affording
ample leisure for the talmudic study that had become the
all-pervading passion of Northern European Jewry, endowed
them temporarily, in the intervals of spoliation, with a remarkable
degree of economic well-being, so that the Jews of France,
Germany, and *England in the Middle Ages constituted one of
ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 6 555