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Jonathan Elukin

Auteur de Living Together, Living Apart: Rethinking Jewish-Christian Relations in the Middle Ages

1 oeuvres 32 utilisateurs 1 Critiques

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Living Together, Living Apart: Rethinking Je… par Jonathan Elukin
I hope this study of how Jews lived among Christians has suggested that many of the fundamental characteristics and experiences of convivencia can be seen in non-Spanish settings. Jewish-Christian relations in northern Europe is actually convivencia in a minor key. Seeing the medieval past in this light will perhaps help to eliminate or at least challenge the false dichotomy between the experience of Jews in Spain (and other Mediterranean settings) and of Jews in northern European societies in the Middle Ages. Jews of England, France, Italy, and Germany were deeply integrated into the rhythms of their local worlds. They faced many of the same challenges and uncertainties as their Christian neighbors. They navigated a world of unexpected violence but recurring stability, ad hoc policies of repression and toleration. All of this suggests that Jewish-Christian relations were dynamic and cannot be understood only in terms of persecution. Jewish-Christian interaction in medieval Europe created if not a history of toleration then habits of tolerance. (136-7)
By trying to write as though the Holocaust were not the inevitable future of European Jews, Elukin aims to shift our attention away from lachrymose history to quotidian survival. In the early middle ages, at least, we shouldn't confuse clerical antijudaism with general attitudes: how much power did Church councils really have, he asks, and what could an antisemitic king do when he could barely hold onto his (Visigothic) throne? Moreover, he argues, violence was not typical for Jews, or, at least, not particular for Jews, given the endemic violence of polities lacking much infrastructure, standing armies, or police forces, and given the general violence of medieval public rhetoric, devoted as it was to praise or blame. Instead, violence should be understood as only occasionally afflicting the Jews, who, despite it all, almost always came back to the cities or regions that expelled or massacred them. Sometimes this took a generation, as in the Rhine valley following 1096; sometimes this took centuries, as in England following 1290. But it always happened. Elukin implies, in brief, that we should not believe we know better than the Jews: if they thought it was safe to move back, why shouldn't we?

Elukin offers some fascinating evidence: Jews in early medieval Sicily established a shrine to Elijah on the model of a Christian saint's shrine; Jews in Rheims offered to bring out their Torah to help break a drought; the Jews of eleventh- and twelfth-century Speyer had to take their turns guarding the town walls; English 'ritual murder' shrines were financially unsuccessful; interfaith marriages and Christian conversions to (what we now call) Judaism occurred...every so often. But a brief work that covers this much temporal and geographical territory (from 5th-century Minorca to 17th-century Germany) must necessarily skim; it's further marred by its credulous handling of medieval historiography (for a comparison, and also for a complication of the categories of "Jew" and "Christian," see the work of Daniel Boyarin, who is fully aware of the work of, say, Bloch and Foucault); and, especially, it hardly considers the counterarguments. Rhetoric against heretics could get nasty, yes, and violence against Jews should be understood within the larger context of medieval European cultures; but surely the repeated massacres and expulsions of Jews, and the centrality of antijudaism to, say, the development of Mariolotry suggests that Jews were a special object of hatred for medieval Christians.

Furthermore, that Jews did not feel themselves to be in danger does not mean that they were not in danger. We here in their future can see patterns they couldn't. Yes, Jews held on to Spain even after 1391; they moved back to the Rhine valley after 1096; they petitioned to return to England in 1320. These were mistakes. Elukin seems to assume that Jews were rational actors. But people aren't rational, or not only rational. A comparison, mutatis mutandis to avoid any sense that I'm blaming the Jews for what they suffered: in 2010, in this time of climate change, people continue to occasionally enjoy good weather, and to live near the water; no doubt many Pakistanis will move back to the coast after this latest round of flooding subsides; no doubt we Americans will continue hyperconsuming until we meet our well-deserved end. This doesn't mean we're not in danger. It just means that, like people generally, we're insufficiently pessimistic, unable to do what we should to escape our coming doom.

For a much less friendly review, with charts on violence against Jews in medieval Germany, see Michael Toch in The Catholic Historical Review 95.3 (2009): 604-7.… (plus d'informations)
 
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karl.steel | Apr 2, 2013 |
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