The Middle Ages: An Introduction

Wherever Jews lived in the Middle Ages, they felt themselves first and foremost as the people of Israel who had crossed the Red Sea and had stood at Sinai, who had seen Jerusalem burned by the Babylonians and by the Romans, who had studied in the Babylonian academies of Sura and Pum- peditha and in the successor schools of Muslim Spain.

Their link to that past was not historiography, although Yosippon (a history attributed to Josephus but actually written in Italy in the tenth century) was a popular text used to explain the present through the ancient past. Familiar archetypes of suffering were reassuring, particularly when they could be linked to messianic hopes. The ‘wars of Gog and Magog’ could be applied to any period as the necessary upheaval of society heralding the coming messianic age. The Akedah (the ‘Binding of Isaac’, told in Genesis 22) could be applied to the Jewish children slaughtered by the Crusaders just as our age linked it to the concentration camps. Not the specific events ofhistory, but the ongoing pattern of persecution had to be fitted into a divine plan. Striving to understand Jewish historical thinking in the Middle Ages, Professor Gerson Cohen writes, ‘Schematology always betrays a very superficial interest in the events themselves, but a deep desire to unravel their meaning and their place in the plan of history as a whole.’² But meaning and purpose, within the continuum of medieval Judaism, were found in the examination ofjewish law beginning at Sinai and moving into the rabbinic decisions of one’s own time—the shalshelet ha-kabbalah (chain of tradition). The medieval Jew lived within that law and experienced all of past history within his own life. In Yosef Yerushalmi’s words: ‘In the Middle Ages, as before, Jewish memory had other channels— largely ritual and liturgical—through which to flow, and only that which was transfigured ritually and liturgically was endowed with a real chance for survival and permanence.’³ The medieval experience entered Judaism in that fashion, albeit incompletely: penitential prayers, fast days and certain rituals recorded those events alongside the communal records, but only as one aspect of a Jewish faith which remembers the paradigmatic and non-historical events of the Book of Esther with far greater clarity than the massacre of Mainz.

The medieval period had to encompass within itself that flow ofjewish history which had moved from biblical times through the Hellenistic period and the Talmudic age into the world of Islam where rabbinic Judaism flourished. Often assigned to Central Europe, the Judaism of that time cannot be understood unless one sees the commingling of ‘Ashkenasi’ (Germany and Central Europe) and ‘Sephardi’ (Spanish and Mediterranean territories) Jewry. The standard text of Jewish life, Joseph Caro’s Shulchan Aruch (first printed in 1567), describes the Sephardic experience; its commentary stresses the Ashkenasi variants. The legal codes of medieval Jewry rise out of the Babylonian Talmud; but that text is seen and mediated by the great Sephardic interpreters, notably Maimonides. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 had tried to isolate the Jews from the outside world: Jews and Christians were not to dwell together, trade together, work together. Medicine, handicrafts, almost anything except pawnbroking and the old-clothes trade was closed to them. They were driven from the rural areas, and confined to what became ghettos in the city. Isolated, persecuted (expelled from England in 1290, from France in 1306 and 1394, from Spain in 1492, from Portugal in 1497, from most German cities during the Black Death in 1348-9), they yet achieved their particular identity as Jews and as a people at that time—it may well have been their chief contribution to the medieval world.⁴ An indomitable optimism and assertion of this world as against the world-to-come, a nonconformity in terms of the outside structures of thought and a total programme of continuous education had fashioned a Judaism which permitted the existence of the most isolated, smallest Jewish communities. The synagogue was the expression of their corporate identity; and from the rabbis and their meetings there issued takkanot—social legislation which dealt with civil and religious matters under a system of self-government which yet kept in touch with the world outside. It was not a perfect system: the rich and the scholars were slow to share their privileges; but Judaism stressed the prophetic vision of social justice, and education was far broader than that of the neighbours. Underneath rabbinic formalism there was always the quest for universal meaning, for a shared life of Jewish testimony to the world. The Siddur, the Jewish prayer book, expressed the rabbinic theology of the near and far God. The Crusades and pogroms brought knowledge of the far God; but the experience of martyrdom by Israel, God’s ‘suffering servant’, reached towards an awareness of the near God which was taught by mystics but lived by the common people.

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Source: Clarke Peter et al. (eds.). The World's Religions. Routledge,1988. — 995 p.. 1988

The Middle Ages: An Introduction

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