A people apart?

The usual image of medieval Jewish society in Christian Europe is that of a community living in isolation from non-Jews, frequently persecuted and steered by religious tradition. On each of the three counts, medieval Jewish life proved more intricate. It is true that the basic religious gap between Christians and Jews was assumed by everyone and shaped their encounters, that Jews were often victims of violence, and that religious tradition underpinned how they lived and thought.1

In a 1928 article the American-Jewish historian Salo Baron argued that the situation of Jews in medieval society is frequently misunderstood. Jews were mostly city dwellers, hence a small minority, set apart by legal status and privileges, from the overwhelming majority, the peasants. Peasants were almost everywhere serfs bound to the land they worked, sold along with it if the landowner sold his holdings.3

Jews never held 'equal rights' in medieval societies, Christian or Muslim, but then hardly anyone did, a notion that would have meant nothing at the time. Jews formed a clearly defined group with certain privileges and with openings closed to the peasant mass. At the same time, as a group they always faced certain restrictions, but that was true of nearly everyone else in medieval society too, nobles aside.4

Christian and Jewish authorities shared an interest in keeping clear dividing lines between the communities: anyone who crossed the boundaries was treated by both as a danger to the social and religious order. Church and state were in a far stronger position to set and enforce rules. But when the Church insisted that Christians not share Jewish food or drink Jewish-made wine, it asked for nothing the rabbis would not also have endorsed: Jewish dietary law likewise served to maintain sharp social borders between Jews and gentiles.5

Everyday reality was another matter; consider the problem of sharing wine. Talmudic rules on producing and handling wine are strict, so many Jews took up winemaking, in places from northern France to southern Spain, supplying the community with a drink used in religious ritual (the Sabbath blessing over wine) and also a staple of daily life. By one historian's calculation, a Jewish household in Umbria late in the 1400s got through 1.5 to 3 liters of wine a day, on average.2

Despite the theoretical limits of religious law, it was known that some Jews in Italy were relaxed about tasting non-Jewish wine: Leone da Modena, a rabbi of Venice, explained in the seventeenth century that Italian forebears had always drunk ordinary wine. Christians, for their part, ignored Church warnings when it came to enjoying Jewish wine: in the fourteenth century Taddeo, a father and abbot of an Umbrian monastery, praised a Jewish winemaker's Trebbiano reds as the area's best, and monks of the confraternity of S. Stefano regularly patronized a Jewish-run tavern at Assisi in the 1380s.6