Flash Review: Jonathan Elukin, Living Together, Living Apart: Rethinking Jewish-Christian Relations in the Middle Ages

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: in polities without much in the way of infrastructure, standing armies, or police forces, in a public rhetorical tradition devoted not to calm description but to evaluation–praise and blame, violence was endemic. What the Jews suffered was not all that unusual. 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’s evidence did shake some of my lachrymose expectations: 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 (see for example Michael Toch’s review of Elukin in The Catholic Historical Review); its reception of Gregory of Tours and other historical narratives takes as straight fact what should be taken as discursive fact (and here Elukin could have looked to the model of Daniel Boyarin’s thinking with Marc Bloch and Foucault, either here or here or here or indeed here); its conception of two clear groups called “Jew” and “Christian” could have worked more with Ivan Marcus and Israel Yuvel. Ultimately, I’m unconvinced by the rosier picture Elukin promotes. Rhetoric against heretics or peasants or women could get nasty, yes, and violence against Jews should be understood within the larger context of a Christian and exploitative and masculinist society whose objective violence is all too clear to we paranoid modern critics. But surely the repeated massacres, judicial murders, and expulsions of Jews from the late eleventh century on, and the centrality of antijudaism to, say, the development of Mariolotry (warning: pdf) suggests that Jews were a special object of hatred for medieval Christians. We may be back where we started.