Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, “Hebrew Documents and Justice: Forged Quitclaims from Medieval England,” in Nora Berend, ed., Religious Minorities in Christian, Jewish and Muslim Law (5th–15th centuries) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), 413-438 (original) (raw)
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Cromohs: Cyber Review of Modern Historiography, 2023
This study presents an original manuscript of the European Genizah containing the earliest account book of a Jewish moneylender in Italy. This document, which dates back to the early fifteenth century, sheds new light on the economic history of the Jews, credit issues in north Italy, Jewish–Christian economic relations and material culture through references to pawned objects, as well as the history of accounting practices. Its paper leaves were dismembered and reused to bind a different book of Italian origin. As with thousands of other fragments found in bindings across Europe, the recycling of codices paradoxically assured their survival. The sheets of the ledger were discovered, detached and conserved when the manuscript was restored at the end of the nineteenth century.
The collective Western mind still today erroneously sees “the Jews” of medieval England as moneylenders. It is generally accepted that the Jews functioned to create a more liquid economy and to provide the crown with much needed financial support. However, while it is true that a select handful of Jews did operate as professional moneylenders, I will argue that the vast majority of Jews could not, and did not, operate as professional financers. The method I have employed to prove this thesis is to conduct a close economic analysis of the document E. 101/249/4. This document is the result of an archa scrutiny (an archa was a chest, held in each major town, within which were deposited any and all loans contracted within the town) that King Henry III ordered in preparation for the collection of his 1241-42 tallage of 20,000 marks. It is composed of two sections. The first section is found on membrane one recto. It is a summary of the returns of the aforesaid tallage and is especially valuable because it provides the names of every adult Jew in Lincoln in 1241-42. The second section provides the actual results from Henry III’s archa scrutiny. It contains eight hundred and eighty-six loans and takes up the vast majority of the document. The results of this economic study convincingly refute the idea that all Jews lent money and that all moneylenders were Jews. Of the one hundred and fifteen Jews listed in the first section (membrane one recto) only thirty-eight had loans in the Lincoln archa; the remaining seventy-seven Jewish residents of Lincoln simply did not lend money. Further, by carefully analyzing the loans found in the archa, one finds that a full seventy-four percent of all loans found in the archa were held by only ten men, and thirty-two percent were held by Aaron of York alone! The remaining seventy-five Jews with loans in the archa collectively held only twenty-six percent of the value of all the loans contained in Lincoln’s archa. These results are significant, for they overturn the nearly ubiquitous assumption that “the Jews” functioned only as moneylenders in medieval England. It is an assumption that is well entrenched in even academia today, and one that I hope to begin to dissolve with this thesis.
The Jew in the Text: What Christian Charters Tell Us about Medieval Jewish Society
Th is paper will explore the viability and limits of using non-Jewish charters for the reconstruction of medieval Jewish history. While the settlement charters have long been recognized as important sources for institutional history, their value to the understanding of the Jewish community has yet to be fully explored. Analysis of these documents has traditionally been limited to determining the level of royal protection of Jewish rights or the nature of Jewish-Christian relations. Th ese charters were, in large part, products of Jewish requests. In locating the voice of the Jewish petitioner within these charters it becomes possible discern the priorities, needs and fears of the medieval Jewish community. Furthermore, these documents also suggest ways in which Jews used Christian secular authority as an instrument for the establishment of political structures internal to their communities.
Contracts: Rabbinic Literature and Ancient Jewish Documents, 2006
The Literature of the Sages, Second Part: Midrash and Targum; Liturgy, Poetry, Mysticism; Contracts, Inscriptions, Ancient Science; and the Languages of Rabbinic Literature (S. Safrai, Z. Safrai, J. Schwartz, P. J. Tomson [eds.]),, Assen 2006, pp. 423–60.