we're going to start with a discussion of jews in the medieval economy and it's going to be a little
bit more broadly focused than some of the other talks especially the more biographic talks that
we've done before and then we're going to really focus in on a couple of aspects of the jews in the
medieval economy specifically commerce and then finance um so these three short talks will give
you a sense however about the nature of the jewish economy in the medieval period particularly around
the high middle ages in particular so let's start by talking a little bit about agriculture which is
not one of the areas in which jews were especially active during the medieval period historically
speaking jews have of course been farmers uh not only in the biblical period when this was the
main economic mainstay of the jewish people as we discussed way way back in this jewish history lab
series but also in the modern period when you come to modern israel and as a matter of pride the jews
specifically moving to israel attempted to return to the land now to a certain degree this was
motivated of course by the necessity of producing agriculture for this increasing population in the
middle east but also because it was a reaction to kind of 19th century ideas uh much of the
thought in europe in the 19th century boat on the both on the right wing of the spectrum and
the left wing of the spectrum as both of these areas were developing kind of like look down on
any people or population that was not specifically connected to agriculture there was this idea for
example if you look towards socialism there was this idea that you know deriving economic profit
from the fecundity of the land was somehow healthier more normal more you know um
honest as it were than commerce because commerce after all deals with buying things cheaply and
then artificially selling them for a higher price that's how commerce works and for much of the
medieval period as well there's been this kind of disdain for commerce it was always considered some
kind of sharp behavior or shrewd behavior and jews and christians and to my mind i believe muslims
all had a certain amount of hesitancy over the nature of commercial profit and sought to regulate
that it was the idea for example of the so-called just price the correct amount that a uh an object
may be you know inflated in value in order to cover the costs of the the seller the person
who was the middleman and we have discussions of this in the talmud as well by the way it's it's
something like a 35 markup was considered more or less normal but there are so many reasons to
um avoid that or get around that so anyway so on the left you have this idea that that jews
being a traditionally urban people for much of their diaspora history were somehow you know like
economically unhealthy or even immoral and on the right wing of the spectrum then you have
the development of this idea of the folk uh which would later become a very powerful ally
of the idea of race that somehow the character of a people was formed by their connection with the
land that somehow by digging their fingers into the soil of their native land for generation upon
generation somehow this created a unique character of the italians with their things and the you know
northern european aryans with their things and that was like part of like what it meant to be
a person was you developed the culture that you had somehow imbibed by having generations of
genetic attachment to the land the jews of course did not have this attachment to the land and so
therefore they were somehow unhuman they were like not human in the same way as others were
humans so there was a very big push in the 19th century to try to get jews back to the land and
we see this not only in israel we also see it in all kinds of colonial projects in the americas in
in the uh the russian empire and so on where there's like encouragement for jews to engage
in farming and they largely succeeded i mean for israel's agricultural input output is is really
impressive and so on but there it contradicts a large trend in jewish history which is primarily
towards um other types of commerce as we shall see agriculture posed a lot of risks without
necessarily all the benefits that jews would associate with a profitable endeavor uh first
is that you know jews are frequently expelled from a given region uh france expelled the jews
i think was four times in the 14th century or three times the 14th century it was
every other generation you could be expelled from your land if you had invested
all of your income all of your wealth in land then of course it was completely gone
because it's hard to run with 40 acres on your back there were areas where jews were forbidden
to own land but those were actually more of the exception than the rule it was simply not a very
wise investment for jews not only agriculture but even like rental properties because
who's to say that you'll be able to keep that land if the political environment changes and you're
uh you're dispossessed of it uh furthermore it's a really hard job you know i once spent
a summer weeding and uh it was horrible you know you're bent over in the sun and uh you're thirsty
and you're picking you know the carrots apart from each other so they all grow at the the best rate
i mean my gosh you would want to spend eight hours a day doing that by hand really really hard work
and you know if the crops go bad forget about it so lots of reasons why jews would not want
to go into agriculture uh and a lot of reasons why other forms of proper work could now the other the
last and perhaps the most important thing in many ways that could have started with this idea really
is the fact that the jews were not especially in medieval europe slotted in the right spot in
the corporate structure of medieval society i'm going to explain what that basically means but
essentially jews were not expected to become farmers and jews as farmers would have been
way out of step with their role in society and when i say rule i can do so for the
medieval period because the way much of medieval europe thought people occupied roles in society
not so much by their individual identities as we would let's say for example in western europe or
in america but by their class and in the case of jews by their religion they occupied a different
box very cast-like almost like the hindu system of varna not nearly as extreme but in that same
family where they weren't supposed to be doing any farmers farming that wasn't for them so let
me explain a little bit about what this corporate structure of medieval society was and it'll be
much easier to understand the jews role in that economy okay so here's a basic schematic of what
corporate society looks like you have the king okay the the he's the chief officer of the country
and then you have below him the nobility that are typically charged with uh running or running
particular sections of the uh the country geographically and then below them this map is not
to scale a huge massive amount of peasants right those are three basic corporations in medieval
society there are more but these are the basic ones and the idea is that the king and the nobles
provide protection to peasants right this is kind of one of the working theories as to how
feudalism developed is very old working theory but the idea is that those elements of the population
that were much better warriors or organizers or leaders sort of rose to the top and they took on
the responsibility of providing protection for those classes underneath them and in return for
that because after all they could not be farming and you know defending the border at the same time
so the uh the peasants and to a certain degree the nobles provided taxes to the king right
the the money flows upward and the protection flows downward if it sounds a little bit like
a protection racket you might not be that far off from the idea of how this works but nevertheless
that's the sort of working idea of how feudalism was supposed to work the vassals the lower classes
and classes not precisely the right word but close owed fealty to higher classes who in return
had to protect them that was kind of like the compact that held it all together this was
paralleled to a certain degree in the church you had the pope and we're specifically now thinking
about catholic western europe although much of this is is broadly generally true for uh the
eastern world as well and below the pope in a hierarchical structure are the clergy and
we've got a whole bunch of different groups in the clergy not just the priesthood but you also have
monks and uh nuns and so on and they often they occupy slightly different roles and believe below
them the big mass of christians and similar to the arrangement with the kings nobles and peasants
you have salvation coming down that is the pope and the clergy provide those essential religious
services uh and education uh as appropriate and um you know salvific acts that allow the lower
classes to achieve their place in heaven and in return the lower classes the christians in general
and then upwards of clergy and the pope provide tithes provide a type of taxation that keeps the
entire system working now you might ask when you look at these two structures you might ask well
who is ultimately in charge and in fact that's something they worried about as well because in
some periods it was clear that the king was in charge of a given region but on a philosophical
level one could make an argument that the pope really should be in charge of european society and
the church sometimes was ascendant and this meant that there were times when the interests of the
king took precedence which was typically good for the jews and there were times when the interests
of the pope took precedence which was typically but not uniformly bad for the jews as we shall see
this is essentially how the corporate medieval structure of society looked uh but now the biggest
question you may have is where do the jews fit in what box do they occupy they're certainly
not nobles peasants are overwhelmingly involved in agriculture so they're neither of those boxes
they're not the clergy and they're not christians so where do they fit so here's where jews fit in
it's really important they occupy a position which was later called sari kamarai regis which means
servants of the royal chamber the jews ultimately ended up becoming specifically
subservient only to the king and that was largely because of their economic role in society
here's a really beautiful piece that probably does not depict two jews
although they're engaged in a classically jewish occupation here the reason why they're
probably not jews is because the woman here is clearly reading a christian book that shows a
madonna with child there there's also by the way since we're down here a little interesting
sort of peak in the mirror of uh the artist probably looking on as he paints this picture
but the idea of this image which is a 16th century dutch work this is a money changer and his wife if
you looked at those boxes i showed you earlier in the corporate structure who exactly is making the
money here who exactly is working literally in coin the peasants certainly not they're working
with goods they're producing agricultural output the nobility is not out there mining the rocks
for silver and gold and so on um who is actually producing and circulating coin in this environment
in order to collect taxes for much of medieval european history the nobility and the king had
to collect it in different ways either taxes in kind which meant you know barrels of wheat and uh
hides of foxes and things like that or corvae which is essentially
taxes in time where the peasants would be required to spend a certain number of time certain number
of days per week or per month farming the king's large land holdings or the nobles land holdings
or the most valuable type but the hardest to come by cash the peasants typically did not hold much
cash all of their transactions were affected with barter and when they paid their taxes they paid
it typically either in kind their agricultural output or in the sweat of their brow by actually
working for the king so the jews here occupy this fascinating position as cervi camareires as
servants of the royal chamber you could also translate that as serfs or slaves maybe of the
royal chamber in which because their economic activity does involve actual cash money uh they
collect a lot of this very valuable coin and their taxes to the king are paid directly to the king
with no intervention of the nobles at all so even though they don't actually occupy a box in that
corporate structure that i showed you they wrote their box as it were it's kind of stuck off to the
side and there's an arrow going straight to the king because they produce that money i should also
point out uh as i think i did earlier but let's you know emphasize it once again that just like
we saw when we talked about the jewish communal structure in the middle ages the king didn't deal
with jews as individuals at all nor did he deal with christians as individuals either he dealt
with them as an entire community meaning if you were a jew that lived in let's say regensburg
you were part of the collective that was required to pay a certain amount of money to taxes
to the king every year and that amount of money was collected by your community leaders in the
kahila and they would forward the correct amount to the king directly you yourself were basically
unknown to the king there were exceptional individuals we'll talk about them god willing much
later the so-called court jews but otherwise it was done entirely on a communal fashion
and the jews had this ambiguous position where on the one hand because they produced
so much of this cash they were very valuable to the king but on the other hand in order to
keep doing their job which the king liked very much they were protected directly by the king
and so the nobles and the peasants would undertake great risk if they were to harm jews in any way
because that meant that they were interfering with the king's own revenue stream so that's the the
risk and benefit associated with this kind of activity of being cervical regis actually turned
out to be a preservative for the safety of juice in um in europe now it also meant however that
as we saw in the earlier diagram of the two arrows with the king and the pope facing to each other
the the church state power uh was often fought over who controlled the jews
sometimes if the church was especially doctrinaire and wish to impose a certain you know pious
wish to impose some pious persecution of the jews on some doctrinal point and and
the king was not powerful enough to protect them then he would lose that revenue stream
on the other hand there were times when the king could become
heavily indebted to the jews and would find it much more expedient to simply cancel his
debts by expelling them and the church might be powerless to protect the jews who were after all
given a particular slot in eschatological history by people like saint augustine saying that the
jews have to serve as a witness so the jews were kind of like buffeted by powerful forces
much more powerful than they largely because of their business acumen so at this point i've given
you kind of a sense of like where they fit in the economic structure i'd like to talk next about
how they exactly made that money first in terms of commerce and then in terms of finance
you