how did the jews survive the medieval period how did the jews survive why what is it that
that gave them the tremendous perseverance to last throughout this millennial diaspora
i will stipulate for the court so to speak that we're not going to discuss the theological
basis for jewish survival it's a fascinating discussion but a little bit outside my
can as a as a historian you know i can put on my rabbi hat even though i'm not a rabbi
and we could discuss that but i think i'll do that offline right now let's try and work with
the rules of history as we understand them and try to figure out what were the mechanisms that
allowed the jews to survive an otherwise incredibly inhospitable period everybody
knows the the joke right what's the definition of a jewish holiday they tried to kill us we survived
let's eat right that's the uh none of you have to laugh because we're all familiar with it but it is
uh it's a gross over simplification and yet it has a certain junisecua it has a certain amount of you
know truth to it let's just try to understand that a little bit so one of the most traditional ways
to approach jewish history has been termed the lacrimos approach it was sallow whitmire baron one
of the greatest historians of the 20th century who coined this phrase the word lacrimos means full
of tears that you know you look back in jewish history and it is just one tragedy after another
viewed from the perspective of the late 20th century in particular after the holocaust my gosh
the the tragedies just seem to get worse and worse and worse and there's a lot to be said for that
detractors of the lacrimos approach sometimes called it the books and pogroms
view of jewish history in the sense that you know the jews are like essentially studiously
working on intellectual attainments and they write these amazing books and then they are
you know horribly persecuted with pogroms and then they go back and they write more of these books
and then they're persecuted again with pogroms now i'm not saying that's not what happened
these things definitely did happen but is it the most productive way to understand
the patterns of medieval jewish history i'm not so sure there is definitely however what to cry
about the lachrymose approach is certainly not a figment of our imagination you know sometimes
when a person says he's paranoid there really are people out to get him
when you look at the the scope of the middle ages uh extending from the the diaspora at the
up until the the great expulsion from spain you know we've got series of expulsions we've got
long lists of discriminatory discriminatory laws passed against jews we've got these horrific
charges like blood libels i mean what a meshugana thing to suggest and yet as this particular image
indicates not only the blood libels but the even more bizarre you know host desecration arguments
resulted in jews being massacred and then perhaps the the worst of the entire medieval period
uh the purge-like environment of the inquisition when we come back after the break and we look
at the sephardic diaspora one of the most terrifying things of the inquisition is that
when jews left spain they were not left alone anytime they landed in a catholic territory
they were subject to the depredations of the inquisition so there's no question the lacrimos
approach of medieval jewish history has a lot of merit it should not be tossed out the window there
is however i think corrective lenses that can be applied to understand this in a little bit
more sophisticated way one of the the questions that really opens up the entire area is you know
if it was really that bad if it was just unrelenting persecution why weren't the
jews simply massacred out of existence god forbid so many times before in history the term genocide
was actually coined only after the holocaust by a jewish man named rafael lemkin and he was
searching for a word to try and describe what the holocaust meant because the holocaust was
such a historical novum it was something totally unprecedented and we had no comparable example
of any organized group of people particularly at the state level bending their entire bureaucratic
engines of toward destruction to the idea that an entire culture should be systematically wiped out
historically there have been lots and lots of massacres lots and lots of expulsions
but the idea of genocide the idea of something like the holocaust
completely new it's only in the 20th century jews of course are not the only victims of genocides
although they tend to be the you know kind of like the most well-known and often cited example in the
holocaust but many others the uh the so the roma in the holocaust as well the uh the armenians a
lot of discussion about their treatment at the hands of the turks the ukrainians in the soviet
period with the holodomor some incredibly horrible things happen to so many peoples
why do we only see that in the 20th century why don't we see those things happening earlier so
let's come back to this question um and i think to answer it at least to approach answering it
i'm going to introduce you to something that i like to call the abramson rule of history
it's just something i say to please myself uh i i do find that undergraduates tend to remember it
and i've run into students like 20 30 years later and this is like one of the few things
they remember from any of my classes i tend to put it always on the final exam so you know
be ready um the abrams in rural history which again it's not really an abramson rule it's more
like a karl marx rule but the rule is that if you don't know why a particular historical phenomenon
exists the answer probably is money right so when you're in doubt just answer money and i think that
if we step away from the lacrimos perspective a little bit and we try to understand why were
the jews allowed to exist why nobody really thought of genocide until a much later period
of time it's because the jews were useful there are lots of ways in which even though
people might have had you know a xenophobic attitude to jews they may have had a religious
antipathy to jews they may have had a lot of reasons why for good or ill they did not like jews
the jews were very useful and quite often useful to essential elements in society the jews were i
think in many ways ironically saved by their own diaspora because for the purposes of jewish living
in a diaspora they needed to be urbanized right you simply it's very difficult to to live as a
minority if you're going to be agrarian you have to you know there are certain communal functions
that you have to have within walking distance a ritual bath a mikvah a synagogue and as you
know i like to say you have to have an asian restaurant within walking distance how can
you possibly have a community if you can't have walking distance to uh asian food that's a joke
uh the uh so the jews tended to congregate in urban centers uh sometimes villages um sometimes
cities you know by the time we get to the 19th and 20th century jews are you know around 30 of
the population of many large cities like warsaw in poland and in their urban environment they tend to
develop urban skills that require literacy and numeracy and they're very very valuable skills
jews as doctors highly prized even to this very day very strong tradition of jews in medicine
linguistic skills make jews especially useful as diplomats or on a lower level simply uh
middlemen being able to communicate with peoples of different cultures to engage in travel engage
in trade and of course as we discussed a few weeks ago money lending you know they're urban they're
they're able to make uh financial calculations and the unusual phenomenon of a ban on christian
money lending creates a unique economic niche for the jews that allows them to flourish so
even if we think about all of the built up hatred that was directed at jews over the
course of the middle ages we see that they possess a lot of valuable skills
that many sectors and society continue to value in the case of money lending in particular
the uh we see that they they derive the protection of the king himself as the servi camarai regis the
servants of the royal chamber that we discussed when we talked about finance because they're the
only people in society who are able to generate cash on a regular basis particularly because
society is so deeply invested in a pre-modern economy with lots of barter the jews are the ones
who are actually you know generating cash that can be taxed by the king and so the king doesn't
want to see anything happen to these jews they are quite literally the cash cow jews are early
on involved in minting and in the production of money and this is at the same time their salvation
because it makes them useful to society and at the same time it is a source of significant resentment
that is directed against them so even though we do see this lacrimos model happening
there's no question that the jews have certain advantages that they have cultivated
over the centuries with their long history of urbanization that makes them you know quite
adaptable to the necessities of a medieval period and let us not forget that from the
religious perspective as well there are lots of reasons why jews were actually protected
one of my teachers in university is a professor alan davies who was a specialist in the history of
church anti-semitism and he liked to say that in reality it was the church that protected the jews
for about 1500 years now i don't think he was really aware of the abramson rule of history of
course i was an undergraduate maybe a precocious one but i don't think i had fully fleshed out that
theory at the time but i think he had a real point and that is because both the church and the mosque
developed a religious modus vivendi with the jews again it's possible especially in certain periods
like 13th century europe that if the church had its way maybe we would see something a little bit
more drastic than the horrible persecution that they endured but the the fact is the demand for
the jewish presence primarily because of their economic value had to find its expression in a
religious modis vivendi a way of living with them and so we have two doctrines that are
ironic parallels to each other that carve out a little space for jews to live in both islamic
north africa and middle east and in christian europe for the muslims it is the pact of umar
which although you know by 21st century standards obviously quite discriminatory but viewed from the
perspective of the jews it meant that there was like a legal space for them to exist as long as
they you know uh accepted the disabilities of their dimmy status which included for example
a uh a punitive tax rate that was not applied to muslims and from time to time they had certain
restrictions on their clothing their architecture their settlement and and and even with all
of these rules there were the occasional uh punctuations of of violence that went beyond what
the pact of umar allowed but it still provided sort of like a medieval charter of rights for
jews not the same rights as muslims but certainly the right to exist the right to be secure in
their worship within boundaries and you know this actually preserved the jews
similarly the doctrine of witness which we saw in christian europe uh really being articulated
by people like saint augustine and especially defended by important popes like gregory the great
said that hey for our own religious reasons we need to keep the jews alive until the second
coming so they can be a witness to uh the the return of jesus right so this is you know a very
important reason why the jews could not be killed why they could not be subject to uh genocidal
impetuses because i wonder if the plural impetus is is impetai probably not sorry for getting
distracted by that but the doctrine of witness said that it would be completely inappropriate
to god forbid massacre the jews or even to convert them forcibly to christianity now as we saw also
with islam perhaps on a much greater scale in christianity there were times when this sort of
theological justification for limited tolerance war thin and you did have episodes of forced
conversions episodes of massacres but on the whole the doctrine of witness held fast and the jews
were ironically protected by both the mosque and the church because they had this sort of
space safe space in which to live when we return to our question of genocide in the 20th century
it is only when the uh power of religion declines so dramatically from the 18th century onward
that these kinds of religious justifications simply have no longer any hold on the modern mind
especially on the postmodern mind right it reminds me of that phrase in the talmud
lace din veles dayan or maybe it's lace day under laced in there is no judge and there is no
judgment right christians for example are always even when they may be you know
built up into a paroxysm of anger over a blood libel charge or something like that they still
have in the back of their mind thou shalt not kill that is still part of christianity of course
derived from judaism but when you say you know there is no fundamental document there is no prime
revelatory experience that people can look back to as a sense of uh you know ultimate responsibility
that's when a genocide really is possible it's only ironically really possible in a secular
intellectual environment god forbid so these ideas of the pact of omar and dr witness they don't work
in modernity anymore and helps to explain the unfortunate huge increase
in the savagery of violence against jews and against other minorities that we have
experienced in the last couple hundred years okay with that i want to bring this semester to a close
i want to thank you very much for your patience and your endurance i'm really looking forward
to when we come back together and we're going to start right away with the sephardic diaspora and
then we're going to continue through the modern age which is just simply so many more fascinating
chapters in the millennial history of the jewish people thank you again for being with me
you