30 Popes and Jews, 1095–1291
events and episodes.10 Yet it is difficult to determine whether this was particularly
characteristic of Jewish historiography, and some have argued that since both
Christian and Jewish historical narratives were relatively rare in the early Middle
Ages, Jewish ideas about history differed little from Christian; that only from the
beginning of the eleventh century did Jews deliberately try to unite sacred and
non-sacred history into a collective, unified vision of a divine design: in other
words into a schema of Jewish historical consciousness.11
The extent to which Jews interacted socially, culturally, and politically with their
gentile neighbours, and what it was to be a Jew in medieval Europe remain central to
the modern historical debate, but interpreting such a range of primary sources as
popular legends, responsa, chronicles, and disputations presents numerous prob-
lems.12 who wrote these very different texts and why? to what extent should we
accord them ‘face value’? Did they have a homiletic or didactic purpose? How may
their readership have influenced the boundaries of their meaning? Here, therefore,
an appreciation of the geographical location of medieval Jewry is crucial.13
Although the culture of the written word seems to have been generally more wide-
spread among Jewish than Christian communities, the difference appears smaller
in Mediterranean regions than in northern Europe where until the thirteenth
century clerics were usually the only Christians able to read and write.14
Correspondingly, Jewish-Christian relations seem to have been less tense in the
Mediterranean Latin west than in northern parts of Europe.15 in the eleventh and
10 Yerushalmi, Zakhor, pp.43–4; p.51; p.52.
11 For example, Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley, oxford, 1993), pp.15–16.
For the idea of collective memory, see Eli Yassif, The Hebrew Folktale: History, Genre, Meaning, trans.
J. S. teitelbaum (Bloomington, indianapolis, 1999), p.312. For discussion of the development of the
perception of historical facts down through the ages, see again Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish
History, pp.22–49.
12 David Myers, ‘introduction’, in The Jewish Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Histories,
ed. D. N. Myers, D. B. ruderman, pp.9–13; Elliott Horowitz, ‘Jewish Life in the Middle Ages and
the Jewish Life of israel Abrahams’, in The Jewish Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Histories,
ed. D. N. Myers, D. B. ruderman, pp.147–57; Abulafia, ‘Christians and Jews in the High Middle
Ages’, p.19; Schäfer, ‘Jews and Christians in the High Middle Ages’, p.29; p.36; Moshe rosman, How
Jewish is Jewish History? (oxford, portland, oregon, 2007), pp.37–8; pp.50–5.
13 Moshe rosman, ‘Jewish History Across Borders’, in Rethinking European Jewish History, ed.
J. Cohen, M. rosman, pp.16–29.
14 Haverkamp, ‘The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages’, p.12.
15 See Haverkamp, ‘The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages’, pp.14–15; Abulafia, ‘Christians and
Jews in the High Middle Ages’, p.20. For Jewish literature in the wake of the Spanish expulsion and in
the sixteenth century, see Yerushalmi, Zakhor, pp.57–75. For the mass conversions in Spain in 1391 and
the particular dynamic of Jewish–Christian relations in terms of literature and politics in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries and the problem of Conversi, see David Nirenberg, ‘Spanish “Judaism” and
“Christianity” in an Age of Mass Conversion’, in Rethinking European Jewish History, ed. J. Cohen, M.
rosman, pp.149–72; ram Ben-Shalom, ‘The Social Context of Apostasy Among Fifteenth-Century
Spanish Jewry’, in Rethinking European Jewish History, ed. J. Cohen, M. rosman, pp.173–98. For the
particular complexities involved in understanding Jewish memory in Spain in the fifteenth and six-
teenth centuries, see David Myers, ‘of Marranos and Memory: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and the writing
of Jewish History’, in Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honour of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi,
ed. E. Carlebach, J. M. Efron, D. N. Myers (Hanover, London, 1988), pp.1–21. For the complex
relationship between Jews and Christians in Spain in the seventeenth century and the Marranos, see
Yosef Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto. Isaac Cardoso. A Study in Seventeenth Century
Marranism and Jewish Apologetics (New York, London, 1971), especially pp.xii–xix; for the Marranos,
see pp.1–50; for the Messiah, see pp.302–49; pp.350–412; pp.413–72; pp.473–80. For the plight