and that distinctions were made between those who worked with various percentages of
precious metals.
Didier J.Course
[See also: AGRICULTURE; CLOTHING, COSTUME, AND FASHION;
ENAMELING; LIÈGE; MIGRATIONS ART; SOLIGNAC; TOURNAI]
Le fer à travers les ages. Colloque de Nancy, 1965. Annales de l’Est 16(1966).
Lespinasse, René de, and François Bonnardot. Le livre des métiers d’Étienne Boileau. Paris:
Imprimerie Nationale, 1879.
“Le travail dans la France médiévale.” In La France et les Français. Encyclopédie de la Pléïade
(1981), pp. 196–347.
Wolff, Philippe. “Le moyen âge.” In Histoire générale du travail, ed. Louis-Henri Parias. 4 vols.
Paris: Nouvelle Librairie de France, 1962.
JEWS
. Jews settled in what is now southern France in antiquity. New settlements took place in
the course of the Middle Ages, although many parts of northern France did not see
significant Jewish immigration until the 11th or 12th century. At its height, immediately
before 1306, Jewish population reached at least 100,000 (in a total population of 9–12
million) with the vast majority concentrated in the south but with significant settlements
in Champagne, Burgundy, and the Île-de-France. Northern French (Tsarfati) Jewry had
its strongest ties to the Rhenish communities to the east and provided the pool from
which Jews migrated to England after the Norman Conquest (1066). Southern Jews in
Languedoc and Provence were in touch with the political, social, economic, and cultural
life of other Mediterranean communities, especially in Spain and northern Italy.
A great cultural division distinguished northern Jewry from southern, especially in the
centuries after 1096, the period that saw massacres of Jews in the Rhineland and
elsewhere in the north in the wake of the Crusades. Society in the north was for the most
part provincial, even parochial; there were few large towns. Northern Jews even before
the period of the Crusades were noted for their brilliant exegesis of the Bible and for
legal(istic) learning in general. Rashi (Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac; 1040–1105) and his
followers loom large in this story. Northern Jews also developed a notable martyrocentric
self-image, expressed particularly in liturgical poetry. Southern Jews mastered these
genres as well but were renowned for their interest in secular subjects, such as
philosophy, in the tradition of the Spaniard Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon; 1135–
1204). Southern Jews were also well known for their lyric poetry, and southern society in
general for its greater cosmopolitanism based on a vibrant urban culture in the coastal
cities.
In the Carolingian period, the Jews of the south enjoyed considerable autonomy, and
their leading citizen, the so-called nasi (loosely translated as “king”), came from a family
of considerable influence with Christians and Jews. Later legends told how the Jews of
the Narbonnais had supported Charlemagne in his military engagements with the
Muslims, and the evident prosperity of the southern communities was supposed to have
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