THE \VESTERJ\ MEDITERRANEA:\ KH\'GDOM 1200-1500Jesus's time had constituted the divine law, and at the End
of Time the remnant of the Jewish people would be con-
verted to Christianity. Jews were not to exercise dominion
over Christians; the loss of political control over the ancient
land of Israel was seen as a further indication that God had
abandoned the Jews because they had supposedly abandoned
Him.^15 Meanwhile it was the Christians who had become the
'New Israel', living under a new law (the New Testament).
In practice the application of legislation against the Jews
was patchy: in the sixth century, the Visigothic kings of Spain
had issued draconian legislation attempting to enslave all
Jews who refused to convert to Christianity, but by^1300 Spain
was notable for its disregard of such precepts. It has been
seen that rulers such as James I and Peter III made full use
ofJewish administrators. Mediterranean rulers often favoured
the Jews, regarding them as an industrious element in the
population, predominantly merchants and artisans. Some
were moneylenders, but the image of the Jew as primarily a
moneylender does not fit the known circumstances in either
Catalonia or southern Italy at this period.^111 Further north, in
northern France, Germany and England, Jews were excluded
from many crafts and turned increasingly to the provision of
credit. It was in northern Europe that the Jews began first to
suffer from a combination of royal rapaciousness and popu-
lar hostility: in France the Jews were expelled from the royal
domain by King Philip Augustus at the start of the thirteenth
century, while horrific and totally unfounded misrepresenta-
tions of the Jewish religion, accusing the Jews of the human
sacrifice of Christian children, began to spread out of Eng-
land from^1144 onwards.^17 Their effect in southern Italy will
be mentioned shortly.
Most of the Catalan-Aragonese rulers had no wish to per-
secute their Jewish subjects, whom James III of Majorca (for
instance) praised for their usefulness in trade. But the kings
came under increasingly heavy influence from those royal
- For a discussion of views in the twelfth century, see Anna Sapir
Abulafia, Christians and jews in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance (London,
1995). - L. Berner, 'On the western shores: the Jews of Barcelona during the
reign ofJaume I, "el Conqueridor", 1213-1276', Ph.D. dissertation,
University of California, Los Angeles, 1986. - W.C. Jordan, The French monarchy and the jews (Philadelphia, 1989).