The historical experience of Jews in medieval Christian Europe has conven-
tionally been presented as the epitome of what Salo Baron termed “the
lachrymose view of Jewish history.” This 700-year experience was undeniably
marked by numerous episodes of adversity, beginning with the First Crusade
and ending with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Nonetheless, rather
than define this extended period simplistically as an unyielding age of perse-
cution and Jewish suffering, it is more accurate to explore the ebb and flow of
Jewish life in medieval Christian Europe in terms of a combination of three
broader factors. First, law in medieval Christian Europe combined elements
of Christian doctrine and Roman law; the legal status of Jews was often an
amalgam of Christian and Roman policy and tactics. Second, the situation of
Jews often reflected the give and take between temporal (royal and noble) and
ecclesiastic authorities (“throne, sword, and altar”). Third, as in the world of
Islam, there was consistently a discrepancy between law and its actual imple-
mentation and enforcement.
This discrepancy is both elusive and crucial – elusive because legal statutes
are one of the main sources of information about medieval Christendom, par-
ticularly with respect to Jews; crucial because of the widely varying
application of legal dicta, particularly between political centers, where social
reality coincided more closely with legal pronouncements, and frontier and
border regions, where, for better or worse, social reality fluctuated widely
from the letter of the law. For Jews in centers of Christendom such as Rome,
that status remained consistent and stable, as evidenced by the fact that the
pope, who ruled Rome throughout the Middle Ages, was one of the few polit-
ical leaders who never expelled the Jews. In frontier regions, such as
ninth-century France and pre-1250 Christian Spain, the situation of Jews
oscillated from exceptionally favorable to exceptionally deleterious. Such
shifts were in some cases set in motion by a realignment in the political hier-
archy, in which royal and papal authority worked increasingly in a more
complementary fashion, often at the expense of the nobles.
By the reign of Charlemagne, the legal status of Jews had been defined,
principally by Pope Gregory VII. In the more outlying parts of Christian
Chapter 5