jihad 403coercion. But by the end of the Middle Ages even conver-
sion did not alleviate their suspect status.
Among the worst confrontations of the early Middle
Ages was an attempted suppression of Judaism in Spain
after the conversion of the VISIGOTHSto Catholicism. In
royal laws and ecclesiastical councils the Visigoths tried
to change and reduce the multifaceted cultural roles that
the Jewish minority had played. The Jews resisted and
welcomed the Muslim invaders in the eighth century.
Under the Carolingians in the ninth century, especially
those of CHARLEMAGNEand LOUISI THEPIOUS, were a
comparative happy and prosperous era for the Jewry of
the West. Their communities grew and multiplied, espe-
cially in the Rhine Valley in northern Europe.
NEW RELATIONS FROM 1096The year 1096 was a turning point in the history of the
Western Jews. On their way to the First CRUSADE, bands
on the fringe of various armies sought out Jews and anni-
hilated the communities of Worms, Mainz, and Neuss.
Elsewhere, as at Spreyer and Cologne, churchmen and
townspeople managed to protect many Jews. Despite
these ominous signs at the beginning of the century, the
12th century was a period of accommodation and, for the
most part, personal security.
The status of the Jews as outsiders with a certain
mobility who were separate from local societies had given
them opportunities for trade and commercial activities in
the expanding economies of the 12th and 13th centuries.
On the other hand the church tried to isolate them from
contact with Christians. The Fourth Lateran Council in
1215 propagated such measures in an overall goal of
marginalizing the heterogeneous elements of all types.
The Jews were then to be marked by the wearing of a dis-
tinctive sign. Cohabitation and meals in common with
Christians were forbidden. In the late 13th century, the
kings of France and England taxed Jews heavily and as
fully as they could. They then expelled them when this
extorted resource ran dry.
LATER MIDDLE AGESThe late Middle Ages was in general a difficult period for
Western Jewry. In addition to experiencing expulsions
from various regions and kingdoms, the Jews became
scapegoats for economic and health problems. The worst
of this was the persecution of 1391 in Iberia, which
signalled a big step in the decline of a once flourishing
Spanish Judaism. The Jews were expelled from Spain in
1492 by King FERDINANDand Queen ISABEL, the Catholic
kings who had recently captured GRANADAfrom the Mus-
lims, thus completing the reconquest of the Iberian
Peninsula. Even those who had been converted for gener-
ations, called disparagingly MARRANOS, became suspect
for practicing the religious rites and rules in secret. Many
of these Sephardic Jews migrated elsewhere in the
Mediterranean.
CULTURAL INTERACTION
Despite these tensions and persecutions there was much
productive cultural contact and interaction between
Christians and Jews during the Middle Ages, especially in
the Iberian Peninsula. Collaboration and mutual learning
occurred between scientists, astronomers, astrologers,
physicians, and philosophers in Spain and in Italy and
southern France. The Jews facilitated the arrival of
IBN-RUSHDor Averroës’s commentaries to the Latin intel-
lectual world. MAIMONIDES’s Guide to the Perplexed
assisted Christian philosophers and theologians to
resolve some of the problems posed by ARISTOTELIANISM.
There were periodic discussions and debates among
scholars on fundamental problems and aspects of the two
religions. There were numerous enriching mutual
encounters about the exegesis and the content and mes-
sages of the BIBLE.JEWS IN THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE
The Jewish communities at Byzantium remained numer-
ous and relatively flourishing, because of the maintenance
of the classical Roman attitude that recognized Judaism as
a licit religion and thus subject to toleration. They were,
however, also permitted to exist because they were viewed
odd but continuing symbols of the triumph of Christian-
ity and were in any case in line to be converted at the end
of the world. They were specially taxed, excluded from
many aspects of society, and affected by legal incapacities,
but these were less severe than those relative practices and
laws existing in Western Christendom.
See also AL-ANDALUS; ANTI-JUDAISM AND ANTI-
SEMITISM; ART AND ARCHITECTURE,JEWISH;ASHKENAZ AND
ASHKENAZIM; BLOOD LIBEL;DHIMMI; HOST DESECRATION
LIBEL;PETER THEVENERABLE;SEPHARDIM.
Further reading:Kenneth R. Stow, Alienated Minority:
The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe(Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, 1992); Mark R. Cohen, Under Cres-
cent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages(Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1994); Joseph Shatzmiller, Shy-
lock Reconsidered: Jews, Moneylending, and Medieval Society
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); David
Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minori-
ties in the Middle Ages(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1996); R. Po-Chia Hsia and Hartmut Lehmann,
eds., In and Out of the Ghetto: Jewish–Gentile Relations in
Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995); Joachim Prinz, Popes
from the Ghetto: A View of Medieval Christendom(New
York: Horizon Press, 1966); see also “Jews in the Middle
Ages,” in the Bibliography, pp. 847-849.jihad(gihad, djihad) Sometimes translated wrongly as
“Holy War,” jihadderived from an Arabic root meaning
basically “to strive.” There were a greater and a lesser
jihad. Jihad was considered by some groups, for example,