Medieval Northern Europe

This chapter considers Jewish settlement in northern Europe. Since Jews were newcomers, and since newcomers are regularly resented by the indigenous populace, much of the new reality and new status was decidedly limited and limiting, inferior to the well-established reality and status enjoyed by Jews in their older areas of habitation. The newness of the Jews of the north stimulated innovative configurations of Jewish economic activity, altered popular imagery of Jews, created difficult social relations between the Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors, fostered altered Church stances toward Judaism and Jews, and fashioned new relationships between the political authorities and their Jewish clients.

Flight from Governmental Repression or Popular Violence

Beginning in the twelfth century, edicts of expulsion set in motion for the first time since early antiquity forced Jewish population movement. There have arguably been two further sources of pre-modern involuntary Jewish migration—repressive governmental edicts that made Jewish life spiritually or materially impossible and popular violence so threatening as to necessitate flight. Neither of these pressures is clear-cut in its impact, as were the edicts of expulsion from European states. This chapter considers the impact of both these pressures on Jewish population movement. It describes instances of abrogation of basic Jewish religious rights, expressed as governmental demands that Jews convert to the ruling faith.

Innovative Recent Perspectives

This chapter considers Salo Baron's writings on Jewish history. Recent historians have come to reject the supernaturally grounded assumption of unending Jewish suffering during the supposed third exile; many of them have also distanced themselves from the modern and naturalistic continuations of this sense of interminable Jewish suffering. The first major challenge to the received wisdom came in 1928 from Salo Baron, newly arrived in the United States from his native Europe. In an essay titled “Ghetto and Emancipation: Shall We Revisit the Traditional View?” he undertook a fairly limited assault on traditional Jewish thinking about exilic pain. Focusing on the French Revolution and the beginnings of the process of emancipation of Western Jewry, Baron examined the centuries immediately preceding the revolution and the immediate post-Emancipation period. He argued that the former was nowhere near so horrific as usually projected and that the latter was nowhere near so idyllic.

Movement Eastward

This chapter details the Jewish movement eastward. Toward the end of the thirteenth century and on into the fourteenth, the more advanced polities of the northwest began to limit and then expel their Jews. The Jews expelled from England and France did not opt to return to the Mediterranean Basin, from which their ancestors had originated. The migration of these banished Jews eastward across northern Europe reflects the extent to which the one-time Jewish newcomers had come to identify with their adopted ambience. Jews were also expelled from Spain in 1492 and Portugal in 1497, following the banishments from England, France, and multiple locales in northcentral Europe. However, the Spanish expulsion had enormous impact on Jewish thinking, and the reason is simple. This was the banishment of an age-old Jewish community, one that saw itself and was seen by non-Jews as profoundly rooted in European soil.

Modern Perspectives

This chapter suggests that despite the removal of God from human history, which radically altered the understanding of the mechanism that propelled Jewish history, assessments of Jewish historical fate as unfailingly painful survived intact. Observers continued to project the Jews as an endlessly afflicted people and to highlight forced Jewish displacement as the most extreme element in the relentless tragedy of the Jewish people. The ongoing emphasis on Jewish suffering and hurtful demographic dislocation combined with the removal of God and divine causation from the historical arena sparked a search for new causative explanations for the long-established and widely shared views of the tribulations of the previous two millennia of Jewish history. These new explanations revised but at the same time reinforced the still regnant conviction that Jews have suffered incessantly since the onset of their purported third exile.

Prologue

This chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. There is a widespread consensus that Jews have suffered an extraordinary level of majority maltreatment, which has occasioned constant population movement resultant from governmental expulsion, hostile legislation, and popular animosity and violence. This book challenges this consensus. The challenge leveled does not deny the reality of governmental expulsions of Jews, of majority limitations on Jewish life that forced Jews to relocate, or of violence that necessitated flight. The challenge to be leveled involves the recognition that in many instances Jews moved themselves and their families for betterment, that Jews were overall more often migrants rather than refugees.

Epilogue

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. Jews have relocated regularly over the ages, becoming an unusually mobile human community. The common view, grounded in the Hebrew Bible and expressed with variations in traditional Jewish, traditional Christian, and modern non-supernatural formulations, projects Jews as overwhelmingly refugees, with their population movement unfailingly involuntary, painful, and hurtful. In contrast, the present examination of Jewish population movement over the past two millennia has shown that Jews to have been primarily migrants, relocating by and large voluntarily in search of a better life and with generally positive results. Although there have been displacements forced upon Jews that were indeed painful and hurtful, such involuntary relocation constitutes the exception in Jewish population movement and was limited to specific times, places, and circumstances.

Return Westward

This chapter details Jewish voluntary population movement back toward the west. This movement took place in two stages, as the states of northwestern Europe, especially the Protestant states, began to adopt new and more positive perspectives on population diversity. During the first stage, from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, there was slow and grudging de facto acceptance of greater religious diversity in the European population. During the second stage, from the late eighteenth century on, a new theory of the state emerged, a theory that formally endorsed the separation of church and state, and thus the de jure acceptability of diverse religious groupings, including Jews, within European and eventually Atlantic society.

The Islamic World

This chapter describes how Jewish life flourished in the Islamic world. The Jews living in the Islamic world were age-old inhabitants, whose presence much antedated the emergence of Islam; these Jews maintained their diversified economic outlets and their well-established social relations with non-Jewish neighbors; they continued to organize themselves effectively as a self-governing minority community; they pursued traditional Jewish intellectual activities and—stimulated by their creative environment—branched out in new spiritual and intellectual directions as well. In a world very much in motion, Jews traveled extensively, sometimes for trade and sometimes in search of knowledge, religious, scientific, or philosophic. In addition, Jews regularly relocated into areas that seemed to promise improved life circumstances.

Late Antiquity

This chapter considers Jewish population movement from late antiquity through the end of the eighteenth century, with a focus on often-neglected voluntary Jewish relocation; it offers a balanced assessment of the proportional relationship between compulsory displacement of Jews and voluntary relocation. It argues that the forced displacement of Jews should not obscure an alternative reality, clearly and regularly documented in past Jewish experience. Jews also relocated voluntarily, enticed by appealing opportunities and often encouraged by ruling authorities eager to attract them as new and useful settlers. These relocations were arduous but positive experiences, undertaken in search of better circumstances and often resulting in radically improved conditions. Since such voluntary migrations were not at all predicted in Scripture and lacked eye-catching drama, they have tended to be overlooked.