7 - Spiritual challenges, successes, and failures

Summary

The Jews in medieval western Christendom have often been portrayed as having lived comfortably (or sometimes uncomfortably) isolated lives, having maintained their ancestral faith effortlessly, and having pursued their traditional culture with a high level of equanimity and unanimity. While it is acknowledged that Jews living in the medieval Muslim sphere were fully conversant with the culture surrounding them and were deeply influenced by that culture, the Jews of western Christendom have often been projected as removed from the broad majority ambience, unchallenged in their Jewishness, and sustained solely by their own cultural heritage. In fact, this beguiling picture is highly inaccurate. The Jews of medieval western Christendom were very much a part of the social and cultural ambience in which they lived, encountered a creative majority milieu seething with new ideas and ideals, and were profoundly challenged by their dynamic environment.

While both majority and minority religious leadership attempted to limit Christian–Jewish social contact, three factors militated against truly effective isolation of the Jews in medieval western Christendom – demography, economics, and language. The towns of medieval western Christendom were very small by modern standards, and the Jewish communities housed in these small towns were minuscule. We recall Benjamin's portrayal of a few hundred Jews at most in the urban enclaves of northern Spain and southern France that he visited. In such small towns with their tiny Jewish communities, there could be no true isolation of the Jews as desired by both the Church hierarchy and the Jewish leadership.