Power, Scapegoating, and the Marginalization of Jews in Western Europe in the High Middle Ages (Eleventh–Fourteenth Centuries)

Summary

AS A MINORITY, Jews were one of several “Others” in medieval Christian society. Yet they were in a unique position because of the complex historical relationship between Judaism and Christianity. This article argues that it was a combination of three types of power—the power of Christian society, the power of the Church and the power of civil authorities, combined with a fourth type of power, rooted in the perceived danger of Jewish agency, which allowed for the marginalization and scapegoating of Jews. It explores how power structures constructed deviance and responded to the agency of a distinctive minority. However, this article is not only about the marginalization of Jews as an “Other” through constructions of deviance. It is also about the particular ways in which Jews and their behaviour were constructed as deviant, as part of a wider process of “othering” religious minority groups by those who held power in medieval society.

Jews living in medieval Europe during the High Middle Ages were a very small percentage of the overall population. Although there were periods of relative calm which allowed for the flourishing of Jewish culture, life for Jews was often dangerous. In some parts of Europe, increasing limitations on what public roles they could perform in the “Societas Christiana” ensured that they gravitated towards commercial activity; at times they were the victims of grass-roots mob violence and of the clergy and civil authorities who imposed on them a range of penal restrictions. Instances of anti-Jewish feeling in Europe took many forms: for example clerics often preached vicious sermons attacking Jews which focused on the role they were believed to have played in the death of Christ; or, for example, kings not infrequently ordered the arrest, despoilation, and increasingly even expulsion, of Jews in their territories.

Charges more and more levied against Jews included ritual murder, host desecration, blood libel, ritual cannibalism, and well-poisoning. The onset of the crusades was highly dangerous and bore the potential for arousing anti-Jewish animus since fear of the Muslim enemy in the Near East encouraged hostility towards Jews as another “infidel” group. When in the fourteenth century the Black Death struck Europe (1347– 1351), people had no idea what caused it, and many blamed the Jews.