“This May Bring about Many Evils”: The Jewish Minority Community in Medieval Europe Facing its Own Thieves

Summary

Introduction

And the thieves that go from one house to another take the “hand of the dead” with them. [Once they enter a house] they place it in the middle of the room and this way it causes everyone in the house to shiver and to fall asleep. And they take four lit candles and they throw on the candles diamond dust. Then they place the candles in the four corners of the house and it seems to the house dwellers that the house is rolling and moving. And when the thieves wish, they take the said hand of the dead and place it on the heart of the owner of the house and they ask him where he has hidden the keys to the gold and the silver hidden in the house and he tells them about all his belongings.

This Hebrew entry is one of a few entries in a collection of practical potions, spells and amulets found in a manuscript copied by a Jewish Ashkenazi scribe in the fifteenthcentury south Italian city of Trani. It describes in full detail how to make use of magical means not only to cast a spell on members of a household in order to break-in and steal goods, but also how to use magic in order to obtain important information about the household vault, with all its gold and silver valuables.

As scholars of crime in medieval Europe have noted, theft and thieving were by far the most common crime in medieval times. In the urban environment, where most Jews in medieval Europe lived, food, produce and livestock were stolen as a matter of course. Outside the towns, theft from wayfaring individuals in the countryside was also rather common, and travel was considered by many to be unsafe, especially if one carried valuables or money. As William Chester Jordan so aptly described the situation especially with regard to the high and later Middle Ages: “Theft in a society where surpluses were low was not a petty crime unless the coveted article or money was trivial in value, and theft then as now was often accompanied by serious physical violence. As a felony, therefore, it merited corporal punishment. Habitual thievery, by this logic, deserved the ultimate sanction, death.”