9 - Jewish Women, Christian Women, and Credit in Thirteenth-Century Catalonia

Summary

Early in 1287, two Christian women, both widows, sought loans from Vidal, son of the late Abraham de Torre, a prominent Jewish lender in the town of Castelló d’Empúries. Beneta, widow of Pere Dalmau of Castelló, received a loan of 50 sous of Melgueil. Berenguera, widow of Guillem Bou of Vilanova de Muga, received a loan of 51 sous of Barcelona. On the same day Vidal extended these loans to Beneta and Berenguera, he made an additional twelve loans, all to Christian men, for sums ranging between 9 and 101.25 sous of Melgueil. Beneta and Berenguera numbered among relatively few Catalan Christian women who sought loans from Jewish lenders without a husband or male relative by their side. However, these two widows resembled other Catalan women in that when they chose to borrow from Jewish lenders, they turned to Jewish men, rather than Jewish women.

Elsewhere in Europe, however, Jewish and Christian women interacted frequently through credit transactions. In a seminal 1978 article, William Chester Jordan argued that when Christian women in Northern France borrowed from Jewish lenders, they ‘either found it more congenial or were simply constrained by circumstances to borrow from other women’. In his study of two thirteenth-century enquêtes or notes on court cases from Picardy, he found that most Christian women borrowers chose either Jewish women lenders, or groups of lenders that included both men and women. Victoria Hoyle also found significant financial interaction between Jewish and Christian women in thirteenth-century England, in a study based on the plea rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews.

The Jewish women of these northern European regions possessed a high degree of financial independence, and often became prominent moneylenders. Jordan and Hoyle both demonstrate this through quantitative evidence: Jewish women participated in nearly half of the loans mentioned in Jordan's enquêtes, and over a quarter of the debt cases involving Jews in Hoyle's plea rolls. Other scholars have relied on anecdotal evidence, particularly responsa literature, to demonstrate the social normalcy of Jewish women's involvement in the credit market. Scholars such as Susan Einbinder and Suzanne Bartlet have reconstructed the biographies of particularly successful and well-documented women lenders, in Northern France and England respectively.