Reassessing Jewish Life in Medieval Europe

Was the Christian encounter with Jewish society in medieval Europe defined by the emergence of a “persecuting mentality,” in which Jews and other subalterns were subjected to an aggressive policy of social and political exclusion, as framed by Robert Moore in his seminal book, The Formation of a Persecuting Society? 1 Should the Jewish experience in medieval Christian Europe be viewed as a “lachrymose” narrative of oppression, expulsion, and marginalization (to use Salo Baron’s phrase)? Or—as Jonathan Elukin has argued—does the image of a “persecuting society” give undo centrality to a small number of violent “disconnected outbursts” that constitute exceptions to the rule of peaceful coexistence of Jews and Christians? 2 The ways in which the ebb and flow of periods of violence and normality should be integrated into the broader depiction of Jewish-Christian relations in medieval and early modern times has been the subject of much scholarship in recent years, and it is to this weighty issue that Robert Chazan dedicates his efforts in Reassessing Jewish Life in Medieval Europe. Chazan seeks to distance himself from the so-called “lachrymose” school of Jewish history criticized by his teacher Baron, but stops short of accepting Elukin’s opposite belief that Jewish-Christian relations were overwhelmingly characterized by peaceful coexistence (pp. xix-xx). Chazan deftly and judiciously charts a middle course that sidesteps the need to champion one perspective or the other by crafting an image of