4 - Jewish Communities, Conditional Toleration, and Rent-Seeking

Summary

the prohibition of usury thus became … the keystone of the political economy of the Middle Ages.

Holdsworth (1903, 101)

On the morning of July 22, 1306 every Jewish home in France was surrounded by soldiers and bailiffs on the order of the king. The timing was inauspicious: the Jews had concluded the ninth day of the fast of Tisha B'Av, which commemorated the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem in the seventh century BCE and the first century CE respectively. As fate would have it, this date would mark a similar catastrophe for the Jews of France. They were arrested, their possessions seized, and given just one month to leave the realm on pain of death.

The writer Ishori Haparchi (1280–1355) was training to be a doctor at the time. He recalled the event as the great tragedy of his age:

I was torn from the house of study, forced naked in my youth to leave my father's home, and wandered from land to land, from one nation to another, whose languages were strange to me … I now give the date of destruction of the “small sanctuary,” that is the destruction of the schools and synagogues in France and part of Provence, when I took flight from the battle. Through our sins, it took place in the year 5066, in the month of retribution. (quoted in Golb, 1998, 538)

In this chapter we describe how the 1306 expulsion of French Jews was related to the new political equilibrium between church and state that emerged in Europe after 1100.

The 1306 French expulsion, and the many other incidents like it, reflect the nature of the conditional toleration equilibrium that emerged in medieval Europe. The alliance between political and religious authorities had two consequences. First, rulers began to persecute religious minorities when this could buttress their sacred credentials. Second, when it was too costly to eliminate the religious minority, states would instead attempt to separate them from the rest of society. In other words, the state would conditionally tolerate the religiously deviant groups.

In this chapter, we describe how this conditional toleration equilibrium applied to Europe's Jewish communities, focusing on why it was self-enforcing, how it also reinforced antisemitism, and how it could break down, resulting in tragedies such as the expulsions of 1306.