Chapter 8 - Northwestern Europe

Summary

Until the end of the first millennium, there was little or no Jewish settlement in northern Europe, which was a backward hinterland to southern Europe. As northern Europe embarked on a process of remarkable vitalization, it became attractive to new Jewish settlers; these new Jewish settlers won the support of the ruling authorities anxious to expand the urban population of their realms and to augment their tax revenues. These new Jewish settlers encountered potent obstacles in the populace, which saw them as newcomers, as religious dissidents, and as the descendants of Jesus’ primary enemies and persecutors. As the principalities of northern Europe progressed during the twelfth century, Jews gravitated to moneylending as their most prominent economic activity, which further exacerbated popular antipathy. Church leaders began to exert pressures aimed at limiting Jewish usury, with considerable success, and the political authorities intensified their exploitation of Jewish resources. Despite these weighty problems, the Jewish population of northwestern Europe continued to expand, and these Jews created effective Jewish communal agencies and a vibrant new Jewish culture. By the late thirteenth century, the concatenation of negative forces—a hostile populace, the Church demands for limitations on Jewish life, and governmental exploitation of Jewish financial resources—led to a series of expulsions that removed Jews entirely from northwestern Europe and shifted the center of northern-European Jewish life eastward.