PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS STUDY seeks to explain why Islamic-Jewish and Christian-Jewish relations followed such different courses in the Middle Ages. Its purpose is to go beyond the facile assertion that Jews lived more securely in the medieval Arab-Islamic world than under Christendom. They did.¹ My goal is to explain how and why and thereby foster deeper understanding of Jewish-gentile relations in the medieval diaspora.

I had the opportunity to test my developing views in an essay first published in 1986,² and I reiterated my ideas, with emphasis on the historiographical issue, in an article that appeared in 1991.³ The mostly encouraging responses to those two forays bolstered my resolve to pursue the research to a conclusion. As I continued to work on the problem, the hypotheses I had developed in the mid-1980s became strengthened. The present book incorporates the results.

Comparative history makes heavy demands on the knowledge of the researcher. Often, in fact, it requires collaboration between experts in different subjects. Alternatively, scholars may present their work in the form of case studies, to be compared with research on other examples.⁴ I should confess that, although I have been teaching courses at Princeton on the Jews in medieval Europe for two decades, and, hence, try to keep abreast of developments in this area, I am far from a specialist on Latin Christendom. Apart from two scholarly forays into seventeenth-century Venice, my research has focused on the medieval Arabic-Islamic world. Nevertheless, it was teaching medieval European and medieval Near Eastern Jewish history that awakened and sustained my interest in the comparative perspective that informs this book. Moreover, the difficulties posed by comparative research are somewhat offset in this instance. For here, the object of comparison is the same people—of the same religion, stemming from the same ancient and late antique roots in the Near East—but living in different civilizations.

The work is aimed at both scholars and general readers, the latter including college students. While Jewish historians and to a lesser extent also general medievalists will find that I go over much ground that is familiar to them, I would hope that both groups might find in this overview a useful introduction for their students to both Christian-Jewish and Muslim-Jewish relations in medieval times. This holds for the educated lay reader as well.⁵

For specialists, the present book offers something new in its systematic, comparative approach to Jewish-gentile relations in the Middle Ages. Since most specialists deal either with the Islamic-Arabic or the Christian-Latin world, the synthesis of views concerning the case they arc less familiar with should be useful. The book also attempts to document with original analysis hypotheses that I have not found elsewhere or have found, but without substantiation, in the research of others. In particular, the chapter on hierarchy, marginality, and ethnicity (Chapter 6), and the discussion of persecution and collective memory (in Chapter 10) offer analysis and interpretation that I have not found in print elsewhere.

I do not cite especially voluminously in my notes,⁶ especially when I feel a point has become part of a scholarly consensus, and wherever feasible I have quoted from sources for which there exist English translations (provided, of course, they are representative of a broader reservoir of texts that support the argument). I have followed this procedure in the interest of the general reader who, not knowing Arabic or Hebrew or Latin, might wish to examine the text for him or herself. Fortunately, there are now a number of valuable anthologies as well as published translations of many salient primary materials. With its generous sprinkling of salient primary sources in translation, the present book, as one reader commented in his report for Princeton University Press, lets “the voices of medieval Islam, Christendom, and the Jews therein speak for themselves.”

In the course of researching and writing this book I had the good sense to consult with colleagues specializing in areas outside my primary research field. Those who gave generously of their time to read part or all of the manuscript during the last stages of the writing are David Berger, Jeremy Cohen, Michael Cook, Theodore Draper, Martha Himmelfarb, William C. Jordan, Suzanne Keller, Daniel Lasker, Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, Amnon Linder, Ivan G. Marcus, Emily Rose, Claudia Setzer, and Avrom Udovitch. Each of them offered valuable criticism that helped me refine the argument and also stay on course where I might otherwise have gone astray. For the defects that remain, I alone am responsible.

Princeton University’s Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences and my own Department of Near Eastern Studies Publication Fund provided support for various stages of the research and writing. I was able to exploit the research assistance services of Kenneth Halpern (Princeton) and Adi Talmon (Jerusalem), sparing me precious time to devote to final revisions to the manuscript, and also to benefit, as in the past, from Ilene Perkal Cohen’s usual editorial acumen, polishing chapters as they rolled off my computer. I completed the last revisions to this book while a Fellow of The Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1992–93), which afforded me an opportunity to work under truly favorable conditions and to tap the knowledge and profit from the criticisms of the extraordinary group of scholars assembled by Professors Hava Lazarus-Yafeh and R. J. Zwi Werblowski in a research group on interreligious polemics in the Middle Ages.

For her wise shepherding of this book at Princeton University Press, I thank History and Classics Editor, Lauren M. Osborne, and for his editorial work, Roy A. Grisham, Jr.

March 23, 1993

In this fourth printing I have corrected a few misprints and mistakes that I or attentive readers have noticed since the book was published in the spring of 1994.

September 1, 1996