Chapter Six
In Homo Hierarchies, the French social anthropologist Louis Dumont, studying the caste system in India, draws some important implications for the social order of premodern societies.1 Dumont argues that the fundamental idea unifying societies composed of a multiplicity of groups and statuses is hierarchy, that hierarchy, more than power, determines how the elements of such a society interact. Hierarchy is “the principle by which the elements of a whole are ranked in relation to the whole, it being understood that in the majority of societies it is religion which provides the view of the whole, and that the ranking will thus be religious in nature.”2 The hierarchical relationship is that “between encompassing and encompassed or between ensemble and element.”3 Paradoxically, the elements of caste systems—and, by extension, the components of any stratified society—manage to coexist more or less harmoniously precisely because each knows that it and all the other subgroups of the population are part of a totality. Differences are accepted as natural in a fully formed, or “ideal-type” hierarchical society, of which the Indian caste system is the best-known example. This, Dumont says, explains the tolerance toward others often noticed among Indians or Hindus.
It is easy to see what this feature corresponds to in social life. Many castes, who may differ in their customs and habits, live side by side, agreed on the code which ranks them and separates them. They will assign a rank, where we in the West would approve or exclude. ... In the hierarchical scheme a group’s acknowledged differentness whereby it is contrasted with other groups becomes the very principle whereby it is integrated into society.4
Medieval Christians had ways of talking about the social order and the place, if any, of the infidel or nonconforming Christian in that order. They were conscious of status rather than class. Thinkers spoke in terms of hierarchies—who was above whom. At the beginning of his history of the hierarchical concept of the “three orders” (those who pray, fight, and labor) in medieval Christendom, Georges Duby quotes the words of Pope Gregory the Great to describe the “necessary inequality” of the social order:
Providence has established various degrees and distinct orders [ordines] so that, if the lesser show deference to the greater, and if the greater bestow love on the lesser, then true concord and conjunction will arise out of diversity. Indeed, the community could not subsist at all if the total order of disparity did not preserve it. That creation cannot be governed in equality is taught us by the example of the heavenly hosts; there are angels and there are archangels, which are clearly not equals, differing from one another in power and order.5
Jeffrey Burton Russell’s description of the principle of “right order” in medieval Christian society complements Dumont’s formulation:
There were three social hierarchies, the feudal-manorial, the urban, and the ecclesiastical. Within this ordered society, every institution and every person had libertas. The meaning of libertas was quite different from the meaning of “liberty” now. It meant the right—and the duty—of an individual to occupy his proper place in society.6
In terms of its social structure, medieval Islam is less easy to define than Christendom. A considerable body of modern scholarship has endeavored to show how analogies with the West frequently do not work. Feudalism and corporation are fundamental characteristics of European society now generally believed to have been absent in Islam, at least in the form known in the West, and in the classical medieval centuries. On the other hand, the notion of hierarchy—while neglected—can aptly be applied to Islam. At the beginning of a discussion of “Islam and the social order,” a leading Islamic historian regrets that “the problem of the hierarchies is one of those rarely touched on by orientalists except from the slightly different angle of ‘social classes.’”7 Few orientalists, however, would dispute the notion of hierarchy as appropriate in an analysis of the position of non-Muslims in Muslim society.
To hierarchy, which marked the social order of the two societies in which the Jews lived during the Middle Ages, must be added the element of marginality. As refined by certain sociologists, “marginality theory” describes a type of hierarchy in which members of a group “(1) do not ordinarily qualify for admission into another group with which, over varying lengths of time, it is more or less closely associated; (2) when these groups differ significantly in the nature of their cultural or racial heritage; and (3) between which there is limited cultural interchange or social interaction.”8 In a “marginal situation”—unlike caste systems with their ideal of permanent or total group exclusiveness—there is some permeability of the barriers (or boundaries) separating elements in the hierarchy.9 While both marginality and exclusion engender or reflect intergroup tensions, marginality expresses a less alienated relationship between the subordinate group and the larger society.10
The concept of marginality that best describes the position of the Jews in the Middle Ages is one that “refers to the fairly long-lasting, large-scale hierarchical situation in which two or more groups or even nations exist together.”
The groups vary in degree of privilege and power and there is inequality of status and opportunity. The barriers between the groups are sufficient to prevent the enjoyment by the subordinate group, or groups, of the privileges of the dominant, non-marginal group, but do not prevent the absorption by the former of the latter’s culture.11
Not infrequently, subordinate strata resist the absorption of some feature of the dominant group’s culture that is incompatible with their own value system.12 This, too, fits the Jewish condition in the medieval diaspora.
The Jews can be said to have begun at the bottom of the hierarchy in Christendom, but in a marginal situation. As the historian Bernhard Blumenkranz has shown,13 there was considerable social interchange between Jews and Christians during the centuries between the Barbarian invasions and the rise of the crusading spirit in Latin Europe. Spatially, the Jews were not excluded; they lived relatively close to and peacefully with their Christian neighbors. The Jews probably engaged in amicable debate about religion with learned Christians. Here and there, Jews held public office. In time of warfare, they could be found standing side by side with Christian comrades in armed defense of their towns. The Jews maintained their own cultural identity by resisting attempts to convert them and by rigorously enforcing Judaism’s ancient taboo against marriage outside the Jewish community.
Even in this relatively tranquil period in Christian-Jewish relations, however, the idea of excluding Jews from Christendom was not absent. In an oft-cited letter of Pope Leo VII (r. 936-39), appointing a certain Frederick archbishop of Mainz, the pope responds to Frederick’s query “whether it is better to subjugate [the Jews] to the holy religion or expel them from your towns.” The pope responds by urging his vicar to strive to convert the Jews through preaching (though not by force). If, however, they refuse to accept baptism, the archbishop possesses delegated authority to expel them, “for we ought not to associate with the Lord’s enemies.”14
Until the eleventh century, Pope Leo’s view had little practical import. The church retained only limited influence over mundane, or even spiritual, affairs in the world at large, and Jews enjoyed substantial support from secular rulers interested in exploiting their economic utility. True, a Latin source relates that the German emperor Henry II expelled the Jews from the town of Mainz in the year 1012. They were allowed to return several weeks later, though, and there is no evidence that Henry’s act was more than a local affair.15 It is thought that he was retaliating for the apostasy earlier that year of a deacon and cleric named Wecelin.16 Nonetheless, the event of 1012 was a harbinger of the more definitive and traumatic expulsions to come during the High and late Middle Ages. It underscored the tenuous dependability of the Jews’ presumptive right to reside among Christians.
With the rise of the crusading spirit and the deepening of Christian consciousness and piety in the population at large beginning in the eleventh century, Jews were gradually excluded from society. As infidels, they were considered “outside the church” (extra ecclesiam); practically speaking, this meant they were not subject to ecclesiastical jurisdiction. In his Decretum, Gratian, the great canonist of the twelfth century, reinterpreted a Pauline saying in the New Testament to support this position:
Their [the infidels’] punishment, however, is left for divine judgment alone, when we cannot exercise discipline over them, either because they are not subject to our law or because their crimes, although known to us, nevertheless cannot be proven by clear evidence. As for those who are not of our law, the Apostle says in the First Epistle to the Corinthians; For what does it concern me to judge those who are outside [his qui foris sunt]? God will judge them.17
Canon law grouped Jews together with other peoples, especially pagans and heretics, with whom contact was discouraged. As we have seen, this clustering of Jews with other subordinate groups, implying guilt by association, was already present in Christian-Roman Jewry law. Medieval canon law included precepts excluding these outsiders from the rights held by Christians in courts of law. Gratian’s Decretum declares that “pagans, heretics or Jews cannot sue Christians.”18 Probably influenced by Roman and canon law, Germanic law disqualified Jews, along with heretics and unbelievers, from “being spokesmen of a man and of standing in court against a Christian.”19
Common, too, was the tendency to lump Jews together with lepers, an association that reinforced their status as outsiders.20 At about the middle of the thirteenth century, as we have seen, the ecclesiastical decree of the Fourth Lateran Council, requiring that Jews exhibit an identifying sign on their clothing, began to be implemented. Secular rulers responded, albeit unevenly, to the church’s call, ruling that Jews must sew different distinguishing marks on their outergarments. Because special attire was prescribed for abhorrent groups such as prostitutes, Christians could not help but consider the Jews’ special sign as also a mark of degradation and exclusion.21 Symbolically, too, descriptions of the role of the Jews in the ceremony of welcoming a king or bishop upon his entry into his city turn from integrative—with “the Jews as part of the community like any other, and often dispersed among it”—to exclusionary beginning in the twelfth century, “a change in the welcoming ritual, whose effect was to exclude them from the political community.”22
We may conclude that, over time, Jews, as they came to be excluded from the hierarchy of the Christian social order, lost the benefits of their marginal situation. By the thirteenth century, Jews in the Latin West no longer conformed to Dumont’s model of hierarchy based on relations “between encompassing and encompassed or between ensemble and element.” Neither Christians nor Jews felt that the latter were integral to society, that they were an encompassed element of the encompassing whole. By that time, the universalism of the encompassing whole had been tempered by a “Christian particularism, the primitive solidarity of the group and the policy of apartheid with regard to outside groups.” None of the complex models subdividing Christendom into socioprofessional “estates” which increasingly came to characterize the social order from the beginning of the thirteenth century had any place for the Jews.23
True, the centuries-old Augustinian tradition that Jews have a role to play in Christian soteriology (as witness to the superiority and chosenness of the Christian faith) continued to assure the Jews of their low rank in the hierarchy of Christian society. The Augustinian theology, however, faced powerful countervailing political, economic, and social forces. The Augustinian tradition did not protect the Jews of the late Middle Ages from exclusion. Once they were no longer tolerated on even the lowest rung of the Christian hierarchy, the groundwork was laid for the widespread explusionary policy of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries.
Turning now to medieval Islam, the question can be asked: What of hierarchy and marginality there? Did the Jews (and other non-Muslims) occupy an organic place in the hierarchy of the Muslim social order? Or did they, like their counterparts in the Christian world, come to be excluded from the prevailing society? It is possible to read the Pact of 'Umar as a document that imposed exclusion on the dhimmīs, since it required that they distinguish themselves from Muslims by special garb and certain behavior. In reality, the regulations of the Pact were intended not so much to exclude as to reinforce the hierarchical distinction between Muslims and non-Muslims within a single social order. Non-Muslims were to remain “in their place.” They were to avoid any act, particularly any religious act, that might challenge the superior rank of the Muslims or of Islam. The dhimmī, however, occupied a definite slot in Islamic society—a low rank but a rank, nevertheless. Like Hinduism, Islam recognized and accepted difference as a natural concomitant of the hierarchical order of social relationships.
The inclusion of non-Muslims within the Muslim hierarchy is affirmed in the most fundamental distinction between insiders and outsiders in Islamic thinking—the division of the world into two parts: the House, or Domain, of Islam [dār al-islām]; and the House, or Domain, of War [dār al-ḥarb]. The Domain of War borders on the Domain of Islam, and Muslims are commanded to wage jihād (holy war) against unbelievers living outside Islamic territory, forcing them to choose between Islam and the sword. A non-Muslim native of the Domain of War may enter Islamic territory—for instance, on business—under a guarantee of safe conduct.24 But this is a temporary protected status only. Ranking above these musta'mins are the permanent non-Muslim inhabitants of the Domain of Islam, the ahl al-dhimma (the Protected People) who benefit from a third option: the privilege of paying tribute in return for security and the more or less free exercise of religion, without compulsion to convert.25 Thus, marginal though they were, the Jewish and Christian dhimmīs occupied a recognized, fixed, safeguarded niche within the hierarchy of the Islamic social order.
Hanafite law—one of the four canonical, or orthodox (Sunni) schools of Islamic jurisprudence—expresses this well. A chapter comparing the juridical status in Muslim courts of legal documents of non-Muslim musta'mins and dhimmīs states the following regarding inheritance law:
The position of the ahl al-dhimma vis-à-vis the musta'mins is the same as that of the Muslims vis-à-vis the ahl al-dhimma, for they belong to our Domain [li'annahum min ahli dārinā] in contrast to the musta'mins. For this reason, too, a dhimmī slave shall not be left in the possession of a musta'min so long as he stays among us. Rather, he shall be compelled to sell him, just as a Muslim shall not be left in the possession of a dhimmī.26
The position is asserted more explicitly, though in passing, in another Hanafite compendium: the punishment for brigands is said to apply equally to Muslims and dhimmīs, “because they belong to our Domain permanently” ['alāal-ta’bīd].27
The concept of a hierarchy that encompasses dhimmī-Muslim relations can be inferred from terminology used in medieval Islamic discussions of the dhimma.28 The most common descriptive for the dhimma system is ṣaghār, derived from the final word in the Qur’anic verse prescribing the jizya payment, ṣāghirūn. As we have seen, many commentators on the Qur’an, as well as other medieval scholars, understand this to prescribe a symbolically humiliating act. An authority as important as Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, however, rejected all those meanings, favoring, instead, the more fundamental notion that ṣaghār refers to non-Muslim submission to the authority (laws) of Islam [iltizāmuhum li-jiryān aḥkām al-milla 'alayhim], symbolized each time he rendered payment of the poll tax.29 Ibn Ḥazm, the eleventh-century Spanish-Muslim litterateur and jurist, spelled this out three centuries earlier:
The ṣaghār means that they are subject to the authority of Islam [ yajrī ḥukm al-islām 'alayhim] and that they shall not expose publicly anything of their unbelief [kufr] nor anything that is forbidden in the Islamic religion. . . . The ṣaghār is summed up by the “Stipulations of 'Umar,” may God be pleased with him because of these.30
Clear hierarchical ranking of groups within the one totality underlies these characterizations of the fundamental relationship between non-Muslims and Muslims.
The people subjected to ṣaghār are marginal but not excluded, for the dhimmī may cross boundaries to participate in a wide range of activities along with the dominant Muslim group so long as he behaves according to his lowly rank. Though manifest in economic activities, it extended to cultural interchange, service in the government bureaucracy, and the medical profession. In other words, the presence of Jews and Christians in a marginal situation within the hierarchy of Islam constitutes a structural feature of its social order.
Conventionally interchangeable with the term ṣaghār, another cluster of Arabic words used to describe the relationship between Muslims and dhimmīs seems to soften the impact of their lowly rank. The most common such term is ghiyār.31 Sometimes the synonym tamyīz, signifying differentiation or distinction, occurs. In the first instance, ghiyār stands for the distinctive dress required of non-Muslims, but by extension the term also connotes the entire system of differentiation between Muslim and non-Muslim.32 Less imperious than ṣaghār, a word straight from the pugilistic Qur’anic jizya verse, ghiyār/tamyīz suggests the possibility of “horizontal” relationships between differentiated ethnoreligious groups, separated yet parallel, coexisting with Muslims who have shared interests, despite the hierarchical sense conveyed by ṣaghār.
Indeed, actual social relations, shaped by the marginal situation of the dhimmīs, somewhat alleviated the discriminatory intent of the regime of ṣaghār. On the basis of sources for tenth- and eleventh-century Iraq, Roy Mottahedeh describes how clerks, soldiers, and merchants (as well as physicians) formed recognizable groups manifesting loyalties that bound them to one another in the pursuit of common interests.33 These “categories,” as Mottahedeh calls them, were not guilds of the European variety with strict confessional criteria for admission. Indeed, the Muslim world had nothing like the guilds of the medieval West.
Dhimmīs, it is crucial to state, could be found in nearly all categories of Islamic society, working alongside Muslims who outranked them by virtue of their religion. They appear as merchants, artisans, agriculturalists, physicians, government clerks (kātibs), and in any one of a number of other categories identified by their professions (excluding the army, with the notable exception of Samuel ibn Nagrela, head of the Berber army of Muslim Granada in the mid-eleventh century, who was also vizier, a post hardly ever granted to a non-Muslim). In such situations, ghiyār let everyone know who was a non-Muslim and who was a Muslim. The “loyalties of category,” to use Mottahedeh’s terminology, extending across the Muslim-non-Muslim distinction, doubtless softened the discrimination incorporated in the concept of ṣaghār. Being a Jew (or a Christian) in these usually prestigious categories somewhat offset their low status in the overall hierarchical scheme.
Arabic sources often refer to the Jews as ṭā'ifat al-yahūd or even sharī'at al-yahūd. Ṭā’ifa, a term common in medieval Arabic, stands for some sort of social category.34 It usually connotes a subgroup of Muslim society, individuals bound together by a common interest, and is often translatable in political contexts as “faction.”35 The petty rulers who divided up the Umayyad caliphate of Cordova when it collapsed at the beginning of the eleventh century are called mulūk al-ṭawā’if (party-kings).36 Among the Jews, in classical Islamic times, the two main factions, the Rabbanites and the Karaites, are regularly referred to as “the two ṭā’ifas” [al-ṭā’ifatayn] in Judaeo-Arabic Geniza texts and elsewhere. Alternatively, the term might designate an entire Jewish community, as when a record of testimony in an Islamic court refers to the leader as al-rayyis 'alā ṭā’ifat al-yahūd, “head of the Jewish community,” meaning, from the Muslims’ perspective, head of the subgroup of society known as the Jews.37 The use of such a nonpejorative, generic term to designate the Jews seems to temper the hierarchical relationship encompassed in such terms as ṣaghār.
A more striking term used to refer to the Jews of Islam is sharī'at al-yahūd, “the sharī'a of the Jews.” Sharī'a means “way” or “path.” The equivalent of the Hebrew halakha, it stands for the holy religious law of Islam (sharī'at al-islām). Its use in Muslim texts, referring to Judaism, reflects recognition of a certain religious parity between Judaism and Islam. This, in turn, conforms to the idea of the Prophet himself, that Judaism—and Christianity—have parity with Islam as divinely inspired religions.
A similar blurring of qualitative distinctions bet ween Judaism and Islam is perceptible in Jewish texts. Jewish scholars readily employed Islamic religious terminology in their Judaeo-Arabic writings. Saadya Gaon, the first great rabbinic figure to write in Arabic, could refer unself-consciously to the Torah as sharī'a, the Hebrew Bible as Qur’an, the direction facing Jerusalem while praying as the qibla, and the prayer-leader (ḥazzan) as imām.38 As Andrew Rippin shows with reference to a chapter in Saadya’s Arabic translation of the Bible, the Gaon employed the target language in a way that displayed an attitude of integration toward the surrounding Arabic-Islamic culture.39
Exchanges of halakhic questions and responsa employed Arabic phraseology similar to that found in Islamic fatwās. A question would open with mā yuftīnā (what is your answer to us ...), using the verbal form of the noun fatwā; the Judaeo-Arabic responsum itself would include formulaic phraseology (even if in Hebrew translation—a conspicuous sign of assimilation) characteristic of Islamic responsa.40 On the basis of Geniza evidence, Goitein suggests that the Jews recognized the institution of jurisconsult (mufti), separate from that of the judge (dayyan) and paralleling the distinction in function between the muftī and the qāḍī in Islam.41 We may imagine that the considerable similarity between Jewish and Islamic law, the analogous way in which each legal system operated in daily life, and the shared universe of linguistic discourse in such fundamental religious and social domains—all enhanced the potential for decent human relations when Jews drew on the possibilities inherent in their marginal situation to associate with Muslims of similar professional category.
I have applied considerations of hierarchy and marginality to our subject to arrive at a new theoretical approach to conceptualizing the place of the Jews in the social order of the two societies in which they lived in the Middle Ages. Summarizing and evaluating the discussion so far, the following can be stated. Within the “natural” hierarchical social orders of medieval Christendom and Islam, Jews had a recognized place, albeit at a very low rank. Egalitarian assimilation was not a possibility, but neither the ruling group nor the subordinate Jews wanted integration. The former perceived it as contrary to “right order,” while the latter viewed it as a threat to communal and religious solidarity. Nevertheless, the marginal situation associated with hierarchy offered numerous opportunities for positive interaction. Whereas Jews as a group occupied a recognized, low rank in the medieval hierarchy, individuals were capable of crossing barriers.
For Jews in Christendom, marginality degenerated into exclusion during the long period from the early to the High and especially late Middle Ages, as they were increasingly restricted to residential quarters (not yet ghettos), physically assaulted, forced to abandon Judaism, murdered individually or in groups, and expelled. Islamic society allowed Jews and Christians the benefits of living in a marginal situation within its hierarchical social order, but the marginal situation had greater staying power there. And, it did not degenerate into exclusion via expulsion.
Light can be shed, I believe, on the reasons for the more favorable position of the Jews of Islam by examining the Jewish-gentile relationship through yet another sociological lens, that of ethnicity. Historically, ethnic heterogeneity has been much more characteristic of the medieval Orient than of the medieval Occident. Arabs, Iranians, Turks, Kurds, Berbers, Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and others populated the social landscape, giving society a richly hued human and cultural texture. Further, the dhimmī group exhibited heterogeneity within its own ranks, with two (in some places, three) nonconforming religions coexisting in the same area. Discrimination and theological contempt by the dominant group were thus more widely distributed, hence somewhat more diffused among these, which made intolerance less onerous for each group. Ethnic differentiation—a counterforce to the exclusivism inherent in “national” homogeneity of whatever kind—was a major factor in preserving the embeddedness of the Jews and Christians in the Arab world and preventing them from being totally excluded from the social order.
Ethnic depiction of the medieval Islamic social order comes from the anthropological study of contemporary traditional Muslim societies. Carleton S. Coon, one of the early anthropologists to write about the Middle East, recognized and characterized the ethnic nature of Middle Eastern society with the metaphor of “mosaic.”42 Most contemporary anthropologists consider this terminology inadequate, finding that the mosaic model fails to take into account the dynamic nature of intergroup relations, that it oversimplifies reality, and that it offers little insight into the historical processes that led to ethnic group formation.43 Many would, nonetheless, agree that some of the core insights in Coon’s analysis remain useful for depicting the operation of the ethnic factor in traditional Arab-Islamic society.
Discounting the inappropriate reference to race, we can learn much about the medieval relationship between Muslims and Jews (or Christians) from Coon’s description:
In the old Middle Eastern culture . . . the ideal was to emphasize not the uniformity of the citizens of a country as a whole but a uniformity within each special segment, and the greatest possible contrast between segments. The members of each ethnic unit feel the need to identify themselves by some configuration of symbols. If by virtue of their history they possess some racial peculiarity, this they will enhance by special haircuts and the like; in any case they will wear distinctive garments and behave in a distinctive fashion. Walking through the bazaar you have no trouble identifying everyone you meet, once you have learned the sets of symbols. These people want to be identified. If you know who they are, you will know what to expect of them and how to deal with them, and human relations will operate smoothly in a crowded space. . . . This exaggeration of symbolic devices greatly facilitates business and social intercourse in a segmented society. It saves people from embarrassing questions, from “breaks,” from anger, and from violence. It is an essential part of the mechanism which makes the mosaic function.44
Fredrik Barth’s work on ethnicity adds an important nuance that clarifies the role of ethnicity in modulating hostile intergroup behavior in the Middle Eastern context:
Ethnic distinctions do not depend on an absence of mobility, contact and information, but do entail social processes of exclusion and incorporation whereby discrete categories are maintained despite changing participation and membership in the course of individual life histories. Secondly, one finds that stable, persisting, and often vitally important social relations are maintained across such boundaries, and are frequently based precisely on the dichotomized ethnic status.
And:
The persistence of ethnic groups in contact implies not only criteria and signals for identification, but also a structuring of interaction which allows the persistence of cultural differences. . . . Stable inter-ethnic relations presuppose such a structuring of interaction: a set of prescriptions governing situations of contact, and allowing for articulation in some sectors or domains of activity, and a set of proscriptions on social situations preventing inter-ethnic interactions in other sectors, and thus insulating parts of the cultures from confrontation and modification. . . . Where social identities are organized and allocated by such principles, there will thus be a tendency towards canalization and standardization of interaction and the emergence of boundaries which maintain and generate ethnic diversity within larger, encompassing social systems.45
Barth’s formulation fits well the situation of the medieval Middle East. In the Islamic social order, people belonged to groups characterized by distinguishable ethnic traits. They lived alongside other ethnic groups. For Muslims of different ethnic origins, membership in the Islamic umma complemented ethnic identity. Creating and maintaining boundaries that reinforced ethnicity and regulated relations with other ethnic groups was a goal or mechanism of the social order, and this included the dhimma system. In their religious and ethnic particularity, Jews conformed to a basic norm of the social order: they defined themselves vis-à-vis others just as others defined themselves vis-à-vis the Jews and other dissimilar groups.
Udovitch and Valensi have illustrated this culture of differences in traditional Islamic society through field work among a modern vestige of classical Jewish-Arab interethnic coexistence. They write that “the paradox of a community which was at once so intensely and completely Jewish and at the same time culturally so thoroughly embedded in its Muslim, North African environment promised to tell us something important about both Jews and Muslims and about their interaction in the present and in the past.”46
Through external signs such as distinctive clothing, dialect of Arabic, choice of personal names, innovation in the architecture of domestic space, and adherence to the Jewish calendar, to give a few examples, the traditional Jews of Jerba ensured their differentiation from Muslims. This, in turn, reinforced their ethnic and religious identity and secured their position as a community paralleling and successfully interacting with the dominant group. Social differentiation extended to the marketplace, where Jews interacted most frequently with Muslims. “Although the ethnic and religious boundaries separating Muslims and Jews are by no means absent or obliterated in the marketplace, it is here that the lines of demarcation are most fluid and permeable,” write Udovitch and Valensi.47 In the economic transactions between Jews and Muslims, a certain measure of trust and familiarity were presumed, as well as a common respect for “the Law”—that is, religious law, a property that reinforced Muslim confidence in Jewish honesty in economic affairs. Udovitch and Valensi maintain that this image of the “honest Jew,” embodied in the Arabic notion of ḥaqq al-yahūd (the law, the justice, the honesty of Jews) underlies the entire realm of Jewish-Muslim interethnic intercourse: “It expresses a vision of organic integration into a system of life in which the fact of their Jewishness becomes a paramount element even in the mundane pursuit of their daily bread and the basis for their relations with Muslims.”48
In his study of economic life in Sefrou, Morocco, Clifford Geertz lists as one of the basic givens, or “characteristic ideas,” of the “mosaic” pattern of social organization in Middle Eastern society the fact “that non-Muslim groups are not outside Muslim society but have a scripturally allocated place within it.” On the question of diversity,
Middle Eastern Society . . . does not cope with diversity by sealing it into castes, isolating it into tribes, or covering it over with some common denominator concept of nationality. ... It copes ... by distinguishing with elaborate precision the contexts (marriage, diet, worship, education) within which men are separated by their dissimilitudes and those (work, friendship, politics, trade) where, however warily and however conditionally, men are connected by their differences.”49
With specific reference to Sefrou, he says: “The Jews were at once Sefrouis like any others and resoundingly themselves . . . [not] a set-apart pariah community, deviant and self-contained, though they were as certainly that too. Moroccan to the core and Jewish to the same core, they were heritors of a tradition double and indivisible and in no way marginal."50
Complementing the model of hierarchy and marginality, these anthropological findings can be applied to medieval Muslim society. In part, they explain what appears to be a tolerant, intergroup relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims. This becomes clearer when we again turn to the Latin Christian West for comparison and contrast.
In the early European Middle Ages, ethnicity was an important factor in what, compared to the later period, was a time of substantial acceptance of the Jews. Considerable ethnic heterogeneity characterized the Barbarian period. Visigoths, Franks, Lombards, Burgundians, and other Germanic tribes coexisted, each tolerating ethnic diversity and distinctive customary law while, at the same time, recognizing the ethnic distinctiveness and separate legal tradition of the native Roman populations. As in Islam, such ethnic heterogeneity, coupled with the existence of large areas of still unchristianized pagan peoples in the Slavic lands of central and eastern Europe, created an environment in which the Jews could be somewhat “tolerated” despite their religious nonconformity and cultural and legal distinctiveness. Here again, ethnicity was an integral part of the social order.51
By the eleventh century, ethnic diversity had receded as a significant factor in Christian-Jewish relations. With the completion of the conversion of the last pagans living in western and central Europe, and the concomitant spread of the notion of a unified, universal, Catholic social order, the Jews, already alien on account of their religion, came even more to be viewed as outsiders. As the ethnic diversity of the Barbarian period gave way (to be sure, in England more so than in France) to a somewhat more homogeneous society bound together by Christianity, the exclusivistic imperative implicit at all times in Christian religious theory rose to the fore and pushed the Jews further toward exclusion. In many cases, exclusion turned out to be a way station on the path to the elimination of Judaism through conversion of the Jews or through their expulsion. This did not happen in Islam.
Hierarchy, marginality, and ethnicity belong to the realm of social scientific theory. They do explain, however, some basic differences in Jewish-gentile relations in Christendom and in Islam. But where shall we turn to view Jewish-gentile relations in action (apart from the marketplace)? In the next two chapters, I attempt to do this in a preliminary way, discussing life in the medieval town and interpersonal sociability.