Chapter Eight
DESPITE segregated residence, medieval Jews and non-Jews socialized in both the Christian and the Islamic milieu. It is illuminating to compare the working of sociability in each majority society, as well as how Christians and Muslims reacted to real or potential fraternization with Jews.
During the early Middle Ages, Jews and Christians mingled quite freely in Europe. Church councils as late as the eleventh century inveighed against eating or drinking with Jews or staying with them in the same house—sure signs that such sociability occurred regularly.1 In letters written during the reign of King Louis the Pious, Bishop Agobard of Lyons complains about excesses in Jewish-Christian fraternization. Bemoaning the fact that Christians eat with Jews on Christian fast days, the bishop said that Jews, encouraged by the king, were preaching to Christians about the superiority of Judaism, even blaspheming Christ in the presence of Christians. Many Christians, he added, thought the Jews worthy of respect because of their ancestors. No one, however, should imagine that the Jews were superior to Christians. Rather than being granted such respect, the Jews should be despised and shunned.2
As we saw in Chapter 3, the Fourth Lateran Council, under Pope Innocent III, expressed concern about sociability between Christians and Jews. Sexual relations between Jews and Christians are cited as the reason for instituting the requirement that Jews (and Muslims) wear distinguishing clothing. “[I]t sometimes happens that by mistake Christians have intercourse with Jewish or Saracen women, and Jews or Saracens with Christian women.”3 From the combination “Jews and Saracens” it appears that the prelates had Christian Spain (and to a lesser extent, perhaps, Norman Sicily) in mind. In Spain, indeed, Muslims and Jews mingled freely with Christians, continuing the centuries-old habit of interfaith sociability under Muslim rule before the Christian reconquests.
The Lateran Council strictly forbade intermarriage. This restriction had long since been expressed in Christian-Roman Jewry law.4 The “crime” was treated on a par with adultery, for which the punishment was execution. With the taboo against sexual mixing regularly ignored, legal texts repeated the prohibition.5 James A. Brundage explains the intensity of concern over sexuality and intermarriage with Jews in medieval Christianity:
At the center of the vagaries of medieval law concerning Jewish-Christian relations lurked a persistent concern about sexual relations between Christians and Jews. A horror of sexuality haunted much of the canon law of marriage, and the canonists’ loathing was particularly acute when they dealt with non-marital sex. . . . The taboo . . . seems also to have been related to a need to assure ritual purity. . . . Contact with Jews not only endangered religious faith, but also blemished the soul and grievously displeased God.6
Not surprisingly, Christian aversion to socialization with Jews is prominent in the chapter on the Jews in the thirteenth-century Siete Partidas, the seven-part law code of King Alfonso X of Castile. The code was not immediately promulgated, nor did it achieve full application until the mid-fourteenth century. Its twelve statutes on the Jews, however, which were heavily dependent on Roman and canon law, mirror the “checkered relationship between Christians and Jews.”7 In the absence of medieval codes from the northern European kingdoms, the Siete Partidas offers the best glimpse we have of consolidated Jewry law as it was envisioned by a learned Christian monarch at the height of the Middle Ages.8
On the question of sociability resulting from residence in Jewish homes, the Siete Partidas echoes early church councils: “We order that no Jew shall dare to have in his house Christian servants. . . . Furthermore, we forbid any Christian, male or female, to invite a Jew, male or female, nor may a Christian receive an invitation from Jews, to eat and drink together or partake of wine made by Jews. In addition, we order that no Jew shall dare to bathe together with Christians.”9 This sweeping prohibition reflects the concern of official Christianity that Jews might seduce Christians to their religion, blaspheme Christianity, or intermingle sexually with Christians. The mention of Christian-Jewish conviviality over wine reacts against an implicit disparagement of Christianity, for Jewish law required that Jews drink only wine produced by coreligionists and that it be served only by brethren in the faith. Combined bathing glossed over differences in social status and religious affiliation, since all were naked—the infidel disrobed from his outer garments, affixed with their discriminatory sign—and friendships could grow out of the casual conversation carried on in the neutral atmosphere of the bath.10
The Siete Partidas reiterates the requirement that Jews wear distinguishing marks as a safeguard against inadvertent sexual mingling.11 Further, Jews are permitted by church and state to live among Christians, but only “that they might live forever as in captivity and serve as a reminder to mankind that they are descended from those who Crucified Our Lord Jesus Christ.”12 Ultimately, this traditional statement defined the highly circumscribed sociability that could officially be tolerated in medieval Christian society.
William Jordan, followed by R. I. Moore, put it well when observing that the lack of ties created over time by sociability—whether via marriage, conviviality, or the sharing of worship and ritual—deprived the Jews of popular sympathy and even a measure of support against tyranny and extortion sometimes bestowed on other victims of persecution, such as the Christian heretics harassed by the Dominican inquisition.13
Like Christendom, Islam preferred that its adherents avoid socializing with the inferior infidel dhimmī. Nonetheless, Islam—at least, orthodox Sunni Islam—had no comparable ideological or theological rationale for shunning Jews and Christians. For instance, Islamic legal pronouncements link social avoidance of Jews to their historical enmity toward the Prophet. When Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya deals with socialization between Jews and dhimmīs, he warns Muslims to be on their guard when greeting a dhimmī. The non-Muslim infidel is notorious for muttering “may poison afflict you” (al-samm 'alayka) in place of the standard Arabic greeting “peace be upon you” (al-salām 'alayka). The safest reply was, “may it be upon you, too” (wa-'alayka).14 The ḥadīth literature contains numerous stories in which Muhammad encounters this contemptuous greeting as well as other manifestations of enmity when meeting Jews and Christians.15 In the main, though, these accounts lack the damaging theological overtones of Christian stories relating Jewish alleged involvement in the death ofjesus.
Largely unfettered by ideological impediments, Muslims socialized with Jews (and other dhimmīs) more or less freely, thus establishing bonds.16 As in the economic realm, so in daily life, ample opportunity arose for Jews, living in a “marginal situation,” to cross barriers erected in Islamic society. Jews and Muslims met in the public baths, an important locus for fraternization outside the family. Periodically, measures were enacted regulating dhimmī use of the baths—for instance, by requiring that they abstain from visiting the bath on Friday until after prayer time, or, as mentioned briefly earlier in connection with the al-Ḥākim persecutions, forcing them to wear something distinctive around their necks while sitting unclothed in the bath.17 Noteworthy in these instances, mixed bathing itself was not banned. Christian rulings forbidding Jews and Christians from visiting public baths on the same days aimed at exclusion, and a thirteenth-century Latin decretist (commentator) on Gratian’s Decretum, reinforced the ban by raising the specter of defilement by the Jews’ filth.18 Muslim regulations were intended to underscore and reinforce the social hierarchy, of which non-Muslims were an accepted part, albeit marginally, and at a low rank.
In his discussion of the pros and cons of this fraternization, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya assumes that Muslims visit sick dhimmī neighbors or relatives.19 Muslims, he says, may convey condolences to non-Muslims or congratulate them on the occasion of a marriage, birth, good health, or the arrival of a person who has been absent. One may not, however, congratulate dhimmīs regarding religious matters touching their unbelief—for instance, on the occasion of their holidays. This dictum resembles rules in the Mishnah regulating Jewish encounters with polytheist pagans, later applied to Christians.20
Formal and informal business partnerships between Jews and Muslims afforded ample opportunity for people of different religions to associate with one another. The business correspondence of the Cairo Geniza attests to relaxed socialization between members of the two faiths in the marketplace, one of the two primary locuses (the other being the mosque) of public life in the Muslim world. Indeed, the very texture of bazaar life lent itself to sociability of an intense nature among Jews and their gentile counterparts.21
This does not mean that differences between Jews and Muslims vanished behind the hectic exchange of goods and money. The mutually recognized hierarchy held sway: Muslim on top and Jew (or Christian) on the bottom. The Islamic law of partnership, for instance, required that the Muslim partner should always act as the agent, lest the non-Muslim, be he Christian or Jew, carry out a transaction forbidden by Islam.22 Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya states that some authorities frowned on partnership with dhimmīs altogether, either for the reason stated or “because becoming partners with them leads to intermingling [mukhālaṭa] and that, in turn, to friendship [mawadda].”23
Long-distance commerce required that partners correspond with one another to convey information about business dealings. Not surprisingly, Ibn Taymiyya quotes a saying attributed to the second caliph, 'Umar: “Do not exchange letters with the dhimmīs, lest amity should be generated between you and them, nor call them by their surnames; you must humiliate them [adhillūhum] but do not wrong them [lā taẓlumūhum].”24
Islamic (Sunni) law took a permissive position on the eating of animals slaughtered by People of the Book (as sanctioned by a Qur’anic verse). This meant that Muslims could dine in Jewish homes. Even the Prophet Muhammad was said to have “eaten of their [the Jews’] food.”25 Eating in Christian homes was more problematic: pork might be served. The permissibility of Jewish slaughtering facilitated congenial relations between Muslims and Jews in one of the most important settings for sociability in Middle Eastern culture. It must have gone on regularly.
Intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews existed as a theoretical possibility in both Islamic and European Christian society. Judaism and Christianity forbade this ultimate form of sociability. Islam handled the matter more indulgently. With Qur’anic sanction, it allows the marriage of a Muslim man to a dhimmī woman, on the presumption that, as master in the relationship, the Muslim husband would not be susceptible to the lure of his wife’s religion.26 Remarkably, Islamic law requires the husband to permit his non-Muslim wife to observe her religious rituals and to pray inside their house, and it admonishes him not to prompt her (if she is Jewish) to break the Sabbath or to eat forbidden foods. Nor may he prevent her from reading her own Scriptures, provided she does so without raising her voice (as required in the Pact of 'Umar), nor from fasting on fast days prescribed by her religion.27 She might not, however, attend her house of worship—according to one authority, lest her Muslim husband forfeit his conjugal right at the time; according to another, lest he seem to be abetting her in her unbelief.28
Islamic lawyers debated whether a Muslim husband might demand that his non-Muslim wife perform Islamic ablutions prescribed for cleansing impurities, including menstrual contamination.29 The aspect of pollution through sexual relations—which, Brundage asserts, strengthened Christian abhorrence of intermarriage and rendered any kind of intermarriage illegal, even between a Christian man and a Jewish woman—appears not to have been a factor in the Muslim world, at least among the Sunnis. The Shiites, however, stressed the opposition of Muslim purity versus non-Muslim impurity (najāsa) as a central tenet of their teaching. This affected Jews in the late Middle Ages. According to the Iranian source, around 1656, in Iran under the Safavids—the dynasty that made Shiism the state religion of Iran—a great persecution ensued after two Jews were found to be ignoring the law requiring distinguishing clothing, with the consequence “that the Muslims could not avoid being infected by impurity.”30
Just as the Islamic marketplace furnished more opportunities than in the Latin West for Jews to meet non-Jews on neutral ground and develop friendly relationships, so did the community of the learned provide a forum for congenial interfaith encounter. This existed to a much greater extent than in northern Christian Europe. To be sure, some Christian scholars turned to Jews for explanations of passages in the Hebrew Bible, and it is certain that educated Christians and Jews established friendships on an intellectual plane even as late as the fourteenth century.31 But in most encounters there was a polemical agenda—debate over the meaning of Jewish Scripture.
In the Islamic world, sociability between Jewish and gentile intellectuals was more regular and less fraught with conflict. Arabic, the language of high culture, was by the tenth century the shared vernacular of Muslims and Jews. Although Arabic served as the language of the dominant religion, it carried few of the negative associations that Latin, the language of the hostile church, had for Jews in Europe. Arabic was employed for writings that were religiously neutral, what might be called secular. Knowledge of philosophy, the sciences, medicine—all part of the unified, secular, Hellenistic-Arab curriculum—could be and frequently was acquired by Muslims and Jews from the same nonconfessional sources, whether written or oral. The description by the twelfth-century Jewish savant Joseph ben Judah ibn 'Aqnīn of the ideal curriculum for Jews substantially parallels the course of study of the tenth- and eleventh-century Muslim philosopher Avicenna, with the exception that Ibn 'Aqnīn’s course of study required religious texts specific to Judaism.32
Ashkenazic Jews shared little in the way of curricular interest with Christians. No intellectual enterprise that assumed Latin as the language of discourse could easily attract them. When scholastic theology, in considerable part adapted from the philosophy of Maimonides,33 came into vogue among Christian thinkers in the twelfth century, Jews in the Ashkenazic milieu did not follow suit. They remained aloof, as well, from the large body of Hebrew translations of philosophical texts produced in southern France, texts that played an important intermediary role in introducing the Arabo-Greek philosophical tradition into Latin.
Dhimmīs enjoyed substantial acceptance when participating in the intellectual circles of the dominant culture, exemplified in such illuminating detail by Joel L. Kraemer with respect to the “Renaissance of Islam” in cosmopolitan, tenth-century Baghdad.34 These and other manifestations of Jewish immersion in the cultural world of Arab savants flowed naturally from what Louis Gardet, in his study of the Islamic mentalité, calls the “intellectual tolerance” of medieval Muslim society during its classical period, which showed “no ethnic discrimination.”35
Jewish physicians were found in Arab society in numbers disproportionate to the Jewish presence in the population at large; they acquired their medical training as part of the standard Hellenistic-Arabic curriculum, often studying with Muslims and Christians. They formed part of the interdenominational circle of physicians working in state hospitals and adorning Muslim courts. Muslim admiration for Jewish men of medicine abounds in Arabic biographical dictionaries. Ibn Abī Uṣaybi'a’s dictionary of physicians, for example, lauds numerous Jewish (and Christian) representatives of the medical profession, including Maimonides and his son, Abraham; the author was personally acquainted with the latter from their work together as attending physicians at the government-endowed hospital in Cairo.36 Jewish physicians had private patients who were Muslim, both dignitaries at court and ordinary people.37 At least in the classical period, these encounters, which provided considerable opportunity for Jewish-Muslim sociability, seem not to have been accompanied by suspicion of the inimical intentions of Jewish doctors that had its roots in late antique Christianity and became so common in medieval Europe.38
An aspect of Jewish-gentile sociability under Islam that seems to lack a counterpart in the Jewish-Christian world is the world of shared popular religious practices. Anthropological study of Jewish-Muslim relations in modern times reveals the existence and extent of this spectacle, particularly the joint worship of saints. Here, interdenominational religiosity has its basis in the fact that the Qur’an honors biblical figures as prophets. Their grave sites attracted both Muslims and Jews. Another example is the now famous post-Passover Mimuna festivities of Moroccan Jewry, during which Muslims played the intriguing role of presenting the first “leaven” to the Jews, a demonstration of Muslim “relief” at the Jews’ return to the marketplace.39 The phenomenon of Muslim participation in non-Muslim religious celebrations did not begin in modern times, however. In the Middle Ages, far from separating themselves from dhimmī religious holidays, Muslims in Egypt often partook enthusiastically of Christian and Jewish religious celebrations.40
Two famous European Jewish travelers of the twelfth century, Benjamin of Tudela and Petaḥiah of Regensburg, noted this interfaith phenomenon with amazement, so uncharacteristic was it of the Christian milieu from which they hailed (Christian Spain and Germany, respectively). Benjamin found Muslims and Jews sharing in the veneration of Ezekiel, the biblical prophet of the Babylonian Exile, at the site of his tomb and at the synagogue named after him, which was tended by Muslim and Jewish keepers.
People come from a distance to pray there from the time of the New Year until the Day of Atonement. The Jews have great rejoicings on these occasions. Thither also come the Head of the Diaspora and the Heads of the Academies from Baghdad. Their camp occupies a space of about two miles, and Arab merchants come there as well. . . . Distinguished Muslims also come there to pray, so great is their love for Ezekiel the Prophet.41
The Jews maintained a synagogue at the sepulcher of Ezra. “And at the side thereof the Muslims erected a house of prayer out of their great love and veneration for him, and they like the Jews on that account.”42
Petaḥiah, who made his journey shortly after Benjamin, obtained from the head of the yeshiva in Baghdad a document instructing Jews to conduct him to grave sites of Jewish scholars and righteous men (tzaddiqim). The first place he visited was the grave of Ezekiel. Petaḥiah relates: “On the holiday of Sukkot, people come there from all lands . . . about sixty or eighty thousand Jews, in addition to Muslims.” Huts (sukkot) were erected in the courtyard of the prophet’s tomb, and people made vows and gave donations in hopes of gaining a favor. Petaḥiah heard a story about a Muslim notable (sar) who vowed that if his barren mare bore an offspring, he would give the foal to Ezekiel.
[E]very Muslim who goes to the place of Muhammad [i.e., on the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina], travels via the grave of Ezekiel, where he gives a gift and a donation to Ezekiel and vows in prayer: “Our lord Ezekiel, if I return I shall give you such-and-such.”43
Muslims even made donations and prayed at the tomb of the Mishnaic sage Rabbi Meir and bowed in prayer at the burial site of Ezra the Scribe.44
In the late fifteenth century, the Italian Jewish traveler Meshullam of Volterra gazed in wonderment at the phenomenon of Jewish-Muslim popular religion.45 Like his two twelfth-century precursors, Meshullam hailed from a Christian environment where Jews and Christians were mutually repelled by each other’s religion. Meshullam could only find this kind of interaction between Jews and gentiles astonishing.
Interfaith sociability, far more extensive in Islam than in Christendom, did not overcome the religious opposition between Judaism and Islam. Conflict, endemic between monotheistic faiths throughout most of history, persisted even as Jews and Muslims formed partnerships in business, ate at each other’s tables, joined in religious festivals, and exchanged ideas. Perhaps even on the fundamental level of religious rivalry, some nuanced differences between the Judaeo-Christian and Judaeo-Muslim conflict can be detected, and so we turn our attention to interreligious polemics, looking for subtle shadings that add to our understanding of the contrasting fate of Jewry in each milieu.