Jews and Crime in Medieval Europe

Ephraim Shoham-Steiner

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780814345603
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Europa medievale

Jews and Crime in Medieval Europe is a topic laced by prejudice on one hand and apologetics on the other. Beginning in the Middle Ages, Jews were often portrayed as criminals driven by greed. While these accusations were, for the most part, unfounded, in other cases criminal accusations against Jews were not altogether baseless. Drawing on a variety of legal, liturgical, literary, and archival sources, Ephraim Shoham-Steiner examines the reasons for the involvement in crime, the social profile of Jews who performed crimes, and the ways and mechanisms employed by the legal and communal body to deal with Jewish criminals and with crimes committed by Jews. A society's attitude toward individuals identified as criminals—by others or themselves—can serve as a window into that society's mores and provide insight into how transgressors understood themselves and society's attitudes toward them. The book is divided into three main sections. In the first section, Shoham-Steiner examines theft and crimes of a financial nature. In the second section, he discusses physical violence and murder, most importantly among Jews but also incidents when Jews attacked others and cases in which Jews asked non-Jews to commit violence against fellow Jews. In the third section, Shoham-Steiner approaches the role of women in crime and explores the gender differences, surveying the nature of the crimes involving women both as perpetrators and as victims, as well as the reaction to their involvement in criminal activities among medieval European Jews. While the study of crime and social attitudes toward criminals is firmly established in the social sciences, the history of crime and of social attitudes toward crime and criminals is relatively new, especially in the field of medieval studies and all the more so in medieval Jewish studies. Jews and Crime in Medieval Europe blazes a new path for unearthing daily life history from extremely recalcitrant sources. The intended readership goes beyond scholars and students of medieval Jewish studies, medieval European history, and crime in pre-modern society.

1

“The Thieves That Go from House to House”

Jewish Thieves in Medieval Europe

And the thieves that go from one house to another take the hand of the dead with them. [Once they enter a house] they place it in the middle of the room and this way it causes everyone in the house to shiver and to fall asleep. And they take four burning candles and they throw diamond dust on the candles. Then they place the candles in the four corners of the house and it seems to the house dwellers that the house is rolling and moving. And when the thieves wish, they take the hand of the dead and place it on the heart of the owner of the house and they ask him where he has hidden the keys to the gold and the silver hidden in the house and he tells them about all his belongings.1

This epigraph, written in Hebrew, appears in a collection of practical potions, spells and amulets copied by an Ashkenazi scribe in the southern Italian city of Trani in the fifteenth century. It describes in great detail not only how a burglar can cast a spell on members of a household so that he can break in and steal their belongings, but also how the burglar can use magic to obtain important information about the household vault, with all its gold and silver valuables.

Theft was by far the most common crime in medieval times.2 In the urban environment, where most Jews in medieval Europe lived, food, produce, and livestock were stolen as a matter of course. Outside the towns, travelers on the roads between cities were frequently robbed as well, making such trips a risky business, especially if one carried valuables or money.3 Under the circumstances, theft was severely punished. According to William C. Jordan, “Theft in a society where surpluses were low was not a petty crime unless the coveted article or money was trivial in value, and theft, then as now, was often accompanied by serious physical violence. As a felony, therefore, it merited corporal punishment. Habitual thievery, by this logic, deserved the ultimate sanction, death.”4

A clear distinction must be made between petty theft and what we still today refer to as grand larceny. Petty theft, such as today’s shoplifting, was an everyday event that usually occurred in the marketplace. Throughout the medieval period, many people, at times a vast percentage of the population, lived at the subsistence level, in dire economic need. At a time of rampant poverty, especially during the economic crisis of the late thirteenth century, the indigent commonly filched small items from market stands and pickpocketed other shoppers.5 Attempts to halt such crime through the imposition of harsher sentences, including the death penalty, often backfired—public hangings, meant to serve as a warning and deterrent to thieves, provided an ideal opportunity for pickpockets to ply their trade.6

The burglary of homes or businesses and commercial theft was also common. Such crimes were not always premeditated; the thief might spontaneously exploit an opportunity when chancing upon a house, barn, workshop, warehouse, or store that had been left unattended or unlocked. Such opportunities were the subject of a proverb attributed to the talmudic sage Raba: “A broken fence beckons the thief” (BT Sukkah 26a). Burglaries plotted in advance were much less common. They required choosing potential victims, gathering intelligence, organizing a team, maintaining secrecy and discretion, preparing a getaway plan, and securing potential buyers for the stolen goods.

The last of these, the partnership between the burglar and the dealer, was an essential component of any burglary scheme, especially a large-scale one. Evidence that Jews engaged in trade and commerce sometimes provided this vital service can be found from the beginning of the Jewish presence north of the Alps.

The Latin words judaious (Jew) and mercantor (merchant) were virtually synonymous in the tenth and early eleventh centuries.7 According to early eleventh century legal codes, there was a fundamental distinction between the actual perpetrator of a theft and any third party who benefited from the theft, including the dealer who sold the stolen goods. While most thieves in the eleventh century were either condemned to death, maimed, or required to pass a trial by ordeal if they sought to prove their innocence, Jewish thieves were treated differently. Most importantly, they were exempt from trial by ordeal.

A Time of Great Risk, Opportunity, and Change: The Late Tenth and Early to Mid-Eleventh Century

Whereas in our times the holy church has been afflicted beyond measure by tribulations through having to join in suffering so many oppressions and dangers, we have so striven to aid it, with God’s help, that the peace which we could not make lasting by reason of our sins, we should to some extent make binding by at least exempting certain days. In the year of the Lord’s incarnation, 1085, in the eighth indictio, it was decreed by God’s mediation, the clergy and people unanimously agreeing: that from the first day of the Advent of our Lord . . . until the end of the day of the Epiphany. . . . The purpose of it is that those who travel and those who remain at home may enjoy the greatest possible security, so that no one shall commit murder or arson, robbery or assault, no man shall injure another with a whip or a sword or any kind of weapon, and that no one, no matter on account of what wrong he shall be at feud, shall, from the Advent of our Lord to the eighth day after Epiphany, and from Septuagesima until the eighth day after Pentecost, presume to bear as weapons a shield, sword, or lance—or, in fact, the burden of any armor . . . it is unlawful, except for those going a long distance, to carry arms.8

With these words, written in 1085 during the reign of Emperor Heinrich IV of the Holy Roman Empire, the armistice that would later come to be known as the Truce (or Peace) of God (Treuga Dei) commenced. It marked the beginning of the end of a century and a half of turmoil and instability in the German realm. During this time, in particular prior to 1050, Germany suffered from political, cultural, military, and economic turbulence.9 Rival local lords fought continually, carrying on age-old feuds, attempting to seize land, livestock, crops, merchandise, and anything else of value from one another, wreaking havoc on their rivals’ lands. The loser took the first opportunity to retaliate against the victor. These turbulent times in the Ottonian Empire offered lucrative opportunities for those who were willing to take risks.

In the following pages I consider several local cases recorded in the Jewish legal responsa literature written during the late tenth and early to mid-eleventh century. This literature constitutes some of the earliest documentation from medieval Europe of a world in which Jews and non-Jews partnered for profit. While violent and very risky, it offered not just economic opportunities but also the potential for intimate collaboration between Jews and Christians. The sources I examine here show that the individuals involved in these activities do not fit stereotypes about the criminal underworld.

The geographical area the sources come from was one of the centers of the new and rapidly growing Jewish settlement north of the Alps, the area where many of the traditions now referred to as Ashkenazi were formed. As of the late tenth century, this region produced a steady stream of halakhic and other rabbinic material, including liturgical poetry (piyyutim) and exegetical writing. Thanks to these texts, it is possible to trace the outlines of the medieval north European Jewish experience.10 Through the prism of this literature, the halakhic works in particular, I will portray the times and the people who braved the treacherous waves of opportunity within the law, on its boundaries, and well outside of it.

Honor among Thieves?

By the early eleventh century, the Jewish presence in northern Europe had become not only slightly more rooted and visible but also better documented.11 The first families to settle north of the Alps in the ninth and tenth century had grown in size, and the Jewish communities in the Rhineland and Danube basin were bolstered by a constant trickle of new immigrants from southern Europe, especially from Italy and southern France.12 By the late tenth century, Cologne, Mainz, and Worms, to name just the larger towns, had a visible Jewish presence. Jewish merchants and businessmen were becoming a common sight in the markets, fairs, and trading posts of the Ottonian Empire.

Historiography tends to highlight the Jewish affiliation with trade and commerce. Some have even gone so far as to suggest that non-Jews followed Jews into commerce, and that the entire pre-Crusade beginnings of the commercially driven urban revival in northern Europe should be attributed to the Jews.13 More recent research has shown that the deep-rooted notion that Jews were at this time engaged in long distance international trade is more of a myth than a fact.14 Even the critics of the earlier scholarly paradigm agree, however, that intraregional and interregional trade and commerce indeed correlated with a visible Jewish presence during this period.

One of the significant sources of information regarding Jewish involvement in illegal activity during these times is an enlightening case15 found in responsa16 from the late tenth or early eleventh-century Rabbi Gershom ben Judah of Mainz (d. 1028), discussing a breach of the inner Jewish laws of ma‘arufiah.17

The laws of ma‘arufiah (from the Arabic root ‘arafa, “to know”) were instituted in early medieval Ashkenazi settlements in an effort to regulate business partnerships between Jews and non-Jews and minimize competition between members of the Jewish communities.18 In the spirit of medieval European economic logic, which sought to curb and regulate competition rather than encourage it, the laws of ma‘arufiah stipulated that once a Jew had established a business relationship with a gentile, their relationship would be exclusive. Thus, unless the Jew “owning” this exclusive relationship unequivocally terminated it, no other Jew was allowed to form a parallel relationship with that person, unless the Jew holding the right explicitly authorized it.19 Breaching the laws of ma‘arufiah was punishable by a fine or even the imposition of a communal ban, a ḥerem, in the more extreme cases.

A suit based on ma‘arufiah rights came before Rabbi Gershom, probably as an appeal. The dispute described in the query concerned the determination of which Jew possessed the right to an exclusive business relationship with a gentile partner, whom the text refers to as a thief. The plaintiff who brought the suit to a rabbinic court alleged that a fellow Jew had attempted to co-opt his business acquaintances in the hopes of diverting some of the profit they could provide into his own pockets.20 Both sides went to considerable lengths to prove their case, making extremely revealing statements about the nature of their relationship with the non-Jewish partners, namely the thieves. These statements, reiterated in the question sent to Rabbi Gershom, were designed to show the court how intricate and elaborate the partnership was, how deep the personal acquaintance between the partners, and how intimate their relationship. Given the ma‘arufiah rule, both sides presented themselves as the legal “owner” of the partnership and the opposing side as the usurper.

The business partnership described in this question was clearly for the purpose of instigating theft and selling the stolen goods thus obtained. From the account in the responsum, it seems that both the thieves and the two Jews—who were neighbors—had a longstanding working relationship. This was no ad hoc partnership but rather a relationship forged by mutual interest, which grew over time. The arrangement between them covered every aspect of the crimes, including planning the theft and extending lines of credit. Evidence of the intimacy of the relationship was that the two parties were able to disclose much information of a personal nature, such as each other’s living quarters, the thieves’ hideaway, and even the place where the stolen goods were stored. All this would have been highly classified information, inaccessible to anyone outside the partnership.

According to the evidence provided to the court, the bond between the Jews and the gentile thieves was cemented by food and drink supplied by the Jewish partner. This is not surprising considering both that the Jews could not eat food prepared by non-Jews and that the Jews were the senior members in the partnership, with the thieves in their employ.21 As there is no indication that the food was in fact consumed together, but only that it was provided by the Jews to the gentiles, it may have been part of the payment to the thieves for their services.

The two Jews seem to have had other business connections, enterprises, and sources of income apart from dealing in stolen goods. According to the information the text relates in the name of the plaintiff (who is referred to as Reuven, the standard alias the responsa literature uses for the first party in a dispute or case), during the grape harvest he, his wife, and other members of the household moved to the vine-growing areas outside the town walls.22 This assertion, when taken together with the fact that the case was brought before Rabbi Gershom of Mainz, suggests that the case came from a Jewish community in the wine country of the middle Rhine and Mosel valley areas, where increasing numbers of Jews lived in the late tenth and early eleventh century. The respondent in the case, alias Shimon, is also described as having other business, involving long-distance interregional trade with the Danube basin area (referred to in the Hebrew text as Donoi). The responsum reports that “his men” were about to set out to that destination when the thieves arrived, offering to sell stolen coats.

The text describes the relationship between the Jews and the non-Jewish thieves, and their usual manner of conducting business. The thieves would scout out places some distance from where they and the Jews lived. Returning to their own town with booty stolen elsewhere seems to have been a way of avoiding suspicion, as they would look no different from legitimate merchants entering town with goods purchased far away. It would thus be easier to sell the merchandise.

On their scouting excursions, the thieves chose targets. They then shared their plans with their Jewish accomplice, including a list of tools that they required for the proposed burglary. So as to demonstrate just how close his relationship was with the thief, Reuven claimed that the tools used in the theft at issue belonged to him, referring specifically to a mallet or a hammer (kurnas) that he had given to the thieves to use in breaking a certain lock.23 The thieves would also provide an assessment of the market value of the goods they proposed to steal. According to the responsum, the Jewish partner would either request in advance that certain items be stolen, or tentatively agree to buy the stolen goods, based on the thief’s knowledge and assessment of market value. The Jewish dealer would then pay th...