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Article Excerpt
Preface
In his essay "The Politics of Culture: Ethnicity and Nationalism," Anthony D. Smith makes the following remark: "But, in fact, many ethnie, usually of the demotic ('vertical') variety, have survived for long periods under foreign rule, notably as 'pariah castes,' like the Jews in Medieval Europe" (Smith, 1994: 715). (1) Smith is referring to the common notion that medieval European Jewry lived under constant legal and religious restrictions and suffered persecutions at the hands of the Christian population. It was Max Weber who first used the term "pariah" with reference to Jews and Judaism in a scientific argument, but his use of the term "castes" in this context did not go unopposed (Momogliano, 1980). Social historians of the Jewish people insisted that the model of the Indian or West African caste system was inappropriate and misleading when used to describe Jewish-Gentile relationships in general, and the Judeo-Christian relationship in particular. Baptism in theory obliterated Jewish confessional identity and this of course ruled out the similarity to a rigid caste system. However, if we modify the term slightly and speak of a "pariah minority," we may use it without its initial connotations. I believe that we can employ this formulation, at least as a working definition, for our discussion.
A "pariah minority" is an ethnic or racial group that shares a language and a culture. Its members are the objects of persecution and are viewed by the dominant population as less then fully human--as dirty, inferior, or impure. Likewise, members of a "pariah minority" are marginalized by those in power and are considered beneath or outside the law. Medieval European Jewry closely fits this pattern. (2) It is also interesting to note how well this definition describes not only Jews, but also lepers in medieval Christian Europe, who were thought of and treated in a strikingly similar manner. Indeed, social historians have already suggested that medieval European Christian society should be seen as a "persecuting society," where both Jews and lepers were regarded in similar terms and treated accordingly (Moore, 1987; Richards, 1990).
This similarity between lepers and Jews raises the question of what perhaps appears to be the "ultimate pariah," namely, the leprous Jew. To the best of my knowledge, besides two footnotes in a book on Jewish history in thirteenth-century Germany, (3) the plight of Jewish lepers has yet to be investigated by Jewish historians or medievalists (or Jewish social historians of the medieval period in particular) (Shoham-Steiner, 2002) . The importance of studying the Jewish lepers of this period and attitudes toward them from within the Jewish community and from without, emerges with particular reference to two related issues: 1) Jewish social and religious intragroup self-image; and 2) the delicate and fragile relationship between Jews and Christians in medieval Europe.
The medieval Jewish community's internal attitudes toward its own lepers offer a new and unique angle from which to consider social phenomena such as "collective-inner reflection" and "othering" as they appear inside the culture of a "pariah minority." Placing this analysis against the backdrop of the relationships between Jewish Christian societies in the period exposes the sensitivity within a marginalized group to its own image in the eyes of the marginalizing majority.
To begin, we need first to define our terms of reference and offer a few words of introduction to the two medieval European "pariah minorities" in question: Jews and lepers. After this we shall consider a few case studies of male and female Jewish lepers and then draw some tentative conclusions about them.
The chronological framework of this study extends from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, an era regarded by many as the height of premodern Jewish existence in Western and Central Europe. As for the geographical scope: since we are adopting a "Jewish" point of view, I thought it appropriate to use a "Jewish" geographical term to delineate the boundaries. We will confine ourselves to an area Jews commonly referred to in broad terms as "Ashkenaz." This term is broadly used to describe the area stretching from the German-speaking lands of Central Europe to northern France and England.
Medieval European Jewry
Social attitudes toward the Jews of medieval Western Europe correspond with the typical patterns of social response to pariah minorities just outlined. On the one hand, Jews were thought to be the cause of physical and moral pollution. As of the mid-twelfth century, the accusation of cannibalistic ritual murder was leveled against the Jews ("blood libels"), mirroring the by then millennium-old accusation of deicide. (4) Popular belief deemed the Jews impure (Bonfil, 1988; Marcus, 1996; Johnson, 1998) and ascribed to them either contaminating powers or the ability to solicit others, such as lepers, to use their actual or imagined powers malevolently to cause harm to Christian folk (Barber, 1981). These attitudes notwithstanding, medieval European Jews lived in the midst of Christian society in relative security, protected by charters and privileges that were granted to them by the ruling elite. Although Jews tended to live apart, in the Jewary or Judengasse (the "Jews' Alley") in medieval towns, in many cases their small numbers did not allow for definite perimeters such that Christians and Jews actually lived in relative proximity to one another. The "ghetto," commonly believed to have been the medieval segregated Jewish residential area, is actually a much later development stemming from early modern sixteenth-century Venice.
Most of the Jews in this period lived in the cities and towns and practiced urban occupations. Due to their exclusion from the manorial or feudal socioeconomic system, Jews were generally barred from agriculture. The most common occupation associated with Jews until the rise of the commercial guilds was trade. By the thirteenth century this changed as Jews were gradually forced out of commerce and into usury and finance. This development had widespread social implications. Though usury was a needed and widely used service, those who practiced it were generally despised on religious grounds. In time it was this occupation that was the most closely associated with Jews, to the further detriment of their negative social image.
This complex combination of toleration and rejection of the Jew in medieval Christian Europe is probably traceable to Church doctrine. Until the High Middle Ages in Europe, Jews were regarded simultaneously as "blind" to Christian truth yet "witnesses" to it. Though they stubbornly refused to believe in Christ, they were "there" when it all began. By the thirteenth century a change occurred and the Jews were gradually thought of as a minority group that should only barley be tolerated. Hence, they were better off segregated and discernible. This change clearly emerges from the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council held by Pope Innocent III in 1215. In these decrees Jews were ordered to wear distinctive clothing, such as a yellow badge on their external garments, and to minimize their contact with the faithful--especially during Christian festivals, which by that time occupied a large part of the calendar (Cohen, 1999; Tanner, 1990: 266). Even if these clerical resolutions were not followed in practice, they reflect an agenda of resentment, segregation, exclusion, and marginalization typically reserved for "pariah minority" groups.
The fragile balance between toleration and persecution evident in the late twelfth century gradually gave way to intolerance, persecution, and finally expulsion. The earliest signs of this appeared when the Jews were first expelled from the royal French domains as early as 1182 but were readmitted a few years later. Similar local expulsions occurred in England and France. In 1290 England became the first European kingdom to drive all its Jews off English-controlled soil on both sides of the English Channel. Expulsions from royal French soil quickly ensued when Phillip the Fair signed the expulsion edict of 1306 (Stacey, 1993; Jordan, 1989; Mundill, 1998). During the next two centuries Jews were driven out of most of the other western European kingdoms and princedoms from Germany to Iberia.
Medieval European Lepers
As was noted, Jews were not the only group in medieval Western Europe who were categorized, persecuted, and thought of along the lines of a pariah Caste (Moore, 1987: 45-60); similar attitudes emerge in the references to lepers and leprosy. (5) (Lepers in medieval Europe suit the classic Indian "pariah caste" model much better than the Jews since they were members of the marginalizing society and not members of a different ethnie or religious denomination.)
Medieval people feared leprosy and regarded it as a medical and social catastrophe. Once diagnosed, a patient received harsh social treatment for two basic reasons:
1) the disfiguring and body-deforming nature of the disease. In its extreme forms leprosy causes ulcers and deformity of facial skin and limbs. When the illness is fully developed, patients tend to loose their eyelashes, noses, and other appendages. Their voices turn hoarse and parts of the body are marked with discolored patches and skin growths (Mitchell, 2000: 246).
2) the strong religious images associated with the disease. These probably drew upon the Biblical term Tsara't, used in the Hebrew Bible (Leviticus 13) to denote certain afflictions of the skin. In the Hebrew Bible people afflicted with Tsara't were deemed impure and required to live separately for the duration of their disease. (6) In the Septuagint, the Hebrew Tsara't was translated lepra and this was the word used by St. Jerome in the Vulgata, the canonized Latin translation of the Bible adopted by the Catholic Church. As a result, the two terms were confused with the effect that the Biblical Tsara't, with all its connotations of segregation, sin, and divinely inflicted punishment, became inextricably linked with the disease of leprosy. This link had grave implications for leprosy patients since all the elaborate moral judgments, implied in Leviticus and other parts of the Hebrew Bible, were projected by medieval society onto them.
In medieval Western Europe lepers were feared and, therefore, excluded and persecuted. (7) The leper's body was thought to have externalized sin and the leper's affliction is discussed in medieval sources as the embodiment of sin....
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