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10. Jewish Demographics and Economics at the Onset of the European Middle Ages Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures McDowell, Naiweld, Ezra (eds) Diversity and Rabbinisation Jewish Texts and Societies Between 400 and 1,000 CE Diversity and Rabbinization Gavin McDowell, Ron Naiweld, and Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra (eds) Jewish Texts and Societies Between 400 and 1,000 CE This volume is dedicated to the cultural and religious diversity in Jewish communi� es EDITED BY GAVIN MCDOWELL, RON NAIWELD, from Late An� quity to the Early Middle Age and the growing infl uence of the rabbis within these communi� es during the same period. Drawing on available textual AND DANIEL STÖKL BEN EZRA and material evidence, the fourteen essays presented here, wri� en by leading experts in their fi elds, span a signifi cant chronological and geographical range and cover material that has not yet received suffi cient a� en� on in scholarship. The volume is divided into four parts. The fi rst focuses on the vantage point of the Diversity and Rabbinization synagogue; the second and third on non-rabbinic Judaism in, respec� vely, the Near East and Europe; the fi nal part turns from diversity within Judaism to the process of ”rabbiniza� on” as represented in some unusual rabbinic texts. Diversity and Rabbinizati on is a welcome contribu� on to the historical study of Judaism in all its complexity. It presents fresh perspec� ves on cri� cal ques� ons and allows us to rethink the tension between mul� plicity and unity in Judaism during the fi rst millennium CE. This is the author-approved edi� on of this Open Access � tle. As with all Open Book publica� ons, this en� re book is available to read for free on the publisher’s website. Printed and digital edi� ons, together with supplementary digital material, can also be found at www.openbookpublishers.com Cover image: Zodiac mo� f and fi gure of Helios on the mosaic fl oor of the fourth-century Hammat Tiberias synagogue. Moshe Dothan, Hammath Tiberias (Jerusalem: Israel Explora� on Society, 1983), plates 10/11. Courtesy of the Israel Explora� on Society. © All rights reserved. Cover design: Anna Ga� . book 8 ebooke and OA edi� ons also available OPEN ACCESS OBP https://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2021 Gavin McDowell, Ron Naiweld and Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra. Copyright of individual chapters is maintained by the chapters’ authors. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text and to make commercial use of the text providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Gavin McDowell, Ron Naiweld and Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra (eds), Diversity and Rabbinization Jewish Texts and Societies between 400 and 1000 CE. Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures 8. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021, https://doi.org/10.11647/ OBP.0219 Copyright and permissions for the reuse of many of the images included in this publication differ from the above. Copyright and permissions information for images is provided separately in the List of Illustrations. In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit, https:// doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0209#copyright Further details about CC BY licenses are available at, https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/ All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web Updated digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0219#resources Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. L’École Pratique des Hautes Études has kindly contributed to the publication of this volume. ISBN Paperback: 9781783749935 ISBN Hardback: 9781783749942 Semitic Languages and Cultures 8. ISBN Digital (PDF): 9781783749959 ISSN (print): 2632-6906 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 9781783749966 ISSN (digital): 2632-6914 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 9781783749973 ISBN Digital (XML): 9781783749980 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0219 Cover image: Zodiac motif and figure of Helios on the mosaic floor of the fourth-century Hammat Tiberias synagogue. Moshe Dothan, Hammath Tiberias (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1983), plates 10/11. Courtesy of the Israel Exploration Society. © All rights reserved. Cover design: Anna Gatti 10. JEWISH DEMOGRAPHICS AND ECONOMICS AT THE ONSET OF THE EUROPEAN MIDDLE AGES Michael Toch (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) The Jewish nuclei of medieval Europe defined themselves— religiously, culturally and linguistically—as parts of the broader entity of a Jewish people historically anchored in the Middle East. Indeed, most of them can be traced back to the Middle Eastern Jewish populations of antiquity, although nowhere by direct evidence of actual migration, but rather by tenuous lines of ritual and literary traditions that must have been carried abroad by migrants and were often reworked into myth.1 Against this mainstream approach, a persistent strain in scholarship postulates non-Jewish origins for both Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews, claiming that communities consist mostly of converts from other faiths, most notably the Khazars.2 The debate has not been 1 See the chapters by Robert Bonfil, Steven Bowman, and Ivan Marcus in The Midrashic Imagination: Jewish Exegesis, Thought, and History, ed. by Michael Fishbane (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993) and, most recently, Robert Bonfil, History and Folklore in a Medieval Jewish Chronicle: The Family Chronicle of Ahima‘az ben Paltiel (Leiden: Brill, 2009). 2 For the hypothesis of Yitzhak Schipper on the Khazar origins of Polish Jewry and its scholarly criticism, see the sympathetic account by Jacob Litman, The Economic Role of Jews in Medieval Poland: The Contribution of Yitzhak Schipper (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984). For a linguistic reworking of this notion, see Peter Wexler, The Ashkenazic Jews: © Michael Toch, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0219.10 324 Diversity and Rabbinization restricted to academia, but resonates strongly with contemporary political contentions. Thus, the origins of the Ashkenazim have been tied to the fight over the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the Jewish claim to the Land of Israel. In the heat of the political argument, the issue of Ashkenazi origins has moved from the fringes into the centre of public debate, for instance, in the writings of Shlomo Sand. A similar assertion of non-Jewish origins has been made for central and northern France, where converts of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages were thought to have been numerous enough to produce the substantial Jewish population emerging there in the eleventh century.3 Running parallel to this mainstream/fringe dichotomy of views on the origin of European Jews, there is a similar one concerning the antiquity of their presence. Most scholars, the present one included, see the Jewries of northern Europe as recent—that is, ninth- or tenth-century—arrivals, with no continuity backwards to a sparse and hazy presence in Late Antiquity. In contrast, the Jews of the Mediterranean south are believed to have a much longer history, to the point that Italian Jewry has been called “millenary,” one that “has lived in one of the Diaspora countries for a millennium or more.”4 To the Italian Jews one must add A Slavo-Turkic People in Search of a Jewish Identity (Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers, 1993); idem, The Non-Jewish Origins of the Sephardic Jews (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996). The year 2008 saw the publication in Hebrew (English translation 2009) of yet another polemic denying Jewish nationhood, ostensibly on Khazar grounds: Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, trans. by Yael Lotan (London: Verso, 2009). In place of the large and usually contentious literature on the subject see now The World of the Khazars: New Perspectives, ed. by Peter B. Golden et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2007). 3 Robert-Henri Bautier, ‘L’origine des populations juives de la France médiévale: Constatations et hypothèses de recherche’, in La Catalogne et la France méridionale autour l’an mil, ed. by Xavier Barral i Altet et al. (Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 1991), 306–16. 4 Moshe Gil, Jews in Islamic Countries in the Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill 2004), 579. 10. Jewish Demographics and Economics 325 their coreligionists in Byzantium. There is considerable overlap between the two in most regions of southern Italy. Contrary to this majority view, since the nineteenth century (and, lately, with renewed vigour), there has been a tendency to claim significant continuity of the Jewish presence not only in the Mediterranean region, but also north of the Alps, in northern Gaul and even in Germany. Here, too, present day concerns can be discerned behind scholarly opinion, for instance, the desire to present the city of Cologne as “the cradle of Ashkenazic Jewry” in a yet-to-be-built Jewish Museum that will cater to an expected torrent of Jewish tourists.5 Elsewhere, in Normandy, a sudden bloom of cultural creativity in the twelfth/thirteenth centuries could not be explained except by “a lengthy prehistory of Jewish settlement and legal rights [...] apparently beginning during the period of Roman colonization of Gaul,” one thousand years earlier.6 In both cases, the evidence proffered for these assertions ranges from flimsy to non-existent. A short sketch of the general political and economic background of Europe might help flesh out the essential timeline. All regions of Mediterranean Europe (Byzantium, Italy, southern France, and Iberia) experienced a headlong economic and demographic crisis between the sixth and eighth centuries, in which the prime victim was the urban population, among which were, of course, the Jews.
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