Researcher of the Week

Manon Banoun, PhD

Postdoctoral fellow in the ISF project “Contending with Crises: The Jews in XIVth Century Europe” (dir. Elisheva Baumgarten)

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

I am an archaeologist specialized in medieval and Jewish archaeology. In my dissertation, defended at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in 2025, I studied the mechanisms of formation, organization, and evolution of medieval Jewish quarters in Northern France and Ashkenaz between the 11th and 14th centuries.

My analysis operated on two complementary scales. At the urban level, I focused on the Jewish neighborhoods of Paris and Rouen as case studies. At a broader regional scale, I compared the results of these case studies with comparable sites in France, Germany, and England, framing them within the wider Ashkenazic cultural sphere of the late Middle Ages. The common characteristics between these neighborhoods were identified by analyzing their location, internal organization, resident and working populations, patterns of spatial mobility and enclosure, as well as the processes that led to their disappearance from the urban fabric. To that end, I draw on several topographic criteria, such as the number of Jewries in a city overtime, their connection to main roads, their proximity to different urban elements (city walls, power places, exchange places, craft activities), the existence of enclosure features like gates and walls, or the location of communal buildings within the neighborhood.

My aim was to understand how Jews lived in the medieval city as members of a particular religious community, how they adapted to the existing material conditions of their urban environment, and how they participated in the urban development that characterized this period. To this end, the Jewish quarters of Paris and Rouen were mainly approached from an archaeological perspective, but also by cross-referencing material data with textual, cartographic, toponymic, and epigraphic sources. This archaeological study was coupled with a spatial analysis based on a regressive approach to the urban fabric using GIS tools, aiming to locate residential areas as well as public and religious institutions—both Jewish and Christian—within medieval Jewish neighborhoods.

During my doctorate, I specialized in building archaeology, which led me to conduct an extensive study of Rouen’s “Maison Sublime”. Accidentally unearthed in 1976, this Romanesque building bearing several Hebrew graffiti has been at the heart of a polemic regarding its nature since its discovery: was it a house, a synagogue and/or a yeshivah? The study, which is still ongoing, led me to propose a renewed phasing of the building and to reconsider the different hypothesis related to its nature and uses overtime.

My current project continues to focus on buildings owned or used by Jews, drawing on both textual and archaeological sources. It examines the fate of buildings left behind by Jews in the Capetian kingdom after their expulsion in 1306, aiming to understand how both private and public properties were recovered and reused by local authorities, communities, and individuals in the 14th century.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Franziska Kleybolte (February 4, 2026). Researcher of the Week. medievalJewishStudiesNow! Retrieved March 7, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/15mmv


About Franziska Kleybolte

After completing her studies in History and Art History in Munich, Pisa, Tel Aviv, and Oxford, Franziska Kleybolte began her PhD at the Cluster of Excellence ‘Religion and Politics’ at the University of Münster, which she is now finalizing. Her doctoral research examines the phenomenon of synagogue-to-church conversions in late medieval Castile. Currently, she is a research assistant in the Jewish Studies Department at the University of Münster, where she teaches undergraduate courses, and at the Bet Tfila Research Centre for Jewish Architecture at the Technical University of Braunschweig, where she develops a teaching network in Jewish Heritage Studies. Her research focuses on Jewish-Christian relations in medieval Europe and their reflection in material culture, as well as the application of postcolonial concepts to premodern contexts. In January 2026, she will join the research project “Contending with Crises” (Hebrew University, lead by Prof. Elisheva Baumgarten) as a postdoctoral fellow, focusing on Jewish responses to spatial crises in Iberia and Ashkenaz.