Category Archives: Research Spotlight

Toward a Comparative (and Connected) History of Expulsion

Rowan Dorin, Stanford University

Thanks to the many decades of work by many wonderful scholars, we know a great deal about the recurring expulsions of Jews that scar the history of late medieval Europe. Several monographs have been devoted to the circumstances and aftermaths of particular expulsions, while other fine studies have explored the dynamics of the successive expulsions within the kingdom of France and the Holy Roman Empire. Historians studying the Jewish diaspora have meticulously retraced the pathways of exile and the destinations of refugees, while specialists in literature and liturgy—here I’m thinking especially of the work of Susan Einbinder—have movingly evoked the impact of these forced dislocations on the shared rituals and cultural life of Europe’s Jewish communities.

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The Emergence of the Passover Haggadah as a Book Genre

Katrin Kogman-Appel, University of Münster

Most readers of this blog know what the haggadah is: a small book, oftentimes illustrated or at least decorated, kept in Jewish households in numerous copies, which contains the liturgy to be recited during the Passover seder. Nowadays, every participant will hold one of these books during the annual evening ritual. Those who do not know Hebrew will have a copy that includes the text in transliteration together with a translation. The Hebrew word haggadah (הגדה) means an act of telling. At some point, the term began to be used to refer to a more or less standardized text to be recited during the ceremony, but it was only in the early modern period that the word “haggadah” began to mean a book, an object.

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Genetic studies of the medieval Jewish cemetery in Erfurt have yielded results that have attracted worldwide attention

by Karin Sczech, Erfurt

Karin Sczech at the excavation, © TLDA

In principle, according to the Jewish faith, burials take place for eternity and graves are only to be reopened if a reburial of the dead to Israel is planned. The integrity of the buried is also very important. Accordingly, archaeological investigations of Jewish cemeteries are rarely carried out.

In Erfurt, a rescue excavation was necessary in 2013 at the medieval Jewish cemetery, as construction machinery had already disturbed the ground. In close consultation with the Jewish Community of Thuringia, anthropological investigations were also arranged after the excavations were completed. Due to various circumstances, these investigations were delayed longer than expected, so that the skeletons were still in storage at the Thuringian State Office of Archaeology in Weimar when, in 2017, the Israeli geneticist Shai Carmi made a request to also conduct genetic investigations. There are very few Jewish cemeteries worldwide where this was possible.

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Toward a Social History of Jews in the Visigothic Kingdom

by Fred Astren, San Francisco State University

This communication follows closely upon a consequential moment in my career, or in anyone’s career, that of retirement from one’s university position. Six months after having finished teaching my final university course, I am finishing a project that has both professional and personal meaning for me.

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On the Mobility of Law: The Transfer of Legal Texts Exemplified by the Position of the Jews in Medieval Europe

by Amélie Sagasser, DHI Paris

(English/Deutsch)

© dhip/Sebastian Borda

My project, initiated in 2020, is dedicated to the connections between legal norms implemented across Europe between the 11th and early 14th centuries. It explores the similarities, connections, and parallel developments of law. Legal texts are promulgations of secular and ecclesiastical authorities addressed to a defined group of recipients in a defined area. They are the written result of a debate that took place beforehand. Indeed, the secular and ecclesiastical actors involved were acting in different spaces.  They knew how to build up a large network, which facilitated the exchange of ideas and knowledge and resulted in an intertextuality of legal norms.

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A ‘Geniza Street View’: On Jewish Neighborhoods and Inter-Religious Neighborliness

by Moshe Yagur, Jerusalem

My current project examines spatial realities of Jewish life in the medieval Islamic cities of the eastern Mediterranean, mostly Egypt and greater-Syria, from the late 10th to the late 15th centuries. It is well known that Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived side by side in these cities, without a clear separation along religious lines. There was also no clear zoning of the medieval Mediterranean Islamic city to residential, commercial, industrial, and public zones. And so, Jews, Muslims and Christians lived, worked, and traded with each other in the same neighborhoods, alleys, and small courtyards, between mosques, synagogues, and churches. The aim of my current project is first to document this reality, which until today was seen as self-evident and has not received proper scholarly attention, and then to analyze these daily, individual interactions around residential areas as an arena for inter-religious encounters.

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The Former Synagogue of Rouffach (Alsace): a Prototype of Jewish Medieval Architecture

by Carla Heym

(English/Deutsch/Français)


East facade of the former synagogue with the central oculus, seen from the street. The synagogue building is the centrepiece of the medieval Jewish quarters and was usually built at the back of the housing blocks away from the streets, as can still be seen in Rouffach (Image: Heym, 2020)

Façade est de l’ancienne synagogue avec l’oculus central, vue de la rue. Le bâtiment de la synagogue est la pièce maîtresse des quartiers juifs médiévaux et était généralement construite au fond des blocs d’habitation et en retrait des rues, comme on peut encore l’observer à Rouffach. (Image : Heym, 2020)
Ostfassade der ehemaligen Synagoge mit mittigem Okulus, von der Straße gesehen. Der Synagogenbau ist das Herzstück mittelalterlicher Judenviertel und wurde meist tief im Wohnblock abseits der Straßen gebaut, wie in Rufach noch gut zu erkennen ist. (Bild: Heym, 2020)


The former synagogue of Rouffach (German: Rufach) is one of the oldest preserved Jewish buildings in Europe. Although some knowledge of the history of the Jewish community in Rouffach is available from written sources, the building itself has not been analysed except for a study by the architect and curator of historical monuments Charles (Karl) Winkler in 1906. The principal hurdle to a thorough building investigation was the fact that the building is privately owned and used as a residence. However, in 2020 the owners agreed to a one-off survey of the building. The goals of the survey were to determine clues to the building’s history and to verify the results of Winkler’s study of the building. The project was carried out as part of a master’s thesis in the field of heritage conservation at the Otto-Friedrich University in Bamberg and was supported by the regional archaeological service SRA Strasbourg and the association B’nai Brith Hirschler Strasbourg.

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The Disputation of Mallorca (1286): A Case Study in the Medieval Culture of Disputation

by Alex J. Novikoff, Kenyon College

Ever since Christianity parted ways from Judaism, its adherents have felt the need to defend their new faith, often combining advocacy of the new religion with the urge to delegitimize Judaism as an outdated and obsolete vestige of a prior epoch. From this theological impulse was born the so-called Adversus Judaeus corpus of writings that stretches from the earliest centuries of Christianity through the end of the Middle Ages, and well beyond. The repetitive nature of this genre notwithstanding, scholars have increasingly come to recognize the many ways in which this confrontation evolved theologically, intellectually, and even socially, involving new spheres of contact and new participants in those debates. Nor was this controversy entirely one-sided, since beginning in the twelfth century Jews began to mount their own polemical response in Hebrew, a corpus that has likewise been the subject of increased and deserved attention.

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Princes and Jews in 15th Century Italy

by Pierre Savy

Influential historians such as Cecil Roth, Attilio Milano, and others noted long ago that late medieval Italian princes generally implemented more welcoming and protective policies towards the Jews than oligarchic regimes (“republics”) did–an attitude that may appear counter-intuitive, should one believe through the anachronistic lens of today that accepting religious diversity is typical of republican regimes, whereas autocratic regimes go together with intolerance. Clearly, things are far more complex.

My research, devoted to Princely policies towards the Jews in Northern Italy (1370-1520)[1], set to be published by French publisher PUF in Spring 2023, intends to focus on this issue with the intent to go beyond the simple explanation of the economic benefit of a Jewish presence that, after all, could have been equally beneficial to non-princely regimes. My hypothesis is that princely policies towards the Jews were a touchstone in the history of state-building processes, as well as central to the function and value of princely power, here investigated without drawing on theoretical literature, but from an empirical perspective. It basically consists in “thinking (politics) with the Jews” (“Is it still Jewish studies?”, one might wonder on a blog devoted to medievalJewishStudiesNow![2]): but “thinking with” does not necessarily imply conceiving of the Jews as completely passive. On the contrary, it gives the opportunity to see how Jews negotiated, informed, circumvented, and, in short, partly determined the princely policies where they lived in Northern Italy.

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Well-Poisoning Accusations Against Jews: Can we Reconstruct the Jewish Perspective?

by Tzafrir Barzilay

During the first outbreak of the Black Death, several European minority groups suffered organized arrests, investigations, and executions. The social dynamics that triggered, supported and justified this wave of persecution were propelled by one infamous allegation: that Muslims, Christian lepers, paupers, beggars, and, most notably, Jews, conspired together to poison water sources in order to spread the plague and undermine the ruling Christian elite. The accusation appears in a wide range of sources from the early fourteenth century until the end of the Middle Ages. My recently published book, Poisoned Wells: Accusation, Persecution and Minorities in Medieval Europe, 1321-1422, focuses on the accusation of well poisoning as a critical chapter in the history of the persecution of European minorities. It explains their background and origin in the thirteenth century, how they gained popularity before and during the Black Death, and why they declined in the fifteenth century. By untangling the dynamics of the waves of violence triggered by well-poisoning claims, the book proposes a new understanding of popular and formal reactions to the Black Death, and hence of the history of minorities and their marginalization in late medieval Europe.

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