TO WHAT EXTENT were the Jews of the Middle Ages conscious of the history of the peoples around them? That is, were they at all interested in the historical traditions of the Christians of western Europe? Were they familiar with Christian historiography or oral traditions? Did they incorporate historical stories, anecdotes, or ideas drawn from Christian history or traditions into their writings? These questions have up till now been only cursorily discussed in the literature, but, to my mind, they are key to understanding not only the world outlook and spiritual concerns of medieval Jews but also the process of their integration into European society. My contribution to this important discussion focuses on the Jews of the Iberian peninsula and ‘Provincia’ (southern France) between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries.

The theory proposed by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi—a seminal authority on Jewish historiography—was that Jews saw the essence of their relationship to the non-Jewish world as having been set out in the legends and homilies of rabbinic aggadah and that there was therefore little need to be concerned with the history of non-Jewish society. There was somewhat more interest in world events when they were such as to encourage messianic fervour, but even then it was tempered by biblical models such as the four kingdoms of the book of Daniel and the final battle of Gog and Magog. Thus, in Yerushalmi's view, the interest that sixteenthcentury figures such as Elijah Capsali and Joseph Hakohen took in the history of non-Jews was a completely new phenomenon.

My understanding of the subject when I embarked on this research was rather different. I intuited that Jews of a scholarly bent would have been familiar with the sources through which historical knowledge was transmitted in the Middle Ages, both written and oral—for example, Christian chronicles, tales of kings and lives of saints, translations of classical works, and popular dramas such as mystery plays and pageants—and that through these sources they would have obtained a clear image of Christian culture and a fundamentally positive one.