Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Prologue: Group Narratives: Their Tenacity and Their Accuracy
- Introduction: The Emergence of Medieval European Jewry
- Part I Historical Schemes
- Part II Historical Themes
- 5 Demographic Movement and Change
- 6 Economic Activity
- 7 Status
- 8 Relations with the Christian Populace
- 9 Identity
- Epilogue: The Medieval Roots of Modern Jewish Life: Destructive Aftermath and Constructive Legacies
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Demographic Movement and Change
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Prologue: Group Narratives: Their Tenacity and Their Accuracy
- Introduction: The Emergence of Medieval European Jewry
- Part I Historical Schemes
- Part II Historical Themes
- 5 Demographic Movement and Change
- 6 Economic Activity
- 7 Status
- 8 Relations with the Christian Populace
- 9 Identity
- Epilogue: The Medieval Roots of Modern Jewish Life: Destructive Aftermath and Constructive Legacies
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Medieval demographic developments are extremely difficult to reconstruct, but exceedingly important. Genuine statistics are impossible to come by, and researchers are left with only shards of impressionistic data. Despite the difficulties, scholars have reached important general conclusions about medieval Jewish demographic movement and change from the available sources and have achieved considerable consensus on these issues. Distinguishing between such scholarly consensus and a variety of theological and ideological prejudgments is no easy task, but it is crucial. For the realities of Jewish demographic movement and change form the essential backdrop to understanding Jewish experience in medieval Christian Europe.
The starting point for any discussion of Jewish demographic developments in medieval Latin Christendom must be recognition of the fact that, in the year 1000, the Jews of this area constituted only a tiny fraction of worldwide Jewry. In the year 1000, the overwhelming majority of Jews lived under Muslim rule, which stretched vast distances from western India all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. Even on the European continent, the numbers of Jews living under Muslim rule in southern Italy and southern Spain greatly exceeded the Jewish population of Europe's Christian territories. The old centers of Jewish life in the Byzantine Empire still housed Jewish communities that far outstripped those of Latin Christendom. Thus, the fundamental demographic developments of the period between 1000 and 1500 involve the overall growth of the Jewish population of western Christendom in general and the emergence of an entirely new set of Jewish communities in northern areas of Europe in particular. This radical shift in world Jewish population is key to a full grasp of Jewish fate in medieval Latin Christendom.
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- Information
- Reassessing Jewish Life in Medieval Europe , pp. 85 - 106Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010