“Cultural Exchange shows that Jews adopted many aspects of Christian art in works made for them. The book’s arguments shine through and the exploration of cross-fertilization, most particularly the frescoes and decorations discovered in medieval and early modern Jewish houses in Swiss and German lands, is a tour de force. This important and creative book brings fresh information and insights to bear on fundamental issues of cross-cultural interaction.”–William Chester Jordan, Princeton University

“This valuable book supports the view that medieval Jews in northern Europe, Iberia, and other Mediterranean societies were open to the style and iconography of their Christian neighbors, despite the protest of Jewish and Christian authorities. While other books on medieval Jewish economic activity, religious customs, and illuminated Hebrew manuscripts have made this case, no other book provides a comprehensive state of the field for researchers and general readers alike.”–Ivan G. Marcus, Yale University

Joseph Shatzmiller is the Smart Family Professor of Judaic Studies at Duke University. He is the author of Shylock Reconsidered and Jews, Medicine, and Medieval Society.

CULTURAL EXCHANGE

Jews, Christians, and Art in the Medieval Marketplace

By Joseph Shatzmiller

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-15699-6

Contents

List of Illustrations………………………………………………viiPreface…………………………………………………………..xiIntroduction………………………………………………………1PART ONE Pawnbrokers: Agents of Cultural Transmission…………………5Chapter One Financial Activities in the Medieval Marketplace…………..7Chapter Two Securities for Loans: Church Liturgical Objects……………22Chapter Three High Finance: Urban and Princely Pledges………………..45PART TWO Human Imagery in Medieval Ashkenaz………………………….59Chapter Four The Decorated Home of the Rabbi of Zurich………………..61Chapter Five German Jews and Figurative Art: Appreciation and
Reservation……………………………………………………….73PART THREE At the Marketplace: Professionals in the Service of the
“Other”…………………………………………………………..111Chapter Six Christian Artists and Jewish Patronage……………………113Chapter Seven Jewish Craftsmanship at the Service of the Church………..141Conclusions……………………………………………………….158Appendix Jewish Traditions and Ceremonies: How Original?………………162Select Bibliography………………………………………………..167Index…………………………………………………………….177

CHAPTER 1

FINANCIAL ACTIVITIES IN THEMEDIEVAL MARKETPLACE

The museologist Mordechai Narkiss has rightly pointed out that thebusiness of pawnbroking constituted one of the most important avenuesthrough which Christian artistic achievements found their way into theJewish society. Yet he said nothing about the marketplace itself and itsdynamics. Therefore, before getting into a detailed discussion of his thesisit is necessary to survey, in broad strokes, a picture of the social and economicconditions that prevailed in the medieval West in the High andLate Middle Ages. We must start by mentioning that during the last centuriesof classical antiquity and those of the Early Middle Ages that leadto the year 1000 CE, Europe reached one of the lowest points in its history.To quote the French historian Georges Duby, “As of the end of thesixth century, Europe was a profoundly uncivilized place.” The shortCarolingian Renaissance of the ninth century notwithstanding, this stateof stagnation went on until the end of the tenth century and even later.During these centuries of European decline, civilization flourished in theIslamic empires that stretched their authority from mid-Asia to the AtlanticOcean and included the Middle East, North Africa, and most of Spain.It is only around the year 1000 CE that we are allowed to talk about anunmistaken awakening of the medieval West.

The causes of this invigoration were multiple and are connected eachto the other. Historians observed a discernible agricultural growth that inan increasing number of places even produced a surplus. This was due totechnological innovations, to changes in social relationships, and mostly(I follow here the studies of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie) to a climatic shiftfor the better. In the markets, which were at the beginnings of an urbanrevival, the people that visited them, eager to exchange goods and services,abandoned the system of barter and welcomed the introduction ofmoney (never in sufficient quantities) that facilitated mercantile activities.Optimism about the functioning of the economic system enticed creditorsto offer loans that would today be consider short-term. By the mid-thirteenthcentury, as Richard W. Emery discovered in his Jews of Perpignanin the Thirteenth Century (New York, 1959), practically all membersof the society, from whatever class they stemmed, were permanentlyindebted. Other studies confirmed his conclusion. This revived “moneyeconomy” required a concomitant agile and swift legal system in order toregulate and to defend the activities of the marketplace. In most cases theold, customary (oral) law did not fit the new dynamics of the social andeconomic relationships. Authorities therefore found it necessary to introducelegal procedures that corresponded to the pace of the activities inthe markets. Most of all the dormant Roman law reappeared with muchvigor and was applied even in modest localities like the city of Manosque,a regional center in Upper Provence. Judges, lawyers, heralds, messengers,and even prison guards were kept busy by the hectic marketplace ofthe city. The public notaries, whose deeds had the power of proof in casesof disagreement, reappeared in great numbers on the social scene, as evidencedby the great quantity of their registers that are kept in the archivesof Manosque, Digne, and Marseille.

In the first stages of the European revival, Jews (most of whom stilllived under Islamic rule) were more than welcomed into the revitalizedLatin West. Indeed, documents show that they were invited to join. Whilethe church condemned credit operations as “usurious,” society and itspolitical leaders on the other hand appreciated credit as an energizer ofeconomic growth. Jews, therefore, who were not under the church’s jurisdiction,were ideally suited to serve in the money economy. To be sure,neither were they the only ones to be active in this branch of activity nordid they dominate it, so that with the halt of growth around the year1300 they were no longer as prosperous as six generations beforehand,and authorities lost interest in their diminishing contribution. As a result,many cities, counties, and states were eager to adopt the church’s attitudeand expel them.

* * *

Let us return our attention to pawnbroking. Jews to be sure were devotedclients of the notaries. In the registers of these jurists, deeds concerningJews represented at times 50 percent of the total and even more. Weknow of notaries that worked mainly or only for Jews. Still, not all operationsof the Jews and of other creditors were insured by notaries’ deeds.Sometimes the sums involved were too high and the creditors looked forsafety by asking for precious objects as collateral. In other instances theloan was, on the contrary, too small and did not justify the expense of anotary’s registration. Here, too, a pawn—a modest one of course—wouldserve as insurance against nonpayment. And since in the thirteenth andfourteenth centuries Jews were dealing largely with members of the lowerclasses of society these small pledges were of much concern to them. Thisfact is openly documented in the records of three Italian municipalities.In the early 1390s the Venetian commune made the admission of Jews tothe city conditional upon their being able to lend money to “support inparticular the poor people (specialtier pro subventione pauperium personarum)”About one hundred years later, on August 14, 1482, thecouncillors of the city of Pavia in the Duchy of Milan alerted the duke toa crisis caused by the Jewish moneylenders of the city. They were refusingto extend loans to anybody as they claimed to already possess too manypawned items. “This will hurt most of all the poor people who have noway to buy their bread,” the councillors warned. Since social unrest wason the horizon and riots appeared imminent, the Duke was asked forhelp. In 1633, more than a generation after William Shakespeare’s Merchantof Venice appeared on the stages of London (worth mentioningeven if beyond the chronological limits of our study), the city council ofPadua pressured the local Jewish community to establish a popular bankbecause “the hue and the cry of the poor for credit reached heaven.” Fortheir part Jews were aware for hundreds of years beforehand of what wasexpected of them. Meir ben Shimon of Narbonne, a leader of southernFrench Jewry around the mid-thirteenth century, was proud of the contributionhis brethren made as moneylenders to the humble and the needyin society. “Who else,” he asked, “would lend to the poor and to the lessfortunate, if not the Jews?”

* * *

Scholars of pawnbroking must work hard to acquire some idea of thekind of objects that circulated in the marketplace. The difficulty resultsfrom the fact that many (perhaps most) transactions relied on oral agreementsand (as mentioned above) were not backed up by written documents.Even though the parties involved could have approached any oneof the dozens of notaries, particularly in the Mediterranean regions, thishappened only rarely and when little money was asked for, since theselegal practitioners would often charge a fee that could exceeded the valueof the transaction.

There are nevertheless ways of opening windows in the otherwiseshuttered marketplace of popular pawnbroking. Local legislation was enactedto regulate business, and in particular to establish a minimumlength of time for which the creditor was required to keep pawned itemsin his possession before he could put them up for sale. A twelve-monthperiod seems to have been the most common time frame, though thiscould be extended to fourteen months, as happened in Volterra, Tuscany,in 1462 and 1474, or to one year and six weeks, as happened in Biel, inthe Swiss Confederation. As well, the law decreed that borrowers mustbe reminded to redeem their pawned items, and it was the task of theherald (preco) of the city to alert them. The archives of Manosque, UpperProvence, which are today housed in the Archives Départementales desBouches-du-Rhône in Marseille (series 56H), contain a register of thepublic announcements that were proclaimed in that medium sized citybetween 1334 and 1341. Its call number is 56H980. There we discover,for example, that on January 14, 1339 (fol. 54bis-v), the preco publicusMatheus Rostagni proclaimed the following message in the streets: “Allpersons who have had pledges for more than a year [in possession of]Bellandus Salamonis, Jew, should redeem them within ten days. Oncethat time has elapsed, the court will have no further dealings with them(ulterius non audiretur).” Four years earlier the local herald had called allthose who had lodged objects as collateral in the premises of BonetusBonafos to claim them within ten days since this Jew intended to leavethe city (domicilium alibi mutare; fol. 7v). As it happens, Bonetus was inno great haste to abandon Manosque: in October 1336 he asked thecourt to issue a similar pronouncement. This time the scribe of the tribunalreported that the herald Matheus went out to the city and after awhile returned and declared under oath that he had accomplished themission. When the Jews possessed pawns belonging to their coreligionists,the messenger would enter the synagogue on a Sabbath day “whenthe Jews are in the said scola” and remind them about the customaryten-day delay. Such an intervention occurred at the instigation of MasterLeo, a doctor, on August 25, 1285 (56H906, 90r).

Urban legislation also regulated the sale of the unredeemed objects.They had to be publicly auctioned, not sold in private, and the event hadto take place within the walls of the city. “Anybody, Jew or Christian whohas pledges for auctioning should sell them, or cause them to be sold inpublic, in auction in the city of Manosque and not elsewhere. A fine ofone hundred solidi [will be imposed] for each [transgression] and thepledges themselves will be confiscated.” This decree was made public onthe last day of February 1339 (fol. 53v). It was repeated three monthslater, referring this time to “pawns and clothing” (pignora et raube).

The registers of the series 56H offer even more information about thebusiness of pawnbroking. While the notaries’ registers of Manosque arenot much help in the history of small credit, the records of the city tribunalintroduce us to individuals whose names are spelled out and to eventsthat can be dated. An inventory of objects that served as collateral can beestablished without much difficulty, while the sentences pronounced bythe judges show how insistent the authorities were when it came to enforcingthe law. A systematic survey of these court records is still needed.The following examples may indicate what future researchers may expectto find in the course of a comprehensive scrutiny of these archives.

Pawnbrokers were often accused of selling off pledged items beforethey were supposed to do so. The original owners would complain incourt about such precipitate sell-offs. One of the first procedures found inthe Manosque records describes a group of thirty-five Jews, nineteen ofthem women, accused of this illegal practice (56H952, 45r; 27.5.1286).Although they may have been acquitted on this occasion (no informationabout the verdict is available), many of their fellow Jews had to enduresimilar purgatorial situations in the ensuing years. Thus, in March 1292,a certain Guillelmus Garcinus claimed that the Jew Vinellas did not waitmore than five days before selling a dresser (gardacorcium) that he hadpledged with him. (56H954, 25r, 29r, 31r–v; 13.3.1292). Moses ofGrassa, another Manosque Jew, sold a rug (baratanum) to a fellow coreligionistjust eight days after getting it. He, however, insisted that the dealwas entirely legal, claiming that it had been a precondition of the transactionfrom the very beginning (56H954, 56r; 1291). Moses Anglicus, in adispute with one Petrus Stephani that went on for several months, gaveconflicting information to the court: at first he claimed that three and ahalf years had elapsed since the item had been pawned to him. Then hereduced the time span to a year and a half. Finally, he presented the judgewith a written permission, dated November 16 of that year (1295), allowinghim to sell the item less than a month before he faced justice. Stillhe won the case, and asked for an official document to exonerate him(56H957, 12v-23r; 12.12.1295).

The Manosque judges would do whatever was needed to discover thetruth and penalize the perpetrators. In 1308 a Jewess named Falcona, thewife of Bonus Nomen, was warned not to put on sale three vases, two ofthem full of wine (56H885, 23r; 17.5.1308). Three months later a similarmessage was sent to Abraham of Castelanna. He was threatened with ahuge fine of fifty pounds (56H885, 25v; 9.8.1308). In yet another instancea Jewish tailor named Aymmus of Sisteron was charged togetherwith a Manosque lady named Resplanda, with being the perpetrator ofmultiple fraudulent transactions. He was found guilty, and had to choosebetween a fine of thirty shillings and a sentence exiling him from the city(56H952, 21v; 6.10.1285). The tension accompanying some of these litigationsis exemplified in the case involving Jacob Anglicus, the son of theabove-mentioned Moses. In the summer of 1306 his wife refused to let ina court messenger who came to fetch a pawned item, while he, Jacob, allegedlyeven insulted him (56H960, 84r;15–16.9.1306).

Most pawns mentioned in these records were of little value. Thedresser (gardacorcin) that was the disputed object of the 1292 lawsuitjust mentioned served as surety for a loan of no more than three shillings.A cooking pot (cacobus) was taken to assure a loan of one solidus(56H960, 60r; 5.8.1306). Textile products, dresses, or covers are mentionedfrequently: a vest (fayssada) (56H962, 33r; 21.11.1310), a coat(epitogium; 56H961, 32r; 3.6.1309); or a cover (coopertum) (56H961,81r; 21.1.1309) are some of the items that surface in these documents. Asimple sack held by Samuel de Grassa became the subject of litigation inNovember 1309. The Jew, it was claimed, filled it up with flour, which hewas not expected to do. Samuel admitted the misdemeanor and claimedthat he simply forgot that the sack did not belong to him (56H961, 97r;27.11.1309). Confusion, misunderstanding, and forgetfulness might havehad severe consequences for another Jewish pawnbroker, Mossonus. Twomessengers of the court accused him on January 12, 1330, of no less thanthe theft of pawned items. The Jew denied ever having received any objects,and to make his point took the severe oath “More Judaico” in thesynagogue (in schola … maledictionem que apud judeos pro excommunicationehabetur pluries ascultavit). Still, the objects were found on hispremises. In his defense Mossonus claimed that it was his son-in-law whohad received the objects. It was the young man who had written the(probably Hebrew) notes that were attached to the objects in order toidentify their owners, and these were exhibited in court as proof of Mossonus’sculpability. This explanation made sense to the judge, who imposeda moderate fine of five solidi on the accused (56H981, 16r;12.1.1330).

* * *

More than any other region in the medieval West the island of Sicily washome for a large number of Jews who were members of the workingclasses. They were involved in manual production or maintenance work,including agricultural labor. To be sure, there also existed an upper classwhose wealth is revealed in their marriage contracts and wills. But all,rich and poor alike, were involved in the credit economy and frequentlyappeared in the judicial system, just as their fellow Jews in Manosquedid. In Palermo, the capital, the civil tribunal was presided over by thepretor of the city; hence, Corte Pretoriana, an institution that continuedto function until the nineteenth century. Until they were expelled fromthe island in 1492 the Jews were also under the authority of this court inmatters of civil litigation. Before reaching their conclusion the judgeswould, of course, lead interrogations, hear witnesses, and examine writtendocumentation, as they did in Provence. The amount of material theyleft in the archives is immense. Shlomo Simonsohn dedicated practicallyall of Corte Pretoriana and Notaries of Palermo (Leiden, Netherlands,2006), the ninth volume in his monumental series The Jews in Sicily, justto listing the verdicts issued by the court.

Sentencing policy was not the same in the courts of Palermo as it wasin Manosque. Most of the Sicilian verdicts tended not to be final anddefinitive: when the litigant was found to be at fault part of his belongingswere sequestered, but not confiscated and not immediately handedover to his rival. Rather, he would be encouraged to look for a constructivesolution within four days (in most cases) and to come to an agreementwith his opponent. Only when he was unable to reach such anagreement would he see his confiscated objects become pawns and put upfor auction.

Many of the objects that were most often sequestered were similar tothose seen in Manosque, though differences between the two cities didexist. For the most part they were private belongings and household utensils.There were huge quantities of clothing. Tunics, gowns, jackets, shoes,women’s shirts and silk napkins formed just fraction of the inventory.Household objects such as beds and mattresses, sheets, and bedcoverswere often included as well as hides and carpets, cauldrons, pans andeven iron jerry cans. Casks of wine were common, and in one case (Simonsohn,vol. 9, p. 5390) the court took away twelve casks of kosherwine. In Palermo even more than in other courts a great numbers ofhorses, mules, and beasts of burden were sequestered. Slaves, black andwhite, male or female, could also end up as pawns.
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