This book proposes the concept of ‘Jewish service’ as the key to an understanding of Christian-Jewish relations in Latin Christendom between 1000 and 1300. It argues that ideas about the services provided by Jews to Christians were crucial to the ways in which medieval Christian authorities explained and justified their policies towards Jews living under their rule. Underlying these ideas were theological and legal doctrines – originating in the early Middle Ages, and especially in the Augustinian doctrine of Jewish witness – that explained the raison d'être of the Jews in Christendom in terms of the service that they provide to their Christian neighbours. But ‘service’ was also a flexible and dynamic term, the exact meaning of which varied significantly in different circumstances and between different social settings. Thus, the notion that the Jews should be preserved because of the services that they provide offered medieval authorities – notably the monarchy – a theological and rhetorical basis not only for protecting Jewish communities or encouraging their economic endeavours, but also for claiming ownership over, and seizing Jewish money. In fact, it is precisely the ambivalent nature of the category of ‘service’ that makes it, in Sapir Abulafia's view, particularly productive for analysing the interactions between Christians and Jews, whose relations were almost always fraught with ambiguities.

The book is divided into three parts. The first, ‘The antecedents of Jewish service’, focuses on the views on the Jews of Augustine and Gregory the Great, as well as on the views articulated by Roman and canon law. It seems that the main point of this discussion is to show how the high Middle Ages inherited an ambivalent theological and legal tradition that, although allocating a place for the Jews in the Christian polity also marked the Jews as a potential source of danger and pollution. The second part of the book, ‘The political and socio-economic realities of Jewish service’, is the best of the three. It consists in a survey of Christian-Jewish relations between 1000 and 1300 in four geographical areas, namely Germany, France, England and the Latin Mediterranean. Building on the work of leading scholars, Sapir Abulafia demonstrates how in each of these locations the particular dynamics of Jewish-Christian relations stemmed from the specific local structures of power, constituted by particular conflicts and negotiations between kings, prelates, aristocrats and urban municipalities. While ideas and rhetoric of Jewish service informed the political arena in each of the lands surveyed, they were appropriated in different ways and for different ends. The third part of the book, ‘The religious and cultural ambiguities of Jewish service’, takes a more thematic approach, discussing sites of Christian-Jewish tensions such as the experiences of Jews during the crusades, the emergence of anti-Jewish blood libels, or theological disputations.

Although at certain points the analysis seems to push the concept of Jewish service too far – suggesting that almost any type of social interaction is ultimately modelled on ‘service’ – Sapir Abulafia's study offers a useful framework within which to examine Christian-Jewish relations in the medieval west. The insights and questions presented in this work may be seen as particularly relevant to discussions concerning the intersections of theology and political practice in the case of medieval Christian attitudes towards the Jews. The author's ability to present a concise synthesis that elegantly reflects on the major historiographical discussions and problems in the field of medieval Jewish history is yet another virtue of this book.