This book contains 16 studies (5 in French, 11 in English, with a French introduction by two of the editors and an English conclusion by the other two editors) on the status and situation of Jews and Jewish communities in the Byzantine empire and the mediaeval West, with special attention to Visigothic Spain. Unlike the periods before and after the one studied, there are few sources, particularly legal sources, for this period and historians have been forced to speculate on the basis of scant evidence. The studies published here are particularly valuable for their extensive presentation and evaluation of what is now available.

Two significant issues present themselves throughout these essays: the first is to what extent these legal sources are reactions to actual conditions and circumstances, or whether they are expressions of a theological or governmental ideology in response to what several authors call the ‘hermeneutical Jew’, a straw man like that of many anti-Jewish polemical works. Philippe Depreux (‘Les juifs dans le droit carolingien’) clearly distinguishes between theological and somewhat abstract references to Old Testament Jews and the obviously real references to actual Jews (such as the Judaei et ceteri mercatores in numerous citations). This is one reason why the studies on Spain are so valuable, since there was clearly a sizeable Jewish community. While there is some scholarly doubt about whether there were any Jewish settlements north of the Alps and the Pyrenees before the eleventh century, there is certainly no question that there were ancient communities in the Byzantine empire – yet until recently there has been very little written about Judaism in mediaeval Byzantium. This lacuna is admirably filled by studies by Paul Magdalino (‘“All Israel will be saved”? The forced baptism of the Jews and imperial eschatology’) and Oscar Prieto Dominguez (‘The mass conversion of Jews decreed by Emperor Basil I in 873: its reflection in contemporary legal codes and its underlying reasons’). These two presentations also point to the leitmotif of forced conversion, undeniably present in the era and detailed in almost all of the chapters of this work.

The second issue in these essays has to do with whether religious identification is a civil matter or a religious (or ecclesial) matter. Ralph W Mathiesen (‘The citizenship and legal status of Jews in Roman law during late antiquity (ca. 300–540 ce)’) presents the evidence from civil law, followed by David Freidenreich (‘Jews, pagans, and heretics in early medieval canon law’) and Jessie Sherwood (‘Interpretation, negotiation, and adaptation: converting the Jews in Gerhard of Mainz's “Collectio”’) supplying the texts from canon law. Bruno Judic (‘Grégoire le Grand et les juifs: pratique juridique et enjeux théologiques’) presents some areas of overlap, but nowhere is the conflict between the two so clear as in Visigothic Spain, as Rachel Stocking (‘Forced converts, “crypto-Judaism”, and children: religious identification in Visigothic Spain’) shows in her presentation of the measures of King Sisebut, on the one hand, and the councils of Toledo, on the other. It is somewhat anachronistic to separate the subject matter into civil and ecclesiastical spheres, since there were few hard and fast boundaries between the two in this period, but the difference between the way in which civil authorities addressed the presence of Jews and Jewish communities and the approach taken by ecclesiastical prelates and councils is instructive and fascinating.

Of particular importance is the series of which this book is a part: ‘Religion and law in medieval Christian and Muslim societies’, sponsored by the Legal Status of Religious Minorities in the Euro-Mediterranean World (RELMIN) project. This is a research project engaging an international team based at the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme Ange-Guépin in Nantes, which collects, publishes and studies legal texts defining the status of religious minorities in pre-modern Europe; its online database of documentation is particularly significant. The first volume in the series (The Legal Status of Dimmī-s in the Islamic West (Second/Eighth–Ninth/Fifteenth Centuries), reviewed above, pp 367–369) was published in 2013 and examined the laws regarding Christians and Jews living in Islamic societies in Europe and the Maghreb. Volume 3 of the collection (Religious Cohabitation in European Towns (10th–15th Centuries)) appeared in 2014. The books published in this series, and the documentation accessible through the RELMIN website, show in a variety of ways how the law has a life of its own, visible in the complexity of relations between different communities.