Over the past two decades, scholarly forays into the medieval Jewish experience have yielded significant, innovative, and at times revisionist analyses of the historical image and historiographical representation of the Jewish communities of medieval Western Christendom. David Malkiel's absorbing new study joins this ever-growing body of work that has sought to modify the seemingly antiquated image of the medieval Jew. His analysis is the most recent effort to recharacterize the historical portrait and historiographical perception of the eleventh- to thirteenth-century Ashkenazic community.

In broad terms, Malkiel aims to challenge the accepted categorization of medieval Franco-German society as saintly, absolutely faithful to Jewish law, and subject to rabbinic authority. This perception dictated the historiographical image of mutual and incessant enmity between the Christian majority and the Jewish minority, while historians remained mindful of the ever-changing and reciprocal economic dependence of the two communities. Malkiel argues in eight skillfully written chapters that medieval Ashkenaz was not a community of saints and martyrs but simply one of ordinary people (xi). By lowering the Ashkenazic community from its pedestal, Malkiel aims to complicate the picture of the medieval period as a time of religious purity and spiritual dogmatism, and instead paints a picture of a community grappling with proscribed internal legal norms and external religious, social, and cultural influences.

The first chapter sets the stage for the subsequent investigation by examining the depiction of the medieval Franco-German Jewish community in premodern and modern historiography. Malkiel reveals a strong bias among historians of medieval Jewry against Ashkenazic Jewry and its economic and intellectual homogeneity, in favor of the enlightened and philosophical medieval Sephardic society. Over the latter half of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scholars addressed this imbalance by offering a more nuanced assessment of medieval Ashkenazic intellectual and economic culture, a position that Ze'ev Ya'avetz and Yitzhak Baer pioneered. Malkiel exhibits wide-ranging knowledge of the historiography of the previous generations, and offers a compelling and succinct baseline from which to develop his thesis.

Several chapters focus on the First Crusade and arise from Malkiel's previously published material concerning the events leading up to and including the attacks of 1096. He confronts the traditional view that several rancorous and hostile encounters that took place between the mid-ninth and eleventh centuries served as a forewarning of the devastations of the First Crusade. Malkiel takes aim against this thesis of a linear progression of violence and anti-Jewish sentiment, and he illustrates that these events, mostly eleventh-century incidents, have little or no connection with the attacks of the First Crusade. The consequence of this revision is a more stable image of Jewish–Christian relations during the High Middle Ages.

In an effort to present a less heroic and more “human” face of the First Crusade martyrs, Malkiel maintains that contrary to the uniform portrayal of the Crusaders presenting Jews with the choice of death or baptism, the element of choice was largely absent. According to both Latin and Hebrew texts, Jews expected to be killed with no option of conversion. Death without a choice of baptism rendered mass suicides less heroic and, in some sense, more comprehensible. Similarly, Malkiel illuminates the heterogeneous, credible, and human nature of Ashkenazic society through its expressed ambivalence concerning martyrdom, and its outright rejection and unheroic conduct by a number of individual Jews during the 1096 attacks.

Malkiel's discussion of apostates challenges the prevailing image of the absolute religious fidelity of medieval Ashkenazic Jewry by arguing that forced apostates did not necessarily outnumber voluntary ones, and even coerced apostates did not always revert to Judaism. Additionally, Malkiel makes a strong and convincing argument that for the medieval rabbis, the distinction between coerced and voluntary apostasy was generally unimportant.Footnote ¹

Malkiel continues to question the image of absolute fidelity to Jewish law and rabbinic authority by arguing that Ashkenazic Jews, especially women, appeared to act contrary to the law of the Talmud and refused to respond to the efforts of medieval rabbis to correct their behavior. Though a number of tosafists posited that nonhalakhic behavior must be grounded in a legal rationale, Malkiel posits that nonhalakhic actions should be accepted for what they are—violations of talmudic law and rabbinic dicta.

Malkiel analyzes Jewish social and cultural integration into the majority culture, arguing against the outmoded image of an autonomous Jewish community. He presents the Jews of France and Germany as an essential component of European society who adopted ideas and values into their own culture. Jewish texts condemning Christian belief or behavior actually imply a degree of reality of conviviality and intimacy on both the social and cultural planes. These arguments echo the significant work of Yisrael Yuval and Ivan Marcus, among others, though it remains unclear to what degree Malkiel acknowledges the cultural, social, and intellectual assumptions in the earlier works.

In his final chapter, Malkiel returns to the Ashkenaz–Sepharad dichotomy discussed in the opening chapter of the book. Malkiel questions the regnant interpretation of Baer, who assigns responsibility for the post-1391 Spanish breakdown to the sizable class of Jewish courtiers. Instead, he posits that the gap between the Spanish and Ashkenazic communities is narrower than it appears, as both cultures exhibited nonhalakhic and deviant behavior. At the same time, he calls into question the feasibility of a comparative analysis of the two communities, and therefore rightly concludes that the shared characteristics between Spain and the Franco-German communities can only complement the more nuanced image of Ashkenazi society.

Throughout the work, Malkiel exhibits an extensive familiarity with diverse medieval and modern source material. A useful methodological discussion of the First Crusade narratives and their questionable historical value precedes their analysis in Chapters 3 and 4. In the later chapters, medieval rabbinic literature underpins the historical argument. However, two key challenges are apparent. The first is the absence of an explicit methodological approach in using responsa and legal literature as the basis of a historical inquiry. Much of the rabbinic literature is quoted from published editions; few, if any, medieval manuscripts are referenced in the endnotes. Second, one might question the frequent dependence on Sefer Hasidim as an accurate reflection of the broader medieval Ashkenazic community. While the author understands the pertinent methodological issues and pitfalls associated with Sefer Hasidim (195–96), he does not fully substantiate the usefulness of the German pietistic work as evidence of the larger context in which it was written.

These criticisms notwithstanding, Malkiel's meticulous summary and evaluation of the extensive modern scholarship are of great value; his broader set of arguments is an important and welcome contribution toward recasting the image and historiography of medieval Franco-German Jewish society. This work is a wonderful and significant resource for the teaching and study of the medieval Ashkenazic community.