In this thought-provoking book, Jonathan Elukin sets out to reread medieval Jewish history in Christian Europe. Its theoretical axis challenges the traditional perspective of historia lacrimosa:

Notwithstanding Elukin's fresh outlook – ‘reading medieval Jewish history against the grain’ (p. 8) – some of his conclusions lack substantiation; for example, his contention that the survival of the Jewish community proves the continuity of relatively stable Christian-Jewish relations (p. 9). The survival of some does not invalidate the suffering of others, just as the current flourishing of Jewish communities does not disprove the Holocaust or minimise its horrors.

Elukin's treatment of late antiquity to the early Middle Ages in chapter i is the most compelling, as Jews were evidently more closely integrated into western European Christian society during that period. Elukin's rereading of Severus of Minorca and Gregory of Tours highlights the complexity of Jewish existence in the early Christian world. With regard to forced conversions and expulsions during the Merovingian period, Elukin claims that their local nature left Jews with the option of migration as an escape hatch, oddly concluding that the fifth-century ‘Mediterranean world still offered many safe harbors for Jews’.

The same argument is repeated in the second chapter, which treats the Carolingian and post-Carolingian periods. As Jews did not choose to cross the borders to Muslim-ruled territories, Elukin assumes that they preferred life under Christian rule. He strives to see Christian-Jewish relations as a continuum. But, although he cites a break in Christian society ‘in terms of Christian identity, political authority and economic structures’ (p. 52), Elukin finds no comparable, revolutionary shift in attitudes toward Jews and Judaism at the time of the First Crusade. True to his thesis, the author sees the building of walls around the Jewish quarter in Speyer as a means of protection, not against the Christian burgher society in which they lived (and which is explicitly mentioned in the relevant charter), but rather some undefined mob that might have endangered them not as Jews, but as traders with money – a rather shaky construction (pp. 60–1). Elukin's selective reading of the sources ignores Solomon ben Simson and the Anonymous Chronicler of Mainz's accounts of burgher hostility toward Jews, and his idealised picture of convivencia in the Rhineland cities before and during 1096 is not borne out by the texts.

Chapter iii, which deals with the cultural integration of Jews into western, twelfth-century renaissance society, provides a good overview of Jewish acculturation into Christian society. Elukin's elegant ability to sum up a whole century in a few sentences is admirable, but not necessarily accurate. The reader is left with the impression that the summaries drawn from a wide range of, often up-to-date, secondary literature are relentlessly moulded to the author's models and preconceptions. Chapter iv's emphasis on Jewish social and cultural integration after the First Crusade as proof of this period's ‘positive tenor’ (p. 83) does not negate the more ‘lachrymose’ facts of persecution. Whenever the facts fail to fit his model, Elukin reconciles the difficulty with remarks along the lines of: ‘in any event, Jews quickly set about the process of rebuilding their lives’ (p. 83), which of course indicates the need for rebuilding and does not erase the atrocities.

Chapter v, ‘Violence’, deals with Christian anti-Jewish polemics. Unable to deny their acerbic language, here again, as for the outburst of blood libels, the author admonishes us to place matters in perspective:

This unmitigated optimism seems misplaced. Viewing the violent outbursts against Jews as having ‘no long-term impact on the way Jews and Christians treated each other in routine situations’ (p. 96) inheres in the definitions of routine and of sporadic. Elukin places the six blood libels in England between 1144 and 1255 in the category of disconnected, idiosyncratic outbursts; he further states that the blood libel of 1171 in Blois, which resulted in the burning of thirty-one Jews at the stake, had ‘no religious resonance for the local population’ (p. 98). Although conversant with Anna Sapir Abulafia's seminal work on Christian-Jewish polemics and Shmuel Shepkaru's recent work on Jewish martyrdom, Elukin chooses more or less to disregard any more conventional reading of Jewish history that does not fit his theory.

The final chapter, ‘Expulsion and continuity’, strives to see the expulsions of Jews from England, France and, finally, Spain not as an evolutionary process – the culmination of previous events – but rather as local, discrete flare-ups stemming from royal personalities and tax problems. The experience of Italian Jews in the sixteenth century shows, according to Elukin, ‘that there could be a range of reactions to Jews, including violence, judicial persecution and expulsion, but that ultimately Jews were treated as normal actors in Italian society’. One wonders. For Elukin, even the creation of the ghetto has its positive aspects (pp. 126–7); he also frames Jewish dress regulations as evidence of interaction and acculturation. The author concludes with a call to view the history of medieval Ashkenaz with its recurring persecutions and expulsions as a living habit of tolerance that provided hope for the future of European Jews (p. 138).

Ultimately, this rose-coloured reading of medieval European Jewish history – against the grain – fails to convince. Notwithstanding the unquestioned value of challenging former paradigms, Elukin's answers offer no satisfactory alternative. While Jews were undeniably influenced by, and part of, Christian society, this did not immunise them against intellectual and physical attack.