Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe

By Kenneth R. Stow

Book Overview

This narrative history surveying one thousand years of Jewish life integrates the Jewish experience into the context of the overall culture and society of medieval Europe. It presents a new picture of the interaction between Christians and Jews in this tumultuous era.

Alienated Minority shows us what it meant to be a Jew in Europe in the Middle Ages. The story begins in the fifth century, when autonomous Jewish rule in Palestine came to a close, and when the papacy, led by Gregory the Great, established enduring principles regarding Christian policy toward Jews. Kenneth Stow examines the structures of self-government in the European Jewish community and the centrality of emerging concepts of representation. He studies economic enterprise, especially banking; constructs a clear image of the medieval Jewish family; and portrays in detail the very rich Jewish intellectual life.

Analyzing policies of church and state in the Middle Ages, Stow argues that a firmly defined legal and constitutional position of the Jewish minority in the earlier period gave way to a legal status created expressly for Jews, who in the later period were seen as inimical to the common good. It was this special status that paved the way for the royal expulsions of Jews that began at the end of the thirteenth century.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674015932
• ISBN13: 9780674015937
• Release Date: August 1998
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 360 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.2" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Important work

This wonderful and important work documents what Jews were doing and where they were between 1100 and 1500. It examines demographic and culture as well as religion and tradition and never forgets to examine the role of Jews in society and pose the question: how important and visible was the Jewish role in society in western world, how did Jews live and what was their culture and place in European history? A very interesting book, scholarly and not exceedingly interesting, but nonetheless important. Seth J. Frantzman