Jews and Crime in Medieval Europe by Ephraim Shoham-Steiner (Wayne State University Press, 2021)
Review by Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein
As its title might suggest, this
book is a multi-case study on the relationship between Jews and crime in the Medieval
period. It provides a fascinating report of this rather obscure topic that
mainly draws from Halachic responsa from the time-period in question. By
drawing on such writings, plus archival data when available, the author tells vivid
stories of different illegal activities in which Jews were involved. He uses
deep-reading techniques and the latest scholarship to tease out details of the
stories told in those primary sources that are left untold in the actual
sources. He then uses the cases that he describes to draw broader conclusions
about the connections that Ashkenazic Jews had to crime in the Middle Ages.
After a thirty-page introduction
in which the author lays out his precise methodology and provides the
background/contextual information for his study, the main body of the book consists
of three chapters divided by the nature of the crime discussed therein. Namely,
the first chapter discusses the Jews’ involvement in theft; the second chapter,
in murder; and the third chapter, in crimes related to women.
The author shows that when it
comes to Jews’ involvement in theft, Jews themselves were not typically the
ones engaged in stealing or robbing. Rather, Jews often served as fences, who
acted as middlemen between thieves and the eventual buyers of stolen goods.
The cases that Shoham-Steiner discusses include complications that present
themselves when the original owners of plundered property were Jews, or when
Jewish buyers would later find out that items they had bought were of dubious
provenance. This chapter also includes
an interesting section on how magic was often times used by thieves in their
illicit thievery, but was also used to help catch and expose those who steal.
In his chapter on murder,
Shoham-Steiner shows how even as honor-related violence and fatalities were
fairly prevalent in Christian Europe, such aggression seems to have been much
less common among Jews. The cases in which Jews were involved in killings
typically involved them hiring/contracting non-Jews to actually do the deed, or
inadvertent bloodshed like a sleeping mother rolling onto her baby. As early as
the Geonic period, much Halachic responsa was dedicated to giving Jewish
murderers (whether intentional or not) a regimen of repentance both to
alleviate their own internal guilt and help them regain their community’s
confidence. Thus, the punishments for taking the life of another often included
such acts of self-mortification as mutilation, fasting, and voluntary exile. Nonetheless,
as Shoham-Steiner shows, the one situation in which the rabbis would be more tolerant/lenient
with murderers was when the victim was a moser (“informer”) who caused
other Jews trouble with the non-Jewish authorities.
Shoham-Steiner dedicates his
final chapter to crimes involving women, specifically sexual misdeeds and
domestic violence. In discussing the former, the author considers how the
Jewish community confronted prostitution, and how some rabbis from the Chassidei
Ashkenaz movement even looked to contemporary Christian clergymen as role models
for successful dealing with this issue. The author also situates that
discussion under the broader context of the community’s response to sexual
promiscuity and licentiousness. In discussing domestic violence, this book
discusses several cases of husbands subjecting their wives to violence and
financial abuse. It also looks at cases in which the rabbis were accommodating
of women who were perceived to have committed murder such that they did not
impose on them the harsh stringencies placed on male murderers.
This book also explores such general
questions as the extent of rabbinic hegemony in the Ashkenazic Jewish community
in earlier times, as well as the extent to which Jewish Courts were independent
of local magistrates and could offer their own punishments/penalties. The
author is clearly cognizant of modern Feminist concerns that occupy a prominent
place in social studies (and is thus bothered by things like the inadmissibility
of womenfolk’s testimony in Rabbinic Jurisprudence and Rabbinic concerns that a
woman be happily married lest she go astray), and also broadly uses Critical
Theory to critique rabbinic authority and its place in the Jewish Community in
the Medieval Period. He often mentions class inequality as a major factor in
deciding when the law would be enforced and what the punishment for breaking
the law would entail. To his credit, Professor Shoham-Steiner is always careful
to separate his own speculation from the documented facts, making that
distinction clear to the reader as he fills in the lacuna left in the primary
sources.
Endnotes serve to provide the
sources for the ideas that Shoham-Steiner mentions in the main text, as well to
help define for the reader some of the more unfamiliar concepts that he
mentions. These endnotes are also full of historical tidbits and insights that
are only tangentially related to the matters discussed in the body text. Professor
Shoham-Steiner also supplies the reader with eleven appendices that are
basically English translations of the Hebrew primary sources that he uses for
his case study.
Throughout this book, the author
shows intimate familiarity with the literary output of such great Ashkenazic
luminaries as Rabbeinu Gershom Meor HaGolah (960–1040), Rabbi Yehuda HaChassid
(1150–1217), Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg (1215–1293), and Rabbi Yitzchak Or Zarua
(1200–1270). He is also at home with the scholarly works of such historians as
the early Modern scholar Jacob Katz (1904–1998), the Medievalist Avraham
Grossman (b. 1936), and the Talmudist Simcha Emanuel (b. 1957). The author
brings all of these sources together in his lively discussions by combining scholarly
sophistication with an easy-to-read and highly-engaging writing style. This
book truly gives us a taste of how the Ashkenazic community of the Middle Ages
approached crime, along with all the possible legal, socio-economical, and
religious rationales for their attitudes.
