“…23 For the rise of anti-Semitism in medieval Europe see Poliakov (1955); Menache (1985Menache ( , 1997; Langmuir (1990); Stow (1992); Nirenberg (1996); Koyama (2010). The Augustinian pledge to preserve the Jews as 'witnesses' protected them in theory from massacres and forced conversions but in practiced anti-Jewish violence increased from the late twelfth century through to the fourteenth century and eventually ended in the expulsion of Jews from almost every western European country.…”
Section: Religious Toleration and Legal Centralizationmentioning
This paper investigates the relationship between the historical process of legal centralization and increased religious toleration by the state. We develop a model in which legal centralization leads to the criminalization of the religious beliefs of a large proportion of the population. This process initially leads to increased persecution, but, because these persecutions are costly, it eventually causes the state to broaden the standards of orthodox belief and move toward religious toleration. We compare the results of the model with historical evidence drawn from two important cases in which religious diversity and state centralization collided in France: the Albigensian crusades of the thirteenth century and the rise of Protestant belief in the sixteenth century. Both instances support our central claim that the secularization of western European state institutions during the early-modern period was driven by the costs of imposing a common set of legal standards on religiously diverse populations.
“…23 For the rise of anti-Semitism in medieval Europe see Poliakov (1955); Menache (1985Menache ( , 1997; Langmuir (1990); Stow (1992); Nirenberg (1996); Koyama (2010). The Augustinian pledge to preserve the Jews as 'witnesses' protected them in theory from massacres and forced conversions but in practiced anti-Jewish violence increased from the late twelfth century through to the fourteenth century and eventually ended in the expulsion of Jews from almost every western European country.…”
Section: Religious Toleration and Legal Centralizationmentioning
This paper investigates the relationship between the historical process of legal centralization and increased religious toleration by the state. We develop a model in which legal centralization leads to the criminalization of the religious beliefs of a large proportion of the population. This process initially leads to increased persecution, but, because these persecutions are costly, it eventually causes the state to broaden the standards of orthodox belief and move toward religious toleration. We compare the results of the model with historical evidence drawn from two important cases in which religious diversity and state centralization collided in France: the Albigensian crusades of the thirteenth century and the rise of Protestant belief in the sixteenth century. Both instances support our central claim that the secularization of western European state institutions during the early-modern period was driven by the costs of imposing a common set of legal standards on religiously diverse populations.
“…Samantha Zacher has recently argued that “Anglo‐Saxon self‐identification as the New Israel (that is, the newly Chosen people of God) laid an important ideological framework for the expulsion of the Jews in 1290 and that chroniclers in the age of Edward I deliberately repurposed this trope in order to position “Englishness” in opposition to Jewishness” (“Judaism”369). Sophia Menache stresses this oppositional tension as central to the ideology of the 1290 Expulsion: [t]he removal of ‘Israel of the flesh’ made it easier for the English to identify with ‘Israel of the spirit’ … The Jews and their heritage thus played a double role, negative and positive, by serving as a reference group to which the English could relate in order to determine their own position.… Henceforth identification with “Israel of the spirit” would serve to express the uniqueness and superiority of the English people over other nations. (360)…”
This essay focuses on the legendary Wandering Jew in order to explore how elements of transnationalism figure into representations of the Jew and Jewish-Christian relations in medieval England and how the Jew figured into emergent English nationalism.
“…It is important to stress that we do not attempt to provide an economic or rational choice explanation for the virulent anti-semitism that emerged in medieval Europe and which had a variety of sources (see Trachtenberg, 1943;Voigtländer and Voth, 2012). Menache (1985Menache ( , 1997 analyzes the importance of the blood libel myth in generating an atmosphere conducive to expulsion. What we do attempt to explain is why negative economic shocks led to the expulsion and expropriation of Jewish communities in some polities but not in others.…”
Section: ) 12mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…One explanation for this pattern is that fiscally weak cities and states expelled Jews in order to satisfy revenue needs (Elman, 1937;Schwarzfuchs, 1967;Veitch, 1986;Barzel, 1992). Others argue that Jews were expelled in response to heightened religious fervor in the late medieval period (Grazel, 1966;Langmuir, 1990;Stow, 1992;Menache, 1997;Bell, 2001) or as part of a project of constructing a religiously or ethnically homogeneous state (Baron, 1967a;Katznelson, 2005;Barkey and Katznelson, 2011); or to a confluence of these factors as Moore (1987) argued in his Formation of a Persecuting Society. Alternatively, Poliakov (1955) attributed the decline in the fortunes of European Jewry in the fourteenth century to the series of calamities that befell Europe from the Great Famine of 1315-1322 to the Black Death and numerous individual accounts of specific persecutions or pogroms cite that the role played by economic hardship, natural disasters and bad weather in triggering particular persecutions or expulsions (Barber, 1981a;Cohn, 2007;Slavin, 2010;Voigtländer and Voth, 2012).…”
What factors caused the persecution of minorities in medieval and early modern Europe? We build a model that predicts that minority communities were more likely to be expropriated in the wake of negative income shocks. We then use panel data consisting of 785 city-level expulsions of Jews from 933 European cities between 1100 and 1800 to test the implications of the model. We use the variation in city-level temperature to test whether expulsions were associated with colder growing seasons. We find that a one standard deviation decrease in average growing season temperature in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was associated with a one to two percentage point increase in the likelihood that a Jewish community would be expelled. Drawing on our model and on additional historical evidence we argue that the rise of state capacity was one reason why this relationship between negative income shocks and expulsions weakened after 1600.
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