Volume 35, Issue 1 - Themenheft Jewish Moneylending and Documentary Culture in the Middle Ages I Hg. von Eveline Brugger, Dean A. Irwin und Birgit Wiedl

The three oldest books with drafts of letters written by the council of Erfurt contain letters from 1427 to 1430, from 1434 to 1438 and from 1449 to 1456. A lot of them mention Jewish matters, among them many concern credits of Jews to debtors in towns surrounding Erfurt. Some credits are even mentioned in different letters. The number of credits rise during the time of economical crisis in the 1430ies. In the 1450ies some Jewish families already left Erfurt, the remaining were forced to leave the city in 1453. Several former Erfurt Jews asked for safe conduct for Erfurt to demand outstanding debts. The letters in general show, how Jewish families dealt with different problems, with slow debtors or with a seizure of their money and registers in the surrounding towns. This demonstrates, in which way Jewish families dealt with daily situations or special occations.

This paper traces the scattered proof for Jewish archival practices, both private and communal, in the medieval Holy Roman Empire. It outlines how these archival practices aimed to organize and conserve written records. I first explain why the production of records led to the need for archival practices and their organization. I then review the available sources for Jewish private and communal archives, while bringing comparative evidence from Christian record-keeping and archival practices. This contribution also demonstrates the significance of Hebrew dorsal notes on Jewish-Christian business records. These dorsal notes are closely linked to Hebrew account books and can serve as indicators of Jewish archival practices. They shed light on the economic and cultural history of moneylending and real estate business between Jews and Christians within this chronological and geographical span. To conclude, the paper discusses the social functions that such archives held in Ashkenazic Jewish communities.

Typically, books of obligations are utilized as primary sources for studying the credit trade, particularly in relation to the role of Jews. Research in this area often focuses on their involvement in credit transactions, examining aspects such as loan amounts, interest rates, pledges, and similar factors. These inquiries are valid, as they shed light on the role of Jewish financiers in the medieval economy. However, in this paper, I explore a different angle: what can the books of obligations reveal about the Jewish community itself and its broader involvement in moneylending and credit trade? The books of obligations preserved in Eger (Cheb) span nearly a century (1405–1496), providing a unique lens through which we can trace the community’s participation and its evolving role within the broader financial landscape during this period.

The royal town of Kolín (nad Labem) has been an important political and economic centre of the Czech state since the Middle Ages. Jews settled here as early as the 14th century. Compared to other Czech towns, the Jewish community here was not particularly affected by the Hussite Revolution. Their population increased significantly in the second half of the 15th century. At the turn of the Middle Ages and the Modern Age, Kolín was an important satellite of the Prague Jewish settlement. A number of important families of Prague Jewish financiers did business and worked in Kolín. Some of the families lived and did business in both towns (Prague and Kolín) alternately. The Jews of Kolín were also important providers of loans, for which they formed alliances with other Jewish businessmen in the Czech royal towns. During the expulsion of Jews from other Czech towns at the turn of the 15th century, Kolín also became a town to which some Jewish families came.

The 1262 rotulo de puramento is a rich source for Anglo-Jewish history. It lists more than a thousand debts with a face value of more than 3,300 pounds. This article explores the administrative structures which led to its production. Additionally, a full discussion of the debts which it lists is provided. As a result, the difference in scale between different Jewish creditors and communities is seen. Likewise, it is possible to map the debts by centre of production of county in which the debtor was resident. The granular detail of the roll is examined at length here.

Scholars of Anglo-Jewish history have traditionally described medieval English Jews as French-speaking, and there is strong and varied evidence of their facility with French, as well as with Hebrew, Aramaic, and (in some circles) Latin. The question of whether medieval English Jews spoke English, however, remains underdetermined. While many have noted the possibility in recent decades, no sustained study of the question exists. This article, by contrast, explores the likelihood of multiple vernaculars for medieval English Jews, including English. It queries scholarly commitment to a singularly French-speaking English Jewry, and it provides some proof of medieval Anglo-Jews’ use of English, both by summarizing available (written) evidence, and by incorporating the domestic (unwritten) environments of Jewish women into the discussion. Considering English Jews’ uses of literacy alongside an invisible archive of vernacular speech, it argues for more deliberate inclusion of English in Anglo-Jewry’s multilingualism.

Jews in the medieval Crown of Aragon were legally mandated to register loans to Christians with local notaries. These notaries were legal professionals and public officials, all of whom were Christian men. Jewish women developed a complicated relationship with notarial documentary culture, shaped by their marginality both as women and as Jews. This article examines the documentary practices that notaries used when recording Jewish loans, and how they shaped the lived experience of Jewish men and women who made loans to Christian debtors. The case study of Dolça, widow of Astrug de Ripoll, a Jewish woman living in the Catalan town of Manresa in the early fourteenth century, offers insight into the challenges and possibilities for Jewish women creditors.

Generations of excellent scholarship concerning the social and economic lives of Jewish communities in late medieval Provence have relied upon notarial contracts to illustrate and analyze financial, seasonal, and demographic aspects of Jewish moneylending. Historians have paid less attention to how Jews influenced the practices of Christian notaries themselves. This article examines the practices of notaries favored by Jewish moneylenders. By focusing on nearly ten thousand contracts recorded in sixty registers composed by late fourteenth-century notaries in Apt, a market town and episcopal see in central Provence, this article argues that notaries created sophisticated information management devices to meet the distinctive needs of Jewish moneylenders. Jews were not simply passive users of notaries, but rather they were actors in the evolution of late medieval notarial practice and legal technologies.

The Cairo Geniza contains a plethora of loan agreements, many of which were executed in the Jewish court. Despite a widely known prohibition on collecting interest on loans, some of these agreements stipulated the payment of interest. I have already explored elsewhere why the court might be willing to give its imprimatur to such agreements despite the fact that they ran afoul of Jewish law. In this brief note, I hope to explore why the parties to such agreements – who might otherwise care what Jewish law had to say – would agree to a relationship that so clearly and publicly transgressed Jewish legal norms. Was this simple economic expedience, or were other factors at play? Did they not know the law? Were they deliberately choosing to violate it? These agreements offer us an unparalleled window into the daily life of the medieval Jewish community and its relationship with the law.

From the time of the establishment of universities in Europe, Jews were barred from university medical training by papal decree. By the fifteenth century, the University of Padua in Italy opened its doors to Jews, followed by Dutch universities in the mid seventeenth century. While Tuviya HaRofeh and Gabriel Felix briefly attended the University of Frankfurt in 1678, it wasn’t until the early to mid-eighteenth century that German universities followed suit. Here we identify the first Jewish medical graduate of one of Germany’s premier medical schools, the University of Göttingen. While Benjamin Wolff Gintzburger is thought by many to have been the university’s first Jewish graduate, we clarify here that it was in fact Lehmann Isaac Kohen, grandson of the Court Jew Behrend Lehmann. The expansive archival record of Kohen’s medical training is unique among Jewish medical students of the Early Modern Period. Kohen was a student of the renowned Albrecht von Haller, and it was in an addendum to Kohen’s dissertation that Haller made an extraordinary statement, ignored in the historical literature, advocating religious tolerance in medical education.

This article deals with an archival find from the Sigmaringen State Archives. The focus is on an early modern source from the middle of the 18th century, which sets out rules for the organization of the coexistence of a rural Jewish community amid the Christian majority of a southwest German village. Randegg, not far from the western shores of Lake Constance on the Swiss border, belonged to the Augustinian monastery of Beuron on the Upper Danube, whose abbot Martin issued a so-called Judenoffnung on February 1, 1743. The document is unique for the wider region and for this period. Its 20 articles provide interesting insights into rural life by touching on various aspects such as business hours, livestock trade, community representatives, taxes and duties, religious practices, and synagogues. The historical commentary is accompanied by a slightly modernized transcription of the source text.