ABSTRACT
In the early Middle Ages, the Jewish occupational structure was diversified and the social prestige of the Jewish community was high. This is particularly true of the Merovingian and Carolingian realms, the core area of the emerging European civilization. Gregory of Tours, in the sixth century, reports that the Jews were merchants, landowners, officials, physicians, and artisans, and that they formed an elite element in the cities where they frequently mingled with Syrians. But the Syrians were Christians, while the Jews, in the eyes of Gregory, were “liars to God,” a “closed-minded, ever incredulous race,” a “wicked and perfidious nation.” Therein lies the difference: the Jews were religious outsiders, and the Church felt constrained to move against their allegedly pernicious influence in matters of faith. In the eighth and ninth centuries, in the reigns of Pepin the Short, Charlemagne, and Louis the Pious, numerous ecclesiastical letters and legislative directives as well as accounts of Arab travelers attest to the high social status of the Jews. They note the presence of landowners, merchants, and world-travelers who were fluent in Persian, Arabic, and Greek, in addition to European languages. Ibn Khordadbeh, postmaster of the Caliphata in Bagdad, likewise in the ninth century, refers to Jewish merchants, called Radanites, who went as far as India, trading herbs, spices, textiles, precious metals, and metalware, stimulating cultural exchange with translated fairytales (Kalilah and Dimnah) and “Arabic” (really Indian) numerals, along with commercial goods. At a time when Spain and Sicily were in Muslim hands and the maritime cities of Italy exposed to raids by Sarazen pirates, the international connections of the Jewish merchants were of inestimable value to the Christian rulers of Europe. It seems 26that the Carolingian kings even went so far as to establish in Septimania and Catalonia (roughly the region between the estuaries of the Rhône and Ebro) a Jewish princedom that was endowed with feudal prerogatives and entrusted with the guardianship of the southern frontier area against the schismatic Umayyad Caliphate in Spain. This may have been done in agreement with the Abbasid Caliphate of the East and in utilization of the Messianic expectations of the Jews which were founded on their claim that secular power had not yet been wrested from them. The Jewish Exilarchate in Babylonia and its western offshoot in Septimania may have lent credence to the assertion on the part of the Jews that they had remained “the people of God”–an assertion that was listened to attentively by king and nobles and widely accepted by the populace.
