ABSTRACT
The dual role of the Jew as a trusted friend and a suspected outsider becomes lucidly clear, if one considers the fate of the Jews of Spain. Also, their dependence on royal power and their precariously ambiguous position within the larger societal structure are obvious. But in many other ways Spain is different. In Germany and in other Central European countries that were closely connected with Germany for a long time, such as Austria, Bohemia, Alsace, and northern Italy, the Jews were constituted as a narrowly circumscribed caste. They came to occupy this position, as we have seen, in the high Middle Ages and remained chained to it until the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Jewish settlement in Spain, on the other hand, retained until the very end the older and more diversified structure of the early Mediterranean settlement. At the same time, Spanish-Jewish history points forward because it foreshadows the role that the Jews performed in the emergence of the modern nation-state.
