ABSTRACT
Any population figures for the medieval period can only provide a rough estimate. Although numbers appear in the writings of Jewish travelers such as Benjamin of Tudela in the twelfth century, as well as other Jewish and non-Jewish sources, they are not usually reliable. A modern “guesstimate” (by historian Salo Baron) suggests the following picture for medieval Christian Europe: in the year 1300, France and the “Holy Roman Empire” (mostly German-speaking lands in central Europe) each had about 100,000 Jews. By the end of the medieval period, around
1490, this number was much smaller in the case of France (20,000), due to the expulsion of the Jews from much of France in the fourteenth century, and also somewhat smaller in the case of the Roman Empire (80,000). By contrast, the Jewish communities of southern Europe had grown significantly between 1300 and 1490 (i.e., before the largescale expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, which marked the end of the medieval period): the numbers rose from 50,000 to 120,000 in Italy, from 150,000 to 250,000 in Spain, and from 40,000 to 80,000 in Portugal. An area that saw a spectacular growth in its Jewish population, largely due to immigration from France and the German-speaking lands, was Eastern Europe: Poland-Lithuania had about 5,000 Jews in 1300 and that number increased to 30,000 by 1490; in the case of Hungary, it rose from 5,000 to 20,000. (This, by the way, compares to an estimate of anywhere between 20,000 and 40,000 Jews in twelfth-century Egypt.) As we said, these numbers have a very large margin of error, but they demonstrate a general trend of Jewish demographic expansion in Europe (with the obvious exception of those countries that expelled their Jews in the course of the period). At the same time, it is important to point out that the Jews never represented more than 1 percent of the total population in any medieval kingdom, except Spain. (This is less significant than it seems, though, for the Jews were often a far larger percentage of the urban population, even if not in the kingdom at large.)
Given the varied and rich experience of the Jews under medieval Christendom, the following pages cannot provide anything close to a comprehensive overview. Because of the important ways in which they have shaped Jewish cultures in later centuries, the focus here will be on the communities of Ashkenaz-northern France and the German Empire-as well as Sefarad-that is, the Christian kingdoms of medieval Spain. We will also hear about the Jews of medieval Italy and other areas (for example, see box, The Byzantine Empire), but the main narrative will concentrate on these two cultural areas that bequeathed a particularly rich legacy onto the Jews of the modern world.
