Effects of the expulsion: Jewish philosophic culture in Roussillon and Provence

In July, 1306, King Philip the Fair asserted his royal authority over the entire realm of France by expelling all Jews from the territories of his vassals. ¹ In the resulting appropriation of Jewish property, the French crown is estimated to have accrued the extraordinary sum of over one million livres—more than twice its entire annual income—with additional money flowing to local baronial authorities. ² At the royal court, the circumstances of Philip’s expulsion relate to the expanding political and economic powers of royal France. In the Languedocian Jewish community, however, Abba Mari attributes the expulsion to divine retribution for excessive allegorical interpretation. ³ King Philip’s expulsion forced Jews to leave any territory subservient to the French crown. At the time of this decree, the city of Montpellier was a dominium of the Crown of Majorca. The Jews of Montpellier, therefore, presumably were expelled only after the assent of James II of Majorca, who would have received the lion’s share of the booty. Indeed, not more than ten weeks after King Philip’s promulgation in Paris, the Jews of Montpellier left their homes for territories outside of royal France. ⁴ Most Languedocian Jews—including, of course, scholars living in the cities of Narbonne, Béziers, Montpellier, and Lunel—sought refuge immediately beyond the realm of the French king. East of the Rhône, Jews were permitted to resettle in Comtat Venaissin, held by the Papacy, and in Provence, held by the Kingdom of Sicily. In fact, Jews were never expelled from the Comtat, but lived there into the modern period; and in Provence, Jews were able to remain until the first years of the sixteenth century. To the west of Languedoc, lay Roussillon, of the Kingdom of Majorca. In Roussillon, Perpignan was the capital of James II of Majorca, who received his Kingdom in 1276 out of the will of his father James I of Aragon. Given their sense of shared cultural patrimony, Languedocian Jews’ resettlement of in Roussillon and Provence must have seemed quite natural. In Roussillon, Meiri observed the arrival of Languedocian refuges to Perpignan, ⁵ and in Provence, Kalonymus ben Kalonymus witnessed their arrival to Arles. ⁶ Both record the expulsion of Jews from the territories of the French crown as a personal and communal tragedy. Obviously, Meiri’s receptivity to Christian critique of Jewish spirituality and tolerance of Christians as “constrained by religious laws” was not developed in an environment in which Christians had ceased to be oppressors of Jews: Quite to the contrary, the generally deteriorating standard for Jews in Western Europe was a fact of life since the second half of the thirteenth century. Indeed, Meiri’s vocation as a moneylender, while a profitable occupation essential to the local economy, nevertheless, may bespeak exclusion from other forms of economic activity. ⁷ Shortly after King Philip’s expulsion, Perpignan Jewry seems to have approached James II formally and received a promise from him to the effect that he would never expel the Jews from Majorca. ⁸ Abba Mari himself is exiled from Montpellier to Arles (Provence). Four months later, he attempted to resettle in Perpignan, but the agents of King James II, at the behest of local Jews, refused his entry. ⁹ As there is no evidence that Abba Mari ever revoked his excommunication, perhaps his adversaries in Perpignan also retained their enmity against him. Perhaps he returned to Arles; but the place of Abba Mari’s eventual resettlement is unclear. We do know, however, that Abba Mari sent his eulogy to Barcelona upon the death of Rashba (d. 1310) and his eulogy to Perpignan upon the death of Meiri (d. 1315) from some third city, but he does not say which one. ¹⁰ In his eulogy for Meiri, Abba Mari mourns “the perfect sage, Don Vidal Solomon, known in the Holy Tongue as Rabbi Menahem ben Solomon [ha-Meiri].” ¹¹ Given Abba Mari’s battle with Meiri during the controversy, the following adoration, rhymed in Hebrew, is worthy of note.

[Meiri] was expert in the Law of Moses and Jewish custom, and from the breasts of philosophy he drank the best part. ¹²

In this poignant context, Abba Mari gave expression to his understanding and respect for Meiri’s relationship to the philosophic tradition. Abba Mari most likely continued to edit Minḥat Qena’ot until the second decade of the fourteenth century, as this eulogy dates to that time. Abba Mari’s great effort to turn his community away from the path of the Tibbons and to exclude Greco-Arabic learning from their curriculum had failed, but his struggle elicited and preserved a correspondence that gives us extraordinarily direct and colorful access to the ambiguities and concerns of Jewish culture in Languedoc at the turn of the thirteenth century. Needless to say, we do not know the specific paths traveled by the overwhelming number of Jews following the decree of expulsion from royal France in 1306. ¹³ In one rare and vivid example, Estori ha-Parhi, a Montpellier native, found himself in the months following the expulsion in Barcelona. In Barcelona, he encountered Armengaud Blaise, a Christian acquaintance from Languedoc. At that moment, Blaise was in the service of the Aragonese crown. In Montpellier, Blaise had collaborated extensively in medical and astronomical translation with Ha-Parhi’s recently deceased relative, Jacob ben Makhir ibn Tibbon. At their Barcelona meeting, Blaise shared with Ha-Parhi a copy of his recently completed Tabula Antidotarii. Ha-Parhi immediately translated it from Latin into Hebrew. In the introduction to his Hebrew translation, Ha-Parhi tells the story of his expulsion from Languedoc and his Barcelona encounter with Blaise.

When we went into exile, the ankles of our understanding faltered and our wisdom slipped. A murderer [Philip IV of France] fell upon us, violent and aggressive. [The king] robbed [us] but the owners have not relinquished ownership; and Hebrew servant, who had lived with the [Christian] like a dove with a marten or a sheep with a wolf, still hoped to recover [his goods].

[The king] should not have imposed any ruling there [in Montpellier] for two reasons, because [the city] was not under his authority, and hence [the Jew’s property there] does not belong to him, as it was not in his domain. We were compelled to take our belongings with us; [to those] looking after us [as we left], we must have seemed like thieves, although we are children of a just, fearful, and humble father.

Estori ha-Parhi expresses his anger and frustration over the expulsion decreed by the French monarch as well as his sense that the Crown’s seizure of Jewish property in Montpellier was illegitimate and unjust. The meek and obedient Jews, in Ha-Parḥi’s description, lived peacefully within the realms of the French king, and his expropriation of Jewish property in the wake of the expulsion represented the shameful deployment of brute force. Ha-Parhi adds the grievance that the special status of Montpellier, as a joint possession of France and Majorca, should have prevented the French crown from acting there. Of course, this fact did delay the expulsion of Jews from Montpellier but did not prevent it. Ha-Parḥi concludes his account of the “exile,” as he calls it, from Languedoc with a rare brief description of Jews actually taking leave of their homes with all they could carry of their personal belongings. Ha-Parḥi experienced it as shameful for the Jews to appear before the onlookers, their Christian neighbors, as if they were a group of thieves fleeing swiftly with whatever they could muster; when they, and their parents, were humble, honest people. This is all that Ha-Parḥi tells us of the expulsion before turning to his encounter with the Tabula Antidotarii and its author, Armengaud Blaise.

Then the book came to me, in another language, more precious than gold … a treasure belonging to the Christian sage master Armengaud Blaise from Montpellier. He gave it to me here in Barcelona, in the year of my subjugation, at the beginning of my new exile, and there I took it over from his language [Latin] to our blessed tongue [Hebrew].

Unfortunately, Ha-Parḥi does not describe his meeting with Blaise in Barcelona or his precise motives for immediately undertaking the Hebrew translation of Blaise’s most recent work. In fact, shortly after his meeting with Ha-Parḥi, Blaise left the service of the Aragonese crown and quit Barcelona. We cannot know with any degree of certainty, but perhaps Ha-Parḥi wished to ingratiate himself with his well-established Christian acquaintance in a new and precarious Catalonian circumstance. Without doubt, a Hebrew translation of the extensive formulae found in the Antidotarii would be invaluable to any practicing Jewish physician, including Ha-Parḥi. Intriguingly, Ha-Parḥi does inform us, however, that the manuscript actually remained unpublished for some time, as well as how he eventually came to publish it. He made his translation of Blaise’s Antidotarii a gift to the Nasi of Narbonne, Kalonyomus ben Todros, who had appeared in Barcelona, later on, as an exile from his home in Languedoc.

The book was with me for some time after I had translated it, because I did not wish to publish it. After the arrival of the nasi in the community of wise and judicious men, he asked [me] for a book and a story. I offered this trifle to him and presented it to him. ¹⁴

The remainder of Ha-Parḥi’s long and substantial translation belongs almost entirely to the history of medicine. Ha-Parḥi did not remain long in Barcelona—he spent the rest of his life in Palestine, where he composed his most famous work, an historical geography of the Land of Israel, Kaftor va-Feraḥ—nor did Ha-Parḥi again translate a medical work. Surely, however, it may not be said that the expulsion fundamentally disrupted intellectual life, as no evidence exists to support such an assertion. We may more readily imagine, as in the case of Ha-Parḥi, that the Jews of Languedoc successfully transported their culture to their new homes. Similarly, Ha-Parḥi’s account indicates the way in which Languedocian Jews were able to energetically pursue serious intellectual work even while on the move. ¹⁵ In assessing the cultural effects of Philip’s expulsion, one should be mindful that Jews were not expelled permanently from Languedoc until 1394. Of course, each French king believed that his expulsion of the Jews was final; that with his appropriation of their property and cancelation of their loans to Christians, Jews would never again reside in France. Throughout the fourteenth century, however, each successor to the throne of France reassessed Jewish policy and frequently reversed the position taken by his predecessor. In 1315, in fact, some Jews, perhaps as many as a quarter of those who had lived in France before the expulsion of 1306, took up the invitation of the French crown to return home. Indeed, many of these Jews appear to have chosen to return to the authority of their local lords before the expulsion. As it turned out, however, their post-1315 residence in France would be rather short lived. By 1323, when their invitation from the crown was not renewed, poor conditions seem to have forced almost all Jews out of the kingdom. ¹⁶ In 1359, some Jews once again took up an invitation to return. By that time, the Jews of Montpellier were under the direct sovereignty of Charles V of France, as James III of Majorca had sold his seigneury over Montpellier to Phillip VI of France in 1349. In 1374, the Jews of Montpellier were also obliged to participate in guarding their quarter’s gates. In 1387, the construction of a new synagogue in Montpellier gave rise to a lawsuit with the bishop, to whom the Jews were compelled to pay a large sum. At the time of what would be their final expulsion from France in 1394, accusations were pending against the Jews of Montpellier at the municipal court. In short, Jewish communal life continued in Languedoc throughout the fourteenth century. ¹⁷