ABSTRACT
The history of Christian–Jewish relations in medieval Germany between 1000 and 1300 is full of contradictions. A sombre picture is projected by the pogroms of the First Crusade and wholesale massacres connected with thirteenth-century blood libels and host-desecration accusations. A different picture emerges from the fact that unlike England and France (and fifteenth-century Spain) German Jews did not suffer universal expulsion from German lands. Worms, for example, retained a Jewish community until the takeover by the Nazis in the 1930s. A grim image is offered by traditional interpretations of German royal/imperial stipulations concerning Jewish chamber serfdom; a more positive impression is gathered from details of Jewish socio-economic activity within the budding German cities of the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Ever present are the dark shadows of the Shoa which continue to make it difficult to analyse objectively the true circumstances of medieval German Jewry. At the same time German centres of Jewish Studies, as for example in Trier, are providing us with a much better understanding of medieval Ashkenaz (the Hebrew term for Germany).
