nirenberg communities of violence

5/24/2018 Nirenberg Communities of Violence

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[OMMUNIT I SOFVIOLEN EPERSECUTION OF MINORITIESIN THE MIDDLE GES

avid irenberg

P R I N E T O N U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

PRINCETON N E W J E R S E Y


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INTRODU TION

T HE TRUTH ofthe dictum that the present shapes the past is nowheremore evident than in the effects of W orld War J on historical writingabout European minorities. Before that war and its attendant horrors,Jewish history was by and large outside the mainstream of the historical profession, written by Jews and ignored by others as in sorne ways it still iS).2 Whenmainstream historians did touch upon the history ofJews and other minorities,it was as part of confessional history. Protestants especially wrote about medievalviolence and intolerance toward minorities (heretics, Moriscos, Jews, lepers,witches) in order to claim that Catholicism had benighted Europe and made itspeople brutal in the period between the fall ofRome and the birth ofLuther.3For the most part, however, the study of"Medieval Society writ large seldomintersected with the study of its minorities.

Since the Holocaust such a position has become untenable. Few today wouldargue, for example, that the study ofJews and attitudes towardJews in Germanytells us little about the formation of modern German cultural and national identities. Nor, in the wake of current attacks on Muslims in the former Yugoslavia,on foreigners (often Muslim) in Germany, France, and Italy, or on Jews inRussia, is it possible to argue that episodes ofviolence against minorities are partof a primitive European past which modern societies have left behind. Thestudy of medieval minorities has therefore acquired a new urgency, and it hasbeen transformed by sorne into a search for the roots of modern evils. "Whendid Europe go wrong?" is a question that has been asked more and more frequently over the past fifty years.

A frequent answer, it seems, is "in the Middle Ages. As Norman Cohn putit in his book Wan-ant for Genocide,As 1 see it, the deadliest kind of antisernitism, the kind that results in massacre andattempted genocide, has Iitde to do with real conflicts of interest between livingpeople, or even with racial prejudice as such. At its heart Iies the belief that Jews-alJews everywhere-form a conspiratorial body set on ruining and then dorninating the

Cf M. Bloch, The Historian s Craft (New York, 1953), pp. 43-47. Bloch wrote these words inhiding shordy before he himself was killed by the Nazis. 1 do not doubt that their articulation wasitself a product of the war.

2S ee G. Langmuir, Majority History and Postbiblical Jews, in Toward a Defintion o ntisemi-tism (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990), pp. 21-41.

3G. G. Coulton is a salient example, most blatantly in his historical novel The Friar s Lantem(London, 1906). Such Protestant-Catholic polemics were particularly important in the early historiography on Muslims and Moriscos in the lberian Peninsula.


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4 I N T R O D U T IO Nrest of mankind. And this belief is simply a modemized, secularized version of thepopular medieval view. 4

The implications ofCohn's thesis are clear: the most dangerous attitudes toward5 minorities, or at least toward J ews, do not draw their strength from the interactions of individuals and groups within a society, but from collective beliefs,beliefs formed in the Middle Ages and transmitted to the present day.s Hencemedievalists have written books like Cohn's Europe's Inner Demons, RobertMoore's The Formaton ofa Persecutng Socety, and Carlo Ginzburg's Ecstases6 -books that are exercises in psychoanalysis, attempts to understand an assumedcollective unconscious of modern Europeans.

There are different opinions, of course, as to when a "tolerant" EuropeanMiddle Ages turned bad. Historians ofJews, Muslims, heretics, gay people, andlepers have all placed the shift at different dates, ranging from the First Crusade(which provoked a good deal ofviolence against EuropeanJews) forward. Mostrecendy Carlo Ginzburg has argued for a later date, claiming that there emergedin the [rst half of the fourteenth century (the period covered in the presentwork) an irrational fear of conspiracy which had previously been repressed inthe European mentality: a belief that certain groups, whether Jews, lepers, orwitches, were conspiring to destroy society. It was this irrational mentality,Ginzburg believes, that led to pogroms against the Jews, to accusations ofwellpoisoning and ritual murder, and to the great witch hunts of the early modernperiodo

Regardless of their different periodizations, all these quests for the origins ofEuropean intolerance have much in cornmon. All take the long view, seekingto establish a continuity between the hatreds of long ago and those of the hereand now. This focus on the longue dure means that events are read less withintheir local contexts than according to a teleology leading, more or less explicidy,

Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiraey and the Protoeols o the Elders oZion (New York, 1967), p. 16. A similar passage from the same work is quoted approvingly andexpanded by 1. Rothkrug, "Peasant and Jew: Fears of Pollution and German Collective Perceptions," Historieal Refleetions / Rflexions Historiques 10 (1983): 59-77, here p 60.

sThere are, of course, historians with the opposite view. B Blumenkranz, for example, writesthat the struggle ofChristianity againstJudaism is not inevitable, necessaty, nor essential. Rather itis a product of general conditions emerging out of intemal and external politics and sociologicalfacts In short, it is only contingent." Such pleas for contingency have had limited infiuence evenupon those who quote them. Thus A. Cutler and H. Cuder, whose translation ofBlumenkranz wasjust quoted, "could not agree more with these sentiments" but proceed on the same page to arguethat AntiMuslimism was the primary factor in the revival of anti-Semitism during the HighMiddle Ages (1000-1300), the effects ofwhich have been felt in all subsequent centuries, includingour own. TheJew as Al1y ofthe Muslim: Medieval Roots o Anti-Semitism (Notre Dame, IN, 1986), p2, quoting from Le jui medieval au miroir de I'arl ehrtien (Paris, 1966), p 136.

6 (London, 1975); (Oxford, 1987); (New York, 1991). See also Lon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth:A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe (New York, 1974); and Rothkrug's article citedaboye, n. 4


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I N TRODUCT I ON 5to the Holocaust. Similarly, instead of emphasizing local or even individualopinions about minorities, they focus on collective images, representations, andstereotypes of the other. The actions of groups or individuals are ignored infavor of structures of thought that are believed to govem those actions.7 Historians therefore act as geologists, tracing the ancient processes by which collective anxieties accreted into a persecutory landscape that has changed little overthe past millennium. The refutation of this widespread notion that we can bestunderstand intolerance by stressing the fundamental continuity between collective systems ofthought across historical time, or in this case across one thousandyears, is an overarching goal of the present work.

The emphasis on continuity and collective systems of thought can be called''!:.tructural,t'' witnout too muen violenee to that ward..8 Within the 'i>troctU dl-ist consensus in the historiography of persecution there are different methodologies. Two are especially cornmon. The first links the rise of persecutingmentalities to other secular processes: the creation of a monetary economy orthe rise of centralized monarchies, for example.9 Exponents of this approach,such as Robert Moore, emphasize processes of historical change up to a point.They allow contingency during the gestation of intolerance, but after its birththe persecuting mentality seems to transcend particularities of time and place.The second methodology traces the pedigree of stereotypes and beliefs in order Jto establish the existence ofa "discourse" about the other and fix its origins. Ittreats intolerance entire1y as a problem in the migratory history of ideas, ignoring social, economic, political, or cultural variables. Thus Ginzburg follows thefolkloric roots of the witches' Sabbath from eighth-century B.C. central Asia toEssex, England, 1645; while the author of another recent work traces the demonization and dehumanization ofJews from Alexandrian Egypt to high medieval Passion plays in order to understand the daydreams of monks, the sermonsof the preachers, the imagination of the artists, and the anxious psyche ofEveryman. 10

7These are, of eourse, relatives of very aneient diehotomies eurrently at the hean of theoretiealdebate about textual interpretation: subjeetivism/objeetivism, structurel ageney, langue parale,among others. Put most briefty and abstraetly, the debate is over the degree ofautonomy individualshave within the eolleetive rules and institutions that structure their soeiety. In the case oflanguelparole, for example, langue refers to the background of rules by whieh language funetions(the linguisties, so to speak), while parale refers to usage, to the ways in whieh individuals speak.scr P. Anderson, In the Tracks ' f Historical Materialism (Chieago, 1984), chapo 2, "Strueture andSubjeet," esp. pp. 44 r

9See , e.g., L. Litde, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaea, NY, 1978),p.42.IOGinzburg, Ecstasies (though e1sewhere he provides a very e1egant formulation of the prablem of

continuity. See his Myths Emblems C/ues [London, 1986], e.g., pp. vii-xiii); M. Lazar, The Lamband the Seapegoat: The Dehumanization of the Jews in Medieval Propaganda Imagery," in AmiSemitism in Times ' f Crisis ed. S. Gilman and S. Katz (New York, 1991), pp. 38-80, here p. 39. Fora very different theoretieal eritieism of this methodology see M. Foueault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy,History," in Language Counter-Memory Practice ed. D. Bouehard (Ithaea, NY, 1977), pp. 139-164.


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6 I N T RODUCT I ON"Everyman" makes out badIy in such works. Ofeen "irracional," at best the

receptac1e of external, inherited ideologies passively and uncritically absorbed,medieval people are presented as dominated by discourse, not as active participants in ies shaping. 1 am not arguing that negative discourses aboutJews, Muslirns, women, or lepers did not exist, but that any inherited discourse aboutminorities acquired force only when people chose to fmd it meaningful anduseful, and was itself reshaped by these choices. Briefly, discourse and agencygain meaning only in relation to each other. Even thus delimited, the notionof a "persecuting discourse" requires quiliflcation. Such a discourse about minorities was but one ofthose available, and its invocation in a given situacion didnot ensure ies success or acceptance. The choice oflanguage was an active one,made in order to achieve something, made within contexts of conflict andstructures of dominacion, and often contested. l2 Thus when medieval peoplemade statements about the consequences of religious difference, they weremaking c1aims, not expressing accomplished reality, and these c1aims were subject to barter and negotiation before they could achieve real force in any givensituation. l3 This book is about these processes of barter and negociation, not

Aout the creation of a "persecuting discourse.", My approach also challenges the current emphasis on the longue dure in theperiodization of the persecution of minorities. By showing how structures aretransformed by the actions and choices of people working within them, it morereadily explains change over time while relying less on an appeal to the irrational. We need no longer insist on continuities of meaning in claims aboutminorities wherever we flnd continuities in form, since we can see how the

11 Here 1 am conflating Bourdieu's notion of "rule-govemed creativity" Out/ine ti a Theory tiPractice [Cambridge, 1977], pp. 15-17 and passim) with Sahlins's discussion of"historic agents" andtheir uses of cultural categories. See Islands tiHistory (Chicago, 1985), pp. xiv, 25. A. Giddens hascome to similar conclusions, albeit by different means. For the simplest exposition ofhis "structuration theory," see his "Hermeneutics and Social Theory," in Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects, ed.G. Shapiro and A. Sica (Arnherst, MA, 1984), pp. 215-231; and "Action, Subjectivity, and theConstitution of Meaning," in The Aims ti Representation: SubjectlTextlHistory, ed. M. Krieger(New York, 1987), pp. 159-174.

12A point made forcefully by S. Feierman, Peasant Intellectuals: Anthropology and History in Tan-zania (Madison, WI, 1990), esp. pp. 1-35. The same can be said of the textual records of suchchoices, on which see G. Prakash, Bonded Histon es: Genealogies ti Labor Servitude in Colonial India(Cambridge, 1990), p. 39; R. Williams, Marxism and IJterature (Oxford, 1977), pp. 36-42. Thisabstract point has practical implications for the medievalist. Compare M. Kriegel's claim-thatroyal documentation is compromised by interests, while municipal documentation represents "thereality of the perception of the Jew" w i th my position that we have no disinterested sources, onlysources with conflicting interests. For Kriege1, see his "Un trait de psychologie sociale dans les paysmditerranens du bas moyen age: le juifCornme intouchable," Annales: ES 31 (1976): 326-330,here p. 327.

13An adaptation ofL. Rosen, Bargainingfor Rea/ity: The Constn.ction of Social Relations in aMuslimCommunity (Chicago, 1984), pp. 1-5, 47, 165-166, 180-192.


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I N T R O D U T I O N 9lachrymose school, which dates back to medieval chronicle traditions, sees thehistory ofJudaism since the fall ofJerusalem as a vale of tears, a progression oftragedieso It is in part an eschatological vision, with each disaster increasing inmagnitude until the last and greatest disaster precipitates the coming of theMessiah and redemption. The Jerusalem school of Jewish history is in sorneways a post-Holocaust, secularized version of the lachrymose school. Thoughits messianism is more muted, it shares with its predecessor a teleological visionin which each incident of persecution foreshadows greater persecutions tocome. Within the field of Sephardic Jewish studies the Jerusalem schoolhas been very influential, owing in large part to the work of Yitzhak Baer,whose two-volume History o the Jews in Christian Spain remains the standardreference. 19

The present work argues against both these positions, against a rose-tintedhaven of tolerance and a darkening valley of tears, but it also borrows fromboth. For example, it agrees with the lachrymose school in recognizing theexistence of long-standing vocabularies of hatred, although it rejects the lachrymose interpretation of the meaning, function, or virulence of these vocabu-laries. In this it agrees with the "optimists," and yet it questions the very ;existence of an age of peaceful and idyllic convivencia whether long or short. Far 1from arguing for peaceful convivencia Part Two of this book demonstrates thatviolence was a central and systemic aspect of the coexistence of majority and 1minorities in medieval Spain, and even suggests that coexistence was in part .predicated on such violenceo - :

This dependence is more important than it seems. The central dichotomy inmodern studies of the treatment of medieval minorities is that between tolerance and i n t o l e r a n c ~ h u s polarized, violence, hostiliry, and competition canbe seen only as destr'tIltive breakdowns of ~ n S t h e a h t h e s l s otass'O::-H Cciative actiono The i d e n t i f i c a t o n o r c o 1 s t r u c d ; e ~ ~ l ; t i ~ n s h i pbetween conflictand coexistence suggests that such a dichotomy is untenable. We should not besurprised that such a constructive relationship does exig;jJiLYiually a commonplace of post-Enlightenment political p ~ t violence and aggres

19(Philade1phia, 1978). It is worth noting that the same polarization between "golden age" andvale of tears occurs in ItalianJewish historiography, on which see R. Bonfll jewish Lije in Renais-sanee ltaly (Berkeley, 1994), pp. 6-9. For more on Baer's positlOn, see below, end of chapo 3. Onche Jerusalem school in general, see D. Myers, " 'From Zion will go forth Torah': Jewish Scholarship and the Zionist Retum to History" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1991). For Myers'streatmene of Baer, see pp. 219-258.20C( Bonl jewlsh Lije in Renaissanee ltaly pp. 7-9. An example ofthe continuingimportance ofchis dichotomy is the current debate over the status of Jews in Arab l.nds between neolachrymose" historians who emphasize persecution and those who emphasize toleration. See M.Cohen, "Islam and the Jews: Myth, Counter-Myth, History," jerusalem Qua terly 38 (1986): 125137, and the preface to his Unde Creseent and Cross: Thejews in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1994).See also the exchange in Tikkun 6, no. 3 (May-June 1991) between Cohen ( The NeoLachrymose Conception ofJewish-Arab History," pp. 55-60) and N. Stillman ("Myth, Countermyth, and Distortion," pp. 60-64).


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10 I N T RODUCT I ONsion are forms of association. According to this point of view, capitalism andbourgeois society are built upon the hostile competition of individuals. Evenwars, unless they are wars of obliteration, are forms of interaction that seek toestablish relations, not destroy them. 21 As Georg Sirnrnel put it: In contrast topure negativity, conflict contains something positive. Its positive and negative aspects, however, are integrated; they can be separated conceptually, butnot empirically." Or, in the words of an African proverb: They are our enev mies; we marry them. 22

As a historian, I am not equipped to represent this empirically inseparable fusion~ polarities with the analytical clarity of a philosopher or the revelatory opacityof a speaker of proverbs. Instead, I have tried to build it into the structure of thebook by writing across sources (e.g., administrative and cultural), topics (e.g.,Muslim, Jews, lepers; sex, markets, liturgy), analytical categories (e.g., violenceand tolerance), and theoretical positions (e.g., structuralist and subjectivist) thatare normally kept separate or posed against one another. The result is that the

l wo parts of this book, and indeed each of the chapters themselves, are heterogeneous. In that each attacks a different aspect of the role of violence in themedieval toleration ofminorities, they can be read individually and stand alone.Their full effect, however, is intended to be cumulative, and it is only in aggregate that they sustain the larger claims presented in these pretatory pages.Chapter 1, The Historical Background, is meant as a general introduction

to the place of minorities and of violence in fourteenth-century Europe andparticularly in the Crown. It is explicitly comparative, contrasting the differingplaces Jews and Muslims occupied in Christian society, and the different kindsofviolence each group was subject tO. 23 Because severallater arguments depend

2lSee, as one example among many, Kant's "Idea for a Universal History with a CosmopolitanPurpose," seventh proposition (ed. H. Reiss. in Kant's Political Writings [Cambridge, 1970], pp. 4153, here p. 47): Nature has thus again employed the unsociableness ofmen, and even ofthe largesocieties and states which human beings comrruct, as a meam of arriving at a condition of calm andsecurity through their inevitable antagonism (emphasis in original). See also his On the CornmonSaying: 'This May Be True in Theory, But It Does Not Apply in Practice,'" in ibid., pp. 61-92,here p. 91; and, for the rrust that must exist in a11 wars except those of extennination, "PerpetualPeace: A Philosophical Sketch," in ibid., pp. 93-130, here p. 96.22S ee Simmel's "Conflict," in Confliet and The Web of Group-Affiliation, rram. K. Wolff(London, 1955), pp. 11-123, here p. 14 (but see also pp. 18, 23 f , 26, 32 f , 61 f). For the proverb,see M. Gluckman, Custom and Confliet in Africa (Oxford. 1956), pp. 12-13.

23Muslims and Jews living in Christian lands are rarely rreated in comparative perspective. Forpioneering efforts in this regard, see E. Lourie, "Anatomy of Ambivalence: Muslims under theCrown of Aragon in the Late Thirteenth Century," in her Crusade and C%nisation: Muslims,Chris tians and lews n Medieva/ Aragon, Variorum Co11ected Studies 317 (Aldershot, 1990); and M.Meyerson, "Comparative Perspectives on Muslims and Jews in Christian Spain" (paper presented atthe Midwest Medieval History Conference, Ohio State University, October 1990).


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I N T RODUC T I ON

on anunderstandingofthese differences, its principalaimis tobe descriptive.Itsconc1usionsareunsurprising,though too easilyforgotten: the types of violence \ /'andarticulationsofhatred minoritygroupsaresubjecttoarenot independent o ~ theroles thosegroups play in society.

The critiqueof theteleologicaltreatmentof violencebeginsineamest withchapters 2, 3, and 4, which constitutePartOne. These chaptersfocus on twocollectiveandcatac1ysmicactsofviolence byChristiansagainst]ews,lepers,andMuslims: the"Shepherds 'Crusade"of 1320, which beganas aCrusadeagainstIslambut quickIyfocusedinsteadon ]ews;andwhat one chronic1erlatercalledthe "Cowherds' Crusade," which beganbyattackinglepers in 32 but alsocarne toencompass]ews and Muslims.Theseeventshavebeen chosenbecausetheyarefrequently invoked in s u p p o r t ~ ~ r . 9 1 l a r a r g u r ~ ~ I l h ~ t the s t e a d ~ r ckflineof..Emoptl ~ ~ o r ~ . u v a s ; :rrordh ~ b r e ~ s Q r v r o =lence which grew progressively m o ~ J ? r u w . . . Each of these events began i "~ f r crossingintothe Crown of Aragon,and eachtook verydifferent \ forms on either side of the Pyrenees. This fact in itselfforces a comparativeapproach, evenwhen the comparison is between aplacethatexperiencedextensiveviolence (e.g., Francein 1320 andanother thatdidnot (theCrown of ....Aragon in the same year).24 Such comparisons have one considerable value:theymake us ask why two areas thatshareacornmon stockof stereotypesandattitudes toward minorities nevertheless respond so differently to accusations 1 .-drawnfromthatstock.In short,theyforceus tomove,fromthecollective to t llocaland backagain. tn e Source of the Troubles," has two broad goals. First,because the violenceof 1320 and 1321 spread from France to the Crown ofAragon,thechapterprovides n e c ~ I } _ E r e n c h h a c k g r Q u n d and ausefulpoint ofcomparisonto eventsinthe Crown. Itssecond aimis tosituate t t ~ sandleperswithin the context ofconflictsover taxation,t l ifproper roleofkings,andthe healthof the body politicin order toarguethat)dolence...agaimtminerities cannot beunderstoodin isolationfrom thepoltical, economic, a n L ~ u lturalstructureswithin which itoccurs. It e m p h a s i z ~ ~ ~ ~ d ~ ~ ~ a c h - o f t h e otherchaptersin thebook)thatv i o l e n ~ ~ _ . g - i m l . m i . r l Q ~ e s is not onll'.-.l:m .tminor-;ities.By providingthesettacks-with multiplesense; ; ~ d ~ ~ ~ ~ x t s , it h i g h l i g h ~ s

"'tj;price we pay in loss of meaning when we categorize them only as "irra- /tional" and restricttheirinterpretationtoapersecutorylongue dure.

The two remainingchaptersofPart One engageas wellinthesearchforlocalcontextandpluralmeaning, though differencesinthe sourcesavailableforAragon result in differences in the questions asked.25 Chapter 3, "Crusade and

24E. P. Thompson reeently urged this type of eomparison. See "The Moral Economy Reviewed," in bis Customs in Common (London, 1991), pp. 262-263: "Comparativestudy offoodriots has been, inevitably, into thehistoryof nationswhieh had riots" (emphasis in original).

25Muehless materialsurvivesfromFranee:mostofit hasbeen published,moreofthe soureesarenarrative (e.g.,chronic1es),andfewerareroyal. InAragon, on theotherhand,theevents of 1320


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12 I N T R O D U T I O NMassacre in Aragon," for example, contrasts several competing narratives ofone~ !\massacre that occurred in the mountain village of Montclus: t h o ~ . - f villagers,

. . J royal bureauc ",, ts, s i x t e e ~ t h - c e n t ~ r y J e w i s h c h r o n i ~ l e r s , and mdem historians,eaCh with their own agenda and their own version of history. It shows howroyal bureaucrats put together accounts ofviolence in order to justifY extortionarethciilJty, and discusses the r o l e : h e ~ ~ b u r e a u c r a i : narratives21a.Y:;;d in c r ~ ~ t -. i ~ g the violence they cbimed mereTy to describe. For c o n t e m p ~ r a r i e s , -? adrilmiStratVerepresemations of violence against ITnorities gave such violencenew motives, meanings, and potential uses. For modem historians, they haveyrovided a deceivingly univoca! source for analysis. The chapter ends by tracing

' / the creation of a narrative about the Shepherds' Crusade in one strand of a laterJewish historiographical tradition, a tradition that sought for prophetic prefigurations of more recent acts of violence in medieva! ones.Chapter 4, "Lepers, Jews, Muslims, and Poison in the Crown, describes the__ ~ stmggle that t O Q ~ E a ~ ~ among people throughout the Crown (including theking), all of whom sought to gain control of a new "persecutory ~ s _ c . C l 1 . r s e ofpoisoning in order to make itmeetiJ1errownpartlcularneeds. It is as concemed as

t h e p ~ e ~ l o u s ' c h a p t e r s with t h i ~ t ~ f a y -&eiWeen languages of hate and localcontexts, but its rhetorical focus is slightly difTerent. More explicitly than itspredecessors, it confronts the argument tha.t EuroliC? ~ progressively more~ intolerant b e c a i I s e - i t s - p e o p l e ' ~ e n , ~ ~ i n r e a s l ~ govemed by an iiTational andp ~ r a n o i d "Co1fe"ctlve u n c ~ n s c i o u s 1 . . a . shift manifested in outbrealcs.ofviolence. Byemphasizi;';'g 'the aegreeto which people in t h ~ ' C ~ ~ w n of Aragon manipulatedthe accusations against lepers, Jews, and Muslims in 1321, t h ~ . chapter shows the~ ~ limitations ofthe irrational iJlilluITnating~ ~ _ _ -t....._ _ 'how cognitive structures af[ected the_ ~ _ - . _ ~ _~ : > acti9ns of i n d i v i d u a s . . ( ) ~ a r d r n i n o r j ~ i ~ s . And by studying the past and the future

of these accusations, it challenges progressive models of intolerance.The explicit juxtaposition of case studies with different outcomes on eitherside of the Pyrenees suggests a rather obvious, though neglected, conclusion:~ ~ v l); ~ : > that ~ b ( ) l : l ~ . ~ 1 1 9 r : j t i e s functiQP. ~ i t h i n and are c


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14 IN T R O D U T IO Nfamilies they could be used to support or to challenge male control of women;and at an individuallevel they could play an important role in countless situations, ranging from extortion to conversion. By exploring the relationship be-.tween the collective and the strategic in the particular case of violence arisingfrom sexual interaction, the chapter demonstrates both the range and the limits1 of negotiation in medieval social relations.

Chapter 5_moy:es from an ,tnJety arising at a particular religious boundary, int h ~ case the sexual one, to the strategic deployment ofthat anxiety in a competi-. ~ tive world and shows how ths n t e I ~ c t i n b e t w e e n discourse ruicontext limits- t h ~ p m ~ ; t i a i ' ~ l miscegenation n ~ ~ e t y to provo ce v . i _ ( ) . 1 ~ w : e : C h a p t e r 6, Minor-ities Confront Each Other:"uKes-i.he' pposte tack, a s k i ~ 2 ~ _ p a r t i c u l a r andcontingent h i s t o r i c ~ ~ ~ ~ , ~ t i o n s r ~ Q : ~ __ h ~ _ e m e r g ; c : ~ ~ < : > L i n t o l e r a n t ' : reli

~ O I ~ ~ . 2 u r s e L a n d give:'i lem-strength"a question approached in this caseV through t h e , ~ t u d y o f M u s l i m - J ~ ~ ~ . h relations in the Crown. Muslims andJews, not only acted and argued out their conflicts in their own religious languages but~ ~ ~ L a c c ~ ~ ~ Q . _ e ~ 2 ~ i ~ y _ ~ h r i s t i < l discourses: Their competitive interact l o n s ~ ~ _ s . r u c . t u r e d ] ) . ' L ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ _ . ~ . ~ t I . : ~ ~ t i ~ . : m s (economic, political,judicial, andthe like) and h < : . . ~ i g o . t l s j c l ~ < ? ~ ( ) g i ~ s that supported these. The need to function( within such institutions forced non-Christians to participate in their logic and toadopt those modes of argument that were most effective within them. To dem-

~ n s t r a t e this, the chapter begins with structural SitU.ations of M.u.s.lim.-.Je.wish ~ o n f l i c t (moneylending, meat markets, sex) and ends with the ,yiolent


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nirenberg communities of violence

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