The Timeline’s mass of data can be overwhelming at first. Here are some patterns which will make the history easier to understand.

Early Centuries

The biggest population center by far was Babylonia, which remained so until the devastation inflicted by the Mongols and Tamerlane. Before then, travelers (Benjamin of Tudela is particularly detailed) reported tens or hundreds of Jewish households in European cities but tens of thousands in Babylonian and Silk Road cities.

The West/Northern Europe

The population steadily shifted eastwards as lands that once welcomed Jews turned hostile. The driving force was an often-repeated pattern of:

a) Rulers grant Jews rights/invite Jews to settle in exchange for filling a need:

  • Economic: The area is either underdeveloped (e.g. eastern Europe) or devastated (e.g. Spanish lands conquered from the Muslims) and Jews are brought in to improve the economy.
  • Military: The rulers need more troops and Jews have a reason to fight — either the Jews are offered improved rights (e.g. Carolingian southern France) or the foe is particularly anti-Jewish (e.g. the Muslim conquest of Visigothic Spain).

b) Period of economic growth.

c) Increasing conflict with Jews as the locals want a piece of the action and loans are coming due. Also, the Crown is using the Jews as tax collectors to boost its revenue and limit the power of the nobles. The commons/nobles oppose the Crown for the same reason. The start of this phase is usually delayed in areas where small states face extensive competition with the neighbors (e.g. Spain, Italy), since the rulers don’t want a competitive advantage moving to help their enemies.

d) Once their services for (a) are no longer needed, Jewish conditions go to heck in a handbasket.

  • The Crown sees Jews as expendable/lootable for current cash or easy concessions to the nobles/Church.
  • The nobility wants to get rid of the Crown’s tax collectors.
  • The Church wants to use the Jews as a unifying Other/threat for the Faithful to attack – especially when the Church gets the property of people killed/expelled for blasphemy.
  • The Christian merchants don’t want the competition and think they can keep the economy going themselves. Sometimes they are right, sometimes not.
  • None of the above want to pay back their loans. Expelled/dead Jews can’t collect on their loans.

e) The Jews are killed or expelled, with survivors moving to countries at stage (a) or (b).

The Middle East

Christian Byzantium was consistently very hostile. It regularly attacked Jewish countries and treated Jews poorly, though at times it hired Khazarian troops.

In several areas that were particularly defensible (e.g. mountainous), Jews were able to create and maintain small, armed independent zones that lasted quite a long time.

Under Islam, conditions varied between very favorable (e.g. Golden Age al-Andalus) and very oppressive (e.g. Almohad al-Andalus). Key here was the concept of the “dhimmi” — the Christian or Jew who was permitted to live and work in a Moslem country as long as he paid an extra tax (the “jizya”) and remained subservient in demeanor, clothing, etc.

  • Dhimmitude did NOT imply acceptance of the dhimmi’s religion as equal to Islam. Islamic texts show a great deal of contempt for Judaism from the very beginning. What it did do is permit toleration of second-class residents and at times their high advancement — at Muslim discretion.
  • Jews who acted too “uppity” in Muslim eyes due to their earned rank/financial success were often killed, along with some of the community.
  • Subservience did not guarantee good treatment – the Jews of Khaybars (95 miles from Medina) signed the first dhimmi agreement in 628 but were then expelled anyway once the Muslims were more militarily secure.
  • On the other hand, after Omar expelled the Jews from the Hijaz (the area around Mecca/Medina) in 642 medieval Jews were given the convert-leave-or-die choice far less under Islamic rule than they were under Christian rule.

Central and Eastern Asia

The Mongols and Tamerlane did not discriminate either for or against Jews.  They cared about total obedience and paying taxes, not to whom their subjects prayed.  Genghis Khan offered prayers to Jewish, Christian, and Muslim prophets as well as the traditional Mongol gods.  The great challenge was surviving the conquests, since many of the cities that the Mongols and Tamerlane devastated were the main centers of Jewish population at the time.

Jews in China and India had the longest-lasting periods of being treated just like everyone else.

  • Jews were very involved in international trade all the way to China from ancient times, and to my knowledge medieval China never enacted any anti-Jewish laws. The community faded from assimilation, not attack.
  • Except for the Portuguese areas in the 16th century, India similarly gave its Jews full rights. There was even a small Jewish free state on the southwestern coast (Anjuvannam). Furthermore, the Malabar community had regular trade/contact with other Jewish communities outside of India.

Survival

Survival and fighting.  There were many cases of what I call “troops-for-tolerance” deals, wherein medieval Jews either helped defend non-Jewish polities to receive better treatment or chose to fight for polities that already treated them better.  In these cases, taking up arms often improved Jewish conditions.

In some cases Jews were legally required to bear arms, most notably in the German towns where all non-exempt residents were required to be part of the militia and take their turns standing wall-guard.  In fact medieval Germany’s oldest lawbook (the Sachsenspiegel) has an illumination showing a Jew with a polearm as part of the assembled mixed crowd right next to the paragraph saying “yes, you all must serve militia duty” – the medieval equivalent of a modern “yes, you must serve jury duty” handout illustrated with a picture of a mixed group of people.  Shared service, especially military service, is usually a bonding experience and so such service may have helped mitigate medieval attacks as well.

Sometimes being armed or even the threat of being armed deterred attack.  For example, in 418 Minorca (a Spanish Mediterranean island) a bishop urged his mob to kill Jews barricaded in a synagogue but the mob refused to attack for fear the Jews were armed.  Once the bishop found out that the Jews actually had no weapons, the mob proceeded to burn the synagogue.

However, taking up arms and fighting back — even from within fortresses – did not guarantee survival.  Sometimes armed defense stopped the attacks (e.g. the Wolkenburg 1146), but sometimes the Jews were overwhelmed anyway (e.g. Verdun 1320 – tower gate burned, York 1190 – besieged and ran out of supplies, Mainz 1349 – initial attacking mob defeated but additional townsfolk joined in).  Thus it was not sufficient to just have weapons and the will to use them – classic military considerations such as terrain, logistics, and enemy morale mattered as well, and those who survived combat tended to have or arranged to have those factors in their favor.

Survival and wealth.  In some cases the well-off and well-connected could for a time buy improved (well, less-worse actually) safety and comfort despite deteriorating conditions.  For example, in post-1200s Christian Spain wealthy Jews could buy exemptions from the badge-wearing requirement and there were courtiers wearing ostentatious clothes well after the 1391 massacres.  However, such individuals were always known targets and subject to sudden attack by rulers who were done just milking the cow and felt it was time for steak.

Survival and running away.  One very common and often successful Jewish medieval strategy was to move from oppressive areas to safe ones – note the many cells with “Jews fleeing here from X” entries.  This was possible because during 300-1600 CE whenever there was expulsion-level hostility there were also welcoming countries (e.g. French/German Jews moving to Eastern Europe,  Spanish Jews being welcomed by the Ottoman Empire).

The challenge was in actually getting to safety — particularly since once an expulsion hit the vultures descended, the expelling country limited what the Jews could take in order to keep as much loot as possible (making it much harder for the refugees to pay for food/transportation/protection/bribes/etc.), and in some cases the destination country decided it couldn’t take quite so many and closed the gates (e.g. North Africa after the Spanish expulsion).  Furthermore, in some cases the Jews in a refuge country tried to limit immigration to preserve their own positions (see the footnotes for Portugal, 1492).

Therefore one’s survival odds were greatly improved by “Getting out of Dodge” before the end was nigh and the most serious attacks/expulsions had started.  Note too that moving to safety was easier when one had highly mobile/needed-everywhere job skills, and valuing such skills (a.k.a. the “My son the doctor” effect) is a Jewish cultural trope that continues to this day.

Defectors

The most dedicated, vicious, and destructive anti-Semites were often ex-Jews who had defected to the opposition.