“The trouble with people is not that they don’t know but that they know so much that ain’t so.”

– Attributed by the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations to Josh Billings.
Ironically, this quote is often misquoted and misattributed.

The scarcity of reliable data has been, and continues to be, the greatest challenge in researching this subject.

Western Europe has ample documentation for lists of massacres, religious rulings, and other traditional topics. However, looking for areas of medieval Jewish freedom or fighters (especially outside of al-Andalus) is not the focus of traditional research, and getting away from that focus dramatically reduces not only the quantity of sources available but also too often their quality as authors’ agendas affect their work.

Some of this is modern politics. Opinions on Jews’ and Muslims’ ability to get along in the past have implications for prospects for peace in the modern Middle East. Accepting or rejecting the idea of Jewish Ethiopians has implications for how their descendants should be treated today.

Surviving medieval sources, which were often written by the Jews’ opponents, can also contain inaccuracies due to their authors’ bias. The Kebra Nagast is one of our few primary sources on the Ethiopian Jewish state. Was it really written in the 500s, or was it actually written in the 1200s as a propaganda piece justifying the new Christian dynasty’s rule? A 1390s illustration of Jews defending a Verdun tower in 1320 shows the Jews wearing knightly armor. Were trained Jewish fighters present, or were the victors just talking up the opposition to make themselves look good?

Interpretation can also be a challenge even without bias being present. For example a late-1500s Spanish fresco of the Battle of Higueruela shows a large force fighting under what looks like blue Star of David banners in the Muslim Granadan army, seemingly implying it was a Jewish fighting unit. However, at the time there were only about 550 Jews in all of Granada and the six-pointed star was often used by Muslims, so it was probably not in fact a Jewish unit (however fascinating that might have been).

Trying to extract the truth from contradictory, questionable, and unclear sources is, of course, part and parcel of all historical study. It is a particular challenge, however, when many authors feel such fighters are not “supposed” to have existed at all. Consider, for example, the effort to document female medieval fighters – a task that faces challenges very similar to the challenges of documenting Jewish medieval fighters (conversely, many of the scholars uncovering Jewish fighters in specific times/places are women). Professor Valerie Eads, in her 2006 conference paper “Means, Motive, Opportunity: Medieval Women and the Recourse to Arms”, provides examples during the Crusades where Turkish and Christian soldiers’ accounts recorded women taking noted parts in (and sometimes dying in) battles, while clerical accounts of those very same battles either do not mention the women at all or claim that old washerwomen were the only women present among the virtuous men.

Certainly the Internet has made a great deal of information more easily available. However, an Internet claim – no matter how often repeated – cannot by itself be accepted as fact. There must be corroborating evidence, and unfortunately I have had to leave out some very intriguing claims made on other websites because of the lack (so far) of such corroboration.

Therefore I continue to work to find new pieces of the puzzle, compare them to the existing pieces, make judgement calls based on the best available but limited data, and tune the this website accordingly.