The Jews in Medieval Normandy.

Drendel, John

The Jews in Medieval Normandy, by Norman Golb. New York, Cambridge University Press, 1998. xxi, 621 pp. $75.00.

The Jews of medieval Normandy emerge from Norman Golb's careful reappraisal of documentary and archaeological evidence as one of medieval Jewry's strongest and most dynamic communities. Golb builds his broad description of the history and cultural contributions of this community upon two original elements. The first is palaeographical; he makes a strong case that scholars have systematically misunderstood the Hebrew transliteration of "Rodom" (Rouen), and thus have failed to identify key early documents. His argument is persuasive, and the resulting re-interpretations of known texts is coherent with other internal and external elements within them. By adding these documents to previously studied sources, Golb has written a fresh narrative history. Two of these documents are of particular importance. A reinterpreting of the "Parma Chronicle" (c. 1200) places Iacob B. Jequthiel in Rouen. Iacob was a wealthy and influential defender of the Jews of France and Normandy at the papal court in the early eleventh century. The eleventh-century letter of Reuben B. Isaac from the Cairo Genizah, whom Golb also shows to have been from Rouen, describes the persecution of Norman Jews of substance by Duke Robert II. These records show that a vital Jewish community lived in Rouen around 1000. Using better-known records, Golb goes on to describe how this community thrived until the thirteenth century. After Duke William II quelled a period of feudal anarchy in 1055, the Jews of Normandy began a long period of ascendance which was only briefly menaced by the massacres of the First Crusades. William Rufus quickly reaffirmed the rights of forced converts to return to Judaism and, in this atmosphere of official tolerance and political protection, the twelfth century witnessed a brilliant cultural period for Norman Jews. Most noteworthy was a circle of Talmudic scholars, the "Perushim", whose ascetic celibacy denotes the influence of monasticism. The achievements of the Rouen yeshivah culminated in the work of the Tosafists, commentators on the Talmud, who thrived in the generation before the annexation of Normandy to France. The author's palaeographical analysis of the Great Mahazor of Amsterdam is more speculative, but the manuscript may well have been copied in Normandy under the influence of Abraham ibn Ezra, who lived in Rouen in the 1160s, and Golb's attribution of the text to a French-speaking community is conclusive.

The strongest case for making Normandy the home of one of the largest Jewish communities in medieval Europe unfolds from a painstaking analysis of place-names and recent archaeological reports. Golb catalogues the mentions of "streets of the Jews", using archival texts, nineteenth century maps and modern cadasters. This allows him to describe a remarkable network of eighty-five Jewish quarters astride routes linking villages and towns, a dense pattern of settlement extending across the width and breadth of the duchy. This survey supports the idea that the Jews of Normandy were not limited to the urban community of Rouen -- rather Jews formed an integral part of the social and economic fabric of rural Normandy as well. While the oral tradition, which anchored the memory of Jewish communities in modern place names, is in itself problematic and requires more methodological consideration than Golb gives it, the geography and sheer numbers are extremely suggestive. Unfortunately, Golb overreaches rashly when he asserts that this settlement pattern attests to the presence of Jewish communities since Roman times. They may well reflect the presence of medieval Jewish peasants -- we know that Jews worked the land in tenth century Macon, for example. However it is more likely, given the siting of these quarters on important roads, that Jews settled in rural Normandy during the economic upturn of the eleventh century, and were involved in commercial and artisan activities rather than in commodity production. If we really want to believe that Norman Jews were once peasants, then their ancestors might reasonably be surmised to be Jews drawn to Carolingian Neustria during the heyday of Jewish activity in the ninth century. The author's speculations on this issue will disappoint readers interested in a contribution to the debate over the origin of medieval villages -- the author appears unaware that any such debate exists.

Still, the heart of the Norman community was in Rouen, and Golb's careful study of archaeological finds, fleshed out with documentary evidence, recreates the topography and the architecture of the Jewish quarter in Rouen, of which the masterpiece was a Romanesque yeshivah of monumental proportions dating from the Plantagenet period. Golb concludes from the placement of this quarter in the heart of medieval Rouen, that the Jewish community dates from the Roman period. That this community is quite ancient is clear, but it is more likely that the earliest continuous Jewish settlement in Rouen began in the late eighth and/or early ninth century, a period during which Rouen began to figure as a centre of trade with southern England.

This is a good book marred by unfortunate exaggerations that hurt the author's credibility -- the author's repeated arguments for a continuous Jewish presence in Normandy since Roman times are advanced without a shred of documentary or archaeological evidence, and are more pertinent to the historiographical concerns of nineteenth-century authors like Regne than to contemporary debates in Jewish studies. It is also unfortunate that he fails to mention some historians with whom he clearly does not agree (Aryeh Grabois, for example who has argued convincingly that the Carolingian "Jewish King" of Narbonne, accepted as historical by Golb, was a twelfth-century invention, is not even mentioned in the bibliography). For these reasons, I hesitate to recommend this work to undergraduate students, who might be misled. However, informed and critical readers will find that, while this study is descriptive rather than analytic, it has many original and well-documented insights which will renew the history of Normandy in the Anglo-Norman period.

John Drendel

Universite du Quebec a Montreal