Ora Limor

Missionary merchants : Three medieval anti-Jewish works from Genoa

Abstract Despite the fact that Jews were not allowed to live in medieval Genoa, three anti-Jewish works were written in that city. The first two works describe religious disputations between Genoese merchants and Jews in Mediterranean port cities, one in Ceuta in 1179 and the other in Majorca in 1286. The third and latest work comprises a collection of anti-Jewish arguments, based on biblical and post-biblical Jewish literature. An attempt to define the cultural and social milieu from which these works originated, uncovered various obvious and less obvious connections between them. While there is a close literacy connection between the first two disputations, the notarial documents in the Genoese archives also reveal commercial connections between the protagonists of these two disputations and the writer of the third polemical work. In addition, the first two disputations are quite exceptional within the genre of polemical literature, both in their plot and in the nature of their arguments. The protagonists of these disputations are lay Genoese merchants, who are described as more capable of defending their faith than monks and clerics. Hence, these works reveal a new and little known aspect of inter-religious controversy, and also contribute to our knowledge of the culture of the Italian cities in the thirteenth century.

Christians and Jews

Like Muslims, Jews were outside the Christian faith but, unlike the Muslims, they were present within Christian society. The concept of boundary and that of the imagined Jew are both keys for deciphering the code of the relations between Christians and Jews in the Middle Ages, particularly in the thirteenth century. Medieval ecclesiastical legislation upheld the rights of Jews to protection and to an existence with a modicum of honour in the Christian world, and several popes issued protective bulls. An important milestone in the attitude of the church towards the Jews was the Fourth Lateran Council, convened in the Lateran Palace in Rome by Pope Innocent III. In the Middle Ages conversion generally operates in a single direction, from Judaism to Christianity, and traditionally the church continued to oppose forced conversions. The first recorded instance of Jews being accused of the ritual murder of Christians is in the mid-twelfth century.