Medieval Jewish Society Wasn’t so Law-Abiding and Chaste After All

Ah, the medieval world of Jewish Europe—a world of study halls and sages, exalted poverty and true religion! Sure, there were pogroms and depredations. No one thinks the premodern Rhineland was a picnic. But we all know the Jews themselves weren’t mediocre like us. They were Rashi and Rabbi Judah the Pious. The Jews of medieval Europe were the real thing.

Anyone inspired by that knowledge should probably avoid Jews and Crime in Medieval Europe, a fascinating forthcoming work of academic history by Ephraim Shoham-Steiner. This study introduces us to a very different slate of characters, like Reuven the Fence, the etrog thief Gedalyah of Stamford, and the notorious Medros, a family of crooks implicated in the burglary of their own synagogue. Rescued from the jail of nostalgia and didactic parables about righteous men, the period leaps to life in disturbing human color: it’s The World of Our Fathers meets The Wire.

Shoham-Steiner, a history professor at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, makes brilliant use of rabbinic legal texts—including some that were long known to historians but avoided because of concerns they could be kindling for anti-Jewish animosity. “Jewish scholars have deliberately disregarded some of the source materials I mine in this book, out of fear of its implications for the image of the Jews, and as part of a long tradition of apologetics,” he writes. “Indeed, I was advised by some colleagues not to pursue the subject.” He understands the hesitation. But the upshot has been the mistaken idea that “medieval Jewish society was inherently law-abiding and chaste, if not outright holy.” This was not the case.