‘Jewish Delinquency’ in Medieval Ashkenaz: Norms, Practices, and Attributions in Inter-Religious Encounter

• Applicant: Dr. Jörg Müller
• Subject Area: Medieval History
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 464126352

The project will provide the first systematic investigation both into the active involvement of Jews in criminal behaviour as well as into allegations of such activities in the medieval German Empire. In this context, ‘delinquency’ means any behaviour considered by contemporaries to be worthy of punishment and thus either prosecuted in court or resolved by out-of-court settlement or arbitration. The phenomenon is a social construct resulting from the interaction between daily life and the legal system. As such attribution is always a product of negotiation processes, it is in constant need of review and verification in its respective context. By focusing on Jewish delinquents the project concerns, as it were, a group marked as ‘deviant’ from two sides. This approach promises basic new insights into the social construction of delinquency and regarding ‘Jewish crime’ as a key indicator for processes of change in both the Christian and the Jewish communities. In order to contextualize the findings, delinquent acts within the Christian community and acts committed by non-Jewish individuals against Jews will be compared with those attributed to Jews. The investigation will be based on sources covering the whole typological range of written documentation from the Christian majority population, from normative texts through various types of court records and other, mainly urban documents down to chroniclers’ accounts. The period until the late-fourteenth century will be covered on the basis of published sources and the material already collected in preparation by the applicant, and analysed with the aim of a balanced view across the whole geographical range. Due to the late-medieval rise in documentation, the same is not possible for the fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries. For the later period, therefore, the project will focus particularly on the cities of Frankfurt am Main, Nuremberg, and Regensburg to arrive at a robust documentation. The sources will be analysed in view of the legal norms at play, their changes and their application in the specific cases at hand; in view of the agents and the courts involved; in view of the type and frequency of the various offences (from violence, property and moral offences down to verbal injuries and transgression of byelaws etc.). The central aim of the study is an assessment of the role of ‘Jewish delinquency’ – i.e., of offences real or imagined, committed or allegedly committed by Jews – as a catalyst in the process of marginalization experienced by the Jewish minority over the course of the middle ages. In this context, the role of poverty and exclusion as criminogeneous factors will be adressed. The project will help to assess the impact of ‘Jewish delinquency’ on the daily lives of Jewish communities and on local Christian-Jewish relations.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants