Linder Amnon. The Jews in the Legal Sources of the Early Middle Ages

Wayne State University Press, 1997. — 715 p.Jewry law, the corpus of legal texts and practices that regulated the life of the Jews in their relations with the medieval Christian society, in one of the main sources of evidence on medieval Jewish history. This volume presents a comprehensive collection of the legal texts bearing specifically on the Jews during the early Middle Ages, from the disappearance of the unitary imperial system in the fifth and sixth centuries to the emergence of centralized governmental structures and the codification of canon law, roughly between the close of the eleventh century and the middle of the twelfth century. The special legal texts that were evolved in regard to the Jews are important for two basic reasons. First, they document the ideological stances, policies, and practical means of application adopted and carried out in regard to the Jews by the ecclesiastical and the secular authorities. This documentation allows historians to reconstruct the roles performed by these two governmental networks, which practically monopolized between them the authority and the responsibility for the creation and application of Jewry law. Second, the importance of this body of texts derives from its specificity in regard to the Jews. By definition, common law and other "extraneous" laws were not directed specifically at Jews. They were applicable to Jews when Jews were included in a population subject to them or to the extent that Jews were involved in situations they controlled.