In This Land: Jewish Life and Legal Culture in Late Medieval Provence by Pinchas Roth (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: In This Land: Jewish Life and Legal Culture in Late Medieval Provence by Pinchas Roth Rachel Furst Pinchas Roth. In This Land: Jewish Life and Legal Culture in Late Medieval Provence. Toronto: PIMS, 2021. 168 pp. The Jews of medieval Provence, positioned between the venerable settlements of Ashkenaz to the north and Sepharad to the south, have long drawn the attention of historians, thanks, in part, to the region’s rich municipal archives. Noted for their participation in local commerce and crafts and celebrated for their achievements in philosophy, linguistics, and the natural sciences, Provençal Jews have been hailed as purveyors of an idiosyncratic hybrid culture that bound together communities from three distinct political realms. In his recently published monograph, Pinchas Roth breaks new ground by highlighting this society’s engagement with and contributions to rabbinic scholarship, a field that has received far less attention than its economic foundations or more secular academic pursuits. Yet the real achievement [End Page 454] of this carefully crafted volume is methodological. Capitalizing on the author’s remarkable command of rabbinic literature from across medieval Europe, it pushes the boundaries of how halakhic sources can and should be read by historians, setting new standards in the study of both Jewish history and legal history at large. The book’s title, In This Land, echoes a rabbinic moniker for the region that stretched along the Mediterranean coast of southern France from Narbonne to Marseille. Through a close reading of rabbinic texts, Roth demonstrates that the Jews who lived in this area had a clear sense of group identity that defied the region’s political incoherence, an identity that expressed itself in the distinctiveness of their religious traditions, as well as in linguistic and cultural terms. Waves of English and especially French Jewish émigrés who arrived in Provence following expulsions at the turn of the fourteenth century challenged many of these local norms, believing their own to be superior. Yet rabbinic discourse reveals that Provençal Jews held their ground, resulting in what Roth dubs a “precocious multiculturalism” (26) that foreshadowed events precipitated by the mass eastward emigration of Jews from Spain and Portugal two centuries later. The book’s introduction familiarizes the reader with responsa, the genre of rabbinic writing that serves as the primary source material for this study. Here the author spells out the challenges of working with these often-arcane records of legal correspondence. At the same time, he argues for their potential to expose aspects of the internal lives and everyday realities of medieval Jews that other types of sources render opaque. This approach moves beyond classic halakhic history, which has concentrated either on rabbinic biographies or on the economic, social, and religious forces that impacted halakhic decision-making in different eras. Chapter 1 introduces the concept that Roth, inspired by legal anthropologists, terms “halakhic culture”—that is, the social norms, practices, values, and dynamics that informed Jewish law and were shaped by it, in turn. This chapter lays the groundwork for a central claim of the book as a whole: that far from affecting only the male, intellectual elite that authored all of its written texts, halakhic discourse during this period engaged a broad spectrum of ordinary Jews. Arguing that legal concepts formed the basic vocabulary of Jewish daily life, Roth maintains that Halakhah lent expression to the affairs and concerns of “women, non-rabbinic intellectuals, merchants, and agricultural workers” (32) irrespective of their fealty to its specific strictures and requirements. He sets out to prove that assertion in five successive chapters, which proceed chronologically from the second half of the thirteenth century through the years following the onset of the plague in Provence a century later. Each chapter showcases a rabbinic scholar from the region, whose approach and oeuvre represent a distinct facet of the local legal environment. Thus, chapter 2 focuses on Mordekhai Kimḥi, scion of a prominent scholarly family who served on rabbinic courts before and after the turn of the fourteenth century. During this era, which witnessed the integration of Roman law in southern France, Provençal Jews turned increasingly to local notaries and judges for civil matters, essentially relegating the...