[3] A significant depletion in their numbers in Western Europe began to take place with the rise of the Crusades, which brought about many pogroms and successive expulsion orders, in England (1290), France (14th century) and Spain (1492).
With the end of the medieval age, a similar phenomenon was to repeat itself in the Italian peninsula and throughout most German towns and principalities in German-speaking lands in the sixteenth century.
[4] The majority of archaeological and epigraphical evidence of the Jews in Late Ancient Rome lies in funerary sites, making it difficult to uncover a historical picture of their daily lives or their interactions with outsiders.
[11] In the High Middle Ages, many European Jews were specialized as merchants, money-lenders or artisans, as they were largely excluded from crafts guilds and barred from owning land.
[15] Jewish migration from Roman Italy is considered the most likely source of the first Jews within German territory, but there are multiple theories present in the scholarship currently available.
During the Carolingian period, Jews had a vital function as importers of goods from the East, and their laws and customs were generally tolerated, although they were not allowed to proselytize to Christians.
[26] While this status did not always lead to peaceful conditions for the Jewish people, they were the most compatible[citation needed] non-Christians for the position due to their shared devotion to the same Abrahamic God that the Christians worshiped.
Charlemagne, moreover, was glad to use the Church for the purpose of welding together the loosely connected elements of his kingdom when he transformed part of the old Roman empire into a new Christian one, and united under the imperial crown all the German races at that time.
Years after his death, in 843, his empire fell apart, and the rulers of Italy, France, and Germany were more attentive to the Church's desires in the making of laws dealing with the Jews.
In the wake of a narrow military defeat over Muslim forces, Leo III of Constantinople decided his nation's weakness lay in its heterogeneous population and began the forcible conversion of the Jews, as well as the New Christians.
The bull forbade, besides other things, Christians from forcing Jews to convert, or to harm them, or to take their property, or to disturb the celebration of their festivals, or to interfere with their cemeteries, on pain of excommunication.
In 1229, King Henry III of England forced Jews to pay half the value of their property in taxes, following burning of the Talmud in Paris and the Tartars' capture of Jerusalem.
In 1385, German Emperor Wenceslaus arrested Jews living in the Swabian League, a group of free cities in Germany, and confiscated their books.
Benedict XIII banned the study of the Talmud in any form, as institutions forced Christian sermons and tried to restrict Jewish life completely, and a few years later Pope Martin V favorably reinstated old privileges of the Jews.
[41] In another instance, the bishop of Trier offered to keep Jews safe from Crusaders in his palace; however, local intimidation eventually forced him to abandon those whom he had previously aided.
Because the bishop had no ancestry or allies in Trier, he felt that he could not muster the political power needed to carry out a successful resistance without the support of the townspeople.
When doing so, he remarked, “You cannot be saved—Your God does not wish to save you now as he did in earlier days.”[42] In Cologne, Jews were protected by local gentiles after violence had broken out at the beginning of Shavuot, a Jewish holiday.
However, the vast majority of Jews in Cologne survived Shavuot because local Christians had reached out and offered their homes as a means of asylum from the Crusaders.
Since the time of the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church upheld the Constitutio pro Judæis (Formal Statement on the Jews), which stated: We decree that no Christian shall use violence to force them to be baptized, so long as they are unwilling and refuse.…Without the judgment of the political authority of the land, no Christian shall presume to wound them or kill them or rob them of their money or change the good customs that they have thus far enjoyed in the place where they live.
"[45]According to Anna Sapir Abulafia, most scholars agree that Jews and Christians in Latin Christendom lived in relative peace with one another until the thirteenth century.
[46]: xii [47]: 3 "Officially, the medieval Catholic church never advocated the expulsion of all the Jews from Christendom, or repudiated Augustine's doctrine of Jewish witness...
[53] Although the French monarchy prohibited the creation of Jewish religious centers, friendly relations with Christians enabled them to build a synagogue in Béziers in 1278.
The Jewish man accidentally scared the Christian's horse with the white corner of his undershirt and the servant rode away, upset about the frightened beast, and told his master he saw the Jew throw a child in the river.
In some cases, the authorities spoke against the accusations, for example Pope Innocent III wrote in 1199: No Christian shall do the Jews any personal injury, except in executing the judgments of a judge, or deprive them of their possessions, or change the rights and privileges which they have been accustomed to have.
And to prevent the baseness and avarice of wicked men we forbid anyone to deface or damage their cemeteries or to extort money from them by threatening to exhume the bodies of their dead.
[67] The Jews, who were driven out of England in 1290,[68] out of France in 1394, out of numerous districts of Germany, Italy, and the Balkan peninsula[citation needed] between 1200 and 1600, were scattered in all directions, and fled preferably to the new Slavic kingdoms, where for the time being other confessions were still tolerated.
In the kingdom of Aragon the strong Jewish ties to the monarchy, in the form of political support, revenue supplies and assistance, ensured their relatively safer position.
Jews continued lending sums to non-Jews and Jewish usury was no longer contested in public, and religious relations remained stable and unmarred by violent activity.
The Enlightenment appeared at the end of the Early Modern Era, and was characterized by a set of values and ideas that completely opposed the previous Medieval age.
A form of "critical rationalism"[84] inspired by the European Enlightenment, Haskalah focused on reform in two specific areas: stimulating an internal rebirth of culture, and better preparing and training Jews to exist in a christocentric world.