Living Together, Living Apart: Rethinking Jewish-Christian Relations in the Middle Ages. By Jonathan Elukin

Abstract

In Living Together, Living Apart: Rethinking Jewish-Christian Relations in the Middle Ages, Jonathan Elukin provides an extended historiographic corrective to the study of medieval and early modern Jewish–Christian relations throughout Europe. Specifically, he challenges scholars to rethink the meanings behind Christian expulsions and persecutions of the Jews and the impact that these incidents had on Jewish understandings of their environment and relationships with their Christian neighbors. He chastises scholars for continuing to focus on persecution as a dominant theme in Jewish–Christian relations despite Salo Baron's nearly eighty-year old exhortation to the contrary. Elukin suggests that the tendency to see the long-term expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 as the terminus ad quem for medieval Jewish history has blinded scholars to the continuities in medieval and “early modern” Christian–Jewish relations in other parts of Europe—for example, Germany—where Jews continued to live well into the sixteenth century. Persecutions and the threat of expulsion remained; however, Jews and Christians continued working and celebrating together.