The scope and effectiveness of imperial Jewry law in the high middle ages

Abstract

From the time that the Church Father Augustine, on the one hand, and the Christian emperors, on the other, decided in the early fifth century to tolerate Judaism as the only non-Christian and non-orthodox religious body in the Christian world,1 the existence of European Jews rested on ecclesiastical and secular Jewry law. Having survived Visigothic and Merovingian attempts to baptize them by force in the seventh century, the Jews were conceded better conditions in the Frankish Empire of the Carolingians. The privileges granted to Jewish individuals and representatives of the Jewish communities by Emperor Louis the Pious laid the foundation for lay Jewry law in Central Europe for more than half a millennium.2 Although the next secular privileges given to Jewish communities did not appear until 250 years later ? namely, the two privileges granted in 1090 by Emperor Henry IV to the communities of the Rhenish towns of Worms and Speyer ? there is no doubt that they were links in a chain of general imperial legislation on the Jews.3