In This Land: Jewish Life and Legal Culture in Late Medieval Provence

Jewish communities existed across the county of Provence throughout the Middle Ages. In This Land reveals the changes that those communities underwent during the late-thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and the social and cultural tensions that shaped their identity.

Legal responsa and other genres of rabbinic literature produced in Provence during this period – many of them previously unpublished – provide access to aspects of the past that have long gone unnoticed. Engagement with legal culture played a central role in the formation of medieval communal identity, providing both a language and a forum for the airing of grievances and the demarcation of social legitimacy. Relations among different ethnic and religious groups, warring spouses, legists and local power brokers were negotiated through the intricacies of Jewish law or Halakhah. Through a close and historically contextualized reading of rabbinic sources, this book provides a startlingly vivid portrait of Jewish life in southern France during the later Middle Ages.