Jews and Crime in Medieval Europe

Jews and crime in medieval Europe is a topic laced by prejudice on one hand and apologetics on the other. Beginning in the Middle Ages, Jews were often portrayed as criminals driven by greed. While these accusations were often unfounded, at times criminal accusations against Jews were not altogether baseless. Drawing on a variety of legal, liturgical, literary, and archival sources, Ephraim Shoham-Steiner examines the reasons for the involvement in crime, the social profile of Jews who performed crimes, and the ways and mechanisms employed by the legal and communal body to deal with Jewish criminals and with crimes committed by Jews. A society’s attitude toward individuals identified as criminals—by others or themselves—can serve as a window into that society’s mores and provide insight into how transgressors understood themselves and society’s attitudes toward them.

This talk will also feature Nicholas Paul, an associate professor of history at Fordham University, and Magda Teter, history professor and the Shvilder Chair in Judaic Studies at Fordham.

About the Speakers

Shoham-Steiner is a professor of medieval Jewish history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Be’ersheva Israel, where he is the director of the Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters (CSOC). He is the author of On the Margins of a Minority: Leprosy, Madness, and Disability among the Jews of Medieval Europe (Wayne State University Press, 2014) and the editor of Intricate Interfaith Networks in the Middle Ages: Quotidian Jewish-Christian Contacts.

Paul is the author of To Follow in Their Footsteps: The Crusades and Family Memory in the High Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), and the co-editor of numerous volumes, including Remembering the Crusades: Myth, Image, and Identity (2012), The French of Outremer: Communities and Communications in the Crusading Mediterranean (2018), Whose Middle Ages? Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past (2019). He is currently working on a project that concerns the place of the Crusades within aristocratic performance culture, which was supported by a Fulbright-University of Birmingham Award in 2019-2020.

Teter is the author of Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland (2005), Sinners on Trial (2011), and Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth (2020). Her work has been supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, YIVO Institute, and the Yad Ha-Nadiv Foundation. This year she is the NEH Senior Scholar at the Center for Jewish History in New York City.

This event is a joint initiative with the New York Public Library and is a part of the Fordham-NYPL Joint Research Fellowship Program in Jewish Studies.