From the Merry to the Macabre: Song and Dance in the Medieval Jewish-Christian Encounter, 1100–1450

The present article documents and discusses the most common musical encounters between Jews and Christians in medieval France, England, and the Holy Roman Empire. It argues that, as two simple everyday activities that span not only the religious and mundane but also the merry and macabre aspects of everyday life, singing and dancing serve as an effective case study to address how Jews and Christians both culturally shared and distinguished themselves in the European Middle Ages. By illuminating how song and dance were fluid across the various arenas of Jewish and Christian life, the following will demonstrate how a focus on these and other everyday activities can reveal the range of relations that existed between Jews and Christians in both thought and practice. It aims to enrich the field of medieval musical culture by synthesizing Latin and vernacular texts with rabbinic, Hebrew sources, a corpus that has not yet been brought into the discussion of medieval song and dance.