Religion and Law in Medieval Christian and Muslim Societies

The unique Arabic version of the Iberian canon law code 'Collectio Hispana' preserved in a mid-eleventh-century manuscript of the Royal Library of El Escorial has been deemed “the most distinguished and characteristic” work of medieval Andalusi Christian writing. It represents an exceptional source witness to the internal legal organisation of Christian communities in Muslim-dominated al-Andalus as well as to their acculturation to Islamicate environments. Yet the Arabic collection has received only little scholarly attention so far. This volume presents the results of a recent interdisciplinary research project on the Arabic canon law manuscript flanked by contributions from neigbouring fields of research that allow for a comparative assessment of the substantial new findings. The individual chapters in this volume address issues such as the origins of the Arabic law code and its sole transmitting manuscript its language and translation strategies its source value for both the persistence and transformation of ecclesiastical institutions after the Muslim conquest or the law code's position in the judicial practice of al-Andalus. The volume brings together the scholarly expertise of distinguished specialists in a broad range of disciplines e.g. history Arabic and Latin philology medieval palaeography and codicology archaeology coptology theology and history of law.

The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) was groundbreaking for having introduced to medieval Europe a series of canons that sought to regulate encounters between Christians and Jews and Muslims. Its canon 68 demanded that Jews and Muslims wear distinguishing dress in order to prevent Christians from entering into illicit sexual relations with them restricted the movement of Jews in public spaces during Holy Week and exhorted secular authorities to punish Jews who in any way “insult” or blaspheme against Christ himself. Other canons sought to exercise greater control over moneylending to provide relief to Christian borrowers to extract tithes from Jews who held Christian properties as pledges and prohibited Jews from exercising power as public officials over Christians. The canons condemned converts who preserved elements from their former religion promoted a fifth Crusade to the East exempted Crusaders from taxes and from interest payments to Jewish moneylenders restricted trade with Muslims or Saracens and condemned Christians who provided arms or assistance to Saracens. The Council’s canons affected the missionary efforts of the late medieval Church and its attempts to convert Jewish and Muslim minorities and established essential guidance on minority relations not to be surpassed until Vatican II in the 1960s.

Judaism Christianity and Islam have coexisted in Europe for over 1300 years. The three monotheistic faiths differ in demography in the moment of their arrival on the continent and in the unequal relations they maintain with power: Christianity was chosen by a large number of inhabitants and became - in spite of important differences according to place and time -a religion of state. The organization of the continent into states and the divisions within Christianity often placed minorities in an unstable and at times painful situation. This partially explains the fight against "heresies" the wars of religions the expulsion of Jews from several European kingdoms (as well as the expulsion of Muslims from Sicily and the Iberian peninsula) the "Jewish question" in the 19th century up until the Holocaust. Since the 20th century the debates concerning Islam and concerning public expression of religion are shaped in part by this past.

The 13 studies gathered in this volume explore the ways in which states have treated their religious minorities. We study various policies - repression supervision integration tolerance secularization indifference - as well as the many ways in which minorities have accommodated the majority’s demands. The relation is by no means one-sided: on the contrary state policies have created resistance negotiation (on the legal political and cultural fronts) or compromise. Through these precise and original examples we can see how the protagonists (states religious institutions the elite the faithful) interact try to convince or influence each other in order to transform practices invent and implement common norms and grounds all the while knowing the confessional dimension of "religious" majority and minority does not fully embrace the identity of each citizen in full.

Muslim law developed a clear legal cadre for dhimmīs inferior but protected non-Muslim communities (in particular Jews and Christians) and Roman Canon law decreed a similar status for Jewish and Muslim communities in Europe. Yet the theoretical hierarchies between faithful and infidel were constantly brought into question in the daily interactions between men and women of different faiths in streets markets bath-houses law courts etc. The twelve essays in this volume explore these tensions and attempts to resolve them. These contributions show that law was used to try to erect boundaries between communities in order to regulate or restrict interaction between the faithful and the non-faithful-and at the same time how these boundaries were repeatedly transgressed and negotiated. These essays explore also the possibilities and the limits of the use of legal sources for the social historian.

The sixth to eleventh centuries are a crucial formative period for Jewish communities in Byzantium and Latin Europe: this is also a period for which sources are scarce and about which historians have often had to speculate on the basis of scant evidence. The legal sources studied in this volume provide a relative wealth of textual material concerning Jews and for certain areas and periods are the principal sources. While this makes them particularly valuable it also makes their interpretation difficult given the lack of corroborative sources.

The scholars whose work has been brought together in this volume shed light on this key period of the history of Jews and of Jewish-Christian relations focusing on key sources of the period: Byzantine imperial law the canons of church councils papal bulls royal legislation from the Visigoths or Carolingians inscriptions and narrative sources in Hebrew Greek and Latin. The picture that emerges from these studies is variegated. Some scholars following Bernhard Blumenkranz have depicted this period as one of relative tolerance towards Jews and Judaism; others have stressed the intolerance shown at key intervals by ecclesiastical authors church councils and monarchs.

Yet perhaps more than revealing general tendencies towards “tolerance” or “intolerance” these studies bring to light the ways in which law in medieval societies serves a variety of purposes: from providing a theologically-based rationale for social tolerance to attempting to regulate and restrict inter-religious contact to using anti-Jewish rhetoric to assert the authority or legitimacy of one party of the Christian elite over and against another. This volume makes an important contribution not only to the history of medieval Jewish-Christian relations but also to research on the uses and functions of law in medieval societies.

Medieval towns from Portugal to Hungary to Egypt were places of contact between members of different religious communities Muslim Christian and Jewish who rubbed shoulders in the ports and on the streets who haggled in the markets signed contracts and shared wells courtyards dining tables bath houses and sometimes beds. These interactions caused legal problems from the point of view of the Jewish Christian and Muslim judicial scholars of the middle ages not to mention for the rulers of these towns. These legal attempts to define and solve the problems posed by interreligious relations are the subject of this volume which brings together the work of seventeen scholars from nine countries (France Italy Spain Hungary Portugal Lebanon Israel Tunisia USA) specialists in history law archeology and religion.