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No Return: Jews, Christian Usurers, and the Spread of Mass Expulsion in Medieval Europe

Online ISBN:
9780691240947
Print ISBN:
9780691240923
Publisher:
Princeton University Press
Book

No Return: Jews, Christian Usurers, and the Spread of Mass Expulsion in Medieval Europe

Rowan Dorin
Rowan Dorin
Stanford University
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Published online:
21 September 2023
Published in print:
10 January 2023
Online ISBN:
9780691240947
Print ISBN:
9780691240923
Publisher:
Princeton University Press

Abstract

Beginning in the twelfth century, Jewish moneylenders increasingly found themselves in the crosshairs of European authorities, who denounced the evils of usury as they expelled Jews from their lands. Yet Jews were not alone in supplying coin and credit to needy borrowers. Across much of Western Europe, foreign Christians likewise engaged in professional moneylending, and they too faced repeated threats of expulsion from the communities in which they settled. This book examines how mass expulsion became a pervasive feature of European law and politics—with tragic consequences that have reverberated down to the present. The book traces how an association between usury and expulsion entrenched itself in Latin Christendom from the twelfth century onward. Showing how ideas and practices of expulsion were imitated and repurposed in different contexts, the book offers a provocative reconsideration of the dynamics of persecution in late medieval society. Uncovering the protean and contagious nature of expulsion, the book offers new perspectives on Jewish–Christian relations, the circulation of norms and ideas in the age before print, and the intersection of law, religion, and economic life in premodern Europe.

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