Expulsion and Diaspora Formation: Religious and Ethnic Identities in Flux from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century

244 Pages·2015·2.28 MB·English

by  John V. Tolan

EXPULSION AND DIASPORA FORMATION
Religion and Law in Medieval Christian
and Muslim Societies
5
Series Editor
John Tolan
Editorial Board:
Camilla Adang, Tel Aviv University
Nora Berend, Cambridge University
Nicolas De Lange, Cambridge University
Maribel Fierro, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas
Christian Müller, Institut de Recherches et d’Histoire des Textes,
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Kenneth Pennington, Catholic University of America
In the middle ages, from Baghdad to Barcelona, significant communities of religious minorities resided in
the midst of polities ruled by Christians and Muslims: Jews and Christians throughout the Muslim world
(but particularly from Iraq westward), lived as dhimmis, protected but subordinate minorities; while Jews
(and to a lesser extent Muslims) were found in numerous places in Byzantine and Latin Europe. Legists
(Jewish, Christian and Muslim) forged laws meant to regulate interreligious interactions, while judges
and scholars interpreted these laws.
Religion and Law in Medieval Christian and Muslim Societies presents a series of studies on these
phenomena. Our goal is to study the history of the legal status of religious minorities in Medieval societies
in all their variety and complexity. Most of the publications in this series are the products of research of
the European Research Council project RELMIN: The Legal Status of Religious Minorities in the Euro-
Mediterranean World (5th-15th centuries) (www.relmin.eu).
Au moyen âge, de Bagdad à Barcelone, des communautés importantes de minorités religieuses vécurent dans
des Etats dirigés par des princes chrétiens ou musulmans: dans le monde musulman (surtout de l’Iraq vers
l’ouest), juifs et chrétiens résidèrent comme dhimmis, minorités protégées et subordonnées; tandis que de
nombreuses communautés juives (et parfois musulmanes) habitèrent dans des pays chrétiens. Des légistes
(juifs, chrétiens et musulmans) édictèrent des lois pour réguler les relations interconfessionnelles, tandis que
des juges et des hommes de lois s’efforcèrent à les interpréter.
La collection Religion and Law in Medieval Christian and Muslim Societies présente une série d’études sur
ces phénomènes. Une partie importante des publications de cette collection est issue des travaux effectués
au sein du programme ERC RELMIN : Le Statut Légal des Minorités Religieuses dans l’Espace Euro-
méditerranéen (Ve-XVe siècles) (www.relmin.eu).
EXPULSION AND DIASPORA
FORMATION:
RELIGIOUS AND ETHNIC IDENTITIES
IN FLUX FROM ANTIQUITY TO
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
Edited by
John Tolan
F
Relmin is supported by the European Research Council, under the EU 7th Framework
Programme.
Relmin est financé par le Conseil Européen de la Recherche, sous le 7ème Programme Cadre
de l’Union Européenne.
© 2015, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
D/2015/0095/151
ISBN 978-2-503-55525-6
Printed in the EU on acid-free paper.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Katalin Szende & John Tolan, Foreword 7
John Tolan, Exile and identity 9
Kyra Lyublyanovics, Spies of the enemy, Pagan herders and vassals most
welcome: Cuman–Hungarian relations in the thirteenth century 31
Katalin Szende, Scapegoats or competitors? The expulsion of Jews from
Hungarian towns on the aftermath of the battle of Mohács (1526) 51
Robin Mundill, Banishment from the edge of the world: the Jewish
experience of Expulsion from England in 1290 85
Nadezda Koryakina, ‘The first exile is ours’: the terms golah and galut
in medieval and early modern Jewish responsa 103
Carsten L. Wilke, Losing Spain, securing Zion: allegory and mental
adaption to exile among refugees of the Iberian inquisitions 117
Marcell Sebők, The Galley-Slave Trial of 1674: Conviction and
Expulsion of Hungarian Protestants 135
Josep Xavier Muntané i Santiveri, Où cessent les mots : juifs de
Catalogne ? Une révision du terme « sefardi » appliqué aux juifs de
Catalogne 149
Patrick Sänger, Considerations on the administrative organization of the
Jewish military colony in Leontopolis: A case of generosity and calculation 171
Georg Christ, Transients? Jews in Alexandria in the late Middle Ages
through Venetian eyes 195
Μarianna D. Birnbaum, Christopher Marlowe and the Jews of Malta 217
Susan Einbinder, Conclusion 231
Index 239

FOREWORD
‘Identity,’ says Tony Judt, ‘is a dangerous word. It has no respectable contempo-
rary uses.’1 Judt, a historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, is well
placed to know the perils for the historian of succumbing to the sirens of iden-
tity. A priori, then, it is a potentially perilous enterprise to undertake a volume
devoted to Expulsion and Diaspora Formation: Religious and Ethnic Identities
in Flux from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century. How does the experience of
expulsion create, deconstruct, or transform group identities? To what extent do
diasporas create cultural identities bridging large spans of time and space? How
do the far-flung elements of those diasporas see their link to each other and to
the (real or mythicized) land of origin?
The eleven articles in this volume are the fruits of a conference held at the
Central European University in Budapest, 5–8 June 2013. The conference grew
out of a collaboration between two research endeavors both interested in the
questions of identity and legal status raised in the process of expulsion and diaspo-
ra. First, John Tolan’s RELMIN project (The Legal Status of Religious Minorities
in the Euro-Mediterranean World, Fifth-Fifteenth Centuries) funded by the
European Research Council (ERC) with an Advanced Research Grant (ARG)
for the period 2010–2015. Second, a collaborative project carried out by the
Transcultural Studies Program and the Institute of Papyrology of the University
of Heidelberg and the Department of Medieval Studies at CEU set up to study
diasporic groups in comparative and distinctly historical pre-modern, that is, late
antique, medieval, and early modern perspectives. This latter project looked into
a variety of professional and ‘ethnic’ groups operating in and/or connecting two
geographic regions: Central and Eastern Europe, on the one hand and the Eastern
Mediterranean, on the other.2
The conference was accompanied by three field trips that presented the herit-
age of religious and ethnic groups that lived in and around Budapest in different
historic contexts. One walking tour followed the traces of the German, Italian,
Jewish, and Moslem inhabitants of Buda’s Castle Hill; another walking tour took
the participants to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish quarter of Pest,
which shows traces of both tragic destruction and modern attempts at revival.
1 Tony Judt, ‘The Edge People,’ The New York Review of Books, 23 February 2010, http://www.nybooks.com/
blogs/nyrblog/2010/feb/23/edge-people/ (accessed 11/3/2015).
2 For an overview see Georg Christ – Katalin Szende, Trans-European Diasporas: Migration, Minorities,
and the Diasporic Experience in East Central Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean from Late Antiquity
to the Early Modern Era – Project Report. Annual of Medieval Studies at CEU 20 (2014), 296–305.
8 KATALIN SZENDE & JOHN TOLAN
The third excursion, to Vác and the Börzsöny hills, traced the vestiges of medieval
German burghers, Slovak settlers after the Ottoman period and a modern Jewish
presence. For researchers of the legal aspects of religious cohabitation, the visit
to the residence of the Werbőczy family (whose most prominent member was
Stephen, the author of the customary law compilation called the Tripartitum) at
Alsópetény was especially memorable.3
We would like to thank the Department of Medieval Studies at Central
European University for hosting the conference and to our colleagues at CEU,
Tijana Krstić and Carsten Wilke for their advice in developing the program.
We also thank the Central European University, the University of Heidelberg,
the German Academic Exchange Program (DAAD), the Hungarian Scholarship
Board (MÖB) and the European Research Council for financing the confer-
ence and this publication. Our thanks also to Brepols and in particular to Loes
Diercken for help with the publication. And special thanks to Nicolas Stefanni
for all his work in the organization of the conference and its publication.
This volume is part of a wider reflection, as the fifth volume of the collec-
tion ‘Religion and law in Medieval Christian and Muslim Societies’ on social
and legal status of religious minorities in the Medieval world. The first volume,
The Legal Status of Dhimmī-s in the Islamic West, published in 2013, examined
the laws regarding Christian and Jews living in Islamic societies of Europe and
the Maghreb and the extent to which such legal theory translate into concrete
measures regulating interreligious relations. The second volume in this series
(published in 2014), was devoted to Jews in Early Christian Law: Byzantium
and the Latin West, Sixth–Eleventh centuries. Volume 3, Religious cohabitation
in European towns (Tenth–Fifteenth centuries), was published in 2015, as was
volume 4, a monograph by Clara Maillard entitled Les papes et le Maghreb aux
XIIIème et XIVème siècles: Étude des lettres pontificales de 1199 à 1419. Subsequent
volumes, to be published in 2015 and 2016 will deal with Jews and Christians
in Medieval Europe: the historiographical legacy of Bernhard Blumenkranz; and
Law and Religious minorities in Medieval Societies: between theory and praxis; and
Medieval Minorities: Law and Multiconfessional Societies in the Middle Ages. And
the RELMIN database continues to make available online key legal sources of the
Middle Ages concerning religious minorities.4
Katalin Szende & John Tolan
3 The field trips were organized and guided by József Laszlovszky (CEU) and Borbála Lovas (ELTE).
The participants gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the Budapest History Museum (András Végh),
the Museum of County Pest (Tibor Ákos Rácz), the Vác Jewish Community (János Turai) and the man-
agement of the Prónay Mansion at Alsópetény (Dr. József Molnár).
4 http://www.cn-telma.fr/relmin/index/?langue=eng (accessed 11/3/2015).
John Tolan
EXILE AND IDENTITY
،ىفنم اوعدِّ ويل مهءارو ىَ ورظىئ لا
ىفنم مهمامأ نّ إف
They don’t look behind them to bid farewell to exile
Since ahead of them is exile
These are the opening lines of Mahmoud Darwish’s poem ‘They don’t look be-
hind them’, which presents a group of exiles living in a time and a space that are
not theirs. His exiles wander, seemingly aimlessly, in the yard of the house that is
their temporary exile, in the street, bearing ‘caskets filled with things of absence’,
telling passersby ‘we are still alive: don’t remember us’. They dream to get out of
the ‘story’ (hikaya) and to bathe in the light, reach the stars, but inevitably wake
up to the story of their exile.1
Exile and longing are constant themes in Darwish’s poetry.2 These poems are
of course informed and inspired by Darwish’s own experience and by that of the
Palestinian people. Yet this poem, like other poems he wrote on these themes,
does not explicitly invoke Palestine or the Palestinians: clearly, Darwish is in-
terested in a universal phenomenon of exile. In another poem, ‘The Kurd has
only the wind’, dedicated to his Kurdish friend and fellow writer Salim Barakat,
Darwish evokes the figure of the Kurdish exile cut off from his land and people,
living in solitude.
In the Near East, multiple narratives of exile intertwine, connect, and often
clash. Shlomo Sand, in his 2009 book The Invention of the Jewish People, calls into
question what he presents as the prevailing national Israeli myth of expulsion
and redemption.3 According to this narrative, which has many variant forms, the
Jewish people were expelled from Israel in Antiquity and lived in exile for 1900
years before the creation of the state of Israel restored their homeland to them.
The theme of exile is of course rooted, for Jews as for Christians, in the biblical
1 For the Arabic text and an English translation, see Mahmoud Darwish, The butterfly’s burden, (Tarset:
Bloodaxe, 2007), pp. 220–221.
2 See Kate Daniels, ‘‘The Song of Everyone without a Homeland’: A Palestinian Writer in ‘Cosmopolitan’
Beirut’, in Diaspora identities: exile, nationalism and cosmopolitanism in past and present, ed. by Susanne
Lachenicht and Kirsten Heinsohn (Frankfurt: Campus, 2009), pp. 148–161.
3 Shlomo Sand, The invention of the Jewish people, (London; New York: Verso, 2009).
10 JoHN ToLAN
stories of the two destructions of the temple of Jerusalem. The poetic evocation
in Lamentations of the Jews weeping by the rivers of Babylon has inspired poets
from antiquity to the reggae group the Melodians (in their 1970 hit ‘The Rivers
of Babylon’). Yet for Sand, the modern Israeli national myth underplays the his-
torical role of proselytism and conversion to Judaism. In accordance with nine-
teenth- and early twentieth-century European nationalism, Israeli nationalism
sees Jews as a nation rather than a religious group, unified by blood and ethnicity,
and the creation of Israel as the restoration of the ancient homeland to a nation
in exile. In Israel/Palestine, two nationalist narratives of exile and longing are in
confrontation.
obviously Europe as well, in the twentieth century, produced its share of
exiles. And its share of narratives of exile. As Peter Fritzsche has pointed out, exile
narratives evoke the loss not only of a homeland, but also of another time, the
time before exile, when things were different, were as they should be.4 one finds
a sense both of homesickness (longing for a place) and of nostalgia (longing for
a bygone era). Fritzsche shows how the French aristocrats who went into exile
during the revolution and returned during the restoration lived on in exile in a
land that was both familiar and strange, their homeland yet no longer theirs, since
society had been fundamentally altered by revolution. Yet while Fritzsche sees
this as an essentially modern phenomenon caused by the rupture of the French
Revolution, earlier ruptures had produced other narratives of exile and longing.
In the pages that follow, we explore the relations between expulsion, diaspora,
and exile between Late Antiquity and the seventeenth century. our goal in bring-
ing these essays together is to try to shed light on a certain number of issues.
a. First, to try to understand the dynamics of expulsion: what are the social and
political causes of expulsion?
b. Second, to examine how expelled communities integrate (or not) into their
new host societies.
c. And finally, to understand how the experiences of expulsion and exile are
made into founding myths that establish (or attempt to establish) group
identities.
Let me take each of these questions individually. (A long answer to the first ques-
tion and briefer reflections on the second two).
4 Peter Fritzsche, ‘Specters of History: on Nostalgia, Exile, and Modernity’, The American Historical
Review, 106 (2001), 1587–618.