IN THE COURTS OF THE NATIONS - DataSpace - Princeton ...

studies thus focus more on law as it was imagined by jurists and less on law as it was practiced
by litigants. 67
The historiography of Jews in Islamic courts is, uncharacteristically, more developed than
that of Jews in the gentile courts of Europe. 68 Although a few scholars of European Jewish
history have investigated Jews’ use of non-Jewish courts in detail, these studies are few and far
between. Nor have these historians offered alternative paradigms with which to understand the
relationship between Jewish and non-Jewish courts. 69 More recently, scholars working on
European Jewry are turning to legal archives in order to write a new socio-legal history of Jews
in Europe. 70 Yet this research largely remains in its infancy and represents only the beginnings
of a historiographical turning point for historians of Ashkenazi Jews. 71
67
See also Tamer El-Leithy, “Coptic Culture and Conversion in Medieval Cairo, 1293-1524 A.D.” (Ph.D.
Dissertation, Princeton University, 2005), 412-22; although El-Leithy stresses the threat to dhimmī autonomy posed
by recourse to Islamic courts, he also notes that this was a common practice despite the existence of dhimmī courts.
El-Leithy’s relatively brief discussion does not, however, offer an alternative model of dhimmī autonomy.
68
This is not to suggest that European Jewish historians have not asked how Jewish religious authorities faced the
existence of non-Jewish legal institutions; Salo Baron, for instance, addressed this topic in his comprehensive work
on Jewish history: Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 3 vols. (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1937), v. 3, 118.
69
See the historiographical comments in Andreas Gotzmann, “At Home in Many Worlds? Thoughts about New
Concepts in Jewish Legal History,” Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 2 (2003): 423-4 and Stefan Ehrenpreis,
“Legal Spaces for Jews as Subjects of the Holy Roman Empire,” Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 2 (2003): 478-9.
Joseph Shatzmiller is the only scholar to devote a large part of a monograph to the subject of Jews in gentile courts:
see Joseph Shatzmiller, Recherches sur la communauté juive de Manosque au moyen age, 1241-1329 (Paris:
Mouton & Co., 1973), esp. Chapter 3.
70
R. Po-chia Hsia, “The Jews and the Emporers,” in State and Society in Early Modern Austria, ed. Charles W.
Ingrao (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1993); ChaeRan Y. Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce in
Imperial Russia (Hanover, NH: Brandeis Univesrity Press by University Press of New England, 2002), esp. 66, 204-
8; Gotzmann, “At Home in Many Worlds?” esp. 427-8; Ehrenpreis, “Legal Spaces for Jews,” esp. 475. See also
works in German by Gotzmann, including Andreas Gotzmann, Jüdische Autonomie in der Frühen Neuzeit : Recht
und Gemeinschaft im deutschen Judentum (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008). Especially significant is recent work done
on Jews in Christian Spain before the expulsion, such as Jonathan Ray, The Sephardic Frontier: The Reconquista
and the Jewish Community in Medieval Iberia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), esp. Chapter 6 and Elka
Klein, Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power in Medieval Barcelona (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan
Press, 2006).
71
There are a number of scholars currently working on more detailed studies of Jewish law as it functioned in
Europe based on archival documents, including Jay Berkovitz (whose current research examines the records of the
rabbinic court of Metz from the late eighteenth century) and Edward Fram (who is writing about a diary from the
rabbinic court of Frankfurt from the late eighteenth century).
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