Israel Abrahams

Jewish Life in the Middle Ages Israel Abrahams

THE expression ' middle ages' is often employed in a very elastic sense, but as applied to the inner life of the Jews it has little or no relevancy. There was neither more nor less medievalism about Jewish life in the ninth than there was in the fourteenth century. If medievalism implies moral servitude to a Church and material servitude to a polity, - a polity known in one form as Imperialism and in another as feudalism, - the Jews bad no opportunity for the latter and no inclination for the former. The Synagogue was the centre of life, but it was not the custodian of thought. If Judaism ever came to exercise a tyranny over the Jewish mind, it did so not in the middle ages at all, but in the middle of the sixteenth century. A revolt against medievalism such as occurred in Europe during and at the close of the Renaissance may be said to have marked Jewish life towards the close of the eighteenth century.