The history of the Jews in the Kingdom of the Crusaders, Yehoshua Prawer. Translated from English: Moshe Saluchovsky, Yad Yitzhak Ben Zvi Publishing House, 284 pages, NIS 95.90
Each book adds, as we know, to the totality of human knowledge, but there are some whose contribution is greater than the others, as they give life to areas of knowledge that have been neglected, degenerated or forgotten. Such is apparently the book of Yehoshua Prawer, which deals with the Crusades and the Crusader entity that took shape in the Land of Israel, from an angle that has received less attention
Relatively - that of the Jews of the Land of Israel.
The urgent need to redeem and nurture this field of research stems first and foremost from the historical and human uniqueness of the phenomenon: the presence of Jews in the Land of Israel in the discussed centuries did not stem from material motives nor from the hope of achieving personal and group security. On the contrary, the evidence shows that in the 12th and 13th centuries the Jews lived here in relative poverty, exposed to harassment and riots. The almost sole motive for their gathering and settling in this land was the desire to be on the land of the Promised Land. This impressive ideological devotion was not the property of those who were in Israel alone: the Jews of the Diaspora also clung to Zion as active followers and exercised them in the form of waves of migration and pilgrimages.
The immigration turned the Jewish identity in the Crusader Land of Israel into a spectacular phenomenon also in terms of cultural research. The pilgrims and immigrants who came from North Africa, Iraq, Egypt, Yemen and Syria, as well as from Germany, France, Italy and Spain - lived
in closed and close-knit communities, and had minimal contact with the non-Jewish world. They brought loads of culture and knowledge with them from their places of origin, and needed a common language through which they could share them with the expatriates of other diasporas.
Naturally, Hebrew was chosen for this purpose, thanks to which it knew, precisely in the shadow of the hardship, an era of cultural and linguistic revival. Religious and Gothic works originating from different parts of the world were merged here into a common work, not large in scope but full of vitality, and in it they met, as Prawer describes it: "The currents of Jewish thought, from Aristotelian rationalism that was harnessed to theology, through the fundamentalist approaches of Ashkenazi Hasidism to the mysterious limits of currents of The Kabbalah, for their many shades".
The astonishment at the relative paucity of studies on the subject of the Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel during the Crusader period increases even more considering the multitude and relative richness of the sources in the hands of historians. Prawer himself comments in the introduction to this book that "the Jews, although they were a minority within the occupied population, left a variety of sources that exceed in quantity what we have in relation to the Christians of the East and the Muslim population, which constituted an absolute majority among the population of the Land of Israel".
One of the explanations for this wealth and its degree of diversity is the extensive correspondence that the Jewish community living in Israel maintained with their relatives in the Diaspora. As is the way of letters, these faithfully reflected the social, economic, religious and even emotional situation of the Jewish population during the Crusader occupation, the rule of the Crusaders, and finally - also their defeat.
The space that Prawer's book comes to fill is therefore large and encompasses many areas of life. Perhaps because of this, the book does not focus on one aspect or another of Jewish life here, but rather covers many different areas. It opens with a description of the physical, organizational and especially mental condition of the Jewish communities in the Land of Israel and in the districts that were on the route of the First Crusade, on the eve of the Crusades. This description is supported by an appendix (the degree of relevance of which will be discussed later) regarding the exact location of the Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem. The following chapters deal with the fate of the Jewish communities during the Crusader occupation, the restoration and construction activities of the Jews in the various cities of the country, the organization of the communities, the legal and social orders that were customary in them, pilgrimage, immigration and settlement.
A separate chapter brings from the travelogues published by Hebrew travelers in the Crusader Land of Israel, including lesser known as well as better known travelers, such as Fatahia from Regensburg, Yehuda Al-Kharizi and Binyamin of Todela. An appendix is also attached to this chapter, which deals with "distances and speed of movement on the roads of the country according to the Hebrew travelers".
The next chapter is entitled "The Thirteenth Century", but deals only with certain aspects of Jewish life in that century, and mainly with the migration of the spiritual and social center of the Jews of the Land of Israel following the Crusader rule from the interior of the country to the coastal cities. The final chapter deals with the "Acre polemic" - the debate over the philosophical writings of Maimonides that broke out in the city of Acre about forty years after it subsided in Europe.
The detail above reflects the versatility of the book, but also a considerable degree of conceptual dispersion. The order of the chapters is usually chronological, but thematically the method according to which the emphases alternate is not clear. Thus, for example, the fifth chapter refers in general to the legal and social organization of the Jewish communities under the rule of the Crusaders, but the economic activity of these communities, which was extremely significant in terms of the development of commerce in Israel and the preservation of the material interest of Europe in the continuation of the existence of the Crusader kingdoms, is only briefly reviewed While referring to a relatively late period - the end of the 12th century and the course of the 13th century
The "Acre polemic" is also placed in its correct place chronologically, at the end of the 13th century. However, from a thematic point of view, it fits precisely in the sixth chapter, "Pilgrimage, Migration and Settlement", since it reflects the typical product of these processes - the cultural heterogeneity that brought together the forces of Continuity and forces of change
from different diasporas.
It could still be argued that the preservation of the chronological order requires such deviations from the thematic logic, were it not for a few cases in which the chronological sequence was violated or at least interrupted for reasons that are not clear. Thus, for example, the seventh chapter, "Hebrew travel descriptions in the Land of Israel during the Crusader period", is a unit by itself that does not fit into the descriptive whole. In some paragraphs it seems as if it would have been appropriate to turn the chapter into an appendix of sources, and in other paragraphs - as if it would have been corrected if it were scattered among the chapters, while enriching them and adding a tone of contemporary authenticity to the author's descriptions.
Even more puzzling is the location of the appendix to the first chapter, which bears the title "Jewish Neighborhoods in Jerusalem". There is nothing in it to add a substantial contribution to the understanding of the matters before and after it, and it seems that, like the travel stories, it could have been integrated into the general material or even turned into a footnote. Only while reading it becomes clear that the motive for the phenomenon is apparently the desire to settle a polemic that the author had with another researcher on the subject.
The thematic distraction of the book might have been less unfortunate, if it had not been followed by the absence of a central thesis. Prawer's well-known composition, "The History of the Crusader Kingdom in Israel", contains instructive approaches and insights, which turn it from a mere report into a key to understanding the transformations that took place in the Christian world and in Europe at that time. The current essay, on the other hand, lacks a sufficient degree of conceptual cohesion that would allow it to take off and transform the set of materials in it into an orderly Mishna.
"The History of the Jews in the Kingdom of the Crusaders" was published in 2000 ten years after the departure of its author. It might be possible to understand the lack of systematicity in its organization if it were defined as a collection of articles, lectures and notes compiled by Prawer's students and his successors, as did the disciples of Mark Bloch, Michela, Kliuchevsky and many others.
But the introduction, signed by the author, indicates that it is actually a complete and integral essay, written in English, published by Oxford University Press and translated into Hebrew. This only serves to increase the bewilderment, and therefore it seems that the book would have been successful if it opened with a note from the publisher that would clarify the circumstances of its writing and publication, and even more so - the logic by which it was edited.
https://www.hayadan.org.il/BuildaGate4/general2/data_card.php?Cat=~~~304526236~~~42&SiteName=hayadan
