A Jewish criminal? Gevald!

Hayim Nahman Bialik once famously said: “We will be a normal state when we have the first Hebrew prostitute, the first Hebrew thief, and the first Hebrew policeman.” This reflected a surprisingly widespread idea: that Jews did not really engage in crime. For a long time, that assumption was so deeply rooted that it extended to the notion that Jews even avoided crime during the medieval period. But Prof. Ephraim Shoham-Steiner, who teaches medieval Jewish history in the Department of Jewish History at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, offers a different answer in his Beit Avi Chai course. His newest book, “Jews and Crime in Medieval Europe”, published first in English in 2020 and earlier this year in Hebrew, challenges this assumption, tracing Jewish involvement in theft, fraud, violence, murder, and prostitution across medieval Europe while asking why, for so long, nobody wanted to know.

The project goes back, Shoham-Steiner says, to his doctoral research in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He was first inspired by the Israeli historian Prof. Shulamith Shahar (1928–2025), who wrote her pioneering work on marginalized groups in medieval society generally; Shoham-Steiner then applied this approach to Jews. He first considered studying all the marginal figures of medieval Ashkenazi society before his dissertation committee persuaded him to narrow his lens. In his first book, “On the Margins of a Minority: Leprosy, Madness, and Disability among the Jews of Medieval Europe”, he examined what he calls “involuntary marginals”: people who were unwillingly excluded from the community because of illness, leprosy, or mental incapacity. The new book develops this idea by focusing on those who were excluded from society after committing crimes, whether by choice or circumstance.

Not natural criminals

The idea that Jews were not natural criminals, Shoham-Steiner says, “was built, deliberately, from two directions at once.” The first was internal: medieval Jewish society worked hard not to expose its own criminal elements to the surrounding Christian world at a time when the crimes of an individual Jew could be used against the entire community. The second came much later, from Jewish historians writing in Central and Eastern Europe in the late XIX and early XX centuries. They were uncomfortable documenting Jewish criminality at a time when Jewish emancipation was still fragile, and antisemitism was on the rise.

This discomfort, Shoham-Steiner has found, is visible in the manuscripts themselves. He points to a collection of X and XI-century responsa edited by German rabbi and Talmudist Joel Müller (1827–1895) in the XIX century, which records a criminal partnership between a Jew and a Christian cleric, who is identified in the original manuscript by the Hebrew term galach – a euphemism referring to the tonsure, the shaved crown that marked a priest. In Müller’s printed edition, galach was replaced by ganav: thief. In other words, a Jewish-Christian criminal partnership was edited into a story about a Jewish victim and an ordinary crook. Comparing the printed editions that circulated widely with the manuscripts, Shoham-Steiner says, is how these discrepancies can be found.

In other cases, the stakes could be much higher. Shoham-Steiner discusses a responsum by the great XIII-century Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg (c. 1215–1293), who partly attributed the 1290 expulsion of the Jews from England to their involvement in the financial crime of coin-clipping – the shaving of silver from the edges of coins. It was, in other words, not only that individual Jews risked the community’s reputation in the eyes of Christian neighbours; it was that Jewish crime could carry consequences as severe as expulsion. This is precisely why Shoham-Steiner insists the subject matters. “I’m committed to the truth,” he says. “Jewish society – like any other – has its criminals.”

Unearthing a hidden history

Medieval England left behind rich judicial archives, but comparable material for Germany or France is far sparser, which forces historians of Ashkenazi Jewry back to Jewish sources themselves – most importantly, rabbinic responsa. Shoham-Steiner describes these as “an interface between life as it was actually lived and the legal aspirations of the rabbis writing about it.” These also reveal the social mechanisms that governed how communities responded – when an offense stayed inside the community’s own courts, and when it had to be taken to the Christian authorities outside. Shoham-Steiner notes that medieval Jewish communities usually enjoyed internal autonomy to police their own affairs, but only so long as the victim was also Jewish.

Shoham-Steiner calls his own method “textual archaeology”: reading rabbinic literature, medieval Hebrew narrative writing, and Christian archival documents together, as layers to be excavated rather than separate bodies of evidence. What is noteworthy, he says, “is how rarely these layers actually contradict each other.” He offers the case of a murder inside the Jewish community of York in 1208. A man named Mylo approached the local Christian authorities seeking to learn who had killed his wife; the investigation resulted in three suspects, each of them Jewish. But then the victim’s brother accused Mylo of being the murderer! Mylo fled to France, and the case was dropped.

Women both as victims of crime and as perpetrators

Although murder grabs the headlines, Shoham-Steiner finds that financial offenses were far more common. One scheme involved counterfeit luxury goods: silver vessels that were in fact copper alloy, dressed up with a layer of silver plating and sold as the genuine article. When such fraud came to light, a Jewish arbitrator would typically order the seller to repay the difference in value to the deceived buyer.

Roughly a third of Shoham-Steiner’s book is devoted to women – both as victims of crime and as perpetrators. Communities sometimes accused women of infanticide following stillbirths, and another major issue was prostitution. Before the XIV century, Shoham-Steiner says, there is almost no written evidence of Jewish prostitution at all (this, of course, doesn’t mean that it didn’t exist). But as European towns began formally regulating prostitution, and as Jews found themselves barred from municipal brothels, some within the Jewish community began establishing parallel, unofficial institutions of their own, often preying on young Jewish women who lacked any family network to protect them. Shoham-Steiner cites a late XV-century responsum by Yehuda Minz of northern Italy (Judah ben Eliezer ha-Levi Minz, 1405 – 1508), regarding a Jewish woman who had emigrated from Germany to Padua with her infant daughter. With no relatives to help her, local Jews attempted to force her into prostitution. Minz’s denunciation of this survives as an unambiguous voice opposing the exploitation of a woman with nowhere else to turn.

Punishment and reintegration

How did communities handle the offenders in their midst? Because they were, in Shoham-Steiner’s words, essentially voluntary associations, punishment depended on communal consent rather than coercive power. In cases of manslaughter, Shoham-Steiner has found elaborate protocols for reintegration: offenders were expected to make amends directly to the victim’s family, sometimes undergoing expulsion from the community for as long as three to five years – a long time given short medieval life expectancy. Communities also deployed other social sanctions, such as barring an offender from the synagogue or excluding him from commercial dealings, to pressure him to reconcile with those he had wronged.

Asked what changes once criminals are written back into our picture of medieval Jewish society, Shoham-Steiner returns to where he began. “Every society has criminals,” he says. Restoring the thief, the swindler, and the murderer to the story is not an act of sensationalism for its own sake. It is a way of insisting that Jewish history, like any history worth taking seriously, must make room for its most uncomfortable chapters.

For more, see Prof. Ephraim Shoham-Steiner’s online series at BAC, “Surely Not Us? Crime and Criminality in Medieval Jewish Society” (in Hebrew).

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