Book Project How Toleration Ends: Antisemitism and the Quest for Sovereignty in Medieval Europe

Why are minority groups forcibly removed from their homes, kicked out to find new lives elsewhere? These forced removals – expulsions – can have very little to do with the minority group, and everything to do with the political dynamics between different factions and powerholders in the majority group. Mass deportations and anti-immigrant policy in the US and across Europe have long had these patterns. My case is the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Germany, when Christians expelled Jews from their cities. I collected data on 800 cities and use quantitative analyses and case studies to show that minorities are forced out because of two mechanisms: when they are treated as proxies for the power of rival majority factions and when they are collateral damage when majority factions resolve conflicts. Studying minority politics in the medieval era gives me a sense of how different dynamics play out over the long-term and what the perennial pitfalls are, so that we can recognize how they also play out in the present.

The political system in medieval Germany was full of uncertainties and rivalries over authority. In many ways, it paralleled how modern political systems, like American federalism, have divisions of power across different layers of government that breed rivalries over who gets to decide what happens. In medieval Germany, Christians made laws that kicked out Jews when they were trying to resolve conflicts and uncertainties amongst themselves. Jews were targeted as proxies for rival Christians’ authority; they stood in for the exercise of authority by someone else, and getting rid of them would damage that other powerholder. Second, the effects for Jews were a process of collateral damage; the resolutions of intra-Christian conflicts had spillovers, and the downstream consequence was that Jews were expelled.

Because of the setting, at the emergence of what will become European states, and the specific groups involved, Christians and Jews, we can learn from this case both generally about majority and minority groups and about why exclusion and mistreatment of minorities were part of modern European government from the start. We often take antisemitism for granted, but I show how and why prejudice and discrimination against Jews became policy. How to govern difference is not just a problem of contemporary liberal democracies; it’s been part of the Western tradition since the early days of modern states.