a baronial aljama: the jews of empúries in the thirteenth...

A baronial aljama: The Jews of Empúriesin the thirteenth century

STEPHEN P. BENSCHDepartment of History, Swarthmore College, Trotter 204, 500 College Avenue,Swarthmore, PA, 19081-1397, USAE-mail: [email protected]

Abstract. The county of Empúries in Catalonia provides an historical laboratory inwhich to examine the formation of a small Jewish community (aljama) in anindependent baronial enclave. While most studies have assumed that Iberian Jewswere directly dependent on the king, the ancient dynasty that ruled the countyeffectively insulated Jews from royal power during the thirteenth century, when thefirst communal institutions took shape. In 1238 Count Ponç Hug III of Empúries issuedan extensive privilege, edited here for the first time, to the Jews in his territory toextend his protection, attract immigrants, and create the outlines for autonomousinstitutions. The grant in fact preceded the better-known royal charters that structuredJewish communal institutions in Barcelona and other major towns in Catalonia.Because the Jews of Empúries were not caught up in the expanding structures of royaladministration, they were also not subject to heavy fiscal burdens and remainedunengaged with the local baronial court. Left relatively undisturbed at first by the fiscaldemands of their lord, the Jews of Empúries adapted to a provincial, rural environmentin the thirteenth century and created a community distinct in its structure and internalsocial tensions from the aljames in the large towns.

Despite sharing a common intellectual passion, Elka and I in fact metonly three times. The first two encounters appropriately began in thesun-drenched archive perched atop the cloister of Barcelona_s cathedraljust as Elka was beginning her exploration of that formidable collectionand I was finishing up my investigations there. We in fact immediatelyrecognized a deep connection in our intellectual pursuits, not only interms of place but also of theme and approach. I still remember herattentiveness and surprise at hearing about some of the lesser knowntroves of parchments that only years of research could uncover.Returning to examine at least a small fragment of the history of theJews of the Crown of Aragon for this paper, I recall my own naiveconfidence as a young researcher that, because of their importance,surely at least the Jews of Barcelona had been the subject of carefulscholarly investigation, for Jean Régné, through his catalogue of docu-

Jewish History (2008) 22: 19Y51 ·c Springer 2008DOI: 10.1007/s10835-007-9047-2

ments relating to Jews, had thrown open the grand series of royal registersin the early twentieth century and explorations in other collections hadbegun during the closing decade of the Franco regime. Returning to theliterature on medieval Iberian Jews years later now makes it clear to mejust how much remained to be done and how many new perspectivesElka_s work has revealed. She will be remembered as one of the mosttalented among a group of foreign scholars who had the good fortune tobecome associated with the grand Catalan metropolis during its periodof rebirth and redefinition at the end of the twentieth century. Her worknot only stands as an intellectual testament to her scholarship but alsoreveals a deep affinity to the past of that remarkable city.

During the thirteenth century a small but vibrant Jewish communitywas taking shape in the county of Empúries in northeastern Catalonia.Centered on the coastal region known as the Costa Brava today,Empúries formed part of the medieval Crown of Aragon yet maintaineda stubborn local independence while developing contacts with the largeurban centers between Barcelona and Montpellier. Because an auton-omous and ancient dynasty ruled the county, the resident Jewishpopulation remained insulated from the control of the kings of Aragonuntil the early fourteenth century. Through its rich local archives,Empúries offers an unusual opportunity to study a regional Jewishsociety within the context of a Mediterranean barony. The expansionand prosperity of Jewish communities in thirteenth-century Iberia havetraditionally been associated with the benevolence of its kings. Incontrast to the insecurity created by intermittent persecutions andexpulsions in northern Europe during this expansive period of economicgrowth and institutional experimentation, Jews in the realms of Aragonand Castile received protection from numerous royal privileges thatestablished their rights to worship, regulate internal affairs, andtransact business. The abundant archival records produced in royalchanceries have supplied the documentary foundation upon which restthe surveys offered by Yitzhak Baer of Iberian Jewry under Christianrule as a whole and by Yom Tov Assis for the Jews of the Crown ofAragon in particular.1 Both authors emphasize that the king and hisofficers offered effective protection and created a legal framework forJewish communities in response to their desire for autonomy andcommunal institutions, all of which came, of course, at a price. Theemphasis placed on royal policy, however, has tended to remove Jewishcommunities in Iberia from the context of seigniorial, ecclesiastical, andmunicipal authority—critical strands that made up the texture of

20 STEPHEN P. BENSCH

medieval social life.2 The surviving documentation from Empúriesprovides a rare opportunity to correct this impression by permitting aclose examination of a Jewish community in an aristocratic lordship atthe moment its first autonomous institutions took shape.

The local community (kahal in Hebrew or, through Arabic, aljama inLatin and Iberian vernaculars) in its mature form provided the primarybody through which medieval Jews negotiated with their lords and withtheir coreligionists elsewhere, but it also had to function among agrowing number of increasingly formalized communal associations andin relation to new forms of lordship that were emerging throughoutEurope from the eleventh through the thirteenth century. Jewish law,ritual, and theology clearly marked the kahal off from contemporaryChristian communities, yet both Jews and Christians had to negotiatewith rulers and communal bodies through shared assumptions aboutthe exercise of power. Through a careful reading of the rich sourcematerials in both Latin and Hebrew, Elka Klein has revealed with sharpdetail and subtle texture the local context within which the Jewishaljama evolved in Barcelona during the twelfth and thirteenth century.Rather than assume that local communal organization emergedsmoothly from ancient precedent and shared identity that eventuallyreceived formal acknowledgement through royal privilege, she insteadlocates the evolving Jewish community at the intersection of powerrelationships and experimental forms of urban representation thataffected Jews and Christians alike.3 Internal Jewish leadership, royalfinancial and administrative service, the exploitation of urban utilities,the increased importance of trade and credit operations, and intercom-munal cultural conflict all had their part to play in transforming a fluidagglomeration of leading Jewish families—a “community by default”—into a formalized, royally sanctioned representative body drawn especiallyfrom economically prosperous new families—a “community by design”—by the mid-thirteenth century. As in Christian society, the movementtoward stable communal institutions and a firm sense of local self-definitionwas by no means linear.4 By firmly situating the medieval Jewishexperience within the local context of lordship and associative traditions,Klein gave close attention to royal power in her study of Barcelona,Catalonia_s largest and most prosperous city. Not only did the king ofAragon create an institutional framework that encased local Jewishautonomy through his privileges, but he also affected leadership withinthe Jewish aljama by favoring individual Jews through the grant of urbanresources and the bestowal of offices in town and at the royal court. Onlyby taking into consideration the local setting of power as revealed by the

A BARONIAL ALJAMA: THE JEWS OF EMPÚRIES 21

actions of both Christian and Jewish inhabitants in Barcelona can theemergence of early communal institutions be adequately understood.

Yet not all Iberian Jews were directly subject to royal jurisdiction.Although far less well-known than Jewish communities in the majortowns in the Crown of Aragon, aljames also took shape in baronialenclaves. Because monarchs in general maintained far better archivesthan aristocrats, the role of the nobility in shaping the contours ofJewish life has been either ignored or judged in negative terms as anarrogant interference on the part of nobles with royal protection. ToBaer, sunny promises by local lords to attract Jewish settlers throughreduced taxes or lax enforcement of laws limiting the amount of interestthat could be charged on loans were in the end deceptive, for, unlike thetested security of the king, these liberal terms tended to “blind the eyesof the Jews to the dangers of exploitation and repression to which theywere exposed later.”5 Recent studies on Jewish communities in theCrown of Aragon have argued that baronial jurisdictions either drove awedge between neighboring Jewish communities or created spaces thatthe most prosperous Jews strategically manipulated to their advantagein order to avoid royal or municipal taxation.6 The absence orunavailability of aristocratic archives has tended to present IberianJews solely from a royalist perspective, particularly during the criticalperiod of community formation in the twelfth and thirteenth century.The increasing accessibility of archives of the nobility, however, offers anew, non-royal perspective on the question of Jewish self-governmentand its relation to aristocratic lordship. Among the most revealing ofthese collections is the comital archive of Empúries.

The counts of Empúries ruled over one of the last independentcounties in Catalonia. The first comital dynasty of Empúries (862–1322)boasted a pedigree as illustrious as that of the counts of Barcelona and,during the eleventh century at least, proved a serious rival for dominanceover the Pyrenean counties coalescing to form Catalonia. Proudlyindependent from the growing power of the counts of Barcelona (whothrough marriage became kings of Aragon in the twelfth century andthrough conquest annexed the kingdoms of Valencia, Majorca, and Sicilyin the thirteenth), the counts of Empúries stubbornly continued toexpress their sovereign powers by minting their own coinage, enteringinto their own treaties with distant cities, and instituting their ownterritorial Peace of God.7 The longevity and independence of the firstdynasty of Empúries contributed to the preservation of its originalarchive, which continued to grow under the second dynasty (1325–


1401), when the county became a royal appanage but still retained alarge measure of autonomy.

Empúries formed a documentary island within Catalonia. The royalarchives contain few references to the region save for complaints aboutjurisdictional infringements. This absence has created a blind spot instudies of medieval Catalonia. The opening of the comital archive ofEmpúries, however, part of the vast holdings of the Archivo Ducal deMedinaceli, makes possible a perspective on Catalan history quitedistinct from that of the monarchy.8 In addition to the rare view offeredby the comital archive, a substantial number of thirteenth-centurynotarial registers for the small towns of Castelló d_Empúries, Peralada,and Torroella de Montgrí, only recently catalogued, allow for the closestudy of local Jewish communities.9 Through these rich yet little-known

Jewish settlements in Empúries ca. 1290


sources, it is possible to observe with remarkable clarity the evolution ofan early Jewish aljama outside the large towns and insulated from royaljurisdiction. The form of baronial lordship and the structure of localJewish society together produced a community different from that inthe large towns. Because the counts of Empúries did not rapidly imitatethe monarchy in developing new methods of fiscal control over theirresources but instead depended on older forms of patrimonial exploita-tion, credit and accounting did not provide an avenue for Jews to enterinto local courts and administrative posts as it did in Barcelona.Furthermore, even though the small aljama of Empúries grew rapidly inthe thirteenth century, the older Jewish families did not possess thestatus, tradition, and resources to band together to oppose emergingnew families and immigrants. The internal fault lines within thecommunity therefore appear quite distinct from those in the largerand older communities in Barcelona, Girona, Narbonne, or Montpellier.Even though one should beware of imagining the county of Empúriessimply as a kingdom in miniature, its lords nevertheless would, like theking, take an interest in providing an institutional framework for theJews in their territory. This resulted in the earliest privilege to aregional Jewish community in Catalonia.

The privilege of 1238: the outline for a baronial aljama

In July, 1238, Ponç Hug III (1230–1269), count of Empúries, granted asweeping privilege to all Jews residing within his lands to confirm andextend their liberties and protect their business practices.10 The bestowalof the charter, surviving in a unique copy and edited here for the firsttime, was a bold move to consolidate the Jewish population alreadyliving in the county and to attract even more Jewish immigrants in thefuture. Ancient precedent rather than an explicit cession of royal rightsprovided the authority for the count to offer such extensive privileges toJews within his jurisdiction. In spite of the aggressive assertion ofsovereign rights on the part of European monarchs in the twelfth andthirteenth century, including the claim that Jews were servi regis,11 directdependants of the king, the count of Empúries considered his authorityover Jews to be equivalent to that of the king in his domains, fortechnically the king of Aragon was, after all, only count in his Catalonianpossessions. In this instance, Carolingian precedent and a venerable


lineage made the count of Empúries within his territory the equivalent ofthe far more powerful count-king in his extensive dominion.

The privilege of 1238 was conservative in tone and similar in form toCarolingian tuitio charters, most famously those issued by the EmperorLouis the Pious.12 In the Carolingian context, special protection (tuitio ordefensio) was extended only to fixed elements in society (not necessarilyJews) and thereby implied a permanent status. Although tuitio charterswere issued only to individual Jews during the Carolingian period, by thelate eleventh century, protection came to include all Jews within aspecific area or region. In contrast to the relatively curt administrativestyle that the royal chancery employed in its grants to Jewishcommunities, the solemn, archaizing language in the charter issued byPonç Hug III served both to bolster comital authority by summoning upCarolingian tradition and to dispel any doubt about the permanence ofstatus that the Jews of Empúries now enjoyed.

In spite of their independence from the count-kings, the counts ofEmpúries were nevertheless fully aware of the institutional experimen-tation that was transforming the nature of royal authority andmunicipal organization elsewhere in Catalonia in the late twelfth andearly thirteenth century. Even with its anachronistic tone, the privilegeof 1238 should also be placed against the background of institutionalinnovation. In the 1170s, King Alfons I (1162-1196) began to transformthe Peace of God, originally an instrument of the Church, into a potenttool of royal authority.13 Through his local territorial officers, the vicars,the king sought to rein in aristocratic and knightly violence. Thevicarial courts became an effective means to implement royal justice,but at the same time they competed in the towns with an informalgroup of community leaders, the prohoms. These men provided a meansof resolving disputes within the community through negotiated settle-ments and thereby offered an alternative to vicarial courts and royaljustice. At the same time, local urban notables also served the king bymanaging elements of the royal domain, extending credit to the Crown,and serving as local royal agents. The tense, complex interface betweenroyal and community-based forms of justice and administrationprovides the key for understanding the late and tentative emergenceof independent municipal regimes in Catalonia.14

A parallel process was at work in the formation of early Jewishcommunities, although through a somewhat different mechanism.15Although Jews were finally mentioned in the Peace statutes promul-gated at Barcelona in 1198, the Peace of God was not the primary


vehicle that the king used to define Jewish status. At roughly the sametime as Alfons I was reshaping the Peace of God, however, he alsoarticulated a separate civil status for Jews in the influential Fuero deTeruel in 1176–1177, an experimental local law code that served as amodel for other towns in Aragon. In addition to clarifying legalprocedures in cases involving Christians and Jews, one of the code_sprovisions made Jews directly dependent on the Crown and assignedthem to the royal treasury.16 As a fiscal resource, Jews therefore enjoyedroyal protection in a form not unlike that of the royal Peace. Alfons Ialso evidently issued a charter to Jews in Barcelona, at least accordingto a retrospective reference in a thirteenth-century Hebrew letter,although the contents of the document are unfortunately not known.17The report nevertheless does suggest that the king for the first timeinterfered with the internal affairs of a Jewish community. Throughmeasures meant to deal with judicial prerogatives, civil status, orinternal organization, the king of Aragon showed a new willingness toprovide institutional outlines to the local Jewish populations in hislands as part of a broader program to increase royal authority andstructure local communities.

These early royal initiatives gained momentum in the early thirteenthcentury and stirred the most independent barons to follow suit. Thecounts of Empúries also promulgated Peace statutes in 1189, 1206, and1220 closely modeled on those of the king.18 The comital statutes, how-ever, did not refer to Jews. The absence is significant, for it emphasizesthat the counts still had no interest in dealing with their Jewish resi-dents collectively even though the royal statutes provided a clearprecedent for doing so. Between 1220 and 1240, however, the counts ofEmpúries continued to experiment with new institutions, includingthose designed to structure the urban community. The counts institutedseveral new officers, including a vicar for the county as a whole and anurban bailiff and a vicar for Castelló, their main provincial center.During this period the urban population also began to form a communalidentity that would eventually mature into an urban consulate, a bodyof municipal magistrates. Significantly, the earliest expression of thecollective identity of Castelló was connected with a comital privilege,which in 1235 ensured its inhabitants protection from arbitrary seizurewithin the district around the town. For the first time in the extantcomital documentation, the charter also specifically referred to Jews,who would enjoy the same protection.19 The sudden emergence of Jewsas a collectivity at Castelló therefore corresponded precisely with thearticulation of new jurisdictional rights in the context of on-going


institutional experimentation. The recognition of Jews in a jurisdictionalprivilege provided a stepping stone to the far more extensive privilege of1238.

The comital privilege of 1238 to the Jews of Empúries included rightsthat are also found scattered among contemporary charters issued byKing Jaume I (1213–1276) to Jewish aljames in different parts of theCrown of Aragon. The earliest surviving charter issued by Jaume I toregulate internal Jewish affairs was granted to Calatayud in Aragon in1229; this was followed in 1239 by another to Jews in the recentlyconquered kingdom of Valencia, a grant subsequently amplified in 1244;and the Barcelona Jews received their foundational charter of self-government from the king in 1241. These charters dealt with theselection of community leaders, the right of Jews to settle disputesamong themselves, and the privilege of Jews to live according to theirown customs.20 The grants of Jaume I represented the culmination ofearlier royal initiatives to organize local Jewish communities from thetop down. Klein has argued convincingly, however, that the majoraljames were hardly passive in the process. In the expansive towns ofearly thirteenth-century Iberia, both Christians and Jews establishedformal structures to determine community membership and obligationand experimented with new forms of local authority.21 At Barcelona,the royal grant of an independent communal government occurred inpart as a result of dramatic conflict within the Jewish community itself.During the 1230s, members of new families mounted a successfulchallenge to the traditional leadership of Jewish notables, the nesi_im,whose prestige depended upon lineage, land, and connections to thecourt of the count-kings.22 At Barcelona the royal charter of self-government of 1241 marked the successful culmination of this challenge,for it placed the leadership of the community in the hands of fourofficials selected for their high reputation and moral standing in thealjama rather than for their pedigree alone.23

Like the king, Ponç Hug III was also searching for a satisfactoryinstitutional formula for the Jews in his territory, but their smallnumber and lack of internal cohesion broadened the emphasis in hisgrant to future settlement in addition to internal organization. Theextensive comital charter of 1238 explicitly takes royal precedent as areference point, for, in addition to confirming in formulaic terms anyliberties, customs, and privileges the count had previously authorized, itgranted to the Jews of Empúries for good measure all the rights andprivileges, whether written or customary, granted the Jews of Cataloniaby Ramon Berenguer I (1035–1076), count of Barcelona and the


presumed author of the Usatges de Barcelona, a compilation of regionallaw, and those granted by his successors. While it addressed similarconcerns regarding protection and the right to transact business, thecharter for the Jews of Empúries struck a more inviting tone than thatfound in the charters issued by King Jaume I. Although the comitalgrant mentioned the region_s principal town, Castelló d_Empúries,which no doubt contained the county_s largest Jewish population, thesweeping declaration of rights also applied to Jews residing throughoutthe county. This blanket territorial privilege was intended to attracteven more Jewish immigrants to the small towns and villages thathoused only a handful of Jewish families and to keep them there. Thelanguage of the charter also presented the provisions relating to lendingas inducements rather than limitations. It specified four basicguarantees for Jewish property and business activities, three of whichrelated to moneylending. First, it authorized Jews to lend to whomeverthey chose; second, it permitted the comital court to seize the propertyof debtors to Jews in case of delinquency; third, it allowed Jews tocharge twenty per cent annual interest; and, finally, the count placedthe Jews and all their property under his protection. Notably absent,however, is the shrill tone increasingly present in royal charters thataimed to limit interest rates charged by Jews to 20 per cent in order tohold in check “the insatiable avarice of the Jews.”24 This bittercomplaint about Jewish avarice comes from a royal ordinanceconcerning Jewish lending issued at Girona in February, 1241; theextant copy of the comital privilege for the Jews of Empúries was in factdrafted only a few months later, in all likelihood to reassure the localaljama at a potentially unsettling moment. Instead of condemningJewish interest rates as abusive, the comital charter extended to Jewsthe freedom to lend at the established rate of 20 per cent annually.25Issued just before the foundational royal charters to Valencia andBarcelona, the privilege of the count was a preemptive strike on theking designed not only to make Empúries attractive to Jews already inresidence but, as the document twice emphasizes, also to those whowould settle there in the future. As a charter of settlement as well as atool of internal organization, it has as much in common with privilegesfor the frontier regions of the Crown of Aragon as with those meant toorganize older Jewish communities.

The concluding clauses of the charter prove the most intriguing, forthere the count guaranteed to the Jews of Empúries in perpetuity thesame privileges that the Jews of both Barcelona and Girona possessed.No clear precedent existed to fuse the customs and privileges of two


separate communities into a new normative model, nor did subsequentroyal privileges to other Jewish aljames take this approach. In 1268, forinstance, the customs and liberties of Barcelona alone served as aprecedent in grants to Jews in Perpinyà (Perpignan), Montpellier,Lleida, and even Girona itself.26

What were, precisely, the customs and liberties that the Jewspossessed at that moment in these two influential towns? This proves afar subtler question to answer than it might first appear, for the Jewishcommunities in both Barcelona and Girona were in upheaval at thetime and the grant of a royal privilege to bring the conflict to a close inBarcelona lay three years in the future. The challenge to the traditionalleadership of the nesi_im, who exerted authority through inherited sta-tus rather than office, was coming to a head at Barcelona in the 1230s,but it also engaged the aljama of Girona.27 The Maimonidean contro-versy was also reaching the boiling point during this decade and deeplyaffected Jewish communities throughout Catalonia and Languedoc.28 Ithas become increasingly clear that the conflict concerned not onlyphilosophy and rationalism but also the nature of power and leadershipwithin local communities. Nahmanides, the eminent rabbi of Girona,weighed in on the side of those Barcelona families challenging thenesi_im, who based their rights to lead upon prestigious lineage andrightful succession. Both communities were in fact embroiled in a bitterstruggle about the nature of authority and leadership. The royal charterof self-government would bring this struggle to an end in 1241 atBarcelona, but the mention of distinct rights and liberties for the Jewishcommunities of Barcelona and Girona in the comital privilege of 1238suggests that both were fashioning new forms of communal represen-tation even if these regimes had not yet solidified. When Count PonçHug III bestowed his privilege on the Jews residing in Empúries, threeyears before the Barcelona community received its royal charter, he wasextending an invitation to any Jew who sought to emigrate from theconflictual environment in the large aljames nearby and establishcomparable institutions in his own territory.

The charter does not articulate with precision all the liberties Jewsin Empúries would enjoy nor the form self-government might take, forthese questions were still very much in play in Barcelona and Girona.Although the grant of 1238 provided the foundation to begin organizinga small regional community, it would take time for institutions tomature. Only in 1284 does a document refer to secretaries, Jewishcommunal officials, at Castelló; at that time there were three secretaries,but their number grew to four by the early fourteenth century.29 As in


Barcelona, where the process is well documented,30 substantialexperimentation with the size and function of the Jewish secretariateat Castelló occurred during the second half of the thirteenth century.The word aljama, with its strong connotation of a formal communalgovernment, was applied to the Jewish community of Castelló only in1296; significantly, the document in which the word first appearedrefers to a collective tax the count imposed on the community.31 Thepressure of lordship had a fundamental role in causing the Jews to actas a collective body. The comital privilege of 1238, however, did not initself elaborate in detail the internal structure of a nascent Jewishcommunity in Empúries. Issued at a moment of considerable turmoilwithin the aljames at Girona and Barcelona, it sought as much to stealthe king_s thunder by attracting royal Jews to the count_s territory asto create a rudimentary communal structure for Jews already present.In a community as small and unformed as that of Empúries, however,the impulse originally given by the local lord was even more critical increating Jewish communal institutions than was that of the king in thelarge towns.

Baronial lordship and the Jewish community

The favorable terms offered by the count of Empúries to attract Jewishsettlers anticipated those in royal grants, but they should not lead us tooverestimate the importance of the Jewish population in the county in1238. It differed significantly in terms of its size, reputation, andeconomic potential from the aljames of the major Catalan towns. Norwere the counts of Empúries, despite their pretensions, on equal footingwith the kings of Aragon. The counts had not followed royal initiativesin exploiting their domain through credit or in exercising new fiscalsupervision over their agents through stricter methods of account,practices that had engaged numerous Jews in royal service. As a result,before the comital privilege of 1238, the Jews of Empúries are virtuallyinvisible as individuals and as a group. The hazards of documentarysurvival do not fully explain this absence, for the comital archivecontains a substantial number of parchments before 1250. Because oftheir small number and lack of cohesion, the Jews at first escaped thecount_s vigilant gaze. Toward the middle of the thirteenth century ahandful of Jewish names appear sporadically in property boundariesamong the many parchments recording land sales and leases preservedin the comital and ecclesiastical archives, but they do not exist in


sufficient numbers to present a connected picture. Only with the extantnotarial registers, the earliest of which for Castelló dates from 1260, canone begin to explore the internal dynamics of Jewish society in theregion and its relationship with its lord.

Baer long ago noted the rapid expansion of Jewish aljames in smallertowns and villages during the closing decades of the thirteenth century;a growing number of detailed studies based on local notarial registershave confirmed his insight.32 By 1300 the notarial registers in Empúriesrecord in considerable detail an expansive Jewish population not only inCastelló, the largest town and county seat, but also a Jewish presence ineven the smaller towns and villages of Peralada, Cabanes, Verges,Torroella de Montgrí, and Figueres. Four of these small settlements,although within the boundaries of the county, were immediately subjectto lords other than the count. Peralada and Cabanes, in thenorthwestern corner of the county, lay within the jurisdiction of thevicounts of Rocabertí, who held their viscounty in fief from the count,whereas the parish of Figueres straddled the boundary between thecounties of Besalú and Empúries and belonged partially to the king andpartially to the count. In 1272 the royal family also acquired the lordshipof Torroella de Montgrí through an exchange with Count Hug V(1269–1277). Whoever their immediate lords might have been, inhab-itants of villages, towns, and castles from throughout the region soughtout Jewish lenders. Owing to the accelerating pace of economic anddemographic growth during the second half of the thirteenth century,Jews became far more involved than they had been earlier in the businessaffairs of Christians, particularly in Castelló. Increasing trade withLanguedoc, Majorca, and other Catalonian towns, an emerging regionaltextile industry, and a thriving agricultural market at least partiallyoriented toward export heightened the demand for credit, which the Jewssatisfied in part.33 The counts of Empúries as territorial lords sought toregulate points of friction between lenders and creditors and began todemand revenue for their protection and for the use of their courts.Because of the nature of their authority, however, the counts ofEmpúries interacted with their Jewish subjects in a way that was quitedistinct from that of the kings of Aragon, for the comital dynasty didnot have a tradition of employing prominent Jews as financiers or fiscalagents.

The privilege of 1238 provided far-reaching security for the Jews ofEmpúries and their business activities, yet the contours of their legaland financial relationship with the count would take shape slowly oversuceeding generations. As lords elsewhere were discovering, community-


building could become a profitable enterprise. By establishing a clearmethod for sanctioning internal leadership and defining group mem-bership with precision, communal privileges provided a key for un-locking the treasure that lords hoped to obtain from their subjectsthrough taxation. In Barcelona, the charters for both municipal andJewish self-government were closely related to the expectation thatcommunity leaders would collaborate in raising future taxes for theking.34 The counts of Empúries also sought subsidies from their Jews,nostri iudei, as Count Ponç Hug IV (1277–1313) called them in aconfirmation of their privileges.35 Because they were not royal Jews,they did not form part of the collecta of Girona-Besalú, one of the fivedistricts in Catalonia which provided a mechanism for the collection ofroyal taxes from Jews throughout a region through its principalaljama.36 Castelló, however, does not appear to have played a similarrole as a centralized collection point for taxes from Jews throughout thecounty; this was in keeping with the loose comital control over elementsof the fisc. At first, local Jews paid relatively little to the count. In 1284the secretaries of Castelló delivered a levy (questia) of 150 solidi ofMelgueil to the count on Easter; later references indicate that this hadbecome an annual tribute.37 In the wake of the French crusade againstAragon in 1285 led by King Philip III, who temporarily occupied thecounty of Empúries and caused considerable destruction in somesettlements, the Jews of Castelló paid a steeper tax of 950 solidi ofMelgueil in 1286, but it was reduced to 100 solidi of Barcelona in 1296.38These amounts were relatively light burdens, however, in comparison tothe growing demands on the Jewish aljames subject to the king at thetime; they also pale in comparison to the high tax burden shouldered bythe Jews of Empúries under the second comital dynasty, which in thefourteenth century adopted fiscal policies toward the Jews in keepingwith the habits of the royal family to which they belonged.39 Light fiscalobligations in the thirteenth century, as Baer pointed out, did provide astrong inducement for Jews to immigrate to baronial lands at first, butthis did not reflect a conscious policy of luring Jewish immigrants onlyto exploit them mercilessly once they had settled. Traditional habits ofpatrimonial exploitation better explain the relatively light demands ofthe counts of Empúries on local Jews than would a policy of deception,for the counts had little experience with turning to individual Jews forcredit and were just beginning to employ communal institutions as atool of taxation in the thirteenth century. The Jews of Empúries did notat first become enmeshed in a fiscal apparatus comparable to that ofthe count-kings; when the fiscal burden did begin to weigh down upon


the Jews in the fourteenth century, the new dynasty was merely imi-tating the increasingly onerous demands imposed by their kinsmen, thekings of Aragon.

At the same time, neither finance nor administration offered Jews inEmpúries access to a potential source of monetary gain and influence inaristocratic courts as they did in the major royal aljames. The kings ofAragon had found in their Jews not only a resource to be taxed but alsoa source of credit, which proved more often an opportunity than aliability for prominent Jewish families with the resources to lend. As thefiscal supervision of the royal fisc tightened and the financial needs ofthe monarch grew, the king increasingly selected bailiffs and other royalofficials, whether Jewish or Christian, for their ability to supply creditpersonally as well as for their competence as fiscal agents. ProsperousJews became important financiers to the Crown and even exercisedsupervisory functions at the royal court. This complex financial rela-tionship that had begun in mid-twelfth century Catalonia gainedmomentum in the early thirteenth century.40 Thus, lending to thecount-kings provided not only impressive profits to prominent Jews butalso access to the royal court and to valuable resources of the fiscassigned for repayment; credit also opened the door for Jews to serve asbailiffs and as fiscal supervisors over valuable royal resources. Withinthe aljames themselves, and most notably in Barcelona, service to thesovereign brought prestige and influence, particularly under the olderstyle of authority exercised by the nesi_im. Indeed, the ability to offercredit to the king was critical in solidifying the status and influence ofthese Jewish worthies, even though the community itself eventuallychallenged their leadership.

This symbiosis between royal authority and local Jewish leadershiphad no parallel in the county of Empúries. Local Jews very rarely lentdirectly to the count, even when financial problems began to overwhelmthe dynasty during the rule of Count Ponç Hug IV toward the end ofthe thirteenth century.41 As a result, Jews never received mills, ovens,market tolls, or other parts of the comital domain in assignment forcompensation, nor did any Jew serve as a local bailiff for the count. Thepersistence of patrimonial forms of authority and the late adoption ofaccounting practices to oversee local agents of comital authority explainin part the distance between Jewish lenders and the court. When, fromthe 1280s onwards, the counts found themselves in urgent need ofcredit, they at first turned primarily to Christians for loans, particularlylocal knights and prosperous burghers of Castelló, but not to Jews intheir own territory. As their financial plight became even more


desperate in the early fourteenth century, however, the last counts ofthis proud dynasty were also forced to seek out Jewish credit, but eventhen they looked to prominent lenders at Girona rather than tomembers of their own aljama.42 The choice was no doubt practical, forit reflected the vast difference in wealth between the Jewish communityin an important royal town and that of a small provincial center. It istherefore hardly surprising that Jews of Empúries did not forge linkswith their lord through finance and service.

Regional nobles on occasion also sought Jewish credit, but theseloans were, as a rule, neither a regular means of finance nor a sign ofchronic indebtedness. The sole exception was the Foixà family, whosefinancial troubles prove instructive. Centered on the castle of the samename on the border with the county of Girona, these well-establishedcastle-lords fell into financial difficulty in the early decades of thethirteenth century. Bernat de Foixà installed a Jew named Momet asbailiff to oversee his mills at the village of Gaüses in 1231, the onlyknown case of a Jewish bailiff in Empúries during the thirteenth centuryand a sign of the growing need of the Foixà family for credit.43 Thefamily_s fortunes only worsened in subsequent generations. Bernat_sheir, Arnau de Foixà, sought substantial loans from Jews at bothGirona and Castelló, but growing debts eventually forced him to sell hisproperties and rights at Gaüses to the bishop of Girona in 1267.Although proceeds from the sale were devoted to repaying creditors,this evidently did not solve the family_s financial problems, for twentyyears later Arnau de Foixà_s son and heir sought out a Jewish lenderfrom Besalú for a loan 15,000 solidi of Barcelona, a sum so large that thecount of Empúries had to act as guarantor. This cautionary tale, surelyan archetype for Christian polemics against Jewish moneylending, infact stands out because of its uniqueness. The constant recourse toJewish credit by the lords of Foixà began in the 1230s, when credit fromChristian sources in the county seems to have been in short supply. As aresult, the family looked for Jewish credit far and wide throughout theeastern Pyrenees. By the end of the thirteenth century, however, credithad become far more available, and nobles turned increasingly toChristian lenders.44

By 1300 attitudes had also hardened against Jews holding authorityover Christians, a prerequisite for marshalling substantial amounts ofcredit through the cession of utilities or tolls in compensation. King Pere IIformally prohibited Jews from serving as royal bailiffs throughout hislands in 1283, and by then prominent members of local Catalan societyhad to a large extent filled the financial breach that had made Jews


attractive as fiscal agents in previous decades. In Empúries, however, theinterface between credit and authority did not have the same dynamic asin royal lands. Financial pressures on the comital dynasty were not acuteuntil the final two decades of thirteenth century, and the local nobilitywith the exception of the Foixà did not fall into debilitating debt. As aresult, Jews kept their distance from the court: no Jew appears among thesubscribers or witnesses to the many hundreds of extant comital chartersfor the thirteenth century. The “refined, pleasure-loving courtier,”45 aprominent figure in Baer_s interpretation of Iberian Jewry, did not find aplace at the baronial court of Empúries.

Economic expansion and internal rivalry within the aljama

Distant from the site of aristocratic culture and sociability, leadingJewish families in Empúries faced considerable challenges due toexpansive economic and demographic growth, particularly from the1280s to the opening decades of the fourteenth century. Jews resident inthe county_s small towns and villages became more firmly establishedand their numbers grew with accelerating speed during the second halfof the thirteenth century. Precise figures do not exist for this period, butunmistakable signs of growth present themselves throughout thenotarial registers. The Jewish residents at Castelló had been centeredin the past around the community_s first synagogue, situated on theedge of the inhabited area at the foot of the hill where most residentslived. By 1284, however, the community had constructed a new syn-agogue on the slope just below the center of town, the Puig deMercadal, thereby extending the Jewish neighborhood (call) into theheart of the rapidly developing market zone. At first described ascontiguous to the moat of the count_s castle, the area surrounding thenew synagogue quickly became covered with streets and houses.46 If oneaccepts that most adult male Jewish lenders who resided in town werealso heads of households, then during the 1280s the Jewish populationwas approaching 200.47 This number represents a significant proportionof the total urban population of Castelló. By the late 1280s the townwas constructing its most extensive ring of medieval walls and appearsto have contained approximately 2,000 residents.48

The rapid rise of both the Christian and Jewish population at Castellóin the late thirteenth century and the economic expansion that underlayit required adjustments in order to cope with the surge of immigration.While studies of Jewish aljames regularly attempt to trace the origins of


immigrants, their impact on the internal dynamics of small Jewishcommunities before 1300 has received relatively little attention.49Because notarial registers emphasize on-going credit relations ratherthan internal competition, they have left the impression that theinstallation of most new families, whose members often arrived withcoins ready to lend, proceeded with little friction. Yet this dependedupon social cohesion and leadership within a community as well as uponthe resources and connections of new arrivals. It is impossible, of course,to determine the provenance of the Jewish population of Castelló withstatistical certainty, but the names of some well-established familiessuch as the Salandí, Cordoví, and Espanya echo the vanishing Jewishculture of al-Andalûs, even if their ancestors may first have emigratedto other regions in Christian Iberia.50 Bonet Melius de Narbona,habitator nunc Castilionis, however, is the sole Jewish inhabitant ofCastelló to bear a name that points to immigration from Languedoc. Incontrast, Perpinyà and Puigcerdà, quite near Empúries in terms ofdistance but backed against the northern slopes of the Pyrenees, drew animportant number of immigrants from theMidi.51 Not surprisingly, otherfamily names at Castelló with toponymic references or specificindications to the provenance of the father refer primarily to Cataloniantowns, including Girona.52 The early Jewish families in Castellótherefore formed a heterogeneous group, drawn from many parts ofIberia; they maintained contacts of kinship and finance with Girona butwithout being dominated by their large and prestigious neighbor.

The first three notarial registers from Castelló, dating from 1260 to1265, provide a glimpse into the early world of a provincial Jewishcommunity before it became inundated by the surge of immigrants andcredit activities that characterized the following decades. While lendingwas certainly present, it does not appear to have been as common as inlater decades, nor was it as widely spread among the Jewish population.Almost half the recorded credit transactions from 1260 through 1265(10 of 22) involved four members of the Salandí family, and anotherindividual, Jucef Malet, accounts for four other loans.53 The number ofJewish credit transactions in general made up a smaller proportion of thedocumentation in the earliest register than in those from later decades.The Salandí family stand out not only for their involvement in credit butalso as property-holders, for they appear to have had deep roots intown. In 1262 the most prominent member of the family, Vidal Salandí,with his wife, Bonadona, sold to the knight Arnau de Requesens asubstantial property, described as a mans (here understood to be acentral building with ancillary structures), located at the Puig de


Mercadal in the very heart of town. The property was so burdened withthe weight of the past that Arnau de Requesens required the seller toprovide several ancillary documents, including a charter of exchangewith the count, a judicial decision by the local court, and documents ofsale for adjacent parcels that had evidently been detached from themans.54 This was not the holding of a parvenu. Other evidence alsosuggests that lending did not constitute the primary economicfoundation for older families, which, much like Jews in twelfth-centuryBarcelona, appear to have lived primarily from small agriculturalholdings and garden plots in proximity to the town.55 Significantly,among the first recorded group of Jewish secretaries from 1284—Abraham Bonet, Samuel Piperer, and Jucef de Cotlliure—onlyAbraham Bonet appears in the abundant records of the 1280s as alender, although certainly not among the most dynamic. Jucef deCotlliure, on the other hand, is only known to have held a garden plot.56In the 1280s these individuals must have displayed maturity, highpersonal reputation, and a recognized place in the community to haveheld office. As representatives of an older generation, their standing inthe community had little to do with the expanding credit market at theend of the thirteenth century. This pattern stands in blatant contrast toBarcelona and Perpinyà, where the men chosen as secretaries wereusually those most active in moneylanding and trade.57

Because of the small size of the early community at Castelló, itsmost distinguished members quickly formed family alliances in order toreinforce their cohesion, if possible through marriages to women fromprominent families outside the region. Provençal Salandí, Jucef Malet,and Abraham Cordoví, all members of well-established houses, marriedthree sisters, Dolça, Druda, and Dura respectively, daughters of awealthy family from Girona. The brothers-in-law acted in concert todevelop important contacts through their wives; in 1265 they arrangedto return 1,500 solidi of Barcelona deposited with them from their wives_grandmother at Girona and deposit another 700 solidi with her throughan intermediary who in all liklihood was none other than Nahmanideshimself.58 Because the Jewish community of Castelló was still relativelysmall and unformed around mid-century, its most prominent membersno doubt found that family ties to the wealthy and culturally prominentaljama in Girona helped them stand out among their Jewish neighborsin a provincial setting. If the poet Isaac de Castelló, whose familyNahmanides defended against aspersions cast on the purity of itslineage, did indeed come from Castelló d_Empúries rather than fromanother town of the same name, one might well suppose that he looked


back in relief that he had escaped the limited horizons that his ancestorshad found in Empúries.59 Even the most prominent Jewish families atCastelló in the early thirteenth century did not possess the wealth,lineage, or learning that allowed the nesi_im to perpetuate theirinfluence in the large towns in Catalonia and Languedoc.60 Dependingfor their modest livelihood upon scattered agricultural properties,garden plots, and urban houses, the older families in the county appearto have created a loose network of marital alliance among themselves,but this was not enough for them to forge a clear communal identity ontheir own or to create a cohesiveness sufficient to secure a dominantposition within the community. The aljama of Castelló therefore readilyabsorbed most newcomers drawn to an expanding regional economy.

As the credit market rapidly accelerated through the easternPyrenean region in the second half of the thirteenth century, newopportunities and new lenders transformed Jewish communities. Smallloans to villagers as well as to modest artisans and merchants in smalltowns proliferated, while small-scale lending spread throughout theJewish population. Claude Denjean has recently demonstrated asubstantial increase from 1260 to 1290 in the number Jewish lendersat the thriving town of Puigcerdà, high in the Pyrenees, and a similarprocess was under way at Castelló.61 Because most loans involved minoramounts, a large pool of borrowers in nearby villages, as well as in towns,anxiously sought money on credit at Castelló and Peralada. Thus itproved relatively easy for a new arrival to establish him or herself as alender, since doing so involved a relatively modest amount of capital.62The wide distribution of small-scale lending therefore provided a criticalmechanism to absorb newcomers as they established new economicniches in an expanding regional economy.

Except through lending, however, local Jews did not fully participatein the growing economic potential of the region. There is no evidencethat they directly engaged in extra-regional trade or shipping eitherindividually or through commercial associations at the time, but a fewfamilies did purchase grain, olive oil, hides, and cloth from localChristian suppliers in sufficient quantity to market these goods locallyor provide them on credit.63 The only interfaith commercial partnership(societas) recorded at Castelló involved the Jew Llobell de Mercadaland the Christian Joan Carbó, who jointly provided two mules to haulwater to and carry salt from one of the small saltpans on the river laMuga below the town.64 The restricted range of economic activities andthe small-scale nature of credit operations did not prove sufficient tocreate substantial fortunes. Even the most prosperous Jews of the


aljama, however, did not convert their assets into urban houses or ruralproperties after 1250. This stands in sharp contrast not only to thebehavior of Jewish families at Castelló earlier in the century but also tothat of Jews in the contemporary frontier towns of Valencia, whichCastelló in many aspects resembled; there Jews easily obtainedagricultural property abandoned by Muslims.65 Between 1260 and1290 at Castelló, however, the many charters of land transactions in thenotarial registers do not record a single purchase of land or houses by aJew, only sales. In 1287, the heirs of Bevenist, a resident of Torroella deMontgrí in the south of the county, sold three houses at the Puig deMercadal in Castelló to Christians, even though his sister was marriedto a Jew of Castelló and his family obviously had strong ties to theprovincial center.66 Rather than obtain or, in some instances, evenretain title to urban houses or rural plots as investments, Jewish lenderspreferred to profit from real estate offered in pledge. This hesitance toacquire either allodial or tenurial land, which earlier Jewish residentshad found attractive, in fact facilitated the integration of old and newmoney within the aljama, for a hierarchy of proprietorship failed toform over time. By the end of the thirteenth century, the aljama ofCastelló was absorbing a substantial number of new immigrants andcoalescing into a cohesive provincial community.

Yet the arrival of new families, particularly those with substantialwealth from major towns, could threaten growing local cohesion. Themost unsettling newcomer to the region was undoubtedly thefinancially aggressive Abraham de Torre. The scribes consistentlynoted that he came from Barcelona, and in all likelihood he was from abranch of the imposing de Torre family, whose members rose toprominence based on lending and commerce in the Catalan capital,although no evidence exists to prove the link conclusively.67 In anycase, when Abraham established himself at Figueres on the westernboundary of the county by the late 1270s, the resources, connections,and ambitions of this Barcelona grandee made him a disruptivepresence. He quickly cut a figure for himself in the region. He purchasedlarge quantities of cloth on credit to engage in the lucrative textiletrade, lent money throughout the northern half of the county ofEmpúries, and even entered into financial obligations with the kingof Aragon.68 Soon after his death, his daughter Regina, with the help ofher three brothers, Vidal, Bonjuha, and Isaac, concluded a marriageagreement with a dowry of 5,000 solidi of Barcelona involving a pledgefrom the secretaries of the Jewish aljama of Girona.69 The immigrationof such an influential Jew of Barcelona to Figueres, a small village at


the time, at first might seem surprising, but a similar phenomenon hasalso been noted at Alcover, close to Tarragona, and Vilafranca delPenedès, to the north. These small communities attracted a substantialnumber of Jewish lenders from Barcelona, who evidently found in thesmaller towns a niche outside the increasingly saturated credit marketof the Catalan capital.70 Tiny Figueres also had numerous advantages.It lay directly on the main road crossing the Pyrenees to Rosselló andLanguedoc and provided a gateway to the county of Empúries and toCastelló. Although the parish of Santa Maria de Figueres was splitbetween the counties of Empúries and Besalú, most of the village wassubject to the king, who maintained a royal bailiff and scribe there. In1267, King Jaume I granted an important charter of liberties to Figueres,including protection to Jews residing there, in order to encouragesettlement.71 From this village base in royal territory, Abraham rapidlyextended his business activities into the separate jurisdictions of theviscount of Rocabertí and the count of Empúries.72 After Abraham_sdeath, his three sons, Vidal, Bonstruc, and Isaac, continued to fan outacross the region. Two remained residents of Figueres but the thirdsettled first at Cabanes and then at nearby Peralada; all three, however,continued to be heavily involved in lending activities at Castelló. Otherfamilies adopted a similar strategy; by establishing brothers in anumber of very small Jewish communities, they sought to penetrateaggressively and with little competition into credit networks throughnew points of access.73

The insertion of a financially aggressive, well-connected Barcelonafamily deeply threatened the stability of the regional aljama of Empúries.The record of a judicial settlement in the royal archives reveals theextent and bitterness of the conflict the de Torre family produced. Inearly 1285, the Infant Alfons received a substantial fine of 7,900 solidi ofBarcelona after an inquest into serious allegations brought againstAbraham de Torre, who had recently died, and his eldest son Vidal, stillliving.74 The settlement (compositio) mentions nineteen acts of assault,attempted murder, extortion, tax evasion, sexual immorality, and fraud.The alleged violence was directed above all against other Jews. Amongother acts of intimidation, Abraham allegedly tried to murder oneworshiper at the synagogue of Figueres during Sabbath observances,dragged another Jew out of the synagogue by his hair to beat him withinan inch of his life, and led a group of armed followers to Castelló, where hebroke into a house and gravely wounded its owner, Isaac Solam.Significantly, Abraham also attacked another house at Figueres wherehe believed Isaac Solamwas residing; one suspects Isaac and his allies were


in bitter competition with the new arrivals. These violent acts hardlyrepresent random crimes but rather constituted a terrifying display offorce to intimidate and humiliate local rivals in the Jewish community.The “big money” from Barcelona had clearly left its calling card.

The inquest concerning Abraham de Torre and his son Vidal, however,also reveals another dimension of a strategy to insert themselves into theregion: a willingness to turn contested jurisdiction to their advantage. Inaddition to a specific allegation that Abraham acted in concert with thecount of Empúries to infringe upon royal rights at Figueres, the suspicionalso arose that Abraham and Vidal conspired to hide substantial profitsfrom their moneylending by passing records off furtively betweenthemselves, including credit instruments valued at 20,000 solidi ofBarcelona that should have been included in the assessment of a royallevy. Although residing within a royal settlement endowed with anextensive franchise, the de Torre family in fact did a substantial part oftheir business within the viscounty of Rocabertí and the county ofEmpúries.75 With their commercial and credit networks spread acrossthree jurisdictions, they proved expert at exploiting ambiguities in bothtax liabilities and court jurisdiction. Because credit operations provedlitigious, local courts could reap substantial profits. At Peralada, in thejurisdiction of the viscount of Rocabertí, the local bailiff ordered oneborrower to sell property to meet his obligations to Nissim Navarra; thecourt also received in fine a third of the value of the loan according tolocal usage.76 Indeed, jurisdiction over Jews increasingly became atouchstone for questions of sovereignty between the king and the countof Empúries. In 1290, King Alfons II (1285–1291) protested that CountPonç Hug IV had improperly opened an inquest into excessive Jewishinterest in his county and in the viscounties of Bas and Cabrera, both ofwhich the count had acquired as fiefs from the Crown. According to theroyal complaint, all Jews pertained to the king, who ordered the countto desist from his inquiry.77 Unfortunately we do not know the reactionof Ponç Hug IV, but this complaint marked the first time the king ofAragon had attempted to interfere with the count_s Jews. It was theopening salvo in an increasingly bitter royal campaign to undermine theindependence of the counts of Empúries.

Conclusion

New forms of Jewish communal organization and leadership emergedas part of the institutional experimentation and social adjustment


that affected every level of European life, Christian as well asJewish, during the expansive thirteenth century. The formation ofJewish communal identity and its institutional forms did not simplybecome fully formed as a natural extension of exclusion. To thecontrary, aljames defined their boundaries with increasing precision anddetermined their forms of leadership through interaction with theirChristian lords and contact with their Christian neighbors. The hazardsof documentary preservation, even with the archival wealth of theCrown of Aragon, have placed the greatest emphasis on the relations ofJewish communities first of all with the Crown and second with thelargest municipalities, but aristocratic lordships formed a third, yetlargely ignored, dimension for the shaping of Jewish life in thisformative period.

The rare records for the provincial society of Empúries reveal that,within their territories, barons were just as interested as the king inintervening to create durable structures for Jews. When the count ofEmpúries issued a foundation charter in 1238, he was looking toward hisown political autonomy and the economic future of his county. He maywell have acted in response to knowledge of tensions within the aljames ofBarcelona and Girona, but he certainly made his move without a needfor Jewish financiers himself and did so well in advance of the localeconomic takeoff which generated the need for credit that would in turnattract numerous Jewish immigrants to his lands after 1260. Within thecontext of this small but vibrant provincial world, the local aljamadiffered in terms of its economic projection and its relation to its lordfrom those of the large cities. The nature of patrimonial lordship did notpromote Jewish financial ties with the local baronial court and thereforedid not reinforce the status of prosperous individuals through admin-istrative office. As a result, social dynamics within the aljama weredifferent in Castelló, since the older Jewish families did not have thesame entrenched position and resources as the nesi_im of Barcelona,Girona, or Narbonne. The relatively modest resources of older familieswould in fact facilitate the integration of Jewish immigrants of middlingmeans drawn to the local credit boom in the closing decades of thethirteenth century. Yet after 1260 when well-connected, economicallyaggressive families arrived from the large cities, their presence couldprove disruptive, in part because they possessed the resources tomaneuver within the interstices of complex aristocratic jurisdictionsand spread their interests through many villages and towns.

The contours and internal dynamic of the Jewish aljama in Empúriesevolved at a different pace than in the large cities, yet its lord shared


with the king of Aragon the desire to protect Jews both as a fiscalresource and as a contribution to regional prosperity. Upon learningthat King Philip IV had expelled the Jews from France in 1306, CountPonç Hug IV sought to calm the fears of the Jews under his ownauthority by informing the secretaries of Castelló that he would confirmtheir privileges and extend his protection. The count of Empúries madeclear to his Jews that he would not follow the “bad example” of the kingof France.78 The experience of this Mediterranean barony offers furtherevidence that the setting for Jewish life under medieval Christian rulewas by no means monolithic.

Appendix*

July 8, 1238

Ponç Hug III, count of Empúries, confirms the customs and liberties ofthe Jews at Castelló and those throughout his lands and grants themadditional privileges.

A. Original lost.B. Parchment translatum, dated July 4, 1241. Archivo Ducal de

Medinaceli, Toledo, sección apocas, legajo 1, no. 18.

Hoc est translatum fideliter factum .iiii. nonas iulii anno domini m.o

cc.oxl.oi.o de quodam instrumento in quo sic continetur. Sit notumomnibus quod nos Pontius Vgo comes dei gracia Impuriarum per nos etper omnes heredes ac successores nostros bona fide et omni dolo cessantenon ad instantiam alicuius set ex proprio motu nostro ex certa scientiain hoc presenti priuilegio laudamus aprobamus et irreuocabilitercorroboramus uobis omnibus iudeis tam maribus quam feminis in uillanostra Castilionis et in terra nostra ubique comorantibus habitantibus ethabitaturis presentibus et futuris omnes libertates et consuetudinespriuilegia quas et que ex puro corde et ex omni iure nostro ex certascientia uobis dedimus et concessimus cum instrumento a nobis benelaudato et firmato etmunimine nostri sigilli et subscripsionemanus nostreproprie corroborato. Et confitemur has omnes libertates et consuetudinesuidelicet que uobis dedimus et concessimus libertates et consuetudinesquas dominus Raymundus bone memorie quondam comes Barchinone etsui successores comites et reges in instrumentis et priuilegiis etconsuetudinibus scriptis et non scriptis in suis usaticis pro iudeisposuerunt constituerunt et sicut melius ipsa usaticha cumconsuetudinibus et libertatibus iudei in terra domini regis tenent et


utuntur. Ita quod possitis peccuniam uestram dare et mutuare ad usurasquibuscumque a uobis manuleuare uoluerint et sicut uobiscumcomponere potuerint usque ad terminum quod in instrumentis aponeturet comprehendet et quod curia nostra distringat uestros debitores et totasuma quantitate in instrumentis uestris comprehensa et aponita uobissoluenda et lucro a terminis in instrumentis aponitis in antea ad rationemde .c. solidis pro uiginti in anno uobis soluendo de tota suma et quantitatein instrumentis uestris aponita seu contenta si uestri debitores debitauestra tenuerint ultra terminos qui in instrumentis uestris aponerentur.Item ponimus et constituimus uos et omnia uestra in nostra emparantiamanutenentia deffensione protectione tutela et custodia et cum sit nostreententionis et uoluntatis quod omnia priuilegia et instrumenta etconsuetudines et libertates a nobis uobis concessa semper in integrafirmitate et sincero robore semper obtineamus custodiamus aprobamus etsaluemus nos dictus Pontius Vgo dei gratia Ympuriarum comes per nos etomnes nostros ex certa scientia et gratuita uoluntate auctoritate nostredominationis et potestatis. Laudamus confirmamus et aprobamuscorroboramus uobis omnibus predictis iudeis et singulis maribus etfeminis uillam nostram Castilionis et terram meam ubique habitantibuset habitaturis omnes libertates et consuetudines et omnia alia expressa uelnon expressa in dicto priuilegio a nobis uobis facto et firmato contentopromitentes firma ac sollempni stipulatione omnia predicta singula etuniuersa firmiter tenere et irreuocabiliter in perpetuum obseruarecomplere atque fideliter custodire in uos et uestros perpetuo sine aliquadeceptione et fraude et malignitate per nos et per nostros in perpetuumsuccessores. Vnde uolumus quod sicut iudei Barchinone et Gerunde utanturusaticis Barchinone et libertatibus et consuetudinibus illis concessis etlaudatis sic uos et uestri ipsis utamini et eas teneatis et firmiter gaudeatissine fine. Et insuper uos et omnia bona ipsa tanquam nostra propriamanuteneamus protegamus atque deffendamus ubique pro uiribus et possenostro. Mandantes insuper districtus quam possimus omnibus baiulisnostris uicariis et subuicariis et iudicibus per terram et dominacionemnostram constitutis et constituendis quod omnia predicta et singulaatendant et hoc [pre]sens79 priuilegium obseruent et in aliquo nondirrumpant. Omnia uero supradicta et singula uniuersa et in unumcollecta promitimus atendere et complere et firmiter in perpetuuumobseruare et in nullo contrauenire aliqua causa uel ratione tactissacrosanctis corporaliter dei euangeliis nostris propriis manibus gratissine ui iuramus. Et ad maiorem firmitatem et securitatem predictisomnibus habendam presens priuilegium nostri sigilli munimine etsubscriptione manus nostre proprie corroboramus. Renunciando ex


certa scientia benefficio minoris etatis et integrum restitutionis et omniiuri diuino aut humano scripto uel non scripto generali uel speciali perquod contra predicta uenire possimus uel aliquid de predictis infringereuel reuocare. Actum est hoc .viii. idus iulii anno domini .m.occ.oxxx. o

viii.o Sig+num Po[ntii]80 de Montirono. Sig+num Guillelmi deMontirono. Sig+num Bellipodii. Sig+num Dalmacii de Villanoua. Sig+num Bernardi de Villanoua. Sig+num Berengarii de Ripollo. Sig+numBerengarii Manog. Sig+num Terreni. Sig+num R. Circii testium.

Ego Poncius Vgo comes Ympuriarum qui hoc firmo Sig+num.Sig(sign)num Guillelmi Petri publici Castilionis scriptoris qui hoc

scripsit cum literis suprascriptis in .xvi. linea.Bernardus de Sancta Eulalia qui hoc translatum fideliter translatauit.Sig(sign)num Guilelmi Petri publici Castilionis scriptoris qui hoc

translatum uidi et legi fideliter fieri iussi subscribo.

Notes

1. YitzhakBaer, AHistory of the Jews in Christian Spain (Philadelphia: Jewish PublicationSociety, 1961), 2 vols.; Yom Tov Assis, The Golden Age of Aragonese Jewry: Communityand Society, 1213–1327 (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1997).

2. See, for instance, the recent remarks by Jonathan Ray, The Sephardic Frontier: TheReconquista and the Jewish Community in Medieval Iberia (Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press, 2006), 8: “a unique relationship with the crown...placed Jewsoutside the normal social framework of medieval society with its intricate web offeudal and local ties...” In his careful analysis of local communities on the Iberianfrontier, Ray in fact brings out much that undermines this exaggerated assertion.

3. Elka Klein, Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power in Medieval Barcelona (AnnArbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006), 26–27.

4. Klein, Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power, 47; Stephen P. Bensch, Barcelonaand its Rulers, 1096-1291 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 174–83,313–25.

5. Baer, History of the Jews 1, 47.6. Assis, Golden Age, 167-71; Mark Meyerson, Jews in an Iberian Frontier Kingdom:

Society, Economy, and Politics in Morvedre, 1248-1391 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2004),148–62; Ray, Sephardic Frontier, 82–84.

7. For a concise history of the dynasty, see Santiago Sobrequés Vidal, Els barons deCatalunya (Barcelona: Editorial Vicens-Vives, 1957), 13-21, 83–95 and the moregeneral survey in Història de l_Alt Empordà, ed. Pere Gifre i Ribas (Girona:Diputació de Girona, 2000), 272–78.

8. Antonio Sánchez González, El archivo condal de Ampurias: Historia, organización ydescripción de sus fondos (Girona: Columna-El Pont de Pedra, 1993). In 1996 mostof the Medinaceli archive, still a private aristocratic collection, was transferred from

* I would like to thank Juan J. Larios de la Rosa, director of the Fundación CasaDucal de Medinaceli, for generously providing me with a photocopy of thedocument transcribed in the appendix.


the Casa de Pilatos, the ducal palace in Seville, to a new home, the ArchivoHistórico de España, Sección Nobleza, at Toledo. The move sparked a series oflawsuits, which unfortunately have made it impossible to consult the originalparchments. Microfilms of the original materials, however, have been distributed tovarious sites in Catalonia, generally the medieval seats of lordship of the individualaristocratic houses that make up the collection.

9. Catàleg dels protocols del districte de Figueres, eds. M. Àngels Adroer i Pellicer,Joan Fort i Olivell, Erika Serna i Coba, Santi Soler i Simon (Barcelona: FundacióNoguera, 2001-2004), 2 vols. All available notarial registers to 1290 for Castelló andPeralada have been consulted for this study. For Castelló, 17 registers (1260–1290)remain and contain 427 documents mentioning Jews; for Peralada, 7 registers(1282–1290) remain and contain 137 documents mentioning Jews.

10. See the Latin edition at the end of this article.11. For the emergence and context of the phrase, see Norman Roth, “The Civic Status

of the Jew in Medieval Spain,” in Iberia and the Mediterranean World of the MiddleAges, 2, eds. Paul Chevedden, Donald Kagay, and Paul Padilla (Leiden: E. J. Brill,1995-1996), 139–62; Gavin I. Langmuir, “‘Tanquam servi_: The Change in JewishStatus in French Law about 1200,” in Toward a Definition of Anti-Semitism(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 167–94.

12. On Carolingian precedents, see Vittore Colorni, Legge ebraica e legge locali (Milan:A Giuffrè, 1945), 27–30, 33–43, 51–53; Kenneth R. Stow, Alienated Minority: TheJews of Medieval Latin Europe (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UniversityPress, 1992), 59–64.

13. Thomas N. Bisson, The Medieval Crown of Aragon: A Short History (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1986), 48–56.

14. Bensch, Barcelona and Its Rulers, 170-83, 206-20; Philip Daileader, “The VanishingConsulates of Catalonia,” Speculum 74 (1999), 65–94.

15. Klein, Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power, 72–78.16. See the careful discussion of the early use of the term servi regis in the code by

David Abulafia, “Nam iudei servi regis sunt, et semper fisco regio deputati: Losjudíos en el fuero municipal de Teruel (1176–1177),” in XVIII Congrés d_Història dela Corona d_Aragó (Valencia: Universitat de València, 2003), 2:1–10.

17. Klein, Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power, 77–78.18. Stephen P. Bensch, “Three Peaces of Empúries (1189-1220),” Anuario de estudios

medievales, 26, no.2 (1996):583–603.19. Archivo Ducal de Medinaceli, Toledo, sección Ampurias (ADM Amp. hereafter),

legajo 120, no. 11098: “nulle persone nobili uel ignobili liceat capere uel capi facerealiquem hominem uel feminam clericum uel laicum uel etiam iudeum nisi proptermanifestam faticam...”

20. Summarized by Assis, Golden Age, 20–21.21. For the Christian urban communities, see the classic work of Josep Maria Font

Rius, Orígines del régimen municipal de Cataluña (Madrid: Instituto Nacional deEstudios Jurídicos, 1946), and the recent reevaluation by Daileader, “TheVanishing Consulates,” 65–94.

22. The careers of nesi_im Sheshet Benveniste (Perfet Alfaquim) and Mahkir benSheshet epitomized this group, see Klein, Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power,78-82, 97-116, respectively.

23. Klein, Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power, 116–41.


24. For a summary of the campaign to limit interest on Jewish loans to Christians to 20per cent in the Crown of Aragon, see Yom Tov Assis, Jewish Economy in theMedieval Crown of Aragon, 1217–1327 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997), 15–27. Documentosde Jaime I de Aragon, eds. Ambrosio Huici Miranda and Maria D. Cabanes Pecourt(Zaragoza: Anubar Ediciones, 1976), vol. 2, no. 323: “sic iudeorum cepit insaciabilisavaricia insevire.”

25. According to Kenneth Stow, “Papal and Royal Attitudes Toward Jewish Lendingin the Thirteenth Century,” Association for Jewish Studies Review, 6 (1981), 172–73 [repr. in Kenneth Stow, Popes, Church, and Jews in the Middle Ages:Confrontation and Response (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2007)], inthe early thirteenth century the papal program launched against the “immoderateinterest” of the Jews was in fact intended to establish an acceptable rate of interestby fulminating against those charging higher amounts. It is still remarkable,however, that Count Ponç Hug III did not choose this language but presented theinterest rate for Jews in terms of a guarantee.

26. Jean Régné, History of the Jews in Aragon: Regesta and Documents (1213-1327),eds. Yom Tov Assis and Adam Gruzman (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1978), nos.392, 394, 395, 400.

27. Klein, Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power, 116–41.28. Bernard Septimus, “Piety and Power in Thirteenth-Century Catalonia,” in Studies

in Medieval Jewish History and Literature, ed. Isadore Twersky (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1979), 197–230; Klein, Jews, Christian Society, andRoyal Power, 116–41.

29. Arxiu Històric de Girona, Girona, secció Castelló (AHG Ca hereafter) 414, fols. 10r,12v: “secretarii iudeorum Castilionis.” For a list of secretaries of the aljama ofCastelló d_Empúries through the early fifteenth century, see Miquel Pujol iCanelles, “La designació de secretaries a l_aljama de Castelló d_Empúries. Dadesdocumentals,” Annals de l_Institut d_Estudis Empordanesos, 24 (1991):141–46.

30. Klein, Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power, 144–45.31. AHG Ca 10, fol. 15v: “secretariis aljame ville Castilionis...in nomine aljame

iudeorum...ratione questie sive tributo iudeorum predictorum.” For the use of thephrase, see David Romano, “Aljama frente a judería, call y sus sinónimos,” Sefarad,31 (1979): 347–54 [repr. in David Romano Venturo, De historia judía hispánica(Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, 1991), 275–82]; Ray, Sephardic Frontier,104–105; Klein, Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power, 42.

32. Baer, History of the Jews, 1:210. Among the most relevant local studies are YomTov Assis, The Jews of Santa Coloma de Queralt: An Economic and Case Study of aCommunity at the End of the Thirteenth Century (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1988);Claude Denjean, Juifs et chrétiens de Perpignan à Puigcerdà XIIIe-XIVe siècles(Canet: Editions Trubucaire, 2004); Christian Guilleré, “L_activitat de lescomunitats jueves de Torroella de Montgrí i La Bisbal a la primera meitat delsegle XIV,” in Jornades d_història de l_Empordà. Homenatge a J. Pella i Forgas(Girona: Patronat Francesc Eiximenes, 1987), 145-49; Maria Dolors MercaderGómez, L_aljama jueva de la Bisbal d_Empordà abans de la Pest Negra. Els libriiudeorum del segle XIV (Girona: Emprenta Pagès, 1999); Xavier SoldevilaTemporal, La comunitat jueva de Torroella de Montgrí (1270–1348). Papers delMontgrí, 18 (Torroella de Montgrí: Servei de Publicacons del Museu de Montgrí,2000).


33. Although the economy of the eastern Pyrenees has only been partially explored, aninitial examination of its sources leaves the impression that the region fullyparticipated in the general economic surge in Catalonia in the closing decades of thethirteenth century. For indications of the accelerating pace of economic exchange,see Stephen P. Bensch, “La primera crisis bancaria de Barcelona,” Anuario deestudios medievales, 19 (1989):311–28; Stephen P. Bensch, “Apprenticeship, Wages,and Guilds at Puigcerdà (1260–1300),” in XVIII Congrés d_Història de la Coronad_Aragó (Valencia: Universitat de València, 2003), 1:209–22; Denjean, Juifs etchrétiens, 90–93.

34. Bensch, Barcelona and its Rulers, 317-19; Klein, Jews, Christian Society, and RoyalPower, 82–89.

35. AHG Ca 24, foli solt (between fols. 69v and 70r), undated.36. Assis mistakenly suggests that Castelló did form part of the collecta of Girona-

Besalú, see Golden Age, 186. One of the two documents he cites (Régné, History ofthe Jews, no. 3192) refers to the tax status of property in Girona owned by a Jew ofCastelló; the other (Régné, History of the Jews, no. 3356) explicitly states that theJews of Empúries pertained directly to the count of Empúries in the same way thatin other areas they pertained directly to the king.

37. AHG Ca 414, fol. 12v. Cf. AHG Ca 414, fol. 10v, and AHG Ca 2087, fol. 66r. In 1296the payment, reduced to 100 solidi of Barcelona, was called questia sive tributum,supra note 31. The coinage of Melgueil (near Montpellier) was the most commoncoinage in the county, although the coinage of Barcelona also circulated togetherwith the local comital coinage. At the time 1 solidus of Melgueil equaled 1.25 solidiof Barcelona. 150 solidi of Melgueil represented roughly half the price of a mule atthe time, or two-thirds of a slave.

38. AHG Ca 2087, fol. 19v and supra note 31.39. In 1333, the aljama of Castelló paid 300,000 solidi of Melgueil, Miquel Pujol i

Canelles, “Sinagogues medievals de Castelló d_Empúries,” Annals de l_Institutd_Estudis Empordanesos, 24 (1991):104. In 1342, the count was demanding 500,000solidi from the aljama of Castelló, ADM Amp., legajo 55, no. 7789. On royaltaxation of Jews in the Crown of Aragon generally, see Assis, Jewish Economy, 133–59; Manuel Sánchez Martínez, El naixement de la fiscalitat d_Estat a Catalunya(segle XII-XIV) (Barcelona: Eumo Editorial, 1995), 82–84, 99–103.

40. Thomas N. Bisson, Fiscal Accounts of Catalonia under the Early Count-Kings,1151–1213 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 1:68,71, 93; Klein, Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power, 82–89.

41. Before 1290, the abundant documentation in the comital archive and the notarialregisters reveals only a single Jewish loan to the count, and it appears to be madethrough a Christian close to the comital court, AHG Ca 2087, fol. 11r.

42. A small register (ca. 1328) records a summary of several substantial debts owed byCount Malgaulí (1313–1322) and his father to Astrug Ravaya and Perfet Ravaya,both members of a wealthy Jewish family of Girona, ADM Amp., legajo 61, no. 8901.

43. Arxiu Diocesà de Girona, Girona, Pia Almoina, Gaüses, nos. 52, 63, 64, 66, 72, 76a,76b, 98, 99, 101a, 104, 107; cited in Gemma Escribà i Bonastre and Maria PilarFrago i Pérez, Documents dels jueus de Girona: 1124–1595 (Girona: Dalmau Carles,1982), nos. 10, 17, 22-27, 29–32.

44. For similar observations about the indebtedness of nobles to Jews, see Richard W.Emery, The Jews of Perpignan in the Thirteenth Century (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1959), 46–48.


45. Baer, History of the Jews, 1:188.46. Pujol, “Sinagogues mediavals,” 57-61. AHG Ca 1944, fol. 34r (1281): “in vallibus

castri comitis...in mota castri comitis.” On synagogues in the Crown of Aragon, seethe detailed work of Jaume Riera i Sans, Els poders públics i les sinagogues seglesXIII-XV (Girona: Patronat Call de Girona, 2006), which does not include theabove reference, one of the earliest in Catalonia, in the documentary appendix.

47. During the 1280s, 31 adult Jewish men can be identified as habitatores Castilionis,as well as two widows performing legal actions independently. Another sevenindividuals lacked a specific reference to their residence but were also probablyurban. Surely, however, some Jewish families did not engage in lending andtherefore do not appear in the notarial registers. Miquel Pujol i Canelles, “Els jueusde Castelló d_Empúries,” Jornades d_història dels jueus de Catalunya (Girona:Ajuntament de Girona, 1987):303–305, has identified Jewish lenders from the manyrelevant documents contained in the libri iudeorum, the notarial registers dedicatedto Jewish lending, that survive for subsequent decades. He places the Jewishpopulation above 200 at the beginning of the fourteenth century and above 300 onthe eve of the Black Death. A household coefficient of 3.69 for Jewish families in theRhineland was calculated by Kenneth Stow, “The Jewish Family in the Rhineland:Form and Function,” American Historical Review, 92 (1987):1093 [repr. in Stow,Popes, Church and Jews] and followed by Rebecca L. Winer, Women, Wealth andCommunity in Perpignan, c.1250–1300 (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited,2006), 83, who places the Jewish population of Perpinyà at 300–400 at the time.

48. This estimate is, of course, speculative and meant only for rough comparisons. Theearliest urban statistical information derives from a fiscal survey in 1359, whichnoted 458 households, but neither nobles nor clergy were included. This seems inbroad terms consistent with the size of Castelló during the late thirteenth-centurydemographic surge that would continue, but with declining momentum, until themid-fourteenth-century crisis. For a summary of what is known about the region_ sdemography, see Història de l_Alt Empordà, 333-34, which puts the urbanpopulation at 2,500 in 1359, a bit on the high side in my view.

49. For an exception, see Yom Tov Assis, “Juifs de France réfugiés en Aragon XIIIe–XIVe siécles,” Revue des études juives, 142 (1983):209–27.

50. On the transition from the Islamic to Christian context of Jewish culture in Iberia,see Bernard Septimus, Hispano-Jewish Culture in Transition: The Career andControversies of Ramah (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press,1982), 1–25. Also see the discussion of Arabic names in Jewish families of Barcelonain Klein, Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power, 81.

51. Denjean, Juifs et chrétiens, 43-45, 60–61; Emery, Jews of Perpignan, 12–14; RobertI. Burns, Jews in the Notarial Culture: Latinate Wills in Mediterranean Spain, 1250–1350 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 14–15, 96.

52. The following names indicate a family provenance from Catalonia but outside theboundaries of Empúries: Astrug de Cotlliure, Astrug de Sant Llorenç, Bonet, son ofVidal de Monells, Jucef, son of Mosse de Lleida, Isaac de La Bisbal, Llobell deMercadal, Mayr Ravall, son of Isaac Ravall iudeus of Girona.

53. For the Salandí family, AHG Ca 156b, fols. 8v, 15v, 31r, 41r, 54r, AHG Ca 206, fols.3r, 89r, 90r and AHG Ca 2085, fol. 16r; for Jucef Malet, AHG Ca 156b, fols. 8v, 31r,41r and AHG Ca 206, fol. 67r.

54. AHG Ca 156b, fol. 21v. Unfortunately no dates are provided for the ancillarydocuments requested.


55. Klein, Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power, 59–61.56. AHG Ca 14, fol. 53v.57. Klein, Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power, 173–74; Emery, Jews of

Perpignan, 27–28.58. AHG Ca 206, fol. 74v: “Bonastrucho de Porta iudeo Gerundensi.” The size of the

dowry was not excessively large in comparison to those found among importantJewish families in Barcelona, see infra note 69.

59. On Isaac de Castelló, see Klein, Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power, 120–21;and Bernard Septimus, “Isaac de Castellón: Poet, Kabbalist, Communal Combat-ant” in this volume. An individual named Astrug de Castelló, son of deceased Isaacde Castelló, was active ca. 1280 at Castelló d_ Empúries, although the identificationof the deceased with Isaac de Castelló the poet remains speculative, AHG Ca 1, fol.12r and AHG Ca 194, fol. 9r.

60. Shlomo Pick, “Jewish Aristocracy in Southern France,” Revue des études juives, 161(2002):106-17; supra note 22.

61. Denjean, Juifs et chrétiens, 87–97.62. While this is not the place to enter into a detailed analysis of Jewish credit, the

following chart summarizes the proportion of Jewish loans (identified by records ofnew loans, repayments, and quittances) in the registers of Castelló and Pereladagranted to creditors based on the residence of the borrowers or by their noblestatus. “Urban” refers to residents of Castelló or Peralada. The results correspondvery closely to the contemporary pattern for the much larger neighboring town ofPerpinyà; see Emery, Jews of Perpignan, 39.

63. AHG Ca 1, fols. 22v, 31r and AHG Ca 2087, fols. 37r, 66v.64. AHG Ca 3, fol. 40r.65. Ray, Sephardic Frontier, 39-45; Meyerson, Jews in an Iberian Frontier Kingdom,

12–15.66. AHG Ca 14, fols. 59r-v, 61r, 63v and AHG Ca 1033, fol. 45v.67. On the de Torre family, see Klein, Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power, 167-

69, 178-80. Abraham de Torre does not appear on the genealogical chart inappendix A, but because Jewish wills from Barcelona have not survived, precisereconstruction of family descent is illusive.

68. In 1282 Abraham de Torre purchased cloth worth 1,250 solidi of Barcelona oncredit, AHG, secció Peralada (Pe hereafter) 10, fol. 14r. Abraham together with hisson Vidal were obligated to the king in eight separate lending agreements, AHG Ca14, fol. 49v.

69. AHG Pe 1035, fols. 1v-2r. For the importance of Jewish wives in establishing widerfamily networks, see Winer, Women Wealth and Community, 84, 91-93, 97–98. Thesize of the dowry was equivalent to that of Christian patricians in Barcelona; seeBensch, Barcelona and its Rulers, 355–56.

70. Klein, Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power, 170–71.

Loans by Jews to Christians

Total Urban Rural Nobility Unknown/other

at Castelló (1261–1290) 325 89 (27%) 153 (47%) 14 (4%) 69 (21%)at Peralada (1282–1290) 86 14 (16%) 34 (40%) 4 (5%) 34 (40%)


71. Josep Maria Font Rius, Cartas de población y franquicia (Barcelona-Madrid:Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 1969–1983), vol. 1, part 1, no. 312and vol. 1, part 2, 622–23; Llibre de privilegis de la Vila de Figueres (1267–1585),ed. Antoni Cobos Fajardo (Barcelona: Fundació Noguera, 2004), no. 3.

72. For later examples of itinerant Jews maintaining several residences, see Mark D.Meyerson, A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2004), 90–95.

73. The three brothers Nissim, Bonjuda, and Vidal Navarra also became residents ofFigueres, Cabanes, and Peralada, respectively. AHG Ca 14, fol. 43r; AHG Ca 1944,fol. 78r; AHG Pe 1035, fols. 25r, 33v-34r. For similar cooperation among brothers inlending and trade at Barcelona and Perpinyà, see Klein, Jews, Christian Society,and Royal Power, 175 and Winer, Women, Wealth and Community, 98.

74. Arxiu de la Corona d_Aragó, Barcelona, Cancelleria (ACA Canc. hereafter), reg. 62,fols. 136v-137r, cited in Régné, History of the Jews, no. 1316. Partially transcribedin José Pella y Forgas, Historia del Ampurdán (2nd ed., Olot: Aubert Impressor,1980), 602–603, note 3.

75. The Castelló notarial registers to 1290 contain references to 101 loans to Christiansfrom Abraham de Torre or his son in the county of Empúries, by far the largestnumber of loans for any Jewish lender. The allegation that the de Torre familycommitted fraud may have encouraged them to register their transactions withparticular scrupulousness, but the remarkable number of surviving recordsnevertheless makes the importance of their credit operations clear.

76. AHG Pe 1, fols. 68v-69r: “per iustitia tertium curie deberetur secundumconsuetudinem usum et obseruanciam Petralate.”

77. ACA Canc., reg. 81, fol. 87r, cited in Régné, History of the Jews, no. 2107.78. ADM Amp., legajo 74, no. 10054 : “intendentes repellere totaliter timorem et

suspicionem predicti mali exempli recipimus omnes iudeos predicte uille nostreCastilionis et tocius comitatus nostri...sub nostra speciali protectione salua gardaatque deffensione.”

79. Small hole in parchment.80. Small hole in parchment.
