Jewish Life Under Feudal Order

In feudal society the Jews were not allowed to work the land. This led to them having mobility because they were not tied to the land like the Christian serfs that worked the land. It also led to the Jews living in urban communities with an internal autonomy. Life centered almost entirely in the Jewish community and security for the individual Jew was for all practical purposes unattainable without membership in such a community. (1) These communities were dependent on rabbinic law for order and stability and regularly accumulated wealth for providing tax revenue to Christian authorities who protected the community from assault and plunder. (2) The Jews in feudal society mostly relied on their occupation as merchants to obtain money to pay the communities taxes.

Under feudal order Jewish society was a radially organized network of essentially autonomous but intimately connected urban communities, by necessity egalitarian in social philosophy, that accorded highest social status only to men who combined religious learning and piety with commercial talent and political wisdom. (3) The need to share the expense of extraordinary or even ordinary taxes levied by an external power to whom the communities were collectively responsible was often at the root of attempts to organize and coordinate the autonomous communities. (4) These communities regulated just about everything in their social world, such as the raising of funds, through taxation, to cover all expenses and financial obligations; and the development and administration of communal, charitable, educational, and religious institutions, for probably the first time in history exclusively on Jewish law. (5) Thus rabbinic scholarship was not a peripheral interest, not a mere luxury for the Jews of Northern Europe, but the mainspring of their being, the essence of life itself. (6) Not only were communal policies instituted based on rabbinic law, but also based on consensus from the community.