‘They Shall Not Keep Their Doors or Windows Open’: Urban Space and the Dynamics of Conflict and Contact in Premodern Jewish–Christian Relations

Christians against Jews

Christian attacks on Jewish houses can be divided into two categories: those that were more or less spontaneous, and those that were planned in advance to some degree. The latter category includes the ritual stoning of Jewish houses, which was particularly common during Eastertide. Stonings were a recurrent phenomenon all over Europe, and, as early as 538, the Council of Orléans ordered Jews to stay in their houses from Holy Thursday to Easter Sunday. A more limited version of this rule, applying only on Good Friday, was later included in the Corpus Iuris Canonici, decreeing that ‘the Jews shall not keep their doors or windows open’. ⁶ In some places, such as the German lands, Jews were also put under curfew (and likewise had to keep their windows and doors shut) during other religious holidays, such as Corpus Christi. ⁷

Such measures carried symbolic overtones that would have been apparent to many people at the time. Windows, for instance, were often referred to as the ‘eyes of the house’, and the English word ‘window’ still reflects its origins in the Old Norse ‘wind-eye’. ⁸ Against the backdrop of this anthropomorphism, the shut windows of Jewish houses could be interpreted as a reflection of the theological idea that the Jewish condition was per se a state of blindness – an idea most infamously epitomized in the Christian iconography of the blindfolded synagoga. Doors, too, were highly symbolic in this context, especially against the backdrop of the New Testament story of St Stephen’s martyrdom: according to the author of Acts, the Jews, unwilling to listen to St Stephen, ‘stopped their ears, and ran upon him with one accord, and cast him out of the city, and stoned him’ (Acts 7:57–8). Drawing on the analogy between doors and ears, which was popular in both architectural and medical discourse during the early modern period, Christian commentators explicating this New Testament story remarked that the ‘Jews stopped the doors [of their bodies], when they stopped their ears’. ⁹ Such polemics went hand in hand with the idea that in a Christian world, Jews should no longer be the perpetrators of stonings (as in the New Testament), but rather the victims of such acts. ¹⁰

The polemic of Christian theologians aside, laws requiring Jews to stay in their locked-up houses also had a pragmatic aspect in that they were meant to prevent an escalation of violence between Christians and Jews. ¹¹ Indeed, while Jews were among the scapegoats of medieval society, they were nonetheless needed. According to a theological line of argument that went back to Saint Augustine, Jews were loathsome, but were nonetheless necessary ‘witnesses’ to the truth of the Christian faith. ¹² Economic interests also came into play: the Church’s strict views on usury meant that the allegedly immoral but economically indispensable task of moneylending was often left to Jews. In a society in which it was not uncommon for people to be ‘permanently in debt’, governments – and many ordinary citizens, too – understood the importance of Jewish moneylending for the functioning of the economy. ¹³

It is this ambiguity of the medieval attitude towards Jews that also characterized the ritual attacks against Jewish houses during Christian holidays. On the one hand, Jews were presented, and even singled out, as legitimate targets of public anger; on the other hand, it was usually not in the interest of the authorities to cause substantial harm to local Jews or to make them flee. It is only against the backdrop of this ambiguity that one can understand why the stoning of Jewish houses during Eastertide was both a very popular and a highly regulated ritual. In medieval Italy, where the stoning of Jewish houses came to be known as sassaiola (from ‘sasso’, stone), these attacks constituted, in the words of Ariel Toaff, ‘a game’ that ‘had its set script, its rules, which were scrupulously observed by the whole cast, and a rigid framework which left no leeway for spontaneous action’. ¹⁴ Indeed, the Church – often in collaboration with the secular authorities – actively encouraged the stoning of Jewish houses during Eastertide, while making it clear that bloodshed or other forms of excessive violence would not be tolerated during these events. As a result, in many places only children and young adults were allowed to throw stones. ¹⁵ The case of medieval Spain is particularly instructive in this respect: although the stoning of Jewish homes constituted a firmly rooted part of Holy Week there, these assaults did not fundamentally change or call into question the fact that Jews and Christians largely lived together as neighbours for the rest of the year (and sometimes peacefully so). As David Nirenberg has argued, the restrictions on the stoning of Jewish houses in medieval Spain may even be seen as a symptom of a ‘constructive relationship between conflict and coexistence’. ¹⁶ In other words, the sassaiola, based as it was on a set of strict rules, functioned as a way to vent popular anti-Jewish resentment without fundamentally upsetting the fragile modus vivendi between Jews and Christians.

Indeed, as long as the sassaiola followed the traditional script, many Jews put up with this ritual. A telling episode comes from Spoleto in the 1510s, where the local Jewish community, in the run-up to Holy Week, sent a petition to the city council regarding the upcoming sassaiola. The petition was not meant to prevent the sassaiola; the Jewish leaders only urged the council to reaffirm the ban on adult participation in the ritual – not least because there were fears that adults would seize the opportunity to loot Jewish banks – and threatened to leave the city otherwise. The city council responded by emphasizing the legitimacy of the sassaiola as an old custom while also reiterating that only those under the age of 15 would be allowed to engage in the stoning; adults were threatened with a fine. ¹⁷

Precisely because the sassaiola was a recurrent event, Jewish residents were able to take precautions along the lines prescribed by the authorities, for instance by closing their shutters and doors tightly. Unannounced, spontaneous attacks against Jewish houses, which occurred throughout Europe, were therefore much more dangerous. Overall, spontaneous attacks, whether carried out by individuals or by groups, seem to have accounted for the majority of assaults, and they occurred in a broad range of contexts. ¹⁸ For heuristic purposes, we may distinguish three different patterns.

First, some assaults were committed out of personal animosity between a Christian and a Jew, sometimes aggravated by intoxication. Consider the case of the Jew Hertzig Abraham from the small town of Löwen in Westphalia (1705). Abraham had sent his son to the store of a Christian grocer to buy flour. Another customer, a Christian by the name of Caspar Nübel, suddenly took the boy’s jar and broke it to pieces by throwing it on the ground. The Jewish boy complained loudly, but Nübel drew his dagger and threatened him with the words: ‘Whether one kills you or a dog, there really is no difference’. When the alarmed father arrived at the scene, Nübel receded but announced that the Jew’s ‘windows [would] soon rattle’. A few days later, Abraham’s windows were indeed smashed during the night. When the authorities later arrested the intoxicated Nübel, who was an obvious suspect, he confessed the deed. ¹⁹

Other attacks were committed as revenge for alleged blasphemy on the part of Jews, sometimes targeting the entire community. Consider, for example, the case of the Jews of Celle, in Lower Saxony, whose windows were smashed with stones by an angry mob in 1699 when news broke that one Jewish criminal had made blasphemous remarks at his execution. ²⁰ A century earlier, in Mantua, a Christian mob stoned the house of a Jewish banker who was accused of defacing paintings of Christian saints on the façade of his house. ²¹ Assaults committed as part of religious conflict were particularly likely to happen during Shabbat so as to deliberately disturb the commandment to rest during this day of the week. ²²

Finally, there were those who attacked Jewish houses out of social envy or economic crisis. Assaults by frustrated debtors fall into this category, and indeed these attacks frequently targeted the houses and commercial premises of affluent Jewish individuals. In 1629, in the small town of Finale in Northern Italy, a group of young men smashed the windows of a Jewish moneylender. ²³ Indeed, young men, especially students, were particularly likely to overspend and borrow money from Jews. ²⁴ The unwillingness to repay the Jewish lenders sometimes even led to attacks on the Jewish community at large. In eighteenth-century Herborn, a university town in Hesse, angry and debt-ridden students hurled addled eggs in their attack on the Jewish community. ²⁵ A few decades earlier, students in Vienna vandalized the Jewish neighbourhood, smashing windows and looting stores. ²⁶ By contrast, the so-called ‘Hep-Hep riots’ that swept through the German lands in the late 1810s were driven primarily by lower-class resentment against Jews and their alleged economic dominancy; these riots, too, frequently involved the smashing of windows of Jewish houses. ²⁷ In the small Hessian town of Windecken, around that time, angry villagers even used axes to batter the windows and doors of Jewish houses. ²⁸

Apart from causing considerable material damage, many of these assaults left the Jewish residents terrified. Among the oldest extant accounts describing the Jewish experience of such attacks are reports about the pogroms committed by the crusader army in the Rhineland during the First Crusade of 1096. An anonymous Jewish eyewitness from Mainz described his horror at the sight of crusaders who ‘came with their insignia and banners before our homes’, making the Jewish residents ‘afraid to step on the threshold of our homes’. ²⁹ When entrapped Jewish women began to throw stones through the windows, the crusaders, vastly outnumbering them, hurled the stones back: ‘The women were struck by the stones, and their bodies and faces were completely bruised and cut’. Eventually, the crusaders managed to break the doors and slaughtered whoever had survived the stoning. ³⁰

One of the most striking depictions of the terror suffered by Jewish residents during such assaults was painted by a Christian artist of the Renaissance: in his Corpus Domini predella from Urbino (ca. 1465), Italian painter Paolo Uccello depicted a medieval anti-Jewish legend revolving around a Jewish pawnbroker who had accepted a host as pawn and later desecrated it. The second scene of the predella shows a group of armed Christians breaking into the house of the Jew to punish him and his family for the blasphemous deed. Throughout the other scenes of the altarpiece, Uccello displayed little sympathy for the Jewish protagonists, whose eventual execution he depicted with gruesome detail. Still, in the scene where the Christians breaks down the Jewish family’s house door, the horror in the faces of the entrapped Jewish family is rendered with poignant realism. ³¹

This resonates with the testimony of Jewish victims of such assaults. In 1567, for instance, a Jew in the small village of Assenheim in Hesse told the authorities that he and his family could no longer continue to live there because ‘on several occasions great damage had been done to me as a result of the smashing of my windows’ (zum offtermhall grosser schadt zugefugt worden, in dem daß mir die fenster ausgeworffen). ³² There are also textual accounts from later periods describing what Jewish victims felt during such assaults. The noted German-Jewish publisher and writer Leopold Sonnemann (1831–1909), who grew up in rural Franconia, recalled vividly how, during anti-Jewish riots in his childhood, he and his family ‘waited behind blocked-up doors, with two loaded guns, for the mob to arrive’. ³³ And his Jewish contemporary Clara Geissmar (1844–1911), who grew up in a small town in southern Germany, recalled from her childhood:

One evening, when my parents were having dinner, a stone was flung through the window, but no one was injured. My mother was in greatest commotion. She was filled with outrage and bitterness over the fact that someone had dared to do such a thing to her husband’s house (she tended to put herself in the background). She refused to have the broken pane repaired. Everyone should see what had been done to our house, and everyone should be ashamed. Over these thoughts, she became very melancholic. ³⁴

The experience of powerlessness and humiliation was incisive for Jewish victims, and as the case of Clara Geissmar’s mother makes clear, it was sometimes not just windows that were shattered, but also the belief in living in peace together with one’s Christian neighbours. However, while the authorities may not have felt much empathy for the victims, they did not shut their eyes and let the offenders go unpunished. Quite the contrary: unlike the Eastertide stonings, which fulfilled, within strictly drawn confines, a politically acceptable role for venting anti-Jewish resentment, all other assaults against Jewish houses were at the same time assaults on the public order and a violation of the legal rights held by the Jewish community – rights that the authorities had often granted out of economic considerations. When authorities were strong enough to punish such assaults, they usually did. There even were rulers and governments that explicitly outlawed any throwing of stones at the houses of Jews. Unsurprisingly, rulers who adopted this stance – such as the duchess Margherita of Savoy in the late sixteenth century – could count on the profound gratitude of the local Jewish community: in the case of Savoy, this found expression in Hebrew poems singing the praises of the duchess. ³⁵

It should be noted that there were also clergymen who disapproved of the stoning of Jewish houses, such as Felix Fabri, the fifteenth-century Dominican monk from Ulm. To be sure, Fabri was not a philo-Semite, but when he made a pilgrimage to Palestine, then under Muslim rule, he found a world turned upside down: he reported that Christian pilgrims usually did not dare to leave their houses on Friday, the traditional day of prayer for Muslims. This experience, in turn, made Fabri more sympathetic to the condition of Jews in Europe: ‘[O]n this day we did not dare to show ourselves out of doors, but kept out of sight in our own places, even as on Good Friday Jews are shut up by themselves, and are not suffered to go about the streets’. ³⁶ Fabri concluded that violent acts against other religions were ultimately not a sign of strength, but rather a pointless provocation that could seriously jeopardize the modus vivendi between different religious groups. ³⁷

Of course, most Christians, even among those who went abroad, never experienced what Fabri did. But while empathy with Jews was often lacking, the legal framework enabled Jews to seek justice. Christians who assaulted Jewish houses during times other than Eastertide typically faced a fine and were also obliged to compensate their victims for the damage. In some cases, offenders were even banned from the city. ³⁸ It was common among authorities to use such incidents to issue warnings to potential emulators. ³⁹ Occasionally, the authorities even responded with capital punishment, for instance when delinquents targeted high-ranking members of the Jewish community whose well-being was of vital (economic) interest to the state. A case in point is the authorities’ harsh response to the attack on the house of the influential Habsburg court Jew Samuel Oppenheimer in Vienna in 1700. This episode began with a brawl on Oppenheimer’s premises between a Christian chimneysweeper and a Jew. When Christian passers-by noticed the brawl, they rushed to support the chimneysweeper, and, soon enough, in the account of a contemporary, ‘a veritable cascade of stones’ hit Oppenheimer’s house and its windows, followed by forced entry and looting. Oppenheimer and his family managed to hide in an underground tunnel. When the city guards regained control of the situation, the government ordered that the Christian ringleaders be hanged from the iron grille over the entrance of Oppenheimer's house, ‘as a deterrent’. ⁴⁰

Authorities also used such incidents to exhort Jews to stay out of the public eye and not to provoke Christians’ anger. In places where Jews were confined to a walled neighbourhood, or ghetto, such orders were easier to implement, and, clearly, the desire of authorities to regulate and minimize Jewish–Christian interaction in the urban space was one of the main factors behind the establishment of separate – and often walled – Jewish quarters during the early modern period. The Jewish community typically had to pay Christian guards, whose task it was to shut the ghetto’s gate every night and to keep an eye on windows facing the Christian surroundings so as to prevent any conflicts between Jews and Christians. ⁴¹

Even in cities with ghettos, despite the considerable amount of regulation, the apertures of houses remained potential sites of conflicts. For one thing, the 1541 charter for the Jews of Frankfurt suggestively specified that the Jews ‘must not pour or throw any impure matters’ onto adjacent Christian premises. ⁴² For another, Christian assaults on Jewish properties still occurred, especially when the security mechanisms meant to separate the ghetto from its Christian environment broke down. With respect to Frankfurt, the infamous Fettmilch uprising of 1614 is a case in point: the uprising led to several days of looting in the Judengasse and even to the temporary expulsion of the Jews; it was only brought to an end by imperial intervention. ⁴³

Jews against Jews

The evidence presented thus far has revolved primarily around attacks by Christians against Jews, but it is important to bear in mind that early modern Jewish communities also saw a considerable amount of internal conflict and violence, which at times resulted in damage similar to that caused by Christian assaults. Jewish communities in the premodern period were generally more violent than many historians of Jewish history have tended to note, and there were various reasons for this violence. The limitations on the professions that Jews could work in often resulted in stiff economic competition within the Jewish community, which in turn fuelled internal conflicts and tensions. Social inequality was the inevitable result of the plutocratic tendencies that characterized the internal structure of many Jewish communities. And in places where Jews lived in ghettos, the tensions were further aggravated by the spatial concentration of the community in an enclosed and often overcrowded district.

In mid-eighteenth-century Frankfurt am Main, for instance, the local Jewish community was divided between supporters of the two powerful and wealthy Jewish families, Kulp and Kann, both of which maintained tight-knit networks of lower-class supporters who were economically dependent on them. When, in 1751, supporters of the Kann camp staged a Purim Spiel that openly caricatured the leaders of the Kulp faction, clashes ensued in the Judengasse, beginning with the smashing of windows and ending with members of both sides being seriously injured. ⁴⁴ Purim was an especially likely time for such clashes to erupt, with people in high spirits and consuming alcohol; so was Simchat Tora, the annual holiday celebrating the completion of a Torah reading cycle. On Simchat Tora in 1724, two Jews in the Austrian city of Eisenstadt began to throw stones in the Jewish neighbourhood; from the surviving records, it is unclear whether they intended to cause damage, but in any case, the windows of a Jew by the name of Israel Modern were broken. A Jewish court sentenced the two offenders to donate candles to the synagogue and to pay for the replacement of Israel’s window. In addition, the judge handed out a fine that was calculated in a rather imaginative way: both offenders had to pay 53 groschen, a fine reflecting the numeric value of the Hebrew word even (stone). ⁴⁵

To be sure, such attacks were not limited to holidays. Any ordinary night provided opportunities. In Florence in 1621, a Jew by the name of Leone smashed the windows of his coreligionist Ventura in the middle of the night because he was in love with Ventura’s daughter, who had been married off to a more affluent man. Due to lack of evidence, a Christian court acquitted Leone, but soon afterward, Raffaelo, Ventura’s son-in-law, took justice into his own hands and assaulted Leone while the latter was engrossed in a conversation in the street. Leone barely managed to make it back to his house, where he locked himself up. But this did not stop Raffaello: he broke the door and continued to batter Leone. ⁴⁶ Similar brawls happened elsewhere in Jewish communities, sometimes even on Shabbat. At the height of the eighteenth-century tensions in the Frankfurt Judengasse, a brawl between members of the two rival camps occurred on a Shabbat afternoon; within minutes, the whole street was in turmoil, with altercations unfolding in front of various houses. From the windows of their houses, members of the two rival families were shouting instructions as well as expletives into the street. Someone even poured water onto the brawlers, who then hurled stones at the window in retaliation. Moderate community members who rushed to the site and exclaimed that it was ‘a sin and a disgrace’ to beat each other and to smash windows on Shabbat were ignored or shouted down. ⁴⁷

Even when internal tensions did not escalate in such drastic ways, windows were sites charged with potential for conflict. More than any other part of the house, they lent themselves to the insulting of passers-by while keeping the insulting party at safe distance. The fact that such insults would inevitably be seen and heard by passers-by amplified the dimension of the humiliation: indeed, we know that in Christian society insults hurled from windows were often seen as graver than those made within the house (where no one except for the quarrelling party would hear them). This view seems to have been widespread in Jewish communities as well. ⁴⁸ Clearly, Jewish offenders knew exactly what they were doing (and what the public effect would be) when they chose windows as sites for insulting their opponents. In the eighteenth-century Frankfurt Judengasse, defamatory puppets, representing family members of the two rival clans, were hanged out of windows with nooses for everyone to see, accompanied by curses. ⁴⁹

At other times, Jews in the street provoked fellow Jewish residents by shouting insults up to the window. In the aforementioned case from Florence, Leone took revenge in this manner: after suffering the assault by Raffaello, he appeared, together with friends, in front of Raffaello’s house when the latter was standing at the window. Leone and his friend began to hurl insults at Raffaello – calling him, among other things, a ‘fucking cuckold’ (becco fottuto) – until city guards arrived at the scene. ⁵⁰ In Frankfurt, the Jew Moses Benedict Beyfuß was called by an enemy to the window, where he was greeted with a stream of insults: ‘Moshe Dirty-Nose [Rotznaß], come down! When will you be my servant? Let us drink a glass of wine!’ Another resident of the Judengasse, Nathan Meyer Juda, told the police that one of his enemies regularly appeared in front of his house to hurl curses at him and his wife, and when his wife shut the windows, the miscreant would continue to shout from an apartment on the other side of the street. ⁵¹ However, women could also be found on the offending side: in eighteenth-century Eisenstadt, the wife of Beer Löb Lackenbach, who had recently been convicted for his involvement in a fight, smashed the windows of the Jew who had reported her husband to the police. The judges found both Beer and his wife guilty in this scheme. ⁵²

Jews who were said to be contemplating conversion or to be entertaining heterodox religious ideas were particularly likely to suffer such assaults at the hands of fellow Jews. In eighteenth-century Minden (Westphalia), a group of Jews schemed to pour three buckets of water out of the windows of the synagogue on Shabbat at the moment their coreligionist Moses Ruben walked by. The pouring was meant as a travesty of baptism, which Moses, according to some, was contemplating. While we do not know whether these allegations against Moses were true, the sources record that he was infuriated by the pouring: he got involved in a brawl with the offenders and cursed their female relatives as ‘witches’ and ‘whores’. ⁵³ A few decades earlier, in Amsterdam, the Jewish ‘freethinker’ Uriel da Costa – who had expressed views that the rabbis perceived as dangerously close to Christian theology – became the victim of similar mocking rituals. In his autobiography he recalls how several Jewish youths, at the instigation of their parents and rabbis, attacked his house in a way that mimicked the traditional Eastertide stoning of Jewish houses: ‘They assembled together before my Doors, flinging Stones at the Windows, and doing every thing they could to disturb and annoy me, so that I could not live at quiet in my own House’. ⁵⁴

Jews against Christians

Christian individuals who aroused the anger of Jewish residents could likewise become targets of Jewish revenge. Early modern Jews shared the culture of honour that played a key role in Christian society, and there is ample evidence to suggest that Jews were willing to defend their honour, especially if they had been provoked. ⁵⁵ Here again, the apertures of house could turn into (convenient) outlets of anger and revenge. In 1641 in Vienna, for instance, a Christian student who made offensive remarks in the Jewish quarter soon found himself encircled by Jews who had rushed to the site and were now ready to give him just deserts while other Jews shouted from the window of an adjacent house: ‘Beat the daylights out of him’. ⁵⁶ There are many other examples of early modern Jews flinging stones or spitting from windows onto Christians in the streets of the Jewish quarter. ⁵⁷ In some places, incidents at windows, with Jews on the offending side, even happened outside the Jewish neighbourhood: in the small Westphalian town of Hausberge, for instance, a group of young Jews flung stones at the house of a Christian woman, though we do not know the reasons for this. The Jewish offenders were caught and had to pay a fine of nine groschen. ⁵⁸

Incidents of this kind during religious ceremonies were particularly worrisome for the authorities. Premodern cities – certainly Catholic ones – were, to use Peter Burke’s phrase, ‘procession cultures’. ⁵⁹ Religious processions were exceedingly important events in the life of a premodern city: they were necessary to please God while also allowing the Church to rally its flock by presenting its holiest objects in public. This included the solemn presentation of the Host, typically carried around in a lavish monstrance made for this purpose. According to the Church, Jews had no right to see the Host and to benefit from its sacramental power; even worse, there were fears that Jewish gazes, if permitted, could have a defiling effect. As early as 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council therefore ordered Jews to keep their doors and windows shut when the Host was carried through the city as part of a procession, a decree that was reiterated by later Church Councils. ⁶⁰

To further humiliate Jewish residents, some governments ordered them to decorate their windows in honour of the procession before shutting them. ⁶¹ Such degrading policies had additional potential to provoke what Elliott Horowitz has called ‘reckless rites’, that is, deliberate acts by Jews mocking and sometimes even targeting Christian symbols such as the Host or the crucifix. ⁶² Indeed, conflicts between Christians and Jews during Christian ceremonies occurred with considerable frequency – and they often began at the window. ⁶³ For the historian it is not always clear whether the acts that triggered such conflicts were intentional or accidental; even for contemporaries the line was sometimes blurred. Consider, for instance, the case of the Jewish moneylender Zaccaria d’Isaaco in the Tuscan town of Empoli, who was arrested in 1518 after pouring the contents of his chamber pot onto the canopy protecting the Host during a Corpus Christi procession. The Christian judges found it impossible to determine whether Zaccaria had deliberately poured the excrement on the canopy, or whether it was just an accident. In the end, Zaccaria was given the benefit of the doubt. Still, he had to pay a fine of 10 florins to finance a terracotta tabernacle showing the Virgin and Christ. An inscription was added to this statue indicating that this was the ‘price the Jews had to pay for their error’ (‘prezzo del gl’ebrei per loro erore’). ⁶⁴

Authorities were clearly less inclined to show leniency when a Jew involved in such an incident was of low station. In Frankfurt am Main in 1712, this was the case for a Jewish woman who was reported to have spat three times from the window onto a crucifix that was carried through the street in a funeral procession. Despite protests by Jewish community leaders, who argued that the woman tended to be absentminded and that she had not acted with bad intentions, she was sentenced to be flogged with rods and then to be put under house arrest. ⁶⁵ This punishment was in line with regulations that were in effect elsewhere in Europe, such as an imperial decree issued in eighteenth-century Vienna, which ordered:

[I]f a Jew happens to be outdoors when the Venerabile [the Host in a monstrance] is carried through the street, he has to go into the closest house immediately; … if he happens to stand in his window, he and all other household members must go inside immediately, so that they can neither see anything nor be seen from the street. [Transgressions of this order] shall be punished with considerable fines or even with corporeal punishment and expulsion. ⁶⁶

Such punishments were no doubt grave, but ultimately much graver was the scenario in which the authorities failed to intervene, thereby letting the enraged Christian populace take justice into its own hands. This is what happened in Cordoba in 1473, when a Jew was claimed to have dropped water (or urine, according to others) from his house onto the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary as a procession passed through his street. The mob violence that ensued resulted in the looting of Jewish houses; what is more, this riot was commemorated in Cordoba with pride well into the twentieth century (at least, well into the days of the Fascist regime under Franco). ⁶⁷ Popular unrest also broke out in Venice in 1625, though the situation was slightly different: certain apartments of the ghetto overlooked a street through which the sacraments were carried every day to be given to the sick, and allegations arose that the Jewish residents ‘would look out of their windows and blaspheme, with great prejudice to the reverence owed to God’. Although the Venetian authorities eventually got the unrest under control, this episode had political repercussions in that it led to a temporary standstill in the negotiations over the renewal of the charter for the local Jewish community. ⁶⁸

Windows and Everyday Interactions

It is no coincidence that episodes like the ones described here occurred, time and again, at windows. Of all the architectural features of the premodern city, windows were particularly likely to become sites of conflict, but also sites for other, more positive forms of interaction, since it was very common among both Christians and Jews to stand or sit at the window for extended periods of time. ⁶⁹

Two reasons for the importance of windows in everyday life stand out. First of all, there were economic incentives to be close to one’s window or to carry out certain tasks there: in the age before electrification there was more natural light available there than anywhere else in the house, and a good number of economic and domestic activities required good lighting. ⁷⁰ Precisely because Jewish neighbourhoods – especially those that could only expand vertically because they were walled – tended to be densely built up, these issues were particularly pressing. The importance of natural light is emphasized, for instance, in the anonymous Hebrew Book of the Rules of the Moneylender and the Borrower, probably written in the fifteenth century, which exhorted pawnbrokers to abstain from assessing the worth of valuables by moon- or candlelight. Only daylight, according to this author, was acceptable for making a qualified assessment. ⁷¹ At the same time, Jewish moneylenders and pawnbrokers were also the one group that had to take the greatest security precautions with respect to their windows. ⁷² The author of the abovementioned treatise on moneylending therefore recommended the insertion of iron grilles and, if the lender was a wealthy person with a large house, the aligning of windows towards the courtyard rather than the streets. ⁷³

For other professions, such security concerns were less pressing, but light was just as important: the textile industry, a key sector of the Jewish economy in many places, is one example. This is vividly illustrated by the case of the seventeenth-century Jewish textile producer Pinchas Netto. Originally from the Netherlands, Netto had moved to the Italian city of Reggio in 1665 after receiving a ducal licence to produce silk stockings there. Four years later, Netto, along with all other local Jews, was ordered to move to the newly established ghetto of Reggio. For Netto this move brought significant economic challenges. As he pointed out in a petition to the authorities, the new apartment offered much less space for his work instruments; even worse, however, there was much less natural light than in his previous flat. We do not know how the authorities responded, but it is not difficult to imagine that in the meantime, Netto – in search of a ‘well-lit space’ (luocho lucido) – would have tried to work as close to his windows as possible. ⁷⁴ The same assumption can be made with respect to doctors who needed daylight to perform certain medical operations, such as uroscopy or dental examinations. ⁷⁵ And, of course, it also held true for scholars and rabbis, whose day-to-day work consisted predominantly of reading and writing. Tellingly, the distinguished Venetian rabbi Leon Modena complained bitterly when, in his old age, he had to relocate to a ‘dark and poorly lit dwelling’ which he sarcastically referred to as the ‘Cave of Makhpela’. ⁷⁶ An entirely windowless dwelling would have been unacceptable to Jews like Modena, who knew that the Talmud explicitly prohibited praying in a house without windows. ⁷⁷

There were also social reasons that led both Christians and Jews to work near the window or to spend their leisure time there. In the age before mass media and telephones, being at the window was essential for staying informed about what was going on in one’s neighbourhood. ⁷⁸ Upper-class houses and apartments could afford balconies or porticoes; in all other cases, windows served as the most important interface between street and house. As an eighteenth-century architectural theorist put it, windows ‘foster sociability between people within and people outside of the building’. ⁷⁹ This function of windows for the gathering of information is also reflected in early modern Jewish legends, such as the one about the twelfth-century rabbi Yehuda HeHasid, who – according to a story told in the popular Yiddish Mayse-Bukh – gained the local king’s recognition by demonstrating his supernatural ability to see from the window how crimes in distant parts of the city were unfolding. ⁸⁰ Such legends aside, we know with certainty that during Jewish festivities and other significant public events, the windows of Jewish neighbourhoods were packed with curious onlookers, much in the way that Christians flocked to their windows on analogous occasions. ⁸¹

It is hardly surprising, then, that windows were prime sites for interaction, both positive and negative, between Christians and Jews. The rise of ghettos did not change this fundamentally. First of all, not all Jewish neighbourhoods were walled ghettos, and even where Jews were confined to a segregated quarter, Christians could still freely walk around there during the day, when the gates were open. As a result, Christians and Jews would still see each other every day, even if they were, quite literally, not on the same eye level. In this context, it is perhaps not too far-fetched to argue that early modern windows fulfilled a function similar to that of the porch in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American South. Needless to say, the American South was a very different social and spatial setting than the one that we find in premodern European cities. But for heuristic purposes, it is interesting to note that the porch, much like the window in premodern Europe, served as a liminal space that sometimes facilitated informal communication between members of different social groups that would avoid communicating with each other in many other spatial settings, including in the street and within the house. Women of different racial backgrounds, for instance, could communicate at the porch. ⁸² Of course, this was a hierarchical form of communication, based as it was on the requirement that each party keep a certain distance. Still, it was communication.

The fact that windows – despite the conflict that often revolved around them – similarly facilitated contact between Christians and Jews is one of the reasons why early modern Christian authorities tried to regulate the appearance of Jews there. It was feared that without regulation, windows would make possible various kinds of unwanted exchanges (unwanted, at least, from the perspective of the authorities). First of all, there was the scenario of objects and persons clandestinely passing through these apertures. In the Tuscan town of Pitigliano, which during the early modern period was home to one of the largest Jewish communities in central Italy, the charter for the Jewish quarter specified that ‘Jews shall not be allowed to have windows facing the windows of Christians’, unless the Jewish houses featured iron grilles that made it impossible to climb through the window or throw anything out it. ⁸³

Windows also offered opportunities for conversations, and the authorities’ fears related to this scenario were particularly salient with respect to Jewish converts: in Catholic areas, such as Italy, Jews who had expressed interest in conversion or had just undergone this process were often temporarily housed in the Church-run ‘Catachumens’ House’ (Domus conversorum) where they would receive further instruction in the Christian faith. However, Church and state authorities feared that Jewish relatives and friends would come to the Catachumens’ House in an attempt to make the convert waver in this decision. This explains why Italian Catachumens’ Houses explicitly prohibited their residents from receiving letters – or from standing by the windows. ⁸⁴

Finally, there were also unwanted gazes that the authorities tried to prevent. In Treviso in the late 1430s, a Jewish banker by the name of Benedetto di Calimano got into trouble with Church authorities because the windows of his apartment allowed him to see the Eucharistic ceremony in the church across the street. Benedetto and other members of his household were accused of not keeping the windows shut during the elevation of the Eucharist; to make things even worse, they were said to have shown disrespect for the Host (though the sources do not indicate what exactly was meant by this). ⁸⁵ Benedetto’s saving grace was his economic status: the sentence is not recorded, but he must have received a relatively mild punishment, for we know that two years later he was in good standing again when the city renewed his banking licence. ⁸⁶ Similar problems presented themselves in the many rural villages in Southern Germany where Jews sometimes accounted for almost half of the population and often lived throughout the village. One such village was Pfersee, an important Jewish settlement outside of Augsburg, where the local Catholic priest in the seventeenth century complained repeatedly about the house of one Jew, Mauschi, who could look from his windows right into the church, which meant that Mauschi could see the Eucharist and other sacramental acts as he wished. Eventually, it was ordered that all windows of Jewish houses facing church property should be bricked up. ⁸⁷

In late sixteenth-century Venice, allegations arose that Jews in the ghetto committed indecent acts while standing by windows facing a nunnery. The Church authorities turned to the Venetian Senate, demanding that the windows be modified ‘in such a way that only light could be transmitted’ (redurle solamente a luce). ⁸⁸ Indeed, in the course of the sixteenth century, the Venetian authorities began to seal up the outward-facing windows of the ghetto, arguing that Jewish gazes caused ‘inconvenience’ to Christians and disturbed their ‘serenity’. ⁸⁹ In its colonies in the Mediterranean, which were constantly exposed to the threat of Ottoman raids, such fears also had concrete political dimensions: during the Venetian-Ottoman war at the end of the fifteenth century, the Venetian authorities – always anxious about alleged Jewish schemes in support of the Ottomans – were alarmed to learn that Jewish houses in the Venetian colony of Corfu flanked the city walls, and that some residents had pierced apertures into the city walls to serve as windows. The Venetian authorities feared that the Jews could use these windows to send signals to attackers, so they ordered that this practice be stopped. ⁹⁰ Similar anxieties seem to have existed in medieval Spain: in fourteenth-century Gerona, protests erupted when Jewish residents living in houses adjacent to the city walls began to insert windows into these walls. It was claimed that these new windows led to the spread of rank smells – clearly, a reference to the Christian stereotype of the ‘Jewish odour’ (foetor Judaicus) – but these allegations were probably just a thinly veiled excuse to seal the windows in the city walls, which were considered a military hazard given the ongoing Reconquista. ⁹¹

Focusing on the situation in Venice, Dana Katz has recently argued that ‘the conflicts over ghetto vistas … reveal the ongoing contestation between Christian and Jew, between social order and disorder. Only the Jews’ complete fenestral blindness could assure social order’. ⁹² This is certainly one aspect of the story, but one should not forget that the authorities’ attempts to regulate the gazes between Christians and Jews also affected Christians, as when Christian residents were told to wall up their windows looking out onto Jewish streets. ⁹³ And there were other religious and social minorities in early modern cities that were ordered, in similar fashion, to keep the outward windows of their houses shut during certain times (or even permanently): in Venice, for instance, this applied to the compound (fondaco) of the German merchant community – a good number of whom were Protestants and thus a religious minority in a Catholic city – as well as to the fondaco of the Turkish merchants. ⁹⁴

As far as Jews are concerned, it is important to take into account that Jewish authorities, too, sometimes had an active interest in regulating the form and function of windows, or even in what Katz calls ‘fenestral blindness’. On the one hand, there were security concerns: although the Talmud requires Jewish synagogues to have windows, medieval and early modern synagogues ‘often only had small windows’. ⁹⁵ This was partly due to fears of stonings and other forms of vandalism; there were also anxieties among rabbis that the sound of prayer – often mocked by Christians as ‘noise’ – could be heard in the street. ⁹⁶ Reflecting on the Zoharic prescription that a synagogue should have 12 windows, the widely travelled seventeenth-century rabbi Joseph Salomo Delmedigo remarked that he had never seen such a synagogue anywhere in Europe. ⁹⁷ Clearly, the relatively small number and size of windows in synagogues resulted in a low level of daylight in the interior, and, unsurprisingly, seats close to the windows were sometimes sold at higher prices than those in other parts of the synagogue. ⁹⁸

With respect to Jews’ domestic spaces, the fears leading to regulation were of a different kind: some Jewish leaders and rabbis shared the Church’s concern about Jewish residents seeing Christian symbols and sanctuaries from their windows, if for very different reasons. In the High Middle Ages, the Chasidei Ashkenaz – a Jewish movement that enjoyed considerable popularity in the German lands and which was known for its emphasis on piety and strict observance of religious commandments – actively encouraged the sealing up of all windows facing churches. Thus, rabbi Yehuda HeChasid, their spiritual leader, instructed his followers:

When building his house, a person should not install windows facing a church, for when he bends down to open the windows it will seem as if he were bowing to the church. Furthermore, he will always be turning toward the church in violation of the scripture, ‘Do not turn to false gods’ [Lev. 19:4]. ⁹⁹

There were also more mundane kinds of gazes that Jewish authorities were not inclined to tolerate. These included gazes among Jews themselves, especially among men and women. Consider the case of sixteenth-century Friedberg, home to one of the largest Jewish communities in Germany, where Jewish leaders and rabbis felt it necessary to order a Jewish resident by the name of Schmuel to keep certain windows of his apartment closed, namely those facing the mikve, the ritual bathing house. (The community’s order suggestively refers to ‘reasons well known to the members of the Jewish community council’.) ¹⁰⁰ In Christian and Jewish communities alike, windows were also an important liminal space for courting rituals – and these declarations of love were not welcome in a society in which families typically arranged marriages based on economic considerations rather than on mutual affection between the betrothed. ¹⁰¹

More problematically, windows of Jewish houses could become sites for encounters between Jewish prostitutes and their male clients. In Renaissance Ferrara, for instance, the leaders of the Jewish community sharply criticized the window appearances of a certain Shlomit B. Divri:

Men have come into her gates too, because she is an expert in stitching furrows [a Talmudic euphemism for sin], and some of them have even complained about her to the teacher, claiming that she winks at them and lewdly invites single fellows through the window. The teacher too saw her playing with them from window to window and, in particular, making love to Zimri. ¹⁰²

The situation was particularly delicate when such encounters involved Jewish prostitutes and Christian men – a constellation that was not at all uncommon even though it constituted a violation of both Christian and Jewish law. ¹⁰³ Even more dreaded among Jewish community leaders, however, was the scenario that an ordinary Jewish girl or woman could succumb to courting by a Christian suitor and leave the Jewish community. This almost happened in Modena in 1602, where Ludovico Mirandola, a Christian, maintained a romantic relationship with the Jewess Miriana Sanguinetti. At some point, Miriana declared that, out of love, she would convert to Christianity, but she later recanted. When the local inquisitors learned about this, they began an investigation. In the course of the investigations, the two lovers confessed that they had regularly (and clandestinely) met at the window of Miriana’s house. ¹⁰⁴ A similar case occurred in the Venetian ghetto in 1589, where a Christian named Giorgio Moreto wooed a Jewish girl by the name of Rachel. In this case, too, the Inquisition eventually began to investigate. Moreto, in his interrogation, recalled that when Rachel’s family became aware of the relation, ‘they barred the doors and balconies and engaged in a thousand intrigues and were determined to injure me’. ¹⁰⁵

Ironically, it was a Christian author – in fact, no less than Shakespeare – who captured most succinctly the fears shared by Jewish leaders, rabbis and parents concerning such scenarios. In The Merchant of Venice, the Jew Shylock exhorts his daughter Jessica, in no uncertain terms, to refrain from standing at the windows (II.5):

What are there masques? Hear you me Jessica,

Lock up my doors, and when you hear the drum

And the vile squealing of the wry-neck’d fife

Clamber not you up to the casements then

Nor thrust your head into the public street

To gaze on Christian fools with varnish’d faces.

However, Jessica defies her father’s order, encouraged by his servant Gobbo, who tells her:

Mistress, look out at window for all this, –

There will come a Christian by

Will be worth a Jewes eye.

Indeed, Jessica, courted by Lorenzo, a Christian, eventually abandons her father’s house – and also the Jewish faith – by climbing out through the window (II.6).

Conclusion

In early modern Europe, the apertures of houses were, in general, sites with vacillating social meaning, and this ambiguity also played out in Christian–Jewish relations: on the one hand, sites such as windows enabled interaction between Christians and Jews (and some of this interaction was unwanted by the authorities); on the other hand, windows could easily become sites of conflicts and violence (which, if excessive, were likewise a serious concern to the authorities).

Acts committed by Christians accounted for the majority of cases of violence against Jewish houses, as well as for some of the gravest incidents. But Jews also engaged in violence against Christians, as well as against fellow Jews. This last phenomenon of internal Jewish violence has received the least attention by historians. Much more attention, by contrast, has been devoted to the phenomenon of Christian violence against Jewish houses. As we have seen, it is precisely this phenomenon that played a key role in the disagreement between Robert Bonfil and Cecil Roth. However, both historians’ approaches have shortcomings: Roth’s account, with its emphasis on the pattern of reconciliation that supposedly followed such incidents, underestimates their psychological effect; as we have seen, there were window-smashings that left Jewish residents terrified and even traumatized. On the other hand, Bonfil’s account, with its emphasis on the deep, almost fundamental antagonism between Christians and Jews, does not take into account the broad range of other constellations aside from Jewish–Christian conflicts in which incidents such as window-smashing happened, including internal Jewish strife.

While it is true that the traditional Eastertide stoning was a violent ritual affecting Jews only, the authorities strictly controlled the way this ritual unfolded. This particular scenario aside, throwing stones at houses was a very common form of popular violence in premodern society at large, and broken windows were the order of the day. There were, for instance, other marginal groups, such as prostitutes, who frequently became victims of assaults on their houses. ¹⁰⁶ In fact, even the authorities themselves were targets of stonings: during riots and uprisings, protestors often threw stones at government buildings and their apertures. Chronicles from medieval and early modern Italian cities – many of which saw decades of bitter political infighting – are replete with accounts of such assaults on government buildings. ¹⁰⁷ It has even been said, more generally, that ‘medieval Italians were aficionados of the sassaiola’ and that ‘no local event, whether joyful or mournful, funeral or fair, festival of a patron saint or settling of accounts between rival factions … could be regarded complete without stones being thrown’. ¹⁰⁸

A similar mindset is found elsewhere in premodern Europe. ¹⁰⁹ In Ancien Régime France, assaults involving the flinging of stones against government buildings were a firmly established part of what has been called a political ‘culture of retribution’. ¹¹⁰ (Tellingly, the Fronde, the large-scale uprising against the House of Bourbon in the mid-seventeenth-century, took its name from the French word for ‘slingshot’.) In the English context, too, scholars have found a culture of ‘spectacular riot’ to which ‘window-breaking was endemic’. ¹¹¹ Finally, in the Holy Roman Empire, the issue of window-smashing was so frequent throughout all strata of society that it was treated by lawyers as a subject in its own right, significant enough to fill whole monographs. For instance, German jurist Johann Philipp Treiber published a treatise in 1701 with the telling title De Excussione Fenestrarum (‘Of the Smashing of Windows’) that saw several reprints in the first half of the eighteenth century. ¹¹²

This is not to downplay the effect of such incidents on affected Jewish residents, but rather to provide the historian with necessary context. Jewish houses were not the only targets of stonings, and historians are well advised to avoid depicting such incidents as a unique characteristic of Christian–Jewish conflict. Historians who focus on the tensions between premodern Christians and Jews – an important aspect of Christian–Jewish relations, to be sure, but certainly not the only one – will arrive at a more nuanced picture if they keep in mind that premodern societies generally tended to cultivate ‘hatred as a social institution’. ¹¹³

It is not the fact that Jewish houses were assaulted, then, but rather the frequency with which this happened in certain places that is the real issue at stake. In this context, there are also open questions for the historian, such as the question of the economic effects of window-smashing. Is there, for instance, a link between the frequency of such assaults and the fact that the métier of glazier occupied a prominent role in the spectrum of Jewish professions? In the Byzantine Empire, the sale of glass was ‘a privileged Jewish trade’ as early as the fifth century, and there is evidence to suggest that in the medieval West, too, Jews were involved in the trade and production of glass. ¹¹⁴ In the early modern period, glassmaking was among the relatively few craft activities in which Jews were officially allowed to engage. From census information collected in Prague in 1546, for instance, we know that eight Jewish window-makers worked in the city; elsewhere in the Holy Roman Empire, records from as early as the fifteenth century confirm the existence of the Jewish surname ‘Glaser’ (glazier) and ‘Fensterflicker’ (literally: ‘window-patcher’). ¹¹⁵ As late as the 1790s, an official census in the Prussian province of Posen showed that 35 per cent of glaziers were Jewish, and in Lublin around the same time only one Christian is said to have been active in this profession, as compared to 30 Jews. ¹¹⁶

Jewish glassmakers sold their products to whomever could afford them, which included Christian customers. ¹¹⁷ Among these customers were members of the aristocracy, clergymen, and even no less a figure than the Pope, who in the 1580s commissioned a Jewish glass producer to procure the windows needed for the glazing of the Lateran Palace, the Papal apartments, and the Vatican library. ¹¹⁸ Of course, the technological know-how to produce glass windows proved particularly valuable to the Jewish community in the aftermath of violent assaults, such as those committed in 1567 by a Christian mob in Assenheim, a small town in Hesse. It was all the more humiliating and frustrating for the Jews of Assenheim that the Christians assailants not only smashed the windows of Jewish homes but also stole glassmaking tools as well as ready-to-be-sold windowpanes from the local Jewish glazier. It should be noted, however, that once the relevant authorities learned about these events, they condemned the violence and supported the Jews’ legal redress – another reminder that at the time there existed a rationale which, foreign as it might seem today, distinguished between legitimate and illegitimate window violence. ¹¹⁹ Without taking this rationale into account, the historian runs the risk that historical actors’ categories will be eclipsed by personal judgement (as in the Bonfil–Roth controversy, in which the cataclysmic experiences of the twentieth century so strongly resonate).

This brings us back to modern times, and indeed a short epilogue is due here. As is well known, the process of political and legal emancipation that began in many parts of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not bring anti-Jewish violence to an end, even though many Jews hoped it would. In fact, it was the twentieth century that saw window-smashing on a scale that had never been seen in any historical period before, the darkest chapter being 9 November 1938, when the windows of hundreds of synagogues and Jewish stores all over Germany and Austria were smashed systematically within a few hours – an infamous event for which the Nazis coined the euphemism Kristallnacht. It is important to stress that the Kristallnacht happened under circumstances that were radically different from the ones we find in the premodern period, not least because the violence was based on racial rather than religious resentment. For historians, it would therefore be dubious to construct a teleological narrative or to read premodern violence through the lens of the twentieth century – yet as historians we also cannot ignore the fact that there were Jewish contemporaries of the Kristallnacht who saw such historical continuities. The experience of the Kristallnacht informs, for instance, Elias Canetti’s observations in his study Power and Crowds (Canetti emigrated from Austria within weeks of the events of November 9):

Windows and doors belong to houses; they are the most vulnerable part of their exterior and, once they are smashed, the house has lost its individuality; anyone may enter it and nothing and no-one is protected any more. In these houses live the supposed enemies of the crowd, those people who try to keep away from it. What separated them has now been destroyed and nothing stands between them and the crowd. They can come out and join it; or they can be fetched. ¹²⁰

Zionists, too, saw the Kristallnacht as but one chapter in a long history of anti-Jewish hostility, and they drew very concrete political conclusions: for them, the Kristallnacht confirmed their belief that Jews could only live safely in their own state. (Theodor Herzl, the father of political Zionism, had of course been unable to foresee events such as the Kristallnacht, but interestingly, the first recorded ancestor of his family was a glazier.) ¹²¹ Indeed, one of the promises that the Zionist project held for Herzl’s followers was that in a Jewish state there would no longer be any need to close one’s windows in fear of Christian assaults. ¹²² This belief is expressed, for instance, in the art of the first generation of Zionist artists, most prominently Reuven Rubin, in whose paintings wide-open windows feature prominently, and deliberately so. ¹²³ Similar observations can be seen in Hebrew literature from this period. Hayyim Nahman Bialik, the foremost poet of the nascent Jewish settlement in Palestine, had himself been an eyewitness to the devastations caused by anti-Jewish pogroms in eastern Europe: in his famous poem ‘The City of Slaughter’, written in the aftermath of the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, Bialik described in powerful language the ‘sevenfold rays of broken glass’ and ‘broken walls’ caused by the massacre. ¹²⁴ Bialik and others hoped that in the Jewish state such incidents would never repeat themselves, and that Jewish buildings would never again become sites of fear and entrapment. Tellingly, in his speech at the inauguration of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1925, Bialik metaphorically invoked this imagery when he declared that ‘the windows of this home will be open on every side’. ¹²⁵

The Jewish state, in the meantime, has become reality. Whether Rubin and Bialik’s vision has followed suit is a different issue.