Medieval Political Competition and the Attack on Ethnoreligious Diversity

Abstract

This dissertation examines urban expulsions of Jews in the Holy Roman Empire 1000-1520 CE. I argue that expulsions were policy changes undertaken within a political economy that placed increasing value on religiously-based concepts of political responsibility and Christian community reform. This project is designed as three papers combining quantitative and historical methods. To complete this work, I translated and digitized a German-language compendium of maps and city histories, building a new spatial database presenting the most up-to-date history of Jewish life in medieval German lands. In the first chapter, I use this database to investigate how local urban politics made Jews vulnerable to political violence. The patchwork landscape of overlapping jurisdictions created conditions of competition over legitimacy, supremacy, and rights to resources, and Jews were symbolic and material prizes in these conflicts. The second chapter asks what social processes guide the spread of persecution. Did an expulsion by one ruler affect another ruler’s choices about expulsion? Using event-history analysis methods, I document how religious change and spatially-structured economic and political incentives unraveled the norm against expelling Jews. The third chapter is focused on how different incentives, institutions, and actors link together in the process of expulsion. Using the first two papers’ quantitative analyses as a starting point, I work through narratives of non-expulsion and failed expulsion in the city of Constance, developing a generalizable theory of how expulsions of Jews fit into ongoing local and imperial political conflicts among Christians.