Yom Tov Assis' recent book makes part of a long list of publications signed by this distinguished medievalist in the last twenty years. Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he assists his mentor Haim Beinart in editing the most important series of studies labeled Hispania Judaica. In fact the first volume of the series, Jean Regne's History of the Jews of Aragon, was published by him together with Adam Gruzman. Jean Regne, the famous French archivist, published almost 3,500 regesta of documents concerning the Jews of the crown of Aragon between the years 1213-1327. They were published in dozens of issues of the Parisian Revue des etudes juives between the years 1910 and 1924. Assis and Gruzman photocopied the relevant pages and--more importantly--equipped their publication of almost 750 pages with very detailed and useful indices. This important endeavor marked the work of Assis in the ensuing years and can be detected in almost every page of the present work, which has a time framework identical to that of Regne's regesta.
In 1988 Assis had published a precious study, "The Jews of Santa Coloma de Queralt" (Hispania Judaica, No. 6), as a result of his research in the notarial registers of the small Catalan city, being "An economic and demographic case study of a [Jewish] community at the end of the thirteenth century". The method of quantitive analysis enabled him to provide us (like Richard W. Emery in his The Jews of Perpignan in the Thirteenth Century (New York, 1959)) with a notion of the dynamics of Jewish moneylending of the period under consideration. Assis is right to label his present study as "Jewish Economy in...Aragon" and not "Jewish Economic Activity" etc., as, for the most part, this second issue ("activity") is treated only briefly, if not casually. The first half of the study is dedicated to the examination of the Canges in the Aragonese crown control of Jewish activity such as keeping the rate of interest at 20%, avoiding compound interest operation and the like (pp.15-94). Another major preoccupation of Assis, which occupies practically all the second part of his book (pp. 118 ff) concerns taxes imposed on Jews or loans required from them by the monarchy. Financing a hefty part of the military and expansionist adventures of the crown (pp. 160-172), Jews were pressured quite often to raise enormous amounts of money. They had to support the monarchy in adventures like the conquest of Sicily, of Sardinia, of parts of Murcia or like the war against Granada. On the other hand monarchs of the thirteenth century recognized the importance of Jews as a source of liquid currency. They invited them to settle in newly conquered territories (pp. 210-211), they defended and protected their business activity, and they were ready even to scale down the amount of exactions or at least to delay their date of payment (pp. 209-213). The Jews, on their part, did not fail to understand that their status in the realm depended on their ability to provide the rulers with the required monies.
Professor Assis is conversant both with the documents written by the Jews (mostly rabbinic responsa) as well as those written about them (pp. 11-13). His propensity to use original documents makes him on occasion overlook modern research on a subject. Thus, for example, much has already been written on taxes imposed on Jews of a whole county and the intercommunal strifes it caused. David Romano, the founder so to speak of Catalonian Jewish History opened our eyes in this respect in an article published almost a generation ago (cf. Sefarad, Vol. 13 [1953] pp. 73-86). Assis prefers to reconstruct this chapter of his history by going back to the sources themselves (pp. 228-229). This propensity also has felicitous results. Aspects of the history of taxation unknown until now are exposed with much clarity and great vigor. Light is thus thrown on interventions of Jewish community leaders in the life of their subjects not only in what concerns collective taxation but also in their economic activities in general (pp. 95- 117). Also loans by the monarchy were demanded not only from rich individuals but, at times, from a community as a whole.
In his bibliographic introduction Assis mentions (p. 9) that with the exception of his own The Golden Age of Aragonese Jewry: Community and Society in the Crown of Aragon, 1213- 1327 (Oxford 1996) (notice the dates!) no monograph has been written about the Jews of Aragon. Reading his study, one realizes how urgently we need a monograph about Jews and taxation in the Middle Ages. The present book constitutes a first step in this direction, a most welcome one indeed.