The historical experience of medieval Jews within the Crown of Aragon and adjacent areas of southern France has been the subject of serious research for just over a century. The resulting scholarship has produced not only deep studies of particular communities, such as Narbonne and Santa Coloma de Queralt, but also major (if sometimes flawed) documentary collections that have made it possible for researchers to undertake larger-scale studies. As others have noted, the sources related to medieval Jews are rich, but not for the faint of heart--their volume is sometimes overwhelming, they are lodged in a number of repositories that demand painstaking work in situ, and their range of language and documentary type demands skillful handling and considerable technical expertise. The use of rabbinical responsa, for example, requires a nuanced understanding of the context in which they were produced. And, of course, the lacunae in the documentation fall where you least need them to, especially in showing the complete lifespan of certain financial transactions. These lacunae demand some interpolation. With great care, Michael Schraer grounds the sources as the starting point for his study of Jews and property investment in the Crown of Aragon.
The center of Schraer's study is at once an enduring assumption and a challenging research question: the nature of Jewish property ownership in the medieval Crown of Aragon, which had a stable Jewish presence in some areas that reached back to the fifth century. There remains a persistent perception--among scholars and non-scholars alike--that Jews in medieval Europe became financiers because their social and political status was always so precarious. Put another way, Jews turned to moneylending and liquid assets ostensibly because they could not hold property or they chose not to in the face of forced exile that could come at a moment's notice (6). Then, moneylending made them both necessary and despised in medieval society, and subject to political vicissitudes. But what happens when we rethink the underlying assumption of this economic theory? Schraer challenges the claim made by other scholars that property transactions were primarily usury in disguise (165). Schraer shows not only that Jews widely held property in the Crown of Aragon, ca. 1150-1400, but also that they utilized property in the same ways, and to many of the same ends, as their peers. Namely, Jews invested, traded, and used property for wealth transfer and security, to establish and build credit, to conduct business for personal and communal interests, and to cement and strengthen socio-familial relationships. It was not until 1391 that property rights "became more fragile" for Jews and converts alike, but even afterward, through the fifteenth century, land ownership persisted (240).
Dividing the work into two sections (the evidence for Jews as property investors, property and the Jewish economy), Schraer begins with a treatment of legal norms that governed property ownership and use for everyone within the Crown of Aragon, but which had important variations within its major territories: not only the Kingdom of Aragon, the Principality of Catalonia, and the Kingdom of Valencia, but also municipalities with their own well-defined fueros and customs. (Schraer does not focus on the Crown territories north of Catalonia or the Balearic Islands.) Calling out these variations, small and large, is critical for the arc of Schraer's narrative, for it underscores the firmly established legal status of Jews in Iberia, as well as the need for Jews--and everyone else--to know how to navigate across the boundaries and intersections of layered medieval legal systems, especially when property exchanges took place among people of different faiths. As Schraer notes, Jews also had an internal legal system to contend with, for Jewish law heavily regulated property, especially within familial and marital relationships. For example, a Jewish woman's marriage contract, the kĕtûbă, was essential for defining a woman's property rights and for ensuring the transfer of wealth among family members (122-123). Moreover, rabbinical responsa repeatedly point to the importance of land assets for providing for widows and orphans (145). However, Jews did occasionally avail themselves of the prevailing Christian court system to adjudicate disputes rooted in Jewish law.
Schraer then goes beyond the evidence for deeply entrenched traditions of Jewish property ownership to explore, in depth, discrete property holdings and exchanges over time and within particular areas, especially in Barcelona, Girona, and Zaragoza. Schraer notes that a distinctive feature of the Christian conquest in the Crown of Aragon, the repartimiento or repartimemt, paid long-term dividends for Jewish property ownership. As Christian rulers seized land and settled towns from Muslims, they apportioned the spoils, as land grants and rents, among their supporters. At the same time, as Christians tried to maintain settlements in newly established or seized towns, they offered generous privileges and exemptions to those Christians and Jews who were brave enough to settle in frontier communities. Outside of the grants secured as part of a repartimiento, individual Jews continued to receive royal gifts and grants of land for service. All of these grants to individuals and groups "played a key role in both the origins of land ownership and the subsequent development of land markets" (58). Jews used that wealth, and other assets, to acquire land on the open market (97). Although Jews tended to live primarily in a call or aljama or judería, there is ample evidence that they owned urban and rural property inside and outside of the city walls, including property that generated rents or agricultural products for sale or consumption. Schraer shows that these patterns of ownership were not static for, throughout the entire period under examination, Jews actively purchased and disposed of property through credit relationships, to generate cash, or to manage investments that were part of trading cycles. Again, Schraer demonstrates that Jews did not simply own property. Instead, they utilized it intentionally, strategically, and advantageously. Land assets were critical for lending and credit, and credit was critical for investing and building wealth.
The heart of the second section of the book, property and the Jewish economy, sets out to "assess the relative importance of land in the overall assets of the Jews" (199). As noted at the outset, gaps in the sources make a complete answer impossible, and Schraer's explanations may not be to everyone's satisfaction, but he uses a robust set of notarial records from fourteenth-century Zaragoza and case studies to understand this relative importance of land in the context of other assets, for communities, families, and individuals. By tracing a series of related transactions over time, Schraer makes a compelling case for the significance of land use among many Jews in the Crown of Aragon, if not for the role of land as a major feature of economic activity for those Jews. But it can be argued that the book need not make that case, for the extant evidence and Schraer's deft, methodical interpretation of it amply argue his point: Jews widely held and utilized real estate as an important financial asset, over a long period of time, throughout the Crown of Aragon--a region where they were deeply rooted, they enjoyed legal protections, and their economic activity suffered relatively few restrictions between 1150 and 1400. In this excellent work, Schraer enjoins us to challenge more vigorously the erroneous notion that Jews were simply financiers who sat the margins of medieval society. As property owners and investors who knew how to utilize property for a range of investment goals, Jews were, in fact, deeply integrated into the "core fabric of medieval society" (11).