Paula Pinto-Costa and Joana Lencart begin their contribution to this volume by noting that, “The study of different ethnic groups throughout Europe has undergone a significant change through the recent work of historians” (201). This is absolutely true, but their contribution is one of only a few in the collection to utilize those changes and talk about issues such as acculturation and identity. They specifically acknowledge that Portugal was “neither a simple bipolar society (constituted by two poles: Christians and ethnic minorities) nor unidirectional” (211). In most of the contributions here, “ethnicity” is rarely, if ever, problematized, and the bipolar option is the default. For example, Grzegorz Myśliwski essentializes the ethnic identity of the various rulers of Poland down to one ethnicity, the “Polish Piast dynasty” (49), despite the fact that the “Polish Piast dynasty” was composed of individuals, male and female, the latter of which came from Rus, the German Empire, Hungary, and elsewhere. These women have had their natal identities expunged in favor of a paternalistic mode of ethnic identification. What is ethnicity and what is its role in relation to the politics of multi-ethnic societies? The latter is one of the questions that this volume, the third in a series sponsored by the Polish Academy of Sciences, sets out to answer. The former is not, however, but it should be, and it should be a base upon which each piece in the volume builds in order to better create an understanding of what a multi-ethnic society is. Instead, the majority of pieces are largely analyses of town life in east central Europe, where Jews stand in for “multi-ethnic.” This is not to say that all of the pieces do this, as there are several fascinating contributions that are highlighted below.
Religious difference is the main marker of a “multi-ethnic” society in the volume, and as such, Jews occur numerous times. Jewish communities in medieval Europe were typically given the “protection” of the local ruler (duke, prince, or king). This created a legal framework for a discussion of them as a separate category within society, which is coded as ethnicity here. Aivaras Poška discusses how the Magdeburg law in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania may have provided for communal coverage of Jews alongside other groups, rather than singling them out. However, from the seven legal documents covering three centuries, it is not clear that this happened with any regularity. Furthermore, Poška does not mention ethnicity once in the essay; discussing Jews as a community is enough to make it multi-ethnic, as is common throughout the volume. In his own contribution, Przemysław Wiszewski (who also edited the volume and wrote its introduction and conclusion) was able to discuss a microcosm of the history of the Jews in Poland. He notes that despite fourteenth-century pogroms, widespread anti-Jewish violence occurred only after 1453 and the arrival of St. John of Capistrano, who preached against both Jews and Muslims (36-37). His preaching made the local population aware of the “other” in their midst and they took action against them, with the government stepping in to seize Jewish property. Jurgita Šiaučiūnaitè-Verbickienė’s contribution is a fascinating examination of the ways that the towns of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania attempted to limit Jewish economic success, and why they failed; though none of this, again, is specifically about ethnicity. Dovilė Troskovaitė adds to the focus on Jews (which could have profitably been separated out as a section of the book to better compare and contrast) but this time on Karaites. Troskovaitė’s article is interesting and problematizes the oft-told tale of the arrival of the Karaites, replacing it with economic motives which also motivated the Rabbinic Jews. Again, however, ethnicity is not discussed in any specific way. Further, these articles on Jews in medieval and early modern Europe do not use Hebrew sources, by and large, and thus approach the issue just from the Christian side. All of this makes me curious what the reception of the work will be in the Jewish Studies community, if any.
Religion is also the focus for Endre Sashalmi, who deals with the Muscovite law code of 1649 (Ulozhenie) and its inclusion and categorization of groups other than Russians. Despite starting with an eighteenth-century context for a seventeenth-century law code, this article offers a fascinating analysis of the terms and self-definitions used in the law code. In summary, Orthodox Christianity defined Russianness, as religion was a marker for other groups such as Jews, Muslims, and western Christians (nemtsy). This is some of the most in-depth analysis of a multi-ethnic society in the whole volume and should be praised for that. Finally, Sashalmi’s conclusion, that service to the tsar trumped any other consideration (religion, nationality, etc.) serves as an excellent comment on the volume’s titular subject. Maria Bonet Donato also deals with religious groups, both Jews and Muslims, in Catalonia, covering the legislation that helped to other them from the Christian population but also the ways that elites encouraged those groups to stay in a Christian-dominated society, and the reasons behind both sets of actions. Flocel Sabate Curul builds on this material to discuss late medieval Catalonia, where Jews and Muslims were required to engage in disputations with Christians, as well as to listen to Christian preaching, a change in the policy articulated by Bonet Donato. And yet, as Sabate Curul points out, the groups still lived in conjunction with one another because of economic necessity (279).
In addition to the fine work of Pinto-Costa and Lencart, we see ethnicity dealt with well by Cosmin Popa-Gorjanu, whose focus is on ethnicity via the category of estates in Transylvania. In this way, Popa-Gorjanu can focus upon a specific source base, where the king intervened between estates, and use the language of the sources without reading assumptions of ethnicity into the documentary record. He also does a good job of problematizing assumptions made by other scholars and keeping to the extant evidence, slim (he notes) as it may be. Daniel Bagi problematizes ethnicity well in his article on the Cuman law, but the text of the article itself is much more about the history and historicity of the law than about ethnicity. And finally, Luciano Gallinari deals with Sardinian conceptualizations of identity, which were self-consciously created “to strengthen the political aims of the island’s elites in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (227). Within that discourse, identities of the past were repurposed to demonstrate the Sardinians’ inherent impermeability to immigrant cultures. These models have been reified such that they still exist in the twenty-first century, though Sardinia has moved from the crown of Aragon to the nation of Italy. These pieces do not deal with religious minorities exclusively and all are able to contextualize and discuss ethnicity to advance their goals and that of the volume as a whole.
Edited collections can be a mixed bag of materials. This volume is no different. One extreme outlier is the piece tucked away at the end of the volume by Joanna Wojdon on Polish immigration to the United States. It is modern, not medieval or early modern, and deals with an entirely different continent. Not nearly as different but still not within the main frame of the volume is the piece by Andrzej Pleszczyński, which has an interesting concept--utilizing “foreign” sources when writing a chronicle. However, it really should not surprise us that chroniclers relied on source material, and we see the same in various places. Further, some of the examples adduced by Pleszczyński suggest that Długosz has altered his source material (regarding the conversion of Volodimer Sviatoslavich in Rus, for example), when, in fact, Długosz keeps close to the base text.
Audience is an essential consideration in any work, edited or otherwise, and it is an open question for this volume. Wiszewski, in his conclusion, draws attention to the context of the meetings of their working group in the latter 2010s in Europe, when a rise in immigration, Brexit, and conflict in eastern Europe led to questions about multi-ethnic societies. And yet, these issues are not well reflected in the volume, though they may have been on the scholars’ minds. Other audience issues exist, such as the utility of these materials for non-eastern European audiences. For instance, Maps 3.1, 4.1, and 8.1 are largely illegible except for the biggest text. And even if they were legible, they are not in English. If one goal of the volume was to make some areas accessible to medievalists of western Europe, it would have helped to have good, legible maps (Maps 10.1, 10.2, and 11.1 are excellent examples). Despite this, Brepols is to be praised for bringing out useful and interesting volumes, and the Polish Academy of Sciences, Wiszewski, and the contributors should be thanked for making the volume open access so that one can dive in and sample the pieces of particular interest to learn more about the societies under discussion here.