‘Jewish Delinquency’ in Medieval Ashkenaz: Norms, Practices, and Attributions in Inter-Religious Encounter

该项目将首次对犹太人积极参与犯罪行为以及对中世纪德意志帝国此类活动的指控进行系统调查。在这种情况下，“犯罪”是指同时代人认为值得惩罚的任何行为，因此，要么在法庭上起诉，要么通过庭外和解或仲裁解决。这种现象是日常生活与法律制度相互作用的一种社会建构。由于这种归属始终是谈判过程的产物，因此需要在其各自的范围内不断进行审查和核查。通过关注犹太犯罪分子，该项目关注的是一个从两方面都被标记为“离经叛道”的群体。这种方法有望对犯罪的社会结构产生基本的新见解，并将“犹太犯罪”视为基督教和犹太社区变化过程的关键指标。为了将调查结果置于背景中，将基督教社区内的违法行为和非犹太人对犹太人犯下的行为与归因于犹太人的行为进行比较。调查将以涵盖基督教多数人口的书面文件的整个类型学范围的来源为基础，从规范文本到各种类型的法庭记录和其他，主要是城市文件，直到编年史家的叙述。直到14世纪晚期的这段时间将根据已出版的资料和申请人已经准备收集的材料来涵盖，并以在整个地理范围内平衡的观点为目的进行分析。由于中世纪晚期文献的兴起，在15世纪和16世纪早期，这是不可能的。因此，在后期，该项目将特别关注美因河畔法兰克福、纽伦堡和雷根斯堡等城市，以获得可靠的文件。将根据现行的法律规范、它们的变化及其在手头具体案件中的适用来分析来源；鉴于涉及的代理人和法院；鉴于各种犯罪的类型和频率（从暴力、财产和道德犯罪到言语伤害和违反规章制度等）。这项研究的中心目的是评估“犹太犯罪”的作用——即真实的或想象的罪行，由犹太人犯下的或据称由犹太人犯下的罪行——在中世纪犹太少数民族经历的边缘化过程中起到催化剂的作用。在这方面，将讨论贫穷和排斥作为犯罪因素的作用。该项目将有助于评估“犹太犯罪”对犹太社区日常生活和当地基督教-犹太教关系的影响。

The project will provide the first systematic investigation both into the active involvement of Jews in criminal behaviour as well as into allegations of such activities in the medieval German Empire. In this context, ‘delinquency’ means any behaviour considered by contemporaries to be worthy of punishment and thus either prosecuted in court or resolved by out-of-court settlement or arbitration. The phenomenon is a social construct resulting from the interaction between daily life and the legal system. As such attribution is always a product of negotiation processes, it is in constant need of review and verification in its respective context. By focusing on Jewish delinquents the project concerns, as it were, a group marked as ‘deviant’ from two sides. This approach promises basic new insights into the social construction of delinquency and regarding ‘Jewish crime’ as a key indicator for processes of change in both the Christian and the Jewish communities. In order to contextualize the findings, delinquent acts within the Christian community and acts committed by non-Jewish individuals against Jews will be compared with those attributed to Jews. The investigation will be based on sources covering the whole typological range of written documentation from the Christian majority population, from normative texts through various types of court records and other, mainly urban documents down to chroniclers’ accounts. The period until the late-fourteenth century will be covered on the basis of published sources and the material already collected in preparation by the applicant, and analysed with the aim of a balanced view across the whole geographical range. Due to the late-medieval rise in documentation, the same is not possible for the fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries. For the later period, therefore, the project will focus particularly on the cities of Frankfurt am Main, Nuremberg, and Regensburg to arrive at a robust documentation. The sources will be analysed in view of the legal norms at play, their changes and their application in the specific cases at hand; in view of the agents and the courts involved; in view of the type and frequency of the various offences (from violence, property and moral offences down to verbal injuries and transgression of byelaws etc.). The central aim of the study is an assessment of the role of ‘Jewish delinquency’ – i.e., of offences real or imagined, committed or allegedly committed by Jews – as a catalyst in the process of marginalization experienced by the Jewish minority over the course of the middle ages. In this context, the role of poverty and exclusion as criminogeneous factors will be adressed. The project will help to assess the impact of ‘Jewish delinquency’ on the daily lives of Jewish communities and on local Christian-Jewish relations.