‘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”是指当代人认为值得惩罚的任何行为，因此可以在法庭上起诉，也可以通过庭外和解或仲裁解决。这一现象是日常生活与法律的制度相互作用的社会建构。由于这种归属始终是谈判进程的产物，因此需要在各自的背景下不断加以审查和核查。通过关注犹太罪犯，该项目关注的是一个从两个方面被标记为“离经叛道”的群体。这种方法承诺基本的新的见解，社会建设的犯罪，并把“犹太人犯罪”作为一个关键指标的变化过程中的基督教和犹太社区。为了说明调查结果的背景，将把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。调查将基于涵盖基督教多数人口书面文件的整个类型学范围的来源，从规范性文本到各种类型的法院记录和其他主要是城市文件，一直到编年史记录。报告将根据已发表的资料来源和申请者在编写过程中已经收集的材料，对直至世纪末的时期进行叙述，并进行分析，以便对整个地理范围有一个均衡的看法。由于中世纪后期文献的兴起，15世纪和16世纪初不可能有同样的记载。因此，在后期，该项目将特别关注美因河畔法兰克福、纽伦堡和里根斯堡等城市，以获得可靠的文件。将从以下角度分析这些资料来源：现行的法律的规范、这些规范的变化及其在所涉具体案件中的应用;所涉的代理人和法院;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条例等）。这项研究的中心目的是评估“犹太人犯罪”的作用，即，犹太人犯下或据称犯下的真实的或想象的罪行-是犹太少数民族在中世纪经历的边缘化过程中的催化剂。在这方面，将探讨贫穷和排斥作为犯罪成因的作用。该项目将有助于评估“犹太人犯罪”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.