“You Void All the Ordinances of the Communities”: Jewish Court Shopping and Communal Authority in the Medieval Crown of Aragon

The Kings of Aragon, rulers of a federative monarchy that included eastern Spain and parts of Italy and southern France, granted Jews the privilege to decide family law cases on the basis of halakhah (Jewish law). Rabbinic authorities jealously guarded this right, and condemned Jews who sought extra-communal interference—the title quotes the writings of Rabbi Solomon ibn Adret (1235-1310), a Barcelona rabbi and communal leader, who saw efforts to turn to non-Jewish courts to settle intra-Jewish problems as undermining the ability of the community as a whole to preserve self-governance. Yet this rejection of non-Jewish courts had its limits: ibn Adret himself occasionally sought the intervention of the royal court, while he and other rabbis deemed acceptable certain uses of Christian notaries. This paper explores how the self-governing Jewish communities of the Crown of Aragon sought to construct and maintain authority, as well as how both communal elites and ordinary Jews engaged with the legal institutions created by and for the Christian ruling majority. The paper will bring together Hebrew rabbinic sources with notarial contracts to address how rabbinic elites understood Jewish communal sovereignty and its limits and the ways in which ordinary Jews encouraged, accommodated, or resisted these efforts while simultaneously attempting to maneuver between Jewish and Christian legal institutions to accomplish their own goals. The paper will also address the role played by gender: how did men and women differ in their relationship to Jewish and Christian legal culture, and how did male communal elites diverge in their approach to men and women seeking extra-communal intervention? Ultimately, the paper will consider larger questions about the nature of communal sovereignty, its relationship to institutions of the wider Crown of Aragon, and how the study of Jewish self-governance challenges our perception of Iberian Convivencia.