Interfaith boundaries: Alum explores Jewish-Christian relations in the late Middle Ages

Didst thou hear? Savoy Curry, a doctoral candidate at Northwestern University and an alum of Binghamton University, studies an overlooked area of the late Middle Ages: sexual relationships between Jewish and Christian people. She finds evidence for these taboo relationships in court cases, rabbinic literature and even in forms of gossip.

“I work with court records, and one ‘genre’ translates to outrage books, which are full of people saying things like, ‘So-and-so came into my house uninvited and took two eggs,’ or ‘Somebody pulled their pants down in the square in public,’ or ‘My neighbor is a liar and sleeps with Jews.’ We have no proof that these things actually happened — many are related to accusations of libel or slander,” said Curry, a history major who graduated from Binghamton in 2019.

Her work focuses mainly on Jewish-Christian relations throughout the 14^th and 15^th centuries. She also deals with cases of illicit behavior and sexual violence, for which medieval people might have faced serious consequences. Looking at documents that show how people reacted to and were punished for these behaviors frames her dissertation.

“I mostly look at German-speaking lands, at how Jews and Christians both thought about illicit sexual and criminal behavior and contributed to the criminalization of this behavior at a local level,” she said. “I focus on the ideas that were coming from people in a regular town and look at how they regulated themselves, to understand how communal and religious boundaries were reinforced.”

She also studies this unique period because of the cultural events surrounding them. In 1348-49, the world was heavily affected by the Black Plague, which ravaged entire towns. In addition to disease, many Jewish communities faced pogroms or were expelled. Once these communities recovered and moved back into communal spaces, there was a long period of rebuilding in which cities flourished.

Simultaneously, and partly due to this growth, cities were moving away from the authority of the Church and of the aristocracy and were becoming more independent. At the turn of the 15^th century, these cities and their religious populations began to look inward, resulting in increased policing and criminalization of minorities. It’s this period that Curry is interested in: As the century ended, Jews were expelled en masse, reform movements led to a crackdown on sexual behavior and criminal punishments became more extreme.

“Cities start pushing out people who don’t fit into the idea of a normal group or a normal citizen. Criminals and sexualities are more regulated,” Curry said. “Sex work is technically legal throughout most of the Middle Ages, but at the end of the 15th and early 16th centuries, cities began closing the brothels. This is a period where you can see restrictions increasing and opinions changing in real-time.”

This project started with an interest in priests’ wives, which were more common in the 11^th and 12^th centuries, and how these women changed perceptions of women’s sexuality. Curry — whose mother is a gender and sexuality studies professor herself — has long been interested in the topic. As the idea developed, she hoped to see how the Jewish community, in which rabbis often marry, reacted to the sudden outlawing of Christian priests’ relationships.

At Northwestern, she found a more focused interest in texts that show another taboo: women punished for sleeping with Jewish men and vice versa. Although laws were often put into place to prevent this type of mingling — with codified punishments as strict as death — they were not always followed.

“The only evidence I have is of people who were caught,” Curry said. “You have periods where the court seems more interested in regulating illicit sex. Is it that people were having more sex then, or is it just that somebody decided that they care more?”

Curry believes that local politics and religious opinions are the root of this type of criminalization. These opinions often play off gendered power dynamics: She can show records of Christian women who were persecuted for their sexual relationships with Jewish men, but the punishments are often disparate between the involved parties and cases. Other explanations may play a part — the accusation was unproven, or a separate Jewish court was the punishing body, for example — but misogynistic biases are reasonable assumptions when Christian men were rarely seen in courts for the inverse scenario with Jewish women.

This factor of sexism is also relevant to the idea of bodily purity.

“There’s the idea that if you’re sexually impure, your soul is contaminated, and maybe then by associating with somebody else, you’re going to contaminate them. With that communal thought, sex work is a necessary evil,” she said. “Because it means that everyone in town would know who is ‘contaminated,’ it’s a way of containing corruption. In this sense, brothels were just a way of regulating who’s having sex with who.”

Although these rules weren’t always strictly followed at the time, Curry is adamant that there is at least one important reason to study them: they form a precedent that, incredibly, can still be relevant today.

“A woman wrote to a rabbi in the early 14th century and said ‘My husband had sex with a Christian woman. Can I get a divorce?’” Curry explained. “This case has been cited in modern rabbinical discussions of divorce — and there are legal consequences that have shaped our modern sense of sexual criminalization.”

Curry is excited to continue building her research. To do so, she is currently on a fellowship at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where she is working with Professor Elisheva Baumgarten and other scholars who are experts in the field of medieval studies. She also believes she owes a lot to Binghamton University, where she first began to establish her ideas under the guidance of Elizabeth Casteen, an associate professor of history and the director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CEMERS), who inspired her to pursue the honors track in history.

Curry feels a duty to discuss aspects of medieval history that are often uncomfortable to address or think about.

“We’re used to discussing how Jews were persecuted in the Middle Ages. They were, and that is often a huge factor in how medieval people dealt with interfaith relationships. But we’re less comfortable talking about how Jewish men participated in and upheld systems of sexual violence,” she said. “We must talk about this; it’s important to understand the complex systems of power that both allowed and disallowed Jewish men to wield their masculinity against women who were similarly able or not able to wield their religious identity in response. If we ignore these power dynamics, if we only frame through the narrow lens of Christians persecuting Jews, it doesn’t help us understand our history.”