Introduction: Social Services and Education

Medieval W. Christendom
Social needs, educational needs, and of course religious needs fell into the
province of the Church for the Christian majority. For the small Jewish minority, these
responsibilities fell upon the Jewish communal apparatus. To be sure, the Jews
welcomed these responsibilities, again out of the sense that they were in fact mandated by
Jewish tradition.

The Jewish community organizations of medieval western Christendom had to
provide a network of social services. Jewish communities all across Europe created a
variety of modalities for support of wayfarers, the poor, the aged, and the infirm. These
agencies operated as constituent elements within the Jewish communal structure and as
separate charitable operations funded through private donations. In the polemical give-
and-take in which Christians and Jews sought to identify aspects of superiority, Jews
regularly cited the largesse of their brethren toward those in need, contrasting Jewish
caring with what was perceived as Christian callousness in dealing with those in need.

Jewish educational needs likewise had to be addressed by the organized Jewish
community. Here, there were major differences between larger and smaller Jewish
communities, with the former able to create more formal schooling structures and the
latter forced to deal more informally with educational needs. Schooling was for males
only, with instruction focused on Hebrew and Bible for younger students and then
proceeding to rabbinic literature for more advanced students. In the early stages of the
development of northern-European Jewry, advanced schools seem to have developed
around the figures of especially revered scholars. Interestingly, in the wake of the crisis
that struck Iberian Jewry at the end of the fourteenth and the early years of the fifteenth
century, major communal reform focused considerably on strengthening the educational
system, reflecting awareness of the importance of schooling for the well-being of the
community and the maintenance of Jewish identity.