What is the place of Jews in medieval Christian societies? in the ninetheenth and early twentieth centuries, this question was largely confined to Jewish scholars, and the academic debates where inseparable from the upheavels of the lives of contemporary European Jews.
This volume shows through the use of legal sources that law was used to try to erect boundaries between communities in order to regulate or restrict interaction between the faithful and the non-faithful; and at the same time shows how these boundaries were repeatedly transgressed and negotiated. Muslim law developed a clear legal cadre for dhimmīs, inferior but protected non-Muslim communities…