Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry
Subject: Blanche of Castile, Queen of France (r.1223-1252), and the Jews.
Supervisor: Prof. Elisheva Baumgarten.
Abstract: My current project is a study on the relationships between queens and Jews in medieval Northern Europe. One basic reality of Jewish life in medieval European lands was living in Christian kingdoms. Jews had to interact with Christian rulers, who were so often involved in Jewish settlement, levying taxes, Jewish communal infrastructure, and more. To explore these dynamics of how Jewish people engaged with their monarchies, scholars have looked almost exclusively to kings and princes. But queens also served as the chief royal advisors, regents, and even sole rulers in this period, leaving the ways in which royal women factored into Jewish-royal relations seldom accounted for in the historiography. My PhD dissertation aims to modify this research paradigm by providing a case study on Jewish relations to Blanche of Castile (r.1223-1252), Queen of France, during the first half of the 13th century. Combining royal administrative and artistic sources with Jewish legal and literary works that survive the reign of Blanche of Castile, this project will consider the role of royal women in medieval Jewish policy, as well as how gender shaped interreligious contacts between Jews and Christian monarchies in the European Middle Ages.