The following is a digital project I would like to put together in the near future and which I’d like to discuss in this year’s Roots and Routes Summer Institute here at U of T

The Archives of the Crown of Aragon contain hundreds of thousands of documents dealing with the history of the Jews in the territories under the control of the Catalano-Aragonese crown. Catalan and Aragonese rulers kept records from the earliest times, much of which survived the centuries.  The great territorial and political expansion that marked the reign of King Jaume the Conqueror (1213-1276) and the more complex bureaucracy necessary to manage Jaume’s new territories led to the creation of the Royal Archives of the Crown of Aragon, a development furthered by the revival of Roman Law and the acquisition of paper-making technology from the Muslims with the conquest of Valencia. The chancery registers of the monarchs of the Crown of Aragon total today over 6,000 volumes of nearly four million unpublished documents spanning seven centuries. The royal chancery of Pere the Ceremonious alone (1336-1387) produced 1,164 volumes of an average of 200 folios each. Since The Crown viewed Jews and Muslims as part of the royal treasury this body of documents include much detail about the daily life of Jews in the medieval Crown of Aragon.

Nineteenth-century archivists and early twentieth-century scholars have catalogued and indexed the documents dealing with Jews in the royal chancery registers for the period of 1213-1327. Such finding aids do not exist for the later period making the process of finding documents dealing with Jews after that period much more time-consuming and tedious. It is precisely this excess of sources that often makes this crucial period for the history of the Jews of the Crown of Aragon so understudied. Over the course of one year, during my dissertation research, I catalogued about 200 registers at the ACA, covering the period 1379-1391. While much of this material is referenced in my dissertation, I hope to make this catalogue available to future scholars in a tool that can be collaboratively expanded as new registers are studied.

Making the full catalogue available would be an ambititous project that would take some time to implement since it would include tagging over 3,000 documents. The proposal is therefore to start with a far more focused project to begin to share at least some of the documentation. The idea is therefore to focus on one Jewish individual – Samuel Gracia, originally from the town of l’Arboç, south of Barcelona. Although most individual Jews appear only once or twice in the royal registers, I have located at least fifty letters dealing with Samuel Gracia. Involved in a series of lawsuits against family, Jews, Christians, and Jewish officials, Samuel Gracia presents an interesting case study for scholars interested in migration as well as the legal culture of late fourteenth-century Catalonia. I have used his case extensively in my dissertation to discuss the ways in which Jews in Catalonia and Aragon consumed Christian justice in order to settle disputed with coreligionists. Through his crafty use of multiple Christian courts and navigation of jurisdictional boundaries, Samuel Gracia exemplifies the degree to which Jews were acculturated in the mainstream legal culture of Catalonia and Aragon.

This case fits well within the topic of Roots & Routes since many ways it shows a Jew often challenging his own Jewish roots in search of ways out of legal and fiscal problems. The main idea is to build a collaborative site – or upload to e-Porte – images of the documents dealing with Samuel Gracia in order to share with the wider world. Ideally, scholars working at local archives in the areas where Samuel lived would add any documents they found in the course of their research.

The hope is that the sources and the topics they illuminate would help bridge the gap between Jewish history, Spanish (or Mediterranean) history and mainstream medieval European history. Within the fields of Mediterranean history, for example, legal cultural historians have began to show how those traditionally considered powerless such as women or slaves used law and litigation in order to shape their lives and identities. Because the assumption by these historians is that Jews resided outside mainstream legal traditions, they have for the most part been absent from these conversations. This project could go  a long way in bridging this gap.