Jewish Life in the Crown of Aragon: Between the Twelfth and Fifteenth Centuries: The Jewish Aljama of Monzón

One of the largest Jewish communities in the Crown of Aragon, and one of the least studied

In 1492, on the eve of the expulsion, more than six hundred and fifty Jews lived in Monzón, in the Aragonese comarca of the Cinca Medio. They had been there for four centuries. Almost nothing has been written about them.

Drawing on nearly thirty years of work in the Archive of the Crown of Aragon and in provincial, municipal and notarial archives, and on Hebrew sources long neglected by historians of medieval Spain, F. Andreu Lascorz Arcas reconstructs Jewish life across Aragon and Catalonia between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries. Reading Hebrew, Catalan, Aragonese and Latin, he sets the responsa of Rabbi Salomon ben Adret and Rabbi Yishaq bar Seset beside royal orders, wills, tax rolls and notarial deeds, and lets the communities speak in their own words.

The book opens with daily life: the languages spoken in the Jewish quarters, food and the laws of kashrut, marriage and the place of women, synagogues and schools, courts, hospitals and confraternities, taxes and trades, festivals and dress, the ritual baths and the cemeteries. It then follows four centuries through the community of Monzón, from the Templar fortress and the Barcelona Disputation of 1263, through the Shepherds’ Crusade of 1320, the Black Death and the massacres of 1391, to the Disputation of Tortosa, the Inquisition, the conversos, and the edict of expulsion.

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What makes this book unusual

• Hebrew sources read directly. The responsa record disputes Christian archives never saw: a widow’s dowry, a contested inheritance, a Torah reader’s competence, a quarrel over a silo.

• Women in the documents. Their rights in marriage, divorce and property, and their part in teaching the next generation, set out from the record rather than assumed.

• The king, the nobility and the Church. Why the Crown protected its Jewish communities, why the Templars so often defended them, and how Rome’s edicts followed the money.

• An onomastic index of the Jews of Monzón, name by name and year by year, with a glossary of Hebrew, Aragonese and Judeo-Spanish terms. A starting point for anyone tracing Sephardic ancestry.

What emerges is not a chronicle of persecution alone, but a portrait of a plural society: what was shared, what was disputed, and what was lost.

This is the first English edition of a doctoral thesis presented at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, in 2021. It carries a foreword by Richard Bruno, Ph.D., and an afterword by Jeffrey Malka, M.D., author of Sephardic Genealogy.

About the author

F. Andreu Lascorz Arcas is a Hebraist and historian. Raised in a Catholic family, he learned at thirteen that his forebears were Jews, and has spent his life since recovering the history of the Jewish communities of Aragon. He has published nine books and fifty-nine articles on the subject, has lectured in Spain and Israel, and led the effort to mark the surviving Jewish buildings of Monzón so that visitors and residents could read their own town.