This has nothing to do with any of my current projects, but it just came across my feed again and I think it may warrant a post of its own. The rule dates to 1084 and comes from a document everyone who studies Jewish history is surely familiar with already, though many who are interested in culinary history may not: The charter by Bishop Rüdiger Houzmann of Speyer codifying the status of the Jewish community. Among many other, more important aspects, it stipulates:
Slaughtered meat which they may not eat according to their law they may lawfully sell to Christians, and Christians may lawfully buy it.
Why did the bishop say this? It has to do with Jewish religious rules, Catholic canon law, the economic reality of medieval town life, and practicality. Firstly, Jewish religious rules.
If you know anything about Judaism, you know it has dietary rules. Certain animal foods and combinations of food are forbidden, others are permitted (kosher). The best known of those rules is that pork is absolutely forbidden, but once you start looking into the detail, you learn there is a variety of rules that apply particularly to meat. Even an animal of a permitted species slaughtered in the prescribed manner can only be eaten if it meets specific requirements. Any deformity, including internal ones that only become visible after slaughter, can lead to it being condemned. In addition, certain parts of an animal that are edible (most prominently the blood) are also not permitted. As a result, you could expect there to be meat that Jews could not eat whenever animals were slaughtered.
Christians, on the other hand, were not bound by these rules. The medieval Roman Catholic church interpreted the New Testament dictum that people became unclean not by what went into their mouths, but by what came out (Matthew 15.11) as ending all food prohibitions for Christians (except for, oddly enough, eating domestic horses). Medieval German Christians happily ate pork, they consumed the meat of hunted animals, cooked with blood, and would generally have made the perfect customers for whatever meat Jewish dietary law forbade.
In addition, it looks as though meat was always coveted. It was not rare in the sense that people suffered for lack of it, but our sources suggest medieval Germans almost always and everywhere would have liked more than they could have. In the close confines of a medieval town where life happened mostly in view of other people, throwing away meat that, by the lights of their Christian neighbours, was perfectly fine would have been very problematic for Jews. Selling it to non-Jews is traditionally the preferred solution. There is nothing derogatory about it; non-kosher meat is not considered inferior, Jews just cannot eat it.
Given this is so obvious, you might wonder why the bishop felt the need to permit it. Basically, because at that point the church had not yet decided how, or whether, Christians were allowed to socialise with Jews at all. By the eleventh century, Jews were the only non-Christians you would meet in most of Germany. The Empire defined itself as a Christian state and its subjects as Christians. Being anything else excluded you from that community. The consequences this should have were contentious. Some Christian theologians argued that it meant complete exclusion, even expulsion. Bishop Rüdiger, on the other hand, took a much less extreme stance. In 1084, this was possible. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council embraced radical positions and decreed social separation in every sphere, paving the way to ghettos, stigmatisation, and expulsion.
The arrangement we see in the decree of 1084 reflects a very different reality. Bishop Rüdiger envisioned a peaceful and productive coexistence, and he was far from alone in this. Speyer, after all, was not just anywhere. Though a minor industrial town in the Rhine valley today, it was an imperial power centre of the Salian dynasty with a grand new cathedral where several members of the dynasty were buried. Its bishops were important figures in the imperial government and their city operated under the eyes of the emperor. Having a thriving Jewish community was a policy goal. In 1096, when the First Crusade passed through the Rhineland, massacring Jews and looting their property wherever they found them, the bishop of Speyer intervened with troops and sheltered the town’s Jewish community in his palace. Anyone violating this protection was threatened with severe punishment.
The flourishing of Jewish culture in Speyer has left tangible traces in the town’s architecture and archeology as well as in the theological legacy of the SHUM synods (the cities of Speyer, Worms, and Mainz, centres of Judaism in the Empire) and the prevalence of the name Shapiro. A study of architectural elements in the remnants of the old synagogue and headstones of the Jewish cemetery suggest that they were made in the same workshops as the stones used to build the cathedral. Whether it was Christian stonemasons working for Jewish clients or (less likely) Jewish artisans building a Christian church is unknown, people clearly did not object to the arrangement.
Of course we all know it was not going to last. Speyer’s Jews lost their protection, their synagogue was closed, their rights curtailed, and their community dwindled to almost nothing. But we should not lose sight of the fact that ghettos and massacres were not inevitable. Germany was home to many traditions, and while all too often the regrettable ones won out historically, this was also a country where Christian stonemasons would buy beef or mutton from a kosher butcher with money they earned making a window frame for the new mikveh.