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Medieval Society

Unehrliche Leute

I use this German phrase because it is shorter than saying "people without honor or who work in trades that are regarded as socially repulsive." If you want to say it in English, you'd say "dishonorable people," but that has connotations of dishonesty that don't really apply. Closer would be "disgusting people," because it conveys the sense of revulsion and contempt that proper society had of them. The term also has a generally urban air to it; one finds it in town records, not in documents from the countryside.

Just as some trades carry with them an automatic prestige (think minister or doctor or professor), so some trades carry with them some odor of the distasteful. An easy example is the executioner. This fellow simply never got invited to social occasions! Not only because of the grim nature of the work, but also because human blood was involved. The barber (who also was a surgeon and a dentist) likewise could never be in the same social circle as the goldsmith or the baker.

Also unehrlich were prostitutes. Even if they might accompany a well-born man, their social station was not so much at the bottom rung of the ladder as it was outside the social ladder entirely.

I'll mention one other group, just to round out the picture. Anyone unfree was by definition unehrlich. Most of the unfree lived in the countryside and so rarely if ever entered into urban society. But one rap the established citizens might give to a newcomer was that somewhere in his past was an unfree ancestor. This gave to him an unehrlich tinge that might keep him from gaining citizenship (rather in the same way that the European Union, for example, keeps voting down certain countries without ever stating the real reasons).

The Jews and Muslims

Not unehrlich because they were their own social group, without reference to anything else. The Jews were, for the Christians around them, simply the Other. They were outsiders, aliens, subject to chronic suspicion, sustained prejudice, and occasional violence. Oddly enough, Jews in many places did enjoy a number of privileges. They were protected, for example, in Castile by royal edict. When Jews were subjected to riots during the first outbreak of the Black Death, the pope himself issued an edict forbidding such violence.

The royal protection enjoyed by Jews in the earlier Middle Ages began to be revoked in the later Middle Ages. They were exiled and their property confiscated, were allowed to return, only to be exiled and looted again. By 1500, they had been run out of most countries in western Europe. They fled to eastern Europe and to certain enclaves such as Venice.

Something of the same thing happened with the Muslim communities in the western Mediterranean, but Muslims were rarely integrated into the larger society the way the Jews were. There were Muslim communities not only in Spain but in Sicily and a few towns in southern Italy and southern France. The ones in France were gone by the 12th century. The Normans drove the Muslims out of Sicily, and the emperors drove them from southern Italy. The last and largest were the Moors in Spain, who were finally defeated and driven out in 1492.