Abstract
No area of Christian-Jewish co-existence during the medieval Ashkenazi period produced more personal contacts than the business sphere. During loan transactions, Jews and Jewesses interacted with Christian men and women from all social classes, from rulers and nobility to townspeople, farmers, craftsmen, and servants. Therefore, German-Hebrew business contracts are not only material cultural goods in their own right, they also serve as media of cultural transfer and as a shared legal, linguistic, and general cultural zone between Jews and Christians in the field of economics and of business practices. This paper not only deals with legal and linguistic topics, but also with the rather hidden and neglected aspects of polemics and humour.
Article note:
Dieser Beitrag ist die überarbeitete deutsche Fassung meines Artikels Jewish Business Contracts from Late Medieval Austria as Crossroads of Law and Business Practice. In: Medieval Minorities: Law and Multiconfessional Societies in the Middle Ages. Hg. von John Tolan, Capucine Nemo-Pekelman, Jerzy Mazur und Youna Masset. Turnhout: Brepols 2016 (in Druckvorbereitung).
© De Gruyter 2016
