Agobard of Lyon: a complaint against the Jews at court

Louis the Pious, Charlemagne's son, issued charters to Jewish merchants: protection of life and property, the right to trade and to keep their own law, defence against arbitrary treatment. At court an official was appointed—the magister Judaeorum—whose office was to stand for them. One such grant, made to a merchant named Abraham between 815 and 825, survives.

To Agobard, archbishop of Lyon, this was intolerable. He wrote four epistles, the sharpest of them On the Insolence of the Jews, of 826–827. He complains that Christians work in Jewish households; that the town's market day was moved off Saturday; that the emperor's commissioners defend the Jews against him, the bishop; that Christians go to hear Jewish preaching and find it more convincing than their own.

The worth of such a source is peculiar. The witness here is hostile, and a hostile witness is most reliable exactly where he describes what he hates. From Agobard's complaint we learn that in the Frankish realm the Jews were merchants holding imperial letters, that the town market respected their sabbath, and that they were not afraid.

In his lifetime Agobard gained nothing: the charters stood, the official stood. What he wrote also stood. A generation later his successor Amulo took up the same pen and wrote to the king Against the Jews, in 843–846. So the see of Lyon acquired a habit of its own, and later ages a set of ready words.