This book is a welcome addition to the spate of books which has recently appeared on the history of the Jews in medieval Iberia. In contrast to many other publications its main geographical focus is on northern Castile, where Jewish communities flourished before the prominent Jewish community of Toledo became part of the kingdom when the city was captured from the Muslims in 1085. This has allowed Irish to consider the nature of relations between Christian rulers and Jews in this area independently from notions of convivencia imported by means of the so-called Reconquista. Peaceful relations between Christians and Jews in Castile were an autonomous development of northern Spain which drew on the pragmatic attitudes of the kings of Castile towards Jews whose economic activities were beneficial for the royal treasury.

The pragmatic stance of the kings of Castile and Castile-Léon towards Jews found full expression in the fueros (city charters) that they granted to towns. In these charters Jews were more often than not described in terms of being the servi of the king. As many have explained before Irish, this did not mean that Jews were slaves. It meant that they served the king, and that it was the king who had legal jurisdiction over them and their communities. This jurisdiction could be granted by the king to others if he wished. Jews served the king or the lord to whom jurisdiction over them had passed by paying taxes and/or levies. They also served in many cases as tax collectors for the king and held various important posts at the royal court. As the kings of Castile conquered more and more of Andalusia, Jews also served as translators, property owners in newly Christianised towns and so on. Employing Jews in many of these functions contravened many rules and regulations promulgated by the institutional Church and encoded in canon law.

As for the institutional Church, Irish argues that for all of its anti-Jewish rhetoric and increasing output of anti-Jewish legislation, the Church in general and the friars in particular were not as hell-bent on converting Jews as has been commonly assumed. In practice those in charge of Church affairs in Castile had more on their minds than converting Jews. They had to deal with time-consuming internal clashes between the newly founded mendicant orders and episcopal structures of authority. Heresy was another major area of concern. As far as Jews were concerned, different sections of the clergy often benefited from their presence, as for example the bishop of Palencia to whom Alfonso viii had granted income deriving from taxes levied on the Jews of the city in 1175. The jurisdiction of the bishop of Palencia over the city's Jews was, in fact, a bone of hot contention between himself and the caballeros villanos, the knights of the town.

It is the caballeros villanos or urban elite whom Irish identifies as the prime agents of anti-Jewish animus from around the 1260s, which eventually fed into the violence perpetrated against the Jews of Toledo in the 1350s and 1360s and the widespread attacks on the Jews of Castile in 1391. She places the actions of the caballeros villanos in the framework of the economic and political upheavals of the latter part of the thirteenth century and the greater part of the fourteenth century when most of the ‘reconquista’ had been accomplished. The wrestling for power in towns between the crown, lay and ecclesiastical magnates, and the concejas (town councils) meant that all parties were keen to derive benefits from the taxes raised from the towns’ aljamas. And the caballeros villanos were determined not to be disadvantaged by any privileges that Jews had received. The Jews of each town for their part made it their business to broker the best deal that they could get within this complicated political set-up. In pursuit of political alliances, kings heard the petitions brought by the caballeros villanos to the cortes convened by the crown; these petitions were replete with anti-Jewish rhetoric. Ensuing cortes legislation was recorded and disseminated in booklets called cuadernos in the aftermath of the meetings. The staple of anti-Jewish tropes contained in cuadernos is what Irish thinks helped to disseminate very negative images concerning Jews. She believes that this helps to explain why the tactical anti-Jewish strategy which Henry ii adopted in his rebellions against his half-brother Peter the Cruel in 1350s and 1360s had such traction with the population of Toledo. She suggests that this also helps to explain why the anti-Jewish activities of Ferrán Martínez in Seville could lead to the widespread anti-Jewish riots of 1391, which left so many Jews in Spain dead and so many Jews converted against their will.

Irish's insistence that the position of the Jews of Castile should be studied in a framework which goes beyond their immediate relationship with the Crown is no doubt correct. This echoes what Thomas Barton argued for the Jews of Aragon in his Contested treasure (2015) and also parallels newer secondary literature on the Jews of Germany, France and England. Her explanation that increased royal financial pressure on Jews exacerbated relations between Jews and their Christian debtors on whom they had to put pressure for repayment of outstanding loans fits in well with the situation in which Jews found themselves in thirteenth-century England. Her focus on the role played by the urban elite in spreading anti-Jewish animus is important and illuminating. What would be interesting would be to explore even more extensively what the relationship might be between the anti-Jewish rhetoric used by the caballeros villanos in their petitions to the king and the developing anti-Jewish rhetoric of canon law and papal pronouncements in the thirteenth century. What causes verbal violence against Jews to morph into physical violence against them at certain times and in certain places remains difficult to determine. But few would deny the significance of verbal violence at times when toleration of Jews lay in the balance, as the benefits of Jewish service were weighed up against the interests of others in Christian medieval polities.