This book tackles the vexed problem of the relationship between medieval Jews and the lords under whose jurisdiction they lived. In medieval Germany the kings/emperors used terms such as ‘cameram nostram attineant’ (‘pertain to our chamber’: Henry iv in 1190; Frederick i in 1157) and ‘servi camere nostre’ (‘servi of our chamber’: Frederick ii in 1236) to articulate the special relationship that they claimed to have with the Jews to whom they granted privileges. In 1179 Frederick stated that all Jews ‘ad fiscum imperatoris pertinent’ (‘belong to the emperor's fisc'); in 1236 Frederick ii denoted that all Jews in his lands were the servi of the emperor's chamber. In Iberia the assignation, ‘servi regis et fisco deputati’ (‘servi of the king and entrusted to his treasury’) had already been used in the Fueros of Teruel (c. 1176) and Cuenca (c. 1190). This kind of terminology, which included the word servi, has spawned a great deal of research on what is called in the literature ‘Jewish chamber serfdom’. It has been argued that the medieval use of the term servi does not necessarily denote serfdom or servitude. Rather, it denotes service in general which can be, but by no means has to be, demeaning. Medieval society was built on the concept of service from the highest service to God to the lowliest, demeaning service of slaves to the masters who owned them.

Contested treasure is not so much interested in the ambiguous meanings of the term servi as in the extent to which the royal language concerning Jewish service translated into effectual control over Jews in the Crown of Aragon. In many ways this book is an Aragonese rejoinder to William Chester Jordan's work on the Capetians and, for example, Alfred Haverkamp's work on the Jews of Ashkenaz. Jordan demonstrated how the French crown used its rulings concerning Jews as one of many ways to expand and consolidate its power over the French magnates. When Philip Augustus expelled the Jews from France in 1182, only the Jews of the Ile de France were affected. The expulsion of Jews in 1306 by Philip iv affected most (not all) areas of what is now is France. Haverkamp and others have argued persuasively how misleading it is to write the history of the Jews of medieval Germany from the sole perspective of the relationship between Jews and the kings/emperors. Jewish lives were equally, if not more, affected by the relationships between Jewish communities and the civic government of the cities that Jews inhabited as well as the local lords under whose jurisdiction these cities fell. A web of interlinking jurisdictions impinged on Jews; nor should one ignore the agency that Jews themselves had in negotiating between competing authorities. In a similar vein Thomas Barton argues how important it is to study Christian-Jewish relations in Aragon within the framework of the complicated history of governance in the kingdom. All too easily scholars have assumed that the terminology of servi regis meant that the crown actually held sway over all Jews of the kingdom. It did not. For much of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Aragon was a patchwork of seigniorial lordships. Barton illustrates this most effectively by focusing on the position of the Jews in Tortosa within the full context of the city's complicated relationship with the crown.

Tortosa was captured from the Muslims at the end of 1149; the new Jewish community dates from 1150. An earlier Jewish community had petered out in the eleventh century as the caliphate fell apart and the rule of the Almoravids took force. The Jewish settlers were granted a settlement charter by Count-Prince Ramon Berenguer iv just as Christians and Muslims were given theirs. Interestingly, the ‘Jewish’ charter was remarkably unspecific about the exact nature of the legal status of the Jews and their legal relations with the rest of the town. Tortosa was a frontier city and initially it was meant to fall under comital/royal control. But from the start the presence of the Templars was strong as well as of baronial families such as the Montcadas. Templar seigniorial activity steadily increased as Ramon's successor, Alfons i, gave the Templars ever more rights in exchange for financial support, culminating in the Templars gaining control over Tortosa and its surroundings in 1182 with the exception of the regalia. In Contested treasure Barton examines what the implications of this were for the Jews of the city. Who had jurisdiction over them? The king? The Templars? The commune as customary law evolved? No hard and fast rules emerge from the sources as the crown continued to develop the principles of its Jewish policy and as Jaume i made concerted efforts to regain royal power in Tortosa from 1247 onwards. Things were not even completely settled when Jaume ii regained control over Tortosa by granting the Templars jurisdiction over a number of places in Valencia. Throughout this examination Barton makes plain how the issue of Christian jurisdiction over Jews must be studied within the wider framework of the evolution of royal authority and its interaction with local power structures. Conversely, historians of governance in Iberia can learn much by looking at the position of Jews (and Muslims) in the evolving Christian kingdoms of the peninsula. This approach yields a much more nuanced image of Iberia than is usually given. My only quibble with this excellent book is the lack of the full texts of the crucial legal documents that it cites; it would have been so useful to have had these in an appendix, especially for those who wish to delve even further in the exact meaning of words used to tease out the nuances that the terminology might convey. But this is no way detracts from the fact that this is a valuable book for students and scholars alike.