Jewish Charity Officers in Fifteenth-Century Aragon

Authors

• Allison Bocchino, University of California, Santa BarbaraFollow

Abstract

In the Late Middle Ages, confraternities and almoinas (communal charitable endowments) existed in the different Jewish communities in Aragon. Records of these organizations are found in the local notarial records and consist mainly of leases and sales of properties owned by the charitable organizations and of receipts of rents owed to them. These documents contain the names of the charitable organizations’ officers who had a variety of titles such as adelantado, mayordombre, prior, mayral, consejero, and clavario. I use the many contracts and other transactions preserved in the notarial protocols to engage in a prosopographical analysis of these men, noting their occupations, property ownership, and positions within the aljama’s government. I also reconstruct their social networks. The charity officers in Jaca consisted of the Jewish communal elite who were tied to one another through service in the aljama’s government, financial transactions, and marriage and family ties. This reflects the closed nature of the Jewish community in Jaca, which remained demographically stable for over a century, and a large gap between the rich and the poor with no significant middling class in Jaca’s Jewish community. The Jewish confraternities in Zaragoza, in contrast, had a more diverse set of officers, and the officers of Zaragoza’s different Jewish confraternities did not always belong to the same social network. The Cabarim confraternity for example consisted of an aristocratic membership made up of the community’s elite while the Cefarim confraternity’s membership came from the middle and lower classes of the Jewish community. This reflects the more open nature of the Jewish community in Zaragoza. It was not only larger than that of Jaca’s and had more middling-class Jews present but it also experienced significant demographic change due to conversions and the migration of Jews from declining Jewish communities in Aragon to the city.

Recommended Citation

Bocchino, Allison (2026) "Jewish Charity Officers in Fifteenth-Century Aragon," Medieval People: Vol. 40: Iss. 1, Article 13.
Available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/medpros/vol40/iss1/13