What can archaeology teach us about Jewish history?
Our main sources for understanding Jewish history in Europe are written records, both Jewish and non-Jewish, as well as countless individual artifacts. What is so far lacking are extensive excavations in every region of Europe that can answer some of the most important questions of economic connections, migrations, and community history. Traditional historiography and scattered references in early medieval texts suggest that Jewish communities existed in France, the Low Countries and in the Rhine and Danube valleys – only to push eastward to Eastern Europe in the wake of the crusades. But even this basic scheme is now under question. Only in the eleventh century does there appear a significant corpus of Hebrew inscriptions and dated tombstones, particularly in the Rhine valley. What happened to the Jews of Western Europe from the fourth to the eleventh centuries? And why did they appear in the archaeological record so suddenly?
