When this groundbreaking, seminal work on the interplay between rabbinic rulings and communal practice in medieval France first appeared in 1967, the author was a doctoral student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Published in Hebrew, the book was a master’s thesis of unprecedented scope, combining historical documentary evidence drawn from bills of sale and tax records – the stuff of everyday life in the Middle Ages – with traditional analysis of responsa and Talmudic commentary. Haym Soloveitchik was then a rare breed – a brilliant and erudite Talmudic mind, scion of a dynasty of scholars (and son of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik), who broadened his research of rabbinic literature to include social and economic history. 

For thirty years, Soloveitchik’s theories remained in the scholarly domain, emerging as a popular work only in 2003 and even then only in Hebrew (although he has spent most of his academic career teaching in English at Yeshiva University). It is thus a rare pleasure to see this classic finally published in English, in an excellent translation by David Louvish, edited by Leon Wieseltier. 

In the intervening half-century, statistics, financial data, and the like have become the warp and woof of historiography, yet they’re still seldom used to shed light on responsa. This is Soloveichik’s genius, weaving together the threads of daily commerce in the two distinct areas of today’s France that housed the two branches of the medieval Jewish community – the wine-growing, Judeo-Spanish influenced expanses of Provence, as opposed to the Ashkenazic bloc of Speyer, Worms, and Mainz (acronym Shum) – to plumb rabbinic decisions with deep, searching, existential questions. 

Soloveitchik’s text is economical yet sweeping, his uncluttered prose contrasting Rashi’s painstaking exegesis of the entire Talmud with the innovative, logical analysis of subsequent generations of Tosafists. The author’s thesis mainly investigates the validity of the halakhic ban on trading wine touched by gentiles, proposing that far from being dictated by Jewish law, this stringency was actually a taboo upheld by Ashkenazim despite the economic hardships it imposed and rabbinic attempts to ameliorate its effects. Perhaps most brilliantly, Soloveitchik uses Talmudic methods not only to follow the legal basis of the prohibition from one generation to the next, but to show how it was upheld in the face of halakhic loopholes with what he calls “almost suicidal” tenacity. That epithet later becomes crucial to the author’s theory of the medieval Ashkenazic mindset and its reaction to the Crusades.

Ever since the original publication of Jews and the Wine Trade, academics have been arguing over the definition of a “taboo” and whether Soloveitchik justifiably applied the term to this area of religious observance. Appendices present the author’s responses to the criticism his work has aroused in the last fifty years.

Soloveichik contends that by refusing to even traffic in gentile wine, by regarding wine touched by a non-Jew as defiled, Jews were turning the tables on their abusive, blood-libeling surroundings. “The public refusal to benefit from one of the most profitable and prestigious products of their region was a proclamation by the Jews that their horror of defilement by Christians was greater than the lust for ill-gotten gain that the Christians attributed to them” (p. 130).

The book’s crowning glory is its new final chapter, in which Soloveitchik extrapolates from his early findings to profile the Ashkenazic pietists of northern France. He suggests that communal solidarity reinforced rabbinic rulings despite the harsh economic price paid over generations, possibly even shifting commercial activity from viticulture (allegedly Rashi’s occupation) to usury. The consequences were horrific – massacres preceding and accompanying the Crusades wiped out Christian debt by eliminating entire communities. Yet there was almost no Jewish apostasy in Ashkenaz (neatly defined by Soloveitchik as the sphere of influence stretching from Prague to York) in response, while in Spain two-thirds of the Jews converted at Christian sword point in the 14th century, well before the expulsion of 1492. 

The Ashkenazim placed principles above pressure, whether it was martyrdom rather than conversion, lending to gentiles rather than Jews, or avoiding wine contaminated by a gentile (and therefore eventually abandoning grape cultivation in the very area that gave champagne its name). “The longstanding defiant posture of Ashkenaz” became “an ever more assertive, in-your-face religiosity” (p. 170). Thus a study encompassing Jewish commerce, medieval drinking habits, and rabbinic responsa yields insight into the tragic enigma of why the Jews of Ashkenaz chose martyrdom over convenience.