To what extent would the Norse/Vikings have been aware of the Jewish people? Were there ever Jews living among the pre-Christian Norse in any significant number?

by LibraryLass

The Vikings interacted with both the Christian and Muslim worlds, and since the bulk of the Jewish diaspora settled in Europe and the Middle East, it stands to reason that Vikings must have raided or traded with them on occasion. Do we have records of any such contact, what the two cultures thought of one another, etc.?

textandtrowel

Viking-Age Norse-speakers traveling outside of Scandinavia would have had occasional opportunities to interact with Jews, but it's doubtful any Jews spent much time in Viking-Age Scandinavia.

As an initial note, regarding the use of the word 'Jew', I'd point you to a fairly recent editorial over at the New York Times. The main takeaways as a historian are that: (1) scholars should be careful not to use 'Jew' in ways that can shade into being a racial slur, and (2) people in the past, as today, might have been 'Jewish' or done 'Jewish' things without considering themselves primarily as Jews. This last point is particularly important, since we know that definitions of Jewishness have changed over time. So while it might be appropriate to state that Norse people met Jews, which at least some of them certainly did according to our definitions of the term, it's more difficult to determine whether they thought of these people primarily as being Jewish—or themselves as being 'Norse', for that matter—which would contradict much of what we know about early medieval ways of seeing the world and defining identities.

With these caveats in mind, where would Norse-speakers have interacted with persons of Jewish traditions or descended from the peoples of the Jewish diaspora? I think there were ample opportunities both east and west.

In Western Europe, Jews certainly lived in Francia, where they were classified as such and protected by the king or emperor. They appear regularly in economic legislation, indicating that Norse traders would likely have interacted with Jews in trading towns like Dorestad, Quentovic, and Walcheren. For my own particular field of research, in one fascinating document from around 825, Louis the Pious (r. 813–840) confirmed that two Jewish slave traders (one was a rabbi!) should enjoy a customary right to buy foreign slaves and traffic them through his empire (MGH Form Merov. et Karol., p. 309). Since the big slave raiders of the Viking Age were, erm, vikings, it's tantalizing to note that this law from a pious emperor protected Jews who were potentially trading in slaves captured by viking raiders. It's a thin thread, but it's enough to suggest that both raiders and traders in the west may have met with Jews.

In the east, the evidence is more clear. Jews comprised a significant minority in the Byzantine empire, including Byzantium itself, which was well-known to Norse-speakers by the name Miklagarðr, 'The Great Stronghold'. For Norse-speakers traveling both to Byzantium and to points even further east, some must have also interacted with Khazars. The Khazars were the Jewish rulers over a vast kingdom between the Caspian and Black Seas—immediately adjacent to lands subject to the Rus. They would have been intermediaries for Norse traders coming from Scandinavia as well. One of the most exciting traces of this contact is the so-called 'Moses Coin' found in the Spillings hoard, which was buried on Gotland around 871. Most of the coins in the Spillings hoard were Arabic dirhams, which are stamped with the shahada: 'There is no god but God. Muhammad is the messenger of God.' The Moses Coin is one of several Khazar versions, stamped with a modified Arabic inscription reading: 'Moses is the messenger of God'! So for the east, the evidence indicates that Norse-speakers certainly interacted with Jews, at least among the Khazar elite and likely on the streets of Byzantium as well.

So there's ample evidence that at least some Norse would have been aware of and interacted with Jewish people, and there's even hints that they could have seen them as distinctly Jewish: Jewish traders in the west secured special privileges by claiming a Jewish identity, whereas the Jewish Khazars in the east used their Jewishness to set them apart from the neighboring Abbasid Caliphate and Byzantine Empire. But it's harder to say whether Norse-speakers would have seen Jewishness as the most important thing about these people or connected these two very different groups together as both belonging to a single 'Jewish' community.