Rowan Dorin’s book No Return: Jews, Christian Usurers, and the Spread of Mass Expulsion tells the story of the expulsion of the Jews from many parts of Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. While the book details the story of Europe’s Jews during the Middle Ages, it also makes clear that it was not only the Jews who were moneylenders, nor were only Jews expelled. Dorin argues that one cannot understand the attitudes toward and actions concerning the Jews without taking into account a much broader picture that includes Christian professional moneylenders, among them Flemish merchants and Piedmontese moneylenders and especially the Lombards. An important part of this argument is that expulsion was a key element of political practice not just for usury but for many other offences as well. Therefore, all aspects of the banishment of Jews from different regions in Europe, whether for a short period or for a much longer one, must be understood as part of a broader picture. Basing his argument on hundreds of legal sources found in archives, manuscripts, and in print from all across Europe, he details a process that took place over close to three centuries. Dorin focuses on law: local, regional, and universal (papal), in practice as well as theory. As appendix 1 of the book demonstrates, there were many expulsions in medieval Europe, a sad testimony to the applicability of the laws at hand. Dorin is also able to show the limitations of the law, for example, when a law was formulated but was ultimately not applied. Reading Dorin’s book, one of the main takeaways and sources of enjoyment for me was that it provides a context in which it is necessary, at least for most of the study, to say “Jews and” or “not only the Jews but also.” This is one of the themes that lies at the heart of this book, which I will call, by way of shorthand Jewish, “unexceptionality” — in other words, how and when Jews were like others. Looking at this question historiographically, one can say that those who lean more toward a lachrymose Jewish history take the side of always seeing Jews as Jews and assuming their immediate self-identification was as such. Those who adopt an anti-lachrymose view — in the spirit of Salo Baron, after whom another prize awarded to our author is named — see them as simultaneously fitting in yet also distinct. Dorin is certainly in the Baron tradition, although, of course, this is a complicated position to take when discussing expulsion and persecution, since the very subject of his book is evidence of the distinct status of Jews as Jews and the ways in which they were ultimately expelled in many places throughout the later Middle Ages. Jews were not newcomers to medieval Europe by the time Dorin starts studying them. They had been part of the local landscape and urban economy since the ninth century in France and Germany and for over a millennium in Italy and Iberia. Thus, it is not surprising to say that they were similar to their neighbours. They utilized the same local markets and surroundings. They were used to working within the same constraints and frameworks. In fact, one could say that in order to live their daily lives, obtain the privileges to live in the places they inhabited, and to do business as they did, permissions were required and rights had to be negotiated. This was done acknowledging their religious difference and some of their communal and individual needs. Of course, in this too, Jews were unexceptional, as privileges had …
