LITTLE attention has been paid to daily life in the juderías of the Crown of Aragon. The lifestyle of the ordinary man in the street and at home did not attract the interest of historians, who looked instead for the personalities and events that, to their mind, shaped the political, intellectual, or religious life of the Jews. The literary product and economic contribution of the Jews occupied a substantial part of historical research and so, inevitably, the history of the Jews in the Aragonese realm depicts the life and achievements of an intellectual and financial elite that controlled Jewish self-government and produced almost all the Jewish sources utilized by historians.

Apart from the fact that many historians tend to see in the political and intellectual leaders of the Jewish community the main, if not the only, matter for historical research, the sources that are at the disposal of the historian belong mostly to the upper circles of Jewish society. The ‘silent majority’ left few records behind. Most Jews were engaged in hard work to earn their livelihood and raise their families and had neither the time nor the literary talent to describe their thoughts, feelings, and activities. References to the life of the Jewish masses therefore come from sources that are necessarily prejudicial and unbalanced and consequently misleading. They do not reflect the lifestyle of the majority of the common Jews, whose daily conduct did not require any record, but focus on the problems and deviations of some members, whose demographic size and representative character remain a mystery. We hear more of thieves, rapists, prostitutes, men of violence, and the like than of ordinary and well-behaved Jews, simple and hard-working craftsmen, loving husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, friends and neighbours. We read more about violence than love, more about robbery than good deeds, more about how people cursed and fought than how they dressed and ate. We hear the voice of the noisy more than the songs of the quiet, the insults of the quarrelsome more than the compliments of the goodhearted. Despite all these limitations, the story deserves to be told, as long as we bear in mind its shortcomings and one-sidedness.