The doctor, the priest, and the widow: financial labor and communal tensions in the aljames of the Catalan Pyrenees, c. 1330

Moneylending was a common activity for fourteenth-century Jewish physicians, who carried out this labor and invested in real estate alongside their practice of medicine. As medical professionals, Jewish physicians made valuable contacts outside of the Jewish community, including with Christian ecclesiastics, and could draw on these to promote their own interests above those of their aljames [self-governing Jewish communities]. A Jewish widow acting as guardian was understood to be doing a service and could claim that she and her children were deserving of support, and even charity. Making such a person settle a debt, which might include liquidating important assets, could prove challenging. A nuanced understanding of what it meant to be a Jewish physician in this time and place needs to take into account the communal situations, financial portfolios, and social influence of individuals.