The Frankish kingdom in the early seventh century was not a tidy thing. It was a patchwork of Roman inheritance and Germanic custom, governed by a Merovingian dynasty whose kings prayed Christian but whose realm was held together by personality, warfare, and the church. Into this world, Jewish merchants and scholars had settled over the previous two centuries - in the old Roman cities of the Rhineland, in the trading towns of Burgundy, in the ports of what had been Roman Gaul. They lived under the general framework of Roman law as it had been absorbed into Frankish practice, occupying a recognised if uncertain place in local economies. Then, in 629 CE, the new king, Dagobert I, issued an order that collapsed that uncertainty into something blunt: the Jews of the Frankish realm were to convert to Christianity or leave. Those who refused both would face expulsion. It was the first recorded decree of its kind from a western European monarchy, and it arrived without warning from a position of settled legal stability into which communities had put down roots over generations.
The immediate trigger, as the sources report it, was pressure from the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius. Heraclius had himself issued a compulsory conversion decree against the Jews of the Byzantine Empire, and had requested that allied western rulers do the same - apparently following a millenarian calculation that the conversion of the Jews was a precondition for the end of times, or simply a measure of political solidarity. Dagobert, newly consolidated as sole king of the Franks after years of dynastic conflict, had reasons of his own to demonstrate piety and align with Constantinople. Whatever the mix of theology and diplomacy, the decree went out. Its practical effect was uneven - the church was not a single machine, enforcement varied by region, and the sources suggest some communities paid fines or found local protectors - but the principle had been enacted, and the precedent was real.
The record
The decree of Dagobert I is recorded in the Fredegar Chronicle (Chronica Fredegarii), a Frankish Latin chronicle composed in the mid-seventh century, one of the primary narrative sources for Merovingian history. Book IV, chapter 65 of the chronicle records that Dagobert, at the urging of Emperor Heraclius, ordered the Jews throughout his kingdom to receive baptism; many submitted, at least nominally, while others fled. The same event is noted, more briefly, in the Liber Historiae Francorum (c. 727 CE). The Fredegar Chronicle is edited in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH), Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum, vol. 2 (Hannover, 1888); an English translation and analysis is provided by J.M. Wallace-Hadrill in The Fourth Book of the Chronicle of Fredegar (Nelson, 1960).
The connection to Heraclius is more than a detail of diplomatic correspondence. In 629 CE Heraclius had just completed one of the most spectacular military reversals in late antique history - the recovery of the True Cross and the provinces of Palestine and Syria from Sassanid Persian occupation. The Jewish communities of Palestine had, under Persian rule, been permitted to settle in Jerusalem for the first time since the Hadrianic prohibitions, and some had aided the Persian conquest. When Heraclius retook the region, that association became a liability. The compulsory conversion decree he issued in the Byzantine east in 632 CE (with earlier regional measures from around 629-630) was partly a punitive response to that history, partly a piece of eschatological calculation. His request to Dagobert linked the Frankish Jews - who had no part in any of this - to a pan-Christian political moment. They became variables in a calculation made thousands of miles from their Rhine-valley workshops and Burgundian warehouses. The dissonance between their actual lives and the ideological abstraction that had just been applied to them is one of the characteristic experiences of this period of Jewish history.
The record
Emperor Heraclius's hostility towards Jewish communities following the Byzantine reconquest of Palestine is documented in several near-contemporary sources. The Doctrina Jacobi nuper baptizati (Teachings of the Recently Baptised Jacob), a Greek polemical dialogue probably composed c. 634 CE, describes compulsory baptism of Jews in the Byzantine Empire and reflects the atmosphere of coerced conversion under Heraclius. The Armenian historian Sebeos, writing c. 660 CE (History of Heraclius, ch. 24), records both Jewish hopes under Persian rule and the reversal under Byzantine reconquest. Modern analysis is provided by Walter Kaegi in Heraclius, Emperor of Byzantium (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 209-213, and by Bernard Bachrach in Early Medieval Jewish Policy in Western Europe (University of Minnesota Press, 1977), which traces the request to Dagobert specifically.
The community did not vanish. Expulsion decrees in the early mediaeval west were rarely total in their effect - the administrative machinery to enforce them uniformly did not exist, the church's reach into rural areas was uneven, and local lords and merchants who valued Jewish commercial networks had their own reasons to look away. Some families converted, at least in the legal register that mattered for the decree's purpose. Others moved eastward, or south toward Italy and Iberia, where conditions for Jewish life were different. The Jewish presence in the Frankish lands did not end in 629. What ended was a period in which that presence could be taken as legally unremarkable. From 629 onward, to be Jewish in a western Christian kingdom was to hold a conditional status - one whose continuation depended not on settled right but on the goodwill and calculation of whoever was currently on the throne. Dagobert's decree invented that condition, and his successors, and then the Carolingians, and then the Capetians, and then every subsequent French and German dynasty, would work within the framework it had created.
The communities that scattered from the Frankish realm in 629 took their learning, their Torah scrolls, and their commercial contacts with them. Some of those contacts were rebuilt; some communities returned within a generation. The decree did not erase Jewish life in western Europe - nothing did. What it left behind was a political grammar: the idea that a king had the power to order a people out of his territory on the grounds of religion alone. That grammar would be read and reread, by worse rulers with better enforcement, for the next eight centuries, all the way to 1492.
