Hannah Teddy Schachter

I am a historian of medieval Europe, examining the intersections of power, gender, and minority experience in Jewish–Christian relations. My doctoral research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem analyzed the relationship between the queens of France and Jewish communities in the High Middle Ages. In doing so, it traced how royal women influenced Jewish life and how Jews navigated these gendered power structures within a centralized monarchy, until the expulsion of the Jews from the French kingdom in 1306.

My current research extends this investigation northward to the late medieval Low Countries, where fragmented lordships and frequent female rule created a contrasting political and social landscape. Often overlooked in Jewish historiography, this region and its Ashkenazic communities form the focus of my second book project, which investigates how interactions between rulers and newly arrived Jewish populations molded local identities, communal networks, and the early contours of Dutch Jewry.

More broadly, my work engages with the political structures of Ashkenazic regions, urban social life, and the strategies Jewish communities employed to navigate authority, secure belonging, and articulate their identities in pre-modern Europe, shedding light on the ways rulers and communities shaped one another.

Publications

Hannah Teddy Schachter, “Judeis dotalicii regine: Les juifs dans les terres des reines médiévales de part et d’autre de la Manche,” Revue des Études Juives 184 (2025): 45–66.

Hannah Teddy Schachter, “When Rulers Came to Town: Jews, Christians, and Urban Processions in Medieval France and the Holy Roman Empire,” Medieval History Journal 27.2 (2024): 353–81.

Hannah Teddy Schachter, Book Review of John Tolan, England’s Jews: Finance, Violence, and the Crown in the Thirteenth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), Journal of Social History 58.2 (2024): 344–46.

Albert Evan Kohn and Hannah Teddy Schachter, “From the Merry to the Macabre: Song and Dance in the Medieval Jewish-Christian Encounter, 1100–1450,” Viator 54 (2023): 233–75.

Andreas Lehnertz and Hannah Teddy Schachter, “The Jews’ Hat in Medieval Ashkenaz: Formal Attire for Everyday Men?” IMAGES—A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture 16 (2023): 52–70.

Elisheva Baumgarten, Nureet Dermer, and Hannah Teddy Schachter, "Juifs et chrétiens au quotidien," in Histoire juive de la France, ed. Sylvie Anne Goldberg (Paris: Albin Michel, 2023), 126–134.

Hannah Teddy Schachter, “A Record of Credit Transaction between Queen Elisabeth of Germany and the Jews of Würzburg, 1308,” in Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Northern Europe, 1080-1350: A Sourcebook, eds. T. Barzilay, E. Baumgarten, and E. Levinson (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2022), 78–79.

Hannah Teddy Schachter, “The Queen and the Jews: Dynamics between Jews and Their Rulers,” in In, Out, Between and Beyond: Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Europe, eds. E. Baumgarten and I. Noy (Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2021), 71–76.

Hannah Teddy Schachter, Book Review of Paola Tartakoff, Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe, (University of Pennsylvania Press 2020) Francia 4 (2021).