Narbonne had been home in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to an important Jewish exegetical school, which had played a pivotal role in the growth and development of the Zarphatic (Judæo-French) and Shuadit (Judæo-Provençal) languages.

Jews had settled in Narbonne from about the fifth century, with a community that had risen to approximately two thousand in the twelfth century.

At this time, Narbonne was frequently mentioned in Talmudic works in connection with its scholars.

One source, Abraham ibn Daud of Toledo, gives them an importance similar to the exilarchs of Babylon.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the community had gone through a series of ups and downs before settling into extended decline.

The thirty thousand deaths associated with Narbonne’s devastating plague of 1310, together with the late-thirteenth-century expulsion of the city’s Jews and the silting up of the harbor due to a change in the course of the Aude River, send the once prosperous industrial city and port into a serious decline.