Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe. Paola Tartakoff
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between circumcision and other types of genital mutilation. Given the currency of punitive genital mutilation during this period in England, however, a literal reading of this source seems warranted. It is likely that Bonefand had Robert’s penis and testicles removed in order to take revenge on him.40 This would explain why Bonefand paid the king one mark for a trial before a jury, why the jury acquitted Bonefand, and why Robert was found guilty of a false appeal.41 Matthew Paris related yet another instance of punitive castration that transpired during the first half of the thirteenth century in England. In this case, a knight of Norfolk named Godfrey de Millers, who had entered the house of a certain John Brito to have sex with John’s daughter, was caught in a trap, hung upside down by his feet from the beams, castrated, and then thrown out.42
Attesting to thirteenth-century associations between circumcision and castration, the Passau Anonymous regaled his readers with a bawdy story that included both procedures and derided the centrality of genital mutilation to male conversion to Judaism. He told of “a certain monk” who “circumcised himself” and married a lascivious Jewish woman with whom he was infatuated. “On account of love for his [Jewish] wife,” the Passau Anonymous explained, this former monk long withstood pressure from his brother, a Christian prelate, to return to Christianity. Out of spite, the prelate eventually decided to compound his brother’s genital injuries. He had the former monk castrated, thereby inflicting a mirror punishment for both conversion to Judaism and sexual misconduct.43 When, on account of this castration, the Jewish wife was no longer able to have sex with the former monk, she spurned him. At this point, having been rejected by his Jewish wife, the circumcised and castrated former monk returned to Christianity and the monastic life.44
Understood as a form of physical violence, circumcision was akin to many of the other acts of which thirteenth-century Christians accused Jews. Like murder, poisoning, and host desecration (understood as the desecration of the body of Christ), circumcision injured Christian bodies. The summary of the legal proceedings in the Norwich case foregrounded Edward’s description of his alleged circumcision and repeatedly stressed the physical harm that this procedure had caused. Punctuating the summary at regular intervals, the official of the archdeacon, the coroners, and the constable of Norwich all testified that, when they saw Edward shortly after his circumcision, his “cut member” was “enlarged,” “very swollen,” and “bloody.” When Matilda took the stand, she declared that Edward seemed so sick when she and her daughter found him that they “thought he would soon die.”45
The alleged violence in the Norwich circumcision case was compatible with contemporaneous Christian anti-Jewish sensibilities also in that its perpetrators were Jewish men—the typical culpable parties in anti-Jewish tales about ritual murder, poisoning, host desecration, and financial malfeasance. As noted above, Master Benedict singled out a certain “Jacob” as the principal malefactor in Edward’s alleged kidnapping and circumcision. According to the summary of Master Benedict’s testimony, “Jacob, a Jewish man, seized Edward, carried him into his home, and circumcised him,” and he “kept [Edward] in his home for one day and [one] night.” Master Benedict testified that, when he ultimately found his son, he discovered him “in the hands of the aforesaid Jacob.” Stressing that Jacob acted out of hatred for all things Christian, Master Benedict added that Jacob “did [all of] this wickedly and feloniously, In contempt of the Crucified One and Christianity, as well as [in contempt of] the peace of the lord king.” According to Master Benedict’s and Edward’s statements, moreover, Jacob did not act alone. Master Benedict named twelve additional Jewish men as accessories to the alleged crime, at least five of whom, as noted in the Introduction, were leading local money-lenders.46 As Miri Rubin has observed, wealthy Jewish men, who were “in a position of economic power and patriarchal authority and bound to other men by ties of sociability and shared ill intent,” figured in Christian narratives as particularly menacing abusers.47 The juxtaposition of a posse of grown men to a small child moreover, evoked a sense of danger, heightening the pathos of the tale and highlighting Edward’s vulnerability.
Even the instrument with which the summary of the legal proceedings portrayed Norwich Jews as having circumcised Edward—“a small knife”—echoed Christian claims elsewhere about the ways Jews wounded Christians and harmed objects that Christians held sacred.48 To be sure, small knives were in fact used in circumcisions. It is noteworthy, however, that these implements figured prominently in host desecration and ritual murder narratives, as well. According to a manuscript from the second half of the thirteenth century, for example, In 1183, Jews in Bristol used a small knife to cut off the nose and upper lip of a boy named Adam, whom they subsequently crucified in a latrine.49 According to Matthew Paris, the Jews who tortured Hugh of Lincoln each pierced him with a small knife.50 According to the chronicles of the abbey of Saint-Denis, when, In Paris in 1290, a Jew was accused of host desecration, he was said to have pierced the host he had procured with a small knife.51 A cult developed, moreover, not only around this eucharistic wafer, which allegedly miraculously bled, but also around the “holy knife” with which it was stabbed.52
Crucial to the compellingness of the Norwich circumcision case as an anti-Jewish narrative was its resolution in favor of Christians and the Christian faith. According to the summary of the proceedings, this resolution began when Edward escaped “from the hands of the Jews” shortly after his circumcision, and Matilda de Bernham discovered him sobbing by the river.53 In this scene, Edward’s tears, the river, and Matilda’s kindness may be read as standard tropes. To be sure, it would have made sense for a traumatized boy to be crying at this point, and it is entirely plausible that Edward might have walked by the river Wensum. The symbolism of water as representing purification and renewal, however, seems apt, as well. Water’s cleansing and transformative properties figured frequently in contemporaneous literature. For instance, In a story in the annals of Egmond Abbey in the county of Holland, a Jewish father—the cruel adult male Jew of Christian lore—drowned his son in the Danube to prevent his baptism. Although this boy’s body had been weighted with lead, the river lifted it up and gently washed it ashore, shining. In the meantime, the water cured the blindness of a female onlooker, evoking how this boy’s mystical passage from Judaism to Christianity entailed a restoration of sight.54 Similarly, both Edward’s tears and the river that flowed by him may be read as representing a salvific cleansing, perhaps even a rebaptism.55
For her part, Matilda de Bernham also played roles familiar from tales of ritual murder and host desecration. First, like the pious Christian women in such narratives, she served as a detector of Jewish abuse.56 Second, as a maternal figure, she evoked the Virgin Mary, who figured prominently in contemporaneous anti-Jewish literature.57 The summary of the legal proceedings stressed that Matilda was a mother. She discovered Edward together with her daughter, and she came before the justices at Norwich “with her daughter similarly under oath.” Furthermore, Matilda acted maternally toward Edward. According to the summary, Matilda testified that she and her daughter “kept [Edward] in their home for the love of God because they did not know whose son he was.”58 Matilda’s solicitousness toward Edward further accentuates the pathos of the account, highlighting the absence of Edward’s own mother from the records of the proceedings—an absence that is analyzed in Chapter 5.
Finally, the summary of the legal proceedings mirrored the narrative arc of contemporaneous anti-Jewish tales by stressing that Norwich Christians defeated the Jews. Although the document was composed in 1235, before the case entered its final stages in ecclesiastical court, its closing words made clear that the Jews had begun to endure their deserved punishment: They “remain[ed] in prison.”59
In short, the summary of the legal proceedings in the Norwich circumcision case was inscribed with thematic and structural features common to contemporaneous anti-Jewish literature. Like myriad tales from its cultural milieu, this record cast Jewish men as harming a Christian boy out of contempt for Christianity and receiving their just deserts. Additional familiar topoi included the innocent child victim who was initially at play, the child as truth-teller, Jewish blindness, the purifying and regenerative power of water, and the intervention of a pious Christian woman who evoked the Virgin Mary. Presenting