Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe. Paola Tartakoff
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largely eluded systematic scholarly analysis. First, it points to the thirteenth-century revival of Christian concerns about formal Christian apostasy to Judaism and about Jews as agents of Christian apostasy to Judaism. These concerns first emerged in late antiquity, but they receded thereafter, as Christianity rose to political, cultural, and demographic dominance. Starting in the thirteenth century, however, popes, kings, Inquisitors, and Christian chroniclers and preachers began to write with horror about individuals who had been born into Christian families who did not vaguely “Judaize” but, Instead, brazenly repudiated Christianity and joined the Jews. These Christians expressed alarm, too, about alleged Jewish efforts to lure Christians over to Judaism. These developments are especially intriguing as they arose at a time when Jews were increasingly reviled. Master Benedict’s accusation and its Christian reception, I argue, constitute early evidence of this trend.
Second, Master Benedict’s accusation raises questions about actual cases of movement out of Christianity and into Judaism during the high and late Middle Ages. Here again, the results are surprising and significant. In thirteenth-and fourteenth-century Christendom, some Jews converted their slaves to Judaism. In addition, against dominant power dynamics, a small number of people who were not slaves and who had been born into Christian families—including learned clergy—risked their lives to convert to Judaism. Jews risked their lives to facilitate these conversions and also to re-Judaize repentant Jewish apostates. Some Jews even pressured unrepentant Jewish apostates to return to Judaism. In short, Christian concerns about Christian apostasy to Judaism and about Jews as agents of Christian apostasy were not divorced from all reality. Movement between Judaism and Christianity was in fact bidirectional, even if asymmetrically so. Moreover, the interplay between fact and fantasy was complex. Depicting Jews as the spiritual corruptors of Christians served a specific Christian hermeneutic function. At the same time, it was suggestive of certain social facts.
Third, by focusing on the experiences of a child, Master Benedict’s accusation invites examination of the relationship between movement across religious boundaries, on the one hand, and family dynamics, on the other. This aspect of the present investigation illuminates the fluidity of religious conversion and the ways in which individual instances of movement into, out of, and back to Judaism sometimes intertwined. The conversion or apostasy of one adult could trigger the conversion, apostasy, or return to Judaism of his or her spouse and children. Christians and Jews contested the religious identities of all of these religious travelers, but disagreements over the religious identities of children proved particularly explosive.
At the same time, then, as the Norwich circumcision case stands as one of many examples of Christian abuse of Jews in thirteenth-century Christendom, the accusation at its heart leads deep into less familiar aspects of Christian constructions of Jews and actual Jewish practices. These contexts, moreover, strongly suggest that, while the legal proceedings were indeed a travesty of justice, they may well have been sparked by an actual occurrence.
Toward a More Inclusive Framework for the Study of Medieval Conversion
Delving into social, cultural, and intellectual history on the basis of sources in Latin, Hebrew, and Romance vernaculars, this study bridges multiple historiographies. First and foremost, it intervenes in the historiography of medieval Jewish-Christian conversion. Traditionally, this historiography has been divided in two, the larger part focusing on Jewish conversion to Christianity, which was exponentially more common than its reverse, the smaller part on Christian conversion to Judaism.
This book brings the latter, less common, and less studied direction of medieval Jewish-Christian conversion to the fore. In so doing, it builds on the work of scholars who have examined discrete aspects of the phenomena that it draws together. Short segments of two tomes published in 1925 and 1953, respectively, consider the relationship between actual thirteenth-century Christian conversions to Judaism, on the one hand, and contemporaneous Christian attitudes toward Jews, on the other.23 The next decades produced a small number of studies on Jewish attitudes toward conversion to Judaism during the high Middle Ages,24 as well as a flurry of scholarship on Christian conversion to Judaism during the eleventh century, some of it informed by discoveries in the cache of Jewish manuscript fragments known as the Cairo Geniza.25 Two essays published in 1897 and 1968, respectively, and a 1977 master’s thesis offer broader overviews of medieval Christian conversion to Judaism.26 In recent years, Ephraim Kanarfogel and Avraham (Rami) Reiner have produced sophisticated analyses of learned Jewish attitudes toward conversion and return to Judaism in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe.27
Breaking new ground, this book investigates the social realities of Christian conversion to Judaism as well as Jewish and Christian attitudes toward conversion to Judaism on the basis of an unprecedented diversity of Jewish and Christian sources. These include secular and ecclesiastical court records; rabbinic responsa (questions and answers pertaining to Jewish law that were addressed to and answered by prominent rabbis); Christian exempla (moral anecdotes); Jewish folktales; royal and papal correspondence; legal, biblical, and talmudic commentaries; Jewish and Christian chronicles; Jewish liturgical poems; polemical texts; and documents from the Cairo Geniza. Drawing on this variegated source base, the present study shows how significant Christian conversion to Judaism was both for Jewish communities and also for Christian perceptions of Jews. In addition, it sheds light on the extent of Christian knowledge about trends and practices in Christian conversion to Judaism, and it provides insight into the backgrounds, motivations, and fates of Christian converts to Judaism. By paying close attention to women’s experiences as converts to Judaism and as facilitators of conversion to Judaism, this book elucidates aspects of the interplay between gender and religious conversion. It breaks with much prior scholarship on medieval conversion to Judaism by distinguishing carefully between evidence of Jewish proselytizing (defined as a determined effort to turn non-Jews into Jews) and evidence of conversion to Judaism. It operates on the assumption that the latter was not evidence of the former.
While this book’s primary historiographical impact pertains to the history of Christian conversion to Judaism, it intervenes in the historiography of Jewish conversion to Christianity, as well. During much of the twentieth century, medievalists who studied Jewish conversion to Christianity focused on thirteenth-century ecclesiastical leaders’ “spasm of aggressive conversionism,” which envisioned bringing all peoples to Christianity.28 They also elucidated the careers and analyzed the Latin writings of a number of Jewish men who embraced baptism and became zealous anti-Jewish polemicists.29 These historians portrayed medieval Jewish conversion to Christianity as a phenomenon that was primarily male and that was significant especially in the contexts of religious and intellectual history.
In recent decades, approaches to the study of medieval Jewish conversion to Christianity have become more expansive. Scholars now recognize that many medieval Jews who converted to Christianity were neither intellectuals nor victims of Christian violence. Instead, they included marginalized Jews and others who sought first and foremost to escape personal predicaments.30 Scholars increasingly recognize, as well, that many medieval Jewish converts to Christianity were women and that the motivations and fates of female converts typically differed in certain ways from those of their male counterparts.31 Tracing the experiences of this motley crew, historians have shown that most converts fared poorly after baptism and that many sought to return to Judaism. In the process, they have illuminated new aspects of the hopes, fears, and practices of the Christian communities that converts sought to join and of the Jewish ones that they abandoned.32 The present study builds on these recent developments, approaching Jewish conversion to Christianity as a venture that all kinds of Jews undertook. Considering the ways in which Jewish conversion to Christianity affected children, it expands understandings of the impact of Jewish conversion to Christianity on Jewish communities. Applying the lens of gender, it elucidates women’s experiences as converts to Christianity, returnees to Judaism, and facilitators of the re-Judaization of Jewish apostates. It also probes Jewish and Christian perceptions of the roles of women in the determination of lineage and as conveyers of religious identity.
Most important, this book charts a new course in the study of medieval Jewish-Christian conversion by jointly considering the histories of conversion to and from Judaism—two subjects whose historiographies have passed until now like ships