Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe. Paola Tartakoff
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reveals, for instance, that, although conversions from Christianity to Judaism were rare, conversions in both directions occurred during the same decades in the same regions. In addition, just as conversions from Judaism to Christianity occurred under a wide range of conditions—such that some are considered more “voluntary” or “coerced” than others—so, too, did conversions from Christianity to Judaism. As noted above, during the centuries in question, at the same time as some high-ranking Christians risked their lives to convert to Judaism, some Jews converted their slaves to Judaism. Moreover, just as a wide array of Jews pressured Jewish apostates to Christianity to return to Judaism, a wide array of Christians pressured Christian apostates to Judaism to return to Christianity. Similarly, just as Jewish authorities assigned acts of penance to repentant Jewish apostates, Christian authorities assigned acts of penance to repentant Christian apostates. Analyzing the social histories of conversion to and from Judaism in tandem reveals additional parallels between the experiences of converts in both directions. Converts in both directions—learned male converts in particular—were celebrated by religious leaders in the communities they joined as testaments to the truth and superiority of their new faiths. Some male converts in both directions engaged in polemics against their former faiths and thus came to “man” the front lines of Jewish-Christian rivalry.
Recognizing these parallels makes it possible to analyze the differences between the experiences of converts to and from Judaism with greater sensitivity and precision. To be sure, there were ways in which conversion to Judaism did not resemble conversion to Christianity because Jewish minority status mattered. For instance, conversion to Judaism could not function as an escape valve to the same extent as conversion to Christianity. Whereas the Christian majority’s social, legal, and political dominance promised to grant Jewish converts to Christianity legal protection, Jews’ subordinate status was such that conversion to Judaism promised persecution. In addition, Jewish converts to Christianity gained access to unique means of harming their former coreligionists as they could denounce them to Christian authorities; Christian converts to Judaism gained no such advantages. Nor did the facilitation of conversion in the two directions have the same implications. Supporting converts to Christianity garnered public praise. Supporting converts to Judaism courted disaster.
Analyzing the social histories of conversion to and from Judaism together reveals also that individual conversions in both directions could be linked. In some instances, one cannot tell the story of a conversion in one direction without referring to a conversion in the other. For example, on several occasions, Christian conversions to Judaism led Christian authorities to harshly punish Jews. To extricate themselves from these punishments, some Jews converted to Christianity. In a further twist, some of these Jewish converts to Christianity subsequently returned to Judaism. Individual Jewish converts to Christianity directly affected the lives of individual Christian converts to Judaism also when they denounced the latter to Christian authorities. Finally, Christian conversions to Judaism sometimes occurred in tandem with the return to Judaism of Jewish apostates. These scenarios could arise when a Jew converted to Christianity, married a Christian, and then decided to return to Judaism. At this point, his or her Christian spouse might decide to convert to Judaism, and the couple’s children might join the Jewish fold, as well.
In sum, studying conversion to and from Judaism together produces a much fuller picture of the nature of interreligious movement in thirteenth-century Christendom. It lays bare parallels in the experiences of converts in both directions that pertained to basic human needs and tendencies. It shows that Jewish and Christian attitudes toward converts and apostates often mirrored each other. It highlights distinctive trends that pertained to Jewish minority status. And it uncovers an intricate fabric of personal connections and relationships. Indeed, it reveals that individuals who traversed religious boundaries had personal and cultural ties not only to the community they sought to abandon, the community they sought to join, and other individuals who journeyed religiously in the same direction. They also had much in common with a broader set of individuals who shared the liminal space between Jewish and Christian communities, a group whose members journeyed in both directions between Judaism and Christianity.
In bridging the fields of Christian conversion to Judaism and Jewish conversion to Christianity, this book deepens understandings of thirteenth-century ecclesiastical attitudes toward converts and religious conversion. It suggests that the thirteenth-century surge in Christian efforts to convert “infidels” to Christianity fanned Christian unease about the changeability of religious affiliation. Popes and inquisitors increasingly pondered conversion to and from Judaism in tandem, both as theoretical inverses and also, notionally at least, as equally possible. This book demonstrates, In addition, that popes and inquisitors intimately associated conversion and return to Judaism as two forms of Christian apostasy to Judaism and thus as essentially the same sin. Elucidating connections between Christian attitudes toward Christian apostasy to Judaism and thirteenth-century anti-Judaism, this book establishes that the Christian charge that Jews were sinister agents of Christian apostasy belonged to the same constellation of anti-Jewish libels as the charges of ritual murder and host desecration (the accusation that Jews physically abused consecrated eucharistic wafers). The central role of circumcision in male conversion to Judaism, moreover, rendered conversion to Judaism a form of Jewish attack that Christians construed as wounding Christians both spiritually and physically.
In its interpretation of thirteenth-century Christian accusations against Jews—and of the Norwich circumcision case, In particular—as combining “fact” and “fantasy,” the present investigation adopts an approach to medieval anti-Jewish libels that scholars including Israel Yuval pioneered. This approach stresses that even “utterly wild, Imaginary fabrications [had] an actual, authentic context.”34 This book develops this line of thought on multiple levels. It does so across its overarching examination of the Norwich circumcision case and Christian concerns about Christian apostasy to Judaism, as well as with regard to a host of discrete issues. The latter include Christian claims about the tactics that Jews employed to re-Judaize Jewish apostates and Christian contentions that conversion and return to Judaism often were related in practice. All of these preoccupations, I argue, reflected the entanglement of ideology, on the one hand, and perceptions of Jewish practice, on the other. Significantly, Jewish converts to Christianity played key roles in mediating—and often intentionally distorting—Christian perceptions of Jewish practice.
Chronology, Geography, and Sources
This book ranges widely chronologically and geographically in an effort to better understand the significance of the accusation that Norwich Jews seized and circumcised a five-year-old Christian boy because they “wanted to make him a Jew.” Local sources are sparse and fragmentary. An aggregation of sources from an array of roughly contemporaneous, Interconnected contexts, however, reveals patterns in Jewish and Christian attitudes and practices that transcended local specificity.
Rooted in the thirteenth century, the present study dips back into the twelfth century in order to trace the history of thirteenth-century social and cultural developments—including tendencies in conversion and return to Judaism, Christian attitudes toward Jews, and Jewish attitudes toward converts and apostates. It reaches forward into the fourteenth century in order to follow enduring trends—including tendencies in conversion and return to Judaism and expressions of Christian concern about Christian apostasy to Judaism and about Jews as agents of apostasy. It stops in the late fourteenth century, as expulsions of Jews from much of northwestern Europe and the Iberian massacres and forced conversions of 1391 significantly shifted the social and cultural landscape of Jewish-Christian conversion.35
Geographically, this book straddles northern Europe (the British Isles and the regions that today comprise northern France and Germany) and Christian Mediterranean Europe (Castile, the Crown of Aragon, and the regions that today comprise southern France and much of Italy)—realms that traditionally have been studied separately.36 In so doing, this study does not intend to minimize the demographic, cultural, economic, and political differences between these areas, suggest that Jewish and Christian attitudes and practices were homogeneous throughout, or discount the importance of local analyses. Certainly, every locale presented unique conditions. Ephraim Kanarfogel has delineated contrasts, for instance, between Jewish attitudes toward Christian converts to Judaism in German lands, on the one hand, and neighboring northern