Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe. Paola Tartakoff
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in this book—starting with the legal records pertaining to the Norwich circumcision case—arose in a specific context without careful attention to which it cannot fully be understood. Applying a wide geographic lens to the study of medieval Jewish-Christian conversion, however, reveals key patterns regarding, for instance, the backgrounds and fates of Christian converts to Judaism and the attitudes of Jewish and Christian intellectual elites toward Christians who converted to Judaism. For the purposes of the present investigation, these broad patterns are most interesting.
One challenge in analyzing geographically diverse sources is that different kinds of texts survive from different regions. Relatively few legal and religious Jewish writings survive from medieval England, the Italian peninsula, and Castile, for example, whereas many more survive from German lands, northern and southern France, and the Crown of Aragon. Documentary sources, which often provide the most straightforward record of medieval experience, survive from the Crown of Aragon, southern France, and England—and to a lesser degree from northern France, German lands, and the Italian peninsula—but not from Castile. Archives in Catalonia, southern France, and Italy preserve invaluable records of inquisitorial proceedings involving Jews, converts, and returnees to Judaism. Such documents are lacking, however, for England, where the papal inquisition (the institutional antecedent to the notorious Spanish Inquisition) never took root. German Jewish communities produced especially valuable texts for the study of attitudes and practices relating to Jewish conversion. These include the anthology of twelfth- and thirteenth-century polemic known as the Sefer Niẓẓaḥon Yashan (Old Book of Victory); the sui generis early thirteenth-century Hebrew compilation of ethical teachings and pietistic practices that was written mainly by Rabbi Judah ben Samuel of Regensburg (Judah he-Ḥasid, d. 1217), Sefer Ḥasidim (Book of the Pious); the Nuremberg Memorbuch (Nuremberg Book of Remembrance), which was created in 1296 to commemorate local martyrs and record bequests that Jews made for the sakes of their souls; a thirteenth-century circumciser’s manual titled Kelalei ha-Milah (Rules of Circumcision); and thirteenth- and fourteenth-century compilations of Jewish folktales. Aware that any attempt to construct a narrative on the basis of such a variegated source base will leave significant gaps and open questions, I strive to read these documents together as carefully and coherently as possible.
Additional challenges relate to sources’ genres. Some texts that I cite repeatedly, Including Sefer Ḥasidim, pose special interpretative challenges as scholars debate the extent to which the anecdotes and moral teachings that they preserve reflected broad trends as opposed to the views of a discrete group.38 Others, such as the Sefer Niẓẓaḥon Yashan and the treatises against “the enemies of the church” of the mid-thirteenth-century Bavarian inquisitor known as “the Passau Anonymous,” have distinctly polemical agendas. Comments in biblical and talmudic commentaries, rabbinic responsa, and legal compendiums often are more prescriptive than descriptive, and they shed more light on the ideals of learned men and on individual scholars’ views on precise points of law than on lived experience. Papal bulls (decrees to which a special leaden seal—a bulla—was appended for authentication) and other documents produced in chanceries (administrative offices) often reproduce generic passages from formularies (compendiums of model documents), obscuring the details of the specific matter at hand.
These considerations notwithstanding, all of the texts on which I draw have the potential to illuminate Jewish or Christian attitudes, If not practices. Whenever possible, I seek to assess how widely representative particular details might be by reading texts against contemporaneous Jewish and Christian sources. In addition, I am sensitive to the fact that many of the documents I analyze may be read on more than one level. For instance, I interpret the court records pertaining to the Norwich circumcision case as accurately, albeit incompletely, documenting who was arrested, who testified, and who was convicted. I read these court records also as reflecting the anti-Jewish prejudices of the Christians who testified in court, the scribes and clerks who recorded the proceedings, and the authorities who adjudicated the case. At the same time, I comb these records cautiously for possible clues to actual Jewish practices. Similarly, I treat records pertaining to proceedings of the papal inquisition as providing evidence of Christian anxiety about Christian apostasy to Judaism and about Jews as agents of Christian apostasy. I read these records also as reflecting inquisitorial assumptions about Jews, Inquisitors’ understandings of their own mission, and inquisitors’ professional goals. Insofar as inquisitorial records often include Jewish testimonies, however, and insofar as the content of these testimonies sometimes aligns with evidence from a variety of Jewish sources, I draw on these records also in seeking to understand daily life.
Chapter Outline
In search of a fuller and deeper appreciation of the landscape of movement between Judaism and Christianity in medieval Christendom, this book applies a sequence of lenses to the Norwich circumcision case and the thirteenth-century resurgence of Christian concerns about Christian apostasy to Judaism. Chapters 1 and 2 examine the accusation at the heart of the Norwich circumcision case—namely, that Jews seized and circumcised a Christian five-year-old because they “wanted to make him a Jew”—through the lens of contemporaneous developments in Christian culture. Chapter 1 presents this accusation as early evidence of a revival of Christian concerns about Christian apostasy to Judaism and about Jews as agents of Christian apostasy. I demonstrate that broad ecclesiastical anxieties about the instability of religious identity contributed to the resurgence of these preoccupations. Contemporaneous churchmen grappled with the realities of Christian heresy and apostasy to Islam; they were distressed about Christian deviance generally. Their hopes and misgivings about Jewish conversion to Christianity focused their attention further on the changeability of religious affiliation. I show that the high-ranking laymen and clergy who adjudicated the Norwich circumcision case belonged to the learned circles that debated these issues during the first half of the thirteenth century. Their prolonged public investigation of the circumcision affair reflected and heightened Christian sensitivity to Christian apostasy to Judaism.
Chapter 2 demonstrates that the revival of concerns about Jews as agents of Christian apostasy to Judaism participated also in the evolution of Christian anti-Judaism. Through close analyses of the summary of the legal proceedings in the Norwich circumcision case and the chronicle accounts of the case from the abbey of St. Albans, I argue that the accusation that Jews lured unsuspecting Christians over to Judaism was of a kind with better-known anti-Jewish libels, such as the charges of ritual murder and host desecration. It was cast in the same narrative framework as these other libels. Moreover, on account of the central role of circumcision in male conversion to Judaism, it resembled them in portraying Jews as causing bodily harm. Chapter 2 also explores links between accusations of circumcision and accusations of ritual crucifixion in the context of contemporaneous developments in Christian thought and devotional practices. I show that, for thirteenth-century Christians, circumcision evoked a physical characteristic of Christ’s body as well as the first stage of Christ’s passion. Performed on Christians as a rite of Jewish initiation, circumcision therefore also connoted Christ’s sufferings at the hands of Jews.
Chapters 3 and 4 examine how the Christian concerns about apostasy to Judaism that Master Benedict’s accusation reflected did—and did not—align with actual Jewish attitudes and practices. Chapter 3 surveys the social history of Christian conversion to Judaism. It reveals that, during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a small number of individuals who had been born into Christian families risked their lives by converting to Judaism. These converts included men and women from a range of backgrounds, Including learned clergy. I suggest that these conversions distressed ecclesiastical authorities as they attested to the enduring potency of Judaism and as they bore the potential to sow doubts in additional Christians about the superiority of Christianity to Judaism. I argue further that some Christians interpreted the