Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe. Paola Tartakoff

misleading the Christian faithful.

      This wider context is key to understanding the resurgence of Christian expressions of concern about Christian apostasy to Judaism and about Jews as agents of Christian apostasy. The Christian men who recorded and adjudicated purported cases of Christian apostasy to Judaism belonged to the ecclesiastical circles that voiced broader anxieties about Christian deviance and infidels’ and heretics’ alleged schemes. Gerald of Wales, for instance, who wrote about the two alleged Cistercian apostates, met with Pope Innocent III in 1198 and spent much of the period between 1199 and 1203 living in Rome. Twelve of the bishops who attended the 1222 Oxford Council, which condemned the apostate deacon, participated in the Fourth Lateran Council, which met in Rome in 1215.⁸³ The third canon of Lateran IV summarized all pontifical legislation to date pertaining to heretics and delineated procedures against heretics and their accomplices. The sixty-eighth canon of Lateran IV promoted separating Christians from Jews and Muslims. At the 1222 Oxford Council, English bishops republished the Lateran decrees. Many of these same bishops were present when the Norwich circumcision case came before King Henry III at Westminster in 1235. Moreover, Gregory IX personally appointed the archbishop of Canterbury, Edmund Rich, who attended the hearings pertaining to the Norwich case at Westminster in 1235 and traveled to Rome in 1238.⁸⁴ Contacts with the Roman curia undoubtedly further sensitized Gerald of Wales and English bishops to the problem of Christian deviance, invigorating these men’s sense of duty to monitor and protect the Christian flock and prosecute its corruptors.

      The Instability of Religious Identity

      The resurgence of Christian expressions of concern about apostasy to Judaism related not only to preoccupations with Christian deviance and infidels’ and heretics’ alleged schemes. It related also to contemporaneous Christian ambitions to convert non-Christians to Christianity.⁸⁵ The early thirteenth century saw the establishment of the influential Franciscan and Dominican orders, some of whose leaders stressed the importance of external mission.⁸⁶ “The ministry of our order,” declared the Dominican master-general Humbert of Romans in a 1255 encyclical, “should … bring the name of the lord Jesus Christ to the unbelieving Jews, the Saracens … the idolatrous pagans, to all the barbarians and the peoples of the world, so that we might be its witnesses and the salvation of all to the very ends of the earth.”⁸⁷ Thirteenth-century popes took up the conversionary banner, too. In February 1233, Gregory IX addressed the bull Celestis altitudo consilii to Muslim leaders worldwide, calling for their conversion.⁸⁸ In 1235, in the bull Cum hora undecima, which was reissued by Innocent IV in 1245 as well as repeatedly thereafter, Gregory instructed Christian missionaries to “preach the gospel to all men so that the process of salvation might be completed.”⁸⁹ Christian kings also promoted conversion to Christianity. In 1232—three years before the Norwich circumcision case came before his court—Henry III established a home for Jewish converts to Christianity in London, the Domus Conversorum.⁹⁰ In 1243, King James I of the Crown of Aragon promulgated legislation aimed at improving the lives of Muslim and Jewish converts to Christianity. During the ensuing decades, secular leaders in Castile, England, France, and German lands followed suit, focusing on Jewish converts in the latter three cases. Monarchs and their Christian subjects across western Europe volunteered to serve as godparents to Christian neophytes.⁹¹

      Thirteenth-century Christian conversionary efforts generated Christian unease and disappointment. Attempts to convert North African Muslims to Christianity proved prohibitively difficult; friars turned to providing pastoral care to local Christians instead. Muslims who converted to Christianity in Iberia—whether in isolation or in droves, as in the aftermath of the anti-Islamic riots in Valencia in 1276–77—often returned to Islam.⁹² The new mandate to convert Jews, moreover, constituted a radical departure from centuries of tradition. The church had always welcomed individual Jewish conversions to Christianity, but Jewish conversion en masse had long been expected to occur only at the End of Days, in keeping with biblical prophecies and Romans 11:25, which stated that some Jews would remain “hardened” until all the nations came to Christ.⁹³ Moreover, thirteenth-century conversionary efforts produced few Jewish conversions to Christianity. The Jewish conversions to Christianity that did occur tended to be motivated by mundane considerations. Archival evidence from across medieval Christendom supports the claim of the tosafist (northern European talmudic commentator) Isaac ben Samuel of Dampierre (Ri, d. 1189) that many of the Jews who decided to go over to Christianity did so on account of poverty.⁹⁴ Addressing the shortcomings of actual conversions, canon 70 of Lateran IV railed against Jewish converts to Christianity who “did not wholly cast off the old person … [but, instead,] kept remnants of their former rite.”⁹⁵ In addition, as Chapter 4 considers, Jewish conversions to Christianity were often short-lived; many Jewish converts to Christianity returned to Judaism.⁹⁶

      Christian misgivings about Muslim and Jewish conversion to Christianity may further have stimulated Christian concerns about Christian apostasy. It is conceivable that the latter in part constituted a psychological projection of Christian unease and disappointment about the former. Troubled by the reversal of traditional attitudes toward converting Jews, the general failure of Christian conversionary efforts, and the tenuous and mundane nature of many actual conversions to Christianity, some Christians could have focused, instead, on imagining that Jews were inappropriately pressuring Christians to convert to Judaism and that some Christians were shamefully going over to Judaism.⁹⁷ Such theories, however, cannot be proven.

      It is more likely that Christian conversionary aspirations intertwined with anxieties about Christian apostasy insofar as apostasy was the logical inverse of conversion. There is subtle evidence that, early in the thirteenth century, some Christians were beginning to think about movement from Judaism to Christianity in tandem with movement from Christianity to Judaism. For instance, in a letter that he sent to the archbishop of Sens in 1213, Pope Innocent III told of an individual who had abandoned Judaism for Christianity who informed on an individual who had distanced herself from Christianity on account of Jewish influence. Innocent related that a recent Jewish convert to Christianity told him that, on account of Jewish seductions, a Christian woman—presumably a servant—who lived in the home of this convert’s Jewish father became “enveloped in the shadow of Jewish error.”⁹⁸ Referring to two liminal figures—the Christian neophyte and the lapsed Christian—in the same vignette, the pope implicitly acknowledged that movement was possible in two directions between Judaism and Christianity. Religious allegiances were fundamentally unstable.

      During the second quarter of the thirteenth century, churchmen who wrote about conditions in North Africa, where Christians lived amid Muslims, similarly described movement to and from Islam in the same missives. In June 1225, for instance, Pope Honorius III called upon Dominican friars in Morocco to convert Muslims to Christianity and reconcile Christians who had apostatized to Islam.⁹⁹ Some time between 1245 and 1250, Raymond Penyafort wrote to the Dominican master general, listing the achievements of Spanish Dominicans in Muslim lands. In this missive, Raymond referred both to “many Saracens” who had been “converted to the [Catholic] faith” and also to Christian apostates to Islam and “many Christians who were … on the verge of apostatizing [to Islam], whether because of great poverty or because of the Saracens’ seduction.”¹⁰⁰ All of these missives acknowledged the bidirectionality of religious conversion.

      Some mid- thirteenth-century texts juxtaposed conversion to and from Judaism both in terms of the direction of movement and also in terms of moral valence. The preamble to the section on Jews in the Siete partidas, for instance, linked conversion to and from Judaism by referring to Christian apostasy to Judaism directly after it referred to Jewish conversion to Christianity. In addition, it made clear that converts to Christianity were to be protected, whereas apostates to Judaism were to be punished. It promised that the code’s section on Jews would address both “how Jews who bec[ame] Christians should not be oppressed; in what ways a Jew who bec[ame] a Christian [wa]s better off than Jews who d[id] not; what penalty those who harm[ed] or dishonor[ed] a Jew for becoming a Christian deserve[d]”; and “what penalty Christians who bec[ame] Jews should receive.”¹⁰¹

      An undated bull of Pope Clement IV (1265–68)