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

of alleged Jewish anti-Christian blasphemy and sacrilege to a new level. Previously, Christian authorities had contended that Jewish expressions of scorn for Christianity could sow or deepen Christian doubts about Christianity. Philip warned, however, that they could drive Christians to abandon Christianity and join the Jews.

      Another set of late thirteenth-century narratives that attests to Christian recognition that the border between Judaism and Christianity could be crossed in either direction described dream visions of the afterlife. The first type of narrative in this set appeared in the Cantigas de Santa María and the Speculum historiale (Mirror of History) of the French scholar Vincent of Beauvais (d. ca. 1264), as well as elsewhere. Here, the Virgin Mary appeared to a London Jew named Jacob, first in a dream, then in person. Mary showed Jacob a valley filled with dragons and devils that were torturing the souls of Jews. Then, she showed him Christ in glory, surrounded by singing angels and a great host of saints. Moved by these visions, Jacob went to a monastery where the abbot baptized him.¹³⁶ A contrasting narrative is preserved in an anonymous work on dreams, Expositio sompniorum (Interpretation of Dreams), in a Paris manuscript from the second half of the thirteenth century. Drawing on a tale from the Collationes patrum in scetica eremo (Conferences of the Desert Fathers) of John Cassian (d. 435),¹³⁷ It tells of a monk who, after hearing about the great deeds of Moses and beginning to prefer Moses to Christ, received a dream from the devil. In this dream, this monk saw Moses with a chorus of angels dressed in white and Christ with a chorus of men dressed in black. On account of this vision, this “wretched” monk “strayed from the faith of Christ and was made a Jew.”¹³⁸

      Together with texts that explored the notion that the same individual could serve as an agent of conversion to his or her own faith or apostatize to another faith, these two sets of narratives—the set about the consequences of Jewish host desecration and the set about dream visions of the afterlife—indicate that, during the latter half of the thirteenth century and into the fourteenth, Christians were pondering conversion to and from Judaism in similar terms and sometimes in tandem. These narratives also underscore the stark opposition in Christians’ eyes between these two directions of conversion. Conversion to Christianity was the product of divine grace and revelation, of eucharistic miracles and apparitions of the Virgin Mary. It was the ultimate desideratum, the happiest of conceivable endings. Apostasy to Judaism, by contrast, was the result of anti-Christian crimes and demonic deception, of Jewish blasphemy and sacrilege and dreams from the devil. The worst of nightmares come true, apostasy to Judaism was the portal to perdition.

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      The thirteenth-century revitalization of Christian concerns about apostasy to Judaism is key to understanding Master Benedict’s contention that Norwich Jews seized and circumcised his son because they “wanted to make him a Jew.” Indeed, Master Benedict’s accusation stands as early evidence of this revival. Voiced and validated in a milieu with close ties to the papal curia, the links of this specific charge to broader ecclesiastical anxieties are unmistakable. Leading churchmen who traveled in the same circles as the bishops who adjudicated the Norwich circumcision case conceived of apostasy to Judaism as being of a piece with a broader set of deviations and defections from the church. They treated movement into heresy and apostasy to Islam and Judaism as parallel and morally equivalent phenomena, and they conceptualized Christian heretics, Muslims, and Jews as agents of Christian apostasy who operated similarly in their efforts to “seduce” the Christian faithful. Moreover, some of these same men participated in thirteenth-century Christian conversionary efforts and likely were uneasy about the apparent interchangeability of religious affiliation. Polemical works, literary exempla, royal pronouncements, sermons, and chronicles all reveal that thirteenth-century Christians pondered apostasy to Judaism as the troubling inverse of Jewish conversion to Christianity. The charge that in Norwich in 1230 Jews sought to convert a Christian to Judaism thus resonated with ecclesiastical anxieties about Christian deviance, infidels’ and heretics’ alleged anti-Christian designs, and the instability of religious identity.

      In addition to drawing attention to the thirteenth-century revival of Christian concerns about Christian apostasy to Judaism, the Norwich circumcision case provides insight into how a single allegation that Jews attempted to convert a Christian to Judaism could reinforce and further disseminate Christian fears. The Christians who attended the various hearings in the Norwich circumcision case constituted a cross-section of Christian society. As noted in the Introduction, they included King Henry III, noblemen, bishops, Dominicans, Franciscans, and municipal officials, as well as thirty-six male residents of Norwich, the woman named Matilda de Bernham who allegedly rescued Edward after his circumcision, and undoubtedly other commoners, as well. Surely, each of these onlookers spread word of the affair within his or her personal and professional circles. Moreover, the high-ranking ecclesiastical officials traveled internationally, including to Rome, after the legal proceedings in the Norwich circumcision case were under way, carrying news of the case with them. There is reason to think also—although there is no hard evidence—that news of the case spread to German lands. In 1236, Henry III sent two Jewish converts to Christianity to counsel Emperor Frederick II regarding a blood libel accusation—the charge that Jews ritually murdered Christian children specifically in order to collect their blood—that had been leveled in Fulda.¹³⁹ These two Jewish converts to Christianity from England who were close to Henry must have been familiar with the Norwich circumcision case and likely mentioned it at Frederick’s court. Jews in France, moreover, surely learned about the case, as at least one of the Norwich Jews who became fugitives as a result of the proceedings fled to France.¹⁴⁰ These contacts constituted additional vectors for the propagation of the view that Jews were intent on turning Christians into Jews.

       Chapter 2

      From Circumcision to Ritual Murder

      In addition to reflecting Christian fears about the instability of religious identity and the machinations of infidels and heretics, the resurgent conviction that Jews were intent on drawing Christians to Judaism bore the imprint of trends specific to anti-Judaism.¹ Twelfth- and thirteenth- century Christian intellectuals often grouped Jews together with Muslims and Christian heretics as “unbelievers.” They did not, however, lose sight of the uniqueness of the relationship between Christians and Jews. Unlike Christian heretics, who emerged from within the Christian flock, and unlike Muslims, who were absent from much of Christendom and whom Christians viewed often as a political and military threat, Jews were the deniers and alleged killers of Christ who lived as outsiders in Christians’ very midst. This distinctive profile is key to understanding the anti-Jewish libels that proliferated during the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries: the charges that Jews ritually murdered Christians in order to parody Jews’ alleged historical killing of Christ, poisoned Christians by prescribing toxic medicaments and contaminating the water supply, abused consecrated eucharistic wafers that Christians deemed to be the actual body of Christ, and preyed upon Christians financially through the practice of usury.

      This chapter argues that the allegation that Jews were determined to turn Christians into Jews belonged to the same constellation of anti-Jewish libels as these better-known accusations. Christian authors characterized all of these alleged crimes as expressions of Jewish spite for all things Christian. For instance, when discussing the alleged ritual murder of young Richard of Pontoise (1179), the French chronicler Rigord de Saint-Denis (d. ca. 1209) asserted that Parisian Jews murdered a Christian every year “as an insult to the Christian religion.”² Writing about the alleged ritual murder of eight-year-old Hugh of Lincoln (1255), Matthew Paris recounted how the Jews of Lincoln had invited Jews from across England to participate in this “sacrifice” “as an insult and an affront to Jesus Christ.”³ Christian authors used similar language to describe purported Jewish proselytizing. In 1290, In the bull Attendite fratres, addressed to prelates in Aix, Arles, and Embrun, for example, Pope Nicholas IV declared that Jews, “the corruptors of [the Christian] faith,” promoted Christian apostasy “as an insult to the Christian faith.”⁴

      The participation of the charge of Jewish proselytizing in contemporary anti-Jewish