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

allegations. In 1205, for example, In a missive addressed to the king of France, Pope Innocent III reported that “news had reached him” about many Jewish offenses. These included turning Christians away from “the duty of [Christian] worship,” as noted in Chapter 1, as well as appropriating ecclesiastical goods and Christian possessions through “the evil practice of usury” and seizing opportunities to kill Christian guests.⁵ The second law of the section on Jews of the Siete partidas discussed Jewish proselytizing alongside ritual murder as a Jewish crime against Christians that merited the death penalty.⁶ The nineteenth canon of the 1267 Council of Vienna prohibited Jews from “luring Christians over to Judaism or recklessly circumcising Christians for any reason,” in addition to forbidding Jews from tending to sick Christians and charging excessive rates of interest. It also directed Jews to close their windows when a consecrated eucharistic wafer was carried through the street in a procession.⁷ In 1304 in Florence, the Dominican preacher Giordano da Pisa accused Jews of engaging in an offensive against Christ that involved abducting and circumcising Christian boys as well as committing host desecration and ritual murder.⁸ As noted in Chapter 1, well-poisoning charges in southern France in 1321 encompassed allegations that Jews not only bribed lepers to contaminate the water supply but also required lepers to “renounce the Catholic faith.”⁹

      Further indicating that the charge of Jewish proselytizing was of a piece with other medieval anti-Jewish accusations, early modern refutations of medieval calumnies debunked the charge that Jews sought to draw Christians to Judaism alongside some of these others. In his apologetic work Las Excelensias de los Hebreos (The Excellences of the Hebrews, 1679), for example, the converso polemicist Isaac Cardoso refuted ten accusations against Jews. These included the allegation that Jews “persuaded the nations to [come to] Judaism” as well as the charge of ritual murder.¹⁰

      The present chapter explores how two thirteenth-century accounts of the Norwich circumcision case further illuminate the embeddedness of the charge of Jewish proselytizing in contemporaneous anti-Jewish discourse. The first account—the extant summary of the legal proceedings that unfolded in 1234 and 1235—portrayed Edward’s alleged circumcision as part of an effort to “make him a Jew.” The second, crafted by the chroniclers at St. Albans Abbey in Hertfordshire, Roger Wendover and Matthew Paris, portrayed Edward’s alleged circumcision, Instead, as part of an attempted ritual murder. The pages that follow first analyze the thematic and structural features of the first account. I show that these illustrate how the charge that Jews were intent on drawing Christians to Judaism could fit into the same narrative framework as contemporaneous tales about other alleged expressions of Jewish iniquity. I demonstrate also that the first account presents circumcision as a quintessentially Jewish form of violence, revealing yet another link between the allegation that Jews were determined to turn Christians into Jews and the better-known anti-Jewish libels of the period: Nearly all of these accusations portrayed Jews as threatening the bodily integrity of Christ or his flock.

      The second half of this chapter turns to the “ritual murder version” of the Norwich circumcision case as recorded in the chronicles from St. Albans. I argue that this second account of the case, which also underscores Christian perceptions of circumcision as a cruel form of maiming, additionally highlights the ways Christians associated circumcision with the body of the historical Christ. To thirteenth-century Christians, circumcision evoked a physical characteristic of Christ’s body as well as the first stage of Christ’s passion. Practiced on Christians as a rite of Jewish initiation, circumcision not only physically wounded Christians, it also recalled the first time Jews shed Christ’s blood. In closing, I suggest that the near simultaneous development of the “conversion” and “ritual murder” versions of the Norwich circumcision case—and the substitution of ritual murder for conversion in the latter—point to the fundamental similarity of the anti-Jewish charges they promoted.

      Circumcision as a Rite of Jewish Initiation

      Preserved in the Curia Regis Rolls of King Henry III, the extant summary of the legal proceedings in the Norwich circumcision case does not present a linear account of Norwich Jews’ alleged crime.¹¹ Instead, it summarizes multiple testimonies one after another. It opens with the testimony of Master Benedict and then proceeds with that of nine-year-old Edward; the collective testimony of a representative of the archdeacon, “a great group of priests,” the coroners of the county and city of Norwich, and thirty-six Norwich parishioners; the testimony of a woman named Matilda de Bernham, who allegedly rescued Edward after he escaped from the Jews; that of the constable of Norwich, Richard of Fresingfeld; and, finally, the joint testimony of the bailiffs of Norwich, Simon of Berstrete and Nicholas Chese. Two paragraphs at the end of these summarized testimonies explain that the case eventually was transferred from the royal court to an ecclesiastical court and that Norwich Jews made a last-ditch attempt to extricate themselves from the proceedings by paying King Henry III to have Edward’s body reexamined.

      This document presents myriad interpretative challenges. As a compilation of information from various sources and an abridgment of much lengthier records, it is the product of a process of culling, rewriting, and translation into Latin in the course of which a great deal inevitably was distorted and omitted. In addition, even insofar as it accurately represents certain aspects of the proceedings, one cannot ascertain to what extent the prosecution and witnesses misreported the experiences they described, whether in order to advance personal agendas or to conform—consciously or not—to widespread preconceptions. Edward’s testimony is particularly unreliable. As a nine-year-old reminiscing about what allegedly happened when he was five, Edward easily could have been told what to say by an adult.

      These considerations notwithstanding, the summary of the legal proceedings may fruitfully be analyzed as reflecting some of its authors’ cultural assumptions. Indeed, when read as shaped by the ways in which contemporaneous Christians conceived of Jews, this document illustrates how naturally the charge that Jews were intent on drawing Christians to Judaism could fit into the narrative framework that characterized tales in the large corpus of Christian anti-Jewish writings that developed during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Primarily of clerical origin, these anti-Jewish yarns appeared in preaching manuals, literary exempla, folktales, miracle collections, chronicles, and royal, papal, and episcopal missives across western Europe.¹²

      The authors of the summary of the legal proceedings—that is, the prosecution and witnesses in the case, the scribes who recorded their statements, and the clerks who finalized the extant record—constructed a narrative about an alleged Jewish effort to turn a Christian into a Jew that so thoroughly infused reportage with tropes familiar from anti-Jewish lore that often it is impossible to distinguish between plausible fact, on the one hand, and fantasy, on the other. The near total omission of Jewish voices from this account leaves no doubt, however, that these authors carefully curated their composition. In court, the Jewish defendants in the Norwich circumcision case were given the opportunity to speak. In fact, the summary of the proceedings notes that the Jews “defended themselves as Jews against a Christian [i.e., Master Benedict].” This document is silent, however, regarding what the Jews said. Insofar as it was crafted to put forth a simple and satisfying tale in which righteous Christians triumphed over wicked Jews, such information was irrelevant.

      Numerous features of the Norwich circumcision case facilitated its narration in this register. One was Edward’s youth at the time of his alleged seizure and circumcision. Young Christian boys were the quintessential victims of alleged Jewish machinations in contemporaneous anti-Jewish tales, especially stories of ritual murder.¹³ As recorded in the summary of the legal proceedings, Master Benedict’s indictment of Norwich Jews underscored Edward’s youthful innocence. Its opening lines stated that, when Edward was kidnapped, he was five years old. Moreover, they specified that Edward was “playing [in the street in the town] of Norwich.”¹⁴ Contemporaneous anti-Jewish tales likewise referred to Jews’ young victims as being unsuspectingly at play when Jews snatched them. For instance, In his account of the alleged ritual murder of Hugh of Lincoln, Matthew Paris cast Hugh as last having been seen, prior to entering a Jewish home, “playing with Jewish boys his age.”¹⁵