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

were accused of having killed in order to collect her blood, as having frequently played with the daughter of a Christian woman who later sold her to Jews.¹⁶ Master Benedict’s indictment of Norwich Jews also emphasized how physically small Edward was by describing how a Jew named Jacob “carried” Edward into his home. The date given for Edward’s alleged kidnapping and circumcision further evoked Edward’s helplessness. The opening sentence of the summary of the Norwich legal proceedings noted that Edward was seized on the eve of the feast of St. Giles (August 31). According to legend, St. Giles (d. ca. 710 near Nîmes) was a Christian hermit who was accidentally shot by an arrow that a huntsman intended for a deer. On account of this experience, St. Giles became the patron of the physically disabled. There was considerable devotion to St. Giles in thirteenth-century Norwich, such that the significance of the date of Edward’s alleged ordeal would have been apparent to local Christians.¹⁷ Likening Edward to St. Giles reinforced the sense that Edward was an innocent victim of violence.

      As a young boy, Edward played a role in the legal proceedings pertaining to the Norwich circumcision case that matched the roles of children in some contemporaneous anti-Jewish narratives: He served as an unassailable witness regarding events that transpired behind closed doors in Jewish homes.¹⁸ In court, before the assembled justices, the prior of Norwich, Dominicans, Franciscans, and other clerics and laymen, Edward recounted how, In Jacob’s home, “one [Jew] held him and covered his eyes, while another circumcised him with a small knife.” Edward’s claim that the Jews covered his eyes constitutes yet another instance in which possible fact and fantasy seem to merge. On the one hand, this claim is plausible. On the other, it resonates with the hoary motif of Jewish blindness to Christian truth—a common theme not only in Christian polemical literature but also in medieval art that personified Judaism as the blindfolded woman Synagoga.¹⁹

      The centrality of circumcision in the Norwich case would have been especially appealing to contemporaneous Christian anti-Jewish sensibilities. Christian theologians conceded that, prior to the advent of Christ, circumcision served a number of positive functions.²⁰ As practiced by contemporary Jews, however, circumcision had diverse negative connotations. Following St. Paul, theologians deemed contemporary circumcision to be spiritually obsolete and illustrative of Jews’ stubbornness in clinging to the Old Law and privileging the flesh over the spirit.²¹ Anti-Jewish polemicists deprecated circumcision as an inferior rite of initiation to baptism as it discriminated on the basis of gender: Only boys were circumcised, whereas both boys and girls were baptized.²² In the twelfth century, the Christian theologian Peter Abelard cast the Jew in his Dialogus inter philosophum, Iudaeum, et Christianum (Dialogue Between a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian) as asserting that gentiles found circumcision “abhorrent” and that Christian women would never consent to having sex with Jewish men, “believing that the truncating of this member [wa]s the height of foulness.”²³ Two thirteenth-century Iberian anti-Jewish polemicists balked in particular at the practice of meẓiẓah, the sucking of blood from the wound. Raymond Martini deemed meẓiẓah “utterly abominable and loathsome” and a fitting punishment for Jewish mouths that blasphemed against Christ.²⁴ An anonymous source vulgarly likened meẓiẓah to sexual intercourse, Identifying the mouth that sucked the wound with a “cunt.”²⁵ In their commentaries on Genesis 34—in which the sons of Jacob trick the Shehemites into being circumcised under the pretense of wanting them to join the Jewish nation, but then murder the Shehemites while they are weak and “still in pain” in order to exact revenge for the rape of their sister Dinah—Christian exegetes criticized the sons of Jacob as typifying Jews’ refusal to join with other peoples. In the context of this critique, circumcision functioned as the lynchpin of a cruel Jewish ruse.²⁶ Some medieval Christians recoiled from circumcision on account of its bloodshed and pain. In his sermon “On the Circumcision of the Lord,” in the course of discussing why baptism was superior to circumcision, Peter Abelard remarked: “Who does not dread to be circumcised by sharp stones in the tender part of the body?”²⁷ The theologian Gilbert of Poitiers (ca. 1076–1154) explained that one of the reasons why circumcision was abandoned after the coming of Christ was that it was “great torture.”²⁸

      Produced within a decade of the Norwich proceedings, an illuminated initial in a Bible that was assembled in Canterbury for the Benedictine abbot Robert de Bello presented a striking depiction of circumcision (Figure 3).²⁹ In the foreground of this image, a swarthy, hairy, beak-nosed, grimacing man, dressed in a luxurious red robe, crouches before three tall, fair, naked boys who stand in a cluster on the right.³⁰ With his left hand, the brutish man draws forth from below the penis of the boy who is closest to him. With his right hand, he brings a small knife with a curved blade to the top of the tip of the boy’s penis. The three boys gaze—two in wonder, the one who is about to be circumcised with apprehension—at flowing blue water in the upper left of the panel, behind the back of the circumciser. The boys’ feet are planted in a shiny, undulating reddish brown substance. From the textual context, it is clear that this image depicts Joshua circumcising the Israelites who had been born in the wilderness after leaving Egypt (Josh. 5:2–9). These younger Israelites gaze at the Jordan River, while standing on the dry ground at Gilgal.³¹ The polemical overtones of this illuminated initial, however, are unmistakable. This image may be read as juxtaposing circumcision to baptism. As if to draw the viewer’s attention to the dichotomy between circumcision and baptism, the boy who is about to be circumcised points down with his left hand to his impending circumcision, and perhaps also to what may be the blood of circumcision on the ground below. With his right hand, he gestures upward toward the glistening water. This image may be understood also as depicting a malevolent Jew who is perversely circumcising defenseless Christian boys, much as the Norwich Jew named Jacob was said to have done to Edward.³²

Figure 3. Detail from the “Bible of Robert de Bello,” ca. 1240–53. London, British Library, Burney 3, fol. 90r.

      During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a number of developments likely heightened the Christian sense that circumcision constituted reckless abuse. For instance, reports emerged from the Holy Land according to which Muslims forcibly circumcised Christians in orgies of bloodletting. In his account of the speech that Pope Urban II gave at Clermont in 1096 calling for the First Crusade, the author of the Historia Hierosolymitana (History of Jerusalem) reported: “The [Muslims] circumcise the Christians, and the blood of circumcision they either spread upon the altars or pour into the vases of the baptismal font. When they wish to torture people by a base death, they perforate their navels and, dragging forth the extremity of the intestines, bind it to a stake; then, with flogging, they lead the victim around until, the viscera having gushed forth, the victim falls prostrate upon the ground.”³³

      Circumcision’s associations with castration undoubtedly reinforced the Christian sense that circumcision was cruel.³⁴ During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, castration served as a particularly humiliating form of retribution for sexual incontinence. Peter Abelard was castrated for his illicit love affair with his pupil Heloise, for example. He explained in his Historia calamitatum (History of Calamities) that Heloise’s uncle and kinsmen “cut off those parts of [his] body with which [he] had done that which was the cause of their sorrow.” Abelard, moreover, took his own revenge by having two of the men who were responsible for his castration genitally mutilated and by having their eyes gouged out.³⁵ Thirteenth-century French fabliaux (humorous narrative poems) described the castrations of lascivious priests.³⁶ The Lincolnshire Assize Rolls document a case of punitive castration that transpired in England in 1202. In this instance, a Christian couple—Alan and Emma—dragged a Christian man into their home and each cut off one of his testicles. As they were subsequently acquitted in court, it seems likely that the man whom they castrated had sexually assaulted one of their relatives.³⁷ In the same year, a Christian named Robert of Sutton accused a Jew from Bedford named Bonefand of having “wickedly had [Robert’s nephew Richard] emasculated” and thereby caused him to die.³⁸ It has been suggested that Bonefand in fact circumcised