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

on drawing Christians to Judaism could assume the same form as contemporaneous tales about other alleged expressions of Jewish iniquity. Possibly, the legal nature of the summary of the proceedings bolstered its perceived credibility. This document’s conformity to and reiteration of ingrained anti-Jewish myths, however, likely also made it convincing. To quote Anthony Bale, “When ‘fantasy’ proliferates and eclipses ‘truth,’ the fantasy is more real, more true, than reality.”⁶⁰

      Circumcision as Prelude to Crucifixion

      The Norwich circumcision case was retold in five thirteenth-century chronicles. The Chronicle of Bury St. Edmunds and the second continuation of the Chronicle of Florence of Worcester both stated simply that, In 1240, “at Norwich, four Jews were drawn by horses and hanged on account of various crimes [but] especially because they circumcised a certain Christian boy according to the rite of the Jews.”⁶¹ Between about 1236 and 1253, Roger Wendover and his successor at St. Albans Abbey, Matthew Paris, recorded a strikingly different account.⁶² Preserved in the entry for the year 1235 in Wendover’s Flores historiarum (Flowers of History)—as well as in the entries for the year 1235 in Paris’s Chronica majora and Historia Anglorum—the short version of this account stated that “seven Jews, who had circumcised a certain boy at Norwich, whom they had secretly stolen away, and whom they had hidden from the sight of Christians for a year, wanting to crucify him at Easter, were brought before the king at Westminster.” The Jews confessed their crimes and were found guilty and imprisoned.⁶³ The longer version, which is found in Paris’s entry for the year 1240 in his Chronica majora, Is more detailed. It mentions that the Jews renamed Edward. It claims that Edward’s father searched for him. It describes Edward’s eventual reunion with his father, and it explains the case’s final adjudication by ecclesiastical authorities. According to this account:

      Jews circumcised a Christian boy in Norwich. Having circumcised him, they named him Jurnin. They kept him, however, In order to crucify him as an insult to Jesus Christ crucified. The father of the boy, however, from whom the Jews had secretly stolen the boy, having diligently searched for his son, found him confined in the Jews’ custody. With jubilant cries, he pointed to his son, whom he thought he had lost, who was wickedly confined in a certain Jewish chamber. When so great a crime came to the attention of Bishop William of Raleigh, a prudent and circumspect man, and some other nobles, all the Jews of that town were seized, lest, through the neglect of Christians, so great an injury to Christ should go unpunished. And when [the Jews] wanted to place themselves under the protection of royal authority, the bishop said: “These matters regard the church. They are not to be dealt with by the royal curia, as this case concerns circumcision and the wounding of the faith.” Four of the Jews were found guilty of the aforesaid crime. First, they were dragged by the tails of horses, and then they were hanged by the gallows, where they exhaled the wretched remains of life.⁶⁴

      Like the narrative that emerges from the summary of the legal proceedings, Wendover’s and Paris’s short and long versions of the Norwich circumcision case—on whose commonalities the following pages focus—had all the elements of a typical anti-Jewish tale. They cast malevolent Jewish men as preying on a helpless Christian child and being punished. Unlike the summary of the legal proceedings, however, these chronicle accounts did not present Norwich Jews as intent on bringing Edward into the Jewish community. Instead, they claimed that Norwich Jews circumcised Edward with the intention of crucifying him at Easter. In other words, they recast Edward’s circumcision as a prelude to—or a first step in—an attempted ritual murder. This interweaving of circumcision and crucifixion into a single anti-Jewish story was unprecedented, and it provides fresh insight into contemporaneous Christian views of circumcision and Jewish proselytizing.

      To modern sensibilities, the notion that Jews would circumcise a child whom they intended to murder is puzzling. Why would Jews perform a rite that they typically performed on their own infants to welcome them into the Jewish community on Christian children whom they allegedly wanted to kill? As the seventeenth-century Portuguese Jewish scholar Menasseh ben Israel pointed out in his refutation of Wendover and Paris’s narrative in his Vindiciae judaeorum (Vindication of the Jews), from a Jewish perspective, circumcision and murder were antithetical. Jewish circumcision was “a testimony of great love and affection,” he explained, “and [Jews presumably would] not dare make a sport of one of the seals of their covenant.” Menasseh ben Israel concluded that the whole Norwich story was a “prank” and that Norwich Jews’ imputed deeds were in fact worthy of Spanish Catholics in the Americas “who first baptized the poor Indians, and afterwards … inhumanely butchered them.”⁶⁵

      Wendover and Paris did not spell out how they conceived of the relationship between circumcision and crucifixion.⁶⁶ As noted above, Wendover and Paris wrote simply that “Jews hid a certain boy from Christian view for a year and circumcised him, wanting to crucify him at Easter.”⁶⁷ Paris’s additional, more detailed account stated merely that “Jews circumcised a Christian boy. Having circumcised him, they called him Jurnin. They kept him, however, to crucify him, as an insult to Jesus Christ crucified.”⁶⁸

      It is possible that Wendover and Paris did not envision any particular logical connection between circumcision and crucifixion. Perhaps, In portraying the Norwich circumcision case as an attempted ritual murder, they conflated it with one of the earliest documented allegations of ritual murder in medieval Europe, which arose in Norwich, too, a century prior—the charge that, In 1144, Norwich Jews murdered a young Christian boy named William.⁶⁹ Such a conflation, however, seems unlikely. Paris demonstrated a keen interest in alleged Jewish crimes, writing in detail about incidents in Berkhampstead in 1150, London in 1244, and Lincoln in 1255.⁷⁰ Amid all of Wendover’s and Paris’s writings, however, there is only one vague and brief reference to William. In his continuation of Wendover’s Flores historiarum, Paris noted succinctly that, In 1144, “a certain boy was crucified by the Jews at Norwich.”⁷¹ Moreover, Paris appears to have composed this part of his continuation of Wendover’s Flores historiarum after he and Wendover wrote their accounts of the Norwich circumcision case. It is possible that Wendover and Paris did not even know about William when they wrote about the circumcision case.⁷² This would not be surprising. Although William of Norwich is well known today—much better known than Edward—word of William did not circulate widely during the Middle Ages. Prior to the fifteenth century, Thomas of Monmouth’s vita of William (which survives in a single manuscript from the last quarter of the twelfth century) was virtually unknown outside Norwich. Information about William that was independent of Thomas’s vita spread slowly.⁷³

      Alternatively, the portrayal of the Norwich circumcision case as an attempted ritual murder may have been reflexive. By the 1230s, the charge of ritual murder was well known across western Europe, and accusations that Jews harmed Christian children in a variety of ways commonly evolved into tales of crucifixion. For instance, whereas in 1232 the Hampshire Eyre Rolls specified that Winchester Jews mutilated and strangled a one-year-old,⁷⁴ the Annals of Winchester later stated that Winchester Jews “crucified” this boy.⁷⁵ Indicating that crucifixion came to dominate some anti-Jewish narratives in subsequent centuries, as well, some later authors who wrote about the Norwich circumcision case—including the Roman legal scholar Marquardus de Susannis (d. 1578), the English chronicler Raphael Holinshed (d. 1580), and the French essayist Albert Monniot (d. 1938)—omitted any reference to circumcision and mentioned only crucifixion. Marquardus de Susannis even contended that Norwich Jews not only planned to crucify Edward but actually accomplished the deed.⁷⁶

      It is also possible, especially in light of Christian views of circumcision as cruel, that Wendover, Paris, and their readers imagined circumcision in the context of a ritual murder as a form of torture. As such, circumcision fit particularly well in a ritual murder narrative. Thirteenth-century Christians depicted Jews as subjecting their alleged ritual murder victims to a wide array of torments, Including a variety of kinds of mutilation. As noted above, according to a manuscript from the second half of the thirteenth century, In 1183 Jews in Bristol cut off the nose and upper lip of a boy named Adam whom they subsequently crucified in a latrine. According to the History of the Monastery of St. Peters at Gloucester, In 1168, Gloucester