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

Christian families) were repudiating Christianity and joining the Jewish community, often at the instigation of Jews. As the following pages show, these Christians described Christian apostasy to Judaism as starting with a “turning away” from Christianity. They claimed that Christian apostates to Judaism “denied the truth of the Catholic faith,” “apostatized,” and “strayed from the faith of Christ.”

      In some cases, Christian authors blamed lust or the devil for these deviations from the Christian fold. In others, they blamed Jews. At times, they blamed Jews in relatively neutral terms, stating, for example, that Jews “made” Christians Jews, or that Jews “turned” or “led” Christians over to Judaism. Often, however, Christian authors stressed that Jews acted against Christians’ will and with evil intent. They referred to Jews as “compelling Christians to apostatize” and as “dragging,” “wickedly attracting,” and “seducing” Christians into error. Jews allegedly did so “maliciously” and “secretly,” “through devilish trickery” and “the promotion of a lie.” Jews’ “cunning methods” were said to include sophistry and bribery. Jews purportedly threatened “unsuspecting” Christians of all kinds—lay and religious. Often, they targeted the most vulnerable: women, children, and “simple” folk.

      Crucially, almost without exception, thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Christian authors mentioned only one element of actual Jewish conversion procedure—namely, circumcision. Circumcision may have been the only actual Jewish conversion rite of which some Christians were aware. Christians were familiar with it from the Bible, where circumcision is the only ritual associated with becoming a Jew.¹² They knew of it also from contemporary Jewish practice, as circumcision constituted verifiable evidence that steps had been taken toward joining the Jewish fold. Thus, according to the chronicler at the abbey of St. Albans, Matthew Paris (1200–1259), Christians examined the body of a former deacon who allegedly converted to Judaism and was condemned at the 1222 Council of Oxford to see if he had been circumcised.¹³ Similarly, the testimonies given in the course of the judicial proceedings relating to the Norwich circumcision case repeatedly emphasized that Edward’s circumcised penis had been seen: Master Benedict declared that he had shown Edward’s body to the justices of Norwich shortly after his son’s alleged circumcision and that “it was clear” that Edward had been circumcised. The official of the archdeacon, the coroners of Norfolk and Norwich, and a large group of priests affirmed that they, too, had seen Edward’s recently circumcised member.¹⁴ References to circumcision in Christian discussions of conversion to Judaism did not relate only to the physical realities of circumcision. “Circumcision” could be understood more loosely, as well, as metonymy for conversion to Judaism. To “become circumcised” was shorthand for “converting to Judaism,” even when speaking about the experiences of women. For instance, in his discussion of Christians “who den[ied] faith in Christ and turn[ed] away to the faithlessness of Jews,” the mid-thirteenth-century Bavarian Dominican inquisitor known as “the Passau Anonymous” listed clerics, merchants, craftsmen, and women who “circumcised themselves.”¹⁵ Insofar as Christians portrayed circumcision as the sum total of Jewish conversion procedure, they deprecated conversion to Judaism. Circumcision involved a minor anatomical operation; it was “of the flesh.” Baptism, by contrast, effected a spiritual transformation.¹⁶

      Finally, in addition to specifying that Christian apostates to Judaism abandoned Christianity, often at the behest of Jews, and that male apostates were circumcised, thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Christian authors noted that apostates assumed a new identity or adhered to a new tradition. Some stated that Christians had been “made into Jews.” Some described apostasy to Judaism as the decision to “take on” living in accordance with Jewish law and custom. Most often, Christian authors described converts as reorienting themselves spatially—as “turning toward,” “being carried over to,” or “flying over to” a destination variously referred to as “Judaism,” “the Jewish sect,” “the rite of the Jews,” “the Jewish law,” “Jewish unbelief,” “the error of unbelief,” “the damnable rite,” or “the execrable rite.”

      This chapter begins to investigate the thirteenth-century revival of Christian anxieties about apostasy to Judaism and about Jews as agents of Christian apostasy. It demonstrates that these developments participated in broad ecclesiastical worries that did not pertain only to Jews. Thirteenth-century popes, bishops, and inquisitors were distressed about Christian deviance generally. They associated Christian apostasy to Judaism conceptually with apostasy to Islam and with falling into Christian heresy. In addition, they associated alleged Jewish efforts to draw Christians to Judaism with the alleged efforts of Muslims and Christian heretics to draw Christians to Islam and Christian heresy, respectively. This chapter shows also that Christian concerns about Christian apostasy to Judaism and about alleged Jewish efforts to draw Christians to Judaism were related to the hopes and misgivings of some ecclesiastical leaders about Jewish conversion to Christianity. Insofar as this was the case, Christian concerns about Jewish apostasy were manifestations of widespread unease about the changeability of religious affiliation.

      The pages that follow first trace the early history of concerns about apostasy to Judaism and about Jews as agents of apostasy. They then document the reemergence of these concerns during the first half of the thirteenth century and show how these budding thirteenth-century anxieties were part and parcel of broader ecclesiastical preoccupations about the instability of Christian identity in particular and religious identity in general. The second half of this chapter focuses on the period 1250–1350, when expressions of Christian concern about apostasy to Judaism and about Jews as agents of apostasy multiplied. Documenting this proliferation through the analysis of secular law codes, the canons of church councils, royal decrees, papal and episcopal correspondence, inquisitorial writings, and moral exempla, i delve more deeply into the ties between these specific Christian anxieties and broader Christian preoccupations. This chapter’s conclusion considers what the records of the Norwich circumcision case reveal about the mechanisms whereby a single accusation that Jews sought to convert a Christian to Judaism could circulate widely, further propagating Christian anti-Jewish prejudices across all levels of society.

      A Tradition of Concern About Conversion to Judaism

      Concern on the part of non-Jews about conversion to Judaism predated the Christianization of the Roman Empire. These earlier worries arose in a cultural context very different from that of high and late medieval Europe. The Roman Empire was religiously pluralistic, especially before the mid-fourth century. Several emperors and jurists of the second and third centuries CE nonetheless objected to conversion to Judaism, in particular on the grounds that it drew individuals away from participating in civic and imperial rituals.¹⁷ In the meantime, conversion to Judaism coalesced as a Jewish legal process whose key components were the acceptance of the commandments of the Torah, circumcision, and ritual immersion for men; and the acceptance of the commandments and ritual immersion for women.¹⁸ The requirement of circumcision for men rendered conversion to Judaism uniquely repugnant to Roman sensibilities. Like many Greeks, many Romans regarded circumcision as a particularly unseemly type of bodily mutilation.¹⁹

      During the second century CE, Romans began to enact laws against conversion to Judaism. The spirit of this legislation was rooted in an ethos specific to the Roman Empire. This legislation sometimes was adopted in later contexts, however, such that it bore an important legacy. Emperor Antoninus Pius (138–62 CE) decreed that Jews who circumcised non-Jews would suffer the same punishment as castrators—namely, the death penalty and confiscation of property.²⁰ According to the Historia Augusta, Emperor Septimius Severus (193–211 CE) forbade his subjects from “becoming Jews” under threat of heavy penalties.²¹ At the end of the third century, the jurist Julius Paulus declared in his Sententiae that “Roman citizens who suffer[ed] that they themselves or their slaves be circumcised in accordance with the Jewish rite [we]re [to be] exiled perpetually to an island and their property [was to be] confiscated; the doctors [who performed the circumcisions were to] suffer capital punishment.” This text survived in Emperor Justinian’s Digest (530–33), whose rediscovery at the turn of the twelfth century prompted a revival of the study of Roman law.²²

      Over the course of the fourth and fifth centuries,