Chapter 4 presents an overview of “return to Judaism” in medieval Europe—a phenomenon that relates to a possible context that could have sparked Master Benedict’s accusation. Chapter 4 discusses the backgrounds and motivations—and the divergent Jewish and Christian perceptions—of Jewish converts to Christianity who sought to return to Judaism. Examining how Jews went about re-Judaizing repentant Jewish apostates, it stresses that some Jews actually pressured Jewish apostates to return to the Jewish fold. I argue that the phenomenon of return to Judaism further nourished and shaped Christian anxieties about Christian apostasy to Judaism and about Jews as agents of Christian apostasy. I contend also, both here and in Chapter 5, that the extent to which conversion and return to Judaism merged in the minds of some Christian authorities as two kinds of Christian apostasy to Judaism may help to explain the terms in which Christians cast the Norwich circumcision case and other possibly similar affairs. Chapters 3 and 4 also establish the bidirectionality of Jewish-Christian conversion in high and late medieval Christendom. Noting parallels and personal links between the various kinds of movement between Judaism and Christianity, they illustrate the value of adopting a broad view of the history of religious conversion.
Chapter 5 proposes a solution to the mystery surrounding the events that spurred Master Benedict’s accusation. Reexamining the summary of the legal proceedings in light of medieval Jewish attitudes and practices pertaining to Jewish children who either had been, or were in danger of being, baptized, I posit that, to Jews, these events constituted an internal Jewish affair. In the eyes of the church, however, they amounted to a vicious Jewish attack on a particularly vulnerable member of the Christian flock. Fundamentally irreconcilable, these Jewish and Christian understandings of the same events illustrate the chasm that could separate Christians and Jews in the same world in which some Christians and Jews—who journeyed back and forth between Judaism and Christianity—knew each other far more intimately than hitherto has been imagined.
Written for a broad audience that includes medievalists, Europeanists, students of Jewish history, students of religion interested in conversion, and students of Christianity as well as Judaism, this book explores questions about the nature of religious identity that pertain to the medieval world and beyond. It probes the mutability of religious affiliation, constructions of the identities of individuals who journey from one religion to another, and understandings of the significance of bodily markers of religious identity—all issues that are arguably as relevant and contentious today as they were eight hundred years ago. In grappling with these themes, the following chapters contend also with the complex interplay between malicious accusations against a group that bear the strong imprint of ideology, on the one hand, and that group’s actual behavior, on the other. It is my hope that, by examining these matters in one particular historical context, this study will contribute to advancing their understanding more broadly.
Chapter 1
Christian Vulnerabilities
The twelfth and thirteenth centuries witnessed a foreboding shift in Christian attitudes toward Jews. After long casting Jews as enemies of the historical Christ yet as docile denizens of contemporary Christendom, a growing number of Christians at all levels of society began to view Jews as imminently menacing Christian welfare.1 A multiplicity of factors contributed to this intensification of the traditional Christian sense of Jewish enmity. The Crusades heightened Christian anxieties about perceived existential foes. A rising sense of Christendom and individual nations as unified Christian bodies made Jews appear to be contaminating foreign elements. Augmented Christian piety across the socioeconomic spectrum spread awareness of the Gospels’ portrayals of Jews as the killers of Christ.2
This turbulent context spawned anti-Jewish allegations that portrayed present-day Jews as intent on harming the body of Christ, understood both as the Christian faithful and also as the Eucharist (the bread consecrated during Mass that Christians believed literally to have become the body of Christ). The charge of ritual murder—that is, the charge that Jews tortured and killed Christians (usually young boys) out of contempt for all things Christian—was documented as early as the mid-twelfth century in Norwich, England, where the case that frames this book unfolded. Writing during the third quarter of the twelfth century, the Benedictine monk Thomas of Monmouth described in gory detail how Norwich Jews allegedly murdered a Christian boy named William in 1144. By the 1230s, the charge of ritual murder was a stock anti-Jewish calumny across western Europe.3 Imputations that Jews poisoned Christians—whether in the context of tending to medical patients or by contaminating the water supply—surfaced during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and assumed devastating proportions during the fourteenth century.4 The charge of host desecration—the notion that Jews physically abused consecrated eucharistic wafers—began to circulate in German lands and northern France during the second half of the thirteenth century and soon proliferated.5 The Christian conviction that Jews sought to oppress Christians financially became especially pronounced in late twelfth- and thirteenth-century England where, on the eve of the Third Crusade, Christians attacked Jews in several cities.6 In 1190, Norwich Christians robbed and killed Jews at night and torched Jewish homes and synagogues.7 In 1200, Norwich Christians desecrated the local Jewish cemetery.8
When, then, as the Curia Regis Rolls of King Henry III state, in 1234, a Christian physician named Master Benedict came before the royal court at Norwich and declared to the assembled justices, the prior of Norwich, Dominicans, Franciscans, and other clerics and laymen that, four years earlier, local Jews “wickedly and feloniously” seized and circumcised his young son Edward because they “wanted to make him a Jew,” his claims fell on receptive ears. In fact, Master Benedict leveled this charge during a decade in England that was characterized by especially intense anti-Jewish animus. During the 1230s, Jews were heavily taxed, extorted, and leaned on for loans. Consequently, they were increasingly resented as creditors.9 The Norwich circumcision case compounded the ill will of Norwich Christians—who probably numbered about eight thousand at the time—toward the approximately two hundred Jews who lived in their midst. This ill will drove Norwich Christians to loot and set fire to Jewish homes and physically assault Jews in 1235 and 1238.10
This book seeks to understand Master Benedict’s accusation—as it was recorded by Christian scribes and clerks—both in the context of contemporaneous Christian fears and fantasies and also as a window onto actual Jewish practices. Chapter 2 explores how the charge of forced circumcision participated in the anti-Jewish discourse of the period. The present chapter considers Master Benedict’s assertion that Norwich Jews “wanted to make [his son] a Jew.” I argue that this intriguing contention constitutes early evidence of a facet of thirteenth-century Christian constructions of Jews that has not yet received systematic scholarly attention—namely, the view that Jews were intent on drawing Christians to Judaism. Indeed, the Norwich circumcision case attests to the revival of long dormant Christian concerns about Christian apostasy to Judaism and about Jews as agents of Christian apostasy.
During the early Middle Ages, Christian authors sometimes accused Christians vaguely of “Judaizing,” referring to associating with Jews or adopting ideologies or practices that were deemed “Jewish,” such as sustained attention to the literal sense of Bible.11 Occasionally in the late eleventh century and increasingly by the late twelfth, they accused Jews of sowing doubts in Christians about Christianity. By contrast, thirteenth- and fourteenth-century popes, kings, bishops, inquisitors, lawmakers, preachers,