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

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СКАЧАТЬ about the liberation of Christian captives who were on the brink of apostatizing to Islam at the hands of their Muslim captors.¹¹³ In 1290, Pope Nicholas IV appointed a new bishop of Morocco for the sake of, among other things, “reconciling [Christian] apostates” to the church.¹¹⁴ The 1321 well-poisoning accusations in southern France also reflected the fear that Muslims sought to turn Christians away from their faith. According to the deposition of the head of the leper colony in Pamiers, Guillaume Agasse, who appeared before Bishop Jacques Fournier (later Pope Benedict XII) and his deputies, Muslim rulers who allegedly supported the plot to poison Christians demanded that lepers “deny the faith of Christ and his Law” and that they spit and trample on “the cross of Christ and his body.” These Muslim rulers purportedly warned, moreover, that any lepers who refused to abjure Christianity would be decapitated.¹¹⁵ Attributed to the widely traveled Spanish theologian and bishop Pedro Pascual (d. 1299), a work known as the Biblia pequeña portrayed Jews as collaborating with Muslims in leading Christians astray. It contended that Jews visited imprisoned Christians in Muslim Granada and persuaded them to believe in “the false sect of the Muslims.”¹¹⁶

      Links between Christian anxieties about apostasy to Judaism, on the one hand, and falling into Christian heresy, on the other, are apparent in the subsuming, starting during the third quarter of the thirteenth century, of matters pertaining to apostasy to Judaism under the jurisdiction of the papal inquisition, which was established in the 1230s, as noted above, to eradicate Christian heresy. In 1267, in the bull Turbato corde, Pope Clement IV reported having heard, “with a troubled heart,” that Christians, “abandoning the truth of the Catholic faith, had damnably gone over to the Jewish rite.” Clement authorized and urged Dominican and Franciscan inquisitors to proceed against Christian apostates to Judaism. In addition, he instructed them to do so in the same way “as [they proceeded] against heretics.” The same personnel were now to monitor both arenas of Christian defection from the fold—falling into Christian heresy and apostasy to Judaism—using the same procedure. Clement also instructed inquisitors to impose “a fitting punishment” upon Jews found guilty of having “induced Christians of either sex to join [the Jews’] execrable rite.”¹¹⁷

      Several secular rulers explicitly recognized inquisitors’ jurisdiction over matters concerning apostasy to Judaism, and they sought to promote the inquisitorial prosecution of Christian apostates to Judaism and their Jewish abettors. In 1276, King Charles I of Sicily, Naples, and Albania—who was also Count of Provence, Forcalquier, Anjou, and Maine—ordered the seneschal and other officials of Provence to extend full support to the Dominican Bertrand de Rocca, whom Charles described as inquisitor “against heretics and against those reprobate Christians who turn from Christianity to Judaism, their patrons, receivers, and defenders, as well as against the Jews who induce Christians [to accept] Judaism.”¹¹⁸ In 1284, King Philip III of France ordered his officials in Champagne and Brie to assist Guillaume d’Auxerre, whom he characterized as “inquisitor of the heretics and unbelieving Jews in the kingdom of France.”¹¹⁹

      Crucially, as Chapter 3 shows, during the latter half of the thirteenth century as well as during the fourteenth century, inquisitors in German lands, France, northeastern Spain, and the Italian peninsula prosecuted born Christians who apostatized to Judaism as well as the Jews suspected of having aided them. A variety of inquisitorial writings provide insight into inquisitors’ engagement in the campaign against Jewish “unbelief.” The compilation of short treatises against “the enemies of the church” attributed to the Passau Anonymous gave full expression to the view that alleged Jewish efforts to draw Christians to Judaism formed part of a broader effort on the part of unbelievers to mislead the Christian faithful. One recension announced: “The Catholic faith is assaulted by Jews, heretics, [and] pagans [i.e., Muslims.] [These groups] arouse and seduce to their sects all whom they are able—men and women, laymen, clerics, and regular clergy.” In addition to reflecting and refracting the sense that Jews were one of several groups that indiscriminately assailed faithful Christians, the Passau Anonymous claimed that Jews, Muslims, and heretics employed the same methods—rhetorical persuasion, bribery, and blasphemy—to do so. All three groups allegedly “gloried in their [respective] law[s] and extolled [them] with authorities and explanations, and they enticed their believers [also] by means of temporal promises and by blaspheming [against] the Catholic faith.”¹²⁰

      Thirteenth- and fourteenth-century inquisitorial manuals prescribed the same consequences for “Judaizing” and sliding into heresy. For instance, an anonymous thirteenth-century Bohemian handbook advised that “the house or synagogue in which someone was re-Judaized or hereticized” should be destroyed.¹²¹ In addition, inquisitorial manuals devoted chapters to Jews alongside chapters on Christian heretics. The inquisitor of Toulouse, Bernard Gui (1262–1331), who was among the judges who condemned the leper Guillaume Agasse in 1322, opened the chapter on Jews in his widely disseminated Practica inquisitionis heretice pravitatis (Practice of the Inquisition of Heretical Depravity, ca. 1324) by thundering: “The faithless Jews try whenever and wherever they can secretly to mislead Christians and drag them into Jewish unbelief.”¹²² As Chapter 5 considers, Gui’s manual and at least four other thirteenth- and fourteenth-century inquisitorial guides directed inquisitors to interrogate Jews specifically about the manner in which they circumcised Christians.¹²³

      During the last decades of the thirteenth century, at the same time as inquisitors increasingly prosecuted apostates to Judaism and their purported Jewish abettors, lay and ecclesiastical leaders persisted in promoting conversion to Christianity. Dominicans established schools where friars were to study Arabic and Hebrew, partly in order to aid in their missionary efforts.¹²⁴ Around 1270, the Catalan Dominican Raymond Martini penned the massive Pugio fidei adversus mauros et iudaeos (Dagger of Faith Against Muslims and Jews) as a handbook for Christian missionaries. In England, France, and Catalonia, kings commanded Jews to attend conversionary sermons.¹²⁵ As in earlier years, however, Christian conversionary efforts proved disappointing. Muslims converted to Christianity in lands that came under Christian rule, but few were baptized in Muslim realms. In 1274, Humbert of Romans lamented that the very few Muslims who had ever been baptized were captives and that these converts seldom became good Christians.¹²⁶ Jewish conversions, too, continued to fall short of Christian ideals.¹²⁷

      Christian sources from the last decades of the thirteenth century and the first decades of the fourteenth reveal a number of ways in which Christian concerns about Christian apostasy to Judaism continued to participate in a broader preoccupation with the changeability of religious affiliation. For instance, Christian authors in various parts of Europe contemplated the possibility that an agent of conversion to a particular faith could become an apostate from that same faith. Recognizing that Jewish-Christian encounters—and religious debates in particular—could lead to crossings of the boundary between Judaism and Christianity in two directions, the anonymous redactor of the Mallorca Disputation (1286) noted that it was agreed at the outset of this debate—likely in jest, but suggestively nonetheless—that the loser would convert to the religion of the winner. If the Jew were to be defeated, he “would be made a Christian and be baptized”; if the Christian were to be defeated, he would “be made a Jew and be circumcised.”¹²⁸

      This was not a new trope. According to the Gesta regum Anglorum (Deeds of the English Kings) of English historian William of Malmesbury (d. ca. 1143), in the late eleventh century, the second Norman king of England, William Rufus, swore that if London Jews won a debate against Christian bishops, “he would go over to their sect.”¹²⁹ Thirteenth-century authors, however, seem particularly frequently to have pondered the interchangeability of the roles of missionizer and missionized. In his collection of saints’ lives known as the Golden Legend, the Italian chronicler and archbishop Jacobus de Voragine (ca. 1230–98) included an anecdote in which Pope Sylvester I (d. 335) offered to consider converting to Judaism during a disputation in which he and his clerks debated against a group of learned Jews. According to this account, when one of the Jews СКАЧАТЬ