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

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      From Circumcision to Ritual Murder

      In addition to reflecting Christian fears about the instability of religious identity and the machinations of infidels and heretics, the resurgent conviction that Jews were intent on drawing Christians to Judaism bore the imprint of trends specific to anti-Judaism.¹ Twelfth- and thirteenth- century Christian intellectuals often grouped Jews together with Muslims and Christian heretics as “unbelievers.” They did not, however, lose sight of the uniqueness of the relationship between Christians and Jews. Unlike Christian heretics, who emerged from within the Christian flock, and unlike Muslims, who were absent from much of Christendom and whom Christians viewed often as a political and military threat, Jews were the deniers and alleged killers of Christ who lived as outsiders in Christians’ very midst. This distinctive profile is key to understanding the anti-Jewish libels that proliferated during the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries: the charges that Jews ritually murdered Christians in order to parody Jews’ alleged historical killing of Christ, poisoned Christians by prescribing toxic medicaments and contaminating the water supply, abused consecrated eucharistic wafers that Christians deemed to be the actual body of Christ, and preyed upon Christians financially through the practice of usury.

      This chapter argues that the allegation that Jews were determined to turn Christians into Jews belonged to the same constellation of anti-Jewish libels as these better-known accusations. Christian authors characterized all of these alleged crimes as expressions of Jewish spite for all things Christian. For instance, when discussing the alleged ritual murder of young Richard of Pontoise (1179), the French chronicler Rigord de Saint-Denis (d. ca. 1209) asserted that Parisian Jews murdered a Christian every year “as an insult to the Christian religion.”² Writing about the alleged ritual murder of eight-year-old Hugh of Lincoln (1255), Matthew Paris recounted how the Jews of Lincoln had invited Jews from across England to participate in this “sacrifice” “as an insult and an affront to Jesus Christ.”³ Christian authors used similar language to describe purported Jewish proselytizing. In 1290, In the bull Attendite fratres, addressed to prelates in Aix, Arles, and Embrun, for example, Pope Nicholas IV declared that Jews, “the corruptors of [the Christian] faith,” promoted Christian apostasy “as an insult to the Christian faith.”⁴

      The participation of the charge of Jewish proselytizing in contemporary anti-Jewish discourse is apparent also insofar as medieval people grouped this charge together with other anti-Jewish allegations. In 1205, for example, In a missive addressed to the king of France, Pope Innocent III reported that “news had reached him” about many Jewish offenses. These included turning Christians away from “the duty of [Christian] worship,” as noted in Chapter 1, as well as appropriating ecclesiastical goods and Christian possessions through “the evil practice of usury” and seizing opportunities to kill Christian guests.⁵ The second law of the section on Jews of the Siete partidas discussed Jewish proselytizing alongside ritual murder as a Jewish crime against Christians that merited the death penalty.⁶ The nineteenth canon of the 1267 Council of Vienna prohibited Jews from “luring Christians over to Judaism or recklessly circumcising Christians for any reason,” in addition to forbidding Jews from tending to sick Christians and charging excessive rates of interest. It also directed Jews to close their windows when a consecrated eucharistic wafer was carried through the street in a procession.⁷ In 1304 in Florence, the Dominican preacher Giordano da Pisa accused Jews of engaging in an offensive against Christ that involved abducting and circumcising Christian boys as well as committing host desecration and ritual murder.⁸ As noted in Chapter 1, well-poisoning charges in southern France in 1321 encompassed allegations that Jews not only bribed lepers to contaminate the water supply but also required lepers to “renounce the Catholic faith.”⁹

      Further indicating that the charge of Jewish proselytizing was of a piece with other medieval anti-Jewish accusations, early modern refutations of medieval calumnies debunked the charge that Jews sought to draw Christians to Judaism alongside some of these others. In his apologetic work Las Excelensias de los Hebreos (The Excellences of the Hebrews, 1679), for example, the converso polemicist Isaac Cardoso refuted ten accusations against Jews. These included the allegation that Jews “persuaded the nations to [come to] Judaism” as well as the charge of ritual murder.¹⁰

      The present chapter explores how two thirteenth-century accounts of the Norwich circumcision case further illuminate the embeddedness of the charge of Jewish proselytizing in contemporaneous anti-Jewish discourse. The first account—the extant summary of the legal proceedings that unfolded in 1234 and 1235—portrayed Edward’s alleged circumcision as part of an effort to “make him a Jew.” The second, crafted by the chroniclers at St. Albans Abbey in Hertfordshire, Roger Wendover and Matthew Paris, portrayed Edward’s alleged circumcision, Instead, as part of an attempted ritual murder. The pages that follow first analyze the thematic and structural features of the first account. I show that these illustrate how the charge that Jews were intent on drawing Christians to Judaism could fit into the same narrative framework as contemporaneous tales about other alleged expressions of Jewish iniquity. I demonstrate also that the first account presents circumcision as a quintessentially Jewish form of violence, revealing yet another link between the allegation that Jews were determined to turn Christians into Jews and the better-known anti-Jewish libels of the period: Nearly all of these accusations portrayed Jews as threatening the bodily integrity of Christ or his flock.

      The second half of this chapter turns to the “ritual murder version” of the Norwich circumcision case as recorded in the chronicles from St. Albans. I argue that this second account of the case, which also underscores Christian perceptions of circumcision as a cruel form of maiming, additionally highlights the ways Christians associated circumcision with the body of the historical Christ. To thirteenth-century Christians, circumcision evoked a physical characteristic of Christ’s body as well as the first stage of Christ’s passion. Practiced on Christians as a rite of Jewish initiation, circumcision not only physically wounded Christians, it also recalled the first time Jews shed Christ’s blood. In closing, I suggest that the near simultaneous development of the “conversion” and “ritual murder” versions of the Norwich circumcision case—and the substitution of ritual murder for conversion in the latter—point to the fundamental similarity of the anti-Jewish charges they promoted.

      Circumcision as a Rite of Jewish Initiation

      Preserved in the Curia Regis Rolls of King Henry III, the extant summary of the legal proceedings in the Norwich circumcision case does not present a linear account of Norwich Jews’ alleged crime.¹¹ Instead, it summarizes multiple testimonies one after another. It opens with the testimony of Master Benedict and then proceeds with that of nine-year-old Edward; the collective testimony of a representative of the archdeacon, “a great group of priests,” the coroners of the county and city of Norwich, and thirty-six Norwich parishioners; the testimony of a woman named Matilda de Bernham, who allegedly rescued Edward after he escaped from the Jews; that of the constable of Norwich, Richard of Fresingfeld; and, finally, the joint testimony of the bailiffs of Norwich, Simon of Berstrete and Nicholas Chese. Two paragraphs at the end of these summarized testimonies explain that the case eventually was transferred from the royal court to an ecclesiastical court and that Norwich Jews made a last-ditch attempt to extricate themselves from the proceedings by paying King Henry III to have Edward’s body reexamined.

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