Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe (Middle Ages Series) - Hardcover

Tartakoff, Paola

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812251873 ISBN 13: 9780812251876

Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

Inspired by one fascinating and unusual historical case, Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe explores the ways religious conversion fueled Jewish-Christian tensions. In the process, it elucidates how the interplay of fact and fantasy shaped Christian views of Jews as agents of Christian apostasy to Judaism.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Paola Tartakoff is Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She is author of Between Christian and Jew: Conversion and Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1250-1391, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Introduction

In Norwich, England, during the 1230s, Jews were charged with seizing and circumcising a five-year-old Christian boy because they "wanted to make him a Jew." The present book examines this unusual accusation, both in the context of this particular case and also as a window onto widespread contemporaneous Christian concerns about Christian apostasy to Judaism. In the process, it investigates the elusive backstory of a tragic show trial, and it analyzes the relationship between Christian constructions of apostasy to Judaism and the realities of conversion and return to Judaism across Western Christendom during the high and late Middle Ages.

I use the term "conversion"—which scholars have applied to a wide array of phenomena, including an inner spiritual transformation—to denote a public change of religious affiliation undertaken in accordance with the institutional norms of the religious community being joined. It is in this sense that many of the sources consulted here use the term—conversio in Latin, literally, a "turning around," and gerut in Hebrew, literally, a "coming to reside." I use the term "apostasy" to denote the repudiation of a religious faith and community as understood by the apostate himself or herself as well as by the community that he or she left behind. It is in this sense that many of the sources consulted here use the term—apostasia in Latin, from the Greek apostasis, meaning "defection," and terms related to shemad in Hebrew, meaning "destruction."

At the same time as this book engages "conversion" and "apostasy" as analytical categories, it interrogates and historicizes these and related constructs, which scholars often reify and take for granted. It shows, for instance, that labels such as "convert" and "apostate"—and even "Christian" and "Jew"—could be subjective. For example, according to Christian canon law, an individual who was baptized and who subsequently repudiated Christianity and underwent a formal process of conversion to Judaism was a Christian apostate (apostata), albeit still a Christian. According to Jewish law, however, this same individual was a convert to Judaism (ger) and thus a Jew. According to dominant interpretations of canon law, an individual who was born of a Jewish mother but who subsequently was baptized was a convert to Christianity (conversus) and thus a Christian. According to dominant interpretations of Jewish law, however, he or she was a Jewish apostate (meshummad) and still a Jew. If this same individual—who had converted from Judaism to Christianity—later repudiated Christianity and sought to resume life as a Jew, he or she was a Christian apostate and still a Christian, according to canon law. According to Jewish law, however, he or she was a "repentant Jew" (ba'al [m.]/ba'alat [f.] teshuvah). Beyond the legal realm, popular perceptions of individuals who sought to change their religious affiliation further muddled the meanings of "Christian" and "Jew."

This book demonstrates that even circumcision—a bodily marker of religious identity that typically is assumed to be clear and permanent—could exist in the eye of the beholder. A formal reexamination, years later, of the body of the boy whom Norwich Jews allegedly circumcised produced ambiguous results. According to the examination report, the boy did not appear fully circumcised; his circumcision would not have met Jewish legal standards. Yet, the Christians who adjudicated the "Norwich circumcision case," as it came to be known, ruled that the boy was indeed circumcised. Moreover, demonstrating that medieval Christian views of circumcision as the sign par excellence of Jewishness were not constant, these Christians insisted that, in spite of his circumcision, this boy was still a Christian. Navigating unstable constructs through the analysis of a wide array of Jewish and Christian sources, this book seeks to recover the complexity of medieval Jewish-Christian conversion.

The Norwich Circumcision Case

The beginnings of the Norwich circumcision case are unclear. The affair first surfaces in a royal writ from 1231 that declares that a Jew named Senioret ben Josce was banished for "circumcising Edward, the son of Master Benedict." The same document specifies that King Henry III seized and granted to Master Benedict a messuage (a dwelling with adjacent lands and buildings) that had belonged to Senioret. No records regarding the case survive from the period between 1231 and 1234. During these years, hearings likely were held in the archidiaconal and coroners' courts as well as before the king's itinerant justices.

In 1234, Master Benedict, who was a Christian physician, came before the royal court at Norwich. So state the Curia Regis Rolls of King Henry III, which preserve a summary of legal proceedings pertaining to the case that unfolded in 1234 and 1235. Before the assembled justices, the prior of Norwich, Dominicans, Franciscans, and other clerics and laymen, Master Benedict accused a Jew named Jacob of having snatched and circumcised his son Edward four years earlier, when Edward was five. Jacob circumcised Edward, Master Benedict explained, because Jacob "wanted to make [Edward] a Jew." Master Benedict implicated twelve additional Jews as accessories to this crime. At least five of these other Jews—Senioret ben Josce (who was outlawed in 1231, as noted above), Meir ben Senioret, Isaac ben Solomon, Diaia (Elazar) le Cat, and Mosse ben Abraham—were leading local moneylenders. The likeness of one of these moneylenders, Mosse ben Abraham—who was known also as Mosse Mokke and Mosse cum naso ("Moses with the nose")—is sketched atop an Exchequer receipt roll from the year 1233, in an intricate and rather mysterious drawing that includes the earliest extant depictions of non-biblical, historical Jews.

Edward, now nine years old, also took the stand in 1234. He told the crowd of onlookers that, in Jacob's home four years earlier, one Jew held him and covered his eyes, while another Jew "circumcised him with a small knife." Edward added that, immediately after circumcising him, the Jews gave him a new name. To choose this name, they placed "the bit that they cut off of his member," that is, his foreskin, in a bowl of sand and took turns searching for it with small straws. The Jews renamed Edward "Jurnepin" after the Jew who uncovered his foreskin.

Circumcision and the bestowal of a new name were both integral parts of the Jewish ritual sequence that brought boys and men into the Jewish fold. Additional testimonies given at Norwich in 1234, as well as before the itinerant justices at Catteshall, stated explicitly that Norwich Jews had sought to make Edward one of their own. A Christian woman named Matilda de Bernham, who allegedly rescued Edward after he "escaped from the hands of the Jews," said that she found Edward "weeping and wailing and saying that he was a Jew." The coroners of the city and county of Norwich and the former constable Richard of Fresingfeld testified that, after Matilda brought Edward to her home, Jews repeatedly tried to take Edward back "with great force," declaring that "Jurnepin" was "their Jew." The constable recounted how some Jews even lodged a formal complaint with him that "Christians wanted to take away their Jew." In addition, according to the coroners and the constable, the Jews forbade Matilda "to give [the boy] swine's flesh to eat because, they said, he was a Jew."

Following the 1234 hearings at Norwich and Catteshall, hearings were held at Westminster before King Henry III, the archbishop of Canterbury, and the majority of the bishops, earls, and barons of England. Meanwhile, other developments were under way. In 1235 and 1238, Christians in Norwich...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2020
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0812251873
• ISBN 13: 9780812251876
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland