A investigation into the thirteenth-century Norwich circumcision case and its meaning for Christians and Jews In 1230, Jews in the English city of Norwich were accused of having seized and ...circumcised a five-year-old Christian boy named Edward because they "wanted to make him a Jew." Contemporaneous accounts of the "Norwich circumcision case, " as it came to be called, recast this episode as an attempted ritual murder. Contextualizing and analyzing accounts of this event and others, with special attention to the roles of children, Paola Tartakoff sheds new light on medieval Christian views of circumcision. She shows that Christian characterizations of Jews as sinister agents of Christian apostasy belonged to the same constellation of anti-Jewish libels as the notorious charge of ritual murder. Drawing on a wide variety of Jewish and Christian sources, Tartakoff investigates the elusive backstory of the Norwich circumcision case and exposes the thirteenth-century resurgence of Christian concerns about formal Christian conversion to Judaism. In the process, she elucidates little-known cases of movement out of Christianity and into Judaism, as well as Christian anxieties about the instability of religious identity. Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe recovers the complexity of medieval Jewish-Christian conversion and reveals the links between religious conversion and mounting Jewish-Christian tensions. At the same time, Tartakoff does not lose sight of the mystery surrounding the events that spurred the Norwich circumcision case, and she concludes the book by offering a solution of her own: Christians and Jews, she posits, understood these events in fundamentally irreconcilable ways, illustrating the chasm that separated Christians and Jews in a world in which some Christians and Jews knew each other intimately.
A investigation into the thirteenth-century Norwich
circumcision case and its meaning for Christians and
Jews
In 1230, Jews in the English city of Norwich were accused of
having seized and ...circumcised a five-year-old Christian boy named
Edward because they "wanted to make him a Jew." Contemporaneous
accounts of the "Norwich circumcision case," as it came to be
called, recast this episode as an attempted ritual murder.
Contextualizing and analyzing accounts of this event and others,
with special attention to the roles of children, Paola Tartakoff
sheds new light on medieval Christian views of circumcision. She
shows that Christian characterizations of Jews as sinister agents
of Christian apostasy belonged to the same constellation of
anti-Jewish libels as the notorious charge of ritual murder.
Drawing on a wide variety of Jewish and Christian sources,
Tartakoff investigates the elusive backstory of the Norwich
circumcision case and exposes the thirteenth-century resurgence of
Christian concerns about formal Christian conversion to Judaism. In
the process, she elucidates little-known cases of movement out of
Christianity and into Judaism, as well as Christian anxieties about
the instability of religious identity.
Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval
Europe recovers the complexity of medieval Jewish-Christian
conversion and reveals the links between religious conversion and
mounting Jewish-Christian tensions. At the same time, Tartakoff
does not lose sight of the mystery surrounding the events that
spurred the Norwich circumcision case, and she concludes the book
by offering a solution of her own: Christians and Jews, she posits,
understood these events in fundamentally irreconcilable ways,
illustrating the chasm that separated Christians and Jews in a
world in which some Christians and Jews knew each other
intimately.
In 1341 in Aragon, a Jewish convert to Christianity was sentenced to death, only to be pulled from the burning stake and into a formal religious interrogation. His confession was as astonishing to ...his inquisitors as his brush with mortality is to us: the condemned man described a Jewish conspiracy to persuade recent converts to denounce their newfound Christian faith. His claims were corroborated by witnesses and became the catalyst for a series of trials that unfolded over the course of the next twenty months.Between Christian and Jewclosely analyzes these events, which Paola Tartakoff considers paradigmatic of inquisitorial proceedings against Jews in the period. The trials also serve as the backbone of her nuanced consideration of Jewish conversion to Christianity-and the unwelcoming Christian response to Jewish conversions-during a period that is usually celebrated as a time of relative interfaith harmony. The book lays bare the intensity of the mutual hostility between Christians and Jews in medieval Spain. Tartakoff's research reveals that the majority of Jewish converts of the period turned to baptism in order to escape personal difficulties, such as poverty, conflict with other Jews, or unhappy marriages. They often met with a chilly reception from their new Christian brethren, making it difficult to integrate into Christian society. Tartakoff explores Jewish antagonism toward Christians and Christianity by examining the aims and techniques of Jews who sought to re-Judaize apostates as well as the Jewish responses to inquisitorial prosecution during an actual investigation. Prosecutions such as the 1341 trial were understood by papal inquisitors to be in defense of Christianity against perceived Jewish attacks, although Tartakoff shows that Christian fears about Jewish hostility were often exaggerated. Drawing together the accounts of Jews, Jewish converts, and inquisitors, this cultural history offers a broad study of interfaith relations in medieval Iberia.
Magda Teter's Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth offers new perspectives of compelling nuance on one of the most enduring and vexing of anti-Jewish accusations. It examines blood ...libels-and Jewish and Christian responses to them-from the Middle Ages through modern times, with a fresh focus on the early modern period, which is often overlooked in histories of antisemitism. Geographically, Blood Libel spans Western and Eastern Europe, concentrating on Italy, German lands, and Poland-Lithuania-a territory wide enough to reveal intriguing regional differences, yet sufficiently narrow to allow for granular reconstructions of intellectual and political networks. By tracing the pathways of early printed books, Blood Libel illuminates how "what people read" shaped, validated, and sometimes mitigated blood libels and their outcomes.Teter's research elucidates multiple intersecting chains of textual transmission and their impact on the lives of Jews. First and foremost, it shows how written accounts of blood libels-in works including world chronicles, anti-Jewish pamphlets, and national histories-inscribed these accusations for posterity and created molds for viewing Jews. Teter demonstrates that the 1475 case of Simon of Trent was especially influential in this regard. Transpiring in the wake of the invention of the printing press, it spawned literary, legal, and artistic legacies that permeated Europe and, centuries later, captured the Nazi imagination. During the early modern period, written accounts of blood libels could participate in a feedback loop serving as evidence in actual trials against Jews, which, in turn, became the subject of new anti-Jewish writings. Meanwhile, Jews drew on these accounts for their own purposes. Sephardic and Italian Jewish chroniclers and polemicists formulated rebuttals to this material and adduced it as evidence of the long history of Christian persecution of Jews. Ashkenazi adapters of the mid-sixteenth century Sephardic chronicle Shevet Yehudah and authors of Yiddish songs and tales about anti-Jewish accusations interpreted these libels as divine calls for Jewish repentance and cast the Jews who died as a result of these libels as pious martyrs.In addition to tracing the wide-ranging deployments of written accounts of blood libels, Teter reconstructs the "paper trail" of legal defenses of Jews. These defenses included medieval and early modern papal and imperial condemnations of blood libels, which were preserved in archives and transcribed in chronicles. They also took the form of seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century treatises by Christians and Jews. The authors of such documents drew on each other's work, across regions and religions. In the seventeenth century, for instance, the French Catholic polemicist Richard Simon and the Sephardic Jewish polemicist Isaac Cardoso wrote treatises in defense of Jews in which they cited centuries of Christian decrees condemning anti-Jewish accusations. An Italian Jew, Isaac Viva Cantarini, republished these documents. In the early eighteenth century, Rabbi Tranquillo Vita Corcos of Rome incorporated and supplemented these materials in his treatises in defense of Jews. In 1759, the Italian Cardinal Lorenzo Ganganelli drew on Corcos' arguments in his now famous report condemning blood libels.
Claims about the history of Jewish conversion to Christianity have long been central to key narratives in medieval Jewish historiography. Most famously, they have served to illustrate an alleged ...cultural contrast between Sepharad, or Spain, and Ashkenaz, or northern Europe. According to this classic view, which was given its fullest expression by Yitzhak Baer in the 1930s and 1940s, the mass conversions of Jews to Christianity that swept Spain in 1391, in the context of the most extensive anti-Jewish violence in medieval history, were the result of Spanish Jews’ engagement with Greek rationalism, their political ambition, and their “passion for erotic experience,” all of which led Spanish Jews to neglect their Jewish heritage. The Jews of northern Europe, by contrast, resisted conversion in the face of violence and instead favored martyrdom (most famously in 1096, at the start of the First Crusade) on account of their single-minded piety. Conversion, in other words, was the outcome of acculturation, and the conversions of 1391, whose scope was unprecedented, attested to Spanish Jews’ excessive cultural openness.
Abstract
In the 1230s, Christian authorities prosecuted Norwich Jews on charges of having seized and circumcised a five-year-old boy in an effort to convert him to Judaism. In the same decade, ...English chroniclers began to depict this case as an attempted ritual murder. According to Roger Wendover and Matthew Paris, Jews circumcised the boy with the intention of crucifying him at Easter. This article explores what the near simultaneous development of these two intriguing and seemingly disparate narratives suggests about thirteenth-century Christian perceptions and portrayals of circumcision. In so doing, it ushers research on medieval Christian attitudes toward circumcision into new spheres, deepens understandings of thirteenth-century Christian anxieties about conversion to Judaism, and brings to light a marginal note in the autograph copy of Matthew Paris' Chronica majora that may constitute evidence of evolving Christian views of the relationship between the bodies of Jews' alleged victims and the body of Christ.
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