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Chapter 2

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.

This document presents myriad interpretative challenges. As a compilation of information from various sources and an abridgment of much lengthier records, it is the product of a process of culling, rewriting, and translation into Latin in the course of which a great deal inevitably was distorted and omitted. In addition, even insofar as it accurately represents certain aspects of the proceedings, one cannot ascertain to what extent the prosecution and witnesses misreported the experiences they described, whether in order to advance personal agendas or to conform—consciously or not—to widespread preconceptions. Edward’s testimony is particularly unreliable. As a nine-year-old reminiscing about what allegedly happened when he was five, Edward easily could have been told what to say by an adult.

These considerations notwithstanding, the summary of the legal proceedings may fruitfully be analyzed as reflecting some of its authors’ cultural assumptions. Indeed, when read as shaped by the ways in which contemporaneous Christians conceived of Jews, this document illustrates how naturally the charge that Jews were intent on drawing Christians to Judaism could fit into the narrative framework that characterized tales in the large corpus of Christian anti-Jewish writings that developed during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Primarily of clerical origin, these anti-Jewish yarns appeared in preaching manuals, literary exempla, folktales, miracle collections, chronicles, and royal, papal, and episcopal missives across western Europe.¹²

The authors of the summary of the legal proceedings—that is, the prosecution and witnesses in the case, the scribes who recorded their statements, and the clerks who finalized the extant record—constructed a narrative about an alleged Jewish effort to turn a Christian into a Jew that so thoroughly infused reportage with tropes familiar from anti-Jewish lore that often it is impossible to distinguish between plausible fact, on the one hand, and fantasy, on the other. The near total omission of Jewish voices from this account leaves no doubt, however, that these authors carefully curated their composition. In court, the Jewish defendants in the Norwich circumcision case were given the opportunity to speak. In fact, the summary of the proceedings notes that the Jews “defended themselves as Jews against a Christian [i.e., Master Benedict].” This document is silent, however, regarding what the Jews said. Insofar as it was crafted to put forth a simple and satisfying tale in which righteous Christians triumphed over wicked Jews, such information was irrelevant.

Numerous features of the Norwich circumcision case facilitated its narration in this register. One was Edward’s youth at the time of his alleged seizure and circumcision. Young Christian boys were the quintessential victims of alleged Jewish machinations in contemporaneous anti-Jewish tales, especially stories of ritual murder.¹³ As recorded in the summary of the legal proceedings, Master Benedict’s indictment of Norwich Jews underscored Edward’s youthful innocence. Its opening lines stated that, when Edward was kidnapped, he was five years old. Moreover, they specified that Edward was “playing [in the street in the town] of Norwich.”¹⁴ Contemporaneous anti-Jewish tales likewise referred to Jews’ young victims as being unsuspectingly at play when Jews snatched them. For instance, In his account of the alleged ritual murder of Hugh of Lincoln, Matthew Paris cast Hugh as last having been seen, prior to entering a Jewish home, “playing with Jewish boys his age.”¹⁵ The mid-fourteenth-century chronicle of Erfurt depicted a seven-year-old girl named Margaretha, whom Jews were accused of having killed in order to collect her blood, as having frequently played with the daughter of a Christian woman who later sold her to Jews.¹⁶ Master Benedict’s indictment of Norwich Jews also emphasized how physically small Edward was by describing how a Jew named Jacob “carried” Edward into his home. The date given for Edward’s alleged kidnapping and circumcision further evoked Edward’s helplessness. The opening sentence of the summary of the Norwich legal proceedings noted that Edward was seized on the eve of the feast of St. Giles (August 31). According to legend, St. Giles (d. ca. 710 near Nîmes) was a Christian hermit who was accidentally shot by an arrow that a huntsman intended for a deer. On account of this experience, St. Giles became the patron of the physically disabled. There was considerable devotion to St. Giles in thirteenth-century Norwich, such that the significance of the date of Edward’s alleged ordeal would have been apparent to local Christians.¹⁷ Likening Edward to St. Giles reinforced the sense that Edward was an innocent victim of violence.

As a young boy, Edward played a role in the legal proceedings pertaining to the Norwich circumcision case that matched the roles of children in some contemporaneous anti-Jewish narratives: He served as an unassailable witness regarding events that transpired behind closed doors in Jewish homes.¹⁸ In court, before the assembled justices, the prior of Norwich, Dominicans, Franciscans, and other clerics and laymen, Edward recounted how, In Jacob’s home, “one [Jew] held him and covered his eyes, while another circumcised him with a small knife.” Edward’s claim that the Jews covered his eyes constitutes yet another instance in which possible fact and fantasy seem to merge. On the one hand, this claim is plausible. On the other, it resonates with the hoary motif of Jewish blindness to Christian truth—a common theme not only in Christian polemical literature but also in medieval art that personified Judaism as the blindfolded woman Synagoga.¹⁹

The centrality of circumcision in the Norwich case would have been especially appealing to contemporaneous Christian anti-Jewish sensibilities. Christian theologians conceded that, prior to the advent of Christ, circumcision served a number of positive functions.²⁰ As practiced by contemporary Jews, however, circumcision had diverse negative connotations. Following St. Paul, theologians deemed contemporary circumcision to be spiritually obsolete and illustrative of Jews’ stubbornness in clinging to the Old Law and privileging the flesh over the spirit.²¹ Anti-Jewish polemicists deprecated circumcision as an inferior rite of initiation to baptism as it discriminated on the basis of gender: Only boys were circumcised, whereas both boys and girls were baptized.²² In the twelfth century, the Christian theologian Peter Abelard cast the Jew in his Dialogus inter philosophum, Iudaeum, et Christianum (Dialogue Between a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian) as asserting that gentiles found circumcision “abhorrent” and that Christian women would never consent to having sex with Jewish men, “believing that the truncating of this member [wa]s the height of foulness.”²³ Two thirteenth-century Iberian anti-Jewish polemicists balked in particular at the practice of meẓiẓah, the sucking of blood from the wound. Raymond Martini deemed meẓiẓah “utterly abominable and loathsome” and a fitting punishment for Jewish mouths that blasphemed against Christ.²⁴ An anonymous source vulgarly likened meẓiẓah to sexual intercourse, Identifying the mouth that sucked the wound with a “cunt.”²⁵ In their commentaries on Genesis 34—in which the sons of Jacob trick the Shehemites into being circumcised under the pretense of wanting them to join the Jewish nation, but then murder the Shehemites while they are weak and “still in pain” in order to exact revenge for the rape of their sister Dinah—Christian exegetes criticized the sons of Jacob as typifying Jews’ refusal to join with other peoples. In the context of this critique, circumcision functioned as the lynchpin of a cruel Jewish ruse.²⁶ Some medieval Christians recoiled from circumcision on account of its bloodshed and pain. In his sermon “On the Circumcision of the Lord,” in the course of discussing why baptism was superior to circumcision, Peter Abelard remarked: “Who does not dread to be circumcised by sharp stones in the tender part of the body?”²⁷ The theologian Gilbert of Poitiers (ca. 1076–1154) explained that one of the reasons why circumcision was abandoned after the coming of Christ was that it was “great torture.”²⁸

Produced within a decade of the Norwich proceedings, an illuminated initial in a Bible that was assembled in Canterbury for the Benedictine abbot Robert de Bello presented a striking depiction of circumcision (Figure 3).²⁹ In the foreground of this image, a swarthy, hairy, beak-nosed, grimacing man, dressed in a luxurious red robe, crouches before three tall, fair, naked boys who stand in a cluster on the right.³⁰ With his left hand, the brutish man draws forth from below the penis of the boy who is closest to him. With his right hand, he brings a small knife with a curved blade to the top of the tip of the boy’s penis. The three boys gaze—two in wonder, the one who is about to be circumcised with apprehension—at flowing blue water in the upper left of the panel, behind the back of the circumciser. The boys’ feet are planted in a shiny, undulating reddish brown substance. From the textual context, it is clear that this image depicts Joshua circumcising the Israelites who had been born in the wilderness after leaving Egypt (Josh. 5:2–9). These younger Israelites gaze at the Jordan River, while standing on the dry ground at Gilgal.³¹ The polemical overtones of this illuminated initial, however, are unmistakable. This image may be read as juxtaposing circumcision to baptism. As if to draw the viewer’s attention to the dichotomy between circumcision and baptism, the boy who is about to be circumcised points down with his left hand to his impending circumcision, and perhaps also to what may be the blood of circumcision on the ground below. With his right hand, he gestures upward toward the glistening water. This image may be understood also as depicting a malevolent Jew who is perversely circumcising defenseless Christian boys, much as the Norwich Jew named Jacob was said to have done to Edward.³²

Figure 3. Detail from the “Bible of Robert de Bello,” ca. 1240–53. London, British Library, Burney 3, fol. 90r.

During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a number of developments likely heightened the Christian sense that circumcision constituted reckless abuse. For instance, reports emerged from the Holy Land according to which Muslims forcibly circumcised Christians in orgies of bloodletting. In his account of the speech that Pope Urban II gave at Clermont in 1096 calling for the First Crusade, the author of the Historia Hierosolymitana (History of Jerusalem) reported: “The [Muslims] circumcise the Christians, and the blood of circumcision they either spread upon the altars or pour into the vases of the baptismal font. When they wish to torture people by a base death, they perforate their navels and, dragging forth the extremity of the intestines, bind it to a stake; then, with flogging, they lead the victim around until, the viscera having gushed forth, the victim falls prostrate upon the ground.”³³

Circumcision’s associations with castration undoubtedly reinforced the Christian sense that circumcision was cruel.³⁴ During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, castration served as a particularly humiliating form of retribution for sexual incontinence. Peter Abelard was castrated for his illicit love affair with his pupil Heloise, for example. He explained in his Historia calamitatum (History of Calamities) that Heloise’s uncle and kinsmen “cut off those parts of [his] body with which [he] had done that which was the cause of their sorrow.” Abelard, moreover, took his own revenge by having two of the men who were responsible for his castration genitally mutilated and by having their eyes gouged out.³⁵ Thirteenth-century French fabliaux (humorous narrative poems) described the castrations of lascivious priests.³⁶ The Lincolnshire Assize Rolls document a case of punitive castration that transpired in England in 1202. In this instance, a Christian couple—Alan and Emma—dragged a Christian man into their home and each cut off one of his testicles. As they were subsequently acquitted in court, it seems likely that the man whom they castrated had sexually assaulted one of their relatives.³⁷ In the same year, a Christian named Robert of Sutton accused a Jew from Bedford named Bonefand of having “wickedly had [Robert’s nephew Richard] emasculated” and thereby caused him to die.³⁸ It has been suggested that Bonefand in fact circumcised Richard in the context of converting him to Judaism.³⁹ To be sure, Christian sources sometimes blurred the distinction between circumcision and other types of genital mutilation. Given the currency of punitive genital mutilation during this period in England, however, a literal reading of this source seems warranted. It is likely that Bonefand had Robert’s penis and testicles removed in order to take revenge on him.⁴⁰ This would explain why Bonefand paid the king one mark for a trial before a jury, why the jury acquitted Bonefand, and why Robert was found guilty of a false appeal.⁴¹ Matthew Paris related yet another instance of punitive castration that transpired during the first half of the thirteenth century in England. In this case, a knight of Norfolk named Godfrey de Millers, who had entered the house of a certain John Brito to have sex with John’s daughter, was caught in a trap, hung upside down by his feet from the beams, castrated, and then thrown out.⁴²

Attesting to thirteenth-century associations between circumcision and castration, the Passau Anonymous regaled his readers with a bawdy story that included both procedures and derided the centrality of genital mutilation to male conversion to Judaism. He told of “a certain monk” who “circumcised himself” and married a lascivious Jewish woman with whom he was infatuated. “On account of love for his [Jewish] wife,” the Passau Anonymous explained, this former monk long withstood pressure from his brother, a Christian prelate, to return to Christianity. Out of spite, the prelate eventually decided to compound his brother’s genital injuries. He had the former monk castrated, thereby inflicting a mirror punishment for both conversion to Judaism and sexual misconduct.⁴³ When, on account of this castration, the Jewish wife was no longer able to have sex with the former monk, she spurned him. At this point, having been rejected by his Jewish wife, the circumcised and castrated former monk returned to Christianity and the monastic life.⁴⁴

Understood as a form of physical violence, circumcision was akin to many of the other acts of which thirteenth-century Christians accused Jews. Like murder, poisoning, and host desecration (understood as the desecration of the body of Christ), circumcision injured Christian bodies. The summary of the legal proceedings in the Norwich case foregrounded Edward’s description of his alleged circumcision and repeatedly stressed the physical harm that this procedure had caused. Punctuating the summary at regular intervals, the official of the archdeacon, the coroners, and the constable of Norwich all testified that, when they saw Edward shortly after his circumcision, his “cut member” was “enlarged,” “very swollen,” and “bloody.” When Matilda took the stand, she declared that Edward seemed so sick when she and her daughter found him that they “thought he would soon die.”⁴⁵

The alleged violence in the Norwich circumcision case was compatible with contemporaneous Christian anti-Jewish sensibilities also in that its perpetrators were Jewish men—the typical culpable parties in anti-Jewish tales about ritual murder, poisoning, host desecration, and financial malfeasance. As noted above, Master Benedict singled out a certain “Jacob” as the principal malefactor in Edward’s alleged kidnapping and circumcision. According to the summary of Master Benedict’s testimony, “Jacob, a Jewish man, seized Edward, carried him into his home, and circumcised him,” and he “kept [Edward] in his home for one day and [one] night.” Master Benedict testified that, when he ultimately found his son, he discovered him “in the hands of the aforesaid Jacob.” Stressing that Jacob acted out of hatred for all things Christian, Master Benedict added that Jacob “did [all of] this wickedly and feloniously, In contempt of the Crucified One and Christianity, as well as [in contempt of] the peace of the lord king.” According to Master Benedict’s and Edward’s statements, moreover, Jacob did not act alone. Master Benedict named twelve additional Jewish men as accessories to the alleged crime, at least five of whom, as noted in the Introduction, were leading local money-lenders.⁴⁶ As Miri Rubin has observed, wealthy Jewish men, who were “in a position of economic power and patriarchal authority and bound to other men by ties of sociability and shared ill intent,” figured in Christian narratives as particularly menacing abusers.⁴⁷ The juxtaposition of a posse of grown men to a small child moreover, evoked a sense of danger, heightening the pathos of the tale and highlighting Edward’s vulnerability.

Even the instrument with which the summary of the legal proceedings portrayed Norwich Jews as having circumcised Edward—“a small knife”—echoed Christian claims elsewhere about the ways Jews wounded Christians and harmed objects that Christians held sacred.⁴⁸ To be sure, small knives were in fact used in circumcisions. It is noteworthy, however, that these implements figured prominently in host desecration and ritual murder narratives, as well. According to a manuscript from the second half of the thirteenth century, for example, In 1183, Jews in Bristol used a small knife to cut off the nose and upper lip of a boy named Adam, whom they subsequently crucified in a latrine.⁴⁹ According to Matthew Paris, the Jews who tortured Hugh of Lincoln each pierced him with a small knife.⁵⁰ According to the chronicles of the abbey of Saint-Denis, when, In Paris in 1290, a Jew was accused of host desecration, he was said to have pierced the host he had procured with a small knife.⁵¹ A cult developed, moreover, not only around this eucharistic wafer, which allegedly miraculously bled, but also around the “holy knife” with which it was stabbed.⁵²

Crucial to the compellingness of the Norwich circumcision case as an anti-Jewish narrative was its resolution in favor of Christians and the Christian faith. According to the summary of the proceedings, this resolution began when Edward escaped “from the hands of the Jews” shortly after his circumcision, and Matilda de Bernham discovered him sobbing by the river.⁵³ In this scene, Edward’s tears, the river, and Matilda’s kindness may be read as standard tropes. To be sure, it would have made sense for a traumatized boy to be crying at this point, and it is entirely plausible that Edward might have walked by the river Wensum. The symbolism of water as representing purification and renewal, however, seems apt, as well. Water’s cleansing and transformative properties figured frequently in contemporaneous literature. For instance, In a story in the annals of Egmond Abbey in the county of Holland, a Jewish father—the cruel adult male Jew of Christian lore—drowned his son in the Danube to prevent his baptism. Although this boy’s body had been weighted with lead, the river lifted it up and gently washed it ashore, shining. In the meantime, the water cured the blindness of a female onlooker, evoking how this boy’s mystical passage from Judaism to Christianity entailed a restoration of sight.⁵⁴ Similarly, both Edward’s tears and the river that flowed by him may be read as representing a salvific cleansing, perhaps even a rebaptism.⁵⁵

For her part, Matilda de Bernham also played roles familiar from tales of ritual murder and host desecration. First, like the pious Christian women in such narratives, she served as a detector of Jewish abuse.⁵⁶ Second, as a maternal figure, she evoked the Virgin Mary, who figured prominently in contemporaneous anti-Jewish literature.⁵⁷ The summary of the legal proceedings stressed that Matilda was a mother. She discovered Edward together with her daughter, and she came before the justices at Norwich “with her daughter similarly under oath.” Furthermore, Matilda acted maternally toward Edward. According to the summary, Matilda testified that she and her daughter “kept [Edward] in their home for the love of God because they did not know whose son he was.”⁵⁸ Matilda’s solicitousness toward Edward further accentuates the pathos of the account, highlighting the absence of Edward’s own mother from the records of the proceedings—an absence that is analyzed in Chapter 5.

Finally, the summary of the legal proceedings mirrored the narrative arc of contemporaneous anti-Jewish tales by stressing that Norwich Christians defeated the Jews. Although the document was composed in 1235, before the case entered its final stages in ecclesiastical court, its closing words made clear that the Jews had begun to endure their deserved punishment: They “remain[ed] in prison.”⁵⁹

In short, the summary of the legal proceedings in the Norwich circumcision case was inscribed with thematic and structural features common to contemporaneous anti-Jewish literature. Like myriad tales from its cultural milieu, this record cast Jewish men as harming a Christian boy out of contempt for Christianity and receiving their just deserts. Additional familiar topoi included the innocent child victim who was initially at play, the child as truth-teller, Jewish blindness, the purifying and regenerative power of water, and the intervention of a pious Christian woman who evoked the Virgin Mary. Presenting a more or less stock narrative, the summary of the legal proceedings illustrates how the charge that Jews were intent on drawing Christians to Judaism could assume the same form as contemporaneous tales about other alleged expressions of Jewish iniquity. Possibly, the legal nature of the summary of the proceedings bolstered its perceived credibility. This document’s conformity to and reiteration of ingrained anti-Jewish myths, however, likely also made it convincing. To quote Anthony Bale, “When ‘fantasy’ proliferates and eclipses ‘truth,’ the fantasy is more real, more true, than reality.”⁶⁰

Circumcision as Prelude to Crucifixion

The Norwich circumcision case was retold in five thirteenth-century chronicles. The Chronicle of Bury St. Edmunds and the second continuation of the Chronicle of Florence of Worcester both stated simply that, In 1240, “at Norwich, four Jews were drawn by horses and hanged on account of various crimes [but] especially because they circumcised a certain Christian boy according to the rite of the Jews.”⁶¹ Between about 1236 and 1253, Roger Wendover and his successor at St. Albans Abbey, Matthew Paris, recorded a strikingly different account.⁶² Preserved in the entry for the year 1235 in Wendover’s Flores historiarum (Flowers of History)—as well as in the entries for the year 1235 in Paris’s Chronica majora and Historia Anglorum—the short version of this account stated that “seven Jews, who had circumcised a certain boy at Norwich, whom they had secretly stolen away, and whom they had hidden from the sight of Christians for a year, wanting to crucify him at Easter, were brought before the king at Westminster.” The Jews confessed their crimes and were found guilty and imprisoned.⁶³ The longer version, which is found in Paris’s entry for the year 1240 in his Chronica majora, Is more detailed. It mentions that the Jews renamed Edward. It claims that Edward’s father searched for him. It describes Edward’s eventual reunion with his father, and it explains the case’s final adjudication by ecclesiastical authorities. According to this account:

Jews circumcised a Christian boy in Norwich. Having circumcised him, they named him Jurnin. They kept him, however, In order to crucify him as an insult to Jesus Christ crucified. The father of the boy, however, from whom the Jews had secretly stolen the boy, having diligently searched for his son, found him confined in the Jews’ custody. With jubilant cries, he pointed to his son, whom he thought he had lost, who was wickedly confined in a certain Jewish chamber. When so great a crime came to the attention of Bishop William of Raleigh, a prudent and circumspect man, and some other nobles, all the Jews of that town were seized, lest, through the neglect of Christians, so great an injury to Christ should go unpunished. And when [the Jews] wanted to place themselves under the protection of royal authority, the bishop said: “These matters regard the church. They are not to be dealt with by the royal curia, as this case concerns circumcision and the wounding of the faith.” Four of the Jews were found guilty of the aforesaid crime. First, they were dragged by the tails of horses, and then they were hanged by the gallows, where they exhaled the wretched remains of life.⁶⁴

Like the narrative that emerges from the summary of the legal proceedings, Wendover’s and Paris’s short and long versions of the Norwich circumcision case—on whose commonalities the following pages focus—had all the elements of a typical anti-Jewish tale. They cast malevolent Jewish men as preying on a helpless Christian child and being punished. Unlike the summary of the legal proceedings, however, these chronicle accounts did not present Norwich Jews as intent on bringing Edward into the Jewish community. Instead, they claimed that Norwich Jews circumcised Edward with the intention of crucifying him at Easter. In other words, they recast Edward’s circumcision as a prelude to—or a first step in—an attempted ritual murder. This interweaving of circumcision and crucifixion into a single anti-Jewish story was unprecedented, and it provides fresh insight into contemporaneous Christian views of circumcision and Jewish proselytizing.

To modern sensibilities, the notion that Jews would circumcise a child whom they intended to murder is puzzling. Why would Jews perform a rite that they typically performed on their own infants to welcome them into the Jewish community on Christian children whom they allegedly wanted to kill? As the seventeenth-century Portuguese Jewish scholar Menasseh ben Israel pointed out in his refutation of Wendover and Paris’s narrative in his Vindiciae judaeorum (Vindication of the Jews), from a Jewish perspective, circumcision and murder were antithetical. Jewish circumcision was “a testimony of great love and affection,” he explained, “and [Jews presumably would] not dare make a sport of one of the seals of their covenant.” Menasseh ben Israel concluded that the whole Norwich story was a “prank” and that Norwich Jews’ imputed deeds were in fact worthy of Spanish Catholics in the Americas “who first baptized the poor Indians, and afterwards … inhumanely butchered them.”⁶⁵

Wendover and Paris did not spell out how they conceived of the relationship between circumcision and crucifixion.⁶⁶ As noted above, Wendover and Paris wrote simply that “Jews hid a certain boy from Christian view for a year and circumcised him, wanting to crucify him at Easter.”⁶⁷ Paris’s additional, more detailed account stated merely that “Jews circumcised a Christian boy. Having circumcised him, they called him Jurnin. They kept him, however, to crucify him, as an insult to Jesus Christ crucified.”⁶⁸

It is possible that Wendover and Paris did not envision any particular logical connection between circumcision and crucifixion. Perhaps, In portraying the Norwich circumcision case as an attempted ritual murder, they conflated it with one of the earliest documented allegations of ritual murder in medieval Europe, which arose in Norwich, too, a century prior—the charge that, In 1144, Norwich Jews murdered a young Christian boy named William.⁶⁹ Such a conflation, however, seems unlikely. Paris demonstrated a keen interest in alleged Jewish crimes, writing in detail about incidents in Berkhampstead in 1150, London in 1244, and Lincoln in 1255.⁷⁰ Amid all of Wendover’s and Paris’s writings, however, there is only one vague and brief reference to William. In his continuation of Wendover’s Flores historiarum, Paris noted succinctly that, In 1144, “a certain boy was crucified by the Jews at Norwich.”⁷¹ Moreover, Paris appears to have composed this part of his continuation of Wendover’s Flores historiarum after he and Wendover wrote their accounts of the Norwich circumcision case. It is possible that Wendover and Paris did not even know about William when they wrote about the circumcision case.⁷² This would not be surprising. Although William of Norwich is well known today—much better known than Edward—word of William did not circulate widely during the Middle Ages. Prior to the fifteenth century, Thomas of Monmouth’s vita of William (which survives in a single manuscript from the last quarter of the twelfth century) was virtually unknown outside Norwich. Information about William that was independent of Thomas’s vita spread slowly.⁷³

Alternatively, the portrayal of the Norwich circumcision case as an attempted ritual murder may have been reflexive. By the 1230s, the charge of ritual murder was well known across western Europe, and accusations that Jews harmed Christian children in a variety of ways commonly evolved into tales of crucifixion. For instance, whereas in 1232 the Hampshire Eyre Rolls specified that Winchester Jews mutilated and strangled a one-year-old,⁷⁴ the Annals of Winchester later stated that Winchester Jews “crucified” this boy.⁷⁵ Indicating that crucifixion came to dominate some anti-Jewish narratives in subsequent centuries, as well, some later authors who wrote about the Norwich circumcision case—including the Roman legal scholar Marquardus de Susannis (d. 1578), the English chronicler Raphael Holinshed (d. 1580), and the French essayist Albert Monniot (d. 1938)—omitted any reference to circumcision and mentioned only crucifixion. Marquardus de Susannis even contended that Norwich Jews not only planned to crucify Edward but actually accomplished the deed.⁷⁶

It is also possible, especially in light of Christian views of circumcision as cruel, that Wendover, Paris, and their readers imagined circumcision in the context of a ritual murder as a form of torture. As such, circumcision fit particularly well in a ritual murder narrative. Thirteenth-century Christians depicted Jews as subjecting their alleged ritual murder victims to a wide array of torments, Including a variety of kinds of mutilation. As noted above, according to a manuscript from the second half of the thirteenth century, In 1183 Jews in Bristol cut off the nose and upper lip of a boy named Adam whom they subsequently crucified in a latrine. According to the History of the Monastery of St. Peters at Gloucester, In 1168, Gloucester Jews tortured a boy named Harold “with extreme cruelty”: “Placing him between two fires, they severely burned his sides, his back and buttocks…. They put molten wax in his eyes as well as his ears…. They also knocked out his front teeth.”⁷⁷ During the thirteenth century, moreover, Christians increasingly claimed that Jews maimed or disemboweled their purported victims, often in the same ways that were used in judicial punishments and reported of the bodily sufferings of saints. It is striking that, In the very same decade as the Norwich circumcision case, genital mutilation surfaced in an English ritual murder accusation: According to the Hampshire Eyre Rolls, In 1232, Winchester Jews gouged out the eyes and heart and “removed the testicles” of the boy whom they strangled.⁷⁸ In sum, contemporaneous Christian perceptions of circumcision and trends in tales of ritual murder indicate that it is possible that some Christians imagined circumcision in the context of a ritual murder narrative as a characteristic form of Jewish abuse.

Wendover’s and Paris’s interweaving of circumcision and crucifixion also invites consideration of contemporaneous developments in Christian thought and devotional practices. As a prelude to crucifixion, circumcision could have powerful Christian meaning. In medieval Christian theology, the circumcision of Christ—which the Gospel of Luke portrays as the occasion for Christ’s naming (2:21)—was understood as demonstrating that Christ was fully human and as adumbrating, and even initiating, Christ’s passion.⁷⁹ During the thirteenth century, In the context of increasing theological investment in Christ’s humanity and the flourishing of affective piety, Christ’s circumcision assumed heightened devotional importance. Alleged fragments of the foreskin of Christ were venerated as holy relics,⁸⁰ and Christ’s circumcision began to figure in devotional meditation as the first of the seven sorrows of Mary.⁸¹ The collection of saints’ lives and verse homilies known as the South English Legendary (composed ca. 1270–85) presented the feast of Christ’s circumcision (January 1) as its first festal narrative, emphasizing that Christ was born into the Old Law even as he ushered in a new era in salvation history.⁸² Around 1260, Jacobus de Voragine affirmed in the Golden Legend that Christians celebrated the feast of Christ’s circumcision because it marked, among other things, the first time Christ shed his blood for humanity and, thus, the start of redemption.⁸³ By the early fourteenth century, In texts and images, the arma Christi (instruments of Christ’s passion) had begun to include not only nails and pliers but also the knife used in Christ’s circumcision.⁸⁴

Christians often imagined that, when Jews committed ritual murder, they sought closely to parody the passion of Christ. In addition to accusing Jews of crucifying their purported victims, they envisioned Jews as reenacting other aspects of Christ’s passion. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle noted, for instance, In regard to the case of William of Norwich, that Jews tortured William “with all the tortures with which our Lord was tortured.”⁸⁵ In his Chronica majora, Matthew Paris described the precise correspondence between the tortures that Jews allegedly inflicted on Hugh of Lincoln and those endured by Christ. Paris wrote that Lincoln Jews appointed one Jew to serve as a judge, “like Pilate,” and that the Jews scourged Hugh “till the blood flowed,” crowned him with thorns, mocked him, spat upon him, Insulted him, and, finally, crucified him and pierced his heart with a spear.⁸⁶

In the context of a parody of Christ’s passion, circumcision could have served as a parody of Christ’s circumcision, understood as the first step in Christ’s passion. This is, In fact, how, In the late fifteenth century, the alleged circumcision of two-year-old Simon of Trent, whom Jews were accused of murdering, was explained in the Geschichte des zu Trient ermordeten Christenkindes (History of the Murdered Trent Christ Child, printed by Albertus Duderstadt/Albrecht Kunne in 1475). In this work, the text accompanying a woodcut depicting a Jew cutting Simon’s penis stated that the Jew performed a “circumcision” in mockery of Christ’s “first bloodshed.”⁸⁷ In the thirteenth century, Wendover’s and Paris’s accounts of the Norwich circumcision case, too, could have been understood as casting circumcision as the first stage in a reenactment of Christ’s passion. This interpretation leaves questions unanswered, however. For instance, If, In the narratives of Wendover and Paris, circumcision was a parody of the first step in Christ’s passion, where were the other elements of the passion leading up to crucifixion? And why did Wendover, Paris, and other thirteenth- and fourteenth-century authors not cast Jews as circumcising other ritual murder victims, as well?

It is possible that Matthew Paris did imagine that Jews circumcised at least one other purported ritual murder victim. In the nineteenth century, In his edition of Paris’s Chronica majora, which is based on what may be the only autograph manuscript of the text, the historian Henry Richards Luard included the transcription of a now illegible note from the lower margin of the folio on which Paris described the tortures that Jews allegedly inflicted on Hugh of Lincoln. According to Luard, the note read: “the Jews … to circumcise … and to call the circumcised [child] ‘Jesus’” (Judaei circumcidere et circumcisum Jesum vocare).⁸⁸ It seems that Paris wished to add that, at some point in the process of abusing Hugh, the Jews circumcised him and started to call him “Jesus.” The notion that Jews circumcised Hugh of Lincoln did not make it into the ballads that were later composed about Hugh or into Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale.” There may, however, be some evidence of awareness of Paris’s note across the ages. In the nineteenth century, the Scottish thinker Robert Chambers (d. 1871) wrote that Matthew Paris “state[d] that the Jews of Lincoln circumcised and crucified a Christian child in 1250 [probably meaning 1255] at whose tomb miracles were performed.”⁸⁹