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Chapter 1

Christian Vulnerabilities

The twelfth and thirteenth centuries witnessed a foreboding shift in Christian attitudes toward Jews. After long casting Jews as enemies of the historical Christ yet as docile denizens of contemporary Christendom, a growing number of Christians at all levels of society began to view Jews as imminently menacing Christian welfare.¹ A multiplicity of factors contributed to this intensification of the traditional Christian sense of Jewish enmity. The Crusades heightened Christian anxieties about perceived existential foes. A rising sense of Christendom and individual nations as unified Christian bodies made Jews appear to be contaminating foreign elements. Augmented Christian piety across the socioeconomic spectrum spread awareness of the Gospels’ portrayals of Jews as the killers of Christ.²

This turbulent context spawned anti-Jewish allegations that portrayed present-day Jews as intent on harming the body of Christ, understood both as the Christian faithful and also as the Eucharist (the bread consecrated during Mass that Christians believed literally to have become the body of Christ). The charge of ritual murder—that is, the charge that Jews tortured and killed Christians (usually young boys) out of contempt for all things Christian—was documented as early as the mid-twelfth century in Norwich, England, where the case that frames this book unfolded. Writing during the third quarter of the twelfth century, the Benedictine monk Thomas of Monmouth described in gory detail how Norwich Jews allegedly murdered a Christian boy named William in 1144. By the 1230s, the charge of ritual murder was a stock anti-Jewish calumny across western Europe.³ Imputations that Jews poisoned Christians—whether in the context of tending to medical patients or by contaminating the water supply—surfaced during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and assumed devastating proportions during the fourteenth century.⁴ The charge of host desecration—the notion that Jews physically abused consecrated eucharistic wafers—began to circulate in German lands and northern France during the second half of the thirteenth century and soon proliferated.⁵ The Christian conviction that Jews sought to oppress Christians financially became especially pronounced in late twelfth- and thirteenth-century England where, on the eve of the Third Crusade, Christians attacked Jews in several cities.⁶ In 1190, Norwich Christians robbed and killed Jews at night and torched Jewish homes and synagogues.⁷ In 1200, Norwich Christians desecrated the local Jewish cemetery.⁸

When, then, as the Curia Regis Rolls of King Henry III state, in 1234, a Christian physician named Master Benedict came before the royal court at Norwich and declared to the assembled justices, the prior of Norwich, Dominicans, Franciscans, and other clerics and laymen that, four years earlier, local Jews “wickedly and feloniously” seized and circumcised his young son Edward because they “wanted to make him a Jew,” his claims fell on receptive ears. In fact, Master Benedict leveled this charge during a decade in England that was characterized by especially intense anti-Jewish animus. During the 1230s, Jews were heavily taxed, extorted, and leaned on for loans. Consequently, they were increasingly resented as creditors.⁹ The Norwich circumcision case compounded the ill will of Norwich Christians—who probably numbered about eight thousand at the time—toward the approximately two hundred Jews who lived in their midst. This ill will drove Norwich Christians to loot and set fire to Jewish homes and physically assault Jews in 1235 and 1238.¹⁰

This book seeks to understand Master Benedict’s accusation—as it was recorded by Christian scribes and clerks—both in the context of contemporaneous Christian fears and fantasies and also as a window onto actual Jewish practices. Chapter 2 explores how the charge of forced circumcision participated in the anti-Jewish discourse of the period. The present chapter considers Master Benedict’s assertion that Norwich Jews “wanted to make [his son] a Jew.” I argue that this intriguing contention constitutes early evidence of a facet of thirteenth-century Christian constructions of Jews that has not yet received systematic scholarly attention—namely, the view that Jews were intent on drawing Christians to Judaism. Indeed, the Norwich circumcision case attests to the revival of long dormant Christian concerns about Christian apostasy to Judaism and about Jews as agents of Christian apostasy.

During the early Middle Ages, Christian authors sometimes accused Christians vaguely of “Judaizing,” referring to associating with Jews or adopting ideologies or practices that were deemed “Jewish,” such as sustained attention to the literal sense of Bible.¹¹ Occasionally in the late eleventh century and increasingly by the late twelfth, they accused Jews of sowing doubts in Christians about Christianity. By contrast, thirteenth- and fourteenth-century popes, kings, bishops, inquisitors, lawmakers, preachers, and chroniclers in England, northern and southern France, German lands, the Italian peninsula, Aragon, Catalonia, and Castile contended that born Christians (i.e., Christians who had been born into Christian families) were repudiating Christianity and joining the Jewish community, often at the instigation of Jews. As the following pages show, these Christians described Christian apostasy to Judaism as starting with a “turning away” from Christianity. They claimed that Christian apostates to Judaism “denied the truth of the Catholic faith,” “apostatized,” and “strayed from the faith of Christ.”

In some cases, Christian authors blamed lust or the devil for these deviations from the Christian fold. In others, they blamed Jews. At times, they blamed Jews in relatively neutral terms, stating, for example, that Jews “made” Christians Jews, or that Jews “turned” or “led” Christians over to Judaism. Often, however, Christian authors stressed that Jews acted against Christians’ will and with evil intent. They referred to Jews as “compelling Christians to apostatize” and as “dragging,” “wickedly attracting,” and “seducing” Christians into error. Jews allegedly did so “maliciously” and “secretly,” “through devilish trickery” and “the promotion of a lie.” Jews’ “cunning methods” were said to include sophistry and bribery. Jews purportedly threatened “unsuspecting” Christians of all kinds—lay and religious. Often, they targeted the most vulnerable: women, children, and “simple” folk.

Crucially, almost without exception, thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Christian authors mentioned only one element of actual Jewish conversion procedure—namely, circumcision. Circumcision may have been the only actual Jewish conversion rite of which some Christians were aware. Christians were familiar with it from the Bible, where circumcision is the only ritual associated with becoming a Jew.¹² They knew of it also from contemporary Jewish practice, as circumcision constituted verifiable evidence that steps had been taken toward joining the Jewish fold. Thus, according to the chronicler at the abbey of St. Albans, Matthew Paris (1200–1259), Christians examined the body of a former deacon who allegedly converted to Judaism and was condemned at the 1222 Council of Oxford to see if he had been circumcised.¹³ Similarly, the testimonies given in the course of the judicial proceedings relating to the Norwich circumcision case repeatedly emphasized that Edward’s circumcised penis had been seen: Master Benedict declared that he had shown Edward’s body to the justices of Norwich shortly after his son’s alleged circumcision and that “it was clear” that Edward had been circumcised. The official of the archdeacon, the coroners of Norfolk and Norwich, and a large group of priests affirmed that they, too, had seen Edward’s recently circumcised member.¹⁴ References to circumcision in Christian discussions of conversion to Judaism did not relate only to the physical realities of circumcision. “Circumcision” could be understood more loosely, as well, as metonymy for conversion to Judaism. To “become circumcised” was shorthand for “converting to Judaism,” even when speaking about the experiences of women. For instance, in his discussion of Christians “who den[ied] faith in Christ and turn[ed] away to the faithlessness of Jews,” the mid-thirteenth-century Bavarian Dominican inquisitor known as “the Passau Anonymous” listed clerics, merchants, craftsmen, and women who “circumcised themselves.”¹⁵ Insofar as Christians portrayed circumcision as the sum total of Jewish conversion procedure, they deprecated conversion to Judaism. Circumcision involved a minor anatomical operation; it was “of the flesh.” Baptism, by contrast, effected a spiritual transformation.¹⁶

Finally, in addition to specifying that Christian apostates to Judaism abandoned Christianity, often at the behest of Jews, and that male apostates were circumcised, thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Christian authors noted that apostates assumed a new identity or adhered to a new tradition. Some stated that Christians had been “made into Jews.” Some described apostasy to Judaism as the decision to “take on” living in accordance with Jewish law and custom. Most often, Christian authors described converts as reorienting themselves spatially—as “turning toward,” “being carried over to,” or “flying over to” a destination variously referred to as “Judaism,” “the Jewish sect,” “the rite of the Jews,” “the Jewish law,” “Jewish unbelief,” “the error of unbelief,” “the damnable rite,” or “the execrable rite.”

This chapter begins to investigate the thirteenth-century revival of Christian anxieties about apostasy to Judaism and about Jews as agents of Christian apostasy. It demonstrates that these developments participated in broad ecclesiastical worries that did not pertain only to Jews. Thirteenth-century popes, bishops, and inquisitors were distressed about Christian deviance generally. They associated Christian apostasy to Judaism conceptually with apostasy to Islam and with falling into Christian heresy. In addition, they associated alleged Jewish efforts to draw Christians to Judaism with the alleged efforts of Muslims and Christian heretics to draw Christians to Islam and Christian heresy, respectively. This chapter shows also that Christian concerns about Christian apostasy to Judaism and about alleged Jewish efforts to draw Christians to Judaism were related to the hopes and misgivings of some ecclesiastical leaders about Jewish conversion to Christianity. Insofar as this was the case, Christian concerns about Jewish apostasy were manifestations of widespread unease about the changeability of religious affiliation.

The pages that follow first trace the early history of concerns about apostasy to Judaism and about Jews as agents of apostasy. They then document the reemergence of these concerns during the first half of the thirteenth century and show how these budding thirteenth-century anxieties were part and parcel of broader ecclesiastical preoccupations about the instability of Christian identity in particular and religious identity in general. The second half of this chapter focuses on the period 1250–1350, when expressions of Christian concern about apostasy to Judaism and about Jews as agents of apostasy multiplied. Documenting this proliferation through the analysis of secular law codes, the canons of church councils, royal decrees, papal and episcopal correspondence, inquisitorial writings, and moral exempla, i delve more deeply into the ties between these specific Christian anxieties and broader Christian preoccupations. This chapter’s conclusion considers what the records of the Norwich circumcision case reveal about the mechanisms whereby a single accusation that Jews sought to convert a Christian to Judaism could circulate widely, further propagating Christian anti-Jewish prejudices across all levels of society.

A Tradition of Concern About Conversion to Judaism

Concern on the part of non-Jews about conversion to Judaism predated the Christianization of the Roman Empire. These earlier worries arose in a cultural context very different from that of high and late medieval Europe. The Roman Empire was religiously pluralistic, especially before the mid-fourth century. Several emperors and jurists of the second and third centuries CE nonetheless objected to conversion to Judaism, in particular on the grounds that it drew individuals away from participating in civic and imperial rituals.¹⁷ In the meantime, conversion to Judaism coalesced as a Jewish legal process whose key components were the acceptance of the commandments of the Torah, circumcision, and ritual immersion for men; and the acceptance of the commandments and ritual immersion for women.¹⁸ The requirement of circumcision for men rendered conversion to Judaism uniquely repugnant to Roman sensibilities. Like many Greeks, many Romans regarded circumcision as a particularly unseemly type of bodily mutilation.¹⁹

During the second century CE, Romans began to enact laws against conversion to Judaism. The spirit of this legislation was rooted in an ethos specific to the Roman Empire. This legislation sometimes was adopted in later contexts, however, such that it bore an important legacy. Emperor Antoninus Pius (138–62 CE) decreed that Jews who circumcised non-Jews would suffer the same punishment as castrators—namely, the death penalty and confiscation of property.²⁰ According to the Historia Augusta, Emperor Septimius Severus (193–211 CE) forbade his subjects from “becoming Jews” under threat of heavy penalties.²¹ At the end of the third century, the jurist Julius Paulus declared in his Sententiae that “Roman citizens who suffer[ed] that they themselves or their slaves be circumcised in accordance with the Jewish rite [we]re [to be] exiled perpetually to an island and their property [was to be] confiscated; the doctors [who performed the circumcisions were to] suffer capital punishment.” This text survived in Emperor Justinian’s Digest (530–33), whose rediscovery at the turn of the twelfth century prompted a revival of the study of Roman law.²²

Over the course of the fourth and fifth centuries, as Christians grew in influence within the empire, Roman attitudes toward non-Christians hardened and formal conversion to Judaism assumed new significance. Christian Roman emperors perpetuated earlier prohibitions against joining the Jewish fold. They also advocated for more deliberate boundaries between Christians and Jews, and they threatened severe penalties for Jews who tried to prevent members of their community from converting to Christianity, for non-Jews who sought to join the Jewish community, and for Jews who welcomed proselytes.²³ The church fathers (influential Christian theologians of the first centuries of the Common Era) defined Christians and Christianity in opposition to Jews and Judaism, such that Christian apostasy to Judaism involved defecting to a rival community. Moreover, it involved joining the ranks of the archvillains in Christian history, a people whom the Gospels cast as having not only rejected Christ but also caused his death. In addition, Christian apostasy to Judaism represented a reversal of the course of Christian salvation history, the putative progressive unfolding of time on which Christian supersessionism was predicated.²⁴ As the sign par excellence of Jewish-Christian difference, circumcision constituted an especially marked affront to Christianity. St. Paul had deemed circumcision as observed by contemporary Jews to be spiritually void; he extolled a spiritual alternative, “circumcision of the heart.”²⁵

During the first millennium, Christian authorities were especially critical of the Jewish practice of circumcising male slaves upon acquisition, which was rooted in biblical law (Gen. 17:12–13). Upon emancipation, these slaves became full converts to Judaism.²⁶ In an attempt to end this practice, in 335, Emperor Constantine declared that slaves whom Jews circumcised would automatically become freemen. In 339, he threatened Jews who circumcised slaves with the death penalty.²⁷ Merovingian church councils condemned the conversion of slaves to Judaism, as did Visigothic legislation.²⁸ A sixth-century legend about the bishop of Paris St. Germanus (d. 576) depicted Germanus as having heroically intervened to prevent Jews from converting a young slave to Judaism. According to this tale, which was recorded by the poet and bishop Venantius Fortunatus (d. ca. 600), Germanus miraculously broke the bonds of a boy whom Jews were leading about the countryside in chains “for being unwilling to subject himself to the Jewish laws.”²⁹ Over the course of the ensuing millennium, popes and church councils repeatedly forbade Jews to convert their slaves to Judaism.³⁰

The issue of slave conversion aside, Christian expressions of concern about Christian apostasy to Judaism—and about Jews as agents of apostasy—dwindled over time. Exceptionally, in ninth-century southern Gaul, bishops Agobard and Amulo of Lyon decried alleged Christian attraction to Judaism and alleged Jewish efforts to convince Christians that Judaism was superior to Christianity.³¹ Into the twelfth century, however, Christian anti-Jewish writings sought primarily to expose Judaism’s theological errors and expound on the ways in which Jewish scriptures supported Christian doctrine.³² Through the end of the twelfth century, the notion that Christians who were not slaves might formally convert to Judaism seems to have been far from churchmen’s minds.

The Thirteenth-Century Resurgence of Christian Concern

The turn of the thirteenth century witnessed two interrelated developments. First, Christian authors increasingly depicted Jews as spiritually corrupting Christians.³³ They described Jews as distancing the Christian servants who lived in Jewish homes from faith in Christ.³⁴ They also portrayed Jews as publicly mocking Christian doctrine. In 1205, for instance, Pope Innocent III informed King Philip Augustus of France that he had heard that Jews in France were openly proclaiming that Christians believed in a peasant who had been hanged by the Jewish people and that Jews ran around town on Good Friday, laughing at Christians for adoring the Crucified One. Jews did these things, the pope explained, expressly in order to turn Christians away from “the duty of [Christian] worship.”³⁵ Between 1227 and 1230, the first of thirteen articles proposed for discussion at a provincial synod of the archdiocese of Tours likewise contended that Jews were brazenly ridiculing Christianity. It stated that Jews, “the enemies of the Christian faith,” should be expelled from small towns and villages because they were asserting that it was impossible for a virgin to conceive, for a closed womb to give birth, and for the true body of the Lord to look like bread.³⁶ During the third quarter of the thirteenth century, the influential Franciscan preacher Berthold of Regensburg (d. 1272) cautioned his audiences that Jews engaged “simple” Christians in informal religious disputations in order to erode their faith. “You are so unlearned,” he explained, “whereas [the Jews] are well-trained in Scripture. [The Jew] has thought out well for a long time how he will converse with you, in order that you might thereby become ever weaker in your faith.”³⁷ In 1289, King Charles II of Naples—who was also Count of Provence and Forcalquier, Prince of Achaea, and Count of Anjou and Maine—justified his expulsion of the Jews from Anjou and Maine by way of reference to a litany of alleged Jewish misdeeds. The first item on this list was the charge that Jews “deceitfully turned many people of both sexes who [we]re considered adherents of the Christian faith away from the path of truth.”³⁸

Second, early in the thirteenth century, Christian expressions of concern about formal Christian apostasy to Judaism reemerged. One example surfaces in the critique of contemporary monastic life, the Speculum ecclesiae (Mirror of the Church, 1216), of the widely traveled Cambro-Norman archdeacon Gerald of Wales. Gerald reported that two Cistercian monks had “cast away their garments, abandoned their household,” and apostatized to Judaism. The first monk, Gerald wrote, “had himself circumcised in the Jewish rite” and “damnably joined himself to the most despicable enemies of the cross of Christ.” The second monk, whom Gerald specified was from Garendon Abbey in Leicestershire, allegedly “flew off with swift and wicked wings to Judaism, the domicile of damnation.” According to Gerald, when the Oxford archdeacon Walter Map (d. ca. 1210) heard about these two apostates, Map exclaimed that he had never before heard of men of any profession or rank apostatizing to Judaism.³⁹ This remark underscores the novelty in Map’s milieu of the notion of Christian apostasy to Judaism. Gerald was a notoriously imaginative reporter, and the veracity of his account may reasonably be questioned. His primary interest in this passage was to criticize the Cistercian monastic order.⁴⁰ Thus, he intimated that these two monks were lustful and self-indulgent. He claimed that they converted to Judaism “instigated by the spirit of fornication” and because “they could no longer bear the harshness and rigor of [their] order.”⁴¹ Regardless of the accuracy of Gerald’s claims, Gerald’s decision to illustrate alleged Cistercian degeneracy by contending that two Cistercians abandoned Christianity for Judaism is significant. It shows that some early thirteenth-century Christian intellectuals were beginning to contemplate the phenomenon of Christian apostasy to Judaism and that they regarded it as reprehensible in the extreme.

Roughly contemporaneous chronicles related another alleged instance of Christian apostasy to Judaism in the British Isles—that of the deacon who was degraded and sentenced at the 1222 Council of Oxford. In this case, too, Christian authors contended that lust drove apostasy. Purportedly, this deacon “was circumcised for the love of a Jewish woman.”⁴² Early thirteenth-century accounts alluded merely in passing to this Jewish love interest. In the 1250s, however, Matthew Paris cast this woman as a formidable temptress, thereby placing the blame for this deacon’s apostasy squarely on a Jew. According to Paris, this Jewish woman declared to the lovelorn deacon, who “ardently pined” for her “embrace”: “‘I will do what you ask … if you apostatize, have yourself circumcised, and faithfully adhere to Judaism.’”⁴³ Specifying that this Jewish woman demanded that the deacon “faithfully adhere to Judaism,” Paris implied that this affair involved a formal conversion—or at least an attempted formal conversion—to Judaism, as opposed to a circumcision that was undertaken independent of a communal Jewish framework. It is not known whether Jewish authorities in fact sanctioned and supervised this deacon’s alleged conversion. No Jews are known to have been punished in relation to this case. It is well attested, however, that the Oxford Council turned this deacon over to the sheriff’s officers for execution. According to several chronicles, the deacon was burned; according to Paris’s Chronica majora (Great Chronicle), he was hanged; according to Paris’s Historia Anglorum (History of the English), he was beheaded. Whatever its means, this execution constituted the first known case of the death penalty being exacted for religious deviance in England.⁴⁴

During the 1230s—the decade during which the Norwich circumcision case unfolded—for the first time in centuries, claims about people who were not slaves, who had been born into Christian families, and who apostatized to Judaism began to surface in papal and episcopal correspondence. On March 5, 1233, for instance, in the bull Sufficere debuerat (which is referred to, like all papal bulls, by the initial words of the official Latin text), addressed to archbishops, bishops, and other prelates in German lands, Pope Gregory IX reported “with sorrow and shame” that he had heard about three sets of circumstances under which Christians were apostatizing to Judaism. First, Jews owned Christian slaves whom they circumcised and forced to “Judaize.” Second, Gregory continued, “some people, who were Christians not in deed but only in name, were going over to the Jews willingly and, pursuing their rite, they allowed themselves to be circumcised and publicly declared themselves to be Jews.” Third, Jews who—in contravention of the Third Council of Toledo (589) and the Fourth Lateran Council (1215)—had been granted “secular dignities and public offices” were “venting their anger against Christians” and “making some [Christians] keep their [Jewish] rite.”⁴⁵ In short, according to Gregory, some Christians were apostatizing to Judaism of their own accord. In addition, in contexts in which Jews wielded power over Christians, Jews were causing Christians to convert to Judaism.

Three months later, on May 18, 1233, Gregory called on the archbishop of Compostela to compel King Ferdinand III of Leon and Castile to address a roster of Jewish offenses that, he said, “it would [have] be[en] not only improper but inhuman for the faithful of Christ to tolerate.” In terms nearly identical to those that he had employed in his March bull to German prelates, Gregory claimed that he had heard that, among other things, Jews in Spain who had been granted “secular dignities and public offices” were “venting their anger against Christians” and “making some [Christians] keep their [Jewish] rite.”⁴⁶ In the same year, in his tractate against the Albigensians, the Leonese bishop Lucas of Tuy—who must have been familiar with Gregory’s missive to the archbishop of nearby Compostela—accused Jews of bribing Christian officials to join their ranks. He claimed that “the malignant Jews” not only blasphemed against Christianity but also “led [Christian] magistrates to their own [Jewish] worship by means of gold.”⁴⁷

During the middle decades of the thirteenth century, three major Castilian law codes addressed Christian apostasy to Judaism and alleged Jewish efforts to draw Christians to Judaism. The first, the Fuero juzgo (Forum of the Judges), was a Castilian translation and adaptation of the Latin Visigothic Forum judicum (Forum of the Judges), which King Ferdinand III—to whom Pope Gregory IX had written—assigned to Toledo, Córdoba, Seville, and other towns in Andalusia and Murcia as their municipal charter. The Fuero juzgo stipulated that “a Christian of either sex, and especially one born of Christian parents, who practiced circumcision or any other Jewish rite should be put to an ignominious death … and all of his property should be confiscated for the benefit of the royal treasury.”⁴⁸ In addition, the Fuero juzgo stated that men who circumcised Christians or Jews were to have their penises amputated and their possessions confiscated. Women who performed circumcisions or brought their sons to be circumcised were to have their noses cut off, suffer a financial penalty, and be exiled for the rest of their lives. Anyone who “carried Christian men or women away from the faith of Christ and turned them toward Jewish disbelief and error” was to receive the same penalties as a circumciser.⁴⁹ These provisions contravened established norms of Christian toleration of Jews and Judaism in thirteenth-century Castile, and there is no evidence that they were enforced. However, the translation and dissemination of these laws during the thirteenth century suggest at least heightened Christian awareness that Jews had the potential to draw Christians to Judaism and circumcise them.⁵⁰

Two other Castilian law codes may have reflected contemporaneous concerns about Christian apostasy to Judaism, although they often echoed Roman and Visigothic material. Redacted between 1256 and 1265 and promulgated in 1348, the Siete partidas (Seven Divisions) of King Alfonso X (d. 1284) included a section on Jews that thrice addressed Christian apostasy to Judaism. Law 10 of this section focused on slave conversion. Law 2 threatened the death penalty and confiscation of goods for Jews who preached to or converted a Christian to Judaism “by praising the law of the Jews and deprecating the law of the Christians.”⁵¹ Law 7 stipulated that Christian apostates to Judaism were to be put to death and their possessions were to be confiscated.⁵² Redacted between 1252 and 1255 by the circle of Alfonso X as a template for municipal law codes, the Fuero real (Royal Forum) addressed Christian apostasy to Judaism in the second of its seven laws on Jews. The Fuero real forbade “any Jew to induce any Christian to turn away from his law [i.e., Christianity] or circumcise him” on pain of death and confiscation of goods.⁵³ In 1255 and 1256, Alfonso assigned the Fuero real to the towns of Sahagún, Aguilar de Campoo, Palencia, and Burgos.⁵⁴

In sum, during the second and third decades of the thirteenth century, chroniclers, popes, kings, jurists, and others in the British Isles, German lands, Leon, and Castile began to express concern about Christian apostasy to Judaism. They penned accounts of alleged cases of apostasy, voiced outrage at rumors that Christians were going over to Judaism, and publicized penalties for apostates to Judaism and their Jewish abettors. In so doing, they depicted Christian apostasy to Judaism sometimes as voluntary and sometimes as the result of sinister Jewish machinations. They contended that Jewish men and women drew Christians to Judaism by taking advantage of Christian lust and greed, abusing the power that they sometimes wielded over Christians, and employing rhetorical skill.

The Instability of Christian Identity

Burgeoning thirteenth-century concerns about apostasy to Judaism were inextricably tied to broader ecclesiastical preoccupations with the instability of Christian identity. During the thirteenth century, ecclesiastical alarm about Christian deviance reached new heights. Determined to root out Christian groups that turned their backs on the church hierarchy and its teachings, Pope Innocent III launched the Albigensian Crusade (1209–29), which applied military force to the problem of heresy in the south of France. During the 1230s, Pope Gregory IX appointed the first inquisitors—Franciscan and Dominican friars whom the pope tasked with using Roman inquisitorial procedure to identify and eliminate Christian heretics.⁵⁵

Meanwhile, Christian self-confidence was rattled by conversions of European Christians to Islam. Some of these transpired in Christian lands that were home to Muslim communities, such as parts of Spain, Hungary, and Sicily. Others took place among Christians who traveled, resided, or waged war in Muslim realms, including in the Near East, North Africa, and Central Asia.⁵⁶ Some of the same Christian authors who addressed Christian heresy and Christian apostasy to Judaism wrote about Christian apostasy to Islam. For instance, as shall be discussed further below, Pope Gregory IX reported having heard that Muslims in Hungary were buying Christian slaves, forcing them to apostatize, and forbidding them to baptize their children.⁵⁷ In addition, in 1235, in collaboration with his confessor the canonist Raymond Penyafort (1175–1275), Gregory responded to questions pertaining to Christian apostasy to Islam that had been sent to him by the Franciscan minister and the Dominican prior residing in Tunis.⁵⁸ For his part, Matthew Paris lamented in his Chronica majora that, during the Muslim siege of the French during the Seventh Crusade battle of Fariskur (1250), some Christian deserters “apostatized and adhered to [the Muslims’] filthiness” and that “the faith of many [Christians] began to waver. [Christians] said to one another … ‘Is the law of Mohammad better than that of Christ?’”⁵⁹

In the context of widespread consternation about the instability of Christian identity, Judaism was one of several dangerous destinations to which Christians were feared to stray. Twelfth- and thirteenth-century churchmen routinely categorized Jews together with Muslims and Christian heretics as unbelievers, and they often conceived of Christian apostasy to Judaism together with Christian apostasy to Islam and falling into Christian heresy.⁶⁰ In fact, in relatively rapid succession, several popes applied the same stock phrases to describe apostasy to Judaism and Islam. For example, when, as noted above, in April 1233, Gregory IX reported having heard that “some people [in German lands], who were Christians not in deed but only in name, were going over to the Jews willingly and, pursuing their rite, they allowed themselves to be circumcised and publicly declared themselves to be Jews,” he drew on language that Pope Honorius III had used with regard to apostasy to Islam (although, strikingly, Honorius had not referred to circumcision).⁶¹ In 1225, in a missive addressed to the archbishop of Kalocsa in Hungary, Honorius had reported having heard that “some Christian peasants [in Hungary] were going over to the Saracens willingly and, pursuing their rite, they publicly declared themselves to be Saracens.”⁶² In letters that he dispatched on March 3, 1231, and August 12, 1233, to the archbishop of Esztergom and to King Andrew II of Hungary, respectively, Gregory reapplied some of this language to apostasy to Islam. He wrote of “many Christians who went over to the Saracens willingly, adopting their rite.”⁶³ The deployment of identical phrases to describe apostasy to Judaism and apostasy to Islam is a reminder that these documents reveal more about practices of document production in the papal chancery than about lived experience. Scribes typically drew phrases and passages from formularies, instead of composing missives from scratch. The deployment of identical phrases shows also, however, that churchmen deemed the phenomena of apostasy to Judaism and apostasy to Islam to be similar in essence and morally equivalent.

Illustrating further that influential Christians conceived of apostasy to Judaism as fundamentally similar to apostasy to Islam and falling into heresy, in its section on Muslims, the Siete partidas prescribed the same consequences for “a Christian man or woman … who bec[ame] a Jew, Muslim, or heretic.” Regardless of the faith for which a Christian departed, if he or she remarried, his or her former spouse was to receive all of his or her property.⁶⁴ Similarly, in law 7 of its section on Jews, the Siete partidas prescribed the same punishments for apostates to Judaism and Christian heretics: “Where a Christian is so unfortunate as to become a Jew,” it stated, “we order that he shall be put to death just as if he had become a heretic, and we decree that his property shall be disposed of in the same way that we stated should be done with that of heretics.”⁶⁵ Promulgated by King James I of Aragon in 1240 and again, in expanded form, in 1261 (revised in 1271), the law code known as the Furs de Valencia (Forum of Valencia) prescribed the same penalty for apostates to Judaism and Islam. It decreed that a Christian who “chose the Jewish or Muslim law and, on account of this, was circumcised, was to be burned.”⁶⁶

In the context of broader ecclesiastical preoccupations, Jews were one of several groups whom leading thirteenth-century churchmen conceptualized as seeking to spiritually corrupt Christians. Gregory IX, for instance, articulated concerns, not only about Jews leading Christians over to Judaism, but also about Christian heretics and Muslims bringing faithful Christians into heresy and Islam, respectively. On April 19, 1233—six weeks after he wrote to German prelates about Christians who were voluntarily becoming and publicly declaring themselves to be Jews, and one month before he wrote to the archbishop of Compostela about Jews in public office who were causing Christians to become Jews—Gregory promulgated the bull Gaudemus in which he first appointed papal inquisitors to eradicate Christian heresy. In this bull, Gregory reported having heard that “the wicked ministers of Satan [i.e., Christian heretics] were sowing the evil seed for the harvest of [their] master … wickedly infecting an unbridled multitude … spreading venom … and bringing many people to Tartarus.”⁶⁷ In his 1231 letter to the archbishop of Esztergom and in his 1233 letter to the king of Hungary, Gregory warned that Muslims in their domains were “wickedly attracting [Christians] to the error of disbelief.”⁶⁸ In 1236, in a letter to Emperor Frederick II, Gregory IX wrote that Muslims in the Sicilian kingdom were “driving the flocks of the faithful away from the Lord’s sheepfold.”⁶⁹

Further demonstrating that early thirteenth-century churchmen thought about Jews together with Muslims and Christian heretics as spiritual corruptors, ecclesiastical leaders described all three groups as operating similarly in their alleged efforts to draw faithful Christians into their respective beliefs and practices. Echoing the New Testament, twelfth- and thirteenth-century Christian legislation and exempla routinely portrayed Christian heretics as “wolves in sheep’s clothing”—that is, as men and women who masked false doctrine with good works and sophistry in order “more freely to invade the [Christian] flock.”⁷⁰ Lucas of Tuy reported that some heretics chose to assume the appearance of Jews—even becoming circumcised—in order to “more freely sow heresies.”⁷¹ The theme of false appearances figured in ecclesiastical writings about Jews, as well. In 1239, for instance, in a letter to the bishop of Córdoba, Gregory IX reported that he had learned from clerics in Córdoba and Baeza that Jews were pretending to be Christians in order to deceive Christians even more. These Jews allegedly abducted Christian children and sold them to Muslims.⁷² Gregory IX cast Muslims, too, as assuming false appearances. In his 1231 letter to the archbishop of Esztergom and in his 1233 letter to the king of Hungary, Gregory accused Muslims of “falsely pretending to be Christians” “in order covertly to shoot the innocent.” In this instance, the Christians on whom infidels allegedly preyed were women. “While seeming to be Christians,” Gregory explained, “[Muslim men] marr[ied] Christian women whom they later force[d] to apostatize.”⁷³ The article that was proposed between 1227 and 1230 for discussion at the provincial synod of Tours also cast Jews as preying on Christian women. It claimed that Jews took advantage of Christian women who came to them from near and far for loans and frequently impregnated them and led them to Judaize.⁷⁴

Thirteenth-century churchmen conceived of Jews, Muslims, and Christian heretics not only as assuming false appearances in their efforts to mislead Christians spiritually but also as targeting particularly vulnerable members of Christian society. As noted above, they conceived of Muslims and Jews as targeting Christian women, and Gregory IX depicted Jews as kidnapping Christian children whom they sold to Muslims. The Norwich circumcision case reveals that some early thirteenth-century Christians believed that Jews tried to convert young Christian children to Judaism. In 1304, the Dominican preacher Giordano da Pisa, who preached daily in the vernacular to crowds of middle-class townsmen in and around Florence, echoed this conviction. He reported that Jews abducted poor Christian boys, promised them money, and circumcised them.⁷⁵

Most frequently, the particularly vulnerable Christians whom churchmen claimed that Muslims, Jews, and Christian heretics sought to mislead were “simple” Christians—that is, Christians who lacked the necessary knowledge and capacity for sophisticated rational thought and therefore depended on the religious guidance of the learned. The article that was proposed for discussion at the provincial synod of Tours contended that Jews were deceiving “simple” Christians and leading them into error.⁷⁶ In his 1233 missive to German prelates, Pope Gregory IX warned that Jews were causing “simple” Christians “to slide into the snare of [Jewish] error under the pretext of disputation.”⁷⁷ Over the course of the thirteenth century, the Franciscan scholastic theologian Alexander of Hales (ca. 1183–1245) and other prominent churchmen repeated words of Pope Alexander III: “Our mores and those of the Jews do not agree in anything. Hence [Jews] might be able easily to make simple souls incline toward their [Jewish] superstition and faithlessness through their continuous contact and assiduous familiarity.”⁷⁸ In 1267, in the bull Dampnabili perfidia judaeorum, addressed to the archbishop and bishops in Poitiers, Toulouse, and Provence, Pope Clement IV lamented having heard that Jews were trying to “attract simple Christians of both sexes to their damnable rite.”⁷⁹ Popes used this same trope in missives about Muslims and Christian heretics. For example, in his 1199 bull Vergentis in senium, addressed to the clergy and people of Viterbo, Pope Innocent III described Christian heretics as having “deceived many simple people and seduced certain astute ones, while cloaked in the appearance of religion.”⁸⁰ Gregory IX echoed these words and sentiments in his letter of March 3, 1231, to the archbishop of Esztergom and again in his letter of August 12, 1233, to the king of Hungary. In both, he lamented having heard from the archbishop and others that Muslims “deceived many simple people among the Christians and seduced some of the astute, while cloaked in the appearance of piety.”⁸¹ On April 19, 1233, in the bull Gaudemus, Gregory reported having heard from the Dominican friar known as Brother Robert that Christian heretics who “had the appearance of piety” were “deceiving the astute and seducing the simple.”⁸² Like the use of related phrases to describe apostasy to Judaism and apostasy to Islam, these portrayals of Jews, Muslims, and Christian heretics as operating similarly arose in the first instance from scribal practices that involved copying formulas. At the same time, they reflected and spread the view that all of these “unbelievers” were intent on misleading the Christian faithful.

This wider context is key to understanding the resurgence of Christian expressions of concern about Christian apostasy to Judaism and about Jews as agents of Christian apostasy. The Christian men who recorded and adjudicated purported cases of Christian apostasy to Judaism belonged to the ecclesiastical circles that voiced broader anxieties about Christian deviance and infidels’ and heretics’ alleged schemes. Gerald of Wales, for instance, who wrote about the two alleged Cistercian apostates, met with Pope Innocent III in 1198 and spent much of the period between 1199 and 1203 living in Rome. Twelve of the bishops who attended the 1222 Oxford Council, which condemned the apostate deacon, participated in the Fourth Lateran Council, which met in Rome in 1215.⁸³ The third canon of Lateran IV summarized all pontifical legislation to date pertaining to heretics and delineated procedures against heretics and their accomplices. The sixty-eighth canon of Lateran IV promoted separating Christians from Jews and Muslims. At the 1222 Oxford Council, English bishops republished the Lateran decrees. Many of these same bishops were present when the Norwich circumcision case came before King Henry III at Westminster in 1235. Moreover, Gregory IX personally appointed the archbishop of Canterbury, Edmund Rich, who attended the hearings pertaining to the Norwich case at Westminster in 1235 and traveled to Rome in 1238.⁸⁴ Contacts with the Roman curia undoubtedly further sensitized Gerald of Wales and English bishops to the problem of Christian deviance, invigorating these men’s sense of duty to monitor and protect the Christian flock and prosecute its corruptors.

The Instability of Religious Identity

The resurgence of Christian expressions of concern about apostasy to Judaism related not only to preoccupations with Christian deviance and infidels’ and heretics’ alleged schemes. It related also to contemporaneous Christian ambitions to convert non-Christians to Christianity.⁸⁵ The early thirteenth century saw the establishment of the influential Franciscan and Dominican orders, some of whose leaders stressed the importance of external mission.⁸⁶ “The ministry of our order,” declared the Dominican master-general Humbert of Romans in a 1255 encyclical, “should … bring the name of the lord Jesus Christ to the unbelieving Jews, the Saracens … the idolatrous pagans, to all the barbarians and the peoples of the world, so that we might be its witnesses and the salvation of all to the very ends of the earth.”⁸⁷ Thirteenth-century popes took up the conversionary banner, too. In February 1233, Gregory IX addressed the bull Celestis altitudo consilii to Muslim leaders worldwide, calling for their conversion.⁸⁸ In 1235, in the bull Cum hora undecima, which was reissued by Innocent IV in 1245 as well as repeatedly thereafter, Gregory instructed Christian missionaries to “preach the gospel to all men so that the process of salvation might be completed.”⁸⁹ Christian kings also promoted conversion to Christianity. In 1232—three years before the Norwich circumcision case came before his court—Henry III established a home for Jewish converts to Christianity in London, the Domus Conversorum.⁹⁰ In 1243, King James I of the Crown of Aragon promulgated legislation aimed at improving the lives of Muslim and Jewish converts to Christianity. During the ensuing decades, secular leaders in Castile, England, France, and German lands followed suit, focusing on Jewish converts in the latter three cases. Monarchs and their Christian subjects across western Europe volunteered to serve as godparents to Christian neophytes.⁹¹

Thirteenth-century Christian conversionary efforts generated Christian unease and disappointment. Attempts to convert North African Muslims to Christianity proved prohibitively difficult; friars turned to providing pastoral care to local Christians instead. Muslims who converted to Christianity in Iberia—whether in isolation or in droves, as in the aftermath of the anti-Islamic riots in Valencia in 1276–77—often returned to Islam.⁹² The new mandate to convert Jews, moreover, constituted a radical departure from centuries of tradition. The church had always welcomed individual Jewish conversions to Christianity, but Jewish conversion en masse had long been expected to occur only at the End of Days, in keeping with biblical prophecies and Romans 11:25, which stated that some Jews would remain “hardened” until all the nations came to Christ.⁹³ Moreover, thirteenth-century conversionary efforts produced few Jewish conversions to Christianity. The Jewish conversions to Christianity that did occur tended to be motivated by mundane considerations. Archival evidence from across medieval Christendom supports the claim of the tosafist (northern European talmudic commentator) Isaac ben Samuel of Dampierre (Ri, d. 1189) that many of the Jews who decided to go over to Christianity did so on account of poverty.⁹⁴ Addressing the shortcomings of actual conversions, canon 70 of Lateran IV railed against Jewish converts to Christianity who “did not wholly cast off the old person … [but, instead,] kept remnants of their former rite.”⁹⁵ In addition, as Chapter 4 considers, Jewish conversions to Christianity were often short-lived; many Jewish converts to Christianity returned to Judaism.⁹⁶

Christian misgivings about Muslim and Jewish conversion to Christianity may further have stimulated Christian concerns about Christian apostasy. It is conceivable that the latter in part constituted a psychological projection of Christian unease and disappointment about the former. Troubled by the reversal of traditional attitudes toward converting Jews, the general failure of Christian conversionary efforts, and the tenuous and mundane nature of many actual conversions to Christianity, some Christians could have focused, instead, on imagining that Jews were inappropriately pressuring Christians to convert to Judaism and that some Christians were shamefully going over to Judaism.⁹⁷ Such theories, however, cannot be proven.

It is more likely that Christian conversionary aspirations intertwined with anxieties about Christian apostasy insofar as apostasy was the logical inverse of conversion. There is subtle evidence that, early in the thirteenth century, some Christians were beginning to think about movement from Judaism to Christianity in tandem with movement from Christianity to Judaism. For instance, in a letter that he sent to the archbishop of Sens in 1213, Pope Innocent III told of an individual who had abandoned Judaism for Christianity who informed on an individual who had distanced herself from Christianity on account of Jewish influence. Innocent related that a recent Jewish convert to Christianity told him that, on account of Jewish seductions, a Christian woman—presumably a servant—who lived in the home of this convert’s Jewish father became “enveloped in the shadow of Jewish error.”⁹⁸ Referring to two liminal figures—the Christian neophyte and the lapsed Christian—in the same vignette, the pope implicitly acknowledged that movement was possible in two directions between Judaism and Christianity. Religious allegiances were fundamentally unstable.

During the second quarter of the thirteenth century, churchmen who wrote about conditions in North Africa, where Christians lived amid Muslims, similarly described movement to and from Islam in the same missives. In June 1225, for instance, Pope Honorius III called upon Dominican friars in Morocco to convert Muslims to Christianity and reconcile Christians who had apostatized to Islam.⁹⁹ Some time between 1245 and 1250, Raymond Penyafort wrote to the Dominican master general, listing the achievements of Spanish Dominicans in Muslim lands. In this missive, Raymond referred both to “many Saracens” who had been “converted to the [Catholic] faith” and also to Christian apostates to Islam and “many Christians who were … on the verge of apostatizing [to Islam], whether because of great poverty or because of the Saracens’ seduction.”¹⁰⁰ All of these missives acknowledged the bidirectionality of religious conversion.

Some mid- thirteenth-century texts juxtaposed conversion to and from Judaism both in terms of the direction of movement and also in terms of moral valence. The preamble to the section on Jews in the Siete partidas, for instance, linked conversion to and from Judaism by referring to Christian apostasy to Judaism directly after it referred to Jewish conversion to Christianity. In addition, it made clear that converts to Christianity were to be protected, whereas apostates to Judaism were to be punished. It promised that the code’s section on Jews would address both “how Jews who bec[ame] Christians should not be oppressed; in what ways a Jew who bec[ame] a Christian [wa]s better off than Jews who d[id] not; what penalty those who harm[ed] or dishonor[ed] a Jew for becoming a Christian deserve[d]”; and “what penalty Christians who bec[ame] Jews should receive.”¹⁰¹

An undated bull of Pope Clement IV (1265–68) contrasted conversion to and from Judaism in an additional way. After affirming that conversion to Judaism involved movement away from the truth, whereas conversion to Christianity involved movement toward the truth, it contended that conversions to Judaism necessarily were obtained through unseemly methods, whereas conversions to Christianity by no means needed to be. Clement warned that Jewish conversions to Christianity could be obtained through illicit means—and thus could resemble Christian conversions to Judaism—if they were effected by force. “Just as [Jews] are forbidden to have the audacity to seduce unsuspecting Christians away from the truth of the Christian faith into the error of Jewish unbelief,” Clement wrote, “so, too, [Jews] are not to be forced to [join] the [Christian] faith against their will.”¹⁰²

The era’s preoccupation with Christian apostasy to Judaism and with Jews as agents of apostasy to Judaism, then, was tied in multiple ways to broader concerns about the instability of religious identity. It formed part of a Christian sense that non-Christians and deviant Christians were intent on leading Christians astray. It also reflected Christian recognition that religious conversion was a two-way street. Thus, lay and ecclesiastical leaders wrote about converts to and from Christianity in the same missives, they discussed conversion to and from Christianity sequentially in law codes, and they compared and contrasted conversion to and from Christianity in theoretical terms. Christian fears about Christian apostasy were inseparable from Christian hopes for conversion to Christianity; inherent in the possibility of movement in one direction was the possibility of movement in the other.¹⁰³

The Consolidation of a Discourse: The Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries

During the second half of the thirteenth century and into the fourteenth, popes, kings, inquisitors, bishops, jurists, polemicists, chroniclers, and preachers across western Europe continued to express consternation about Christian apostasy to Judaism and Jews as agents of Christian apostasy. At least two provincial councils addressed alleged Jewish efforts to draw Christians to Judaism. The Council of Vienna (1267) recommended a number of measures “to restrain Jewish insolence.” Suggesting that local Christians were concerned that Jews were pressuring Christians to convert to Judaism, these measures included forbidding Jews to “lure Christians over to Judaism” or “recklessly circumcise them.”¹⁰⁴ The only canon of the Council of Bourges (1276) regarding Jews called for Jews to live separately from Christians on the grounds that Jews’ “unbelief fraudulently deceived many simple Christians and maliciously drew [Christians] into [Jews’] own error.”¹⁰⁵ Fourteenth-century German legal works addressed alleged Jewish efforts to draw Christians to Judaism, as well. Written around 1325, the gloss of Johann von Buch to the East Saxon common law collection known as the Sachsenspiegel (Saxon Mirror, ca. 1220), which rarely mentions Jews, stated: “No Jew shall convert a Christian to his faith; if he does it costs him his life.”¹⁰⁶ In the late fourteenth century, the legal compendium arranged alphabetically by theme known as the Regulae juris “ad decus” forbade Jews to convert Christians to Judaism.¹⁰⁷

Figure 2. Detail from the Decretals of Gregory IX with gloss of Bernard of Parma (“Smithfield Decretals”), ca. 1300–1340. London, British Library, Royal MS 10 E IV, fol. 164v. London, TNA, E401/1565 M1.

Other sources depicted Jews as intent on turning Christians away from Christianity, even if not specifically to Judaism. Pictorial representations from Castile, German lands, France, and England of the widespread Marian miracle story known as the Theophilus legend—a tale in which a Jew facilitates a pact between the devil and a demoted archdeacon named Theophilus—portrayed this Jewish intermediary as physically pushing or pulling Theophilus toward the devil, who demanded that Theophilus “deny Christ and his mother” (Figure 2).¹⁰⁸ Accusations that reverberated across southern France in 1321 to the effect that lepers had poisoned wells also gave voice to the fear that Jews were intent on spiritually corrupting Christians. According to multiple French chronicles, Jews persuaded the lepers to poison wells, and first they made these lepers “renounce the Catholic faith.”¹⁰⁹

During the later decades of the thirteenth century and the first decades of the fourteenth, Christian concerns about Christian apostasy and its alleged encouragement by Jews remained part and parcel of broader concerns about the instability of Christian identity. Alarm about apostasy to Islam and about Muslims as agents of Christian apostasy ran especially high in Mediterranean Europe. In the 1260s, in two crusade sermons, Cardinal Odo of Châteauroux accused Muslims in Lucera in southern Italy of “seizing many Christians, especially women and children, infecting them with the error of the law of Mohammad, and blinding them spiritually.”¹¹⁰ The collection of hymns known as the Cantigas de Santa María (Canticles of Holy Mary) of King Alfonso X of Castile depicted a Muslim woman in Tangiers as warning two female Christian prisoners that, unless they “became Muslims and renounced Christianity,” “she would put them both in chains and submit them to such great tortures that no sound piece of skin nor nerves nor veins would remain in their bodies; in addition, she would have them beheaded.” According to this text, one of the Christian women “said in fear that she would willingly [convert to Islam].”¹¹¹ In his novel Blanquerna (1283), the Catalonian polymath Ramon Llull (1232–1316) lamented that Christians living under Muslim rule had “no more belief in the Holy Catholic Faith, but renounce[d] it and t[ook] the faith of those among them they live[d] in opposition to the will of God.”¹¹² Compiled in the late thirteenth century by the Castilian Dominican Pedro Marín (1232–93), a collection of miracles allegedly performed by St. Dominic of Silos (1000–1073) prominently featured stories 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 suggested that the contest turn from words to deeds, Sylvester declared that, if the Jews could revive a dead bull, he would believe that they operated by the power of God and not by the power of the devil. For their part, the Jews agreed that, if Sylvester could raise the bull in the name of Jesus, they would believe in Christ.¹³⁰ Some contemporaneous Christian authors evoked the interchangeability of religious identities similarly in relation to Islam. According to Ramon Llull’s autobiographical Vita coaetanea (A Contemporary Life), in the 1290s, Llull assured Muslims in Tunis—likely in order to draw them into debate—that, if they could convince him of the truth and superiority of Islam, he would convert to Islam.¹³¹

The fourteenth-century Old French version of the (now lost) eleventh-century Latin Historia Normannorum (History of the Normans) portrayed a Christian missionary as actually becoming drawn to Judaism. It recounted how “Jews’ rhetoric”—“the venomous sweetness of their words”—temporarily “destroyed the devotion to the [Christian] faith” of a Christian youth who had set out “to dissuade the Jews from their evil belief and faith.” According to this text, “the Jews counseled this Christian [youth] to leave the Son and believe only in the Father,” and “the devil bound [the youth] to the Jews’ words.”¹³²

The notion that encounters between Christians and infidels could result in conversion either to or from Christianity is evident also in the simultaneous circulation of narratives that were closely related, except that one culminated in Jewish conversion to Christianity and the other culminated in Christian apostasy to Judaism. Two types of references to a host desecration charge that was leveled in Paris in 1290 illustrate this phenomenon.¹³³ Latin and French homiletic and chronicle accounts of this host desecration charge portrayed it as having led to conversions from Judaism to Christianity. According to the anonymous De miraculo hostiae (On the Miracle of the Host, ca. 1299), for example, when the Jewish host desecrator threw the host into a cauldron of boiling water, the water became bloody and the host was transformed into a crucifix that hovered above the cauldron. Upon witnessing this miracle, the Jewish culprit’s wife and children converted to Christianity. In addition, “many other Jews, moved by so patent a miracle, converted to the [Christian] faith, as well, and embraced the sacrament of baptism.”¹³⁴ By contrast, in the same year (1299), in a plea to the justices of his kingdom to cooperate with inquisitors in punishing a spectrum of purported Jewish offenses, King Philip IV, “the Fair,” of France referred to Jewish host desecration not by way of celebrating how associated miracles could lead Jews to convert to Christianity but, instead, by way of warning that Jewish offenses of this nature could lead Christians to apostatize to Judaism. “[By] daring wickedly to handle the most holy body of Christ [i.e., to desecrate the host] and to blaspheme other sacraments of [the Christian] faith,” Philip cautioned, Jews were “seducing many simple Christians and circumcising those whom they had seduced.”¹³⁵ Here, Philip IV took Christian concerns about the impact on Christians of alleged Jewish anti-Christian blasphemy and sacrilege to a new level. Previously, Christian authorities had contended that Jewish expressions of scorn for Christianity could sow or deepen Christian doubts about Christianity. Philip warned, however, that they could drive Christians to abandon Christianity and join the Jews.

Another set of late thirteenth-century narratives that attests to Christian recognition that the border between Judaism and Christianity could be crossed in either direction described dream visions of the afterlife. The first type of narrative in this set appeared in the Cantigas de Santa María and the Speculum historiale (Mirror of History) of the French scholar Vincent of Beauvais (d. ca. 1264), as well as elsewhere. Here, the Virgin Mary appeared to a London Jew named Jacob, first in a dream, then in person. Mary showed Jacob a valley filled with dragons and devils that were torturing the souls of Jews. Then, she showed him Christ in glory, surrounded by singing angels and a great host of saints. Moved by these visions, Jacob went to a monastery where the abbot baptized him.¹³⁶ A contrasting narrative is preserved in an anonymous work on dreams, Expositio sompniorum (Interpretation of Dreams), in a Paris manuscript from the second half of the thirteenth century. Drawing on a tale from the Collationes patrum in scetica eremo (Conferences of the Desert Fathers) of John Cassian (d. 435),¹³⁷ It tells of a monk who, after hearing about the great deeds of Moses and beginning to prefer Moses to Christ, received a dream from the devil. In this dream, this monk saw Moses with a chorus of angels dressed in white and Christ with a chorus of men dressed in black. On account of this vision, this “wretched” monk “strayed from the faith of Christ and was made a Jew.”¹³⁸

Together with texts that explored the notion that the same individual could serve as an agent of conversion to his or her own faith or apostatize to another faith, these two sets of narratives—the set about the consequences of Jewish host desecration and the set about dream visions of the afterlife—indicate that, during the latter half of the thirteenth century and into the fourteenth, Christians were pondering conversion to and from Judaism in similar terms and sometimes in tandem. These narratives also underscore the stark opposition in Christians’ eyes between these two directions of conversion. Conversion to Christianity was the product of divine grace and revelation, of eucharistic miracles and apparitions of the Virgin Mary. It was the ultimate desideratum, the happiest of conceivable endings. Apostasy to Judaism, by contrast, was the result of anti-Christian crimes and demonic deception, of Jewish blasphemy and sacrilege and dreams from the devil. The worst of nightmares come true, apostasy to Judaism was the portal to perdition.

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The thirteenth-century revitalization of Christian concerns about apostasy to Judaism is key to understanding Master Benedict’s contention that Norwich Jews seized and circumcised his son because they “wanted to make him a Jew.” Indeed, Master Benedict’s accusation stands as early evidence of this revival. Voiced and validated in a milieu with close ties to the papal curia, the links of this specific charge to broader ecclesiastical anxieties are unmistakable. Leading churchmen who traveled in the same circles as the bishops who adjudicated the Norwich circumcision case conceived of apostasy to Judaism as being of a piece with a broader set of deviations and defections from the church. They treated movement into heresy and apostasy to Islam and Judaism as parallel and morally equivalent phenomena, and they conceptualized Christian heretics, Muslims, and Jews as agents of Christian apostasy who operated similarly in their efforts to “seduce” the Christian faithful. Moreover, some of these same men participated in thirteenth-century Christian conversionary efforts and likely were uneasy about the apparent interchangeability of religious affiliation. Polemical works, literary exempla, royal pronouncements, sermons, and chronicles all reveal that thirteenth-century Christians pondered apostasy to Judaism as the troubling inverse of Jewish conversion to Christianity. The charge that in Norwich in 1230 Jews sought to convert a Christian to Judaism thus resonated with ecclesiastical anxieties about Christian deviance, infidels’ and heretics’ alleged anti-Christian designs, and the instability of religious identity.

In addition to drawing attention to the thirteenth-century revival of Christian concerns about Christian apostasy to Judaism, the Norwich circumcision case provides insight into how a single allegation that Jews attempted to convert a Christian to Judaism could reinforce and further disseminate Christian fears. The Christians who attended the various hearings in the Norwich circumcision case constituted a cross-section of Christian society. As noted in the Introduction, they included King Henry III, noblemen, bishops, Dominicans, Franciscans, and municipal officials, as well as thirty-six male residents of Norwich, the woman named Matilda de Bernham who allegedly rescued Edward after his circumcision, and undoubtedly other commoners, as well. Surely, each of these onlookers spread word of the affair within his or her personal and professional circles. Moreover, the high-ranking ecclesiastical officials traveled internationally, including to Rome, after the legal proceedings in the Norwich circumcision case were under way, carrying news of the case with them. There is reason to think also—although there is no hard evidence—that news of the case spread to German lands. In 1236, Henry III sent two Jewish converts to Christianity to counsel Emperor Frederick II regarding a blood libel accusation—the charge that Jews ritually murdered Christian children specifically in order to collect their blood—that had been leveled in Fulda.¹³⁹ These two Jewish converts to Christianity from England who were close to Henry must have been familiar with the Norwich circumcision case and likely mentioned it at Frederick’s court. Jews in France, moreover, surely learned about the case, as at least one of the Norwich Jews who became fugitives as a result of the proceedings fled to France.¹⁴⁰ These contacts constituted additional vectors for the propagation of the view that Jews were intent on turning Christians into Jews.