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

      Introduction

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

      I use the term “conversion”—which scholars have applied to a wide array of phenomena, Including an inner spiritual transformation—to denote a public change of religious affiliation undertaken in accordance with the institutional norms of the religious community being joined.¹ It is in this sense that many of the sources consulted here use the term—conversio in Latin, literally, a “turning around,” and gerut in Hebrew, literally, a “coming to reside.” I use the term “apostasy” to denote the repudiation of a religious faith and community as understood by the apostate himself or herself as well as by the community that he or she left behind. It is in this sense that many of the sources consulted here use the term—apostasia in Latin, from the Greek apostasis, meaning “defection,” and terms related to shemad in Hebrew, meaning “destruction.”²

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

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

      The Norwich Circumcision Case

      The beginnings of the Norwich circumcision case are unclear. The affair first surfaces in a royal writ from 1231 that declares that a Jew named