Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe by Paola Tartakoff (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe by Paola Tartakoff Magda Teter Paola Tartakoff. Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. 304 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009421000271 Those familiar with sources from medieval Christian Europe will not be surprised that some Christians converted to Judaism. The Hebrew chronicles of the Crusades include glimpses and allusions to them, and many papal letters and bulls express anxiety over Jewish-Christian proximity and the resulting conversions. But aside from a handful of articles about such conversions in the premodern periods, there is no systematic monograph on the subject. Paola Tartakoff's book seeks to fill this lacuna, exploring a variety of sources—legal and literary—from across Europe—north and south—and across centuries. Tartakoff disentangles conversions of those she calls "born Christians" from Jews who had converted to Christianity and decided to return to the fold. Jews considered these two types of conversion as different acts and processes—giyyur for the conversion to Judaism and ḥazarah bi-teshuvah for return to the fold. For Christians these were not distinct; they represented a rejection of Christianity—an apostasy. But these two conversions were sometimes intertwined. To tie different geographies, chronologies, and themes together, Tartakoff frames the book around "the Norwich circumcision case," in which several Norwich Jews were accused in 1234 of having circumcised a five-year-old Christian boy, named Edward, four years prior. This became a protracted trial that ended in 1240 with the execution of three of the accused Jews and expulsion of several others. This was likely, as Sara Lipton has suggested, a case of a child of a Jewish convert to Christianity, perhaps in a custody battle, whom Jews may have been trying to bring back into the community by "making him a Jew." The accusation was apparently first considered in a royal court before being transferred to an ecclesiastical court. One of the beneficiaries of the Jews' conviction was the child's father, Benedict, who received a part of the confiscated property. The Norwich circumcision case is a puzzle. Tartakoff seeks to unpack the story by locating it "in contemporary anti-Jewish discourse" and the "thirteenth-century trend of prosecuting Jews on charges of having preyed on a Christian boy" (5–6). While there was no effort during court proceedings to connect Edward's supposed circumcision with anti-Jewish murder libels, which had emerged in the twelfth century in England (indeed, in Norwich itself) and began to spread across the continent in the thirteenth century, this link would be made some years later in a chronicle by Matthew Paris, a Benedictine monk at St. Alban's (d. 1259). What remains puzzling is that neither the surviving court records nor Matthew Paris's chronicle evoke the story of William of Norwich, whose death in 1144 led to the rise, decades later, of the first anti-Jewish narrative of murder libel, with even a shrine apparently established in the town. Instead, in the court documents Edward is likened to St. Giles (51). This deafening silence about William of Norwich, unaddressed by Tartakoff, suggests that perhaps William's story was already forgotten, but more importantly, that Edward's reported circumcision was not seen through the lens of these early anti-Jewish libels. [End Page 469] Tartakoff's reading of the case seems forced, even anachronistic. For example, discussing a small knife said to have been used in Edward's supposed circumcision, Tartakoff notes that "these implements figured prominently in host desecration and ritual murder narratives" (56). A similar point is made about a Christian woman, Matilda, who reportedly rescued Edward. She played, Tartakoff claims, "roles familiar from tales of ritual murder and host desecration" (57). But by 1234, the date of the court summary, or even 1240, the date of the execution, aside from the apparently lost narrative of William of Norwich by Thomas of Monmouth, there was no developed anti-Jewish discourse that could have colored the lens through which Edward's case would have been seen. Host desecration stories emerged later in the thirteenth century, and murder libels would become much more entrenched in European and English imagination...