Testing Boundaries: Jewish Conversion and Cultural Fluidity in Medieval Europe, c. 1200–1391

Abstract

Claims about the history of Jewish conversion to Christianity have long been central to key narratives in medieval Jewish historiography. Most famously, they have served to illustrate an alleged cultural contrast between Sepharad, or Spain, and Ashkenaz, or northern Europe. According to this classic view, which was given its fullest expression by Yitzhak Baer in the 1930s and 1940s, the mass conversions of Jews to Christianity that swept Spain in 1391, in the context of the most extensive anti-Jewish violence in medieval history, were the result of Spanish Jews’ engagement with Greek rationalism, their political ambition, and their “passion for erotic experience,” all of which led Spanish Jews to neglect their Jewish heritage. The Jews of northern Europe, by contrast, resisted conversion in the face of violence and instead favored martyrdom (most famously in 1096, at the start of the First Crusade) on account of their single-minded piety. Conversion, in other words, was the outcome of acculturation, and the conversions of 1391, whose scope was unprecedented, attested to Spanish Jews’ excessive cultural openness.