Jewish Converts Research Articles

La comunidad judía y conversa de Daroca (Zaragoza) en el siglo XV: refundación, vida cotidiana y círculos de sociabilidad

En el presente artículo abordo las claves de la refundación de la comunidad judía, a mediados del siglo XV, después de su disolución como consecuencia de la Disputa de Tortosa, así como la integración de la primera generación de conversos en la ciudad. Se analiza asimismo, a través de los testimonios judíos recogidos en los procesos inquisitoriales —contrastados con la documentación de la Cancillería Real, los Protocolos Notariales y las Actas del Concejo—, la interrelación existente entre las familias judeoconversas de segunda generación y la modesta aljama hebrea, compuesta en su mayoría por artesanos y pequeños comerciantes. Dicha convivencia se perfila en dos vertientes de signo muy distinto: la enemistad personal y la rivalidad comercial, de un lado, y la permanencia de los lazos socio-laborales, de parentesco, afectividad y amistad, así como las persistencias culturales y creenciales de los neocristianos.

The Hazards of Conversion: Nuns, Jews, and Demons in Late Renaissance Italy

Female monasticism and the conversion of the Jews were both major concerns for the ecclesiastical establishment, as well as for Italian ruling elites, after the Council of Trent (1545–1563). Hence, the monachization of baptized Jewish girls acquired a unique symbolic significance. Moreover, during this period cases of demonic possession were on the rise, and so were witchcraft accusations. This article explores a case from late sixteenth-century Mantua in which Jewish conversion, female monachization, demonic possession and witch-hunting all came into play in a violent drama. Drawing on unpublished documents as well as on chronicles and hagiographies, the article elucidates the mental toll that conversion and monachization took on the Jewess Luina, who later became known as Sister Margherita. It delineates her life, which culminated with her diagnosis as a demoniac, and analyzes the significance that this etiology held for the energumen—whose affliction was attributed to her ongoing contacts with Jews—and for Mantua's Jews. The article argues that the anxiety provoked by suspicions that a formerly Jewish nun reverted to Judaism was so profound, that it led to the burning at the stake of Judith Franchetta, the only Jew ever to be executed as a witch in the Italian peninsula.

Obviousness: the unexpected benefit of phenotypic dissimilarity

ABSTRACTEthnoraciality research consistently purports that phenotypic similarity to a reference majority benefits individual identification with a group; a notion reinforced by social identity theory. I present a counterpoint to this supposition. In-depth interviews with 101 white, black, Asian, Latino/a, and multiracial Jewish converts in three metropolitan areas show that converts who least resemble Jewish phenotypic stereotypes attain a sense of belonging within Jewishness most easily. Converts who are phenotypically similar to a Jewish prototype are tempted to pass as Jewish by birth, and those who engage in passing experience sustained anxiousness about being outsiders. Converts who are phenotypically dissimilar from the prototype do not see passing as an option, and thus bypass equivalently-sustained anxiousness and immediately work toward attaining a sense of belonging. Departing from the literature’s expectations, this case suggests that, when it releases pressure to fit a group prototype, obvious phenotypic dissimilarity can have a beneficial identificational effect.

“All one in Christ Jesus”? Spiritual closeness, genealogical determinism and the conversion of Jews in Alonso de Espina’s Fortalitium Fidei

ABSTRACTAlonso de Espina’s vitriolic polemic, Fortalitium Fidei (The fortress of faith, c. 1458–1464), includes a ferocious attack upon both Jews and the descendants of converts, who were collectively accused of judaizing. This would seem to set him at odds with the Apostle Paul’s formulation in Galatians 3:28 of a powerful notion of equality between Christians that transcended ethnic divisions. Espina has become notorious among modern historians as an influential “anti-Semitic” writer. In this article, I argue that the significance of Espina’s opus for the wider history of anti-Jewish texts needs to be revised and nuanced since, in stark contrast to many later anti-converso polemicists, he does not seek to undermine the Pauline concept of Christian spiritual closeness by appealing to biological or genealogical determinism; rather, he insists on the generalization of converso judaizing and the exceptionality of genuine Jewish conversions to Christianity.

‘Saben moltes coses contra molts convessos de Xàtiva e de València’. Converted Jews in the Kingdom of Valencia: Denunciation and social Betrayal in Late 15th century Xàtiva

The article analyses the mechanisms of denunciation used in the early years of operation of the Royal Inquisition court of Valencia in the late 15th century. Our study of the testimony given by a group of old Christians who denounced various Jewish converts in the city of Xativa has enabled us to reconstruct how denunciation took place, and the development of the climate of social betrayal which was encouraged by the inquisitorial authorities. We have identified the informants —old Christians— and those denounced —Jewish converts— and their respective socio-professional occupations. The informants were extremely intolerant of their Jewish converso neighbours, whose attitudes they monitored. They used the new horizontal mechanisms for social control, implemented, disseminated and encouraged by the inquisitorial authorities, which encouraged old Christians to observe, monitor and report dissident behaviour and practices among Jewish converts in Valencia.

Violent Men and Malleable Women: Gender and Jewish Conversion to Christianity in Medieval Sermon Exempla

Sermon exempla are entertaining and illustrative stories that medieval preachers inserted into their sermons in an attempt to hold the attention of the audience while conveying an important religious message. Use of such stories spread in the thirteenth century, when popular preaching emerged on a large scale, and famous preachers began composing collections of them that functioned as handbooks for other preachers throughout Europe. Exempla sometimes feature the conversion of Jews to Christianity. In these stories, Jewish men appear as evil, hostile adversaries whose conversions typically took place after they had attempted to cause some harm to a Christian or to Christianity, only to see their evil act prevented or reversed by a miracle that convinced them to convert. However, Jewish women very rarely act as enemies of the faith and instead appear in these stories as willing converts to Christianity. Some convert of their own accord, in the absence of miracles, while others call out to the Virgin Mary in a time of need and choose to convert after receiving her miraculous help. Medieval assumptions about gender played a role in creating these gendered narratives. Women were assumed to be more malleable and fickle than men, while men were considered to be more stubborn and violent than women.

Violent Men and Malleable Women: Gender and Jewish Conversion to Christianity in Medieval Sermon Exempla

Violent Men and Malleable Women: Gender and Jewish Conversion to Christianity in Medieval Sermon Exempla

Peter’s Kingdom Keys Explain Subsequence

This article proposes a solution to the Dunn Debate. It is that Peter’s temporary role in using the metaphorical ‘keys of the kingdom of heaven’ that Jesus promised him in Mt. 16.19 involved both Peter’s preaching the gospel and Jesus’ initial baptizing with the Holy Spirit. Thus, no subsequence (post-conversion Spirit baptism) presumably occurred with the 3,000 Jewish converts at Pentecost in Acts 2 and certainly with the Gentiles in Acts 10 because Peter was the preacher of the gospel when they believed; but subsequence did occur with the Samaritans in Acts 8 because Philip preached and they believed, but Peter came to them days later, using his kingdom keys. After that, with the exception of the anomaly in Acts 19, Dunn is correct that conversion and Spirit baptism always occur simultaneously.

Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic

Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic

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

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.

Islam and Nazi Germany's war

In the most crucial phase of the Second World War, German troops, fighting in regions as far apart as the Sahara and the Caucasus, confronted the Allies across lands largely populated by Muslims. Nazi officials saw Islam as a powerful force with the same enemies as Germany: the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Jews. Islam and Nazi Germany’s War is the first comprehensive account of Berlin’s remarkably ambitious attempts to build an alliance with the Islamic world. Drawing on archival research in three continents, David Motadel explains how German officials tried to promote the Third Reich as a patron of Islam. He explores Berlin’s policies and propaganda in the Muslim war zones, and the extensive work that authorities undertook for the recruitment, spiritual care, and ideological indoctrination of tens of thousands of Muslim volunteers who fought in the Wehrmacht and the SS. Islam and Nazi Germany’s War reveals how German troops on the ground in North Africa, the Balkans, and the Eastern front engaged with diverse Muslim populations, including Muslim Roma and Jewish converts to Islam. Combining measured argument with a masterly handling of detail, it illuminates the profound impact of the Second World War on Muslims around the world and provides a new understanding of the politics of religion in the bloodiest conflict of the twentieth century.

Corrective conversion: unsettling citizens and the politics of inclusion in Israel

Gauri Viswanathan's notion of religious conversion as an ‘unsettling’ political event has recently figured prominently in the scholarship on conversion. However, although numerous scholars have productively applied Viswanathan's understanding in their work, primarily in the context of conversion to religious minorities within the nation‐state, to focus too heavily on conversion's unsettling effects risks overlooking political constellations in which it might have rather settling effects. In contrast to the scholarly focus on conversion's disruptive qualities, this article offers an ethnographic account of the ‘settling’ ambitions and logics that underwrite the state politics of Jewish conversion (giur) in contemporary Israel. By looking ethnographically into the mundane discursive, pedagogic, and bureaucratic processes through which the Jewish state converts non‐Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union, I demonstrate how religious conversion works to restore the bureaucratic logic of Israeli nationalism, thereby reinstating unambiguous forms of Jewish belonging. Religious conversion can also be an act of taxonomic repair.

Bureaucratic gifts: Religious conversion, change, and exchange in Israel

ABSTRACTViewing religious conversion through the lens of exchange rather than change calls attention to the web of interactions, practices, and discourses that constitute conversion as a relational domain. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork that straddles the institutionalized interface of state‐run Jewish conversion in Israel, I show how the conversion process constitutes a reciprocal transaction by which each party to the exchange—the state and its subjects—provides the other with national recognition while also receiving and thus validating its own national identity. I trace the historical and political circumstances that have entangled the Jewish state and a significant cohort of Jewish converts within this reciprocal relationship. In doing so, I identify the biopolitical, moral, and bureaucratic frameworks that bear on this institutional transaction. [conversion, reciprocity, exchange, biopolitics, bureaucracy, ethnography of the state, Jews, Israel]

Learning about Judaism from Apostate Writings

Learning about Judaism from Apostate Writings Marc Saperstein Yaacov Deutsch. Judaism in Christian Eyes: Ethnographic Descriptions of Jews and Judaism in Early Modern Europe. Translated from the Hebrew by Avi Aronsky. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. xi + 304. Michael T. Walton. Anthonius Margaritha and the Jewish Faith: Jewish Life and Conversion in Sixteenth-Century Germany. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012. Pp. xvi + 242. Through the late Middle Ages, few Christians seemed interested in learning about the Jewish religion and Jewish religious practice from reading postbiblical texts or observing Jewish behavior. Where they read Jewish texts beyond the Hebrew Scriptures, such as the Talmud, it was usually in order to highlight apparently absurd theological assertions or insulting remarks about Jesus, or occasionally to find some useful passage that would confirm a Christian theological stance. The situation changed in the sixteenth century for two reasons: the significant number of Jewish apostates who drew on their prior knowledge of Jewish behavior to score polemical points, and the increasing number of Christian Hebraists who were able to master traditional Jewish texts for their own scholarly purposes. The two books under review reveal important aspects of these dynamics. The volume by Yaakov Deutsch has a broad purview, surveying all texts written by Christians—whether Jewish converts to Christianity or those born into Christian families—meant to provide their Christian readers with knowledge about the religious and social behavior of Jews. Some of these books were very long: in the case Gottfried Selig’s Der Jude (1768–72), nine volumes totaling over three thousand pages. The author designates these works as belonging to the category of ‘‘polemical ethnography.’’ In order to avoid a detailed discussion of the accuracy of these [End Page 315] accounts, Deutsch sets as his focus not what the contemporary reader can learn about the actual behavior of early modern Jews but rather what these texts tell us about the attitudes of the Christians who wrote and read them (pp. 31–32). Deutsch identifies forty-three works, dating from 1508 to 1785, that fit his criteria. Rather than attempting to cover all the material about Jews in all these works, he focuses in depth on three major themes: Yom Kippur and the process of atonement, circumcision of male infants, and dietary laws. For the discussion of Yom Kippur, Deutsch identifies sixteen themes and in a two-page table indicates which are addressed in each of the books he surveys (pp. 84–85). Some of the themes are to be expected: kaparot, asking for forgiveness, the ‘‘Al da’at ha-makom’’ proclamation, ‘‘Kol Nidre’’; others, such as ‘‘Flagellations’’ and’’ Blessing of the Moon’’ are perhaps more surprising. The most important theme for his purpose is that of kaparot (acts of atonement), which is discussed in all but two of the forty-three works examined. This includes not only the familiar waving of a rooster or hen over the head before slaughtering it as atonement for one’s sins—of which some striking engravings are provided (figures 2.3, 2.5, 2.6)—but also some less-known customs as well. Several of the Christian writers, beginning with the former rabbi Victor von Carben in 1508, report that Jews who could not afford to purchase a rooster or hen would stand outside waiting for a Christian to pass and then ‘‘secretly say, ‘May the Lord make you my atonement this year,’ ’’ or (according to the convert Anthonius Margaritha, with the agreement of the Christian in return for a small payment), they would say ‘‘kapara mita meshuna’’ (may you die an unusual death as my atonement) (pp. 96–97). Some of the authors insisted that they had personally witnessed this practice. Despite Deutsch’s focus on Christian attitudes, it would have been useful to be referred to Jewish sources confirming or refuting the reliability of such reports, as he provides in other cases (e.g., pp. 139, 141 on customs relating to the birth of a son). In the discussion of circumcision, it is somewhat surprising that the practice of metsitsa, or the allegedly prophylactic sucking of blood by the mohel from the infant’s newly circumcised penis, does not seem to have engaged...

What Do Christian Hebraists Have to Do with the Cultural History of Judaism?

What Do Christian Have to Do with the Cultural History of Judaism? David B. Ruderman. Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010. Pp. ix + 326.INTRODUCTIONJohannes Buxtorf the Elder (1564-1629) was a brilliant and subtle philologist, a master of European and Oriental languages both ancient and modem.1 The son of a Westphalian minister, Buxtorf studied at Herbom, Heidelberg, Basel, Zurich, and Geneva, where he rubbed elbows with the luminaries of mid-seventeenth-centuiy Reformed Protestantism-including Heinrich Bullinger and Theodore de Beze-while mastering the languages of biblical exegesis, especially Hebrew. Settling in Basel, where he became university professor of Hebrew, Buxtorf quickly sifted, collated, translated, and published his way to the pinnacle of the European Republic of Letters, revolutionizing the discipline of Christian Hebraism with a stunning array of learned bibles, dictionaries, concordances, and commentaries in Near Eastern languages. While his Biblia Hebraica cum paraph rosi Chaldaica et commentariis rabbinorum (1618) introduced a wide readership of Orientalists and exegetes the Hebrew text of the Bible, the Aramaic of the Targums, and an impressive array of medieval Jewish commentaries, his Tiberias, sive commentarius Masoreticus (1620) offered fellow specialists an uncommonly sophisticated insight into the historical context in which the masoretic text of the Bible was produced. Even without his greatest academic work, the posthumous Lexicon Chaldaicum, Talmudicum, et Rabbinicum (1632), which pioneered a new form of biblical concordance, Buxtorf would likely have remained a standard resource for down to the nineteenth centuiy. Yet for all this, Buxtorf was perhaps most famous among contemporaries as the source of a veiy different kind of access to Jewish knowledge - namely, his Juden-Scbul (1603), which promised its Christian readers nearly unprecedented entree into the homes and observances of Buxtorf's Jewish colleagues and neighbors, describing eveiything from the Passover seder to the rituals surrounding circumcision and menstruation. Unfortunately, in this arena, at least, Buxtorf was rather less distinguished than in his philological studies: as contemporaries quickly observed, JiidenScbiil is essentially a pastiche in which the morsels of trustworthy ethnographic knowledge Buxtorf had acquired from Jewish collaborators are far outweighed by textual tradition and Christian fantasy, not entirely unlike the libelous accounts of Jews and Judaism penned by sixteenthcentuiy polemicists like Anthony Margaritha.2Buxtorf, and other Christian like him-including not only well-known figures like Johannes Reuchlin but also the obscure Dutch Orientalist Wilhelm Surenhusius-play a significant role in David Ruderman's Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History. They figure prominently, for example, in two different chapters, the first on the impact of print on Jewish learning (Christian and Their Judaic Publications in chapter 3, Knowledge Explosion) and the second on Jewish converts to Christianity (The Conflicting Loyalties of Christian Hebraists in chapter 5, Mingled Identities). While page counts are always a crude measure of significance, it is hard to overlook the considerable space dedicated to Christian Judaica: on a per capita basis, Christian and kabbalists like Pico della Mirandola drown out all but a handful of Jewish celebrities from the period, like the Abarbanels, Shabbetai Zevi and his antagonists Jacob Emden, Jacob Sasportas, and Moses Hagiz, the Luzzattos, or Spinoza. And the profile of Hebraizing Christians rises still further if one includes a second group of major importance to Ruderman: the conversos, who (as mentioned above) are the subject of their own chapter in large part because of their role as intermediaries between Jewish and Christian communities and cultures. …

Voices of Jewish Converts to Christianity in late Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England

This paper seeks to highlight the content and context of the conversion narratives written by Jews converting to Christianity in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. It will be demonstrated that a non-Pauline pattern of conversion writing emerges. The content of these conversion treatises will be contextualized by looking at a whole range of English treatises concerning Jewish conversion, in particular those containing voices of “hermeneutical” Jewish converts. It will be argued that the period under scrutiny evinced a waning of the barriers surrounding Jewish conversion.

Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England by Jeffrey S. Shoulson (review)

Reviewed by: Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England by Jeffrey S. Shoulson Esther Liberman Cuenca Jeffrey S. Shoulson, Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2013) 263 pp. The sixteenth century witnessed a tempest of religious change for English people across all social and political divides. The country had undergone three dramatic “conversions:” the deepening of confessional divides between the Church in England and Rome during the reign of Henry VIII, the subsequent fissures between Protestants and Catholics under Mary I, and eventually the growing sectarian differences among Protestants themselves during the Elizabethan era. The great literary works of the early modern period, from Shakespeare [End Page 329] to Milton, reflected these social and cultural tensions, oftentimes in the figure of the Jew. Expelled from English society since 1290, the Jew cast a long shadow over early modern poetics and the rich tradition of biblical exegesis in this period. Jeffrey Shoulson argues that representations of Jews in literature and exegetical commentaries did not derive their symbolic power from realistic or complex depictions of the Jewish people or their religion; rather, archetypal tropes of the Jew stood in for the religious anxieties of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and were deployed in a variety of “fictions” of conversion as commentary on broader political and religious changes during these tumultuous centuries. A lesser book might have focused solely on Jewish figures in the great works of early modern literature (Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta immediately comes to mind), but Shoulson’s ambitious meditation also examines two other types of conversion, the translation of classical texts and the science of alchemy, as a result complicating and deepening our understanding of conversion during this particularly fractious period. The introductory chapter spends little time on historiography, instead focusing on understandings of conversion in its various early modern contexts and meanings. One of Shoulson’s primary concerns is fear, particularly fears about social cohesion as manifested in literature and attesting to a deep anxiety about the authenticity of religious conversion. In the early modern Spanish context, the concern over the sincerity of the converso (or the Jewish or Muslim convert to Christianity) was one that intermingled with the general unease over miscegenation and disloyalty to the newly unified Catholic state. In the early modern English context, absent contact with actual Jews, English anxieties over conversion revolved around whether the authenticity of an individual’s conversion experience was sufficiently genuine to merit redemption and divine reconciliation, especially in a climate of millenarian angst. Whether insincere or false, conversions were phenomena whose implications stretched far beyond questions of individual salvation; the spiritual welfare of the realm and the political directives of the state-sponsored English Reformation also hung in the balance. While Jews were far removed from English society in both time (as distant biblical figures) and space (the nearest communities were in Holland), and thus ultimately posed no threat to the precarious status quo, the Jews, because of their unique position as biblical ancestors and antagonists, stood in as proxies for many of theological debates about conversion. The first two chapters of the book focus mainly on biblical conversion narratives that shaped exegetical commentaries. Chapter 1 treats Christian writings on conversion that predated the early modern period, and subsequently influenced the fictions of conversion that form the main focus of this book. The central and early figure of Jewish conversion is St. Paul, whose spiritual redemption on the road to Damascus represented the ideal for most early modern commentators, who sought exemplary models for conversion experiences. Other well-known non-Jewish figures whose conversion narratives influenced the discursive framework upon which early modern literature and commentaries drew included Augustine of Hippo, Martin Luther, and John Calvin. The chap-ter’s most provocative contribution is an analysis of the deep and abiding English interest in the marrano, a derogatory Spanish term for a Jewish convert to Christianity. This term was rarely used in England, but the marrano came to [End Page 330] represent the frightening possibility that conversions could be inauthentic and thus indicative of a larger rot...

Martin III, Bishop of Medininkai, Archdeacon and Canon of Vilnius: the Lawyer Bishop

Bishop Martin III (Johannis) of Medininkai is the first Žemaitijan ordinary of whose activities we knowmore than merely a few facts. Unfortunately most of what is written about him is false: he did not havea surname (Lintfari is a scribal error for Lituani); he did not hold canonries in Liege, Louvain or Poznan,let alone ‘work’ in Flanders or Poland. This article reviews diverse known sources for Martin’s life andcareer and provides new information from the Gniezno Consistory Court record and other manuscriptswhich reveals how his career formed in the Roman Curia before he returned to Lithuania as bishop ofMedininkai and reflects his concerns for the affairs of Church and State. An appendix provides five newsources from manuscripts in Cracow and Gniezno along with a new edition of Martin’s will from theearliest surviving copy. KEY WORDS: Medininkai, Žemaitija, Bishop Martin, papal provision, Vilnius, canon, Jewish conversion,parish foundation. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/ 10.15181/ ahuk.v27i0.896

Children's Exodus: A History of the Kindertransport, Vera K. Fast (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011), xvii + 270 pp., hardcover, $42.00/ 25.00

In Children's Exodus, Fast joins a steadily growing group of scholars who have written on the fate of Jewish children during the Holocaust and in its aftermath. Her book focuses on the immigration of Jewish refugee children to Great Britain from the first Kindertransport in December 1938 to the arrival of the last displaced youth in 1948. Fast's contribution is primarily one of synthesis: she provides engaging and readable accounts of well-known topics such as the British Jewish relief organizations' extensive efforts on behalf of Jews trapped in Nazi Europe, and of lesser-known topics such as the reception of Orthodox Jewish refugee children (including three transports of Polish Jewish youth who arrived in England in February and August 1939); care for young Jewish converts to Christianity in England; and rescue work carried out by the charismatic and controversial Rabbi Dr. Solomon Schonfeld. Fast's presentation clearly shows her abiding sympathy for the uprooted young Jewish refugees of German, Austrian, Czech, and Polish nationality and of varying social and religious backgrounds. She brings to life the voices of the young refugees, their distressed parents, and British officials engaged in saving them.

Between Christian and Jew: conversion and inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1250-1391

Note on Names, Money, Terminology, and Transliterations Map 1 Map 2 Map 3 Introduction PART I. BEFORE THE TRIBUNAL Four Arrests Chapter 1. Defending the Faith: Medieval Inquisitors and the Prosecution of Jews and Converts Chapter 2. From Resistance to Surrender: Jewish Responses to Inquisitorial Prosecution Four Condemnations PART II. AT THE FONT OF NEW LIFE Alatzar and Abadia, Baptized Chapter 3. Between Doubt and Desire: Jewish Conversion, Converts, and Christian Society Chapter 4. Homeward Bound: The Fates of Jewish Converts Two Converts, Repentant PART III. BY THE FIRE The Intervention Chapter 5. Apostasy as Scourge: Jews and the Repudiation of Apostates Chapter 6. Recruiting Repentance: The Re-Judaization of Apostates The Road to the Stake Conclusion List of Abbreviations Notes Glossary Bibliography Index Acknowledgments