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
