from various sources and an abridgment of much lengthier records, it is the product of a process of culling, rewriting, and translation into Latin in the course of which a great deal inevitably was distorted and omitted. In addition, even insofar as it accurately represents certain aspects of the proceedings, one cannot ascertain to what extent the prosecution and witnesses misreported the experiences they described, whether in order to advance personal agendas or to conform—consciously or not—to widespread preconceptions. Edward’s testimony is particularly unreliable. As a nine-year-old reminiscing about what allegedly happened when he was five, Edward easily could have been told what to say by an adult.
These considerations notwithstanding, the summary of the legal proceedings may fruitfully be analyzed as reflecting some of its authors’ cultural assumptions. Indeed, when read as shaped by the ways in which contemporaneous Christians conceived of Jews, this document illustrates how naturally the charge that Jews were intent on drawing Christians to Judaism could fit into the narrative framework that characterized tales in the large corpus of Christian anti-Jewish writings that developed during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Primarily of clerical origin, these anti-Jewish yarns appeared in preaching manuals, literary exempla, folktales, miracle collections, chronicles, and royal, papal, and episcopal missives across western Europe.12
The authors of the summary of the legal proceedings—that is, the prosecution and witnesses in the case, the scribes who recorded their statements, and the clerks who finalized the extant record—constructed a narrative about an alleged Jewish effort to turn a Christian into a Jew that so thoroughly infused reportage with tropes familiar from anti-Jewish lore that often it is impossible to distinguish between plausible fact, on the one hand, and fantasy, on the other. The near total omission of Jewish voices from this account leaves no doubt, however, that these authors carefully curated their composition. In court, the Jewish defendants in the Norwich circumcision case were given the opportunity to speak. In fact, the summary of the proceedings notes that the Jews “defended themselves as Jews against a Christian [i.e., Master Benedict].” This document is silent, however, regarding what the Jews said. Insofar as it was crafted to put forth a simple and satisfying tale in which righteous Christians triumphed over wicked Jews, such information was irrelevant.
Numerous features of the Norwich circumcision case facilitated its narration in this register. One was Edward’s youth at the time of his alleged seizure and circumcision. Young Christian boys were the quintessential victims of alleged Jewish machinations in contemporaneous anti-Jewish tales, especially stories of ritual murder.13 As recorded in the summary of the legal proceedings, Master Benedict’s indictment of Norwich Jews underscored Edward’s youthful innocence. Its opening lines stated that, when Edward was kidnapped, he was five years old. Moreover, they specified that Edward was “playing [in the street in the town] of Norwich.”14 Contemporaneous anti-Jewish tales likewise referred to Jews’ young victims as being unsuspectingly at play when Jews snatched them. For instance, In his account of the alleged ritual murder of Hugh of Lincoln, Matthew Paris cast Hugh as last having been seen, prior to entering a Jewish home, “playing with Jewish boys his age.”15 The mid-fourteenth-century chronicle of Erfurt depicted a seven-year-old girl named Margaretha, whom Jews were accused of having killed in order to collect her blood, as having frequently played with the daughter of a Christian woman who later sold her to Jews.16 Master Benedict’s indictment of Norwich Jews also emphasized how physically small Edward was by describing how a Jew named Jacob “carried” Edward into his home. The date given for Edward’s alleged kidnapping and circumcision further evoked Edward’s helplessness. The opening sentence of the summary of the Norwich legal proceedings noted that Edward was seized on the eve of the feast of St. Giles (August 31). According to legend, St. Giles (d. ca. 710 near Nîmes) was a Christian hermit who was accidentally shot by an arrow that a huntsman intended for a deer. On account of this experience, St. Giles became the patron of the physically disabled. There was considerable devotion to St. Giles in thirteenth-century Norwich, such that the significance of the date of Edward’s alleged ordeal would have been apparent to local Christians.17 Likening Edward to St. Giles reinforced the sense that Edward was an innocent victim of violence.
As a young boy, Edward played a role in the legal proceedings pertaining to the Norwich circumcision case that matched the roles of children in some contemporaneous anti-Jewish narratives: He served as an unassailable witness regarding events that transpired behind closed doors in Jewish homes.18 In court, before the assembled justices, the prior of Norwich, Dominicans, Franciscans, and other clerics and laymen, Edward recounted how, In Jacob’s home, “one [Jew] held him and covered his eyes, while another circumcised him with a small knife.” Edward’s claim that the Jews covered his eyes constitutes yet another instance in which possible fact and fantasy seem to merge. On the one hand, this claim is plausible. On the other, it resonates with the hoary motif of Jewish blindness to Christian truth—a common theme not only in Christian polemical literature but also in medieval art that personified Judaism as the blindfolded woman Synagoga.19
The centrality of circumcision in the Norwich case would have been especially appealing to contemporaneous Christian anti-Jewish sensibilities. Christian theologians conceded that, prior to the advent of Christ, circumcision served a number of positive functions.20 As practiced by contemporary Jews, however, circumcision had diverse negative connotations. Following St. Paul, theologians deemed contemporary circumcision to be spiritually obsolete and illustrative of Jews’ stubbornness in clinging to the Old Law and privileging the flesh over the spirit.21 Anti-Jewish polemicists deprecated circumcision as an inferior rite of initiation to baptism as it discriminated on the basis of gender: Only boys were circumcised, whereas both boys and girls were baptized.22 In the twelfth century, the Christian theologian Peter Abelard cast the Jew in his Dialogus inter philosophum, Iudaeum, et Christianum (Dialogue Between a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian) as asserting that gentiles found circumcision “abhorrent” and that Christian women would never consent to having sex with Jewish men, “believing that the truncating of this member [wa]s the height of foulness.”23 Two thirteenth-century Iberian anti-Jewish polemicists balked in particular at the practice of meẓiẓah, the sucking of blood from the wound. Raymond Martini deemed meẓiẓah “utterly abominable and loathsome” and a fitting punishment for Jewish mouths that blasphemed against Christ.24 An anonymous source vulgarly likened meẓiẓah to sexual intercourse, Identifying the mouth that sucked the wound with a “cunt.”25 In their commentaries on Genesis 34—in which the sons of Jacob trick the Shehemites into being circumcised under the pretense of wanting them to join the Jewish nation, but then murder the Shehemites while they are weak and “still in pain” in order to exact revenge for the rape of their sister Dinah—Christian exegetes criticized the sons of Jacob as typifying Jews’ refusal to join with other peoples. In the context of this critique, circumcision functioned as the lynchpin of a cruel Jewish ruse.26 Some medieval Christians recoiled from circumcision on account of its bloodshed and pain. In his sermon “On the Circumcision of the Lord,” in the course of discussing why baptism was superior to circumcision, Peter Abelard remarked: “Who does not dread to be circumcised by sharp stones in the tender part of the body?”27 The theologian Gilbert of Poitiers (ca. 1076–1154) explained that one of the reasons why circumcision was abandoned after the coming of Christ was that it was “great torture.”28
Produced within a decade of the Norwich proceedings, an illuminated initial in a Bible that was assembled in Canterbury for the Benedictine abbot Robert de Bello presented a striking depiction of circumcision (Figure 3).29 In the foreground of this image, a swarthy, hairy, beak-nosed, grimacing man, dressed in a luxurious red robe, crouches before three tall, fair, naked boys who stand in a cluster on the right.30 With his left hand, the brutish man draws forth from below the penis of the boy who is closest to him. With his right hand, he brings a small knife with a curved blade to the top of the tip of the boy’s penis. The three boys gaze—two in wonder, the one who is about to be circumcised with apprehension—at flowing blue water in the
